BLOOD AND SOAP: Vampires On Television

Well, last night I finally saw an episode of CW's "Vampire Diaries." I thought I'd been missing something. I was wrong.

God, how boring. It's slick, talky, full of wooden actors who look like models -- and in the "vampire soap opera" category, the emphasis was not on "vampire" but on "soap opera." Very little action. Compared to "True Blood," it's completely anemic.

The good news is that it was followed by a rerun of a fairly exciting episode of "Moonlight."

I've been watching vampire soaps since the 1960s, when I ran home from Catholic grammar school every weekday to watch "Dark Shadows" with my grandmother. She'd be half in the bag by then -- she'd started drinking red wine during "General Hospital." Even though we were Catholic, it never occurred to me that her dark red drink was an ironic choice of beverage while watching a vampire show.

A few years later, I actually met star Jonathan Frid, when he did a personal appearance at the John Wannamaker department store. I shook his hand and got him to sign my copy of a "Dark Shadows" comic book. I would give my left testicle to still have that issue, but my mother threw it out during a vengeful "cleaning" binge. It's no wonder her mother drank.

I was very fond of the vampire detective show "Forever Knight," not so much because of the handsome hero, Geraint Wyn Davies, but for Nigel Bennett, who played his delightfully supercilious nemesis/sire/old friend Lucien LaCroix. I particularly liked the episodes where they emphasized LaCroix's part-time job as late-night radio host -- a sinister voice expounding very cynical philosophy and dripping with sarcasm toward the whole human race (and other sentient species as well). Davies and Bennet acted much more like bitter ex lovers than the ambivalent associates they were supposed to be.



The hunky Mick of "Moonlight" -- another vampire detective, albeit a private one -- turned my head too.




Before "True Blood" came along, though, my favorite "vampire soap" -- though it was certainly much more than that -- was the TV version of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer." I really cared about the characters -- making us feel that is the key to making horror that really hooks the audience -- and it had the two hottest male vampires we'd ever seen at that point, Angel and Spike.

I was also very moved by the delicate and poignant depiction of the relationship between Willow and Tara, one of the most empathetic presentations of a gay relationship ever shown on TV.

Now we have "True Blood," which not only gives us gay characters but gay vampires -- not to mention the hottest parade of shirtless hunks ever to grace the small screen. Yum.

What's your favorite vampire show so far?

MAX SCHRECK COMES TO LIFE AGAIN

(John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe in Shadow Of The Vampire)


This week I revisited Shadow Of The Vampire (2,000) director Elias Merhige's fictionalized account of the making of the classic silent film Nosferatu. The film's central conceit is that star Max Schreck (brilliantly played with twitchy, barely-restrained menace by Willem Dafoe) actually is, unbeknownst to the cast and crew, a real vampire. Director F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich) has convinced him to play the role in exchange for the blood of his spoiled leading lady (Catherine McCormack) -- and on condition that he wait till the filming of the final scene to actually drain her on camera.

The company finds it odd that Schreck is shot only at night, and that they only see him in character and in full makeup (and the makeup job, I might add, is an unnervingly effective homage to Schreck's original). The catch is that, as they say, "you can't eat just one" -- cameraman Wolfe (Ronan Vibert) ends up a snack for Schreck, and producer Albin (a perfectly cast Udo Kier) starts to suspect what's really going on.

Everyone plays their role flawlessly, The film is darkly funny at times, but also really spooky and suspenseful. It lives up to the ingeniousness of the idea and makes it plausible. It also makes a very respectable tribute to the original film, especially in the recreation of "Nosferatu" scenes where it moves seamlessly in and out of the camera's POV, adding peeks at events occurring out of camera range.

The film's gay connection? For one thing, the title character in the novel Dracula is rumored to be inspired by author Bram Stoker's repressed love for his employer, stage actor Sir Henry Irving, on whom the vampire is allegedly modeled.


(Sir Henry Irving -- looks a bit like Gregory Peck, doesn't he? But perhaps what turned Bram on was having to call him "Sir.")

More to the point, Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau, a major character in Shadow Of The Vampire, was gay -- a fact the film doesn't ignore but doesn't really dwell on, either.


(F.W. Murnau)

Ironically, Bram Stoker's widow successfully sued Murnau because he filmed her husband's novel without her permission, and ordered all prints of Nosferatu destroyed. Luckily for us, a few bootleg copies survived.

Mexican Fright Memories

Hunky Abel Salazar makes eyes at a hypnotized victim in The Brainiac

Does anyone remember the low-budget Mexican horror films from the 50s and 60s? Robot Versus The Aztec Mummy, The Braniac, The Bloody Vampire... and several films pitting professional wrestlers like the silver-masked Santo against vampires and other monsters. They were dubbed and released as kiddie matinee movies in Amercia by a guy named K. Gordon Murray out of Coral Gables, Florida. They're very campy now, but as a kid I actually got caught up in them and found some of them pretty scary. The one that got to me the most was The Brainiac, which I actually found recently as a DVD for $5.99.


Actually, director Chano Rueta's The Brainiac (1963) even now remains one of the weridest horror films ever. I originally saw it in the theater at about age eight.

The Braniac stars the suave Abel Salazar as Baron Vitelius d'Estera, a nobleman who is burned alive for witchcraft by the Inquisition in the first scene. He ridicules and curses his executioners, smirking as the flames consume him.

Three hundred years later the Baron returns to avenge himself on the descendants of his killers. His soul is brought back to earth by a comet (the most ludicrous effect in film history) and the astronomers who spot it are among his intended victims. The handsome Baron can put people in a trance using a light from his eyes that for some odd reason blinks on and off. This keeps them still while he transforms into a big-headed furry monster, creeps behind them, and sucks out their brains with a forked rubber tongue. He doesn't have to go hungry while in human form, either; he snacks on brains from a silver cup even while entertaining unsuspecting guests at cocktail parties.


Mexican brain foood in The Brainiac


Though unintended laughs abound, for deliberate comic relief we have a couple of chuckle-headed detectives who earnestly deliver lines like, "A maniac with a lot of knowledge is a threat." The special effects are among the chintziest you’ll ever see, but the music is eerie and Salazar’s face and body language exude a cool charismatic menace that shines through the terrible dubbing.

The film is 77 minutes of pure delirium. Former acidheads should take note that it may cause flashbacks.

The other Mexican fright flick that still sticks with me is The Bloody Vampire, released the same year. I may even have seen them as a double feature. I found the torture of a servant in this film so disturbing that it even haunted my dreams (partly because it was performed by a really buff, sweaty shirtless guy).


The big beefcake torture scene in The Bloody Vampire

Seeing it again now, despite its glaring flaws – more bad dubbing, an inane and way too talky English “script,” the ludicrous effect of a big rubber bat on a string bouncing in front of the camera – I still found many parts of it chilling. It has atmosphere galore, spooky sets, nerve-wracking music and sound effects, and an actor in the title role whose imposing physical presence and menacing charisma are not lost in the inept translation.

Charles Agosti plays Count Frankenhausen, a vampire who terrorizes his servants, holds his ailing but feisty wife prisoner in their palatial house, and causes a series of young girls from the nearby village to go missing. Like Salazar, he’s handsome – he resembles a younger Burt Reynolds, in fact – but he’s cruel, and sports a mouthful of very big sharp fangs when his bloodlust is aroused. He has a way with a whip, and hypnotic eyes that light up while an eerie electronic “hypno theme” plays in the background. The film contains memorable shots of him running down a corridor towards the camera, fangs exposed and cloak billowing behind him, that would be copied about a decade later in the more well-known Count Yorga movies. At one point he also goes off into a completely irrelevant five-minute monologue extolling the virtues of coffee, but he delivers in the frequent scary parts.

His wife Eugenia (Erna Martha Bauman) holds him at bay with a spear when he enters her room, and relies heavily for support on loyal servants Anna (Begona Palcios) and Lazaro (Enrique Lucero). The Count has his own enforcers and procurers, however; chief among them the icy and somewhat butch Frau Hildegarde (played to the hilt by the haughty Bertha Moss). But the Count doesn’t know that servant girl Anna, on whom he has romantic and sanguinary designs, is a spy in his household. She’s the daughter of this story’s Van Helsing, vampire researcher Dr. Valsama Cagliostro (Antonio Raxel). Unfortunately, a lot of the film’s dialogue among the good guys is pseudoscientific tech babble about a miraculous curative plant extract called "Vampirina," which sounds more like it should be dog food for "Zoltan, Hound Of Dracula." The dubbing is as dumb as the translation.

The most effective scene in the movie is the first, a sequence showing an uncannily soundless horse-drawn carriage driven by a Grim Reaper-like figure in slow motion over a foggy country road where a lynching has just taken place. Nothing that follows quite matches the atmosphere of that sequence, but the tension in the Frankenhausen home is palpable, and the violence shockingly gory for its time – close-ups of nasty neck wounds are accompanied by startling electronic sound effects, unprecedented in movies at the time. The torture of servant Lazaro, gleefully overseen by the Frau, is also surprisingly gruesome.

If you can forgive its flaws, this Miguel Morayta flick can really make your flesh crawl. It’s melodramatic and pretty silly on some levels, but it can scare you if you let it.

I WAS A TEENAGE DRACULA? The "hidden" film in Herman Cohen's Trilogy

(Sandra Harrison after history's worst makeover in "Blood Of Dracula")


American International released a trilogy of teen-oriented horror films from producer Herman Cohen in 1957. All involved teens being turned into monsters by trusted authority figures secretly conducting “mad scientist” experiments. Two, including this one, were directed by Herbert L. Strock. This last film in the trilogy, for some reason, didn’t have a title beginning with the words “I Was A Teenage…”, and that may in part be why it’s much less well-known than the others, though it’s by far the campiest of the three.

Like “I Was A Teenage Werewolf,” “Blood Of Dracula” focuses on a particularly alienated teen – the hot–tempered Nancy Perkins, ably played by Sandra Harrison. Nancy is placed in boarding school because she won’t warm up to her father’s brassy new wife (married only 6 weeks after her mother’s untimely death). The degree of her anger is apparent in the opening sequence, when she grabs the steering wheel while being driven to the school and almost causes a fatal crash.

Shortly after her arrival she gets into a hair-pulling match with one of the girls who sneak into her room to “greet” her, but despite this she’s welcomed into “The Birds of Paradise,” the group of “cool” girls at the school. Unfortunately, the “Birds” aren’t the only people interested in taking her under their wing.

Teacher Miss Branding (Louise Louis) hypnotizes her – supposedly to calm her down after a second fight breaks out in the chemistry lab – using a rather large medallion “from the Carpathian mountains.” Pretty soon Branding is using the talisman long distance to turn Nancy into an animalistic killer that strangles various other girls. Branding supposedly wants to prove a theory that will put an end to war when the world discovers that she can “unleash a power in a single human being that will make the split atom look like a blessing.” The fact that the transformed Nancy has two absurd frontal fangs that make her look like a beaver in a Bride Of Frankenstein wig doesn’t help to make the attacks scary, though one – set in a supply closet – beat “Psycho” to the use of the swinging light bulb effect by three years.

But the movie has other charms going for it: the girls speak in self-conscious jive lingo that makes much of the dialogue unintentionally funny, and a boy they sneak into their room performs a sinister-sounding rock ‘n’ roll song (accompanied by a 45 RPM they play ) called “Puppy Love” -- complete with a suspiciously well-choreographed “impromptu” dance involving couch cushions.

Harrison also invests her character with enough “Rebel Without A Cause” angst to make you care what happens to her, and there’s a certain intriguing unacknowledged sexual chemistry between her and Louise Louis’s Miss Branding, who’s awfully preoccupied with proving herself as competent as any man. It remains fun to watch till the inevitable showdown, proving again that those who dabble in things better left alone “only work out their own destruction.”