Category: Movies

Hey folks — it’s been a bit, but the run of the Kansas City Renaissance Festival ended this past weekend, and so now I’m rested up and ready to get back to my Spooktober viewing.

Last night was a first for Spooktober — I started a movie, and it was so bad that I shut it off and went for something else. The awful film was a demonic possession movie (usually of interest to this former Catholic School kid) called Along Came The Devil, and the less said about it, the better. I only made it like a half hour in.

Disappointed, I returned to an old favorite, which I haven’t watched in a couple of decades — 1986’s horror-comedy, VAMP, starring Grace Jones and 80s EveryNerd Chris Makepeace.

The movie features the first time that I recall seeing the “Vampires Run A Strip Club, Feeding On Men Who Won’t Be Missed” angle, later used in From Dusk Til Dawn. It also features a standard cringeworthy sidekick performance by Gedde Watanabe (although to be fair, this time it’s “clueless rich nerd”, rather than explicitly racist), and the “stripper with a heart of gold, who turns out to be the literal girl next door” stereotype played by Michelle Pfeiffer’s younger sister DeDee (over there —->), who wears the sort of outfits that 80s movies and music videos all told us that Hot Girls wore, but that were seldom encountered in the real world (I dunno, maybe this *was* how they dressed in L.A.?). Regardless, it’s a look that still speaks to my inner teenaged brain, I’m embarrassed to admit.

It’s not a good movie. At all. But I like it. It is steeped in nostalgia for me — of my vampire movie fandom, of my new wave music fandom, of my high school and early college years (I saw it in the theater when I was in high school, and rented it on VHS to watch in my dorm room with my roommate during my freshman year).

And sometimes, nostalgia is good enough.

Home sick today — turns out that two days out in the cold rain at KCRF isn’t conducive to one’s health.

The last bit of Spooktober viewing last week was Friday night, where Laura and I watched Count Dracula, the 1977 BBC miniseries, often touted as the most faithful adaptation of Stoker yet filmed.

It was pretty damned faithful, although seemingly arbitrary changes were made: Mina (Judi Bowker, who would make an impression on me 4 years later playing the Princess Andromeda in Clash of the Titans) and Lucy (Susan Penhaligon, who bears such a resemblance to Alicia Vikander that I had to do a double-take… check the pic, you see it, right?) were made sisters… and Arthur Holmwood, Lord Goldalming, is entirely removed from the narrative, yet his last name given the American, Quincey. (And the less said about Quincey’s accent, the better.)

Dracula is played with a feral grace and urbane intelligence by Louis Jourdan, in what is easily the best of the portrayals of the time — unlike Frank Langella, Jourdan actually managed to convey an otherworldly menace, a genuine threat.

As Laura remarked when we were watching, it also seems obvious now in retrospect how much of an influence this production had on Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, particularly in what scenes, often left out of adaptations, were included, and how they were staged.

Another thing I found remarkable — for a 1970s BBC production, at a time when self-appointed moral guardians were screeching about “video nasties”, Count Dracula was shockingly visceral. I was expecting something a bit more reserved. The staking sequences in particular were bloody and harrowing, with the vampires howling in agony as the claret gushed.

Really enjoyed this one. You can pick it up at the link above.

So last night’s Spooktober viewing was NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF, a 1981 Spanish film whose original title was El Retorno Del Hombre-Lobo.

It’s one of Paul Naschy’s twelve-film series about the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. It’s only a “series” in the strictest sense — they’re largely unrelated films, all of which feature a 16th century Polish nobleman who’s been cursed to be an immortal werewolf. Each film pretty much stands alone, and this one, in fact, is a higher-budget remake of one of his earlier stories, 1970’s La Noche De Walpurgis (Walpurgis Night, known in the US as The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman, in which Daninsky combats the vampiric Elisabeth Bathory, who has returned from the beyond the grave to something something.

Gotta be real: NOT a good movie. There’s something about bad dubbing and Cinemax Bewbs that just makes even the most earnest attempt nearly unwatchable. But, it was a fun bit of horror-adventure-pulp, and really wasn’t trying to be more than that.