Before Moonrise

An American Werewolf in Paris (1997) directed by Anthony Waller

“She’s not interested in douchebags like us. European babes are charming and sophisticated. Especially the French.”

Tom Everett Scott is a lucky lucky man. You can consider 1996-1997 to be the highlight of his career: a popular bubblegum movie about a faux bubblegum pop song (That Thing You Do!) and then he got to hold Julie Delpy’s breasts while she says “This will relax you, no?” (Relax may not be the word for it. I would say, maybe, soothe.) James Dean’s career looks like a failure by comparison. (Holding Sal Mineo’s man-boobs in Rebel Without a Cause just doesn’t make the grade.)

Now that I’ve mentioned the reason I loved this movie in 1997, we can move on to some other things of interest in this movie. I was never a big fan of An American Werewolf in London, so even the tentative (and underplayed) relationship between the earlier film and the new one didn’t really resonate with me. Maybe it’s time I took another look at the original. The thing I wasn’t expecting on watching An American Werewolf in Paris again was how much it screamed “Mid-1990s” to me.

The Americans in question (Andy, Brad and Chris) are backpacking through Europe with their Eurail pass and engaged in a running contest to see who gets the most points for doing x-treme™ things like bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower. X-treme™! And if that doesn’t scream x-treme™ to you, maybe the music of Smashmouth will. Ah, 1997. The only thing that would have made this film more 1997 would have been if the climax of the film had featured a retro-swing bar populated by werewolves doing the Lindy. Granted the motif of sensitive 90’s American college student (“No one as beautiful or as sensitive as you deserves to be so sad,” he says to her.) in Europe trying to score with a French girl is really more 1995, but the fact that for both Ethan Hawke and Tom Everett Scott the femme in question is Julie Delpy…well, that really speaks to my generation in a special way. Very special. Very…way.

Anyhow, in the wake of Hostel it was interesting to see an earlier film tackle the idea that there are people in Europe who are just looking for novel ways of dispatching and brutalizing American expatriate college students. Spend your year abroad studying in Fiji and you’re fine. Spend a summer in Europe, though, and you’re one party at the Clube Lune away from being eaten by a werewolf. (And elitist, America-bashing Social Darwinist French werewolves, at that.) Just how old is this distrust of Europe as expressed in horror stories? Older than Smashmouth, I would guess.

The werewolf transformations and lore are pretty good for 1997. The CGI is tolerable, as is most of the humor and action. For a movie that closes with a song by Bush (yeah, it’s just like 1997 all over again) it has aged pretty well. (Though, if this movie was a George Lucas film he would probably have changed the New York skyline for the ending when Serafine (Julie Delpy) and Andy (Tom Everett Scott) jump off the Statue of Liberty. Vince Vieluf (Brad) has a couple of good scenes after his character dies, as does the hilarious Julie Bowen (who attempts to have sex with Andy on Jim Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise cemetery). Two Julies for the price of one! And only one of them will make you drink a heart smoothie.

I’m not saying this is one of the best horror comedies ever. I’m not. But it’s pretty good and it’s a really entertaining time capsule of a special, more innocent and yet, more x-treme™, time. So, if you’re tired of brooding werewolves, werewolves who must fight vampires, or would like to see a mix of Hostel without the torture, and Before Sunrise but with Werewolves with a little bit of Eurotrip thrown in, with a pair of Julies, and a French cop (who must be friends with the one from The Transporter) and love Smashmouth, then this is a good fun movie to sit through.

Extras
Trailer
“Things are going to get a little hairy…” Yep, they are. Good trailer.

Additional Titles
The posters for Scream 2, The Crow and Playing God, or as I like to call it, The World’s Most Unlikely Triple Feature.

Jess Franco’s Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula (Singing Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat”)

Count Dracula (1970) Directed by Jess Franco

You have learnt much. You can do nothing. – Dracula

Many films claim (with varying degrees of pretension) to be faithful to their source material, and few come really close. It’s gotten to the point where it would actually be refreshing to see a film open up with a title card that reads “based tentatively on the hideously uncinematic novel by ___.” We can have a whole argument about why a society that supposedly values original thought and intellectual property should be so demanding of products that are sold as “based on a true story” or claim to be as faithful as possible to someone else’s intellectual property. And we can have another argument about why anyone should or shouldn’t bother to be faithful to Bram Stoker. We can have both arguments right now. Seriously.

But the funny thing is that we should be discussing this at all while talking about a Jess Franco film. My introduction to Señor Franco’s filmmaking efforts began when I stumbled upon a VHS copy of Oasis of the Zombies in the clearance bin at Woolworth’s in Waltham, Mass. For the longest time I thought I had in my possession one of the worst films ever. I have long since stood corrected. The thing about Jess Franco’s Dracula, and what gives it an edge over that other monstrosity (I’m looking at you, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula) is that, bless his heart, Jess Franco obviously tried to get it right.

For one thing, he managed to do a pretty good job of hiding his small budget. Dracula’s castle is as good as anything from the contemporaneous Hammer oeuvre. The plot follows Stoker in most cases and if you’ve sat through any three other Dracula films you can almost forgive the changing of the various characters around Mina and Lucy and Jonathan. (It almost seems to be a point of pride amongst Dracula adaptors to see who can make the most hopeless jumble of Harkers, Holmwoods, Sewards, Westenras and Morrises. How hard could it be to keep track of five characters? Maybe they need a soap opera writer to do an adaptation from Bram Stoker.) The most telling detail is in the way Dracula becomes younger and more robust in the course of the film. This is straight out of Stoker, and this was the first film to remember that part of the story and try to represent it. And that’s just one example of Franco’s attempts to keep his film faithful to Stoker. The fact that he makes a halfway decent film while doing it is to his credit. It proves once and for all that he’s not a shitty filmmaker because he doesn’t know how to make a good film or what a good film should look like.

So, maybe you don’t care about whether or not a Dracula film is faithful to Bram Stoker. What else could make you want to see this film? Did I forget to mention that Christopher Lee is Dracula? Yeah, I forgot to mention that. As inconsistent as this film is, it’s probably the best Christopher Lee Dracula performance ever. If you don’t believe me, just skip ahead and watch the monologue that Dracula delivers to Harker about the history of the Draculas. It’s terrifying, awe-inspiring, oddly touching, menacing and simply brilliant. It’s not just the acting there, but the writing is good too. It pains me to think that people will continue to watch that craptastic BS Dracula from the 1990s and will never bother to see a moment of brilliance like Christopher Lee saying “I am not young, yet I am restless.”

And did I mention that Klaus Kinski plays Renfield? I did now. He looks like a blonde Mick Jagger in a strait-jacket. And when you find out he’s gone insane because his daughter was killed by Dracula, he becomes suddenly much more interesting than just some crazy guy who likes to eat flies and lives in a padded cell.

And did I mention that Herbert "Chief Inspector Dreyfus" Lom is Dr. Van Helsing? (Apparently he was the second choice, because they couldn't get Vincent Price.) The only way it could have been better is if they had gotten Alec Guinness for Dr. Seward and Peter Sellers as Quincey Morris. Lom is a great Van Helsing. He could easily have gone head to head with Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing and is a sight better than most of the other versions. (I’ll make an exception for Christopher Plummer’s Van Helsing from Dracula 2000.)

I think what really impressed me (and which felt more true to Stoker than other versions) was the absence of exploitation. There’s no gore or grotesque effects, precious little in the way of blood and nary an exposed ankle’s worth of sexploitation. It’s a film that is almost as repressed as Stoker in its sexuality. For the director of Vampyros Lesbos to show that kind of restraint shows just how well he understood Stoker’s novel and just how true he intended to be to it in spirit. The latent sexual metaphor of vampirism loses its power if you actually show other forms of sexuality. What makes it fascinating in Stoker and in this film is how it is a form of release, if you will. And it makes us more fully understand Lucy and Mina’s mesmerized attraction. Soledad Miranda does a particularly wonderful job of playing the hypnotic hunger when she’s trying to hunt the little girl in the cemetery. It’s seductive without being obviously sexual, which is a good way to describe the best parts of this film.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a real Jess Franco movie without the scene that makes you either groan or laugh like a maniac at the absurdity. In this case, it’s a scene in England where Dracula’s lair is populated with various examples of rural taxidermy that turn and shake a little (like a really piss poor haunted house exhibit) while lights shine and various animal hisses and screeches are heard. Franco says the scene is symbolic of Dracula’s violation of the natural order of things, presumably because Dracula can wire up the forces of taxidermy and a reel-to-reel tape player. It’s the only scene that reminded me that this was a Jess Franco film and it made me smile a little (yes, that’s a badger over there, and not just any badger but Dracula’s Badger, with pointy buck teeth) even if it felt very out of place in an otherwise noble effort.

Extras

If Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom and Soledad Miranda weren’t enough for you, then maybe you’ll want to stick around for the extras.

1. Christopher Lee reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula
It’s an abridgement, but it clocks in at around 84 minutes, so it’s a good night’s entertainment and a great moment in audiobook history. You really haven’t lived until you’ve heard Christopher Lee narrate the entirety of Dracula. Also, if you had any doubts about how faithful Jess Franco really was to Stoker, you can actually listen up. Again, I think it shows a respect and love for the original on the part of both Jess Franco and Christopher Lee.

2. Beloved Count
A retrospective documentary featuring interviews with Jess Franco and others. Besides stories about Klaus Kinski (who apparently gave Jess Franco no trouble at all but allegedly bothered the producer Harry Alan Towers in novel ways, if Towers is to be believed) the most amusing part is to see Jess Franco (subtitled, even though he’s speaking in English, allegedly) trash-talking Francis Ford Coppola’s Mary Shelley's Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “I know that Coppola said his adaptation is more faithful to Dracula. It’s not true. The meaning of the film is completely wrong…” I can’t do full justice to either Jess Franco’s mangled English or his hilarious delivery here, so you’ll just have to watch it yourself. In another context I might consider it would be ironic, absurd or surreal to watch any filmmaker being taken to task by Jess Franco, but the thing is, when he says that Coppola’s Dracula is absurd, he’s right. And there’s something entertaining about watching Jess Franco be right about something.

One more thing that Jess Franco may be right about is Klaus Kinski. Franco’s response to one anecdote is the best demythologizing line I’ve ever heard: “I can’t remember that because it’s not true.” The story in question is that Kinski had no intention of doing a Dracula movie and that he didn’t realize he was in one until a moment of clarity while working on a scene with Maria Rohm (wife of producer Harry Alan Towers) and said to her “That bastard husband of yours has got me in a Dracula film.” For this story to be believable we’d have to think that Klaus Kinski didn’t read the script (or didn’t have a script) that he didn’t know his character was named Renfield or that he was in a scene with someone named Mina or that he was so drugged up that he only became lucid halfway through filming. Makes a great story, but maybe it’s one more thing that Jess Franco is actually right about. But lest we completely dispense with the legend of Klaus Kinski, Difficult Actor, Franco does mention that Kinski wanted them to shoot his scenes in a real asylum. Franco recalls, “I said if we start shooting with you in a real cell, they hear you, they won’t let you out.”

More difficult than Kinski were the Catalan police dogs, which prompt this aphorism for filmmakers: Always in cinema you have problems because of the dogs.

3. Soledad Miranda essay
A brief bio about the late Soledad Miranda who died in a car accident in 1970 not long after making most of the films she is remembered for.

4. Still Gallery
Be sure to check out all the foreign posters for the film.

Lorenzo Lamas Sucks...Blood

Blood Angels (2004) dir. Ron Oliver

Also titled Thralls, there are several reasons to actually see this film:

1. Lorenzo Lamas as a jerkwad vampire named Mr. Jones. As if being a vampire doesn’t make him enough of an asshole, Mr. Jones also drives a Hummer—thus making him an energy vampire as well. Nice symbolism.
2. The pathetic assistant Rennie (Richard Cox): it’s hard to label him “comic relief” in a film that is laughable enough most of the time, but he is worth a few chuckles. Silliest Renfield I’ve seen in a long time.
3. Leslie (Leah Cairns) should be familiar to BSG fans as “Racetrack.”

If that’s not enough to get you to see this, then…well, I suppose there is something to be said for the entertainment value of just sitting in front of a bonsai tree and watching it grow. But if you’ve had enough of vegetation, this isn’t a bad alternative.

To begin with, why does it have to always have to be about the end of the world?
It’s not enough that Mr. Jones’s thralls (sub-vampire concubine-like servants) have escaped and he’s going to chase them down—no, they also have to be duped into organizing a New Year’s Eve rave that will provide enough psychic energy to power up the ritual opening of some sort of hell-gate that will unleash Belial, a world-killing demon. I know the importance of raising the stakes, but sometimes a film can benefit from kicking them down a notch. In this case, the problem is that when you promise a world-killing demon and you deliver a worm with a puppet head at the end of the movie, you have not impressed upon me the high stakes you were going for. And all this building up psychic energy nonsense through intense rave dancing is almost as lame as counting up midi-chlorians. Almost.

But let’s backtrack a second to what this film does right: a band of attractive women kicking ass and sucking blood while being chased by a smug Lorenzo “It’s demon time!” Lamas doing his best Billy Zane impersonation. The “psychic energy” might be a lame excuse for the Coyote Ugly-style grrl bar scenes at the rave, but hey if that’s what it takes to get writhing thralls, then so be it. And the best part about these thralls is that they are about as nice as vampires can get. They don’t kill anyone, they just apply a light draining to over-eager guys. The best example of this is the lucky bastard whose punishment for starting a fight at the rave is to be taken to a back room by Brigitte (Moneca Delain) and given either the world’s worst fellatio or the world’s most awesome leeching.

It’s great how Mr. Jones keeps his thralls dressed in white, shackled together in an upstairs room bathed in white light. Nothing says “vampire” more than bright white lights. And is it bad that when Roxie (Fiona Scott) takes off her top while taking a break from deejaying my immediate thought was that her breasts would turn into snakes and bite Doughboy (Kevan Ohtsji)? (By the time she says “You like ‘em? Good. They like you, too,” I had already long since foreseen the eel-like serpents that would attach themselves to the poor sap’s neck and drain him.) I think I’ve seen too many movies like this when that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I see a topless girl. Let’s hope this doesn’t bleed into my personal life.

Of course, all this wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t have Leslie’s innocent pig-tailed sister Ashley (Siri Baruc) who is being abused at home and is a cutter. It may be a little trite to throw something serious in here, but it’s not a stretch to say that the super-human vampire strength is a wish-fulfillment metaphor for feminist empowerment. Speaking of which, when the thralls have to turn Ashley into a fully fledged vampire to save her life she instantly loses the pigtails—because vampirism is the opposite of frumpiness.

One liners abound and there’s even an appearance by a Hunter Thompson look-alike talking about bats and we are even set up for a sequel (did they really think that would be forthcoming?) by ending with Lorenzo Lamas’s detached head attempting to give someone the finger.
Good vampires triumph over the bad ones and the one thrall who sells out the rest gets her comeuppance by dying in an embarrassing way with Rennie the loser. Let’s here it for Girl Vampire Power! (Thrall-power?) Or something like that.

And if all that wasn’t entertaining enough, the credits sequence is interrupted with a music video for “Lady Venom” by the Swollen Members, which I’ll admit after a second viewing I think is not a terrible video for a song that has a decent beat and could be a lot worse. And why did I see this video twice? Because the movie was actually amusing enough for me to go watch the whole thing a second time. If you’re up for a decent crappy movie (I warned you about how awful Belial looks but I forgot to mention that the opening scene of the movie looks like an out-take from a Church of the Subgenius video.) then Blood Angels sucks in just about the right way.

Extras
I have to admit that I’m especially fond of trailers and other previews, even the annoying ones that automatically come on at the beginning like these.

1. Evil Remains (featuring Kurtwood Smith, from That 70’s Show) as some guy who is evil and is…remaining…somewhere and Estella Warren as some girl who has possibly remained somewhere that is evil.

2. The Life featuring Daryl Hannah and Denise Richards as prostitutes. This is like the Platonic form of a Skinemax film.

I’d like to say that I’m immune to advertising, but I’ll have to admit that I’ve been tempted by both of these flicks when I’ve seen them inching their way to the clearance bin. So far, I have resisted the temptation, but of course, if I had enough time on my hands to see Blood Angels twice…you might be seeing a review of those movies coming soon. (Call it a titanic struggle of willpower, if you’d like.)