Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

Year 9, Day 287 - 10/14/17 - Movie #2,752                              

BEFORE: Peter Cushing carries over again from "Frankenstein Created Woman", and this will be my last Frankenstein-based film for the year.  I've got to move on to other creature-based films, I'm on a tight schedule if I want to both keep the list from expanding out of control and finish this year's films in time for my vacation.

THE PLOT: Together with a young doctor and his fiancée, Baron Frankenstein tries a brain transplant to save an associate, the mentally ill Dr. Brandt.

AFTER: Well, it's about time someone took Dr. Frankenstein down - and make no mistake, the titles of the Hammer Films series clearly and correctly refer to the DOCTOR when they say "Frankenstein", not any creature that he may have created.  So, points for that - the original novel is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus", and Prometheus was the Greek god who gave humans fire and life and knowledge, so even in the original story's title, it's the doctor, not the creature being discussed.  The creature should always be nameless, or if that's too weird, then "Frankenstein's Monster" will suffice.

But even in this Hammer Films series, at some point they reached the point of ridiculousness - I realize now that each film is meant to be taken individually, the story doesn't really carry over from one film to the next to form one larger story.  None of the films make references to events from a previous film, or Dr. Frankenstein can be working anonymously in one film, then openly in the next, as the story requires.  He can even appear to die in one film, only to be miraculously revived for the next one.

But what really stretches the bounds of credulity is his stubbornness in continuing to conduct brain transplant experiments, when none of them ever really turn out well.  I guess if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail, and Dr. Frankenstein's "hammer" is brain transplants, because we're back on that bus tonight.  "But, Dr. Frankenstein, the patient has a sore foot!" "Tut, tut, a brain transplant will fix that problem, just wait and see!"  So what if he becomes a raging beast with a giant scar around his scalp, he's in a new body with a perfectly fine foot!

Which leads to a few questions, like if Dr. Frankenstein can fix his former associate's mental illness, why does he have to put it in a new body to do so?  Why can't he open the skull, fix the brain, and keep the brain where it is?  OK, so the first body "died", but doesn't the second body also die when you take its brain out?  And if he can bring that second body back to life, why couldn't he just bring the first one back instead, without scooping out the brain?  I may not be a doctor, but I think I can tell when a medical process is not being implemented in an efficient manner.  Like if you brought your car to the auto shop with a bad spark plug, would you let the mechanic transfer the whole engine to a different car just so he could replace that plug?  It would be little consolation if you came in with a 2016 Ford Mustang and left with a 1975 Ford Pinto that had the other car's engine in it.

But I digress.  The first time we see Dr. Frankenstein here he's robbing labs for equipment, but wearing a disturbing mask while doing so.  Because if he's arrested, there's no chance that the police will remove that mask and identify him.  He soon moves to a boarding house, and he learns that the woman who runs it is engaged to a doctor who works at an insane asylum, who's stealing narcotics to help pay for his fiancées mother medical expenses.  Dr. F. leaps at the opportunity to blackmail them both into working for him, raiding more labs for equipment and supplies.  All so he can "help" out his old associate, Dr. Brandt, who's an inmate at the asylum.

If there was any doubt about Dr. Frankenstein sociopathic nature, this film confirmed that he would do anything - lie, cheat or steal - in order to keep his experiments funded.  He uses all kinds of blackmail and manipulation to keep his assistants in line, and in this film, that even includes rape, in a very controversial scene that was added late in the production process.  Cushing said repeatedly that he hated the scene, because he didn't want Dr. F. to be seen as a sex fiend - but I guess being a thief, murderer and a doctor performing illegal brain transplants was better by comparison?  I don't know where one draws the line, I guess.

It seems like a shame that TCM didn't run two of the Hammer Films Frankenstein films, especially since the final one, 1974's "Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell" featured Dave Prowse as the new Creature, and that's an interesting pre-cursor to the first "Star Wars" film, with Cushing and Prowse later appearing on screen together as Grand Moff Tarkin and Darth Vader - I'll have to try to track that one down someday, but I just don't have a slot for it now.

Also starring Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones (last seen in "The Elephant Man"), Simon Ward, Thorley Walters (also carrying over from "Frankenstein Created Woman"), Maxine Audley (last seen in "The Prince and the Showgirl"), George Pravda (last seen in "Anastasia"), Geoffrey Bayldon (last seen in "To Sir, With Love"), Colette O'Neil, Peter Copley (last seen in "Oliver Twist"), Jim Collier, Windsor Davies, Allan Surtees.

RATING: 4 out of 10 scalpels

Frankenstein Created Woman

Year 9, Day 286 - 10/13/17 - Movie #2,751                        

BEFORE: I can't believe it, but after last night there are just 50 more movies to watch in 2017.  But I feel good about the fact that I know exactly what those 50 films are going to be.  All of those are in my possession on DVD except for 10 of them - of those 10, 4 will be released on the big screen this fall, another 4 I'll have to buy in a DVD set from Amazon, 1 is screening on Netflix, and the 10th I will be taping off cable very soon.  So it's all kind of coming together as I'd hoped.  (And I now have a ticket for "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" on December 15, so I've got that going for me...)

Of the remaining 50, 12 of them are horror films - and once I'm done with Frankenstein films, I'm going to transition to a mix of aliens and creatures - you'll see what I mean in a few days, and how the linking has dictated what's in this year, and what's being put off until next year.  And if nothing links together next year, which is possible, I'm prepared to accept that - at least I'll know I had the best possible Movie Year 9, and October of Movie Year 10 is for random follow-ups (ghosts, zombies, Dr. Jekyll and yeah, probably more vampires).

Peter Cushing carries over again from "The Revenge of Frankenstein".  Since TCM ran these films last year, I've learned that "Revenge" was the 2nd film from Hammer Studios in their Frankenstein series, and tonight's film is not the third, but the fourth.  So TCM kind of screwed me here, by not running ALL of the films in this series, just select ones.  And I usually trust them to be completists, like me - what gives, TCM?  Now I've got to watch an incomplete series, and even if I do catch up later, the other films will now be out of sequence.

Who knows, maybe the third film, "The Evil of Frankenstein" was really terrible, and they're doing me a favor.  For now, I'll have to proceed with the plan, I'm locked in to it now.

 

THE PLOT: Baron Frankenstein captures the soul of a recently executed young man and installs it in the dead body of a young maiden, Christina.  With the memories of the man still intact, she starts to kill the people whose false accusations led to the man's execution. 

AFTER: The Baron is back, after some other adventures not disclosed here, and he's back to doing medical experiments - because those have worked out SO well in the past...  And though this is still set back in the prehistoric age where science is concerned, this film was made in 1967, so what else can you expect from the swingin' sixties but a beautiful young Playboy model type playing the poor, crippled peasant barmaid?  And the doctor can't wait to put a man's soul into that body, because that's just so kinky, right?  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First off, we're presented with Hans, a noble peasant man who's been known to help Dr. Frankenstein (who's back to using his full last name now, so I guess the heat's died down...) and his new medical partner, Dr. Hertz (is his first name Dick?) around the lab.  When Hans was a boy, he watched his father get executed by guillotine (because Hammer Films paid good money for that guillotine, so they have to use it in EVERY film...) and that affected him deeply.  Hans loves Christina, the daughter of the local innkeeper, and the innkeeper isn't crazy about Hans dating his daughter.  But she's paralyzed on one side, so really, the innkeeper should just be happy that someone has taken an interest.

Then there are these three "dandies" - in modern times they'd be called "douchebags" - who frequent the inn and give Christina a hard time.  Hans gets into a scuffle with them to defend her honor, but they return late at night to steal some wine and end up killing the innkeeper and framing Hans for the crime.  As we've seen in previous Frankenstein films, there was no real forensic science back then, so all you had to do was leave someone else's article of clothing at the murder scene, and no worries.  Hans refuses to give up an alibi, I guess because if he said he was sleeping with Christina, that would destroy what little reputation she has left in that small German town.

Dr. Frankenstein appears at Hans' trial as a character witness, but that feels rather half-hearted, since the Baron probably can't wait to get a fresh dead body to try out his new "soul machine", which can somehow remove the soul from a dead body - even one with the head chopped off.  It's something of a leap in logic from one experiment - the Doctor has his own body frozen and revived, to prove that the soul does not leave the body after death - to the next, but it's really junk science that makes this whole franchise work, so you kind of just have to roll with it.  At least this is more elegant than cutting the brain out of one body and putting it in another - cheaper in terms of special effects, too.

So Hans dies and the Doctor vacuums out his soul, and then Christina is so distraught that she drowns herself, giving the Doctor the perfect (?) place to put Hans' soul.  But he kind of forgets to remove her own soul, so suddenly there are two souls fighting for control of that body.  Hans' spirit ends up acting like a voice in Christina's head, telling her to seduce and kill the men who framed him.  I can't quite tell if this is poetic justice or an evil spirit acting from beyond the grave, maybe somehow it's both. 

Also starring Susan Denberg, Thorley Walters (last seen in "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother"), Robert Morris, Duncan Lamont (last seen in "Mutiny on the Bounty"), Peter Blythe, Barry Warren, Derek Fowlds, Alan MacNaughtan (last seen in "Patton"), Peter Madden (last seen in "Doctor Zhivago"), Philip Ray, Ivan Beavis, Colin Jeavons (last seen in "The French Lieutenant's Woman"), Alec Mango (last seen in "Lust for Life").

RATING:  3 out of 10 spilled glasses of wine

The Revenge of Frankenstein

Year 9, Day 285 - 10/12/17 - Movie #2,750                     

BEFORE: We were out late last night, we went to see "Sweeney Todd" in an off-off-Broadway production at the Barrow Street Theater in Manhattan's West Village - it was the Sondheim musical, but presented in an innovative way, with minimal props and a small 3-piece orchestra, and within a relatively small space made up to look like Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, with serving tables (that the actors frequently walked and danced on) and benches for seats, and the actors walking around in the aisles, occasionally interacting with the audience.  Forget theater in the round, this was a completely immersive experience, and for an extra charge, guests could arrive early and eat a genuine meat pie with mashed potatoes and a beverage.  (If you've seen the play, you know why it's probably better to eat the meat pie BEFORE and not after.  The real meat pie contained chicken, but still.)

While there were many things that this stage play was forced to compromise on - like having most of the killing performed off-stage, and having no mechanical barber's chair or complicated method of delivering bodies from the barber shop to the bake-house - the creepiness factor was amped up by the possibility of having the actors performing only inches away, even making direct eye contact.  I had the actor playing Sweeney Todd swinging his razor very close to me, and though I knew the razor was a prop and therefore probably not very sharp, there was still a part of the lizard brain that activated the "fight or flight" danger response.  This was a lot like virtual reality, only more real somehow - I guess that would be close to "reality", right?

But it got me thinking about Sweeney Todd (I'll probably try to re-watch the film version with Johnny Depp before Halloween, just for comparative purposes...) and how he stands in contrast with Victor Frankenstein - they're like opposite sides of the same coin, even though they're both Europeans from that Gothic/Victorian era (Frankenstein was set in 1818 and Sweeney Todd in 1846).  And both were madmen, but one was a surgeon who saw a bunch of dead bodies in Germany and tried to bring them back to life, while the other was a barber who saw a bunch of living people in London and thought they'd be better off dead.  When you put it that way, Dr. Frankenstein doesn't seem so bad, now, does he?

Peter Cushing carries over from "The Curse of Frankenstein", somehow...

THE PLOT: Baron Frankenstein escapes from the guillotine and goes to Germany, where he renames himself Dr. Stein and plans to restart his experiments by using parts of dead bodies.

AFTER: We don't really find out until about halfway through this film EXACTLY how Dr. Frankenstein got out of his execution - and even then, the details are sketchy, we know WHO helped him, but not so much with the HOW.  I find this hard to believe, that he could have cheated death this way, but if he didn't, then we wouldn't have a story. Then it's pretty hilarious that he moves to Germany and just changes his name to "Victor Stein", like that's going to do the trick.  Why not call himself "Frank N. Stein", if he's going to go hide in plain sight?

And why stick with the body-snatching and body-assembling bit?  Isn't it enough to be a doctor to the wealthy, having cheated death once, why press his luck?  But no, the compulsion to resurrect dead tissue is powerful indeed - remember, this guy PERFECTED the formula that could bring a dead person back, you'd think that there would be some rich families in Germany willing to pay top dollar to have a beloved family member resurrected.  But no, Dr. Stein persists in feeling like he has to build his own person from the ground up.  Imagine that someone found the cure for cancer or heart disease, and then decided that he wasn't going to release it until he cracked the genetic code to prevent aging or something.  Because what's the point in saving someone's life, or bringing them back from death's door, if they're only going to get old and die again someday?  Medicine is like all-or-nothing with this guy, I swear.

There's a hunchbacked assistant in the lab (isn't there always?) named Karl, and the plan here is to build a new body and put Karl's brain inside - somehow that's easier than fixing Karl's original body, which is probably a debatable point.  But this hearkens back to "The Ghost of Frankenstein", which I watched last year, where they kept putting different brains inside the Creature's body - first one of the assistant doctors, and then the brain of Ygor, the deformed assistant.  I think we know now that once you remove a human brain, like cut the brain stem or whatever, it's really not any good any more.  I mean, we can transplant just about any human organ except the brain, right? 

The poster's a bit misleading, because the "Creature" here doesn't have green skin, or look like the old Universal version, with bolts coming out of his neck and everything.  He's essentially the "perfect" body here, and that sort of leads to questions about Dr. F. and why he's so obsessed with achieving this, and also exactly what his standards are when it comes to "perfect" men's bodies.  Like, size obviously matters because Frankenstein's Monster is usually portrayed as a giant - some films in the series have explained that delicate surgery is probably made easier when the body is larger, but now I wonder if that's a bit of a dodge.

But there's really no "perfect" in the world of medicine, right?  The new improved Karl soon shows signs of being the old, deformed Karl, and I don't know if that's one of those nature vs. nurture things, or just karma catching up with him for having his brain put into a new body.  Either way, things don't go well for Karl, and we're never really sure why.  The monkey who got a brain transplant didn't do well either, and theories range from him being frightened too soon after the surgery, or from eating meat.  Well, I guess that's good to know - if you find your brain has been put in a new body, you'd better become a vegetarian right away.

But the Creature manages to "out" Dr. Stein for who he really is, and then nearly everyone turns on him, especially the poor people in his hospital, the ones he's been taking body parts from.  Come to think of it, we never really find out who Dr. Frankenstein wanted to get his "revenge" on, or whether he achieved that this time around.  Maybe we'll get some understanding in the next installment, but I kinda doubt it. 

Also starring Francis Matthews, Eunice Gayson (last seen in "From Russia With Love"), Michael Gwynn (last seen in "Cleopatra"), John Welsh (last seen in "Indiscreet"), Lionel Jeffries (last seen in "Lust for Life"), Oscar Quitak, Charles Lloyd Pack (last seen in "Bedazzled"), George Woodbridge, Michael Ripper, Arnold Diamond, John Stuart (last seen in "Number 17"), Marjorie Gresley, Anna Walmsley, Alex Gallier (also carrying over from "The Curse of Frankenstein"), Michael Mulcaster (ditto).

RATING: 4 out of 10 medical council members

The Curse of Frankenstein

Year 9, Day 284 - 10/11/17 - Movie #2,749  

BEFORE: OK, enough with Dracula - I'm going to transition over to remakes of that OTHER Gothic horror tale, the one from Mary Shelley.  Christopher Lee carries over from "Count Dracula" making that both easy and logical.  (Though in retrospect maybe I should have connected to the remake of "Nosferatu" via Klaus Kinski.  Oh, well...)

Last October, TCM ran four of these Frankenstein films made by Hammer Films in the 1950's & 60's, starring Peter Cushing - but I didn't have room for them last year, and they got pushed forward into 2017.  But I did watch "Victor Frankenstein" last year, along with three older Universal Frankenstein films - four seems to be my limit on the number of films about each monster that I can watch in a year.  Soon all of the channels will be airing horror films, and I may be forced to prioritize.  I've got a ton of movies coming in right now, and not enough slots unless I'm willing to allow the Watchlist to get bigger.

THE PLOT: Victor Frankenstein builds a creature and brings it to life, but it behaves not as he intended.

AFTER:  I tend to complain a lot about the use of framing devices, like the current trend of starting a film with the single most exciting moment in the story's action, and then snapping back to explain how we all got there.  I tend to think of this as a device similar to the opening "splash page" in comic books, and mostly I consider it a cheap way to grab people's attention, as well as covering up a host of other potential drawbacks, most notably it's an admission that telling the story in the proper sequence would be very boring, and therefore it's usually a giant red flag.  But thinking about the novel "Frankenstein", which framed the story with a sequence of a ship exploring the North Pole region which comes across both the fleeing Creature and the pursuing Dr. Frankenstein - that makes me realize that this literary device has been around for a very long time.

Now, this 1957 film from Hammer Studios didn't use exactly that framing, instead they started with Victor in a prison, incarcerated for murder, and then telling his entire story to a visiting priest.  Clearly you need a big budget to film on a ship stuck in an ice floe, and with a limited budget, some concessions must be made.  But this also prompts me to go back to the original novel to see where the film deviates from Shelley's story.  In the novel, Victor falls in love with his adopted sister, Elizabeth, and in this film, Elizabeth is his cousin.  (In the 1950's as well as in Victorian times, I'm betting it was more proper to marry one's cousin than one's sister...)  In the novel Victor's friend and confidante is named henry, here it's Paul Krempe.

Those seem to be minor details, but the bigger differences concern the creation of the Creature, and his portrayal.  In the novel, the creation of the man, the re-animation of dead tissue, happens quite quickly.  Perhaps it's movies that made this into a long, arduous process, with flashing lights and bolts of electricity in the lab, which are very photogenic.  In the novel it's more like a school project, Victor just builds a creature while at university, with about as much difficulty as a teenager would have while writing a book report.  The bulk of the story, the real heart of the philosophical debate comes after this, when the Creature spends a few months living behind the cottage of a poor family in the woods, during which time he also learns to read and write.  (Umm, that doesn't end well, and soon the Creature returns to get revenge on Victor, for creating him in the first place.)

My point is, the Creature in the novel is able to speak, and to have philosophical debates with Victor, and then make demands and threaten him when the debating doesn't work.  But in "The Curse of Frankenstein", just like with Renfield yesterday, we never hear the Creature say anything, which seems a bit odd not only because it's important to the story, but also because film is a medium of sound as well as picture, and this therefore seems like a bloody waste.  On the other hand, a Creature that can't talk can't be reasoned with, and therefore there's something scarier about him, he's just a force of strength and violence.

The weird thing is that when Victor and Henry begin their experiments, we see them pouring various chemicals over a dead puppy, and once they land on the exact combination, they're able to bring that puppy back to life.  The next logical experiment would be to pour those chemicals on a human corpse, to see if they can replicate their success - but no, Victor insists on putting together the perfect specimen first, which means assembling the body of a hanged thief, the hands of a sculptor, and the brain of a professor.  NITPICK POINT: We see Victor cut off the thief corpse's head, and dissolve it in the acid bath, but whose head does he then put the professor's brain into?

It's a nice theory, that if you took the best parts of different people, you might be able to make the best possible person.  But I think we can all safely predict that things don't always work out the way that the mad scientist wants them to.  So little was known at the time about how quickly dead tissue deteriorates, or like I said, maybe they should have focused on reviving ONE person who was already in one whole piece, instead of dealing with all the complexities of assembling a patchwork person as a test subject.  Because what they get here is akin to a mindless, suffering killing machine.

Now, in the novel the Creature is quite crafty, he even frames the nanny Justine for his murder of Victor's brother, just by planting a locket on her.  So that's pre-meditated murder, planting evidence - not bad for a re-animated corpse.  Things are quite different in this film, where Victor digs up the Creature after Paul buries him, to kill Justine, the maid Victor's been having an affair with.  Hey, it's almost like a soap opera with monsters!  But really, isn't Victor the REAL monster here, I mean, tampering with the forces of life and death, robbing graves, and killing anyone who doesn't agree with him?  But then we find out whose murder Victor is charged with, and damn it if what comes around doesn't go around in the end.  See ya later, Baron.

Also starring Peter Cushing (last seen in "Rogue One", sort of...), Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Melvyn Hayes, Valerie Gaunt, Paul Hardtmuth (last seen in "I Was a Male War Bride"), Anne Blake, Raymond Ray, Noel Hood, Claude Kingston, Alex Gallier, Michael Mulcaster, Andrew Leigh, Sally Walsh.

RATING: 5 out of 10 black-market eyeballs

Count Dracula (1970)

Year 9, Day 283 - 10/10/17 - Movie #2,748  

BEFORE: I spent most of yesterday in bed, dealing with a combination of exhaustion from loading everything out of NY Comic Con and a cold, no doubt obtained by spending four days in a convention center with a closed air supply and over 100,000 nerds in a confined space.  Thankfully it was Columbus Day, so much less pressure to go in to the office on a federal holiday.  I slept most of the day away in 3-hour blocks, waking up only to have some soup and change the tape on my DVD burner, since I have to put THIS year's Dracula films on DVD to get ready for NEXT year.  TCM went and made Dracula their "Monster of the Month", but I can't work those new films into my chain because they won't be done airing them until the end of October, and I can't wait that long, I've got other monsters and creatures I want to cover.

But my last version of "Dracula" for this year comes from 1970, directed by Jesus Franco, who also seems to be referred to as either Jesse Franco or Jess Franco.  So there's a little confusion here, also over the title of the film, which is "Count Dracula" on the IMDB, but "Bram Stoker's Count Dracula" on the poster.  It seems we may finally get in a Dracula film this month that was based on the original novel, and not the stage-play from the 1920's.

The poster below also has a confusing tagline in "Finally! The original version!"  Well, since original usually means "first", and "Finally!" seems to be a poke at those OTHER Dracula films, especially the famous one with Bela Lugosi, you can't really say this film is "original" because it had so many predecessors, right?  But I know what they were trying to say, taking credit for being the first film to really go back to the source, but they clouded it up with contradictory grammar.

THE PLOT: This version of the Bram Stoker classic has Count Dracula as an old man who grows younger whenever he dines on the blood of young maidens.

AFTER: Apparently this fact was mentioned in the novel, that Count Dracula would appear to get more vital, or "younger" the more blood he drank - so they gave him gray hair at the start of this film, and he makes references to being old and in need of a change when he rents the property in England from Jonathan Harker's firm, but by the end his hair is darker and he appears younger.  (Again, language problems, he can't "become" younger, that's impossible without reversing time, he can only appear to do so.).

We're back to Harker traveling to Transylvania, but Harker's really dumb here - he doesn't pick up on the fact that the villagers are all afraid of the Count, and even when he's seduced by the three female vampires, who Dracula distracts with a live baby for them to eat, he convinces himself that it's all a dream.  At least he doesn't think those two puncture wounds on his neck come from mosquito bites, but since he doesn't offer up any other possible explanation, he just might as well have.

What about those three female vampires in Dracula's castle, anyway?  After seeing several versions of this story now, some call them "the sisters" and others "the Brides of Dracula", I'm wondering why they were such under-utilized characters.  We see them seduce Harker, and then we never see them again.  Why introduce them into the story if they serve no other purpose?  Did everyone, including Bram Stoker, forget to use them in the latter part of the story?  Why does Dracula want so desperately to move to the U.K. if he's got three wives?  (Wait, that question maybe sort of answers itself...)

Harker escapes from Dracula's castle in this one, and is found in a river in Budapest.  But he wakes up in a psychiatric clinic in London. NITPICK POINT: How did anyone in Budapest know that he was from London, and who had the knowledge and resources to send him home?  Shouldn't someone in a coma not be moved across such a great distance?  This seems like just a cheap way to get all the relevant characters - Mina (Jonathan's fiancée), Lucy (Mina's friend), Dr. Seward, and Van Helsing, who coincidentally owns the clinic, even though he's not any kind of doctor.  I suppose it's not as cheap as making Mina the daughter of Van Helsing, but it's close.

They shoehorned Quincey Morris in here too, as Lucy's fiancé, and Renfield (referred to as "Reinferd" in the credits for some strange reason) is just an inmate at the asylum who eats bugs, and I don't think we ever hear him say any dialogue in this whole film, despite LONG sequences where the doctors are begging him to talk.  "Come on, Renfield, you can say it.  Just tell me.  Come on, you can tell me now..." and so on.  Renfield serves an important function to the story, not only helping Dracula move into his new castle but also giving the audience the important details about who Dracula is and what he does, even if no one in the story believes it.  Removing his power of speech completely not only slows the story down, it makes him a completely tangential, useless character. I'd say that Klaus Kinski did the best job he could playing a catatonic mental patient, but that seems like a backhanded compliment.

After you watch a few of these Dracula films, like I have, you realize that Dracula spends a lot of time boxing himself up and shipping himself across Europe, along with his spare coffins.  What kind of rate did he get for this, while he slept in the coffin for what, 2 weeks?  And what courier did he use for this, was it UPS UnderGround?  Undead-Ex?  Or maybe DH-Hell? 

There are other problems here, like that fact that much of the dialogue seems like it was dubbed in later, or perhaps the audio was not synched up properly, and that gives this the overall feel of a cheap foreign film.  Dracula crawling down the walls of the asylum upside-down is a neat effect, but a fake bat still looks like a fake bat, so not as much changed in 40 years of filmmaking as one would have hoped.  And if you are familiar with the novel, they still left a LOT of stuff out here, so the claim to be the first film based on the novel seems a bit toothless since they ended up jettisoning half of the details anyway.  Maybe the decision to base the other films on the stage-play wasn't such a bad one after all.

Starring Christopher Lee (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski (last seen in "Doctor Zhivago"), Maria Rohm, Fred Williams (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Soledad Miranda (last seen in "100 Rifles"), Paul Muller, Jack Taylor.

RATING: 4 out of 10 Gypsy servants

Dracula (1979)

Year 9, Day 282 - 10/9/17 -  Movie #2,747

BEFORE: I'm done with another Comic-Con, at least this one was in New York and I didn't have to travel - but now I'm exhausted and I have a cold and I just want to sleep through all of Columbus Day.  But with a little help from DayQuil and Mountain Dew I can stay up for a movie (after a little nap, of course) and thus stay on track.

I've got one more Dracula film tomorrow, made in 1970.  This one was released in 1979, so I'm not going chronologically - but the 1970 film links to the next block, so it's got to come last.  Anyway that puts this one next to the more famous 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, and both films were based on the stage version of "Dracula" rather than from the novel, so this should make for a logical side-by-side comparison.

THE PLOT: In 1913 the charming, seductive and sinister vampire Count Dracula travels to England in search of an immortal bride.

AFTER: While it's definitely the same plot as the 1931 film - Dracula hires a ship to take him and his many coffins to the U.K. - there are still some notable differences.  For example, this film starts out on that ship, with Drac's voyage already in progress.  Why waste time dicking around with exposition in his Transylvanian castle when we can get right to the action and the imminent threat of a vampire heading for a crowded, industrialized nation?  The Count can catch up with Jonathan Harker in England when he moves into Carfax Abbey, the prime real estate that comes with its own cobwebs, so he should feel right at home.

This moves Renfield back to being introduced later in the story, just like in the novel.  But he still ends up in the asylum that's run by Dr. Seward.  Only here Dr. Seward is Lucy's father (in the book she's Lucy Westenra, which was always an odd last name, I thought) and to further simplify things, Mina Murray (later Mina Harker in most versions) becomes Van Helsing's daughter for this film.  You have to remember that the 1931 film was made during very cheaply during the Depression, and there was also a notable recession during the 1970's, so it seems that the production company tried to save some money here by reducing the number of last names.  For a story that only had about a dozen characters to begin with, they whittled the story down here to just about 7 or 8 major roles.

This does give both Dr. Seward and Prof. Van Helsing good reason to take an active role in battling Count Dracula - because their daughters are not safe when there's a horny vampire on the prowl.  And even if they can't save their daughter's lives, they can at least save their souls with a stake through the heart.  But in most of the versions I've seen so far, Lucy is Dracula's first victim and Mina is romantically involved with Jonathan Harker, but they flipped the script here and made Mina the first woman Dracula attacks, and Lucy Seward is engaged to Jonathan.  I'm not sure why this changed, maybe some focus group responded better to the name Lucy, so they gave her the bigger role?

I'm also a little disappointed that they chose to set the action in 1913, where the 1931 film seemed to be set in the present - at least the scenes in London depicted a modern city of the 1930's.  When I imagined the type of Dracula film that could be made in the late 1970's, I pictured Dracula grooving down a NYC sidewalk, like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever" - it's not a big leap from that cape he wears to a disco outfit from that time.  (And this film was directed by John Badham, who also directed "Saturday Night Fever"...)

But it's good to see that production values and special effects were much better in this later remake, at least compared with that 1931 version.  Unfortunately a fake flying bat still looks like a fake flying bat, but at least there's some gore when Dracula bites a neck or tears open a throat, where the Bela Lugosi film had all that take place just out of shot.  And it looked like they shot the sailing scenes on a real working ship, and not just a set.

Starring Frank Langella (last heard in "The Prophet"), Laurence Olivier (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Donald Pleasance (last seen in "Shadows and Fog"), Kate Nelligan (ditto), Trevor Eve, Jan Francis, Tony Haygarth, Teddy Turner.

RATING: 5 out of 10 communion wafers