The Friday Night Horror Movie: Dracula (1979)

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Though I’ve seen probably a dozen Dracula movies, I’ve never actually read the book by Bram Stoker. Everything I know about the story, the characters, and the most famous vampire of all comes from the movies. I have no idea how accurate any of them are. They all change the narrative to suit their cinematic needs. But I figure between them all, I’ve probably gotten all of the details in there somewhere.

This version of the story was based on a stage play (the same one the Bela Lugosi film was based on). It doesn’t do anything particularly new with the story, though it does lean more into the seductive side of Dracula than the violent, destructive side. But it is a very good adaptation, if not exactly a necessary one.

It skips the beginning of the story with solicitor Jonathan Harker (Trevor Eve) visiting Count Dracula (Frank Langella) at his home. Instead, it begins with the arrival of Dracula on the Demeter. The ship crashes near the home of Dr. Jack Seward (Donald Pleasence), and Dracula is rescued by his daughter, Lucy Seward (Kate Nelligan).

At first, Dracula is friendly with everybody and dines that evening with the Seward’s and their friend Minda Van Helsing (Jan Francis). But that evening he’s sucking Minda’s blood and seducing Lucy.

Minda’s death brings Professor Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier) back from his journeys and…well, if you’ve seen other adaptations of the story, you more or less know what comes next.

Like I said, it doesn’t do anything particularly new with the story, but I quite liked it anyway. The sets look amazing, and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, along with director John Badham, create some stunning imagery.

Olivier is great as Van Helsing, and Pleasence is enjoyable as Dr. Seward, whose home also happens to be situated on the grounds of an insane asylum, providing the film with some of its most memorable set pieces. Tony Haygarth gives a fine, if all too brief, performance as the deranged Renfield.

The entire cast is quite good, save for Frank Langella as Dracula. His performance lacks the menace or sensuality the role requires. He plays it like he’s an old gentleman, beset by loneliness who periodically has to suck people blood to survive. There are flashes of something special hidden in there, but mostly I found it a very odd performance.

But overall this is a very good version of the old story.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Prince of Darkness (1987)

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A priest dies. With him is a cylinder that contains a key and diary. Another priest (Donald Pleasence) is called in. he discovers the key and opens the door to a basement inside an old, abandoned church. Inside he finds a large cylinder filled with swirling liquid. The priest calls his friend Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong), a quantum physicist to investigate. He calls in a bunch of graduate students.

They discover the cylinder is ancient. The diary is coded, written in multiple languages, and full of equations. Decoded it says that the cylinder literally contains Satan and that Jesus Christ was an alien who came to Earth to warn humans about the cylinder. Jesus was killed by humans who thought he was insane.

The priest questions his faith. In some ways, Prince of Darkness is yet another inquiry into the age-old question of science versus faith. But told by horror maestro John Carpenter by way of B-movie genre cinema. It totally works for me.

Outside the church, a group of people (including a dude played by Alice Cooper) gather. They simply stand there and stare. Later one of the students will try to escape and he’ll be righteously killed by those people (and then somehow reanimated by bugs). Some of the canister goo will pour into another student’s mouth turning her into a Satan zombie. Or something. She’ll spit in other people’s mouths turning them into zombies as well.

Meanwhile, the priest, the professor, and the remaining students try to figure out how to keep the Satan goo from taking over the world.

As you can tell the plot of Prince of Darkness is pure schlock. It is goofy and weird, silly, and quite a bit dumb. But it looks great. Cinematographer Gary B. Kibbe lights the film to perfection, filling the screen with lots of beautiful candle-lit shots. And Carpenter is a master of this stuff.

It is a little disappointing that a film that promises Satan and the Apocalypse never gives us much more than goo in a jar and some silly zombies, but it doesn’t really matter. This is John Carpenter, genre master, having lots of fun. I did too.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Paganini Horror (1988)

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Horror, as a genre, can take some of the dumbest plot points and turn them into something fun, and interesting, and when you’re lucky, even scary. Killer clowns are living in the sewer, hatchet-wielding dudes slice up coeds in isolated campgrounds, killer tomatoes lurk at the grocery store, and just today I watched a short film called Hair Wolf.

Sometimes the movies are in on the gag (that killer tomato movie is full of winks towards the camera), sometimes they find ways to elevate the material, and sometimes they are just dumb.

Paganini Horror has a fairly interesting (if rather silly) idea but doesn’t find a way to do anything interesting with it.

An all-girl rock band is struggling to come up with their next big hit. Their producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) complains that all their new songs sound like their old ones. They need something new, something bold, something that will wow their fans.

Naturally, they buy an unpublished score by the famous Italian violinist and composer Paganini from an unscrupulous dealer (Donald Pleasence who doesn’t get to do much but has one scene in which he throws piles of cash off a tall building while muttering “fly away little demons.” Naturally, they decide to shoot a video of them performing their rock-n-roll version of the Paganini song inside the murder house where he lived. Naturally, this unleashes a gateway to Hell.

See what I mean? That’s not a bad setup. I mean, it’s pretty silly, but a good writer and director could do something with that. Instead, we get some half-thought-out ideas, a couple of decent bouts of gore and violence, and two (count them) two full-on music videos.

Daria Nicolodi who starred in a bunch of great Dario Argento films (and cowrote Suspiria with him) costars as the owner of the creepy mansion. She also co-wrote it with director Luigi Cozzi and Raimondo Del Balzo (who hasn’t done anything else I’ve seen). You can kind of see what they were going for, but without a true master like Argento to help out it all comes out as a big mess.