FANTASIA OBSCURA: This Dodgy Dracula Needs a Transfusion of Good Taste
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, unfortunately, you need to bring a film out of obscurity just to make sure that you never make THAT mistake again…
Old Dracula (fka Vampira) (1974)
Distributed by: American International (in US)
Directed by: Clive Donner
Yes, yes, I know, things were different in the past, and stuff we call out today made for acceptable mainstream humor back then.
It doesn’t make it right, though, and even back in the day you could make some poor critical choices that even your contemporaries would cringe at.
Case in point:
Note that there will be spoilers here, because this one had it coming…
After a credits sequence scored by David Whitaker that’s more downriver Mississippi than Danube (and totally not how you want to open a vampire film), we come to a darkened room lit only by candles, which is appropriate for a spooky old place like Castle Dracula, which is what we’re told this is later on.
It’s dark, however, because a fuse blew, which we learn when the manservant, Maltravers (Peter Bayliss), informs his master, Count Dracula (David Niven), that the matter has been addressed, just before the lights are turned back on. This pleases the Count, as that means he can go back to his reading an issue of Playboy that he’s going through.
Like other guys back then, they are discussing the features of the models that draw their interest the most, in particular their veins and jugulars. We learn through their casual conversation that Dracula’s castle is open as a tourist spot, playing up its history while guests are given dinner and lodgings. It’s an arrangement that provides Dracula with money for the upkeep of the place, and nourishment from unsuspecting guests who spend the night there as he feeds on them.
(If we have to give this film any credit, we can say that they were ahead of its time as far as Dracula tourism is involved…)
Reading Playboy does have one advantage: The Count finds out that there is a party of Playmates booked to come to his place, who are competing for the designation as “most bitable Playmate of the Month”. Which you think he’d have found out about ahead of time when the place was booked and Playboy had gotten a location release sewn up before they flew to Transylvania. (The fact that Transylvania and the castle were in Ceausesceu’s Romania and kinda hard to get to, they don’t bother with…)
Along for the ride with the four Playmates are Marc Williams (Nicky Henson) a horror writer attached to Playboy’s contest for unexplained reasons, the girls’ Playboy UK manager Pottinger (Bernard Bresslaw), and his assistant Angela (Jennie Linden). They spend the night at the castle, giving Dracula their business as he gives them the business in return.
Dracula’s especially interested in examining the women… particularly their blood type, as he hopes they have an element in their blood, which would cure his wife, the Countess Vampira. She was poisoned by a villager with a blood disease 50 years before, and been in stasis since. One of the young ladies, it ends up, has the cure, and he uses it to revive her…
…which has a side effect he wasn’t counting on: That suddenly, she’d be played by Teresa Graves (in her last feature role). This comes as something of a shock to the Count, who wasn’t expecting so radical a redefinition of his wife, and a bit shocking to anyone who knows that there is no relationship whatsoever between blood make-up and skin color, as the suggestion otherwise leads to some deep, racist dead ends that should have stayed buried years ago.
Must. Resist. Obvious. Comment…
The fact that Dracula finds himself wanting to get another sample from his victim with the cure (the identity of whom he doesn’t know thanks to a clerical error in his lab), is where the film makes a further grave mistake: The idea that he can’t accept his wife for her looks to the point where he feels he has to change her, without any say on her part, would be cringy enough without the whole change of color element thrown in. Add to that the fact that he goes ahead and tries to do that without anyone to stop him, even if Vampira herself is accepting her new look, even embracing it.
Original British trailer for film, under Vampira title
This leads to a trip to London, where the Count tries to mesmerize Marc to go after the Playmates who were on the trip to have him help gather samples. Once the donor is identified, he hopes to repeat the process and have his titled wife look more like him the way she used to.
(Insert Duchess Megan pointed comment here…)
Not only doesn’t the process change Vampira’s color, she in turn bites her husband, who ends up by the end of the film, uh…
Okay, there’s a lot to get through from the script written by Jeremy Lloyd (yes, the same guy who was the goofy dancer in A Hard Day’s Night):
– We have suggestions that there are more things that separate us by race than unite us as humans, which is never a good hill to die on…
– We have some serious stereotyping that goes on when, after Vampira goes to see Black Gunn, she starts talking in ‘jive-isms’ that were corny and misguided even back then…
– We have a husband who is trying to change his wife’s identity without her say-so or input…
– And we have a lot of nudging-and-winking in depicting the lives of Playboy models as set pieces to sleep with…
But this? Having the denouement for the film leading to blackface?
No. Just, no! Any fun you might have had in trying to watch it just dies at that moment. Oh GODS, does it die!
Any one of the cringe-worthy points noted above other than this ending would be a problem to accept. Any one of the above with this ending would be a bigger issue. But having the whole package put in front of you like this… No!
Just, seriously, just no!
This is not just reacting with modern sensibilities to a 45-year-old film. Both Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times and Richard Eder at The New York Times called out the film for this bad jokes in bad taste. And reviews that didn’t take issue with this, such as the one from Variety, just stuck to how bad it was overall.
Original UK theatrical poster
It didn’t help its case much that the film Donner directed could be neither a good horror film or a good comedy, failing badly at both. Niven certainly does his best to drive things forward, while Graves is game to try and make her character work despite her material with much of the charm she brought to Laugh-In and Get Christie Love!. (Sadly, she never got another chance to make up for this one.) Whatever good Whitaker brought to the set, Henson wasted it, and just about everyone else was a wash.
US theatrical poster
The film might not have even come over here to the States had American International realized that with a name change, to Old Dracula, that the picture might draw in audiences who at the time were enjoying Young Frankenstein. They reasoned that with this title, the film could ride along with the other easily enough, and at some venues both movies were placed on a double bill.
The film, however, could not get over that way too wide a gap between them in terms of quality. It was no Mel Brooks for, for sure.
Now Mel Brooks, envelope pusher that he was, even he would not have gone where this one did!
NEXT TIME: We watch a movie that asks “What if…?” while trying not to answer it with, “Why bother…?”
