Movie Review: Maximum Overdrive

Maximum Overdrive (1986 De Laurentiis Entertainment Group Dir. Stephen King)

DAMN RIGHT!

Let us drop hyperbole for a moment and admit that this is the best feature film Stephen King has ever directed. Those of you who don’t have your hymnals open to page 19 won’t get that joke, and if you didn’t bring your hymnbook with you, I’m not going to explain things. This is, however, King’s single best directorial effort with no mistake or argument. I’ve heard that the impetus was a bet between King and George Romero after King commented that making a movie didn’t look all that hard. At the time, King was working with Dino De Laurentiis, who I will always love because the man never turned his nose up at a stupid idea. DEG Produced both Evil Dead II and Cat’s Eye as well. Without him, there might not be a Maximum Overdrive and the world would be a darker place. Based on the short story Trucks, King pulls double duty as both director and writer of this magnificent piece of Grade A 80s era cheddar.

The man, the myth, the stupid clip-on sunglasses.

Maximum Overdrive is a film that challenges you as a viewer. It’s a movie that asks “Am I really a bad movie?” to which you are expected to answer “Well, yeah, obviously.” Except, if you dismiss it like that you’re going to get hit right between the eyes with “Yes, but are you sure that wasn’t deliberate?” and then you’ll have to stop and think. Because there is this sense that maybe it was supposed to be like this, that maybe King got exactly what he was going for with this movie. Go watch Creepshow again and tell me this man doesn’t have a screwy sense of humor. Twenty years before Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were hailed as heroes for failing with Grindhouse, Stephen King failed with Maximum Overdrive. Not artistically, financially. I think it was too early, and too many people didn’t quite get the idea of winking comedy and horror put together yet. Odd, because Creepshow had come out almost five years before this.

Ah the 80s, when an entire movie could be explained with a single paragraph.

The movie begins with a text wall explaining that a comet made everything happen. This isn’t really important, because the rest of the story will more or less follow the story of Trucks in that the characters don’t actually know why the machines have decided to rebel. The first person to have any lines is King himself, getting the cameo out of the way to complain about and ATM calling him an asshole. And then the AC/DC music starts and you have to love King all the more. Who else gets one of the best rock bands in the world to score his movie? The first sign that the machines have more than profanity in mind when a drawbridge decides to raise itself. This movie isn’t 6 minutes old and we’ve had asshole, what the hell, shit, goddamn, Jesus Christ and fuck all spoken by characters. Shit doesn’t get a mention until later. If only there was a naked woman this would be everything I love about crappy 80s movies. Okay, technically, there are naked women, there are some photos from dirty books taped up to a wall in the truck stop. It’s not quite a later day Pearl, but you’ve got to make allowances. You don’t get everything in the first 6 minutes, the gratuitous machine guns don’t show up until later. We did get a blond in a white headband though, and that was awesome. It’s like we’re witnessing the Citizen Kane of 80s horror.

It’s not so much hard to come up with a joke for this shot as much as it’s hard to pick a joke.

After the opening madness at the bridge, we go to the Dixie Boy Truck Stop where the bulk of the movie will take place. Good idea, a single shooting location in North Carolina provided a lot of economy in those days and made it possible to show more of America than just New York and L.A. in the bargain. We’re introduced to our hero, a fella named Billy Robinson, who we are told is an ex-con. While we’re introduced, the games room of the truck stop is going nuts and braking, where upon a young man tells the machines how he feels explaining, “Your momma!” before stuffing his pockets with cigarettes that the vending machine begins to spit out. After that, a man is sprayed in the face by a malfunctioning pump hose and screams and screams. The reason Billy being an ex-con comes into the story is that there is a subplot that, in true drive-in fashion, fails to go anywhere about the boss of the Dixie Boy being a corrupt so and so. This reflects the deep seated corruption we remember from Chinatown, only it’s more personal and believable here.

It’s like Film Noir. Only, you know, not.

While Billy is talking to the boss, a waitress is taking care of the grill, until she’s attacked by an insane electric knife that is. The knife effect is really neat since it turns towards her before switching itself on and cutting into her arm. Blood sprays all over the place and Billy takes a hammer to the knife, killing it after several blows, proving him to be a kin to St. George who slew the Dragon of Silene all those years ago. Only Billy has no horse, or sword, or armor and goes off on an electric knife with a hammer. Still though, in this modern age without noble heroes, we take what we can get. Now while that’s going on, the fellow in the game room manages to get himself electrocuted and Sir Billy of Robinson is sent in to deal with him.

All he says is “Yo momma!” but when he says it, we believe him.

Suddenly, the focus of the movie shits to a little league game, where a young man has just hit what is sure to be the winning run of the game. This scene would later be mirrored in Kitano Takeshi’s 3-4 x Jugatsu only that movie was a fantasy of yakuza violence and retribution where a looser imagines himself to be slightly less of a looser where as here the kid makes the run and wins the game. The coach goes to buy some sodas (which I assume it a southern word for pop) and is attacked by the machine in a way that Jamie Hyneman would later use for a 7 Up commercial. As you are no doubt becoming aware, Maximum Overdrive is both the alpha and the omega of pop culture. The machine attacks kids left and right, before a steamroller comes for them. How awesome is it to still hear the under 16s using phrases like “Oh shit!” and “What the hell?” in a movie? We don’t get that anymore. Mom’s groups have fits and don’t let us have any fun these days. Once the kid who was good at baseball gets away, we shift story lines again. These interweaving story lines will come together in the end, focusing into a single thread, much like L.A. Confidential would do later. We’re introduced to a lecherous bible salesman and the girl he’s picked up names Brett. Point of order, why did girls stop wearing suit jackets with the sleeves pushed up and fedoras with their jeans and white shirts? She looks so good, and other girls looked great when that was the fashion.

Incredulous cuttie is incredulous.

When they get to the Dixie Boy, the big truck attacks. You shouldn’t be surprised that they get to the Dixie Boy. Everyone in this movie eventually gets to the Dixie Boy. Like Rome, all roads lead to the Dixie Boy. Once again the movie shifts and we meet Curt and Connie, a nice couple on their honeymoon. I don’t know about the guy, but Connie sounds a lot like Lisa Simpson, so I’m assuming that The Simpsons used an actress that imitates her voice with out the southern drawl in an obvious homage to this film. As the two of them stop at the wreckage of a filling station, they’re merciless attacked by an enraged tow truck. Curtis, at first, tries to reason with the truck, missing the patches of blood that adorn the front of the cab. For the first time, we get a confirmation that there is no one actually in the vehicles that are attacking people. One wonders why the cars aren’t acting up like the trucks and knives, but perhaps being more domesticated they don’t rebel as easily.

Please Matt Groening, get your show started and save me from all this.

Billy, being the heroic type, goes to investigate the big rig that tried to kill the bible salesman and Brett a scene or two ago. He’s still of the belief that someone must have gotten into the rig, but the facts don’t bear that out. As he investigates, Brett sneaks up on him and that have a Lead Male/Lead Female sort of conversation. She actually does just look at him and say “You’re cute” as an opener. It’s the sort of sparkeling dialogue I’d expect from My Man Godfrey, not some b-grade horror flick! She then asks “Did you ever see that much nothing at 10:15 in the morning hero?” which you must admit, is a hell of a philosophical question. Think about it for a moment. Have you ever seen that much nothing at 10:15 in the morning? I haven’t. These sort of weighty questions harkens back to The Seventh Seal and the questions that picture raises for the viewer. Only, instead of asking the question with impenetrable symbolism, it asks it outright through the medium of insane machinery on a rampage. In that way, it makes these questions more accessible to the mainstream audience and thus creates a more palatable sense of dread when facing a cruel an uncaring universe.

You’re the lead male
Yeah, and you’re the lead female
And this is the 80s. You know what that means don’t you?
We get to shoot guns later?
…Yes, that as well.

Our baseball player rides through the suburbs of his small North Carolina town, witnessing the violence that has be fallen his neighborhood and following in their wake like the narrator of War of the Worlds, dodging death at every turn when even the lawn mower comes after him. As it turns out, the baseball player is the son of the man who got the facefull of diesel in his face. He decides that he has to get to his son, announcing that “I gotta find my boy” to the world entire. This sort of fatherly dedication is right out of The Godfather. His dedication is short lived, since a rig runs him down almost upon the instant, killing him and driving the inmates of the Dixie Boy into the building. All but the bible salesman that is, who runs out to confront the evil like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, only in this case the windmill actually is the imagined giant. The reward for his gallantry is a blow that sends him right out of his shoes and into a ditch.

Just a little hay fever.

The group tries to raise help, but the radio is a machine and the machines have risen against them. This story line would later be mirrored in the Terminator series, and while the first movie came out before this, the original story of Trucks is clearly the inspiration for that movie’s back-story. The trucks now begin a campaign of terror by driving around and around the Dixie Boy in an attempt to break the spirit of the humans within. Meanwhile Curtis and Connie head inexorably toward the Dixie Boy, only to be menaced by another of the phantom trucks. Connie cries out “Why is this happening?” which is both a reasonable question and a great demand to the gods for an explanation for the entirety of the mortal world. Curt and Connie barely make it into the Dixie Boy parking lot. Connie then engages in a stream of profanity hardly seen outside of a Tarentino movie. As Billy and Brett attempt to get Connie and Curtis from the wreckage of their car, the first of the weapons come out. The boss of the Dixie Boy pulls out a bazooka, yes a bazooka and fires a round into one of the trucks which destroys it. Score one for the human race. They then fire a second rocket and boom goes another truck. It’s like Rambo, without the muscles, the mullet or the knife fetishism.

It took hours for them to realize that the first one in line was following the last one.

This leads to a tender male lead/female lead moment between Billy and Brett. This is because there must be a love story and they’re the lovers for today. Then they investigate the armory in the basement and discuss how Billy got to be an ex-con for a bit. It’s a confession that will be mirrored years later when George Lucas would borrow the scene in Episdoe Two, having Anakin explain his murder of the Sand people to Padmé. Meanwhile, the baseball player continues his Odyssey like journey toward the Dixie Boy, but finds his progress stymied by a series of obstacles put before him by the almighty. We then cut back to Billy and Brett, who have consummated their Male Lead/Female Lead status in the back of the truck stop, because romance happens anywhere. I was going to put a TV Tropes link here about how everyone always falls in love, but I can’t seem to find it and frankly, after 10 minutes I don’t care anymore. You’d think that’d be the easy one to find, but no. I guess it’s so obvious that there is ALWAYS a romance they don’t even bother to mention it. So fuck them, let’s get back to the movie. They then discuss the idea of going to a small island which is free of motor vehicles for the duration of the madness. One sentence? I continued for one sentence?

Nice to see Dee Synder kept working after the operation.

Sadly, the waitress has decided to go insane. She bangs a beer bottle on the table as she demands “They can’t do this” and then runs outside screaming “We made you!” to the machines demand that they can’t do this. The machines however, like the slave revolting in Spartacus, insist that they can. Once the machines decide they’ve had enough, they cut the power and leave their former masters in the dark. After a moment of that, the bible salesman proves that he isn’t quite dead by screaming in pain. The Dixie Boy inmates, or at least Billy and Curtis decide to go and rescue him. Connie complains that he should go and tells him not to make her a widow on her wedding day. He begs her “Do not forsake me, oh my darling, on this our wedding day”. It’s just like Gary Cooperonly without him selling a load of crap to McCarthy in hopes of ruining a lot of people he didn’t like. In greatest 80s fashion he and Billy strap on a bazooka and an M-16 before they run out to save the day. The guns aren’t immediately useful as they only want to get to a large shower drain in order to sneak along and find the salesman while AC/DC rocks along with them.

I will not make a lit fart joke, I will not make a lit fart joke, I will not make a lit fart joke…

It’s always great seeing in a movie when someone waves a small flashlight and it results in a grip off camera waving a large halogen light to create the illusion that the room is being lit by the single bulb. Billy and Curtis come out of the drains to discover that the bible salesman has passed on, but they do find the young baseball player and thus complete the trinity of useful male characters in this movie, bringing them all together at last. We are then left and the characters are all allowed to sleep for a while.

He actually believes this is a “Yee-Ha” situation we’ve got right here.

The morning of day two begins with a little military mobile platform and a bulldozer pulling up to the Dixie Boy. The dozer gets their attention by pushing away the wreckage of the destroyed vehicles and then attacking the front of the Dixie Boy. There is a small attempt to fight back, but the platform has a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho. The military scoot then pulls up and honks out at them inmates in Morse Code, delivering terms to them. The baseball player got a merit badge in Morse recently, so it’s up to him to translate. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a merit badge just for knowing Morse code. There is the Radio Merit badge, which requires knowing Morse, but none for the code itself. The machines explain that if they pump gas, the inmates of the Dixie Boy will be allowed to live. They agree because, well, what else can they do? A rock montage then ensues of them filling the trucks all day long. “They don’t understand how a man gets tired” Billy complains as the unending stream of trucks just keep on coming. This of course is the symbolic complaint of the proletariat against the uncaring factory owner who constantly uses men and grinds them into the dust. There will be no union to help them though, because the trucks won’t allow such a thing. This is more or less where the original story ended, with them filling up the trucks, slaves forever under the wheels of the trucks. However, here there is a little more going on and besides it’s the 80s and we have rocket launchers. Billy suggests that a race of aliens is controlling the machines to destroy the humans and wipe the place clean before infesting the planet. From there, he begins to form a plan.

See? Heat, camel, it’s all symbolic.

A hand grenade into the platform removes the issue of the machine gun. Once they remove that threat, they run from the Dixie Boy, slipping away through some of the other drainpipes. Once the trucks realize that they haven’t seen the humans for a while, they start to smash into the Dixie Boy, turning it into a big pile of kindling. The destruction of Dixie Boy reminds me of the destruction of… oh hell, I don’t know. Pick something. I mean I could mention a lot of things, but it’s all a bit silly at this point and I can’t think of anything good at the moment. I mean damn, I’ve compared this movie to enough things, you think of one for a change! Why is it always me that has to do all the heavy lifting around here?

Can I a get a Woo Hoo?

The Dixie Boy escapees then run away to a marina where they finally finish off one of the main trucks and escape on a sailboat to the island we talked about earlier. I haven’t really talked about it, but you know what truck I mean. What’s perhaps most surprising is the sheer number of survivors there are. In most movies the group is picked off one by one until one three or four remain. Now there is a certain amount of picking off, but there are a dozen or so survivors by the end of this movie. Far more live than died. The end claims that a large UFO was destroyed and that six days later the world passed through the tail of the comet and everything was alright after that. The survivors of the Dixie Boy, we are told, are still survivors. And what better way could you end a movie than that? It makes the Triumphant ending to Star Wars seem small potatoes by comparison.

There! I showed the Green Goblin Truck! Happy now?

I guess I can understand why someone might not like this movie. It’s not funny enough to be a pure comedy, but there are too many jokes for it to be a straight horror. It’s not an easy movie to categorize. It also addresses too many of the greater questions that face humanity, which could scare away the sort of person who never looked into the abyss and found the abyss looking back. There are also some people who have no taste in music at all. Those folk might not like the AC/DC songs, but those people are bastards and should be punched in the crotch. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that the story telling is very much the “Tab A into Slot B” style with action around the story points to pad the run time. That’s not really a problem for me though. King was a first time director after all and at least his movie makes sense. Had he made more, I’m sure he would have done even better. No, in the end, this is the finest movie of its kind to come out of the 80s and it’s everything I love about cheap cinema. It’s filled with screwy ideas, a lot of “yeah, whatever” explanations as to why some very convenient things happen, and it lets the scrappy good guy win in the end. What’s not to love? Yesterday’s review was painful, but this was joy.

And the whole epilogue is explained in one paragraph too. God, I miss those days.

This may just be the best movie ever made.

Did you come? I came.

Happy Halloween everybody!

Movie Review: The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera (1925 Dir. Rupert Julian and others)

Welcome my friends to the show that never ends…

Phantom is another movie that I always find to be more tragic than horrific. There are freights to be had, but the movie is much more about the tragedy and the insanity of Erik that always brings me back to it. Erik isn’t just a mad man he’s a mad man who feels that he’s been driven to perform the evils he’s done. You have a sort of early stalker mentality going on where Erik feels he’s owed something by young Christine. He trained her, he loved her, and she cast him aside when she sees his horrific visage.

After this shot, the urban myth of a munchkin hanging himself lasted for decades.

I’ve always had trouble having any sympathy for Christine. She’s not terribly bright, and she is amazingly selfish. It takes her nearly an entire reel to figure out that her masked benefactor is the Phantom, and she figures that out long after she’s taken to the underground lake, and the crypt like lair of Erik’s base of operations. She doesn’t even seem that concerned with the fact that Erik kills lots of people in order to advance her career.

Oh darling, my head is filled with cotton, but my mustache is fabulous!

I mean Christine even fails to follow even the most simplistic instructions. I mean he makes one simple rule, that she can’t ever see his face. Not hard, not tough, very easy. All he does is tell her she can’t ever see his face, fearing that his face would make her freak out, and that all she must see is the mask. So what does Christine do?

One simple instruction, and she fails.

Yeah, she yanks it off the first chance she gets! Then, her attitude totally changes. When before, her eyes were bright and her face in a state of sexual excitement, she reacts only in terror after seeing him. I can admit that she does get a little creped out by the mask, and the room she wakes up in does rather smack of a stalker fan boy palace, but still she’s sort of hot for him right up until she takes the mask off. I mean this is a guy who totally flatters her at every step, what young girl wouldn’t be excited. Still though, I have trouble feeling sympathy for her over Erik. I mean, after all this horribleness, she still goes on stage even though she knows that Erik is out there and killing people.

You ever notice it’s alwas me on the left and you on the right?

Once the unmasking happens though, the rest of the movie really starts rolling. It’s the scene after this, when Erik releases Christine and allows her to go back to the real world that we get the Masque Ball. In the version I used for screen caps, this version is entirely shot in color. I have 3 different versions of this movie on DVD, but the one I used has the most color scenes and for a few other reasons I used it for this. The Masque is the big scene in the movie for me, even more than the unmasking scene which has some major feeling to it. I like the masque because of the technical aspects dealing with the color, but it is a great scene even in blank and white.

Dude, shut up.

After the masque, we get the final opera performance. Christine foolishly goes back on stage, instead of running away, and she pays the price for it. Erik kidnaps her and her boyfriend and a police officer (who strangely has a fez and mascara) follow them. The hero boys get trapped in a torture chamber and then we get one of the oddest bits of the whole movie.

What you can’t see is that he’s sitting on a swordpoint.

As the heroes are trapped in a room that is being heated, baking the boys alive, Christine is given a choice. Erik gives her a pair of brass anthropoids, a grasshopper and a scorpion. If she turns the scorpion, she enslaves her self to Erik and saves her lover. If she turns the grasshopper she blows up the Opera House but is released. As she turns it, her boyfriend and the cop are almost drowned anyway.

My pokemon, let me show you them!

Then there is the death of The Phantom, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. After being hidden for as long as he was, the mob suddenly knows where his lair is and comes to get him. He escapes in a carriage, which falls over and sends him running to the Seine. Entertainingly enough they run in front of the façade of Notre Dame that was made for Hunchback. Of course he’s killed and thrown in the river, but not after making everyone think he had a grenade for a moment.

Why yes! I am interested in lowering my long distance bill!

Sadly, Chaney is the only thing that keeps me coming back. He outstrips everyone else and the movie falls down and dies whenever he’s not on screen. This happens with a lot of Chaney’s movies though. This isn’t a bad movie, but much of the movie looks so much better during the bits where Chaney reputedly took over the direction. The movie isn’t the best thing ever, but it does carry a good mood with it and is a bit creepy.

Pimping ain’t never been easy.

I have three copies of this movie on DVD. These came in two packages and I’ll deal with the oldest first. My first version was built from the 1929 version of the movie, more on what I mean by that a bit later. It has a new soundtrack by Gabriel Thibaudoux, which is something you regularly find with silent movies on DVD. Any old music or possible sound is often gone from the four winds, which requires new music to be produced. The picture has a certain amount of scratches and isn’t as well restored as some later versions will prove to be. It’s entirely tinted, which was a common practice as the time, to show moods. It contains the color sequence for the Masque Ball, but it’s not as large a piece as the version I used for the screen caps here. I’ll provide some comparison later.

This comes from the disc I talked about above.

The other version I have is actually a two disc set containing a more improved version of the 1929 release and a 1925 version. The 29 version is produced from several different prints, because much of the film has gone missing over the years, for this reasons there is a slight cobbled together feel to this version. Fortunately it rarely becomes an issue. The 29 version has a much clearer transfer, free of the scratches that mired the last version. Of course this newer version came something like 5 years later so there was technical advances. This version is freer of scratches and warpings as well. There is a musical score, this time by Carl Davis, and an early attempt at a soundtrack. Some voices were recorded on disc to run with the movie. They took those and fit them to the movie to produce a film with sound for about 2/3rd of the movie. There is also an audio commentary on this disc as well as deleted scenes and some more audio.

Those Vouge photographers just wouldn’t stop hounding him

On the second disc of that set is the original 1925 version, sans colour and with a different music score by Jon Mirsalis. The 25 version contains scenes not found in any other version of the movie, but is a much more damaged print of the movie as a trade off. There are a few interviews and a section of Faust (the opera in the movie) from another feature it seems. All in all, you can get something like 5 different versions of the movie if you really want to collect them all.

Movie Review: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920 Decla Film Ger. Dir. Robert Weine)

A quiet, small town, the sort of place you want to grow up in.

A fairly modernist and expressionistic movie from the early part of the century. On the surface it appears to be a murder mystery with a slightly odd sense of set design. Scratch that surface though, and you’ve ruined a perfectly good DVD and must go buy another one. The set design is actually in perfect harmony with the story and even has a use as early as the first scene. This is a story that is ostensibly told in flashback, when the flashback begins so does the set design. The set design helps create a sense of the unreliable narrator. This is the earliest example of unreliable narrator I’ve seen in movies, and everything in the movie is strangely subservient to that idea.

Silly ergonomic chairs, you’ve got to crouch just to stay in shot.

The story itself begins with the hero of the movie telling a tale to another man. He explains that this is a story worse than any other the man has heard or even the one he has just told about spirits following him. He then goes on to tell his tale, which throws us into the expressionist world that has drawn so many people to the movie.

Just another happy day at the fair.

The world is distorted by its set design, which in some cases means that the camera can only shoot them from one angle. Doors hang so strangely, often because the walls themselves are slanted on steep angles, that they can hardly be opened without swinging back and slamming themselves shut. Light beams are painted on the floor and walls, and in many places the story points are emphasized by the way the sets are constructed and painted. Large rough strokes are used deliberately to set up the bizarre nightmare world the story is told in, the not quite done feeling adds to the sense of unease you get while watching. The strange sense is even taken to the title cards, where the little bit of written information is presented, which themselves are filled with odd shapes, lines and fonts.

Funny… I’ve never heard it called that before.

One of the problems this movie faces though, is that people get so startled by the spectacle that they forget this movie actually has an extremely interesting plot. I don’t say story, because the parts of the story that don’t include Caligari and Cesare do get a little bogged down, but their parts are fantastic. The tale being told is actually very good when we stick to the people who, for want of a better term, are our monsters for this movie.

Only when it was too late did he discover where the “exhibit” was being “displayed”.

Caligari is introduced almost immediately and becomes far more compelling and interesting than any of the so called main characters. As is so often the case with horror, the ordinary people are ordinary and thus are not terribly interesting. We come to see monsters, not to see normal people. He and Cesare, are really the only ones who seem to fit wholly into this world that we’ve been thrust into, making them the point of solace in this film. Everyone else seems to belong to the real world, so they are the ones that don’t fit instead of our two twisted monsters. This strangely makes us more in touch with them than any of the people who are supposed to be the heroes of this film.

One day I’ll move away from this place and go live someplace with an objective landscape.

In the story, Caligari is presented to us as the purveyor of a side show act, a somnambulist who tells the future. The problems arise when Cesare, the somnambulist in question, begins to foretell deaths that come true. The hero Francis finds his best friend Alan murdered and decides to take the case of finding the killer himself. He goes to Jane, the girl that he and Alan loved, to tell her of his intent to solve this murder.

In the garden of Eden baby, don’t you know that I’ll always love you…

From here on, it’s difficult to discuss the rest of the movie without tripping into Spoilerville. For that reason I’m going to put the rest of the tale behind a cut. If you’ve not seen the movie you may wish to be spared having the shocks of the movie spoiled. Of course you may feel that the re-watchablity of the movie speaks for itself and possibly it won’t bother you. Also, you may wish to see the rest of my nifty screen caps.

Mad am I? We’ll see who is mad around here!

Worst Bed and Breakfast place ever!

The killer is of course the somnambulist Cesare, under the guiding hand of the naughty Dr. Caligari. A short subplot pops up in which it looks like it might be someone else for like 2 minutes, but trust me it’s Caligari. He’s been using a dummy to cover up the fact that he sends Cesare out to commit dastardly crimes. Francis even sits and watches Caligari spend a night watching the wax dummy while Cesare goes out to kill Jane. He totally fails to kill Jane, too taken with her radiant beauty and opts for a kidnapping instead.

Later generations would learn that glass, and not just frames, helped a lot in keeping dangerous lunatics from getting in.

He carries Jane out into the twisted cityscape, with the townspeople close behind. He drops Jane off in a painted bit of light before running off and collapsing in the forest never to be seen or heard from again. Well, they do find him in the fields and have a look at him, but it’s not really a big scene. He’s only a prop from the moment he falls onto the painted canvas that serves as the floor.

It can go through a steel drum and still do delicate brain surgery!

After we dispatch with the killer, it becomes time to hunt down the master. They find Caligari’s books and journals which leads them to discover the truth! Caligari, as it turns out, is the director of the local asylum, and used his position to acquire Cesare for his experiments. It also turns out that Caligari isn’t even his actual name. Since the real name isn’t given in the movie so I’m forced to use the name I have. I find it odd that there is never a name takced on beyond Caligari for this character.

Scuze me, do you has a flavor? (boy that joke won’t make sense when I link back to this review in three years, will it?)

Caligari used Cesare as his instrument of murder, which he decided to commit as a result of some madness that overtook him. Armed with the knowledge of who, what and something of the why the murders were committed. By the time the movie is to this point, Francis has more or less taken over the whole of the investigation and has made himself the central focus of the tale. Even though mostly he lets others perform the actions, he’s the central instigator by that point. Having revealed the director as the mad man behind all this horror, Francis lets the other doctors tie him up in a strait jacket and stuff him in a cell.

After the great white paint disaster, criminals started not going places just because there was a line to follow.

And evidently, that is where the movie would have ended if the original writers had been given their way to make the movie how they wanted. Most stories told say that the producers didn’t want such a dark and macabre ending to the movie, so one that’s even more subversive is added on. It turns out that Francis is in a mad house, and that all the players in the movie are inmates at the asylum. Jane thinks she’s a queen, Cesare is a gentle flower loving lunatic and the director of the asylum is a dedicated doctor with hopes of treating a patient.

When you are bad here, they put you in the pointy room.

In some ways, people dislike this ending because it makes the whole story just a lie and a delusion. They see it as the same kind of cop-out as the ‘just a dream’ ending. I like it, not because it’s an explanation for the sets, but because the way the story travels it makes the way Francis suddenly becomes the central character make sense. If this is all his delusion, the story makes much more sense. It’s almost makes the more more deranged that it’s all in his fantasy than the first ending would have been.

Look, Morrie, you borrowed Jimmy’s money. You’ve gotta pay him back.

One of the problems that this movie is that there aren’t enough good actors in it. I’ve often thought that one of the biggest problems people have with silent movies isn’t the lack of sound, but rather the fact that usually only one or two people in these movies are really worth watching. One of the things that has to be done in silent movies is an exaggeration of facial features and gestures to get the story across without any dialogue. There are always the title cards which give you some idea of what’s going on, with a little dialogue, but for the most part everything has to be interpreted through pantomime.

New flesh is delivered to the pervy old man convention.

As a result, people either don’t emote enough, or they go into histrionics that look foolish. Even in comedies it’s can be difficult to take the people on screen seriously enough to go with the caricatures on the screen. When you’ve only got two people who can manage the narrow bridge between interesting pantomime and restraint to avoid over acting, it does become difficult. Of course in some of those movies, you don’t even get two. Sadly in some movies you don’t even really get one.

Damn graffitti artists!

I’m always a little surprised that this movie has never really been given a full blown remake. There was a shot for shot remake made last year with the actors standing on green screens and the backgrounds added later from screen caps, but that hardly counts. I mean a really big, grand remake. Tim Burton’s been calling back to this movie for a good part of his career, so I think he could do a remake with class.

I’ll show you who’s crazy! I’ll shave your @*%#ing cats! That’ll show you!

My copy of the movie comes from Image Entertainment. There are a few problems with it. You may have noticed a line at the top of a few of the caps. I understand other versions don’t have this bar, which is evidently a mistake from one of only pieces of source material they could get their hands on at the time. As I said, I understand other versions don’t have this. There is a fairly interesting but not perfect commentary on the disc, which is good but leaves me wondering about a few things here and there. I’ve found in subsequent research that some things were left out that probably should have been included, but these aren’t big deals.

In the court of the mad

Movie Review: Hellraiser

Hellraiser

Pimping ain’t NEVER been easy.

Hellraiser (1987 New World Dir. Clive Barker)

Depending on your view, either nothing good or something wonderful will come from this box.

There’s a Monty Python sketch that starts with a bishop and two of his buddies sitting in an audience for a game show and they sit up and yell “Open the box! Open the box!” for whatever reason. I always assumed it was some British game show I knew nothing about. But what if, what if they were kinky? Maybe those religious people in that sketch wanted this box opened, so they could share in the delights that the cenobites have to offer. Now the rest of this review has got some pretty bad images, so I’m going to have to put them under a cut because this is a family LJ.

Insert stupid joke about “Don’t go to pieces” here.

It’s sometimes hard to go back and watch Hellraiser just on its own merits now, after so many bad sequels have come and gone. I liked the first sequel well enough, but after that they were pretty terrible. Of course part of the problem is my view of what makes a proper horror movie. I’m not too keen on slasher flicks and from Hellraiser 3 and on that was all they were. The first two though were what I like in horror, they were monster movies.

Sadly, I’m a sexless twerp.

Of course being a Clive Barker story, the real monsters turn out to be the normal people, while those who are outwardly monstrous seem to be sort of okay. Well, not okay because the cenobites are still monsters who would like to rip your face off, but their not as bad as Frank and Julia. Frank and Julia wouldn’t even wait for you to finish the funky Rubick’s Cube from Hell before starting in on you. At least the Cenobites wait to be called and don’t just jump you for your blood or anything like that.

I’m the pretty one, so I shall live!

This is still pretty early in Barker’s career and in some ways the rough edges are still showing where they shouldn’t. Barker’s work always has a pretty rough edge, but here the edge is rough because of limitations in budget and experience. That’s not to say the movie is bad in anyway, but merely that one can see the room for improvement. There is also still a shyness about the work in an odd sort of way. For something so famously explicit, I’ve always felt there was a certain coolness and distance in his work when it comes to some of the subjects. The subjects he seems to get fussy over though are the normal things, meals, conversations, the semi-almost-not-quite romance between Kirsty and her boy toy. When it comes to creatures with sewn shut eyes and necks held open by wire, he’s got no problem with that. Something about the ordinary seems to disturb him though.

A small gathering of saints.

One of the things about this movie, is that it seems like they want you to think that it takes place in American, with a lot of American actors. They’ve dubbed half the actors in the movie to give them American accents. The main characters (besides Julia) are all supposed to be American and the father Larry clearly states that it’s his parent’s home. There are bits with people in New York Yankee’s ball caps, and other little oh so American touches. Except that it’s England. It’s so clearly England though that the wikipedia article states the movie takes place in England. Actually it was shot to take place in England, and then the distributors decided to get them to blur that line and pretend it was America because they thought it would do better that way. That’s not important though, because where the movie takes place hardly matters, what matters is the movie itself.

He’s going to get “nailed” here. Oh gods, what lousy jokes.

If you miss the first two minutes of the movie, you’re going to wonder what the hell this movie is about. Except for those two minutes, the first twenty minutes are just a story about a guy moving back to his parent’s old house while his wife remembers an affair she had with his brother. If you miss the bit at the beginning where Frank gets torn apart by the Cenobites, who you only see for a few seconds, you’d wonder why it’s called Hellraiser at all. Not only that, but you’ll wonder why so much detail is given to certain parts of the movie. If you miss those first two minutes, you’ll be totally out to sea for a good long while. Guess how I saw it the first time. Go ahead, guess! Even having seen the opening two minutes, it seems there is a long bit of family drama before the horror gets started.

What a sweet face, you could take him home to mother.

So the movie starts with a guy getting a wood and metal box, the lament configuration. It’s never actually called that in the movie, but that’s what it is. He gets the box, opens it up, and chains suddenly rip into his flesh and tear him apart. The room is then re-decorated with a lovely chain and spinning rectangular column motif. We then see an early shot of the cenobites playing around in the attic and putting Frank’s face together on a floor. Then he closes the box and it all vanishes, including the lovely re-decorating job. I can only assume Frank was behind on his mortgage repayments and they repossessed everything including him. That really is the first two minutes of the movie, roughly. I’ve never actually timed it out or anything, but it seems to go by very fast.

Bride of Frankenstein hair here.

The next bit, the next 20 minutes or so, it very odd by horror standards. I say odd, even though they’re perfectly ordinary in reality. It’s odd because this is not a happy family, but it’s a movie family. If this were a typical movie, we’d have a happy family that would have a perfect life if only those pesky minions of hell would stop trying to interfere with them. Instead we have a dysfunctional family with an insufficient husband, his wife who longs to cheat on him with his brother, and the daughter that isn’t really wanted by her step mother. Not a happy family, so when the reanimated corpse of Frank shows up, it’s already a full tale.

Dancing in the dark.

The thing is that the story is really dependant on this family being the way it is. If it were a happy family the one little thing (hell’s minions) would never be able to touch them. I know that it’s really Frank and Julia who push the dark portions of the story forward, after the first accident of course. See Larry cuts his hand and bleeds all over the floor of the attic where Frank was killed. That blood brings Frank over again, and from there the movie starts to move forward.

Beauty takes effort.

Frank comes back from the dead but only part of the way. He’s sort of a wasted walking skeleton when he comes back, and he needs more blood to come all the way back. Essentially he needs Julia to commit murders for him, which she decided to do in order to get him back. She does this by picking up men and bringing them to the house so she can kill them. After whacking a couple of guys with a hammer, Frank then consumes them somehow that’s not really clear to me. He becomes more complete with each person she brings long though, that much is clear.

There has to be some joke about feeling out of your skin or something that goes here.

During this time Kirsty, the actual star of the film, is being followed around by a creepy tramp in a Dr. Who scarf. She sees him a few times while wandering around the unnamed city. The tramp is just an extra bit of creepiness for the movie, which doesn’t have a pay off until the end of the movie. There is also a semi-subplot about Kirsty having a boyfriend and trying to start a relationship, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Kirsty fails to have much to do with the story for about half the movie. It’s not until she discovers the box that Kirsty really has anything to do with the movie.

Smoking kills!

Kirsty discovers the box when she sees Julia taking another victim to Frank’s clutches. She hears the man scream and goes into the house, working her way up to the attic where Frank is waiting. Frank tries to attack her, but she gets a hold of the box. Frank reacts immediately to her having the box, and she throws it out the box out the window. She then grabs the box again and runs away, before collapsing on the street. She then wakes up in the hospital where a doctor gives her the box and asks about it.

What a wonderful box she has.

Kirsty, not understanding the significance of the box, plays with it and opens the door to hell. Then the cenobites come onto the stage for real, after a bit with a monster in the corridor of course. When they actually show up, the cenobites are really quite threatening. They don’t come off as any sort of goofy monster with zippers up the back or a silly make up job that was only half done and shot in the dark to cover up the errors. The cenobites are shown in hard white light, so bright that it’s almost like shooting them in the dark because the light allows very little shadow and it almost over lights them.

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.

They explain what they are and that she opened the box which called them. Seems the cenobites are sort of the BDSM crowd of the underworld and as such they can get into some REALLY freaky stuff. Instead of just whips and leather cuffs, they go for hooks with chains on the end. Kirsty more or less loses it and demands that she didn’t know what the box was. While they tell her about what the deal is she tells them that she knows where Frank is and that she can lead them to her. See, Frank got away from them and they resent it. Frank it seems is the guy who shows up to a play party thinking it was going to be an ordinary orgy and decided to check out when he discovers it’s a lot of BDSM stuff going on. However, instead of just telling him not to let the door hit him where the good lord split him, the cenobites say he can’t leave until they’ve played with him. When he escapes with the equivalent of a pair of hand cuffs on and a ball gag in his mouth, they come after him.

Hansome man.

She goes back to the house to tell her father and Julia about Frank. The thing is, that it’s not her father who tells her that Frank is dead. It’s Frank in her father’s skin, having stolen it after killing Larry. She goes into the attic to see her father’s dead body, thinking its Frank and finds the cenobites telling her that they want the person who killed the dead body before her. She thinks the dead body is Frank and tells them no. She then runs down stairs thinking that they’ve come for her father, but discovers the truth a little too late. She does manage to lead Frank back up to the attic though, and the cenobites come and get him. I’m putting a lot of tension into a little paragraph, but it’s all there trust me.

The suit makes the sexy.

Of course after coming back to get Frank, they put all their hooks into him and he delivers one of the great lines in horror films. All Frank says, while being held in the hooks before being taken away is the phrase “Jesus wept” which has got to be one of the all time great lines. Barker has said that he had something more obscene planned but that the actor playing adlibbed the line thinking it was a more apt line to give.

Jesus wept.

Sadly, the nightmare isn’t over then, because the cenobites had decided that she was still needed as a plaything. She plays with the box to close it up the door and send the monsters away. This also causes the house to fall down for reasons I’m not really clear on. The house always falls down in these movies though, so it’s expected. When they get away, Kirsty tries to burn the box. Sadly, after throwing it in the fire the tramp from earlier comes back and grabs the box out of the fire. He then turns into a giant skeletal dragon and flies away with the box. The movie then closes on pretty much the same scene it started on, the bazaar with the man asking “What’s your pleasure sir?”

The world, Pre-Ebay

What’s interesting is that the monsters that this series is known for is hardly in the movie. In total the cenobites have maybe five whole minutes of screen time. It’s jus that they dominate the screen whenever they’re on it. They’re not even the monsters of the movie, as I said earlier on. Frank and Julia are the monsters here. If anything, the cenobites are sort of the hand of authority that come to put things right instead of making things go wrong.

Another dramatic 80s hair moment.

I think there are some six to eight versions of the movie on DVD right now. I have one from Anchor Bay that has a commentary and few other featurettes. It also came with a second disc that holds Hellraiser II on it. I know this review degenerated more into a simple description about the movie rather than being an amusing review. I’ll try harder next time.

The last three are presented because I mis counted my paragraphs.

Sewn up eyes.

I’M SEXY!

I feel a fart comming on!

Movie Review: Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead (1968 dir. George A. Romero)

Unrealistic hair and a broken psychie. Barbara doesn’t get any breaks.

What I’ve always found interesting about this movie is how many true gotcha moments it has. I’ve always considered Ben the main character of this movie instead of Barbara and it’s a good 13 minutes before he even shows up in the movie. It’s like they thought Barbara was going to be the hero and then discovered all she could do was whimper and brought in Ben because we needed SOMEONE to save us. In a way, Sam Raimi did the same thing in the first Evil Dead movie. If you didn’t know better, would you have picked Ash as the hero from the start? Well, maybe. He has the chin after all, which grants mystical powers.

I feel pretty, oh so pretty

We’re not talking about that movie though we’re talking about this movie and this movie is a strange collection. I’m not about to get into all the political and social points this movie is supposed to be making, because I’ve never studied the sixties like that. I know, there is supposed to be all this important stuff that was going on at that time, but it doesn’t have much to do with me I’m afraid. As social commentary the movie isn’t a complete loss though, some of it has managed to come across. As a piece of horror though, the movie totally works though, so if you loose some of the social comments it’s okay.

I feel a sneeze coming on.

The movie starts simply enough with a brother and sister going to a cemetery to put flowers on their father’s grave. While they’re in the cemetery, the brother quotes a fairly famous line that I didn’t know was from this movie until I was about 27 or so because that was the first time I actually saw the whole thing. Yeah, that’s the sad truth. I never saw the entire Night of the Living Dead until I was at a pretty advanced age for this sort of thing. I’d seen bits and pieces, almost all of it, but never the opening 20 minutes or so. For that reason, I’d never connected “They’re coming to get you Barbara” with this movie. Hundreds of TV shows and movies, not to mention a whole lot of songs that sampled the phrase, and I never knew it was from this.

This man is creeped out by that stag head.

So anyway, a zombie shows up and kills Johnny before coming after Babs. This results in one of the first times that zombies run and are strong, since the zombie has to break a window and reasonably keep up with Babsy. Barbara manages to get to a near by farm house and wanders around until Ben shows up. Barbie is pretty far into catatonia by this point and is just sort of wandering around shell shocked. If not for Ben, Barbara wouldn’t have made it past the first reel and the movie would have been pretty short. He takes some time explaining how he first came across “those things” and how he escaped his first encounter with them. His explanation of his adventure opens Babsy up and she starts talking, which is a nice way to learn what happened to her if you missed the first 20 minutes or so. Sadly, Barbie then flips out, as she will do many times in this movie. Ben calms her down with a quick right to the jaw.

A radio!

Ben then gets back to the business of boarding up the windows and lighting chairs on fire. He does this because the creatures don’t like fire much, or maybe because he doesn’t react to stimuli very well and this is his way of lashing out. After all, he does spend a lot of time tearing the furniture apart and ripping the walls down during this period of the film. Oh sure, he covers up the tearing down of the doors by nailing them up over the windows, but that’s just and excuse. He’s just looking for something to do while the radio fills us in on all the exposition that we need.

Any movie with a naked zombie is a good movie.

While Ben goes to look around upstairs people come up from the cellar to see what’s been going on. We discover that a family and a young couple were hiding down there the entire time. Evidently they decided that they’d come up to help once the black man had actually done all the hard work. Then an argument starts about whether they should go into the cellar or stay up stairs. The elder, Mr. Harry Cooper decides that the cellar is the best place while Ben and the young man Tom and his girlfriend Judy decide to stay upstairs.

The family gathers around the TV to hear the news.

When we see the Cooper family, which isn’t a particularly happy family. Helen thinks Harry has made a mistake, and lets him know it in her own special way. They decide to stay down in the basement until someone mentions that they’ve found a television which brings them out of hiding. The change in Helen when TV is mentioned is really quite remarkable. They come up and everyone enjoys a new broadcast, which offers even more exposition. Everything we learn about the zombies comes from these reports because the actual movie only gives us a few scant details. Radiation from Venus is suggested as a cause for the zombification of the recently dead, who are rising up and getting funky.

The world is screwed… film at 11

Ben and company more or less decide to get gas from the farm’s pump. Harry objects to the idea of going out, assured with the knowledge that the cellar is the best place to hide. Tom and Judy have a long drawn out conversation while making some kerosene bombs out of jars and cloth. They get Harry to throw them out the window and sets the front lawn of the house ablaze. Judy runs out to help them and they all get going to the gas pump.

Stand in shadow, look dramamtic, don’t trip over the furniture.

Of course, this being the kind of movie that it is, things don’t exactly go as planned. Tom gets gas all over the truck and accidentally gets to close to Ben’s torch. They drive off, and the entire truck goes up in a fireball. This leaves Ben outside without help, but also leaves the zombies with a nice barbeque to eat. Ben gets back to the house by waving his torch and shooting the zombies with his gun, but it’s a struggle. When he gets away, the zombies eat like kings.

Oh god! This chair has no lower back support!

Ben has to kick the door to the house in because Harry locked the door and ran to the cellar. This causes Ben to get a little riled and punch Harry out a little. They then sit around again and discuss how they’re going to get away. Then the television comes back again, more talk about what they think they’re going to do next. The zombie attack in the middle of that and when Ben drops the gun, Harry grabs it and tries to be a tough guy. This results in him being shot and stumbling back down to the basement where he goes to die. To add insult to the injury, his own recently zombified daughter starts to eat him. Karen then goes after Helen with a trowel and the family is taken care of.

The loving couple

While that goes on, the zombies break through and Barbara’s brother leads the pack as they drag Babs away to get eaten. We don’t have much time to reflect on the incestual angle of Barbara’s brother having a strong desire to eat his sister because we’re distracted by the child zombie trying to attack Ben, who is the last man standing at this point. Ben escapes to the basement, and hangs out there until morning when the reinforcements show up. He has to cap the zombie Cooper, but that turns out to be a small issue for him by this point.

Little known fact: Zombies LOVE KFC

As soon as morning comes, he goes upstairs to look around and the final joke of the film is delivered when a member of the team looking to shoot zombies mistakes Ben for one of the undead and shoots him. Having gone through the whole movie, once again his biggest danger came from his fellow man. I think that’s the reason the movie survives like it has, because it ends on such a wonderful and big F. U. for the audience. You just went through hell with this guy, and the last thing we do is kill him.

Daddy is… delicious!

I think my copy of the DVD might be out of print. Amazon claims you can still get it, but I think the rights may have moved on and this might be stuff they still have in stock. I don’t know rightly. My copy is the Elite Entertainment Millennium Edition, and if not for spell check I would only have gotten two of the words in the name spelled right the first time. It contains two commentaries, along with a lot of interviews, the script, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Most notably, there are a bunch of commercials that Romero made for TV when he wasn’t making movies.

Gimmie a kiss baby!

Movie Review: Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror

Just playing for time, quite good at playing for time.

Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922 Prana-Film GmbH Dir. F. W. Murnau)

Our intrepid hero, walks towards a door… a door to HORROR!

Ah, how beloved is this first version of Dracula ever filmed? Well, not beloved if you ask Mrs. Stoker who tried to have the film destroyed. See it was used without permission and the studio went bankrupt so there was no money to pay Stoker’s widow with, so the courts ordered the whole thing be destroyed. If they had succeeded, Nosferatu would have been a lost film instead of one of the most famous films from the silent era. There are bits from this movie in many other Dracula movies that would come later as well as many other horror films. The design of Count Orlok particularly is a major difference as almost every other version of the story tends towards good looking seductive vampires while our monster here is a hideous beast all the way through.

Once again an example where glass would prevent people from getting in.

I don’t know of my own knowledge how many people had an experience like mine, but I am fairly sure that Nosferatu is the first full-length silent movie I ever saw. Before that the only thing I’d seen were Chaplin shorts, so as you can imagine this was more than a change of pace. I won’t say it was actually particularly frightening, because in many ways you need to be a little more grown up to be scared by something like this. This however the first long form silent movie I’d ever seen. I know a few other people who count this as their first and I know others who claim it as their own silent movie experience. The point remains that many people have seen this movie, even people who would normally shun old and silent films have seen this. I think it’s that this appeals to the Goth sensibilities. Here is something genuinely old, and genuinely scary that you can’t soften up for kids. Orlok would be scary as a stuffed toy, so you can imagine how he looks in the movie. The Universal Dracula was turned into a rather sad joke by the end, and campiness has followed the Dracula movies like a bad smell. But since this movie is like it is, you can’t really… defang the movie as it were. I didn’t want to make that pun, but it’s the only turn of phrase I can think of.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… pimpin’ ain’t never been easy.

There are many changes made between the original book and this version of the movie. There are superficial changes in names (Jonathan Harker becomes Thomas Hutter and Mina is Ellen) and instead of London we have Wisborg Germany, but the changes run a little deeper than that. The personalities are changed and story points are shifted, in many ways until they hardly resemble their novelic counterparts. Thomas is almost childlike in his exaggerated movements and gestures as opposed to Jonathan’s seriousness. At one point in fact, so childlike does Thomas become that he throws a blanket over his head when Orlok comes calling. So as we see, even when you change the name a Harker is still the dumbest creature you can come across. The Hutter version is probably the dumbest version, or at least the most childish.

You want to me give a hickey? Oh GOD that joke sucks!
…
Yeah, I see what I did there. Sorry.

The story does still follow the same basic pattern as Dracula, but with many subtle differences. The movie starts by introducing Thomas and his wife in a small domestic scene. If you have an analytical mind you might try to suggest things about the marriage, but I don’t intend to go there. In order to get the plot moving Thomas is sent by this movie’s version of Renfield, here called Knock, to Transylvania to see Count Orlok. Instead of being in a mad house, Knock is Thomas’s employer and a confederate of Orlok’s. We get to see this in a few different ways, with letters and with Knock behaving in the regular Renfield manner of knowing when the master is near and what’s going on all around.

Just a little, tiny bit Freudian.

Upon arriving in Transylvania Thomas stops at an inn for a night and picks up a book of folk lore. This book will give us much of the information the audience gets about vampires within the movie. Thomas is then driven out to the middle of no-where to meet with Orlok’s driver. As usual the driver is of course Orlok himself, but we don’t know that yet. Well, we do now because I just told you. Um… SPOILER! There is an interesting trick which sort of works and sort of doesn’t. When Thomas gets in the black carriage, the film is under cranked so everything moves much faster. Then there is a shot that is in negative, but because they used a white carriage in that shot, it still appears black, as does the driver and horses. When we come to the castle the film is once again the positive image with the black carriage. It’s interesting, but it doesn’t exactly work for me. One of the main problems with it is that I know exactly what I’m looking at. I’m looking at a negative image and as a result of knowing that it’s not scary. Poor old me, knowing too much to be scared. Story of my life.

Positive

Negative

As is usual, at dinner Thomas cuts his hand and Orlok decides to attack. This attack is strangely off screen, we only really see Orlok approach and then sit down across from Thomas. Thomas then wakes up in the chair, having clearly slept there all night. The implication is clear, but the actual consummation is left to the individual viewer as to what exactly happened. Just off screen is tube of lubricant and a pack of Trojans. Actually, this is really the one place where that joke just doesn’t work. Almost any other vampire movie, yes. Here, no. As I say, this movie just isn’t sexual. With Thomas at least partly in Orlok’s thrall, he remains with Orlok for some time.

They told me this would be slimming. Is it?

One of the interesting features of this movie is that the tinting actually matters here. The blue tints for the night shots, orange for the day, yellow for day and so on. There were almost no real night shots in silent films, because the cameras needed a great deal of light in order to properly film action. For this reason, without the blue tints it looks like the whole movie is shot between eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon, which is foolish. Since Orlok ends in this movie not by a steak through the heart but rather by the light of the sun, the time of day is quite crucial. You couldn’t have the Count walking around during the day, it just wouldn’t work.

Orlok’s shadow puppets were a favorite at sleepovers.

When the big revel of Orlok comes for Thomas to finish the job, Ellen steps in and sends a signal by psychic radio to save him. This moment is sadly laughable, but we do get to see some cross cutting which was something of an innovation at the time. It also manages to transfer the count’s interest from the husband to the wife. That at least gives a reason for him to go to Germany. From there Orlok begins his trip by stacking up boxes of earth and strangely getting a boat. I’ve never understood the need for the boat. Surely Germany is closer by land than by sea, right? After Orlok leaves Thomas makes a break for home as well, but gets hurt and ends up in a hospital for a while before getting home to warn people. Yeah, Thomas really is a Harker, no one else could be quite so stupid.

Stupidest place for a cemetary I’ve ever heard of.

During a short period where the story lags, we see the Van Helsing for this story explain how the natural world has things that are like phantoms and vampires. A venus fly tray and a microscopic polyp are given as representatives of the darkness in the real world. During this time, Knock goes nutso and begins to describe himself as a spider, eating flies he snatches out of the air. While this goes on, Ellen waits by the seashore for Thomas, or possibly Orlok who is on the boat for no good reason. It’s hard to say, but I do know that gothy girls would start to dress like her constantly in the 90s.

That’s a happy man.

The boat does give a good chance for some serious creeps though, which is probably a good enough reason. And of course on the boat you get that famous scene where the count rises up out of his coffin, seeming to be lifted on a board that has its juncture point somewhere around his ankles. He raises without movement beyond his right hand that extends out to scare the bejezzues out of someone. While on the boat, the count picks the crew off one by one, but through sickness instead of blood loss. The vampire here spreads death through plague, as I may have mentioned. I can’t remember if I did and I don’t want to re-read the whole review again (I R Professional) because I’m just adding bits here and there.

Really, this is jsut forced perspective. He’s actually only 3 feet tall

Interestingly, when Orlok shows up he seems to bring plague instead of bloodshed. The plague takes many victims, and it’s clear that this is sickness we’re talking about. Several scenes go by where parades of coffins are seen, people discuss the sickness, and we’re meant to understand this is all from the vampire being around. SO there you go, had I read a little further, the note in my last paragraph could have gone unwritten. Sad really, now I’m typing out useless notes here as well.

Dude, they’re called nail clippers and they aren’t expensive.

We never actually see Orlok try and stalk anyone after the boat until he finally makes an attempt to get to Ellen. All we get are a few ancillary scenes, sort of filling in a few blanks. After Orlok has been in town a while, Knock escapes from his captors and is mistaken by the mob as being the source of the plague. Knock is chased down but they loose him and decide to kill a scarecrow instead when they loose him. I wish I was joking! They really tear down a scarecrow and more or less say that’s that. Peasants! Am I right?

I wasn’t going to show this one, but then I was told that there is a law that you have to have a screen cap of this scene every time you do a review of this movie.

When Orlok finally comes for Ellen, she sends Thomas away to get him out of the way. Then of course, Orlok comes for her, but she keeps him away from his lair until day break. In a completely new idea and one that would endure through out vampire lore, Orlok is destroyed by the sunlight. As far as I know, this is the first time that the sun proves deadly for a vampire, but it would be taken up and used by many writers and film makers later. With Orlok dead, Ellen slips away leaving Thomas alone and broken. Knock sulks about the master being dead. The last shot of the film is a broken castle keep on a hill, clearly meant to be the final remains of Orlok’s castle which has crumbled without him being alive to keep it up.

That tuft of hair behind his ear? Drives the ladies WILD!

You could start analyzing this movie in the morning and not be done by bed time, which is why I’m not really going to try to do it here. I leave it to the viewer of the film to perform that task in their own good time. Here, watch a free copy. My copy of the DVD is pretty good. There are scratches and grain, but it’s got a serviceable commentary and two separate musical tracks. I’ve been told there are better versions of the movie out there, but I’ve never gone looking for it because this one dose well enough. I suppose that says all that needs to be said about it.

Everyone sing “Fade into You” By Mazzy Star! Yeah, I got nothing.

Movie Review: Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994 Geffen Pictures Dir. Neil Jordan)

Wow, what a great story. I hope I get remembered for this instead of Heathers.
(this is called foreshadowing)

Yah! The gay vampire movie! Actually, that’s not really fair as I don’t get nearly as much of a gay vibe off watching the movie as I do trying to read the book. I say trying, because I never actually finished the book. I listened to a seriously cut to the bone abridgement back when audio books were almost all abridged, but I only got as far as Louis and Lestat wandering the world after Lou burned down the house. As you’d expect, a lot was cut from the book, but not much was changed as I understand it. I only put this explanation here so you’ll understand I’m only going to review the movie, without much comparison to the book. What I will say is that I only started hearing that Tom Cruise was gay after he played Lestat. I don’t know if it was going on before, but I only heard about it after. I keep wondering if there is some massive form of projection going on, or if Cruise identified with the character in the book or if none of that’s true and it’s just a rumor.

If you don’t talk to your kids about ridiculously foppish outfits, someone else will!
(Fop is a word for a young man more concerned with his appearance than for other matters. Fops are often seen as effeminate, because of their fancy dress, stupid for their lack of understanding of even the most basic principals of particle and overly foolish because they bloody well are. Other words for Fop include dandy, popinjay, and Justin Timberlake.)

So, the movie opens in modern day San Francisco, or at least the modern day San Fran of fifteen years ago. You can tell it’s fifteen years ago because there are no SUVs in the opening credit sequence and the people aren’t cowering with the fear that Muslims might attack or gays might try to get married at any moment. An interviewer for a radio station has met up with a man who claims to be a vampire and they discuss the interview that’s about to happen between them. A few quick cut moments, just to prove that Brad Pitt is actually supposed to be a vampire and not just some emo-goth talking a lot of shit and we’re into the movie. There is a lot of work done here to produce the feeling they were going for. Everyone did their jobs very well, my complaints are small and mostly based on the source material, which was itself never supposed to be taken for anything more than a horror/fantasy of the oyster tickling variety.

You know, those taste even better after the Colonel has fried them with his eleven herbs and spices.
(Colonel Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1929)

The opening of the actual story is pretty simple… guy named Louis is really, really depressed and then he meets a homoerotic vampire who turns him. You could say he turns him gay if you wanted, but really he just turns him into a vampire because that’s all he does. The gayness, as I said, was really toned down for the movie, but when you know it’s supposed to be there, you can see it. It’s not exactly hidden so much as made way less explicit than in the book. When I first watched the movie for the first time though, it wasn’t really in my mind. It was just sort of sexy and cool with them sharing babes and stuff. The movie emphasizes the overall erotic rather than the specifically homoerotic.

I am just going to hold this candle and mope until Terry Gilliam gets here and saves me from this image.
(Brad Pitt was thought of as merely a pretty boy before his performance in 12 Monkeys and later Seven. Since then, he’s proved what a serious actor he is by being in Ocean’s Twelve)

Lestat makes Louis a vampire and begins the process of instructing him and the audience about what it means to be a vampire. He will be informing Louis that he’s a vampire, every thirty-three seconds until he leaves the film. This is a movie about a mopey looser and a mean screwball, standing around talking about being vampires. As far as a movie goes, Lestat is the villain here, even if he’s the sort of villain you want to root for. Depending on your mood, you are either sympathetic for Louis while admiring Lestat’s sagacity about their vampirism, or you are completely disgusted with Louis and his constant whining. Louis is a whiner after all, let’s be clear about that. It’s hard, unless one is mired in one’s own depressive swamps, to have sympathetic feelings for a hunter who refuses to hunt. What, one may ask, is the point of being such a creature if one is too timid to actually attack anyone? Why did he agree to become a vampire if he didn’t want to be one?

Check out this bitching power cord I can do on Guitar Hero!
(Guitar Hero is a video game for people to pretend they’re playing guitar. Some people become convinced they can play after being good at the game.)

While sulking, Louis has a predictably manic moment where he decides to eat one of his slaves, free the slaves he didn’t eat, strike a blow for women’s suffrage by writing a strongly worded letter to The Times, destroy the house by burning everything including himself, sell his car for ten dollars on e-bay, and sing Abba’s greatest hits in a tutu. However, he is saved from his own stupidity by Lestat who swoops in and yells at Louis for burning down the place. The greatest single moment for Lestat is when Louis makes some typically dour comment only to have Lestat snap “Oh, shut up Louis!” before rescuing him. After this they begin a series of scenes where Lestat and Louis argue about killing and not killing. Lestat comes off like a monster, but in a way he’s just trying to teach Louis to hunt. They’re predators after all and Louis is just a whelp who refuses to hunt. As I said, it’s easy to feel contempt for Louis.

And when they hit the on switch, Lestat discovered why they call it “The Gooser”
(It’s an anal sex joke about a vibrator. It’s funny because people still have hang ups about homosexuality and back door action. A rather lazy writer, like me, will use these hang-ups in order to get a cheap laugh.)

Now of course, we come to the really dark part of the movie. Louis finds a young girl in a plague-ridden part of town and decides to feed on her. Lestat surprises him, and Louis runs away with the shame of being discovered. There is another discussion about being a vampire… which gets a tad tedious I have to say. Lestat is constantly reminding Louis that he’s a vampire over and over again as if Louis was going to forget that part if he weren’t told every fifteen seconds. Lestat then makes the little girl Louis attacked into a vampire, and thus Claudia enters the story. Claudia, of course, is a killer right from the word go and never suffers the sort of wimpy streak that causes one to despise our narrator so. The role between Claudia and Louis in the movie is very father/daughter while in the book I’m told it goes to much creepier places. Another point of the book being toned down for the movie. A great deal of comedy is derived from the relationship between Claudia and Lestat as she keeps eating the servants despite Lestat’s admonishments.

Hey, just FYI. Because I played this part, it’s gonna be a little creepy when you see me in Maxim in a few years.
(Because it was creepy! One day she’s playing a seven year old the next, BAM in a magazine in her panties.)

The problem becomes that Claudia remains a child and for thirty years and this causes some predictable problems. The three of them become annoyed at each other, then begin to hate each other, then Claudia comes up with a solution to all their problems. Granted, her solution involves whacking Lestat mafia style and sinking him in the swamps, but it does solve the problem of Lestat being a pain in their asses. Now obviously that’s not the end of Lestat because there are another 37 books with him in them, but it looks good. Actually, all the makeup effects are really good and mostly subtle in this film. The death of Lestat looks great and his return looks pretty awesome too. Lestat comes back for another fight, but Louis sets him on fire… because that’s what he does. When Louis is faced with an issue, he sets the house on fire, sets Lestat on fire, sets all of New Orleans on fire, set a theater on fire, sets London on fire, sets Rome on fire, lets Nero fiddle for a while before setting him on fire and then runs away. My problem with a movie like this, where people stand around and talk at each other endlessly, is that they tend to bunch all the action up in one place so everything happens at once. Lestat now, more or less, vanishes from the movie. We’re supposed to believe he’s dead, but since the next book is named after him, and a parade of Goths will try to dress like him forever, we know he isn’t going anywhere.

I feel pretty, oh so pretty.
(This is an example of sarcasm, it does not count as irony because that isn’t what irony means.)

Now we begin what I suppose is the second half of the movie, the Paris adventure and the Theater of the Vampires. Now, I’m going to take a slight diversion for a moment. The theater wasn’t as odd as it might at first seem. There was a theater in Paris called the Grand Guignol which is a place where interesting little plays were carried out. Often bloody, filled with up to the minute effects, and morality plays that often didn’t have much morality. Read the wiki article for more information, but really watching the play in the movie is almost as good. Rice has said she was unaware of the theater when she wrote the book, but that doesn’t mean the filmmakers were also ignorant. I suspect that someone knew a bit about it, or had seen Behind the Green Door. I mention that because the murder of the girl in the performance greatly echoes the opening sex scene in that movie what with her being surrounded by robed figures and all. Oh, don’t give me that look! You know how I am about historical works. Of course, I’m going to be familiar with classic pornography.

In this scene, there are 47 vampires. None of them can be seen.
(See the Monty Python Sketch “How Not To Be Seen” to get this joke)

There are several, huge, logical holes in the story of the theater, what with vampires not popularly being thought of as even remotely human until after Dracula, the hip and groovy Paris audience isn’t going to be that interested. The fact that at some point, someone is going to notice it’s a different girl every performance. There is also the fact that no one ever sees the performers outside of the theater and so on. As far as I know, this is the beginning of the vampire coven thing. Groups of vampires have never, ever worked for me. I don’t think it could really work, the whole vampire idea strikes me as a solitary hunter, working alone with perhaps only a mate. Otherwise, the deaths pile up quite a bit and people aren’t quite as dumb as vampire lovers seem to think. Someone would start to notice.

No clever joke for this caption, I just totally want that vest.
(Seriously, wouldn’t anyone want that vest? You can’t just order one online though. I’d have to buy a vest and get someone to do the embroidery.)

Anyway, back to the story. Louis hangs with Armand, Claudia finds a woman to replace Louis, but they’re both killed within about three minutes. I must complain about this, the making of Madeleine is treated as such a huge deal before it happens and then *poof* she’s dead Claudia’s dead, Gertrude dies when she drinks of the cup, Hamlet gets poked by the poisoned sword, and Louis decides to go all John Rambo, killing everyone until his country loves him as much as he loves it. Killing of Claudia doesn’t even make a hell of a lot of sense since they just sort of burst in and announce they’re going to kill all of them. It’s sort of insinuated that it’s being done because of Lestat, but it’s not really clear. I know from the audio book that Lestat was supposed to be there to accuse them, but here it’s not really stated.

Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance! Cha, cha, cha!
(It’s a reference to a SNL skit)

Now for a controversial statement. Once Louis destroys the theater, the movie is over. The twenty minutes that follow the destruction of the theater are just a long, slow, meandering decline into nothingness. No matter what the book says, the movie ends at that point and should have been capped there. They should have just come to the last five or ten minutes and gotten it over with on the high note. Instead, we just wander around with Louis becoming a movie freak, visiting Lestat one last pathetic time, and then we come to where the movie should have arrived fifteen minutes ago. The interviewer asks to be made a vampire, Louis shouts at him, and Lestat finds him, gives him a bite, Scrooge learns the meaning of Christmas and of course, the lovers are reunited. Lestat seems to be all better at the end, wearing a leather jacket and ready for some Rock ‘n Roll.

I’d make a “Baby Cart in Paris” joke, but I doubt most people would get it.
(See Lone Wolf & Cub for details)

Strangely, there was never a real direct sequel to this movie. Yes, yes, they made Queen of the Damned, but it’s not really a sequel to this movie so much as the movie version of that book which happens to be one of the sequels to the book this movie was based on. They never got Tom back, never got any of the other actors back, and Queen didn’t have one-tenth the cool that Interview did. I’ve never quite understood why they didn’t make a direct sequel, unless they felt that people would see it as re-telling the story we’ve already seen. I don’t know exactly, probably if they made it today they’d have signed everyone into cast iron contracts, but they didn’t do that when they made this, clearly.

Wait a second! YOU’RE THE GUY FROM HEATHERS!
(Did you spot the foreshadowed joke? Heathers is a movie Christian Slater was in. When it was announced he would be in this movie, everyone I knew said “The guy from Heathers?”)

Anyway, the movie in a nutshell…

Act One
Louis: I’m depressed!
Lestat: I’ll make you a vampire!
Louis: I’m still depressed!
Lestat: Nothin’ I can do about that.
Louis: Then I’m going to set the house on fire!

Act Two
Louis: I’m depressed!
Lestat: I’ll make this little girl a vampire.
Louis: I’m still depressed!
Lestat: Nothin’ I can do about that.
Louis: Then I’m going to set you on fire!

Act Three
Louis: I’m depressed!
Armand: I’ve got a theater full of vampires!
Louis: I’m still depressed!
Armand: Nothin’ I can do about that.
Louis: Then I’m going to set the theater on fire!

Addendum
Louis: I’m depressed!
Interviewer: Make me a vampire!
Louis: NO! And I’m still depressed!
Lestat: Oh shut up Louis!
Louis: You wouldn’t talk to me like that if I had some matches…

Movie Review: Dracula

Dracula (1931 Universal Dir. Tod Browning)

Um, Karl? You want to stop doing that, please? You’re sort of freaking out the tourists.

Wait, what? I’ve never done a review of the Classic Universal Monster movies? For reals? WOW! Well then. Yeah, let’s get on that shall we? This is the start of Universal Studio’s domination of the horror market, or at least the definition of great horror icons. Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy, are all greatly defined by their appearances in these early thirties movies. There is also The Wolfman in 1941, which almost completely defined werewolves for all of us, but that’s not important right now because we won’t be reviewing that one. I could review it, but I’d have to buy it and I have a rule about not buying things just to review them. If I started buying things just because I thought it would be fun to write reviews for them I’d have crossed the line.

He was pretending to decide, but really it was down to the cute chick or the old man.

Let’s start by talking about what this movie is or isn’t. It isn’t actually an adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, but rather it adapts the stage play which was based on the book. Before you ask, yes it is a little important to have that settled before we begin. I don’t want to keep harping back that this isn’t to the book or that isn’t to the book. It’s not the book, it’s the play. Get it? Got it? Good! One of the first changes you’ll notice is that the movie is actually set in the then present day of the late 20s and early 30s instead of being set in Victorian London. Actually, you won’t notice it as first because the movie opens in Transylvania and that’s portrayed as a sort of quaint area of the world where electricity hasn’t arrived yet. The Transylvanians are stuck in the late 1800s in this movie, but there are signs that this is the (then) current day in a few costumes and comments. This is fine since, despite the outdated style of the gothic novel, Dracula was meant as an up to the minute story including the latest technology such as Dictaphones and modern ideas fighting against the ancient evil. Except of course, this isn’t the novel, it’s the play. So forget I ever said anything about it.

Coffee… gimme coffee.

Now, we’re not dealing with Jonathan Harker here. This is Mister Renfield, who is strangely one of my favorite characters. I have no idea why, normally I greatly dislike lackeys and bootlickers. There is something in this character though, that I can’t fully describe. Like Gollum from The Lord of The Rings, there is just something that keeps me feeling sympathetic toward him, no matter what evils he may eventually commit. It depends on what version you’ve got how much they use Renfield, but I still feel some affection for him, the poor mad blighter. Normally, Renfield is only seen as a maniac, but in this he plays the Harker roll for the opening of the movie. The problem here is that Jonathan Harker is the single stupidest character ever to originate in the English language. There may be stupider characters in German Folklore or possibly Greek Comedy, but in English, it’s Johnny Harker. This means that Renfield is portrayed as being as dumb as a sack of rocks for nearly 20 of the movie’s 73 minutes after which he more or less vanishes. Well, no, maybe not. It’s about 17 minutes in that he’s taken by Drac, so I guess he’s only dumb up till then. Anyway, the peasants try to get him to stay instead of rushing off to the Borgol Pass, which he ignores and goes onward. You’d think, after the 200 some adaptations that the peasants would just stop trying to persuade people. They’d just make a token effort and then mutter to themselves “Chump don’t want no help, chump not get no help.” before going inside for a drink. But then, you’d think people would be warned off trying to sell real estate to Dracula by now, so there you are.

In Castle Dracula, even the bugs are vampires!

There is a slight problem in watching Dracula, in that we know it’s all old and we’re supposed to see it as sort of goofy today, but there is an actual sense of menace in Lugosi’s performance. There is a tremendous atmosphere in some of the scenes, which if you didn’t know that you’re supposed to be worldly and above all this, would be sort of creepy. It’s not campy, it’s not silly, it actually manages to maintain a serious level of chilling strangeness in the entire coach scene… right up until the plastic bat on a string is seen driving the horses. I’ve got this terrific sense of “And you were doing so well.” as I watch that bit. However, once that’s over and Renfield enters the genuinely huge and cavernous castle, the creep factors return. The set is massive, and it looks more like a ruin than a castle anyone might live in. Everything about the place radiates a sense of wrongness and it shows on Renfield’s face. There is almost more in the reaction from the actor playing Renfield working on your nerves here than there is
Lugosi’s friendly welcoming manner.

Yes. Take it off, but take it off slow.

The first time I get any sort of sense of real menace from Lugosi as Dracula, beyond the sense of something being just plain wrong, is when Renfield cuts his finger. There’s something deeply disturbing in how Dracula looks at the young man, particularly when you consider the post-just-about-everything education I have. In this version, there is as much sexuality as they would let the characters get away with, but Dracula’s attack on Renfield becomes extraordinarily sexual when you consider that for the rest of the movie Ren is going to be panting after Drac looking for another bite. It’s a great relief to me for them to get on the boat because Renfield is much better as a lunatic than as an innocent victim. He’s almost more freighting than Dracula, because he’s just sooo uncool and trying so hard to please. He’d eat your face if he thought it would make Drac happy. At any rate they arrive and Ren gets locked up as it should be. Drac starts wandering around London for a while, whacking victims left and right for a couple of minutes before we have to settle down and have some plot.

This is a happy, happy man.

Drac meets Lucy, Dr. Seward, Harker and Mina all at once at the opera. This leads to Dracula fixating on Lucy, as he always does. Two hundred and some odd versions and they never do protect that poor girl. It’s like a sacrificial lamb being staked out for the great tiger to eat. In this version, Lucy is dead almost on the instant. We get Drac coming in toward her and then we see her pronounced dead in what has to be the biggest operating theater in Christendom. The poor girl is simply thrown away, killed in a single fangless thrust. Yeah, there are no fangs in this movie, or any of the Universal Dracula movies as I remember. I could be wrong and there might be some in the later sequels but I seem to remember no fangs and almost no blood, besides the tiny amount on Ren’s hand when he cuts himself at the beginning. There’s more blood in The Public Enemy than there is in Dracula, which is a movie primarily about blood. There must be something to that, maybe because it’s so pervasive in the plot and the minds of the censor board they wouldn’t allow much too actually be shown.

THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!

Doctor Van Helsing just sort of shows up in the movie. I think he’s supposed to have been working at Seward’s Sanitarium, or was brought in for the emergency. Either way, he’s here to be the authority figure and chief exposition device. He’s not the most interesting Van Helsing in my collection, nor is he the best, he’s the most bookish though. At least in this version Ren doesn’t vanish from the story, he’s interrogated by Dr VH and has some wolfsbane shoved all up in his grill. Ren reacts badly and Dr VH announces that there are indeed vampires about. I have to say though, having smelled things that have “bane” in their title, I’d react badly too. There’s a reason those things keep animals away. Dr VH can be portrayed in so many different ways, and this is one of the good ones but not the best. He’s not as interesting as some of the guys we’ll be seeing later, but is he one of the most reassuring. There is something almost grandfatherly about him. He’s also the most investigatory of the three interpretations we’ll be seeing. Normally the gathering of evidence is just presented so that Dr VH can stand there and say “See? I was right.” but here I get the idea that he’s really trying to make sure that his suspicions are correct. There is something less arrogant and more likeable here.

Where will you be when your laxative starts working? Which one of them has just realized what’s about to happen?

After the first encounter of Drac and Mina, she relates the event as a nightmare to Harker. Johnny boy then cements his reputation as being the stupidest character in the history of English Literature by telling her not to worry her little head, that she shouldn’t talk about it anymore and just to think about something cheerful. Yeah, his advice is to forget about everything and think of cheerful things. It’s a good think Dr VH is around to check her neck and discover the bite marks. When the bites are reveled Johnny runs to her side and asks why she didn’t let him know about the bite marks. One can only suggest that she knew if she did tell him he’d tell her to sing a jolly song and not to worry about them or something. Since Johnny here isn’t exactly a smart person, almost anything he has to say can be discounted and ignored. At least with Johnny stupidly reaching for a cigarette it give Dr VH, the one competent person in this tale who isn’t evil or insane, a chance to notice that Drac can’t be seen in a mirror. This confirms things for Dr VH, instead of just giving him a point to tell everyone how right he was. He explains things to the group, and has to get out the big print edition with drawings and small words so Johnny Boy can follow along. He has to spell everything out for dumb old John, not just because John Harker is stupid, but because this was one of the first times in American Cinema where the supernatural was allowed to be completely supernatural. It had to be fully and firmly established that this was not going to end with some convenient, but ultimately mundane explanation. As a result, they had to pound it into the audience’s head that this is a supernatural tale. It’s just fortunate that they have someone as stupid a John Harker to explain things to so we know if he gets it, then everyone in the audience gets it. This paragraph got a little long, but I can’t be bothered to cut it now. The screen caps have all been uploaded and resized and stuff. It would screw up all my arrangements.

It just occurred to them that I’m trapped in a middle class existence of near impenetrable spiritual isolation. Either that or I have gas.

Once the supernatural has been firmly established, we pretty much move at a good clip from there on out. Lucy becomes the woman in white, Johnny says something stupid, Dr VH asks Mina about Lucy, Johnny says something stupid, Dr VH and company discuss how to get rid of Drac, and Johnny has to get a thinking brain dog to stop him from choking on his own tongue. I wish that this was just a joke or something, but Jonathan Harker is always the stupidest person in any given presentation of Dracula and in this version, he’s panicky too. I must also now talk about the fake English accents of some of the people. There are faux cockney folk in this movie, and they are so VERY faux cockney. Even if they’re English actors, they’re still trying to fake the cockney-ness of their accents. It’s really painful listening to them, particularly since they’re played for comedy and they just aren’t funny. By comparison, this paragraph feels really, really short now. I should have cut the last paragraph in half. Somewhere around the mirror stuff. Too late now, live and learn. Only not because almost all the Halloween stuff has been written at this point and I’m just punching up a few things now. Still, I did manage to pad this section out a few lines, and that helps.

I’m too dumb to understand what’s going on here.

So there is some talk between Renfield and Dr VH in which he reveals all as they used to say. Then there some talk between Drac and Dr VH where in they have the traditional battle of wills. It’s actually sort of cool because Drac does the whole come to me bit and Dr VH manages to resists, but the whole thing is done in the looks between the two of them. Meanwhile, Mina is up and about, running around and trying to get herself eaten by Drac. Johnny performs the duty of the complete and total moron, thinking that nothing can harm Mina because he’s around. No really, he actually says “It’s alright, now that I’m here.” like anyone named Harker has ever done a single competent thing in the history of stupid men being stupid. Everything he does is the definition of stupidity, and he is frankly the most useless lump of meat in this movie. No, actually, useless would be better because he’s actively part of the problem. I can’t stress enough to you how dumb Jonathan Harker is. If I stood and chanted “stupid, stupid, stupid” for an hour and a half it wouldn’t be enough. If this were a slasher movie, Johnny Harker would be the one to leave the room and investigate that sound he heard outside or possibly suggest that they should split up to search the place.

Doesn’t he look cheerful? He’s just happy to be here.

Fortunately, we have Dr Van Helsing to fall back on. He follows Renfield to Drac’s hide out with steak and hammer in hand. That is Van Helsing has the hammer and spike, Renfield only had mindless devotion and an oh-so-breakable neck. After Drac throws Ren down some stairs he dies a sad and lamentable death, being the best Renfield in the history of cinema. Actually, I forgot, Dr VH doesn’t have the spikes, he has to improvise. The killing of Dracula happens off stage, and we actually see his death in the reaction of Mina as she is released from Drac’s mental grip. Dr VH tells her that Drac is dead and everything is going to be all right now.

I heard the movie was running low on smug, so I came to see if I could help and of course, I can.

Of course things couldn’t just end that way. There had to be sequels. There was the Daughter and then the Son and eventually House of Dracula in which the whole thing sort of fell apart. The problem is that each movie was only about one third as good as the last, so you can imagine how bad they got at the end. Not just bad, but goofy. As the audience started to grow younger and censors grew more powerful, they ruined these movies and turned them into something that can only be mocked. We won’t even get into Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, because… just no. I have my pride. Suffice to say that in the end, the whole thing collapsed under its own weight and it was years before Dracula could show his face again. Fortunately, you only have to wait until next week to learn about it instead of the thirteen years that Drac had to wait.

Yeah, still not feeling anything. Pretty much just a lot of ennui.