Silent Bite

 





Nosferheistu

Silent Bite
Canada 2024
Directed by Taylor Martin
Blue Eyes Media

Okay, this one isn’t great but it’s certainly not too shabby compared to some Christmas horror movies I’ve seen over the years. Silent Bite is a ‘heist aftermath gone wrong’ movie with four bank robbers dressed in seasonal disguises, holing up in a motel (the Jolly Roger Inn) while they wait for their fifth gang member, who is decoying cops away from the scene of the bank robbery depicted at the start of the film, to double back and come get them with the getaway vehicle later.

Well, I say depicted... the film shows its low budget early on as the heist in question actually plays out as a series of motion graphics while the opening credits roll. Which is fine because they look pretty good and you get the idea easily enough. Then the four check in and wait for their friend but, unknown to them, the motel also has a family of female vampires calling the place home, who see the guys as a Christmas present.

Now there’s good and there’s bad on this one. Some of the acting is pretty good and two of the four especially, the leader codenamed Father Christmas played by Simon Phillips and ‘the rowdy one’ codenamed Snowman, played nicely over the top by Michael Swatton - do have a certain British charm and good chemistry to their characters. They kind of save the film in a way and it helps, for them and the rest of the cast, that a lot of the dialogue is quite humorous and smartly written. At least, for the male contingent in the film... the vampire gals are a different story with the credibility of the writing for their characters and the performances of them, well, just about scraping by.

That being said, although some of the dialogue is really nicely done, the story itself is not very original and it doesn’t really do much to rise above its initial premise. There are certainly questions about the use and misuse of vampire lore which one could maybe delve into if one were being picky (of the ‘why did that happen for one person but not that person’ variety) and the film does kinda drag in the last third because of it.

And some of the kills are off camera and don’t really work in a satisfying way... again, I suspect some of these scenes were a casualty of a comparatively low budget and I’m guessing certain things got axed during the shoot (I hope... or the writing really is a lot worse than I realised).

Then there’s the music. The opening animation also has a strong, electric guitar dominant version of Jingle Bells to set the mood which is helpful because, without some of the window dressing employed throughout, such as this music, then the film really didn’t need to be something set at Christmas... it’s not integral to the plot and could have taken place anytime. But Darren Morze’s score throughout the film is not as unsubtle as the opening titles might lead you to expect and it does a good job of supporting the action and keeping things buoyant.

All in all, I don’t have much more to say about Silent Bite. I thought the film was, for the most part, competently made and certainly entertaining enough. I suspect it could have been a much better film if the production company had thrown more money (and also time) at it but I don’t know what the pitch was like. If you like seasonal horror movies however, it fills it’s hour and a half running time nicely and most fans of this sub-genre shouldn’t feel too short changed by it. Definitely worth a look if you have nothing better to do.

Vampire VS Vampire

Eyebrow Humour

Vampire VS Vampire
aka Yi mei dao ren
aka New Mr. Vampire 2
aka Mr. Vampire V
Directed by Ching-Ying Lam
Hong Kong 1989
Golden Harvest/Eureka
Blu Ray Zone B

Vampire VS Vampire is the final film presented in the Hopping Mad - The Mr. Vampire Sequels Blu Ray set from Eureka Masters Of Cinema and sees, after his absence in Mr. Vampire Saga IV, the return of Ching-Ying Lam in a role very similar to the Taoist priest role he played in the three films prior to that. Lam, a former Shaw Brothers and Bruce Lee collaborator, also marked his directing debut with this feature, playing One-Eyebrow Priest. The young hopping vampire kid also returns for this movie, dressed pretty much as he is in the previous ones and the other main vampire in this, midst various other threats such as a ghost and a banana tree spirit, is more the traditional, superstrong, non-hopping variant you would find in the west. There is also a bunch of Chinese nuns following Christianity in the movie.

Now, I have to be honest (and this is why you are getting another fairly short review in this case), while it’s not worse than the previous movie I reviewed in the series (reviewed here)... it’s also certainly no better. I quite like Lam and wish he’d made a better movie. Although, in his brief life, he certainly made a mark as a Chinese action icon, in his own way... he was dead from liver cancer at the age of 44, 8 years after directing and starring in this movie. But, yeah, although he’s good in it, it’s a fairly awful and forgettable film.

Although it does, kind of, have a through line on a story element, mostly, it’s really just a lot of comedy action incidents which are edited so that, if you don’t question what’s going on too much, just about hold on to the idea of a story. However, it’s a very thin thread by which the various set pieces are stitched together and that makes it tough to follow sometimes, I thought.

My main problem, with this one... and it’s my main problem with most of the Mr. Vampire films in general (if, indeed, this one really should be credited as a sequel, rather than just a hopeful declaration as such by the marketing people at Eureka Masters Of Cinema), is that it’s really just not funny. These movies are known for their slapstick, very obvious humour, to be sure but, slapstick is not really my favourite form of comedy either. Even so, this has no laughs in it, as far as I’m concerned.

Some of the stunts are to be admired, I guess but, even the wire work seems a bit poorly done on this one, I thought. And it’s not helped, either, by the similar sounding ‘comedy score’ that's credited to three composers, which really works against it and which I am assuming is either just needle dropped in from other films of those composers or, possibly, it might be library music. Once again though, it sounds kind of cheap and synthesiser based which, might work with something more sinister like a horror film but utilised in a more light hearted tone here, it just doesn’t really come off well. I got the feeling that the music is trying to cue the audience in to when they are supposed to laugh but, yeah, it certainly didn’t work for me on this one.

And that’s about all I have to say in the case of Vampire Vs Vampire and the Hopping Mad - The Mr. Vampire Sequels Blu Ray collection in general. Of all the films in the series, the only one that really worked for me was Mr. Vampire III (reviewed here) but, yeah, the other ones felt a little like a chore to watch, to be honest. I probably won’t look at these ones again for a very long time but, I do appreciate the label putting out films like this in the UK. That can only be a good thing, right?

Bliss (2019)

Night Of The
Living Pez

Bliss
USA 2019
Directed by Joe Begos
Eureka Entertainment

Warning: Spoilers here be... you were warned.

I missed Bliss a couple of years ago when... I think it played FrightFest over here in the UK? I think it was a case of really not liking the poster design (I still don’t) and having other movies on my priority list that year. The only reason I came back to this is because the writer/director, Joe Begos, made another movie I saw recently called The Mind’s Eye (reviewed here) which was... well it was kind of an unofficial sequel to Cronenberg’s Scanners, to my mind. The stand out of that movie for me was the score by Steve Moore, which sounded a lot like early to mid phase John Carpenter by the finish of it. Anyway, astonishingly, I managed to find a soundtrack CD to that movie (which is great, by the way) and when I was looking at the website of the company that put the CD out, Relapse Records, I came across a couple of other CD scores by the same guy including this one, Bliss, which was for the same director. So there we are... I wasn’t expecting too much but I gave it a go and... wow.

I really wasn’t expecting to be as impressed by this movie as I was (so much so that I’m going to order a Blu Ray copy of it real soon... and the CD, of course). A certain amount of that is down to the director and crew. I don’t know who Begos is but it’s like, since The Mind’s Eye, his confidence and boldness with what he is trying out with the camera and editing has matured and grown to the point where he really delivers something which demands your attention. The crucial part of this movie for me though, was the absolutely brilliant, tour-de-force performance by an actress I’ve never heard of called Dora Madison, who plays the films central protagonist Dezzy.

Okay...the plot is extremely simple. Dezzy is an artist, working on a big piece on canvass for an exhibition but has been ‘blocked’ for months. She can’t seem to get the painting done and it’s got to the point where she has no rent money and is dumped by her agent. So she goes to one of her drug dealing friends, played by Graham Skipper from The Mind’s Eye and gets something called Diabolo, which is the drug ‘Bliss’, referred to in the title. The effect is marked and immediate and Dezzy is out of it until she wakes up at a party and then has a threesome with two friends... Courtney (Tru Collins) and Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield). Because she’s riding the effects of the drugs and booze she doesn’t notice when, during the sex session, Courtney delivers a vampire bite to her neck and sucks her blood and then gives her some in return. The effect on her painting, however, is beneficial and the rest of the film is about her getting paranoid, getting drugs, finally realising she’s a vampire and then killing people to drink their blood (in some fairly graphic ways) so she can finish the painting... because she will stop at nothing to complete the painting and, that’s kind of my way into the character because I can kinda sympathise with that. Anyhow, that’s the film in a nutshell, if plot is your kind of thing but it's the performance and direction which really make this one of the true vampire masterpieces of our time.

Now, most people who know me know that the quality of the performance in a film rarely comes up but, this one’s hard to ignore as Madison gives her all to the role and really lets go of herself to deliver one of the grittier and gutsier acting jobs I’ve seen in a movie for a long time. And it works in spite of the character she’s playing. I mean, honestly, she’s a hard person to like. She’s bratty, antagonistic, generally unsympathetic and, normally, this would be more than enough to turn me off a movie but, somehow, the actress finds a little of the light of the character to keep me interested in this one (even though she wears a Death Waltz t-shirt and, honestly, vinyl is not my thing... give me a CD any day of the week). I think, for me, the absolute obsession of her to finish the art at the cost of everything and everyone in her life is the glimmer of empathy I needed to get me into the character. I used to love doing ‘fine art’ before I became a graphic designer and the obsessive ‘art trumps people’ kind of attitude you kinda need as part of your psyche to pull this stuff off was something I’d forgotten about but was happy to be reminded of.

And a lot of the scenes in this are wordless, as she gets naked in front of her canvass (both physically and spiritually) and just tears into it with paint and, yeah, sometimes blood. It’s astonishing stuff and the way the camera works in this, totally focused on her character the whole time, really pays off. Such as when the camera is doing 360 degree turns in a bar with a swirl of noise and music before we are suddenly jarred out of it with an overhead shot of her naked on the floor, back in her studio.

Indeed, the way her performance is captured is inevitably a big contributing factor towards the success of the movie too. There’s a party scene where various conversations are chopped up and cross cut to give a real naturalistic feel of people dipping in and out of conversations, fuelled by booze and drugs. My favourite thing, though, is there seems to be almost an absence of establishing shots for most of the film. So instead of going to the next scene, we’ll suddenly be surprised by already being in a different location in the next scene without any preliminary visuals to give us a location fix and this works really well as an on screen indicator of the level of paranoia and the drug/blood heightened sense of dislocation of the character. There are even a few of those shots where the camera is connected directly onto the actor so the front or back of her is static in the middle of everything else she’s moving around... it’s not done often these days but it’s a trick that never really gets old, it seems to me. It’s great stuff and, all the while, Steve Moore’s very different but still kick ass score punctuates the splintering visuals with something which lifts them even higher.

Also, in addition to all this (as if this wasn’t enough), there are some great new takes on the old school vampire legacy. Such as, when a vampire is staked in this... instead of crumbling to dust they just kind of melt away like ice cream (which I suspect is possibly how the practical special effect of this was achieved). Ditto, when a vampire is exposed to sunlight, it’s not a disintegration, it’s a full on blood splashed explosion of flesh. And some of the kills are really memorable too... in addition to seeing George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) come up very close and personal with Dezzy’s new vampiric blood lust... there’s also a scene where she literally pops a guy’s head back like he was a Pez dispenser, leaving the head attached by a hinge of flesh while she dives into the bloody stump of the neck for her next, urgent fix. It’s a memorable moment for sure.

And, yeah, that’s me done with Bliss (until I watch it again which, well, which will be when the Blu Ray arrives and I take an evening off from writing). This feels like one of the best vampire movies in the last ten years and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who has an affinity to films that portray obsession, horror, vampirism or, like this one, the thrilling intersection of all three. If you like that kind of stuff... go seek this one out now, it’s truly phenomenal.

Lake Of Dracula

The Stake’s Progress

Lake Of Dracula
aka Noroi no yakata: Chi o suu me
Japan 1971 Directed by Michio Yamamoto
TohoArrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

So here we have Lake Of Dracula, which is the second, tentative, entry into what is nowadays being called The Bloodthirsty Trilogy on the recent Arrow films release. Again, a bit of a misnomer because the films really don’t have a lot of blood in them, at least the first two films don’t (I’ve yet to see the third one but plan on getting to it before this review is published). So, barring the occasional blob of blood on the mouth of an undead creature of the night or dog, don’t expect too much in the way of goriness from this one until you get to the final sequence here which, even compared to the previous movie The Vampire Doll (reviewed here), is not really in any way gruesome, it has to be said.

This film stars Midori Fujita as Akiko, the films main female protagonist. We see her character first as a little girl in a pre-credits sequence which is referred to for most of the rest of the film as the recurring dream this character has in real life. After her dog Leo escapes her, she finds him in a ‘vampire house’ but we don’t find out what happened to her when she goes in here until the finale of the film, more or less. However, after the credits finish we find her some... I dunno... maybe twenty years later, living with her sister Natsuko, played by Sanae Emi. They live right by Lake Fujimi which, I’d like to say is the Lake Of Dracula but... there are some things which stop me from making that connection, it has to be said. For a start, it turns out that the lead vampire harkens from Akiko’s home town which is a coastal town and not by a lake. And though he has his coffin delivered to Akiko’s new locality decades later, the lake has no real tie in to the story in any way, it has to be said.

Another reason why I’m hesitant to call this place the Lake Of Dracula is because, like the previous movie, Dracula isn’t actually in it. He gets a mention at least once in the English subtitles but he’s nowhere to be seen. At least, though, the unnamed vampire character is actually a true vampire this time, unlike the character in The Vampire Doll, around which there seemed to be a fair bit of doubt. There’s also a bit of back story to his character which does, at least, suggest that he is the great grandson of Dracula so, you know, that’s something. Perhaps ‘Dracula’s Heir’ may have been a better title.

Anyway, after his coffin arrives and the locality suffers some sinister, vampiric goings on, it’s up to Akiko and her doctor fiance Takashi, played by Chôei Takahashi, to investigate the unexplained shenanigans and get to the truth of her connection to the vampire. And also find out why her sister is suddenly acting so strangely, too. Actually, the fact that she begins wearing a scarf half way through the movie after she starts acting as sinisterly as she was sisterly should be a dead giveaway, I’d have thought, that she is hiding fang marks. As would be the fact that her face seems to be several shades paler than usual after a certain point in the movie but, hey, what do I know about siblings?

The vampire himself looks very good and he is played here by Shin Kishida, who was apparently quite often cast for his sinister looks. Readers may recognise him for his excursions in other famous Japanese movies including roles in entries in the Zatoichi, Lone Wolf and Cub, Hanzo The Razor and Godzilla movies... not to mention the Zatoichi TV show. He doesn’t have a lot to do in this film, to be sure but he does look good and wears a long white scarf to offset his dark clothing, making him look the very height of vampire fashion in most of his scenes. Neil Tennant wears a very similar costume in the Pet Shop Boys movie It Couldn’t Happen Here (reviewed here) and I wonder if he caught this film back in the days when he used to go to Scala screenings.

The film looks as good as the last one, with the director slicing the screen up a lot into slats and placing his characters into situations where natural or often unnatural (this is a movie after all... everything is as controlled as you can get it) verticals and horizontals box them into their own area of the screen. He also does something a few times which gives me pause to think in that, sometimes, when all the characters have exited the screen, he will choose to hold the shot for a couple of seconds with nothing else going on. Not sure why he does that but it isn’t jarring in any way and doesn’t detract from the pacing too much.

Okay, so lets talk about the dog. I’m firmly convinced that the film-makers threw the ‘dream’ angle in there for a bit... before it’s confirmed as a true memory and not a dream... to stop the audience realising something is very wrong with Leo the dog. When he runs away at the start of the film he definitely seems to be a different breed of dog to what he eventually grows up to be. Which is pretty strange casting if you ask me. Also, the fact that this dog must be over 20 makes no sense as it’s still running about everywhere and getting into trouble... I would say the ‘grown up’ version of Leo is no older than 10 so... yeah, it’s a pretty tenuous version of doggy reality/continuity if you ask me. Maybe Leo always wanted to be some kind of Alsatian when he grew up. Who knows?

This does seem to be one of those films where, as brilliant as the technical stuff is, there’s always something really silly going on in the main narrative content to counter the remarkable achievements of the crew. For example, there’s a fight sequence in the car where Takashi has a fist fight with this film’s version of a kind of Renfield character... as in a character who has been vamped up to serve his new master. It goes on for a while and takes place completely in the car with a lot of juddery, handheld camera work... and it must have been a really tough thing to shoot. I have no idea how the cameraman was able to get in there with them and keep himself out of the way of the action... but it’s pretty good stuff.

However, as I said... lots of silly stuff too. For instance, when Akiko and Takashi are reading the notebooks of the completely non-vampiric but dead father of the film’s lead vampire... they get to a point where his narrative voice stops because our two heroes are discovered and cornered in the room they are reading this from by the vampire himself. However, the vampire carries on the narrative on the back story for them at the exact moment that they left off reading. Seriously, how does that happen? How would he know which part of the story the inner voice of these two characters had gotten too? Makes absolutely no sense.

So there you have it. All said and done though, I really enjoyed this one almost as much as the previous as it gives off that kind of Hammer meets Amicus meets AIP kind of vibe which the first one had in spades. As does the musical score. Lake Of Dracula is a minor vampire film but fans of the conventions of the genre should be happy enough with this, is my guess. Grab it while you can and fangs me later.

Dracula AD 1972

Rising Vamp

Dracula AD 1972
UK 1972 Directed by Alan Gibson
Screening at the Regent Street Cinema
with Q&A from Caroline Munro 5th March 2020

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Okay, so when I found out that my favourite of the Hammer Dracula movies was playing in London, I couldn’t resist seeing this thing on the big screen, finally. Especially since I found out that one of my all time favourite screen personalities, the lovely Caroline Munro, would be doing a Q&A session after the main feature.

Dracula AD 1972 was Caroline’s first feature for Hammer and although she’s not in it all that much... she comes to a definitively sticky end quite early in the movie... she was the first and, as far as I know, the last actress actually put under contract by the Hammer Studios, following this film up with the equally excellent Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter. Alas, she’s not in this much but she surely makes a memorable impression as one of a young group of hippie friends crashing parties and generally having a wild time in ‘swinging London’... an incarnation of the counterculture which had moved on somewhat by the time this movie was shot but, it sure seems like a nice place to be.

Another actress in this group of ‘wild young friends’ is Stephanie Beacham as Jessica, the granddaughter of the contemporary ancestor of Van Helsing... in this film he’s the ‘all new’ Lorimer Van Helsing but he’s still portrayed by Peter Cushing (in a dual role... I’ll get to that in a minute). The group also includes Marsha Hunt, Michael Kitchen and, as Dracula’s main assistant, Christopher Neame as the wonderfully monikered Johnny Alucard (I’ll leave you to ponder the permutations of that last name... I don’t think you’ll need to draw out a hilarious chart like Peter Cushing does in this movie). Neame also plays a dual role here as his own ancestor in the film’s opening sequence.

Of course, we also have the inimitable Christopher Lee back as the charismatic Count and, as far as I can see, this film also stars the only other actor besides Cushing and Lee to play a running character in more than one Hammer Dracula movie... Michael Coles as Inspector Murray, who would also turn up in the next movie in the sequence, The Satanic Rites Of Dracula. Jessica Van Helsing would also be back in the next movie but played by Joanna Lumley the second time around.

And it’s still my favourite of the Hammer Dracula movies, that’s for sure.

The film starts off a little differently than their usual fayre, with an opening reminiscent of the James Bond movies in that it shows an ‘end of mission’ action sequence as an opener. The pre-credits are all set in 1872 as we are witness to the final confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing, starting with a galloping stage coach, Dracula clinging to the sides as he attacks the latter. The coach crashes into splinters and Dracula finds himself ‘staked’ to one of the broken coach wheels but, not before he has put paid to Van Helsing. However, Christopher Neame’s pre-20th Century character gathers Dracula’s ring, some of his ashes and buries them in a grave next to his nemesis as the burial goes on. We then witness director Alan Gibson’s first flash of creative genius (in a film full of really nice stuff) where he pans up from the graveyard in the Victorian era, into the sky as we see a jumbo jet soaring above London, effectively segueing from one millennium to the next in the space of a few seconds in one shot... which is really cool. Then, more of Mike Vickers excellent and funky 'wah wah' score kicks in as the opening credits play out.

From then on, the film is one big romp of a fun movie set in early 1970s London... the kind of period and city I love to watch on film anyway because it reminds me of my early days as a child model in the city. It’s a bit of a chamber piece in that it’s not epic in scale but it works really well and there’s a lot of nice stuff. The director designs some wonderful frames and he’s one of those people who is not afraid to use just a quarter of the screen and leave the rest in darkness so he can focus you in... there’s a pretty cool shot of a car pulling into a garage/drive from within, for example, where the only area of the screen that isn’t black is the bottom right hand corner where we can see the car’s arrival.

Also, considering the phenomenally low budgets of these Hammer films, they used to look way better than their actual financial means should have allowed for... the production values are something else. One of the audience asked Caroline Munro after the film if the church was shot in a real church or if it was a set. Her initial reply of... “What do you think?” was followed up with the revelation that the interiors of the church were shot in a studio and... well, honestly, they had me fooled. It looks a lot like a real location to me.

Peter Cushing had recently lost his wife when he made this and there’s even a photo of her on Van Helsing’s desk in the film but, he turns out one of his usual, interesting performances for this and he comes across particularly well in his action scenes, which he doesn’t look like he is able to handle but does so admirably. Lee is his normal, solid self in a role which he had, by all accounts, had enough of.. he didn’t like the idea of Dracula being modernised, from what I understand... and Miss Munro indicated after the movie that his personal feelings about the role and the script were not even felt or realised on set by the other actors... which shows you what a professional he was.

Stephanie Beacham is pretty good as Van Helsing’s grand daughter but I don’t think she has the best or, at least, most credible lines in the movie, for sure. And, of course, Caroline Munroe, in the few scenes she has, is absolutely brilliant. I love her opening dance scenes where she looks like a floppy, bouncy miracle bundle of energy who could go all night. I wish her role could have been a little more expanded but I’m just grateful she got the part, which she explained came about because the producer used to ride the trains a lot and saw her in her famous Lamb’s Navy Rum girl campaign posters at the time (I used to love those when I was a toddler, the colours and poses on those posters were quite striking).

The film is a little problematic in terms of continuity in future films, especially with the death of the original Van Helsing set as 1872... but thats something I’m going to need to look into a little more when I get around to re-watching Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires at some point. But there’s honestly not much I could find at fault here, to be honest, except for maybe the silliness of the dapper Johnny Alucard (he has the best shirts) falling in the bath and accidentally turning the shower on when he grabs it to save himself... effectively killing himself because, in this version of the Dracula mythos, vampires can be killed by running water (never really understood that one myself).

Dracula AD 1972 is a fine, visually inventive entry in the series and is the main one I’ll always come back to. Especially interesting to historians as a time capsule of what the establishment who were making the picture perceived the ‘youth of today’ to be, rather than actually nailing that side of things.  I’m so glad I finally got to see this one on a big screen too... that’s another one crossed off my cinematic bucket list.

Le Viol Du Vampire (aka The Rape Of The Vampire)

Lady And The Vamp

Le Viol Du Vampire
(aka The Rape Of The Vampire)
France 1968 Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

There were already riots happening in Paris when Le Viol Du Vampire, Jean Rollin’s first feature length film, was released in pretty much the only cinema left showing anything in town. Like the critical reception of Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andelou, the film was met with taunts, jeers, death threats and a generally negative and incredibly violent reaction from the public. Rollin says that there was a riot in one of the screenings but whether this was due to the overall atmosphere in France at the time or because of the perceived incomprehensibility of this film is anyone’s guess. I suspect it’s a combination of the two, to be honest.

The film is the one I come back to the most, every decade or so, out of this amazing director’s oeuvre of astonishing, vampiric motion picture art and I suspect the audiences at the time, who were presumably being fed on an diet of imported British Hammer Horror films and their nearest equivalent, were just not ready for something as uncompromisingly surreal (to an extent) and, frankly, as badly acted as what they were shown.

It’s funny, no matter how many times I’ve watched this over the years on varying different prints on various different ‘this is the best one yet’ transfers of those prints, I’ve always thought the film as completely incomprehensible. However, I can’t think why now because, when I rewatched this recently for this review, the whole thing really made a lot of sense to me, to be honest.

The film is split into two parts comprising a short film about two guys and a girl wanting to cure four local women of the delusion that they are centuries old vampires. However, Rollin realised that this could be expanded into a feature and so he use the idea of a second chapter, like the various serials he adored, to shoot a another part with more or less the same cast later. When everyone in is dead in that first part, the second chapter (where most of these characters return from their dead status), which is much longer, picks up the story and introduces the striking features of Jacqueline Sieger as The Vampire Queen who is experimenting on bringing dead people back to life but, unbeknownst to her, her human surgeon who wants to marry one of her underlings is working on his own cure for vampirism.

The film is, I think, the only one of Rollin’s features (at least that I’ve seen) which was shot in black and white. He usually has some interesting colours in his movies but even in this, you can see how his eye for 'the perfect shot' is never lacking. This is a beautiful looking film full of sublime and surreal imagery (if not as surreal in plotting, as is often vocalised). Rollin employed no actual actors in this and, like it does in a lot of his other films... this really shows. Honestly, the acting in this is worse than you can possibly imagine but, the thing about Rollin is, it’s about the beauty of the imagery and the way those actors interact with each other and their environment that’s the reason for watching these. They really are like exquisitely composed paintings brought to life... the acting may be dire but, like some of the films of Dario Argento, it really can’t ruin the overall artistry on display here. This is one of my favourite Rollin films and for good reason.

Right from the start we encounter the rich and provocative imagery that Rollin is known for. A woman in a diaphanous white dress is standing against a tree while a bat sucks the blood from the top of her bosom. And Rollin starts as he means to go on with various interesting compositions showing, in this case, a heck of a lot of vertical shapes splitting off sections. So frames will be filled with an abundance of graveyard crosses, candlesticks and a load of skittles on the grass. Even the locations he films are full of uprights, like the groynes of the beach which was to feature in many of his future movies... or the poles and trees along the road which threaten to split up the perspective of the shot as cars and people roam from one rectangular section to another.

And, of course there’s the vampire queen herself and that wonderful shot of her licking the blood off the big curved knife she has just used on someone, like a cat with cream. For some reason, the ladies in these pictures never seem to wear many clothes and in this one, there’s always a breast or two popping loose from the thinly fastened or draped veils they wear. It seems impractical some of the time, such as when the vampire queen rides around the countryside with her breasts on show from the back of an open top car but it looks fantastic and so I think it’s fair to say that Rollin is always more than happy to abandon the practical elements of a tale in favour of the visual poetry of a shot.

Another thing he does... and I’ve seen this done in a few Japanese things too over the years, as a way of highlighting an important emotional beat of a story, is this. He will cut to the same kind of action in a different location or situation, sometimes three or four at once, to give weight to their place in the scheme of things. So when a vampire girl knocks over a skittle on some grass in long shot, we cut to a close up of the skittle being knocked over on the beach. Or when a vampire girl is flogged and subjected to sunlight (which seems to not make a jot of a difference to some of the vampires in the film), we see her undergoing things simultaneously as if they are happening all at once, which, to be fair given the timescale being explored, they probably are. These aren’t montages to shorthand a specific passing time shift like you see in most American movies... these are shifting in space and highlighting a less practical intertextuality, where moments of cinematic time are given more weight through the exploration of a different way of looking at things simultaneous to actual events. I’ve seen this happen in a few anime or anime inspired films over the last couple of decades.

One thing that I only twigged this time around, though, is that one of the actors in the first section... and I’ve no idea which as he’s just listed as one of the villagers... is played by Philippe Druillet. Druillet, of course, is a key French comic book and graphic novel artist and writer (and inker and colourer) whose work I used to occasionally catch in the Heavy Metal comic magazine in the late 1970s and early 1980s (which was the American edition of Métal Hurlant). So that’s new to me and I wonder, since Rollin would often take to writing novels and comic books when he couldn’t get his films produced, if they were good friends and colleagues in those kinds of professions too.

Not much else to say on this one for me, I think. Le Viol Du Vampire is an absolutely brilliant movie and it just gets better and, sadly, more comprehensible the more I watch it. The sometimes cool and sometimes grating jazz atonalism aesthetic of the soundtrack by  Yvon Géraud and François Tusques sometimes helps and sometimes almost hinders the atmosphere that Rollin is trying for but, like the acting, it doesn’t really manage to sabotage the general aesthetic too much. Despite this film not being in colour, this movie is an excellent jumping on point for the cinema of Jean Rollin as it demonstrates quite clearly the way he manages to mix some horrendously awful, performances from the actors with some truly breathtaking, gorgeously surreal and sometimes erotic imagery on screen. About the only key thing missing in this one is his obsession with having twin vampire girls as the main protagonists but... that would come fairly soon. If you’re looking for a typical Rollin film to see, if you are able to juggle the negative and tremendously positive factors of his creations, then this is the one to go for. I must return to it quicker next time.

Dracula Was A Woman

Bath Awry

Dracula Was A Woman - In Search Of The Blood Countess Of Transylvania
by Raymond T. McNally
Book Club Associates (No obvious ISBN)

Dracula Was A Woman - In Search Of The Blood Countess Of Transylvania is one of the earlier books, published in 1983, about the famous Countess known as Elisabeth Bathóry (or Báthory Erzsébet, as it is in Hungarian). And, a fair amount of research has gone into it so, for that reason alone, the volume is worth some consideration. This one was a Twitter recommendation I saw flying by in my timeline and, after procuring a very cheap, second hand hardback copy from Amazon, I was all set to read about a pretty legendary... in terms of being infamous... person who has been exploited as a character in many a movie over the last six or so decades (and probably in a lot of other media too, such as literature) and has become, of late, something of a pop culture phenomenon.

Now there’s good and bad about this book and, mostly, I’d have to say that this one gets an A for effort but a C minus in terms of being a focussed, coherent and ‘on topic’ read.

Now, I’ve not read any of Mr. McNally’s books before but the four books he both wrote and co-wrote before this one have all been about Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the inspirations behind it so... this is definitely the kind of thing he's a bit of a specialist on. And, to be fair, the first chapter is set out in diary fashion and captures the imagination a little because, in this way of writing and only for that opening after his introduction to the book, he is deliberately echoing the diary style narrative of the content of Stoker’s novel itself. So we witness the author and his wife have a bit of a ‘research holiday’ in Munich, Vienna and Bratislava and find that ‘Transylvania’ certainly exists in these parts as a place because, as he explains, it’s an expression that comes from the latin for “the land beyond the forest’. Which is quite interesting and not something I knew before reading this so, while I was a little disappointed in certain sections of the tome, I was at least learning things as I went so you really can’t judge a book too harshly if you’re being educated on the journey from cover to cover.

After McNally finishes his research tour, in which he makes friends with various people ‘in the know’ in the relevant countries, he finds himself in possession of a fair amount of knowledge gleaned from ‘new documentation’ that has been found in order to aid his trip. And when I say new documentation, I mean newly discovered documentation, as various people have dusted away the cobwebs and presumably opened boxes and drawers they’d never bothered to open before.

This all flows very nicely for the author to build up a picture of Bathóry over the next few chapters and help give at least a little... well not so much ‘evidence’ but an unearthing of the possibility that Stoker took the myths (not facts, as it turns out) about the lady in question and used them in Dracula. And by this we are, of course, talking about Bathóry’s spoken legacy that she bathed in the blood of freshly killed virgins in order to keep herself young and healthy. Indeed, there is a passage in Stoker’s novel where the grey old man who is Stoker’s original version of the famous Count, becomes visibly younger after drinking the fresh blood of one of his victims. So, yeah, I’m sure the idea for this may well have kickstarted the brain of Stoker and it’s possible Elisabeth Bathóry was an influence on his creation. Or... not, we just don’t really know. Or at least, we didn’t back when this book was written. It may be that one of the other volumes written about the subject in the intervening decades were able to throw light via even more newly discovered documentation but, since I’ve not read any of them, I can’t offer up any kind of confirmation of that.

Certainly here, apart from one tale about Bathóry accidentally cleaning some blood off her cheek and finding the tissue under where the blood splashed had become somewhat rejuvenated, there’s no evidence to support the famous blood bathing claims which have arisen in numerous films based on the legends such as, for example, Hammer’s Countess Dracula (reviewed by me here back in the early days of this blog). However, as McNally suggests, there is no real evidence to support the claim that this was part of the Countess’ practices.

What is pretty clear though, from the more historical and very dry first half of the book, is that Bathóry and her accomplices tortured and killed possibly over 650 young women and that a trial was held in an effort to punish these people not because the powers that be were all that bothered about somebody killing the peasants in fairly harsh and brutal ways... but because they wanted to get hold of the land and so on that the Countess owned (if I’ve been reading this account correctly).

So far so good but, then we have the second half of the book where the writer seems to somehow use the excuse of all his further, elliptical research... perhaps because he’d be in trouble with his wife if he wasn't looking at all this stuff in order to write a book, I somehow suspect... to write about all manner of things which really do seem to be tangentially related to the subject at hand.

Some of it, such as random accounts of the various rituals and practices of drinking blood throughout history and the demonisation of women due to various cultures rejecting the concept of menstruation, seems somewhat relevant. As does, at a stretch, the stuff about vampires. However, when he starts going into werewolfery and justifies this examination of lycanthropy (which actually doesn’t mean quite what a lot of people think it means, it seems to me) just because Bathóry tended to rend the flesh of many of her victims with her teeth... well, the whole thing loses a fair bit of credibility for me.

So yeah, as interesting as it is to learn about things like the female undead Eskimos devouring their victims with their vaginas and various blood deficiencies leading to ‘living vampires’ in real life, so to speak... well, the stuff all comes seemingly randomly with no real focus, it seemed to me... let alone being relevant to the title and subject of the book a lot of the time. What finally wrecked this book for me, though, was when the author tried to talk about films at various points...

As far as I know, for example, 2001 - A Space Odyssey is not based on Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. I mean, sure, the movie has a piece of music in it based on that but... you know... that’s just the music. Also, there certainly wasn’t two seasons of Kolchack - The Night Stalker ever made... sadly (and this was written decades before the stillborn attempt at a remake of that property too). And what the hell have films like Halloween, The Haunting or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got to do with Elisabeth Bathóry? The straw that broke the camel’s back for me with this book, though was when he was talking about my favourite werewolf movie, Werewolf Of London and said that a werewolf played by Warner Hand bites Henry Hull’s character at the start of the movie. Um... nope... that would be the great Charlie Chan actor himself, Warner Oland, in this role. Honestly, how can you get your facts so wrong. It’s like he was writing it in long hand and the person typing it up couldn’t read Oland properly and put Hand instead. Seriously?

And that for me, alas, is where the book unravels a little bit for me because... look, I know the man is a historian and not touting himself as an expert on film but these are basic mistakes and incorrect assertions and the worrying thing for someone like me who is a complete novice on the subject of Bathóry is... if he gets really obvious stuff like  this wrong, then who’s to say he’s not also making some terribly obvious mistakes in all the other stuff he’s purporting to be ‘fact’ here?

Now, I don’t really like conclusions in academic(ish) works but I was kinda looking forward to one here because I was really rooting for the author to somehow tie all these marvellously ‘off point’, randomly appearing anecdotes together and say ... "Aha! You thought this was irrelevant but here’s why it isn’t!" Alas, although there is a conclusion section to the book, it doesn’t seem to shed anymore light on the subject and so I have to say that I can’t really recommend this book to many people, although to be sure it does have some interesting content and it’s certainly whet my appetite to find out some more about the subject in more modern tomes at some point... especially since Bathóry’s such a well referenced, somewhat inspirational (if you know what I mean) figure in the arts these days. Following the conclusion there are a couple of short documents translated into English regarding the findings of the original trial and the very grim punishments put to the lady’s accomplices which is kinda interesting but isn’t enough really, to my mind, to save Dracula Was A Woman. However, applause to the writer for at least attempting this book when, frankly, not many people of the time were writing too much about it, it seems to me (despite film culture having already gone into overdrive on this particular person by a good two or three decades before this was written). So, enter the lady’s chamber if you will but, in terms of actual factual accuracy of the subject matter... enter at your own risk.

Blood Of My Blood (Sangue Del Mio Sangue)

Vamp Light

Blood Of My Blood (Sangue Del Mio Sangue)
2015 Italy/France/Switzerland
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Seen at the London Film Festival October 9th 2015.

Warning: Light spoilers.

Marco Bellocchio’s new film, Blood Of My Blood, is one of the three films I picked out to see at the London Film Festival this year because the premise sounded intriguing. It also sounded very similar, in some respects, to a movie called The Witches’ Sabbath which has been languishing in my ‘to watch’ pile of DVDs for almost a year now. Which, bizarrely, I found out on the IMDB the day after I watched Blood Of My Blood, is also by this same director... a man whose work I have not seen before. Must be something in my subconscious picked this one out of this year’s programme to apply for the tickets, I reckon.

This movie is interesting in that it’s a film of two definitive halves, both set in the small town of Bobbio but in two different time periods. One section set historically at a time where suspected witches were being tortured for confessions by various monks in their monasteries and then flipping over to the present day halfway through the movie. The main lead actor, Pier Giorgio Bellocchio who plays Federico, is also the producer and son of the director and, like a few people in this movie, he has a dual role playing a character and then, later, a different person in contemporary times... presumably an ancestor of the one he played in the first part.

The plot involves a beautiful actress called Lidiya Liberman, in her debut role, playing Benedetta, a woman who the monks need to confess to consorting with Satan to allow Federico’s twin brother to be buried properly, rather than as a suicide which goes against God. In order for that to happen, they have to prove that he was not in sound mind and committing the action of his own free will and so... they need to torture a confession out of Benedetta.

The first half of the movie is Federico going from hatred to love of Benedetta as she undergoes fairly common witchcraft style trials such as the “if she floats she’s guilty” variety and, surprisingly, passing them all until she gets to a point where a kind of compromise is reached and she is, rather than burnt, walled alive into a tiny cubicle.

When we jump to the present day, we follow the upset caused by a Russian businessman who wants to buy the building in which Benedetta was walled up in and the current owner, an old vampire from a secret society of vampires, who wants to block this from happening but isn’t really in a position to. There are echoes from the past as he goes about his business and spies a new waitress in town who is the dead spit of Benedetta. Is she an ancestor? Well probably not as a nice revelation scene about her nature takes place in flashback towards the end of the movie... but I won’t spoil that moment for you here.

There are also some nice comedy moments, during the first half especially, where Federico introduces the two women he is staying with while he is visiting the monks, to the fanning of their sexual curiosity and awakening of their desires... which Federico is able to kindle and satisfy in one hit. He does tend to put it about a bit in his earlier incarnation, it has to be said.

Now there’s an interesting thing about the camerawork on this one, I noticed. Specifically, a lot of the shots in the first half of the film seem to be pitched from a point of view either slightly below or slightly above a ‘square on’ view. Not everything in the first half of the movie is shot like this but a lot of it seemed to be and that means that you are always either looking slightly down or slightly up at the characters as they come into view. This is bolstered by the odd extreme shot taken from either a greater height, such as the top of a staircase looking down at a door (something which is used a few times in the first part of the movie and again in the contemporary section of the film) or a shot from well below the view of the particular subject matter of a sequence. The latter is best demonstrated in a really interesting view point as when Benedetta is being thrown into a river loaded down with chains... the camera views her atop a cliff from under the water as a blur, later returning to this point of view as her body drops and breaks the surface of the water. There are definitely some nice things being done with the cinematography on this one.

The musical score by Carlo Crivelli is mostly appropriate and tasteful (asides from a few overtly comically scored moments, perhaps) but at a few points a couple of songs by ‘Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ are used and one of them, in the same sequence as the trial by water I described earlier, starting up when Benedetta is weighted down at the bottom of the lake, is Self-fulfilling Prophecy. Now I don’t know why the director and producers chose this but it popped me straight out of the movie for two reasons... other than for being a truly beautiful and haunting piece of music in its own right (which I guess means I’ve maybe answered my own question as to why it was chosen, to some respect). One reason is because it’s almost a more modern sound and doesn’t feel contemporary to the period it’s supporting. Now this is not a new thing and is, actually, a very common practice of musical anachronism found in more films than you might expect. To be fair, it’s not being used as ‘source music’... but I just find that when songs with vocalised lyrics are used that it tends to ‘break the spell’ of the illusion of the movie much more than if it was a purely instrumental piece. This is not what I would expect from the period in which this portion of the film is set.

Secondly, it’s already a piece of music I associate with both cinema and vampirism, being as it’s used to very good effect on the 2010 German vampire movie We Are The Night, reviewed here. So I don’t know if this was chosen to maybe evoke the idea of vampirism into the subtext of the movie before the overt introduction of one in the second part of the story but, much as I love this particular piece of music, I suspect this would have been much better off serving as purely a temp track in the rough cut for a new piece of score rather than being used outright in the movie. Of course, for people who are unfamiliar with We Are The Night or, indeed, the music group in question, then this may not have the same effect on certain members of the audience. I’m not in a position to be able to guess at that one.

All in all, Blood Of My Blood is a pretty good movie. It doesn’t spoon feed the audience and it leaves little puzzles and mysteries of the characters to play out in the mind after the movie is done. For me, for instance, a scene involving the throwing of a second cloister key onto the river bed may be concealing more interesting truths about the two characters than my brain was divulging to me on this first viewing. This is always a good thing but I’m not sure, to be honest, if this is a film I’d want to watch again. It is, however, a bit of a rare gem and the performances of the actors and the great, almost larger than life characters they conjure up here, are quite watchable and interesting. Most people should have a fairly good time with this movie, I think. Not exactly unmissable but certainly a rewarding film if you have the time and if, indeed, it gets any kind of release in this country at some point.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Prowl Play

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
2014  USA
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour
UK cinema release print.

I’ve been desperately waiting for this movie to come out over here in England for a while now, after it got such good word of mouth on the festival circuit. It’s been dubbed as the first Iranian vampire movie and, while I think the director might be Iranian and it’s certainly set in Iran... it was filmed in California. So I think that claim might need to be taken with a pinch of salt, depending on what your criteria are for the funding or location of a film and how much a part that plays in its nationality. It’s also been called a “vampire Western” but... no.

Not even close.

What it is, in fact, is a very good independent vampire movie which gets a lot of things right, eschewing the general over-explanatory route of story telling, often found in a lot of modern Hollywood and English movies and, instead, bringing a real sense of emotion and heart to the piece. I could go directly to the cliché of saying it’s quite a quirky film but, when you get what is essentially a black and white foreign movie of any type these days, then quirky probably covers a myriad of terminological sins that I’d rather avoid but... I suspect you’ll get that word applied a lot to it in reviews of this one, as a general catch all.

When I had to go into Central London to see this film because the local multiplexes wouldn’t pick it up, I was appalled that I was charged £14 for a cinema ticket now in this country’s ‘bright capital’... after all, I will probably be able to pick up a Blu Ray of the film for far less after a month or so of its release... but at least I can say that, in the case of this particular cinematic experience, the money was well spent.

The film is shot in a very crisp greyscale and tells the story of Arash, played by Arash Marandi, who lives with his junkie of a father and has to live with the fact that his dad owes the local and thuggishly villainous pimp lots of money, in a place referred to only as Bad City. But then there’s the title character too... the girl who walks home alone at night... played by the quite delightful Sheila Vand (with the director herself standing in for her in long shots on a skateboard). This lady who has no name is, in fact, a vampire and, though a lot of the scenes take place at night, where she wanders around and somehow manages to stay on the periphery of everybody’s consciousness, she doesn’t necessarily follow all the normal vampire rules that movies have laid down as law over the years. She’s not allergic to sunlight, she casts a reflection in mirrors and she has no fear of running water, for example. But she does have a great set of retractable fangs which can do a lot of damage, drinks blood and has a beautiful and commanding screen presence, even though she’s waif-like and seems to be a remote and lonely soul at heart. In terms of her visual look she definitely, due to her hair style and the striped top she has a penchant for wearing, reminded me a lot of Elina Löwensohn’s character in Hal Hartley’s Simple Men and one wonders if the director is a fan of Mr. Hartley’s excellent work.

The first thing that struck me about the film, and which continued to entrance me as I watched, was the director’s fixation of manipulating large visual blocks within a frame, often split up with a vertical line. She will find a way of splitting the frame up into, say, two sections, taking up either half the frame each or a two thirds to one third mix of space, and then have all the action of the shot predominantly taking place in one of those areas... whether there is a definite visual, vertical indicator or not. There are actually, when you start watching out for it, very few sequences (there are a couple, I think) where this visual modus operandi has not been employed, even when the camera is tracking somebody who is, for example, turning the corner of a street... the camera will more often than not follow with them so they are framed within roughly the same spot in the moving shot. Which is very good practice, actually, because it allows the director to do the thing which was good and common practice within movie making when widescreen formats were first popularly used back in the 1950s, which is to ensure the eye is not jumping from one place to another when the shot cuts to a reverse shot of the same scene or makes a transition to another. In fact, there is quite a beautiful transition from two totally different scenes which relies on the use of a splitting, vertical plane within the first few minutes of the movie. It makes good sense when using a 2.35:1 or similar aspect ratio, as this film does, to employ this kind of very controlled frame design within your scenes because it means you are less likely to pop your audience out of the action or give them an unintentional, visual jolt when you cut from moment to moment. And the flip side of that, of course, is that if you do want to give the audience a bit of a shock or a challenging sting, then you can just use the familiarity of the visual style as something to suddenly drop for a moment and get the desired kick out of it. It seems to be one of the arts of composing shots for a widescreen set up that seems to have either gone out of fashion or has been forgotten in recent years so... I’m glad that someone is still making use of this extremely controlled and ultimately beautiful technique of making films.

The other standout thing about this film is the writing of ‘the girl’ and the way that Sheila Vand plays her. I said she was waif-like and she also seems lonely and vulnerable at times... I imagine that she wanders the streets at night on the prowl with food being only partially her reason for doing this... I think she just wants to interact with people because she has almost forgotten what it’s like to have somebody else there for her. As such, the film develops with an implied, developing romance between her and Arash, even though she has done something terrible to Arash without either of them at first realising it... and also something near the start of the movie which has helped Arash turn his life around a little... so it’s interesting. There’s a really fantastic scene where Arash gives her some earrings and she doesn’t have pierced ears... so she gets Arash to pierce them on the spot for her and that... but I don’t want to give away the whole of a scene, which is a charming turning point for the title character. Enough to say that ‘the girl’ is truly adorable.

It would be easy to say that she is an avenging crusader, in that you get the feeling she is protecting people from bad antagonists at times, even with the fall out from the last person she kills on screen, because she does seem to relish inflicting her special brand of justice and, of course, she needs to eat. There’s a brilliant scene where she scares a little boy half to death on purpose, presumably to bring him in line and ensure he grows up to be a good person, but there’s also the fact that she seems to enjoy it a little and she is truly fearsome when she needs to be. I think one of the things I like about this film, though, is its deliberate refusal to paint everything in black and white tones worthy of the film’s greyscale palette... the director makes no real judgement on the people who inhabit the screen and, though they are very much ‘broad stroke’ characters, there is a certain complexity to all their emotional or psychological make up which leaves you, as an audience, in the position of working out if any given character is ultimately a good person or a bad person... and whether their past actions are something they need to be answerable for now. As the title character says to Arash at one point... “I’ve done bad things.”

This is a philosophy which I almost always applaud a writer or director for and, in the case of Ana Lily Amirpour, she’s both. And it helps that the title character is not without humour either... the way she stalks some people using stereotypical ninja stealth skills that go hand in hand with the legacy of vampirism in cinema is present but there’s also a magical scene where, a little way in, you realise she’s doing her own version of the famous Groucho/Harpo mirror sketch in Duck Soup... and that definitely got a little chuckle from me. And, again, I applaud the writer/director for a magical little scene which will live on in my memory through the years.

Ultimately, I have to say that A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is easily one of the best films I’ve seen all year. It’s wonderfully shot and lit, beautifully written, more than competently acted (and I’m totally in love with the central character), well designed and, concerning what I said about the composition of the majority of the shots in the movie, easy on the eye when it comes down to the editing. A truly charming film which will stay with me for a long while after the memories of other movies released in cinemas this year will have dimmed and turned to dust. A great success for Ana Lily Amirpour, who has instantly marked herself out as someone to definitely keep an eye on. Do yourself a favour and try and catch this one before the screen space gets devoured by the onslaught of dinosaur and time travelling robot movies in the not so distant future. One of the best films of the year.

'Salem's Lot

Barlow Sugar

'Salem's Lot
1979 USA
Directed by Tobe Hooper
Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

There’s an image which has stuck in my memory over the years but it rarely haunts my dreams the way it did as a child. A big double window made of various panes, looking out into the night through this window and the fog rolls in. Out of the fog, a small boy floats towards the window, his eyes black rimmed and glowing. He starts to tap/scratch on the window... he needs entrance and, of course, everybody knows a vampire has to be invited in.

This scene is something I saw in either 1979 or 1981, if you believe the UK TV release date from the IMDB (which I don’t as it happens, pretty sure it aired both in 1979 and 1981 over here). It’s one of many images which made a distinct impression in my mind when I was just 11 years old (or 13 depending on whether you believe etc), as I watched, over two consecutive nights I think it was, the two episode mini series ‘Salem’s Lot. I already liked (and had bad dreams from) various horror movies as a growing lad (most notably with the series of Quatermass remakes by Hammer) and I was doubly curious because it also had David Soul in it, who had just finished his very successful four year run as one half of what the BBC television announcer would weekly proclaim as, “those rough, tough but likable cops” Starsky and Hutch. Soul played Ken Hutchinson, the weedy one, but it was still kind of interesting to see how he would be acting in something else.

What can I say? Not only is he pretty brilliant in this (and I don’t even want to think about the TV mini-series remake of Casablanca he was in where he played Bogart’s role, thanks very much) but ‘Salem’s Lot is actually a quite brave and interesting piece of US horror television, following in the footsteps, perhaps, of the two extremely successful TV movies The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler and the one season TV show they spawned, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. 

It’s been a long while. 34 years (or 32, depending on, yeah you know that bit already) and I have to say, it’s really stood the test of time. I do think that this is the stand-out career highlight for director Tobe Hooper, director of the original version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, allegedly, pseudo-director of... erm... Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist. There are things that people of a younger generation might find hard going about this one these days... it had a pace all it’s own and most kiddies these days might not be able to sit still for that... but for people of my generation who were terrified and in love with the show, as I was, well it really isn’t all that dated compared to the original broadcast years ago.

The first episode starts off with a scene which takes place two years after the main narrative of the show and we meet David Soul as Ben and Lance Kerwin as Mark, still running from the events you are about to watch. A little bit of business with a vial of Holy Water which glows blue and then we’re into the jigsaw-like typography of the main credits, as composer Harry Sukman’s unbelievable score quotes the Dies Irae for a little bit before propelling us at high speed through a main title piece which is so startling and memorable that I’m surprised it hasn’t been released as a soundtrack before now. It was, in fact, released as a limited edition, 2 disc CD soundtrack a mere two weeks ago and I expect it will sell out soon (mine arrived a couple of days ago and it's been well played already) but the score is astounding in its moody atmosphere and that title music, I suspect, may have even been inspiration for Danny Elfman’s opening titles for Beeteljuice (and may also have been “inspired” itself by Bernard Herrmann’s Skeleton Duel music from The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad). That’s just my own flight of fancy speculation, of course... but I do believe it. 

Then we get in to the main story as writer Ben returns to his home town of ‘Salem’s Lot in Maine (where the writer of the original novel, Stephen King, sets most of his books and, indeed, lives), once known as Jerusalem’s Lot but shortened over the centuries. He comes to write the story of a house that terrified him as a child. A house where... bad things happen and, by a strange coincidence, where bad things are happening again. And this is where King pays tribute to (or just plain steals and splices in) the original Bram Stoker version of Dracula. With James Mason’s Mr. Straker acting as a Renfield substitute to “Mr. Barlow”, who is a vampire modelled after the Max Schreck performed creature in F. W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror (hmmm... Nosferatu... sure I’ve heard that name before somewhere). The local estate agent has secured Mr. Straker and Mr. Barlow a nice antiques shop and, of course, the house that Ben has returned to write about.

And things get predictable but comfortable from this point, as Ben and his friends try to find out what is going on while the vampire slowly starts pulling the town apart. It’s not, in any way, rushed... but it still feels pacey at some points. I believe it was also very influential (I can think of at least one moment in John Carpenter’s The Fog which was done here first, although it's more likely that the specific scene I'm thinking of was first seen by Carpenter in the movie version of The Trollenberg Terror aka The Crawling Eye) and it firmly supports the foundations of the vampire myth in the 20th century while still having a certain amount of fun with it.

It also has some really nice shock and scare moments which were very well documented and talked through over the course of the next few days after its original airing in various school playgrounds around the country. The moment, for example, when a young boy is driven back from the wind, walks towards camera and then a black silhouette pops up from the bottom of the screen in front of him which is guaranteed to make most viewers who are engrossed in this jump out of their skin. Especially when it’s accompanied by a particularly close relative of the 1950s, B-movie monster, musical stinger, courtesy of Mr. Sukman’s thrill ride of a score. A similarly startling but, at this point expected, sit-up-in-the-coffin-and-take-a-bite moment also sticks in the memory. It’s all really great stuff and filled with carefully timed moments such as this, coupled with great acting from the entire cast, but especially all those I’ve mentioned so far and with a big shout out to young Bonnie Bedelia (known more for her role as Bruce Willis’ wife in the first two Die Hard movies) and the always watchable legend who is, one of the greatest overlooked actors in the history of the cinema... Elisha Cook Jr.

There is one irritating thing, though. It’s a glaring continuity error with a set of packing instructions which are stuck to the front of the crate which holds the coffin and body of Mr. Barlow. They seem to appear and reappear at will. You can forget about matching shots in this sequence of the show... but it is fun to play “spot the packing instructions” I have to admit.

Now, something which I would like help with from the memory of the NUTS4R2 reader collective is this. The character Mark has a penchant for horror pop culture. Various model kits and posters/stills of the iconic Universal monsters fill his disproportionately large bedroom (how do characters get that kind of money in the jobs they are in). In the story he is seen fixing part of the old Auroura model kit of the Frankenstein monster. Now I remember a scene where, once it was fixed, he pressed a button on the model several times and its eyes lit up and it made a buzzing sound. It doesn’t, however, seem to appear on this version of the show. Did I remember this right or have I remembered a scene from another movie or TV show from around the same time and grafted it onto my memory of ‘Salem’s Lot as the decades take their toll on my tired brain. I’d be really grateful if somebody could leave a comment or get in touch through twitter and put my mind at rest on that one.

And so that’s about it for this write up. I loved this as a kid and I still do now. This and Christine were the first two Stephen King books I read in my early teens (I read Christine first). I remember when I read ‘Salem’s Lot that the book followed it a good deal but then branched away and did its own thing... that is to say, the TV show changed it around and the writer, director and producers made some decisions about how best things would play out on popular TV is my guess. But it’s a pretty entertaining horror show and very much talked about by people, especially children, at the time. Definitely one to grab hold of and have a look if you’ve not seen it before and are in love with the horror genre. I understand there has been both a sequel and a remake to this in the ensuing years, but I haven’t seen either of those yet. I plan on fixing that sometime soon but, in the meantime, I will say that I can’t imagine any remake or alternate adaptation of this which could be anywhere near as engaging and entertaining as the original... nor have such a kick-ass score as this one. Definitely watch this 1979 version if you’ve got the time.

Dracula (Horror Of Dracula)

Fangs Of Fury

Dracula (Horror Of Dracula)
1958 UK
Directed by Terence Fisher
20th Century Fox Blu Ray B

Warning: Spoilers may bite you in the neck...

Right. Before I get into this review, I want to state up front that this is not one of my all time favourite Dracula adaptations... although it would certainly be in my top ten (and possibly even make my top twenty vampire movies). My all time favourites would be the unauthorised 1922 version of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (aka Nosferatu), the 1931 Todd Browning version of Dracula and the simultaneously shot 1931 Spanish version of Dracula which utilised the same sets but different actors and with some more interesting artistic flourishes than the Browning version (although you can’t beat putting Dwight Fry in a movie, no matter how good your direction is).

I do, however, have a soft spot for some of the Hammer films. The first Hammer movie I saw was when I was about 6 years old in 1974. I remember going around to my uncle’s house to see a television screening of Taste The Blood Of Dracula. This was a very important moment in my infant life because a) it was another Dracula movie I hadn’t already seen and b) my uncle had a colour television set. Colour! This was still a novelty for many people in the UK in the early seventies.

I remember liking Taste The Blood Of Dracula so much that, one year later, I started collecting the Shock Theatre bubble gum cards, along with all the other infant school kids, with their depictions of, often quite nasty and blood curdling, photographs from various Hammer Frankenstein and Dracula movies. I remember I never got to finish putting more than just over half of the set together because all the kids parents got wind of them and they were soon banned at my school. Trying to complete my set now, with an exorbitant amount of money being asked for just single cards, would probably be out of my price range, to be honest.

In the ensuing years, I watched the various Hammer Dracula movies as they came on television but I can’t quite remember when I saw this first one. I certainly remember going to a 2007 screening of Dracula at the National Film Theatre with my friend @cultofthecinema and being somewhat disappointed and, frankly, infuriatingly alarmed at the liberties that were taken with the story in this version... although I seem to have calmed down a bit about that now. Most movie adaptations are versions of the stage story of Dracula and, even when they’re not, most movie companies make absolutely horrendous changes to the tale (see my review of Dario Argento’s new version here for another take).

I was expecting to be a little disappointed on this subsequent viewing again, to be honest, but I wanted to see it because the new 2012 restoration includes shots taken from the Japanese release print. Long story, but there were usually a few different release prints of the Hammer films for different global regions (so I’ve always been told and this film seems to prove that) and the Japanese version would usually be slightly longer with more gore, to cater for the tastes of that market. So I was interested in seeing those few seconds of footage and, to be honest, to also see the new documentaries on this edition (of which, at time of writing, I’ve only been able to see the first featurette).

The added unexpected outcome of this viewing, however, turns out to be that it seems to have grown on me and the Hammer version of Dracula is a much better movie than I’ve previously given it credit for. I even like one of the things which critics have faulted it for but i’ll get to that a little later.

So... okay, as a straight adaptation of Bram Stoker’s original novel, the Hammer version, if you’ll pardon the pun... sucks. But, as a tight script which distills the essence of Stokers novel, cutting away huge chunks but also making some bold and sometimes quite canny changes to the story line in deference to both budget and timescales, it really isn’t a bad piece of economic writing and Terence Fisher shoots the whole thing with a certain panache, it has to be said.

One of the main things it’s got going for it is that the rhythm changes often take you by surprise and are quite emotionally manipulative. Now if I was being less kind or seeing it for the first time in a long time (and this may have been my problem with when I saw the BFI print back in 2007) then I might be overly critical for the film having what could be described as an uneven tone. But on this viewing I realised that those tonal shifts from sedate, long, tranquil stretches to sudden, intense moments of fury... notably in the scenes where Dracula catches his “bride” with Johnathan Harker and, again, with his final fight with Van Helsing... were actually quite deftly handled. Of course, you’ve got a wealth of good actors selling you the moments through their performance and able to keep up with those sudden emotional switches without having to pause for breath, but the way the shots are edited together, the whole tempo of those sudden rises to match Christopher Lee’s sudden bouts of animal fury or Peter Cushing’s sudden bursts into action is all marvellously well done.

Naturally, the music really helps and James Bernard’s score, which possibly sounds a little like his scores to the first two Quatermass movies in certain places (although that might just be me responding to his personal style of composition) supports this movie quite assuredly, matching the sudden bursts of ferocity with great cries of what I can only describe as musical chaos whenever the film suddenly shifts gears. I’m amazed the first of Bernard’s Dracula scores has never, at time of writing, been released on CD.

There are, as I said, a lot of big changes to the story. The swapping of Mina and Lucy and their relationship to Jonathan Harker, for example, will probably catch many people off guard. The cutting of Dr. Seward to an extremely minor role and the absence of his sanitarium and, indeed, of the Renfield character, might equally throw some people (I know it did me, back in 2007). Not to mention the location shift (due to budgetary constraints).

One of the more interesting changes is the fact that, rather than appearing at Dracula’s castle as an estate agent, Jonathan Harker is, in fact, Van Helsing’s fellow vampire hunter, and he is there to end Dracula’s life right from the start of the movie... under the guise of a librarian to help catalogue Dracula’s books. This also, of course, means you can call the Van Helsing character into the storyline fairly easily and rationally without having to jump through narrative hoops... you can cut a few corners in the story is what I’m saying here.

All of this makes a pretty good Hammer film, marred perhaps by the fact that the same set seems to keep being re-used and dressed to double for multiple locations. Something I picked up on back in 2007 and which further added to my disappointment at that particular screening. Reworking the sets is a skill still practiced to this day, of course (just go ask Ridley Scott), but I wish it hadn’t had to have been so obvious in this movie.

Still, I did enjoy this rescreening for myself and I even found Michael Gough’s performance, which is often attacked, to be quite enjoyable too. He has a certain chemistry in the role with Cushing, I feel, and I would like to see if they ever worked together again. It certainly doesn’t mar the experience for me... certainly not as much as the poor, overworked sets... colourful and brilliant as they are, shot from curious angles and lovingly plastered across the screen in some, nevertheless, beautiful compositions.

Colour me surprised but I certainly appreciated this screening of one of Hammer Studios’ most important films a lot more than the last time I saw it. It’s not as good as their excellent Dracula AD 1972, of course, but as Dracula movies go it’s really not a bad one. Bit of a classic. Miss it at your peril.

Female Vampire

When in Romay...

Female Vampire
1973 France/Belgium
Directed by Jess Franco
Redemption BluRay Region A/B/C

This is one of those eurocinema films you see when you’re young and the imagery stays with you for years... although it’s not exactly the greatest movie ever made. This was one of Lina Romay’s earlier films with the director and of the 120 movies she made before her death last year, the majority of them were made for her lover Franco... taking up “muse duty” after the tragic death of Franco’s equally famous figure of inspiration, Soledad Miranda (perhaps best known for the starring role in two of his movies in particular, Vampyros Lesbos and She Kills In Ecstacy). That Romay was a self confessed exhibitionist meant a match made in heaven for her and Franco and the images of her walking around this film and coming towards the screen out of the fog wearing just a hooded cloak (which manages to reveal everything about her) and a black belt will probably stick in the minds of most red blooded young men who come into contact with this film at an early age.

As a horror film it’s not much good, truth be told, but as a softcore exploitation movie with little dialogue designed to inflame the lusts of all those with a vampire fetish... well it does pretty well on that count (or countess).

The story, such as it is, tells the tale of Countess Karlstein, a mute vampire who sustains her life by giving fellatio or cunnilingus to her sexed up victims (depending on whether she happens to be sexing up a man or a woman, obviously) and then sucking the life force out of them from their respective “naughty bits” when they reach orgasm - a much shorter, toned down version with people wearing clothing and where the Countess gets her vampiric fix by sucking blood from more traditional, self made orifices, was released in some countries as the inappropriately titled, given its highly censored nature, Erotikill.

The film is very much like the more classic Vampyros Lesbos in many ways, but there’s a lot less going on here and, while this makes use of references to Karlstein’s family (which was probably as close as they could get the more famous vampiric name of Karnstein without having copyright issues, is my guess) and even has references to Franco’s earlier Dr. Orloff movie, this doesn’t share the same kind of substance as Vampyros Lesbos, which could easily pass for a not bad parody of Bram Stoker’s Dracula book (or stage version for that matter).

Still, the film is quite hypnotic and not just for the fact that most of the running time is taken up with female nudity, sex and a touch of badly restored S & M (with still material missing from the original shooting, I suspect, as Romay’s character is pre-wounded before we get to the main body of those scenes). Although I imagine the budget for this movie wasn’t what Franco would have wanted, it seems that the inspiration behind some of the shot designs are every bit as thoughtful as some of his other classic works. It’s just that there are vague distractions when a hand held camera is used, for instance, when you suspect the director would rather have used a proper tracking shot for certain sequences. Still, you can still make out the intentions behind the shots and a lot of it is very good.

You also have present Franco himself, as a kind of light weight/minor inconvenience Van Helsing type character, and it’s far from unusual for Franco to save money on his productions by casting himself. One story tells of him shooting himself in close up on a shot for a movie once while operating the camera himself (reaching around it) at the same time.

The presence of cult genre actors Luis Barboo (The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tale, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, The Wind And The Lion and Conan The Barbarian etc.) and Jack Taylor (Dr. Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo, The Ghost Galleon and Tender and Perverse Emmanuelle etc) make for another tick box for lovers of this kind of movie too... each of them turning in serious performances for a less than serious movie.

The scoring is pretty decent, although Daniel White’s music is less funky than some of the stuff you might equate with this director. There really does need to be a proper soundtrack CD of this score sometime... it’s really quite infectious and captivating.

So... a brilliant movie of little consequence, although I have to say that the Redemption BluRay I have here surprised me a little in that something seems amiss in terms of quality. I can’t work out if it’s the original source print that the BluRay has been mastered from that’s just absolutely crap in places (especially the opening sequence of Romay emerging from the fog in a forest) or if it’s the actual transfer that’s at fault and, while I’m pleased to have this version and it’s extras, I have older films which look a whole lot better than this on my BluRay and so I did wonder if I’d have been better not purchasing and sticking to my old Region 1 DVD edition from Image Entertainment. I’m fairly new to BluRay so maybe I should start being a bit more discerning when it comes to trusting who is doing what and from which available materials they are doing their “what” with in future.

Anyway, this doesn’t effect the slow burn, cumulative quality of the film any and, if you’re a fan of gratuitous nudity and beautiful women with a touch of somewhat pretentious vampiric angst thrown into the mix and some fairly questionable acting from Lina Romay on this one, then you’re probably going to be able to watch this movie on its own terms for what it is. For novices into the world of Jess Franco, too, I would say this is worth a look, although it’s not quite in the league of such works as Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed In Ecstacy and Countess Perverse (reviewed here). The iconic imagery, however, should pull you in a bit and make you seek out some of this man’s other works. If you do that, let me know what you think.