Visiting and Revisiting:The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) Pt. 2

[This is the second part of a two-part piece discussing the 1977 film version of H.G. Welles' science fiction classic, Island of Dr. Moreau. To read Part One, please click here.]

Rik: Besides the character of Montgomery, whom you mentioned in passing [in Part I] (and who I feel is still played very strongly by Nigel Davenport), there are a couple of other major characters in the film we haven’t touched on. First, there is the Sayer of the Law, who serves as quite literally what is imparted in his name. In this version, Richard Basehart, whom I knew very well from television on Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, plays the Sayer. When I first saw the Sayer of the Law in this version of Moreau, I never made the connection that it was the captain of the Seaview wearing a mask, even though upon reflection, his basic features can be made out underneath the makeup. Because I was never enamored of Basehart as an actor (I always thought he was kind of stiff), I likewise never really connected with his performance here. I did spend time teaching my brothers to recite The Law after I saw the film, as I coached them into performing scenes from the film so we could run around as Beast-Men, but it really wasn’t because of him.

Aaron: Of the three films, Richard Basehart struck me as the most forgettable Sayer of the Law. That may be a combination of both acting and makeup, as I found the look to be fairly nondescript. It’s basically a ring of white hair around his face and a vaguely canine nose that from many angles looks merely like a larger-than-average schnozz. Obviously this is to give the Sayer of the Law a distinct appearance, apart from the humanimals but yet not quite human, and yet it lacks anything distinctive. He could just be another shipwrecked soul. Bela Lugosi’s Sayer of the Law was also less distinctively animal than some of the other beasts in Island of Lost Souls, wearing what was essentially fur glued to his face, but Lugosi has that voice, and those eyes! He’s a captivating presence even when he’s not speaking, and seems otherworldly at all times. Richard Basehart basically let the makeup convey the animalistic side of the character, while remaining fairly human in his actual performance.

Rik: Lugosi has always seemed like the perfect choice for the Sayer to me. His performance resonates with me the most (as I expect it would with a majority of humanity). The casting of Ron Perlman in the 1996 version seems like the most obvious one to make, especially given his success in playing characters saddled with extreme makeup effects. And Perlman is a very strong actor. The problem for me is I cannot recall his performance at all when I think back to the film. For that matter, I have a hard time recalling anything except Brando and his little person pal. And that ice bucket. Oh, that ice bucket…

Aaron: Yeah, Perlman had a great look to him in the film, and he was fine with what they gave him to do, but that film is such a mess that it’s hard to pick anything out aside from Brando and his increasingly bizarre character choices. 

Rik: I would love to remember his performance, but I simply can’t. I saw the film last when it came out in the theatre, and I think, apart from seeing scenes in the Stanley documentary, have largely expunged it from my mind.

The last major character we haven’t tackled is the one I would most love to, and that is Maria, played by a lovely, fragile-looking Barbara Carrera. In my memory, I continue to think of Carrera as a Bond girl of that period, but she wasn't in a Bond flick until the non-Broccoli Never Say Never Again in 1983, where she played Fatima to Connery's returning super-spy. I fell in love the instant I saw her on the cover of that Moreau novelization. She basically represents the puma in the novel who will ultimately battle Moreau to the death, and Lota the Panther Woman in the 1933 version who is at the center of all the bestiality hubbub regarding that infamous take on the tale.

Here, her character is sweet but really rather dull, almost like she is being used only for scenery (much like the cover photo that drew me to her) and/or to throw us off the scent a bit. I had always assumed just from her appearance on the island that Moreau had experimented on her. She also walks around holding an ocelot much of the time, which says to me they were at least trying to make us believe she is more than what she appears. The final scene on the boat, when a passing ship discovers them, is very strange. When we first see the lifeboat (the Lady Vain, the one in which Braddock first arrived, so that now he leaves the island the same way), we only see Maria, her face obscured by her hair. When Braddock, now changed fully back to his human form, crawls out from under his blanket, her back is to us. It is pretty clear to me that they are at least hinting that she has transformed into something else. Braddock gets distracted by the noise of the ship's horn trying to get their attention, and we see only one shot of Maria's face, and she looks unlike she does anywhere else in the film. Yes, she is crying, but her eyes seem very odd and her face seems puffier. Then the film is over.

It makes me wonder if there was an alternate ending filmed where we see her eyes are yellow as she begins to transform. Honestly, I thought she was starting to change into a cat when I went to the film that first time. And it stuck in my head that she was, and every time I see it since, I always get riled up about the ending. But there are two very good reasons for my belief that she is some sort of ocelot or panther woman: the original movie poster. The top third of the frame is definitely a female who goes through the process of switching into a ferocious panther. Since this does not appear anywhere in the film, it leads me to believe it may have been filmed and then cut (I can't imagine why you would go to the expense and then trash it, unless it was really terrible).

The second comes from the novelization, which as I mentioned is based on the original screenplay. This is the final paragraph of the book: "Maria spoke no words. She only opened her mouth, revealing two fangs, two puma-like, animal fangs."

What is your take on Maria and the case of the missing panther-woman, Aaron?

Aaron: I think anyone with any sort of familiarity with this story would recognize Maria as a panther-woman from the very outset, when she first arrives on film. Certainly the ocelot she’s constantly carrying with her would be another clue, for those not yet in the know.

And so I find it odd that the film tries to be coy about it at all. Possibly that was a move meant to keep some of the stricter censors off of the film’s scent, because when Michael York and Barbara Carrera first have sex, my initial thought was ‘wow, so the film actually went there’. If the film had been more upfront in stating that she was actually a cat, I doubt those love scenes would have been included. But then, why continue that coyness even to the end? It’s obvious as soon as the two of them are adrift on the life raft, just from the character’s positions alone, that something is wrong with Maria, and yet the film keeps holding off on showing us what we already know, only to let the shoe drop with a literal blink-and-you’ll-miss-it insert shot of Maria with a slightly lumpy face. It’s strangely anticlimactic, giving the ending a weird shapeless feel, and leaves so little an impression that even the film’s Wikipedia page neglects to include this information in the otherwise rather detailed synopsis.

Rik: Not much respect has been paid to the film in its releases on video. I had a VHS copy for many years, which I replaced with the MGM Presents Midnite Movies DVD when it came out in 2001. The only special feature is the original theatrical trailer. It would have been really nice to have a commentary to confirm some of my suspicions about the Maria character. I just found out that it was released earlier this year on an all-regions Blu-Ray disc, but there are no extra features that I can find, apart from a widescreen 1:85:1 frame, which I already have on my DVD version. I doubt we will get many answers about it anytime soon, if ever.

While I loved the makeup of the humanimals when it came out, time has not been kind. They seem rather immovable and too inorganic to me. While I like his work, it is not surprisingly to learn that John Chambers, who won an Oscar for the original Planet of the Apes, was the creator of the makeup effects. Tom Burman is credited with the makeup design. I know Burman from many horror and fantasy films he did in the ‘80s and ‘90s (though he now wastes his talent on things like Grey’s Anatomy… still, steady work is nice). How do you feel about the makeup work?

Aaron: Well, I’ll say that it makes sense now that I know the makeup effects artist worked on Planet of the Apes, because the designs and execution here have a similar rubber-mask feel, and are not expressive at all. Everyone’s expressions are constantly fixed, and when characters speak the mouth remains almost motionless but the nose portion of the mask will wobble up and down unrealistically. That said, I don’t think they look horrible in their design. They do look a bit like mythical beasts, and not so much like what I imagine transmogrified man-animals would look like, but they are distinctive enough that I could see being impressed by them if I had seen this at the age you had seen it.

We keep going back to it, but if you look at some of the beasts in Island of Lost Souls, they look like what you’d imagine when you think of someone cutting up animals and piecing them together like jigsaw puzzles. Some characters will have features that look vaguely catlike, and then a segment of their face will be clearly avian. It’s truly nightmarish, and another example of why that film stands head and shoulders over the rest of the films made. Compare that with this version of the film, where many of the non-featured humanimals seem to just have lumpy, furry faces, like maybe their having an allergic reaction to something. Outside of the main creatures, I don’t think you can look at most of the humanimals in this version and deduce what animal they used to be. They all have very similar physiognomies.

Rik: Something of which you may not be aware, Aaron, and I really wasn’t at the time, but the character of M’Ling, the Beast-Man servant, is played by Nick Cravat. Growing up watching The Crimson Pirate (and another swashbuckler featuring Lancaster called The Flame and the Arrow), I knew Cravat as Burt’s right hand guy, a generally mute character with whom Lancaster would perform acrobatics in the film. They were best friends since childhood and real life, and performed in the circus together for years before Lancaster broke through in Hollywood. His appearance with Lancaster in Moreau was the last of their nine film appearances together. I also knew Cravat from a small role in Disney’s Davy Crockett film. I never picked up on Cravat even watching the credits, probably because I really didn’t know his name at the time, just his face, which is absolutely obscured by makeup (though once again, it is easy to make out his basic features if you know what he looks like in real life).

Aaron: I’m not familiar enough with Nick Cravat to have picked him out of a lineup, but I think you’re glossing over what may be his most pertinent bit of work history prior to this: Cravat was apparently the Gremlin in the original Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode of The Twilight Zone.

I feel bad for not mentioning M’Ling before now, because he is quite a sympathetic character who also has some important bits of business to do. But the character seems underutilized in this film, showing up every once in awhile, and disappearing for so long that when he helps Braddock and Maria escape at the end I had kind of forgotten him. The character gets no real chance to develop on his own.

Rik: My final opinion on the film is that I still enjoy it after all this time, though it pales in comparison to Island of Lost Souls. Lancaster's performance holds up for me, as do those of Davenport and York. But in the end, the film feels today like a Hallmark production (the ones regularly aired on NBC and CBS in the '70s, not the current TV network), or like a Reader's Digest condensed version of the tale, where they have scrubbed some of the more inflammatory material to make it palatable to the general public. For production value alone and the latent memories I have of it, this version still warrants a 6/9 on my scale, which is "good". But I would prefer people watch Island of Lost Souls if they want to see a really incredible version of this story (whether or not they end up loving it as we do).

Aaron: That’s a good point about this feeling like a condensed or sanitized version of the story, which also strikes me as a bit bizarre, because my favorite parts of this film, dealing with Braddock’s transformation and Moreau’s downfall at the hands of his creations, strive towards something that could be genuinely challenging. This movie hints at something more inflammatory than some of the other moments in the other versions, and yet the film seems to pull back from those ideas before completely committing to them. If it had gone farther in those directions, and actually addressed any of the philosophical implications of what it means to be human, or whether we can ever conquer our own natures, this could have been a classic for the ages. Reading this back, I feel like I come across as too harsh on the film, which is not as bad as I maybe make it out to be. As it is, I think my rating would be slightly lower than yours. I’d give it a 5/9 on the same scale you use, which in my eyes means it was worth seeing, but I didn’t completely like it.

Once again we've reached the end of our Visiting and Revisiting discussion. If you enjoyed this back and forth, and look forward to more, be sure to check back for our discussion of Hirokazu Kore-eda's 1998 film, After Life.

Visiting and Revisiting: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) Pt. 1

[Rik: This is Part I of a two-part article in which my good friend Aaron Lowe (Working Dead Productions) and I discuss the 1977 film version of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau.]

Rik: The 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau was the first film that I ever saw by myself in a movie theatre. My craving to see the film led to my mother dropping the twelve-year-old me off at the Fireweed Theater in Anchorage, Alaska, while she and my brothers went shopping. At the time, we lived in Eagle River, about fourteen miles outside of Anchorage proper (which is considered to be a "suburb" of the bigger city, but growing up there, we always thought of it as a town unto itself since there is no real physical connection). It was also a very different time, and while I do recall being a little weirded out at being all alone in a movie theatre with random strangers about me, all of that went away when I realized that I was in my element. I had finally found my church. It is a mood that has stuck with me the rest of my life.

What fired me up about seeing the film was a book. Not THE book. Not the novella written by H.G. Wells in 1896, but rather a novelization of his famous story, built around the screenplay for the film. I had picked up a copy of it on a visit to a Mom-and-Pop bookstore in Eagle River (I do not remember the name, but it was same store where I first purchased my Marvel Star Wars comic books that summer). I had seen the trailers for Moreau on television as well, and those had me pretty excited, but the book in my fingers not only had pictures of all the characters on the front and back covers, along with movie credits, but there was also a generous supply of black-and-white plates in the middle of the book mainly featuring photos of the "humanimals" (the trademarked name for the half-human creatures in the film) and some behind the scenes shots as well.

I had not read the original story at that time, though I had read several Wells novels like The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. And truthfully, I forged through the book not realizing it was a novelization (by Joseph Silva, which does appear on the lowest part of the back cover and on the title page, but not anywhere on the front cover). It was certainly not in Wells' style I knew at the time, but I loved it all the same, and immediately began demanding that we go see the movie. Of course, while just a PG film, it was definitely not material for the younger set, so I totally understand why I ended up on my own at the theatre without my little brothers. [Just to set a time frame a little more, the film that I got to see at the movies in faraway Anchorage before this one was Star Wars, with the whole family (sans my divorced father), and the next film I would see would be The Spy Who Loved Me, which my mom and I took in, sat in the front row, snuck in Doritos and shaky cheese, and watched all the way through the second feature, Won Ton Ton: The Dog That Saved Hollywood.]

I remember being both scared of and awed by the creatures in the film, and fascinated by the story itself and its lead actor, Burt Lancaster, who plays the mesmerizing Dr. Moreau, a scientist obsessed with creating his own race of beings by fusing man and beast together in various combinations. I knew Lancaster mainly from one film at that age, another of my favorites, The Crimson Pirate. Being that there are exactly 25 years between the films, I don't believe that I caught on to the fact they were the same actor until it was explained to me. I just thought Dr. Moreau was an incredible character, though his methods shocked me as I was fanatical at the time about becoming a veterinarian. That said, I find his portrayal of the doctor to be the most humane version at the outset, where he doesn’t appear immediately insane or outrageously flamboyant as in the other versions. You can believe he is a serious scientist deeply involved in research that he believes will better mankind.

Aaron, this is your first time with the movie. What is your history with the film? Did you remember hearing or knowing about growing up, and is there a specific reason why you waited so long to see it?

Aaron: I don’t really have a history with this film, and I can’t think of any specific reason I never saw it, other than the fact that I just wasn’t ever around it. I don’t recall seeing it on the shelves of the nearby Video City that became my second home for many years, though it’s likely that I just kept passing over it on my regular perusals. The first time I really remember seeing the movie on a shelf was when I worked at Suncoast in the early-to-mid 2000s. The DVD featured a menacing Burt Lancaster holding a hypodermic needle, a screaming Michael York, looking rather ridiculous in both facial expression and in the mid-metamorphosis makeup he’s wearing, and a few of the humanimals looking concerned in the lower corner. It was not the most interesting cover, and made the film look like any number of hokey, brightly colored ‘60s/’70s fantasy films.

But then I’ve never had much of a history with H.G. Wells, either. I’ve read a couple of his novels, and of course have a longstanding love of all things War of the Worlds (even the bizarre musical version from Jeff Wayne, featuring members of Thin Lizzy, The Moody Blues, and Manfred Mann), and yet as a writer he’s never been a favorite. I like his plots, and I think he has great striking ideas, but I find his writing at times to be too clinical and detached. Although The Invisible Man has some great moments of dry humor in it.

Or possibly it was my memories of another H.G. Wells adaptation from the same period, and actually part of the same cycle produced by AIP: The Food of the Gods. [Editor’s note: The third film of that cycle is Empire of the Ants.] Now, The Food of the Gods is a film I actually do enjoy, though I think that owes more to the age at which I first saw it, back when I was young enough to not recognize the trickery that went into creating those giant rats and bees. I didn’t think of miniatures or rear projection; I thought they had actually found a giant chicken to menace those people..

There’s also something about a bad movie from the ‘60s or ‘70s that affects me unlike a bad movie from any other decade. While I can find some genuine enjoyment, and even some form of comfort, in a schlocky “B” movie from the ‘40s and ‘50s, or even the ‘80s and ‘90’s, a bad film from the ‘60s and ‘70s will often strike me as unpleasantly cheap and seedy, with an ever-present air of anger and violence. It’s no secret why that is; that period’s rage and frustration made its way into every genre of film, and probably most explicitly in horror films. But while I admire and enjoy that subtext in films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes, I see those as standouts in the field. The period is often called a great turning point in American cinema, and rightly so, but it’s probably my least favorite period for horror. That being said, the movie truly started to win me over only once some of that seediness and anger began to push its way to the forefront, or perhaps I’m just grasping at straws there.

Rik: Aaron, I believe that not that long ago, if I remember correctly, you first saw the far superior 1933 version called Island of Lost Souls when Criterion Collection released it on Blu-Ray. I saw Souls after this one when I was in my teens, and it blew my mind. I had read the real novel by that point, and even though there were naturally some changes, I felt it stuck closer to the true spirit of what Wells intended (though Wells apparently hated the more horrific sequences). How do you feel the two versions stack up? And feel free to riff on the 1996 Brando/Frankenheimer abomination if you wish.

Aaron: That is correct, the first experience I had directly with this story was through my purchase of Island of Lost Souls on the absolutely essential Criterion disc. Just by virtue of my addiction to pop culture I was pretty familiar with the underlying Moreau story, and yet Souls really surprised me. Not only was the violence disturbing, but the sexual content was absolutely shocking. Laughton’s portrayal of Dr. Moreau is less a scientist, and more a vile, leering hedonist, even before he begins pushing Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) into having sex with his animal women. Laughton’s Moreau doesn’t seem to be interested in any real scientific advancement, only in casting himself as a Greek god in reverse, coming down in human form to mate with the animals.

Obviously my heart lies with Island of Lost Souls. I find it has an eerie, slightly unwholesome power, almost immediately from the first frame. That’s not something I would say about the 1977 version, which I found to be a bit dull for the first half. Maybe it was overfamiliarity with the plot (at this point I’ve seen both of the other versions, and, in the case of Souls, multiple times), but this version seemed to have the least personality at the outset. Burt Lancaster is indeed the most humane, and believable, Dr. Moreau in all the films, and while I love him as an actor and enjoyed him onscreen, I think the character needs more of a touch of madness, certainly more than Lancaster brings to the role for most of his screen time. And then you can look at the infamous 1996 version, where Marlon Brando went way too far with the character’s madness, to the point where it just doesn’t seem believable that this guy would have the presence of mind to figure out, and implement, a method for turning animals into humans. I don’t have a lot to say about the 1996 version, because I’ve only seen it the once and better writers than I have already dissected (or should it be vivisected?) that film completely. I will just say it’s the worst of the three versions. I usually love crazy, extravagant fiascos that get batshit insane, and the ’96 Moreau surely fits that bill, but it’s also too meandering and lazy to be entertaining.

Rik: I am so with you on the Island of Lost Souls, sir. For me, it is not just one of the best horror films of the 1930s, but one of the greatest and most perverse of all time. It is truly twisted in a way that is impossible to believe could be achieved in those days. The John Frankenheimer version in ’96 is also a mind-melt, mostly due to Brando’s machinations, but it is also regrettably an unpleasant, sweaty, and uncomfortable experience. It is not the film the already immensely successful Frankenheimer signed on for after the dismissal of original director/screenwriter Richard Stanley (battles recounted in the rich documentary from 2014, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau). It really got out of his hands.

Getting back to the 1977 version now, Michael York plays the lone human protagonist, Andrew Braddock (Edward Prendick in the true novel), who ends up on Moreau's island after being lost at sea. Watching the film again, I am shocked at how thin (though still muscular) York appears, and this may be purposeful since he is supposed to have been at sea with no food or water for a considerable period. I knew York from The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, where he played D'Artagnan, and York was somewhat of a hero of mine at that age. I suppose my swashbuckling fanaticism at that time was another reason I was able to convince my mother to let me see the film, but I am fairly unsure of that point.

Aaron: I believe this is the only version of the story where the Prendick/Braddock character falls victim to Moreau’s experimentation, and it’s through that subplot that my true enjoyment in this film originates. For a while it seems like Braddock might be coming around to Moreau’s way of thinking. If he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with the experiments being carried out in the compound, he’s at least decided to not rock the boat. That changes when Moreau and Braddock hunt down a humanimal who has shed blood, which is strictly against Moreau’s law. This is punishable by a trip to the House of Pain, where Moreau’s hideous and painful experiments take place. The humanimal is injured in the chase, and pleads with Braddock to kill him instead of hand him over to Dr. Moreau, and Braddock complies. This is in violation of the Law, and Dr. Moreau must punish Braddock for his transgression, or ignite distrust and anger in the population of humanimals. That’s open to debate, of course, because Moreau is such a godlike figure to these creatures that he likely could have avoided punishing Braddock. It actually seemed to me like Moreau was simply curious as to whether he could turn a man into an animal, instead of the other way around. And why wouldn’t he be? It’s something I’d always asked myself while watching the other versions of this story, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been repeated in any of the other iterations of this concept. 

This section of the film was the most compelling to me, and the most chilling, as Moreau calmly describes to Braddock the changes his body and mind will be going through. His thoughts begin to break down and words are replaced by images and instinct. His screams of pain seem to inspire even the sympathy of the humanimals, who certainly know better than anyone what he’s going through. It also inspires the sympathy of Moreau’s right hand man, Montgomery, who opposes Moreau’s decision only to get shot for it. This angers the humanimals, who witness Moreau breaking his own law, and sets the stage for the final confrontation when the beasts storm Moreau’s compound. There’s a nice touch in this section, after the humanimals have killed Moreau, where Braddock and Maria string Moreau’s body up over the compound’s gates and try to convince the humanimals that Moreau is still alive. This actually works, for a few seconds, and I thought that was a nice detail that shows how animalistic the thinking of the humanimals was, and how high Moreau’s stature was in their eyes. He wasn’t another animal, he wasn’t even mortal, he was a god to them, and even seeing their lifeless god hanging from a rope was intimidating.

Rik: This version really downplays the fact that in the original novel, Moreau is a vivisectionist who experiments quite messily to achieve his results in creating the Beast-Men. Once again, I didn't know this at the time, and did not even know the term "vivisectionist," so I suppose if they stuck to the original intent, I would have been even more shocked than I was by Moreau's domineering behavior. Here, the doctor mainly sticks his subjects with a syringe; using some sort of serum he has developed using human genes that can somehow transform the animals into human beings. What a rotten turn for the animals. They were certainly better off before.

Part II of this discussion can be read by clicking here.

Visiting and Revisiting: Ghosts of Mars (2001) Pt. 2

[This is the second of a two-part discussion about John Carpenter's 2001 would-be sci-fi/horror epic, Ghosts of Mars. To read the first part of this article, visit Part I here.]

PART II

Rik: That usual Carpenter spooky ambience plays well as the platoon enters the mining camp, wanders about, and slowly begins to realize that all is not right in this place. Less successful is the dialogue among the platoon members, especially any time one of the male members (played by a rather fresh in his career Jason Statham) thinks with his member whenever he is near Natasha Henstridge. His character is such a douchebag that it is remarkably upsetting when she actually starts to fall into his trap just before they are interrupted by a sudden attack. I wanted the film to cut back to the Inquisitor and have her ask Henstridge, “Really? That guy?” I get that the ladies do like Jason Statham, and that he has a lot of charisma, but not as played by his character in this film. Just a little too evidently a rapist waiting to happen, if he hadn’t already before the film.

While I understand that for some people the flashback structure can often take them out of the film, as it does ruin story points and telegraphs a lot of things for the audience, they mostly worked for me as I was watching the film. There were just enough moments early on where I was getting caught up enough I had to remind myself that this was a story being told by a narrator. It was an indicator to me that I had found myself actually involved in the story to a good measure. This mood went away, however, the further the film progressed. By the time that the Martian warriors were assembling and getting suited up for battle, I pretty much lost interest in the movie. I thought their look was so overwhelmed by clichés — the porcelain skin of their leader, the long hair, the tattoos, the self-mutilation, the strange piercings, that it really just looked like any regular day at a Hot Topic to me.

Aaron: I agree with you about Statham, who is not an actor I really love, but who does have a natural charisma that makes him seem comfortable at all times on screen. That charisma is almost entirely lacking here, and I can’t quite tell if that’s due to the character, or that he hadn’t quite transitioned into his action persona. And I also agree about the Martians, or at least how the humans look while possessed by the Martians. I think it’s the element of the film that most obviously marks it as a product of the early 2000s, as most of the warriors look like Marilyn Manson knock-offs. Even in 2001, when I was less critical of the film, I thought they looked faintly ridiculous. Henstridge in the commentary starts singing Marilyn Manson when the Martian warriors show up, and Carpenter merely remarks that he’s been hearing that a lot. Certainly the soundtrack doesn’t help, which features a lot of squealing guitars and generic power chord riffs.  

But beyond that, the way the Martians are presented and dealt with in the film is a bit odd. Basically, they are spirits that possess the humans, and killing any possessed human simply frees the ghost to possess someone else. This presents a great opportunity for dramatic tension; surrounded, outnumbered, and killing your enemy only makes them more dangerous. What do you do? Well, apparently you conveniently forget that killing them does no good, and you just start mowing them down with any improvised weapon you can find. This gives the ending, where the Martian ghost cloud begins overtaking Chryse, an odd sense of defeatism. Ice Cube shows up and throws a gun to Natasha Henstridge. The implication is that they’re heading off to kill a bunch of Martians, which as we’ve seen means they’ll probably end up slaughtering the entire city. Possibly the entire planet.

Rik: I have a longtime love for all things Frisbee, but even I could not buy into the weapon of choice of the Martian warriors: razor-edged, spinning discs that were equally proficient at lopping off the heads of opponents as they are clanging and ricocheting in a rather silly way off sets and props. I laughed out loud each time some of the good guys would suddenly find themselves under attack by some of these weapons. To my eye, they were simply shiny Frisbees, and sometimes I had to rewind a tad to make sure that there weren’t beach balls being kicked at them as well because of how much things would just fly and bounce across the screen. (If there were beach balls, this film would have gotten a perfect rating from me.)

I hated the way that bodies were possessed by the spirits in this film, because it was too limiting in how they could be stopped (really… illicit drugs were the only way to keep them out?) and, as you mentioned, really created a massive plot-pit in regards to battling them. What was the point of fighting them with guns if their deaths only meant the spirits would come out and possess any body that didn’t have a spirit in it already? Wouldn’t trapping the warriors inside something be more practical so you could make an effective escape away from the area?

Aaron: I actually really like the use of illicit drugs in the film, as I think it’s another in a long line of instances where Carpenter aligns himself with the underdogs and outcasts. It also begs the question; if the drug repels the Martians while also leaving you conscious enough to function as a human being, why isn’t everyone raiding her stash?

If the resultant film is less than the sum of its more successful parts, I tend to put a lot of that at the feet of the casting choices. The cast of Ghosts of Mars is full of people whose work I’ve enjoyed in other films, but who come across as flat or stilted here, unable to really convey the right smart-ass tone that Carpenter requires. The most interesting casting occurs on the sidelines, as the two men working on the train are Robert Carradine and Carpenter mainstay Peter Jason. The rest of the film could have used that same character actor energy, as a Roddy Piper, Donald Pleasance, or Dennis Dun would have helped things go a bit more smoothly. The best piece of casting in the film, Pam Grier as the lesbian commanding officer, is also one of the worst. One of the biggest problems with this film is that it introduces Pam Grier, and then kills her a few minutes in. There’s not even any dramatic tension to it; she just wanders off, and a few minutes later you see that she’s been decapitated. Oh, how much better this film might have been had Jason Statham been the one to wander offscreen.

Rik: I like Henstridge in the lead role. She has the physicality for the part, and she carries herself well in the fight scenes. Statham is saddled with a terrible role, and hadn’t yet really come out as the big action guy he would be later that year and moving forward. He is stuck with a fairly limited range of moves in the battle scenes. (I think it would be a fun project to grab footage of him from his later movies and edit them into his scenes in Ghosts of Mars.) And while he has never been more than a decent actor, he is pretty stiff in this film. I also don’t like the idea of hiring the great Pam Grier for a film only to discard her twenty minutes into it. If Carpenter was going for a little Janet Leigh misdirection, it worked. I thought she would be around longer.

Aaron: The misdirection in Psycho, however, is a genuine shock. It’s the sign of a filmmaker knowing what his audience expects and then doing the opposite. In this film, Pam Grier’s death is so underplayed that audience reaction is basically a shrug and “oh, well, I guess she’s not in the movie anymore.”

Rik: Agreed. The acting role that truly frustrates me is Ice Cube. The Cube was fine in Boyz n the Hood and Three Kings, of course, and I liked him well enough in the first two Friday films (the only two I have seen). I especially like him in the two Jump Street parodies, but apart from just a few others (Trespass, Higher Learning, Anaconda), I’ve not seen a lot of his films. (And none of his TV works… surprise!) But in Ghosts of Mars, as Desolation Williams (shitty name, by the way), he is tremendously out of his depth and fairly ridiculous. Sure, he pouts all through the film in that way that he does to look "tough," but he comes off looking like a teddy bear built out of marshmallows. Maybe his name in the credits should have been “Ice Cub”. I never believed that he was as adept a warrior as he is made out to be, and his fight scenes made me feel like I was watching adults play-wrestle with a little kid, as they let him throw them around the room in an exaggerated manner. And Ice Cube is that little kid.

Aaron: Speaking of Snake, one persistent rumor around this film is that it began as Escape from Mars, and would be a third Snake Plissken film. You and I have both seen this mentioned in several places, but we haven’t been able to find any legitimate sources to back this up. I can tell you Carpenter never mentions it in the commentary, at any rate. But it makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Ice Cube does seem to be filling the Kurt Russell role (and at the very least they seem to shop at the same clothing outlets), and with very little tweaking you could see this fitting into the Snake Plissken narrative.

Rik: If indeed he is supposed to be a replacement for Snake Plissken, he is a pretty poor one. I am guessing he was the best they could get in their price range.

What I found pleasing to encounter was the domination of women in the film, where they are clearly far more in charge of important decisions and planning than the men are. They aren’t running things any better, but they seem to be in charge. To establish this matriarchal society, we are given two strong female figures at the outset of the story (Henstridge and Grier), but we also come across the inquisitor (Rosemary Forsyth) to whom Henstridge relates her flashback-heavy tale, and later meet Joanna Cassidy’s character, who was in charge of the mining camp and also releases the titular spirits from captivity to run amok. Having not listened to Carpenter’s commentary on the DVD (and not having run across written confirmation), It certainly seems like things have at least worked out or even run the other way on the equality front, not that they have gotten any less violent.

Aaron: I can’t make up my mind on whether Carpenter views the matriarchy as a good thing or a bad thing. At the very least, I think he views it with the same distrust of authority he displays in most of his previous films.

Rik: As he well should.

I’m ready to call this one. I think Ghosts of Mars has some good visual ideas, remains true to Carpenter’s through-line in regards to style and mood, has interesting casting for the most part but the wrong people in a couple of key roles, and really overestimates my need to watch ancient Martian warriors try on sale items from mall stores that cater to a false counterculture. I give it a 5 out of 9 on my rating scale, which is the middle of the road for me. How about you, Aaron?

Aaron: Yeah, I think I agree with you in general on this, and more than I thought I would going in. I thought I would be defending the film to you, but once I rewatched it, I found we were pretty much on the same page about everything. My grade, using your scale, would probably be about a 5 as well, leaning close to a 6. Can I use half points? I still enjoy a lot of the film, but feel like it might be awhile before I feel the urge to watch it again. Aside from the touches that mark this as distinctly Carpenterian, this film feels like something Paul Verhoeven would have done around the same time. Certainly the matriarchal society seems like something he would have a lot of satirical fun with. And that might lead to my biggest complaint with the film; it has no bite, no distinct identity of it’s own. And Carpenter is no stranger to satirical material, or loading his genre clichés with social/political metaphor. Ghosts of Mars could have used quite a bit more of that.

And with that we come to the end of another edition of Visiting and Revisiting.Thanks to everyone for joining us, and check back next time for our discussion of the 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. 

Visiting and Revisiting: Ghosts of Mars (2001) Pt. 1

Welcome to the second edition of Visiting and Revisiting with Aaron Lowe (Working Dead Productions) and Rik Tod Johnson (The Cinema 4 Pylon). The focus of this column, intended to be a semi-regular feature on both our sites, is to review films that one of us has already seen, possibly even multiple times, but the other has somehow put off watching over the years. Sometimes we get surprised when one or the other has not seen a fairly well known film, so we felt this was a good way to not only give the film either a fresh or updated viewing, but also to allow us to discuss the film at length afterwards.

Aaron: I saw Ghosts of Mars in the theater in 2001, if not on opening weekend, it was pretty darn close. I was 23, and I loved John Carpenter. Despite a few films in the ‘90s that I chose to ignore, he had never really let me down. Vampires, his previous film, I had seen on opening night, and despite its less-than-stellar reputation, I really enjoyed it. The fact that I liked — but didn’t love — Ghosts of Mars was, I reasoned, a testament to Carpenter’s consistent history of ridiculously enjoyable genre fare. Its low ranking when compared to his previous efforts spoke not so much to Ghosts’ lack of quality, but to the fact that it’s hard to top yourself when your filmography contains Halloween, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China, to name just the first three that pop into my head. For nearly a decade, Ghosts of Mars appeared to be Carpenter’s last theatrical film, which meant that I felt more defensive of it than I might otherwise. I had more than a few discussions where I came to the film’s defense, but arguments such as ‘sure, it’s not his best, but it’s more fun than you remember’ struck me even at the time as apologetic and noncommittal.

Ghosts of Mars begins on the red planet, with a ghost train arriving in the city of Chryse. The train’s sole passenger, police officer Natasha Henstridge, is unconscious and handcuffed, and there is no sign of the crew or her fellow officers. Brought before a tribunal, she recounts the story of how she was sent to the small mining colony of Shining Canyon to retrieve Desolation Williams, a particularly nasty outlaw accused of slaughtering dozens of civilians. What she and her fellow officers find is a ghost town, with everyone either dead or missing, and Williams (Ice Cube) still locked in his jail cell, while just over the hills, a band of resurrected Martian warriors readies themselves for battle. The majority of the film concerns the cops teaming up with the criminals to defend themselves against the titular ghosts of Mars.

The flashback structure used here, where the hero is discovered by people in authority and forced to tell their story while some larger threat grows outside, is one that Carpenter had previously used for In the Mouth of Madness, and that sort of self quoting is something he does a lot in this film. The film’s most obvious precedent is his own Assault on Precinct 13, which told a similar story of cops and criminals forced to cooperate in order to defend themselves against a common enemy massing outside. The score and editing seemed designed to quote his ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ as well, most notably Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, while the isolated location and idea of being replaced by an alien intelligence recalls his classic The Thing. You mentioned in one of our discussions the connection to The Fog, which is his earlier film about a mist that brings violent ghosts with it. It’s such an obvious reference that I am utterly ashamed to have not noticed it all these years.

The one thing I’m most looking forward to with this entry of Visiting & Revisiting is that we’re both approaching this with different histories, but with a certain shared level of clarity; you, as a first time viewer, and I, without the rose colored glasses through which I first saw the film. If I’m being honest, the film has several glaring problems, but I still think it’s more fun than its reputation suggests, and is also clearly a film no one but John Carpenter could make, or at least no one else would make it in this way. That alone gives it some value in my mind, as I prefer the relative failure of this, which still feels like a Carpenter film, to the failure of The Ward, his first (and to this point only) theatrical production since. The Ward makes a good contrast, because it’s a competently made film, but completely devoid of anything you look for in a Carpenter film. The result felt lifeless and generic to me, which is not a comment that I believe can be made about Ghosts of Mars, despite what the title tells you.

I know you’ve only very recently seen this film, though I also know you’re a fan of Carpenter in general. Any reason for the fifteen-year wait?

Rik: Ghosts of Mars came out to theatres at a crucial time for me. I was still beat down from the previous two films from one of my favorite directors, John Carpenter. I had seen all of his films in theatres starting with The Fog in 1980 (I snuck in… too young to buy a ticket) through Vampires in 1998. Escape from L.A. (1996) had been the first cinematic beating I took from the Master (though frankly, I did not like previous film, his remake of Village of the Damned, all that much). I liked portions of Escape from L.A. well enough, and it was grand to see Snake Plissken back in action, but goddammit, that surfing scene is still absolutely horrible and murdered the overall picture for me to this day. Vampires came after I had seen so many better vampire films, I could not get into any of the characters, and I thought much of it was lazy filmmaking. Three years later, Ghosts of Mars comes out and I just look at the trailer and say, “Hmm… not today.” I thought Carpenter was just spinning his wheels, and had really sort of given up the ghost (without actually giving up the ghost).

I avoided Ghosts of Mars until a couple of weeks ago, when I decided that I should at least watch the one remaining film on his professional resume that I have not seen. After all, since Ghosts came out, Carpenter had shown there was still life in the old boy yet with a couple of episodes a full decade ago for the Masters of Horror television anthology, one which I thought was pretty good (Pro-Life) and one that I thought was amongst his best work (the more well-known and regarded Cigarette Burns). He also came back to theatres in 2010 with the aforementioned film, The Ward, which I liked a bit more than Aaron. I didn’t care if it was missing many prime Carpenter touchstones, chiefly because Amber Heard gives me serious Ward.

And so, one morning I popped in Ghosts of Mars, and while I did not like much of it, I did not hate it either. From the outset, it was pleasing to immediately fall into that sense you can only get from a Carpenter film, which has been my chief reason for sticking with him all these, well, decades. Carpenter is a filmmaker who sticks tight to his bag of tricks. Like De Palma, he is the sum of his early influences, but unlike De Palma, whose slavish devotion to Hitchcock is both his most charming component and his ultimate downfall, Carpenter is harder to pinpoint. Yes, he is admittedly and obviously a big Howard Hawks guy — and Ghosts of Mars’ referencing of Carpenter’s own Assault on Precinct 13 likewise registers new echoes of its forerunner, Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) — but Hawks himself was hard to hold to a set genre, and was comfortable adapting his fast-talking, tough guy style to anything thrown at him. Carpenter exists more in a specific genre, but is one of those filmmakers — whatever his influences — that has such a consistency of mood and tone to his overall oeuvre that it is hard to mistake most of his films for the work of another director. Cronenberg, Lynch, Maddin… they too have been able to do this, but except for Cronenberg’s last few films, their work has generally resided on the more extreme end of modern filmmaking (and in Maddin’s case, often the fringe), where a director can get away with this. Carpenter has been more of a Hollywood guy, and so the fact that even his most mainstream works still contain his undeniable essence behind the camera points to how strongly he has been able to brand his own style.

Aaron: Yes, the film’s story is old hat for Carpenter, and many of the stylistic touches are as well, but there is one wrinkle in the film I really enjoy, and that is the film’s flashback structure. The entire movie is a flashback, but repeatedly the film bounces back even further as a new character is introduced and we learn their story. We also see the same events from different angles depending on which character we’re supposed to be focusing on in that instance. This isn’t exactly Rashomon, but I enjoy the way we get multiple perspectives all branching out from the main perspective of Natasha Henstridge recounting this story, and I enjoy the editing techniques he uses to differentiate which level of a flashback we’re in. The main timeline uses a lot of crossfades, as scenes fade directly into the next with no fade to white or black. Flashbacks are entered through use of one of those fades, while the flashbacks-within-flashbacks use various forms of screen-wipes to transition between camera shots. The crossfade is something he uses a lot in normal scenes as well, as he uses it to cut out a lot of incremental movement. At first I thought this was Carpenter aping a then-popular technique, popularized by Robert Rodriguez in El Mariachi and Desperado, but listening to the commentary it seems like it was a choice Carpenter made in order to give the rather slow opening a sense of momentum. I have to admit, it does give a sense of creeping momentum to everything. I don’t think it entirely succeeds, but I believe it gives a sense of impending, continual danger. And as you said, it lends the film that distinctive Carpenter touch, as he’s always been a director that enjoys putting an ominous, pulsing score behind everything.

[To read Part Two of Visiting and Revisiting: John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, click here.]

Visiting and Revisiting: John Badham's Dracula (1979) Pt. 2

[This is the second part of a two-part piece on John Badham's 1979 version of Dracula. To read Part One, please follow the link here.]

Part II

Aaron: John Badham's Dracula is a marvel of production design, and is gorgeously shot by Gilbert Taylor, who heightens the gothic atmosphere through crisp, grayish cinematography. This is not as lush or baroque as Coppola's version (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992), but still conveys a sense of decaying majesty through the hectic asylum where Dr. Seward works, Carfax Abbey where Dracula resides, and the mist-covered fields and forests between both locations. Carfax Abbey, in particular, is one of those structures that only seem to exist in movies, with the large head-shaped entryways and looming architectural flourishes.

I've always said that everything about Coppola's version is near perfect, aside from the casting. Beyond Keanu Reeves' ridiculous attempt at a British accent, everyone in the film seems to be operating on different frequencies, and none of the casting gels. Here, however, Frank Langella is the centerpiece to a cast that seems more than up to the task. His performance as Dracula is less bombastic than many other portrayals, and certainly reads as less obviously dangerous than many other screen vampires, and he brings a sense of composed regality to the character of Dracula, to the extent that it is completely understandable that men would respect him and women would be easily wooed by his attentions.

You mentioned in the first part of this crossover post that the men aren’t buying Dracula’s brooding presence, but I think that’s mostly confined to Jonathan Harker’s jealousy of the Count’s clear sexual prowess. Dr. Seward seems rather taken in by Dracula’s presence, and seems excited to be around someone so exotic. Once Van Helsing shows up, however, things begin to change in that regard.

Rik: You may be right on the Harker thing, though I was taking his reaction as representative of men on a larger scale should they encounter a similar situation as the one Harker does with the Count. We are working from a rather small sample from which to gather evidence.

Apart from Ryder and Reeves in the Coppola version, the one actor I continue to struggle with is Anthony Hopkins. I now feel he is miscast, though I didn’t think so at the time. Tom Waits is far too broad in his acting as Renfield, but it is consistent with Waits’ persona in general, and he does look great in the film.

Aaron: I’ll agree with the Hopkins statement. I enjoyed him quite a bit when I first saw that film, but his performance hasn’t aged well. He’s hammy in a way that the rest of the film tends to veer away from. I'm curious what you think of Renfield in this version. He seems almost under the Count's spell in the very first scene, but he doesn't end up doing much for him throughout the film.

Rik: I think he is indeed under the Count’s spell from the start. But, while Tony Haygarth portrays him decently enough, I think this may be the most unnecessary occurrence of Renfield in a Dracula film in history. He is merely there to spit out half intelligible inanities and eat bugs. Maybe he is just meant as wallpaper, to help continue the general atmosphere of decay and lost humanity.

You told me you have a problem with a particular bat in a particular scene? Want to explain?

Aaron: First, let me say that I agree with your take on Renfield as well. Were I not familiar with the underlying story, I would wonder what his function was, as there doesn’t seem to be any real reason Dracula would want him around. As for the bat in question, it comes during what I believe to be the biggest signifier of when this film was made: a sex scene within a swirling red vortex of mist. It's an effect that could easily read as cheesy, but through the use of the score, and the performances of the characters, has a sense of epic grace to it. That is, until the unnecessary bat imagery pops up. Superimposed over the image of Dracula and Lucy in the throes of sexual ecstasy is the silhouette of a flying bat. You pointed out, which I was unaware of, that this segment was directed by James Bond opening-credits maestro Maurice Binder, which makes perfect sense looking back on it, but doesn’t quite redeem the bat in my eyes. I think it turns what was already symbolic and lushly romantic into something a bit too crass and on-the-nose.

My one real complaint with the film, aside from that silly thing with the bat, is the very end of the film. A triumphant happy ending is just fine, and in fact the final showdown is pretty dynamically staged and quite exciting. It's a bit of a letdown, then, when the Count is inexplicably able to get up and fly away, in what may be the worst special effect in the movie. I'm not sure why it was added in, since it literally comes at the last minute and does little in the way of add any dramatic dimension to the proceedings.

Rik: I will agree that the bat in the montage is unnecessary, but the bat part that bothers me most is when Lucy goes to visit Dracula at Carfax, and when the doors open, behind Dracula at the back of the room is a giant, extremely detailed bat with wings outspread. He just moved into the place and has little time to find a fabulous decorator. Where did the bat come from, eh? The only thing that I can figure is that this proves Renfield purpose in the movie. I need to check the credits to see if he is responsible for the set decoration.

Badham claims he intentionally left the ending ambiguous, where it is not supposed to be clear to the viewer if that is just a wind carrying the cape off or if the Count lives on somehow. He also says that they were trying to hint that Lucy may be pregnant, and that they were not trying to suggest a sequel. I have my take on it, based on the evidence at hand. What do you think?

Aaron: I feel like that isn't very well implied by what we see on screen. The cape is clearly moving steadily and not quite with the wind, and the process by which they got it to move makes it look like a large, black paper airplane. Lucy’s smile to me seemed to imply that she knew Dracula had escaped, and was cheered by the fact.

Rik: A helicopter is pulling the cape, and yes, it looks too smooth for it to be the wind. I think he has escaped somehow. Lucy is definitely still under his spell, and I just thought the smile was in remembrance of their passion. But, is she pregnant? Can an undead vampire’s boys still swim? Doubt it, but it has happened in other films and TV shows. Badham offers it as a suggestion in his commentary, and he also says they did not mean to imply there could be a sequel, but I think he is full of beans.

Aaron: So, I think we’ve pretty much covered the film itself. Are there any other aspects you’d like to cover? I’d just like to point out the John Williams score, which is a much more tender, sweeping, and romantic mode than I’m used to hearing from him. It also sounded oddly familiar to me, and I think Wojciech Kilar might have reworked or quoted from his soundtrack quite a bit for the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola version.

Beyond that, maybe we can cover a bit of the Dracula mythology, because I found myself thinking of a few aspects I’d never considered before, based on how they’re presented in the film. What do you think of Dracula’s apparent ability to turn everyone he kills into a vampire? In order to turn Lucy, he needs to give her his blood, and yet everyone else he kills becomes a vampire as well. Assuming he didn’t give his blood to Mina, what do you make of her later resurrection? I’m assuming her appearance, markedly different from Dracula (more monstrous and decayed), indicates this is what happens when he feeds without sharing blood. If so, this shows a remarkable lack of care for where he leaves his victims, and seems a little short-sighted if he plans to make London his home.

Rik: I don’t think he really cares, or at least, the Dracula in this film version doesn’t really care. If I recall correctly, Dracula’s purposes for going to England are hinted at in the novel as that he wants to expand, over time, his race of beings, and that London is unprepared for dealing with someone of his power, unlike the people of his homeland. I think it is just pure bad luck for him that the place he chooses to start his eventual conquest has a connection to Van Helsing, who will figure out how to combat him.

Aaron: That brings up a good point, actually. Do you believe the Dracula story is about the triumph of the new world over the old, or an argument that we need to retain the knowledge of the old world? The fact that Dracula has lived for centuries in Romania only to be killed almost immediately after arriving in London speaks to the idea that the new world is able to vanquish the nightmares and demons of the old. And yet the new world only triumphs because of the superstitions and beliefs of the less technologically advanced older world.

Rik: I don’t have much to add to that summation of the story. It seems a fairly obvious case for such a metaphor to be derived from the story. The second part, regarding the irony that it is the old world knowledge that delivers ultimate defeat to Dracula rather than any modern technology, that is the most interesting to me.

Aaron: Also, the boat passage from Romania to London has always bothered me for some reason. It seems uncharacteristically risky for the Count. He’s clearly not averse to using human assistants, and yet he foregoes that security and sequesters himself for a long sea voyage, putting himself completely into the hands of possibly untrustworthy strangers. There are so many things that could have gone wrong on that trip, even without his habit on feeding on the crew members in a way that draws suspicion to his mysterious crates of Transylvanian soil. I suppose it speaks to the animalistic nature of the Count, who must feed even if it puts his life in danger.

Rik: Obviously, a vampire must feed. It’s always important to pack an extra lunch or two on a long trip, and the Demeter makes for a handy, seagoing lunch box.

Joking aside, I agree with your assertion of his animalistic nature being in charge. It seems his bloodlust gets the better of him on this trip, throwing aside his normal caution of humanity at large. But it shows the difference between the people of his old country – who are accustomed to the superstitions of vampires and how to keep them at bay – and those from other lands, as most of the sailors may be. In the normal course of things, a couple of sailors die on the trip, and your mind, as a fellow sailor, is going to look first for rational reasons this may have occurred. The reasonable must be approached as a possibility first; otherwise, you are a loony. It might take you a while to come around to “Hey, someone died on this ship… that means there must be a vampire on board.” You and I have each seen a zillion monster movies, so we would automatically think, were we in that situation, that a vampire is a likely suspect. But we are not the men on the Demeter, nor are we in their time. And vampirism, we must assume, is something none of these sailors have dealt with… ever. As the death count grows, and irrationality takes hold, certainly they might believe that something evil is among them, but at that point, it is too late. Their paranoia will get the best of them and they will not be operating with all of their faculties at top gear, which will make it all the easier for the Count to hold sway. I think mainly that Dracula is hedging his bets with the sea trip, knowing that he must take this opportunity to survive, as his homeland has become too dangerous for him.

Aaron: Well, I believe that brings us to the end. It has been a blast, good sir, writing up this piece with you, and I look forward to the future editions of Visiting and Revisiting. Thank you to all who have read through both of our sites, and we hope you'll come back to join us again for the next film in this series, John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars (2001). See you soon!

Visiting and Revisiting: John Badham's Dracula (1979) Pt. 1

Welcome to the first edition of a new shared column by The Cinema 4 Pylon (Rik Tod Johnson) and Working Dead Productions (Aaron Lowe) called Visiting and Revisiting. 

The focus of this column, intended to be a semi-regular feature on both our sites, is to review films that one of us has already seen, possibly even multiple times, but the other has somehow put off watching over the years. Sometimes we get surprised when one or the other has not seen a fairly well known film, so we felt this was a good way to not only give the film either a fresh or updated viewing, but also to allow us to discuss the film at length afterwards.

Rik: The film we have at hand today is the 1979 version of Dracula, starring Frank Langella, Laurence Olivier, Kate Nelligan, and Donald Pleasence, and directed by John Badham. A little background is probably necessary before we begin. 

The 1977 Broadway version of Dracula with Langella was a revival of the original play adapted from Bram Stoker’s 1896 novel by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston, and used most famously for the 1931 adaptation with Bela Lugosi. The sets were even designed by the wonderfully ghoulish artist, Edward Gorey. The show only received mixed reviews, but it was the very definition of a monster hit, and Langella would be nominated for a Tony Award as Lead Actor in a Play. Talk turned eventually to a film version, but Langella had misgivings, and would only do it if they promised to work by his own guidelines for the character. Once Langella was on board to play the Count again in a new Universal film version, the play was given a nearly complete rewrite by W.D. Richter (who would go on to write and direct The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, co-write Big Trouble in Little China, and direct Late for Dinner, three favorites of mine). The director, John Badham, was on fire in Hollywood at the time of this film, having previously directed the Oscar-nominated Saturday Night Fever. After Dracula, he would be best known for WarGames (1983), Blue Thunder (also 1983), Short Circuit (1986), and Stakeout (1987). On a side note, his younger sister, Mary, played Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).

Aaron, you have never seen this film before. I generally assume you have seen most of the major horror films that have been released. Any solid reasons why this one slipped by you?

Aaron: There are probably a couple of major reasons I've never watched the 1979 version of Dracula before today. Despite a fairly serious high school Goth phase that included plenty of Anne Rice novels, I've never been a big vampire fan. I understand the appeal, and yet, I don't find them inherently interesting in the same way I enjoy other monsters. Sure, plenty of good-to-great vampire films exist, and the original Bram Stoker novel is quite enjoyable, but even my favorite vampire films don't enjoy the level of attention in my house as, say, some of the Frankenstein films, or the Invisible Man, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. 

I also had an image in my head of what this film would be like, probably inspired by a less-than-flattering VHS cover in the local video store. I had it in my head that Dracula would be a late ‘70s cheese-fest, full of chintzy sets, histrionic acting, and dated special effects. It turned out, happily, that I was wrong on all counts. Or nearly wrong on all counts, which we'll get to in a minute. Also, the film has a curious lack of reputation. It doesn’t seem to get mentioned a lot, and I never see it in any lists or discussions of vampires in film. The fact that I simply haven’t heard much about it, combined with how much I read about horror movies, led me to assume the film had been a forgettable flop. I was pleasantly surprised by the final results, and am more than a little annoyed I hadn’t sought the film out before now. But that seems to be a theme with this year’s Halloween viewing: seeking out and watching those big titles (or medium titles) that have somehow slipped under my radar.

You have a more extensive history with the film, Rik. Why don’t you tell us a bit of your background with it?

Rik: In early 1979, when I was 14 years old, my attention was caught in a rather significant way by a television advertisement for the upcoming feature film version of Dracula. In the ad, Dr. Van Helsing, played by Sir Laurence Olivier, holds up a Eucharist in order to keep the dread vampire at bay. Count Dracula, played by Frank Langella, hisses a single word, “Sacrilege!” before hightailing it away from Van Helsing.

This commercial played repeatedly over a couple of months, and I loved it. Any time it came on, as soon as Van Helsing would hold aloft his supposedly holy weapon of choice, I would shout, “Sacrilege!” with all the vigor of the man portraying the monster in the film. Then it went beyond the commercial. I do recall riding about with my mother and brothers one afternoon, and when my mom held up a finger to flip me off for saying something in that way that I do, I yelled “Sacrilege!” once more. Her reaction was to ask me, “Do you even know what that word means? Maybe you should know before you run around shouting it.” I did know what the word meant, but she stopped me dead with her response, and I remember it shut me up for a brief time.

I was, at that age, in the throes of a burgeoning interest in horror films, and especially in the Hammer films I was seeing late night on a local show called The World’s Most Terrible Movies. Just a couple of months earlier, my mother had taken me to see George Hamilton as a disco-dancing Dracula in Love at First Bite, which was a huge comedy hit at the time. But this new Dracula was rated “R” and we had not quite moved from Eagle River to Anchorage, where the movie theatres were. To see a film required special effort and a drive 15-odd miles away. Film viewing usually occurred in conjunction with a weekend’s outing for shopping that went beyond supermarket necessities, or when we spent alternate weekends with our father who had moved to Anchorage. Unfortunately, talking him into an R-rated film was impossible unless it had Clint Eastwood in it. Thus, alas, I did not get to see John Badham’s version of Dracula in a theatre in 1979. It would not be until the film came out on VHS that I would get my chance. And I have seen it several times over the years since.

So, Aaron, what were your impressions of this version of Dracula upon watching it?

Aaron: The Dracula story is so ingrained into popular myth that just about everyone could recount the basics of the tale, which is one of the reasons this film is such a surprise. My knowledge of the stage versions of Dracula is almost nonexistent, so I wasn’t able to spot what came from the stage and what was altered. But in this film version, it almost feels like the screenwriters are remixing Bram Stoker more than they are adapting him, taking the familiar elements and shifting them around to tell their own version of the story.

The film completely drops Jonathan Harker’s ill-fated trip to Castle Dracula, opening as Dracula is already en route to London on board the Demeter. Although most of the basics of the story still remain, many of them appear in slightly different configurations. Lucy and Mina seem to have switched names, so that Lucy is Jonathan's beloved, and Mina becomes Dracula's first proper victim, with the added wrinkle that she is now Abraham Van Helsing's daughter. Dr. Jack Seward, instead of being one of Lucy’s multiple suitors, is actually Lucy's father in the film. Quincy and Arthur are nowhere to be seen in this version, but I think they’re usually left out of the screen versions anyway. I'm assuming that many of these alterations are imported from the stage version of Dracula. Either way, it provides for a nice streamlining of events, in order to confine the novel’s multiple perspectives into one singular, linear story.

Rik: In the play, the characters of Mina and Lucy are combined as “Lucy Seward”. There is no Mina. I guess they resurrected her from the dead for the film, and, as you pointed out, switched her part with Lucy. 

What do you think of Langella’s choices for the character, such as no blood on his mouth, not fangs, etc?

Aaron: I think those were absolutely the right choices, and I’m glad he insisted on them. They not only add to the character’s elegance and believability as a menace, they serve to highlight the differences between him and the other few vampires we see in the film. The other, lesser vampires are sickly looking, rotted, with pallid complexions and pitch black eyes. They look marvelous, as ghouls, but also pathetic in a way. Had Langella put in black contacts or a pair of fangs, it would have turned his Dracula from a believable member of ancient aristocracy into a cheap Halloween costume.

Rik: However, if you and I showed up for a Halloween party dressed exactly as Langella’s Count, sans fangs and blood, it would look precisely like the cheapest Halloween costume imaginable.

While I do greatly enjoy the lush romanticism of the film, what I especially love is just how dark Dracula is, not only in the mood and atmosphere, but also in its physicality. The edges of the screen loom around your eyes while you watch it. You know five minutes in that this is not going to be an easy ride and there will be little in the way of comic relief.

My sense of the film to this day is that despite the violence of the storm in which Dracula lands in England, and despite the deaths of the crew that brings him there, that the Count rather improves the place (briefly) with his arrival, simply by his elegance. We are made to believe that the older continent from which he comes and the modern (as in the 1890s), civilized world appear to be equally decrepit. The civilized world is almost entirely showcased within the confines of an insane asylum, and we hear the screams of its manic inhabitants throughout the film, as even greater chaos erupts. Whatever pretense of civilization that exists in the living quarters of Dr. Seward and his family is merely a very thin veneer, and Dracula’s appearance punctures that fabric.

Langella’s Count is the ultimate smooth operator, speaking lowly in a seductive, measured purr and staring deeply but with a hint of softness into women’s eyes. You believe quite easily that he can seduce anyone even without supernatural aid, though that is surely a factor. However, it is lucky for humanity that the males in his presence aren’t buying it, otherwise the film would just be a bloody romance.

[To read Part 2 of Visiting and Revisiting: John Badham's Dracula (1979), click here.]