"It Might Even Horrify You": A Retrospective on Universal Horror, Part 1 (Dracula)

In my looks at trash films from the '30s and '40s, I've made references to the Universal Horror movies, namely to kick them around a lot. But as I get older in this world and feel a need for literary integrity, even on a forlorn blog such as Ye Humble A-List, I feel like I should start making more connections in my writing and displaying more honesty with my work as a whole. As a result, I should probably stop kicking around movies that I haven't seen in a long time, or haven't seen in their entirety, especially when it's a relatively broad franchise as Universal Monsters. In fact, starting today and continuing over the next four days, I'll be taking a look no less than 24 films--no easy feat, even while being six shy of the 30 I looked at in last year's Godzilla Retrospective. Many of these films I haven't seen since I was a kid--others I haven't seen at all. Hopefully we'll find some gems among what largely consists of bad memories for me. So without any further ado, let's start with the first of the first: Dracula.

Dracula (1931):

I always hated Dracula, ever since I was a child. I think I hated Frankenstein more simply because I found the monster to be completely uninteresting. He lacked the admittedly-thin charisma of Count Dracula and so that film was just a little better. Watching Dracula again now confirms that I wasn't entirely wrong in that hatred: at the very least I can't understand why people would rank this higher than, well, most of the later adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel, including and especially Dracula vs. Frankenstein. While the film spends a lot more time, money, and effort on establishing setting and atmosphere compared to the films that followed, it can't escape the fact that it is a flat and dull thing even compared to Stoker's original tome. A lot of the mechanisms used to film it are stodgy and tired by today's standards, and there is little artistic merit to the film outside of visual spectacle.

We open with a real estate agent named Renfield making the knee-knocking journey up Borgo Pass, Transylvania to Castle Dracula. In an atmospheric scene reminiscent in some ways of the shots of isolated peasantry in The Witches' Mountain, we see the villagers express their hammy horror over the prospect of voyage there. Once he is there we learn that its inhabitant, the sinister Count Dracula, has bought Carfax Abbey in England, and once Renfield signs over the paperwork to him to complete the transaction Dracula's partially vampirizes him, turning him into his human agent. Once in England Renfield is placed in the asylum of Dr. Seward, coincidentally Dracula's neighbor at Carfax. Dracula soon meets Seward and his daughter Mina, as well as Mina's fiance Jonathan Harker, and their friend, Lucy Weston. After this establishment the movie begins to sort of suck, with scenes happening honestly sort of at random. We see Dracula feed on Lucy! Then we see Dracula ask Renfield to do something for him! Then...we see him feed on Lucy some more! Eventually, we meet the extremely dull Professor van Helsing just as Lucy is vampirized and staked, leaving Mina next on Dracula's menu. It leads to a final confrontation with Dracula and Renfield in the spooky old crypt...and a stake in the heart.

I started talking about how this film thrives largely on spectacle, and that in turn is tied to the fact that this movie shot down any hopes I had of the early Universal movies escaping the cheap, crass commercialism I usually associate with their later entries. Yet Dracula, for indulging spectacle to the degree it does, is one of the many reasons why it feels like a commercial film of today--a Transformers for the 1930s. I say that because everything is too flat, too arranged, to be as artsy as it seems to think it. Dracula's emergence from his coffin is legitimately chilling, but it is so unlike the cramped shots that comprise the rest of the film that it seems like nothing but a trailer moment. In fact the shot I'm referencing is in the original trailer for the film! In addition to trying to dazzle us with eye candy, the film cheats on its suspense at times. Notably there is a scare when Dracula sneaks up on Renfield, who is walking backwards through the expansive entrance to Castle Dracula. Why is he walking backwards? I'm sure he's supposed to be taking in the admittedly impressive space behind him (even I have trouble believing it's a movie set), but that's communicated poorly by both Frye's performance and the staging of the shot.

Like a lot of modern blockbuster stinkers it also assumes too much idiocy on behalf of the viewer: for example, they have to explain that Renfield has gone insane, as if him clutching a coffin and calling Dracula "Master" weren't enough. Also, I am far from the first person to comment on this, but Dracula's castle has fucking armadillos in it. One of my middle school teachers, who screened the film in a science class because I live in the United States, tried (somewhat vehemently) to justify that in the '30s few people had seen armadillos and they were frequently used in '30s horror films as a placeholder for what was tantamount to Freud-uncanny horror--maybe what it would be like to come face-to-face with a goblin shark or some other monstrosity of the deep that we've pseudo-popularized today as the poster child for "strange animals." Well, let me tell you, I have seen a lot of fucking 1930s horror movies at this point, and I have never seen a single one of them try to pass off armadillos as the National Vermin of Transylvania--sadly, that explanation makes more sense that the suggestion that they're supposed to stand in for rats, which the studio "couldn't afford" for some reason. (Write me a novel on the Rat Crisis of '31 where there were so few rats available that it was cheaper to get armadillos.) Call me prejudiced to the past, but did they really think that showing these dopey, cuddly little creatures wouldn't shatter the mood they were struggling to establish, unless everyone watching the movie was that terrified of mammals they'd maybe occasionally seen before?

Finally, the film is just dull, and I realized why. In the novel, we follow Jonathan Harker to Dracula's castle rather than Renfield, and Harker escapes Renfield's fate. Hence we have a central character to follow even as the novel branches into many subplots as we see the letters and diaries of the various characters linked to Harker. Here, the main hero is van Helsing, and because he clunks through the whole film without any energy, we suddenly realize how weak the rest of the cast is when we try to get one of them to be the hero instead. Harker and Mina get no characterization; Dr. Seward is ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things; leaving our other protagonist to be Renfield. Fortunately, Dwight Frye's performance is involved and has good physicality, even if I was laughing at how cheesy his parts are even as a ten-year-old. Actually, most of my memories of this movie from age ten that are in any way positive come from laughing at the awful acting of the side cast. The main cast is mediocre, generally, but characters who only get a line or two of dialogue are usually evidence enough to make me question the idea of Hollywood ever having standards.

(And yes, even I will admit that van Helsing's verbal and psychic duel with Dracula is very good, and actually reminded me somewhat of the similarly-slow but nonetheless dramatic duel between Obi-Wan and Darth Vader in A New Hope. But this scene works largely because it's where the writers poured their most effort--it has the best dialogue of the whole film.)

I've also had the distinct pleasure of seeing Universal's other 1931 adaptation of Dracula. Back in the day studios would create non-English versions of their films before the popular practice of dubbing or subtitling took hold, with completely different casts and crews. And so was born the 1931 Spanish version of Dracula, which is a far superior film in almost every way, even though they are virtually identical save for cast and language, being as near to a shot-by-shot recreation as possible. By this I mean the acting is better, although one complaint my theater audience commonly had was that Bela Lugosi was significantly less goofy than Carlos Villarias, who plays the Count here--the Internet seems to agree. But c'mon, it's Bela Lugosi, and he was the epitome of goofy ever since he got his big start here. While Lugosi certainly has very good moments in Dracula (his awkward English often gives him an uncanny, inhuman oddity which later Dracula performers, especially Gary Oldman in my mind, definitely aimed to replicate), he was better in some of his Poverty Row movies. His most compelling performance wouldn't come until years later, in Glen or Glenda. (And as an aside, yes, seeing the 1931 Dracula--either version but especially the Spanish one--on the big screen does make a huge difference in how you watch it. For all its faults: its screen presence, combined with how fresh it must have been in 1931, do make its sizable cinematic impact very believable.)

Dracula's Daughter (1936):

When my family rented the Universal Horror Dracula Collection from Blockbuster back in the day, we watched Dracula and Son of Dracula. I can only suspect that I insisted on skipping Dracula's Daughter because it was about a girl. Well, if I had watched that movie then, I'd probably be one step closer to realizing that I was a girl, for indeed, Countess Marya Zeleska is one groovy lady. Dracula's Daughter is a breath of fresh air after Dracula, showing how Universal mercifully learned how to make movies and not just filmed stage plays in the span of five years. There are still many problems but the general experience makes this probably the best Dracula film of the original three.

We continue right at the end of Dracula, with the police discovering the bodies of Renfield and Dracula. Van Helsing (now "Von Helsing") doesn't disguise his role in the latter's death, and he is arrested. Over the course of ten painful minutes of lame mid-'30s comedy with the bobbies, we are introduced to Marya Zeleska, who steals Dracula's corpse and burns it. She is his daughter, and she views the vampirism he passed onto her as a curse. Yet the destruction of the remains of Dracula do not break the curse, and once more she is forced to feed--a fact her manservant Sandor mocks her over. Along the way Von Helsing recruits Jeffrey Garth, a fellow psychiatrist and one of his former students, to help defend him in his trial for Dracula's murder. His psychiatric methods may be the key to curing Marya's vampirism, as well...yet in trying to cure her obsession, he becomes the subject of it. Soon it's off to the castle in Transylvania--where he must obey her or die.

This movie is instantly more kinetic and lively than Dracula, which is nice for hooking viewers like me. I think I figured out part of the problem: the first film was made in a time when music was not a feature of movies, especially horror movies, since the silent era had only recently ended. This second film was made when movies with sound were cemented as the norm, and as such there is almost constant music in the film. Sadly, the soundtrack is often misplaced, giving weirdly dissonant tones in a movie that already suffers from tonal whiplash. One moment we are out on the foggy moors, watching Marya burn her father's corpse, her eyes bright in a cloud of smoke. Then whacky slapstick music is playing, and the cops are talking about how cowardly they are! What's more is that this kinesis isn't spread through the movie--it has a looong middle, even if there are many scenes throughout that make it worth it. The ending is worth it, too, being well directed. Plus, the acting is generally better, including Von Helsing's, even if he still gives pretentious pseudo-philosophical lectures about how stupid it is for people to disbelieve in vampires. We also get actual characters, with hobbies and motivations, and not just people inserted because they were in the book.

The movie suffers in places from a problem that happens in many sequels, where they have to shout out famous lines or scenes from the first film...like if you're watching a Kevin Smith film, chances are someone's gonna say some variant of "I wasn't even supposed to be here today!" I didn't like it when it happened here but that's just because I still don't like Dracula. The Countess gets to say "I never drink...wine" and crawl her fingers out from under a coffin lid...just like in the first movie! Except it feels clumsy, and oftentimes these shoutouts are rushed or delivered poorly, almost as if they were studio mandates that the director wanted to gloss over. Dracula's Daughter feels much less commercialized than its forebear, and ironically that's probably why it's comparatively forgotten. Which is too bad, because there's actually some interesting thematic stuff here.

The first is the more obviously touted concept of magic vs. science. Ultimately science wins, but there's still an interesting scene where Marya warns Jeffrey that her powers of mesmerism are not hypnosis, as he's been calling it, but something "far older...far greater." Magic still has power even if science has now reached the point where it can conquer it. Thinking about that in the context of Frankenstein makes this even more interesting, as the Frankenstein series, especially Bride of Frankenstein, have comparisons between old-world powers and the rising new world of machines and chemicals.

The second piece worth noting is the implication that Marya is bisexual. In the scene where she corners her shirtless female art model and says, "I have a jewel--very old, and very beautiful--I'll show it to you," you can't help but wonder if she's going to drop trow, as it were, and reveal something that's not just a hypnotic pendant. This is played for horror, if it is indeed intentional (we the audience already know that this topless girl is on her way to a throat-suckin'). This wasn't unprecedented: Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, a much better vampire story, was published in 1871, twenty-six years before Dracula. In it there is no question that the titular Carmilla is a lesbian. Audiences would know the codes planted here, and some of them would have even read LeFanu's novella. This is not positive representation--Marya is bisexual only as a predator. In the 1930s it would have been popular belief that bisexuals were monsters, like vampires. Obviously as a queer person I find this uncomfortable, though I know that queer representation amongst vampires got better over time.

Though it makes some questionable choices and drags in places, Dracula's Daughter is well-made enough and complicated enough to reach my bitter old heart. And yet, this was technically the last of the three Dracula movies I sat through, so perhaps time will tell yet that I am merely caught in Stockholm Syndrome. Decide for yourself with my warnings.

Son of Dracula (1943):

Son of Dracula kind of surprised me because I was expected a much more coherent link to Dracula--wouldn't you? Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention but as far as I saw it wasn't so much about the Son of Dracula and more like Dracula in disguise whose identity is partially divined by historical knowledge of the vampiric history of the Dracula family. That may sound like picking nits, but one of the key revelations of this film is that the villain is none other than Dracula himself! Surely that rules out the possibility that he is Dracula's son, right? (Unless squicky time-travel is involved?) And yet by merit of the title, most of us seem to go with the idea that the family relationship is specified in this movie when I don't feel like it is. This may be one of just a few flaws of Son of Dracula, but sadly, these few flaws generally sink what should be a decent film, one which surpasses its source material.

At the Louisiana plantation of Dark Oaks lives Katherine Caldwell, who is in some sort of cahoots with the mysterious Count Alucard. Alucard's presence causes the sudden death of Katherine's elderly father, but despite that (and perhaps more alarmingly), Katherine blows off her fiancee to take up with Alucard instead. Frank, the jaded man in question, tries to shoot Alucard but bullets are as effective on him as they'd be on a ghost--Katherine, standing behind the immaterial Alucard, is shot instead, but her death proves to be temporary. After all, Alucard is the same man as he whose name is his spelled backwards, and Katherine originally contacted Alucard with the hopes of becoming a vampire and gaining eternal youth. Katherine's family has already contacted Professor Laszlo, our merciful replacement for dusty old Professor van Helsing, and it will take a confrontation of the ages to destroy both vampires.

First the good, which crops up in an unlikely place You may be wondering how Lon Chaney Jr. fares as a European vampire. I mean, look at him! I chose the poster I used for a reason: Lon Chaney Jr. shares acting schools with Alan "The Skipper" Hale, not Bela Lugosi, and it's predictable that any attempt of being actually creepy is beyond him. As we'll get to in The Wolf Man, Chaney did best when he was playing sympathetically innocent losers who got wrapped up in something awful. And his elder sister had taken the angsty vampire gig already in 1936, so there's little room for him to beg to be freed of his curse. Yet he does his best to play an aristocrat, albeit one with an American accent; he keeps the movie afloat, and that he has actual chemistry with lover/victim Katherine helps too. Katherine herself is an engaging character, because she represents the promise that Dracula makes to van Helsing in the 1931 film, concerning Mina: "She will live through the centuries to come, just as I have." It's intriguing to see someone--especially a woman in the 1940s--be shown with the ambition to become immortal even at the cost of becoming a monster, while still being somewhat sympathetic. There had to have been some reason why Katherine's family and fiance find her sudden turn to darkness odd--she was evidently a person they wholeheartedly loved. Yes, she's largely unconcerned with her father's demise, but if she becomes eternally young she'll outlive her entire family anyway. She seems to truly love Alucard, and he probably excites her not merely because he'll give her eternal life, but because he is another immortal to spend eternity with. She doesn't know the full extent of his evil until it begins to corrupt her soul as well--a natural consequence of vampirism.

And yet there is also bad...and it is bad. Son of Dracula introduces racism to the franchise: while the Dracula story was largely based on British fears and biases against Eastern Europeans in the first place, this movie has an American touch and as such we get lots and lots of voiceless, objectified, "happy in servitude" butlers and maids of color wandering in the background. There is one named black person whom we focus on, and she is a voodoo queen named Madame Queen Zimba. Yep. And she drops dead in foreboding of Alucard's approach soon after she is introduced, which, when reported by Katherine to the other white characters, is met with one some of the sickeningly heartless apathy I've ever seen. I don't recall if a character actually says, "Who cares? She was just a Negro," but they come close to it. I shouldn't be surprised: this is four years after Gone with the Wind, arguably the second most famous adaptation of a Klan apologist novel. (Oh sorry did I offend GwtW fans again whoops I don't care)

On a lesser note, it's also odd that the film at its conclusion chooses to frame Frank as the hero of the story, when all that he did was go into a berserk rage and accidentally kill his girlfriend (before later purposefully killing his girlfriend). The movie frames it as his loss even though he was still wildly irresponsible around Katherine. Even if Alucard hadn't been a vampire and his body was affected by bullets, at close range, the bullets probably would have pierced Alucard and struck Katherine anyway! The weird "it's sad that this man must now go through life single" ending contrasts this recklessness as well as the fact that I don't buy his grief as much as the movie wants me to.

And then there's the thing about the title. Ignoring the question of whether Alucard is the Son of Dracula or Dracula himself, the reference to the Dracula family mentions the last one dying in London...in the late 19th Century. Dracula's Daughter, set literally moments after the end of Dracula, features 1930s cars, even if Dracula seems to generally preserve the Victorian setting of the novel. Universal Horror continuity is famously broken but I still want to chart it out nonetheless, because it's fun. I love bad continuity. I'll do an X-Men Retrospective sometime. Kidding.

Again: if it weren't so racially offensive, Son of Dracula would be quite enjoyable, and I would consider it an unsung classic among the Universal sequels. Unfortunately, in today's world, I can't take the film's treatment of black people lightly, even if "it was another time."

By the way, this part of the review contains a hypnotic code-phrase that causes all fans of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to now see Castlevania's Alucard as Lon Chaney. You're welcome!

Next time, we see lightning strike with the coming of Frankenstein!

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Image Source: Classic Horror Posters, Wikipedia, Universal Horror Wiki

Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), by Al Adamson

I don't know if I've ever seen a bad review of Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Those that I have seen have usually been by people who watch--ugh--good movies and can't stand anything that suggests that there is a cinematic economic class below that to which they are accustomed; or by folks who have confused it with the 1970s Dracula vs. Frankenstein made by Jess Franco, which is a life-draining experience. Adamson's film is the jewel in a crown which also contains wonders like Brain of Blood--it makes him a fond memory in the mind of trashsters the world over, and indeed, Dracula vs. Frankenstein has a strange archetypical quality about it that really does make it feel like a foundational pillar for trash cinema. As Top Hat is to musical films, Dracula vs. Frankenstein is to movies made by wide-eyed movie nerds with loads of ambition but not a penny to their name. Indeed, estimates suggest it took Adamson five years to make this film due to continuous budgetary issues. Which makes the final flick fascinating indeed--why, it almost feels like a real movie!

Dr. Durea runs a museum of wonders in a tacky seaside carnival. With the assistance of Grazbo, his Little Person carny barker who eats money and Grodim, his brain-damaged bruiser of a lab partner, he ekes out a cheap living privately trying to bring the dead back to life until he runs into Count Dracula. Dracula reveals that Durea is a descendant of the Frankensteins, and that he can help him get revenge on all the scientists who have snubbed him--after all, he has the original Frankenstein's Monster, and he will help Durea bring it back to life. Durea can hardly refuse, but the awful activities of the two will hardly go unnoticed. Friends of some of Grodim's victims begin closing in on Durea, until inevitably all falls apart, and the Monster of Frankenstein turns on the King of Vampires...

With a premise like that--dishonored son of House Frankenstein wants revenge, leading to teamup with and battle against Dracula--does really help sell the idea that this movie belongs somehow, doesn't it? Isn't that the exact plot of one of the later Universal movies? I can never keep them straight, and that's because this film is better than all of them combined. To me, Dracula vs. Frankenstein ends up becoming a paradox: it embodies the exact model of a series of movies that I hate (and I will make it no secret on these pages that I'm not fond of actually watching the Universal monster movies), and yet is one of my favorite movies of all time. I can't ignore the fact that it is bettered by arriving about thirty years too late, and by being an outsider to the studio system, for all its faults and glories. By using the Universal formula in 1971 (or earlier, depending on when Adamson commenced filming), the movie has a touching self-awareness about it that never makes it drop down from celebration to parody. It is indeed a celebration; Adamson, I think, presents himself as a '30s and '40s horror nerd by sheer merit of the film's plot. But in case you don't believe me, then examine this movie's casting decisions. Dr. Durea (pronounced Durray, Duhr-ee-AY, Drury, or Dray variously throughout the film) is J. Carroll Naish, of such Golden Age creepers as Dr. Renault's Secret, The Monster Maker, and House of Frankenstein. Grazbo is Angelo Rossitto, from Freaks and The Corpse Vanishes. And as you may already know, Grodim (or Groton, or Grahtim, or Groban) is the last appearance of Lon Chaney Jr. We also get Forrest J Ackerman, comic book writer/editor/superfan, as a character named Dr. Beaumont (which may be a reference to Edmund Gwenn's character from the 1936 horror film The Walking Dead--IMDB flat out claims they're the same character).

That someone as cheap as Adamson ended up with a cast like this definitely contributes to the memorability of the film. I have my own thoughts on each of them. Naish generally brings in the best performance in the whole damn thing, even when he's clearly reading cue cards, in a way that strangely precedes Marlon Brando's shockingly good work for Island of Dr. Moreau. (I'll get to that film soon enough.) He gives Dr. Durea both serious gravity and a hammy accent that suggests he's having the time of his life with the part. Rossitto has some of the strangest dialogue in the movie and for that I enjoyed his appearance greatly. He also plays a more sadistic "Evil Little Person" stock type in Brain of Blood who also gets some truly excellent stuff to say. That he flat out fucking eats a dollar bill not five minutes into the movie shows that we're in good hands. As for poor Lon Chaney, then: I can't be the first person to comment on how it is sad that the very last thing we see of the star of The Wolf Man in movies, forever...is him falling off a roof like a bag of mashed potatoes. Prior to this all he gets to do is mug and strike an Of Mice and Men impression. After watching this movie for this review, I continue my winter study of Bela Lugosi's career by watching The Black Sleep, an aptly-titled snoozer which features the admittedly impressive teamup of Lugosi with Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Tor Johnson, and yes, Lon Chaney Jr. And sure enough: Chaney basically plays Grodim in that movie, too. It's really odd that in the early parts of Dracula vs. Frankenstein, which were presumably shot first, Chaney looks no older than he did when Black Sleep came out in 1956, fifteen years prior to this film--and in that movie, he looked roughly the same as he did in The Wolf Man, released fifteen years before that! For someone who hit the booze and cigarettes as hard as Chaney famously did, he was well-preserved, or at least, well-made-up. In the later scenes, Chaney looks a much older and harder man, but that works to his advantage as the film implies and later forgets that he is a werewolf. Constant sweating, grunting, and panting definitely benefits the strain of trying to hold back such a transformation. And finally there is Ackerman; almost a nonentity in the film, he's a fun addition simply because I can thus pretend that this movie takes place in the same universe as Philip Jose Farmer's duology Image of the Beast and Blown, where Uncle Forry is kidnapped by sex aliens.

Whew! I could go on about this movie, but suffice it to say that I can hardly describe the pseudo-grandeur the casting obtains without offering the counterweight of the movie's trashiness. It still looks like a Nathan Schiff movie, and definitely feels like one too (perhaps by way of Waldemar Daninsky). Adamson's scripts feel unfinished, or more properly, nonexistent. We get odd moments where a man says to his girlfriend: "I wish I could hold you in my arms right now." Except...he does so while holding her in his arms, right then. Add that to the fact that none of Dr. Durea's technobabble makes sense from a grammatical or scientific standpoint. There are also several key points which ground this movie firmly in the '70s: namely, there are bikers, and at one point, the bikers try to rape someone. There are also hippies, who get dialogue like, "His body was chopped up all into little pieces! Man, it's a real bummer!" Perhaps it's these elements which further spare the '40s callbacks--they add to the fact that what we're looking at is a living comic book, replete with monsters, mad scientists, and awful haircuts. The dips through trashy weirdness make the film immune to the torrents of boredom, overhype, and insipid Abbot-and-Costello non-jokes of the Universal films it's based on.

Welcome to the A-List in 2017. If this is what my year looks like...I'm glad to be back.

A Taste of Blood (1967), by H.G. Lewis

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?