BEFORE: Well, I started my Dracula chain with the 1958 film "Horror of Dracula", and worked my way forward to 1972, though continuity-wise, it wasn't exactly a straight path. Now I'm jumping back to another film from 1958, and I'm going to work my way backwards through the Dracula films that followed the original Lugosi film. I figure there wasn't much attempt to make a cohesive overall franchise story going forward, so really, it doesn't matter what order I watch them in.
So no actor linking tonight, just the character of Dracula carrying over. But the concept is similar, since last night's film brought Drac into the modern-day (at the time) year of 1972, and this one brought him forward in time to the modern (at the time) year of 1958.
THE PLOT: After a vampire leaves his native Balkans, he murders a Czech artist, assumes his identity, and moves in with the dead man's American cousins.
AFTER: Damn, but it's hard to know even where to start with this one, which takes Dracula out of his usually cloudy and rainy Transylvania and sends him to Southern California. Like, if sunlight kills him, is there a worse place for him to go and visit? Maybe the Sahara desert, but California's probably a close second. I was joking last night about putting Dracula in a sitcom, but this really puts him in that idealized TV world, like something out of "Leave it to Beaver" or "Father Knows Best". They should have just called this "Dracula Knows Best" or maybe "I Love Lucy Westenra" and been done with it. This is the worst idea since putting the Gill-Man in a cardigan and giving him a house in the suburbs in "The Creature Walks Among Us". But then again, last year the literal "fish out of water" storyline in "The Shape of Water" won the Best Picture award, so I guess you never can tell.
Let's look at the logistics of this for a second, because they sort of gloss over Dracula's travel with a train trip where he kills a man and assumes his identity, a 5-second shot of an ocean liner, and then next thing you know, he's arriving in California on another train. I'm going to put the brakes on this story right there, because everything we've been told about Dracula up to this point is that he HAS to return to his coffin in his castle every night, before morning, or he'll die. And if he needs to go on the road, it must be in a coffin that contains some of his home soil, or again, he'll die. (This was all laid out in "Dracula A.D. 1972" with a song that ripped off Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover", called "50 Ways to Kill Your Vampire". Who can forget the memorable lyrics "Just cut off his head, Ned / Get a new stake, Jake / Just let in the sun, Hon / and get yourself free... Pick up a cross, Ross / You gotta believe, Steve!" and so on.")
So while he was taking that train, and relaxing on that cruise ship, where was his coffin? Didn't that raise a few eyebrows, when the porters were asked to deliver a coffin full of dirt to his cabin? Of course, he probably had an interior cabin with no balcony or even a porthole, probably saved a lot of money that way, but I bet the cruise director got annoyed that he never turned up for shuffleboard during the day or even went swimming in the pool. But I bet he enjoyed the nightlife on board, and the late-night dining, but since there were probably fewer passengers on the ship when it docked than when it left port, that probably raised a few concerns, no?
Then he had to spend what, like three days on another train to get to California, while his coffin was in a giant crate. Again, this is a huge problem because we've been told that he absolutely must be in his coffin every morning before the sun comes up, so this sort of trip would have been impossible without breaking the vampire rules. (I wonder if they addressed this sort of thing in "Hotel Transylvania 3"...). But there would also be problems with immigration, if he went through Ellis Island, and he didn't match the physical description of the guy he was pretending to be. Or did he kill this guy, Bellac Gordal, because he sort of matched Dracula's height and weight? It's tough to say. Either way, immigrating from a Communist republic like Romania at the height of the Cold War was probably quite difficult, even for a vampire - did he have to hypnotize the immigration officers, or did he tell them he was a vampire, but not a Communist? Better undead than red, I guess.
Then when Dracula finally makes it to Carleton, California, how does he know so much about Bellac Gordal, the man he's pretending to be? He killed him in the train car before he could learn anything about where he was going, who he was going to be staying with there, and so on. But when he hits town, he somehow knows the name of Bellac's childhood friend, Cora Mayberry, and the fact that she's a widow with a teenage daughter and a son. Then there are times when he can't seem to remember key details of things that happened to Bellac when he was young, and these are, for some reason, easily glossed over and not focused on. But bear in mind, this was 1958, when internet scams and catfishing hadn't been invented yet, so why on earth would someone pretend to be a lowly Czech artist emigrating to America?
Bellac's strange sleeping hours are similarly explained away due to re-adjusting to a new time zone, after traveling a great distance - but there's no jet lag if you didn't take a jet to get somewhere. And another NITPICK POINT, how did he get his coffin crate delivered to that cave outside of town? The freight people would have needed a specific address, you can't just put "that cave outside Carleton" on the shipping invoice - and someone HAS to be there to sign for it between the hours of 10 am and 5 pm, and that's when Dracula needs to be sleeping in his coffin! I don't think most people realize just how hard it is to be a vampire in the modern world - take it from me, because of my late-night movie watching I basically keep vampire-like hours myself.
The good news is that the stray cat and stray dog problem around Carleton seems to have been solved, and then they went through a period where nobody saw a tramp or a hobo for a good long time. But then Dracula eventually had to turn his sights on teen girls again (I wonder if a vampire has to go knocking on his neighbors' doors when he moves into a new neighborhood, to let them know there's a predator living on the next block...). He not only tries to seduce Rachel, Cora's daughter, but also a blind girl named Jennie who lives in the "parish home", whatever that is. Seems to be some form of assisted living run by the church, which again, would only be a problem for Dracula to get into if there were a bunch of priests and crosses everywhere.
But would Dracula be able to seduce a blind woman? We've been told that he uses a form of hypnotism, which would imply that someone would need to make eye contact with the Count in order to be enthralled, but here he invades Jennie on a psychic level, and he promises to bring her out of the dark and into the light, which seems like a bunch of B.S. But if Dracula made a blind girl into a vampire, would she then be able to see? Or would the process heighten her other senses, like smell and taste, to make up for it? Because if not, then she'd be able to turn into a bat, but then fly around and bump into things, at least until she figured out how to use that echolocation thing. These are the things I think about that concern me.
Starring Francis Lederer, Norma Eberhardt, Ray Stricklyn (last seen in "Somebody Up There Likes Me"), John Wengraf (last seen in "The Thin Man Goes Home"), Virginia Vincent, Gage Clarke, Jimmy Baird (last seen in "Rebel Without a Cause"), Greta Granstedt, Enid Yousen, William Fawcett (last seen in "Sex and the Single Girl"), Robert Lynn (last seen in "An Affair to Remember"), John McNamara, Belle Mitchell (last seen in "The Spider Woman"), Norbert Schiller (last seen in "Kismet"), Charles Tannen.
RATING: 4 out of 10 broken mirrors
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