In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

In 1928, an unauthorised Turkish version of Stoker's Dracula was published. Like Makt Myrkranna a generation earlier, it's a free adaptation rather than a translation. For example, it bears the title Kazıklı Voyvoda (Impaler Voivode), which is what the Ottomans called the historical Vlad Dracula, includes dialogue spelling out explicitly that he is the exact same person (rather than hinting allusively at the idea like Stoker), and shifts the post-Transylvania action to Istanbul rather than London. This film is based on that book, but adds its own layer of adaptation as well by updating it to the 1950s. There's a pretty good page explaining all about it here (annoying auto-playing video, but you can kill it and read a transcript underneath instead), and if you're lucky enough to speak Turkish, the original film is here.

Unfortunately, I am not, so I had to watch this version instead, which a) is a very shonky print indeed, b) has had the original sound-track completely overwritten by discordant organ music throughout (except for one dancing scene) and c) has subtitles which were clearly generated with the help of automatic translation software. Of these flaws, it's the shonkiness of the print that's really irritating. It meant I struggled to tell what was going on half the time, and certainly couldn't appreciate what seems (from a quick glance at the Turkish-language version linked above) to have been pretty decent camera-work. All I can really say is that possibly some effects were quite surreal and phantasmagorical and some shots nicely composed, but I'm not 100% sure. The subtitles, by contrast, were absolutely charming. I had fun counting the multiple different ways in which they spelt 'Dracula' - at least eight by my reckoning, although the only ones I can remember now are Dracula, Drakula, Drukala, Dragula, Draqula and Draquelle. I was also highly amused when the moment came for him to proclaim his past as the legendary Impaler - or, as the subtitles had it, the Poker! But the best moment of all was when our 1950s Dracula asked Azim (the Jonathan Harker character) to write three emails to his friends because the postal service was so bad. Brilliant.

These frustrations and sillinesses aside, it was a fascinating adaptation to watch. Despite being in some ways two good hearty steps (novel adaptation, then film) away from Stoker, it actually retains a surprising amount of detail from the original, and more than some films which claim to be faithful adaptations. For example, it includes scenes of Dracula crawling down the wall of his castle, Azim hitting him on the forehead with a shovel and Sadan (the Lucy character) saying she is floating in green water and that it feels both sweet and bitter when Dracula bites her. The first two of those are rare in film adaptations, and I don't think I've ever seen another one which retains Lucy's description. Some of the unexplored corners of Stoker's novel also get filled in as well. I particularly appreciated the landlady in Bistritz adding weight to her pleas to Azim not to go to Dracula's castle by explaining that her son didn't listen to such warnings a year ago and is now dead. I've always wanted to know what experiences she and her husband have had before Jonathan Harker arrives which cause them to react so strongly when they hear where he is going, and I think the producers of this film (or the author of the novel it's based on?) were right to identify this as one of the implied possibilities.

Meanwhile, there are all sorts of intriguing little changes, too - some obviously for pragmatic reasons, some for more dramatic ones. Pragmatic changes include just the one vampire bride (a popular budget-saving measure) and no Demeter (ditto). Dracula does seem to arrive into Istanbul by boat, but this is conveyed simply by Guzin (Mina) and Sadan (Lucy) meeting people carrying boxes from Romania up from the shore. Sadan's mother is included in the story (not often the case, and probably reflecting the strength of Turkish family structures) and dies in similar circumstances to Stoker's original, but there's no wolf crashing through the window (again for obvious budgetary reasons). And garlic entirely takes the place of crosses, as is appropriate for a non-Christian context and as Zinda Laash (LJ / DW) also did for the same reasons (though additionally ditching the garlic and the stakes).

Less obviously pragmatic / logistical changes include Dracula having a servant in his castle, who conveys some of what were his lines in the original novel: for example the warning to Azim not to fall asleep anywhere except his bedroom and the library. This I like - I've always been quite invested in the idea of Dracula having human servants in his castle, as it demonstrates his power to bend people to his will and the extent of his domination over the local populace. He also seems to have some additional supernatural powers which don't come from Stoker - specifically the ability to materialise out of nowhere (though Stoker's Dracula can solidify from mist into human form) and to make a piano play ghostly music using nothing but the power of his will.

Guzin (Mina)'s characterisation is also quite significantly changed - or at least, developed quite considerably along its logical trajectory. Far from being a school-teacher (only ever an off-page role for Mina anyway), she is a show-girl, and generally very much the independent, modern 1950s woman. In one scene, she teases her husband by telling him that she is knitting something for 'another stud' who will visit them in eight months' time. What she means, of course, is that she is pregnant, but he is utterly oblivious, and I don't think ever cottons on until after the end of the main story. Her profession is also used quite deliberately for titillating belly-dancing sequences, as are scenes of her in the bath. I suspect this material would have seemed quite saucy anywhere when this film was made, let alone Turkey specifically, but presumably it was done in the expectation of boosting box-office takings. Certainly, it's another point of connection with Zinda Laash, which gives Dracula's vampire bride a seduction-dance and includes scenes of dances in the local bar as well. What I don't know is whether Turkish cinema in this period had as strong a tradition as Pakistani and Indian cinema of more-or-less obligatory dance sequences. In any case, here it all paves the way for an excellent climactic scene where Dracula traps her in the theatre where she works, commands music out of the piano and makes her dance just for him - now uncannily like The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula (LJ / DW), in which he does just the same to the dancer Lakshmi.

Overall verdict - a very enjoyable version which was probably better in its original form that I could appreciate from the version I saw (but then again gained a lot from its terrible subtitles!). I'd definitely like to see this in a better-quality print, and I also really want to read the novel it's based on. An English translation actually came out only a few months ago, but seems to have been released as a print book only in the USA, which is a bit annoying and the main factor that has stopped me actually buying it so far. I'll definitely get to it at some point, though.

I've just got five remaining 2017 film reviews to write now. I'm going to try to knock out one or two an evening this week, so that I can get on to the four films I've seen by now in 2018 by the weekend.


32. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher

I watched this on the weekend just before Halloween 2017, when my sister and her family came to stay. After the children were in bed on the Saturday night, I suggested an M.R. James adaptation, which is what we had watched on the same occasion the year before, but my sister said she'd like to see a Hammer horror film, and after some discussion we decided on this one. Obviously, I've seen it a few time before (previous reviews are indexed on my Christopher Lee list: LJ / DW), but this viewing offered me the opportunity of seeing it through the eyes of people who haven't flagrantly over-watched it. Charlotte (my sister) broadly knows the story of Dracula and reckoned she had probably seen this version once before during our childhood, but so long ago that she couldn't remember anything specific about it, while Nicolas (her husband) was coming to it pretty much cold. So I told them to share with me any thoughts or reactions they were having as they watched, and also periodically asked them questions to see what they were making of it.

Perhaps the most interesting outcome of this was their reading of the first encounter between Jonathan Harker and the vampire woman (who I just call Valerie Gaunt, because it's such a perfect name for a vampire) in Dracula's castle. Watching this, Charlotte announced her suspicion that Valerie must be a vampire straight away, and when I asked her why, she said she thought Harker had reacted with surprise because she was cold when he touched her – not something that's ever stated in the dialogue, but actually perfectly plausible within the terms of the story, since Tanya does notice that vampire!Lucy's hand is cold later on. Nicolas, meanwhile, wasn't at all convinced, arguing that she wouldn't be asking him to help her escape from Dracula's castle if she was a vampire. In other words, Charlotte read the scene correctly because she paid attention to the body-language, whereas Nicolas did not because he allowed himself to be taken in by the dialogue. I cannot help but observe that that's a very gendered split, although possibly Charlotte did have an advantage in the form of her slightly better knowledge of Dracula stories generally, which gave her a stronger expectation that there would be vampire women in Dracula's castle.

Other than that they followed the story much as you would expect, and seemed to enjoy it. With a bit of luck I'll be able to lure them further onwards into the series on future visits!


33. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014), dir. Peter Jackson

And this one was my last Lovefilm rental before their tragic closure. Perhaps not the best note to end that relationship on, actually, because this is how I had come to feel by about an hour and a half in:

Just watching Battle of the Five Armies on DVD. It's pretty, but they've now been fighting for what, an hour? Struggling to stay interested.

— Penny Goodman (@pjgoodman) November 4, 2017

In fairness, I should probably have anticipated that a film called 'The Battle of the Five Armies' might involve a fair amount of fighting. And it was pretty alongside the battles – the lake-town, the city near the mountain, the mountain façade, the icy mountain-tops. Plus it had Christopher Lee in it, at least for a little while, in one of his last few screen appearances.

Probably most interesting for me, though, was the strong inter-text between Luke Evans' portrayal of Bard the Bowman and his role as Vlad Dracula in Dracula Untold (LJ / DW). That is, both involve him leading a ragged band of desperate early-modern humans against a seemingly-unbeatable foe, shouting things like "Any man who wants to give their last, follow me!" and showing a tender concern for his family, set against a similar aesthetic of fortified cities, battles on plains surrounded by mountains and war-bats. The two roles overlap weirdly for him: judging from Wikipedia he'd already recorded all his scenes as Bard in both The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies before he began work on Dracula Untold, although Battle was released last (it's all rather complicated, primarily because of the way the Hobbit series was extended from two to three films part-way through). So that means he would have been playing Dracula in the knowledge of his completed performance as Bard, and I think the one probably did inform the other. And meanwhile, even before Battle's release it's not a stretch to imagine that Dracula Untold's production team was hoping to capture something of the feel of the Lord of the Rings / Hobbit films generally, and perhaps even specifically bits of Battle through general insider industry knowledge. It's always nice to put those sorts of jigsaw pieces together.

28. I, Monster (1971), dir. Stephen Weeks

This is an Amicus version of Jekyll and Hyde, and one of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee's 24(ish - it depends how you count) film pairings. It isn't generally very highly regarded, largely because of problems stemming from its production context. Writer/producer Milton Subotsky had managed to convince himself that he could produce a 3D effect on the cheap by keeping the camera constantly panning from left to right, but that turned out not to be true, and meanwhile the tussles over that took everyone's eyes off the core issues of plot and characterisation. Despite all that, lady_lugosi1313 and I both felt on re-watching that it's not as bad as people often tend to suggest. It has some really good sets and locations which are often very nicely photographed. Cushing is as crisp and professional as ever, and Lee's physical transformations into Blake (this production's name for Hyde) are excellent - although I'm afraid I felt that in his 'straighter' scenes as Marlowe (this production's name for Jekyll) he was rather dialling it in. The story also tries to engage directly and explicitly with the Freudian implications of the Jekyll / Hyde motif, although unfortunately the way that comes out isn't very logically coherent. Marlowe is supposed to realise that his potion is doing the same thing to all of his subjects, despite radically different results, but it also seems clear from other dialogue that what it is actually doing is destroying the super-ego in some people and the id in others - which isn't 'the same thing' at all. The behaviour of his Blake isn't consistent either. Sometimes he seems utterly self-confident and to take full pleasure in his crimes, whereas other times he is shamed when people laugh at his experience or seems guilty about what he has done - and it's not at all clear what make the difference in each case. In short, the script needed another edit for consistency and clarity, but I guess all the 3D kerfuffle is why it didn't get it.


29. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), dir. Alan Gibson

Seen a few times before, obviously, and reviewed in full here (LJ / DW). Rather like Scars of Dracula, I know it's one of the weaker films in the Hammer Dracula series, and as such I can tend to slip into thinking of it in the abstract as 'not very good'. But it is still a Hammer Dracula film, of course, so the effect when I actually watch it is usually to be pleasantly surprised. I do especially like the whole D.D. Denham business magnate set-up, which is absolutely logically what Dracula would do in a modern setting. Peter Cushing's confrontation scenes with his old academic pal Dr Julian Keeley (Freddie Jones) are very good as well, offering an extremely believable and well-conveyed sequence of stages of realisation and emotion on both sides as Keeley's story comes out. In fact, now I come to think of it, there is something both quite M.R. Jamesian and quite Tom Lehrer-esque about Keeley's character, as an academic happy to turn a blind eye to the dark implications of his work in return for the temptations of unlimited funding - not to mention disturbing resonances for those of us trying to negotiate the profession in the present day. It also has some beautiful outdoor location footage of London, and especially of Peter Cushing walking past the Albert Hall.



30. Valley of the Eagles (1951), dir. Terence Young

Taped off the telly and watched because it has Christopher Lee in it. This is pretty early in his career, but it's a very characteristic role for him. He's a police detective, operating as a right-hand man to an inspector named Peterson, and as such gets to be clipped and a little bit intimidating while wearing a fedora and pointing a gun at people. Sadly, however, he works in Stockholm (where the story begins), but after about half an hour of screen-time it develops into a chase up towards the Finnish border which he does not come along for, and so his character is absent from the rest of the film. The main tension at the heart of the story is essentially civilisation vs. nature. Though it starts off as a crime investigation into the theft of a crucial piece from a cutting-edge scientific invention (hence the involvement of the police characters), this is only really a ploy to get the scientist whose work has been stolen up into Lapland with a group of reindeer-herders, attempting to track it down. He himself says he has half-forgotten about the equipment by the time a few days have passed, and instead he is drawn into a world of reliance on reindeers and fending off wolves, where he loses his glasses (very symbolic!) and falls in love with a beautiful young Laplander woman. The fairly conventional story of love overcoming a cultural gulf which unfolds from here was given a rather icky edge for me by some dialogue about him needing to be convinced that the Laplanders aren't 'savages', and having this question resolved to his satisfaction when he comes across the young woman reading the Bible to the children in her care. I found that all too reminiscent of white colonialist missionary attitudes to countries full of non-white people. Otherwise, there's some nice footage of snowy landscapes, but much of this actually consisted of pre-existing film shot by the National Geographic Society - so you might as well just watch a nature documentary, really.


The next item on my to-review list is a little bit special and I think needs a dedicated entry of its own, so I will stop there.

16. Byzantium (2012), dir. Neil Jordan

This was another Google Play Movies film, which I hadn't consciously heard of before this year, but which came up when I started typing search terms such as 'Dracula' and 'vampires' into their database. It sounded from their description like it was going to be pretty trashy and maybe even a bit porny, but the pickings of vampire films which they had available and which I hadn't already seen were slim indeed, so I downloaded it anyway, and watched it in a wonderful log-cabin in Queensland (LJ / DW) with nothing but darkness and the sounds of the rainforest all around me.

Happily, the on-site description turned out to be almost entirely misleading. It is actually a really great film, and I think one of the most feminist vampire films I have ever seen. The basic crack is that there is a secret society of vampires called The Brethren, all of whom are white, male and aristocratic, and who jealously guard the knowledge of how to become a vampire to keep it for themselves and their chosen associates. Early in the 19th century, a young woman called Clara has her innocence exploited by a human aristocrat to seduce her and push her into prostitution, and soon ends up broken and riddled wih tuberculosis. But when she over-hears a visitor to the brothel telling her exploiter that he knows the secret of vampirism, she sees her chance at life, steals the secret and takes immortality for herself. Once transformed, she secretly watches over Eleanor, her daughter whom she had borne early on and been forced to give up to an orphanage, and when Eleanor in turn is raped and infected with syphilis by the same exploiter, she uses the secret once again to transform her too into a vampire and save her.

Most of this we learn gradually via flash-backs from the present day. Eleanor and Clara are still living together and have been on the run ever since from the Brethren, who are of course furious that two low-born women have stolen their secret power. Clara, still fiercely protective of her daughter, ekes out a living as a sex-worker because that's all she knows, and torches the places they have occupied each time they move on to help hide their tracks. Meanwhile, Eleanor tries to come to a moral accommodation with her vampirism - for example by killing only those who are near to and actively longing for death anyway - and periodically risks their safety by trying to befriend humans and telling them about her and Clara's past.

Things resolve in a somewhat more traditional fashion at the end of the film, when Eleanor and Clara are saved from the Brethren by an old admirer of Clara's (rather than saving themselves), and both women are rewarded by getting paired off into happily-ever-after romances. But still! A film which is basically about disadvantaged women stealing noble men's privilege, forging their own paths with it and triumphing in the end? I am totally here for that.


17. Let the Right One In (2008), dir. Tomas Alfredson

This one I watched in Melbourne on my friend mr_tom's clever magical telly-box full of downloaded movies. It is widely highly-regarded amongst vampire film fans, and I absolutely agree. I thought it was beautifully shot and scripted, and loved how it gave vampirism a sense of reality by showing it as utterly brutal and animalistic while also thinking hard about how such a creature would operate logistically in the modern world. Apparently the main vampire character, Eli, is supposed to be gender-ambiguous, but I'm afraid I missed this on viewing and only really know about it from reading the Wikipedia page. I just thought the human boy character was surprised to see Eli's pubic hair, rather than any scar, when he saw her without clothes on, and that when Eli said "I'm not a girl" he / she simply meant they weren't human. I wish I had noticed at the time, though, as I feel it adds an extra layer of poignancy to both characters. The ending is ostensibly a happy one, as they appear to have settled into an accepting relationship all of their own, much like the vampire girl and the human boy (Arash) in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014). But I felt that, given the beginning of this film, there was considerably more scope for predicting an unhappy fate for Oskar (the boy) a few years down the line. After all, its opening scenes already showed us Eli's last human devotee, Håkan, failing him / her and dying miserably as a result...


18. Crimson Peak (2015), dir. Guillermo del Toro

Another one from mr_tom's telly-box, which I had meant to see in the cinema but never quite got round to. Pace calliopes_pen, whom I know loves it, I'm afraid I found it hugely disappointing. It's one of those films which sounds good on paper – Tom Hiddleston, a haunted Gothic mansion in Yorkshire, a dysfunctional family with a violent past – but just doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts. It lost a lot of points in particular for the fact that the family house looked exactly like a classic American haunted house, and nothing at all like anything in the UK, let alone Yorkshire specifically. I don't mean that merely as an aesthetic complaint or gripe against the primacy of American culture, either - it's symptomatic of a major problem inherent in the film, which was the sacrificing of potential atmosphere, all the stronger for being rooted in realism, for over-blown symbolic pastiche. The same issue applied to the ghosts, which were far too corporeal, so that they reminded me more of the roaring CGI monsters in the terrible 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill than anything creepy or otherworldly. Similarly, where we could have had a compelling psychological portrayal of Edith (the main character)'s slow realisation of her circumstances, we were just flipped straight into melodrama and quivering terror instead. And it annoyed me that she was supposedly 'a writer', but nothing much was ever made of this and it didn't seem to me to make any difference at all to the way her character experienced the events of the film. In short, a very good example of why I usually avoid modern horror films and stick to those made before about 1980 instead - though, to be fair, Byzantium and Let the Right One In above are both strong counter-examples, so it does clearly pay to explore beyond my comfort-zone sometimes.


19. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) dir. David Yates

Watched on the plane from Sydney to Singapore. It would undoubtedly have looked better on a big screen, allowing all the strange creatures and scenes of 1930s New York to shine in their full glory, but it was still very pretty and pleasant to watch. That said, Eddie Redmayne was a bit more Hugh Grantish than I would have liked, and I had difficulties with the ending. The whole film is all about how Grindlewald’s plan to wipe out muggles (or ‘no-majs’, as they’re called in the States) is a Bad Thing, and how the mainstream magical community’s own strict rules about non-mixed marriages aren’t exactly helping to counter it. So, great, there's a good and very appropriate message there about how full-blown fascism is facilitated by structural racism. But then the no-maj character who has accidentally become embroiled in the magical world, fallen in love with a witch and (crucially) proven himself absolutely trustworthy to the magical community doesn't get to be straightforwardly celebrated for his role in defeating Grindlewald, and his relationship with the witch hailed as the first step towards a new and brighter future. No, he himself cheerfully agrees that it’s probably best for him to voluntarily step into some magical rain which will obliviate his memories of the whole thing, including their relationship. Even worse, just as he is standing in the rain and his memories are fading, the witch he’s fallen in love with steps forward and kisses him, knowing he won’t know she's doing it or remember anything about it. A follow-up scene in which we see her coming into his bakery and both of them smiling at each other with the implication that they will start all over again isn't enough to redeem all this for me, either. Why couldn’t they have just kept the honest, straightforward relationship they already had, rather than having to forge a new one which will be imbalanced from the start because she already knows lots of things about both of them which he doesn’t remember, which has the potential for dishonesty because she can now choose to keep him in the dark about her true magical nature, and is tainted by the fact that she has already kissed him when he didn’t know about it and couldn’t consent? I basically just really hate memory-wiping of all kinds in fantasy stories - it's lazy writing at best and very often (as here) comes as part of a package with characters trampling merrily over any notions of consent. So, down with that, and boo to it being in this movie.


20. Spectre (2015), dir. Sam Mendes

Watched on the plane on my final leg of the journey, from Singapore to London. I probably didn’t follow every detail of the plot, because the sound was ill-balanced, so that I could only follow what the characters were saying if they articulated clearly and crisply – and not all did. Still, it doesn’t really matter for a Bond film, does it? Essentially they are about expensive cars, jet-setting and looking cool, and this one did not disappoint in any of those departments. I liked that the overall plot carried a very liberal message about the dangers of centralisation and cyber-surveillance, and that the main female lead told Bond he couldn’t teach her anything about guns and rescued him at one point. Job done.


OK, that's enough of a batch for the time being to hit 'post', I think. Plenty more still to come, though! ;-)

Apologies in advance if these film reviews are not very inspired. I watched the films in question between about February and May of this year, and didn't take any notes about them at the time. So I'm now more or less reduced to reading the Wikipedia entries (vel. sim.) and trying to remember what I thought of them. I'm just noting down that I watched them, really.


6. House of Frankenstein (1944), dir. Erle C. Kenton

This is one of Universal's multi-monster stories, featuring Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman. Somewhat confusingly, Boris Karloff is in it, but not as Frankenstein's monster: Glenn Strange takes that role, while Karloff plays quasi-Frankenstein figure Dr. Gustav Niemann instead. lady_lugosi1313 suggested we should watch it primarily because it includes a portrayal of Dracula, here played by John Carradine in what I think is the first time I've seen him in the role. He's pretty good while he is in it, doing some nice evil seduction stuff on a young lady, but he gets killed off quite early, so that his story doesn't overlap very much with those of the other monsters (or creatures), and he doesn't get much chance to interact with them. The rest of the film was enjoyable in itself, though, with good castle sets and some dramatic deaths at the climax.


7. The Ghoul (1933), dir. T. Hayes Hunter

This is another Boris Karloff film, in which he plays a paranoid ageing Egyptologist who lives in a gloomy isolated house and is nearing death. Taking his inspiration from the rituals and beliefs of the Egyptians he has spent his life studying, he has built himself a huge neo-Egyptian tomb, complete with a statue of the god Anubis, whom he worships and believes will grant him immortality in return for the offering of a magical jewel. For a long time, the film maintains ambiguity over whether apparently supernatural events are 'real' or not: we see Karloff apparently dying, being interred in his tomb and returning as a vengeful ghoul, and the hand of the Anubis statue appearing to become animated in order to clutch the jewel. But eventually all is revealed to have non-supernatural explanations: the statue's moving hand was actually a servant reaching through a hole in order to steal the jewel, while Karloff turns out to have slipped into a cataleptic trance and then revived. Meanwhile, there is a lot of detective work dedicated to discovering what is going on, and plenty of other strange and gothic happenings. Karloff is absolutely superb in the title role and the whole film a real treasure. Definitely highly recommended.


8. Tendre Dracula (1974), dir. Pierre Grunstein

Oh my! This is one bizarre film. Peter Cushing stars as an ageing horror actor, who wants to move from horror into romance roles. Two scriptwriters are sent by their producers to his home, a crumbling chateau, to persuade him to change his mind, taking their girlfriends with them. There, increasingly bizarre things happen to them all. Is Cushing's character playing an elaborate series of jokes on them all, or is he actually somehow imbued with supernatural powers and they are in for some terrible fate? And what sort of film is this even supposed to be? The weirdest moment is when he puts one of the girls across his knee and starts spanking her, all the while continuing with his conversation as though nothing were out of the ordinary. But that moment is not actually shockingly or strikingly weird compared to what else goes on around it - it just edges slightly ahead of the pack. lady_lugosi1313 may have scoffed at me (perfectly fairly!) for watching Eugénie... the Story of her Journey into Perversion (LJ / DW) just because it has Christopher Lee in it, but now that I have sat beside her watching this film just because Peter Cushing was in it, I feel we are even after all.


9. The Monkey's Paw (1948), dir. Norman Lee

This is a shortish (only just over an hour) adaptation of the classic horror story by W.W. Jacobs which lady_lugosi1313 had recorded off the telly. The print quality was a bit smeary, but we both thought it was very good, and probably had looked pretty beautiful in its original condition. It is updated to the present day of the production, so that the son dies in a drag-car racing accident rather than at a factory, but otherwise follows the story fairly straightforwardly. There are some good working-class characterisations in it, and the sense of dread and fear as the unseen Thing knocks at the door to come in was very effective, if maybe slightly over-played.


10. The Legend of Hell House (1973), dir. John Hough

A haunted house movie starring (amongst others) Roddy McDowall, of whom I have been a great fan ever since I first saw him as Octavian in Cleopatra (1963). The premise is that a group of people made up of scientists and psychics agree to stay for a week in a haunted house where terrible events occurred twenty years earlier, in order to try to document and investigate the possibility of supernatural survival after death. Given the genre, the ghosts soon start to oblige, and given the date of production in the early '70s, many of their manifestations are distinctly sexual. That is, it's basically a load of schlocky, sexy, technicolour nonsense. However, much the the cinematography was absolutely exquisite, the score and sound effects were co-produced by Delia Derbyshire (of Doctor Who theme and the music during the resurrection ritual in Dracula AD 1972 fame), and Roddy McDowall certainly did not disappoint. He delivers a genuinely compelling performance of a character at first riddled with anxiety from his own traumas of twenty years ago, but gradually growing in strength and confidence until it is he who confronts the domineering spirit at the root of all the trouble, reveals his shameful secret and thus disempowers and exorcises him. Also includes a surprise cameo appearance from Michael Gough, who is always a bonus, although he doesn't do very much!


11. The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), dir. Peter Weir

Pretty different from the others listed here, and perhaps more accurately described as a cult film rather than a horror film. It's Australian produced and set, so I was keen to watch it partly with a view to my trip there in the summer, but also because it's a classic which I've always wanted to see anyway. It is quite Wicker Mannish in its portrayal of an outsider who finds himself alone in a deviant community, and perhaps also a little The Prisonerish as he tries to figure out what is going on, everyone reassures him that everything is absolutely fine, and he discovers that he is unable to escape. But, unlike those examples, our point-of-view character is pretty naive and lacking in confidence, while there is internal trouble within the community itself, between the ostensibly repectable mayor and his circle and a subculture of punky rebels. It is only after open violence breaks out between these two sides that the outsider character is eventually able to escape. Along the way there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek comedy about small-town / rural Australian life, and some good black humour around the horrific deeds which the townsfolk are getting up to. Far from a run-of-the-mill mainstream movie, this definitely deserves its reputation as a cult classic, and is sure to surprise more or less whatever you are expecting of it.

I got back on Monday night from a long weekend in Whitby spent in the company of around 40 Dracula Society members: including lady_lugosi1313 whom I have now dragooned into joining! I went there with a smaller group of them two years ago, and managed a decent write-up of it afterwards too (LJ / DW), but this was a more formal gathering designed to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Society's first official visit there in 1977.

lady_lugosi1313 and I got there shortly before lunch on the Friday, but the official business didn't begin until that evening, so we spent the afternoon enjoying Gothic seaside fun in the sunshine. We pottered around the shops buying various treasures, and then headed down to the harbour front where she introduced me to Goth Blood milkshakes - basically ordinary milkshakes with bucket-loads of food colouring in them which turn your tongue blood-red after a single sip:


I also went through the Dracula Experience: a once-in-a-lifetime audio-visual presentation of the Dracula story. I say 'once-in-a-lifetime' because it is so rubbish that it is hard to imagine anyone voluntarily going twice (for all the reasons aptly articulated in these TripAdvisor reviews). They have a cloak at the beginning of the exhibition which they claim is one of Christopher Lee's Dracula capes, but I'm afraid it clearly isn't: it has a strong diagonal ridged texture which none of Lee's capes in any of the Hammer Dracula films ever did. Still, though, the whole thing only cost three quid, and I did chuckle most of the way through at how inept it was, so I guess it wasn't the worst thing I've ever spent money on. Afterwards, we spent one whole pound each on the tuppenny falls, where lady_lugosi1313, who is an experienced competitive player, completely wiped the floor with me, winning more than double the amount of tuppences I had managed to score every time we compared our takings.

The evening began with the traditional gathering around the bench which the Society donated in 1980 (I suppose we'll celebrate the 40th anniversary of that in three years too!), where lady_lugosi1313 encountered most of the Society's members for the first time, and was also introduced to tuica: Romanian plum brandy, and of course our preferred toast. The rest of the evening was informal, but Julia (the Society's very energetic chair) had laid on a wonderful programme of events for us at the Royal Hotel the following day.

We began with a screening of ( 27. Holy Terrors (2017), dir. Julian Butler and Mark Goodall )

We also had two talks given by members of the Society: Gail-Nina Anderson on werewolves and Barry McCann on Jekyll and Hyde. Both traced the evolution of their creatures and their stories through time, looking at how and why they have been treated differently in different circumstances, and what aspects of the human experience they have been used to explore. And although this wasn't particularly planned, both actually informed the other very neatly, and indeed made me realise something I had never really noticed before: that Jekyll and Hyde is essentially a werewolf story. As Gail had already shown us, werewolf stories have never actually been that prescriptive about the matter of how a person becomes a werewolf: many just take it for granted that they exist, and those which do try to explain how it happens offer a much wider range of possibilities than the now common idea of being bitten by an existing werewolf. Nor is the moon particularly consistently required to prompt transformations. So a story about a man who brings out his inner beast voluntarily through a potion of his own making fits right into the canon.

After lunch (roast pork baps from the Greedy Pig GET IN MY FACE!), it was time for a quiz. Given that this consisted of a ten-point round on Stoker's Dracula (which I have read multiple times and am reading right now), a ten-point round on Whitby (where I was sat while taking the quiz), and a twenty-point round on film adaptations of Dracula (which are basically the heart of lady_lugosi1313's and my co-conspiratorial film watching), you would have thought I might manage to do quite well on this, but no! Somehow Julia managed to make it really hard. The winner, Kate, scored a fairly modest 26.5 points out of 40, while I scraped along with 14.5 and lady_lugosi1313 bagged a mere 11.5. It's almost like we've been wasting our lives!

Oh well, at least we had plenty of opportunity to buy up books and DVDs which might help us to do better next time in the society auction - not to mention all sorts of other goodies, from the utterly tat-tastic to the actually very tasteful. ( This was my personal haul, including a notebook in the shape of Christopher Lee as Dracula )

That evening was the Society's formal dinner, so I grabbed the rare opportunity to dress up in full Gothic finery with both hands. We had allowed plenty of time to walk down from our guest-house and ended up arriving ridiculously early, so, as it was still light and I don't look like this very often, lady_lugosi1313 indulged me with a little photo-shoot.

( Vanity, vanity, all is vanity )

Much wine was drunk, merriment had and patrons on a ghost walk of Whitby outside the window trolled by means of a green Frankenstein torch shone at them through a white napkin (though irritatingly they didn't seem to notice). None of this, though, stopped a hardy band of us from getting up the next morning bright and early to do the six-and-a-half-mile cliff walk from Whitby to Robin Hood's Bay. This of course was all in honour of Mina and Lucy, who do just this walk in Stoker's novel straight after the funeral of the Demeter's captain: a plan concocted by Mina with a view to tiring Lucy out and stopping her from fretting about the funeral and sleep-walking that night. She records her plan in an entry on the morning of 10 August thus:

She will be dreaming of this tonight, I am sure. The whole agglomeration of things, the ship steered into port by a dead man, his attitude, tied to the wheel with a crucifix and beads, the touching funeral, the dog, now furious and now in terror, will all afford material for her dreams. I think it will be best for her to go to bed tired out physically, so I shall take her for a long walk by the cliffs to Robin Hood's Bay and back. She ought not to have much inclination for sleep-walking then.

And you can read her post-factum report of the walk itself that evening here.

We grabbed a couple of group pictures before we set off, which I hope Michael won't mind too much that I have stolen from his FB page:





Then off we went, ( past many picturesque delights )

The conversation as we walked unfolded much as you would expect in the circumstances. I can't remember exactly who said what now, but the gist of it all went more or less like this:

"Presumably Mina and Lucy can't actually have walked to Robins Hood's Bay. They must have taken a horse and cart or something."
"Oh no, it says quite clearly in the novel that they walked."
"Yes, that's right - they're obviously going across the fields because some cows come up and give them a fright."
"Can you imagine doing this in heels and a corset, though?"
"Well, Victorian women did have sensible walking boots and country clothing."
"Yes, absolutely - the Victorians were very much into their physical exercise and fresh air."
"They would still definitely have been wearing corsets, though."
"Oh yes. Mind you, the whalebone corsets had quite a lot of give in them. You would only wear the steel ones in the evening."
"Well, my respect for Mina and Lucy is increasing with every step."
"You've got to wonder if Bram ever actually thought about the implications of doing all this in a corset, though."
"Hmm, yes - good point. Well, unless he dressed up in the full regalia himself and did the whole walk that way. You know, just to really get into the heads of his characters."
"Well, given that he was 6'4", that would have been quite a sight!"

In the end, we were not as hardcore as Mina and Lucy ourselves, though. They walked both ways, and had to suffer an unwanted visit from a curate in the evening. We got the bus back, before enjoying another final dinner together ahead of our general dispersal on the Monday morning. Not that lady_lugosi1313 and I were in a rush to get home that morning, though - not least because she didn't have any house-keys, so couldn't get into the house until planet_andy got home with his set anyway, and furthermore because their boiler had broken so the house would be freezing. Instead we spent most of the day in Filey, which I have never visited before, but which proved to be a charming seaside town with a lovely museum, some great charity shops, some excellent cafes, and a fountain with a surround designed like ( a compass showing the directions of all the locations mentioned in the shipping forecast )

They also had a crazy golf course, where lady_lugosi1313 and I played a game so utterly inept that it more than once reduced us to tears of laughter; but I feel duty bound to note that she did beat me, with a score of 37 shots for 9 holes to my 40. Finally it was time to head home, playing games of "I Spy" and "I am a Hammer film: which one am I?" as we drove. All in all a very enjoyable and much-needed final summer jolly before term hits with a vengeance next week...

This is a Pakistani version of Dracula, based very heavily on Hammer's Dracula (1958). If that sounds like a tricky thing to imagine, this trailer may help a little:

Watch on YouTube

I watched it with ms_siobhan a couple of weeks ago, and it took us a while to get the measure of it. Neither of us had ever seen a Pakistani horror movie before, so we had no knowledge of the genre's standard motifs and expectations. A lot of the pleasure of watching low-budget horror movies for us lies in laughing at the obvious wig glue, day-for-night filming, wooden / hammy acting, etc. But because we didn't know what was 'normal' for this kind of film, we also didn't know what was relatively successfully or unsuccessfully done in this particular example. And the fact that it was an adaptation of a British film we know extremely well exacerbated the problem. When the Pakistani film-makers interpreted aspects of that film in ways that to our eyes seemed inept, was it OK to laugh at that (in the way we would at a British cheap Hammer rip-off), or was that just incredibly racist?

After watching the film itself, we then also watched two documentaries on the DVD, one interviewing the makers of this particular film and one about Indian and Pakistani horror films in general, which between them gave us a better picture of the industry, the people involved in it, where they were starting from and what they were trying to achieve. In essence, much like Hammer in the first place, Pakistani film-makers basically churned out stuff they thought would be fun without taking it too seriously, especially during the 1980s. But this particular film seems to have been an early attempt to take on the western Gothic horror genre, so of course it was produced by people who were not hugely familiar with its tropes and motifs. In some places that meant lots of creativity and vitality, but in others it just missed the mark - at least for us. I'm sure Pakistani viewers feel the same when they see westerners trying to take on their stories.

The plot for this film is very close to Hammer's Dracula, although an opening sequence sees the 'Dracula' character (here initially a human being called Professor Tabani) using classic movie 'sciencey-science' equipment (bunsen burners, conical flasks, long distillation tubes, etc.) to make an elixir of life. By implication, he expects to remain human but become immortal when he drinks it, but instead he dies and becomes an undead vampire! This of course picks up on the scientific feel of Hammer's own take on the vampire myth (at least in the first film), where Dracula cannot turn into a bat or wolf, and vampirism is presented as a contagion with symptoms similar to addiction. In fact, for all we know, Hammer's Dracula could originally have become a vampire in the same way - the issue is never explicitly addressed in their films. In Zinda Laash, though, it does get them into a bit of trouble later on in the story. The professor is supposed to be the first ever to have produced the elixir of life, and yet it turns him into a known creature called a vampire with known weaknesses (particularly sunlight). So the plot and dialogue vacillate a little between whether the characters involved understand the nature of what they are dealing with or not.

There is also a bit of a muddle around what the Jonathan Harker character (Dr. Aqil) and Van Helsing character (here, his brother) know or are motivated by in the early stages of the story. When Dr. Aqil arrives at Professor Tabani's house, he claims that he has just turned up on spec for no particular reason, and indeed Pakistani hospitality culture probably means he doesn't need to use any subterfuge to get in there in the way that Harker does by pretending to be a librarian in the Hammer film. Aqil then proceeds to take notes on odd aspects of the Professor's behaviour, and apparently knows enough about vampires to dispatch the Professor's female companion, while his brother later confidently explains to his fiancée's family that Aqil was turned into a vampire while at the Professor's house. So far, so in line with the Hammer film - we are meant to understand that they are vampire-hunters, and know the Professor's true nature from the start. Except that towards the end of the film, when they return to the area to try to rescue the Mina-character, they seem to need the man who runs the local bar to explain to them how the Professor became a vampire and how to destroy him. It is actually this bar-keeper who comes closest of all to playing the traditional expository Van Helsing role within the story, leaving me puzzled as to what Aqil and his brother actually did know at the beginning.

Anyway, things basically settle down to the understanding that the Professor is a vampire in the broadly normal sense of that term. But many of the usual western motifs of vampirism are missing, not least of course because the cultural context is non-Christian. Crosses are never used or mentioned, and nor in fact are garlic and wooden stakes. Instead, the Professor and his minions can be killed by stabbing them with a knife, shooting them with a gun or exposing them to sunlight. (This last of course provides the exciting climax, much as in the Hammer film, except that the Van Helsing character knocks the shutter off a window accidentally, rather than pulling down curtains deliberately). Hammer's comic relief characters (the undertaker, the frontier guard) are also utterly gone, but in their place we get lots of song-and/or-dance sequences, along the lines most of us are familiar with from Bollywood films (except of course that this isn't a Bollywood film, as it is Pakistani not Indian). These were incongruous on one level, as sequences like that amongst what is otherwise ordinary acting and dialogue almost always feel quite shoe-horned in, but also amazing and awesome in their own way, and in their very incongruity - especially the first one, which was the Professor's vampirised assistant doing a drapery-flouncing dance in order to seduce and bite the unfortunate Dr. Aqil. Very different from Valerie Gaunt's exceptionally English pretence at helpless victimhood in Hammer's equivalent scene.

The assistant is the first of three women to be attacked or pursued by the Professor, and I felt we learnt quite a lot about 1960s Pakistani fears around female transgression from all of them. Certainly, Omar Khan, himself a horror film director, explained in the documentary on the DVD that female victims in Pakistani horror films are always coded as transgressive - e.g. they have blonde hair or smoke cigarettes. In this film, the assistant's fate was pretty much sealed from the moment she entered the Professor's laboratory, found him absent, and immediately made a beeline for the drinks tray on the side to pour herself a glass. This didn't directly kill her, but it did come immediately before her discovering the Professor's prone body behind the sofa (and dropping the glass in shock), and then as soon as he had been buried and come back to life, she was the first one he went for. Later on, the Lucy character (Shabnam) dies not because she persuades the maid to get rid of the garlic keeping Dracula away (as per Hammer), but because she persuades the maid, who has been sitting watching over her in person, to leave the room altogether - i.e. she is left unchaperoned. And the Mina character (Shirin) gets into trouble because she goes off on her own and gets into a taxi, which of course turns out to be being driven by the Professor himself. So, yes, there are some pretty direct messages there.

The acting seemed strangely variable to my eye. Sometimes, it was very stagey and melodramatic, but sometimes characters showed no signs of the emotional responses I would have expected given the circumstances - e.g. people staking vampires like it was utterly routine and no biggy, or simply standing stock-still on their last mark while another character did or said something dramatic. I would need to watch it again to check whether this was a case of the same actors behaving differently in different scenes, or rather a matter of clashing acting styles. The soundtrack music was also very varied, ranging from traditional-sounding Pakistani music during the song-and-dance routines, to cheerful popular music in exterior travel scenes and lots of ripped-off cues from James Bernard's original Hammer Dracula soundtrack during the most Gothic scenes. Lovely though this was to hear, it sometimes missed the mark for me by using the music 'inappropriately' - e.g. using slow, creepy music for chase scenes, or dramatic action music for seduction scenes. But that's what is bound to happen when you are not deeply familiar with a musical genre and it all sounds generally western and Gothic to you. Again, I'm sure westerners would make the same sorts of mistakes with what they perceived simply as 'Bollywood music'.

The cinematography was generally pretty impressive, with some nicely-composed shots and effective chase sequences, as well as particularly good use of a crumbling old-fashioned building for the exterior shots of the Professor's house. The main action of the film is set in the 1960s (another departure from Hammer), but this building looked like it might be a left-over relic of the colonial era. I'm not well-enough versed in Pakistani architecture of any kind to be sure, but if so that added some excellent resonances to the motif of vampirism. The Professor himself was Pakistani, rather than white British, which would have ramped the symbolism up all the higher, giving us the vampire as an undead remnant of the former colonial power, still haunting the land a generation after the Raj itself had been expelled. But still, just situating him within that setting hinted at the issues without overdoing it, while affording us some nice shots of crumbling brick-work in the process.

Overall verdict - a fascinating watch, for which I'm grateful to DracSoc chair Julia Kruk for the recommendation, and which has made me curious to explore the world of Pakistani horror and fantasy a little further.

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My first film of 2017, seen this afternoon with ms_siobhan and planet_andy at the Hyde Park Picture House. They were, of course, showing it in tribute to the late Debbie Reynolds, and I'm pleased to say that she got a healthy audience and a round of applause at the end.

Ironically, having made a point of clearing my review backlog so that I could start my 2017 film reviewing with a blank slate, I find I don't have a huge amount to say about the actual film which I didn't already say four years ago when we saw it at the Cottage Road cinema. I can certainly say that I came out of the second viewing feeling just as enthusiastic about it as after the first, though. It is a bit bare-faced about crow-barring the song and dance numbers into the plot, but you forgive it anyway for doing so with a nod and a wink, and for being so consistently funny and beautiful the whole way through. And I think it's probably humanly impossible not to be just a little bit in love with Gene Kelly by the end of it all.

One thing I see I didn't mention in my last review (but ms_siobhan did in a comment!), and which deserves due tribute, is this wonderful Silent Movie Vamp Lady in her spider-web dress:




Simply, wow!

One more thing which should be noted here, and which I've only just realised while filling in the tags for this entry: I have now been reviewing all the films I see here on LJ consistently for ten whole years. Here's where it all began, with Metropolis in January of 2007. I have sometimes got behind on my reviews, and felt burdened-down as a result, but overall I am heartily glad that I have done it. It has definitely helped me to get an enormous amount more out of what I see, both at the time of viewing and while writing about it afterwards. I think it has also enabled me to home in more efficiently on films I will actually like. Whether I will keep it up for another ten years from now remains to be seen, but I certainly don't intend to stop any time soon.

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