Blood Island Journal # 4: The Blood Drinkers (Gerardo de Leon, 1964)

Previously in this hastily scribbled and mysteriously stained journal, we’ve raised the question of what exactly happened vis-a-vis the career of Filipino horror auteur Gerard de Leon in the interim between the sombre professionalism of 1959’s Terror is a Man and the outrageous Tiki bar camp of 1968’s Brides of Blood. 1964’s ‘The Blood Drinkers’ is the answer, and I’m happy to report that it is a very satisfactory answer indeed.

Originally filmed in the Tagalog language under the slightly more poetic title ‘Kulay Dugo Ang Gabi’ [“Blood is the Colour of the Night”] and re-cut and re-dubbed for U.S. audiences shortly thereafter, ‘The Blood Drinkers’ turns out in fact to be an under-appreciated masterwork of world-wide weird gothic cinema – a uniquely oneiric excursion into monster movie dream-space, in which ‘logic’ and ‘narrative’ are reduced to distant, blurry figures waving vainly from the far-off hills, whilst de Leon instead conjures a pungent, indelible atmosphere that at various points bears comparison to the work of Jean Rollin, José Mojica Marins, and the productions of Abel Salazar’s Cinematográfica ABSA in Mexico.

So, yes, basically what I’m saying is, if you were to boil down all of your old Mondo Macabro DVDs into a magic potion, drinking it would probably produce a vision rather like ‘The Blood Drinkers’. I hope I’m not over-selling it, but seriously folks, this is great stuff.

One thing that immediately differentiates ‘The Blood Drinkers’ from the Blood Island movies is the lack of American involvement on the production side. Both de Leon’s regular collaborator Eddie Romero and U.S. co-producer Kane Lynn are notably absent from the credits, with future action-exploitation kingpin Cirio H. Santiago instead acting as sole producer.

As noted, the film was shot in Tagalog, presumably with the expectation that a local audience might actually want to watch it, and – joy of joys – it features no slumming American b-movie actors in garish short-sleeved shirts uncomfortably wiping sweat from their brows. (“It’s nice to know the Filipinos can make a monster movie without John Ashley,” cracked Michael Weldon in his Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film.)

This lack of foreign investment carries with it an accompanying lack of budgetary resources which, strangely, actually works in the film’s favour in some respects. Most notably, a shortage of colour film stock led to the majority of the film being shot in black and white, heavily tinted in post-production with a wild array of hues (red, blue, purple, and everything in between) to give the illusion of colour – a technique which I don’t think had been used this extensively since the silent era.

Although this could easily have been seen at the time as a cheap, misleading gimmick, in retrospect the decision to use tinted B&W was inspired. It lends ‘The Blood Drinkers’ a ‘feel’ that is entirely unique within ‘60s horror, and, whereas the film’s few genuine colour sequences (used to differentiate scenes of ‘normal’, everyday life) look blurry and drab, as if shot with sub-par, bin-salvaged stock, the quality of the black & white photography (courtesy of veteran Filipino DP Felipe Sacdalan) is frequently magnificent.

The antiquated aura created by the tinting process is furthered when, straight out of the credits (blaring, ‘40s Universal style music needle-dropped over crude, blood-dripping typography – very Coffin Joe), we see an extremely ornate Victorian funeral carriage (where on earth did they find one of those in Manilla?!) rolling down an uneven country road, in shots that look as if they could have come straight from Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ or Dreyer’s ‘Vampyr’… until that is, we see a (presumably contemporary) black-finned American sedan following close behind.

If the temporal dissonance created by this seems strange, it’s as nothing compared to the raw weirdness generated by the crew who eventually disembark from these vehicles, after they’ve passed through the spiked iron gates of the obligatory crumbling, colonial-era mansion.

I may not have been very impressed by Ronald Remy as the Mad Doctor of Blood Island, but rewind a few years and he’s absolutely fantastic here as Dr Marco (note THAT surname), our resident vampire overlord. (Yes, the vampire is also a scientist, got a problem with that?)

Bearing a passing resemblance to a shaven-headed Marlon Brando (imagine if he’d played Colonel Kurtz ten years earlier in life and you’ll get the general idea), Remy projects a sinister and imposing screen presence, communicating with his underlings using dramatic, sweeping hand gestures, and modelling a fetching pair of futuristic, wraparound shades alongside his regulation opera cape and crumpled evening dress.

Clearly a “belt and braces” kind of guy when it comes to assistants, Dr Marco employs the services of both a capering dwarf and a snaggle-toothed hunchback, and he is also accompanied by an impossibly beautiful young woman, who also sports shades and, in this opening scene, wears a glistening snake-skin dress. Played by Eva Montes and credited as ‘Tanya, the Vampire Bride’ on IMDB, this woman’s taciturn, unexplained presence - reminiscent of Vulnavia in the Dr. Phibes movies - adds greatly to the film’s eerie atmos, not to mention its subliminal erotic charge.

Completing this uncanny procession is a middle-aged lady in a heavy black shawl – she turns out to be the aristocratic mother of the deceased – and of course, the occupant of the hearse herself: the perfectly preserved body of the woman who turns out to be Dr Marco’s Great Love.

Now, personally I would have thought physical death was more or less compulsory for the romantic partner of a vampire, so I’m not sure what the assembled weirdos are all so upset about, but hey, I don’t write these things. Anyway, Dr Marco seems determined to revive his beloved – “in all other matters I have risen above human feelings, but I MUST save Katerina,” he declares at one point. So, before you know it, she is laid out on the slab in the mansion’s cramped chapel of rest, hooked up to his ramshackle array of whirring mad scientist machinery (it mostly looks like WWII-era radio equipment?).

In order to save Katerina, the Doctor announces, he will need to claim the still-beating heart of her estranged sister, who lives down in the village, blissfully unaware of all this. Said sister turns out to be our soon-to-be-long-suffering heroine Charita (Amalia Fuentes, who naturally also plays Katerina with the aid of an unflattering blond wig), and the vampiric cohort begin their plans for her by promptly murdering the elderly adoptive parents to whom Charita’s mother abandoned her twenty years earlier. Nasty.

At the funeral, Chairta’s birth mother (posing as her aunt) basically tells her, “ok, you must come and live with me now”, and her surviving male relative and the local priest are both like, “yeah, I guess that’s probably the best thing to do here” – but Charita herself is unsure. In particular, she is anxious about the fact that she and her deceased parents seemed to be operating some kind of proto-Air B&B / guesthouse type arrangement, and that some guests – Victor (handsome young Eddie Fernandez) and his two sisters – have arrived from the city in a shiny red convertible, unaware of their hostess’s travails.

Thankfully though, Victor and the girls are nice folks, so they understand that Charita might not have had a chance to make the beds and so on - and indeed, they turn out to be happy to help her out in her fight against the vampire and his weird minions, which is super lovely of them.(1)

And…. that’s about all we’re getting here in terms of plot, which is fine by me. The remainder of the film basically consists of a long series of nocturnal stalkings, random vampiric encounters, eerie, fog-shrouded mesmerism and stern lectures on vampire lore, all of which tend to blur into one, in the best possible way.

In a sense, this mirrors the kind of “characters wandering around bumping into each other” stuff that blights the middle acts of the Blood Island films, but the superior artistry and atmosphere of ‘The Blood Drinkers’ manages to transform this directionless drift into a far more pleasing sensation of woozy, nightmarish delirium, comparable to that subsequently perfected in Europe by the ‘Erotic Castle Movies’ of the early 1970s.

In one particularly startling ‘primal scene’, Charita is awakened in night, only to find the ravenous zombified corpses of her recently buried parents stomping toward her in their grave-clothes. They proceed to man-handle her and attempt to chew her neck with their newly acquired fangs, until Dr Marco materialises out of the darkness and begins flagellating his badly behave undead minions with a giant bull-whip! Holy hell.

Elsewhere, Tanya and Katerina (who now seems to be wandering around under her own steam after drinking some blood, so I’m not sure where that leaves the plot…?) emerge from massive banks of fog (seriously, this film goes toe-to-toe with 1960’s ‘City of the Dead’ for sheer quantity of dry ice), diaphanous gowns swirling as they sl-o-o-w-l-y approach their hypnotised victims, Theremin blaring wildly on the soundtrack. It is all absolutely marvellous.

Until I watched ‘The Blood Drinkers’, I was unaware that the concept of “too much theremin” was one that I would ever need to acknowledge in waking life, but verily, this film’s soundtrack (music “directed” by Tito Arevalo, although I don’t know whether any cues were actually recorded specifically for the movie) has TOO MUCH THEREMIN.

Meanwhile, Victor gets stuck into some creditable punch ups with the hunchback and the dwarf, and Dr Marco calls upon the services of BASRA, seemingly some kind of supernatural bat spirit thing which hovers over him in the form of an adorable flappy-winged bat puppet.

Apparently this whole Basra business was the invention of the film’s American distributors at Hemisphere Pictures, who, whilst recutting the film for the U.S. market, decided that they liked a few brief close up shots of the bat so much, they determined to repeat them about twenty times over the course of the film, giving it a name, and inserting accompanying reaction shots of Ronald Remy singing its praises!

A bastardisation of de Leon’s original film? No doubt, but with the director’s initial Tagalog cut apparently lost to the ages (most likely a victim of vintage Filipino cinema’s catastrophically low survival rate), we’re stuck with Hemisphere’s version, and personally I’m more than happy to accept Basra and his repetitious antics as yet another loopy element crammed into an already rich smorgasbord of demented horror movie imagery. In fact, I really love the little fella. Look at him go!

“Remember my dear, the colour is blood red. Basra is calling, you must discard all other thoughts... you shall utter no word without the permission of BASRA. Remember Basra is your master, Basra is watching!”

As is clearly signalled by the fact that our head vampire is also a scientist (who also seems to venerate some kind of god-bat), ‘The Blood Drinkers’ take on the whole “science vs religion” thing as regards vampirism is a bit confused, to say the least.

At one point, the good guys consult the local priest (voiced in the English dub by your friend and mine, Mr Vic Diaz, who also provides the film’s totally redundant voiceover narration). “Vampires, vampires, ah – here we are,” the priest mutters as he runs his finger down the index of his Big Black Book of Evil (every clergyman should have one), and, facts suitably checked, proceeds to lay down the lore.

Interestingly, the priest insists that stakes plunged into the hearts of the undead must be wooden, because, and I quote, “the mysterious germ, the bacillis vampiris, creates in the body of the vampire a fluid which is similar in chemical composition to that of glue”. This means that they cannot be harmed by bullets, but, “wood turns the glue into water”. Curious stuff indeed.

Subsequently, the priest also clarifies that, “vampires are not afraid of the cross, it is the icon’s reflection that they really fear; they're afraid of the glare of the light”, so, uh… ok, bearing in mind that this movie was probably dubbed into English on a pretty tight deadline, I’m just going to leave that there for more pedantic souls than myself to unpack.

Despite these pseudo-scientific musings however, the priest soon pulls himself together and remembers who’s paying his wages, telling Charita, “there is something more valuable than bullets or wooden stakes, and that is... prayer and faith my child!”

Elsewhere, the Catholic background of Filipino culture makes itself strongly felt, as de Leon fills his mise en scene with crosses, crucifixes, rosary beads and chintzy porcelain icons of one kind or another, and, as things progress, the film seems to follow the lead of its resident spiritual advisor by doubling down on the more church-y side of the equation.

Following a midnight mass and ad-hoc exorcism session at the high altar, the power of our heroes’ collective prayer seems to instigate an extraordinary sequence in which Dr Marco and Katerina awake, apparently freed from their vampiric curse, and emerge into the world of full colour, walking hand in hand through an over-saturated, sun-dappled rose garden. An intoxicating, weirdly moving, non-sequitur, this scene feels almost like a lost fragment from a ‘40s Powell & Pressburger film, encouraging us to feel a certain empathy for the austere romantic dignity displayed by the previously monstrous Dr Marco.

It also feels very much like it should be an ending, but, there’s still twenty minutes left on the clock so, inevitably, things don’t work out for the immortal lovers, and we’re soon back in the blood red netherworld of Basra and Gordo the hunchback for a final good vs evil showdown, including the extraordinary sight of the priest, bible in hand, leading a cross and torch bearing procession of robed church-goers, who square off in the graveyard against Dr Marco’s ever-growing army of the undead. (So, not much room for ambiguity there vis-a-vis the film’s religious intent!)

As more open-minded vintage horror fans will be well aware, the explosion of regional gothic horror production which spread across the world in the wake of Hammer’s ‘Dracula’ (and, to a lesser extent, AIP’s Poe cycle) in the 1960s was a rare and wonderful thing to behold. The progress of this wave can literally be traced border to border across the entire globe, but, within the further reaches of the cycle, I’d go so far as to say that ‘The Blood Drinkers’ is probably the best explicitly Western-influenced ‘60s gothic horror film I’ve ever seen from an Asian country - a heavily qualified boast perhaps, but an impressive one nonetheless.

In view of the presumably minimal resources available to them, the film stands as an extraordinary achievement on the part of de Leon and his collaborators. Over half a century later, it stands out for its beautiful photography, intelligent and emotionally engaged direction and wildly imaginative production design, as well as for its richly pungent atmospherics and – die-hard gothic horror viewers should take particular note of this final point – for its *pacing*.

Yes, within the context of its oft-plodding genre, ‘The Blood Drinkers’ moves like a rocket, with almost non-stop spooky action, and relatively little dialogue-based down-time. Imagine - a ‘60s gothic horror without any stuffy scenes in which people sit around an oversized dining table making awkward small talk, and get shown to their rooms because they must be tired from their long journey etc. Incredible though it may seem, Gerardo de Leon proved it was possible. Praise the lord, or Basra, or whoever!

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(1) Checking out Eddie Fernandez’s IMDB profile reveals a whole secret history of (now presumably lost) Filipino crime movies and spy adventures, informing us that he appeared “in the title role” of ‘Johnny Oro: Kaaway ng Krimen’, ‘Hong Kong 999’, ‘Triggerman’, ‘Wanted: Johnny L’ and ‘The Lucky 9 Commandos’, amongst others. Oh, for a time machine, and the necessary funding to establish a temperature-controlled film preservation facility in Manila circa 1966, etc.

Gothic Originals / October Horrors # 11: Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

Another year, another straggler crossed off the increasingly short list of “Hammer horror films I’ve never seen”. In fact, if we strictly limit things to their period/gothic horror output, I think this might be the very last one to unfold before my tired eyes.

I suppose I’ve previously avoided ‘Scars of Dracula’ due to the general consensus that it is not very good, but I’ve recently noted some people speaking positively about it, and it’s had a re-release on disc, so… I mean, at the end of the day it’s a Christopher Lee Dracula entry with a reputation for gory violence and Roy Ward Baker calling the shots. How bad can it be, really?

The answer, unfortunately, is very bad indeed. Seriously folks, this one is shockingly poor. It is so unapologetically shit in fact that, if I hadn’t already been in my own living room, and if it hadn’t been raining outside, I probably would have walked out in protest.

Say what you like about Jimmy Sangster’s much-maligned ‘Lust for a Vampire’ and ‘Horror of Frankenstein’ (both of which went into production the same year as this one – ye gods, what on earth was going on over at Hammer House?), at least they were trying to do something a bit different.

‘Scars..’, by contrast embraces the same tone of smirking, half-hearted crappiness, but applies it to a script that is bluntly derivative of earlier entries in the series, barely even summoning the energy to drag itself through the same old clichés one more time.

If you’re feeling charitable (which I tend to be, when it comes to this sort of thing), the two Sangster films could also be excused to a certain extent by the fact that they were helmed by an inexperienced director, trying to bring the blackly humourous aspect of his writing to the screen, with fairly disastrous results.

‘Scars..’ however has no such excuse. Indeed, Baker usually managed to bring some notably superior cinematic chops to the British horror films he directed, sometimes elevating mediocre material to a higher level than it really deserved. Like all work-for-hire directors though, he was at the mercy of what was placed before him by his employers, and it is painfully clear that he has given naff all to work with on ‘Scars..’, whether in terms of budget, scheduling, script, crew or anything else.

The first real warning sign, I think, is the bats. The film opens with the unedifying spectacle of a big, floppy bat-on-a string drooling Kensington gore all over Dracula’s ashes, which are helpfully spread out along with his best cape, on a slab in his mid-European castle at some unspecified point in the fairy tale past (never mind the adventures he had enjoyed in 1890s London in Peter Sasdy’s excellent ‘Taste the Blood of Dracula’ six months earlier). (1)

Admittedly, achieving decent bat effects has always been a problem for gothic horror films, but this one looks particularly onerous, with a sculpted plastic face and an overstuffed body like some giant bluebottle. For a single shot, perhaps we could excuse it, but unfortunately these bats actually go on to play a pretty significant role in the film. Acting as Dracula’s primary avatars, they’re flapping about all over the place, and are central to several of the film’s main horror set-pieces. And yet -- they look absolutely stupid throughout.

The fact that neither Baker nor line producer Aida Young were able to have a quiet word in the ear of one of Hammer’s big-shots to say, look, we’ve got to do something about these bloody bats or the film will be a laughing stock, speaks volumes about how little the company actually cared about the quality of their product at this point in time.

A few years earlier, viewers could have had confidence that even the most mindless horror films Hammer turned out could to some extent be redeemed by their technical accomplishments, proving that a little bit of beautiful photography and classy production design can go a long way. (The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is a good example.) Those days seem to have been long gone by 1970 though, and ‘Scars of Dracula’ is blandly over-lit throughout, leaving no shadows, no room for atmosphere, and nothing to hide its rather ugly, poverty-stricken sets.

In stark contrast to the attention to detail that used to prevail at Hammer, the props and costuming too are almost unbelievably shoddy here. When Patrick Troughton, playing Dracula’s craven servant Klove, is seen dragging an animal carcass over the back of his horse at the end if a hunting expedition, it looks as if he’s been handed a bedraggled soft toy splashed with red paint and told to make the best of it. I’m not even sure what kind of animal it was supposed to be, to be honest.

Again, I only bring this up as a symptom of the wider malaise affecting every aspect of this production. The fact this scene was filmed and printed, rather than being put on hold whilst the art director was bawled out and some production assistants dispatched to come up with something better before the next tea break, again speaks for itself. (2)

I should make clear that it’s not really my intention to get all high-minded when it comes to assessing the quality of Hammer Dracula movies. I have no desire to echo Christopher Lee’s snooty approach to such things, and I’d be perfectly happy to enjoy a ragged, pulpy Dracula movie full of sex and violence (for such is the reputation of ‘Scars..’ has acquired over the years). But… this damn thing can’t even get being sleazy right.

The bawdy behaviour that comprises much of the first half of the film is pitched strictly at a Benny Hill / pre-‘Confessions of..’ level, with Christopher Matthews as a leering, jack-the-lad type chancer getting his end away with a succession of flirtatious barmaids and the like, but with no actual nudity, and none of the (relatively) grown up eroticism that caused such a stir in Baker’s previous assignment for Hammer, ‘The Vampire Lovers’.

As to violence meanwhile, Baker seems to have realised that his only hope of winning the fans over with this one was to just go for it (I’m reminded of Brian Trenchard Smith’s tales of how he started desperately hacking off limbs and throwing blood around when his budget for 1980’s ‘Turkey Shoot’ was cut in half mid-way through production), and if nothing else, ‘Scars..’ is at least a contender for the goriest film Hammer ever made.

Even here though, things are compromised by those bloody layabouts in the art department. Hammer’s preferred shade of bright scarlet house paint never looked as absurd as it does here in the light of Moray Grant’s remorselessly bland photography, and the resulting parade of rubber bat attacks and lurid close-ups of poorly applied wound make-up achieves the rare distinction of simultaneously feeling both prurient and boring. (3)

One of the more interesting aspects of ‘Scars..’ is its apparent attempt to associate Dracula with bladed weapons. (“Be careful, it’s sharp” is his introductory line, as he walks in on Matthews’ character admiring the obligatory crossed swords mounted on his castle wall.)

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea (and I’m sure Lee would have relished the opportunity for a bit of supernatural swashbuckling), but it is poorly developed here – most notably in an absolutely astonishing scene in which, following an almost shot-for-shot re-tread of the bit in Terrance Fisher’s ‘Dracula’ where The Count reprimands his bride for trying to take a bite of the Harker-surrogate’s throat before him, Dracula here proceeds to punish her by whipping out a butcher’s knife and stabbing her to death.

Aside from the fact that it is entirely unmotivated by the script, this is… very un-vampiric behaviour, to say the least. (If Dracula were to resort to sword-play, surely he’d do so purely for the purposes of pageantry and sadism, rather than hacking away at one of his vassals like some back alley slasher?)

This is basically only a taster though for an even more witless moment later on, when the Lord of the Undead, whose mesmeric powers can crush a man’s soul with a mere glance, apparently resorts to drugging the heroine’s soup. As Jonathan Rigby laments in his review in English Gothic, “what use has Dracula for these pantomime contrivances?”

Anyway – on to positives. There must be some, I suppose?

Well, it’s hard work, but… at least Christopher Lee gets some lines in this one I suppose, with Dracula speaking calmly and assuming his ‘cold but polite host’ role for the first time since Fisher’s 1957 ‘Dracula’, I believe.

Given the voluminous litanies of complaint Lee liked to issue each time he was – ahem – “forced” to appear in another Dracula film, one can only imagine how cheesed off he must have been whilst participating in this particularly shabby instalment, but even if he’s not exactly giving it his all, such are the meagre pleasures offered by ‘Scars..’ that merely hearing Christopher Lee say some things is quite nice.

As always, it’s nice to see Hammer lucky charm Michael Ripper getting a significant role too, appearing here as the world’s least hospitable inn-keeper. He gets quite a lot of screen time in ‘Scars..’, and spends almost all of it ordering people to get out of his inn, refusing to let them in in the first place, or telling them to “go to the devil”. He does though have one lovely moment when he temporarily drops his guard, wistfully telling our lead couple they should enjoy their best years together… shortly before he discovers they’re also would-be vampire hunters and manhandles them out of the front door before they’ve even finished their soup.

As a fan of ‘The Sweeney’, I was delighted too to see a young Dennis Waterman popping up as our ostensible hero, although it’s doubtful that this role did much to help propel him to his later TV fame, as he delivers a veritable master-class on the theme of “ineffectual youth”, despite being thirty two years old at the time.

I also found it interesting that – for some reason – ‘Scars..’ takes the opportunity to include the rarely filmed scene from Stoker’s novel in which Jonathan Harker abseils out of his locked room in Dracula’s castle and find himself trapped in the lower chamber which houses The Count’s coffin. This bit was relatively well done, and provided a welcome break from the remorseless grind of reheated cliché that comprises the rest of the film’s action.

And… that’s about it really.

[Deep sigh.]

In general, I tend to feel a great warmth and fondness for British horror films of all stripes, and for Hammer films in particular. As such, I can usually find a certain amount to enjoy in just about any of them, even if it’s just a bit of period charm and some familiar faces popping in for a scene or two. Even on this basis though, I can’t stress enough just how dispiritingly rubbish I found ‘Scars of Dracula’ to be. It’s really the pits.

Essentially playing out like some cruel, self-reflexive pastiche of the company’s public image, ‘Scars..’ feels less like an actual Hammer film, and more like a realisation of what the closed-minded contemporary critics who wrote horror films off as juvenile trash and never went to see them might have imagined a Hammer film to be like.

By pandering to this kind of Lowest Common Denominator public expectation, the company did themselves a dreadful disservice in ‘70/’71, and this one seems to me to be the absolute nadir of the particularly dodgy patch they seemed to be going through at the time.

At least we can take succour in the fact that they bounced back shortly thereafter with great pictures like ‘Twins of Evil’ and ‘Vampire Circus’, keeping themselves afloat creatively speaking for at least a few more years before the inevitable end arrived in the mid ‘70s. Maybe I should watch one of those again to help take the taste away...

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(I do LOVE some of this foreign language poster artwork for this film though…)

(1) At the risk of sounding like the worst kind of nit-picking fanboy, the fact that ‘Scars of Dracula’ completely blunders the (admittedly loose) sense of chronological continuity established by the other Hammer Draculas just seems to add insult to injury. I mean, after Dracula is defeated in London at the end of ‘Taste the Blood..’, it would seem to set things up perfectly for his resurrection in the same city almost a century later in ‘..AD 1972’ – yet we’ve got this damned mess in the middle, which drags him back to the vague, mittel-european gothic setting we’d previously kissed goodbye to (and frankly had quite enough of) in ‘..Risen from the Grave’ a couple of years earlier!

Is ‘Scars..’ thus non-canonical? Is it a prequel? This being 1970, I’d imagine Tony Hinds and Michael Carreras would have had little to say on the subject beyond, “What the bloody hell are you talking about? Get out of my office!”, but it still irks me.

(2) For further evidence of just how badly put together this movie is, I suggest consulting the unusually extensive list of ‘goofs’ on IMDB.

(3) We should make clear that, after serving a long apprenticeship as a camera operator through the ‘60s, Grant did far better work as DP on ‘The Vampire Lovers’ and ‘Vampire Circus’ amongst others – so again, we can perhaps chalk up the fact that ‘Scars..’ looks as if it was shot under office strip lighting to budget and schedule shortcomings.

Gothic Originals / October Horrors # 6: El Mundo De Los Vampiros (Alfonso Corona Blake, 1961)

I confess, I get all these ‘50s/’60s Mexican vampire movies a bit confused. There were just so many of them produced in such a short time frame, all with fairly similar titles.

Consulting the chapter on Mexico in Pete Tombs’ ‘Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around The World’ (Titan Books, 1997) has however helped me to establish that ‘El Mundo De Los Vampiros’ was the third vampire film made by actor/producer Abel Salazar’s company ABSA. (Arriving about five years after Salazar revitalised Mexican fantastic cinema with 1957’s ‘El Vampiro’, ‘El Mundo..’ belatedly followed 1958’s ‘El Ataud del Vampiro’ [‘The Vampires Coffin’].)

Anyway, now that we’ve got that out of the way – ‘El Mundo de los Vampiros’ rules. It gets straight down to business right from the very first frame, as we see our vampire (Guillermo Murray, looking for all the world like a more fresh-faced, Hispanic Christopher Lee) rising from his tomb (it’s velvet-lined and has an automatic lid - nice). He wears a full opera cape, complete with one of those massive, upturned bat wing collars that only movie vampires (and Dr Strange) ever wear, and a huge silver amulet. (1)

Leaving his crypt, the vampire wonders through his splendidly cob-webbed dining room, before descending to the gigantic subterranean cavern beneath his house. Mouldering skeletons hang in chains from the walls, alongside some even more impressive cobwebs. The stone entranceway to the cavern has been crudely carved to resemble a mouth full of fangs, and beyond it, a pair of blazing stone braziers are decorated with human skulls on each corner, standing before a classic sacrificial altar. Naturally, the flames shoot upward when he gestures toward them with his cape.

After taking a few moments to admire the majesty of his interior décor, he moves on to – joy of joys – a full size pipe organ crafted entirely from hollowed out bones and skulls! Man, this is a vampire who knows how to live!

If you look this film up on IMDB, and you’ll immediately find reviewers deriding it as a “cheap Mexican vampire flick” and such like, but bugger that – this bone-organ is one of the most elaborate props I’ve ever seen in a ‘60s horror film. It must have taken somebody weeks to build this thing, and it is absolutely incredible.

As the vampire seats himself herself the keyboard and starts to lay down some dark, dissonant dirges, a brief cut away takes us above ground, to a desolate looking wilderness, in which a young couple are driving around in a land rover, having apparently lost their way.

Seemingly manifesting via some kind of underground gas jet, the vampire appears in the middle of the road, accompanied by a crowd of surprisingly effective animated bats. “Why doesn’t he move aside?”, the wife asks optimistically after her husband sounds the horn, but it is too late. Grinning, the vampire reveals fangs the size and shape of baby carrots. The woman screams, and before you know it, we’re back downstairs in the cavern, where The Count continues to work through some remarkably uncompromising modernist organ jams.

By this point, the vampire’s followers have begun to assemble. Weird looking, zombified guys in sinister, hand-sewn animal masks, body-stockings and capes, they arise from coffins scattered around the cave floor, or simply loom out of the darkness, shuffling around restlessly and awaiting further orders, strongly reminding me of the similar “creatures of darkness” featured in Jess Franco’s delirious ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ (1972).

Acknowledging their presence, the Head Vampire shrieks in the voice of a hissing cat, before returning to his music. His followers meanwhile begin preparations for some black magick rite, bringing goblets and a dagger to the altar, before a gaggle of Vampire Brides (recognisable by their diaphanous gowns and ridiculously OTT eye make-up, seemingly modelled on Carroll Borland’s get-up in Tod Browning’s ‘Mark of the Vampire’ (1935)) make their entrance, dragging the hypnotised wife of the kidnapped couple. Her protesting husband meanwhile is chained to a stake, whilst the follower vampires chew on his neck en masse.

The sacrifice, it transpires, is to be offered to Astraroth, “the evil spirit whom all of us here have come to adore”. Before doing the deed however, the Head Vampire pauses to reflect that “..with this dagger, I was murdered more than one hundred years ago, by a man who carried the cursed name of… Colman!”

Since then it seems, our vampire has dedicated his time to tracking down and destroying the remaining members of the accursed Colman dynasty – and yes, hearing him spit the rather mundane name of Colman with great vehemence and repulsion throughout this film proves very amusing.

You’d think wiping out a single bloodline over the course of a century would be easy work for such a ferocious Lord of the Undead, but he must have been slacking off a bit, because three Colmans remain extant – a father and two daughters. Using the hypnotised bride on the altar as a kind of human scrying orb, he establishes that they are all alive and well. Quoth the Vampire; “..as long as they refuse to join the legion of the living dead, I will not be able to give the signal which will launch the conquest of the universe!” (And you’d better believe that sounds pretty impressive when solemnly intoned in Spanish).

Eventually, after giving her neck a good, erotically-charged chew, the Head Vampire plunges his dagger into the neck of the sacrificial victim, but, instead of dying, his bite revives her as one of the evil brides! Her outré eye make up is already in place, and she turns to the camera and cackles in wild and uninhibited fashion.

By this point, we are over fifteen minutes into the film, and, perhaps sensing that the monster kids in the audience probably need a break from all this blood-curdling brilliance before their little hearts expire, ‘El Mundo de los Vampiros’ takes a deep breath, and reluctantly cuts to the ‘good guys’.

Now, I’ve seen enough Mexican horror films to realise that, when we cut to the good guys, it’s generally time to put the kettle on or visit the bathroom. Although such tedium is, in fairness, a tradition that stretches all the way back to Bram Stoker, these stiffly formal scenes in which well-to-do gentlemen pay effusive compliments to each other and chivalrously praise the beauty and achievement of the film’s soon-to-be-betrothed young ladies seem to be a particular blight upon Mexico’s contributions to horror cinema.

Even here though, ‘El Mundo de los Vampiros’ manages to liven things up a bit, investing it’s inevitable post-dinner party hand-shaking with an element of intriguing weirdness almost equivalent to the extraordinary scenes which have preceded it.

We are at a soiree held, of course, by the refined Senor Colman and his two eligible daughters, and this evening they are joined by an esteemed guest who has recently returned from ‘the capital’ – the handsome musical prodigy Rodolfo Sabre (Mauricio Garcés), who is of course urged to take a turn at the piano. (2)

Rodolfo demures, explaining that his hosts would not enjoy the kind of music he plays these days. “One could say that I study the science of music, in a way – the effect of sound on living beings […] sound can kill an animal, or a human being, or make them insane,” he helpfully explains.

Persuaded to play an example of this daring new music, he sits at the keyboard and knocks out some mildly dissonant, minor key romantic melodies. Dogs outside howl, one guest feels her spirit lift from her body, and another is reminded of the death of her mother. “This music contains elements that are aggressive, humourous, religious and terrifying, it produces an effect on all types of being,” Rodolfo tells his listeners.

He furthermore claims that the music he is playing originates in Transylvania, where it is used to “summon the dead” - and, right on cue, the Head Vampire appears in the doorway, his entrance accompanied by a brief orchestral fanfare that causes everyone to stand to attention.

Adopting the conventional “hey, I’m an eccentric Eastern European aristocrat who just moved to the neighbourhood, what’s up?” approach, Count Subotoi (for that is his human name) introduces himself to the assembled guests, but soon causes a scene when Rodolfo’s sinister music causes him to freak out (as he desperately tried to prevent his fangs from protruding from his lips, we presume), precipitating his hasty departure.

From this point onward, it must be said that the film begins to drag somewhat, as it proceeds along a fairly conventional vampire movie trajectory. As such, the vampire begins the laborious process of seducing the young ladies of the Colman household, mooning outside their windows, gaining entry and neck access in the form of a bat and eventually spiriting them off to his lair, all in the tried and tested manner.

One weakness that emerges once the full-strength craziness of the film’s opening act eases off is that, whilst Guillermo Murray clearly looks the part, he does not actually make for a very charismatic vampire. In this regard, it is worth noting that ‘El Mundo..’ was the first ABSA vampire film not to feature Mexico’s best known vampire actor, Germán Robles, who by this stage seems to have moved on to a bunch of rival vampire films from other production companies.

Could we thus chalk Murray up as Mexico’s equivalent of Mike Raven..? He has a bit of that bland, “unconvincing understudy” vibe about him, but the film is otherwise so strong, and his character so blessed his outrageous, comic book action to perform, that this deficiency doesn’t make much of a dent in the overall quality.

Anyway - naturally the steadfast gentlemen of the picture gradually figure out what The Count is up to and set out to stop him and reclaim their women, etc. One thing I thought was a bit odd in this respect is that, although Rodolfo’s Transylvanian music is supposed to ‘summon’ vampires, it appears in practice to have the opposite effect of freaking them out and making them grasp their heads and writhe about in pain… so I’m not sure what that’s all about. Just a sub-titling error perhaps?

As per Mexican monster movie tradition, ‘El Mundo..’ rallies significantly after its saggy middle section, mustering it’s forces for a great, action packed finale that is easily a match for the extraordinary opening outlined in detail above.

Yet another exciting feature of Count Subotoi’s vampire lair is his impressively huge and deep PIT OF SPIKES, and this gets plenty of play in the final act, including extensive use of a rather splendid, Bava-esque forced perspective shot taken from the bottom of the pit.

Needless to say, there is much fun to be had here with Rodolfo and Senor Colman punching vampires in the face, leaping across chasms etc, all leading up to a denouement in which… well, if you’ve read this review and can’t guess the nature by which our heroes nullify vampires evil power, you’ll probably enjoy the movie even more than I did.

I don’t have much more to say in conclusion, except to note that it saddens me to note how neglected and unfairly derided these vintage South of the Border horror films continue to be in the English speaking world. Though their uneven mixture of classic gothic atmosphere and loony monster bash thrills might not be to everyone’s taste, there is a whole world here that remains more or less invisible in terms of officially-sanctioned, English-friendly releases. Digging into it through, er, other means however reveals a seemingly unending supply of films that, like ‘El Mundo de los Vampiros’, are more fun than the proverbial barrel of monkeys.

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(1) Murray played another vampire in 1963’s ‘La Huella Macabra’ (“The Sinister Footprint”?), before going to on to what I’m sure was sterling work in ‘Neutron Traps the Invisible Killers’ (1965), ‘Planet of the Female Invaders’ and ‘Gigantes Planetarios’ (both ’66). God bless Mexico in the 1960s.

(2) Another Mexican horror veteran, Mauricio Garcés also appeared in ‘La Llorona’ (‘The Crying Woman’, 1961) and the fantastic ‘El Barón del Terror’ (aka ‘The Brainiac’, 1962), amongst other Salazer/ABSA productions.

FRANCO FILES: Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein(1972)

 

AKA:

‘Drácula contra Frankenstein’, ‘Die Nacht der offenen Särge’, ‘The Screaming Dead’.

Context:

Incredibly, there was a new Jess Franco film hitting cinemas about once a month during 1972-73 – an astounding work rate, even by the standards of the man who is quite possibly the most prolific feature film director of all-time. For some reason or other, Jess took time out during this period of peak productivity to bang out a couple of slightly uncharacteristic Frankenstein/Dracula ‘monster bash’ movies – whether on the behest of some producer, or just for a change of pace, who knows.

Of these, ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ is usually held to be the most noteworthy – in fact it’s one of the wildest pictures Franco ever made - but I think ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’ also has its charms. A slightly more low key effort, its general vibe has a lot in common with the kind of tired, last gasp gothic horrors that independent producers in Europe still seemed to be making in defiance of all reason in the early ‘70s (think ‘Lady Frankenstein’, ‘Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks’, that sort of thing). But, Franco being Franco, he puts a uniquely strange and somnambulant spin on the material, resulting in a movie that is… certainly unlike anything else being offered up by the commercial film industry in 1972.

Content:

You know those scenes that sometimes turn up in ‘70s/’80s horror films, when the characters go to the cinema and watch a schlocky film-within-a-film monster movie (the unspoken implication being that of course OUR smart, modern horror film isn’t like one of those corny old flicks etc etc)..? Well basically, ‘Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein’ plays a lot like a real life, feature length version of the fake footage created for scenes like that. I can’t pretend to know much about how or why the film got made, but it seems like somebody just got on the blower to Franco and ordered a few reels of horror film, so he turned on the sausage machine and churned it out.

Largely plotless and featuring no real dialogue in the opening half hour (and precious little after that), ‘Prisoner of Frankenstein’ exists within that magic moment when the production of genre-based exploitation footage becomes so mindless and automatic that the results emerge as almost entirely abstract, bordering on avant garde. Kind of a zen-like ‘first thought / best thought’ meditation on the proliferation of horror movie imagery through popular culture, perhaps? Or alternatively, just imagine if some joker kept spiking Al Adamson’s coffee with ketamine and you’ll be thinking along the right lines.

In fairness, some kind of a storyline does begin to develop in the second half of the film, communicated largely via a post-production voiceover from Dennis Price’s Dr. Frankenstein. Although his conventional monster seems to be doing quite well for itself, the Baron seems to have an altogether more ambitious scheme in mind this time around. Announcing that he “now rules the great beyond”, Frankenstein has succeeded in attaining dominion over the spirit of Count Dracula (Howard Vernon) and another female vampire (Britt Nichols), intending them to head up a “new and bizarre army, an army of shadows” that he claims will allow “the great beyond” to “overpower the world”. So there ya go. Any questions?

Of this hypothetical army of darkness, the only other member who turns up – perhaps summoned by some gypsy magic, perhaps not – is the Wolfman, and unfortunately for the Baron, he seems largely concerned with just stirring up a ruckus, picking fights with the other monsters as the inevitable flaming torch wielding villagers led by vampire hunter Alberto Dalbes closes in.

Kink:

It’s possible that a stronger cut of this might been assembled for some markets, but there’s certainly very little hint of eroticism in the version I’m watching. A German language cabaret scene, and the subsequent kidnapping of the singer by the Monster, seem like a straight recap of ‘..Dr. Orlof’, with some similarly unsavoury “lady in lingerie tied to the operating table” jive following in turn, but it’s pretty mild stuff by ‘70s standards. Nichols certainly looks great as ‘un chica vampire’, and there’s a marginally kinky moment when Anne Libert (appearing as ‘Primera víctima de Drácula’) takes her leather boots off, but, uh… that’s about it? 1/5

Creepitude:

With any thread of narrative coherence banished to the same “great beyond” that Dr. Frankenstein keeps going on about, most of this film’s run time is spent drifting insensibly through a patchwork of certifiably creepy goings-on.

Bats both real (stock footage?) and laughably unreal (flopping about on strings, perhaps left over from 1970’s ‘Count Dracula’?) are much in evidence, and Howard Vernon seems to be popping up outside windows and doors all over town, white-faced, top-hatted and baring his fangs like some sort of Dracula/Orlof crossover, as intermittent bursts of lightning strike, and prolific Spanish actress Paca Gabaldón freaks out in what I think was her only role for Franco, rocking back and forth humming to herself and shrieking in a room full of by neo-primitive sunflower paintings and straw dollies… (an example of the common Franco motif of occasionally cutting to seemingly unconnected scenes of an unidentified woman experiencing some sort of mental breakdown, perhaps implying that she’s either dreaming the action on screen, or else a prior victim of its antagonists, cf: ‘Lorna the Exorcist’, ‘Nightmares Come At Night’). 

Grumpy looking Alberto Dalbes rides around endlessly in a coach, whipping his horses and looking determined, whilst Dennis Price favours a vintage motor car, in which he cruises around (sometimes with Vernon sharing the back seat) looking thoroughly suspicious in a fur-collared coat and fez. Back at the chateau, he’s got a superb collection of mad scientist gear on the go (lots of flashing lights!), and his own monster to play with (an endearingly dirt-cheap, rubber mask approximation of the Karlof monster, it’s a more traditional creation than ‘Erotic Rites..’ rather bizarre “bodybuilder painted silver” effort).

Probably the film’s strangest scene is the one in which Price resurrects Dracula by draining the blood of the kidnapped cabaret singer into a bell-jar containing a bat (a real one, alarmingly - seeing the poor blighter floundering around as they dribble ‘blood’ all over it is pretty uncomfortable), as lights flicker and the mad scientist machines whir away like happy hour at the Radiophonic Workshop. At the crucial moment, the doc hits the power switch, a fizzing coil overheats, and bat, bell-jar and everything suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke, leaving a fully sized, opera-caped Howard Vernon lying there! Top dollar horror flick craziness.

Soundtrack-wise, Bruno Nicolai’s score from ‘Justine’ is re-used wholesale here, but his bombastic, James Bernard-esque theme actually sounds a lot more comfortable and less irritating in this pulpy, ghoulish context. Elsewhere, a strange backdrop of exaggerated wind sounds, looped animal cries and disembodied melodic humming proves incredibly atmospheric, summoning that eerie, earthy atmosphere that characterises many of the best ‘70s Spanish horror films. 4/5

Pulp Thrills:

Well, let’s see: we’ve got Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman running around, loads of pulsing, flickering mad scientist machinery, a hunchback assistant (named Morpho of course, this time portrayed by some hairy ginger guy), lines like “these two vampires will obey my orders and terror will prevail”, and a final monster bash showdown that aspires to the primitive chutz-pah of a Mexican luchadore movie. Pulp enough for you? 5/5

Altered States:

In the notes I scribbled down whilst re-watching this film to get some screen-grabs, I wrote that at times ‘..Prisoner of Frankenstein’ is “like some retarded version of one of Chris Marker’s travelogue films”. Perhaps not the most eloquent phrase I’ve ever penned, but I can’t think of a better way of communicate this film’s accidental avant garde stylings, as Franco spends his time shakily zooming in on dogs, cats, flocks of birds, window panes, street signs, candlesticks… I know it sounds mental to say this in view of the film’s subject matter, but it’s almost got a documentary/home movie kinda thing going on in places, as if Jess is simply capturing the minutiae of his surroundings for posterity, and monsters and vampires just keep getting in the way.

With almost every shot climaxing in some kind of weird, meandering zoom, zeroing in on some seemingly random detail, this is precisely the kind of slap-dash, zoom-heavy direction that Franco’s detractors have always ridiculed, but once you get used to the technique, it has its own idiosyncratic appeal. Breakin’ all the rules just for the sake of speed and laziness, it allows the film to run free alongside the director’s wavering attention, as his unpredictable camera movements imitate the way one’s eyes might shift back and forth across an unfamiliar scene. It may be the complete opposite of the well-planned, deliberate filmmaking that we’re all taught to respect and aspire to, but here we actually get to witness in real-time the process of the director noticing something or other, thinking “whoa, check that out”, and filling the screen with it, just because he feels like it. The effect is disorientating, and the constant disruption of on-screen space can be near intolerable at first, but the more of these films you watch, the more you’ll learn to love the woozy, displaced feeling that results.

The somnambulant pacing too is something that neophytes are just going to have to roll with if they want to remain conscious beyond the halfway point. Regardless of what transpires in them, Franco films are never exactly ‘fast-paced’ (Stephen Thrower has spoken of him filming according to his own “internal, metabolic tempo”, or something like that), and the way he lets scenes drag and wonder and drift into each other has a tendency to make any sense of logic or connection between the images disappear entirely. Once again here, he manages the unique feat of taking a film in which a huge number of things happen, but almost all of them fall out of the viewer’s mind immediately, leaving us with the impression that we’re stuck in a kind of trance-like, repetitive limbo, as the clock slooowly rolls by. In the best possible way, of course. 4/5

Sight-seeing:

Much of this film appears to be shot around a mist-shrouded hilltop castle overlooking a dilapidated little Spanish town full of narrow, maze-like streets, and, if some of the meandering landscape shots are to be believed,  I think this is actually a single location, rather than a composite of several places. Clearly a GREAT one-stop horror movie shooting destination, it lends the film a huge amount of ready-made atmosphere, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen such a distinctive locale popping up in more gothic horror movies.

Don’t take my word for it though – writing on imdb in November 2000, one ‘Maxorin-2’ commented that:

“This is the horror film with the best castle I've ever seen. It's better than all that castles of the Hammer. Trust me. It's bigger and darker. Very strange and interesting. I've visited it in Alicante, Spain, and it seemed to me that Dracula was walking around. If you want to be scared go on and watch it.”

Duly noted. 4/5

Conclusion:

An utterly disconnected piece of filmmaking, I think ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’ actually makes a good tool for the diagnosis of Franco Fever.

If you’re unafflicted by the malady, then the film’s complete lack of narrative drive or audience involvement, its lethargic pacing and inept, disorientating zooms, will likely prove insufferable, to the extent that you may find yourself furious that this aimless garbage is actually being offered to you as a piece of structured entertainment. And that’s fine. You’re better off that way. Just walk away, put something else in the DVD player. You’ve got a long and fulfilling life ahead of you.

For those of us who’ve already succumbed to the sickness though, it’s too late - this is pure nectar of the gods. Drink it in in all its pointless, zonked out glory, my brethren, and go to a happy place. I’ve watched it three times at the time of writing, and I’ll likely watch it again. In the Church of Franco, we can ALL rule the great beyond.