Der Fluch der gelben Schlange / The Curse of the Yellow Snake

This CCC krimi from 1963 feels very much like a cross between Edgar Wallace and Sax Rohmer, with a Fu Manchu like mastermind plotting world domination, beginning with the expulsion of the British from Hong Kong.

In other words it's the kind of film that's highly problematic in these more politically correct times in that its stereotypes go beyond the usual ones of an imaginary / idealised England, which we insiders can always laugh off as camp or kitsch, to also encompass those of an Other culture, where it can be difficult to find an acceptable position to take.

But rather than refusing to engage with such films – and here I would include the Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu films along with the likes of Hammer's Terror of the Tongs and Stranglers of Bombay – I would argue that it is the cult film fan's responsibility to see them and attempt to contextualise them so that they can be understood as the products of their time, place and circumstances.

Here, of course, what we have is a 1960s German adaptation of a 1920s British novel. One defence could be to argue that the orientalist aspects of the piece are more ignorant and innocent and thus excusable than those of the contemporaneous Dr No, while Caucasian actor Pinkus Braun's Eurasian villain is likewise not in the same league of grossly insensitive caricatures as Mickey Rooney's Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffanys.

In other words, there's always some way of making excuses for the things we like, so why should cult fans be any different?






Some nice expressionistic compositions, albeit compromised by panning and scanning from the original 1.66:1 to 1.33:1

The story begins in a studio-set Hong Kong as two agents of the Fighting Hand society steal the Yellow Snake, a legendary talisman that guarantees victory in war to whomsoever possesses it and begins the battle on the Day of the Dragon, November 17.

Our hero, Clifford Lynn (Joachim Fuchsberger), immediately raises the prospect of an inside job to his adoptive father, Joe Bray (Fritz Tillmann), that the murdered guardian of the hidden snake might have been “more loyal to his colour than you think,” and that his half-brother, Graham / Fing Su (Braun), could well be the one behind the crime.

He's right, of course, but until everything turns to type midway through, we've got an interesting subtext of filial piety as Cliff is send to London to undergo an arranged marriage to one of Bray's business partners which neither he nor either of the prospective brides to be are particularly happy about, all to be overseen by Fing Su...

And, even when Fing Su and Cliff show their true colours – i.e. yellow and red, white and blue respectively – as the true villain and hero of the piece, there's still an element of this remaining, in that Fing Su's loyalty, as his choice of name serves to indicate, is to his late mother's side of the family and her motherland...


The two brothers can hardly bear to look at one another

Thus, though I wouldn't say Fing Su is quite presented as more sinned against than sinning, things are definitely more complicated than they initially appear – much, indeed, like Rohmer's novels with their self-deconstructing presentation of Petrie's desires for the 'exotic' Kâramanèh.

And in the end that is perhaps why I so enjoy popular works like these: they are not trying to be art, but only to entertain their audience and, in so doing, unselfconsciously express the unconscious desires, fears and beliefs of this audience. (More awkwardly, of course, they also helped shape them at the time they were originally circulated; but again I'd say that something like the Indiana Jones films are far more pernicious here today precisely because they'll be approached by more people unthinkingly. In most circles you don't have to defend your liking for them, whereas if you watch Eurotrash or whatever you have to work through to your position.)


An obligatory this is England shot

Other pleasures to be had from the film include Fuchsberger's charming yet somewhat grey knight performance; Werner Peters' characteristically shifty mercenary businessman; a woman and child as property subtext if we want to look for it, and some nice expressionistic angles and lighting from director Franz Josef Gottlieb and cinematographer Siegfried Hold.

As with Eddi Arent's comic relief, the score is however likely to divide audiences. Rather than attempting to convey orienticity the composers take a decidedly modernist experimental approach, with strange electronic noises perhaps reminiscent of the Darmstadt School or the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. While they work in the context of the film, especially as many are emphathetic to its visual images, I don't think they'd be the best cues to have on a krimi compilation CD.

A useful article on Fu Manchu derivatives: http://www.njedge.net/~knapp/clones.htm

Delitto al Blue Gay / Ein Superesel auf dem Ku'Damm / Cop in Drag

Delitto al Blue Gay opens with six minutes of non-stop action, albeit at least in part culled from previous poliziotto films, accompanied by a voice-off introducing Tomas Milian's Nico Giraldi character to those unfamiliar with him; I have the strong suspicion that the opening clip actually sees Milian pursuing himself, in the guise of one of his Lenzi characters.

Next we get a lip synched song and dance number, “man or woman, makes no difference on stage” delivered by a bunch of men in drag, at the Blue Gay club. Following some backstage bitching between leading diva Columba Lamar and her understudy and rival, Nadia, the introduction of visiting German film director Kurt Linder, and another stage routine, Nadia is found in her dressing room, murdered.


Columba and Nadia, moments before the latter is murdered


A bunny girl with a difference

No prizes for guessing who is assigned the job of going undercover at the Blue Gay or who he ropes in to help him...




The many faces of Nico Giraldi

Directed and co-written by Bruno Corbucci, this 1984 film is the 11th and last entry in the Giraldi series inaugurated by Cop in Blue Jeans eight years before. The formula remains much the same as its predecessors, with a mixture of action and crude comedy episodes centred around the endearingly scruffy Nico, his bumbling petty criminal sidekick Venticello and common-law wife Angela, who has just had another baby.

Unfortunately with all this there's also the sense of not really trying to go beyond a somewhat tired formula, that we've seen it all before and done better before, with two exceptions. The first, the inclusion of the song and dance numbers, most notably an interminable breakdancing and body popping zombie music video a la Thriller, soon become tiresome. The second, a chase in which Nico, dressed as a roman centurion, pursues a car in a chariot, is a nice idea, but fails to convince – how slow is the car going for the chariot to keep up – and also means there is no real possibility for more crazy stunts.


A familiar sight




Breakdancing zombies

The English title, Cop in Drag, is also something of a cheat in that Nico himself never actually dresses up as a woman, and keeps the beard and moustache throughout, with it being Venticello who is assigned the task of impersonating a woman on their visits to the Blue Gay.

This said, despite the stereotypical gay characters and frequent references to “fags” and “faggots” in the dialogue, the filmmakers prove surprisingly progressive and sympathetic in their portrayals of the Blue Gay's habitues, with Nico soon largely overcoming his masculine heterosexual anxieties and even incorporating Columba into his extended family by the end.

Femina Ridens

Co-written and directed by Piero Schivazappa, this film goes by a number of different titles, each placing its own distinctive slant on the proceedings – The Laughing Woman, The Frightened Woman and Games of Love, Games of Death.

Philippe Leroy plays Dr Sayer, a misogynist obsessed with male virility and the threat of a female-dominated future. He's also a sadist who enjoys regular weekend sessions with a high class hooker. When she cancels at the last minute, Sayer decides to take advantage of feminist journalist Maria, played by Dagmar Lassander, inviting her to come over to his apartment later to collect some papers she needs to be able to write up her article over the weekend. There, Sayer slips Maria a drugged J&B and takes her to his country home, with the intention of re-educating her as to the 'proper' places of men and women...








Images haunting sayer's dreams / nightmares

There's not much more than can be said without spoiling things for the first time viewer, except that, like Deep Red or Kidnapped / Rabid Dogs, it's worth paying close attention to the opening sequence. And, in common with these other masterworks of Italian popular cinema, The Laughing Woman is also sufficiently rich in its images and ideas to reward repeat viewings once the surprise is over.


A shot that would not be out of place in The Conformist


The duplicitious woman, framed in the mirrors


The buttoned-up, straight-laced Maria




Some of Sayer's abstract paintings, based on viruses under the microscope

As the synopsis indicates, we're very much in battle of the sexes territory, with all the usual structural oppositions in place: male / female, master / slave, active / passive, bearer of the gaze / object of the gaze, sadist / masochist, victimiser / victim etc. Yet The Laughing Woman also goes a considerable way towards challenging these binaries, treating them in a distinctly ironic manner and encouraging the viewer to take another look.


Sayer and Marie in a cage


Sayer and “the usual phallic cutlery”


Sayer's ideal man, himself


The voiceless woman

Again, it's difficult to say much without spoiling things. Despite all his attempts to master and discipline his own flesh and that of Maria and her predecessors, Sayer's position is ultimately one of fear and weakness. He has a revulsion for intimacy with the female, believing that she will kill him once she has mated in a manner akin to a scorpion he saw in his boyhood, while his dreams are dominated by the image of a giant vagina dentata, an abyss into which men enter never to return.


Obvious sexual symbolism


Sayer photographs his trophy




But to play the great white hunter, he must place himself in the frame and the camera's eye, surrendering a degree of power


Maria usurping the gaze

The thing that really sets the film apart is how beautifully stylised it all is. Moreover, it is not just about style for its own sake. Rather, form and content are intertwined, body and mind becoming a single flesh. It's not just the way in which the gigantic sculpture of vagina dentata and curvaceous, contoured abstract female form around it so brilliantly incarnates Sayer's fears, but also the suggestiveness of the relentlessly rigid and linear compositions around him, with their parallel connotations of a need for control, order, domination and systematisation.

Though there are a few more characters at the start and end, the bulk of the film is essentially a two hander between Leroy and Lassander. As such, it's crucial for the success of the piece that both deliver strong performances, with Leroy especially successful in conveying his character's preening narcissism and Lassander winning the viewer as well as Sayer over.

Lassander has long been something of an enigma to me. To put it crudely and admittedly cruelly, what happened to her between this film, So Young, So Lovely, So Vicious, where she plays the new stepmother and rival to Gloria Guida's teenage temptress, and The House by the Cemetery, where her Mrs Gittelson is very much middle aged and non-sexual, with only that fiery hair as a reminder of past glories. Was it simply time and nature taking a harsher toll than on any of the other starlets of similar age, or of Lassander's enjoying that bit too much of la dolce vita in the intervening years?

Whatever the case, she's in her absolute prime here, with her own particular dance of the one long veil to Stelvio Cipriani's “sophisticated shake” with its breathy female vocals surely counting as one of the most wonderfully erotic and sensuous moments to come out of the entire Italian cinema of this time. Its also a crucial moment of spectacle within the film gestalt, again foregrounding a somewhat more complex dynamics of looking and being looked at inasmuch as Maria is here putting on a performance that shifts the balance of power between her and Sayer for the first time.


Lassander's dance; note the teeth motif on the wall and the obligatory J&B bottle


Another stunning composition


Both characters again in a cage

It's telling in this regard that the film was picked up for international distribution by Radley Metzger's Audubon Films, given the still subversive nature of Metzger's own erotic and pornographic films of the same period such as Score, The Lickerish Quartet and The Punishment of Anne, with their aims of stimulating the viewer both physically and mentally; in Metzger's masterpiece The Opening of Misty Beethoven, for example, passengers boarding a routine jet flight are asked which meal option they would like and whether or not they want oral sex administered in a manner reminiscent of a scene in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty in which eating is done in private and is a taboo subject, whereas everyone gathers around the table to do the toilet. The point, there as here, is reminding us that the 'natural' and 'normal' are at least partly conventional.

If it would be going too far to say that The Laughing Woman is a Nieztschean film, despite the philosopher's notorious and revelant proclamation that “when you go to a woman, you should take a whip with you,” it does have that quality of making you think about such things. (Intriguingly, however, Bertrand Russell also opined that “Nine out of ten women would get the whip away from him [Nietzsche], and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks,” with this being a remark well worth thinking about on a repeat viewing.)

The Laughing Woman also features a stunning score from Stelvio Cipriani, which has itself recently been re-issued on CD by Digitmovies. Besides the aforementioned Sophisticated Shake, other standout tracks include a spaghetti western style deguello theme, which plays over the final showdown between Maria and Sayer, replete with alernating close-ups of their eyes, and the closing “A Man like You,” sung by Olimpia in her deliciously accented phonetically pronounced English.

The weakest aspect of the film is perhaps its dialogue, with some awkwardly arch lines that today's audience may find dated and hard to take seriously. Even here, however, it's evident that the filmmakers took considerable care over what they were doing, with some subtle little hints here and there of what is to come. The self-consciously 'meaningful' nature of many of the exchanges also helps in the creation of an enclosed world with its own particular rules and logics, in keeping with the production design, direction and overarching themes of the piece.

Take, for example, one of the initial exchanges between Maria and Sayer, after he has learned that she prefers to work at weekends: “You have a very odd way of spending your weekends.” “I seem to work better on those two days. I like to shut myself off from people and not be distracted.” The point is that Sayer's own weekend activities are not particularly normal, while in abducting Maria and subjecting her to various bondage scenarios, he is himself helping shut her off from (other) people and anything that might distract (or detract) from her experiencing her full quotients of suffering and he of pleasure.

In sum, a stunning one-off that still holds up well nearly 40 years after its original release while also providing a fascinating time capsule of the beginnings of second wave feminism and its social and cultural reverberations.

Un Par de zapatos del '32 / Qualcuno l'ha visto uccidere (Unica traccia: un paio di scarpe n.32 / The Student Connection / Witness to Murder

The opening gambit of this Spanish-Italian co-production recalls The Case of the Scorpion's Tail as a heavily disguised man – indeed, some might almost say too heavily disguised, with a neck-brace and a curiously Asian name for a European that one suspects would draw unwanted attention to him today as fitting the terrorist profile – plants a bomb on board a passenger plane, killing his target and another 139 people.

The assassin's reasoning makes sense, in its own perverted, psychopathic way: it's safer than taking a more director, personal approach to his target and, with this number of casualities, its highly probable that the a political motivation will be presented or imputed for the terrorist-seeming act.

Unlike his counterpart in Sergio Martino's film, however, his co-conspirator, doctor and headteacher Roger Mell (Ray Milland) isn't too pleased to learn that he's now indirectly responsible for a mass murder and proceeds to react by killing the assassin, whom he then buries in the greenhouse of his boarding school.

At this point the thriller rather than political aspects of the scenario come to the fore as the conspirators' personal motives emerge, in that Mell and his mistress Sonia (Sylva Koscina) only wanted to be rid of her husband, while the authorities begin to investigate the case in a throughly routine manner rather than take advantage of it by attributing it to some convient political enemy – a spider's stratagem that would seem to have been all too common in Italy's years of lead, but which would have never passed by the Spanish censors under Franco; it is also perhaps telling that the location of the film is southern France rather than north western Italy or northern Spain. (Not that any other country is necessarily any better: who knows what secret histories will emerge in 30, 50 or 100 years around our present, or what has already vanished from the official record, or was never put on any record to begin with.)

The trajectory of the piece is completed by the fact that one of the school's pupils, saw Mell kill the assassin. While Mell isn't sure which one, Sonia is sure of what they must do once they identify the child who saw too much: silence him...

All they initially have to go on is the size of the child's shoes, from which the Spanish and Italian versions of the film take their titles.

Much like the way Martino's film unexpectedly disposed of its apparent female protagonist one third of the way through a la Psycho, The Student Connection's inversion of the more usual giallo framework helps keep it fresh and engaging throughout.

Knowing whodunit, the emphasis is more on whosawit and whether the reluctant killer, already wracked with guilt over his initial crimes, will actually be able to coldly kill an innocent himself when the moment comes.

The commutation of what would otherwise be an array of adult suspects into potential child victims also works in the film's favour, in that every time Mell or Sonia are alone with one of the children the imbalance of knowledge between viewer and characters – except for in the case of the child who saw it all – creates considerable suspense, with one false move or misreading potentially signalling an innocent's death.

Though Milland likely took the role strictly because it was available and he wanted / needed to keep working, his performance, like that in The Pyjama Girl Case, belies such circumstances, beautifully expressing the complexities, anxieties and position of his character as a man hopelessly out of his depth.

Koscina doesn't quite transcend the femme fatale role, but then again isn't really required to so long as she brings the necessary glamour and danger to it. While none of the child actors are required to provide the same complexity of performance as Ana Torrent in the contemporaneous Spirit of the Beehive, which still represents the touchstone for all child performances as far as I am concerned, they are nevertheless always believable and avoid obnoxiousness of the sort that starts to see you almost rooting for the killer.

Essaying his first thriller after a series of westerns, Rafael Romero Marchent demonstrates a professional facility for adapting his style with some nice nighttime stalking sequences, echoed on the soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani's tense, psychedelic rock giallo rather than spaghetti themed cues, with jazz squalls in lieu of mariachi deguellos.

One does, however, wonder what co-writer Luciano Ercoli might have made of the same material, and his wife Nieves Navarro of the Sonia role.

Yet, disregarding the what ifs, the what is still warrants an hour and a half of your time.

Another opinion: http://euro-fever.blogspot.com/2008/02/student-connectionun-par-de-zapatos-del.html

Bathman dal pianeta Eros

What could be better or worse – depending on taste – than an ultra low budget Italian Batman rip-off / spoof?


Holy lawsuits Batman!

How about an ultra low budget Italian hardcore porn Batman rip-off / spoof?


Some alien android, I think

If you're not sold on the film or scurrying for cover yet, consider also that it stars none other than Mark Shannon, he of Joe D'Amato's Dominican Republic sex and horror epics and the lumpy scrotum, in the title role.


The Penguin, Joker and Catwomen

That there's not terribly much more can be said about the near plotless series of sexual numbers that follow, except for that they also feature Bathman's female sidekick, a gender shift obviously intended to avoid any suggestion of the camp crusader's not being one hundred percent heterosexual, though we also get a gay Penguin, along with the Joker and a Catwoman or two, along with a Commissioner Gordon clone, who gets turned gay; holy subtexts batman!


The gay Penguin looks away in disgust at two of his minions' heterosexual antics

What one does wonder, however, is how the big studios and corporations and their porn industry counterparts negotiate films like Bathman, perhaps more particularly in the US context. Do sound-alike porn films simply fly under the radar of the big studios? Do they avoid acting because it might be self-defeating, drawing more attention to the porn product, in a Streisand Effect manner? Do the porn producers know how far they need to go to produce something that's a parody rather than plagiarism, or which no reasonable individual could ever mistake for the real thing?




Robina engages in some auto-erotic activity

Perhaps the most incredible thing of all, however, is that Bathman isn't even the nadir of the Batman porn films, with that honour going to the once seen never forgotten Batpussy, a film which can only be summarised by the final words of Heart of Darkness: the horror, the horror!


Does this really need an explanatory caption?

http://batmanfansite.blogspot.com/2008/05/klito-bell-ovvero-bathman-dal-pianeta.html

Epic Films: Casts, Credits and Commentary on over 250 Historical Spectacle Movies

The cover of the 2004 second edition, with expanded coverage

This McFarland book, published in 1990, discusses the epic film, providing full reviews of 222 movies and shorter summaries of another 73. Richard Harrison, the star of a number of Italian peplum productions in the 1960s provides the introduction, followed by an overview of the history of the genre by author Gary A. Smith. It's important to note the boundaries of the epic Smith provides here as they define what gets included and what doesn't.

Budget is not directly an issue, though the presence of larger-than-life characters and monumental events, whether historical or mythological, are prerequisites. So too is that these events occur sometime between the beginning of the world and the thirteenth century – the latter proving a somewhat arbitrary cutoff point that leads to the exclusion of a film like Freda's Maciste in Hell which would otherwise presumably qualify.

Another limitation, perhaps more obvious today than at the time of the book's publication, is its strong emphasis on European history, religion and mythologies and corresponding film productions, with no mention of, say, Tarkan Meets the Vikings from Turkey or Tales of the Taira Clan from Japan.

Nevertheless, the range of films featured is still broad, ranging from silent Italian and Hollywood epics such as Cabiria and Intolerance, through much of Cecil B DeMille's output, onto the 1950s Hollywood epics, scores of peplums, sundry Hammer exotics, Caligula and Caligula the Untold Story (but no mention of Mattei's Caligula and Messalina) and even a few versions of Bible stories produced under the auspices of church groups and released theatrically.

All the longer reviews follow the same basic format, telling the potential viewer what he or she needs to know, with an overview of the story and an evaluation of the film's strengths and weaknesses, along with any particularly noteworthy facts about the production.

Though perhaps not as comprehensive as it could be I doubt that it would be possible for anyone to genuinely cover the epic across the entirety of world cinema and feel sure that Epic Films will remain a useful guide to pre-Gladiator, 300 and Passion of the Christ historical spectacles. Certainly, I came away from it with a better sense of where these films fit in relation to their wider sub-generic histories. And, at the simple level of knowing whether this or that Hercules or Maciste peplum is worth a look, it will undoubtedly help.

Tempi duri per i vampiri / Hard Times for Vampires / Uncle was a Vampire

It's well known that Christopher Lee refused to reprise the part of Dracula for a long time after playing the character in Hammer's 1958 film for fear of becoming typecast in the way that Bela Lugosi had been, leading Hammer to produce Brides of Dracula and Kiss of the Vampire as vampire films without Lee or Dracula.


Hotel Dracula?

What's not so well known, however, is that long before his return to the role in 1965's Dracula Prince of Darkness he had played a vampire and upon his association with the Dracula role in this 1959 Italian horror-comedy. Even odder is that, with the film being executive produced by Joseph E. Levine and dubbed into English – albeit with another actor providing Lee's heavily reverbed voice – it clearly had distribution outwith Italy, even if this was delayed by a few years.






Lee trading on his Dracula image

The film is surprisingly prescient, prefiguring elements of Blood for Dracula, Love at First Bite and – given Lucio Fulci's mentoring by director Steno – Dracula in the Provinces.

Beyond this it's also an engaging and entertaining film that's worth watching in its own right given the reliable and versatile Steno, a comedy specialist who could also turn out an excellent hard-hitting poliziotto conspiracy thriller when the occasion demanded, and the presence of the multi-talented Renato Rascel (also one of the co-writers and composers, along with Armando Trovajoli) and a young Sylva Koscina and Kai Fischer amongst the euro-starlets on display.

We begin with a Renfield-like servant transporting his master, Baron Roderico da Frankurten (Lee), to the train station in a crate, ready for shipping to Baron Osvaldo Lambertenghi (Rascel) in sunny Italy.

It doesn't seem the most obvious place for a vampire, but Frankurten is running out of options and hopes that his nephew's castle will provide a suitable replacement for his own, which has been destroyed; his servant's last request is to have permission to commit suicide, which the Baron graciously, wordlessly grants.


“And at last Baron, may I commit suicide?
Thanks; can one say this was really living sir”

Meanwhile Baron Lambertenghi is selling his castle to the Atlas Hotel Corporation in order to raise the money he needs to pay his back taxes, 80 million lire. Graciously, however, the Corporation agrees to allow the Baron to stay on at the castle in a position appropriate to his status and worth, that of the bellhop; they also convert the family crypt into a bar...

Learning the truth about his uncle, Lambertenghi resolves to destroy him, but finds his attempts repeatedly stymied by the interruptions of the other staff and guests. Worse follows as Baron Frankurten, weary of an unlife of moving from castle to castle and tomb to tomb, decides to transfer the family curse / inheritance / disease to his nephew. (As with the Hammer Dracula, from which the filmmakers draw a number of images, the direct image of one man biting another is evaded, though here we see Lee throwing his cloak around Rascel.)


The two barons meet; note the contrast in their outfits / uniforms


Gaze into the eyes that hypnotise – Lambertenghi addresses the spectator

Transformed from gamekeeper into poacher, Lambertenghi begins to work his way through the female staff and guests, beginning with Koscina's character's mother, before waking up in his uncle's coffin, wearing an opera cloak and remembering nothing about the previous night's antics. He then can't understand why no fewer than 42 women are infatuated with him, “ready to die for love” or asking for “one more bite”...


Lambertenghi has women trouble – too many of them

Though the film's version of vampirism is perhaps thus more akin to lycanthropy the filmmakers elsewhere engage nicely with other aspects of traditional vampire lore, having Lambertenghi attempt to fumigate his uncle with a garlic infused garden spray and one guest inadvertently paralyse the vampire with a cross-shaped clothes hanger, temporarily robbing the vampire of his powers.


An owl, recalling Terence Fisher's Dracula

They also make the most of the contrast between the tall, aristocratic Lee and the short Rascel, with the latter taking a somewhat more Lugosi like approach to the vampire role, exaggerating his gestures and expressions for greater comedic effect. He also delivers some monologues direct to the audience, again reminding us of the way in which long established popular theatrical conventions had their own proto-Brechtian elements, with some critics forgetting that in addition to alienating his audience from the work Brecht was also concerned with transforming their notions of popular entertainment.








More Hammer-style images

Apologies if this seems like an obsession in my writing of late; put it down to the coincidence of having seen multiple films using similar devices in a short space of time, along with the ease with which its possible to read social, sexual and political subtexts into a film like this. The more committed modernist can however take comfort from the fact that the film's resolution is more conventionally happy and reassuring than revolutionary.

Or, as the closing theme has it, with its blend of traditional and contemporary, “Dracula, cha, cha, cha”