Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Blood For Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)

On first viewing, ‘Blood for Dracula’ was by far my favourite of the two Paul Morrissey / Udo Kier horror films. Long story short: upon returning to the film for the first time in many years, my opinion remains unchanged.

‘Blood..’ has a genuinely funny / sexy premise (helpfully summarised by the Italian release title, which translates as ‘Dracula Seeks a Virgin’s Blood… and He is Dying of Thirst!!!’), and an interesting and unconventional take on the Dracula/vampire mythos, but more importantly, it also feels far more tonally consistent and comfortable in its own skin than Flesh For Frankenstein had a year earlier.

I’m not quite sure how to quantify that impression exactly, but… this one feels more like the kind of European film which an actual European filmmaker might have made, if that makes any sense? It is a film which actually seems to have risen from the culture in which the story takes place, rather than reflecting the perspective of a cynical outsider looking to tear shit up and upset people. As a result, we’ve got less sniggering from the back row this time around, and more actual stuff-which-is-funny. Taken purely as a black comedy in fact, ‘Blood for Dracula’ is often pretty sublime.

Once again, Udo Kier must be singled out for praise here. Dialling it down slightly from his mincing fascist Baron in ‘Flesh..’, his malnourished, hypochondriac Count Dracula is a truly pitiful creation. It is often reported that Kier starved himself to the point of infirmity before taking on the role, and his frighteningly cadaverous, translucently pale visage certainly bears this out. Barely keeping it together during moments when he is required to present himself in public or interact with other human beings, Keir’s performance is, in its own strange way, just as much of a compelling vision of the vampire-as-other as Max Shreck’s Graf Orlok in Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’.

For all this though, the energy Kier puts into the nauseous bathroom freak-outs we’re subjected to as Dracula expels torrents of tainted blood from his system is remarkable. Both horrifyingly intense and disconcertingly intimate, these scenes of physical collapse prefigure the similarly unforgettable transformations Kier put himself through in Walerian Borowczyk’s ‘Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes’ (1981), whilst the fact that he manages to carry off this disconcerting business without undercutting the film’s comedy is little short of extraordinary. (Indeed, he even manages to deliver one of the greatest lines in film history whilst in the midst of his unnatural convulsions.) (1)

Here though, unlike in ‘Flesh..’, Udo is assisted by the presence of a supporting cast who (for the most part) prove strong and/or interesting enough to go toe-to-toe with him. Arno Jürging is once again very good, playing it less broad and rather more cunning than in the previous film as Dracula’s dedicated valet/servant, and I was also very impressed by British-born actress Maxime McKendry, who is absolutely dead-on as the harried, snobbish matriarch of the poverty-stricken aristocratic family Dracula infiltrates in search of a bride.

Best-known for her work in the fashion industry, McKendry was seemingly cast here as a result of her friendship with Andy Warhol (perhaps his only tangible contribution to these films, beyond lending his name to their American release), but she is so good, it is almost impossible to believe that this was her only acting credit.

Her matter-of-fact response to walking in on the sight of her youngest daughter being raped by the gardener is one of the film’s blackly comedic highlights, although her doddering, crackpot husband, played by no less a personage than Vittorio De Sica, proves equally amusing, seemingly improvising the lion’s share of deeply eccentric performance.

Elsewhere, Elsa Lanchester-lookalike Milena Vukotic is also memorable as the family’s eldest daughter, and even ol’ Joe Dallesandro is served better here than he was in ‘Flesh..’, despite making no effort either to exhibit any emotion or to disguise his incongruous New York drawl.

Once again, Joe is called upon to embody the brutish, proletariat assassin of Kier’s aristocratic entitlement, but the script’s decision to go all out in making his scowling, sex pest gardener an early-doors communist proves inspired; the sheer misery he manages to pile upon the poor Count’s head, quoting simplified Marx-Leninism as he shags his way through through his employer’s assorted daughters, is comedy gold.

Meanwhile, ‘Blood..’ is, if anything, even more grandly appointed than ‘Flesh..’, with the familiar Villa Parisi, which serves as the film’s primary location, looking absolutely beautiful here, augmented by Enrico Box’s exquisite set dressing and Luigi Kuveiller’s hazy, diffused photography. Ancient and austere yet decrepit, chilly and depressing, the villa provides a perfect visual metaphor for the fading, dysfunctional dynasty who dwell within it, whilst its bright, airy spaces offer a stark contrast to the dusty, shadowed chambers occupied by both the film’s peasants, and its vampires.

Claudio Gizzi’s stately, orchestral score feels more appropriate here than it did amid the comic book slaughter of ‘Flesh..’, particularly during the film’s strikingly melancholy Transylvanian title sequence, during which we see Dracula swathed in near total darkness, painstakingly applying the make up which allows him to pass as human in preparation for his reluctant departure from his ancestral estate.

Largely devoid of camp/comedic intent, these opening scenes are in fact extremely sad. In spite of everything, we feel for the Count, as he is pulled away from his crepuscular world of taxidermy and dried flower arrangements by the ugly realities of seeking sustenance in a cruel world which no longer defers to his aristocratic pedigree.

Sequences such as that in which Kier and Jürging inter the remains of Dracula’s now-expired vampiric sister (Eleonora Zani), who after untold centuries has expired from her ‘thirst’, are simply fine, atmospheric filmmaking, and, in using vampirism as a prism by which to explore aging and mortality, Morrissey even finds himself pre-empting the funereal tone of Tony Scott’s The Hunger to some extent. (Which also makes this pretty much Goths on Film 101, children of the dark should take note.)

Assuming viewers are prepared to roll with the total absence of sympathetic characters (pretty much a given for a Paul Morrissey film), ‘Blood for Dracula’s greatest flaw is probably the performances by the actresses playing the family’s other three daughters. Despite including ‘Suspiria’s Stefania Casini and poliziotteschi stalwart Silvia Dionisio amongst their number, one suspects that these ladies were probably not cast for their thespian talents (their participation in the film’s soft focus sex scenes is both lengthy and relatively explicit), and insisting that they recite their dialogue in heavily-accented, phonetic English strikes me as having been a really bad decision.

Contrary to standard practice in the Italian film industry, my impression is that these Morrissey films must have been shot with live sound, but I wonder to what extent Casini, Dionisio and other Italian performers were aware of this? To my ears, much of their dialogue in the film sounds akin to a ‘guide track’, waiting to be replaced with something better in the dub, and as a result, much of what they have to say is both excruciatingly delivered and also somewhat incomprehensible.

(To be fair, De Sica also suffers from the same problem, but it’s less of an issue given that his character is supposed to be a rambling old duffer who rarely says anything of narrative importance. And yes, SDH subtitles would no doubt help, but I watched the film on this occasion via an old DVD copy which offers no such luxuries.)

Aside from this unfortunate throwback to Morrissey’s earlier bad-on-purpose methodology however, I was surprised at just how well ‘Blood for Dracula’ stands up. Both effective and actually quite affecting in parts, it’s an accomplished social satire and an intriguingly clever / self-aware take on a late period gothic horror film - but most importantly, it’s also still uproariously entertaining despite its decadent languors, easily capable of winning over a suitably cynical/open-minded crowd nearly half a century later. The next time I find myself idly mulling over a list of ‘best vampire movies’ or ‘best horror-comedies’, I definitely feel it’s earned itself a spot.

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(1)Amazingly, it has only just occurred to be that there might actually be a tangible connection between these two Morrissey films and Borowczyk’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne’, or ‘Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll’, or whatever you wish to call it. I mean, obviously Borowczyk brought a very different sensibility to the table, and his film was made nearly a decade later, in a different country, but think about it. Intense performance from Udo Kier in the lead; chaotic / anti-authoritarian feel, ‘shocking’ content and overwhelming emphasis on cruelty, excess and perversion. Plus, if you’ve already done Frankenstein and Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde is the natural next step, right? Not that I’m suggesting Borowczyk was directly influenced by these films, you understand, but could the idea of the Jekyll film forming the final part of a trilogy have been floating around somewhere in the background when his film was being conceived and financed..? Who knows.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Flesh For Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

 As part of my portfolio of horror-related activities this October, I decided to belatedly revisit the two “Andy Warhol”/Paul Morrissey horror films for the first time in many years, purely to try to decide whether or not I actually like them.

Of the two films, ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ in particular never really clicked with me back in the day, leaving a bad taste in my mouth which has endured for nearly fifteen years since my last viewing. Long story short: I found a lot more to enjoy in it this time around, but I can definitely still see where my younger self was coming from.

There’s a lot of rather good, really funny and innovative stuff going on here, but at the same time, much of what surrounds it feels tiresomely bad-on-purpose or sophomorically ‘offensive’, conveying a sense of full spectrum cynicism which makes the film difficult to fully engage with, or to even really get an angle on.

By which I mean, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, even as he was leaning heavily on the talents of the exceptional crew which producer/instigator Carlo Ponti had assembled for him (DP Luigi Kuveiller, Production Designer Enrico Job, Second Unit Director Antonio Margheriti and special FX maestro Carlo Rambaldi foremost amongst them), Morrissey still arrived on set thinking he was somehow better than these crazy Eyetalians and their silly horror movies. Newsflash from the Eurohorror Fan Gazette: he was not.

Each time I’m getting ready to turn it off in disgust and cue up some hearty, proletarian fare like Lady Frankenstein instead though, something sufficiently extraordinary or weirdly beautiful happens to keep me glued to this unsavoury epic, come what may.

Along with the sterling work of the aforementioned technicians, the main thing which got me through the film I think is Udo Kier’s performance as the Baron. He is absolutely fantastic here - OTT in precisely the right way to suit the material. Just a perfect, Python-esque lampoon of an effeminate Nazi aristocrat, he fills the oft-torturous dialogue assigned to him by the the script with unexpected, lip-smacking emphases, managing to make almost every line reading laugh-out-loud funny. (I won't quote the famous line at you again, but his despairing “zis is all YOUR fault!” as he throws his own severed hand in the general direction of Arno Jürging’s Otto at the film’s conclusion is pretty hard to beat.)

It’s a shame then that most of the rest of the cast fall so far short of Kier’s form that they might as well crumble to dust and blow away in the breeze when he’s going full throttle next to them. Jürging delivers a solidly furtive/dislikeable turn as the Baron’s dim-witted assistant, and it’s nice to see the iconic Nicoletta Elmi present and correct as one of the Frankensteins’ silent, creepy children; aside from that though, everyone else pretty much just plain stinks (a circumstance which I can well imagine Morrissey, in keeping with his Warhol/NY camp background, finding just heee-larious).

Monique van Vooren in particular is nails-down-a-blackboard bad as the Baroness (I’m surprised to discover she’d been acting since 1950), whilst Joe Dallesandro is stiff as a board, stubbornly ignoring anything in the painfully wordy script which might call upon him to emote or develop a sense of character (a decision I can only assume was deliberate, in view of the far better performances he went on to deliver in other European movies).

Along similar lines, issues like the confusion of the Baron and Baroness’s husband-wife / brother-sister status also grate. Committing to one scenario or the other could have allowed the characters to be more sensibly fleshed out (sorry), their assorted transgressions made more tangible, but mixing/merging the two feels either like a tiresome bit of “oops, we changed the script, lol” meta-bollocks, or a cheap attempt to shock easily offended viewers, depending on which way you choose to look at it.

That said though, the film’s overall level of perversity, combined with the extremity of Rambaldi’s gore effects, is undeniably pretty audacious. Outside of H.G. Lewis and his competitors in the depths of the Southern U.S. grindhouse circuit, I’m not sure that any filmmakers to this date had dared push their viewers’ faces into the realm of violated human innards with quite the pathological glee Morrissey exhibits here.

Placed alongside the film’s determination to pull every last unhinged erotic possibility from the corpse of the Frankenstein mythos, it’s fair to say that, in terms of pure bad taste excelsis, ‘Flesh..’ takes us to places no horror films had previously explored, and which few have dared return to subsequently (within the commercial/popular sphere at least), even as the kind of graphic splatter pioneered here became de-rigour through the 1980s; an achievement which it is difficult not to admire on some level.

Meanwhile, I also found myself reflecting this time around on the way that, rather than merely taking the piss out of gothic horror movies (which, let’s face it, is all too easy), Morrissey aims higher here by invoking many of the primary themes of mid-century European art-house cinema (bourgeois hypocrisy, echoes of fascism, the fading of the old aristocracy, masochistic sexuality, etc) and playing them as complete farce, as if, as an American, he thought all this wacky Euro shit was just a laugh riot, be it high-brow or otherwise.

Making things feel even weirder meanwhile is the fact that he chooses to express this using a variation on the era’s low-brow British humour (complete with our beloved funny foreign accents, etc), meaning that every scene which takes place outside the gore-splattered laboratory keeps threatening to turn into ‘Carry On Visconti’ or ‘Up Bunuel’ or something - a result only avoided due to the fact that the cast (aside from Udo) are too clueless or disengaged to really wring any laughs out of the absurd material they’ve been presented with.

On relfection, I don't really know whether this approach to socio-cultural satire is a good thing, or a bad thing, or what really, but it's certainly... something.

Which, now that I think about it, actually seems like a pretty good verdict on the entirety of this uniquely troublesome, badly behaved film. 

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The Adventures of John Carpenter in the 21st Century: Cigarette Burns (2005)

After effectively clearing his desk and waving goodbye to the Hollywood rat-race following the critical and commercial failure of ‘Ghosts of Mars’ in 2001, John Carpenter’s next directorial assignment was a one hour TV movie, produced as part of the first series of the ‘Masters of Horror’ project in 2005. Subsequent to its original broadcast, ‘Cigarette Burns’ has lived on as one of the most talked about and well regarded entries in that series… although the extent to which its success can be attributed to Carpenter’s participation is debatable, as we shall go on to discuss.

Before we get to that though, Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan’s script for ‘Cigarette Burns’ is very much a “high concept” number, and a pretty great one at that, so a quick synopsis is probably in order.

Basically, the story here is nothing less than a cult movie in-joke blown up into a full-blooded piece of cosmic horror, built around what is basically a celluloid equivalent of Lovecraft’s ‘Necronomicon’ (or, more prosaically, a movie-world version of the 1999 Polanski thriller ‘The Ninth Gate’).

Our protagonist is Kirby (Norman Reedus), the proprietor of a struggling Alamo Drafthouse-style repertory cinema, who also holds a formidable reputation for tracking down elements for lost and ultra-obscure films. It is in the latter capacity that Kirby visits the home of a decadent, ultra-wealthy collector named Bellinger (played for maximum creep effect by Udo Kier), who offers him enough money to immediately write off his debts and save his cinema, if he can track down a print of one particular film.

All well and good then, but we can almost feel Kirby’s guts perform a somersault when Kier dramatically announces that the film he wishes to locate is… ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’.

The near mythic final work of a controversial (and deceased) European director named Hans Backovic, ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ was publically screened only once, at the Sitges festival in 1969. Legend has it that people died, and blood ran in the aisles. Survivors refused to discuss what had happened in the screening room, and were never quite the same. The director’s sole print of the film was reported to have been seized by the Spanish authorities and destroyed. Or was it…?

Bellinger has of course been obsessively collecting ephemera related to ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ (a framed poster hangs next to his priceless three-sheets for ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Nosferatu’), and the stakes are raised further when he offers to show Kirby the jewel of his collection – a living souvenir from the production that subsists in darkness, chained in his basement.

Now, if you’re anything like me, by this point the rest of this review will pretty much be moot. You will need to seek out and watch ‘Cigarette Burns’ immediately.

Ever since Lovecraft first placed the idea in my head as a teenager, I’ve loved the notion of a cultural artefact so terrible (in the literal sense of the word) that it destroys those who come into contact with it, and have always found myself totally captivated by stories along those lines.

That the ephemera surrounding weird, esoteric movies also greatly appeals to me should be no-brainer given the nature of this weblog, and I’m happy to report that, for the most part, McWeeny and Swan’s script tackles this material as well as could be wished for, mixing up just the right quantities of mystery and ambiguity, attention to detail and engrossing detective work to create a slow, creeping sense of dread and fascination around ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’, building up our anticipation of the moment when Kirby finally finds himself touching the canisters containing the reels of the film to fever pitch.

Given that this review strand focuses on John Carpenter though, we should probably divert our attention back toward his contributions, and, the first thing that will be obvious to the director’s fans is that ‘Cigarette Burns’ does not feel very much like a John Carpenter film. I’m not sure at what stage of the pre-production Carpenter became involved, but suffice to say that, beyond the actual, technical business of directing, the other distinctive touches that feed into what we think of as “a John Carpenter movie” – usually incorporating everything from the writing, to the casting, to the score – are notable by their absence.

My gut feeling is that Carpenter must have approached this one as a straight “shoot the script as written” job, and, given the strength of the material provided him by the writers and the wealth of interesting plot detail to be covered, that was probably a good call.

Nonetheless, I hate to say it, but…. I can’t help but feel that the intermittent weaknesses that compromise this otherwise excellent film could potentially be interpreted as the result of Carpenter bungling certain aspects of the script that simply presented him with situations and ideas that he was simply unable to get a proper angle on.

It’s not as if Carpenter hadn’t taken a few creditable shots at cosmic horror in the past (see ‘Prince of Darkness’ (1987) and ‘In The Mouth Of Madness’ (1994) in particular), but, whilst I like both of those films, I’ve always felt that his sensibility as a director does not really lend itself to grasping the totality of the Lovecraft/Kneale-derived stories he so obviously admires.

Caprenter’s take on things is just too, I dunno… pulpy, for want of a better word. His best films are down to earth, action-orientated, practical. At times, he has been able to conjure great power and atmospheric gravitas from Weird Tales-esque subject matter, but when more careful notes of subtlety are required, or when things start to get more cerebral, multi-layered or mind-bending, he has a tendency to (sometimes literally) lose the plot.

Thus, whilst the treatment of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ during the first half of ‘Cigarette Burns’ achieves an absolutely sublime level of eeriness, things become progressively more inconsistent as our protagonist gets closer to comprehending the true nature of the film-within-a-film.

Personally speaking, I found the story’s ‘angels & demons’ angle to be both tediously over-familiar and pretty poorly handled, and the film’s conclusion is also marred by the inclusion of an excruciatingly silly, sub-Fulci gore set-piece that seems to have been thrown in purely as a rather patronising attempt to keep the horror fans ‘on-side’ – but whether you wish to place the blame these minor fumbles on script, director, the producers of the series or some combination thereof is largely a moot point.

A more significant misstep comes I think when Carpenter actually begins to let us see pieces of footage from the dreaded, blasphemous reels of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’, and – in the tradition of every film you’ve ever seen in which a character is built up as an artistic genius whilst the poor production designer is handed the thankless task of coming up with some evidence to justify this assertion – it is inevitably a bit of a let-down.

As if echoing the real life experience of soaring expectation followed by crushing let-down that frequently befalls those of us who make a habit of tracking down weird and obscure movies, the scene earlier in ‘Cigarette Burns’ in which we get to see some production stills from ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ is almost heart-stoppingly exciting - all the more so given how closely it mirrors the feeling I’m sure we’re all familiar with, when one sees a hazily suggestive black & white still from some extraordinary, esoteric movie reproduced in a reference book and thinks, “my god, what is this movie?! I must see it!”.

It is in these moments – whilst interrogating the networks of fascination, repulsion and obsession that underlay our shared desire to seek out non-mainstream films – that ‘Cigarette Burns’ is at its strongest, finding new ways to fuse the real life interests and activities of its perceived viewers with intimations of doom-laden supernatural horror.

The moment it becomes clear however that ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ basically just resembles some pretentious, Catholic-baiting Euro-arthouse S&M/torture flick – the kind of thing a particularly po-faced student might come up with after watching a few Borowczyk or Robbe-Grillet films - the spell is broken.

Another significant drawback arises from the fact that, whereas in his own films Carpenter has pretty much always framed his characters within a semi-fantastical, action-adventure environment, ‘Cigarette Burns’ by contrast requires him to present his protagonist’s back-story (which involves drug addiction, the death of a partner and a hefty burden of subsequent guilt and responsibility) in strictly realistic, harrowing terms.

As a result, the scenes in question are played so heavy-handedly they’re almost laughable, raising sniggers from moments in our characters’ lives that should be devastating, and botching the whole (potentially very interesting) aspect of the story wherein the power of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ lies in its ability to become toxically entwined with the personal failings and guilty consciences of the individuals who become involved with it. Such an idea is, admittedly, pretty difficult to fully elucidate on screen, and I hope readers will understand that it is not necessarily a criticism of Carpenter when I say I suspect that, working under the time and budgetary constraints of a one hour TV movie, he couldn’t really make it fly.

But, I don’t want to accentuate the negative too much here. Although flawed to a certain extent, ‘Cigarette Burns’ is nonetheless a captivating and thought-provoking effort that – in direct contrast to the reassuringly familiar terrain of ‘Ghost of Mars’ – sees Carpenter casting the net of his ambitions way beyond the limits of the comfort zone he had carefully established for himself in preceding decades, producing a bold and unique horror film that, whatever your eventual take on it is, certainly stands as a ‘must see’ for anyone with an interest in cosmic horror, the culture surrounding ‘cult films’, and the potential intersection between the two.

Were it not a TV show, this would be one of those movies for which you would be well advised to book a table in advance for the post-screening discussion, which is liable to get just as involving as the movie itself. I highly recommend tracking it down, despite having just spent the best part of a thousand words griping about all things it got wrong.