There's a curse that happens often to creators. The things we make that we love the most are often viewed by others as our worst crap; and the stuff we churn out just to pay the bills is usually seen as our classics. Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes, but he covered the rent--meanwhile, M. Night Shyamalan seems to consistently believe he's onto something big with each new project and yet everyone harkens for the days of The Sixth Sense. That brings us to this entry in our H.G. Lewis retrospective: the one he hoped everyone would remember for. Herschell Gordon adamantly believed that A Taste of Blood was his magnum opus, which is why the thing runs for nigh-on two hours. I suppose I'd be cheating with that curse if I applied a more critical lens than usual to this film, but if a movie is proclaimed to be one's personal best, and if it's going to make me sit still for 120 fucking minutes, I'm going to study the holy hell out its every bad inch. Of course, when that movie is ostensibly an adaptation of Dracula, I have to go full Academe™, 'cause Dracula, after all, is "High Art!" Even if it is honestly remembered more because of its adaptations, rather than literary merit--one need look no further than The Lair of the White Worm, with its twisted syphilitic misogyny, to see the prose failings of Bram Stoker, brimming with hate for the same wife who would viciously defend his copyrights after his death, nearly resulting in the complete destruction of all prints of Nosferatu. But I digress. We're here to talk about H.G., and study him in what he viewed as his greatest triumph. Does A Taste of Blood stand up? Well...we'll just have to see!
John Stone is a wealthy businessman with a devil-may-care attitude towards his wife Helene and his business partner/flirt-buddy Hester. He receives a large package from London, and it is the first large package that John has probably received because he is a sexist pig, even by H.G. Lewis standards. "Maybe my friends in London sent me Anne Boleyn's chopping block!" he jokes. His wife replies, "I hope her head isn't still attached." He shoots back: "If it is, at least she'll have learned to keep her mouth shut!" HAW HAW HAW. Of course, he's hardly the biggest idiot in the early parts of the movie, as both Hester and the deliveryman don't seem to notice that the mysterious box is smeared with blood. John, Helene, and Hester learn that the box contains brandy from John's ancestor "Baron Khron," with a deed to the Khron family estate in London, and instructions to drink a toast to the Baron. When John does so he slowly becomes a different person: literally. It turns out that Baron Khron's wicked brandy is transforming John into the reincarnation of Count Dracula. He becomes distant and cold to his wife, and moves to England to begin killing descendants of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Quincey Morris, and Lord Godalming, the members of the group that struck down Dracula in the 1890s. Of course, when Helene's friend Hank gets involved, he finds a Dr. Howard Helsing at his side. Will they be able to stop the vampiric Stone? Or will Helene be his next (neck's) victim?
A Taste of Blood is interesting because while it is a Lewis movie through and through, it is also, in its own way, two films. The way the characters interact, and the many--too many--scenes of characters in rooms talking to each other, which are often used as the only manner of character development, are very much Lewis' work. This includes the sexism, which I'll get to in a moment. These scenes often contain some truly strange dialogue; believable dialogue to be sure, but somewhat off in a way that could have been fixed with some editing. First John is talking to Hester about a trip to Hawaii, where if she drinks too much coconut rum, she'll end up "dancing the Hawaiian war-dance." (Ah, so he's racist, too.) But Hester's response is, "Ah, a man who likes efficient women." Are we supposed to correlate a war-dance with efficiency somehow? Is she being sarcastic about the inverse relationship between efficiency and getting sloshed off your ass? She's one to talk--were it not for off-ass-sloshing, many of her costars wouldn't have their careers!
But once John becomes a vampire, there are some notable departures from the Lewis mold. There is little blood in this movie, much less people getting their tongues ripped out or arms hacked off. There's definitely a Universal vibe here, especially in the interactions between Dr. Helsing and John/Dracula, even if there's still some trademark Lewis silliness as far as choices characters make--and he plays with shadows and muted images in a way that contrasts the Batman '66 approach of the pop-gore Blood Feast. My experience with Lewis' films after this one are that they do not reattempt the Gothic shadow spookiness--the ever-tedious Wizard of Gore, for example, is like Yellow Submarine in my memory. If Lewis doesn't succeed here with atmosphere, it's because he employs it scarcely. While it was admirable for him to try for subtle creeps, Lewis worked best with a cudgel. That's how he made the stuff he did as audacious as it was. Loudness was never a second point on the list for him. And mercifully, the film's divide is never as extreme as it was in Lewis' earlier effort, Monster a-Go Go, which was completed by Bill "The Giant Spider Invasion" Rebane, which never resembles either a Rebane film or a Lewis one.
And yet there are still some interesting thematic tidbits I want to crack open. The movie, as I said, is sexist, but there is an interesting subversion in the fact that it is patrilineage that dooms John to vampirism. John remarks on how his mother was Baron Khron's descendant, and yet she was not the recipient of the brandy, nor was her mother. Hester replies that John is Khron's "only heir," as contrasted from heiress. If John had been Joan, then presumably she would have been spared. (But then, if you think about it, Dracula's awfully exclusionary for not wanting to reincarnate into a woman...) What's more is that John's vampirism makes him abusive to his wife in a particular way: he becomes cold to her. No lusty vampire is he, it seems--the problem with vampirism, Lewis seems to say, is that it creates barriers between the sexes. The love they have for each should save each other, but the evil that has come upon them turns John away from that love. It's telling that Hank and Helene develop feelings for each other, though that may be a small victory for Helene, as Hank has a tendency to be as irksome as John. Nonetheless, masculinity is not wholly the heart of the triumph here. It's the men who are the true monsters of the film.
Speaking of Hank, there is an interesting part where he jokes about how he get during "a full moon." Man, imagine if it turned out that there was a werewolf in this movie, too! Then H.G. might have crossed the threshold from what is ultimately an overlong and over-padded film into an Al Adamson wonderland a la Dracula vs. Frankenstein. I can see that H.G. wanted to aim for the artistic rather than the schlocky this time, but sometimes, if you're really good at knocking haymakers into people's face, you don't end up any good at taekwondo. If you want to see the man's wackiness at work it's still a good watch, but Lewis' true artistic-aesthetic powerhouse was Jimmy, the Boy Wonder. Not only does Lewis voice Baron Khron, doing a reasonable Russian-type accent, but he also plays a character known only as "Limey Sailor." Trust me, I tried to analyze these scenes to figure out why exactly Lewis chose these roles in the movie he considered to be his diamond. But all I could come up with was another question, a parallel: why did Jess Franco play a piano player in all of his movies?
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