Dracula and Son

Dracula and his son Ferdinand are forced to flee Transylvania after the communists come to power and lay claim to their castle. Fleeing to the west they are separated, Dracula winding up in London and Ferdinand in Paris. They are then reuinited when Dracula goes to Paris to work on a film. It is, of course, a horror film, its star having established himself as an actor whose gimmick, as far as the public are concerned, is that he believes himself to be a vampire. Initially father and son are happy to be reunited, but then come into conflict over a woman who just happens to be the spitting image of one of Dracula's brides – the one who was Ferdinand's mother!

As is well known, Christopher Lee was reluctant to reprise his career-making role as Dracula (1958) for Hammer, apparently fearing that he could become typecast in the role as the previous generation's Dracula, Bela Lugosi, had been.

What is less well known is that Lee quite happily traded upon his star persona in Italian productions such as the spoof Hard Times for Vampires (1959) and the Carmilla adaptation Crypt of the Vampire (1964) before his eventual return to Hammer and Dracula for Dracula Prince of Darkness (1965).

As is well known, Lee thereafter reprised the role for Hammer, but with increasing unhappiness at the conditions under which he was working. Eventually he refused to re-appear as the character following The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), thus compelling forcing the studio to find another actor to play the role in The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974).

What is less well known is that he again played Dracula - here.

Some of Dracula and Son's gags recall earlier horror comedies, as with some invisible in the mirror scenes reminiscent of Dance of the Vampires (1968), along with the deployment of a hammer and sickle as a crucifix in the manner of The She Beast (1966) during the Blood for Dracula (1974) recalling eviction scene.

These are, however, offset by the way in which the central self-referential conceit in turn prefigures Shadow of the Vampire (1999) by a good quarter century. (A vampire pretending to be a human pretending to be a vampire – how avant-garde – as Interview with the Vampire's Claudia put it.)

In addition plenty of further laughs come from the way the film-makers explore the vampires' plight in the modern world, as with Ferdinand's needing to find a job where he is on a constant night shift and general reluctance to feed upon living human victims resulting in frequent stomach rumbling and failed attempts at raiding a hospital blood bank, working at a slaughterhouse and suchlike.

Lee's playing with his image is also a lot of fun, as is the all-in oedipal conflict between the two Draculas, while the early scenes set a couple of hundred years back prove surprisingly evocative as straight gothic romance, replete with fearful coach drivers, a creepy castle and the like.

Probably not Black Park, but certainly evocative of it.

Lee does his thing

Fans of French arthouse fare may care to note that Fat Girl director Catherine Breillat and her sister Marie Helene appear as the Draculas' love interests, making one wish that they had worked with Jean Rollin in the manner of the Catherine and Pony Castel, to further round out that familiar art/trash circuit.

I watched Dracula and Son, whose dialogue is a mixture of English, French and Romanian, in a German edition. This in itself was of interest when it came to the credits, in that these credited not only the performers but also their German dubbing voices.

Recommended.

Sfida al diavolo / Challenge the Devil / Katarsis

One of the things about watching lots of Italian genre films from the late 50s through 80s is that you get used to certain names cropping up, like wig makers Rocchetti and Carboni or CSC graduate Carla Mancini.

This, by contrast, is one of those films where most of the names in the credits don’t mean much – including director Guiseppe Veggezzi / Joseph Vegh whose sole IMDB credit this is.

The two important names in the cast are Christopher Lee and Giorgio Ardisson, the former spelled as Cristopher in the credits and the latter’s forename Anglicised to George.

The film opens at an airport and looks like it’s going to be a crime thriller as two hitmen prepare to go into action against Carlo, for his refusal to hand over some documents.

Although wounded, Carlo escapes – it isn’t completely clear how – to a monastery where he asks to see one of the order, Pejo, an old friend. Carlo explains he hasn’t got the documents because Alma took them.

We then cut to a nightclub and are presented with a succession of song and dance numbers. Their relationship to the previous scenes only becomes evident when Pejo goes to visit Alma, a dancer at the club, backstage. Alma is reluctant to give up the documents – at least not for a considerable sum of money.

Pejo then recounts the story of how he became a monk – we’re now 20 minutes into the 75 minute film – and we segue into an extended flashback.

He and the rest of the gang – including the particularly out of control Ugo, played by Ardisson – were out looking for kicks, entailing forcing other cars off the road and then beating the occupant of one such vehicle after he has crashed.

Continuing on, the gang leave the road and, as night falls, end up at an old and apparently uninhabited castle. They decide to break in and explore the place, soon finding a banquet table laid out with food and drink which, needless to say, they gorge themselves on, before having a remarkably chaste “orgy” entailing dancing around and playing bongos for several minutes.

At this point Lee makes his appearance as the old man of the house and talks about his dead beloved and sold his soul to the Devil in order to bring her back. He hears her voice, but can never find her, and thus offers the gang all the riches in the castle if they can find her for him. After they have gone, the clock chimes midnight and the man is either replaced by or transforms into the Devil himself.

Round about this point the gang, who have gone in search of the treasure, start to feel a little less brave, and we get some reasonably decent Gothic/Fantastique atmospheres along with the woman making her appearance, leading the gang onto a seemingly endless spiral staircase ending in a crystal/mirror image filled room, traps each of them such that they can see the others but not reach or touch them.

The existential dread of the scene is effectively conveyed, recalling the likes of Sam Dalmas’s entrapment in the gallery sequence of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; the infinite plane that Liza and John find themselves in at the end of The Beyond; Eswai’s pursuit of himself in Kill Baby Kill and – perhaps ultimately most revealing – the doubled characters in Nude for Satan.

Having been trapped for a while and now on their last legs, the gang follow one of the spiders inhabiting the place to find an equally long descending staircase that in turn leads onto a long passage. They have only just entered it, however, when they fall into a pit and encounter the Devil and/or the old man again. Suitably chastened and transformed by their experiences, they flee the castle.

At this point we cut back to the framing narrative as Pejo provides the moral of the story before, back in the past, the lady of the castle appears to them once more, coming out of a clock in a somewhat Rollin-esque manner.



At this point we cut back to the framing narrative as Pejo provides the moral of the story before, back in the past, the lady of the castle appears to them once more, coming out of a clock in a somewhat Rollin-esque manner. They take her out of the castle, into the light, and give her a proper burial. Significantly here we’re given a semi-subjective shot from inside the grave, looking up to the heavens.



As the contrite gang members pass the man they had earlier beaten, they tend to his injuries. “Strangely, his face resembled the old man from the castle.”

Alma, reduced to tears by Pejo’s tale, gives him the documents; that her name means soul hardly seems coincidental insofar as she too has been saved.

While this can in no way be considered a good film, it is certainly an interesting one for its combination of the inept and the poetic, or that “sublime” which Ado Kyrou famously identified as a reason for watching bad films.

Thanks must again go out to the badfilm community for recording this obscurity off Italian TV;  converting it to an AVI and torrent, and providing fansubs.

Il castello dei morti vivi / Castle of the Living Dead

Castle of the Living Dead is famous for two main reasons.

First, Donald Sutherland took his son Kiefer’s name from the film’s writer and co-director Warren Kiefer AKA Lorenzo Sabatini

Second, it represented the first credit for Michael Reeves, who co-wrote the film and apparently functioned as more than just second unit man; producer Paul Maslansky subsequently backed Reeves’s official directorial debut The She Beast the following year.

The Reeves connection is immediately apparent, as a scene-setting voice-off establishes a somewhat disordered situation that prefigures Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General.

First, we are told that Napoleon may have been defeated, but that demobbed soldiers have turned to banditry and made the roads unsafe.

Then we are told that executions of bandits are thereby commonplace, and presented with what seems to be one such scene. The incongruities are the victim’s dress – a harlequin’s motley, rather than a soldier’s uniform – and the souvenirs being sold by a dwarf.

The harlequin then contrives to have his would-be executioner put his own neck in the noose and kicks away the stool, much to the (anti-authoritarian) amusement of those gathered.

Next it is revealed that executioner and executee, along with the dwarf, are in fact part of a theatrical troupe and the whole thing was a gag.

They collect their money and go to the inn.

There, the leader of the troupe, Bruno, and the harlequin, Dart (Luciano Pigozzi), argue over money – another trope whose mundane quality seems very Reeves if we think of the impoverished circumstances of Karloff and Lacey’s couple in The Sorcerors or the discussions between Hopkins and Stearne – another arguing (homosexual) couple, perhaps – in Witchfinder General.

Eric (Philippe Leroy) intervenes as Dart is about to kill Bruno, leading to Dart fleeing on the ex-soldier’s horse. (Ian Ogilvy’s Richard Marshall is also a soldier in Witchfinder General.)

Turning a bad situation into an opportunity, Eric decides to join the troupe, just as they have been offered the chance of doing a private performance for Count Drago for three gold pieces – a tidy sum, apparently.

Watching this, and the similiarity with what unfolds, I wondered if the makers of the 2000 French fantastique entry Deep in the Woods had also seen Castle of the Living Dead.

The troupe travel to Drago’s castle, en route encountering a witch, played in drag by a young Donald Sutherland, who had earlier played a soldier/policeman at the hanging, who foretells doom should they go there.

Since the film wouldn’t get much further if they heeded said warnings, the troupe continues on, greed outweighing other considerations.

There they meet Drago, (Christoper Lee) who makes his entrance in the approved Dracula-esque manner and who proves to be equally suspicious in his behaviour, as when he offers Bruno a pre-performance drink:

Bruno: "Aren’t you having any?"
Drago: "Alas, no. I give it only to my guests."

Indeed, having imbibed the concoction, Bruno suffers a fatal ‘accident’ whilst performing the hanging routine…

More character driven than most 1960s Italian horrors, Castle of the Living Dead is unusual for its relatively low-key approach to evil. Drago has no grand designs for revenge or ruling the world. Instead, he just wants to be able to perform his dubious experiments in peace. His victims, meanwhile, are neither particularly heroic nor bent on vengeance. Instead they just want to make it out alive in one piece.

Adequately directed and nicely shot in black and white (Luigi Kuveiller was camera operator), the film is atmospheric and benefits from wry performances from Leroy, Lee and Mirko Valentin (as Lee’s henchman, Hans), while Gaia Germani as Laura makes for an unusually active and level-headed love-interest cum victim.

Christoper Lee receives knighthood

Congratulations to Christopher Lee on his knighthood

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8097274.stm

Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen / The Devil's Daffodil / The Daffodil Killer

With newspaper hoardings announcing a second daffodil murder a young woman goes to make a call to Scotland Yard, but is herself murdered by a black clad masked figure before she can can be put through to them.






The daffodil killer strikes again in a scene full of giallo-style iconography but comparatively lacking in style

After leaving a daffodil on the body the killer then goes after Global Airlines investigator Jack Tarling, played by archetypal krimi detective hero Joachim Fuchsberger, finding him with a cargo of fake daffodils containing heroin intercepted by customs officials as part of a cargo from Hong Kong.

While successful in blowing up the customs officials the daffodil killer fails to kill Tarling, who then meets with his Hong Kong counterpart, Ling Chu, played by the unlikely seeming figure of Christopher Lee, as planned.


Fuchsberger and Lee

After announcing their presence to Scotland Yard the two men then investigate the convoluted mystery, beginning with the daffodils' importer, Lyons, before moving on the Soho nightclub where the first three murder victims all worked, the Cosmos...


Yet more daffodils and a characteristic mirror shot

With the subsequent proceedings continuing very much in the conventional krimi vein – Klaus Kinski is also on hand in characteristically twitchy mood, though Eddi Arent's comic relief is absent – the most interesting aspect of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodil is arguably its production context, as one of the few collaborations between German and British filmmakers on an Edgar Wallace adaptation.

From the point of view of the krimi productions, the chief benefit of the co-production emerges as its affording more location shooting and less stock footage than usual. Even here, however, while Picadilly Circus is effectively used as the backdrop for one assassination – the victim ironically falling into a flower-seller's basket after being shot – Scotland Yard is still represented by a plaque on some random building elsewhere over which, inevitably, Big Ben chimes.


On location in exotic Soho

Insofar as the German audience would happily accept this attempt at conveying London-ness, what really hurts the film is the blandness of the Shepperton Studio interiors, which generally have a somewhat flatter and anonymous look to their lighting and lack the kind of production details that are so much a part of the charm of their German counterparts.

In fairness Terence Fisher's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace suffered from a similar aesthetic discomfort when moving geographically in the other direction, suggesting that both British and German filmmakers of this type were perhaps somewhat set in their own comfortable ways of working at home.

Certainly if the later example of Cave of the Vampires is taken into account director Akos Rathony gives the impression of being a competent veteran but one who never found his particular niche, the first signalling his similarity with Fisher and the second his difference.

Ultimately one thus feels that it is the film's very title that indicates what it most lacks: an expressive use of colour.

If it is Blood and Black Lace rather than Hammer that would prove the catalyst here, The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils' intersection of a drug smuggling plot with a masked killer working his way through a number of glamorous women, all from a particular place, and the prominence given elegant yet sleazy sounding bongo rhythm heavy music combine to suggest that some influences may conceivably have gone in the other direction.

It's as if, having seen what the British could bring to the krimi the Germans then sought to see whether the Italians could do any better, with the colour flooding into the antique shop from the adjacent dance hall and the more surreal look given the masked killer in Bava's film indicating that they most certainly could. (Not that this prevented future German-British krimi collaborations, as Circus of Fear demonstrates, but the results were decidedly uninspired.)

With Fuchsberger's investigator operating in the same respectable, s(t)olid manner as his more usual Scotland Yard men, it is Lee's character who is given responsibility for the more ruthless aspects of the investigation, including a spot of torture where he drowns out the victim's screams by turning up the radio.

Much like the notion of having a white actor playing a non-white this is a piece of stereotyping whose implications – these sadistic Orientals with their history of fiendish tortures as per Fu Manchu etc. – are decidedly awkward today.

This is however partly offset by Lee's always respectful performance, alongside the simple fact that at the time the ability to perform the role would have likely appeared a positive sign of his versatility as an actor rather than as negative display of potential cultural insensitivity; here it must be remembered that Lee also appeared in all manner of European productions with no-one ever really seeming to complain that his portrayal of, say, a WWII veteran German officer in The Virgin of Nuremberg was offensive or taking away work from indigenous actors.

More important than this, however, is that within the context of The Mystery of the Yellow Daffodils itself the filmmakers actually make an oblique comment on the performative rather than essentialised nature of identity by having Ling Chu have a habit for quoting Confucian proverbs and epigrams in a Charlie Chan manner only to eventually reveal that he has been making them up as he went along.

Finally, it should be noted that the film was shot in both German and English language versions, with some differences in the casting of the smaller roles. That the German version is the only one available, complete with a commentary track but no English subtitle option, presents a clear indication of the differing popularity of Wallace in the two territories today.

Another review of the film: http://dantenet.com/er/ERchives/reviews/d_reviews/daffodil.html

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”