BEYOND MOMBASA (1956)

Here's an unpretentious but colorful programmer George Marshall directed for Columbia Pictures that features a fun star turn by Cornell Wilde, one of Christopher Lee's more substantial pre-Dracula parts, and a vivid combination of African location shooting by Freddie Young. The story, adapted by Richard English and Gene Levitt from an apparently unpublished story, is pure pulp. Wilde plays Matt Campbell, an amiable boor who arrives in Kenya to learn that his brother, a uranium miner, had just been killed. He was the victim not of the Mau-Mau, those predictable villains of a contemporary cycle of African movies, but of a resurgent cult of leopard men, sacred killers who don leopard skins for their dirty work. Matt wonders whether that's the truth of a story someone else made up, as his brother had some questionable business associates, particularly the sleazy white hunter Gil Rossi (Lee) and fellow miner Hastings (Ron Randell). Possibly more dependable are the missionary Ralph Hoyt (Leo Genn), an expert on the leopard cult, and his anthropologist neice Ann Wilson (Donna Reed). Rossi, Hoyt and Wilson take Matt to the site of the mine, which "clicks" according to the last letter from Matt's brother, which means whoever owns it has a fortune. Matt's his brother's heir, Hastings was his partner and Rossi was a 1,000 pound investor in the project. Matt instinctively looks on the other men with suspicion, but they're not the only people he has to worry about, as the leopard men seem to be all too real...

Cornell Wilde flirts with Donna Reed in Beyond Mombasa

Once Ralph Hoyt admitted he was only a lay missionary you could add him to the list of suspects, especially since Genn gives the sort of meek-and-mild performance that becomes increasingly suspicious as the film proceeds into the jungle, arriving finally in the ruins of an older civilization where our protagonists end up besieged by the leopard men and a white ally. I will spoil things only partly by letting you know that even before audiences identified him with movie villainy, Christopher Lee made a good red herring.

Wilde, who would famously return to Africa for his own project, The Naked Prey, is easily the best thing about Beyond Mombasa. His Matt Campbell is a bit of a goon, a tough guy who'd been working in Saudi Arabia before this opportunity turned up, a master of drunken fighting but also terrified of the local wildlife, including a chimp the Reed character decks out in a dress for nebulous purposes of scientific observation. Once they're on safari and under fire -- from spears, blow darts and rocks, that is -- Matt becomes more of a standard he-man hero, but his blatantly flawed nature earns our interest and sympathy more than if he'd been too good at everything to be true.

The three-way bickering of Wilde, Lee and Randall keeps things pretty hard-boiled most of the way, and when the film finally goes over the top it has the lurid flavor of men's adventure magazines of the period. I like that in a Fifties movie, and while Mombasa has no delusions of grandeur it does provide 90 minutes of two-fisted fun for those who appreciate that sort of thing.

Christopher Lee (1922-2015)

 
From Mario Bava's The Whip and The Body (1963)

He may not have cared to acknowledge it himself, but Lee, whose death last weekend was just reported today, was the last of the Horror Men. We still have horror directors today but we no longer have stars like Lee who were typed as horror actors and around whom horror movies were built as star vehicles. The closest we've had to that in more modern times is Robert Englund, who has done what lately? Like many Horror Men, Lee's career ran a kind of inverse arc, dipping in the 1970s from his peak of Hammer and international stardom to a trough of for-the-money trash (look up his sci-fi bomb End of the World, for instance), for which he would make bitter excuses after the fact, only to rise again at the turn of the century. The irony is that while Lee's passing marks the end of an epoch of grand-manner horror and character acting, it was modern moviemaking and its computerized wizardry, along with the fond memories of fans turned moguls, that made him viable again in his last years. You could digitally attach his face to a fake body so that Count Dooku could battle Yoda with inhuman acrobatics, yet it was Lee's voice and his imposing presence that George Lucas remembered and realized he could still use. Likewise, Lee's longevity and the enduring power of that voice earned him the main gig of his latter career as Peter Jackson's Saruman. As an aside, I suppose Jackson has been kicking himself for the last dozen years for having thrown away the Saruman-centric "Scouring of the Shire" episode when he probably could have made at least one full-length movie out of it with his current methods, and it wouldn't surprise me if Lee had grimly reminded him of this while they shot his Hobbit scenes. Modern technology gave Lee an additional outlet in numerous opinionated and entertaining know-it-all DVD commentary tracks, though the advent of streaming video may soon reduce his remarks to buried treasures. Like Karloff and Vincent Price, Lee ended his career as a beloved icon, and was used as such not only by Tim Burton in several films but also by Martin Scorsese, to amiable effect, in Hugo. Lee's ultimate triumph is that he is remembered this week not just as a legend of horror but also as a contemporary movie star. He didn't have to depend on his old movies remaining relevant, though many are. He was part of this generation's pop-culture mythology as well as their grandparents', because his talent, and not just his material, remained relevant to the end.

Click here for a compilation of reviews of Lee's work.

DVR Diary: HORROR CASTLE (La vergine di Norimberga, 1963)

The "virgin of Nuremberg" in the Italian title of Antonio "Anthony M. Dawson" Margheriti's Eastmancolor gothic is an iron maiden, an ancient torture device preserved in the title edifice of the American edition. We're introduced to the "virgin" as new bride Mary Hunter (Rosanna Podesta) inspects the creepier corners of her new home. She has quite a fright when she sees a dead body inside, but her husband Max (Georges Riviere) is all calm reassurance. He has the era's reliable remedy for female hysteria: pills -- but Mary quickly has grown suspicious enough not to take them. The torture paraphernalia commemorates an earlier occupant of the castle: "the Punisher." But don't get the wrong idea; the title of this picture is Horror Castle, not Frank Castle. And in the end, our menace -- for the Punisher is not merely a relic, but a real living threat -- is less a Punisher than a Red Skull. I'd split the difference and call him a Crimson Executioner, but that name is taken -- though it wasn't when Margheriti/Dawson made this picture about a madman identifying with an infamous torturer. A tragic backstory elevates the material: Max Hunter has good reason to cover up the goings on in the torture chambers, while an FBI man makes an ironic yet understandable mistake in his belief that the castle harbors a Nazi war criminal. Add Christopher Lee (mostly dubbed in the American edition, though I think it's his own voice when he speaks German) as a scarred servant and there's enough going on to keep a viewer guessing for a while. All told, this is an atmospheric scare-show in the Mario Bava manner, distinguished by its locations and the cinematography Riccardo Pallotini. Margheriti pulls off one impressively Bava-esque bit of business when a panicked Podesta runs out of the castle into the night. Long takes of the leading lady running and running are intercut with expressionistic shots of tree branches looming into the camera like clawed hands grasping at the heroine. Riz Ortolani contributes an often-jazzy score, a musical commentary on the juxtaposition of the past and present in 20th century gothic. Overall, Horror Castle is a pretty standard Italian horror film from the pre-giallo era, not too demanding but just efficient and imaginative enough for 90 minutes entertainment when October puts you in the mood for mild and comfortable chills.

On the Big Screen: HUGO (2011)

With an irony that will probably prove the project's undoing at the box office, Martin Scorsese has employed state-of-the-art cinema technology to celebrate the most primitive forms of special effects in his heartwarming infomercial for film preservation. Hugo is a film that will more likely find its audience on home video, as a TV perrennial or an oft-watched DVD. It's too intimate a children's film, if you even want to call it that, and too humanely paced to provide the constant spectacular agitation multiplex audiences seem to demand. Is it a children's film at all? I guess it is, since The Invention of Hugo Cabret is considered a children's or young-adult story. But where are all the one-liners, the insults, the slapstick, the potty humor, the pop-culture references? There are chase scenes and cliffhangers, but I wonder whether one guard chasing one boy on foot through a train station will stimulate young audiences as much as is usually thought necessary. In any event, Hugo is above categorization. Working in the classical style, Scorsese would not think of making a film only for children -- the little brats wouldn't get many of his homages anyway. I'm sure he'd like the kids to be dazzled by the magical cityscape of 1930s Paris, enthralled by the tunnels and clockwork of Hugo Cabret's world, fascinated by the pageantry of Georges Melies' pioneer moviemaking. But I have my doubts, which reflect more on American youth than on Martin Scorsese. He's made a charming, even heartwarming picture that pulses with his love for movie history, but in this latest autumn of Twilight that love will go mostly unrequited. But that only makes Hugo more poignant, since the tale of a movie artist losing his audience is the mystery and the heart of the show. The likely massive loss of money won't kill Scorsese's career, but the hunch that this film will flop only confirms its own message that such tragedies happen.

Hugo is a very old-fashioned tale of an orphan who maintains the clocks at a Paris train station in his uncle's absence while struggling to repair the title invention, a mechanical man his late father had been tinkering with before his death in a fire. Hugo's thefts of parts and tools from a bric-a-brac dealer with a shop at the station leads to his discovery of a closer connection between the dealer, "Papa Georges," and the mechanical man. He eventually learns that the old man is the long-forgotten, believed-dead Melies, the director of A Trip To the Moon and hundreds more fantasies of innovative trickery. The invention proves a McGuffin, as the real story becomes the effort to get the embittered old man to re-embrace his past and accept the collective embrace of early film buffs and historians -- to realize, one might say, that he had a wonderful life despite all his defeats.

So benign is Scorsese's vision this time that he gives us Christopher Lee as a perfectly benevolent bookseller -- and somehow I can imagine the great man hectoring the director about what Paris was really like back when he was a boy tourist -- Lee would have been close to Hugo's age at the time of the picture. Lee's presence at this late point in his career is always a plus, and here particularly his casting is yet another token of Scorsese's adoring cinemania. It's also typical of the peculiar casting and dialogue direction that renders Paris circa 1931 a colony of the British Empire. Even Sasha Baron Cohen, practically invited to turn his awkward security guard into a Clouseau homage, steers clear of anything resembling a French accent. His character takes us back to the good old tradition of comic bumbling cops, but Scorsese can't help humanizing him while milking his leg brace for politically-incorrect humor and ultimately redeeming him. Cohen's subplot is part of a not very convincing argument that World War I was to blame for Melies's decline as well as the guard's poor attitude and his obsession with catching orphans. This approach elevates Melies's rediscovery into a moment of national healing, represented by all our various eccentric characters partying together -- but the history of cinema argues against any claim that the Great War killed audiences' appetites for fantasy. The overstatement doesn't really hurt the film, however, since its real point is rediscovering a legacy that was lost, whatever the reason for the loss.

Along with Lee and Cohen, Ben Kingsley is predictably excellent as Papa Georges, and Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz are very likable as the lead kids. Some of the character actors get relatively short shrift, as if Scorsese thought they'd keep our interest just by looking funny. The attention he pays to these characters without really giving them much to do slows and pads the film a bit, but the lesser characters are never on so long that they try our patience. Visually the production and cinematography are beautiful, but sometimes the 3-D only gets in the way. Scorsese puts the process through its paces and often achieves remarkable effects. But the stereoscape, as usual, eventually hits a CGI wall that flattens the illusion of reality. If Scorsese were still building massive sets like he did for Gangs of New York, or had been able to film on authentic locations, the 3-D would have been far more impressive. Instead, despite the tremendous efforts of Scorsese, Robert Richardson and Dante Ferretti, Paris still ends up looking like a video game sometimes, however attractive. That being said, Hugo is still easily one of the best 3-D movies of the current generation, and perhaps the best of them in pure movie terms. The more you like movies -- the more movies you like -- the more you'll like this one.

Wendigo Meets HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

My friend Wendigo estimates that he's seen Terence Fisher's landmark vampire film more times than any other "Dracula" movie, unless you count Nosferatu. Despite that, he was still able to look at it with fresh eyes to mark our return from an unintended hiatus following Wendigo's discovery of the Encore Westerns channel. Someday we might start doing "Wendigo's Wild West," but for now we've taken the latest title off the top of his to-do pile and asked ourselves where Horror of Dracula's real significance lies.

Released in the U.K. as just plain Dracula -- Warner Bros., the U.S. distributor, was more deferential toward Universal's implicit claim to the Dracula title even though Universal itself distributed Hammer's film in some markets without fuss -- Fisher's film is a natural follow-up to his Curse of Frankenstein from the previous year, bringing back Peter Cushing as the protagonist and Christopher Lee as the monster. Like Curse, it was something new as a Technicolor horror movie. What was new and lastingly distinctive, in Wendigo's opinion, is the paring down of Bram Stoker's source story and the increased prominence of Van Helsing as a more energetic vampire hunter. Renfield is perhaps the most conspicuous absence, and as is almost always the case, Quincey Morris is nowhere to be found. Dracula himself is strangely monogamous, having but one bride when Jonathan Harker visits him, but Wendigo suspects that the master vampire may have had to live on a budget. Most impressive and probably most influential is the physicality of the combat between vampire and hunter. Cushing has to do more than brandish a cross to get the upper hand on Lee -- crossing candlesticks is really more a coup de grace than the decisive blow. Cross damage, however, plays a more important role here than in previous vampire films; Fisher makes much of how they burn a vampire's thrall on contact. That's typical of a greater use of effects to portray supernatural damage, as in Lee's protracted destruction.

Above and below: the power of the cross.

As a new kind of Dracula, Lee makes a strong early impression, but there are already signs of trouble for his later career in the role. In his first appearance he is casually conversational, articulate and businesslike, and Lee handles these scenes with ease. But after he leaves Harker in his room, Lee never gets another line of dialogue, setting the tone for his reappearance in Dracula, Prince of Darkness, when he has no dialogue at all.

Christopher Lee: shadow and substance.

Why silence Lee so soon? I suspect that Hammer may not have been too confident in an un-accented, un-foreign Dracula, but Wendigo makes the more pragmatic point that, in billing and practically every other detail, this is Cushing's movie, not Lee's, and it wasn't Lee's job to upstage the star by grabbing the best lines. Cushing at this point was perhaps the most popular star on British television while Lee was still paying his dues, and the roles are proportioned accordingly.

Wendigo readily allows that Horror of Dracula -- or Dracula, if you prefer -- is a movie about Van Helsing. That may reflect Cushing's stardom, but it also reflects a new sense of what Van Helsing is about that continues into a sequel that also has Dracula in the title, but features Van Helsing instead of Dracula. The scholar and vampire hunter is the initiator of the action rather than an expert called in for help in the middle. Jonathan Harker is only his helper and spy, sent by the good doctor to take the job Dracula was offering (in the want ads???) as the castle librarian. He is one of who-knows-how-many agents Van Helsing employs in his crusade against the "insidious cult" of vampires, and as such, the protagonist of Stoker's novel is no more than cannon fodder. That means, we must note, that Harker has to be stupid. He could have ended this movie after two reels if he had thought to stake a still-helpless Dracula first when he discovers the vampire's sleeping quarters. Instead, the idiot decides to stake the contentious Mrs. Dracula first. What was that, practice? Anyway, for that Harker deserves his fate, and that clears the stage for Van Helsing to take over. Our hero is a man of science as well as fate; in a scene Hammer would come to regret, he tells Arthur Holmwood (the late Michael Gough) that vampires turning into bats is just a myth. Wendigo thinks this bit of debunking was another case of Hammer knowing its limitations. In his opinion, given the studio's history of bat effects, they shouldn't have forgotten them. But he thinks Van Helsing's lecture may have had an influence beyond Hammer, as many modern vampires lack the panoply of powers that the doctor denies.

But for all that's new in Hammer's Dracula, Horror is in some ways reminiscent of Universal's vampire films. The most notable similarity is tied to writer Jimmy Sangster's most significant departure from Stoker -- the fact that Dracula never leaves Europe. The way some people write about how Stoker's Dracula stands for the general threat of the foreigner polluting England, it might seem that Sangster loses the point of the story if the Count doesn't invade the island kingdom. But he sets the story in a landscape much like what we call "preoccupied Europe," the timeless setting of Universal's monster rallies. Casting Lee as Dracula and having him speak without a Transylvanian accent is reminiscent of Universal's use of Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine in its later Dracula movies. By comparison, when an American studio revived Dracula around the same time, they made a point of casting an obvious foreigner, Francis Lederer, in an echo of Bela Lugosi. As for the period, the most we can say is that, whether Sangster meant it or not, the film can take place no earlier than 1903, thanks to Van Helsing's comparison of a little girl to a Teddy bear. But the landscape of Klaussenberg, Ingolstadt, etc., strongly resembles Universal's Visaria more than anyplace else -- with an important bit of difference. Dracula's territory seems to be getting colonized by Englishmen.

Horror of Dracula competed against William Castle's Macabre in some North American markets. At least one enterprising exhibitor thought the film could use a gimmick to compete more effectively.

Jonathan Harker is just an interloper, but Arthur Holmwood appears to be a permanent residence, and another Englishman, Dr. Seward, practices there. Wendigo notes that Hammer's mitteleuropa is really a barely-disguised rural England, given how few actors attempt foreign accents. He suggests that Hammer's Europe may symbolize English nostalgia for a disappearing past and its rustic traditions. I can agree with that, but I'd like to go further out on a limb and suggest that Horror of Dracula is a "postcolonial" film for the dying days of the British Empire. My description of Holmwood and Seward as "colonists" probably tipped my hand already on that point. In that context, it may not be as important for Dracula to invade England as it is for him to be a kind of native insurgent, representing the danger of the "dark" tides engulfing the handful of English whose efforts to civilize the world are apparently failing. Read that way, the "horror" film Dracula is not so different from such Hammer "adventure" films as Stranglers of Bombay and Terror of the Tongs, which also highlight Englishmen in peril abroad among secretive hostile natives with strange powers over the mind, thanks to drugs or fanatic religion. The "cult of the vampires" thus becomes an analogue for the Thugee cult and other terrifying phenomena of imperial history that Hammer would later confront directly. Wendigo sees some merit in this reading, but he thinks it was more likely a subconscious approach by Sangster, the conscious motive being to save money by re-using as many Curse of Frankenstein sets as possible.

Lee lacks a certain grace in his flight from Cushing, but those stairs probably did neither man many favors.

Horror of Dracula's place in movie history is indisputable, but Wendigo finds the Hammer Dracula series to be less than meets the eye. The studio never really gives the vampire enough to do, or at least enough to make him an interesting character. Most of his favorite Hammer vampire films have nothing to do with Dracula; those do more with vampire concepts than the Dracula movies ever dared. Brides of Dracula is arguably an exception, but mainly because it had no Dracula. Had a Van Helsing series continued from that point, instead of being feebly resumed with Dracula A.D. 1972, Hammer may have changed the face of horror cinema in an even more profound way. Christopher Lee may not be a truly great Dracula, but Peter Cushing is nearly the definitive cinematic Van Helsing, with Edward Van Sloan from the Universal Dracula as his only serious competition. For introducing Cushing's vampire hunter, the model for generations of paranormal warriors to come, Horror's place in history remains secure.

It's harder than I expected to find a 1958 "Dracula" (as opposed to "Horror") trailer online -- so this U.S. trailer uploaded to YouTube by hermankatnip will have to do.

Wendigo Meets CRYPT OF THE VAMPIRE (La Maldicion de los Karnstein, 1964)

This Halloween night, Wendigo and I present a Frankenstein's monster of a vampire film, a sewing-together of popular horror elements in early 1960s Europe. It's one part Mario Bava's Black Sunday (the revenge of a condemned witch who has a look-alike in the present day), one part Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian-vampire ur-text Carmilla (au courant thanks to Roger Vadim's Blood and Roses) and one part just plan Christopher Lee. That may read like an awkward mix, but in the hands of "Thomas Miller," aka veteran director Camillo Mastrocinque, it's alive!...

Since Christopher Lee is top-billed, we may as well show him first.

What makes it work is the way the four-man Italo-Spanish team of adapters complicate the Carmilla story (which isn't acknowledged, of course) so that those familiar with Le Fanu may find themselves actually uncertain of how the story will turn out. As Wendigo pointed out to me, the standard Carmilla narrative doesn't kick in until just before the 24-minute mark, when a coach carrying the famous seductress (here called Ljuba and played by Ursula Davis) loses a wheel outside the Karnstein castle.

Before she arrives, we're introduced to a troubled Karnstein household, headed by a widowed Count Ludwig (Lee) indulging in an affair with his sexy blond maid Annette (Vera Valmont). The maid seems to be scheming to become the new Countess, either as his wife or his heir, but in her way stands Ludwig's daughter Laura (Adriana Ambesi), who has major problems of her own -- in her dreams, at least. She dreams of biting people on the neck and killing them. Under the tutelage of her caring, Satanist (!) head maid Rowena (Nela Conjiu) she has flashbacks to a Karnstein ancestress, Cirra, who was crucified (i.e. tied face down to an x-frame and left to die from exposure) for witchcraft, but not before cursing her descendants. At Annnette's instigation, Ludwig has invited young scholar Friedrich Klauss (Jose Campos) to research the history of Cirra and the curse, but as he comes closer to discovering the key detail -- that the curse will be realized through Cirra's lookalike -- an antsy Ludwig tries to shoo him away.

Who's responsible for those terrible dream/flashbacks Laura's experiencing? Ambitious Annete (top), maternal Satanist Rowena (bottom) or someone else???

With Annette apparently trying to drive Laura insane, and not necessarily needing to do a whole lot to reach her goal, and with Laura under the dubious protection of a devout devil-worshipper, Mastrocinque and his writers have set the stage for Ljuba's arrival. You may think you recognize Carmilla at this point, but what does Ljuba have to do with what we've already seen? Is she a prior instigator of events? Will she be a catylyst for future disasters? Or is she simply going to be an innocent, endangered bystander? It's Laura, after all, who dreams of biting Ljuba -- on whom she has an obvious girl-crush -- and Ljuba's neck is the only one that has marks on it.

Is Ljuba the vampire, the victim or just the love interest in this picture?

It's Laura who's obviously having supernatural experiences, and both Annette and Rowena seem quite capable of mischief, either against Laura or on her behalf. This chaos is best illustrated by the fate of an itinerant hunchback who tells fortunes and sells charms. Yes, Ljuba seems unduly alarmed by the man and his dog, but she seems just as alarmed when she and Laura discover him hanging by the neck in a crypt with a hand hacked off. And it's Rowena who hacked the hand off, to turn it into a Hand of Glory, a devil-approved divining tool to help her detect who's killing Karnsteins across the country.

But then who stabs Rowena in the back before she learns too much? Annette? She sees it happen and freaks out, only to vanish through a secret passage. Is someone trying to get her out of the way? Who, then, and why? More than one person has a motive, and Mastrocinque strives heroically to keep the ultimate truth a mystery until the film's final moments....

Rowena points an accusing finger from beyond the grave (above)
while the girls embark on a fateful elopement (below).

Wendigo hasn't seen every Carmilla-inspired movie, but he's seen a wide range of adaptations, including the loosely-inspired Blood and Roses and the more literally faithful Vampire Lovers. Crypt uses the core story as a starting point for a more elaborate mystery plot, but is otherwise faithful to the core. He pointed out to me that one surprise scare involving a man popping out of a coffin to attack one of the heroes, is straight out of Le Fanu, including the man's identity as the father of one of the vampire's victims. The key lesboerotic friendship between Ljuba and Laura is pretty much consistent with Carmilla, except with the names changed, as is the idea that the vampire walking the earth is actually a projection of the corpse that remains in its coffin. Wendigo hadn't heard of Crypt (which is also called Terror in the Crypt) before I added it to my Netflix queue, and would now not be surprised to learn that there are many more adaptations. While Vampire Lovers is more faithful and is free to be more explicitly erotic than the still-sensual Crypt, Wendigo doesn't see much distance between the Hammer classic and this underrated (5.4 on IMDB? It's better than that!) Euro effort.

Along with the creative adaptation, Wendigo enjoyed Crypt's Bava-inspired black-and-white cinematography and art direction, and the overall craftsmanship of the relatively unknown Mastrocinque. While no one actress in Crypt's cast is the equal of Barbara Steele in Black Sunday, -- and Mastrocinque would get his chance with her in An Angel for Satan -- they're all attractive or charismatic, and there's real chemistry between Ambesi and Davis, and they all have a better story to work with, in Wendigo's opinion, than Steele did. While distributors could not resist temptation and teased in the ballyhoo that Lee was the menace, the actor gives a solid, straight performance as a troubled, relatively passive hero, and even Jose Campos was adequate in the customarily romantic dull male lead role. Wendigo says that if he sees more films like Crypt, he may change his mind about European horror once and for all.

The following video, uploaded to YouTube by qloshima27, is more of a highlight reel than a trailer, but it gives you some hints of the action.

Wendigo Meets COUNT DRACULA (1970)

Forty years after Tod Browning's seminal film, Dracula needed no introduction to movie fans, but any attempt to film Bram Stoker's novel needs to introduce the Count all over again. Even forty years after Jess Franco's interpretation of the story, writers and directors are looking for different angles from which to show the legend as it's evolved in our collective mythology, quite independently from Stoker or any single filmmaker.

In an interview on the DarkSky DVD of Count Dracula, Franco explains that his objective was to do the most faithful film version of Stoker to date. Looking back, the prolific director scoffs at the notion that Francis Coppola's version was more faithful to Stoker than his. My friend Wendigo, who may count as more of a vampire expert than Jess Franco, claims that the 1970 Count Dracula is really no more faithful, cumulatively speaking, than Coppola's. He admits that Franco is right about how Coppola's romance storyline deviates from Stoker's more simply bloodthirsty intentions, and concedes that Franco doesn't taint his version with like sentimentality. But Franco then proceeds to distort the story in so many different ways of his own that his claim of fidelity becomes ludicrous. He eliminates characters and changes some of the relationships among the survivors, making Dr. Seward an assistant at Van Helsing's clinic and Lucy Westenra the fiancee of a British (not Texan) Quincey Morris. Franco also innovates, giving Renfield a backstory with a daughter who became Dracula's victim during a tour of Transylvania, giving Van Helsing a stroke so Herbert Lom doesn't have to travel to another location with the vampire hunters, and having Dracula attack Mina in a box seat at a theater while a chorus sings Fahoo Dores or some such thing. Most laughably, the director improvises a sort of attack upon the vampire hunters by Dracula's menacing yet immobile collection of taxidermy, and has the gall in retrospect to tell us that that was a nice scene to look at. Wendigo could go on at great length on these deviations, and is talking faster than I can write, but I think his point has been made quite sufficiently.

To be fair, Wendigo acknowledges that Franco did do some bits of Dracula right for the first time in movies. Working closely with Christopher Lee, he gives us a Count in the opening scenes that really resembles the character in the novel, and a speech that is verbatim Stoker. Dracula's brides also get to say their original lines, and the Count offers them a baby in a bag to keep them off Jonathan Harker, as in the novel. Most importantly, Lee enacts the novel's youthening process for the vampire as he gluts himself on fresh blood, going from fake grey to hair dye in dramatic fashion. As a rule, Wendigo says, whenever Lee is on screen Franco lives up to his supposed intention. Otherwise, without Lee looking over his shoulder, the director assumes artistic license, though without much artistry. Franco is off-key in a different way than Coppola is, but both versions strike plenty of false notes, though in different spots.

Men: Are you tired of going grey? You need fresh blood for darker, fuller hair! (Allow several treatments to get the full effect)

Sir Christopher Lee has been privileged (cursed, he might say) with opportunities to offer more than one interpretation of Dracula (the entire Hammer series counting as one), with the Franco film representing his own idea of authenticity as well as the director's. Unfortunately, Wendigo feels that Lee's work here is weaker than in his best Hammers. Even out of elderly makeup, Lee comes across too often as a tired old man, without the energy he enjoyed a dozen years earlier. His speech about his crusading ancestors should be a bombastic, warlike oration -- Gary Oldman actually does better here -- but Lee's delivery is bland and complacent like a retired British general recalling the good old days in camp. Wendigo allows that Lee may have overstated his feebleness the better to sell his rejuvenation in England, but thinks that the star's performance never really recovers from the lackluster first impression. He doesn't invest the character with the uncanny quality Bela Lugosi provides with his eerie slowness, which doesn't project health but isn't feeble, either. Wendigo doesn't really think Lee gives a bad performance here, but feels that Lee has done better in less faithful Dracula films.

Lee's limitations may be obscured by the black hole on screen that is Klaus Kinski as Renfield (or "Reinfierd" in the DVD's Italian closing credits). Wendigo and I have heard Kinski's performance here praised for years after we'd first seen the Franco film, and that's always left us wondering whether something had been cut out of the version we saw, since our recollection was that Kinski did nothing but stare at the padded walls of his cell and grab the occasional insect. Now, having seen a presumably complete DVD, Wendigo says: "I'd criticize his performance if he gave a performance." But there's nothing there. People involved with the production clearly realize that they have to explain something about Kinski. Producer Harry Alan Towers claims that he had to trick Kinski into doing his scenes by telling him he wasn't making a Dracula movie, while Franco says Towers is full of it. But Kinski's is a singularly uncooperative act. We can believe that the great man may have refused to speak lines or even utter sounds for Franco. When he's offscreen, we hear great howls and screams that are attributed to Renfield, but inside the cell sits a mute who plays with bugs or finger paints with gruel flung on his wall. Wendigo sees that Franco and his writers may have had an innovative notion of Renfield as a man who has shut down mentally after losing his daughter to Dracula, only to spring to dangerous life by the vampire's mental commands, but a mute Renfield does nothing for the story. Totally gone is the mania that defines the Stoker character and must be expressed verbally. We're left with a virtual actor's strike on screen, an appearance that can only be praised by Kinski cultists, just as the movie as a whole can be approved only by indiscriminate Franco fanatics.

Kinski's stunt-dummy gives a livelier performance.

I've seen Jess Franco at something closer to his peak form, while Wendigo hasn't. Count Dracula leaves Wendigo doubting whether Franco has any talent as a director. This film has little sense of art direction or Gothic expressionism apart from whatever Franco found on his locations or could apply with a generous use of cobwebs. He does little with composition or camera movement to create atmosphere, with rare exceptions like Dracula's appearance in Mina's box seat. This is one of the films that earned Franco a reputation for a lazy reliance on zooms; a comparison with Tod Browning's use of dolly shots is telling. Franco shows little skill with the actors, leaving Herbert Lom (whom Wendigo thinks a near-ideal Van Helsing) lost while treating the other vampire hunters almost interchangeably. He certainly flatters Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda, but Count Dracula probably is not his best showcase for either actress.

Junior vampire Soledad Miranda starts small while Dracula hunts the big game (Maria Rohm).

As for special effects, Wendigo did like a few attempts, like the double-exposure materialization of Dracula's brides out of their coffins and the simple yet effective dissolve of Dracula's shadow, a moment straight out of Stoker. Franco makes decent use of simple gimmicks like smoke and mist for appearances and disappearances of characters. On the other hand, Count Dracula may have the worst bat effects ever, exemplified by the Transylvanian Glider Bat that sails unflappably past Lucy's window so often and by the bouncing boulders that the hunters drop on hapless gypsies. One of those giant rocks hits a horse smack on the head, but the animal is almost undisturbed, and after we see them come to rest after scattering the crowd, Franco cuts to a shot of gypsies somehow crushed under these paperweights. Wendigo also objects strenuously to Franco's substitution of police dogs for wolves, something the director apologizes for in his interview. Wendigo's view is, if you don't have the means to do something right, skip it -- just as Franco (probably wisely) skipped anything to do with the Demeter and its voyage to England.

The vampire hunters had staked two of Dracula's brides without a mess before Quincey Morris (Jack Taylor) hit a gusher on the third attempt. Had they missed vital organs before?

Seeing Count Dracula after many years has only decreased Wendigo's opinion of the movie and its director. Speaking for myself, having seen more Francos (including Vampyros Lesbos, which I may get Wendigo to watch someday), it strikes me that the director is only fully engaged and energized when working with his own personal mythology and symbolic iconography, regardless of the genres involved. He may talk big about his ambitions for Dracula now, but the film looks like a work for hire in which he invested little of his own particular creativity. Whatever interest Count Dracula has rests entirely on Christopher Lee's variation on a favorite theme; apart from that, there's little here for vampire fans or Franco fans, though Wendigo can speak only for the former.

Here's a German trailer for Nachts wenn Dracula erwacht uploaded by DocPhnoeker. It's actually pretty easy to follow regardless of language.

Wendigo Meets THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

The next movie on the top of my friend Wendigo's vampire movie pile is The Forsaken. Perhaps understandably, he wanted to watch something else. He offered Christopher Lee's swan song in the role that made him a star. Many people feel he went out with a whimper, but Wendigo feels that Alan Gibson's film does some things with the vampire genre ahead of its time but doesn't get credit for them. For instance, Dracula becomes more of a cult leader in what would become the Jim Jones sense of the word, the sense of having an apocalyptic vision, than Robert Quarry did in either the Count Yorga films or The Deathmaster. Also, Dracula in his alias as Mr. Denham more successfully infiltrates mainstream society as a business magnate more successfully than modern vampires had yet done. It makes him more of a menace than if he spent his time preying on hippies or other outsiders.

English and American distributors differed on how to exploit this movie, the U.K. opting to emphasize Satanic Rites (above), the Americans Vampire Brides (below, caught in a romp with Joanna Lumley)

Satanic Rites is a direct sequel to Dracula A.D. 1972, using the same modern Van Helsing (Peter Cushing as usual) and some of his helpers from the previous film. Wendigo considers the later film a big improvement because, though Dracula remains reclusive, he actually partakes of modernity this time instead of lurking at the fringes. Rites is clearly designed as a modern movie with secret agent, biker and conspiracy elements -- not to mention the trendy satanism of the Seventies and the decade's ghastly fashion sense. The cult aspect of the Hammer Dracula had been around from the beginning, when the Count in Horror of Dracula is identified as the leader of "the cult of the vampires," but Rites is the most elaborate illustration of the premise since the Dracula-free Kiss of the Vampire.

"My revenge spans centuries!" Dracula blusters as his house burns down. If so, he should have invested more resources into recruiting (and outfitting) quality personnel.

Wendigo always likes to see authentic vampire lore in vampire films. Vampiric vulnerability to running water is demonstrated when Dracula's brides are destroyed by a sprinkler system in their basement lair, as it had been in A.D. 1972 when a vamp is killed in a shower. But Rites's most infamous use of authentic lore is its employment of a hawthorn bush as a mortal obstacle to vampires. Allegedly the raw material for the Crown of Thorns, its tangential holiness makes the hawthorn even more of a nuisance for the undead than it is for the living. Christopher Lee has had some sad finishes in this series, but being trapped, ripped and tripped by shrubbery before Cushing administers a merciful stake would seem to touch bottom for the poor man. But Wendigo advises: at least he never had to count grains in the road or succumb to other embarrassing vampire foibles. On the other hand, Dracula has foibles enough. He can't resist the temptation to taunt and boast until doing so ruins all his lovely plans for exterminating the human race by plague. Then, unable to resist being taunted, he lets Van Helsing goad him into that fatal bush

Lee was quite sick of Dracula but kept coming back for more, complaining to his fans all the while, until he was done with this one. At least here he gets a decent amount of dialogue compared to the growling and hissing written for him in previous episodes. On the other hand, he doesn't put in an appearance in a film in which he's the title character until about a half hour in, and then just for a perfunctory biting seen that has little to do with the main story. It seems to have been included just so viewers wouldn't feel ripped off by his not appearing for yet another half hour. By now, however, the public may have been sick of Lee as Dracula. This second attempt to set him in the modern world was the end of the experiment. The Americans didn't even want it until 1978, when they could exploit the anticipation of Frank Langella's Dracula film -- and even then they had to sell it with outrageous ballyhoo like "The King of the Undead marries the Queen of the Zombies!" I mean, that's not even real! Anyway, Hammer's next try was The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, once more a period piece with the added exotica of kung fu. Lee was invited to appear but finally found the will to refuse. Cushing's age also gives Rites the feel of a series that had finally run out of gas. You can see an effort at transition to a new generation of vampire-fighting heroes (including pre-AbFab Joanna Lumley), but Van Helsing's helpers don't have the great man's charisma.

The final battle between Lee as Dracula and Cushing as Van Helsing should be a major moment, but when people can turn vampires with crosses made out of just any old thing (as Michael Coles demonstrates below) it undercuts the drama a bit.

While Wendigo considers Satanic Rites an improvement on A.D. 1972, he admits that there really wasn't anywhere left for Hammer to go with Lee as Dracula, especially given Lee's attitude by this date. He thinks it's a better finale for a key Hammer series than Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, at least. On the other hand, Wendigo thinks the Hammer Dracula series was less than the sum of its parts. Horror of Dracula is fine and Brides (without Lee) may have been Cushing's finest hour as Van Helsing, but after those first films the sequels are uninspired in their use of Lee. Hammer's historic contributions (blood and sexuality, etc.) can't be denied, but the evolution they started can't help but make them suffer in retrospect. This last effort at least showed more imagination than most of what came between the beginning and the end.

Here's the original British trailer, uploaded to YouTube by gotohelltown:

Meanwhile,Surfintheater has uploaded but regrettably left a mark on the wacky but spoilerific American trailer for "Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride."