31 Days of Dracula- Day 27: Dracula (Spanish 1931)

Universal was very, very clever back in the day. They would save money by filming foreign language versions of their movies using the same sets and scripts. Probably the most famous of these is Dracula, starring Carlos Villarias as the Count.

I wasn't sure what to think the first time I saw this movie.

I'd seen the Lugosi version several times, so I was familiar with the sets and script, but this movie stands pretty well on its own merits.

Pablo Alvarez Rubio doesn't bring the same degree of pathos to Renfield as much as Dwight Frye does, but he's certainly crazier.

Lupita Tovar is Eva, the "Mina" for this production, is much sexier than Helen Chandler.

 

And Carlos Villarias. He reminds me slightly of Steve Carrell. Which makes him all the more menacing. He's kind of dashing as well. At least for me, he lacks the sense of otherness Lugosi as Dracula, speaking accented English, surrounded by native speakers, has, since Villarias is speaking Spanish to Spanish speakers.

Director George Melford was lucky enough to watch the daily footage of Tod Browning's Dracula and was able to use what suited him while changing things as well. He's got a much more dynamic use of camera than Browning.

Of course, my favorite thing about the movie is how the film faded into obscurity until David Skal's 1990 book Hollywood Gothic brought it back on to the cultural radar, Skal travelling to Cuba in 1989 to see the best print available. 1992 saw the movie show in revival in Hollywood.

In fact, when Skal revised Hollywood Gothic for a later edition, the chapter on the Spanish Dracula is considerably longer.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 26: Van Helsing

When I saw Van Helsing at the movie theater, I hated it.

It's good to know it's just as good on dvd.

It's a sort of tribute to the classic Universal Horror movies, directed by Stephen Sommers, the fellow who did The Mummy movies. It has Dracula, Frankenstein's Creature, The Wolfman, and the Hunchbacked assistant, like the classics House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula.

Of course, the House movies didn't have superninja Van Helsing with ubercool steampunk weapons played by Hugh Jackman.

Nor did they have Kate Beckinsdale, playing Transylvanian battle vixen Anna. (Van Helsing and Underworld seem to have made her action-chick, which is disconcerting for me since I learned to love her during multiple cinema viewings of The Last Days of Disco.)

But Richard Roxburgh has a heckuva time playing Count Dracula- playing it over the top, since he is an undead prince of darkness.

Frankenstein's Creature is probably the most sympathetic here than in many productions in recent memory- in fact the opening sequence of the birth of the Creature and the angry villagers at a burning windmill is the best part of the whole movie, filmed in black and white, the sets reminiscent of the James Whale Frankenstein movies for Universal.

There's a nice tip of the hat to serious horror fans with the town undertaker, with his top hat, scraggly and feral teeth, he's reminiscent of Lon Chaney Sr in London After Midnight.

I think my main problem with Van Helsing is that it's a summer blockbuster- lots of fight scenes and explosions and plot holes you can drive a tank through (how many nights of the full moon does this story have?). I think I'd have liked it if it were a little tighter a story that wasn't so caught up on the special effects.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 15: Universal Monsters: Dracula- Return of Evil

Well, here's a fun one.  The premise seems hatched out of committee, but whether Larry Mike Garmon was given the premise or came up with it on his own, Dracula: Return of Evil is a fun little jaunt by someone with obviously a deep affectation for the Universal Monsters.

In a nutshell:  Florida.  Universal Studios Orlando.  Experimental super duper dvd player.  Freak accident.  The classic monsters come to life and have to be captured and returned to the projector across a series of six books.

It's a kids book so the protagonists are all in their early teens with the standard Breakfast Club archetypes.  The monsters are menacing, but really only REALLY dangerous off camera.

What was really clever was releasing this at the same time they repackaged and re-released the movies in 2001.  Even if the casual reader wasn't familiar with the stories past the names, Dracual, Frankenstein,  the videos would be readily available at the local Blockbuster. Ah, marketing.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 14: Universal Studios Monsters Presents Dracula

From the same people who brought us the tray puzzle, Golden Books, this Universal Monsters licensed adaptation of the 1931 movie is one of a series of adaptations from the company.  They had a huge push back in 1991, and two lines of books were part of this. 
One was a slightly post Berenstain Bears series of illustrated adaptations- I've got Frankenstein but Dracula as since eluded me- and the other was fourth grade level adaptation.
No illustrations, but they've got great fold out posters.

This was the not-quite-Lugosi look that Universal was running with at the time.  They'd have a look and market the heck out of it.
There was even a watch in this style.

This watch image below was snagged from ebay, but I had one back in the day- I used to wear a lot of black, read a lot of Anne Rice and smoke cloves, so a Dracula watch went pretty well with all that.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 13: Dracula Beanie From Stuffins

This nine inch tall Beanie Baby-ish figure of Dracula was originally available from CVS by Stuffins back in 1999.  I've been luck enough to pick up a collection of them over the last few years, the set including Frankenstein's Monster, the Bride, The Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Creature from The Black Lagoon, Quasimodo and The Phantom of the Opera.

They made these in three sizes, nine-, twelve-, and twenty-four inch tall- I have a nine-inch Mummy and twenty-four inch Creature, as well as a full set of the smaller ones.

Who would have imagined the King of the Vampires could be so adorable?

31 Days of Dracula- Day 9: House of Dracula

I have a problem with House of Dracula.  See the poster-->
You've got Frankenstein's Monster.
And Dracula.
And the Wolf Man.
And the Mad Doctor.
And the... nurse?

Oh, wait, she's billed as the Hunchback! because she does have one, yes.  But unlike the sympathetic but less than articulate Quasimodo, or the unsympathetic and won't shut up Daniel of House of Dracula or the cruel Fritz of the original Frankenstein... Nurse Nina just happens to be a hunchback; in fact, she's probably the most likeable character in the whole film.

That said, this isn't 31 Days of Nina the Hunchback Nurse.

John Carridine is back as Dracula, this time tortured by his existence, asking a scientist, Doctor Edelmann for assistance in curing his vampirism.  At the same time Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, is in town, looking for a similar cure. 

Coincidentally, Edelman discovers Frankenstein's Monster.  Hilarity ensues.  (Oh, wait, that's the next film Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein).

Of course, Dracula can't help himself and he just has to seduce Edelmann's other nurse, the one without the hunchback.  Because Dracula.

Edelmann betrays Dracula, because Mad Scientist.

It's a workable enough Saturday Matinee movie, but not one I'll likely watch unless I'm binge watching the Universal Monsters movies again.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 8: The House of Frankenstein

Yeah, after this... I'm going to do a couple of other mediums because, well... It was disappointing.

A Dracula always adds a little something to a movie, and that's what you get in The House of Frankenstein, a little something and not really much more.

It is the first time John Carridine played the role of Dracula, brought back to life by Boris Karloff, not playing  Frankenstein's Monster, but a mad scientist, Dr Niemann, determined to gain vengeance on those who imprisoned him. 

In a continuity be damned move, it seems the Count wasn't killed in London, but Transylvania, and his body wasn't dispatched by his daughter.  Instead, the staked skeleton ended up in the possession of George Zucco's traveling Chamber of Horrors.

Zucco is killed by Niemann,  who then takes over the Chamber of Horrors. 

And because pulling the stake out of the skeleton of a vampire is what you do when you have one, that's EXACTLY what Niemann does.  He and Dracula come to an understanding and he sends the Count after one of his targets.

Dracula kills a Burgermeister that helped convict Niemann, but being Count Dracula, he can't help himself and he tries to seduce the Burgermeister's grand-daughter-in-law.

This doesn't quite work out for the Count, who's thrown under the bus first chance Niemann has. 

He's back in House of Dracula though, so as usual in these movies, death isn't really the end.

My main complaint is that HoF really seems like two movies, one with Niemann and Dracula, then one with Niemann and Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolfman, and that the Dracula half is rushed. 

House of Dracula will be tomorrow night's movie.  Should be fun to see what they do with that.  Then it'll be non-fiction for a few days as a palate cleaner.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 6: Son of Dracula

Well, after the weird melodrama of Dracula's Daughter, the Count's other offpring showed up in Son of Dracula.
Lon Chaney Jr. was Count Alucard, road tripping it to Lousiana, invited there by Katherine Caldwell, a morbidly inclined young lady who encountered Alucard on a trip to Europe.
Alucard kills Katherine's father and she inherits the family estate, Dark Oaks.

She marries Alucard to become a vampire, but she's playing a long game, hoping her fiancée can destroy Alucard and join her in vampirism, so they could live together, forever.

These things never work out, though, do they?

Of the six Universal Dracula films, this one actually seems more in line with contemporary Gothic sensiblilites, it's almost bingo.  New Orleans.  Vampire. Swamps. "Dark Oaks".  Gypsies.

Considering the director Robert Sidomark's noir filmography, Katherine is practically a goth noir femme fatale, playing her boyfriend against her husband, treachery and betrayal all part of her plans.

When talking with friends, Son of Dracula doesn't seem to get the respect it deserves, not the classic of the original, or as "controversial" as Daughter.... Son seems to be best know for the Alucard anagram rather for the story.

31 Days of Dracula - Day 5: Dracula's Daughter

The Count himself is hardly in Dracula's Daughter, a sequel that picks up moments after the ending of the 1931 Dracula.
In fact, he's just a wax bust of Bela Lugosi.
 Edward Van Sloan returns as Von Helsing, taken into custody after heving told the police he'd put a stake through the heart of the Count.
Gloria Holden is Countess Marya Zaleska, Dracula's daughter, come to make sure her father is truly dead in hopes it will free her from the curse of vampirism.

It doesn't.

She has her own servant, Sandor, who loves being EEEEEEEEEVIL.  She tries to soothe herself after burning the Count's body, she imagines birds and dogs, while Sandor tells her they're bats and wolves.

"Sandor, look at me. What do you see in my eyes?"
"Death."

Of the Universal Dracula movies, Dracula's Daughter stands out because the monster, the vampire, doesn't want to be one.  She longs to be normal.  She sees a psychiatrist even.

No use.  She can't escape her fate.

There is a heavy lesbian subtext here, her attempts to change her nature with the help of a doctor.  When that doesn't work, she gives in to her need by choosing a street girl as her victim.

Dracula's Daughter actually made me a little melancholy, giving us a horror character as tragic as James Whale's Frankenstein's Monster .

31 Days of Dracula- Day 4: Universal 1931

Bela Lugosi's Dracula. Where it all started.  I was a little hard pressed on what to write... there are dozens of books on the movie- I'll be looking at those books during the month- not to mention the coverage it gets in other books.  In fact, when I picked up a used copy of Tom Weaver's Universal Horrors, the chapter on Dracula was mostly missing, but I had a copy of David Skal's Hollywood Gothic that certainly compensated for the missing text.

What I'm sure I've read somewhere, but didn't actually occur to me until my rewatchings was how different the family movies (Daughter of... Son of...) were from the original, which, thanks to it's basis in a stage play based on the novel, seems like a drawing room melodrama.

Lugosi`sets the bar high in this, creating a Dracula by which all subsequent portrayals are judged, fascinating, hypnotic, menacing but suave and sophisticated.  He only played Dracula one more time- in Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein- but played variants on the theme in Mark of the Vampire and Return of the Vampire... I'll be passing on them this season since I'm focusing on Dracula specific pieces.

Terror in the Aisles

I couldn't decide what to watch tonight, so I compromised- I watched Terror in the Aisles, a 1984 compilation movie of  scenes from over seventy-five horror movies, linked by commentary from Donald Pleasence from Halloween and Nancy Allen from Dressed to Kill.

It's like That's Entertainment, but with a body count.

Most of the clips are from Universal Studios movies, with extra attention paid to Halloween, Psycho, and, for some unknowable reason, the thrillers Vice Squad and Sylvester Stallone's Nighthawks.

It's great background noise for a mindless evening, since it's a lot of screaming and running, with the occasional montage of doors slamming or killers stabbing.

There's lots of "thoughtful" commentary that just serves to set up a new sequence of clips, but Pleasence does ask a good question- why do people like horror films?- and offers the beginning of an answer: "Perhaps we create artificial horrors to help us to cope with the real ones."

Looking at the recent news and that sounds as good a theory as any.

Nadja

Rewatching Nadja tonight, cheating a little and reusing my reaction to it from another blog I used to write:

I'm not sure how I missed this, but Nadja is amazing.
For all intents and purposes, it's a remake of the 1936 movie Dracula's Daughter.
Filmed in black and white, it's a slow dreamy thing, like a vampire film by David Lynch, which isn't surprising as Lynch is a producer and has a cameo as a morgue attendant.

Nadja, Dracula's daughter, lives in New York and is lonely. She's having to deal with the death of her father at the hands of Van Helsing.

Elina Lowensohn is haunting as Nadja, while Peter Fonda is delightfully manic as Van Helsing.

Aside from the black and white, it's got footage filmed with the Fisher Price pixel-cam, adding another layer of dreamy-ness to it, capped off with the use of My Bloody Valentine on the soundtrack.

A nice touch for Universal fans is the use of Bela Lugosi from White Zombie in a cameo as Dracula.

I think I'm going to try and pick this up for my permanent collection- it's the perfect movie to watch while sipping bitter, licorice flavored, green liqueurs.
--

Post script:  Well, now I'm going to have to rewatch Dracula's Daughter tomorrow night.

Post-Post script: Well, I thought I'd hit "publish" last night- oops.  So, here's the trailer to make up for that:

Crestwood House Monsters

Well, I mentioned the Crestwood House books a couple of posts ago... well it was these beauties that gave me my love of the movies- prior to actually seeing any of these films.

The first wave of these titles, as seen on the back of one of the books, was King Kong, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla, and Mad Scientists.

Heavily illustrated with black and white photographs, these books tell the stories of the movies and then supplement them with information about the sequels and behind the scenes production stories.

Later sets included The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, and- as seen in the second picture- The Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of the 1932  Bela Lugosi Universal movie, which is... an odd choice for a children's book.

The covers were distictively orange (someone's even made t-shirts of them).  They fade into yellow but some schools had them rebound into sturdier, but less attractive volumes- see the brown Draculas in the pictures, as well as The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets Wolfman.

This is my collection so far- I've picked them up at library fairs and thrift stores and trained Igor to keep an eye out for them in our travels.

For years, I thought I was the only person who remembered these outside of a small circle I'd been lucky to meet- and then came the internet.
Cinemassacre has a great video about them here.
Branded in the 80s deconstructs the Frankenstein volume here, and Titans, Terrors and Toys does a nice quick overview here.

Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy

Watched Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy for the first time in years and... hmmm.  It was enjoyable enough.

I didn't enjoy it as much as I did when I watched it last- five or six years ago- mostly because I've rewatched The Mummy's Hand several times in the interim and the idea of two Americans in Egypt (A&C here and Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and Babe Jensen (Wallace Ford) in TMH), down on their luck, enmeshed in an adventure that takes them to a lost tomb where they have to contend with a Mummy and the head of an ancient cult... well it kind of wore out with me.

Fortunately, it had A&C hijinks and the comedy made up for what I'd seen before, including some sufficiently silly parts I had to rewind to watch again- including a bit where the femme fatale is trying to seduce Lou by giving him all her contact information.

Also, the wonderfully disconcerting presence of  Richard Deacon as Semu, the high priest of the Mummy cult.  He's best known as Mel Cooley from the Dick Van Dyke Show.  Yes, him, playing an Egyptian priest.

All in all, it's a good rainy day movie, not necessarily part of a Mummy marathon, but definitely part of an A&C double or triple bill.

Thank You Universal! Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters Collection.

As October approaches, I make a point to check the video sections of Target, Walmart and other such places, because that's when Horror Movies season is at its peak in the bargain video sections.

Today I was in our local Walmart with Igor and saw last year's Legacy collection releases for the Mummy and Dracula.  Having both, from a previous legacy release, I decided to check them anyway for the extras... and there they were: Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, I had a moment of nerdrage- I DON'T WANT TO BUY THESE AGAIN! - when I noticed Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters Collection, featuring the two mentioned above and ...Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and ...Meet the Invisible Man.

...Meet Frankenstein is special because it's the last movie in the original arc of Universal Horror films as well as the return of Bela Lugosi in the role that made him famous.

Plus there's commentary and a documentary.
The documentary is David Skal's Abbot & Costello Meet the Monsters from 2000, with commentary from Costello's daughter, Lugosi's son and other genre scholars.
Tom Weaver, one of the authors of Universal Horrors is one of the commentators on Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy.

It's been a crazy kind of week, so it was nice to find this collection- it'll be hours of fun.

Required Reading: Universal Horrors and The Monster Show

You know, film history is such a broad topic that it's hard to pinpoint the best books on the subject, even within a genre.  But I'm going to try...

First, you've got to know the classics.  And the true classics of horror are, for the most part, Universal Horrors- Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man.  Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas  do an exhaustive study  of the Universal Studio's horror and monster films, including the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies.  These movies didn't just start a horror boom in the thirties and forties, but they also provided the core of the Shock Theatre syndication package for television, giving rise to Forrest Ackerman's magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, and instilling a love of the genre into Monster Kids all over America.

At $55, Universal Horrors is a little expensive for the casual fan, but it's so data rich to give hours of browsing pleasure- it's broken down film by film, so you can just read about a single movie at a time.

Of course, other studios had their classics- RKO and King Kong, Warner Brothers and Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and David Skal's The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror covers those as well as silent movies, the Universal canon, and covers nearly a centuries worth of the genre, including the fifties Bug monsters and the slasher films of the seventies and eighties.

The important thing about the Monster show is the fact that it puts the films into a cultural perspective, be it the Great Depression, The Cold War or the Counter Culture, looking not only what the influenced the genre, but what the genre influenced as well.

Skal also wrote the definitive history of Universal's Dracula, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web ofDracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, and a companion volume focusing on Dracula's director, Tod Browning, Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood's Master of the Macabre with Elias Savada.

I'm going to try and get on a more consistent posting schedule and I think I'll be focusing on books on Mondays.  Thanks for reading!