Too Much TV: DRACULA (2020)

The creators of Sherlock claim that one purpose of their free adaptation of Bram Stoker's famous character -- to call their Dracula an adaptation of Stoker's novel may go too far -- is to make the king vampire the central character, "the hero of his own story" as it were. They then open their first of three episodes with a framing device ensuring that, as ever, we will see Dracula through Jonathan Harker's eyes. Harker tells his story at the convent where he takes shelter in the novel, to an irreverent nun (Dolly Wells) who apparently is the sister of Abraham Van Helsing, sharing his preoccupation with the undead. Harker (John Heffernan) as narrator is an unsettling sight, far more damaged than we're used to seeing, as if Deadpool had mated with a 1980s AIDS patient. This comes to seem appropriate as Harker endures a more severe ordeal than even Stoker had imagined through the hospitality of a rapidly-youthening Count (Claes Bang). This all begins quite promisingly; for much of the first hour co-writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat succeed at making a Dracula story feel more disquietingly Gothic than Stoker's novel by introducing the idea of a secret prisoner in Dracula's castle and later showing how the Count treats some of his victims as experiments. This sets the tone for the rest of the story, establishing that Dracula, after so many centuries, remains uncertain about exactly how his vampiric powers work and whether they're inherited by his "brides," female or male. But a discordant note begins to creep in as the vampire, absorbing Harker's knowledge by drinking his blood, starts talking in a familiarly glib, almost slangy way, calling his guest Johnny and generally sounding more and more like a standard 21st century charismatic villain. At the same time, commenting throughout on Harker's story, Sister Agatha tends to quip in drastic hit-or-miss fashion. The writings clearly aspire to accessibility at whatever cost, and the tone becomes too comic -- however fun it may be to hear Sister Agatha taunt Dracula near the end of the first episode -- for its own good. But I'm probably mistaking my own idea of its own good for its creators' intentions.

The second episode -- all three run approximately 90 minutes -- comes closest to the Dracula-as-central-character idea, though it also interposes a framing device, this time with Dracula narrating his famous voyage on the Demeter to a surprisingly friendly yet still skeptical Sister Agatha.  This second episode is also the worst by far of the three, introducing a shipload of thinly sketched passengers for the vampire to victimize before Agatha breaks out of the framing device and reclaims the upper hand. Inclusiveness substitutes for substance here as the passenger list includes an Indian scientist and his mute daughter as well as the black gay lover of this episode's walking in-joke, the decadent Lord Ruthven. Yet this group may as well have come from a Russian novel of Stoker's time compared to the cartoon characters who pass for the Demeter's crew. They all amount to vampire fodder, of course, and with Dracula the focus rather than his victims his attacks are more reminiscent of Bugs Bunny's inevitable triumphs than they are horrific to any extent. It becomes less a question of which of the crew or passengers will survive than whether the viewers will survive -- and yet it's all nearly redeemed by the episode's closing twist.

The finale picks up threads of Stoker's story in the present day, as Dracula wakes from more than a century of recuperative slumber underwater to walk into a trap set nearly that long ago by a vampire-hunting organization founded by none other than Mina Murray, whom Dracula spared from a bad predicament at the end of the first episode for no apparent better reason than that the writers needed someone to found this organization. Working for this shadowy group is a familiar face: Zoe Helsing, Agatha's great-great-grandniece. She survives a vampire attack because her blood sickens the Count, for the all-too-mundane reason that she has terminal cancer. Other stories make dead people's blood potentially fatal to vampires, so this arguably is a modestly plausible leap forward. Zoe's organization wants to preserve Dracula and experiment on him, but they're thwarted by, of all things, a lawyer. Try and guess his name! After this presumably powerful, possibly malevolent organization meekly gives up its prisoner, the episode introduces us to a 21st century Lucy Westenra (Lydia West) and her familiar suitors -- minus one if the gay guy was supposed to be Arthur Holmwood. Dracula becomes obsessed with this reckless girl without really understanding why as we pick up the thread that may unravel the vampire after all. Just as he's never fully understood his own powers, this show proposes that Dracula has never understood, or at least hasn't fully come to terms with, his own nature. Inquisitive Agatha had wanted to know why Dracula fears Christian symbols -- apparently, their being holy never satisfied her inquiring mind, and in any event we'd seen another vampire in the first episode regard the same stuff without fear or pain -- and the Count's own half-baked idea that Christianity's bloody history makes the cross a symbol of death isn't satisfactory either. His fascination with Lucy -- who suffers an even more horrific fate than in the novel -- offers an important clue, but Zoe needs to drink Dracula's own blood in order to get insight from her feisty precursor Agatha. The resolution of all of this is weak: Dracula the mighty warrior, it turns, out, has always been ashamed of his own fear of death, and flinches from the traditional portents of his extinction -- the cross, the sun, etc. -- even when they won't hurt him at all, as Zoe/Agatha proves by aping Peter Cushing's heroics from Hammer's Horror of Dracula. So enlightened, our protagonist decides he may as well die. I'm not sure if that follows, but I suppose it effectively preempts any talk of another season -- unless, of course, the vampire rises to shrug, "Well, that didn't work!" and goes on about his business, should the ratings require it.

CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD (Der Fluch der grünen Augen, 1964)

Hungarian director Akos Rathonyi filmed this German-Yugoslav production featuring a mostly German cast, along with African-American expatriate John Kitzmiller, who ends up being the most interesting thing about the film. Known as "The Curse of the Green Eyes" in its original language, the movie follows an Interpol inspector (Adrian Hoven) into a village where a serial killer seems to be at work. There's a lot of superstitious suspicion about the deaths of several young women, but the local doctor dismisses the twin puncture marks on the most recent victim's neck as "superficial scratches." The local witch tells a different story, urging Inspector Dorin to carry protection against vampirism. We soon find ourselves in a whoisit as a number of candidates for the role of the killer emerge, including the reclusive professor (Wolfgang Preiss) conducting blood experiments in an old castle, his lovely assistant, his black servant (Kitzmiller) and a belligerent deaf-mute (Emmerich Schrenk) -- and you can throw the aggressively skeptical doctor in, too, if you're in an expansive mood. Meanwhile, Dorin sleeps through a failed vampire attack thanks to the power of the cross, while a persistently disappearing corpse finally separates the doctor from his skepticism.

 Unfortunately for anyone expecting suspense, the perpetrator's true identity isn't that hard to guess, and that lack of suspense only underscores the picture's overall lack of thrills or scares. That leaves only the admirable black and white cinematography by Hrvoje Saric and the subplot involving Kitzmiller's character to admire. It's unusual if not unique for a European vampire film to go off on a tangent about racism, but that's what Rathonyi and his co-writer do here. John, the black servant, serves as sort of a red herring for a while, if only because of his color. He faces in-you-face hatred from the mute, who tosses him out of a tavern despite the innkeeper's own tolearance, and even the witch, otherwise treated as a benign character, mistakes him for a monster when he happens to look into her window one night. The film tries a tricky balancing act, since John is thisclose to being the stereotypical scaredy-cat black servant, but it also shows us that John has real reason to worry, though not so much about the supernatural. This subplot could have been better integrated into the main story; the witch's prejudice might have undermined her credibility with the more cosmopolitan inspector, for instance, maybe making him less likely to adopt her safeguards. As it is it seems all too easy to vanquish the vampires once their lair and leader are identified, but I get the impression that the filmmakers may have seen all the undead stuff as a Macguffin enabling them to say something more interesting about small-town Mitteleuropa. Their message comes across as muddled or muffled, but it's hard to say whether the English dub accurately represents what the creators actually wanted to say. But since the U.S. release was sure to maximize the film's scare quotient, the lack of real scares in that version is pretty damning. Cave isn't a bad film to look at, but I wouldn't make it a high priority when you're scheduling horror movies for Halloween season.

DVR Diary: BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966)

You get the feeling watching William Beaudine's horror-western that the real creative work had been done when someone thought up the titles for the notorious double-feature of this film and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. Put those titles on a poster, someone must have thought, and you'll get people into the theaters. At that point, it doesn't matter what they see. It has to have been like that -- doesn't it? -- to explain what we still see. Beaudine was near the end of a very long career that stretched from Mary Pickford A pictures in the 1920s to Bowery Boys Bs and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla in the 1950s. Apart from the color, BvD is no real advance on the horror films Beaudine had made with Lugosi twenty years earlier for Monogram. For John Carradine, returning to the role of Dracula (though no one calls him that in the film) after twenty years, it was the opposite of an advance. He is a sadly shabby vampire despite the desperate attempt to tart him up with poofy cuffs and a huge red tie. His hypnotic gaze looks more like the drunken leer it probably was. His special-effects surrogates are some of the worst bat effects you'll ever see, and the transitions are truly primitive. A fake bat glides behind some object -- a rock or a stagecoach, for instance -- and Carradine scuttles out from behind.  He's probably the least graceful Dracula, though that's more the producers' fault for casting so physically limited an actor in the role. And with all these handicaps, Carradine is almost still the best actor in the cast. His only real rival is Olive Carey as a folksy old female doctor who becomes the nearest thing this film has to a Van Helsing.

But who needs Van Helsing when you have Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney)? The legendary gunman has gone straight and hopes to live in obscurity as just plain old William Bonney the ranch foreman, even though everyone in town seems to know about his past. He's sweet on Betty Bentley (Melinda Plowman), the gal who's inherited the ranch he works on, and he has a rival so we can have a fistfight every few reels. Betty is expecting an uncle to arrive and act as her guardian, but she's never seen the man before -- no photo, no painting, no lithograph. Unfortunately, the uncle and his wife divulge this fact to their fellow stagecoach passenger in black and red, who boards not long after draining but not killing the blonde daughter of an immigrant couple. At the next stop, the vampire bites an Indian girl, inciting the nearby tribe to massacre the stagecoach while he flaps to town to introduce himself as the uncle arriving early. The immigrants reach the same town and recognize "Mr. Underhill" as the vampire. If you're a vampire trying to maintain an imposture, what do you do at this point?

A. Kill the entire immigrant family.
B. Kill the daughter while leaving the mother, sleeping beside her, alone, and allowing the immigrant elders to live even after Betty has hired them as your household servants who constantly interfere with your plans, from spouting vampire lore to lining Betty's window with wolfsbane.


Underhill apparently prefers to rant at the hapless foreigners and occasionally shove them, because that way he gets more lines. That's the only motivation that makes sense. But the vampire's lack of self-preservation instincts is partly understandable: the poor man's in love. From the first time he saw Betty's face in a black and white miniature, he had decided that she would be his immortal mate. Underhill has set up a challenge for himself: seduce a woman while passing himself off as her uncle. But never underestimate an old man's stare and the seductive power of Raoul Kraushaar's generic spooky music. All that's left is to consummate the unholy marriage in an abandoned silver mine -- who knows how he got the big bed in there? But it's Billy to the rescue, having overcome everyone's skepticism about "bats and vampires" (both being equally mythical, I guess) and armed himself with Doc's book-learning -- admittedly incomplete since her German isn't so hot -- and the metal spike necessary to kill a vampire. Of course, Billy being Billy, he leads with his revolver, but bullets can't hurt the undead! Bullets can't, but the gun itself can as Underhill takes a vicious blow to the face that sets him up for the deathblow. Apparently a vampire can not only transform into a bat, but can also project a bat from his body, as one takes flight as Underhill squirms in Billy's grip. The bat flops to earth as the vampire dissolves into nothingness. But we don't see the bat dissolve, so is this truly the end??? Gott in Himmel, let's hope so.

DVR Diary: FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR (La Marca del Hombre Lobo, 1968)

The coming of all-digital television and the allotment of extra digital channels to existing local stations has resulted in more people discovering old movies the old way: on commercial TV, interrupted by ads, possibly further edited for time and formatted to fit the screen. In the last year or so, my local cable service has added three channels that occupy local stations' digital space. Grit is an action-oriented channel split between westerns and more recent shoot 'em-ups. Get.TV is a less genre-specific channel that showcases the Sony Pictures library, along with a bloc of vintage western TV shows. Most intriguing of the lot is Comet, which aims to cover more psychotronic territory. While the name says science fiction, Comet also shows horror films dating back at least to the 1950s, and it was on Comet that I finally got around to seeing Paul Naschy's first appearance as the accursed Waldemar Daninsky, el Hombre Lobo. The only difference between seeing it on Comet and catching it on an independent station some weekend thirty years ago is that Comet happened to have a widescreen print of the American edition of this 70 mm extravaganza, which played in 3-D during its original European release.

Readers of this blog probably know how Enrique Lopez Egiuluz's film got its inaccurate American name. U.S. distributor Independent International was committed to deliver a Frankenstein picture to theaters, namely Al Adamson's legendary Dracula vs. Frankenstein, but the picture wasn't ready, apparently due to legal reasons. So I-I  slapped a new title on the Spanish film -- the end credits offer yet another title, Hell's Creatures -- and added a prologue explaining how the Frankenstein family had been cursed with lycanthropy for its unholy experiments and renamed Wolfstein, thus explaining how the film's Imre Wolfstein is a werewolf. Ironically, a later Daninsky film, released in some places as Dracula vs. Frankenstein, was retitled Assignment Terror for the U.S.in deference to the Adamson film. More confusing still, the Hammer production Horror of Frankenstein was released in some U.S. markets as Frankenstein's Bloody Terror! Check out the Gadsden Times for January 31, 1972 on the Google News Archive if you don't believe me.

Naschy was the onscreen alter ego, adopted to win over this film's anticipated German audience, of screenwriter Jacinto Molina, heretofore little more than a bit player in movies and a big fan of the Universal horror cycle. Molina/Naschy's career project was to revitalize Universal tropes with a modern, adult Euro sensibility. Waldemar Daninsky is his take on Larry Talbot, albeit more dangerous as man and wolf. His opening scene, in which he appears at a costume party in a mephistophelean red outfit, is a warning that, however charming Daninsky may be, he's someone dangerous to know. And that's before Imre Wolfstein, recently resurrected by fools removing a stake from his heart, transmits his curse to the Polish Count. While Naschy does the Talbot torment thing well, screenwriter Molina spares himself the "they won't believe me" misery Lon Chaney's Larry often endured. Daninsky has won friends who see plainly what has happened to him and are eager to help him beat the curse. Their research turns up a potential expert on curing lycanthropy whose work was thirty years in the past. The expert's son arrives by train with his female assistant and one large wooden crate. He is, in fact, the expert himself (Julian Ugarte), a vampire who revives Imre yet again, imprisons Waldemar, and plans to make Waldemar's friends his undead thralls.

Ugarte's vampire is the weirdest thing in the picture. You know he's bad news before the reveal, as the camera approaches him warily at the lonely train station. Once he's revealed, he proves a strangely frolicsome creature, seducing an intended female victim with a running dance. Here Molina takes no cues from Universal but gives us a vampire whose spirit of amoral play reminded me of Molina's contemporary, Jean Rollin. Treating the vampire that way makes sense on Molina's own terms, however, because it maximizes the contrast between the elegant, almost ethereal vampire and the brute force of the werewolf, played by Naschy as a drooling cannonball of animal fury, especially compared to the greying Imre. The transformed Daninsky swipes at his prey compulsively, swinging his arms like he was throwing haymakers, when he isn't hurling himself at human or undead targets. Even before the makeup goes on, when Waldemar is chained, the former weightlifter Naschy thrashes about so, while an incredible chanting theme for the transformation plays, that you fear for the props. Naschy has always reminded me of John Belushi a little, and if any of you remember Belushi's Weekend Update editorials when work himself into an apoplexy and throw himself to the floor, that's Naschy just getting started. You can see how he became a horror star here; Naschy as performer and Molina as writer infuse the old tropes with an unprecedented level of energy, while the widescreen cinematography and terrific locations and sets give Daninsky the biggest possible showcase. Frankenstein's Bloody Terror isn't free of the curse of dubbed Euro-horror: bland supporting characters are rendered still more bland by dull dubbing, and either this cut or further cuts imposed by Comet eliminated nearly all of a final fight between Daninsky and Imre. Most of the time, fortunately, the slow bits are redeemed by the pictorial spectacle, even in what looked like an unmastered print. Under even worse broadcast conditions long ago, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror inspired people to seek out more of Naschy's work. It has been a while since I'd seen any Naschy movies, but now I want to get back into the habit.

 

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2014)

Ana Lily Amirpour was born in Great Britain and considers herself Iranian-American. To my knowledge, she's never set foot in Iran, yet she has made a movie in her ancestral Farsi and planted Farsi street signs on her southern California locations. Are we supposed to believe that it's taking place in Iran? Is it in some way a reflection on the Islamic Republic? Or is it just weird for the sake of weird? My last guess is probably the best one. Amirpour's "Bad City" is a dystopia -- there seems to be a municipal dumping ground for dead bodies near some busy roads -- but there's nothing oppressively Islamic about it. Instead, there's the blasphemy at the heart of the picture: under the chador that signifies modesty and obedience a vampire (Sheila Vand) stalks the city. This nameless vampire seems stuck in eternal late adolescence, happily claiming a skateboard as tribute from a frightened child. Apparently she was turned in the early 1980s, to judge from the music posters in her lair. That's nearly contemporary with the advent of the Islamic Republic, but maybe Amirpour just likes the music and fashions of that era. Apart from the vampire's mocking chador and the fact that everyone talks Farsi, Bad City looks pretty much like the America where the film was shot, complete with a hapless hero (Arash Marandi) with a leather jacket and a convertible to drive through the Lynchian industrial landscape.

A skateboarding vampire symbolizes eternal youth pretty nicely,

but even eternal youth grows dated in time.

 

Amirpour calls her film an "Iranian vampire spaghetti western." Check, check and .... well, no. Let's draw a line somewhere. That label really only underscores the movie-movieness of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The Iranian-ness of the characters and dialogue and the genuine inspiration of the menace under the chador -- has Amirpour been accused of inflaming Islamophobia? -- only superficially covers the essentially derivative nature of the movie, giving it a pretentious novelty. Yet there is something sincere in her empathetic approach to her alienated protagonists groping toward intimacy amid squalor and danger. The vampire girl still longs for human company, for friends if not lovers whom she doesn't have to devour. There are plenty of people left over for that purpose: the pimps, the junkies and other dregs of society. Her victims eventually will include the hero Arash's father, but the father's addiction, fed by the pimp, has made Arash's life hell, if not more of a hell than life in Bad City is for anybody. Under more normal circumstances this killing might turn our hero against his undead friend, but in fact it's the moment that allows them both to cut their ties with the accursed place.

There's a slight echo of Let the Right One In/Let Me In in this creepy courtship, though A Girl Walks Home is ultimately more romantic, its vampire more in need of a soulmate than a servant. She sees something more in Arash than initially meets the eye when she finds him in a Dracula costume, having staggered stoned from a costume party, staring at a streetlamp. I don't think she's dumb enough to have though he might be like her that way, but she does seem to sense that he's like her in some way. She feels a similar sort of kinship with a prostitute who seems as much a victim of life as Arash, abused by the same pimp who claims our hero's convertible as payment for dad's drugs before the vampire kills him and manhandled by the dad (who has a past with her) until the vampire kills him. People like Arash and the hooker are the closest she'll get to the underworld of sociability with which most American vampires are blessed these days. In that sense, depending on your preferences, A Girl Walks Home is more of a proper vampire movie than many made these days, or at least more of a horror film than those fantasy films, even if it's still too romantic, in its despairing way, for some tastes.

 

Welcome to Bad City

It's a pretty slick piece of work, thanks largely to Lyle Vincent's black and white cinematography. If there's anything "spaghetti" about the picture its Amirpour and Vincent's proficiency in widescreen composition. It's mercifully light on effects, as Vand's vampire displays quite modest fangs and gets her voice mechanically modulated when she wants to scare people. Overall, it reveals Amirpour as a talent, but it seems just a little too calculated a revelation. It's paid off just the same, since she'll have an English-language cannibal movie with real stars out next year. Let's wait for that one before we say that Amirpour is really a talent to watch. For now she's done enough to get a second chance.

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (2014)

It was a low bar to hurdle, but Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement deserve credit all the same for writing, directing and starring in the funniest vampire comedy ever made. There may not be much competition -- qualitatively speaking, that is -- but such competition as exists only proves how hard the task has been. How did these New Zealand comics pull it off? I compared notes with my longtime friend and longertime vampire-movie fan "Wendigo" and among the things we agreed on was that this film benefited from not focusing on one specific vampire film or personality to parody. Instead, it's a fairly comprehensive survey of vampire archetypes without stooping to impersonation. This is a film where no one does a "blah, blah" version of Bela Lugosi's voice, but there is an Euro-accented romantic-tragic vampire, Viago (Waititi) and a vampire inspired by the pop-mythological Vlad Tepes, Vladislav the Poker (Clement), who share a Wellington NZ house along with Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), whom Wendigo had to tag for me as an Ann Rice-type vampire gone to seed, and Petyr (Ben Fransham), a mute Nosferatu type who spends most of his time in the basement. The creators resist any remaining temptation to parody the Twilight cycle, but instead get laughs out of 21st century vampire Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer) boasting implausibly that he inspired the books. The simple idea of What We Do in the Shadows is to throw these types together in one cramped setting, where none of them really fit, and let them bounce off one another. In short, it's reality TV or, more accurately, mockumentary, the gimme being that these vampires have allowed a documentary crew to film their activities, promising not to kill them and, indeed, keeping their word. The description doesn't sound very promising, really, and Wendigo in particular was skeptical about the rave reviews the film was getting, but the vampires' desire -- Viago's more than anyone else's -- to publicize themselves gets us quickly to the heart of the parody. Above all, the vampires (not counting the indifferent Petyr) are narcissists almost to the point of neurosis and don't really want to be in the shadows at all. In short, they're a lot like us.

It really was that simple. Give us vampires with the full panoply of powers -- mesmerism is especially important for them, particularly when police have to inspect the house shortly after one of the vampires has gone up in flames -- but make them almost mundane in their humanity, or almost human in their mundanity. That's the sort of comic gambit we might have expected in the 1950s, the golden age of parody, only now it comes out somewhat less Yiddish than it might have then. More to the point, whereas most vampire comedies aspire to an Addams Family mentality, What We Do in the Shadows is more like The Munsters, though the vampires in the picture are more like Herman than Grandpa, the actual vampire on the show. For all their irrepressible exoticism, there's something laughably bourgeois about their squabbling over household chores, their glee at getting admitted into trendy niteclubs with the help of Nick, their newest recruit, their still greater glee when Nick's still-human buddy Stu (Stu Rutherford) wires their home for the Internet and really introduces them to the 21st century. While most vampire comedies take the glamour of vampirism for granted, What We Do in the Shadows constantly punctures the glamour while exploring the paranormal underworld of Wellington. Our vampires trade insults with an equally bourgeois band of werewolves; their "Dark Masquerade" that climaxes the film takes place in a bowling alley banquet hall. Just as important, the film doesn't try to get laughs out of dumb humans getting seduced or waylaid by the vampires. It does quite well without an "audience point-of-view" character, the most prominent human character, Stu, being noteworthy for his utterly passive fearlessness in the vampires' presence. If anything, his technical knowhow makes him as fascinating and exotic a character to the vampires as they should seem to him.

All of the above would only add up to good intentions if the cast didn't deliver fully committed character turns. Each of the vampires (apart from Petyr) has a storyline running through the picture: Viago's pining for a still-living human lover he was separated from 70 years ago; Vladislav's much-hinted at feud with "the Beast," and his squabbles with his current human servant Jackie (Jackie van Beek), a local housewife impatient for eternal life; Deacon's growing jealousy of Nick, now the most modern and fashionable of the group, even as he seems to ape Deacon's fashions; Nick's own imperilment of the group's safety by his public boasting of his new status. What We Do in the Shadows keeps a lot of balls in the air while most vampire comedies can barely hold on to one. I won't go into further detail because it's a good enough comedy not to have its gags spoiled. It's no masterpiece by any means, and if I find it one of the funnier movies of the past few years I have to add that I seek out relatively few comedies. But it is the best of its kind and that justifies some hyperbole, as well as renewed astonishment that it too cinema so long to do this right.

DVR Diary: DRACULA UNTOLD (2014)

If "zero to hero" is the popular paradigm today, the reverse of the coin is the villain who has his reasons. Just as we seem uncomfortable with characters who are inherently good or effortlessly competent, so we seem, if anything, more uncomfortable with characters who are innately wicked, neither reformable nor redeemable. Given a widespread inclination to see the mythic Dracula -- a modern amalgam of Bram Stoker's fictional character as interpreted in numerous films and the historic Vlad Tepes -- as a tragic figure, something like Dracula Untold was inevitable. It's not exactly "hero to zero," since this film's Vlad is always too scrupulous and sensitive to truly go bad, but it still reflects audiences' presumed obsession with the becoming of heroic or legendary figures, and in this case especially, to understand is to excuse.

Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans) is the stren, protective ruler of his people after a hard childhood as a hostage and child soldier of the rising Ottoman Empire, where he learned the fine art of impaling and its strategic uses.Gary Shore's film is at pains to tell us that Vlad doesn't impale folks gratuitously, but as a deterrent, for all the good that does when Islam is on the march. But despite what I just said, Dracula Untold admirably underplays the Turks' religious aspect. For this film's purposes they're generic invaders and enslavers, the better to make clear that Vlad does what he must for his people to survive. Understanding that the odds against him are hopeless, he takes interest in a legend of a powerful, demonic figure dwelling in a cave recently occupied by now-dead Turkish troops. This mystery man is a very old vampire (Charles "Tywin Lannister" Dance) who offers Vlad a deal. He'll let Vlad drink his blood, which will give the prince vampire powers for three days, time enough to fend off the Turkish threat, and when those days expire that will be that -- unless Vlad should drink human blood, at which point he'll become a full-time vampire, while his sire will be freed from his cave prison to pursue some nebulous mission of vengeance that may require Vlad's assistance down the line. An optimistic judge of his own integrity and willpower, Vlad accepts the generous offer.

Turk-trained Vlad is already a formidable fighter; we see him take out a half-dozen Turks singlehandedly to save his own son from enslavement. Now, with vampire blood seething through him, he's literally a one-man army, not to mention a one-man flock of bats. It's no longer cool enough for Dracula to turn into a bat; he's got to be lots of bats, a cloud of them, though there's no practical point to this. Shore clearly though it was a cool video-gamey effect for him to turn into a cloud of bats when he flies speedily from one opponent to another, but wouldn't it make his task easier if he could, in bats-form, attack multiple foes at once? Well, it's a moot point, since even in his own pokey one-at-a-time fashion he can take out an entire Turkish army by his lonesome. This show of power takes his people aback ever so slightly, but it's not until he starts to sizzle in sunlight that they really start to take offense. Still, they're going to need him when his childhood pal Mehmet II, the Conqueror, the man who took Constantinople (Dominic "Howard Stark" Cooper), comes calling with the main Turkish army. For the big battle he gets help from an actual flock of bats, and when his lady love (Sarah Gadon), dying from Turk treachery, begs him to drink the blood he'll need to finish the job, even at the cost of his soul, it looks like another rout. But Mehmet's not "the Conqueror" for nothing. He lays a trap for Vlad, luring him for a final battle in a tent piled ankle-deep with silver coins, nullifying our hero's vampire powers. But don't assume that history's a guide to what happens next, because there weren't vampires in history, after all.

Dracula Untold is unrepentantly preposterous but the director and writers brought some redemptive imagination to what could have been simply a by-the-numbers origin story. The fight in the silver-tent is an inspired idea, and despite the inevitable dull CGI skies the picture has some decent production design. Its main fault is its dogged refusal Dracula become truly evil -- though I suppose you could see something evil on the level of hypocrisy about the denouement. While Vlad's been fighting Mehmet the Turks have pretty much massacred his incompetent subjects. Our hero finds a handful of wounded survivors to whom he offers vengeance via vampirism. A total wipeout of the Turks results, until the only humans left alive our Vlad's son and a monk. The other vampires are his people now, but Vlad suddenly grows less protective of them. To be fair, their desire to drink his son's blood has something to do with that. After sending his son off with the monk, Vlad uses his vampire magic to part the clouds and expose himself and everyone else to purging sunlight, but before he can join them in deserved oblivion, a gypsy proto-Renfield he met earlier in the story (Zach "Captain Charles Vane" McGowan) drags his scorched form to shelter, and that leads us to the present day. Has Vlad lived out Dracula's legendary career of wickedness or has he just hung around Transylvania as a benevolent spirit? The film isn't telling, but the filmmakers feel that one thing Dracula must do is meet a reincarnation of his lost first love -- and it also chooses this point to remind us that Vlad still owes that older vampire some service, hopefully in a sequel that a worldwide gross of a quarter-billion dollars may justify. I understand that hopeful filmmakers like to leave their pictures open-ended, but it was kind of demoralizing to have this film's last words be "Let the games begin." The film we have is a tale told by talented idiots, but a lot of that was due to the pictorial potential of the period, and I doubt strongly that they can repeat what modest success they had with a period piece in modern dress, especially when burdened with the tired gimmick of the reincarnated lover. Better, I think, to quit when they're slightly ahead and leave the rest of this story untold.

The Twilight Saga: BREAKING DAWN PART 2 (2012)

My old friend Wendigo gave up on the vampire movie reviewing project some time ago, as longtime readers must have noticed, but it's his copy of the final film of the Twilight series that I watched last night. His enthusiasms have changed -- he's more a superhero guy right now -- but he's also a completist, so he had to have this last disc. I decided I might as well see it through as well. As a reminder, I agree with Wendigo's basic position that, whatever you think of the books as literature or the films as films, there's nothing wrong with the basic Twilight concept of benign vampires falling in love with mortal teenagers. Folklore is always evolving and pop culture's embrace of the noble vampire is just part of that evolution -- not necessarily progress, but change. But having said that, I found that Breaking Dawn Part 2, Bill Condon's conclusion of the series felt even less like a vampire film than all the others. As Wendigo may appreciate, it seemed more like a superhero movie, spending much of its time introducing new characters, some of whom have superpowers to show off. The bad thing about it all is that Part 2 is in such a hurry that it never really lets any of these new characters justify the buildup they get along the way. You get the sense that we got the buildup scenes because the object was to film every part of the book (or what was left of it after Part 1) that could be rendered with special effects on film. Little else seemed to matter.

 

Bella Cullen and Friends

In its determination to let nearly every available character take another bow, and in its cringeworthy banter, Part 2 seems like its own fanfiction. The writing is on that level ("You nicknamed my baby after the Loch Ness Monster !?!") It's more purely fantastical in its emphasis on gathering vampires from around the world -- it's still introducing new characters almost to the very end -- and its resolution of the Cullen clan's feud with the Volturii than any previous film. Whatever was attractive in the series's balancing act between Bella's world and Edward's is gone once Bella's marriage to Edward is truly consummated by her becoming a vampire. Could Part 2's power fantasy of Bella as more powerful than everyone else -- she can cast force fields and is really, really strong -- really have come from the same writer, or appealed to the same audience? In effect, the Cullens are stand-ins for the real world, for us, in their wishfully passive resistance to the mean old Volturii. These antagonists let the books and movies eat their cake and have it too, giving us the sort of prancing, pompous personalities most people identify with classic movie vampires. You can tell they're the bad guys because they parade about in capes and robes, while the good vampires are more casual or look more cool. Never mind whether vampires belong in Bella's mortal world; the Volturii don't belong in the same world as Bella's vampires and werewolves. They may be the single silliest element in the whole series, and that becomes a problem when we're expected to take them seriously as a threat to everyone we presumably care for. Whenever Michael Sheen as the head Volturii opens his mouth, you wonder whether to laugh or pity the man.

Despite that, even at its worst Part 2 is a better wrap-up to an overextended movie series than the final Harry Potter films. Despite everything, Condon manages to nurse some genuine tension out of the long confrontation in the snow between the Volturii and the Cullens et al. And when the negotiations appear to collapse, the fighting is at least more interesting to watch than people waving wands at one another. Part 2 also deserves credit for the single funniest scene (intentional category) of the entire series, the moment when guileless Jacob Black tries to introduce Bella's dad to her new reality by changing into a wolf before his eyes -- though not before stripping down in a manner that was probably more alarming to the old man than the eventual transformation. Taylor Lautner is one of cinema's good sports, exposing himself to the contempt of all the cool moviegoers yet making the most here out of a character for whom supernatural wonders are too often cause for embarrassment. As for his equally-despised co-star, Robert Pattinson is definitely more natural, comfortable, loose and likable here than he was in Cosmopolis. If anything, alas, Kristen Stewart has devolved during the series, but at least she conveys convincingly that something about Bella is dead. Conventional standards of acting never really mattered to these films, of course; the actors' overall lack of affect probably made them easier for their audiences to identify with. In the end, I can't be too hard on these movies because, as I've understood all along, they're not meant for me. They've never been very good movies, but they're not the crimes against culture that some seem to think they are. Leave them alone, I say, and in a few years it'll all be forgotten -- at least until a nostalgia wave hits sometime in the 2030s. I don't need to have vampire superpowers to see that coming.

LIPS OF BLOOD (Levres de sang, 1975)

While the rest of Europe made what I call "swinging Gothic" horror films in the 1960s and 1970s, Jean Rollin comes closer to just plain Gothic. His is a Gothic manner befitting his own time, however. Some of his films are period pieces, but Lips of Blood in particular portrays nostalgia, and arguably criticizes it, rather than being a mere exercise in nostalgia. It creates a fitting setting for nostalgia: a modern France of bland parties, workmanlike sexuality and abandoned storefronts. The present day, for Rollin, already seems to be in a state of decay, dark and empty but for monuments where killers living and undead stalk the few hapless seekers. Why not yearn for a fantastic past as Frederic (Jean-Loup Philippe) does, like a sleeper awakened, when he happens to see a photo of an old castle at a party? The picture stirs long-buried memories of a night spent huddled under a borrowed shawl in the castle, and a friendly girl who comforts him and sends him home in the morning. Yet Frederic's mother says he never spent a night at such a place. And what's up with her? We saw her during the opening credits supervising the disposal of several bodies, still-breathing figures dumped into coffins that are nailed shut. It looks like sinister work, but is it?

For some strange reason Frederic isn't satisfied with life in Seventies France (above), but longs for a gothic past.

The rest of the film is Frederic's struggle to fully recover his memory of the chateau. He begins to see the mute girl from the chateau, at among other places a movie theater showing Jean Rollin's Nude Vampire. The visions draw Frederic to open the coffins we saw at the start of the picture, which have bats inside them now. Before long, vampires are stalking the city and helping Frederic in his quest when not feasting on victims. Frederic needs help because people are out to get him. A woman confronts him and claims to be the girl from the chateau, now middle-aged; she leads him to a house and locks him in a room until the vampires rescue him. He's shadowed by a gunman who corners him at a large fountain until the vampires distract him by turning on the sprays. He's thrown into a mental hospital until the vampires disguise as nurses and spring him. But dumb luck puts a postcard in his hand that identifies the old castle, still the mystery girl's home. He find her in a coffin as his mother finds him, and the truth comes out. The girl is a vampire who infected the other vampire girls who've been helping Frederic. Mom and her vampire-hunter pals will take care of them, but Frederic has to resist the temptation to free his memory, or else the plague of vampirism will break out anew.

Spoiler: Frederic doesn't resist. That's what makes it a horror film.

And what's horrific about it -- chilling sounds like the right word -- is the way Rollin roots horror in nostalgia. If Frederic feels victimized by the repression of a memory, Jennifer (Annie Briand), the object of his longing, has been condemned to a regime of enforced nostalgia. Her coffin is surrounded by treasures of her childhood, including storybooks and Donald Duck comics. She can project her consciousness outside the coffin even before he's freed -- that's how Frederic could see her -- but she was stuck reading the same stories over and over. In later films, especially Two Orphan Vampires, Rollin will again summon nostalgia for a storybook world, but there his is the elegiac nostalgia of an old man. In Lips of Blood nostalgia comes with a threat of corruption, with a warning that some things should not be remembered or longed for so intensely. Frederic doesn't start seeing Jennifer until the random encounter with a photo jogs his memory. Once he sees her, his fairytale quest to rescue a sleeping princess threatens to cost him his sanity or his soul. If Jennifer's liberation can look like an escape from the past, Frederic's quest and his final choice seem like a retreat to an imagined past that can only render the seeker undead. The ambivalent mood of the movie may be as much Philippe's idea as Rollin's; the actor co-wrote the screenplay. That ambivalence still allows the possibility that Frederic's choice is the right one in his dead-end world, though that makes the conclusion no less horrible.

Lips of Blood is Rollin's most accomplished work as a director of his films that I've seen. His atmospheric instincts are assured, whether he films amid the ruins of the chateau or the modern ruins and monuments of the city. A strong sense of dread pervades everything once Frederic's quest begins. The film's one galling weakness is in the casting of the vampire girls. Briand is fine as an actual character, but the four subordinate vampires seem to be utter amateurs with no instinct for the camera whatsoever, stumbling about vacuously as if they've just staggered out of a nightclub or fallen out of bed, barely capable of grimacing or baring their fangs on cue. They are so many does in the headlights, and I feel sorry for the two who had nothing to wear but big diaphanous veils that blow wildly in some surely cold winds. They're all expendable, of course, but they undercut whatever mood Rollin is aiming for whenever they appear. Fortunately, they don't undercut the mood fatally; the director's vision here is too profound and expansive to be so easily ruined, and few great horror films are without awkward elements. I'm not ready to call Lips a great horror film after one viewing, and it'll never rank as any great scarefest. But if you're looking for a certain gothic creepiness rather than raw fright, Lips of Blood has something special to offer.

BLOOD BATH (1963-66)

With hyperbole rare for a non-controversial subject, Wikipedia says of Blood Bath that it "had possibly the most convoluted production history of any horror movie ever made." Over three years, under the worried stewardship of Roger Corman, a Yugoslavian-American spy picture called Operation Titian transformed first into a Jack Hill slasher picture, then into a Stephanie Rothman vampire movie. The finished product is reported by Wikipedia to be 69 minutes long, but more footage was added so the picture could fit into a conventional TV time slot, while the version available for streaming on Netflix is a minimalist 61 minutes. It must have seemed far out of date by the time it was released in 1966, being in black and white and burdened with comedy-relief beatniks. But despite everything it has its moments.

Confusion sets in early after a stylish opening that appears to establish the location as somewhere in Europe. Yet the story seems to be set in Venice, California, rather than Venice, Italy. Saying otherwise, you could still explain the beatniks by calling it an artists' colony for expatriate Americans, but you'd have a harder time explaining the beaches facing the Pacific Ocean. Some scenes of stalking and chasing were shot in Europe for Operation Titian, and one of the stars of the first draft, William (Squire of Gothos) Campbell, returned for the California shoot. Whatever he was in Titian, he's now the painter Antonio Sordi, the envy of his pretentious beatnik rivals and lately acclaimed for a series of paintings portraying women in their death throes. Little do the connoisseurs realize that these scenes were modeled from life ... or death. But Sordi is no mere madman, as he had been in the Jack Hill version. He is a vampire, an accursed Renaissance artist haunted by the taunting spirit of his original muse. Sordi's vampirism was Rothman's idea, but Campbell didn't come back for the third round of filming, so Rothman films transformations that allow another actor to play the grey-haired, puffy-faced bloodsucker. The vampire idea sits well, however, with a storyline filmed by Hill in which Sordi falls in love with a woman he doesn't want to kill. One of Campbell's scenes with the girl (Linda Saunders) can even be taken, in the new context, as a riff on Nosferatu. During a picnic, the girl struggles to slice a loaf of bread. Watching a vampire movie, you expect her to cut herself and tempt Sordi with her blood, but Sordi himself seems to anticipate that possibility and snatches the bread and knife from her before any mishap can occur.

 

Portrait of the Vampire as an Artist

 

According to Wikipedia, while Rothman shaped the final story, most of what we see is Hill's work. Before reading the reference, I assumed the beatnik scenes were Hill's because Hill protege Sid Haig is one of the beatniks. The joke is that the beatniks are vacuously pretentious, led by Max (Carl Schanzer), the inventor of gun-toting "quantum painting" and Sordi's rival in the local art market. The beatniks squabble over "formalism" and go into raptures over random splashes of color. In his one scene with the beatniks, Campbell contemptuously squirts ketchup from a bottle onto Haig's newest work, and Haig feels the picture's been improved. Oddly, the beatniks emerge as quasi-heroes in the final version, temporarily rescuing the Saunders character from a vampire attack while Max chases the monster and seems to defeat him. The beatnik material seems to brand Blood Bath as an AIP product, evoking memories of A Bucket of Blood in particular because of the art-horror angle, but at this late date it looks like a case of AIP nostalgia for itself.

Highlights include most of the stalk and chase scenes, including a Felliniesque encounter with masked revelers that has Sordi briefly confronting a fake vampire and a man in a skeleton costume innocently dragging Sordi's target from her hiding place; the beach chase scenes with Campbell's daywalking stand-in; the impressionistic flashback to Sordi's origin, climaxing in the desert as the camera hurtles back from the painter's easel to reveal corpses all around him. Dare I suggest, by the way, that Blood Bath's final concept of a vampire cursed by a witch and obsessing over a presumed reincarnation of his lover anticipates some elements of Barnabas Collins, who first appeared on Dark Shadows the year after Blood Bath finally appeared?

 

 

The lowlight, regrettably, is the out-of-nowhere EC Comics finish in which those victims of Sordi whom he'd preserved as pseudo-sculptures come to vengeful un-life. However you distribute the hits and misses, the film is a mess, and no one is more to blame for that than the hard-to-please Corman, who may have been too conscious of rapidly changing tastes and too desperate to adjust. The film we have is a shambles of potential, and I wouldn't mind someone trying to remake it as a more coherent whole. It wouldn't be hard.

Jonathan Frid's Last Bow

Devoted fans of the Dark Shadows soap opera of the 1960s and early 1970s may be forgiven for speculating that publicity for Tim Burton's movie remake may have sped the demise, reported today, of Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas Collins. From my own experience showing the trailer to my friend Wendigo, what Burton appears to have perpetrated has shocked and infuriated many fans of the old series. They were clearly hoping for a somewhat straight retelling of Dan Curtis's Barnabas legend, but Burton, in the promotion stage at least, has delivered a travesty that looks as much like a pastiche or parody of his own past work as it resembles a homage to or parody of Dark Shadows. Watching it with no vested interest in Dark Shadows myself, I was appalled that Burton had seemingly backslid about a quarter-century -- though the film is clearly meant in a nostalgic vein -- when something more in the Sweeney Todd manner might have been expected from him and purported Dark Shadows superfan Johnny Depp. Burton has tried to spin this -- presumably in the face of fan-base rage, --  by saying that they'll like the film as a whole better, but that he felt that overt comedy would evoke the unintended amusement many viewers got from the cheap, campy old shows.  In any event, lest anyone feel that Frid went to his grave -- or wherever -- cursing the movie, original co-star Kathryn Leigh Scott is quick, following the announcement of his passing, to state that neither he nor she resented Burton's treatment of their legacy. Both Scott and Frid make cameo appearances in the picture next month and we may presume that both were treated with a due deference from self-professed fans on the set that may color their attitudes. As old troupers they may also have been better sports about the material than their fans. Whatever Frid himself felt about it -- he remained relatively aloof from the fandom for many years, perhaps cursing the typecasting that limited his post-series acting career, before embracing them late in life -- it might be said that when Burton's movie appears and Frid has his scene, the beloved thespian will at last be truly undead....

Wendigo Meets FEMALE VAMPIRE (Les Avaleuses,1973)

Wendigo didn't know that Lina Romay had died until I told him, but he knew the name when I said it. He'd first seen her in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, but got to know her better, he's not ashamed to admit, in the pages of Celebrity Sleuth and Celebrity Skin. Because the latter two magazines were fairly informative about their subjects' careers, he had some awareness of the late actress's work and her relationship with Jess Franco, but he doesn't recall seeing any of Romay's films before I showed him Franco's Female Vampire last weekend. He was more familiar with it under the alternate title The Bare Breasted Countess and had a good idea of what he was in for -- but it didn't help much. Wendigo's a Franco skeptic -- he thinks poorly of his Count Dracula, for instance, -- but was willing to give the cult auteur another shot.

We cheated: this is a shot from Erotikill, an alternate version of Female Vampire.

Romay plays Countess Irina von Karlstein, last of an accursed line and vacationing in Portugal. The mute Irina is more like a succubus than a vampire in the current sense of the word, -- except in the alternate Erotikill version -- but Wendigo notes that vampires in pre-modern folklore were not exclusively blood-drinkers, and that a succubus is really just a kind of vampire, or vice versa. In Irina's case, it's succubus with an emphasis on suck. She drains your life force through oral sex -- but she's increasingly unhappy with her plight. The big problem seems to be that her sex partners die
before she can be satisfied.

 

Here's Romay in a mood more typical of the Female Vampire version.

Seeking satisfaction, she can't stop preying on people, or humping her bed, or fellating her bedpost. Recklessly, she drains the masseur of the hotel she's staying in, as well as a reporter sent to interview her notorious aristocratic self. Courting danger, she briefly turns vigilante vampire to break up some sort of torture-snuff ring before falling hard for a morbid poet (Jack Taylor) who wants her to take him "beyond the mists." This isn't just a poetic metaphor; after Irina kills the reporter, we see her escort the bare-breasted victim literally beyond the mists and into a magical forest from which she never returns.

Interview with the Female Vampire, and its sequel

Irina can only show the way but can't follow until the poet's example awakens the idea that she could will her own death. But maybe she won't have to go to that trouble, since the dedicated Dr. Roberts ("Jess Franck"), advised by the inevitable (for Franco) "Dr. Orloff," is determined to track down a vampire perpetrator of recent murders despite the skepticism of the local police. Will the intrepid occult investigator overcome Irina's equally-mute manservant in time to confront the countess in her Kool-aid filled bathtub -- because there's no way Franco's telling us that's blood -- before more people die or Wendigo falls asleep?...

There's your story, but Franco's real subject is ennui -- terminal dissatisfaction despite all efforts. In Wendigo's opinion, that choice of subject inherently limits the film's appeal, because even if Franco succeeds in creating empathy in the audience, their shared ennui would only leave them indifferent to Irina's fate or anyone else's. He might get away with it if Female Vampire were more successful on an artistic level, but Wendigo felt that Franco succeeded only sporadically in creating the right mood. He manages it best in the purely pictorial scenes when Romay wanders through the woods. There are other odd or arguably surreal moments that impressed or amused him. He was tickled by the way Romay would start to flap her arms like bat wings as if about to transform, only to have Franco cut to the flapping bat-winged hood ornament of a limousine as Irina delivers her self-pitying internal
monologues.

I bought a vampire limousine

But there's too much going on in the movie, and not enough, to maintain the tone. The movie suffers, in Wendigo's view, whenever it returns to Dr. Roberts and his desultory investigations. These scenes have a perfunctory quality -- Franco himself is lifeless in the vampire-hunter role -- and the English dubbing we subjected ourselves to was awful. But the real problem is Franco's all-too-obvious desire to film his girlfriend screwing and masturbating. To a certain extent you need these scenes to drive home the theme -- lack of satisfaction is one of the few themes capable of artistic realization in porn -- but Franco doesn't know when to quit. The sex and masturbation scenes just go on and on, far longer than necessary to make any point Franco can think of. They contributed to my own feeling that something like Female Vampire could never really have what we think of as a "director's cut" -- a definitive version of Franco's vision from which nothing can be cut. My hunch is that he thought almost everything he shot was provisional or expendable -- and the history of variants running between 70 and 110 minutes seems to bear me out. This may be the perfect case of a film being less than the sum of its parts. The way Wendigo sees it, Franco failed by succeeding. Female Vampire does inspire the ennui it describes. It leaves one drained and indifferent -- or at least that's how Wendigo felt.

While we watched, I suggested that this could be Franco's imitation of a Jean Rollin film, and Wendigo is willing to agree to a degree. Wendigo likes Rollin better because the Frenchman was capable of seeing magic in practically any setting or any object, while Franco, in my friend's opinion, has all the magical sensibility of a Polaroid camera. He has some sense of style, but Wendigo senses an essential absence of ideas or real imagination that limits Franco as a cinematic fantasist. His nice Portuguese location goes largely to waste, for instance, while he spends precious time in Romay's bedroom. We also compared Franco unfavorably to fellow Spaniard Paul Naschy -- you can tell the difference when you consider the awful scenes with Franco as Dr. Roberts. Naschy was a true believer in material like this, but Franco is clearly just going through the motions. Those scenes are just excuses to cast himself and get a Dr. Orloff into the movie -- and all the scenes could easily be cut without harming the story.

Jean-Pierre Bouyxou as "Dr. Orloff" looks up -- to show that he's blind,

while "Jess Franck" (left) looks on.

Wendigo hasn't seen much Franco, and hasn't seen anything that he's liked yet -- though he's curious to see the shorter, blood-oriented Erotikill version of this film. I've seen some that I've liked so I'm still willing to cut Franco some slack, but I can understand Wendigo's frustration. His admiration for Lina Romay's attributes remains undiminished however, and we agree that there is new poignancy now in the final moments when the countess, no longer bare breasted and possibly redeemed, finally walks on her own through the mist into posterity. Like the countess, Lina Romay herself now belongs to the ages.

1954-2012

Wendigo Meets MIDNIGHT SON (2011)

Don't watch Scott Leberecht's feature-film directing debut the way we did if you can avoid doing so. Wendigo and I watched it on FearNet, and despite the fact that we pay a premium to get that station, it censors movies. Curse words grow common at a certain point but all get censored, and women's naked breasts disappear in clouds of pixilation. Despite those drawbacks, we found the film worth reviewing, and we regret that it didn't get a chance to prove itself in theaters, apart from a handful of film festivals. Back in the day, something like Midnight Son would have been booked into drive-ins and grindhouse theaters. That's not to say that it's a good film or worthy of play in a modern multiplex -- Wendigo confesses that he would have been disappointed had he shelled out ten bucks to see it -- but is that the film's fault or the fault of modern distribution or exhibition policies? Does no one know how to promote something like this anymore? But enough editorializing.

Midnight Son is a B movie with the mindset of an "independent" film. That is, Leberecht, a former special-effects art director for Industrial Light and Magic, aspires more to art than exploitation. Like many a modern vampire movie this one can be taken as a metaphor for alienation, addiction, or what have you. The protagonist, Jacob (Zak Kilberg) is a security guard first seen waking up at night and parting the curtain-like blanket that keeps the sun off his bed. He's avoided sunlight since childhood, when his arm literally caught fire in strong daylight. He's feeling kinda poorly as he approaches his 25th birthday -- as a friendly janitor (veteran character actor Tracey Walter earns an "and" and honorary red-herring status for his trouble) helpfully explains, a body finishes growing at about that time. Jacob feels weak, has fainting spells, and goes through fits of the munchies -- nothing seems to satisfy him. A doctor suspects a form of anemia, and through trial and error Jacob discovers that only raw blood can calm his rumbly tummy. He buys animal blood by the carton from the local meat market, but after a while it fails to satisfy. Suspecting the worst -- he watches Fright Night on video and handles a cross to test himself -- he grows desperate for human blood. Caught trying to get into a medical-waste dumpster outside a hospital, Jacob becomes a client of Marcus (Jo D. Jonz), a corrupt orderly who eventually starts bleeding innocent people to supply our horrified hero. His increasingly dangerous relationship with Marcus complicates his romance with Mary (Maya Parish) a coke-addict cocktail waitress whose nosebleed during sex awakens his appetite for human blood. His efforts to avoid killing for blood only embroil him in violence -- and he worries that he may have killed without realizing it as police investigate the death of a woman who worked in his building.

At a certain point, Leberecht stops teasing and makes clear that Jacob has become some sort of vampire. Worse, he's started making vampires without meaning to. In one case, the new vampire is a menace that has to be stopped. With the other, Jacob faces a choice that decides the future for both himself and the woman he wants to love....

Wendigo was encouraged initially by Leberecht's pictorial ambition. Midnight Son is a slickly made movie, and for a special-effects guy the director seemed to have a sure hand with his actors, keeping them lively but also keeping them from going over the top. Wendigo sticks with that assessment; without going overboard himself, he found the movie a modest but solid success. The lead actors proved themselves promising, and the supporting cast didn't suck. The story won't set anyone's world on fire -- it isn't really anything new and doesn't pretend to be. It works familiar B-movie ground effectively, though it did leave us asking unanswered questions about Jacob's upbringing and whether his parents knew anything about his potential. Is his vampirism a biological accident or destiny? Leberecht doesn't say. But questions like that don't reflect poorly on the film. Arguably, they reflect its success as a character study that keeps you thinking afterward.

If anything, Midnight Son is too modest in its approach, too reticent apart from some moments of sex and gore, to grab the general audience, and it's not pretentious or transgressive enough to attract arthouse attention. FearNet was probably this film's best hope for wider exposure, which comes with a price. Regrettably, it isn't original or outrageous enough to distinguish itself from the low-budget pack, and Leberecht clearly can't afford (and maybe wasn't interested in) the effects that would have made his movie more spectacular. For Wendigo, Midnight Son was a mostly enjoyable experience, but it could never deliver enough enjoyment to justify dropping multiplex money to see it. But he thinks that any real vampire-movie fan would get something out of this sincere, somewhat thoughtful and somewhat above-average effort. He hopes that Leberecht can build on it and go on to bigger and better things.
Here's a trailer created for Midnight Son's showing at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival.

Wendigo Meets THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN, PART 1 (2011)

Regular readers should know the drill by now, but for the uninitiated, my friend Wendigo is a fan of the Twilight books and rejects the contention that Stephenie Meyer's use of vampires is "wrong" in any significant way. The folklore of the vampire has evolved over time and keeps evolving, and if it evolves to the point that they become often-benign fantasy creatures -- elves in our world, I say -- so be it. That being said, Wendigo's attitude toward the Twilight movies is more tempered. He feels that the series started strong, slipped in the second installment -- the story required more emotional range than Kristen Stewart had at the time, -- and recovered in the third part. He waited for the fourth film with trepidation, knowing that Summit Entertainment had cynically decided to divide the final book into two films, Harry Potter style. We saw Deathly Hollows Part 2 a few days before Breaking Dawn Part 1 and thus were well aware of the pitfalls of splitting a long novel -- the Potter series sadly staggered to its conclusion, we felt. While Wendigo thought that the novel Breaking Dawn did have a convenient dividing point, he wasn't certain that writer Melissa Rosenberg and new director Bill Condon would pick the right spot. He feared that, like Deathly Hollows Part 1, the first Breaking Dawn would feel unpleasantly incomplete.

Part 1 actually takes us about two-thirds through the novel, but Wendigo says that's where it should break if you have to break it. The final third and second film will bring a lot of new characters into the spotlight, some of whom are introduced fleetingly in Part 1 -- most notably a group of Cullen-inspired Alaskan vampires who show up for the long-awaited nuptials of Edward (you know who) and Bella Swan (ditto). In simplest terms, the first film leads up to the climactic moment of the book if not the entire series, the violent birth of Bella's hybrid baby, while the second film addresses the consequences, hinted at in a mid-credits visit to the Volturii, those nasty foreign vampires who've been spoiling for a fight with the kindly Cullen clan.  Part 1 itself divides neatly into halves, the first building up to the wedding and Brazilian honeymoon, the second playing out Bella's unexpected and increasingly nightmarish pregnancy.

Even Wendigo feels that the wedding preparation, the ceremony and the celebration dragged a bit. So if you're not all in for Twilight, the first 45 minutes or so of the picture may be unendurable. Everything is nicely shot by Condon, a proven talent, but the content, especially to the uninitiated, is on the level not even of a Lifetime but a Hallmark TV movie -- less menace than benign numbness. Wendigo stresses that the tone in the novel is less treacly; the wedding in print is a more bittersweet event, more starkly a farewell to the life and the people Bella has known, than the movie's celebratory tone suggests. For moviegoers, the wedding is a payoff, a victory lap, the audience's reward for three film's worth of patience. Few shadows are cast, the most prominent by the sulking Jacob (you know who, too), and Condon leavens the happy tone with Ed's flashback confession to his Depression-era career as a vigilante vampire and Bella's horrorshow dream of her family slaughtered by her bloodstained intended.

 

Above: Depression Edward eyes some action while Bride of Frankenstein plays in an homage by the director of Gods and Monsters to himself. Below...Are you entertained? Is this what you came to see?

Wendigo's big complaint about the first half is less with the wedding than with the silly reception speeches. It's meant to be funny, but he found it generic and tedious -- though I felt that Pattinson was at his most relaxed to date during Ed's slightly tipsy speech. Wendigo felt that time would have been better spent recreating the exotic mystery of the new couple's journey to their Brazilian honeymoon island. Condon pays too much attention to the swanky furnishings of the Cullen vacation house -- including their all-too fragile bed -- to evoke the location the way Meyer does. The landscapes back in Forks may be familiar by now, but that doesn't relieve Condon of an artistic obligation to make it look impressive. Part 1 was the most claustrophobic of the Twilight films so far as far as Wendigo was concerned. That said, Condon pulled off some nice visuals, even if he's more comfortable with interior than with outdoor space, and the action sequences with the superspeedy vampires and the CGI wolves were mostly well done. Condon may be the most prestigious director to take on Twilight, but in Wendigo's opinion Catherine Hardwicke still sets the standard for handling the material right.

Above, the voice of Taylor Lautner stands out from the pack.

Below, the live Lautner bows before the Cullen baby, his "imprinted" mistress.

Bella and Edward's honeymoon is cut short when the new Mrs. C. finds herself visibly pregnant after only two weks of marriage. This catches all the Cullens flatfooted -- in patriarch Carlisle's centuries of medical practice he's never heard of a vampire impregnating a human -- while it infuriates the Forks wolfpack, who regard the impending offspring as an abomination. It's not so good for Bella, either, since the baby is like a parasite, draining her vitality from within. This leads to differences of opinion -- Jacob defies his pack to protect Bella (for a film focusing on the main pair's wedding, Wendigo felt that Taylor Lautner stole it with a forceful performance), and more importantly, the Cullens are split over whether the baby should be aborted -- if possible -- or carried to term. Ultimately it's Bella's decision, and despite being well-aware of the mortal risk to her, she insists on keeping the baby and -- still more horribly -- naming it "Ejay" if it's a boy and "Renesme" if a girl. Don't ask. A political message might be inferred here, but the movie doesn't really try to make a political issue of it. Both sides of the debate have good arguments, but it probably makes sense in the overall context of Twilight for Bella to carry the baby to term.

Since we started watching the movies Wendigo and I have pondered what metaphoric meaning vampirism might have for Stephenie Meyer. By now we're fairly convinced that it stands simply for coming of age, for the rites of passage that culminate, for females, in childbirth. It seems archetypically right that Bella should finally be turned upon giving birth, on an understanding that vampirism represents the mystery of adulthood, its pains and responsibilities, from the anxious yet ardent perspective of Meyer's target readership of teenage girls. Wendigo would add that the target audience really could extend to anyone capable of empathy with those adolescent feelings. It's a pretty good overarching metaphor -- but we haven't quite figured out where the shapeshifting Indians fit into the symbolic plan.

Cullens must fight for a very good reason,

Punching out wolves like Liam Neeson. Y'heard?

Breaking Dawn Part 1 disappoints Wendigo slightly for being less explicit and graphic, in order to keep the PG-13 rating, than the book. That means we don't get to see Bella nude and we don't see the baby's birth in all its splatterpunk splendor -- Edward discreetly bites through Bella's belly and placenta offscreen, obscured by mommy's belly. It's the main moment when the book lives up to the expectation horror fans bring, rightly or not, to anything dealing with vampires. While I felt the pregnancy and birth were the strongest drama of the movie series so far, Wendigo stresses that the film's birth scene falls far, far short of the horror that might finally have reconciled gorehounds and genre buffs to these much-hated films. Readers actually feared for Bella's survival, but the film's toned-down presentation, and the obvious fact that a sequel's on the way, diminish any anxiety viewers might fear. The cliffhanger becomes not whether Bella will survive, but what kind of vampire she'll be as she wakes up red-eyed in the final shot of Part 1.

Wendigo isn't worried over whether there'll be enough material left in Breaking Dawn for one more feature film. He can't really explain without spoiling Part 2, but suffice it to say that "all sorts of stuff" happens. He's also satisfied with Part 1 as it is, though he admits to a bias in favor of the material that makes him potentially more forgiving than he was with the last two Harry Potter films. But he thinks he could say objectively that Breaking Dawn Part 1 is better than either half of Deathly Hallows. It's still well short of the standard set for him by the first film -- though his wish that Hardwicke had stayed on was dampened after seeing Red Riding Hood -- and he doesn't think it's quite as good as Eclipse was. But at least it didn't make him dread seeing the final film in the series. Despite his reservations and criticisms, he's looking forward to seeing Condon close things out.