Dracula (1974)

... aka: Bram Stoker's Dracula

... aka: Dan Curtis' Dracula

... aka: Dracula et ses femmes vampires (Dracula and His Vampire Wives)

... aka: Drácula, el último romántico (Dracula, the Last Romantic)

... aka: Drácula, O Demônio das Trevas (Dracula, the Dark Demon)

... aka: Graf Dracula (Count Dracula)

... aka: Il demone nero (The Black Demon)

Directed by:

Dan Curtis

As most people reading this are probably already very well aware, Bram Stoker's novel Dracula is one of the most filmed literary works of all time, and the titular vampire count is one of the most filmed literary characters of all time. That horse has not only been beaten to death, it's been smothered in garlic, doused in holy water, had a crucifix shoved in its face, received a stake through the heart and been exposed to direct sunlight more times than anyone can count. There are so many versions out there, across all forms of popular entertainment (film, TV, stage, anime, video games...), and of varying degrees of faithfulness, that one wonders if there's really anything left to gain from watching yet another version. I personally cannot answer that except to say it depends on who you are. If you can't get enough of the book or this character, you'd be fine checking out this version as well. If you're just getting started, I recommend going all the way back to the earliest versions; the unsanctioned German silent classic Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) and the 1931 original "legit" version from Universal starring Bela Lugosi, and working your way up from there. With some discernment.

The 1970s alone saw portrayals of the count from Frank Langella (on Broadway and on film), Louis Jourdan, Klaus Kinski, Narciso Ibáñez Menta, Udo Kier, Jamie Gillis, George Hamilton and many more. Hell, Christopher Lee alone played him in no less than five different films. This one gives us Jack Palance, who'd previously starred in Curtis' The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1968) to positive reception, in the role. Palance seems a very odd choice at first glance, bordering of miscasting. I mean, an American tough guy actor playing a Hungarian count? How about an American tough guy actor playing a Hungarian count who doesn't even bother with any kind of accent? Disaster? Well, not entirely. Though born in Pennsylvania, Palance (born Volodymyr Ivanovich Palahniuk) was at least of Eastern European (Ukrainian) descent and he kind of just does his own thing here for the most part. How you react to that is going to depend on expectations and how big of a stickler you are for literary faithfulness.

It's 1897 (the same year the novel was first published and presumably set) and British solicitor Jonathan Harker (Murray Brown - VAMPYRES) has just arrived in the Carpathian Mountain-set village of Bistritz, Hungary. He's there at the behest of the elusive and mysterious Dracula and immediately notices that everyone in the area shudders at the mere mention of him. He gets a ride from a coach but the driver refuses to get too close to the castle. Instead, Harker's met by a second coach sent by the count, which whisks him away into the night. They're chased by a pack of wolves that surround the premises, then he's dropped off and the coachman swiftly drives off without having uttered a single word to his passenger.

Harker is soon met by Dracula, who has dinner waiting for him. The count is shown some properties in England that he's hoping to purchase and soon move into and opts for the rustic Carfax Abbey estate. Instead of it being a done deal and the young solicitor being on his way, Dracula insists he stay at his castle for an entire month. He keeps Harker up all night long talking and drinking, and even locks him in his room when he goes so his guest can't leave even if he wanted to. During their conversations, the vampire is shown a photo of Harker's fiancée, Mina (Penelope Horner), Mina's best friend, Lucy Westenra (Fiona Lewis, whose haunting blue eyes are well-utilized here), and Lucy's fiancé Arthur Holmwood (Simon Ward). Dracula seems to take a special liking to Lucy.

Getting locked up for the day yet again, a frustrated Harker discovers a doorway hidden behind a tapestry that leads to a separate wing of the castle. After walking down some hallways and ascending stairs, he finds a room with a casket reading "Vlad Tepes, Prince of Wallachia, 1475" and an old painting of Vlad that looks an awful lot like Dracula. Also in the painting is a young woman who's a dead ringer for Lucy. Before he even has a chance to put two and two together, Jonathan's forced to write a letter home and is then attacked by Dracula, a couple of his goons and three of Dracula's vampire brides, two of whom are played by Virginia Wetherell (THE CRIMSON CULT) and a young Sarah Douglas (who'd go on to play Ursa in Superman 1 & 2 plus a lot of roles in fantasy, sci-fi and horror films in the following decades).

With Harker now out of the way, Dracula arrives in Whitby, England via a Russian schooner five weeks later. Soon after, Lucy comes down with a bizarre illness punctuated by anemia, weakness, sleepwalking and terrible nightmares, accompanied by strange marks on her neck. Mina arrives at their estate to help out Mrs. Westenra (Pamela Brown), while Arthur brings in reinforcements in the form of Dr. Van Helsing (Nigel Davenport - PHASE IV). Naturally, Dracula has been luring Lucy out of the home late at night for necking sessions. Van Helsing, who's well-versed on all things supernatural, fears a Nosferatu may be responsible and takes the necessary precautions. However, garlic necklaces, blood transfusions and trying to guard the girl all end up for naught when Dracula uses a wolf to distract the family and is able to sink his fangs into Lucy yet again. She passes away and is entombed, returns as a vampire and has to be staked.

Now that the reincarnation of his lost love is gone, Dracula sets out for revenge. He kills a zookeeper (using an entranced wolf), a servant and some guys at a hotel (heaving one out of an upstairs window), plus sets his sights on Mina. Meanwhile, Van Helsing and Arthur try to find out more about him. They're able to tie his arrival in England to the Russian boat and a shipment of dirt (that the count needs to sleep in), which then leads them to Carfax. There, they destroy coffins containing the Earth, effectively forcing Dracula to return home. While that sounds good in theory, Mina is hypnotized and drinks the vampire's blood first, which forces them to go all the way to Transylvania to track Dracula down in order to prevent her from turning into one of the undead.

This is a very difficult movie to either praise or criticize, so I won't really do either. I mean, it's FINE. It's adequate. It's watchable, well-produced, well-acted, paced about right and competently directed and presented. There's nothing wrong with this at all... and yet there's also very little that stands out about it either. The art direction, sets, props, costumes and overall period detail are fine as an evocation of the late 1800s... yet not particularly imaginative. The photography is decent and there are some odd camera angles... just not very many of them. Same with landscape shots and shooting locations (mostly the UK but with bits shot in the former Yugoslavia). All nice. All fine. Richard Matheson's script, which adds a reincarnated love story angle and ties to Vlad the Impaler to the works, is also fine. I could continue to "fine" you to death right now describing everything else about this so I won't.

Palance's approach to the part combines a stiff gait, soft-speaking, a certain breathlessness at times... plus some animalistic hissing during the more intense moments. Everything about him seems a little bit off. He's awkward, sometimes anxious and doesn't seem comfortable in normal conversation; certainly not the suave, sophisticated, confident, gentlemanly Dracula we so often see in other films. Though he's aware of his power and strength, he's mostly quiet and brooding. His driving force is love and companionship and Palance attempts to play him more as a tragic outcast than outright evil. Though I could see this casting choice and the actor's approach to the role being problematic for purists, Palance ends up being the most interesting thing here because at least he offers up something different. As far as the rest of the cast is concerned, zero complaints there. Every single actor does their job well.

Originally scheduled to make its U.S. debut on CBS TV in October 1973, the premiere had to be bumped a full four months to February 1974 due to more pressing news coverage involving the resignation of corrupt president Richard Nixon's corrupt vice president Spiro Agnew. While Agnew got off easy like nearly all wealthy, well-connected people do (he had all charges dropped aside from one, paid a small fine and was given a few years probation), Dracula ended up getting screwed. It lost its prime time pre-Halloween time slot and was then unceremoniously dumped off later on to little attention. To make up for that somewhat, this was released to theaters in the UK, Italy, France, Brazil and in other countries. It was also later able to capitalize on the release of Francis Ford Coppola's (overrated) big budget Dracula adaptation in the early 90s with TV and VHS reissues.

This made its VHS debut here on the ThrillerVideo label in 1986, which came with Elvira commentary. MPI then handled later laserdisc, VHS, DVD and Blu-ray releases. The version that ran on TV was slightly cut to remove a bit of blood seen in the theatrical cut; changes that are outlined in one of the bonus features on the Blu-ray. It also has (very brief) interviews with both Curtis and Palance. The extras are slim on all of the releases.

★★1/2

Kawaii Akuma (1982) (TV)

... aka: 可愛い悪魔

... aka: Cute Devil

... aka: Lovely Devils

Directed by:

Nobuhiko Ôbayashi

Made for Japan's Nippon TV / JOAX-DTV / Channel 4, this is widely described as a Japanese take on The Bad Seed, though writing it off as just that isn't quite capturing the full essence of the film and  those expecting another frenzied HAUSU from director Ôbayashi also need to keep their expectations in check. Things begin at a lavish, fairy tale-style wedding ceremony between young groom Koji (Hiroyuki Watanabe, who sadly committed suicide just last year) and his bride Kuyuko (Nao Asuka). After they're whisked off to the reception by a horse-drawn white carriage, Koji's cute little 5-year-old niece Alice becomes infatuated with Kuyuko's veil and repeatedly asks if she can have it. Fuyuko finally puts her foot down and explains that she plans on keeping it until the day she dies as a memento of the wedding. "Until you die?" returns Alice. Fuyuko shrugs and runs into the house to fix her makeup as the photographer is gathering everyone outside. Suddenly, the new bride comes flying out of an upstairs window and dies a twisted, bloody mass on the ground below. Approaching the body, Alice then turns to her mother and asks if she can have the veil now.

We then jump to Vienna, Austria at the "same day, same time," where Fuyuko's sister, Ryoko (Kumiko Akiyoshi), a music student and accomplished pianist, is in the middle of a heated lover's quarrel. As her boyfriends walks out of the door, she angrily whispers "Die!" Suddenly, there's the sound of a car crash. She looks out of the window to see that her ex, having been struck by the car, has indeed died. Blaming herself for the accident, Ryoko has a mental breakdown, starts beating her head against the wall, attempts suicide and has to be taken to a mental institution. It seems they've finally gotten through to her after three long years, at least to the extent where she can return to society.

Koji decides to take Ryoko back to his beautiful oceanfront mansion to work as a governess and tutor. Though he doesn't have a child of his own, Koji lives with his widowed sister, Keiko (Miyoko Akaza), and her daughter, Alice (Tina Jackson). You remember her? The little girl who got her veil? She's now slightly older (8) but, it turns out, hasn't changed much otherwise. In fact, her initial fear of Ryoko staying in the home stems from paranoia that she's there to take the veil back! Once she finds out she can keep it, Alice reverts back to cute little girl persona.

Ryoko's first night there, she's woken in the middle of the night when the veil is tossed over her. Keiko comes in, tells her not worry and that Alice likes to play jokes. The following morning, Alice denies playing the joke and Keiko denies either knowing about it or even coming into her room and having a conversation with her at all. Ryoko then starts seeing visions of her deceased sister, clad in her veil and wedding gown, lurking around the mansion grounds late at night. This casts a shadow of doubt about her actual recovery from her mental break. Or perhaps it could all be by design...

Keiko, an alcoholic who isn't the picture of sanity herself, may intentionally be stirring up trouble and has a variety of different possibly motives for doing so. She could be trying to make Ryoko lose her mind again. She could be trying to make her out to be an unreliable witness so the validity of everything she claims to hear or see in the future will always be in doubt. Or she could be trying to drive her out of the home for her own safety, to protect her against her sociopath daughter. Either way, she's been picking up on the fact that there's some mutual attraction between Ryoko and her brother and wastes no time running to tell Koji all about Ryoko's various incidents, suggesting he consult her former doctor immediately and send her somewhere else to convalesce.

Little Alice soon starts showing her true colors again in scenes that ARE quite obviously swiped from the 1953 classic this is often compared to. When she loses out on a doll prize during a singing competition, her teacher who awarded it to someone else mysteriously falls to her death from a bridge... after being bludgeoned in the head with a metal instrument... after Ryoko had already caught Alice up late at night hammering metal onto the bottom of her shoes. Alice later suggests the death was "divine retribution" for her not giving her the doll she so rightfully deserved.

This also has a Henry Daigle (groundskeeper from the original Seed) substitute in the form of a scumbag drug addict / sex predator / yo-yo aficionado who lives in a shack by the river and happens to witness Alice cleaning blood off her shoes after the teacher's death. Instead of going to the police, he attempts to use it as blackmail to get "favors" from both Ryoko (whom he first suspects is Alice's mother) and even little Alice herself ("I'll hand them over if you give me a kiss"). Ryoko attempts to leverage her position with the creep; sex in exchange for him getting Alice on tape admitting to her crimes, but he meets a fiery end instead thanks to some spilled gasoline and a firecracker. As all of this is going on, Ryoko tries in vain to convince Koji of Alice's true nature, but will he or anyone else believe a "precious" 8-year-old could be responsible for such ghastly crimes?

Seeing how I don't agreed with the general consensus that Hausu is a masterpiece, I'm not one bit surprised I also found many of the same exact strengths and weaknesses from a film made by the same guy just five years later. While this is nothing like the spastic, colorful pop art fx bonanza Hausu, it does share a similarity in that its greatest strengths lie in its visuals. The shots here are well-framed and frequently imaginative, the art direction is nice, there's decent use made of matte paintings for seaside landscapes, neatly-done flashback scenes with centralized color and sepia edges and some slightly surreal dream / hallucination sequences thrown in. That all helps to somewhat spruce up the middling script.

Where this didn't sit so well for me was how simple plot revelations are delivered to us with zero nuance. This is filled with so many comically unsubtle, soap opera-esque zoom shots and blaring music cues any time something peculiar is happening it almost reads as some kind of parody of old Gothic melodramas. At times I suspected that may have been an intentional angle the director was working, but that doesn't entirely appear to be the case. Instead of going for the over-the-top, theatrical histrionics that are a staple of classic Gothic films (and also the work turned in by Nancy Kelly and Eileen Heckart in the original Seed), he has the cast pitch their performances in a more mannered fashion.

The Ryoko and Keiko characters are saddled with various mental issues, neuroses and secrets, which work early on as a way to cast suspicion on multiple characters, but it's ultimately just a distraction that eventually gets cast aside for a basic final reel psychoanalysis of Alice, delivered to us in heavy-handed fashion. She suffers from something called "abnormal attachment" syndrome after losing her father to suicide and is now compulsively fixated on getting whatever she wants whenever she wants it. Killing is just a means to an end for her. Alice has similarly leeched onto her uncle as her new father figure and will lash out at anyone who threatens to come between them. Quite a complex psychological makeup for the little peanut, huh?

The level of exaggeration eventually becomes a bit of a turn off here too, especially considering the film spends 90% of its time trying to be plausible only to then do a 180 into bonkers territory right at the end. The finale features such silly moments as the young psycho tipping a large glass vase over some upstairs railing and having it fall directing and snugly on top of someone's head without shattering, suffocating them to death. Alice also rigs a bunch of booby traps around the house, like fastening a fountain pin to a mouse trap, which somehow rockets it across the room with such force it sticks into a wall 20 feet away. The tiny 8-year-old menace also flings a large scythe all the way across a lawn at our protagonist as if she's suddenly been granted superhuman strength. An ambiguous final scene is then trotted out that may (or may not) explain all of this.

Playing small roles here are Shin Kishida (best known for playing the vampire in both LAKE OF DRACULA and EVIL OF DRACULA) and Tôru Minegishi (also in the director's Visitor in the Eye and The Aimed School). To my knowledge, this has never been released here in America. The Japanese DVD from Dimention (not to be confused with Dimension) isn't English friendly, though fan-made English subs are available. It's worth a look for the stylish directorial touches and isolated moments of interest. Just don't expect to be blown away.

★★1/2