Dracula A - Z

Dracula. Is he literature’s most terrifying, most deathless villain? Is he the fanged heavy in countless international motion pictures? Or is he a star of the stage or perhaps radio or TV? Could he be a figure of ridicule? A cartoon? A toy? A puppet? A breakfast cereal spokesman? Surely he is all these, otherwise, how could there be a thing of such unspeakable horror as…

 Our story begins—as all discussions of our topic should—with Abraham “Bram” Stoker. Although Stoker would achieve his most enduring renown as the Author of Dracula, he was invested deeper in the theater than the printed page during his lifetime. He managed London’s prestigious Lyceum Theatre and saw to the personal requirements of the theater’s temperamental star, Henry Irving (see H below). He was known to hobnob with such major figures of his time as Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and by the speculation of writer Jim Steinmeyer, Jack the Ripper. Stoker’s writing was essentially a sideline gig. His first book was the decidedly non-Gothic, though not totally unterrifying, The Duties of the Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a government handbook published in 1879. Two years later he released Under the Sunset, a somewhat tedious collection of children’s fairy tales with a heavy Christian bent. Despite its title, his first novel, The Snake’s Pass (1890), was not a horror story but a romance. Following several other books, Stoker drew on the folklore he learned from “Transylvanian Superstitions,” an essay by Emily Gerard, to pen his epistolary masterpiece. Published in 1897, Dracula was well received by critics, but it was not a major seller. Adaptations on stage and screen boosted its reputation considerably over the years.

Stoker’s subsequent works never enjoyed a fraction of Dracula’s lasting appeal, though such books as The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm would be adapted into motion pictures as well, the former inspiring Seth Holt’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb in 1971 and the latter being improved infinitely by Ken Russell in 1988. Published in 1911, White Worm was Stoker’s final novel. He died the following year on April 20 with “Locomotor Ataxy” being given as the primary cause of death. There has been much speculation over the precise cause, particularly since Locomotor ataxia, the loss of control over one’s limbs, is a symptom of tertiary syphilis. This theory has never been proven definitively. What has been proven is Stoker’s incredible influence on vampire fiction, not only conjuring its most famous creature—a literary character rivaled only by Sherlock Holmes in terms of cultural influence—but introducing numerous new twists to the folklore, including the vampire’s need to slumber in its native soil and its aversion to mirrors and crucifixes.

Only Bram Stoker had a more significant influence on Dracula’s place in our culture than Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blaskó. More succinctly known as Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor began embodying the count in 1927 after theater director Jean Williams discovered him at the Harvard Club. While Williams was most impressed with Lugosi’s presence and charisma at their initial meeting, Horace Liveright was less enamored with Lugosi’s audition after taking over for Jean Williams. A main issue was that Lugosi had learned his lines phonetically. Little did Liveright know that this stilted, heavily accented delivery would come to be one of Drac’s key calling cards. Lugosi also had little leading man experience. When Liveright voiced his concerns to the six-foot-plus actor, Bela Lugosi glared at him with the menace and intensity that would make him our most memorable Dracula. Another element the actor brought to the character was his hitherto untapped sexiness. Lugosi’s dark good looks were a far cry from the odious character Stoker described.

While Liveright’s Broadway production was a major success, Lugosi was not Universal Pictures’ first choice to play Dracula in his official screen debut. Lon Chaney was a natural choice to vamp it up for Tod Browning, but his death in August 1930 put a sad end to that dream. Ian Keith, William Courtney, Joseph Schildkraut, Chester Morris, and Paul Muni were also under consideration. Lugosi remained determined to snare the part, lobbying so relentlessly—even stating his plea in a letter to Florence Stoker— that Universal’s cash-strapped Laemmle family (they’d lost $2.2 million in revenues in 1930) sussed the actor might take the role for a considerable pay cut. Lugosi ended up earning a piffling $500 a week for the film’s seven-week shoot.

Dracula revived the flagging Universal, sparking the cycle of monster movies that would bring it amazing success throughout the thirties. Lugosi was less lucky, finding himself type-cast as a monster. Though there would be a couple more leading roles in classic horror films such as White Zombie, The Black Cat, and Murders in the Rue Morgue, Lugosi would soon find himself in numerous diminished roles and a lot of less fondly remembered pictures. Some, such as Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster, would be fondly remembered for reasons no actor would wish. Despite his association with Dracula, Bela Lugosi would only play him on screen one more time in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. His two screen portrayals of the count are so utterly iconic that every other performance by the myriad actors who followed him into the cape would feel lacking in comparison.

Diary of the Dead 2013: Week 2

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 4

Hollywood Boulevard (1976- dir. Allan Arkush and Joe Dante) ***

Producer Jon Davison bet that he could make the cheapest movie New World Pictures ever made. Roger Corman took that bet, hence the existence of Hollywood Boulevard, a $60,000 crazed-killer flick/clip show littered with bits from eleven previous Corman pictures. Davison guaranteed he’d have more than a bet-winning turkey on his hands by hiring the future directors of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Gremlins to get behind the camera and Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, Dick Miller, and the deputy from Jaws to get in front of it (plus bonus cameos from Robby the Robot and Godzilla!). As a result, Hollywood Boulevard is a cartoon-come-to-life parody of movie making from a bunch of people who’d reduced movie making to a cartoon parody. Unfortunately, attempts to mine laughs from rape keep derailing the fun. Exploitative, sleazy, self-aware, and mostly entertaining. It’s a Roger Corman movie.

Konga (1961- dir. John Lemont) ***½

AIP gives King Kong a mad scientist twist in Konga. Michael Gough is the doc who gives his chimp, Konga, a dose of enormity serum he picked up from an old witch doctor buddy. Soon the cute little guy is a hulking gorilla loose in London and smiting Gough’s enemies. I get why Konga gets bigger, but there’s no explanation for why he becomes a totally different species of primate. Whatever. It’s pretty stupid tp split hairs about a movie starring a guy in a gorilla suit. Gough is pretty psycho, so Konga isn’t totally devoid of menace, and the ease with which his sweet girlfriend (Margo Johns) goes along with the killing is kind of chilling, but the bottom line is that this is schlock, which becomes wildly clear when Konga starts treating Gough like Fay Wray in the final reel. I like schlock, and it sure isn’t boring, so I’m not complaining.

October 5

World War Z (2013- dir. Marc Forster) **

Despite being the most limited monsters, zombies continue to get more play than vampires, werewolves, and Frankensteins combined. World War Z is well made and well acted, but you’ve seen 100 other movies just like it and there will be 100 more before this year is over. The only things that distinguish it from other zombie movies are its globetrotting and its refusal to criticize the military. Otherwise, World War Z is purely generic. Panic in the streets, martial law, flesh eating, metaphor, metaphor, blah, blah, blah.

October 6

Scream Pretty Peggy (1973- dir. Gordon Hessler) ***½

Donald from “That Girl” is a sculptor who hires a college kid to do his housekeeping. His mom is Bette Davis, who flounces around the house in her nightgown drunk. He keeps his sister locked up above the garage to keep her from hacking up the neighbors with a kitchen knife. Co-writers Jimmy Sangster and Arthur Hoffe rip limbs off of three well-familiar Gothic and horror stories, piece them back together like a couple of little Dr. Frankensteins, and end up with a made-for-TV horror flick that goes down as easily as a fistful of Velveeta. Plus, you can never go wrong with Bette Davis. That’s currency you can put in the bank.

October 7

Pumpkinhead (1988- dir. Stan Winston) ****½

Special effects and makeup whiz Stan Winston (Jurassic Park, Aliens, The Star Wars Christmas Special) takes a crack at directing his own film and cracks it wide open. At a time when cynical slasher movies and ironic horror-comedies were king, Winston made an old-fashioned monster movie with a fairy tale-like atmosphere. Pumpkinhead is a wonderful creation, not unlike the Gill Man but still very original, which is the least we should expect from Winston. The real surprise is how much humanity, sincerity, and willingness to confront moral complexities he brings to his first picture. Lance Henrickson gives a restrained yet emotionally intense performance as a grief-stricken father who makes a demonic deal of love and revenge. Winston makes some concessions to contemporary tastes with the systematic slaughter of a bunch of teens, and the killings are the least interesting parts of Pumpkinhead. Fortunately, Winston populates his film with enough witches, monsters, owls, spooky old graveyards, and real people with real feelings to distinguish his film from its era.

Grim Prairie Tales (1990- dir. Wayne Coe) *

A couple of great actors anchor this direct-to-video portmanteau, but there’s no getting around how insubstantial it is. Menacing James Earl Jones and city slicker Brad Dourif tell each other a quartet of horror stories around a campfire in frontier times. There’s so little to the first tale about a man passing over an Indian burial ground that the most shocking moment is when it ends so abruptly and anticlimactically. The second one about a sexual encounter is the best of the lot for its utter weirdness, but again, it’s all over too quickly. The third tale, in which a girl discovers that her dad (William Atherton) is a member of a lynch mob, is actually genuinely horrifying, but not for the usual horror movie reasons. This story raises some serious issues, and its refusal to deal with them more directly may have worked in a better film, but it feels downright offensive in this perfunctory piece of crap. Finally, there are some gunslingers and a ghost. In the spirit of the movie I’m reviewing, I’m not going to bother thinking about that final story, and I’m just going to end this review in the sloppiest, most sudden way I can. Fart.

October 8

Room 237 (2012- dir. Rodney Ascher) ***

If any filmmaker constructed his images so meticulously that even his background props deserve closer study, it’s Stanley Kubrick, but Room 237 is not really a documentary about interpretations of The Shining. It’s about how that invitation to study closer can be a slippery slope to the kind of madness Jack Torrance might think is a bit much. Not every interviewee is a total crackpot. The guy who reads themes of Native American genocide into The Shining brings up some interesting ideas before going off the deep end, and hats off to the eagle eye who somehow spotted that Jack is reading a Playgirl while waiting in the Overlook lobby. However, the woman who sees Minotaurs in every frame takes overreaching to new lengths, as does the guy who’s convinced the movie is about the holocaust. The one who believes Kubrick faked the Apollo moon landing footage is flat-out nuts. A little of this stuff goes a long way, and Room 237 could have earned itself another half-star by losing a half-hour. That footage of The Shining superimposed forwards and backwards over itself is pretty cool though.

October 9

Child’s Play 2 (1990- dir. John Lafia) **

When I began Diary of the Dead (and Psychobabble!) five years ago, the biggest and most delightful surprise was how good Child’s Play is (which, quite coincidentally, I watched precisely five years ago today). In tribute to that momentous discovery, I’m going to be hitting a Chucky adventure a day for the next three days. First up is John Lafia’s Child’s Play 2, in which Grace Zabriskie places the kid from the first movie in Jenny Agutter’s foster home. Brad Dourif returns as Chucky, who possesses a Good Guy doll left by one of Agutter’s former charges. Mayhem ensues. As I’m, sure you’ve already detected, the cast of Child’s Play 2 is very cool. Dourif still delivers some foul-mouthed fun, but there’s not nearly enough Zabriskie. That’s not the only issue with Child’s Play 2, which just isn’t imaginatively written or directed. There’s none of Child’s Play’s social criticism and too little of its humor and outrageousness. I have a feeling that’s going to change tomorrow, though.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995- dir. Mel Brooks) **

Why oh why would Mel Brooks make a movie that so welcomes comparison to his greatest parody? His love for the subject matter is just as on display in Dracula: Dead and Loving It as it was in Young Frankenstein (no doubt horror historian and co-screenwriter Steve Haberman can also be thanked for a lot of the specific references to Tod Browning’s movie), and the cast is good, but they have nothing to work with. Brooks’s best films—Young Frankenstein, The Producers, even Blazing Saddles—each had an emotional core that is totally absent from this cold corpse. Even worse, there isn’t a single funny gag. You know the screenwriters are desperate when they start stealing jokes from “The Groovie Goolies.”

October 10

Bride of Chucky (1998- dir. RonnyYu) ****½

After a genuinely clever and pointed opening act, a lazy Part 2, and a third act that I haven’t seen, Chucky is back and realizing his full high-camp potential in the post-Scream era of self-aware horror. The winking nods to horror films past come furiously. Psycho, sexy, hilarious Jennifer Tilly is here to carry the first half of the picture as Charles Lee Ray’s former murder-mate, Tiffany. She then resurrects Chucky with a handy copy of Voodoo for Dummies and gets transformed into a devil dolly herself. Bride of Chucky is the most fun installment so far. Director Ronny Yu and cinematographer Peter Pau animate it with wonderful style that often resembles panels from an E.C. horror comic, and the doll effects are rad. Tilly and Brad Dourif are a killer team whether in the flesh or in the plastic. I even liked the teens’ funny “accidental Bonnie and Clyde” parallel plot. But what would happen if Tiffany got her wish and this terrible two had a baby doll?

To be continued…

Review: 'Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art 2'

If boring stuff like a pond of water lilies, some girl wearing pearl earrings, and Jesus having dinner can inspire great works of art, then who’s to say that awesome stuff like Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me can’t do the same? Not me, brothers and sisters. In fact, some of the most eye-bursting contemporary art you’ll see is compiled in Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art 2, Gallery 1988’s follow-up to their first installment published in 2011. Snobs expecting to see a bunch of sub-tattoo-parlor smudges will be knocked out by the breadth and technique on display in this collection, with pieces owing to the expected comic book and graphic arts, but also splashing into photorealism, surrealism, pop art, and Soviet art, as well as three-dimensional mixed-media, sculpted, and plush works. The quality is as (for the most part) consistent as the styles and subject matter are diverse. As Seth Rogen points out in his foreword, this is an art book for people who usually don’t care too much about art. What he doesn’t note is that it is also an art book for people who care deeply about art, and at this point in history, anyone close-minded enough to not accept Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Shining, or even Scott Pilgrim vs. The World—a lousy movie that still inspired some very good pieces scattered across the six-page spread that concludes Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art 2— as viable art topics has no business judging art in the first place.

Review: The Criterion Edition of 'Eyes without a Face'

France is renowned for its excellent filmmakers, but it isn’t known for its horror films. When considering the very best horror films, only a couple from France will likely come to mind, and one of those will most certainly be Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face. This grim tale of murder, megalomania, and face transplants has enough classic horror trappings to entrap classic horror fans (a mad doctor, extreme grisliness, Gothic imagery) and enough elegance and intelligence to place it as a specimen of early sixties French cinema.

In America, Eyes without a Face wasn’t treated with the respect it deserved: edited, dubbed, retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, and coupled with a cheapie called The Manster as a double feature for the matinee crowd. In 2004, Eyes without a Face finally received the stateside respect it deserved when the Criterion Collection released it restored and in its unadulterated form on DVD. Nine years later, that restoration literally pales next to Criterion’s most recent Blu-ray restoration. I tested the previous disc against the new one, and that 2004 DVD looks washed out compared to the high-contrast Blu-ray restoration. The blacks are much richer, which is important for a film in which darkness play such a key role. It’s hard to believe that this beautiful film will ever look more beautiful.

The extras have mostly been shuttled over from the old DVD, but the most significant one—Franju’s disturbingly chilly 1949 short documentary on slaughterhouses Blood of the Beasts—has been given the same high-def treatment as Eyes without a Face. That’s a true rarity for a bonus, though it does show its age more than the pristine feature film. The one new bonus to go along with the other previously released ones (archival interviews with Franju, the Eyes without a Face-centric parts of a 1985 documentary about the guys who wrote it) is an interesting 8-minute interview with star Edith Scob (who still makes experimental films…check out 2012’s Holy Motors!). The one extra that did not make the transition from DVD to Blu-ray is a photo gallery, though many of those pictures appear in the Scob interview.

Review: Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band's 'Safe as Milk' Mono Edition

Less than two years before releasing Trout Mask Replica, the album that would forever endear them to overly intellectual Rock critics, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band put out a record that was considerably less challenging and a lot more listenable. As someone who favors good old Rock & Roll over cacophony, I personally rate Safe as Milk as Captain Beefheart’s real masterpiece. Despite its comparative poppiness and wholesome title, Safe as Milk ain’t exactly Up, Up and Away. Don Van Vliet’s pre-Tom Waits frog howl is still way out there, and the Magic Band’s fuzzed-up and freaked-out interpretation of the blues is still some pretty heady shit. What really puts this album over the top is the totally consistent, totally eclectic songwriting, which finds the group getting muddy not just in the blues but in jangly garage rock (“Zig-Zag Wanderer”), thereminized psychedelia (“Electricity”), hippity-hoppity country pop (“Yellow Brick Road”), pseudo-Native American percussive insanity (the amazing “Abba Zaba”), slow-burn murk (“Autumn’s Child”), and slow-grind soul (“I’m Glad,” a song I’m convinced former neighbors of mine fucked to every Sunday morning).

For a long time, Safe as Milk has only been available in stereo, most notably in Buddha/BMG’s 1999 edition that affixed seven bonus tracks to the original album. Sundazed’s new mono edition loses those bonuses, which already found Beefheart traveling less accessible roads, but gains a cleaner, drier sound (though there’s still a lot of grit in the creases—“Call My Name” remains particularly filthy). Unlike a lot of audiophiles, I don’t have an aversion to stereo, and in a lot of instances, I prefer it. The stereo mix of Safe as Milk really isn’t bad. In his liner notes to the new mono edition, David Fricke suggests that Van Vliet’s voice was placed randomly in the stereo mix. While I do agree that the decision to often bury his voice in a single channel was a poor one, the movement of his voice to the center at certain moments is not random but a way to put extra punch behind choruses or bridges. The instrumental backing is pretty full in stereo too. So whether you prefer the mono or stereo mix of Safe as Milk will most likely depend on whether you prefer mono or stereo in general. Sundazed does its usual exceptional mastering—full of warmth and depth— on its new edition, so if you’re on the fence about which mix you want, that just might push you off it.

Ten Reasons 'Bride of Frankenstein' is the Most!

There’s a lot of brilliance packed into Bride of Frankenstein’s slight 75 minutes. Here are 10 reasons why James Whale’s final monster movie remains cinema’s greatest.

1. What of My Mary?

As we open on Bride of Frankenstein, we witness one of its most inspired scenes. We are not in a laboratory of blasphemous horrors but an opulent living room where literary giants Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley discuss the latter’s most famous creation. Informing her husband that Frankenstein “wasn't the end at all,” she proceeds to tell the tale of the Monster’s quest for a mate. There is literary accuracy in this scene, since Shelley’s original novel did, indeed, include a major subplot in which the Monster compels Frankenstein to build him a bride. There is also great cinematic ingenuity in this prologue. It is a way to directly transition into the second chapter of Frankenstein, to acknowledge its literary origins, and to tie the new monster to her true creator, as Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary and The Bride. As barrier-breaking ideas often do, the prologue had its obstacles. Editor Ted Kent wanted Whale to cut the sequence, feeling it detracted from the horror. The décolletage-baring gown Lanchester wore as Shelley set off alarms with the censors. Fortunately, Whale ignored Kent and a few minor cuts placated the censors enough for the prologue to remain, providing Bride of Frankenstein with its cleverest postmodern touch.

2. Woman… Friend… Wife

She only has four minutes of screen time in the film named after her, but Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein is without question the most memorable female monster in cinema history and certainly the first significant one. With her lightning-streaked fright wig and childlike awkwardness, The Bride has inspired countless imitators and been captured on an innumerable amount of merchandise. Her unsettling combination of morbid weirdness and early-Hollywood glamour (designed by Universal’s resident makeup whiz Jack P. Pierce) laid the groundwork for all of the sexy grotesques that followed her, from Vampira to Princess Asa Vajda of Black Sunday to Morticia Addams to Elvira to Lady Sylvia Marsh of Lair of the White Worm. Her hairstyle has been appropriated in one form or another by personalities ranging from Lily Munster to singer Dave Vanian of The Damned. Her teasingly brief presence in Bride of Frankenstein sparked numerous attempts to fill in the gaps (Elizabeth Hand’s imaginative feminist novel The Bride of Frankenstein: Pandora’s Bride; Franc Roddam’s film The Bride), yet she packs a lot of living into her four minutes on film. She learns to walk by leaning on the shoulders of her creators, takes in all around her with a wide-eyed mixture of wonder and disgust, tentatively considers a romance with an ugly but sensitive brute, and ultimately says “no thanks” to it all. That concise arch from childlike hesitancy to aggressive self-reliance makes The Bride a fully realized personality despite her lack of screen time. Couple that complexity with an iconic appearance and you’ve got the most unforgettable female monster of them all.

3. A Perfect Human

Review: 'Frankenstein and Philosophy: The Shocking Truth'

Open Court Press’ “Pop Culture and Philosophy” series has been holding up various films, books, TV shows, and video games up to philosophical scrutiny since the publication of its inaugural volume on “Seinfeld” back in 2000. It’s surprising the series has taken so long to swing around to Frankenstein since Mary Shelley’s tale is so philosophically pointed. Or perhaps it has taken so long because Shelley makes her point so clearly that it doesn’t lend itself to multiple interpretations that well. We are reminded of this time and again Frankenstein and Philosophy: The Shocking Truth, because a lot of the book’s 27 essays hit the same conclusion: neither the Monster nor science is inherently evil; it is Doctor Frankenstein’s lack of love for his creation that drives the Monster to destroy, and therefore, science must always go hand-in-hand with love, care, and humanity. Although the writers behind these essays may frame them within themes of theology, eugenics, or Marxism, the fact that Shelley’s essential conclusion is so often repeated can make for repetitious reading. So I often appreciated the essays with which I don’t necessarily agree (such as Keith Hess’s examination of whether or not the Monster has a soul), were inconclusive (such as Jonathan Lopez’s attempt to figure out who a man is that has been created from multiple parts), or didn’t focus as keenly on the topic (such as Skyler King’s primer course on moral relativism vs. moral absolutism that merely uses the monster as illustration) simply because they mixed up the perspective.

Several of the more divergent essays stand up on their own merits completely. I liked Elena Caseta and Luca Tambolo’s rejection of the flippant and erroneous buzzword “Frankenfood” for its originality, its soundness, and my own pet peeve about flippant and erroneous buzzwords. I found Caroline Mossler’s piece on the Monster as a pioneering revolutionary against a human-centered society provocative and particularly relevant. John V. Karavitis daringly blasts past Shelley completely to examine the morality of biomedical enhancements under the microscope of Dean Koontz’s reinterpretation of the Frankenstein story.

Some writers managed to illuminate otherwise unobserved angles of Shelley’s central theme or find particularly clever ways of approaching it. Jesse Dern clarifies the theme by explaining how Frankenstein has superficially written off his creation as a monster from first glance. Mirko D. Garasic inverts the theme by using Frankenweenie as an example of how a creator’s love can redeem a monster. Nevertheless, we should not accuse the multiple philosophers behind Frankenstein and Philosophy of unoriginal thought but applaud Mary Shelley. How many 18-year olds can construct a philosophical fiction so lucidly that the philosophy remains both unmistakable and valid 200 years later?

Diary of the Dead 2013: Week 1

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

September 30

Horror Express (1972- dir. Eugenio Martin) ****

Christopher Lee is a scientist transporting a “fossil” from China to Moscow aboard the Trans-Siberian Express. Lies! The parcel is really a monkey man, and not the good kind like Mick Jagger. This is a bad monkey that makes people bleed out of their eyeballs. I don’t have to tell you that it’s always a pleasure to watch Lee and Peter Cushing, who plays a fellow scientist, at work together. The pace is brisk, the production values are quite nice, and the horror-movie-on-a-train concept is pretty original (with all due respect to Agatha Christie). The villain is grotesque enough that he manages to recapture a bit of the classic monstrosity of the Mummy or the Wolf Man, which is good since apes are always such disappointing monsters. The third act introduction of some totally unexpected gonzo humor by way of Telly Savalas’s Cossack captain and a sci-fi twist that must have gotten Chris Carter’s attention elevates Horror Express from schlock masquerading as art to the other way around. A great start to this Halloween season… hoorah!

Dracula [Spanish Language Version] (1931- dir. George Melford) ***

You probably already know the story: to increase the international appeal of its new horror cycle, Universal produced a Spanish-language version of Dracula on nights after Tod Browning’s English version wrapped for the day. Director George Melford would watch Browning’s dailies in a conscious effort to figure out how he could upstage his counterpart, which he did with more thoughtfully designed shots and more fluid camera work. While many commentators will tell you Melford ended up with the superior film, I believe his Dracula is inferior for two reasons: no Lugosi and no Frye. As the Count, Carlos Villarias’s comic mugging can’t hold a candle to one of cinema’s most iconic performances. As Renfield, Pablo Alvarez Rubio goes for screaming hysteria, but Dwight Frye’s intense interpretation is infinitely creepier. The Spanish-language Dracula also runs a saggy, talky half-hour longer than Browning’s tidy film. The one choice that resoundingly trumped the English-language Dracula was casting Lupita Tovar as Eva, this film’s Mina. Tovar is sexy dynamite while Helen Chandler is a slightly damp sparkler at best.

October 1

The Boogens (1981- dir. James L. Conway) ***

This movie was a big topic of discussion in my household when I was a kid solely because my parents thought The Boogens was a hilarious title for a scary movie.  So does The Boogens get the title it deserves? Well, yes in the sense that it’s fairly amusing and not always unintentionally. Miners awaken a monster after a century of slumber, and it starts doing its thing amidst a pretty, snowy landscape. To make up for the paucity of monster time, we get a cast of likably goofy, perpetually horny characters led by Rebecca Balding, whom you may remember from “Soap,” and Anne-Marie Martin, whom you also may remember from the wacko ’80s comedy “Sledgehammer.” Once the Boogens finally started boogening, I was sorrier to see these people go than I usually am while watching a movie of this sort. The Boogens reaches it’s full goof-ball potential with the appearance of creatures that look like rubber turtles with tentacles, which probably explains why we don’t get a good look at them until six minutes before the closing credits.

October 2

Leviathan (1989- dir. George P. Cosmatos) ***½

More mining mishaps! Precious metal miners go rummaging 16,000 feet in the ocean where no one but the fishies can hear you scream. They rustle up a body-invading sea monster. Leviathan is a straight-up Alien rip off, right down to its Nostromo-copy submarine and its co-ed character actor cast. That cast—featuring Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Ernie Hudson, Daniel Stern, and Hector Elizondo—and a few body horror effects nicked from John Carpenter’s The Thing make Leviathan entertaining even if Ridley Scott did it a lot better in 1979 (Amanda Pays is no Sigourney Weaver). A bonus half-star for the absurd decision to become Jaws in the final five minutes.

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961- dir. Roger Corman) ****

Snazzy, jazzy attitude and in-on-the-joke comedy elevate another Roger Corman no-budget amateur hour to brilliance. Counterrevolutionaries hire an American gangster to smuggle the gold treasury out of Cuba. An American agent (played by future Chinatown scribe Robert Towne under an alias!) is aboard the escape vessel to topple the scheme. An unexpected interruption from a heap of moss with cue ball eyes complicates matters further. Corman doesn’t take a frame of it seriously, and his depiction of the Americans as utter buffoons was pretty daring at such a hot stage of the Cold War (Kubrick wouldn’t try this trick for another three years!). A drive-in movie for kids who thought Little Shop of Horrors was too solemn.

This Is the End (2013- dir. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) ***½

Judd Apatow’s stock company holes up in James Franco’s pad while the world outside goes to shit. Is it the Biblical Rapture? Alien attack? Zombiepocalypse? Doesn’t really matter. What matters is the onslaught of gags, which is quite the bombardment. They’re pretty hit-or-miss and often dependent on your tolerance for dude humor, Hollywood in-jokes, and the Back Street Boys. There’s something a little lonesome about knowing I’m not having nearly as much fun watching This Is the End as the guys had making it, but a movie in which Emma Watson axe-murders a giant penis sculpture and Michael Cera gets impaled on a telephone pole can’t be all bad.

October 3

Cujo (1983- dir. Lewis Teague) ***½

I’ve tried making it through the novel Cujo a couple of times, but Stephen King’s looong build up to what I know will be a killer pooch story always kills my progress. I also tried making it through Lewis Teague’s adaptation once before but couldn’t do it. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood, because Cujo is actually a good minimalistic horror movie. The little town setting is pleasing even when not much is happening (which is fairly often), and Dee Wallace retains her tiara as the most accomplished scream queen of them all. As many have pointed out before me, little Danny Pintauro of “Who’s the Boss” is good as Wallace’s monster-phobic son, and he pulls off the movie’s most effective scare when suffering a seizure. Teague also wrings as much exhausting tension out of the climactic showdown between mother, son, and dog as is imaginable, but the story’s central issue remains hard to ignore: no matter how much they may need a bath, St. Bernards are not scary. Even after Cujo had been pounding on Wallace’s car with egg yolk on his face for 40 minutes I still wanted to scratch him behind his ears and give him a biscuit.

So this has been a pretty good opening week for Diary of the Dead 2013. None of the films have won the elusive five-star review, but none dipped below a respectable three-stars. Don’t fear though. I’ll be sure to watch some real pieces of crap next week. Stay tuned…

21 Underrated Episodes of “The Twilight Zone” You Need to Watch Now!

“Time Enough at Last”… “The Eye of the Beholder” … “To Serve Man” … “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” … “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”…

You don’t have to be a “Twilight Zone” freak to be familiar with every twist and turn these episodes take. They are among the 35 or 40 shows that have found a place in Rod Serling’s canon of classics. But what of the other 120-something episodes? Surely there are a few should-have-been-classics in that bunch.

There are, and the following episodes may be good next steps to take after watching “The Howling Man,” “The After Hours,” “Walking Distance,” and the others that have found permanent places in annual “Twilight Zone” marathons or have been parodied on “The Simpsons.” So I now submit for your approval 21 Underrated Episodes of “The Twilight Zone” You Need to Watch Now! 

(Read cautiously... here there be spoilers)

Halloween Season 2013!

Good eeeeevening, and welcome to Halloween Season 2013 where it ’s evening 24-hours a day all October long! It is year five of our horrifying month-long celebration of all things that creep and creak and year five of Psychobabble in general. To commemorate this monstrous anniversary, we’ll have new installments of Monsterology, A-Z, List-O-Mania, The Most, and the ghost-post I was first to host, Diary of the Dead! So get yourself a mega-size bag of candy corn and an extra-mega-sized barf bag, because the festivities are about to begin…