Underworld: Rise of the Vampire Knitting Society

Daughters of Darkness (1971) dir. Harry Kümel

Do you ever wonder why vampires have been so energetic lately? For creatures who spend most of their time sleeping in coffins and whose diet consists entirely of blood they’re just so damned spry and superhuman. With all that super-strength and those super-senses it’s no wonder people think vampires are sexy.

Well, if you’re tired of Olympic athlete vampires who jump over tall buildings and smash walls with their fists while performing gymnastic stunts then the pale languid cribbage-playing vampires of Daughters of Darkness are your new friends.

Daughters of Darkness is like the Last Year at Marienbad of vampire movies. That might or might not be a compliment, I’m not sure. Suffice it to say that at one point we find the Countess Erzabet (or Elizabeth) Bathory (Delphine Seyrig) sitting in the lobby of an empty hotel in Ostend knitting. Are you ready to become a member of the undead yet? You too can knit a sweater in Belgium during the off-season!

Any comparisons with Last Year at Marienbad are especially apt given that Delphine Seyrig is in that film as well. Go ahead, make some comparisons. They'll be apt...and so will you.

Daughters of Darkness is loosely based on the character of the notorious “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Bathory who allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins for one of those traditional reasons given for depraved acts like that. The Bathory name and legend are in fact more of a background that lends some Eastern European depth to the story, or lack thereof and it’s notable that the character of Stefan (John Karlen) may be a reference to Stefan Bathory, another notorious historical Bathory.

The mysterious background of our male lead, Stefan, is another element that makes this film more interesting than I thought it would be. Frustrating, but interesting. He is apparently sure that “Mother” will not approve of his newly minted marriage to Valerie (Daniele Ouimet). Valerie insists on making Stefan call “Mother” to let her know that he’s got a surprise daughter-in-law who’s dying to meet her and to check out the ancestral manse. Here’s the spoiler: Stefan calls “Mother” and “Mother” turns out to be a creepy older lisping gay man (Fons Rademakers) who is reclining in his tropical solarium). That’s all we get on that front. We are led to imagine that Stefan and Mother will end up offing poor Valerie or something terrible like that but we don’t know and never find out. How mysterious!

Stefan is played by John Karlen, who you might remember from Dark Shadows if you’re the kind of person who remembers Dark Shadows. I didn’t really recognize him until I heard him on the commentary track and realized he was the guy who played Tyne Daly’s husband on Cagney and Lacey. Stefan is a misogynist and a bit of a sadist, or the other way around. Of course, given his undefined relationship with “Mother” it’s no wonder he has some screwed up relations with the opposite sex and for that matter with sex. By the time he meets his accidental end I was rooting for Valerie to be free of him.

Speaking of accidental ends, most of the key deaths are accidental. Stefan meets his end by slipping and slashing his wrists on some broken glass, prompting a hurried finishing of the job as Valerie and the Countess drain him of his remaining blood. The Countess herself dies at the end in a car crash with Valerie that sends the fated Bathory flying through the windshield and incidentally impaled on a stake by the side of the road. And then there’s Ilona (Andrea Rau), the world’s most boring (but mostly naked) vampiric minion. She’s not as pale as the Countess Bathory (in fact, I think she may have had tan lines) but she certainly has the same bored languid attitude. Early on she says “I wish I could die” and after a few more scenes of her I wished she would get her wish. Seeing her vomit blood while hunched over the Countess’s toilet naked did not improve my opinion of poor Ilona. But when it comes to spectacularly improbably deaths, she takes the cake. It all starts when Stefan tries to get her to join him in the shower after they’ve spent a chunk of time in bed doing things that one might do when one is either a sadist or a bored vampire minion. (Not knitting, I have to say.)
The key piece of vampire lore here is that vampires are apparently afraid of running water, so Ilona really doesn’t want to get in the shower. (This lack of showering might explain Ilona’s death wish. I wouldn’t want to smell the resulting combination of centuries of drinking blood and not bathing.) Anyhow, Stefan, being a sadist (and a bit of a misogynist, or the other way around) decides it would be fun to drag the screaming Ilona forcibly into the shower. The improbable result of this act of dubious moral conduct is that Ilona tries to get away, grabs a straight razor, slips and falls (on her back, mind you) onto the straight razor which kills her immediately (presumably by severing her spinal cord given the placement of the razor) and yet without showing a drop of blood. The resulting full frontal nudity is of the distinctly weird and un-sexy variety (I was so puzzled by the bizarre mechanics of the death that I was still wondering what the heck just happened) and is fortunately cut short by the timely appearance of Valerie and the Countess to catch Stefan in flagrante bizarro. Boy, nothing ruins a honeymoon more than when your new bride comes back to the hotel room with an older woman and catches you with a naked dead girl in the bathroom.

I should backtrack a second here and mention that the whole reason Ilona got some alone time with Stefan was because he had spent the night before whipping Valerie with his belt so that she decided to leave him and this prompted the Countess to go to the train station and try to get her to stay (not so much with Stefan, but with her). Catching Stefan in the bathroom with the dead naked Ilona was the nail in the vampiric coffin of his doomed relationship with Valerie and drives her into the awaiting (and unsurprised) arms of the Countess Bathory.

Disposing of Ilona’s body is a farcical venture, as the 3 newly minted amigos drive to the beach and bury her in a shallow sand dune grave. This farce is repeated at the end when Valerie and the Countess dispose of Stefan in the same way. Another recurring motif is the Countess Bathory’s sentimental attachment to young couples in love. That’s what drives her interest in Stefan and Valerie and the motif is repeated in the end when Valerie and a new young couple leave a café together to do…well, we have no idea what Valerie will do with them, because it might be better left to the imagination than turned into another languid vampire movie. But I have to say that there’s something really great about the empowerment of Valerie’s character at the end of the film. Granted, she is empowered into becoming a vampire, but it’s so much better than being strung along in an abusive relationship with Stefan (and perhaps also “Mother”) that seeing her at the end free of that relationship and not beholden to the Countess (whose death seems almost like a sacrifice for Valerie’s liberty) that it makes the whole thing almost redeeming.

So, why bother with Daughters of Darkness?
1. There’s the design/directing attention to detail. For instance, the color red shows up all around the Countess in subtle ways. It took me a second viewing to notice that her car was red all along, because the color wasn’t visible in the dark scenes until almost the end of the film. That was actually clever.
2. Then there are the two amusing supporting Belgians: the Hotel clerk (Paul Esser) and the retired police detective (Georges Jamin). The Hotel clerk is an older man who remembers seeing the Countess in the same hotel when he was a boy (and she looks the same age!) and the Belgian detective who remembers a series of killings in Ostend from the same time and who sees the pattern repeated in Bruges and Ostend now that the Countess is back and who is then dispatched (presumably killed) when the Countess hits his bicycle with her car on the way back from burying Ilona. (Not quite accidental death, but close.) The two Belgian men have delightfully expressive faces and they’re worth seeing.
3. Then there’s Delphine Seyrig who is just perfect as the washed out vampire version of a faded movie star. Her voice is delicate and reassuring and she plays the boredom of undead immortality perfectly whether she’s knitting or pretending to drink a blue grasshopper in the lobby. Ms. Seyrig was a superb actor and if you’re going to see her in a languid European movie then you should skip Last Year at Marienbad and see her in Daughters of Darkness. Her sentimentality is strange but believable and the whole déjà vu effect of the film hangs on her performance. You can really see why the old hotel clerk would remember her for all those years. She can have that kind of mesmerizing effect.
4. Oh, come on, you know you want to see what “Mother” looks like.
5. Ostend and Bruges (where Valerie and Stefan take a daytrip) are very visually appealing and the empty hotel and city make a very opulent ghost town.
6. You learn the important lesson that while it may sound awesome to have an entire hotel in Belgium to yourselves on your honeymoon, it’s actually quite dull and increases your odds of running into bored vampires who will get you involved in their shenanigans.
7. And there’s the corollary lesson that you should always ask to see the family pictures before you marry someone, lest “Mother” turn out to be some aging queen or a vampire or both.

In the end, Daughters of Darkness is more thoughtful than the Eurotrash erotic horror sleazefest that it seems like it would be at first sight, though it certainly includes many exploitable elements of the erotic vampire oeuvre. But if you’re worn out watching supervampires leaping all over the place chasing werewolves and shooting each other with ultraviolet light-bullets, then bored European vampires might be a decent change of pace.

Special Feature:
Commentary with David Del Valle & John Karlen

The commentary track is worth a listen if you’re so bored to death by the long silences of the film on its own. David Del Valle (a film historian and specialist in horror films) is there to provide and prompt the traditional commentary factoids. (e.g. The Astoria Hotel was apparently Gestapo headquarters during WW II—a claim that every grand hotel in Europe seems to make.) And he makes a great straight man for John Karlen’s more…colorful…commentary which makes watching the film a much more lively experience.
Among the things we learn is that Delphine Seyrig was paid in cash because she didn’t trust the independent production, Daniele Ouimet apparently had some junk in her trunk, the actor who plays the detective was quite a gourmet and that John Karlen is a dirty old man.

Here are some choice examples of Karlen’s turns of phrase:
“I always wanted to be on the Orient Express with a big Belgian woman.”
And now, for the low price of 750 euros John Karlen’s dream can become your reality.
“She [Delphine Seyrig] was mostly concerned about being paid in cash.”
Now that’s an acting method that I can get on board with.
“Everything is perverse. We’re all perverse.”
Now bring me a melon and an ear of corn and we can make this a real honeymoon.
“Beautiful Bruges which smelled badly…”
Apparently Belgium in the summer during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s smelled like tuna and ass, heavy on the ass.
“As in all European hotels the beds stink.”
Apparently the Gestapo was also afraid of running water and Europeans think it’s unlucky to get new mattresses.
“It had to be maidens’ blood because hookers’ blood wouldn’t do.”
I have nothing to add to this statement.
And this description of “Mother”: “Overweight sissified Bela Lugosi with a Castilian lisp.”
Sounds like sitcom gold to me. Somebody call Ray Romano quick.

William Shakespeare’s Bram Stoker’s The Mummy (also singing Al Stewart’s “The Year of the Cat”)

Bram Stoker’s The Mummy (1997) directed by Jeffrey Obrow

Speaking of Bram Stoker, here’s another film based on one of his books, in this case The Jewel of Seven Stars. Unlike Dracula, no one gives a rat’s ass whether or not this book is faithfully adapted or that it’s even been adapted at all. I mean, how many people came out of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Bingo Dingleberry’s Dracula and said, “You know, I hope someone adapts another Bram Stoker book four years from now because I am SO there!”

And you know you’re in for a treat when the packaging has to include a disclaimer such as, “Not affiliated with Universal Pictures.” Really? Did the folks at Universal really sit there and think that someone would be so mentally deficient that they would mistake this movie for the one with Brendan Fraser? How gorram insecure are the folks at Universal? If I’m going to read a warning label for a film I want it to be something like, THIS MOVIE MAY CAUSE INTENSE DIARRHEA AND KIDNEY DAMAGE. Now that’s an impressive disclaimer. Not affiliated with Universal Pictures? Why not sue people until that actually has to be the title of the movie instead of Bram Stoker’s The Mummy?

So, does anyone care if this film even vaguely follows the novel? It does…vaguely. But you don’t really care, do you? Do you?

Our story begins in 1947 in Egypt in The Valley of the Sorcerer (the lamest fake place name in fake Egyptology history) where some people are blackened to a crisp when they touch this mysterious jewel that looks like a hardened chunk of strawberry-banana jell-o.
Then we jump over to the “present day” in Marin County, California to an Egyptian themed study in a faux English manor house where Abel Trelawny is working on reading some hieroglyphs and then something bad happens to him offscreen.

The transportation of the manor house from England to California leads to the high humor value of seeing some of the worst faux British accents ever captured on the screen. I call them “faux British” because I have a theory about this: When Abel Trelawny moved out to California he couldn’t find many actual British people to work at his manor so he forced his people to speak in whatever British accents they could come up with.
That’s the only reason I can think of for saddling actors with doing accents and saddling an audience with having to sit through them. I don’t know why Abel Trelawny would attempt to recreate an English manor on the West Coast and it’s the sort of mind-boggling conundrum that makes for the better part of entertainment from this kind of film.

Meanwhile we meet our young hero Robert Wyatt (Eric Lutes of Caroline in the City) and his sidekick Brice Renard (Richard Karn, from Home Improvement). I have to say that of all the casting coups in this film this pairing is the best. Eric Lutes is just smarmy enough to sell the idea that he’s pretending to be an expert in Egyptian art and archaeology in order to impress a girl and Richard Karn alone is the highlight of the film. (I got an especial kick out of the pointlessness of the scene where Lutes calls up Karn in the middle of the night forcing Karn to talk about the faux Egyptian god Anuba while his topless companion decides to get up and leave thus earning an R rating in a completely dispensable way.) The relationship between Karn and Lutes is the most interesting one in the whole film. I mean this in the best way, but these two should get together and make more crappy movies together.

I should also take the time to mention that this crappy movie also features the talents of Louis Gossett Jr. That’s right, Academy Award Winning Actor Louis Gossett Jr. graces this crappy mummy movie with his intense presence as Corbeck the man obsessed with bringing Queen Tera back to life. (Apparently Queen Tera had seven fingers on one hand.)

Queen Tera? Why not bring back Queen Shannon and Queen Tiffany also?

Victoria Tennant makes a cameo appearance as Corbeck’s blind girlfriend. Why is she blind? Just so she can smell Corbeck’s presence on a business card. Why does Corbeck check himself into what looks like a jail cell at an insane asylum that he can leave anytime he wants? I have no clue.

I have a special enjoyment of the scene in the Trelawny study where the head of security sets us up for a drawing room mystery with all the suspects in the room. That’s where we meet the housekeeper Mrs. Grant (the omnipresent character actress Mary Jo Catlett) and her assistant Lily (Laura Otis) who remind me of how much fun it is to watch a community theatre production of an Agatha Christie play. Catlett is so over the top that I expected her to break into song at any moment. Laura Otis has a British accent so atrocious that it’s actually the basis for my earlier theory. On the other hand, we do get a decent gander at her gams which explains why anyone would hire her to speak with a bad British accent either in real life or for a mummy movie. And she has the most unexpectedly funny line in the whole film. When she goes down into the basement to get a heater she sees a bunch of sand on the ground and inexplicably escapes death at the hands of the awakened mummy (who is presumably too lazy to kill her): “Sand? I’m not cleaning that mess up.” I have never heard a more useless line from a maid in a movie.
I only wish it was a motif that she repeated throughout: “Blood? I’m not cleaning that mess up.” “Global economic collapse? I’m not cleaning that mess up.”

My first thought on seeing Amy Locane’s performance as Margaret Trelawny was that she looked wooden and glazed, but given the fact that it turns out that she is either being possessed by Queen Tera or is actually a reincarnation of Queen Tera herself or something like that it actually seems in retrospect to be foreshadowing of the twist instead of just bad acting. Frankly it was hard for me to believe that even a Melrose Place alum could act that way unless she was told to.

As with all mummy movies, the flashback sequences to Ancient Egypt leave you wanting more. I don’t care if some screenwriting workshop clown says that flashback digressions are irrelevant to the story—they’re audience gold and I want to see more of them.

On the other hand, what’s the point of including an occasional gruesome death scene only to reveal that it was a bad dream?

I’m sure that you’re all ready to run out and try to get a copy of this movie, so let me spare you the trouble by giving away the twist. Corbeck is killed by Queen Tera when he gets too uppity for her but Wyatt manages to stop Queen Tera. Everyone who doesn’t die lives happily ever after and you’d think the movie was over but you know things are going to take a turn when there’s an actual romantic honeymoon scene and when Wyatt gets up to have a bit of champagne he reveals a seven fingered deep bloody scratch on his back. Then Margaret says that Paris is the second most romantic place after Cairo. Oooh, creepy. But why would an ancient Egyptian queen think anything about Cairo, which wasn’t even founded until the 7th century A.D.?

So, what are the important lessons here?
1. Don’t bring back a mummy from the dead—and if you do don’t get all superior with them about it.
2. If you think your new partner may be a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian queen it’s best to have a safe word. My safe word is “apples.”
3. Don’t take advice from someone who is willingly living in a jail cell with no lock.
4. Blind people can smell your business cards to know if they actually belong to you.
5. Ancient Egyptian priests could have saved themselves and the rest of us a heap of trouble by burning any seven fingered Queens as witches.
6. If you have enough money you can staff your house with people who will pretend to be British, but you’d better have enough money to train them if you don’t want them to sound ridiculous.
7. If you hire a maid because she’s pretty, you can be sure she won’t clean up any sand that spills in your basement.

All in all, you’d have to be a real fan of mummy movies to give this one a try, or a hardcore Bram Stoker follower. While the cast of known actors gives this film a leg up if you’re looking to do a game of “where have I seen you before?” you’d be better off popping in the previously mentioned Lorenzo Lamas oddity if you need to see a moderately bad film.

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.)

Who Haunts the Haunters?

The Haunting (1999) directed by Jan de Bont

Who knew that ghosts could be in conflict with each other? Or that they can make phone calls? These were just a couple of things I learned from The Haunting, a salute to overwrought architecture.

As haunted house movies go, this is a relatively decent one. I don't know why anyone would build a house with so many exterior and interior elements that look like eyes, but then that sort of decrepit Gothic Revival creepiness is what makes haunted house stories possible. There aren't many stories about haunted bungalows or scary log cabins—they just don't have the right architecture to put a fright in a person.

The scenery is probably the best reason to see The Haunting. There were obviously some ridiculous sums of money thrown into this production and that kind of spectacle is worth taking a look at. Hill House, as envisioned here, is really something else: giant fireplace, a greenhouse the size of Denver, a mirrored carousel room, a hallway with standing water and stepping stones that look like books that have fallen into the pond, the requisite ominous looking portrait of the scowling master of the house and, of course giant statues that come to life and try to attack people. This is a truly extravagant haunted house.

Depending on how you want to feel about this film you can call it simple or rudimentary. To be fair, a close look at even some of the best of classics in any genre can prove to be disappointing if you start seeing all the flaws. On the other hand, it's always a bit disappointing when you get the feeling that either the writer forgot to finish a thought that was set up earlier, or the director didn't care about it, or it got edited right out.
Case in point: Theo (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is introduced to us as a ravenous bisexual. Shortly after that she brushes Eleanor's (Lili Taylor) hair provocatively (Hair brushing?! Good heavens, what next?) and when Eleanor flinches at the touch that's the end of that.
Now, there are a lot of horrible horror movies that would have proceeded to turn that moment into a soft-porn debacle, but would it have been so bad to actually develop that thought further into, say, a dramatic subplot? Are audiences so dumb that we can't be trusted with a subplot in a film? Is Desperate Housewives the last bastion of subplots?

I make the above complaint not because this is a terrible movie, but because it seems like a film that wanted to be about an hour longer with much more character development and possibly even a few more frightening incidents. Instead we have a spare/rudimentary movie that is technically impressive and which has a decent storyline but that feels like it could have given us a few more rooms of the house to look at.

Yes, that is Virginia Madsen as Eleanor's sister Jane in the opening scene, and no, although I love Virginia Madsen, I didn't expect to get a well-developed subplot about her and her annoying son. It’s enough to know that Eleanor has no place to go now that her mother’s dead and her sister is kicking her out of the apartment. (This lack of feeling explains why the ghosts of dead children didn’t bother calling Eleanor’s sister to help them.)
But I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a Victorian novel lost in the relationship between Eleanor, Theo and Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson). And we could definitely have done better with more of the plucky comic relief from Owen Wilson. (Owen's character is named Luke, which means that either they got the wrong Wilson brother or Luke Wilson was otherwise engaged playing a character named Owen.)
And what’s the deal with the creepy caretakers Mr. & Mrs. Dudley (the truly great Bruce Dern and Marian Seldes)? I half expected to find out they were behind the whole thing and I genuinely wanted to see Bruce Dern say “and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”

But back to the big question of the plot: if ghosts can place telephone calls to living people then how come they need Eleanor to show up and go head to head with her evil ancestor? Why don’t they just try to call up an arsonist to burn Hill House down and free them from the evil?
At any rate, the actual struggle of the story—between the ghost of the evil industrialist child-killer Hugh Crane (assisted by his malevolent house) and the ghosts of the dead kids (championed by Eleanor Vance) is actually a good conflict. The aesthetics and symbolism are well thought out (is it a coincidence that Eleanor drives a Gremlin? I think not.)—and there are some really good lines. (e.g. “Did you study art?” “No, I studied Purgatory. I was there for eleven years.”) And it has a mercifully low body count (if you don’t count the ghosts. Luke is beheaded by a giant swinging lion’s head and Eleanor sacrifices her life help the kinderghosts get to heaven. A different kind of haunted house movie would have populated the screen with several more thinly sketched characters to kill them off in clever ways around the house, but not this film. The Haunting seems to strive for a more thoughtful psychological approach, but this is somewhat undercut when we start to actually see the physical manifestations of the house’s malevolence.
Dr. Marrow is trying to study the roots of fear. I would venture to say that we have certain fears and subfears: the fear of the unknown (or unknowable) and the fear of the known (and especially the fear that you cannot defeat the object of your fear whether you know it or not.) Once you have a giant statue try to grab a character and drown him you’ve lost the fear of the unknown and replaced it with the fear of the known, which makes for a fun ride, but doesn’t unsettle you. What makes this movie less chilling is that it gives us an out—the mystery is explained (except for the mystery of the creepy caretakers) and evil (Hugh Crane and the malevolence of Hill House) is vanquished by good and specifically by the sacrifice of a good person.
In short, The Haunting is a moral fable that offers the comfort of salvation, so no matter how scary the unknown horrors are we can be comforted by the thought that all can be known and that good can overcome evil (and that there is such a thing as good and evil, for that matter). Compared to the unremitting unsettling horror of something like Darkness, that makes this a romantic comedy.

Special Features

Theatrical Teaser – Okay, houses that look like faces are frakkin’ scary.

Trailer – I’ll have to admit that I like the little poem about the house:

There once was a house, a bright happy home
Something bad happened
Now it sits all alone.
Its pillars are its bones
Its wall are its skin
Its windows are its eyes,
Won’t you come in?

No, I’m going to the next town over to have a sandwich with Bruce Dern.

Behind the scenes feature

Hosted by Catherine Zeta-Jones, this is better than the average Entertainment tonight promo reel that passes for a making-of feature. You get a nice look at the difference between the computer animation and practical effects, you get a standard set of interviews where the actors talk about what scares them and everyone talks about how spooky the set was and that no one wanted to be around it at night. The first highlight is a look at the horror movie pedigree of the producers of The Haunting. Susan Arnold is the daughter of Jack Arnold, the man responsible for The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Donna Arkoff Roth’s father was the renowned B-movie producer Samuel Z. Arkoff.
But the highlight of this special feature is the extra bit where we get a tour of some real haunted houses like Harlaxton Manor (the actual exterior set of The Haunting), a nearby haunted hotel and the infamous Winchester House which is always worth a scare.

Darkness

Darkness (2002) Directed by Jaume Balagueró

Darkness was a good reminder to me of why I enjoy bad schlock-horror movies—because they’re not really scary—at best they’re sometimes creepy, and most of the time they’re more amusing than frightening. If I want the shit scared out of me I can read the news or The Weekly Standard. Mostly my taste in horror leans toward the all-time classics that are stylish and thought-provoking but not so chilling to me anymore. Granted, I can remember when I was very little being so scared of Frankenstein that even Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein gave me nightmares. Darkness, though, is a genuinely creepy and frightening film. I don’t know what possessed me to watch it twice (maybe it was “the Darkness”) but even though I knew everything that happened and when it would happen, I still found myself trying to read a book (about the archaeology of Pompeii, if you must know) while “watching” it the second time because sometimes knowing what’s coming doesn’t help.
I have to admit that in the light of day and with a little bit of thought I can think about how silly the main premise of this film is and I start wondering about the giant plot holes. But after midnight, in a darkened quiet room all by myself, I’m more than a little creeped out by this film.
So, what’s so damn scary?
1. Jaume Balagueró seems to understand that even in a motion picture it’s what you don’t see that can be the most frightening. You might think it’s a cheap trick to have the antagonist of the film be “darkness” thus implying sinister motives to every shadow, but it’s hard to pretend that it’s silly when you get a flash of something crossing the screen or—in the most godawfully nightmare inducing moment--a flash of light reveals a room full of ghost children in the foreground with their backs to the camera as they (and we) look beyond them to Anna Paquin in the well-lit room beyond. She never sees them, we do, and it’s not funny, it’s not silly, it’s not cheesy, it frankly still scares the everlasting crap out of me. You can have the world’s best special effects create the world’s ugliest monster—but while that may be grotesque, it’s not necessarily as frightening as a brief glimpse of nothing and the suspicion that something may be amiss.
2. Children, as has long been noted, are the perfect targets of potential victimhood in fiction because we (most of us) are hardwired to want to protect the little ones. So, the first time Paul (Stephan Enquist) watches his colored pencil start twitching like a compass needle and rolling under the bed (into the “darkness”) of its own accord, or when his toy carousel lights up and starts whirling about on its own, it activates that child-saving part of the brain even as it also sparks the visceral memories of being afraid of the dark and all the unknown potential malevolent entities that might be lurking about in the great big world.
3. Anna Paquin in peril sparks a very different, but similarly essential desire to protect and serve.
4. There’s nothing scarier than not knowing where the danger is coming from. The great red herring of the film is the father (Iain Glen) whose fate is the crux of the film. Even when I knew he was going to be the victim his snapping rage was a bit creepy.
5. There’s nothing more evil than being betrayed by your own grandfather. Grandparents are supposed to be even more kindly than parents, so when Giancarlo Giannini turns out to be evil, it’s disappointing enough, but when he reveals why his evil ritual didn’t work out in the first place he turns out to be two different kinds of evil.
6. Real horror is unremitting. In a different kind of horror movie Anna Paquin and her boyfriend and little Paul would make it out alive and then you’d get some sort of ominous thing following them—thus setting up the sequel. Darkness, on the other hand, is as bleak as the title—no one makes it out alive. The father is killed by his own loving family in a botched tracheotomy. (Don’t swallow a whole bottle full of pills when you’re angry.) Lena Olin’s blood is sprayed all over the kitchen. The real Carlos is suckered into the house where he will be taken care of. The architect who tries to help is killed in the subway and Regina and Paul close out the film by being driven into their end in a tunnel by the fake Carlos. That’s a pretty brutal body count.
The real reason to see Darkness is for the visual style. It has some of the best use of background light and practical effects you’ll ever see. The scene with the architect walking through the subway tunnel with the lights going off behind him in stages as the darkness catches up to him is as brilliant as it is simple. Balagueró and his cinematographer Xavi Gimenéz are consistently clever in their use of practical effects and simple light and shadow to give us a sense of evil. I thought even the orange juice in the house was evil.
On the nature of that evil, though, the attempt to make this something bigger than a haunted house movie comes up with mixed results. Sure, the house and the darkness are eerie, but once you throw in the visit to the library to look up the conveniently located tome describing an ancient ritual unleashing the original evil darkness the mystery is gone and suddenly I’m not scared. (How scared can I be by something hidden in a library in Spain?) And here’s the key question: if the darkness is already capable of imitating people and beating up children in the house, and if it is already capable of hunting down and killing people in the subway tunnel, then what purpose does it really serve to complete the ritual to “unleash” the darkness? It would seem that the darkness is already pretty fucking leashless.
And are those the actual ghosts of the children in the house, or is it just the darkness using their apparitions? I can only assume that they’re just creepy minions of the darkness because otherwise I don’t understand why the ghosts of the murdered children would want to be so cooperative with the agenda of the darkness.
Also, why is it that the electrician who shows up to work on the house is Scottish? I guess the EU’s employment rules have really opened things up for Scottish Electricians.
Now, you might take issue with all this overthinking of the details, but it sure does take my mind off the creepy things lurking in the shadows—and you might need to use a similar technique to get to sleep after seeing Darkness.

Acting
Iain Glen comes off like a creepy version of the dad from Malcolm in the Middle (Bryan Cranston) and does an incredible imitation of a cuisinart. My favorite moment is when he gets loopy and gulps down a whole bottle of meds while trying to batter down the kitchen door.
Maybe it’s just the legacy of Romeo is Bleeding, but Lena Olin always has something of an edge to me. That explains why I thought she might be in on the evil plan.
Anna Paquin is obviously really good in the vulnerable role, though there were several times when I wished she could just go ahead and mix up Regina and Rogue into one character and just start kicking ass. Also, I have to hand it to the filmmakers that they managed to work in both a scene with Regina in a bathtub and one in the changing room of a natatorium without ever going for the exploitation angle.
Giancarlo Giannini exudes weariness and between this film, Hannibal and Dune he’s mastered the ways of people secretly up to no good. His best moment is when he explains that he knew that killing his own kid wouldn’t complete the darkness ritual because he realized that he didn’t love his son. Heartbreaking…and creepy.
And a special notice goes to Fermi Reixach, whose character of Villalobos, the architect is my personal favorite. His scene in the subway tunnel should be iconic as a symbol of man limping forward with determination in the struggle against evil. Yeah, I got all of that from Fermi Reixach walking down a subway station hall.

Special Features
Yeah, the trailer and the teaser are as scary as the film itself. The teaser asks "Will you dare enter?" and I can only respond with a resounding "No, not really, I think I have to go mow the lawn or something."
“Darkness Illuminated” features director Balagueró explaining how most of the effects are done in camera and how the most effective frights are what you don’t see. As a matter of cinematic technique it's worth hearing someone talk sense and not hide behind technical wizardry. And Lena Olin sums up the film with “It’s a very specific way of scaring the crap out of people.” Only too true. Sometimes watching these behind-the-scenes featurettes helps take the edge off a horror movie. Not this time.