Dracula A.D. 1972

Year 10, Day 286 - 10/13/18 - Movie #3,078

BEFORE: I've reached the end of my Hammer Films chain, for now, until I tackle more Mummy-based films next year.  I still have four Dracula films - after this I'll head backwards in time to some of the classic Universal films that I skipped over last year.  But only 6 more films until I go away on vacation, then 2 more horror films when I get back, then October will be over and I'll hit the home stretch for the year.

Christopher Lee carries over from "Taste the Blood of Dracula" for another appearance in the cape.

THE PLOT: Johnny Alucard raises Count Dracula from the dead in London in 1972.  The Count goes after the descendants of Van Helsing.

AFTER: This film somehow found a way to both follow the continuity of the Hammer Films series, and also break with it at the same time.  The last time we saw Dracula, in "Taste the Blood of Dracula", he died inside an old London church, and in this one, that's where he's resurrected, decades later.  So that tracks, assuming it's the same church.  But then the prologue here shows Dracula battling Van Helsing, and he dies in a carriage accident, when he's impaled on a broken wheel, and Van Helsing breaks off the round part of the wheel, leaving one of the spokes to function as an impromptu stake.  But when does this happen?

It can't be a reference to "Horror of Dracula", because Van Helsing defeated Dracula there by opening the castle curtains to let the sunlight in.  (Why does Drac's castle even HAVE curtains?  You'd think he would have had the windows bricked over as a precaution, but whatevs...). Does that mean he was resurrected again after Van Helsing killed him, and then Van Helsing killed him again?  That messes with the continuity where Dracula died in some of the previous films and then revived in "Taste the Blood of Dracula".  Are we just going to ignore his various resurrections in between 1872 and 1972?

Of course, there was the 1970 re-telling of Dracula's original story, which I watched last October, but that wasn't a Hammer Films production, and it also didn't have a carriage chase in it and a wagon-wheel impalement.  And Herbert Lom played Van Helsing in that one, not Cushing - so just like with the James Bond series, there's very little regard for continuity between the films.  If this film says Dracula died by carriage wheel, the story just has to roll with that.

For convenience's sake, of course the same actor would play Van Helsing in the flashback sequence, and then his grandson, Lorrimer Van Helsing in the 1972 scenes - but does this really work?  How many people are the spitting image of their grandfathers?  I can handle the fact that the modern guy has the same last name, because that just takes one guy having a son and then that son having a son, but the physical resemblance thing is a little off-putting.  How much in-breeding was there in British society to allow that to happen?  This also happens with the Alucard character, the guy in 1872 that collects Dracula's ashes appears again in the modern scenes, but they don't say if that's supposed to be the same guy, or his grandson, or what.

Pity how hard it is to be British, because as we saw in the last film, people are all so bored with culture in the U.K. that they have to turn to the dark arts, just to get a few kicks.  But I feel like some screenwriter totally mis-read the room here, maybe he used the Rolling Stones' song "Sympathy for the Devil" here, plus the fact that the kids were listening to bands like the Zombies, Black Sabbath and the Grateful Dead, and figured the next logical thing was for kids to go from go-go dancing to rock and roll straight to black masses and trying to resurrect vampires.  And that just wasn't a thing back in the early 1970's, it never caught on.

A couple of NITPICK POINT things here, like the fact that it takes way too long for anyone to figure out what "Alucard" spells in reverse, and similarly it takes too many tries for Johnny to bring Dracula the woman that he wants to possess.  Like, there are only three birds in the group, and one of them has Van Helsing as a last name - dude, it's probably her.  Why does he keep seducing the wrong girl,  is he really that bad at following Dracula's directions, or is he screwing up on purpose, just to get laid?  And another huge N.P. would be - why would Drac use an old church as his lair, wouldn't there be crosses everywhere?

There were also some missed opportunities here, like what would happen if somebody was stoned on LSD and then Dracula drank their blood - would he get high or would he spit it out?  And having been dead for 7 or 8 decades, what did he think of modern music, or cars, or telephones?  I guess we'll never know.  Could he seduce a woman who was attracted to women and not men?  And the other side of that, would he have an easier time seducing a gay man, or does Dracula not swing that way?  Certainly all the ladies in London here found out that "Once you go Drac, you never turn back".  But that's because he drank all their blood.

And if Hammer Films had kept making the Dracula films, what would have come next?  Would they have followed the trends of the 1970's, and moved Dracula to New York, for a "Saturday Night Fever"-inspired spin through the disco scene, or maybe "Welcome Back, Dracula", where the Count would then return to his Transylvanian home town to teach high school?  It's tough to say.  I'm also sorry that the "Johnny Dracula" spin-off never came to be, I thought that one might have some legs - but I guess there's no place for vampires in the 1970's if they can be defeated so easily by modern plumbing.

Also starring Peter Cushing (last seen in "Dracula: Prince of Darkness", Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame (last seen in Licence to Kill"), Marsha Hunt (last seen in "Never Say Never Again"), Caroline Munro (last seen in "The Spy Who Loved Me"), Janet Key (last seen in "1984"), Michael Kitchen (last seen in "My Week with Marilyn"), Lally Bowers, Maureen Flanagan, Michael Coles, William Ellis, Philip Miller, David Andrews, Constance Luttrell, Michael Daly, Artro Morris, Jo Richardson, Brian John Smith, Penny Brahms.

RATING: 5 out of 10 goblets of blood

Taste the Blood of Dracula

Year 10, Day 285 - 10/12/18 - Movie #3,077

BEFORE: I've noticed a lot of connections between the Hammer Films movies and a couple other series, most notably the Bond films and also the "Star Wars" films.  The Bond thing I get, because both series were filmed in the U.K. in the 1960's, so they were drawing from the same pile of actors.
Desmond Llewelyn, who played "Q" in the Bond films so many times, appeared in "The Curse of the Werewolf, for example.  And Christopher Lee, of course, played Scaramanga in "The Man with the Golden Gun", but a lot of other actors in smaller roles also crossed over between the two series.

The Star Wars connections are very obvious to me, of course - Peter Cushing (Van Helsing) also played Grand Moff Tarkin in "Episode IV: A New Hope", and his image was then used again in "Rogue One" a couple years ago.  Then Christopher Lee played Count Dooku years later in the prequels, Episodes 2 and 3.  Then we've got Eddie Byrne, who appeared in 1959's "The Mummy" as a police inspector and was also a Rebellion General in "A New Hope".  Tonight we've got Russell Hunter, who plays the queerish guy who works as the British pimp, it turns out he was married to Caroline Blakiston, who played Mon Mothma in "Return of the Jedi".

I'm sure there are a bunch more connections, I'll keep an eye out for more.  Christopher Lee carries over again from "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave".

THE PLOT: Three distinguished English gentlemen accidentally resurrect Count Dracula, killing a disciple of his in the process.  The Count seeks to avenge his dead servant by making the trio die by the hands of their own children.

AFTER: It's not just that Count Dracula is evil, it also stings that he's very impolite.  Here, three English upper-classmen are so bored with all the usual vices that they go seeking a new friend, someone who can turn them on to the harder sins, and that guy wants to bring Dracula back to life.  When they succeed, you'd think that Drac would be happy to be alive again, right?  Like, I don't know, a thank you card at least seems in order, but it wouldn't hurt to also send them a nice gift, something personalized and from the heart.  But as we learned last night, Dracula doesn't really do polite very well - his default setting is "Kill", or I guess that really is "Drink all their blood first, then kill".

But wait, how do they bring Dracula back?  The last time we saw him, he'd been impaled on a cross, and that's curtains for a vampire, right?  I mean, if a wooden stake through the heart would usually kill them, a cross has got to be worse than that, PLUS the priest managed to say the prayer, so that's it, he's toast, done for, no coming back.  EXCEPT that an enterprising man had been thrown out of a carriage, and that just happened to take place right near where Dracula was dramatically decomposing and turning into a pool of ketchup.  Wait, I mean blood, it only LOOKED like ketchup.  Dracula has chunky-style blood, it turns out.  Anyway, that guy saved the Count's clothing, plus the medallion with the word "Dracula" on it (you know, he wears that just in case he might forget his own name ??) and he scooped up as much of the blood as he could, before it turned into a fine powder.

(Great, the only people more vampiric in this world than vampires are collectors...trust me on this one)

Anyway, the weird new friend tries to get the guys to drink some VERY Bloody Mary's, only they can't do it, so he does it himself, and is sort of turned into the Dracula familiar to this franchise.  Dracula takes being brought back to life as some kind of personal offense, because that process destroyed one of his biggest fans, though it's a bit questionable how Drac knows this, since they're never seen together.  But the vampire process that brings him back to life somehow uses this guy's body as source material, or a template, or something, so perhaps some kind of sense memory was retained?  It's tough to say.  He strikes at the older gentleman by seducing two of their daughters, Alice and Lucy.

Alice is in love with Paul, who's Lucy's brother.  Only Alice's father forbids her to date Paul, even though he's friends with Paul's father.  This is never fully explained, why he won't let his daughter date the son of his friend - is this because he and Paul's father have visited so many whorehouses together?  Is he assuming that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, so Paul will never be faithful to his daughter?  Or is he such an over-protective father that no man will ever be good enough to date his daughter?

Anyway, Dracula proves again that he can steal just about anyone's girlfriend or daughter, and make her do whatever he wants.  It's not like any woman can resist him, after all, since they're the fairer sex and therefore weak-minded.  Geez, Dracula, it's time to drop these old stereotypes and join the 21st century!  (OK, the 20th at least.) 

Also starring Geoffrey Keen (last seen in "Doctor Zhivago"), Gwen Watford (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Linda Hayden, Peter Sallis (last seen in "The Curse of the Werewolf"), Anthony Corlan, Isla Blair (last seen in "Johnny English Reborn"), John Carson, Martin Jarvis (last heard in "Wreck-It Ralph"), Ralph Bates, Roy Kinnear (last seen in "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother"), Michael Ripper (also carrying over from "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave"), Russell Hunter, Shirley Jaffe, Keith Marsh (last seen in "Othello"), Peter May, Madeline Smith (last seen in "Live and Let Die"), Reginald Barratt.

RATING: 5 out of 10 desecrated graves

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave

Year 10, Day 284 - 10/11/18 - Movie #3,076

BEFORE: Well, the calendar still says October, but I'm already planning for the end of the year, and the start of Movie Year 11.  That means figuring out my February romance chain, and based on the films that I have already, plus a few that are on Netflix, I think I've figured out a good starting point and a good stopping point, though given the size of the chain it may have to start in mid-January, or drag into mid-March.  It's unfortunate that February is the shortest month, but I've tasked it with covering one of the most common genres, the romantic film.  Though I may be pushing the definition of what constitutes a romance film just a bit, I'm good with this chain - and the films I added as bridging material are probably available on iTunes (I'll check on that this weekend if I get the time) or, if luck is with me, they'll pop up on premium cable between now and then, it's certainly possible.
But luck is involved, because I can't burn a DVD from every premium channel, not since I got the new DVR in June.  I've been running some tests, though, and some channels still allow me to record onto VHS and then transfer that tape to DVD, while certain others (cough - HBO - cough) run that signal that prevents duplication.

(Some channels run that signal, but I've developed a couple simple work-arounds, which I won't reveal here, because that could put an end to them.  Anyway, I'm back on the case and I can start work on clearing my movie DVR again.  Even with the larger storage drive, it was getting up near 75% full.)

Christopher Lee carries over from "Dracula: Prince of Darkness"

THE PLOT: When Castle Dracula is exorcised, it accidentally brings the Count back from the dead.  Dracula follows the Monsignor back to his hometown, preying on the holy man's beautiful niece and her friends.

AFTER: There's a point in this film where the lovely Maria, young niece of the Monsignor, gets attacked by Dracula in the basement of the tavern, and she gets away from him, only when she comes up to the main floor of the pub, nobody believes her.  Let me be clear, in this little town in Transylvania, where Dracula re-surfaces every decade or so, and the villagers lock their doors and close their windows every night just in case somebody found a way to bring Dracula back to life, they don't believe a woman when she says she's been attacked.  Oh, if only there were some real-life story in the news that I could draw a comparison to, how insightful would that be as a commentary on our society and our collective problems with believing the stories of victims of harassment.

What part of the basement did this happen in, Maria?  Was anyone else in the basement that could verify the alleged attack?  How many beers did you have that night, Maria?  Was that what you were wearing when you went down in the basement?  The truth is that you came on to Dracula, isn't it, Maria?  Turns out victim-blaming is nothing new, it was going on way back in the 1800's, even in remote areas like Transylvania.  The question then becomes - why don't the people in the pub believe Maria, why can't they face what's going on right downstairs, literally below their feet?  And it would be very ridiculous if the townspeople then reacted by saying, "Well, if Maria could accuse Dracula of trying to bite her neck, then she could accuse any of us of doing the same thing!  So none of our sons, brothers and fathers are safe now, she could falsely accuse them all of being vampires!"

The answer has everything to do with the big, scary man that lives in the giant castle (I think you can tell where I'm going with this...) and nobody wants the gaze of Dracula to fall on them, so they blame the victim, or they pretend not to see the big castle or deal with what they know is going on inside of it, and it's for their own safety, or their own self-interest.  Because if they did, then they'd have to get some pitchforks and some torches and deal with the monster themselves, and that's dangerous - it's easier to just sit at the bar and do nothing, because who cares if the town loses a couple of maidens or barmaids, there's a lot of them about, only that might not be the case if people turn a blind eye for too long.  Eventually this little town in the Carpathian Mountains will be devoid of people, the monster will have consumed them all, and he'll move on to the next village and do the same thing all over again.  So in the end, you've got to get your pitchforks and drive the evil villain out of town, and it won't be easy or fun, but it's the only thing that will save the country in the long run.  Are we clear?

Now, how did Dracula get revived?  He died in the last film by being drowned in his own castle moat, but about half an hour into this film, he's seen frozen in ice, up in the mountains.  Huh?  I thought his castle was on flat land, so how did he get into the ice at a higher elevation?  Last time I checked, water ran downhill, not up.  So for this to work, his castle had to be on a flat plain that was also up on a mountain, so a mesa?  And then the moat had to have running water, like to be connected to a river, which as I said last night, is a rarity for a moat.  Then that moat would have to drain out like halfway down the mountain, still at a high enough altitude to keep Dracula's body frozen in ice, so I'd say that's a bit of a stretch.

Then that ice also had to be a very specific thickness, thick enough to not unfreeze easily, but thin enough so that when the priest trips and falls on it, it cracks open, and allows the blood from his convenient head wound to drip right into Dracula's mouth to revive him.  It's a one-in-a-million shot, but it has to happen for the story to continue.  Now, you'd think that Dracula would be thrilled to be alive again, and therefore thankful to the Monsignor who had the crazy idea to perform an exorcism at his castle, but the Monsignor sealed the castle doors shut with a large cross, so Drac can't get back in, he's essentially homeless.   Turns out the Prince of Darkness can't seem to look on the bright side of things, he's more of a circulatory system-half empty kind of guy.  But hey, at least he got his voice back, he's talking again in this movie!  I'm not sure why the poster shows him with purple skin, though.

So Dracula sets out to discredit the Monsignor, destroy his family and seduce his niece, Maria.  There's an interesting wrinkle here, in that the main hero (Maria's boyfriend, Paul, who resembles a young Roger Daltrey) happens to be an atheist, so he clashes with the Monsignor at dinner over theological matters, but when the Monsignor realizes how badly he messed up by bringing Dracula back to life, Paul's the only one he can school in the methods of defeating a vampire.  Which then leads to the question, what good is battling Dracula with a crucifix if the person holding it doesn't happen to believe in its power?  Is it the shape itself that tortures him, or the faith of the person wielding it?  Geez, Dracula would have a field day today with all the hipsters who either identify as pagans or Wiccans, or just say that they're "spiritual, but not all, you know, religious...".

Similarly, we're shown here that staking Dracula is pointless unless you also recite a prayer while doing it, or shortly thereafter.  If you don't do this, then he can just pull up stakes (sorry...) and start over.  See, this is what I mean when I say they're always changing the rules on battling vampires here.    Christopher Lee himself reportedly said that this plot point was B.S., because in previous films all you had to do was drive that stake into a vampire's heart (or mid-torso, whatever...) and the destruction would then take care of itself.  And this is also the first time I've seen Dracula use a priest as one of his thralls - you'd think that there would be something holy about them that would prevent this, but this one priest folds like a cheap suit.  What is this movie, then, trying to say about the priesthood?  That it's a noble establishment, but it's full of weak-minded people?  That the temptations of the flesh sometimes come before spiritual concerns, even for the clergy?  I suppose I'd have to agree with that theory.

(Yes, Dracula also had a man on the inside at the abbey in "Dracula: Prince of Darkness", but that man was not a friar or a priest, he was just that weird dude that the brothers found in the forest years before.)

To me it's a NITPICK POINT how an atheist can also believe in vampires.  Doesn't the presence of a real vampire confirm that the dark forces of evil are real, and if that's the case, seeing as how the vampires are repelled by the crucifixes and other holy items, doesn't that prove that God is real?  Now, of course I think both God and the devil are supernatural B.S., but if one were proven real, then I'd be forced to believe in the other, right?

Also starring Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson (last seen in "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed"), Barry Andrews, Ewan Hooper, Barbara Ewing (last seen in "Mute"), Marion Mathie (last seen in "Lolita"), Michael Ripper (last seen in "The Curse of the Werewolf"), Norman Bacon, John D. Collins, George A. Cooper (last seen in "Start the Revolution Without Me").

RATING: 5 out of 10 bloodshot eyes

Dracula: Prince of Darkness

Year 10, Day 283 - 10/10/18 - Movie #3,075

BEFORE: As I write this, I'm listening to some tracks from Vanilla Fudge, a little-known band from the 1960's.  They're probably most famous for their cover versions of other people's songs, like the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" and the Supremes' "You Keep Me Hangin' On".  Sure, lots of bands back then covered those songs, but not everyone brought their own sounds to the party.  Vanilla Fudge was famous for making those light songs sound really HEAVY, by slowing them down to a crawl and then adding a keyboard that sounded like a pipe organ, pounding drums and more than a few guitars.  They had vocals that call to mind the later sound of Chicago, but many people point to them as the link between the psychedelic sound of the 1960's and the heavy metal sound of the 1970's.  Think of them positioned right between the Young Rascals and Deep Purple, if that makes any sense.  And check out their covers I mentioned above, plus "I Heard it Through the Grapevine", "I'm a Believer", "I Can See for Miles", "For What It's Worth" and "Gimme Some Lovin'", and you'll see what I mean about their unique, heavy take on softer songs. 

And that, to me, is what Hammer Films seemed to be about - they took the characters made famous by Universal, like Dracula, the Mummy and Frankenstein's Monster, and they gave them some new weight - like, really, how scary was that old mummy when he was just a guy wrapped in bandages, stumbling towards his prey at a top speed of 1 mile per hour?  Or how scary was Dracula if the camera cut away every time he bit into a neck?  Frankenstein's Monster was always covered by a sheet or something, so you never saw the gory bits of sewing him together, example.  Of course, those movies were made during the 1930's, and it was a gentler, less gorey time.  Hammer Films came along and suddenly you SAW the vibrant red blood when a vampire got staked through the heart (OK, usually it was the mid-torso, but filmmakers weren't known for their accurate anatomy knowledge...) 

So Hammer Films was like the Vanilla Fudge of horror films - they saw those soft, non-gorey monster movies and said, "These really need to be updated, and we need to show some REAL (fake) blood.  It should be red, anyway, even if it's not the right shade..."  And then eventually this led to more modern horror films like "Poltergeist" and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" that showed murder and gore in great detail, but we might never have had the latter without the former.  Just like we might not have had Led Zeppelin, Styx and Yes without Vanilla Fudge updating those old songs and putting a new spin on them.  Oh, yeah, it's Halloween time, so also check out Vanilla Fudge's cover of Donovan's "Season of the Witch".  You're welcome.

Peter Cushing carries over from "The Brides of Dracula", but only in a flashback sequence, relating how he killed Dracula in "Horror of Dracula".  Still, that counts, like a few weeks ago with Samuel L. Jackson appearing in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle".

THE PLOT: Dracula is resurrected, preying on four unsuspecting visitors to his castle.

AFTER: As we learned in the last film, Dracula is dead but there were plenty of people in Transylvania keeping his ideals alive, or looking for a way to bring him back.  This film shows how one of those people was successful, he was the caretaker at Dracula's castle who somehow got a hold of Dracula's ashes, and figured out that he could bring the vampire back, just by pouring a person's worth of blood over them.  (How he got the ashes is unclear, and so is how he determined this would be a valid method of resurrection...) 

To get the blood, he maintains the castle every day for years, hoping to attract some lost travelers - he puts up his listing on SCARE B&B, I bet... and he lucks out when two vacationing couples from England visit Romania, you know, to do a little hiking and some sight-seeing and they don't seem to understand why everyone closes up shop before sunset and rolls up the sidewalks.  As entitled Brits, they demand that the carriage driver deliver them to their next hotel, only he kicks them out of the cab in the forest, and won't drive them by Dracula's castle.  However, he offers to return after dawn to pick them up...if they survive the night!  (Nope, no red flags there, not one.)  Well that's no way to get a good Uber review - "Dropped us off too close to vampires, would not take us to our destination.  Threw our luggage into a pile of leaves.  One star." 

A driverless carriage soon arrives to pick them up and deliver them to the castle, so the Count can have them for dinner.  Sorry, I meant have them OVER for dinner, my mistake.  "The castle was very hard to find, as the locals pretended not to know where it was.  While we appreciated the ride from the forest, and dinner was provided for free, we got a very creepy vibe from our host, Klove.  Then we found the castle gate was locked and we could not leave.  To make things worse, one of our guests was drained of blood in order to resurrect a vampire. His wife was bitten in the neck and is now undead. Zero stars." 

And so two couples become one couple, but the remaining British tourists (by coincidence, named Charles and Diana) escape in a carriage, but it crashes and they encounter Father Sandor, a roving priest who serves the Van Helsing role here, who happens to sound a lot like Liam Neeson.  They go with him to his Abbey, but it's not long before Dracula packs up the coffins and heads after them, because he's got a man on the inside there, a weird guy named Ludwig that the friars found in the forest years ago, who's a genius when it comes to decorative book covers but terrible when it comes to following safety instructions.  "Sought refuge at a holy place, but the security was terrible.  You'd expect an abbey to be free of vampires, but this place was infested with them too.  And bedbugs.  I know it's the 1800's but can't we do something about pests in hotels? Be sure to pack your crucifixes if you stay here.  One star." 

It's a little odd that Dracula has NO DIALOGUE in this film - and over the years, various reasons have been given for this.  Christopher Lee stated that the dialogue he was given was terrible, so out of respect for the audience he decided not to say any of it, and express himself via hissing instead, which I have to admit is a fair sight creepier.  Later the screenwriter claimed that he never could have written anything as cool as those hisses, so he didn't even bother to try.  Someone here just wasn't being completely truthful.

The film ends rather abruptly, with Dracula trying to return to his castle, only his coffin slides out of the wagon and on to the ice of the frozen moat.  (Funny, it was September just a few days ago, and now the moat is frozen, because the story demands it...)  But the quickly-devised and conveniently aforementioned rule about vampires being killed by running water comes in very handy here - and the ice just happens to be thick enough to stand on, but also thin enough to be broken by a bullet from 100 yards away.  Which is funny, because you'd think that ice of that exact thickness would be clear and see-through, but this ice resembles inch-thick white pressboard.  But no matter, it's time for a quick game of "Break the Ice" so the vampire will drown.  I shouldn't even have the heart to point out that a castle moat usually does not consist of running water - but that's a big NITPICK POINT right there.

Oh, that wacky Dracula, always not dying because of some technical foul in the way you kill him.  He'll be back tomorrow, just wait and see.

Also starring Christopher Lee (last seen in "Horror of Dracula"), Barbara Shelley, Andrew Keir (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Francis Matthews (last seen in "The Revenge of Frankenstein"), Suzan Farmer, Charles Tingwell, Thorley Walters (last seen in "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed"), Philip Latham (last seen in "Force 10 from Navarone"), Walter Brown, Jack Lambert, George Woodbridge (also last seen in "Horror of Dracula"), John Maxim (ditto), Philip Ray (last seen in "Frankenstein Created Woman"), Joyce Hemson.  

RATING:5 out of 10 terrified villagers

The Brides of Dracula

Year 10, Day 282 - 10/9/18 - Movie #3,074

BEFORE:  There's one of the big banks here in NYC that, according to their commercials, has now transformed into a chain of coffee shops where people can also do their banking.  This seems weird at first, but the more I think about it, the more it feels like genius.  More people are doing their banking online, they're even taking pictures of their checks with their phones to deposit them, and people hardly even need to use the ATMs when they can just buy everything with their cards or phones.  So the people who run this bank probably noticed that there was less and less foot traffic, and here they are, taking up all this real estate with fewer people going to the bank.  So yeah, instead of closing branches or laying off tellers, let's combine coffee shops and banks, we've already proven that this town can take a Starbucks on nearly every corner, so you might as well sell coffee in all those nearly empty banks, or give coffee-drinkers a chance to bank online while they drink their java, or whatever new combination of banking and coffee-drinking works for people going forward.

This got me thinking, there are probably a lot of things we do today that seemed a little weird at first, like the first person who proposed putting a kitchen on a train probably got a few funny looks, from people who said "I don't get it..." but it really worked - I can jump on an Amtrak to go visit my parents, and if I don't have time for a bite to eat first, I know I can get a burger and a beer from the café car.  Same goes for food trucks - not too long ago it was probably a very strange idea, but now they're commonplace.  Which leads me to wonder - what other businesses could be combined?  If I could think of the next great combination and that becomes a million-dollar idea, I could quit my job.

People already watch TV when they're working out at the gym - but would they watch a movie while exercising?  Instead of putting comfier recliner chairs in a movie theater, could you just put a row of treadmills or exercise bikes?  If we could combine movie theaters and fitness centers, could that be a thing?  If so, I've got the perfect name - Net-Flex.  OK, maybe that's a little cutesy - but on long subway rides, this is the stuff I think about, when I daydream about owning my own business of some kind.

What about a homeless shelter and, say, a telemarketing company?  I think they tried this with prison inmates making calls before, but that led to some bad people getting the personal information of strangers, or perhaps having convicts calling people at home just creeped people out.  But people in shelters are just there all day, sitting on cots, doing nothing, it's an untapped resource.  Give them some phones and an auto-dialer, and as long as companies are ignoring the "Do not call" lists anyway, why not give these people a new purpose, and maybe they can also earn a few bucks?

Not every combination of business would work, of course, but some might make a little sense - what about restaurant valet parking, combined with an auto service center?  You go to a fancy restaurant, some guy drives your car away and you won't need it for the next couple hours, why not get the oil changed at the same time?  Alternately, I would settle for a decent restaurant placed inside a car service center, because when my wife brings in her Nissan for something, all we really get is vending-machine snacks, along with some K-cup coffee.  But if they put a DINER in there, they might really be on to something.

Or just put an auto service center right inside a large parking garage, so your tires can be rotated while you're at work, you won't need your car anyway in the middle of the day, it's just sitting idle.  Similarly, nail salons can be set up inside doctors' offices, so you can get a manicure or pedicure while you wait for your test results.  I've got a million ideas for ways to save people's time, only most of them are going to sound weird - but remember, every innovative idea sounds a bit weird at first, we just need to get used to them.  (Hmm, that's what they said about "Soylent Green", right?)

Then there are organizations like City Harvest, which take donations of food that can't be sold in restaurants or leftover from events, and deliver those items to soup kitchens and places that feed the homeless. I also saw a piece on "60 Minutes" the other night about an Italian chef, Massimo Bottura, who has opened several "community kitchens" that feed the homeless, free of charge, using scraps of food from other restaurants, and this is financially supported by his other restaurants, which of course charge top dollar.  It's possible, the right combination of things can be successful, cut down on wasted resources and time, and also do some good in the world.  I just want to think up something like that, is that too much to ask of myself?

I guess in Dracula's world, you'd need to combine a vampire café with a human blood bank or something.  But that's probably been portrayed already in vampire fiction somewhere.  Peter Cushing carries over from "Horror of Dracula", and so does at least one other actor.

THE PLOT: Vampire hunter Van Helsing returns to Transylvania to destroy handsome bloodsucker Baron Meinster, who has designs on beautiful young schoolteacher Marianne.

AFTER: At first thought, this movie seems to be poorly named, because Dracula is NOT in this movie, and for that matter, neither is Christopher Lee.  And a voiceover at the beginning says, "Dracula is dead..." but was he ever really alive in the first movie, to begin with?  So I have a feeling we'll be seeing him again, despite the ending of "Horror of Dracula".  That guy's got more lives than a freakin' cat.  But on second thought, we're not promised Dracula in this film, the title only mentions his brides, so they could easily appear without him, right?  I remember there were those three women in the original Bela Lugosi film that seduced Jonathan Harker, and then were never seen again in the film.  WTF?  They're sometimes called the "Weird Sisters", and some call them the "Brides of Dracula" but their absence in the latter part of the film is very strange.  Why introduce three characters like that and then never follow up with them, especially when they imply that Dracula is a polyamorous vampire, or is that polygamous?  That makes him a very interesting character, though again, it also pushes old "love 'em, bite 'em and leave 'em" Drac a little bit more into the realm of a sex offender.

(Last night's film reduced the three "Weird Sisters" to just one, who pleaded with Harker for help, before trying to bite his neck.  Budget concerns, I guess.)

Instead of Dracula, we're presented here with the strange case of Baron Meinster, who's something of a Dracula wanna-be - is he a real vampire, or just part of some strange cult that follows Dracula's teachings?  Yeah, the three women seen here definitely come off as vampires, but I'm not so sure about the Baron himself.  If you look closely, his fangs aren't even the same color as his other teeth, so he looks like he's wearing falsies.  (I know, all of the actors are wearing false teeth, but on him it's just so flaming obvious...)  Did he stick two metal teeth on to his real ones, just to try to bite people like Dracula would?  Because that's not how vampires work.  He's a sham-pire, if you ask me.

The story starts with a French woman, Marianne, taking a coach to Transylvania, where she's got a new job as a teacher.  The people at the local pub think she's crazy to be traveling by herself through Transylvania, because it's so dangerous.  The Baroness Meinster arrives at the pub, drinks wine with her and offers her a place to stay for the night, because she's just a lonely old woman with nobody to talk to, except her servants and her son who's chained up in the East Wing.  Wait, what?  Yep, that's right, he's by himself in a sealed-off part of the castle, chained by his leg to a large table - nope, nothing weird about that at all.  So she tells Marianne to avoid that part of the castle with all the enthusiasm that Willy Wonka mustered up when he told naughty kids not to do something in his factory.

Clearly, the Baroness is used to trolling the pubs in the area to find young women to lure back to her castle, and by telling them NOT to go visit her poor, lonely, sick and misunderstood son in the East Wing, well, they probably all just can't resist that, now, can they?  Each girl wants to be the one who's going to visit this lonely soul and redeem him, or at least cheer him up, but they have no idea that he's got this vampire fetish where he bites them with his fake metal teeth and watches them bleed out.  That's my take on the situation, anyway.  He plays up his poor, confused vampire act just to get more attention from the ladies, but hey, whatever gets him laid, I guess.  And he doesn't have a problem with consent like Dracula did, because the women broke the rules, and went to visit HIM when they were told not to.  It's very sneaky how he makes himself irresistible.

But just like in the original "Dracula" film, there's an extremely unconvincing model bat here.  Note to filmmakers, if your special effects look like crap and a close-up would reveal that your bat is just a puppet on a string, for God's sake, don't have so many close-up shots of it.

Spoiler Alert, Van Helsing gets bit in this film - but he's OK, he disinfects the evil bite with a searing hot iron, then follows that up with a holy water dousing, and within seconds, he's not even burned.  Good to know, even if they're just making up the rules as they go along.  I seem to recall a rule about if you kill the vampire that bit you before you turn into a vampire yourself, you might be OK.  I guess Van Helsing just lives by his own impulses.  Or maybe the guy that bit him was never a true vampire to begin with, just saying.

Also starring Martita Hunt (last seen in "The Unsinkable Molly Brown"), Yvonne Monlaur, Freda Jackson (last seen in "Henry V"), David Peel, Miles Malleson (also carrying over from "Horror of Dracula"), Henry Oscar (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Too Much"), Mona Washbourne, Andree Melly, Victor Brooks (last seen in "Goldfinger"), Fred Johnson (last seen in "The Curse of Frankenstein"), Michael Ripper (last seen in "The Curse of the Werewolf"), Norman Pierce, Vera Cook, Marie Devereux (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Michael Mulcaster (last seen in "The Revenge of Frankenstein"), Harold Scott.

RATING: 4 out of 10 locks on the coffin (that bit was really confusing)

Horror of Dracula

Year 10, Day 281 - 10/8/18 - Movie #3,073

BEFORE: Well, this is, more or less, about where I left off with Count Dracula last year - in 2017 I watched three films with the Count, the Bela Lugosi one from 1931, the Frank Langella film from 1979, and the 1970 one with Christopher Lee.  I was forced to table the rest, just as I was forced to table most of the mummy movies this year.  Nothing's going to get in the way of our vacation.

But those three films had something in common, they all claimed to be based on the original story - only two of them weren't based directly on the Bram Stoker novel, they were based on the 1924 stage play, which helped cut down on the number of sets.  You can spot films based on the stage play because Renfield is locked up in the sanitorium, there's a reduced number of characters (Lucy and Mina get combined into the same helpless female) and an increased amount of exposition.

But after watching those three films, I still had an excess of Dracula films to take care of, so here they come - 6 from Hammer Studios, and then I've got four older ones from Universal, which will take me back in time to where I need to be for my next link.

George Woodbridge carries over again, from "The Curse of the Werewolf".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Dracula" (1931) (Movie #2,746) & "Dracula" (1970) (Movie #2,748)

THE PLOT: Jonathan Harker begets the ire of Count Dracula after he accepts a job at the vampire's castle under false pretenses.

AFTER: Like the 1970 film that also starred Christopher Lee, this one's definitely based on the novel.  But this means re-boots are not exactly a new phenomenon - the first Hammer Dracula film had Christopher Lee as Drac, along with Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray and Lucy Western, (only here it's Mina Holmwood and Lucy Holmwood, and I guess they're sisters-in-law, so there is some combining of surnames) and then Hammer re-booted their own Dracula series by doing another version of the Stoker novel in 1970.  Geez, maybe this is where the trend started - and this is why we've had to watch three versions of Spider-Man's origin in just the last 15 years.

This was Lee's first appearance as Dracula, and Cushing's first as Van Helsing, but they ended up playing off each other in many films, and also in Hammer's Frankenstein films, where Cushing was always Dr. Frankenstein, and Lee occasionally played the monster.  (Remember, this Halloween, don't make the mistake of calling the big green monster "Frankenstein", that's the scientist's name, the monster had NO NAME in the novel.).

They did change things up a little bit here, like Jonathan Harker still arrives at Dracula's castle, as he does at the start of the book, but in the book it takes him a LONG time to figure out that something's not right with this guy.  Here he seems to know it right away, and he only took the job as Dracula's librarian in order to get close to him and figure out where he stores his sleeping coffin.  So he KNOWS already, which takes away some of the suspense, but on the other hand, it does hurry things up quite a bit.  (Unlike last night's film, where I had to wait a freaking hour to see a werewolf...)

In addition to meeting the count, Harker meets a young woman who claims to be kept prisoner there, and she pleads for his help, only she can't quite exactly say what the deal is, why she's being kept captive, or the Count's true nature - yeah, that's a big red flag right there.  Harker falls victim to the woman, and once he finds the bite marks on his own neck, he knows he's living on borrowed time.  So he stakes the thrall, but fails to take out the Count himself.  He also made the fatal mistake of showing Dracula a picture of his beautiful fiancée, Lucy - geez, that's even stupider than showing your girlfriend's picture to your platoon-mates if you're in a World War II film.

Naturally, Drac's gotta get himself a piece of that - and so here come the first similarities between Dracula and a modern-day sexual predator.  He's got a compulsion, that's clear, and once he sets his sights on a particular woman, he's just got to have her, consent or not.  We've been led to believe that Dracula practices a form of hypnotism, but it's also possible that he exudes pheromones, or some other kind of drug is involved.  And then once his blood mixes with hers, that woman is under his spell, and in fact his victims often faint from blood loss, but Dracula doesn't seem to mind.  No, no, Dracula, this might have been condoned back in the 1800's, but these days this behavior is frowned upon, and is in fact quite illegal.  (Somebody needs to do a comedy sketch, if they haven't already, about how the #MeToo movement has affected the classic movie monsters.)

Van Helsing arrives on the scene, following Harker's trail, and a helpful serving woman at the local pub slips him Harker's diary.  But there's really no need for this plot element, it was already established that Harker knew Dracula was a vampire from the start, so it stands to reason that Van Helsing probably would have already known, too.  After staking the remains of Harker, Van Helsing heads back to break the bad news to Harker's fiancée and her family, and of course he learns that Dracula is one step ahead of him, he's already been to visit Lucy, and she's under the Count's spell.  The audience can figure that out just from the fact that she won't wear her crucifix to bed, and suddenly likes to sleep with all of the windows open.

She might have made it, if the stupid maid hadn't agreed to her request to remove the garlic bouquets from the room - but if the maid listened to Van Helsing, then we wouldn't have a storyline.  Dracula visits again, and it's curtains for Lucy, but don't worry, she'll be back.  That's how the vampire STD spreads, she comes back as an undead and then tries to infect more people, and so on.  Van Helsing wants to use Lucy as bait to track down Dracula, which is a solid plan, only it takes too long to convince her brother Arthur that it's a good idea, so she ends up paying the price.  (Arthur here is played boy Michael Gough, who went on to play Alfred Pennyworth in the "Batman" films from 1989 to 1997, so it seems his most famous roles were always sort of Bat-centric...)

They did the best they could here with what they had, obviously there were budget constraints, because Dracula's only got a total of seven minutes of screen time, and Peter Cushing doesn't show up until 25 minutes in, and the whole film's only 82 minutes long - then Jonathan Harker's not in the last half at all.  They moved Dracula's castle from Romania to Germany, and he doesn't travel to anywhere near London, instead it's presumed that the Holmwoods also live in Germany, no doubt within a bat's flying radius from the castle.  And we never even see Dracula turn into a bat or a wolf or even a cloud of mist.  (The 1931 film with Lugosi did the bat thing, but the effect looked really cheesy, so maybe it's better to avoid it.)

Also starring Peter Cushing (last seen in "The Mummy"), Christopher Lee (ditto), Michael Gough (last seen in "The Age of Innocence"), Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, John Van Eyssen, Janina Faye, Charles Lloyd-Pack (last seen in "The Revenge of Frankenstein"), George Merritt (last seen in "Young and Innocent"), George Benson, Miles Malleson (last seen in "Stage Fright"), Geoffrey Bayldon (last seen in "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed"), Olga Dickie, Barbara Archer, Valerie Gaunt (last seen in "The Curse of Frankenstein").

RATING: 5 out of 10 improvised crosses

The Curse of the Werewolf

Year 10, Day 280 - 10/7/18 - Movie #3,072

BEFORE: It's the last day of New York Comic-Con, and it's a little weird to be on the sidelines when this event is happening just across town.  My company decided not to spend money on a booth in San Diego this year, and instead we decided to focus on the NYC con, where our travel expenses would be next to nothing.  But we decided to ditch the expensive booth on the main show floor and apply for a table in Artists Alley, but somehow the organizers' web-site didn't properly process our application, so when I asked when we were going to hear about our table, my contact didn't have any record of us applying for it.  The best I could do was get us on the waiting list for a table, and hope that someone had to change their appearance schedule, or had massive problems traveling to New York.  Since we didn't get a call, I'm assuming that everyone showed up as planned, and so we had to take a pass.  Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying the time off, and the fact that I didn't have to scramble to get our supplies and merchandise across the six-block trip to the Javits Center, but still, I'm missing the hectic, chaotic fun/nuisance of that event.  I'd been working a booth at the NY Con for 7 or 8 years straight.

Well, we had no new product to sell, anyway, so maybe it's for the best that we didn't go.  I can start getting my ducks in a row for next October's event, and maybe taking a year off from going to Cons will make me feel less tired and more eager to go next year.  I toyed with the idea of going to the Con today as a spectator, but when I saw that tickets were $50, and on top of that, the event was sold out, I quickly lost interest.  I've never paid to attend either NY or San Diego Comic-Con, so why start now?

Besides, I've got plenty to do at home, like catching up on TV and staying current on horror films.  I knew that if I could get to one of the Hammer Films, I could link to a bunch more, it was one of those studios that kept hiring the same actors again and again for different roles in each film.  I saw this also earlier this year with the Sherlock Holmes films that starred Basil Rathbone, they were drawing from a very small pool of actors, so the same actors kept popping up in different parts in each film, an actor could be a criminal mastermind in one film and then a Scotland Yard inspector in the next, my guess is that the audience didn't really care all that much. George Woodbridge carries over from "The Mummy", and so do two other actors.  I'll get back to Cushing and Lee tomorrow.

THE PLOT: In 18th Century Spain, an adopted boy becomes a werewolf and terrorizes the inhabitants of his town.

AFTER: This film took a LONG time to get to a damn werewolf - seriously, it was 45 minutes into the film before Oliver Reed's character showed up, and then he was played by a child for another 10 minutes?  For a film called "The Curse of the Werewolf", it's BARELY about the werewolf, it focused too much on the curse, if you ask me.  Back in my day, I think all they had to do was to have a character get bitten by a wolf and live, but BOOM, there's your werewolf.  Oh, sorry, in the original 1941 film Larry Talbot had to get bitten by another werewolf, that's what spreads the virus, or disease, or whatever it is.  But then there's that rhyme about how "even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night, May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright..." and that poem doesn't even say a THING about getting bit.

Here, things are much more complicated, since the film opens on a beggar in a village in Spain, wondering why the bells are ringing on a weekday.  The villagers tell him it's because the Marquis has gotten married, and the beggar should go visit the Marquis' castle, since he's basically got all of the villagers' money.  Umm, I came here for a monster movie, not a lesson on the economics of rural Spain in the 1800's, and besides, so the Marquis is a one-percenter, so what?  That just means that nothing's changed in all that time.  When the beggar arrives at the castle during the wedding feast, the Marquis calls for him to have food and drink and some money, provided he allows himself to be "bought" as a pet for the Marquess.  But even though she seems like a (relatively) kind woman, the beggar gets "taken care of" by being thrown in jail, then forgotten about.

Time passes, and the beggar grows old in jail, the Marquess dies but he still gets fed by the daughter of the jailer, who is mute, and then SHE grows up to become a pretty woman, and gets groped by the Marquis, who gets angry because she won't tell him her name.  Then SHE gets thrown in jail (victim blaming, am I right?) and the old beggar's still there, so one thing leads to another, and the old, mad beggar rapes her before he dies.  (Like, is there a werewolf in my future, here?  Come ON!)

When she's brought before the Marquis again, she struggles against her tormentor, and kills him, then flees into the forest, where she's found by Don Alfredo and his housekeeper Teresa, who nurse her back to health, only she dies in childbirth.  However, this happens on Dec. 25, and there's some long-standing curse that an unwanted child born on Christmas would become a werewolf.  See what I mean, it's a long, windy way to go to produce a werewolf - and then for another 10 minutes he's just a kid who sneaks out at night and enjoys late night dinners of lamb, very rare lamb that is.  A herder's dog is blamed for the deaths of all the lambs and goats, and Leon's taste for blood is curbed by his surrogate parents for the next 13 years, though the film never explains exactly how.

Fast-forward to Leon as a young man, who leaves his parents' house and strikes out on his own, though later we learn that he didn't really go very far, he gets a job offer just walking down the street in the next town, to work in a vineyard doing very complicated tasks.  Like, the wine goes IN the bottle and the label goes ON the bottle, I don't know how he manages to keep that all straight.  Before long he falls for the daughter of the wine-maker, even though she's engaged to someone else, but it seems that's an arranged marriage and she doesn't really love the guy.  But somehow the love he feels brings the hot, werewolf passion to the forefront again, and he kills a number of people at a local brothel.

This is also pretty confusing, because the priest said that the only cure for his condition would be if he somehow found one woman to love him back, but as soon as he meets this girl, he starts being affected by the full moon again.  So, should he fall in love, or not?  They said it would help, but it sure doesn't seem like it.  Damn, this sort of thing was a lot easier back when it was JUST the full moon that would turn the infected men into werewolves - that way at least you'd know that if you locked the guy up when the moon was 95% full he might not kill anyone over the next few days.  But what do I know?

I guess he learns here that being around Cristina can help control his urges, but before long he's put in jail without her, so that can't be good.  And then when she finds out about his true nature, that's something of a deal-breaker - so he can't be with the one woman who could help cure his condition.  But hey, don't look for a medicinal cure or expect any help from science, just keep hoping against hope to find love with a woman who's into very hairy guys.

The true moral here is that the criminal justice system has many flaws - here everyone who gets put in prison only becomes either a rapist or a killer, so that's hardly ideal.  And we still don't have a way to reform werewolves, the only solution is to shoot them?  That seems like a pity.  I guess that's why Hammer Films only made one werewolf movie and was unable to turn this into a franchise.

Also starring Clifford Evans, Oliver Reed (last seen in "The Sting II"), Yvonne Romain, Catherine Feller, Anthony Dawson (last seen in "Dial M for Murder"), Josephine Llewelyn, Richard Wordsworth (last seen in "The Revenge of Frankenstein"), Hira Talfrey, Justin Walters, John Gabriel, Warren Mitchell, Anne Blake (last seen in "The Curse of Frankenstein"), Michael Ripper (also carrying over from "The Mummy"), Denis Shaw (ditto), Ewen Solon, Peter Sallis (last seen in "The V.I.P.s"), Martin Matthews, David Conville (last seen in "The Fourth Protocol"), Sheila Brennan, Joy Webster, Renny Lister, Loraine Carvana, Charles Lamb, Desmond Llewelyn (last seen in "Cleopatra").

RATING: 5 out of 10 goat herders