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.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 3: Nosferatu

I have a special place in my heart for Nosferatu, because I didn't really appreciate it when I was younger. First, it was silent, which practically NOTHING was in the eighties of my youth.  There were the subtleties of German Expressionism, which I totally wasn't prepared for.  Combine that with the over stylized acting of silent movies and it just seemed goofy.  Count Orlock, the *NOT DRACULA* vampire, certainly was special in his unique rat like look.  I think the most memorable thing to me at the time was the fact that I should never have seen the movie at all, that Bram Stoker's widow sued to have them destroyed in a copyright infringement case.

But, a film class here, a couple of theater history classes there, and a late night rewatching of a scratchy videotape, I had the lightbulb moment... OH! now I get it.

Nowadays, I can still watch it, it's silent nature makes it good for background video when I'm focusing on something else.


 

31 Days of Dracula- Day 2: The Graphic Novel

Actually, I was wrong yesterday and didn't realize it until later.  The FIRST version of Dracula I ever read was the "Now Age Illustrated" version.  It's a graphic novel version from before they were a thing.  It's illustrated by Filipino artist Nestor Redondo.

Even today, I still remember black and white art.  The moment that stands out, even after all these years is Dracula, a gleam in his eyes and his hand raised.. asking "What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?' or whatever the quote was- I know it was abridged, but I definitely remember the part about Attila.

While I was working on this I had a moment:
OH MY.  1) Marvel did an edition of this book.  2) In color.
This was the panel I was remembering and DAMN if it isn't as effective now as it was then.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 1: The Book

Happy Halloween Month! 
In celebration of the most monsteriffic of holidays, I'm going to look at one of the greats of the genre, Dracula. 

I'll start where it all began: the novel.  Originally published in 1897, the novel has had multiple editions over the decades.  These three are the core of my bookshelf, and I'll be dealing with each of them in the next couple of weeks, but I'll start with the Essenital Dracula edited by Leonard Wolf from ibooks, the most recent version of the edition I read first. 
Yes, that does sound a little confusing.  The text used in this book is from the second printing of the first edition.  Wolf was the editor and annotator of The Annotated Dracula in 1975.  Byron Preiss Publishing updated the Annotated Dracula as The Essential Dracula, not to be confused with the Essential Dracula from McNally and Florescu from the seventies...
This is what happens when books enter the public domain.

Bats

I have to thank Kensington books for making William Johnstone's Bats available to me in galley format...the fact that I got a comped copy didn't influence me at all, but I have to say: I LOVED IT.

I love the "nature runs amok" genre, and one of my favorite movies is the eco-horror film from 1972, Frogs.  I also enjoyed the (no relation) 1999 Lou Diamond Phillips movie Bats.  So when I saw a listing for the e-release of William Johnstone's 1993 book Bats, I knew I had to read it.

It's crazy.  Johnny McManly lives alone in his compound in Lousiana, hiding from the world and kill squads after being a black ops superninja.  Then the bats show up. 

Giant bats. Smart giant bats. Smart giant mutant bats. 
A bat scientist shows up.  She's woman enough for Johnny, and he's man enough for her, in a totally g-rated sort of way.

The bats can handle sunlight. And are rabid. 
Then the Satanists show up. They aren't too smart so they let one of the bats bite them. Because Hail Satan. Rabies. Not Zombies, but rabid, bitey Satanists.

...and then there's a wild boar. A newly rabid wild boar.

Things just get crazier and crazier, in an awesome Saturday afternoon way.

The media shows up.  Johnstone gripes way too much about the liberal media, making his newspeople whiney enough that you're glad when the bats kill them.  But then, you know they're going to die because it's just that kind of book.

Because it's in football country, we get a nice chapter of Friday Night Lights go to Hell bats attack.

But Johnny McManly stops them with the power of his American testosterone.

The author is just to the left of Tim LaHaye. Not surprising given the inherent conservative nature of his usual genre, the western.

Deus Ex Machina ending, but otherwise a serviceable by the numbers nature gone amok story. Recommended.

The Swarm

There's an old joke about Pia Zadora in the title role in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank.  Toward the end of the play, someone in the audience  had gotten so annoyed with her, they yelled out "She's in the attic!".

Irwin Allen's The Swarm is like that.  A killer bees disaster movie, it should have been a hit. By the last act, though, you want to smear honey on Michael Caine and Katherine Ross, and not in the sexy way.

Following his successes with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, and in the wake of Earthquake and the Airport movies, Allen returned to directing (after doing the action sequences in The Towering Inferno) after a sixteen year break.  He should have stuck to directing.

Based on the novel by Arthur Herzog, Irwin took a script from his Inferno writer Stierling Silliphant and turned it into a cast of thousands epic.  Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Jose Ferrer, Olivia De Haviland, Richard Chamberlain, Patty Duke, and Slim Pickens  All wonderfully, marvelously overacting- Pickens mourning his son in a ten minute segment has more range- and EMOTION!- than I've seen in, well anything else he's done.

The effects should have been better.  It was Irwin Allen, for Heaven's sake.  But the wideshots of the swarm looked like coffee grounds.  The final bee killing conflagration was bad bluescreen.

The only redeeming things about it were A) the really, really bad science and B) awesomely snarkable material.  I can be quiet and respectful to movies when they warrant it, but this was PRIME MST3K materail.

We got a flatscreen television and a Roku for Christmas; Warner Brother has an interesting selection of movies that I'm looking forward to watching-  The Swarm?  I'm looking forward to forgetting.