Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy

October Viewing – 7

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The Wolf Man (1941)

I figured it was time to review Lon Chaney Jr.’s magnum opus.  The first thing that is apparent is that Claude Rains was an order of magnitude above the rest of the actors.  Well, Rains was two orders beyond Chaney.  But I will say that in the non-monster related earlier part of the movie the scenes with Chaney and his father and with the girl were fun to watch.  As Larry Talbot, Chaney was engaging and sympathetic.  But once he started killing werewolves and becoming a werewolf he became increasingly annoying and neurotic about telling everyone about how tough it was being a werewolf.  Me, me, me.  Very needy.

Incidentally, they killed off Bela Lugosi about ninety seconds into the only screen time he was given.  And to add insult to injury, they didn’t even bother to give him an original character name.  They called him Bela!  I mean, how lousy is that?  They probably paid him by the hour and sent him packing after his scene to save money.  Very sad.

And I noticed something very strange about the wolf man character.  Right before Larry Talbot  goes out on his first killing spree, he notices hair growing on his body.  He takes off a white shirt leaving him in a white undershirt (incidentally a wife beater style).  Then he takes off his shoes and socks and we watch his feet becoming paws while he is sitting in a chair.  Then still focusing on his legs he gets up, apparently heading out the window of his room to go find the grave digger and rip out his throat.  But in the next shot we see the wolf man in a dark colored button down shirt.

Now are we supposed to believe that the Wolf Man went into Larry Talbot’s closet, picked out a matching shirt and using his front paws, buttoned it up and headed out for a bite to eat?  I don’t know.  I mean it was a nice shirt but just how far is my suspension of disbelief supposed to stretch.  I feel like I’m being abused here.

Well, anyway, after Claude Rains clubs Lon Chaney Jr. to death with his own silver wolf-headed walking stick, the gypsy lady recites that, “The way he walked was thorny” doggerel over poor Larry’s corpse and the music soars and the credits roll.

But i don’t know.  I feel kind of cheated.  I feel like Larry’s ghost should have appeared and complained about the bum deal he got.  He’s living in California for eighteen years, helping to build the Mt Wilson observatory.  Then his elder brother dies so he returns to Talbot Castle to take up the role of heir apparent to his father’s title (baronet?) and after just a couple of days he’s bitten by a werewolf and beaten to death by his own dad.  And what fun did he actually have?  He only managed to kill one crummy grave digger.  It doesn’t seem fair.  At least if he’d gotten a chance to sink his teeth into Gwen Conliffe’s throat he’d have a story to tell the other dearly departed monsters like Dracula and the Mummy.  But as things stand he seems to have been given short shrift.

Alright.  That’s enough.  So all in all the movie starts off well and ends a little flat.  Perhaps I’ll consider Larry Talbot’s run in with Abbott and Costello more successful.

October Viewing – 6

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Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – A Science Fiction-Fantasy Movie Review

First of all, I assume everyone knows the plot of Dracula, so there will be no spoiler alert.  I’ve been wanting to review this movie for a while because I read that it was pretty good.  Well, pretty good is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

This movie is all over the place.  First off look at some of the cast members:

Gary Oldman as Count Dracula

Winona Ryder as Mina Harker

Anthony Hopkins as Professor Van Helsing

Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker

So, you can imagine the range of acting ability here.  Oldman and Hopkins do the best they can with the script and dialog but Reaves and Ryder … are Reaves and Ryder, so you can imagine.  Keanu is especially notable for his amazing 19th century British accent.  I keep expecting him to exclaim, “Whoa!”

Alright, so let’s talk about the approach to the Dracula story.  Apparently, by the movie’s name, director Francis Ford Coppola intended for this film to be seen as adhering, to some extent, more closely to Stoker’s novel than most other versions.  I read the novel many, many years ago but from what I remember there were no nekkid vampire women sexing up Jonathan Harker at Castle Dracula.  And, granted, unlike many other versions of the story, the end of this movie does take place where and how it occurred in the book, but Coppola added Mina Harker into the climax to close out her romance with Dracula.  That’s not Stoker.  Also, the movie starts off in the 15th century with Vlad the Impaler renouncing God because his wife (who is also played by Ryder) committed suicide and therefore she cannot go to heaven.  And because of all this, we are supposed to see Dracula as a sympathetic character and at the end he gets this redemption scene where instead of looking like this decrepit bat-like thing he turns back into young and relatively handsome Vlad and dies the beautiful death (well, he still gets his head chopped off but he does get a nice moment).  So, Bram Stoker’s Dracula?  Some yes and a lot no.

The special effects are pretty good for 1992.  And the sets and costumes look like they cost a bundle.  I didn’t hate the whole movie.  I rather enjoyed most of Hopkins’ Van Helsing and a lot of Oldman’s spoken part was well done.  I think what I objected to was Ryder’s absurdly emotional scenes with Dracula.  I guess we’re supposed to imagine that the Mina Harker character must have some kind of psychic link to Vlad’s dead wife and this compels her to fall hopelessly in love with the undead and mostly repulsive looking creature that has very recently murdered her best friend, Lucy.

So, let’s say there is some kind of twisted logic to this take.  But since this is framed as a Christian legend, complete with crucifixes and holy water are we supposed to add in an un-Christian example of reincarnation?  And somehow God is going to forgive Vlad for four centuries of murdering people because Winona Ryder loves him?  I could be wrong but I don’t think that’s how it works.  Someone named Vlad the Impaler is going to need a much stronger advocate than that when he gets to the Pearly Gates.

Alright, I’ll put all my quibbles aside.  What’s the verdict?  Well, since this is a Dracula movie then as a Dracula movie it provides blood and gore, a castle with frightened Transylvanian peasants nearby, a vampire that can turn into bats, wolves and mist and is attractive to female victims and a final scene with a stake and even a decapitation.  So, successful, I guess.  But Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder?  That’s not helping.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

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Well, the horror is upon me.  I got home tonight around 9pm and hadn’t had dinner yet so my whole schedule is a mess.  And this will be the way of it for the next three weeks.  I’ve gotten ahead on the daily photos and quotes which is good.  But my brain is groggy and I haven’t had a chance to go over much of the news and even if I had there doesn’t appear to be anything interesting to discuss.  I mean do we want to talk about Kamala Harris?  Why?  Has she suddenly raised her IQ to 80?  Did she accidentally get injected with Sodium Pentothal and started telling the truth?  Did she catch her husband diddling the nanny again and asked for a new First Gentleman?  And even if all three of these things had happened would anyone care?  I know I wouldn’t.  I find Kamala so profoundly stupid that it’s hard to listen to her anymore.  I need a break of at least a few days.

I was considering watching and reviewing Coppola’s Dracula tonight but I’m afraid I’d fall asleep in the middle.

So, what the hell do I write about tonight?

How about a little wishful thinking about the future?  Let’s assume the worst occurs in November.  Harris is installed in the White House and doubles down on invasion and Bidenomics.  After eighteen months in office inflation reaches an annual rate of 150% and the cities are so crime-ridden and filthy that even Democrat voters revolt.  Armed insurrection becomes widespread and Harris resigns and Walz agrees to make Trump his Vice President and then resigns in his favor.  Trump declares martial law and implements a laundry list of executive orders to drain the swamp and clean up the country.  By the end of Trump’s term in 2028 J D Vance is extremely popular and landslides to victory with majorities in both houses of Congress.  After another eight years of conservative rule the United States has eliminated the deficit and is on track to pay off the debt within a decade or so.  The energy problem has been fixed with multiple robust sources and the United States is able to concentrate on raising the standard of living for all its citizens to heights never imagined.  All of the Bill of Rights are restored to their original forms and affirmative action and DEI are just bad memories of a failed social movement that did no one any long term good.

And finally, SpaceX finally sends a manned mission to Mars and they discover that the Martians have been hiding below the surface all along trying to decide if they wanted to meet up with us or not.  They make friends with Musk and allow him to build his asteroid mining base on Mars and shortly afterward he finds a fifty-mile-long gold nugget somewhere near Jupiter and becomes the first quadrillionaire.  Shortly afterward he begins building his ring world project and all intelligent life leaves Earth to the Democrats and other invertebrates.

There that’s better.  Now I better get some sleep.  It’s going to be a long three weeks.

October Viewing – 5

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I was all over the place deciding on what I should watch next, I considered two movies that are genuinely disturbing; “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs.”  I couldn’t decide between them so I put them aside.  Then I started watching “Carnival of Souls.”  But although that movie has some truly disturbing images, the majority of the film is so devoid of acting, interest or sympathetic characters that I turned it off in disgust.  I may go back to it later.  As I said it has some potent imagery but I just wasn’t in the mood to subject myself to its depressing banality.

I decided to watch the 1932 “The Mummy.”

Of course this is a movie I’ve already reviewed.  But I needed something fun and also, I wanted see what I could extract from it by giving it a pair of fresh eyes.  So, I tried to imagine what the crowd of 1932 would see in it.

I looked through some of the older and newer discussions about the production and what was common to them all was the link to the King Tutankhamen discovery in the 1920’s.  Apparently, that archeological discovery had been enormously popular with the general public and so the filmmakers were right in thinking that a horror movie that piggybacked on ancient Egypt was likely to be popular.

And so, they cobbled together the story line of the Egyptian priest who was buried alive for stealing the secret of resurrection from the sacred Scroll of Thoth to bring back to life his great love; the Princess Anck-es-en-Amon.  Of course, whenever Karloff chants the name in the movie it sounds like “ankhs and almonds.”  Which made me think of some kind of mummy-themed breakfast cereal like Count Chocula but more health conscious like Honey Nut Cheerios.

But I digress.

So, I could see the audience of young men and teenagers bringing their girls to be frightened by the monster and thereby getting to hug them for moral support.

But what about the modern audience?  Well, my favorite scene is the initial discovery of the mummy and the chest holding the scroll of Thoth.  In this scene the character played by Edward Van Sloane, the same actor who plays Professor Van Helsing in Dracula and Doctor Waldman in Frankenstein is once again warning the impetuous skeptics about the dangers of interfering in the dark arts.  But of course, the young archeologist opens the chest and begins reading the scroll and so, awakes Imhotep (Karloff) who absconds with the scroll and leaves shocked scientist laughing psychotically and headed for death in a strait jacket.

This is the only scene where we see Karloff in his mummy makeup.  It was well made.  He looked quite like a 4,000-year-old corpse.  After that the story goes downhill.  Twelve years later the British Museum expedition is back in Egypt but now the son of the previous expedition’s leader is in charge and after receiving a hint as to where to dig, by Ardath Bey (the mummy pretending to be a modern Egyptian), they dig up the undisturbed tomb of ankhs and almonds.  Once she is safely deposited in the Cairo Museum of Antiquities Ardath Bey begins to work at resurrecting his former love.  And by reading passages from the scroll, he is able to lure ankhs and almonds present reincarnation (a pretty half-English half-Egyptian girl who happens to be Edward Van Sloane’s medical patient).

She falls in love with the young archeologist and it’s a photo-finish to see if she ends up with Ardath Bey as a murdered but re-animated corpse like him or her modern self marrying the Englishman.  In the intervening struggle the older archeologist is murdered by Ardath Bey and hijinks ensue.  In the final showdown the girl remembers her past life and enough ancient Egyptian language to make a prayer to the statue of Isis to help her by zapping Imhotep with her ankh which both burns up the scroll of Thoth and turns the mummy into a pile of bones.

Being in my senior years I was disturbed to see how little concern the younger archeologist seemed to exhibit at his father’s death.  I mean sure, the guy was old but at least a day or two of mourning before proceeding with his pursuit of the hot-looking former Egyptian princess should have been a reasonable thought.  Well, that is the essence of life.  And she was pretty alluring in her more scantily clad scenes.  So, I guess I can cut him some slack.

All in all, it’s a decently entertaining film.  Allowances have to be made for the definition of scary a hundred years ago but it’s a fun film.  I’ll give it a thumbs up as a light-hearted October viewing.

Update:
War Pig commented:

I, too, am intrigued by what Americans found frightening a century ago. Of course with modern special effects a scary film from today would cause a stampede out the doors of a roaring twenties theater and a call for congress to ban or restrict such films. I also find it curious that naked bodies and other sexual scenes were made verboten while wholesale slaughter and bloodshed were allowed when the 1930s movie codes were mandated.

For me, simple shock and violence are moot. I want suspense. Old classics like Night Of The Demon, Black Sunday, Psycho, Night Of The Hunter or Hour Of The Wolf and Rashoman. There’s just something about black & White cinematography that lends itself to horror movies. Masters of the craft such as Bergman, Hitchcock, Brava and Kurosawa used it to great effect. Horror, and suspense, are best served in black and white where you have to concentrate on the story instead of the fancy effects.

photog replied

Yes, a century has removed all the taboos.  But as you say gore and shock don’t guarantee satisfaction with the product.  Engage our imagination and gore isn’t that important.

One Shining Moment

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Today I put up a link to that video of SpaceX’s booster rocket returning to the launching pad like something out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  It was beyond amazing.  It was preposterous.  How could the control system of this rocket have it fall out of the sky like a stone, then brake and maneuver under power and stop in mid-air exactly at the docking station and be caught by a mechanical hand as if it were a ballpoint pen.  It’s beyond technology it’s some kind of black magic.

Well, it did me good to see something positive online for the first time in years.  Sure, it doesn’t really impact my life in any way that can be measured.  I don’t even own any stock in SpaceX.  And I don’t really think that going to Mars has any benefits for humans that could be identified in the next hundred years.  But what I am seeing is men using their intelligence to do things and make things that have never been done or made before.  And every time this happens the side effects from such an endeavor always produce benefits that no one had even considered.  Computers are the side effects that accrued from trying to crack codes during WWII and building missiles and rockets.  We needed machines that could do the ballistic calculations faster than humans could.  If Musk manages to convince the US government to send a mission to Mars, I don’t doubt that the fallout from that project will be more useful than the information we get from going to Mars.

Humanity is a misbegotten collection of mostly psychotic apes.  Every time I look online, I see examples of brutality, depravity and stupidity that should cure anyone of having hope for this world.  But something like this gives me that rush of excitement and reminds me of what seemed possible back in the days when I was young.  Instead of the drab, hopeless world that the Al Gores and Greta Thunbergs try to convince kids to despair about; where we eke out a miserable existence under pathetic wind turbines and solar panels, we could have a world where the world’s energy needs could be completely provided by any number of powerful technologies.  Instead of the phony equity of fake scientists selected by racial and sexual quotas we could go back to a meritocracy where the best would be rewarded by the chance to achieve real breakthroughs in all the STEM applications.

Watching that rocket land on a dime in mid-air was like a shot of adrenaline.  These things can still be done and they should be done.  Hell, I would rather the US government had given SpaceX every penny of the 200+ billion dollars that they threw at the senseless and barbaric Ukraine war that we ginned up.  If we had, we’d probably already be on Mars.

Okay, I know this was all just pure emotion.  I let myself get caught up in that “Right Stuff” rah-rah feeling.  It reminded me of the sense of wonder I felt reading all those science fiction stories that Heinlein wrote back in the stone age.  And it has absolutely nothing to do with present day America.  The land of illegal alien cannibals that we pay billions of dollars to invade our country.  But for one shining moment it felt good.

This is the Validation of Science Fiction in Its Best and Truest Form

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This truly is magic.  Even the booster rocket is precisely controlled by the remarkable technology of Musk’s SpaceX.  This is science fiction come to life.

Science fiction was looking at the world and imagining how humans could use science to push the boundaries of what we could know and do.  This is the fruition of that imagining.  Jules Verne and H G Wells and Robert Heinlein and all the other visionaries led up to this.  And Elon Musk is the one who decided to make it happen.

Well done.

October Viewing – 4

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I thought of an interesting choice for tonight; the 2023 movie “Nefarious.”  I hadn’t watched the movie since it came out last year.  I had forgotten how good it is.  The malevolence and twitchiness of the Nefarious character and the step-by-step demolition of the psychiatrist’s composure and then his mental balance is fascinating to watch.  The creative team (including the actors) crafted an intricate little machine that advances the plot one ratchet tooth at a time and then brings us to the electrocution room in the penultimate scene.

And the electrocution of the demon’s host provides all the horror that is needed for a Halloween movie.  They even have to “fry” him twice for good measure.  And even though this film was made by a “Christian” production studio and has a clear message concerning the reality of evil in the world, that messaging does not overpower the dramatic balance.  The story works as a story for any audience.  I guess for non-believers they’ll just have to chalk up the strange events to psychological phenomena, such as multiple personality syndrome and autosuggestion.

Comparing this movie to other films I think the confrontation with Nefarious is somewhat akin to Agent Starling interacting with Hannibal Lector in “Silence of the Lambs.”  Of course, not exactly because there was a certain sympathy that Lector felt for Starling.  Whereas Nefarious is wholly bent on the destruction of everyone around him including the psychiatrist.  But there is the same sense that a malevolent genius is toying with his jailors.

And the other comparison that this movie conjures up in my mind is C. S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters.”  In both works you get to see the demon’s point of view.  Nefarious at a certain point has to prove to the psychiatrist that there is a logic to the whole idea of demonic possession.  He has to explain how it’s done and how it advances the goals of Nefarious’ master.  And from what I can tell I think he used pretty orthodox doctrine on how and why Satan carries out his war against Heaven and mankind.

So, all in all I think I made a pretty good choice for tonight’s movie.  Of course, whether I watch the movie for Halloween or Easter is a matter of mood.  After all, you really can’t consider Hell without contrasting it with the establishment run by the power whom Nefarious calls “the Enemy.”  But even for atheists I think Nefarious is a pretty good choice for this time of year.  And to round off this post I’d like to say that all of the actors in this little teleplay acquitted themselves very ably.  But the actor who portrayed Nefarious was especially good.  If they gave Academy Award nominations to actors in movies made by Christian production companies then he would have deserved one for the performance he gave.  And the actors who played the psychiatrist and the warden were also top notch.

Well, if you’re looking for a good scary movie, I highly recommend Nefarious.  Give the devil his due.

October Viewing – 3

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And now a return to form.  Whereas Charles Laughton can make a “horror” movie into a semi-legitimate film, putting Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi into a movie ensures that the full Universal horror treatment will ensue.

The Black Cat was such a pairing.  Bela Lugosi is a German medical doctor who was taken prisoner by the Russians during the First World War and eighteen years later he is looking to take revenge on Karloff who was the German commander who sold his troops out before the battle.  Also, while Lugosi was in prison Karloff stole away his wife telling her that Lugosi was dead.  Lugosi comes back to the scene of the battle where strangely Karloff has built an art deco palace on the site of the fort that he had commanded.  Later on, we learn that the whole hill is still booby-trapped with dynamite.  Well, you never know when that might come in handy.

There is a young American couple honeymooning in this Hungarian locale (sure why not) and Lugosi befriends them and then because of a motor vehicle accident during a rain storm, Lugosi is forced to bring them both to Karloff’s house where the doctor performs minor medical procedures that require putting her under a powerful sedative that makes her somewhat prescient upon meeting Karloff.

While the Americans sleep that night Lugosi and Karloff have a conference and we find out that Lugosi’s wife died of “pneumonia” years before.  Unsurprisingly Karloff decided to have her embalmed and put on display in his basement.  Well, sure, who wouldn’t!  And if all that isn’t bad enough Karloff tells Lugosi that his young daughter also died.  Next, we find out that Karloff is a satanic priest and the next night is the new moon and he will be celebrating a black mass at which he wants to sacrifice the American girl to Satan or something.  Lugosi objects and Karloff offers to play a game of chess to see whether she will die.  And Lugosi loses.  Darn.  Meanwhile we discover that Lugosi’s daughter is not dead but is married to Karloff and living in the house they are in.  The American girl meets her but somehow Lugosi still hasn’t heard about her.

A lot of goofy stuff happens with Lugosi’s servant pretending to obey Karloff and the American man being trapped in a room that eventually he escapes by just opening the door.  And even though the satanic mass is quite crowded Lugosi somehow easily manages to rescue the American girl.  And then everyone heads down into the basement for the climax.

So, let’s see.  Lugosi stumbles on the dead body of his daughter.  Karloff and Lugosi get into a fight that ends when Lugosi’s fatally wounded servant helps him over power and chain up Karloff to a dungeon wall (yes dungeon).  Then Lugosi decides to finally revenge the deaths of his wife and daughter on Karloff by skinning him alive.  But when the American girl sees this going on she screams and her husband finds their location and mistaking Lugosi’s intention he shoots the doctor.    Lugosi calls him a fool but tells the American couple to rush out of the building and get away from the hill because he is about to set off the timer that will trigger the dynamite to blow up the satanists, Karloff and Lugosi.  And in the last scene the happy honeymooners continue their railway journey to Budapest.

This movie has so many hokey things going on.  Why would Karloff believe that Lugosi’s loyal servant would do his bidding instead of his master?  Why would Karloff still have the timer and detonator for the dynamite not only intact but on prominent display in his basement?  Why wouldn’t Lugosi have killed Karloff as soon as he saw his wife stuffed and mounted in Karloff’s basement?  Are all art deco architects, satanists?  Or are all satanists art deco devotees?  What did Lugosi’s morbid fear of black cats have to do with anything else in the movie except the title?  So many questions.

The strange thing is I enjoyed the movie.  Sure, it made no sense.  But there was a style and an energy to it that was fun.  You sort of knew the American couple would emerge unscathed so really, we were watching the duel between Lugosi and Karloff and we knew that some kind of justice would prevail.  And those lousy satanists would get blown up.

In a way, with its modernist architecture juxtaposed against the medieval stonework of the underground fort it was a perfect way for the modern (1930s) world to intrude on the gothic horror that is the stock in trade of the Universal horror movies.  Art deco horror.  Well done Bela and Boris.

October Viewing – 2

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So, I enjoyed my recent first foray into old horror movies with Dracula enough to give it another whirl.  Tonight, I was going to try the Mummy but last night TCM had some Lugosi movies on so I picked “The Island of Lost Souls.”  This is a 1932 film starring Charles Laughton as Dr Moreau; a scientist who experimented on surgically converting animals into humans.  Lugosi has a relatively small part as one of his experiments.  He looks like a man-wolf and functions as, “The Sayer of the Law.”  This movie is just a renamed version of H.G. Wells’ story, “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

Okay, the first thing to take into account is that Laughton is a much better actor than your typical horror movie mad scientist.  Now granted, this isn’t “Mutiny on the Bounty” so he has to work with what he’s given but Laughton sells it well.  The rest of the cast is adequate to the task at hand.  And the movie does deliver the climax that a fiendish Frankensteinian scientist will always reap; destruction at the hands of his tortured creations.

The highlights of the movie are of Moreau portraying an omnipotent ruler as he commands the obedience of his many creations.  On a hill in the jungle, he rings a gong twice, cracks a bullwhip and shouts down to his assembled subjects repeatedly, “What is the law?”  And the Sayer of the Law gives the various answers at each repetition of the question,

“Not to walk on all fours.  Are we not men?”

“Not to spill blood.  Are we not men?”

“Not to eat meat.  Are we not men?”

And this is enough to quiet the beast within each “man” when the night awakens his blood.  And if they become especially restless, he reminds them of “The House of Pain.”  This is where Moreau rearranged their living flesh to simulate a human form and apparently anesthetic was not part of the program.  Just the mention of it triggers howls of fear.

But when Moreau orders one of his creatures to murder an outsider, a man like Moreau, the creatures put together the pieces of the puzzle.  Moreau ordered one of them to spill blood, so, “the law is no more!”  And a man like Moreau was killed, so Moreau could be killed!  And so, dragging Moreau into the House of Pain for some unskilled surgery of their own was now on the agenda!

The subplot where Moreau tried to get an outside human male to fall in love with the “panther woman” who was his most successful attempt at mimicking the human form is somewhat interesting.  And the antics of the sailors who show up in a couple of sections of the story provide a slight amount of comedy.  But the real story is Moreau playing god to his creations and the inevitable revenge reaction destroying him.  H. G. Wells was a good writer so it is no surprise that his story is somewhat fun to watch in its first Hollywood portrayal.  I very much enjoyed rewatching Island of Lost Souls.  And I assume that Charles Laughton is the main reason.  Now, without a doubt he hammed up his portrayal as needed.  But his Moreau is a successful portrayal of the mad scientist.  Kudos to Mr. Laughton.

 

October Viewing – 1

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I was thinking of watching the Vance/Walz debate.  But I just didn’t feel like it.  Around ten o’clock I was browsing my X timeline and noticed that several of the people I follow were saying that Vance was doing serious damage to Walz.  But I just couldn’t be bothered.  I figure by tomorrow if he really did serious damage to Walz there would be all kinds of highlights to watch and if there weren’t I would have saved myself a lot of annoyance.  Instead, I decided to celebrate October by watching some Universal Horror.  I watched Dracula.

Now. I’ve seen that movie dozens of times.  I know it inside and out.  But what I did was to try to watch it as if for the first time.  I divorced it from the familiarity that renders it just a collection stereotypes and associated memories and tried to look at the images and the dialog to see how they strike me as cinema.

And it’s a funny thing.  It occurred to me that an audience that was used to cowboy movies and had only in the last year or so begun watching talking pictures might have been very excited by the visuals and the scenes portrayed.  The opening scene of Renfield travelling by horse drawn carriage into the Carpathian Mountains was very atmospheric.  The backdrops of the mountains were very well done.  And Castle Dracula was equally well done.

Renfield’s interview with Dracula was just the right combination of comedy and menace.  I will confess that I never found Bela Lugosi menacing enough to make his Dracula compelling but Van Helsing’s scientific vampire hunter is highly entertaining.  When he confronts Dracula with the mirror and later during his conversation with the vampire where he promises to find Dracula’s coffin and drive a stake through his heart, we are witnessing the central tension of the movie.  Everyone else is blind to how their neighbor from Transylvania is the nexus for all of the death and inexplicable occurrences.  But once Van Helsing shows up with his wolfbane and crucifixes even Renfield starts talking sense.

And that brings me to another aspect of the movie.  The humor between Renfield and the psychiatric orderly Martin is hammy and over the top but provides a very enjoyable counterpoint to the wildly unrealistic dramatic story.  The working-class manners and behavior of Martin and the rest of the staff contrasts to the more aristocratic manners and speech of the Sewards and their friends.  Even the madman Renfield is humanized in his dealings with Martin who affectionately calls Renfield “old fly-eater” and seems genuinely friendly to this vampire-in-training.

The final climax of Van Helsing and Harker storming Carfax Abbey and finishing off Dracula with the promised stake through the heart is a little underwhelming but I think that at the time and at first view Dracula must have been an exciting motion picture that thrilled audiences, especially young women who would have personalized the erotic danger that Dracula was meant to imply for them.

Now of course, for us, after nearly a century of time in which the movie has accreted mostly comical connections to everything from breakfast cereals to Sesame Street characters it’s hard to imagine real fear associated with this film.  But looked at as a piece of art it can definitely be enjoyed for what it is.  There is still blood left in the movie.  And as Bela reminds us, “The blood is the life.”

Update:

War Pig commented:

To the contrary, since I first saw it as a child, Lugosi was the perfect Dracula. While Christopher Lee was more intimidating, Lugosi was the epitome of the Count. Suave, debonaire, charming, intelligent, faultless evening dress which he wore with dignity and aplomb. So smooth and with the east European accent. Yet he was also the very image of evil when he went for the throat.

Mom and my sister sat and watched it with rapt attention. The vampire is, of course, the ultimate Casanova, as well.