Now Watching: Blacula (1972)

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Blacula (1972)
Directed by: William Crain
Starring: William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, Denise Nicholas and Gordon Pinsent

Synopsis: An 18th-century African prince is turned into a vampire while visiting Transylvania. Two centuries later, he rises from his coffin, attacking various residents of Los Angeles and meeting Tina, a woman whom he believes is the reincarnation of his deceased wife.

Rating: 7/10

I tend to do my movie watching over the weekend. The rest of the week tends to be dedicated to television series. Which means if I keep this up, you’re gonna get a lot of Now Watchings on Saturday and Sunday and basically none through the rest of the week. For now, I like doing these as it lets me give some basic thoughts on a film without having to put all the time and energy into a full review. I’ll still do full reviews, I’ve got a couple of war movies to talk about soon, but I like supplementing them with these snippets.

I can still remember browsing the aisles of my local video store (Mega Movies, the biggest and best rental place in town – it used to be a Burger King and they had a lot of floor space) and always smiling when I came across Blacula. I was aware of the existence of Blaxploitation films at this point, but had not seen any of them. But the idea of a black-centered Dracula movie was awesome to my young eyes.

I never did rent it, though. I couldn’t tell you why. But it always stayed in my mind, it remained on my list. Thirty years later, and I’m just now actually sitting down with it.

It is probably a better film than I imagined it to be, though not nearly as much fun. I hear the sequel leans into its inherent silliness.

The plot is pretty basic; it is pretty much explained in that synopsis. Mamuwalde (William Marshall) visits Dracula in 1790. In this film, Dracula is an old racist and states that he thinks the slave trade is good, actually. Mamuwade yells at him, and Dracula sucks his blood, sticks him in a coffin and our hero doesn’t wake up until 1972 when some gay interior decorators buy the coffin, ship it to Los Angeles and awaken our newly christened Blacula.

Mamuwalde/Blacula doesn’t even blink looking at how things have changed while he’s been away, gets him self spiffed up and hits the town. He sucks a little blood, learn to dance, and meets Tina (Vonetta McGee) who looks exactly like his wife from olden times. He becomes obsessed with wooing her.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala) begins to suspect a vampire may be the cause of the recent uptick in murders, and the chase is on.

I’m by no means an expert on Blaxploitation films, but the ones I’ve seen have a lot more style and are a lot more fun than this one. Blacula isn’t dull by any means, but it leans more into the drama/horror aspects than the exploitation ones. It takes a few digs at social commentary, and William Marshall looks terrific as a vampire with some major sideburns.

Worth watching if you are into this sort of thing, but I can’t say I’ll revisit it anytime soon. But I definitely want to watch the sequel.

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: Mr. Vampire (1985)

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My pneumonia is subsiding, but definitely not fully gone. I’d say I’m up about 80 percent on that front. But you may recall when I first started getting sick I complained about having done something to my hip. Well, that is back with a vengeance. I don’t know what I’ve done to it, but it hurt like crazy anytime I stand up and try to walk.

Getting is old is not fun, my friends.

I’m in no shape to write a long review tonight, but since I missed last week’s Friday Night Horror and haven’t written much since then I wanted to talk a little bit about this movie.

I actually started Smile 2 this evening. Got about halfway through then got hungry. When I had finished my meal, my daughter had snuck into my room to watch something of her own. My wife was downstairs and she doesn’t like horror movies so after a bit we landed on this, a rather silly and not very scary horror movie.

Mr. Vampire is the first in what you might call the Hopping Vampire genre of Hong Kong cinema (I previously reviewed a later film in the genre, Encouter of the Spooky Kind (1980). The hopping vampires are actually Jiangshi, which come from traditional Chinese folklore and are something like a mix between vampires and zombies. Or so says Wikipedia anyway.

This film follows a Taoist priest and his two inept assistants who battle a super strong vampire, a couple of other vampires that he’s recently turned and eventually a succubus type ghost.

As you might suspect from that description it is a very silly movie. There are lots of broad jokes, goofy physical humor, and some pretty good kung fu action. It is, perhaps, a little too silly for my particular senses, but ultimately it won me over in its sheer entertainment value.

My wife seemed to enjoy it too. Definitely recommended when you are looking for something different.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

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Talk about a case of a sequel being better than the original. I watched Vampire Hunter D a few weeks ago and thought it was awful. There were interesting story ideas, cool characters, and deep mythology hidden within a terribly written and animated film. This sequel, made some fifteen years later improves upon everything in every way.

The basics of the story are essentially the same. This one opens up the mythology a little bit and adds some characters, but it is still Vampire Hunter D trying to rescue a beautiful maiden from a vampire.

In this version, set in the far future, vampires have essentially ruled the world for centuries, but they are slowly dying out. Or rather they are slowly being killed by vampire hunters. Most of these are humans, mercenaries looking for big paydays and a bit of danger. But D is a dhampir – half human half vampire.

The girl, Charlotte (Wendy Lee) is taken from her home by Meier Link (John Rafter Lee) a vampire of nobility. Her family pays D (Andy Philpot) a hefty downpayment (with promises of much more if he succeeds) for rescuing her.

They’ve also paid The Marcus Brothers, a motley crew of hunters to do the same. They mostly consist of the same type of characters you get in any film with mercenaries – rough-and-tumble dudes who are good with specific weapons and get smart-assed with their dialogue. There is one lady Leila (Pamela Segal) and a bedridden psychic who can psychically leave his body and do severe damage to his enemies with his mind.

Leila gets the most screen time and she is the most interesting. The rest of her crew immediately take a disliking to D as they see him as competition. But Leila forms a friendship of sorts with him. He rescues her then she rescues him and they form a bond.

There are monsters, including a shapeshifter and a werewolf, they must battle but those scenes are short, and the fights are finished fairly quickly. It is as if the film understands that the monsters might be fun to watch for a minute, but it is the characters that are going to create fans.

The story is mostly good, though it borrows heavily from other stories and periodically drags. It is still lightyears above what they did in the first film.

The animation is gorgeous. The film wanders from a desolate desert to a great forest and we spend the third act in an enormous gothic castle. All of it is rendered beautifully. The characters are well-drawn and the action flows like the best live-action movies do.

It is astonishing how much better this film is than the original. Highly recommended.

Embrace of the Vampire (2013)

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They remade that terrible erotic vampire movie starring Alyssa Milano. God knows why. The only reason anyone watches the original is because Alyssa Milano was in an erotic vampire movie. She’s not in this one, but the thing is, the remake isn’t all that bad, actually. I mean it isn’t good or anything, but unlike the original, the filmmakers here know how to tell a coherent story.

You can read my full thoughts here.

Embrace of the Vampire (1995)

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I respect women. I believe women. I think women should be cherished for their intelligence, wit, kindness, for their humanity, for all the wonderful things that make them women.

I’m also a big, dumb, man. A cis-gendered, straight man at that. I have a full-blooded sexual appetite. I find women attractive.

In my younger years, I was sometimes known to watch movies just to see beautiful, famous women in various states of undress. Oh, who am I kidding I’m still sometimes known to do the same.

I say this as a way to introduce my review of Embrace of the Vampire, a very dumb mid-1990s movie in which Alyssa Milano gets nekkid. This was just a few years after her turn in Who’s the Boss and she was clearly trying to shed that clean-cut teenage image. I was in college at the time and me and my pals rented the film because…well, you can probably guess.

I’m a little embarrassed by the review now. It was very much written with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. I was trying to be funny. I’m not sure how well I succeeded. I debated whether or not I should even turn the review in at the time, but I couldn’t figure another angle on the movie. It is very much remembered now because Alyssa Milano got naked. I can’t imagine anyone would know it still existed if it weren’t for that fact.

Anyway, here’s the review, please take it as it was meant to be read – as a lark, a dumb joke, an acknowledgment of my own big, dumb maleness.

31 Days of Horror: The Night Stalker (1972)

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While I was attending university I didn’t watch a lot of TV. I didn’t even own a TV until my senior year (and that wasn’t mine, but my roommates). I went to the movies every weekend, but I just wasn’t interested in whatever was going on in television at the time.

Because of this, I missed a lot of seminal shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. Luckily I have a wife who is a nerd and she’s turned me on to such things.

This year marks 30 years since The X-Files first premiered and so my wife wanted to start rewatching it. I haven’t watched it in over a decade so it has been fun going through it again.

I was recently reminded that one of the great inspirations for The X-Files was Kolchak: The Night Stalker. It started out as a TV movie from 1972 entitled The Night Stalker, which was followed by a sequel in 1973 entitled The Night Strangler, and then a television series that ran from 1974-1975 which was entitled Kolchak: The Night Stalker. They tried to revitalize it in 2005 but it was cancelled after ten episodes.

I watched The Night Stalker a few nights ago and I will most likely be watching the others (well, probably not the remake) in the near future.

Kolchak (Darren McGavin) is a reporter who has been fired from nearly every major newspaper in the country. He’s a good reporter, but he has a loose and sarcastic mouth that gets him into trouble. He’s currently working at a low-rent paper in Las Vegas, where he is asked to cover some recent murders in which the victim’s bodies have all been drained of blood.

He eventually comes to believe that the killer is a vampire and collects enough evidence to prove this. But he is thwarted at every turn by the police, the politicians, and even his own boss.

You can see already how this influenced The X-Files, though McGavin’s performance and the overall low-fi vibe of the show seems more in line with the funny episodes of The X-Files than the serious ones. I’ll be interested in seeing how the sequel and the series fare.

It is very much an early 1970s TV movie. The budget was clearly very limited – there is hardly any set design, or lighting design, or any design of any kind. The violence is mostly off-screen. There are a few tussles and quite a few cops shooting blanks at the killer (they don’t even bother with squibs), but nothing particularly visually interesting. The plot plays pretty fast and loose with anything close to how things would actually go. Even though the police and politicians hate Kolchak they keep inviting them to their private meetings to discuss the case and then ask everyone to keep quiet about it. As if a reporter, especially one as nutty as Kolchack, will keep quiet about a serial killer.

I did enjoy that it was shot in Las Vegas and there are a lot of exterior scenes. I love getting glimpses of a city from years gone by. Every time they drove by the Stardust Casino I wondered if Lefty Rosenthal (portrayed by Robert DeNiro in Casino) was there.

Despite all of this, I really rather enjoyed it. McGavin is a lot of fun to watch and it all plays out with this goofy kind of joy to it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Vampire Doll (1970)

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I’ve talked about how the Criterion Channel is one of my favorite streaming services. Mubi is fast becoming a contender in that category. Mubi actually works as a kind of sister channel to Criterion. Where Criterion focuses on the world’s greatest films and lots of classic Hollywood films (and lots of other more esoteric themes like Snow Westerns and 1970s sci-fi) Mubi’s focus is on more modern art-house fair. They show films that premiere at film festivals like Cannes and Sundance, but that doesn’t necessarily reach a wider audience.

They also have a lot of what you might call cult films – genre movies that have been all but forgotten except by a small group of fans. The Vampire Doll is a good example of what I’m talking about. This was the Japanese film company Toho’s attempt at cashing in on the horror craze that so popular at the time.

It looks and feels like a Hammer Horror film with its creaky old mansion as a setting and its moody supernatural storyline. A man who has been traveling abroad for the last few months returns home to Japan. He immediately rides out to the country to see his girlfriend Yuko (Yukiko Kobayashi). Upon arrival, he is told by her mother (Yôko Minakaze) that Yuko is dead. She died in an automobile accident a few weeks prior.

That evening he sees a woman that appears to be Yuko. Flash forward a few days and the man’s sister, Keiko (Kayo Matsuo) and her fiancee Hiroshi (Akira Nakao) visit the old mansion because they have not heard from her brother in a while and that is unusual. Keiko immediately senses something is wrong and decides to stick around and investigate.

With a 70-minute run time, the plot moves along pretty quickly. Honestly, storywise the film isn’t great. It doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen before. But it works really well as a mood piece. The mansion is full of creepy shadows, and the music is particularly moody. I mentioned Hammer Horror earlier and that is fitting. If you’ve ever seen any of those old movies then you’ll know what I’m talking about. They have a particular look and feel to them that is perfect for this type of gothic horror.

And that’s why I love sites like Mubi. I’d never heard of this film before, but they spotlighted it and now I’ve seen it and I’m glad that I did.

31 Days of Horror: The Blood Spattered Bride (1972)

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The story Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu is one of the earliest known works of vampire fiction. It is also the origin of just about every lesbian vampire trope out there. The Blood Spattered Bride is one of many adaptations of that story to film. It is beautiful to look at, mesmerizing, and eternally slow.

It is about a woman, Susan (Maribel Martín), who has just married a man (Simón Andreu). He is unnamed in the story which suggests that he is not that important. They return to his ancestral mansion. She is a virgin on their wedding night and while she enjoys the pleasures of his company as the days and nights pass he is increasingly aggressive and demanding, which makes her grow distant.

She keeps having dreams about a strange woman. One day that woman, named Carmilla (Alexandra Bastedo) shows up. She looks just like one of her husband’s ancestors. The story goes that the ancestor slaughtered her entire household after going crazy

Carmilla seduces Susan and drinks her blood. Then she tells her to kill her husband.

It is all very dreamy. The ladies wear those flowing white gowns. The lighting is soft. It is like a renaissance painting (albeit with a bit more neck biting) come to life. It is definitely a film that is best to just allow it to flow over you. Don’t come in expecting lots of action and violence (though there is one scene that is pretty gory), and you might be pleasantly surprised.

31 Days of Horror: Near Dark (1987)

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A couple of young guys are hanging out one evening on a sidewalk. They spy a pretty woman standing alone. One of the guys, Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) walks over to her. Or rather he struts. He’s full of confidence. He asks the girl her name – it’s Mae (Jenny Wright). He asks if she’s got a boyfriend. She says she needs a ride home.

In his truck, he is full of flirt. He asks her to slide over. He puts his arm around her. She asks him to stop so they can look at the night. He tries to kiss her, but she pulls away. Later they stop again. He literally lassos her and tries to kiss her again. She sees the dawn coming and says she has to get home. Now. He says he won’t take her unless she kisses him.

The beginning of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark begins with a push and pull of the most interesting power dynamics. It is a situation most women will recognize, I imagine. A man offers kindness to a woman, but the wants something in return, and he gets more and more demanding if not immediately satisfied. But we know something poor old Caleb doesn’t – Mae is a vampire and she can bite him anytime she wants. She does exactly that when he tries to stop her from returning to her home before daylight.

When he turns, she introduces him to her band of fiends which includes Lance Henriksen as the defacto leader who has been around since the Civil War, Jennette Goldstein, Joshua John Miller who plays a vampire who was turned when he was just a kid and Bill Paxton whose channeling his Aliens character’s energy, but without the fear and a whole lot of nutso bravado. If you are paying attention you’ll notice that half the cast was also in James Cameron’s Aliens. He was dating Bigelow at the time and basically told her his cast would be perfect for her film and she agreed. So do I.

It is a western take on the vampire story and it is rather glorious. Shot in parts of Texas and Oklahoma, Bigelow fills the screen with this wideshots of beautiful, desolate landscapes. There are bar brawls and shoot-outs. The violence is stylish and brutal. The story – which winds up being about Caleb’s reluctance to take human life – is a bit too familiar, but I love the way it is told. And Paxton is bloody fantastic.