The Romance of Dracula; a personal Journey of the Count on celluloid

by Butler, Charles E.

  A film that seems to have been buried in these politically correct times is the comedy Vampira (Old Dracula: 1974). The producers inject a bit of class into the Count's aristocracy by casting David Niven as Dracula, trying to bring his dead wife, Vampira (Theresa Graves), back to life while being surrounded by centrefolds. A plus for the film is the inclusion of Linda Hayden from Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969). In this one the king vampire is turned black after ingesting negro blood.

  Niven carries the absurdities of the film by sheer force of his personality and comic timing, but didn't anyone learn anything when he was cast as an equally bland James Bond? If the film is buried, I'm glad. Not because it is overtly racist, but because Niven was also a fine screen actor and should never be remembered for this type of exploitational trash!

  (Psst, anyone got a shovel? I've got a copy of Casino Royale (1967) here)

  Reggie Nalder turned up as a satanic fractional lamia trying to revive the dead body of his master, Count Igor Dracula (Michael Pataki), in the lacklustre, Dracula's Dog (Zoltan, Hound of Dracula: 1978). An excavation of the Dracula tomb only unearths his pet pooch however, that commits itself to vampirizing every other dog in the neighbourhood. The pack of hellhounds then search out the Count's only living relative, Michael Drake (Pataki again), with the idea of putting the bite on him and turning him into their new master.

  As Drake takes his family on the inevitable camper holiday, he is pursued by Veidt Smit (Nalder) and his furry friends. Bringing up Drake's defence is the incomparable Inspector Branco, huffily personified by Jose Ferrer. Branco has evidence of Drake's ancestry in the form of a photograph (how did he get that?) of the Count and his dog.

  After a couple of midnight attacks on the family trailer, Drake takes the Inspector's rantings seriously and returns home to fight the hound on his home ground. In the ensuing confusion, Smit is staked and Zoltan falls onto a picket fence when confronted by Drake's crucifix, begging the question, do animals have religious beliefs?

  At the fade out, we see a cute puppy turn toward the camera with glowing eyes and larger canines than usual. Directed with all seriousness by Albert Band, the film is watchable for all the wrong reasons. In fairness, it does boast a nerve-jangling prologue as Zoltan and Smit are resurrected by an expendable soldier.

  Reggie Nalder would go on to play Kurt Barlow in Salem's Lot (1979), and Van Helsing in the porno pastiche, Dracula Sucks, in the same year. Pataki had already played the vampire, Caleb Croft, in the oddball, but disturbing tale, Grave of the Vampire (1974).

  Love at First Bite (1979), directed by Stan Dragoti, is still the best comedy on the Dracula theme. It isn't directly in line with the major Stoker versions, but it does slot itself very cheekily into the mix, by claiming sequelitis to the Bela Lugosi original. Pasty faced and sans fangs, Count George Hamilton is the total antithesis to his usual persona of his unique sun-tanned lothario.

  Evacuated from his home by the Hungarian authorities -"We will be back with the trapeze, parallel bars and Nadia Comaneci!"- Dracula sets off for New York with his scene-stealing familiar, Renfield (Arte Johnson).

  Quote: "You carry the master," intones a beleaguered cab driver.

  "I always do," quips Renfield.

  Screwball comedy triumphs as the Count conducts his search for the reincarnation of his lost love, Mina Harker (Susan St James), and is perilously pursued by the grandson of Dr Fritz Von Helsing (Richard Benjamin - stealing the film).

  Interestingly, unlike most of the screen versions, the Count gets to utilise all of his famous abilities, changing into a bat, a mist and a large black hound, and makes better use of his infiltration into society. An oversight that would doom the later Hammer versions.

  I loved the idea of turning the ancestral home into a training ground for Hungary's Olympic prospects of the day. Dracula disco dancing? Anywhere else, it would be ludicrous. Here, it just fits right in.

  Even the tired formula - Dracula searches for his lost love - has lasting resonance in this film, simply because the Count tells us that Mina Harker is still alive in another reincarnation - a top fashion model - than having to rely on soft focus flashbacks as in, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1973), or adding an apocryphal prologue to a supposedly factual event i.e. the defeat of Constantinople by the original Vlad Tsepesh in Francis Ford Coppola's fiasco.

  Hamilton's undead aristocrat pursues his nymphomaniac quarry with grim determination and campy Bela Lugosi mannerisms, all the while battling to stay dignified in a town where everything is totally over the top. His sole motive is Mina Harker. Dracula has already conquered the world and has no more use for it.

  Throw Dick Shawn's belligerent police detective and tired Roots gags: "Ben Vereen is a terrific dancer!" into the bowl, and you have an amusing concoction to satisfy anyone with a funny bone.

  Quote: "Who knows, by the 21st century, homosexuality may be the normal way of life?"

  Indeed.

  As reported in Chapter Eleven, Dracula was driven off the screen by the late seventies appearing only spasmodically in the far from capable personas of Paul Naschy, Zandor Vorkov, Des Roberts, Alex D'arcy, Jamie Gillis and Howard Vernon. Most films with Dracula’s name in the titles were copouts and very poorly made to boot. It is fair to say that the American film industry would revive the Count in the mid-eighties with the aid of bigger budgets, special make-up and mind bending photographic effects.

  Not a Dracula movie per se, Tom Holland's Fright Night (1985), is touted by many fans as being a classic of the modern vampire cinema. It isn't. What it actually is, is a film by a writer/director who knows, not only his onions, but the entire Sunday roast.

  Holland, like Roman Polanski before him, plays with a Dracula-obsessed audience. Not only with script and lighting, but with absolutely everything in the vampire film canon. Even down to make-up effects and background music. Every frame can be matched to a preceding vampire movie. Every attitude and most of Chris Sarandon's line deliveries, can be traced to an earlier representation of the Count in cinema. Unlike Polanski, Holland juggles all these concepts and still keeps hold of his main plot device without dropping a stitch.

  Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) tries to convince his high school friends, Amy (Amanda Bearse) and Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys). that his new next-door neighbour, Jerry Dandridge (Sarandon), is a vampire.

  When they hear that he is planning to stake his neighbour through the heart, Amy and Ed plead for the services of ageing horror host Peter Vincent - an amalgamation of Peter Cushing and Vincent Price - (Roddy McDowell). Unlike his screen persona of the great vampire killer however, Peter Vincent turns out to be a coward and declines. Knee-deep in debt and facing eviction, he takes the job for payment of a $500 savings bond, offered by Amy. The stage is then set for one of the most memorable confrontations ever filmed between vampire and hunters. Holland was well-used to 'reinventing' classic sequences to a new audience as he had previously penned all the derivative devices used in Richard Franklin's Psycho 2 (1983) and Phillipe Mora's, The Beast Within (1982). But it is in this film where everything comes together seamlessly, perhaps because Holland knew that, by this time, the clichés connected with these films had already been overused. If you have a few moments, here are just a few noteworthy similarities:

  • 1), The film is set in an unspecified mid-American town (The Return of Dracula: 1958; 'Salem's Lot: 1979).

  • 2), Sarandon's home turns into a frighteningly comic-horror version of 1313 Mockingbird Lane, the home of The Munsters.

  • 3) "Welcome to Fright Night", snarls Sarandon, more like Bela Lugosi's "I bid you welcome!", than anything said by Roddy McDowell's character whom the sneer is aimed at.

  • 4) McDowell's Peter Vincent hosts ‘Fright Night’ - the show within a show - from a coffin, in the same manner that Criswell oversaw the worst excesses of director Edward D Wood jr.

  • 5), As McDowell vengefully crosses to the vampires lair, he is hit by a film composition similar to the one greeted by Max
Von Sydow in The Exorcist (1973).

  • 6), Sarandon's appearance amalgamates Christopher Lee, Frank Langella and George Hamilton. His American swagger lends a nod to AIP's Yorga and Blacula movies. When decaying towards the end, we see structural make up versions of Reggie Nalder and, in many of his physical attitudes, Max Schreck.

  • 7), The staking of the vampire who refuses to lie down and pulls the stake from his chest (Dracula Has Risen From the Grave: 1968).

  • 8), The bat, designed by William Randall Cook, is a frightening modern creature. But the fight with the bat, almost shot for shot, harks back to Frank Langella's escape in Dracula (1979), even down to similar smoke effects.

  • 9), Amy battles with Charley in much the same way as Kate Nelligan scuffled with Trevor Eve in the Badham film to keep him away from her slumbering Master.

  • 10), Peter Vincent first views the vampire in an ambiguous introduction at the top of a flight of stairs (Dracula: 1958; Bram Stoker's Dracula: 1973).

  • 11), Roddy McDowell is the quintessential English actor betraying a mild character to portray a fearless vampire killer. This is obviously an affectionate homage to the only Van Helsing, Peter Cushing, who was the total antithesis to the characters he played on the screen.

  • 12), Billy Cole, Dandridge's Renfield, is despatched in much the same way as James Mason in Salem's Lot (1979), being shot numerous times on the staircase.

  There are many, many more such cinematic references. My own favourite, missed by everyone, I think, is the face of Amanda Bearse wearing her stalactitic fangs. Now, a test for you, hold that picture of Ms Bearse up to the famous still of Christopher Lee bearing his fangs in Dracula (1958). Now, what do you know...?

  As Peter Vincent informs Charley, "So far, everything's been like it was in the movies".

  In Fright Night, inventive genius knows no bounds. In fact, the only original concepts are the vampire whistling, 'Strangers in the Night', when out on the hunt, and locking his coffin from the inside, to outfox the John Hughes-type vampire hunters. But for all that, you won't feel cheated when the final credits unfold.

  Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad (1987), is a film that mixed special effects and nostalgia for the Universal horror films of the forties. Stan Winston's workshop revived Count Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Werewolf, the Mummy and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The script was credited to Lethal Weapon creator Shane Black and plays fair with all of its monsters giving each one a riotous send off. The Creature is shot, as is the Wolfman. The Mummy simply unravels like a knitted cardigan. Frankenstein's monster (Tom Noonan) is hurled back through time and Dracula (Duncan Regher) follows suit after possibly giving the Count his scariest coverage since Christopher Lee turned it all in, in 1973.

  It surprises me that in films of this nature, American film-makers seem more at home with the Count and can pinpoint the type of danger he represents very easily. But when faced with straight adaptations of the tale, they always seem to have untold problems. Only Jack Palance has been able to imbue the Count with the required menace of Stoker's imagination in Dan Curtis' Bram Stoker's Dracula (1973).

  Another film on similar lines is Van Helsing (2004). As reported earlier, meant as a sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and set to star Anthony Hopkins in his role as Professor Van Helsing. This idea was scrapped and the script was refashioned by Stephen Sommers who had scored big with his two The Mummy revivals. Richard Roxburgh plays a camp, wall-walking Dracula and picks up where Gary Oldman left off. Spending most of the film raging threats against practically everybody.

  He does take the time out to soothe his three stunning brides (Silvia Colloca, Elena Anaya and Josie Maran), but for the most part, he insists on returning to the confusing plot device of reanimating the Frankenstein monster for his own nefarious deeds (Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein: 1948 and The Monster Squad: 1987).

  Throwing in scenes of a changing werewolf, literally climbing the walls in agony as he rips out of his skin, three flying harpies with extreme facial contortions and some admittedly breathtaking action scenes that must have been great fun to stage, it becomes unclear what message the movie is trying to convey.

  As Gabriel Van Helsing, dressed in slouched hat, long leather trench coat and boots, Hugh Jackman is a kind of medieval James Bond, with Kevin J O'Connor as his Q sidekick, sent by the Secret Order of the Vatican, immortalised in the shape of Alun Armstrong, to stop the rule of Draculea (yawn). On the way, he meets and falls in love with Kate Beckinsale's feisty princess.

  As the film's running time continues we are subjected from one amazing CGI effect to another, the speed of which would probably have had Stoker's original Van Helsing reaching for the inhaler, and the whole thing becomes very downbeat and exhausting. No one cares when it is revealed that Beckinsale's Princess is dead but the final confrontation between Dracula in bat form and Van Helsing, who has been infected with the curse of a werewolf, is worth staying the course.

  My own favourite section of the film is the opening scene as Van Helsing tracks Mr Hyde to Paris. Hyde is a full CGI character voiced with just the right amount of knowing camp by Scots lad Robbie Coltrane.

  For the rest, I can only say that it is a film of pure indulgence in the case of Mr Sommers, as he sees just how far he can take his audience before everyone involved loses interest. A sequel, Van Helsing 2 and an animated series, has been optioned, and then canned, repeatedly since 2007.

  Dracula had popped up in another film that crossed horror with the western/comedy genres again (The Curse of the Undead:1959 & Billy the Kid versus Dracula:1966), called Sundown, the Vampire in Retreat (1988). This starred David Carradine, of TVs Kung Fu fame and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, as Count Mardulak. Another frustrating movie that receives excellent reviews but is almost impossible to track down. It was filmed in 1988 but wasn’t released to American audiences until much later. The internet movie bible the IMDB gives its release date as 1990.

  Apparently, Mardulak aka Dracula and a band of vampires settle in the western town of Purgatory and are constantly hassled by a roaming descendant of Professor Van Helsing (Bruce Campbell of the Evil Dead movies). It was directed by Anthony Hickox and dedicated to his late father, director Douglas, who gave us the gore-filled funfest, Theatre of Blood (1973), and brought John Wayne to London in the equally entertaining cop thriller, Brannigan (1975). Despite this author’s relentless search, I still haven’t seen a copy of Sundown on DVD or video, but constantly relish the thought of witnessing Carradine inject life into his father’s old role.

  Michael Almereyda’s Nadja (1994), begins with the demise of Dracula as carried out by Van Helsing (Peter Fonda playing both roles), in the vampire’s crypt. Nadja (Elina Lowensohn) is the Count’s daughter from his union with a Hungarian peasant woman in the Middle Ages. A half-vampire who carries out her daughterly duties by claiming her father’s body and cremating him, just as Gloria Holden did in Universal’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936). Coincidence abounds as Nadja befriends and then bites, as it turns out, Van Helsing’s daughter in law, Lucy (Galaxy Craze).

  She then proceeds to revive her dying twin, Edgar (Jared Harris). He repays this deed by helping Van Helsing dispose of Nadja with a stake through the heart. Off-the-cuff ideas and dazzling imagery fog the senses and cloud over a confusing plotline. David Lynch appended his name as executive Producer and his quirky storytelling is suffocating in every frame.

  With meandering soliloquies and distracting dialogue, I found the movie easier to handle by watching in two sittings. For purists there are a couple of static shots of Bela Lugosi from the 1932 melodrama White Zombie, and some excellent uses of stark black and white photography; Pixel-Vision, with a vibrant soundtrack offered up by The Verve, My Bloody Valentine, Portishead and Spacehog.

  A risible addition to the myth is Patrick Lussier’s Dracula 2000 aka Dracula 2001 (2000). Gerard Butler looks both bewildered and bemused as he takes the Count into the new Millenni
um. He is released from a high-tech security vault by a group of thieves who have obviously cut their teeth on the Die Hard genre of movie. The vault belongs to antiques expert Van Helsing (Christopher Plummer) who curiously bleeds himself with leeches on a regular basis to keep his immortality and refers to his grandfather as a simple country practitioner whose name was borrowed by Bram Stoker for his horrific tale of terror.

  Joining the fight is Van Helsing’s enthusiastic apprentice Simon (Johnny Lee Miller with a deplorable cockney accent). He belongs to the Trevor Eve school of vampire-hunting: totally useless in the romantic stakes and becoming increasingly intimidated by the Count’s three gorgeous brides. However, when Van Helsing is unexpectedly murdered, he pursues the Count with gusto to protect the old man’s daughter, Mary Heller-Van Helsing (Justine Waddell), who holds a telepathic link to the vampire and discovers a whole new history. Dracula, it is revealed, is actually Judas Iscariot, the disciple who turned Jesus over to the Romans for crucifixion, the curse of vampirism being a punishment for his treachery from the Lord himself.