Tag: Dracula

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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We have a family get together on Saturday and I was looking for a movie for the grandkids in case things get too quiet.  By luck I had recorded this monster themed comedy movie back in October.  Now of course I’ve seen this movie many times.  One of my local tv stations back in New York City during my childhood would cycle through the Abbott and Costello movies on Sundays.  Annoyingly, the movie always coincided with church which really made me wonder about God’s priorities and sense of humor.

So, I put it on tonight.  And just as I remembered, it’s the perfect movie for boys between the ages of seven and eleven.  All of the jokes are corny as hell and the monsters are about as tame as rabbits.  But Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman still look the part.  And Lou Costello sells his constant hysterical fear with his signature screams of panic and running around in circles.

The plot is laughably bad.  Dracula and the Frankenstein monster have been shipped to America disguised as exhibits for a “House of Horror.”  Bud and Lou work for the company that is supposed to deliver them.  The Wolfman is in America to foil the plan and Lou’s girlfriend Sandra is a mad scientist who is working with Dracula to re-energize the weakened monster.  In addition, she has selected Lou’s brain to be transplanted into the monster’s body to give it a more controllable personality for Dracula’s plans.  Of course, Lou doesn’t know about these plans.

Add in a beautiful insurance claims investigator named Joan who is searching for the missing monster exhibits and a non-evil medical doctor who is assisting Sandra and you have a showdown at the island castle laboratory with Sandra, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and Lou in the operating room when Larry Talbot (the Wolfman), Bud Abbott and the Doctor break in and stop the surgery.  Eventually the Wolfman grabs Dracula in his bat form and the two of them fall from the castle heights into the ocean.  The doctor rescues Bud and Lou from the monster by setting on fire the dock that the monster is trapped on.  In the last scene Bud and Lou are in a rowboat and are rejoicing that Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolfman are dead and they don’t have to be scared anymore.  Suddenly the Invisible Man chimes in that he wants to join the fun and the boys jump overboard.

I didn’t give a spoiler alert because the plot really doesn’t matter at all.  It’s just an excuse for Universal Studios to cross-pollinate their monster movie franchise with their most successful comedy team.  They would follow this up with several of the other monster characters (the Mummy, the Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) meeting the “boys” but I would say this first effort was the most successful and most enjoyable.  It works as an Abbott and Costello comedy and as an homage to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s.

I’m very hopeful that the younger grandkids will enjoy this ancient comedy.  I’ll report back with an update.

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.

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.

 

Nosferatu (1922) – Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – A Science Fiction & Fantasy Movie Review

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Last night I watched both Nosferatu movies.  I believe they are best reviewed together since Herzog’s remake of the silent film is in many ways an homage.  Almost all of the “dialog” of the silent film is reused word for word.  The appearance of the Dracula character and even the sets have been constructed to mimic the look of the originals.  Mercifully, the science of motion picture imaging had progressed tremendously between 1922 and 1979 so the picture quality of the latter film has none of the pioneering qualities of its predecessor.  Night scenes weren’t shot during the day and there is sound so the actors can restrain their pantomime gesturing.  But that being said it is essentially the same story.

In this version of Dracula, Renfield is a “land agent,” sort of a nineteenth century realtor and he employs Jonathon Harker to go to Transylvania to sign papers to buy a house in Bremen, Germany.  Jonathon leaves his wife Nina behind fretting about his safety.  When he gets to the environs of Castle Dracula the townsfolk warn him about spooky stuff but he goes anyway.  Dracula meets him and signs the papers and then feeds off of Harker for a few days, packs his dirt boxes and drives off with horse and wagon.  Harker escapes from the castle, and after recuperating for some time in the village heads for home by horse.

Dracula takes the slow boat across the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea to Bremen.  Enroute, he sucks the life out of the crew so that the boat drifts into Bremen with only the captain’s lifeless body tied to the ship’s wheel.  Somehow Dracula sneaks off the boat and takes up residence in the house across the street from the Harkers.  Dracula also brings a goodly supply of plague rats with him and the town starts dying off of the bubonic plague in droves.

While Dracula was enroute by ship Renfield is somehow driven mad and starts eating flies and biting animals and people to get blood.  He is cast into a mad house but eventually escapes and capers around town awaiting “the master” and acting like a gibbering idiot.

All this time Nina has been suffering mentally from the strain of worrying about Jonathon and because she seems to be a clinically depressed heroine.  When he arrives, she reads this book on vampires that Jonathon has specifically told her not to read.  This disobedience seemed the most realistic detail of the movie.  Nina reads that a pure spirited woman who offers her blood freely to the vampire can keeps him drinking until dawn.  And at that point the sun will destroy him.  Nina feigns illness and sends Jonathon to get a doctor.  She invites Dracula to her home and he falls for the trick and is evaporated in a puff of smoke.  Jonathon and the Doctor arrive just in time for Nina to greet Jonathon and expire from exsanguination.

In the 1979 version the ending is less positive.  When Nina expires Jonathon, who has been slowly becoming a vampire for the last few days goes full Nosferatu and escapes the town on horseback to start his own reign of death somewhere else.

So, what about these movies?  The silent version is a product of German Expressionism and uses bizarre and unreal imagery to evoke the sense of fear and dread.  The Dracula character is a cartoonish figure.  He is exaggeratedly tall and gaunt, has a dead white skin color, an elongated hairless head, protruding front teeth and ridiculously long and curved fingernails.  The sets at Castle Dracula showcase bizarre architectural details like the odd shaped doors and the monolithic walls in the crypt.  Everything is unnatural and bizarre.  I would say for a silent film this is a successful visual representation of a horror story.  But remember, it’s a silent film.  That means the acting is painfully exaggerated to pantomime the meaning.  Both of the Harkers are always gesticulating and grimacing to let you know they are emoting something or other.  I think very few modern viewers can get past the staginess of silent films to enjoy the story as a story.  So, it’s a successful silent horror film but I couldn’t recommend it to the general audience.

As for Werner Herzog’s 1979 homage, that’s more of something we can discuss in normal movie terms.  I’d call it an art film.  It goes a long way to provide good cinematography, good (if odd) acting and a rationale for the actions of the primary characters.  Dracula even gets to tell of his ennui and his envy for those who can die.  And he invests the characters with a reasonable level of personality above what was provided in the silent film.  There is even a small amount of humor thrown in, primarily around the character of Renfield but what struck me as funniest was a scene at the very end of the movie.  Dr. Van Helsing is holding a bloody stake that he has used to permanently kill Dracula.  Two town officials arrive on the scene and Jonathon denounces Van Helsing to them stating that the doctor has murdered good old Count Dracula.  The magistrate orders his underling to have Van Helsing arrested and jailed for murder but the subordinate argues with him that there are no police left to arrest him, no jailors left to imprison him and no town officials left to charge and try him.

Herzog has succeeded in making an atmospheric, artistic horror film.  It’s not particularly frightening but it attempts to adhere to the spirit of the original Dracula story, a sort of late nineteenth century gothic fairy tale.  So, my recommendation is restricted to people who enjoy art films.  And it wouldn’t kill a horror fan to watch it.  It just might not be completely what he would be hoping for.  So, there’s my Halloween day horror review that I promised.

Universal Classic Monster Movies – An OCF Classic Movie Review – Part 2 – Dracula

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Re-posted from October 2017

 

Dracula is the King of Monsters.  He is obviously royalty.  He has all the trappings.  His castle, his formal evening attire, even his diction and good manners.  He is called Count Dracula in the Universal film but his legend descends from a real prince.  Vlad III (the Impaler) was ruler of Wallachia in present day Romania.  He was called Dracul (Dragon) for his defense of Christians against the Turks but his cruelty against just about anyone he came in contact with was legendary.  The legend of the vampire (nosferatu) is central European in origin and goes back very far into the imagination of primitive people huddling in the dimly lit hovels and fearing the long winter nights for all the real and imagined terrors that lurked right at their doorsteps.

Bram Stoker took this legacy and created a gothic novel that followed the conventions of his time and populated it with upper class British characters right down to the damsel in distress and the square jawed leading man ready to save her from a fate literally worse than death.  It cried out for a stage adaption and of course it got it.  And then some.  Several productions were launched and in 1927 a company opened the play in the United States.  And interestingly enough three of the lead male parts reprised their roles in the Universal film, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Edward van Sloan as Dr. Van Helsing and Herbert Bunston as Dr. Seward.

Let’s now look at the film.  What are its chief characteristics?  It’s an early talkie.  The sound is not perfect.  Whether an artifact of the age of the prints used or of the original production there is considerable background noise.  The sets for the most part are the studio versions of city streets and upper class drawing rooms.  The sets used for the village and castle in Transylvania are unconvincing but highly evocative.  My one pet peeve with Castle Dracula is that while showing all the creatures crawling around in the cellar we are given a good look at some armadillos.  These are New World creatures and what they would be doing in central Europe is very hard to imagine.  The set for Carfax Abbey is equally entertaining and in fact is probably built on the set for Castle Dracula used earlier.

With respect to the actors, they are exaggeratedly and understandably stagey.  After all, most of them were stage actors.  They exaggerate their words and gestures to such an extent that sometimes it appears to a modern audience as parody.  This is probably the result of both the stage and silent film legacy of most of the cast.  Probably the most entertaining performance is given by the Cockney Orderly who watches over the madman Renfield.  He is an exaggerated lower-class everyman who adds comic relief and a really terrible accent to the film.

And finally the special effects.  At one point, Renfield looks out the window of the stage coach he is travelling in to Castle Dracula and sees a bat flying above the horses.  It is hard to minimize how laughably pathetic it looks to anyone used to the magic that CGI can perform today.  I think the strings are actually visible, but maybe it was just my scornful imagination.  There is at least one more bat flyby in the film and it doesn’t improve over the first.  ‘Nuff said.

Okay, now I’ve run down everything about the film.  It sounds like a hot steaming mess.

 

Well, it is and it isn’t.  All that I’ve said is true.  But it still remains an entertaining experience.  It is a time capsule of what our great grandparents looked on as theater.  The British basis of what was considered civilized and urbane is on display.  And you can see the tension between reason and science on the one hand and the instinctual and irrational forces at work in the universe.  And it’s interesting to note how young women are the weak point in the rational structure being undermined by the powers of darkness.  Really the story isn’t that different from our own morality tales about the dissolution of the world of light into the abyss.  It’s only different in that it has a happy ending.  Today the forces of darkness would win and we would cheer them because of how cool they dress.  And the characters get to mouth some very entertaining lines.  In one exchange between the main protagonists Dracula declares in his best Transylvanian English, “You are wise for one who has not lived even one lifetime, Van Helsing.”  For me that’s worth the price of admittance right there.

Universal Classic Monster Movies – An OCF Classic Movie Review – Part 1

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Re-Posted from October 2017

 

A friend of mine at work is a movie fan.  But being a Gen X aged guy he hasn’t been exposed to the full gamut of classic Hollywood films from the ‘30s and ‘40s.  Recently he’s begun a systematic review of these films.  For instance, he just finished up an exhaustive viewing of all Alfred Hitchcock’s films in chronological order.  He even watched the early silent films Hitchcock made.  Now that is dedication.  On the whole he seemed impressed by Hitchcock’s body of work.  While he recognized weaker efforts he also felt that Hitchcock was an extremely competent craftsman who produced quality work.  And he noted that Hitchcock innovated over the course of his career and broke new ground in several ways.  He did chide him for birthing the slasher films with Psycho.  But all in all he was a great director.

This month he started on a smaller project.  He’s watching the Universal Classic Monster films.  He just finished up on Dracula, Frankenstein and the Bride of Frankenstein.  When I spoke to him he was surprised and disappointed at what he judged a lack of quality.  I told him I predicted he’d really be shocked once he’d watched the Wolfman.  He is soldiering on but I could see he was let down.

After my comment, my friend questioned whether I disliked the Universal series.  I told him I have a fondness for them but have no illusions about the artistry they represent.  My exact words were, “Peter, they were made to scare children and simple people.  They were wildly successful at doing this.  And if you watch them in the right frame of mind they still can entertain.”  I’m not sure if I convinced him but it got me thinking about what those movies could say to an audience today.

First off, let’s see how they do with today’s kids.  I have a 13-year-old grandson who has been fed a steady dose of these films from about the time he was five.  Now, they may have become tame fare for him now but he still likes watching them.  He probably recognizes the relation to such modern fixtures as the Count on Sesame Street and Hotel Transylvania.  And basically kids are still kids and monsters are great fun for kids.  So, one audience still exists for these movies.

For those of us who grew up watching these movies their charm although thinned by use still survives.  They’re like old relations who diminish in importance as we grow up but still are fondly regarded and maintain an association in our minds with the happiness of childhood (if your childhood was happy).  This audience is shrinking but is still a large population.

And finally, there are those who are fans of all things fantastic.  If you are a SF&F fan then how can you not, at least, have a curiosity about the origin of all those First Blood and Underworld stories?  Sure, the 1930’s models were vastly less cool, what with their crosses and holy water, but even if just from an historical perspective, they should be viewed and discussed.

Being solidly in the second and third camps I feel entitled to give my opinion.  And that’s what I’ll do.  I’ll plow through the canon and give the pluses and minuses as honestly and objectively as I can.  It should be fun.  Stay tuned.