You've been here
often enough to know how it goes: Jonathon Harker travels to a
forbidding manse where he is greeted by a noble he doesn't realize is
a vampire. At night he meets one or more of the vampire's seductive
female concubines. Then she breaks into a musical number.
As an adaptation
there isn't much to say of Zinda Laash except that it's quite good.
It's modeled directly on Hammer's 1958 Horror of Dracula, liberally
appropriating some sequences shot-for-shot as well as tracks from
James Bernard's score. Those lifts are supplemented by a deranged
range of musical selections that include nightclub songs, Western
saloon piano, the Barber of Seville, and La Cucaracha. Some of it
misses the mark tonally, but somehow altogether it works to infuse
the movie with a sense of fresh energy. Shot in luminous b&w,
Zinda Laash is pretty to look at and well paced. Like Horror of
Dracula, Zinda Laash pares back the need for sfx – no wolf, bat, or
mist transformations. Harking back to the original novel, the
vampire's feeding of the kidnapped baby to an underling makes its
second appearance in a Dracula adaptation. Not that the moment is
explicit, bitings are discreetly staged and edited. Much more
effective are the shadows and webs of the vampire's home.
One effect I found
notable was a transitional fade that occurs two or three times. You
know, that old technique used for, say, werewolf transformations?
The camera focuses on the actor's face, a few frames are shot, and
then makeup is added in increments before shooting a few more frames.
In Zinda Laash the difference between a vampire and a human is a
matter of fairly subtle makeup – no Joss Whedon vampfaces here.
Basically, when an actor changes from human to vampire, they just
look a little less restrained of nature. So, when you see a
transitional fade in this movie you're seeing an obvious fade with
little or no obvious difference: the actor, a fade, and the actor
looking the same. The effect calls attention to itself, and the
first time it threw me. Then I realized that you don't need to see
the change, the fact of the fade itself clues you in that there's
been one. Subtle and brilliant.
The differences
are mostly cultural: the supernatural horror aspects are kept to a
minimum, which necessitates a prologue in which we learn that the
Dracula character was a scientist named Tabani who vampirized himself
with a potion gone wrong. No one waves any crosses about, there's
not much talk of religion...and every so often the women break into
song and dance (even the climactic fight sequence is choreographed to
look like a dance, though I suspect this was unintentional). That's
just par for the course with Lollywood (Lahore-based) cinema, a film
is incomplete without musical numbers. Similar to Drakula
Istanbul'da, Zinda Laash transplants the tale not only geographically
but temporally as well to modern times. We've seen Dracula driving a
car in other versions, but somehow it seems fundamentally wrong to
see him driving a car. The styles on display are Western in attire
and furnishings, and there's a strong sense of '60s youth “scene”
about the movie.
Also interesting
are the women of Zinda Laash. They never show much skin but are all
highly sensual, not least when they dance. Human, vampire, and in
transitions between they move like flames and drape themselves over
the furniture with the silky fluidity of some of their costumes.
Their looks smolder. Even in innocence they radiate energy, as in a
beachside number. Still human, Shabnam (the Lucy character) waiting
for Dracula is the most outright expression of sexual longing to
appear in any Dracula movie to that date and for some time to come.
It's kind of
fascinating to watch Zinda Laash thread its way between suggestive
behavior and the strict moral purity imposed by Pakistan's
dictatorship of the day. The censors were apoplectic that a horror
film had even been made in the first place (Pakistan's second, the
first being 1964's Deewana, a version of The Invisible Man). Cuts
were made to some of the more provocative dance moves, and the film
was finally okayed for release only upon the promise by the
producers that they would never, ever again make a horror movie.
Zinda Laash was released with an 'adults only' certificate,
guaranteeing that everyone wanted to see it. It was a hit.
Pakistani theaters were well used to horror imports, but this was
their own and nigh forbidden to boot.
I saw it a month
ago on YouTube and have happily added Mondo Macabro's 2003 DVD
release under the alternate title “The Living Corpse” to my
collection. Having only recently been a lost film, this boasts a
beautifully restored image that suffers only a brief drunken wobble
in one scene. It's a sweet package that includes a commentary track
, new interviews the filmmakers, a clip-heavy look at Asian horror
cinema, a song cut from the film, galleries, and trailers. The movie
itself is in Urdu with optional English subs.
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