Let Us Now Praise Famous Bricks

Brick (2005)
Written & Directed by Rian Johnson

Brick doesn’t need my praise. (Nor does Brick from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for that matter.) It’s a great film with an innovative premise: film noir detective mystery set in a modern high school. It’s a brilliant concept, which even if poorly executed would have me going.
Lucky for all of us that Brick is in fact flawlessly executed, from script through direction and performances and post-production. If you haven’t seen it, then you should. If you have seen it, it’s time to see it again. It’s a really well-made film with exceptional storytelling.

So, we begin with Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), our erstwhile detective reconstructing the events leading up to his finding his ex-girlfriend, Emily Kostich (Emilie de Ravin) dead in front of a storm drain tunnel. Emily had called Brendan with a cryptic message that at first made my brain explode with its arcanity until it was clear to me that it wasn’t because I had missed some generational leap in lingo but that even Brendan was puzzled as to what it was about. Brick, Pin, Tug, Poor Frisco. And the lingo doesn’t end there. Johnson really outdid himself internalizing the classic detective lingo and I love it.

I also love how the film keeps undercutting the grown up aspects of the detective story by reminding us of the setting. The authority figure isn’t a cop but the Assistant Vice Principal Trueman (I’m guessing Roosevelt is still the Principal.) And who is Assistant V.P. Trueman? None other than Richard Roundtree. Shaft is the Assistant V.P. at this high school. Things must really be tough at this place if even Shaft can’t keep things in line. Brendan has been working with Trueman, but Brendan is a freelancer, doing his own thing and in this case it’s personal and he needs to get to the bottom of who killed his ex before the real authorities discover her body and put the kibosh on the whole shebang. At any rate, Brendan goes to the high school drama department to get some info from Kara (Meagan Good) who is the queen diva of the theatre crowd and is involved in all kinds of unsavory things. Brendan is assisted along the way by The Brain (Matt O’Leary), a nice guy who wears glasses so thick that the Whataburger announcer will surely be using them as a metaphor for the latest monstrous burger concoction to come our way smothered in jalapenos and cheese. My personal favorite high school intrusion moment is after we’ve met The Pin (Lukas Haas) who is a club-footed drug dealer living in his mom’s basement. He’s referred to as “old” because he’s 26. And while I usually resist using the word “emo” or “Goth,” The Pin doesn’t just wear all black but he’s also got a cape, so make your own judgments.

The Pin: You read Tolkien?
Brendan: What?
The Pin: You know, the Hobbit books?
Brendan: Yeah.
The Pin: His descriptions of things are really good. He makes you wanna be there.

I think this bit does as much to remind you that even The Pin is just a kid as the scene where The Pin’s mom offers Brendan some breakfast cereal.

So, if Emily is the dame in trouble, then the femme fatale is Laura Dannon (Nora Zehetner) who we are introduced to at a costume party which excuses the chanteuse outfit nicely. Brendan knows that this dame knows something about what happened to Emily, so he has to get close to Laura—maybe too close.
Meanwhile, he follows leads that take him to the hop-heads who hang out behind the local diner (Coffee and Pie, Oh My). Turns out Emily’s new boyfriend is Dode (Noah Segan) who looks like he’s Kenickie and Rizzo’s grandson. Emily insists that Dode is a good friend, but Brendan can’t help disliking him.
And then there’s Tug (Noah Fleiss) the muscle man for The Pin. Tug is going off the rails and as Brendan points out to The Pin, muscle you can’t control is a liability.

At any rate, the story takes its twists and turns and Brendan sets up his revenge for Emily’s death, while trying to figure out the root of the caper and just to let you know that the world is grey Brendan manages to get innocent people hurt as well as the guilty and the really guilty.
I’d usually be all about the spoilers, but I’ll leave the ending of this one alone because it suffices to say that it resolves the story nicely and I liked the story. There's a lot to be discussed here.

In short, Brick is a brilliant neo-noir piece. I wish there were more films like this. I really do. It’s uncompromising. It’s dark and hardboiled and every other adjective you could think of. And the music is just really great, too.

If the surest mark of success is imitation, then the surest mark of singular brilliance is the complete paralysis of imitation. And this is my real disappointment with the Brick effect. This film should open up the floodgates of its own style and genre, but it hasn’t. I can understand why Rian Johnson wouldn’t want to make another film in this style—because then he’d be that guy. But it would be nice to see people attempt to make more films like this. It would be a damned sight better than the millions of Transformers clones (I’m looking at you, Transmorphers!) or whatever. Honestly, I’d be willing to sift through the piles of bad imitations of Brick to find the couple that may be gems in and of themselves. That’s how new genres are created, after all, and it would be a welcome break from the onslaught of vampires, zombies, slashers and movies about dogs named after composers to see a new genre of noir high school dramas. Here’s the hurling of the gauntlet. Make your own damn bricks, please.

Bonus Features

1. Deleted & Extended Scenes with Introductions by Director Rian Johnson
1. The Moon and I
This is the full version of Laura’s spoken word and piano bit from Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado which is our introduction to her character at the big party. I can appreciate the cut for the final version of the film, but it’s nice to have the full version as a special feature.
2. Pie House Rat
An extended version of the scene with Brendan and Dode behind the pie diner. “You’re on the bright side of dim, Dode. I thought you had this half handled I’d be eating lunch.”
3. Economics
A phone conversation with Brendan and The Brain.
4. You Trust Me Now?
The original version of a scene in the car with Brendan and Laura that was reshot before Sundance.
Brendan: What’s your angle in all this?
Laura: I don’t know. You know, I’m usually pretty sharp but maybe I see what you’re trying to do for Em, trying to help her and I don’t know anybody who would do that for me.
Brendan: And now you are dangerous.
5. Heaven
A fantasy scene where Brendan imagines seeing Emily floating over the football field after Dode knock him out. A little too strange for this film, unless they had set up Brendan’s character as prone to NyQuil induced hallucinations.
6. New Orleans
The original bed scene with Brendan and Laura. It certainly eliminates the ambiguity about whether Brendan and Laura had sex. They do and afterwards they have a nice chat. “I have a car. I have an aunt in New Orleans. She wouldn’t care.” It’s a good scene.
7. Kara Plays Her Hand
An extension of the mirror scene with Brendan and Kara with Kara trying to blackmail Brendan.
8. A Dirty Word
The original version of the field scene. The final version of the scene was done in low-angle closeups to conceal the fact that the formerly barren field had been covered in Astroturf in the intervening months between the original shoot and the reshoot. A continuous shot that makes for interesting scenery, but I like the closeups in the final version.

2. The Inside Track: Casting the Roles of Laura and Dode
1. Nora Zehetner’s audition from May 2003. She does a decent read.
2. Noah Segan’s audition from May 2003. He looks a bit strung out, but it works.
These are both very brief and without anything in the way of context.

3. Commentary with Rian Johnson, Noah Segan, Nora Zehetner, Producer Ram Bergman, Production Designer Jodie Tillen, and Costume Designer Michele Posch
A very informative and lively commentary, though it’s done with the host and rolling guest speaker talk show style of commentary that I don’t much care for. Noah Segan does a great impersonation of Ram Bergman. Anyhow, this film was scraped together by plucky upstarts and Rian Johnson managed to shoot most of it in his old high school in San Clemente, California.

Trailers
1. Dave Chappelle’s Block Party
An odd choice for a trailer here.
2. Slither
An odder choice, but I love this movie.
3. Inside Man
“This ain’t no bank robbery!” I’ve seen this trailer a million times and I still don’t care what Clive Owen is really up to.

Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis!

Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (1997) directed by John Henderson, screenplay by Craig Strachan

The title of this film alone is worth the price of admission, so any degree of entertainment after that is just a delightful bonus. I stumbled into this movie after I had started working on a character also named Mavis Davis (a detective, not a singer like this Mavis) so my initial interest was tangential, but my curiosity was rewarded with a comedy that is (surprisingly enough) actually funny. (Also, any comedy which references Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia can't be that bad, right? I mean, The Brady Bunch was a great satire of The Wild Bunch, after all.)

Here’s the setup: Marty Starr (Rik Mayall) is a record producer with a failing business (I know, I know, it’s almost a redundant plot point these days), behind in alimony to his ex-wife Cynthia (Jaclyn Mendoza) and deeply in debt to a certain Mr. Rathbone (Danny Aiello). A stroke of desperate inspiration later and he’s on his way to attempting to kill his big star Marla Dorland (Jane Horrocks) to boost her record sales and get him solvent again. Hilarity ensues.

Now, the thing about comedy is that you could take a decent premise and turn it into an absolute pile of crap. (Add Will Ferrell and shake thoroughly.) Taking a chance on comedy is a lot like drinking something from an unmarked black bottle: You might get a swig of a tasty beverage, or you might end up with a mouthful of carbonated possum piss—and you have no way of guaranteeing that you’ll get one or the other. And the worst thing is that there’s no such thing as a comedy so bad that you find yourself laughing at it. You can have a ridiculously poorly made comedy, but if its funny then it’s funny. A bad comedy is usually one that in some way compromises the comedy or pulls its punches or, conversely, tries too desperately to get a laugh, as if the expected audience is a mentally challenged tortoise. (Yeah, I'm looking at you Scary Movie IV.)

The reason I mention all that is that I have imagined how Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis would be remade as a big studio romantic comedy and how awful it would be. My biggest fear is that it’s already been done and that it starred Hugh Grant and Ben Stiller.
At any rate, what’s so damn funny about this film?

First, (and maybe funniest?) is the idea that a record producer could turn a profit. Nothing dates this film more than the lack of complaints about online piracy and mp3s. It lends the whole thing a quaint period air that may have been a bit old-fashioned even in 1997. Another anachronism of note is a moment when two thugs are talking about chips and pommes frittes in an hommage to Pulp Fiction. The thing about that moment is that it resonates as a pop culture reference, but I also have to wonder how many real thugs have found themselves trying to be more like Jules and Vincent Vega. So is this scene about filmmakers referencing a movie or life imitating art?

Then there’s Rik Mayall. I guess I might be one of 3 people on this continent who might remember Rik Mayall from Drop Dead Fred (1991), and I guess even my memory of that movie is a bit hazy (think of it as Beetlejuice's poor cousin from Arkansas), but he’s funny. Granted, I did find myself imagining what Simon Pegg would do in his place, but that’s not to detract from Mayall’s performance. (It’s more about the hair than the performance, per se.) In fact, one of the reasons this film works for me is that the character of Marty Starr is an asshole and that he doesn’t have a moral conversion that makes him nice at the end. In the end, he’s still an asshole, he’s just an asshole who no longer wants to kill Marla Dorland. (Maybe Ben Stiller really has been in a remake of this movie.)

And of course there’s Jane Horrocks. I can’t say enough about Jane Horrocks. She's a marvelous singer (underused here) and can take a character that shifts from shallow pampered (and slightly loopy) Marla Dorland back in time to the hopelessly unfashionable Mavis Davis and then forward to a couple of moments of genuine sympathy. You can really see why Marty has no problem wanting to kill her for most of the film and you can really understand why he wants to save her by the end of the film.
She can play deliciously venomous, vapid or sweet and make all of them seem like the real thing.

Also, there’s Belize. It’s often overlooked as a means of getting a cheap laugh in Central America, but it’s there and should be used more often.
And one of the funnier bits is the way Marla Dorland’s tour keeps getting renamed in dedication to the additional members of her entourage who have been bumped off in the bungled attempts to kill her. (This reaches its heights when Marla Dorlan’s lapdog is assassinated.)


Sorry for the spoiler there, but yes, Marla Dorlan’s dog is assassinated. Clint the assassin (Marc Warren, aka Pvt. Albert Blithe from Band of Brothers) is one of the best parts of this film. He manages to combine excellent marksmanship with complete bungling.
And I don’t know who Danny Aiello owed money to, but if this is how he paid it off, then it was worth it. The scene where Rathbone and Marty observe Rathbone’s son Paul (Paul Keating) working on an atrocious song is especially priceless.

I guess the thing that gives this comedy its edge is that the protagonist manages to engineer the deaths of several people (and the dog) and get away with it. I have to admit that it’s perversely satisfying to see a comedy that gets away with that kind of moral ambiguity. Sure, you can say that Marty Starr undergoes a kind of rebirth of humanity that sends him in the line of fire to save Marla’s life, but this doesn’t change the fact that he really has no comeuppance for the collateral damage caused by the one murder he commits and the two people (and a dog) who are killed accidentally by Clint in the effort to kill Marla. Even at the end Marty smiles at the camera as Clint puts his laser sight on Marty’s ex Cynthia. There’s something refreshing about a comedy that doesn’t feel the need to fix the ethics and morals of its characters and re-establish the right and proper order.

In a way, an ending like this calls into question the idea that a morally perfect and ethically just world is the “normal” order that is to be restored at the end of a comedy. As light-hearted as this film is, it does posit a world where the wicked and grasping ultimately prosper and where the most you can hope from humanity is a little bit of warmth and love in the midst of it all. But the great thing about Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis is that you don’t have to think about anything deep to enjoy it, but you don’t have to feel guilty for enjoying it either.

Special Features
Behind the Scenes
This behind the scenes documentary is so un-slick that it’s worth seeing because at least it isn’t the overly packaged Entertainment Tonight “behind the scenes” style crapfest but a much more homely second cousin of such things.

Coming Attractions

As per the usual for the Badger Box Office, other projects have caused a backlog of films to develop.
For those folks who want a preview of what's been on the screen here's a list of films for which commentaries are forthcoming:

Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (1997)
Art School Confidential (2006)
Brick (2005)
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Black Widow (1954)
The Thin Man (1934)
Why We Fight (2005)

Also coming up in Badger-vision (http://willyvision.blogspot.com/) an episodic review of HBO's 1980's series
Philip Marlowe, Private Eye
as well as The Guild Seasons 1 & 2 and Weeds Seasons 1-3.

And in the Badgervision Annex (http://badgertvannex.blogspot.com/) several projects forthcoming:
Why We Fight (1942-45)
Betty Boop
and Atomic Testing films.

In addition, as part of my research for playing a horror film director in the Attic Rep Theatre's production of Allison Moore's Slasher, I will be examining a whole host of slasher films (and works that critique the genre) of which the following are already on the docket:

American Psycho (2000)
Hostel (2005)
Hostel: Part II (2007)
Turistas (2006)
Make a Wish (2002)

Have Stakes, Will Travel

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974) written & directed by Brian Clemens

I’ll have to admit that I wasn’t expecting much from Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, but I was drawn to this late Hammer outing by the title alone. (It's the kind of title which somehow implies cheap science fiction and more than a little embarassment.) I braced myself for some sort of wretched excess, so when this film turned out to be a unique and classy film I was more than pleasantly surprised.

Captain Kronos (Horst Janson) is a Napoleonic officer who rides around Europe with his hunchback sidekick Professor Hieronymous Grost (John Cater) with a cart filled with wooden stakes and prepared to do battle with the minions of darkness. He’s like a cross between Zorro, Yojimbo and Van Helsing. The only thing he's missing is a boomstick. He even has his own logo and I swear that was a cheroot he was smoking there.
Kronos is called in by his old friend Dr. Marcus (John Carson, who played Secker in Taste the Blood of Dracula) to investigate a curious case of vampirism. (It's like Bones, only with vampires instead of David Boreanaz.)
The world of this film posseses a very rich understanding of vampirism. The idea here is that there is no single way to kill a vampire because vampires are understood to be a collection of many different species/types/variations, each with its own attributes and methods of destruction. For instance, the vampires going on a tear at the top of the film don’t drain people of blood, but instead steal their youth and vitality, so that the victims instantly age and die leaving behind bodies that look like old crones. Something is going terribly wrong here and that calls for the services of a professional vampire hunter.

Meanwhile, Kronos, on his way into town picks up a hot gypsy girl Carla (Caroline Munro) who is put into the stocks by some concerned citizens because she was dancing on a Sunday. Frankly, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be okay to see her dance any day of the week, but hey every community has standards and practices. Kronos, though, has the right idea and rescues her for which he will be adequately rewarded later.

The vampire (or vampires) continue on a tear while Kronos investigates the situation and we are introduced to the suspects.
An especially novel method of finding a vampire is Toad in the Hole, where you bury dead toads in boxes in an area and for whatever reason if one comes back to life it means an undead person has passed over it. This method leads to the discovery of carriage tracks that lead to the home of the Durwards. Apparently the 9th Lord of Durward, a friend of Dr. Marcus, died some time ago and his widow (Wanda Ventham), who doesn't want to be seen, hasn’t forgiven Marcus for not saving him and thus leaving her to take care of the two beautiful (and oddly attached to each other) Durward children Paul (Shane Briant) and Sara (Lois Dane).
Kronos, meanwhile has to deal with some toffs led by a man named Kerro (Ian Hendry) who are hired to get rid of him. Kronos (one part Zorro, after all) dispatches the hired swordsmen with aplomb and goes back to his main work of hunting vampires.
But not before having an extremely tasteful love scene in the stables with Carla while Grost and Marcus play chess in the house.
Marcus (Kronos calls him “you old leech-lover”) is eventually turned into a vampire unwittingly, but this gives him a chance to sacrifice his life so that Kronos and company can discover what will finally kill this variety of vampire. What follows is a hilarious series of bits I call 100 ways to kill your vampire friend. The experimentation is hilarious as Kronos tries everything and it looks like he’s torturing poor Markus. (Which causes the townsfolk to form a posse to go after Kronos because they don’t know what’s going on.) Finally, serendipity strikes. It turns out only a cross made of steel can kill this kind of vampire. Fortunately for Kronos, there is a cross made of steel in the town cemetery and he and Grost fashion the cross into a sword for Kronos to wield.
There are a couple of red herrings involved in the conclusion as Kronos heads up to Durward castle and has to figure out if the real vampires are the Durward children or the Lady of the house. He uses Carla as bait, very fetching bait.
It turns out that Lord Durward (William Hobbs) is alive and kicking (or, actually undead and biting) and going around doing some form of hunting in the night, but what they didn’t really know is that it was their mother all along. Lady Durward is a Karnstein by birth (whatever that means), member of an illustrious vampire family (with their own set of Hammer films). She mesmerizes her children and tries to take Carla's vitality but Kronos uses his shiny mirrored cross/sword to freeze her in place while he duels Lord Durward to death (or re-death) Lady Durward is then finished off too, leaving.
It’s unclear what the Durward/Karnstein kids will do in the aftermath now that they've found woken up from their spells and have seen the instantly decayed bodies of their evil parents. (Are the kids evil too?)
But Kronos rides off into the sunset leaving behind the girl (though he promises that he will think of her on his journeys). He'll think about her a lot, I'd think.

Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter is a great vampire film and should be a classic, not least for some of the most imaginative thoughts about vampirism and its varieties. It’s refreshing to have a vampire film that doesn’t try to create a unified field theory of the origin of vampirism but is just about the adventuring involved in tracking down and destroying the many evolutionarily variegated species of vampires that are running around. Captain Kronos imagines a big rich world full of vampires and gives us an awesome hero to take them on. It’s a shame this film didn’t pan out into a lengthy set of sequels, because I could have done with 3 or 4 more Captain Kronos films to watch. As it is, we have to settle for just the one, but it’s a good one.

Special Features
Commentary with Brian Clemens and Caroline Munro
“Violence and sex should be taken off the screen and put back where they belong in the mind of the viewer.”
It’s great to listen to a commentary on one of these 1970s pieces that includes a woman’s perspective and isn’t just a pair of horn-dog old men.
Caroline Munro is a classy woman and one of the greatest of the scream queens and frankly not a bad actress all told.
We learn that Horst Janson was dubbed throughout the film, that there were 1300 storyboard drawings prepared for the film which was influenced by John Ford westerns.
Also, Caroline Munro had to spend so much of the shooting period barefoot that she was in pain for a lot of the time.
The commentary here is good and reveals the filmmakers to have been thoughtful and rather classy compared to the exploitation racketeers that are rampant in the horror biz.

Taste the Clams of Dracula!

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) directed by Peter Sasdy, screenplay by Anthony Hinds

Taste the Blood of Dracula is a mixed bag of a film. It edges toward exploitation, but of course it’s not Vampyres by a long shot. It hints at incomprehensibility, but for a script that wasn’t originally going to include Dracula at all, it actually works out alright. (Christopher Lee was reluctant to play Dracula again and the story was supposed to revolve around young Lord Courtley’s revenge, but the American distributors wanted Dracula in there somewhere because they judged, rightly, that they could sell anything better with a Dracula name attached than without.)
The opening of the film features a fat salesman named Weller (Roy Kinnear) in a carriage who manages to piss his fellow travelers off so badly that they toss him right out into the (presumably Eastern European) forest. He hears screaming and discovers Dracula (Christopher Lee) impaled with a stake and dying. (This is apparently taken from the end of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave.)
Dracula’s eyes are creepily blood red (allergies again) and after a bit of writhing he finally turns to dust and his blood (do vampires bleed?) turns into a powder. Dracula then disappears from the film for a while.

Meanwhile back in England (at last, we’re out of Ingolstadt) we get a little scene in a churchyard straight out of Trollope or George Eliot with the young lovers of the community paired off and making arrangements for their assignations. Jeremy Secker (Martin Jarvis) is in love with Lucy Paxton (Isla Blair) and Lucy's brother Paul (Antony Corlan) is in love with Alice Hargood (Linda Hayden). But Alice’s father forbids her from seeing young Paul despite the fact that he himself is friends with the boy’s father as we soon learn.

In fact the fathers of the kids here form a little trio that gets together the last Sunday of every month to do “Charity work in the East End.” I don’t know who Charity is, but she must work pretty hard. It’s a shame these guys don’t have a name for their little trio. (The Ambulators, The Victorian Dads Thrill-Seeking Hooker & Blackjack Club, The T-Birds, Cougars, Hawks, Jerkoffs, whatever…) or for that matter t-shirts and nicknames.
Apparently, they are bored, or at least Hargood (Geoffrey Keen) is bored, Secker (John Carson) and Paxton (Peter Sallis) seem to be enjoying themselves. (Hookers and cigars and cocaine, what else could a Victorian gentleman need?) Hargood, though, needs something to keep him interested since abusing his wife and daughter and heading to the bordello once a month don’t seem to do the trick anymore.

The bordello in the East End is the exploitation element that provides the titillation factor and a bit of nudity as we tour the place with Felix (Russell Hunter) the ridiculously made-up mostly bald pimp. (When I say ridiculous, please understand that this is something of an understated. Hugo Weaving in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert looked more classy.) We get a really atrocious bit of exotic dancing by an uninteresting lady (Malaika Martin) with a snake (I can see why Hargood is bored) though, again, Paxton and Secker seem to be quite enjoying themselves with their own ladies.
But even this bit of Sunday night fun is interrupted by the appearance of young Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates) (whose character was originally intended to be the main evil of the film in place of Dracula). Courtley is a proto-Aleister Crowley/post-Byronic character who has gone whole-hog into devilry and evil. He is the real deal compared to the T-Birds and their attempts to stave off boredom. Despite not having a penny, Courtley walks into the brothel like he owns the place, walks in on every room in the place and in each one the prostitutes swoon over him because he’s just that damned charismatic. He’s like a Victorian devil-worshipping Fonzie. Courtley is so cool that he walks right in on the old guys and their snake dancer takes Hargood’s whore away from him with a snap of the fingers and walks out to the great embarrassment (as if he wasn’t a walking embarrassment already) of Felix the Pimp.
Hargood is now bored and angry but also kind of curious and breaks up the whole party and (perhaps mesmerized by the clammy excitement of Courtley’s evil) goes looking for the young man to see if he can provide the gang with better entertainment.
Courtley is excited by the prospect of people with money and suggests they follow him to a shop where he can get them something really exciting. It is, of course, the fat merchant Weller who has the relics of Dracula including the powdered blood of Dracula amidst his other knicknacks.
It costs a freaking fortune but Hargood bullies everyone into pitching in (or he'll disband the club altogether) and they meet up with Courtley at an abandoned church where he sets up a low-budget black mass and proceeds to brew up 4 goblets of Dracula blood smoothies. Courtley orders the old men to drink the blood (without actually using the phrase “Taste the Blood of Dracula” fortunately) and they refuse because A) it looks (and maybe smells?) disgusting and B) it turns out they were bored but not THAT bored. Hargood tells Courtley to drink it himself, so the young man obliges and takes a big gulp of Dracula which then causes him to collapse. (There is a particularly annoying heartbeat camera effect here.) And then, for no discernible reason the older men beat Courtley to death and then, horrified (and a little thrilled?) by what they’ve done they go their separate ways and (in order to avoid suspicion) disband their club or at least suspend their activities. (Which isn't suspicious at all.)
After the chorus of old men leave the church Dracula finally appears (a little late to give the old folks a little thrill) and declares “They have destroyed my servant. They will be destroyed.” (If he had shown up a minute earlier he could have destroyed them in less than a minute and put an end to this movie right then and there.)
So, the rest of the film turns into a revenge film as Dracula takes out his vengeance on the fathers by using their children.

Hargood begins to drink more than usual and act ever more abusively with Alice. The look on the father’s eyes when he goes after Alice to hit her is not just menacing but portends even more disgusting possibilities. (I mean, he did kill a man, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still bored enough to do something far worse.)
Alice runs away from her father and stumbles into the arms of Dracula, who turns her into a minion (though not full-fledged). Her father chases after her, and under the spell of Dracula she takes a shovel and stoves in her father’s head.

This brings the police into the game as they begin to suspect everyone of everything without much luck. Alice lures her friend Lucy into Dracula’s arms (and teeth). Secker figures out what’s going on and tries to fix the problem (he suddenly becomes a stand-up guy here) and with Paxton in tow goes to the church where they discover Lucy’s body. Secker tries to convince Paxton what must be done but Paxton shoots Secker and then, refusing to kill his own daughter is instead killed by Lucy and Alice in a bacchic frenzy.
The innocent children as the instrument of their guilty fathers’ demise is a great device, though once Secker is stabbed by his own son it becomes less clear what Dracula’s problem is with the children other than pure mayhem.
Paul, armed with information from the now-deceased Secker who managed to take the time to research vampires before being killed (“You must arm yourself with knowledge.”) embarks on an ad hoc hero quest to rescue Alice from Dracula. Alice ends up being too needy a minion for Dracula who doesn’t want to be pestered by her. (Why don’t you turn me into a vampire too? Did you think Lucy was prettier than me? Do I look fat in this yellow dress?)
But Dracula’s rejection of Alice is costly as she joins up with Paul at the end to trap Dracula in an ambush of crosses, liturgy and light (including an especially amazing glowing cross) that finally does the vampire in. (I don’t know why Dracula takes to hurling objects at people, but he does.) Paul and Alice (no longer bothered by the sins of the older generation) survive to do what young folks do. Too bad their friends are dead, but that happens.

So, Taste the Blood of Dracula, while not rising to the level of a classic, does have some interesting angles to it. I can see how the story was at once convoluted and enriched by the presence of Dracula. It’s hard to imagine Courtley as having the same dark mesmerizing capability of Christopher Lee’s Dracula and while there is much that is incomprehensible here and it’s not a must see, there are some decent elements of interest. So, if you’re as bored as the old guys here, watching this movie would be a better choice than going to a Victorian whorehouse or drinking Dracula’s frothing blood.


Extras
Theatrical Trailer
The trailer actually says: “Sense the clammy excitement of his evil.”
Sense the WHAT? Sense the CLAMMY WHAT?
How far off the deep end does a slogan writer have to go to write the words “Sense the clammy…” and go on from there to finish the sentence? And how coked up do producers have to be to say “That’s brilliant. It really captures the essence of the film.”
Clammy. Excitement. Evil. This is not a combination known to nature.
When I think of excitement I don’t think of the word clammy? I don’t even think of clams when I think of excitement. (Well, I suppose it does depend on the type of clam we’re talking about, but still…)
I don’t know whether it’s insulting or liberating that someone got away with this ridiculously bad line.
I don't know, because I'm still a little bit deranged from being hit in the head with the line "Sense the clammy excitement of his evil!" No. I will not sense his clammy excitement. I don't want to sense his clammy anything. I won't do it.
Perhaps instead of the imperative, they could at least make it an offer: Sample the clammy excitement of his evil! Sip the Blood of Dracula!

Frankenstein Must Be Retired

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) directed by Terence Fisher, screenplay by Bert Batt

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was the fifth of Hammer’s Frankenstein films and it shows in both the maturity as well as in a little bit of Frankenstein fatigue.
I am hard pressed to think of a less sympathetic version of Frankenstein than this one. Grand Moff Tarkin is a sane gentleman compared to the sadistic bastard baron here.
The film opens with Frankenstein stalking and killing geniuses so that he can lop off their heads and experiment on transplanting their brains. (That old gag.) He’s like some bizarre Jack the Ripper. And if it wasn't for a petty criminal who attempts to burgle him (I love that verb) he would have gotten away with it too. But Frankenstein has to dispense with his lab and head out on the lam. With the police on his trail he cheeses it and finds another German burg to haunt. Then he takes up lodging and proceeds to blackmail his landlady Anna Spengler (Veronica Carlson) and her fiancé Karl (Simon Ward) into helping him recreate his lab and begin experimentation again.
His goal? To extricate a certain Dr. Frederick Brandt (George Pravda) who had been in correspondence with Dr. Frankenstein and who separately arrived at the secret of life. Frankenstein’s experiment went awry (as we all know) and Brandt’s discovery drove him mad. Fortunately for Frankenstein Dr. Brandt is incarcerated in the same asylum that Karl works at (The Ingolstadt Institute for the Mentally Dishevelled.) Also, Karl is stealing cocaine from the hospital to sell on the black market to use the money to take care of Anna’s severely ill mother, which is the dirt that Frankenstein uses to blackmail the young couple.

Frankenstein takes Karl on his expeditions to steal medical supplies and Karl is forced to kill a hapless security guard, thus enmeshing Karl (and, by implication, Anna) further into Frankenstein’s evil crimes. Blackmail, murder, unethical science—as if these weren’t enough, Baron Frankenstein actually rapes Anna in a brutal and disturbing scene made more so by his request for 2 basted eggs for breakfast later. It really leaves me with a lack of desire to ever order basted eggs, that’s for sure. Apparently the scene itself was a late addition to the film and Peter Cushing objected to it strenuously, but the fact of the matter is that it’s really not a far cry from anything else this incarnation of Frankenstein does. Frankenstein really MUST be destroyed.

But while the completely irredeemable nature of Frankenstein here is somewhat off-putting there are several reasons why this film is actually quite worth the time.
1. Peter Cushing as an evil bastard. You keep expecting him to ask Anna where the location of the rebel base is.
2. Karl’s hair. I think Karl’s hair escaped from Mick Jagger’s head and made its way to Hammer productions. It makes his already goofy looking face look even more like that of a 12 year old schoolboy escaped from a road-show production of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
3. Veronica Carlson. She is quite pretty as a damsel in almost constant distress. The best part is when they’ve buried Brandt’s body in the garden and a water main breaks exposing the body forcing Anna to pull the body out and hide it elsewhere while keeping the municipal workmen from seeing what she’s got hidden.
4. The world’s funniest undertaker. There’s a scene with the befuddled inspector interviewing the darkly humorous fellow and it's worth a couple of good chuckles.
5. Funny cop, funnier cop. The scene with the undertaker is really great because of the hilarious duo of Inspector Frisch (Thorley Walters) and The Police Doctor (Geoffrey Bayldon). Walters is a puffed up inspector who refuses to listen to anyone and then comes to the same conclusions and the long-suffering gestures from Bayldon make the film. I only wish that this duo had been teamed up for their own film at some point. It would have been like Without a Clue only years earlier.
6. Freddie Jones. He plays Dr. Richter, who is killed for his body and Frankenstein puts Brandt’s brain in his head. Which now, as an acting challenge, means that he’s playing Dr. Brandt in the body of Dr. Richter. It’s not just that he brings a real humanity to a complex role, especially in the scene near the end where Brandt goes to see his wife Ella (Maxine Audley) and tries to explain the situation to her—as if that wasn’t enough, it’s that he’s Freddie Jones, which means that forever in my mind he will be the mentat Thufir Hawat from David Lynch’s Dune which just adds a whole level of sympathy for him. And it’s thus gratifying when Brandt/Richter gets the drop on Frankenstein at the end.
"I fancy that I am the spider and you are the fly, Frankenstein."
It's a line that could have come from Dune, frankly.
Freddie Jones' captures real human anguish. His own experiments have led to this moment when his brain has been put into someone else's body, so that his own wife rejects him--not even because he is ugly, but because of the invisible monstrosity of the crime. Frankenstein really must be destroyed, and it is Brandt/Richter who takes him down and chooses to perish with him rather than allow the perversion of nature to continue.
“You must choose between the flames and the police, Frankenstein.”
Frankenstein chooses the flames (lured by the desire to find Brandt’s papers) and the “monster” dies in the flames, having been revenged upon the Baron for his unnatural creation.

The ethical dilemma posed by Frankenstein here is especially convoluted, because he keeps talking about finding the secret of life and keeping geniuses at the height of their abilities alive forever, but functionally his whole project consists of merely transplanting one living brain into another perfectly good body. He isn’t even really reanimating anyone here so much as keeping the animated going by switching vessels or by piecing together new vessels. Maybe I’ve seen too many Frankenstein films, but by Frankensteinian standards this isn’t a very groundbreaking line of inquiry.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed was better than I expected even if the ending still felt abrupt. Karl survives (if you want to call it that) but Anna is stabbed and killed by Frankenstein when he discovers she has not only let Brandt/Richter escape but stabbed him out of fright. (I won’t even go into the misogyny inherent in killing off the “stained” woman but letting the sullied man live.) There’s no denouement to speak of as the film just ends with the sound of crackling flames and the credits rolling over the fire.

Again, a Frankenstein film with some flaws, but in many ways a rich experience.

Pharoah Got Your Tongue?

The Mummy (1959) directed by Terence Fisher, screenplay by Jimmy Sangster

I don’t even remember the first time I saw The Mummy. It must have been in color, because I distinctly remember the second time I saw it, which was on a tiny black and white television set in a van during a road trip. I was probably no more than 9 years old and I can remember thinking at that moment about how the scene looked in color.
I must have seen this movie dozens of times because it seemed to be on every other weekend or so for years. And I know exactly why this movie made such an impact on me—it was because of the scene where Christopher Lee gets his tongue cut off. (I would flash “Spoiler Alert” here but, folks, the film has been around for 50 years.)
It wasn’t even the most gruesome thing I’d seen by then. (That would be watching Christopher Walken blow his brains out playing Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter when I was around 7years old.)
But something so viscerally struck me about the whole tongue bit that it was remained with me in the back of my mind. Perhaps because it was, in the story, a punishment for forbidden love, so that it became in my mind associated with the lengths some people will go to keep people apart, though a mute man might be just the right thing for some women. (But a tongueless man? Only a woman with a peculiar fetish could want that.)

I think the key to it all was the setting, though. Even in ancient times other cultures thought Egypt was exotic and sexy. Maybe it was because everyone shaved off all their hair and wore candles on their head. Maybe it was the eyeliner. Maybe the hot climate and diaphanous clothing.
The thing is, what I now love even more about The Mummy is how the entire flashback scene (which seems very lengthy) violates several rules of modern storytelling by interrupting the action of the here and now and by revealing backstory through pure narration. But, it is so effective that the Stephen Sommers Mummy films use the same trick at some point.
Why? In part, because what’s the point of telling a story that has ancient Egypt in it if you can’t use it as en excuse to dress people up like King Tut? Bubba Ho-Tep has a flashback sequence. Even lesser entries in the mummy genre get this. (Bram Stoker’s The Mummy has a flashback sequence). The brilliance of The Mummy is that it’s in color and, it’s combined with something that can make anyone squirm. I think it’s the look on Christopher Lee’s face that does it. It’s not like we see what happens. But Lee’s expression makes the fear palpable.

Now, allow me to backtrack a little to set the film itself in better perspective. Long before we see Christopher Lee, we begin with an 1895 British archaeological expedition in Egypt which includes…wait for it…Peter Cushing as John Banning, driven seeker of antiquity, Grand Moff Tarkin as Indiana Jones. His father Stephen Banning (Felix Aylmer) and uncle Joseph (Raymond Huntley) have spent 20 years looking for the Tomb of Ananka, Lady of the Two Kingdoms and Easy Upon The Eyes of Horus. They find it, and they are warned by a sketchy Egyptian fellow named Mehemet Bey (George Pastell) that evil will befall them for robbing the graves of Egypt, and he should know because he’s going to follow them home and do evil to them.
But the archaeologists didn't come all this way to play tiddly-winks and then go home. They go in to see what is to be seen and they find The Scroll of Life, which, as we know, is always a paradoxically dangerous magical item. They should just call it the Scroll That Will Make You Wish You Hadn't Learned Hieroglyphics. John can't make it to the tomb because of an injured leg so Uncle Joe goes to tell him about the news.
The elder Banning reads the scroll of life and then sees something that horrifies him into catatonia.
Fast forward to 6 months later when the remaining team dynamite the entrance to the tomb to seal it. John and Joseph can't find the Scroll of Life (it's always the last place you look for it) but they don't dwell on it. (It's not like it was the Scroll of Endless Porridge.)
Next thing you know, it’s 1898 and Mehemet Bey has rented a manor house right next to the Banning estate. There’s a great scene with some low comic characters in a pub who are transporting things for the Egyptian. (The characters are named Pat and Mike so it's really old-school low humor.)
Meanwhile the Mummy heads over to the Engerfield Nursing Home for the Mentally Disordered (a great name for an institution, like The Sunnydale Academy for the Psychologically Disarrayed.) and kills the elder Banning and from here on out the whole thing plays out (both narratively and visually) as a drawing room mystery with the twist of supernatural provided by the Mummy of Kharis.
This is where the flashback comes in. It is 2000 BC and Kharis the priest (Christopher Lee without bandages and with blue eyeliner) is in love with the princess Ananka (Yvonne Furneaux). When she dies the priests do their business and we get an interesting reconstruction of Egyptian funeral rites and mummy wrapping. (The nude body of the princess is tastefully shown with a pair of columns covering the R-rated parts). The priests even kill a bunch of servants as a human sacrifice. Later Kharis sneaks into Ananka’s tomb to resurrect her (because she is quite attractive, even dead), but he is caught and for defiling the tomb of the princess he is punished by having his tongue cut off in the aforementioned scene of awesomeness and then he is mummified alive. (Actually, neither alive, nor dead, just eternally vigilant—though, it doesn’t make sense as a punishment for his forbidden love to leave him forever guarding the dead woman he was in love with, but the Egyptians weren’t exactly the most consistent of people anyhow.)

But now there’s a case of murder and this brings out Police Inspector Mulrooney (Eddie Byrne) (because even in England, they trot out an Irish cop) who believes in “cold, hard facts” which will soon enough include the cold hard fact of a living dead mummy. When the mummy shows up at the Banning house and kills Uncle Joseph, John manages to shoot Kharis twice to no effect.

Banning intuits that the Egyptian (who has transformed his rental into a veritable Egyptian temple) is behind the killings and may be controlling the mummy so he heads over and when his suspicions seem confirmed he goads the Egyptian (by referring to his chosen deity as a third-rate god) into making a move.
This leads to a discussion about archaeology and colonial exploitation.
Mehemet Bey: It has often puzzled me about archaeologists. Has it never occurred to them that by opening the tombs of beings that are sacred they commit an act of desecration?
Banning: If we didn’t, the history of your country, indeed of a great part of civilization would still be unknown.
The Egyptian adopts the language of post-colonial resistance which is instantly discredited for our audience by virtue of the fact that we already know that he is a vicious murderer and a fanatic cultist. Is it coincidental that a proto-nationalist Egyptian would be presented as an occultist murderer a mere 3 years after the debacle at Suez? I think not.

In the end, Banning is saved by the remarkable resemblance of his wife Isobel (Yvonne Furneaux again) with Ananka, so that Kharis will do anything for her, including burying himself down into the murk of a bogside and taking the Egyptian with him. (In the end, Kharis acted completely out of love. Mehemet Bey could only control him as long as he could convince Kharis that his actions were for Ananka, but when he overreaches and tries to make Kharis kill the person he believes is Ananka, then Kharis turns on him with all his supernatural might.)
It is this angle which gives The Mummy its humanity, because Kharis is allowed an inherent goodness that Frankenstein’s monster in Curse of Frankenstein is completely denuded of. Kharis is never the villain, just the unwitting tool of one. The “monster” is just a lover, cursed by fate. It’s an actual human-scale tragedy. Kharis isn’t a world-devouring apocalyptic super-villain. He’s just the remnants of a human.

I know it’s really easy to compare this film with modern filmmaking and laugh at how cheap it is and how much more awesome the effects are today. But I have a question: what the hell is wrong with us that we can’t tell simple stories on a human scale anymore? Why do all the supernatural stories now have to be about the end of the world? Why can’t we scale things down a notch to a more human level? How inflated do our heroes have to be? How heroic do they have to be? Why do we even need heroes?
Think about this, is there even a hero in this film? John Banning is a protagonist, but he’s no hero. There’s a villain. There are victims. But the closest thing to a hero is Kharis, who suffers for love, and even makes the ultimate sacrifice not even for his love but for an approximation of love (unless you believe Isobel is the reincarnation of Ananka). It’s a far cry from that level of complication to the shoot-‘em-up good-guy heroes we’re used to.

I like the fact that the climax of this film plays out like an Agatha Christie mystery with a Mummy. It's approachable. Don't get me completely wrong, watching a sandstorm nearly devour Brendan Fraser is awesome too, but there should be a place for something less apocalyptic too.

So, The Mummy is, for all its simplicity more complicated underneath than you would expect and while Christopher Lee is buried under gauze for most of the film, the flashback sequence alone makes this another Hammer classic.


Extras
as per the other releases
Cast & Crew
Theatrical Trailer