Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) aka Horror of Dracula

Thanks to this movie Van Helsing was my second action hero after Batman. Chasing down vampires, flinging himself at windows, striking heroic poses with improvised crosses, saving the day...all made an indelible impression. I wanted to be Van Helsing.

None of the rest of it stuck, though, because my older sister watched the movies too and always ordered me out of the room whenever someone was about to get bitten. Christopher Lee never had the same chance with me that Peter Cushing did, the scares never registered, and my sexuality was not imprinted by Hammer's women. How would one put it – that I was left unscarred for life? Hammer should have been a natural for me but, sadly, acquiring that taste has been an uphill slog.

If that's an awkward introduction to the movie, I guess it's a bit of excuse-making. I could argue the impact this movie had on the genre but if I did I'd be passing along half-understood observations from the scholarly works of others.

I should have opened the review the way the movie opens: with blood, bright red and dripping. Dracula has always been a lurid tale...corpses reanimated by evil, victims exsanguinated for thirst, submission to urges for illicit sex. Before 1958, these feverish haunts of the mind had remained matters of suggestion on screen. Hammer made them explicit and gave them color. Before the opening credits have even finished, audiences are jolted with a score blaring simple notes of straight-out alarm, the sight of flowing blood, and an enveloping widescreen image just to make them feel overwhelmed .

The funny thing is that Hammer didn't get there first. Two months prior to Horror of Dracula's release, The Return of Dracula had done the same thing: vivid red blood welling up from what might have been the first explicit closeup of a staking, in a widescreen format. The shot is all the more shocking for the rest of the film having been shot in black and white. Yet it was the Hammer film that is remembered for it, and which has taken its place as a seminal film in the genre, while Return is largely forgotten.

In The Return of Dracula, a contemporary California family welcomes long-estranged relative Bellac Gordal home from Romania, unaware that the real Bellac has been killed and his identity stolen by Dracula to escape capture in his homeland. Cousin Rachel, an older teen, at first takes a sentimental approach to Bellac, but he remains reclusive even as he moves into the family home. Soon he vampirizes Rachel's friend Jenny and has designs on Rachel herself. It's a good movie, with fine production values and acting, competent low-key direction, and lovely if unimaginative photography. Its story is directly modeled on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, and in tone plays more like film noir than horror. That's why it failed where Hammer succeeded: while there's nothing at all wrong with Return, it did nothing to challenge viewers. They'd seen it before. This Dracula didn't even have the taboo factor as his feedings were strictly asexual – that is, family friendly.

Released practically simultaneously, the two Dracula films could not have made a stronger contrast.

The difference? Christopher Lee. Christopher fuckin' Lee! Women do love their bad boys, and Lee was the baddest. Casting the Count as a handsome romantic idol had already been a standard set by Lugosi, but Lugosi's Dracula had been charming, urbane, witty. Not Lee. Lee was hate in a cape. When we first meet, he's at the top of a staircase with us looking up at him, and after descends the camera gets a good intimate shot from inches away – still looking up. That is to say, him looking down at us where we belong. For his guest Jonathon Harker, Dracula manages a chilly civility, but the facade doesn't last past his second appearance minutes later when he's crossed by one of his vampirized women. Suddenly he's snarling like a beast – there's a table between them that he had set for Harker's meal, and instead of running around it Lee leaps upon it and pounces on her from it. That same snarl lurks beneath the surface of his sneer when he takes his bedded victims: another easy conquest, and his contempt is as naked as his lust. Chris Lee has a scant few minute of screen time, and no dialogue whatsoever beyond his introduction, but the indelible impression he makes with those few minutes make his presence felt throughout. 

Dracula is only half the equation. The women are the other half. In previous cinema the women of Dracula put up an agreeably pious struggle against their own desire for him, or showed no desire at all if the film were restrained (timid) enough. Hammer changed all that. These women are eagerly complicit in their own ostensible demise. Yet, it's a demise that would see them live on unshackled from society's mores. It's an interesting move, but more immediately it caught audiences breathless: no more faux objections, no pretending that sex is undesirable or that the vampire really just wants to feed. Fuck no, he wants to feast.

Had Chris Lee never made another movie, he would still have been a rock star for Dracula.

The first time we see Dracula take a new conquest, before his arrival she behaves like a teen girl about to sneak out the bedroom window to meet the date her parents disapprove of or a wife hiding the fact she's about to join the lover she's cheating with. She's so breathless with anticipation that she almost blows her pretense of calm before the unsuspecting members of her family as she rushes them out of her bedroom, throws open the veranda doors, and arranges herself on the bed. In this movie Dracula's women are not victims. This time the women eat him up.

That's led to a theory among some that Dracula is actually the hero of the film, and Van Helsing the villain trying to stamp out the sexual liberation of womankind in the name of all that's Holy and patriarchal. I don't entirely buy that, but it's a strong case worth considering. Under that reading, Dracula is a cypher rather than a character, and so cannot be judged as a character: he has no motive, he simply is - a force of nature one either denies or accommodates. I can hear poor Arthur Holmwood arguing with Van Helsing - “But the female orgasm is a myth, everyone knows that!” If Van Helsing seems kindly and concerned, well, that's often the demeanor of unwanted help...”Love the sinner, hate the sin” and all that. Surrender your own identity to society, we know what's best for you. Let's not let the men slide on social morality either – if your sweetie threatens to enjoy her sexuality, men, who better to brutally stamp that out than you who love them most? Pick up that stake, Arthur Holmwood, and run her through. You're saving her immortal soul.

Hell, I'm starting to convince myself the theory has merit. Still, I can't adopt it without major reservations. In vampire fiction one has to actually die in order to live forever. That can be taken as spot on to the above theory because Western mores do tend to treat sexually active women as dead to society, but in Dracula the vampire's loved ones become dead to the women in return. Freedom in this tale isn't just freedom from stricture, it's freedom from conscience, from feelings of love or compassion or empathy. Sexuality shouldn't be a matter of one or the other – sex or love. The metaphor has worth but it has its limitations too.

Besides, I'm biased in wishing to see Van Helsing as a hero. It's the more simplistic reading, I admit, less challenging, but it makes me happy. Chris Lee gives the movie its edge but I'd contend that Horror of Dracula could not have worked with Lee alone. Peter Cushing provides Dracula's polar opposite in sentiment and is his equal in presence. They need each other or the tale is lopsided. As Van Helsings go, I think Cushing is my favorite...not the most accurate to the novel (that would be Frank Finlay in the 1977 BBC version) but the most even-handed, the most empathetic, and arguably the most effortlessly personable of them all. Unlike some this VH refuses to railroad his allies, and is unfailingly kind to those watching helplessly as their loved ones succumb to forces beyond them. Cushing, who can be one cold bastard when he plays a villain, has big puppy dog eyes fixed in that skeletal visage of his. When he feels pain, you can't help but feel it with him.

Michael Gough also must be mentioned, and that's a surprise because he's the one with the unenviable task of playing Holmwood. Holmwood typically is one of the young paramours watching his intended slip away. He's young, strapping, forthright...and that's all there is to him. He's usually considered a complete drip. Actually, in most adaptations he doesn't make any impression at all, so the ones that leave the worst impression are the only ones that are memorable.

But not this time. Holmwood is always the last character to be convinced that vampires are real, and the last on board with killing Dracula. Most often he has to be bullied a bit to see the light. Horror of Dracula gives us a Holmwood who is credibly disbelieving at first but who has the initiative and intelligence to investigate on his own without having to be dragged every petulant step of the way. Gough does a superb job with the role, making wholly dimensional (and wholly sympathetic) a demanding character arc. If there has been another Holmwood half so compelling it isn't coming to mind.

Universal was very protective of its own Dracula and kept Hammer wary enough to make sure their production couldn't be mistaken as a copy. That meant changes to the script, which streamlines the tale to a great degree, but also the whole look and atmosphere. Gone are the ruins and cobwebs, the chiaroscuro shadows, the forbidding crags of the Carpathian Mountains, the old-world solemnity of moneyed English estates...and the fog, that wonderful mysterious fog that cloaks so much. I miss all of that. No doubt it's the foremost reason that it's taken me so long to give the movie its due, I was looking at what was missing rather than what was offered.

Changing things up led to some alterations I've struggled with a little. There's no Renfield, but with the swift pace of the telling his absence isn't noticed. OTOH I can't help notice that the interior of Dracula's castle is a cheery, well-lit place, clean, far from an air of menace or mystery...nor does it convey Dracula as a being of enduring immortality. Likewise his home locale is a minor complaint first in that it's apparently in a valley rather than the usual remote height (contradicting those great intro shots of the Count seen as superior), and that his home nation is but a few hours ride from his European target. It reduces his menace for me in subliminal ways as h is no longer quite the alien invading from a remove. In fact, he's practically domestic. They're all good neighbors!

It's only conjecture, but I think perhaps all this is another reason why Horror of Dracula made such a splash. It's been said that the cobwebs and Gothic cliches of the Golden Era of Universal monsters had become risible. Certainly the Abbot & Costello flicks didn't help. I can't agree, though, when you had Mario Bava and the Italians making such affecting use of the same imagery beginning with I Vampiri only the year before. It even translated well to color under Bava's masterful guidance. Dracula, though, that's another thing. Dracula has baggage, carries expectations. When you see the cliches in a Dracula movie, they're comforting. They feel like home. You can kick back and chuckle at every wolf howl, scurrying spider, every familiar line, you can turn to the people with you and do a Lugosi impression for a laugh. Horror of Dracula denied audiences of the day that comfort zone. It must have been thrilling.

Mentioned before, this is the first Dracula in color. That means blood, of course, but just as important it means flesh at its warmest and most alluring. When Dracula gets an eyeful of invitingly soft decolletage, so do we. For all the lack of Gothic atmosphere, I find myself mesmerized by the stained glass windows of all things. Don't know why. There's a shot near the finale when the windows themselves are hidden from view yet their colors softly bathe a wall with the promise of sunrise to vanquish the vampire. I couldn't tell you why, but I'm taken with that shot.  The entire movie is subtly lit and photographed, never overstated or lurid.

I finally got my chance to play Van Helsing too, on the stage in two different productions (Franklin High School and Artists' Repertory Theater, both using the same terrible script). Cushing remained firmly in mind as our high school drama teacher (and the play's director) had to tell me not to strike action poses wielding the crucifix. I don't know which is the more absurd, me striking action poses or (atheist) me running around thrusting crosses in people's faces. Even more ironic if Van Helsing's mission in life is really to save women from their own sexual autonomy – not my values at all. Got to do the poster art though someone else added the lettering. And I had already fallen in love with Dana Cooper, our Mina, and managed not to skewer her on the actual splintery wooden stake I was handed in lieu of the collapsible prop I was supposed to hit her with. That's another strange story, and it hasn't ended yet...but that high school production is a cherished memory.

Sôseiji aka Gemini (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1999)

“I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.”

“I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm. “

“...it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.”

- from the modern Hippocratic Oath

I am restricted from telling too much about Sôseiji. That would be robbing the film of its mysteries. It may have to suffice that you know it's a Grimm's Fairy Tale of a film about a doctor who may not survive a meeting with his doppleganger. Is the doppleganger real? A ghost, a mental aberration...an act of God? A figure of punishment, or one of redemption? The first time I saw Gemini, I didn't know whether what was happening onscreen was meant to be taken at face value. I guessed wrong.

It is 1910 as the Meiji Era nears a close, and Yukio is settling into his life at home after attending the wounded in the Russo/Japan War. Yukio has earned the trust and accolades of his peers and his community. He is nothing if not respectable, and highly civilized in his parents' image. They have made him the man he is, from his father's ethics to his mother's deepseated bigotry toward the poor.

Yukio has a wife, Rin. Rin was once a patient, having been rescued after a fire and suffering from amnesia. There's no love lost between Rin and the parents: she is acceptable charity. Something about her bothers Yukio's mother, but Rin remains just this side of objectionable. Lucky for Yukio, or he wouldn't have the spine to love her. All told, Yukio has a very comfortable life. A respectable life.

Even so, Yukio is uneasy. He's bothered by matters of conscience regarding the oath he took as a physician, and he senses he's being watched by someone outside the household which doubles as his clinic.

Not long after he makes a critical decision Yukio meets his twin, who promptly throws him down a dry well. The double assumes Yukio's identity and begins to rehabilitate the doctor's image all the while keeping Yukio alive to torment him.

More of the plot than that I won't tell. To be honest I'm still studying the film. Aspects of it have gone unexamined as I've just now gotten a grasp on the triangle at the heart of the film. 

Director Tsukamoto is again working for-hire but unlike with Hiruko the Goblin this time he makes something personal to himself of a short story by Edogawa Rampo. Gemini unfolds with all the logic of a fable, depending on ironies as tragic as they are unlikely and on outrageous twists of fate. Leaving Tokyo behind with all its cold surfaces, everything else opens up from the claustrophobic to the lush and open: a rural village setting of trees and rivers, homes of ascetic formal beauty and tranquility, slums filled with color-bedecked survivors who entertain for scraps. The director's visual palette is given free voice to soar with natural colors, and bold lighting: cold white floods, sunset oranges, purples, greens. It's one of Tsukamoto's most beautiful movies to look at. The natural world suits him and he should go there more often.

The first time we see the double, he appears as a wraith from Japanese lore, a savage storm of colorful rags and pelts. It's one of the movies most memorable moments as he poses and cartwheels like an actor in a more traditional Japanese stage drama. Gemini is a stylistic melange on other levels as well, from lighting to costumes. For sound, Chu Ishikawa's driving industrial beats are traded for creepy disjointed vocals and a delicate piano lament. 

Tsukamoto is often compared to David Cronenberg for the body horrors of Tetsuo and Videodrome. I think the comparison between these two directors has never been so appropriate as here, though for a different reason. Cronenberg's cinema has always been concerned with the mutability of identity. Tssukamoto has always focused on hidden sides to the psyche, identities repressed. Rin still fulfills that function in Gemini, but what the fates have in store for Yukio and his doppleganger go well beyond his usual obsession with releasing inner furies. Rin herself is a puzzlebox, cautiously letting us in on her own journey of identity shifts a little at a time. Rin and Yukio share that in common, both base their identities on fear of society's judgment.

One of the most rewarding things about Tsukamoto's work is that there is always something new to discover on further viewings. For example, an important aspect of Sôseiji is the ways in which the director contrasts the life of poverty with that of privilege. I should be writing about that but I'm barely beginning to see that facet of the movie myself. Until now I've still been sorting out the dynamics of the central characters (the M-F-M triangle again).

I will dare to say that the fairy tale tone of Sôseiji allows Tsukamoto to give full unabashed voice to his humanism for the first time, but ya know what? I'm still guessing. The final sequence of shots are still ambiguous enough to make me wonder whether the lesson has been learned. I prefer to think that it has.

Bullet Ballet (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)

I have to confess up front that an aspect of this movie is always going to fly right over my head. Guns aren't my thing, neither are they a pet issue for me. They have iconic power in the West. The rest of the world sees the West as gun-crazed. I can scarcely imagine what iconic meaning guns must have in Japan where private ownership is illegal.

Whatever that might be, a gun cannot be obtained in Tokyo without going to a great deal of trouble. Goda (Shinya Tsukamoto) badly wants one. Not just any gun, but the same model that ended his girlfriend's life. If he can wrap his hand around its grip, Goda hopes, maybe he'll be able to wrap his head around her suicide.

Goda's mind is in a spiral. What was she doing with a gun?? Was she involved in criminal activity? Drugs? Why did she kill herself? She must have led another life, had another side of herself that he never knew about, that she never trusted him with. Now he can never ask her about it.

There is one person who might give him insight. Not long ago Goda saved a young woman from apparent suicide, a street punk named Chisato. She wasn't overly grateful, judging by the teeth marks she left in him.

Chisato belongs to a restless street gang that gets its kicks and its money from shaking down salarymen like Goda, the symbol of a society they despise, when they're not rumbling with rival gangs. They're low on the totem pole of urban crime, but none of them really care as it's mostly just passing the time. Facing their own futures, most of them are secretly making their ways into that domesticated life. Secretly, because it shames them with their peers.

Chisato isn't like them. Chisato sees no future that doesn't terrify her. Where the others plan out their lives, Chisato joins the violence night after night waiting for oblivion.

Once a gun enters the mix, everything changes. They're all headed for a collision.

Filmed in stark black and white with a handheld camera that emphasizes restlessness, Tsukamoto finds a Tokyo his movies have never shown before – the real one. It's an exciting place, especially at night mixing it up at street level. Tokyo Fist was shot with an artist's eye, Bullet Ballet trades that for a documentarian immediacy. So too does the director continue to find new departure points for his past concerns.

Violence is swift, unglamorized., and emotionally gutpunching – knowing his life is about to end, one youth is on the phone. “Mom”, he says with heartbreaking regret, “I'm not coming home.” the next moment his head has a hole in it.

Chisato could be the spiritual relation to Hizuru of Tokyo Fist except that she lacks Hizuru's spark of life. She belongs neither to nor with anyone, the gang being wallpaper to her bored existence. Goda is just another distraction until he persists in invading on her awareness and that of the gang. He's a mystery, and in him she begins to see a reflection of herself that gang life no longer offers. Goda, in fact, is sinking to her level of alienation from life.

Meanwhile, the gang's alpha male, Goto, comes into possession of the much-sought-after weapon. At first, it's an easy tool to resort to and threatens to change the balance of power between rival gangs, a fact not unnoticed by their Yakuza elders. Soon enough “shit gets real” and the power of the gun unmans Goto.

There's no message to be found. Tsukamoto isn't interested in guns as a political issue any more than I am. What Bullet Ballet is instead is a potent meditation on generational experience and depression. Chisato is compellingly played by the beautiful and sexy Kirina Mano, with pixie haircut, tight leather miniskirt, and street-ugly Doc Martens. It's not an easy role, and she essays it with mercurial shifts of ennui, and cynical amusement giving way to wonder and vulnerability. In a repeated gesture that becomes a motif, she stands with her arms out, unguarded (one could say Christlike). She stands over the edge of a subway platform with her arms stretched out as it rushes past at her back - “I'm open to the death this might bring”. Later she will strike the same pose during a gang brawl when about to be struck with a weapon (“I'm open to your blows”. The final shots of the film will see her “open” once again, running the streets of Tokyo, and it will mean something completely different.

Tsukamoto further questions the modern urbanite life as he's done with previous films. Goda shared a life with a woman he didn't realize until too late that he didn't fully know. Later, another stranger asks him to marry her for legal residency – once married she'll go her way unless he wishes occasional sex as payment. No intimacy required, no human bonds sought.

To date, this was Tsukamoto's most mature and sophisticated work, his best and my third personal favorite. It gets my highest recommendation.

Tokyo Fist (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1995)

This. This is where Shinya Tsukamoto came into his own. If Tetsuo was about learning his craft, and Tetsuo II about teaching himself the fundamentals of storytelling, Tokyo Fist was about fully exploring the humanity of his characters. Setting aside Hiruko the Goblin, that's only three feature films. That's a tight learning curve.

Tsuda (Shinya Tsukamoto) is an insurance salesman. He is harried by the pressures of his job, not really happy but highly comfortable with a nice apartment and a live-in girlfriend Hizuru (Kaori Fuji) he takes for granted. It's a plug-&-play life. Everything fits, no reason to screw with it. Hizuru is content to make half-hearted attempts at arousing Tsuda's erotic interest which doesn't extend much further than buying her virginal white dresses that fit little better than sacks. He advises her that all men are wolves and orders her to avoid them.

On his walk spots a dead animal in an alley, decaying. When he passes that way again later it has been removed. It had been a sign of life (and the messy vitality of it), and now it's forgotten, no trace left or tolerated by society. This is Tsuda's world...sterile by collusion..

A chance encounter reunites Tsuda with his best friend from school, Kojima (Koji Tsukamoto, the director's brother), an aspiring boxer. Kojima is all smiles but plans to dismantle Tsuda's life and psyche.

With his first few films, Tsukamoto had established a pattern: a male protagonist, imperfect but our point of identification; a male antagonist, the catalyst that transforms our hero in some way but not much more; the woman caught between them who will be important to the hero but story-wise a passive element . Tokyo Fist turns the formula on its head.

I'll warn you now, there are spoilers ahead. I can't discuss the movie without them, and I really want to. Sorry.

In their youths Tsuda and Kojima burned with inner fire, a blaze that Kojima has carefully tended and stoked all these years. Seeing that Tsuda hasn't done the same enrages Kojima and gives his animal rage a new focus. His psychological assault on his old friend begins by convincing Tsuda that Kojima and Hizuru are having an affair.

Oblivious to Hizuru's faithfulness to him, Tsuda devolves before her, consumed by jealousy and impotent rage until finally she sees him attack and be beaten by Kojima. It's a powerful sight, her Tsuda whimpering and Kojima preening like a bestial thing unleashed. It breaks some leash in her psyche, and soon she has ditched the white sack for a tight red dress, shorn her hair to near-punk shortness, and starts exploring body modifications like piercings, weights in her skin, and tattoos (something respectable Japanese society finds abhorrent). She's not a masochist – the physical pain is an adrenaline rush. She moves out of the apartment she and Tsuda have shared.

Kojima hasn't stolen her, Tsuda has driven her away by his very possessiveness and distrust. Thanks to Kojima, Tsuda has found once more the spark of life within himself. However, he doesn't know what to do with it – he's lost his girlfriend, he neglects his job, fails to pay his rent...he cannot focus on his own life, consumed as he is with Kojima and Hizuru.

Here the formula is starting to break down already, as our presumed protagonist Tsuda devolves not only in Hizuru's estimation but in our own. Simply put, it becomes hard to root for the guy before the first act closes, and for a moment Hizuru looks to replace him. On the other hand, she turns such a chill toward him that she too is hard to feel any sympathy for. Tsukamoto is doing a boxer's dance around the points of the triangle with audience sympathy.

Kojima also loses his inward focus, obsessed first with destroying Tsuda and then puzzling over Hizuru who refuses to be the conquest he had assumed. Unwittingly, his unmanning of Tsuda has freed Hizuru, and he utterly fails to recognize that he has sparked her own inner life force. When she begins to explore it, it has the ironic effect of unmanning Kojima himself. He is incapable of accepting her true self, he is repelled and afraid when her true self emerges even though it's he that unleashed her. This shakes his self-assurance and his vision, and threatens to undo him when he is asked to face off in the ring with a boxer who left his last opponent dead.

That's Tsukamoto evolving again: his catalyst (Kojima) has now himself become catalyzed, and the passive female third point for the first time in any of the director's films has become a potent agent of change that overwhelms both men. While Tsuda and Kojima obsess over each other, Hizuru turns her gaze inward to understand what is going on in her own soul. Both men have failed her. She had moved in with Kojima to better understand her self.

Thus, Hizuru is the first to find her way...but not without the help of Tsuda, who begins to master his own fire abd by doing so comes to recognize hers. And here's the big spoiler as far as I'm concerned, and the thing that won me over. Kojima, who opened Hizuru to her true self, is too little a man to deal with her, it is ultimately Tsuda (the man who loves her) that accepts Hizuru's true self and vindicates her at-times confused and alarmed journey of self-realization.

Meanwhile Kojima has become at last a fully realized character in his own right. Our sympathies now lie fully with all three. Previously, Tsukamoto has been a stylist whose humanism has been only glimpsed within clever filmmaking. With Tokyo Fist he has given it full voice.

One thing remains the same, the director maintains his visual signature though expanding his color palette. The handheld camera work, the bursts of frenetic energy, the heavy blue and amber filters and lighting are all present as is the punk score by collaborator Chu Ishikawa. More natural colors are allowed in, and Tsukamoto further refines his vision of Tokyo as an inescapable prison of towering smooth and sterile blocks into a thing of poetry more home to science fiction. The only thing of nature its denizens ever see is the occasional small patch of sky far beyond reach, visible in small windows framed by the overwhelming architecture.

Pay attention to the one shot where lush foliage is seen, and try to tell me you weren't moved by it.

Drakula Istanbul'da (Mehmet Muhtar, 1953)

Faithfulness to the source in a Dracula adaptation is a tricky thing. You can get the details spot on and miss the flavor entirely. Removing the tale from its setting, as some versions do, has been especially dicey.

Stoker's novel is one of British xenophobia of the East, the fear that their women and their economy were at risk.. If the story of Dracula held any significant undertone for the Turks – aside from a chance to besmirched Vlad III – I have no knowledge of it. I expect they just knew a cracking good story when they read it – or a great villain. Tvlad Tepes did not endear himself ot the Turks, and it's not surprising they got in on the action.

Properly told, the Dracula story has always had a distinctly English flavor to it beginning with the manners and sensibilities of its characters to its very proper concern over sexual mores and fear of social/class contamination. Even the American-based Universal film felt essentially English. That flavor is not to be found in Drakula Istanbul'da, though, which transplants the tale to modern-day Turkey. This movie has a more broadly European feel to it, not far removed from Italian cinema for a breezy suavity wholly removed from the more staid English form.

At first the changes changes are minimal. Azmi (the Harker character) travels to Romania to meet Dracula at his castle, to arrange the sale of some properties back home in Istanbul. For thirty five minutes the story is familiar, adding a hunchbacked servant but marking the first screen treatment of Dracula's canine fangs, the stolen baby for the bride (singular, not a trio) to feed upon and the baby's distraught mother, Dracula's descent of the castle wall, and Azmi's attempt to kill the sleeping vampire with a shovel. Not for nothing do some hail this version's fidelity to Stoker.

It is the appearance of the Mina character that marks a radical alteration. Mina was a proper young Englishwoman, concerned with Victorian decency in her own conduct and her worldly outlook. If she looked forward at all to women of the future it was in her personal bravery and forthrightness, not I proving a woman's place as an equal...and certainly not as a sexually autonomous being. Mina was a being of strict Victorian virtue, and would have been proud of it if pride were not unladylike.

Her counterpart in this film, Arzin, is also a woman of virtue but her virtues are entirely of another age and culture. Where Mina Murray was s schoolmistress, Arzin Arsoy, is a stage artist, a dancer. whose acts are fairly sexy for the era. Quite a popular one, too, fending off advances and being asked to perform of benefits. All the same, Arzin is an upright woman, faithful to her fiance Azmi. Even so, it would positively give madame Mina the vapours, as would the way the movie constantly revels in lead actress Annie Ball's legginess.

Every Dracula adaptation conveys an air of sexuality, even the subdued likes of the earlier films, and certainly later films would be even more openly sensual. However, but most play like exploitation pics: sex is offered for viewer enjoyment, stoking the lust of the viewer even while lust is vilified as no less than an evil force. That's quite a potent conflict, one that film buffs never tire of being stoked by. If it doesn't work here ...well, I'm not sure the film is even trying for it. In Drakula Istanbul'da's modern world sexuality is simply not a scandal. Acting on it wantonly is still a no-no, but it's no longer a cultural threat.

Thus Drakula loses a significant bit of his potency as a monster in this version. All the notes of his portrayal are dead to rights from his look (an older man imposing of stature, white hair receding from a domed forehead, ) played by Atif Kaptan with a low beastly growl of a voice, keeping a haughty nature barely stifled. He is of course an undead creature that drinks the blood of human victims, and that's plenty enough for a horror fan...but he is no longer the virulent corrupter of the Christian world (there are no crosses wielded in Drakula Istanbul'da). Choosing Azmi as his unwilling intended is horror on a personal scale, not a cultural one. Azmi's circle of friends are fighting for themselves, not society. Though it's not meant as a reflection of the movie's budgetary scale, this Drakula is all the same a monster of regular size.

That's not to diminish the movie, which went farther than any before it to follow the plot outline of Stoker's novel. While she awaits Azmi's return, Arzin has been staying with Sadan whose ailing mother is worried. Sadan has taken to sleepwalking and suffers mysterious blood losses every night. A doctor bearing garlic has been called in. The story is all there, stripped of few beats for time and budget (there is no Renfield, or anything made of psychic influence. Also presnet is the same air of anxious nocturnal vigils that fills every telling of Dracula.

Budget is a factor you'll have to overlook. The sets are spare, framing often stagey, fx almost non-existent...Drakula's powers are endowed by his cape, so robbing him of it saves the filmmakers a lot of money! Good thing, too, as when he transforms into a bat the result is rather funny.

There is a copy of the movie currently on You Tube, which is where I saw it (I'd love to have a DVD). I should warn you that the English subtitles are quite bad and the film itself needs a restoration. Look past that, Drakula Istanbul'da a worthy adaptation deserving the attention of any fan of Dracula.

Dracula's Daughter (Lambert Hilyer, 1936)

A man is found in a crypt with two dead bodies. He admits having murdered and mutilated one of them and calmly declares it a service to mankind because the victim was a vampire. A woman tormented by what she believes is a family curse that involves the undead. Both seek the aid of psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger). Dracula's Daughter, a direct sequel to Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula, is less bloodcurdling than the first film but more mired in its passions, more intimate, and every bit as dark.

Gloria Holden plays the title role, a true heir to the royal family of Count Dracula and not merely a vampirized spawn. Like Dracula, she has a need to drain humans of their blood to survive. Unlike her father, she sees it as a curse that has twisted her soul. When she hears Garth speak of freeing his patients of their obsessions, she risks exposing her secrets to him for the chance to live normally. Holden makes for a strange, haunted creature, at once deathly still and yet animated by anguish and an undercurrent of temper. Her eyes go from a zombielike stare to flashes of need or pain in an instant while in the same instance the calm in her voice seems intoned by another person entirely. Successor to Lugosi indeed, she has exactly the strength of presence and the exotic air demanded by the role. Zaleska is a true royal, haughty in bearing when her true colors, unhesitating to use or take the lives of others. It's debatable how much she is motivated by conscience or remorse.

Dr. Garth has been called in to defend the man found with the bodies, Edward Van Sloan reprising his role as professor Von Helsing (Wait, what? Von Helsing?) Garth is a steadfast man, sure in his convictions and abilities. No vampire talk will deter him from learning the truth of these mysterious deaths. This new woman in his life, the Countess, might prove a distraction though...he's smitten with her, and that's making his assistant Janet more of a pain in his side than usual. Truth is, Janet is in love with him.

Complications of infatuation and frustrated desires are what Dracula's Daughter is all about. Zaleska may or may not be infatuated with Garth. She has a jealous assistant of her own, the creepy Sandor whom she has promised to turn into a vampire in reward for his loyalty. Sandor doesn't love her, but he is in love with an ideal she represents – murderous power, and immortality. She is his goddess. He has no tolerance for her humanity.

It's a nearly perfect movie with a deft touch for manipulating mood and a rich chiaroscuro cinematography. An early scene easily manages to be hair-raisingly creepy with suggestion alone while still lightly comic (two police watch the bodies at night). Next, witness the funeral pyre scene for a lesson in evoking mood with lighting and score. Listen to the verbal dancing of the dialog as Sandor defeats his mistress' will to be cured or Garth spars with Janet. It's a film as smooth as cognac and flows as easily. At an hour and eleven minutes, this lady really moves.

Only two things sour the movie for me, and both owe to viewing it removed from the social prejudices of its time.

I don't care much for Garth, the man is arrogant and thoughtless. A man's man in his day, no doubt. His arguments with Janet are meant to be playful but after the first few you can sense genuine hostility in him – he's not entirely playing. Later a patient he's been consulted on dies under his observation, and not for a moment does he acknowledge responsibility for pushing her when he should have been heedful of her condition. Garth's ego is no mistake of a script witty enough to recognize it, as Janet delights in tripping him up at every occasion and Zaleska plays him with transparent flattery...I just don't like him much.

More bothersome, though, is the matter of Zaleska's sexuality. Today we'd recognize her with a shrug as bisexual, but this is the 1930s we're talking about. Her desire for women is characterized as an “obsession”, regarded by the Countess herself as an unwanted indecency, and ultimately presented as destructive. It's been suggested to me that her character is shown in such sympathetic light (true enough) that we are not meant to assume a homophobic slant but merely a representation of her own ambivalence. I wish I could buy that, but given the era I can't.

Melancholie der Engel (Marian Dora, 2009)

The horror genre at its core is about the fear of the loss of our own humanity. Not just the loss of life itself, that's low-hanging fruit. We fear losing any of the things that make us who we are – our empathy, our bodies, our individuality, our sanity, our families and friends... If you accept this postulate then a case can be made that Melancholie der Engel is the ultimate horror film. Stripped down to just the core I proposed above, the monsters in this movie are also their own victims: a quartet of people who determine to stamp out every last vestige of anything human within themselves.

It's not necessary to describe their transgressions here except to warn that there are a number of sequences that involve the torture and dismemberment of live animals, none of it faked. I will never argue in favor of this for the sake of art, but I won't argue against it in this review either – decide that for yourself. The central characters (practically the only ones in the film) are obsessed with death and physical corruption, with the bounds of societally structured morality, and philosophizing to rationalize their own choices. It's all very much out of de Sade...but with a difference, and it's in that difference that I find the movie both fascinating and much more disturbing.

The Mad Marquis copiously produced works of Schadenfreude, the pleasure derived from the pain of others. Schadenfreude is a conspicuous absence from The Melancholy of the Angels. Where de Sade's characters committed inhumanities with sexual glee or a cartoonishly affected torpor, the people who inhabit this movie never take any pleasure from what they do. They act out of pure anger and resentments which they nurture and indulge. One of the women cries at the brutality – she holds back from the worst of it, but pointedly never lifts a finger to stop it as she seeks the cruelty as much as her companions.

So why are they doing it?

The title of the movie is your first clue, and it's underlined by their discussions and by the meditative quality of the film's pace – nearly three hours of peace punctuated by outbursts of cruelty and body wastes. By their own testimony these people live in morbid fear of a connection to others: love and loss. They've made a conscious decision not to connect with humanity, and no transgression is too far to deaden their own capacity for empathy. They're never entirely successful, as they grieve for each other or lie together to give comfort, but they keep trying. Some of the horror lies in just how far gone they are, that their pointed efforts have now possessed them as thoughtless compulsion. Each to a different degree, they have sublimated the pain and horror by sexualizing it – one looks on the killing and disintegration of a pig at a slaughterhouse with the fervor of a newborn voyeur about to masturbate, another is turned on by a rotting animal carcass – feeling herself up and sucking at the corpse oblivious to being in broad daylight in the middle of a road.

Maybe the most potent horror, though, is in just how close they are to us. We wouldn't think of committing the acts depicted in Melancholie, but many of us have known the desire to deaden our own hearts against the brute force of depression. I've wished that I could stop caring about anything or anyone. That's another place Melancholie der Engel distinguishes itself from de Sade: his characters were two-dimensional, not even cyphers but puppets for his own fevered fantasies. Filmmaker Marian Dora treats his characters as genuine human beings driven by their own haunted psyches.

As the movie opens a few old friends gather for a sojourn to a house they frequent in a secluded valley. In that region they feel free to indulge themselves in their libertinage as a confirmation of their beliefs. Along with them are three guests and it is what happens with one of them that gives the film its power. She and a friend will be first witness to and then the subject of inhumanity. One of the two will be drawn to what she experiences. Will she ultimately reject the philosophy of her new acquaintances or embrace it? What does it take to be okay with becoming a monster?

That pig slaughter is worth mentioning as it is part of a lengthy montage juxtaposing a rape and the veneration of a decaying corpse as a religious sacrament in a temple. I musts confess watching all this in my peripheral vision and turning away when the pig was onscreen. The photography is quite accomplished, understated and often beautiful, the editing never lurid but never shying away from full disclosure, and where you might expect Death Metal the soundtrack gives us classical compositions of peace. Marian Dora isn't wallowing, he's conducting a painfully honest examination of his own soul. It may not have been fully explored – there was a thought raised by the scenes of a novitiate to the temple and the hypocrisy of a religion that venerates the corruption of the human body while treating simple joy as sin, but those thoughts never gelled in me as the film forced me forward...maybe they never really formed whole in the movie either. Meclancholie is already dealing with plenty of baggage for one movie.

People often don't know how to take de Sade. Many think his works are brilliant put-ons, which to me suggests that they reject the idea that anyone could derive sexual pleasure from monstrous acts. I'd suggest that real life and history have proven them wrong, that the truth is more complex, and that de Sade's brain really was burning up with the need to express the triggers of his lusts regardless of the intent behind his lengthy philosophical interludes. Melancholie der Engel begins and ends with the same transgression, the most outrageous of the onscreen atrocities. The newcomer will discover, and her response is the truest expression of de Sade's writings.

Recommended but only to those with strong constitutions. I saw this as a FTV for the October Challenge, and it really cast a pall over my week. It's also one I'll never forget and - after a couple of weeks - am glad I took in.

Jarmusch in Your Hearing Aid

Some people with tinnitus experience phantom music. It's a sustained noise that occurs in one's inner ear which the brain tries to interpret as music. I've experienced, it's kinda trippy...an unending, improvisational riff that can sound like any instrument or musical genre. I've heard it as an electric guitar, a sax wail, bagpipes, singing...it's been metal, C&W, a Celtic jig, opera, acid, and more. If you sit back, relax, and just let it play it's not at all unpleasant. It induces a state that's a little light-headed, in a good way, a little meditative. Probably it has something to do with inner ear pressure – I had this happen when I took my first flight on a passenger jet.

Recently I've been discovering the cinema of Jim Jarmusch, beginning with Only Lovers Left Alive this past October. No thought on his films yet, I'm just letting them soak in...have seen all of his features but Stranger Than paradise and his Coffee and Cigarettes series. The only one I haven't enjoyed is Permanent Vacation which takes a long time to convey very little. Besides his fascination with cultural interplay, the standout theme I;m seeing is the transience of all things but art and fame.

His movies' moods are a little lightheaded (in a good way, a little meditative.

Jarmusch's film Dead Man opens with Johnny Depp on a train traveling the old American West. The director favors long, static takes and contemplative silences, and he sets the tone of each film with scenery of aging and dilapidated structures or the ruins of same. We get a sense of just how endless this journey is for Depp's character, and it will continue long after he has deboarded.

After some minutes, and electric guitar begins a subdued, aimless riff. My immediate thought was of how anachronistic the choice was, but after a moment it struck a chord with me (sorry): I thought, 'That's what Depp is hearing in his head! He has tinnitus!”

That was a month ago, and the thought was mostly a whimsical one. A few months ago I watched another Jarmusch protagonist on another spiritual journey in The Limits of Control, and again (and for the entirety of the film, similar to Dead Man) the films' original score employs the same kind of music, not quite subliminal, long improv riffs on a single chord. In both films, the music is exactly what people with tinnitus hear, in the same circumstances, and inducing the same airy state of mind/being.

I'm seriously wondering now whether this isn't intentional on Jim Jarmusch's part and whether he doesn't have tinnitus himself. Or is this something his fans already know? A quick internet search this afternoon turned up no hits. See, it occurred to me after the fact that this is exactly the kind of thing I would want to do with a movie were I a director...but if I did I'd be accused of copying Jarmusch, and rightly so.

Update: Twice Upon a Time to be released!

Both versions to hit DVD,  hit the link for details.  Sometime this Spring, per the article...not up for pre-order yet, I'll be watching for that!