The over 225 films reviewed in this section are dated to the time of their American release. For example, some sources list Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! as being produced by Hammer in 1969, but the film didn’t hit American shores (or reviewers) until 1970, hence its inclusion in this text. As critics will no doubt note, this is an American-centric text, but it also includes representative “foreign” horror films when they made an impact on the United States market, its directors, or audiences.
The films listed in this section appear alphabetically by year of American release, and most entries include several categories of information. Critical Reception is a sampling of ’70s and contemporary reviews, Cast & Crew highlights the film’s personnel, and the P.O.V. offers a pithy quotation from a talent pertinent to that film’s production. Critical Reception and P.O.V. sections appear only where pertinent information is available. It is difficult, after all, to find three reviews of barely remembered films such as Shriek of the Mutilated (1974) or Carnival of Blood (1971).
The Synopsis is a recounting of the film’s story, and the Commentary is this author’s analysis of the film in question. Some especially notable horror films, such as Halloween (1978), also feature a section entitled Legacy, which looks at the film’s position in the horror pantheon beyond the 1970s.
For a handful of films—most of them genre efforts that played at local drive-ins—the Synopsis and Commentary sections have been folded into one short paragraph called Details. Because few of these films are available for viewing today, it was not possible to provide full information or commentary.
All the films are rated in the traditional four star system, with four stars (* * * *) being the highest rating and one star (*) the lowest.
“…Everything goes well toward building tensions with understated effects. But eventually, by mere repetition, the understated effects begin to look like poverty of the imagination. Then terror becomes a function of gratuitous camera technique….”—Roger Greenspun, New York Times, April 5, 1970, page 44.
CAST: Pamela Franklin (Jane); Michele Dotrice (Cathy); Sandor Eles (Paul); John Nettleton (Gendarme); Clare Kelly (Schoolmistress); Hana-Marie Pravda (Madame Lassal); John Franklyn (Old Man); Claude Bertrand (Lassal); Jean Carmet (Renier).
CREW: Production Supervisor: Johnny Goodman. Assistant Directors: Ken Baker, Alain Bennett. Continuity: Mary Spain. Casting Director: Robert Lennard. Director of Photography: Ian Wilson. Camera Operator: Godfrey Godar. Camera Assistant: Brian Cole. Make-up: Gerry Fletcher. Hairdresser: Allan McKeown. Sets Designed by: Phillip Harrison. Assistant Art Director: Roger Christian, Eric Simon. Wardrobe: Roy Ponting. Construction Manager: Stan Gale. Properties: Rex Hobbs. Editor: Ann Chegwidden. Sound: Bill Rowe. Sound Assistant: Terry Allen. Dubbing Editor: Peter Lennard. Music: Laurie Johnson. Original story and screenplay by: Brian Clemens and Terry Nation. Produced by: Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens. Directed by: Robert Fuest. Made on location in France and at the Elstree Studios of Associate British Productions Ltd., London, England. M.P.A.A. rating: PG. Running Time: 94 minutes.
SYNOPSIS: Two beautiful English girls, Cathy and Jane, tour rural France by bicycle. They stop at a cafe and plan their next destination when Cathy makes eyes at a mysterious Frenchman named Paul. They resume their journey and Paul blazes by them on his motor scooter. He parks and waits for them ahead, and they pass him by. When they are gone, Paul visits the grave of a young woman not far from the roadside.
Cathy and Jane stop for a rest. They discuss marriage and life until Jane decides it is time to get going … because it will be dark soon. The girls quarrel because Cathy wants to meet Paul and catch a nap. Subsequently, Jane sets off without Cathy. Then, thinking better of it, Jane stops at the Cafe San Rivo and waits for Cathy to catch up. Madame Lassal, owner of the cafe, warns Jane that the road is “bad.” This fact is proven dramatically to Cathy when she awakens from a nap and is observed by a dangerous stranger. Cathy finds her bike sabotaged and is then attacked by the stranger.
The hours pass and Jane grows worried about Cathy. She rides back to the spot off-road where her friend was resting and finds Cathy’s camera, but no sign of Cathy. Paul mysteriously arrives at the same time, claiming to be a Parisian detective, and helps Jane search for her friend. Jane backtracks to another road stop and meets a British schoolmistress who warns her that a beautiful tourist was murdered on this very road three years earlier. When Jane meets up with Paul again, he tells her he has found Cathy’s bike under a car in a junkyard. Jane grows suspicious of Paul and flees from him when he exposes the film in Cathy’s camera, the very film that might have photographed a murderer.
Jane runs to Cafe San Rivo, gets no help, and makes her way to the gendarme’s house. There, she meets the gendarme’s deaf father, a weird old bird who has been wandering the road and backwoods all day. Jane tells the gendarme her story and he drives his motorcycle to Cafe San Rivo to confirm the story with the owners.
Meanwhile, Paul catches up with Jane at the gendarme’s house and begs to be allowed inside. When Paul breaks into the house, Jane flees through the backyard and runs to a junkyard of trailers and derelict cars. Jane hides in a trailer as Paul hunts her down, saying he needs desperately to talk with her. As Jane hides in the closet, Cathy’s dead body falls on her! Jane screams and runs from the trailer, Paul in hot pursuit. Jane fights back and strikes Paul in the face with a rock.
Just then, Jane runs into the gendarme. He comforts her for a moment, but then starts to make advances toward her. Jane realizes that the gendarme is the killer, and tries to escape. In the end, a wounded Paul comes to her aid and saves Jane from the gendarme who is also a rapist-murderer.
COMMENTARY: Penned by British fantasy television’s most renowned writers Brian Clemens, who created The Avengers, and Terry Nation, creator of Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who’s popular Daleks, And Soon the Darkness is a suspenseful little masterpiece of the psycho-film variety. The film is admirably compact, dealing with only a handful of characters (many serve as red herrings), an isolated setting (a stretch of country road in France…) and a terribly brutal crime: the rape and murder of a beautiful tourist. From this simple template, director Robert Fuest wrings maximum shivers, proving he can accomplish his best work in a quasi–Hitchcockian framework rather than the more campy, though amusing, supernatural horror his name came to be associated with (The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, and The Devil’s Rain).
Some horror/suspense films fail by attempting to stretch shallow concepts across a wide canvas when a more personal, more intimate approach seems appropriate. And Soon the Darkness is a film that understands this shortcoming and focuses itself on the issue at hand: a tiny stretch of road in rural France. During the course of the picture, the viewer travels this road with protagonist Jane (Pamela Franklin) so many times, back and forth almost endlessly, that even the most rudimentary landmarks (like trees and rocks) become recognizable. Yet, amazingly, the mystery deepens as viewers become more familiar with the terrain. The geography may be plain, but the psychological geography of Cathy’s murder (which Paul calls “the most unpredictable of crimes”) remains hidden until the closing moments of the picture.
The consequence of traveling this particular road so frequently is that every change, every nuance in the well-explored terrain takes on significance in the mystery. What are the owners of the San Rivo Cafe burning in their garage? What is hidden in the haystack on the curb? What secret is shrouded inside the automobile junkyard behind the gendarme’s house? Who is the strange figure that appears periodically (in cryptic long shot) out in the distant fields? All of these questions take on a sense of menace because director Fuest has given the film time to develop its isolated landscape before plunging into the pertinent action. Fuest is especially strong at not revealing his hand too early, and the film builds slowly enough, never pushing the tension, to allow audiences to ponder important questions.
Who is Paul and why does he follow the girls? Is it wise for Cathy and Jane to separate? Why is the gendarme so disliked by locals? How is the British school teacher, who gazes about suspiciously after offering Jane a ride, involved in Cathy’s disappearance? To the film’s credit, it moves forward purposefully, while hitting each note of suspense on the way to crescendo.
And Soon the Darkness also trades effectively on its conventional horror setting and situation: the road trip gone wrong. A set-up featured in many 1970s horror films, including The Brotherhood of Satan, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Race with the Devil, and Tourist Trap, the “road trip to terror” is usually an effective scenario because the audience comes to sympathize with the fish-out of-water protagonists. While traveling, after all, everyone is a stranger. When you don’t know where you are, when you don’t know or understand local customs, when you are in fact, a stranger to everyone nearby, it is difficult to be sure where to go seeking help or who to trust during an emergency. And Soon the Darkness plays on the fear of being isolated in a strange land and becomes ever more sinister because the viewer realizes just how much he or she does not know about the locale. Like Jane, the viewer does not know who to fear and who to trust, and director Fuest ruthlessly exploits that sympathetic uncertainty to achieve his effects. The film literally makes one tight-throated with suspense as it goes from murder to trust to mistrust, but never loses focus on its anchor: Franklin’s expressive, increasingly fearful face.
And Soon the Darkness earns its suspense stripes in other ways too. The film makes use of the anxiety-provoking knowledge that sundown is inevitably approaching (hence the title), and that it would be terrible, catastrophic even, for Jane to remain in this neck of the woods as night falls. It is also a unique-looking horror film because it is set almost entirely out-of-doors, and even has a psychological complexity in dealing with reflections of the same demented personality. Two law-enforcement officials stalk that stretch of the road: both obsessed; both solitary; both wanting something from Jane. Yet only one of them is a murderer.
In all horror films, there is (consciously or unconsciously), a directorial approach: shock versus suspense. A movie can either “jolt” a viewer with surprise information, or drive a viewer up the wall by making him or her aware of how certain facts might play out. Like the best of its genre, And Soon the Darkness incorporates both approaches well, interspersing jolts with an air of uncertainty. The early scene in the woods wherein Cathy is killed is a notable example. The audience is aware that the girls have been followed. It is aware that Cathy and Jane have quarreled and that Jane has elected to continue her bike journey, leaving Cathy alone in a clearing. The audience has also seen the grave of a beautiful blonde girl who died on that very road. All of these facts, taken together, generate a feeling of tension or suspense: a shadowy pursuer, an opportunity to strike, and a history of violence in this place. The suspense becomes palpable when Cathy awakens from a nap and realizes that an intruder is close by, that he has sabotaged her bike and made off with her luggage (including her spare underwear…). She hears a rustling in the woods and then BOOM—the jolt, “the stinger” comes. It is just one very well handled scene in a picture of Hitchcockian purity and dimension.
The last sequence of shots in And Soon the Darkness serve the picture particularly well, heightening suspense, providing release, and ultimately issuing a warning to all travelers. After Jane has grappled with her attacker (the gendarme) in high angle (expressing her entrapment), Paul rescues her. Mysteriously, the camera adopts an even higher angle, looking straight down at the action as it withdraws from the scene, the conflict resolved. As Fuest’s camera glides away from Jane, now safe, and Paul, now vindicated, it gazes down briefly through the transparent sunroof of a discarded trailer (where Cathy’s corpse has been stowed.) The camera glimpses part of her twisted body and the audience is reminded of the preceding horror. But then a cleansing rain falls on the window, obscuring the corpse and letting the audience know that this particular nightmare is over. Yet next, the camera cuts to the road, that same bloody road, and two innocent bikers traverse it playfully, blissfully unaware. Fuest’s message is plain: this particular horror may be over, but there are others lying in wait on the road for those who are not careful. It is a stunning finale, and one that understands how camera placement and movement can convey theme and mood.
And Soon the Darkness is a terrifying venture into a foreign land, where foreign secrets threaten to reach out and strangle the innocent. The film never reveals precisely why the gendarme has turned into a homicidal rapist, but nor should it. Were we in Jane or Cathy’s place, traveling gleefully on vacation in another country, we wouldn’t know the answer either. And that’s what makes And Soon the Darkness a truly frightening picture. It reminds us that what we don’t know can hurt us.
“…for the first hour, Piers Haggard keeps his themes and the blood flowing nicely. It begins in style…. Sadly, Haggard lets things slip and the make-up man takes over.”—Adrian Turner, Time Out Film Guide, Seventh Edition, Penguin Books, 1999, page 789.
“…cinematic diabolism of some style and intelligence … a horror movie of more than routine interest … it contains Lovecraft’s perfectly straightfaced acceptance of a universe whose natural order may, at any time, be overturned by supernatural disorder.”—Vincent Canby, New York Times, April 15, 1971, page 35.
“What makes this British movie about witchcraft … more effective than most period horror pictures is its convincing and dramatic depiction of its historical setting…. The script may fall down in spots, but the well-crafted mood … still manages to carry the ball.”—Dr. Cyclops, Fangoria #30, October, 1983, page 44.
CAST: Patrick Wymark (the Judge); Linda Hayden (Angel Blake); Barry Andrews (Ralph Gower); Michele Dotrice (Margaret); James Hayter (Squire Middleton); Anthony Ainley (Reverend Fallowfield); Howard Goorney (the Doctor); Avice Landon (Isobel Banham); Charlotte Mitchell (Ellen); Wendy Padbury (Cathy Vespers); Tamara Ustinov (Rosalind Barton); Simon Williams (Peter Edmonton); Robin Davies (Mark Vespers).
CREW: Dennis Friedland and Christopher C. Dewey Present a Tigon British/Chilton Film Production. Music composed and conducted by: Marc Wilkinson. Art Director: Arnold Chapkis. Editor: Richard Best. Production Manager: Ron Jackson. Assistant Director: Stephen Christian. Camera Operator: Dudley Lovell. Sound Mixer: Tony Dawe. Sound Editor: Bill Trent. Dubbing Mixer: Ken Barker. Casting Director: Weston Drury, Jr. Set Dresser: Milly Burns. Continuity: Josie Fulford. Make-up: Eddie Knight. Hairdresser: Olga Angelinetta. Wardrobe Mistress: Dulcie Midwinter. Focus Puller: Mike Rutter. Grip: Peg Hall. Titles and Opticals: General Screen Enterprises Ltd. Processed by: Rank Film Labs, Denham. Director of Photography: Dick Bush. Executive Producer: Tony Tenser. Original Screenplay by: Robert Wynne-Simmons. With additional material by: Piers Haggard. Produced by: Peter L. Andrews, Malcolm B. Heyworth. Directed by: Piers Haggard. Made at Pinewood Studios, England, and on location. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running Time: 90 minutes.
SYNOPSIS: In 1670, young Ralph Gower is plowing the Edmonton field when he unearths a bizarre, inhuman skull in the mud. He reports his finding to the Judge, an official visiting from London, but his report is dismissed when the skull mysteriously vanishes. Meanwhile, young Peter Edmonton has brought his fiancée, Rosalind, to the farm. She is to spend the night in an attic room, but once darkness falls, Rosalind goes crazy, terrified of some dark presence in the room. The next morning she is carted off to an insane asylum … her hand transformed into a hairy, pointed claw. Peter’s aunt, scratched by Rosalind’s clawed digits, then disappears … not to be found anywhere.
Peter becomes convinced that evil is free in his small parish, even as the judge returns to London to research the possibility of witchcraft and Satanism in the small rural hamlet. Soon, other villagers are cursed by the claw of Satan. While frolicking in the Edmonton field, beautiful teen Angel Blake also finds a satanic claw … and becomes possessed with evil. She attempts to seduce the Reverend Fallowfield, but he rejects her advances. Later, she accuses him of raping her, and the town squire believes the charges. This witch hunt gives Angel and her strange satanic cult the time it needs to grow and spread among the youngsters of the parish.
Before long, the virtuous young are becoming minions of evil. Kathy Vespers is raped and killed for bearing the mark of the devil (a hairy tuft on her back), and another boy, Mark, is found murdered at the bottom of a woodpile. Ralph, terrified at the terror his discovery has wrought, seeks to protect Margaret, a girl being hunted as a witch. He finds, to his horror, that she too bears the mark of the devil and asks the local doctor to cut it out. Even with the hairy deformity lopped off, Margaret still confesses her allegiance to the Dark One, and Ralph realizes that she is truly a devil worshiper. Soon, the forests outside town are too dangerous to traverse, and devil rites are held by night with Angel Blake presiding.
Peter visits the judge in London, who declares he is ready to return and defeat the growing evil. He sets out with vicious dogs to hunt the devil and his kindred. Meanwhile, the morally upright citizens of town form a mob to burn the witches. Ralph, hoping to stop the evil, visits the Edmonton attic, is confronted by a dark specter … and is then prepared for a satanic ceremony. Before Ralph can be sacrificed, the witch hunters (led by the judge) interfere in the rite, killing Angel Blake. Satan himself is stabbed by the stalwart judge with a sword, and then hurled into a fire.
COMMENTARY: Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw transports the viewer to a world without sunlight, and consequently without hope. In this strikingly photographed horror picture, all light is a cold blue, deathly as it were, and every color is distinctly faded … as if life itself has been bled out of reality. This icy look, coupled with a very accurate, very detailed art design, is the film’s greatest advantage. Never for a moment is the viewer required to leave the reality of the historical period for lack of accuracy or believability. For better or worse, the audience inhabits the English parish besieged by evil, and that grounding in a specific place ultimately plays in the film’s favor. In keeping with the look of the film, The Blood on Satan’s Claw’s plot is less than linear, less than coherent even, and the story is muddled and confusing at times. But, in horror the story is not always as paramount as the texture or mood established, and in this regard, The Blood on Satan’s Claw clearly excels. Its bleak visage is a memorable one, and echoed by the particulars of its story.
A world without hope is the terrain of The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The sun—a warm, welcoming, bright source of light that casts hopeful yellow illumination—is never seen in this picture. Skies are overcast and slate gray. But the absence of the sun is not the only element in the film that reflects hopelessness and death. As the film opens, young Ralph Gower tends to a field. All around him in that fallow field is overturned mud, earth, and dirt, but importantly no greens, no bright colors whatsoever. Even behind him, the green of the foliage is washed out to a muted gray. Appropriately, the demon skull is found in this spot, which the color palette informs the audience is quite dead. Nothing will grow from that earth except evil.
In the same sequence, young Cathy Vespers greets Ralph, and Haggard’s camera adopts a position behind her, amidst the woods. This beautiful young girl (Wendy Padbury—Zoe of Doctor Who), is seen through the lifeless branches of dead trees. The lack of leaves, of vegetation, again cements the impression of a cold, dead world (or season) where life does not flourish. In keeping with this motif of pallor and death, Ralph discovers not a bud blooming in the Edmonton field, but the skull of an ancient “fiend.” The land has brought up only a flower of death, and soon that death will spread across the rural landscape like ivy, infecting all it touches.
There can be no hope, no future, in a world where the children (the torchbearers in human terms) are lost, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw continues the metaphor of hope murdered by making it the children (or the young adults, anyway) who are contaminated by evil first. It is no accident that the children are corrupted initially, because their conversion to evil signals the death of the future, hence the death of a better tomorrow, or any tomorrow at all. Virginal Angel Blake is transformed into a lusty whore, forsaking the church to bring down the virtuous (in her attempted seduction of Reverend Fallowfield). The transformation to evil is played out on her very face; it is darkened by overarching black eyebrows, a stark contrast to the sunny blond hair that informs her young beauty. Likewise, Cathy Vespers, a humble servant girl of solid character, is deflowered, robbed of her virtue, and killed in her prime. Even the level-headed Ralph succumbs to the spreading evil, only to be rescued by the judge at the last minute. And those children who do not die outright (such as poor Rosalind) are tainted forever by madness, doomed to fruitless lives of incarceration and mental illness. Thus Haggard has visually killed hope (with the washed out, lifeless look of the picture) and metaphorically done so to boot, by targeting the future in the form of the next generation. It goes without saying that the adults represent a kind of emptiness. The reverend, a man purportedly representing God, is named “Fallowfield,” a synonym for “empty.” Adults, and even religious faith, offer nothing but dogma.
The Blood on Satan’s Claw is a bizarre, frightening film despite the meandering of its plot, emerging as a creepy, atmospheric nose-dive into the irrational (and anti-rational). Accordingly, some of the scenes in the picture are genuinely frightening. Early in the film, Rosalind sleeps in the dark Edmonton attic, and the film plays on that primal human fear that there is something malevolent waiting for us in the blackness of night. In this case, that fear is well grounded, and the film only hints at the precise appearance and nature of this evil: a flash of dark motion in a dark room, a glimpse of something hairy and animal-like, before the silence at midnight is punctuated by terrified shrieks.
Two other characters, Peter and Ralph, journey to that attic (at night as well, naturally) in due order, and each occasion is similarly terrifying. The monster inhabiting that room seems to exist in barely lit corners, under floorboards, beside the bed … waiting. To some, this notion of an old evil infecting our reality is representative of a Lovecraftian order, but fear of the dark is a universal dread, one exploited by The Blood on Satan’s Claw.
Oddly, The Blood on Satan’s Claw does not unfold in the dogmatic manner of its brethren horror films. As viewers, we have all been conditioned to expect things at certain times, and to feel certain ways when images of terror pop up. This movie defies that training and marches along to its own unusual rhythm. If the plot does not exactly make literal sense that too seems a reflection of its content. In its tale of a diabolical world order inexplicably and irrevocably replacing our own, the film kills reason, rationality and science. Characters change into monsters with no prologue, demons shrouded in hoods prowl the forests, the virtuous become deviant, and there is nary an explanation in sight. The spread of evil seems random and rampant, nonsensical even. Yet what better way to depict a world without hope than to murder those very things which provide man a measure of solace in this mortal coil? The comfort of reasonable scientific explanation, of faith even, is denied the audience.
In its depiction of an anti-rational spread of pure evil, The Blood on Satan’s Claw generates real psychological discomfort. Why is this outbreak occurring here, now? Why and how are people succumbing so rapidly? The movie denies all impulses to frame answers, and audiences are left with a perplexing, but ultimately rewarding meditation on the fact that it is the essence of the human condition not to have answers. Existence is mysterious, and our physics are but human constructs designed to explain these enigmas. But, in the end, explanations are merely constructs, and oddities and anomalies, like an inhuman skull unearthed in the mud, have a way of popping up and shattering the delusion that we understand our universe.
As a witch hunt movie, The Blood on Satan’s Claw is quite interesting because it takes a stance opposite from the majority of its brethren (such as The Devils [1971], Mark of the Devil [1972], and The Crucible [1996]). In those instances, there are no witches, and the witch-hunters are depicted as self-righteous opportunists and demagogues out to destroy that which they do not approve. In this film, the judge (Wymark) is heroic, and there truly are witches loose in the woods. Again, this is interesting only in that it is an unconventional take on timeworn material. This movie is not out to make a social comment about paranoia, the mob mentality, politics or the like. Its scope is actually grander. It wants viewers to question their assumptions about reality and reveal a world where sunlight (and reason) don’t penetrate.
Though populated by too many bland characters and saddled with far too many irrelevant, seemingly unconnected incidents, as well as weak make-up for the demon (only briefly glimpsed), The Blood on Satan’s Claw is a film that generates a feeling of unease. Though good is vindicated in the abrupt finale, there is the sense that this evil flower could blossom again, that malevolence has not been stamped out. It is a gray, hopeless, and frightening motion picture, and in that way, quite effective as horror.
“Count Dracula … despite claims of being completely faithful, is a complete mess…. Lee makes the most he can of the opportunity, but the shabby production values defeat him in the end….”—Steve Biodrowski, Cinefantastique Volume 23, #4: “Dracula The Oft Told Story,” December 1992, page 29.
“It was a good idea to attempt an exact filming of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, but Franco and producer Harry Alan Towers clearly weren’t up to the task…. The film proceeds clumsily and looks disgustingly cheap…. Lee’s performance is authoritative but loses its edge under the deadpan stare of Manuel Merino’s inept camera….”—Tim Lucas, Fangoria #78: “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Jess Franco” (Part I); page 18.
“…demonstrates none of the flair and ingenuity of Badham’s Dracula and none of the unpretentious craft of Fisher’s [Hammer] vampire films…. Problems with sound synchronization, dubbing dialogue and inappropriate locations … often turn this film into unintentionally humorous camp.”—Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, 1986, page 136.
CAST: Christopher Lee (Count Dracula); Herbert Lom (Professor Van Helsing); Klaus Kinski (Renfield); Maria Rohm (Mina); Frederick Williams (Jonathan Harker); Soledad Miranda (Lucy); Jack Taylor (Quincy Morris); Paul Muller (Dr. Seward).
CREW: Photographed by: Manuel Merino. Assistant Director: John Thompson. Art Director: George O’Brown. Production Manager: Jose Climent. Editor: Derek Parsons. Sound Editor: Joyce Oxley. Music: Bruno Nicolai. Editor: Derek Parsons. Screenplay by: Peter Weibeck. Produced by: Harry Alan Towers. Directed by: Jess Franco. A Towers of London Production.
SYNOPSIS: In 1897, a young lawyer from London, Jonathan Harker, boards a train for Transylvania to visit with a new client, Count Dracula. A fellow passenger on the train and the wife of an innkeeper in Transylvania warn Harker not to visit the strange count on St. George’s night because it is a bad omen. Harker ignores these warnings and proceeds. In the dark of the night, he is picked up by Dracula’s carriage and driven to a magnificent castle. On the way, wolves bay in the woods, and the mysterious carriage driver—Dracula himself—clears them away with a supernatural power.
Jonathan arrives at the castle of Dracula and notes that his host casts no reflection. Ignoring this oddity, Harker gets down to the business at hand: Dracula wants to purchase land in London, specifically Carfax Abbey. Meanwhile, Dracula spies a photograph of Harker’s beautiful fiancée, Mina, and her lovely friend Lucy, and his old blood is subsequently stirred to devilish new action. Harker is locked in his room for the evening, and then captured by three brides of Dracula—all vampires. Dracula prevents the women from feeding on his guest, and the women hungrily drink a baby’s blood instead.
The next morning, Harker awakens with two puncture marks on his neck and realizes that his escape from the lair of Dracula is a matter of life and death. After discovering Dracula asleep in a coffin, Harker jumps out a window and is carried away to safety on the currents of a river.
Some time later, a demented Jonathan Harker arrives at the private clinic of Professor Van Helsing and Dr. Seward in London, just across the street from Carfax Abbey. Harker is not the only one to rave about the power of Dracula. Another patient, Renfield, has also been driven mad by his encounter with the demonic count. Soon, Mina and Lucy visit the clinic to check on Harker, and decide to remain there until he is well. But by night, Dracula summons Lucy, calling her out onto the grounds of the clinic. Mina follows the mesmerized Lucy and finds her victimized: her neck drained of blood! Learning of Lucy’s desperate condition, her fiancé, Quincy Morris, arrives to give his beloved a much-needed blood transfusion.
That night, Dracula strikes again. He steals into Lucy’s room and dines on the blood from her sweet neck until Mina interrupts. Meanwhile, Van Helsing tells Quincy Morris and the rapidly recovering Jonathan Harker that poor Renfield’s daughter was the victim of a mythological creature known as a vampire. Furthermore, Van Helsing believes Dracula to be that vampire: an undead creature of the night capable of maintaining eternal youth by feeding on the blood of the innocent. He also fears that poor Lucy, dead from Dracula’s consumption, will return to life as a vampire herself. This is a more accurate guess than he realizes; Lucy has already risen from her coffin and feasted on the blood of a young girl! That night, Van Helsing, Morris and Harker visit Lucy’s mausoleum and drive a stake through her heart to prevent any further resurrection from the grave.
Dracula sets his vampiric sights on Mina, and attacks her at the opera. Aware that Van Helsing and the others are onto him, the Prince of Darkness decides it is time to return to Transylvania, and books passage on a ship bound for Varna. While Van Helsing remains behind to protect Mina from Dracula’s deadly attentions, Morris, Seward and Harker race to Transylvania in an attempt to beat the count to his castle. They successfully interrupt his journey and burn Dracula’s body while he sleeps peacefully in a coffin. Dracula ages hundreds of years in just seconds, and finally dies.
COMMENTARY: Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is to horror films what William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is to the theatre and film: a great work of art revisited time and again across the decades, always a bit different from previous incarnations, but always the same in important ways too. And, like Hamlet, the primary interest in any adaptation of Dracula is the portrayal of the lead role. Every new actor who essays either the Prince of Denmark or the Prince of Darkness injects a fresh spin on the familiar material. And, audiences never grow fatigued with the different cadences and nuances in such updatings.
On the silver screen there have been at least three significant Hamlets: Laurence Olivier in 1948, Mel Gibson in 1990 and Kenneth Branagh in 1997. There have been even more Count Draculas (Bela Lugosi in 1931, Lon Chaney, Jr. in 1943, John Carradine in 1944, Christopher Lee in 1958, David Niven in 1973, Udo Kier in 1974, Frank Langella in 1979 and Gary Oldman in 1992). On TV, Jack Palance and Louis Jordan have had the honor of portraying the famous vampire.
If one is of the opinion that both versions of Nosferatu (1922 and 1979 respectively) are also variations on the Dracula myth, horror’s equivalent of Hamlet has been produced for film a staggering number of times. Dracula (1931), The Horror of Dracula (1958), Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula (1970), Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974), Dracula (1979), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) all employ the characters and situations outlined in Stoker’s seminal book. If one adds the sequels, spin-offs and such, the appearances of horror’s Hamlet increase geometrically. Dracula’s Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943), House of Dracula (1944), Dracula—Prince of Darkness (1965), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), Dracula’s Dog (1978), and Dracula’s Widow (1988) are a few such titles.
When one delves further, matters get even more bizarre: the regal count has been a porn star in vehicles such as Dracula Sucks (1978) and Dracula Blows His Cool (1979) and, in an even less dignified moment, he co-starred in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948])! Blacula (1972), Love at First Bite (1979), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It! (1995) represent other twists on the oft-repeated mythos.
Why is Dracula so popular a story to dramatize on film? The answers are numerous. Like Hamlet, Dracula can be interpreted as a tragedy. Dracula, once a great and noble warrior, is doomed to an eternal half-life spent feeding on the living, and his great love always eludes him. Depending on the version, Dracula can be seen primarily not as horror, but a love story which “crosses oceans of time,” (Dracula [1979], Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1992]).
Other answers have less to do with literature and romance and more to do with plain old lust. Those who seek to analyze Dracula’s popularity inevitably find themselves discussing the “the blood is the life” notion of the novel and its numerous adaptations. Specifically, Dracula steals the bodily fluid of beautiful women, enslaving them to his will. He is a charming seducer, a foreigner, who, inevitably, saves the beautiful Mina (or Lucy, depending on interpretation) at least briefly from a life of domestic boredom with the oh-so-stolid Jonathan Harker. Dracula is the perfect last fling before marriage: a sexual partner who promises great pleasures and then who conveniently dies, thus allowing his lovers to return to more “appropriate” life styles. A tragic love-story and a Victorian sexual adventure, Dracula is also about man’s quest for immortality, something moviegoers of every generation can relate to.
And, at a basic level Dracula is a simple horror story: good versus evil, man versus monster. Dracula is also perfect film fodder because it has a powerful central role (the count himself), multiple beautiful women (Mina, Lucy and brides of Dracula), and an opportunity for an abundance of special effects (Dracula can be wolf, bat, man, or fog). What’s not to like?
Since Dracula has been dramatized so frequently, it is hard to put a new spin on the story. It is difficult, if not impossible, to shock audiences with a story they are already familiar with. And that fact, at long last, brings to mind Jess Franco’s 1970 production, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As the film opens, a title card reveals that “for the first time” filmmakers are intent on re-telling Bram Stoker’s story “exactly as he wrote” it.
In other words, the twist evident here is a high degree of faithfulness to the source material. In Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula this faithfulness is primarily demonstrated in that the early part of the novel, Harker’s adventure at the Castle of Dracula, has been re-inserted. Most Dracula films dispense with this section of Stoker’s text, and skip immediately to Victorian England and the Count’s arrival there. So, it is a delight to report that Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula does restore this section of the novel, and in fact, it is the most interesting portion of the film. If Franco’s intent is to remain faithful to Stoker, then one can see why certain choices have been made. Christopher Lee’s count wears all black and is decked out in a moustache—touches straight from Stoker. And, Lee even gets to mouth authentic dialogue (about Dracula’s lineage in regards to Attila the Hun) from the novel. In a bow to realism, Lee’s Count is equipped with pointed fangs at all times. In other words, his vampire teeth are not retractable as in most versions of the story, lowering and appearing only when he comes in for the kill.
So earnest and respectful is director Franco in his attempt to make his Count Dracula faithful to Stoker that he presents what could be termed the most restrained version of the story yet. There are no surreal special effects or showy film techniques in the picture, and that might be considered a good thing. Some of the crazy effects and jumpy film techniques orchestrated by Francis Ford Coppola in his 1992 version transformed the story of Dracula into a freak show, so it is nice that such a path is not chosen here.
In addition, histrionics among the cast of Count Dracula have been discouraged. All of the actors are mightily restrained, to the degree that even the deranged Renfield is affected by the overarching air of respect and dignity for the material. Most frequently in film, Renfield is depicted as a crazy blabberer, but Kinski’s interpretation is that of a silent brooder, a man more sullen than animated with fear. Herbert Lom is so taciturn and restrained as Van Helsing that in one crucial scene it is impossible to tell if he has suffered from a narcoleptic attack, is merely resting his eyes, or (as is actually the case) has suddenly suffered the effects of a debilitating stroke!
Christopher Lee makes for a remarkable Dracula, as usual, but he is not in the picture as much as one would hope. He is almost a guest star, appearing occasionally and then vanishing from the goings-on for interminable stretches. The inevitable result of such a restrained, respectful treatment is that Count Dracula becomes totally and utterly lifeless—a bore, in fact.
Once the die has been cast, and Franco has chosen what might be deemed the high road (faithfulness, restraint and respect for the material), he is left with perilously few options. Above all, a horror movie is intended to scare or thrill. Unfolding at a leisurely pace and flattened out by minimalist performances, Count Dracula is lacking in thrills, romance and fear. Lucy is played as a zombie who virtually surrenders at the drop of a hat to Dracula, and since there is never a bond formed between Mina and Dracula there is no romance either. Because the performances are so spare, the motivations of the characters seem missing in this version of Dracula. The count sees a picture of Mina and Lucy early in the picture and then goes to London to “take them” for reasons known only to him. In other versions of the film, Mina and the count share a timeless kind of love, or at least a powerful, seductive relationship. There is no such eroticism or suggestion of affection here, much to the film’s detriment.
The decision to make a “realistic” Dracula without the surreal, and without hint of the Gothic, also results in the most lifeless finale to a vampire film ever put to celluloid. Seward, Morris and Harker catch Dracula sleeping and burn him in his coffin. The end. There is no feeling of relief (because no terror or suspense has been generated) and no sense of accomplishment or victory either.
The horror film is a tricky game: too little respect for the genre and its conventions and filmmakers end up with an ugly exploitation that pleases no one; too much respect for old material (as evidenced here) drains the life and inspiration out of a film and renders it stodgy. Jess Franco re-tells Dracula as though he, as director, is incidental to what unfolds on screen and Stoker’s vision has apparently been substituted for his own creative input. Count Dracula may be faithful to a greater degree than many other Dracula films, but the film is so basic, so lacking in inspiration that it advances the Dracula legend not a bit. It could have been made in 1931 or 1958 because no new thought or inspiration (even as far as execution of the standard special effects) has been included. In horror, there are films that push the envelope, look forward to the future, and carry the genre to new edges. In the seventies, such films were The Exorcist (1973), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Carrie (1976) and even The Last House on the Left (1972). Unfortunately, there are also those horror films that look backward and seem dated almost the moment they are released. If not for the technique Count Dracula most frequently deploys (zooms), the movie could have been made (and made better) by Hammer Studios in 1959.
One element of Count Dracula that dates it to the 1970s is the pervasive use of the zoom lens. In the seventies, zooms were terribly overused. As a result, most films made today shun the zoom as a laughable technique. The zoom is disliked by many cinematographers and directors because it distorts the edges of the frame as it does its thing, moving in or out. Today, zooms are utilized mostly to generate campy effect. A quick zoom in on somebody’s face can generate a scare or a laugh, if done just right. Count Dracula, unfortunately, is mired in zooms.
Franco zooms in on wolves, zooms out from the castle, zooms in Dracula’s eyes, zooms out from candelabras, zooms in on Lucy’s catatonic face, zooms in on bars from Renfield’s cell (and gets so close that the bars actually go out of focus then flicker back and forth, in and out of focus), ad nauseam, ad infinitum. When used sparingly and suddenly, a zoom can have dramatic and meaningful visual effect: shock! surprise! horror! But in Count Dracula Franco most often zooms at the slowest possible velocity, making his shots utterly predictable. The audience understands from the start how the zoom shots will end (either pulling back, or closing in), and thus long passages become waiting games as the camera endlessly zeroes in or backs up.
Often, it is unclear why a zoom is being used at all. A zoom is a useful technique in formalist film because it pinpoints something important to the audience—a detail, a face, a view. When used all the time, the zoom loses its potency because it is pinpointing every detail—often to the bewilderment of viewers.
Franco is not well served by the editing of the picture either. Much of the action of the film occurs in Van Helsing’s clinic. One or two exterior shots of the clinic are appropriate. Strangely, the editor shows the same establishing shot of the clinic no less than five times during the duration of the picture, and holds on the familiar view for at least five or six seconds too long on each occurrence.
Another grave miscalculation is the ludicrous scene in which a bevy of stuffed and mounted animals come to life in Carfax Abbey. Not only are there too many blurry zooms in this sequence (a flaw, alas, of the entire film), but it is obvious that a stagehand is moving these lifeless creatures incrementally, just out of camera range. There is no sense that the animals are “animated’ by the evil of Dracula, only the clear perception that a hand is twisting these stiff little critters back and forth. On top of all that, there are a multitude of zooms and close-ups, which only succeed in making the sequence last at least a minute too long. An editor cognizant of pace and fluent in the language of shock (which demands that scary things be shown once or twice but not repetitively), would have trimmed this scene.
Another editing blunder finds Lucy in the middle of her bed in one shot and at least seven or eight inches from the center of the bed in the very next. So continuity is not a strong point either. With all of these editing and technical missteps, the only moments that really come alive in Count Dracula are the two occasions in which the camera is untethered, and Franco generates an unsteady feeling from the use of a hand-held. Lucy’s pursuit of an innocent girl and Dracula’s final attack on Lucy both use this technique well.
Oddly, scenes that should be occurring at night are lensed in the daytime and blue skies and clouds are visible overhead. Some Franco defenders would no doubt argue that this is another example of the director’s faithfulness to his source. After all, in Stoker, Dracula was not “allergic” to sunlight (that allergy was invented for the 1922 Murnau film Nosferatu), and so it is perfectly appropriate for the heroes of this Dracula film to be skulking around the castle by daylight. That answer does not hold up, however, with the details of the individual scenes. When first mesmerized by the count, Lucy awakes from a deep sleep and heads out into the grounds—daylight obvious above her. Was she just napping in the afternoon, or was this scene really supposed to be lensed at night?
Secondly, when Seward, Morris and Harker stalk Dracula, they are carrying a lantern. If the scene is not meant to be happening at night, why bring an artificial light source along?
It has been widely reported that Christopher Lee participated in this film because it was to be a faithful rendering of Bram Stoker’s timeless novel. Though the final result is faithful, to a high degree, the audience walks away feeling neither thrilled nor excited by Count Dracula, but bored. The cast is excellent (Lom, Lee and Kinski—what a combo!), the musical score is terrific, and Franco’s sincere approach is appreciated, but Count Dracula is like a Cliffs Notes version of Stoker. It provides all the information one might need to know to pass a test about Dracula, but a successful artistic approach to the classic material is absent.
“…the special appeal of Count Yorga, Vampire may well be its Los Angeles locale…. Count Yorga’s ambience is pure Hollywood and the seamy elegance of Robert Quarry’s performance … exactly compliments [sic] that ambience. Bob Kelljan’s direction, often resourceful, does especially well by Quarry’s disdainful civility….”—Roger Greenspun, New York Times, November 12, 1970, page 49.
“…primitive, but not unimaginative.”—Tom Charity, Time Out Film Guide, Seventh Edition, Penguin Books, 1999, page 181.
CAST: Robert Quarry (Count Yorga); Roger Perry (Dr. Jim Hayes); Michael Murphy (Paul); Michael Macready (Michael); Donna Anders (Donna); Judith Lang (Erica); Edward Walsh (Brudeh); George Macready (Narrator); Julie Connors, Paul Hansen, Sybil Scotford, Marsha Jordan, Deborah Darnell.
CREW: American International Pictures Presents Count Yorga, Vampire, an Erica Production. Production Supervisor: Robert N. O’Neil. Camera Assistant: Pat O’Mara, Jr. Chief Electrician: John Murphy. Wardrobe: Nancy Stone. Property Master: James Stinson. Animal Owner/Trainer: Vee Kasegan. Script Supervisor: Pat Townsend. Sound Assistant: George Garrin. Set Design: Bob Wilder. Make-up: Mark Rogers, Master Dentalsmith. Special Effects: James Tanerbaum. Sound Recorder: Robert Dietz, Lowell Brown. Sound Effects: Edit International. Rerecording: Producers Sound Services, Inc. Color: Movielab. Film Editor: Tony de Zarraga. Cinematography: Arch Achambault. Music: William Marx. Produced by: Michael Macready. Written and Directed by: Bob Kelljan. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running Time: 92 minutes.
“I was fighting against the Bela Lugosi image and Christopher Lee’s Dracula. Not that there was anything wrong with either one of them, but they were unreal in a certain way, and I wanted to give Yorga kind of reality and play him straight”1.—Robert Quarry discusses his interpretation of the modern vampire in Count Yorga (1970).
SYNOPSIS: In contemporary Los Angeles, a group of hip young adults gather for a séance in an attempt to contact the recently deceased mother of Donna, one of their number. Unfortunately, the medium selected on this occasion is none other than Count Yorga, a modern-day vampire living in the City of Angels. While the others watch, Yorga secretly enslaves Donna with his powers of telepathy.
After the séance, Erica and Paul agree to drive Yorga home in their van, while Donna wonders why the count was not present at her mother’s funeral, as he insists. After dropping Yorga off at his secluded mansion, Erica and Paul find their VW van trapped in the mud on a dark road. They are forced to spend the night there. They make love in the back of the van, but afterwards, Yorga attacks. Paul is knocked unconscious, without remembering his assailant, and Erica is bitten by the vampire.
The next day, Paul notices the odd puncture marks on Erica’s neck and takes her to see Dr. Hayes. Later, when Hayes and Paul find Erica drinking the blood of a kitten, Hayes suggests there is a vampire at work. Understandably, Paul is doubtful such a thing could happen in modern L.A. But that night, the hypnotic Yorga summons Erica. She awakens, lustful, and he offers her eternal life as one of his vampire brides. When Erica agrees, Yorga takes her back to his castle. In hot pursuit, Paul, Dr. Hayes and Donna’s boyfriend, Michael, try to save Erica before it is too late. Paul arrives first and is murdered by Yorga’s brutish manservant. When, Dr. Hayes, Michael and Donna arrive at the castle, there is no sign of Paul. Suspecting that Yorga is a vampire, Hayes attempts to keep the vampire awake with polite conversation until daylight. He even asks the count if vampires are real. Yorga’s response is chilling. Vampires are real, he concludes, and they are far superior to human beings. When Yorga retires just before the deadly rays of sunrise, Hayes and Michael plot to kill him the following evening.
The next day, Yorga calls to the enslaved Donna, ordering her to his house. When she arrives, Donna suffers a worse indignity than Yorga’s domination: Brudeh, the brute manservant, forces himself on her. Later, Michael and Hayes storm the house to rescue her. In the cellar, Hayes and Yorga engage in battle, but Yorga’s vampire brides (including the transformed Erica) rise and feed on the good doctor. Desperate and alone, Michael attempts to dispatch Yorga and save his beloved Donna. He kills Brudeh and then finds Hayes, barely alive. Hayes informs him that Donna is locked up safely upstairs, where Yorga has reintroduced her to her dead mother—now a vampire bride.
Taking action, Michael impales the monstrous mother, then Yorga himself. As Michael and Donna attempt to escape, they are confronted by two vampire brides. Just as Michael’s escape looks to be assured, he faces a nasty shock: Donna is already a vampire.
COMMENTARY: There are two ways in which one might assess Count Yorga, Vampire (actually, onscreen, Count Iorga Vampire). By looking at it in 1970 terms, the film would garner a (reservedly) positive review for the manner in which it inches forward the notion of vampires dwelling in a modern technological society. But studied in Y2K terms, Yorga seems distinctly old hat, offering precious few twists and turns on the well-established canon of vampire lore. Of course, one goal in critiquing these films in the year 2001 is to study their accomplishments within their historical context, at the time of release, so perhaps it is not fair to expect Yorga to appear innovative after thirty years in circulation.
After all, it is easy to forget that in the year 1970, vampire films were invariably set in Victorian times—or the 1930s at the latest. Hammer’s Dracula (Christopher Lee) had not voyaged to the present yet (Dracula A.D. 1972 would usher in that development) and Kolchak’s face-off with Janos Skorzeny in the popular TV movie The Night Stalker (1971) was another year off. Contemporary visions like The Hunger (1982), Fright Night (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), A Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998) and Blade (1998) were a long, long way off too. So, Count Yorga’s central plot twist, bringing a vampire to 1970s California was, if not revolutionary, at least ahead of the curve. In fact, Yorga’s identity as a vampire not Dracula (or one of his brides or many offspring) might even be considered trail-blazing in a way. Before Yorga, vampires and Dracula were pretty much synonymous. Yorga’s a very different cat.
On the other hand, the best 1970s horror films (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, The Exorcist, Jaws, even Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and Last House on the Left) do retain their aura of inspiration and innovation even in the opening days of the 21st century, decades after their release. Count Yorga is clearly not in that class. It lacks the directorial flair of a true classic, and substitutes camp humor for chills at its most critical junctures. Though it is fun to hear Quarry’s Yorga declare that he’ll “have a snack later,” or to watch as a VW van, a symbol of the hippie generation, is molded into a vehicle of action, the film skimps on the thrills and charts a bland, ultimately unsatisfying course. It is a cheap film, and one feels that budgetary limitations hampered its ability to thrill on a significant level.
Count Yorga opens in almost amateurish fashion as a narrator describes the arrival of a modern-day vampire in California. As this breathy narrator relates the story, the film’s images reveal a crate being lowered onto a pick-up truck, and the truck then heading out on a sprawling American highway. Oddly, the narration is unnecessary, as is the opening sequence: Yorga has obviously been in the States for some time when the plot proper begins, so what does the arrival of his coffin (we presume it is his, anyway) have to do with this story? Why is it necessary to show that Yorga came from Europe, when all the action takes place in the United States? Blacula took a different, and more coherent, tack in 1972: revealing the origin of Blacula in Europe and then dramatizing how he came to be re-awakened in the United States. Yorga’s opening feels more like an attempt to pad the running time than a legitimate jumping off point for the story.
Still, Count Yorga has some fun, effective moments, as though a bunch of artists got together and decided what they would want to see happen in a vampire movie. Thus wooden stakes are fashioned from broken broom handles, a weak vampire sucks on a kitten to gain nourishment, and the film’s highpoint is a reasoned, rational conversation between vampire and vampire hunter. All of these moments, particularly the well-acted confrontation between Roger Perry and Robert Quarry, speak to a real creativity on the part of Yorga’s production team, but these flashes of inspiration (as well as the groovy 1970s touches) serve an old story that looks back rather than forward.
For instance, when Paul learns of Jim’s suspicion that Yorga is a vampire, he is completely dismissive, even though Jim’s theory perfectly fits all the facts. This is the movie automatic pilot answer to such a situation, not a genuine one arising out of character. People are being felled by pernicious anemia after showing up sick with puncture marks on their neck, and a blood specialist says they have been drained of blood. And, on top of that, your girlfriend is found sucking the blood of a helpless kitten … with fangs!!? Could it be a vampire? The obvious answer is yes, but Count Yorga’s script feels obliged, wrongly, to kowtow to the old movie cliché stating that reasonable characters should disbelieve in vampires (thus allowing the ghouls the opportunity to continue killing…). Yet, here, as in most such stories, the facts happen to fit Jim’s thesis.
Ironically, Count Yorga’s strengths and weaknesses can be found side by side in one particular scene. Yorga stalks two young people as they make love in their VW van. There are longs pans across the darkness, the noise of crickets on the soundtrack, and the camera adopts the eerie, subjective, P.O.V. angle, closing in on the unaware innocents. The sound of the crickets turns to a loud screech when the camera focuses on Yorga, lit from below, as he stands outside the window, waiting to attack. It is a very effective and suspenseful moment until the actual attack comes. Then it becomes plain that Yorga is garbed in a black suit and a long, flowing cape … a cliché of vampire films that has lost the power to scare.
Somehow, the image of the 19th century vampire is not really scary anymore. The well orchestrated approach to terror, mixing an appropriate camera angle, well-used sound effects and creepy lighting, is finally undercut by an image out of place in modern Los Angeles: an old guy in a cape with pointed teeth. In the ’80s and ’90s, vampires were reinvented, courtesy of productions like The Hunger, The Lost Boys, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and even John Carpenter’s Vampires. These, and other, films eschewed old traditions like capes and middle–European accents, and in some cases even made fun of such unfashionable affectations. It is strange that Count Yorga has the foresight to imagine that a vampire might dwell in contemporary America, but not the smarts to update the vampire’s look to go with the modern feel. If a vampire wanted to “blend in” in the late 1960s or early 1970s, shouldn’t he wear bell-bottoms and tie-dye shirts? That would have been an innovation.
Though it might accurately be called a bridge between vampire generations, Count Yorga’s lasting strength, even today, remains its central performance. Robert Quarry is ideal as the vampire: cunning, slick, smart and with a malicious leer that suggests appetites most unhealthy. He is better than the script, which ends with Yorga’s demise and, finally, an easily anticipated “sting.”
LEGACY: Count Yorga, Vampire, was so popular and well-received that a sequel, Return of Count Yorga (1971), followed, and Robert Quarry, for a time, became a cult-horror star, leaping franchises and appearing as Vincent Price’s nemesis in Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972).
CAST: Boris Karloff (Professor Marsh); Christopher Lee (Marley); Barbara Steele (Lavinia); Michael Gough (Elder); Mark Eden (Robert Manning); Virginia Wetherell (Eve).
CREW: Directed by: Vernon Sewell. Screenplay by: Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. Director of Photography: Johnny Coquillon. Music: Peter Knight. Produced by: Louis M. Heyward. American International Pictures. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running Time: 87 minutes.
DETAILS: In an English hamlet, a scholar in the ways of witchcraft (Karloff) faces off against a coven of witches that bears a historical grudge. Long believed to be Karloff’s final film, The Crimson Cult features an all-star horror cast, including Lee, Gough and Steele.
CAST: Vincent Price (Lord Whitman); Hilary Dwyer (Maureen Whitman); Patrick Mower (Roderick); Elisabeth Bergner (Oona); Essy Perrson (Lady Whitman).
CREW: Directed and Produced by: Gordon Hessler. Screenplay by: Christopher Wicking and Tim Kelly. Director of Photography: John Coquillon. Music: Les Baxter. Film Editor: Oswald Hafenrichter. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running Time: 90 minutes (approx).
DETAILS: An evil nobleman (Price) goes on a rampage, killing all the witches of the land. One wrathful witch named Oona (Bergner) takes exception to this cause, and summons a banshee to strike back at the lord’s family. A cheap “witchhunt” type of movie, though spiced with Price’s fine performance and plenty of nudity.
CAST: Sandra Dee (Nancy Walker); Dean Stockwell (Wilbur Whateley); Ed Begley (Dr. Henry Armitage); Sam Jaffe (Grandpa); Lloyd Bachner (Dr. Cory); Donna Baccala (Elizabeth Hamilton).
CREW: Directed by: Daniel Haller. Screenplay by: Curtis Lee Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky. Based on the Story by: H. P. Lovecraft. Director of Photography: Richard C. Glouner. Music by: Les Baxter. Produced by: James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff. American International Pictures. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running Time: 90 minutes.
DETAILS: An early screen adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s terrifying work. When a sacred book is stolen from Miskatonic University, a doorway is opened for a race of evil creatures imprisoned in another dimension. Sandra Dee plays a college student who gets involved in supernatural happenings, and Sam Jaffe, an old man who warns of horrors to come.
“…Anthony Nelson Keys and Bert Batt, who wrote the original story for this one, have made a couple of minor, though notable, changes in the recent [Hammer Films] formula.”—Vincent Canby, New York Times, April 16, 1970, page 54.
CAST: Peter Cushing (Baron Frankenstein); Simon Ward (Karl); Veronica Carlson (Anna); Thorley Walters (Inspector Frisch); Freddie Jones (Dr. Richter); Maxine Audley (Ella Brandt); Geoffrey Bayldon (Police Doctor); George Pravda (Doctor Brandt); Colette O’Neil (Mad Woman); Peter Copley (Principal); Frank Middlemass, George Belban, Norman Shelley, Michael Goren (Guests); Jim Collier (Dr. Heidecke); Allan Surtees, Windsor Davies (Police).
CREW: Warner Brothers and Seven Arts Present a Hammer Film Production. Produced at Associate British Studios, Elstree, London, England. Distributed by Warner Brothers—Seven Arts. Directed by: Terence Fisher. Produced by: Anthony Nelson Keys. Music Composed by: James Bernard. Musical Director: Philip Martell. Director of Photography: Arthur Grant. Supporting Art Director: Bernard Robinson. Editor: Gordon Hales. Production Manager: Christopher Neame. Assistant Director: Bert Batt. Camera Operator: Neil Binney. Sound Recordist: Ben Hawkins. Sound Editor: Don Hanasinghe. Continuity: Dolcen Dearnaley. Casting Director: Irene Lamb. Make-up: Eddie Knight. Hairstylist: Nat McDermott. Wardrobe Supervisor: Rosemary Burrows. Wardrobe Mistress: Coffie Slattery. Construction Manager: Arthur Hanley. Screenplay by: Bert Batt. From an original story idea by: Anthony Nelson Keys and Bert Batt. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running Time: 103 minutes.
“Freddie Jones plays a man who has his brain transplanted to a new body by Frankenstein. He visits his wife, who fails to recognize him, and she rejects him. I love that subject! I thought about that film more than any of the others, because of that one element”2.—Director Terence Fisher reflects on Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! (1970).
Lucky Peter Cushing gets a grip on buxom Veronica Carlson in a publicity still from Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! (1970).
SYNOPSIS: Forced from his homeland and living in hiding in England, the Baron Frankenstein is up to his old ghoulish tricks. He murders a prominent city doctor to possess his head, and the city police investigate the crime, aware they are looking for a dangerous, mad, medical “adventurer.” Frankenstein moves into the boarding house of a beautiful girl named Anna. When the Baron learns that Anna and her boyfriend, Dr. Karl Holst of the local insane asylum, are involved in illegal narcotics, he blackmails them into becoming his assistants. Karl helps Frankenstein steal equipment one night and kills a night watchman, getting himself in even deeper with the mad Frankenstein.
The Baron has come to England with a purpose. His compatriot, Dr. Brandt, possessed the knowledge to keep disembodied brains alive for transplant surgery, and Frankenstein needs that information. Unfortunately, Brandt went insane after his dealings with Frankenstein and is now residing in the asylum where Karl works. Frankenstein and Karl break Brandt out of his imprisonment, but he is injured in the process. Frankenstein transplants Brandt’s valuable brain into the body of another man, Professor Richter. Meanwhile, the police tighten their search and Brandt’s wife, Ella, recognizes Frankenstein on the street. She pursues him to the boarding house and Frankenstein shows her how he has saved her husband’s life by transplanting his living brain into the body of Richter. He swears Ella to secrecy, but when she leaves, flees with his patient and Anna and Karl back to his homeland. Ella informs the police.
At Frankenstein’s castle, Karl and Anna plot to escape from the madman. Brandt awakens in his new body and realizes what has become of him. Frightened by Brandt, Anna attempts to kill him. Frankenstein kills Anna for her transgression, leaving an angry Karl. Meanwhile, Brandt returns to London, Frankenstein in hot pursuit, and has a tender last meeting with his wife Ella. Then, he decides that all his work pertaining to successful brain transplants must be destroyed. Plotting revenge against Frankenstein, Brandt taunts him with the formula he so desperately desires. But Brandt burns down his own house and carries Frankenstein to a fiery death while Karl watches.
COMMENTARY: The horror films produced by Hammer Studios are beloved by fans around the globe for so many good reasons. When they re-invented and re-introduced the Frankenstein and Dracula myths in the late 1950s and 1960s, Hammer Studios updated the horror ethos with gore galore (i.e. running blood), garish color (running red blood), and a whole lot of female pulchritude. Fine production values were in evidence, and the films were invariably fronted by Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and, praise Heaven, Ingrid Pitt. The stories were familiar for the most part, but solidly scripted and competently directed. Most importantly, the Hammer horrors treated their subject matter with straight-faced respect, not camp humor or jokey irreverence. The thoughtful approach alone was enough to win the films legions of admirers.
But by the 1970s, the light behind Hammer’s films was starting to fade. Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, the gore, the women and the production values were still in the limelight, as was the straight-faced, honest approach to storytelling, but the films no longer felt new or innovative, not after a dozen years (and a dozen films) repeating the same formula. Christopher Lee was bored out of his mind towards the end, the scripts became re-hashes, wit was absent, and the Hammer Frankenstein and Dracula series suffered the fate of all franchises. Quality declined and so did audience affection. This is not an attack on Hammer, it is merely a fact. All franchises decline at some point, as witnessed by the fall of Star Trek today, or the fading of the James Bond film series in the late ’80s before Pierce Brosnan took over. The fact that Hammer’s films grew worse in the ’70s in no way subtracts from the fact that in the late ’50s and all throughout the 1960s Hammer was a pioneer and a producer of fine, memorable pictures. But much of its output in the seventies was plainly inferior to what had come before. In a way, this acknowledgment is another backhanded compliment because, among others, Hammer was clearly competing with itself and its own history of excellence at this point.
Which brings the discussion to Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!, the luridly-titled Frankenstein opus of 1970. It is sad and discomforting to see a pioneer become old hat, but that is exactly what happens here in a subdued, slow-paced film that never reaches the intensity promised by its title. The film opens with melodrama. Two schemers, Karl and Anna, are caught in an illegal narcotic ring by the Baron Frankenstein and consequently forced to serve as his assistants while he attempts to preserve the mind of an insane associate named Brandt. The elaborate plot winds on through drug trafficking, blackmail, murder, prison breakouts and precious little horror or suspense until the absurd true plot is laid bare. Get this: Brandt has learned the secret of successful brain transplants, but he’s crazy. So Frankenstein breaks him out of an asylum and cures his insanity so as to get the secret formula of brain transplants. But, Brandt is wounded in the asylum breakout and Frankenstein must transplant his healthy brain into a new body to save him.
Okay, that plot is either absurd or inspired, depending on one’s point of view. At the very least, it is workable, though only Frankenstein could see curing insanity as just one more little hurdle to jump. However, at the end of the movie, this plot is revealed to be completely ridiculous when Brandt returns to his home and burns all of his research about brain transplants. Now wait a minute! If Brandt recorded the all-important secret formula for successful brain transplant surgery in his notes, why didn’t Frankenstein simply go to the Brandt home and take the notes, thereby getting the secret he needed? If Brandt’s wife had refused Frankenstein access, he could have broken in and stolen the notes. Instead, Frankenstein adheres to his crazy plan: breaking Brandt out of the asylum, transplanting his brain, curing his insanity, and getting the formula straight from the horse’s mouth. Personally, this author would have tried for the notes first.
It isn’t often that a film renders its own plot idiotic, but Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!’s unbelievable final act does just that. Actually, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!’s script is shoddy in a number of areas. All through the picture, it cuts back to London police officers as they valiantly attempt to track down Frankenstein and stop his reign of terror. There are at least four scenes of the inspector, the doctor and other officers following the case of what they presume to be a murdering doctor. Yet, amazingly, there is no closure to these sequences, and they ultimately contribute nothing to the film. The police do not solve the case, and do not catch Frankenstein either. They do not even get in a token appearance at the end of the picture. With no punctuation, no closure whatsoever to these scenes, the cop subplot is revealed to be a time-waster; padding that adds nothing to the film on any thematic level.
But Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!’s worst transgression is neither its absurd plot nor its dead-end script structure. Worst of all, the screenplay fails to really understand the character of Brandt, the surrogate Frankenstein monster in this case. Again, it is helpful to review the situation. Brandt is wasting away in an asylum, driven irrevocably insane as the picture starts. His doctor believes this melancholy is incurable, so Brandt is a man with no future. In the course of the story, Frankenstein restores Brandt’s sanity and puts his brain in a healthy body when his old one is mortally wounded. There is just one side effect: a long scar on Brandt’s forehead. But is Brandt grateful to have his mind back after beings nuts, alone, and consigned forever after to an insane asylum? Is he glad to be alive and whole and sentient? Of course not, because the great law of movie clichés tells us that Brandt is an abomination against God! Instead of thanking Frankenstein for saving him, Brandt wants revenge against the good doctor. Why should the character possibly feel this way? Without Frankenstein’s intervention he was doomed, forsaken, and crazed!
If this is indeed a moral, ethical and religious issue that Frankenstein tampered in “God’s domain,” then there still should have been a moment in the screenplay when Brandt weighed these factors against his own newfound health. Instead, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! relies on clichés, flies on autopilot and assumes that Brandt would simply want vengeance for his new shape. Bizarrely, the script makes the same assumption about Brandt’s wife, Ella. If your spouse was condemned to insanity wouldn’t you rejoice to have him or her back, even in a new, slightly scarred body? If one thinks about it, Frankenstein accomplishes two miracles in this movie (successful brain transplant surgery, and the curing of insanity) but all anybody can do about it is complain!
Despite the numerous script flaws, Peter Cushing, the busiest man in horror in the 1970s, remains a marvel as Frankenstein. Though the character is doomed to be static, never learning from mistakes, always creating death rather than life, Cushing nonetheless imbues the character with a most compelling brand of obsession. Whether arguing for scientific advances (“without pushing the boundaries of knowledge, we’d still be living in caves!!!” he snaps), or barking orders at his unwilling underlings, Cushing paints a fine portrait of genius-tinged madness. A tribute to his skill is that the most fascinating moment of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! comes when Cushing’s doctor catches a glimpse of the beautiful Anna undressing in her bedroom. A lustful Frankenstein breaks in, and viciously has his way with her, proving he is not all intellect and science after all. If there is anything surprising in the least about this film, Cushing’s moment of physical release would certainly qualify. Frankenstein, usually so focused on other matters, succumbs to the desires of the flesh in a flurry of violence … if only for a moment. Cushing seems to understand here, and throughout the film, what makes this madman tick, right down to his carnal appetites.
Hammer films are much, much more than buxom women in diaphanous nightgowns and torrents of running red blood, but Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! reveals a franchise in serious decline. It looks good and it is well acted, but the script is awful, filled with plot dead-ends and implausibilities that undermine the narrative. An old saying goes: “if it isn’t on the page, it won’t be on the stage.” That truism could have been the motto of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! It has all the icing of Hammer’s best desserts, but the cake underneath is stale.
CAST: Ralph Bates (Victor Frankenstein); Graham James (Wilhem); Kate O’Mara (Alice); Veronica Carlson (Elizabeth); Dennis Price (Grave Robber); David Prowse (the Monster).
CREW: Produced and Directed by: Jimmy Sangster. Written by: Jeremy Sangster and Jeremy Burnham. A Hammer Production. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running Time: 94 minutes.
DETAILS: Yet another entry in Hammer’s long standing Frankenstein film franchise, though this one lacks the star presence of Peter Cushing. Ralph Bates is the new Frankenstein, but he’s trapped in a familiar story involving murder, a monster, body parts and the doctor’s laboratory.
“…has no subject except its special effects (which aren’t very good) and its … shock sequences. Characters are picked up and dropped with indifference…. And by the end of the movie everybody is either dead or discarded or a vampire…. It is neither fun nor even especially clean.”—Roger Greenspun, New York Times, October 29, 1970, page 58.
CAST: Jonathan Frid (Barnabas Collins); Grayson Hall (Dr. Julia Hoffman); Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans); Roger Davis (Jeff Clark); Nancy Barrett (Carolyn Stoddard); John Karlen (Willie Loomis); Thayer David (Professor T. Eliot Stokes); Louis Edmonds (Roger Collins); Donal Biscoe (Todd Jennings); David Henasy (David Collins); Dennis Patrick (Sheriff George Patterson); Joan Bennett (Elizabeth Collins Stoddard); Lisa Richards (Daphne Budd); Jerry Lacy (Minister); Barbara Cason (Mrs. Johnson); Paul Michael (Old Man); Humbert Astredo (Dr. Forbes); Terry Crawford (Todd’s Nurse); Michael Stroka (Pallbearer).
CREW: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Presents A Dan Curtis Production, House of Dark Shadows. Film Editor: Arline Garson. Camera Operator: Dick Mingalone. Sound: Chris Newman, Jack C. Jacobsen. Sound Mixer: Bob Fine. Titles: F. Hillsberg Inc. Special Make-up: Dick Smith. Wardrobe Designer: Ramse Mostoller. Make-up: Robert Layden. Hairdresser: Verne Caruso. Set Decoration: Ken Fitzpatrick. Casting: Linda Otto. Stunt Choreographer: Alex Stevens. Filmed in: Metrocolor. Production Supervisor: Hal Schaffel. Assistant Director: William Gerrity, Jr. Music Composed and Conducted by: Robert Cobert. Director of Photography: Arthur Ornitz. Production Designer/Associate Producer: Trevor Williams. Screenplay: Sam Hall and Gordon Russell. Based upon the ABC-TV Series. Produced and Directed by: Dan Curtis. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 90 minutes.
“Youngsters today are looking for a new morality. And so is Barnabas… He hates what he is and he’s in terrible agony. Just like the kids today, he’s confused, lost, screwed up and searching for something”3.—Jonathan Frid ruminates on the popularity of his vampiric alter ego.
SYNOPSIS: Looking for young David Collins, the youngest child of a wealthy New England family, governess Maggie Evans stumbles across drunk Willie Loomis on the family grounds at nightfall. He is searching for the legendary Collins jewels in the estate graveyard, but he uncovers something infinitely more frightening. In the Collins crypt, Loomis opens a sealed casket and frees an ancient evil, the regal vampire Barnabas Collins. Before long, this vampire has sucked dry his first victim, Daphne, leaving two puncture marks on her neck. Meanwhile, Maggie becomes locked in the old Collins estate until her boyfriend Jeff finds her, along with the naughty, mischievous David.
A few nights later, and after more deadly vampire attacks, Barnabas introduces himself to the polite society of Collinsport, passing himself off as a Collins cousin from England. Barnabas immediately charms the relatives and is welcomed to live in the old Collinswood house. Ironically, this is the home he lived in a hundred and eighty years ago, and it has hardly changed in the intervening decades. On the eve of a masquerade ball, Barnabas seduces and bites Carolyn Collins, making her his undead slave. At the party, Barnabas also finds himself interested in Maggie Evans because she is a dead ringer for the love of his life, Josette DuPres. Almost two hundred years ago, Josette jumped to her death from Widow’s Hill when she learned that her beloved was an undead monster. Feeling that Josette has returned to him, Barnabas sets out to woo Maggie. A jealous Carolyn attempts to stop these romantic attempts, but Barnabas bites her again, killing her this time.
At the same time, a doctor named Julia Hoffman, who is writing the Collins family history, analyzes some of the blood on Carolyn’s corpse and determines that the creature who attacked her suffers from a rare form of a disease—vampirism—that could be curable through advanced medical science.
That night, a living dead Carolyn Collins rises from her grave and attacks young David in the dried-up Collinswood pool house. He escapes and warns his family that Carolyn lives, but the family does not believe his wild story. Carolyn’s lover, Todd, is attacked by Carolyn that very night, but an angry Barnabas warns her not to act without his direct authority. Carolyn ignores this warning and makes Todd a full vampire. The police arrive, armed with crucifixes, and put an end to Carolyn’s defiance.
Now that Dr. Hoffman knows that Barnabas is a vampire, she offers him a cure. Barnabas eagerly accepts the chance to escape his disease, and soon after the therapy begins, shows signs of improvement, even being able to walk in the sun. However, Hoffman has secretly fallen in love with Barnabas and is jealous of the affection he showers on Maggie. Hoffman purposefully botches the cure and Barnabas ages hundreds of years in a matter of seconds. An angry Barnabas kills Julia for her betrayal and feeds on Maggie to restore his youth. The Collinsport police and Collins family rally their forces to protect Maggie from the vampire, but Barnabas returns to her, seeking his bride, and takes her to the old house.
Finally, it is up to Maggie’s boyfriend David to defeat Barnabas in the old house before a deadly wedding can occur.
COMMENTARY: Adapting a popular TV series into a successful feature film is rarely an easy task. The Star Trek franchise has attempted this balancing act nine times (as of this writing) and had, arguably, only two or three successes in translating its video material into original, but faithful, screen gold. Forget about The Wild Wild West (1999), Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) or Lost in Space (1998): they did not even attempt to honor their TV material, instead relying only on a well-known franchise name, and big star appeal. But long before any of these TV-to-film ventures came about, Dark Shadows producer Dan Curtis was confronting the same problems. How could he translate the success of an afternoon daily soap opera (which aired more than 1,000 episodes!) into a box office success that nonetheless remained true to the ethos of what he and Art Wallace had created for the tube?
What Curtis did, which is evident in House of Dark Shadows, was to improve the overall production values, retain the original cast, and telescope a long and familiar story into a short, familiar one. The first two decisions work to the film’s advantage to some degree; the third does not. Because the cast is so large, it is ill served in a feature of this length (barely 90 minutes), with only Frid making any impact. And the story, now stripped of the soap’s tangential (and often inspired) flourishes, looks more imitative of Bram Stoker’s Dracula than ever before.
First impressions from House of Dark Shadows are rather positive. The film looks good, getting a leg-up on its on-the-cheap TV brother by featuring real exteriors (rather than soundstages), and genuinely impressive sets, as well as more explicit bloodletting. The menacing Frid, a powerful screen presence as the vampire Barnabas, is rightly held back for a time (with the audience catching glimpses only of his ringed fingers and trademark cane), thus building anticipation and making for a grand entrance. And, fostering a sense of nostalgic enjoyment, Curtis’s direction employs then-timely camera moves and techniques to flashily serve the story.
But, House of Dark Shadows has a weak script in an important regard: there are no introductions to any of the Collins family other than Barnabas, meaning that those who do not follow the show are left rudderless. Who are these people? What are their relationships to one another? House of Dark Shadows assumes that the audience already knows all of that material, rightly or wrongly, and the characters (on the movie screen) never translate as individuals. This problem is enhanced by the fact that few of the Collins get separate screen time, let alone meaningful dialogue, unless they are featured in a death sequence … not the best venue in which to get to know someone.
Lacking the extraordinary individuality of the TV characters, as well as the subplots that made their machinations interesting, House of Dark Shadows emerges as something that the TV series never was, a bland derivation of Bram Stoker’s novel. To wit, Willie Loomis now seems like Renfield, less the opportunist of the TV series and more the vampire stoolie of cliché. The old Collins house where Barnabas takes up residence also smacks of Carfax Abbey without the rich detail of the long-lived soap. Elliott is a dull Van Helsing substitute, and so forth. It is a shame to witness this homogenization of Dark Shadows because the TV series really saw things through a skewed, and wonderfully energetic, perspective.
Frid’s Barnabas (on TV) was a Byronic vampire worthy of sympathy, an anti-hero who hated what he was, and even became a kind of generational spokesman for disaffected youth of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Though in the film, Barnabas is still tortured (decrying “how could anyone live like this?”), he is more like the traditional vampire of yore, garbed in cape and fangs, seducing the innocent and drinking their blood. The portions of the film that work best are those that involve Barnabas’s belief that he can be cured, and thus redeemed. But those moments, unlike the TV series, are brief.
House of Dark Shadows also depends on what this author often calls “selective stupidity” in its plotting. A clever viewer will ask some pertinent questions. Like, who is the one new person in town, whose very arrival coincides with a rash of vampiric attacks and death? Gee, could it be the caped fellow who just happens to be a dead ringer for a Collins who “mysteriously vanished” 180 years ago? Over the weeks and months on the TV series, issues like this were flattened out through time, barely having impact, but in a sparse 90 minutes, the story of Barnabas is exposed as rather weak. And, sadly, the audience is once again back in that predictable world where vampire bites on the neck are dismissed as animal bites, a factor also in Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) and Blacula (1972). It is a shame, but House of Dark Shadows is a horror film with dumb characters. As it stands, half the Collins family is exterminated by the time anyone realizes something sinister is really happening.
The best way to describe the difference between Dark Shadows on TV and Dark Shadows as film is that the former is soap opera first and horror second, while the latter is the reverse. What made the low-budget series unique, charming, and long-lived was its concentration on characters and relationships. The film lops out all of that good stuff, all of that interpersonal intrigue, and is left with a hollow shell, the bare bones of its familiar vampire story. No, the movie is not terrible, and Frid is still a great vampire, but in the end, House of Dark Shadows is another TV-to-film failure, a movie that fails to understand why Dark Shadows was so popular in the first place.
LEGACY: A sequel (sans Jonathan Frid, and the Barnabas connection), was released in 1971, entitled Night of Long Dark Shadows. Poorly received, the film landed Dark Shadows in cult obscurity until 1991, when Dan Curtis revived the franchise in a short-lived NBC TV series, featuring Ben Cross as Barnabas Collins. Since then, there has been talk of a Dark Shadows movie, and a Dark Shadows Broadway production. The show remains a staple on The Sci-Fi Channel.
“…it offers an increasingly complicated plot combined with elements of jokiness which together render Lust for a Vampire more an example of early 1970s camp, a curious hybrid of romance, comedy and thriller, than a horror film.”—Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film, Manchester University Press, 1993, page 165.
CAST: Ralph Bates (Giles Barton); Barbara Jefford (Countess Herritzen); Suzanna Leigh (Janet Playfair); Michael Johnson (Richard Lestrange); Yutte Stensgaard (Mircalla); Helen Christie (Miss Simpson); Pippa Steel (Susan Pelley); David Healy (Raymond Pelley); Harvey Hall (Inspector Heinreich); Mike Raven (Count Karnstein); Michael Brennan (Landlord); Jack Melford (Bishop); Judy Matheson (Amanda); Christopher Neame (Hans); Erik Chitty (Professor Herz); Caryl Little (Isabel); Jonathan Cecil (Biggs); Kirsten Lindholm (Peasant Girl); Luan Peters (Trudi); Nick Brimble (First Villager); David Richardson (Second Villager); Vivienne Chandler, Erica Beale, Melinda Churche, Melita Clarke, Jackie Chapman, Sue Longhurt, Patricia Warner (School Girls).
CREW: A Hammer Production. Director of Photography: David Muir. Art Director: Don Mingaye. Editor: Spencer Reeve. Music composed by: Harry Robinson. “Strange Love” sung by: Tracy, Lyrics by: Frank Godwin. Musical Supervisor: Philip Martell. Production Manager: Tom Sachs. Assistant Director: David Bracknell. Sound Recordist: Ron Barron. Sound Editor: Terry Poulton. Camera: R. Anstisss. Continuity: Betty Harley. Make-up Supervisor: George Blackler. Hairdressing Supervisor: Laura Nightingale. Construction Manager: Bill Greene. Recording Director: Tony Lumkin. Dubbing Mixer: Len Abbott. Choreographer: Babbie McManus. Screenplay: Tudor Gates. Based on characters created by: J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Produced by: Harry Fine, Michael Style. Directed by: Jimmy Sangster. A Hammer Film Production made at EMI/MGM Elstree Studios, England. Distributed by Anglo-EMI Film Distributors Ltd. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running time: 92 minutes.
Yutte Stensgaard portrays the vampire Mircalla/Carmilla, embodying Lust for a Vampire (1970).
SYNOPSIS: In 1830, a peasant girl is abducted in a carriage belonging to Count Karnstein, and transported to the family castle. There, she is killed in a sacrificial homage to Satan and her virginal blood resurrects the beautiful vampire Carmilla (also known as Mircalla).
In the nearby village, playboy and writer Richard Lestrange takes up residence and is warned about the Karnstein family of vampires. Ignoring the danger, Lestrange visits Karnstein castle and meets a bevy of local schoolgirls who are also visiting the decaying mansion on a field trap. Lestrange returns to the school with the girls and meets the beautiful new student who has just enrolled—actually the vampire Mircalla. At the same time, Lestrange befriends the odd science teacher, Giles Barton.
Before long, Mircalla Karnstein is up to her old vampire ways. She drains the blood of a barmaid at the inn, and then sucks dry a beautiful schoolgirl, Susan Pelley. The pupil is consequently dumped in a well by a secret accomplice. As Mircalla works her way through the tasty schoolgirls, Lestrange finds himself hopelessly in love with her. This does not please Janet Playfair, a fellow teacher who has developed an affection for Richard. Richard also shares his obsession for Mircalla with Giles Barton. One night, Barton arranges to meet secretly with Mircalla at the Karnstein Castle. He tells her that he knows who she is, and that he wants to worship both her and the Devil. Mircalla rejects his offer and kills him. The following morning, Barton’s pale, drained body is found on the school grounds.
While investigating the deaths of Susan and Barton, Richard realizes Mircalla’s true identity and arranges to meet Mircalla at the castle that night, repeating Barton’s mistake. Mircalla reveals that she is a Karnstein, but claims to have changed her name. She also denies being a vampire. Richard demands that she make love to him as proof of her innocence. She acquiesces.
The police and Susan Pelley’s father investigate Susan’s disappearance and Barton’s death. Susan’s body is discovered in the well (where Barton hid it to protect Mircalla), but the police inspector comes to an unpleasant end when Count Karstein hurls him down the well too. Meanwhile, Janet Playfair protects herself from the hunger of Mircalla with a crucifix. Susan’s father and a pathologist discover vampire bites on Susan’s corpse and confer with a visiting Catholic priest about it. Their forces marshaled, the priest, the villagers and Mr. Pelley storm the castle. They kill the Karnsteins, and burn down the castle. Mircalla is killed when a flaming two-by-four falls from the castle roof and stakes her through the heart. Richard is then released from his lust for a vampire.
COMMENTARY: You have to love Hammer. There is very little doubt why this vampire movie (the second in the Karnstein cycle after The Vampire Lovers) exists at all. Breasts. It’s all about breasts. Every element of this picture, from setting to plot incident, is designed solely to reveal breasts in all their glory. Big breasts, little breasts, breasts under nightgowns, exposed breasts in water, heaving breasts, etc. But movies have been made with less noble intentions and Lust for a Vampire displays its up-front charms with enough good humor and blood-letting to give one the illusion that the baser human instincts are not being pandered to. But, of course, they are.
Considering the new freedom of 1970s cinema and the loosening of the moral code, perhaps it was only a matter of time before Hammer Studios set a horror film at an all-girl’s school. This setting permits for many lascivious moments, all wonderfully lit and filmed. In one notable scene, a bevy of adolescent girls frolic and dance on the school grounds in skimpy dresses that have slits cut all the way up the legs. In another scene, set in a dormitory room, a beautiful student (the luscious Pippa Steel…) thoughtfully massages Mircalla’s (the even more luscious Yutte Stensgaard’s…) shoulders, and her blouse “inadvertently” (right!) drops to reveal her ample breasts. Then, because there is a God, the same student (Steel) obligingly suggests a midnight visit to the nearby lake … and a skinny dip.
At this point in the film, this reviewer’s wife was starting to grow suspicious. As the camera lingered on the two beautiful girls in the water … mostly topless, she pointed out that it still appeared to be daylight. “Midnight is really bright in England, isn’t it?” she noted with a hint of irritation. All the better to see those breasts by, my dear.
Before long, there have been eight shots of beautiful breasts and three flashbacks of scenes already shown (quite smart, actually, in case attention was diverted from the plot by the visual charms of the female cast). Then, there is the immortal love scene in which Mircalla (the iron-willed queen of evil) is seduced against her will by a randy teacher. Stensgaard’s eyes go cross, and then roll back in her head as she makes love: a funny visual cue to her attainment of orgasm. All this happens, humorously, to a wretched pop song entitled “Strange Love.” Throughout this sequence and the film itself Stensgaard is unfailingly beautiful and sensual, though perhaps lacking in the gravitas of her predecessor in the role, Ingrid Pitt.
Predictably, all the elements of Lust for a Vampire not involving nudity seem rushed and poorly conceived. Mircalla dies when—get this—a flaming two-by-four from her castle ceiling conveniently stakes her through the heart! Talk about good aim (and bad luck)! And, of course, there is also a sexist double standard at work here. Mircalla clearly enjoys going both ways (seducing men and women), but the audience never sees Christopher Lee, as Dracula, seducing a man, does it? Even more to the point, Mircalla gets seduced herself by that randy professor, not vice versa. Again, Dracula was never so weak as to be the victim of his own prey, was he? Poor Mircalla … she’s got a long way to go, baby.
All in all, Lust for a Vampire is a brilliant male fantasy. A man goes to work at an all-girl school and gets to make it with a really hot lesbian vampire. The period detail, the stately acting, the presence of evil … that’s all afterglow here. Stensgaard, Steele, and Leigh (as another teacher) are unfailingly gorgeous (and ample), and they make Lust for a Vampire eminently watchable and thoroughly enjoyable.
CAST: Alberto De Mondoza (Neil Ward); Edwise Fenech (Julie Ward); Cristina Airoldi (Carol); George Hilton (George); Ivan Rassimov (Jean).
CREW: Directed by: Luciano Martino. Screenplay by: Ernesto Gastaldi with the collaboration of: Vittorio Caronia. Original story: Eduardo M. Brochero. Director of Photography: Emilio Foriscat. Music: Nora Orlandi. Produced by: Sergio Martino and Antonio Crescenzi. Released by: Marion Films Limited and Gemini Releasing. M.P.A.A. Rating: R. Running Time: 81 minutes.
DETAILS: The New York Times called this slasher picture “splattery and sloppy” in its August 7, 1970, review of the film. Various sources list it as being of Italian, Spanish or German origination. The ad line was “Heaven Help Whoever is … Next!” The film involves a series of murders in Vienna that are being conducted by a sex-crazed lunatic who strikes with a razor. Released on American video as Blade of the Ripper.
CAST: Christopher Lee (Dracula); Dennis Waterman (Simon); Jenny Hanley (Sarah); Christopher Matthews (Paul); Patrick Troughton (Klove); Michael Gwynn (Priest); Michael Ripper (Landlord); Wendy Hamilton (Julie); Anouska Hempel (Tania); Delia Lindsay (Alice); Bob Todd (Burgomaster); Toke Townley (Elderly Wagoner); David Leland (First Officer); Richard Durden (Second Officer); Morris Bush (Farmer); Margo Boht (Landlord’s Wife); Clive Barker (Fat Young Man).
CREW: EMI Films Productions Ltd. Present a Hammer Production, Scars of Dracula. Director of Photography: Moray Grant. Art Director: Scott MacGregor. Editor: James Needs. Music Composed by: James Bernard. Musical Supervisor: Philip Martell. Production Manager: Tom Sacks. Assistant Director: Derek Whitehurst. Sound Recordist: Ron Barron. Sound Editor: Roy Hyde. Continuity: Betty Harley. Make-up Supervisor: Wally Schneiderman. Special Effects: Roger Dicken. Dubbing Mixer: Dennis Whitlock. Recording Supervisor: Tony Lumkin. Screenplay by: John Elder. Based on a character created by: Bram Stoker. Produced by: Aida Young. Color by: Technicolor. Directed by: Roy Ward Baker. A Hammer Production made at EMI/MGM Elstree Studios England. Distributed by Anglo-EMI Film Distribution Ltd. and released through MGM-EMI Film Distribution Ltd. M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running Time: 96 minutes.
SYNOPSIS: The blood of a bat spills on the ashes of Count Dracula and he is resurrected. Before long, he is up to his old vampiric tricks, draining the blood of beautiful local women. A mob, led by a barkeep and a priest, stages an attack on his castle and starts a fire. Dracula survives the attack and goes on the counter-offensive, sending an army of vampire bats to murder all the townswomen as they pray in church.
Elsewhere, a gallant fellow named Paul is chased by the police for his deflowering of the daughter of a local official. He survives a trip on a runaway carriage and ends up in Dracula’s woods. After being denied access to the inn, he travels to the still-standing castle. He is welcomed by Dracula, and compelled to stay the night. Paul soon realizes he is a prisoner in the mansion and attempts to escape by climbing out a window. He ends up in Dracula’s bedroom … with the sleeping vampire only feet away.
Meanwhile, the police search for Paul and are told he went to the castle. Paul’s brother, Simon, and his beautiful betrothed, Sarah, try to find Paul by retracing his steps. They too meet Dracula at his castle. Simon questions Dracula’s hulking manservant, Klove, about Paul, and the odd fellow warns Simon to take Sarah away before Dracula has his way with her. Simon and Sarah escape from the castle as night falls.
In the village, the townspeople refuse to help Simon and Sarah, except for the town priest. He takes them to the church, the site of the massacre, and shares the history of Dracula with them while they wait for dawn. When dawn comes, Simon returns to the castle to find Paul, only to learn that the count has murdered his brother. Dracula mesmerizes Simon, and the young hero is unable to stake the vampire. Back in the village, a bat pecks the town priest to death and Sarah is compelled to return to the castle. Simon breaks free of Dracula’s power and fights him off with a crucifix as Sarah finds herself in imminent danger. Simon delivers the vampire a final death blow by spearing him with a metal rod. Lightning then reaches down from heaven and electrocutes the vampire.
COMMENTARY: Hammer Studios is back to its old bag of tricks in the lackluster Scars of Dracula, a by-the-numbers sequel that amply demonstrates why the studio’s audience was shrinking as the 1960s became the 1970s. The film commences with the inevitable fake bat flapping about on wires. Unlike most bats, this fella proves extremely accommodating: it flies into Dracula’s castle on a specific trajectory, obligingly spits blood on the vampire’s ashes (thus resurrecting him…), and then flaps out on its preordained wire path. In film history, has there ever been a more uninspiring or silly monster resurrection? Well, in fairness, probably so, since a dog’s urine (?) brought life back to Freddy Krueger’s discarded bones in A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1989). Still, this ludicrous deus ex machina resurrection ranks high (or is it low?), lacking the pomp and dignity that Count Dracula should surely embody.
From that inauspicious start, Scars of Dracula, as if on automatic pilot, re-hashes in rote fashion all the popular plot elements of previous Dracula films. The audience sees the fearful, superstitious villagers, there is the imprisonment of a stranger in the Count’s foreboding castle, there appears a lovely maiden who Dracula takes a liking to, et cetera. In toto, these vampire movie clichés are so old they are brittle. Watching the great Christopher Lee go through the same set of hackneyed paces for the umpteenth time, one is left to wonder some deep questions about the meaning of life. Is Dracula happy to be “alive” yet again, living the same old existence in his lonely castle? The isolation, the dependence on blood, the interference of strangers in his personal affairs—these must seem awfully tiring things for the old count to deal with. If the movie actually dealt with the questions of Dracula’s unusual existence (seemingly a bunch of painful deaths separated by intervals of equally painful undead life), it might have actually been interesting. Instead, it is all leftovers from Bram Stoker and previous Drac films.
Making matters even more dire, Scars of Dracula puts up no worthy opponent in Dracula’s path. Peter Cushing is (wisely) nowhere to be found. The only question this time around is how will the count be offed? In that respect, the film does not disappoint, flashily employing electricity as the mode of the vampire’s inevitable (but temporary) destruction.
The films of Hammer Studios are pretty well impervious to criticism since so many people love them so deeply (and in some cases, so blindly). But, it is important to remember that not all Hammer films are created equal. Scars of Dracula, like a Phantom Menace (1999) or a Final Frontier (1989), is a retread of past glories rather than an innovative chapter in a well-established franchise. It is no wonder that after Scars of Dracula, Hammer went fishing about madly for new concepts to enliven their moribund vampire series. Dracula A.D. 1972 brought the count into the twentieth century, Rites of Dracula saw him involved in an Avengers-like caper to unleash bubonic plague upon an unsuspecting world, and The Legend of 7 Golden Vampires depicted Dracula in the form of an ass-kicking, Chinese martial artist/warlord. Any of those unusual (and rather wacky) developments would have been welcome in Scars of Dracula, which suffers a terminal case of tired blood.
“Scream and Scream Again proceeds to unwind British-style, crisply, puzzlingly and with some restraint … into a good, tight knot, after the director, Gordon Hessler, bears down hard and graphically on a countryside pursuit…. But … the picture slouches into standard fare and ends up in still another mad scientist’s lair….”—Howard Thompson, New York Times, July 9, 1970, page 44.
CAST: Vincent Price (Dr. Browning); Christopher Lee (Fremont); Peter Cushing (Major Benedek); Alfred Marks (Detective Superintendent Bellaver); Christopher Matthews (David Sorel); Judy Huxtable (Sylvia); Anthony Newland (Ludwig); Kenneth Benda (Professor Kingsmill); Marshall Jones (Konratz); Rita Lerka (Jane); David Lodge (Detective Inspector Strickland); Peter Sallis (Schweitz); The Amen Corner (Themselves); Michael Gothard (Keith); With: Yutte Stensgaard, Julian Holloway, Judi Bloom, Clifford Earl, Nigel Lambert.
CREW: American International Pictures Presents Scream and Scream Again. Lighting Cameraman: John Coquillon. Editor: Peter Elliott. Production Manager: Teresa Bolland. Art Director: Don Mingaye. Make-up: Jimmie Evans. Hairdresser: Betty Sherriff. Wardrobe: Evelyn Gibbs. Dubbing Editor: Michael Readborn. Dubbing Mixer: Hugh Strain. Sound Mixer: Bert Ross. Screenplay: Christopher Wicking. From the Press Editorial Services novel The Disoriented Man by: Peter Saxon. Produced by: Max J. Rosenberg, Milton Subotsky. Executive Producer: Louis M. Heyward. Directed by: Gordon Hessler. Screenplay by: Christopher Wicking. Music: Dave Whittaker (video release—Kendall Schmidt). M.P.A.A. Rating: PG. Running Time: 94 minutes.
“It was interesting to have them all in the same film, but they should have had the contretemps between them, utilizing all three in one scene in a face-to-face showdown. But there was no way of working it in: We just brought them in to take advantage of the names, for marquee value”4.—Scream and Scream Again’s executive producer, Louis M. Heyward, comments on the horror trifecta of Price, Cushing and Lee.
SYNOPSIS: In London, a man collapses while jogging in the park and is promptly taken to a medical ward for attention. When he awakens there, he finds, to his horror, that a leg has been amputated…
Meanwhile, there have been a series of deaths in London. Recently, a woman, Eileen, was found dead in a park, her throat cut, her body drained of blood. The police, led by Detective Bellaver, question her employer, the mysterious Dr. Browning, but he claims to know nothing of the so-called “Vampire Murders.” Not far away, the beleaguered jogger awakens from a deep sleep to find he is missing his other leg…
In another part of the world, a strangely powerful man named Konratz moves up the chain of command in his dictatorship-like government by murdering his superior officers. He has a dark secret, one related to the murders in England, but Major Benedek is killed before he can stop Konratz.
Back in London, Bellaver, teaming up with a young coroner, sets up a sting operation for the vampire killer. Aware that the killer stalks his prey at nightclubs, the police set up a female officer as bait. She is nearly murdered by the killer, a superstrong man, but he escapes. They pursue him to a quarry, and he flees on foot up the side of a treacherous mountain. Even after falling down the hill and being cuffed to the car, the vampire-like killer escapes. This time, he breaks off his own wrist to escape custody!
The police chase leads to Crossways, the home of Dr. Browning. The killer jumps into a trough of acid to escape captivity. With the killer dead, the case is considered closed, but the coroner suspects intrigue, and examines the amputated hand. By night, the jogger’s nurse (who has now overseen the amputation of the poor man’s arms), steals the hand from the coroner’s office!
At the same time, Konratz has traveled to the U.K. to meet with Fremont, a top government official. Konratz demands all materials relating to the vampire murders in trade for the release of a captured spy plane and pilot. With Fremont’s permission, Konratz takes the file, killing Superintendent Bellaver in the process.
Still suspecting foul play, the coroner breaks into Browning’s home and finds a high tech laboratory there, as well as a repository of frozen body parts. He is confronted by Browning, who shows him the entire operation. It seems that Browning is part of a special elite of scientists who are building “composite” people: sentient beings assembled from various limbs and body parts. Browning even reveals he is a composite himself, part of what he calls a super race. Unfortunately, Konratz arrives in the laboratory and tells Browning that he and all his kind are expendable. Browning and Konratz then fight, while the coroner and a captive would-be organ bank flee Crossways. Browning kills Konratz, submerging him in a bath of acid, but then Fremont—another composite man—arrives to kill Browning. Fremont tells the coroner that the affair is not over, that it is “just beginning.”
COMMENTARY: Gordon Hessler’s Scream and Scream Again has one nifty and rather ghoulish visual joke in it. A healthy-looking jogger collapses during an afternoon run, and awakens in a hospital to find that one of his legs has been amputated without his knowledge (or permission). Later in the film, the jogger awakens again, to find his other leg missing. When the audience next sees the poor man, he is missing both arms. Scream and scream again, literally! Alas, the rest of this film does not live up to that moment of Grand Guignol humor. Worse, it squanders the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price interacting on film, making it a missed opportunity rather than the high-water genre mark it aimed to be.
To fully understand a critic’s frustration with Scream and Scream Again, one must only consider expectations. Price, Cushing and Lee are the great horror icons of the 1960s and 1970s. Price for his Poe roles and Phibes films; Cushing for his efforts as Dr. Frankenstein and Van Helsing; and Lee as (arguably) the greatest screen Dracula of all time. What a coup to have signed these three stars for one film! Price’s devilish humor, Cushing’s genteel determination, Lee’s overt physical presence and menace … just imagine how those qualities might have played out in full-blooded scene after dramatic scene.
Now, keep imagining, because none of those scenes exist in Scream and Scream Again. Peter Cushing appears as a Nazi-like officer in only one scene (before being killed by a technique that resembles Mr. Spock’s famous Vulcan nerve pinch…), and doesn’t get to share the screen with either Price or Lee. Vincent Price appears at the start of the film, and also has a significant presence at the denouement, but is otherwise missing in action. As for Lee, he appears a few times (perhaps four), all in the latter half of the picture, but shares just one (brief) moment with Price. What a disappointment! The icons never work in combination, and a great opportunity is lost. Although it is better to judge a film on what it does, rather than what it fails to do, it is difficult to forgive a movie that makes a blunder like this … even if the rest of the picture is exemplary (which it isn’t).
Foremost among the film’s problems is its so-called plot (or rather plots, since there seem to be about four of them…). There are the goings-on in an unidentified eastern European country modeled after Nazi Germany (down to swastika-like symbols on blazing red arm bands), as an officer tortures refugees (Yutte Stensgaard in a cameo), kills his superiors (including Cushing), and plots some kind of military and political upheaval. In addition to being boring and mostly indecipherable, these sequences go nowhere and have little bearing on the remainder of the film. Then there’s poor Christopher Lee, laboring through his very dry espionage subplot … mostly sitting behind a desk and answering the phone. Then there is a sub-plot about a serial killer called the “Vampire Murderer,” and the police attempts to catch him before he kills again. Then there is Price as Dr. Browning, a suspicious character working up something strange in his laboratory. Then there’s the young coroner trying to solve the case. Finally, there is the revelation of a conspiracy of super-intelligent, super-strong supermen sewn from stolen body parts (hence the jogger’s unfortunate limb deficiency). Scream and Scream Again has an excess of plots, but none of them are handled with much flair. Audiences need a note pad to keep up with all the various threads. The destination is not worth the complexity of the trip.
Scream and Scream Again plays like a James Bond film without James Bond, for there is a plot to rule the world, yet no worthy or interesting hero to step in and fight it. And, like the James Bond films, Scream and Scream Again suffers from what Roger Ebert calls the “Fallacy of the Talking Villain.” At the end of the picture, mad-scientist Vincent Price confronts the young coroner (a deadly bland Christopher Matthews) and invites him to look over his secret operation. Then, in detail, Price explains everything to the young man, making sure to leave no detail out. Of course, the coroner is able to escape eventually, whereas if Price had just killed the guy before talking, his plan might not have been jeopardized…
Scream and Scream Again also fails to convince in its scientific thesis. The ultimate point of the film is that man should not tamper in God’s domain by building supermen out of human spare parts. That is fine, but today it seems a thematic dead end. In 2000, audiences understand that if a super race is created, it will happen courtesy of DNA and genetic engineering, not the sewing together of spare parts. Even in 1970 such a plot does not really hold up well. How does a “new” superman, assembled from spare parts, become a different sentient individual if the brain in use is from another (already living) human being? Would not you merely have another person’s brain inside a super powerful new body, rather than a new personality who is consciously part of a master race and its conspiracy? And why no seams? If these folks are sewn together from spare parts like the Frankenstein monster, should not there be physical remnants or traces of the surgical procedure? If not seams, then how about scars? As was stated so eloquently in Spinal Tap, there is a fine line between stupid and clever, and Scream and Scream Again crosses that line.
Besides an exciting car chase and the extended pursuit of a super being who is difficult to injure, let alone capture, Scream and Scream Again is more baffling than intriguing. In some fan circles, the film enjoys a reputation as being quite good, a classic even. One has to wonder how that assessment was reached, as the film is resolutely style-less and lacking in pace. Throw in an ineffective, overly cumbersome plot, a ridiculous scientific resolution to the mystery, and a failure to exploit the presence of three genre greats, and one is left feeling suspiciously like that poor jogger … as if pieces are missing.