Keiko Desu Kedo (I am Keiko) (Sion Sono, 1997)

I had to watch 'I Am Keiko' at least three times before I even began to know what I was seeing.  At first it seems like a tedious piece for art's sake.  Its only character never comes right out and tells you what's really going on with her. There's a reason why they tell you to watch for signs of depression, most who suffer from it aren't going to announce it.  I didn't. I didn't even know that's what it was.

The first five minutes f the film is a static shot of Keiko (played by Keiko Suzuki) staring directly at us, unspeaking, with a tear welling in one eye.  In the background, walled away in another room, are ambient family noises.  Keiko seems completely open, vulnerable, but the silence becomes uncomfortable.  It is broken when she announces the film's title (and first credits).

I have posted this review under the film's given Anglicized name but I suspect from the credits translation that its  more correct title is "It's Me, Keiko", and definitions of the individual Japanese words 'desu' and 'kedo' suggests even that isn't quite right either.

Keiko will be 22 in three weeks and wishes to document that passage of time.  "I want to record my own time as precisely as possible."  Time is more than a concern of hers, it's an obsession.  Can one be awake, aware, and active every minute of one's life?  What constitutes an acceptable use and what is a waste?  The film will end in precisely one hour and one minute, she tells us, and keeps her word.

Meanwhile she spends entire blocks of minutes counting off each second while we stare at a clock.  This is a hard movie to watch.  My first time seeing it I wanted to hit FF.  Much of I Am Keiko is made up of static shots of her surroundings, or of Keiko staring out windows.  The movie is without score though the ambient noise hints at Sono's preference for classical music.  Color schemes are stark and primary.  Until breaking out in the final act most of the film is confined to Keiko's bedroom. She shows us some snapshots of her history.  "Here we are" she says of one snapshot, speaking of her family, but the picture is of an unoccupied table.

She is hyper-aware of the passing of time, yet does nothing with it as if paralyzed with her own thoughts.  She doesn't seem to get much sleep, as we see she is filming even in the middle of the night.

This is the behavior of a depressive.  Keiko's father died recently, and while she doesn't speak much of it we see several times a small box she has kept with a few of his bones she stole from the crematorium.

Echoing Rupert Pupkin (or just about every child ever) Keiko shares with us some "news broadcasts" she anchors, reaching out to an audience that isn't there. For each pretend broadcast she wears a different wig.

I don't know if this is a clue to the movie if if the movie is a clue to writer-director Sion Sono, but I Am Keiko directly quotes an earlier movie Sono had made as a teenager with his own camera, "I Am Sion Sono".  In that film Sono was the polar opposite of Keiko - manically extroverted.

I haven't figured out Sion Sono yet.  His best-known works are those of a director of flamboyant material, sometimes excessive or grotesque and usually tongue-in-cheek.  I Am Keiko wouldn't seem to fit that pattern.  He can also be overstated in one sequence yet oblique in an overall scheme, and he can be nakedly sentimental.  Here he has stripped down Keiko's predicament to it's most fundamental even beyond exposition. Keiko is using her camera as a lifeline, trying to connect with whoever will watch.

Star Cops - Conversations With the Dead (S1E2)

The introductory ep of Star Cops had a cast of characters who treated death in a rather chilly fashion.  In this second  ep, loss of life is more keenly felt, especially by Nathan Spring.  Lee Jones, Nathan's girlfriend, is murdered.  Meanwhile, his officer David Theroux is looking into an accident that has set a spacebound couple on a trajectory which will see them run out of oxygen with no recovery possible.  The crew at the moonbase react in their individual ways, but all are devastated by the inevitable deaths of their colleagues.  The episode is all about grief, a welcome and stark contrast to the insouciance of 'An Instinct for Murder'.  As a newcomer to the show, it's a relief to see that 'Star Cops' does have a heart after all.

I think my initial guess was right, though, that the coldness of the first episode was a deliberate part of this fictional landscape.  Nathan, being a cop, damn well wants to find Lee's murderer himself but is bluntly told to butt out by the cop (Devis) who's actually assigned to the case.  Devis is one of those TV police who is pigheaded, incurious, unimaginative, uncaring, rude, and wouldn't bat an eye if the case  was closed without a solution - less work for him to bother with.  That's all Lee's death is to him, work.  He's not much like Nathan except in that one crucial regard: a life lost is not felt personally, it's just an academic puzzle to solve.  Karmically speaking, Nathan has has met himself and it's a slap in the face.  Butt out?  Someone he loves has just been brutally murdered and he's supposed to just whistle  his  way back to the moon?  It isn't just indifference, either, Devis tips his hand with a snide remark about leaving the job to "real policemen", revealing his contempt for the 'star cops'. Later Devis will show a more sympathetic side but admit that he finds Spring "a bit sentimental for my taste".

Lee's murder is a small masterpiece of budget-conscious staging.  She returns home to find that a message from Nathan awaits her, laden with security  encoding that takes forever to get through.  That it's from Nathan makes us more urgent than it does her, we know it must be important.  We get more anxious the further the scene progresses, the more we want to hear that message.  When it comes, it's a dire warning that Lee's life is in danger...and it just sits there  with Lee in another room not seeing it.  The lights go out. A stranger has broken in.   Hitchcock would be proud of the manipulation of both Lee and us.  The message was a ruse to keep Lee in place so that her killer could be sure of her location.

I felt this death too.  Time was devoted to establishing the bond between Nathan and Lee in the first episode, which served as character development for Nathan.  I thought it might lead somewhere, but not here.  Had Lee been introduced in this episode, we wouldn't have shared that loss with Nathan.  Another innovative scene transpires with a grieving Spring at the restaurant at which we saw them before, reliving their last conversation together.  At first it looks like a flashback until we see that Nathan's lips aren't mouthing the words we hear from him.   It's disorienting.   Anyone  who has lost someone dearly loved will have had similar moments of dislocation.  On a personal note, I've just been through that recently, so I know.  It's a poignant scene expertly intuited by director Christopher Baker.

On the moon, personnel are dealing with the unavoidable but still pending deaths of a couple (Mike and Laura) who were shepherding a supply shuttle to Mars.  The shuttle's engine has fired early, forcing them into a trajectory that has sent them on a death course.  They are as good as dead but still alive to know it.  The base personnel are  crushed and try to deal with their grief in their own ways, including arguing about how to take the news and what to do next.  What will Mike and Laura do?  Blow out the airlocks and die quickly?   Play out their time?  Theroux wants to discover whether the engine failure was intentional but finds that his questions are an intrusion on  the attempt to cope with devastating loss.

We never see Mike and Laura, we only hear their transmissions.  At first this bothered me a little.  But I think it helps us to identify with the moonbase personnel. We know the couple are going to die but are too removed from them to do anything about it.  Think of it as  Voight-Kampff empathy test.  We knew Lee already, but we feel even more for Spring...Mike and Lura we don't know at all but we can feel for them, and for the  ones they left behind. Loss is loss.  I wanted to know who the executed Russian girl was in Instinct for Murder but no one gave a damn.

Productionwise, Star Cops is still finding it's feet, just like Nathan in zero-G.  One effective weightless scene involving a  sleeping harness is followed by another unconvincing one of Nathan trying to seat himself at a  console.  In his acrobatics to appear weightless you can see that he is  actually struggling against gravity.  He gets all the moves just right but the illusion is broken by the effort itself.  Ironically, it made me better appreciate the work that went into it from the actor (David Calder) to whoever choreographed the scene.  Incidental music was more on target this time, two pieces of scoring suited  Lee's murder and a sequence luring Spring to a park  for info on the killer.  That theme song has become a lot more on-message now. I like the look of the moonbase and the moonbuggy that gets people  there.  Looks very proto-UFO.

There's another nice touch in Spring's meeting in the park at night.  He is approached by a shady but possibly innocent character who happens to be on roller skates.  You don't often see physical assaults that involve skates.  It's just unusual enough to provide a bit of off-kilter flavor.

Like the previous ep, there are two cases that are unrelated.  One is transparent, the culprit obvious the moment we are introduced.  The other story is far more clever.  I didn't catch it, because like Nathan I kept tuning out the newscasts as so much unwanted distraction.  Both cases bring us back to that same coldbloodedness, a blind eye to the value of other's lives in the face of our own goals.  The people responsible for Lee's death do indeed understand grief and the human psychology that drives it - they understand but don't care except that it is a tool to their own ends.  In neither case will justice be  served.  It's a cold world after all that warm-blooded nobodies like Laura, Mike, and Spring live and die.  The eps finale took me by surprise for Nathan's solution and his unresolved desire for revenge clashing with his self-loathing at having been personally responsible for three deaths now.

9 pairs of rollerskates in the dark. 

My favorite line came when Spring, trying to wrestle down his anger, barks "DEVIS!!  ...d'ya wanna  drink??"

Star Cops - An Instinct for Murder (S1E1)

Let me say right up front that I like Star Cops. I want that right up front because I'm having a serious problem reviewing it.  I've seen the first episode twice and have no idea what to say about it.  It kinda puts my brain on hold, and I haven't been able to pin down why.

The name had me expecting something quite different.  Didn't Gerry Anderson do something about a space precinct?  Rather Star Warsy (think cantina scene), I saw a few minutes of it.  Sounds like an action show.  Could be drama, could be humorous.

What I got instead:  Chief Superintendent Nathan Spring is comfortable in his job and would like to remain so.  Where he's at is conducive to the family he's planning to start.  His superiors, on the other hand, have zero interest in his plans or what he finds comfortable.  He's being forced to take over another department, a move that means personal upheaval.  Nathan is a man old enough and secure enough in his position that he likes to wear sweats to work while the younger officers under his command dress chic.  He's not yet retirement age, but he's not young anymore.  Nathan is soft-spoken, a man of consideration, and given to a dry ironic humor.  His manner is amiable but slightly put-upon.  He's not world weary...just weary.  No go-getter, in his estimation he's already gone and got.   Keeping in mind that this is a production for British television, this plays very much like any number of police mysteries (I'm especially fond of Inspector Morse).  It's all played with understatement, not histrionics.  So far so good.

So, "Star Cops"?  Yes.  The year is 2027 and the setting is the burgeoning world of space exploration in the hands of the international corporations funding it.  We can expect stories of politics, corporate espionage, and the like.  "Star Cops"' innovation is the invention of a  special police force detailed to cover this effort: badges in space.  Spring has been hand-picked to head this agency, the International Space Police Force.  Some wag in the media dubbed them 'Space Cops', and it stuck.  There's nothing flashy here or overtly futuristic, opting for verisimilitude.  Again, I'm on board.  It's a great idea from the show's creator, Chris Boucher of Doctor Who and Blake's 7 fame.  Boucher wrote and directed this introductory episode. 

Two murders have taken place.  We ave two floaters, one in a lake and one in orbit.  We all float up here.  Or would that be 'out here'?  We the audience know they were murders, we saw them happen.  Nathan Spring thinks they might have been and would like to know more.  Various police authorities have decided that no crimes have taken place not on the strength of  the evidence but because a computer analysis has concluded that it's unlikely.  Spring wants the lake death investigated.  On the space station Charles de Gaulle space cop David Theroux finds the number of supposed EVA suit malfunctions (resulting in deaths) suspicious.  Spring is ordered off the Earthbound case and into orbit.  No one really cares, I think, it's just a gambit to secure Spring as the new Space Police Commander. 

On Earth or in space, Spring disdains computer analysis at the expense of human intellect.  He asks of his people that they utilize their own instincts, their capacity for reasoning, curiosity, and observation.  In fact, when the solution to the death in space is revealed it turns out to be one Theroux might have caught were he more fully in the habit of using his own faculties.   He's halfway there, having pressed for the deaths to be questioned instead of taking  the computers assessment as everyone wanted him to.  He will be appointed Spring's second in command. 

Star Cops aired in 1987.  I remember there was a streak of distrust of analysis in police fiction, if not in real life.  Screen heroes with badges universally rolled their eyes at words like"profile" and treated experts with open hostility and ridicule.  Often the analysts were portrayed as incompetent and full of airs .  Today those analysts are glamorized by pop entertainment, from Clarice Starling to NCIS and many other shows.  Spring may be a badge in 2027, but he's pure '80s old school.  This is one of the major conflicts of the episode and I expect it to be a thread throughout the series.  Spring has a technological personal assistant, a boxy device called Box (foreseeing real-life devices like Alexa).  He constantly has to argue with it, cajole it, and rebuke it as if it were alive.  Spring has a measure of reliance on Box he finds annoying.

The kind of story the pilot promises is one of clever manipulation of the rules this fictional realm works on by highly placed instigators we never meet and who may never really be brought to justice.  Spring is a low-level servant, arresting the low-level servants who carry out the crimes.  Very non-Hollywood.

So I do like this show.  Why am In not more enthusiastic yet?  I'm not sure the hybrid works smoothly yet - it's hard to imagine Inspector Morse defending himself with a medical laser.  Space Cops gives us astronaut training instead of an exciting space flight - this is good, sure it saves on the budget but it also stresses a character moment over action.  OTOH we're expected to accept that more sci-fi flavored action does take place even though we're not allowed to see it.  Some of the predicted technology hasn't aged well and I'm doubtful they would have played well even in 1987, if for no other reason than that they clash with the usual contemporary detective fiction.  I've seen Outland, I thought that dd it better.  On the up side, the tech of the spacecraft, stations, etc. are based on current real-world designs, That's crucial to the show's credibility.

It might be the dialog, which is entertaining but hard to follow for the accents and rapid pace of banter.  I like clever dialog, I like it even more when it's not so clever as to obscure its import.  This is not Joss Whedon.  I eventually had to resort to headphones to catch more of the words, that helped.  Dialog often overlaps in Robert Altman style, which suits the verisimilitude but hinders clear presentation of information. 

It's definitely the production.  I'm used to seeing unconvincing sets on Doctor Who, but I don't see why a police station set only a few years in the future should look so little like what you would see in real life when realism is a goal.  They're worse given that the space station locales are more convincing by comparison. The FX of weightlessness are better than expected, lending weight and credibility to the space-borne scenes.  I like the costume design, aside from one Miami Vie escape who rolls up the sleeves of his business jacket.  It's recognizably of our world instead of campy spandex, glitter, and outrageous collars and hats. 

I do have a problem with the theme song and incidental music.  I think the score was meant to be hiply ironic but the choices jar as inappropriate. I can take that if the choices are good, these aren't.  Maybe I'll get used to the theme song (it's by Justin Hayward!) but I doubt it will ever feel like it belongs.

I think what blunted the episode most for me was an emotional disconnect - which I hasten to add may well be a deliberate choice reflecting the theme of humanity surrendered to technology.  People die in this story at an alarming rate yet no one ever seems to care except Spring and Theroux, and I'm not sure it was more than an academic exercise from Spring.  Theroux tries to recruit the help of someone who's more concerned with her recreation.  So what if people are dying, the computer says it's statistically acceptable!  Another innocent is put to death by her government when she was not at fault.  That life lost is no more than a cynical aide, we never meet her nor does anyone express remorse.   There are no grieving friends or relatives.  What drove Morse (sorry, I keep bringing him up but its true for all the others, the best of them) expressed moral outrage and an appreciation of loss. 

Torn between  a 6.5 and a 7.  It's a refreshing premise with a protagonist well-played by David Calder, has an interesting scheme but is hampered by some poor production choices.  Okay, let's give it room to go up...6.5 restaurant TV trolleys.

Blake's 7 - The Way Back (S1E1)

Earth's future, at an unspecified date, in an unnamed country, under an interplanetary federation.  Good citizen Roj Blake  has a dodgy history.  In fact he might have more than one, and dodgy in ways he doesn't even know.

Blake was once a dissident who, having recanted and renounced the rebel movement in his highly public trial, would like to move on.  That's not easy to do when one of his friends is one of those annoying conspiracy theorists.  She insists on thrusting her anti-government rap at him. Lately she's asked him to fast for a few days as she claims the food and water are secretly medicated to keep the populace sedate.  Nutty, and yet he goes along with her request.  Now she's got him going to meet some "friends", a meeting she didn't tell him would be highly illegal.  Her friends turn out to be a group of rabblerousers and legal outliers eager to begin a new revolt now the last is several years dead.  Their leader has a shock for Blake: he says Roj's life is a lie.  Blake, he contends, was brainwashed and his family murdered. They want him to reclaim his role as their spearhead.
Before Blake can process this, he witnesses government forces slaughter the group as they try to surrender peaceably.  Welcome to the future.

So we have our world-building.  Blake's Earth is a dystopian future under a faceless totalitarian regime - the police stormtroopers wear threatening gear that hides their faces and kill without reflection, the bureaucrats  are mild-spoken folk who as a matter of routine decide Blake must be discredited all over again, and the populace is laced with spies that Stalin or McCarthy would be proud of (one such, Dev Tarrant, set up the dissidents to be butchered).  Blake's 7 was a British television production of the late 70s, a natural development under the Doctor Who mold.  That means its production values had to be curtailed, leading to some very sparse set design on obvious stages, and location work at numerous bleak-looking industrial installations.  It may look cheap, but it is also well-suited to the tone set by the premise: bleak.

It's decided that the Federation's best interests would be served by making Blake out to be something so reprehensible that any decent citizen must balk at the idea he could be any kind of hero.  Thus they charge him with molesting children, and proceed to manufacture evidence and witnesses.  This means brainwashing children with false memories of having been sexually assaulted.  This is decided in the same manner with which a committee might decide on a tax measure or work  bill.  It makes no difference to the children that the assaults never took place - they will now be scarred with the memories of it all the same, never knowing its not true.  Projection - the government piously accuses an innocent of the very crimes they commit themselves.  The very banality of the villains and their deliberations is the most chilling thing about them.  It's not melodrama, just procedure.  The villains look like school teachers, librarians, and kindly grandmothers.

As a protagonist, Roj Blake appears on the surface as the standard hero.  He's earnest, forthright, and not unduly outraged at the injustices welling up around him.  He's an everyman, one of us, an ordinary citizen.  Who wouldn't identify with that?  He's the hero we'd all like to be.  Look a little deeper and he seems a bit flighty.  Invited to break the law in a particularly serious manner, he protests..then meekly goes right along with it.  Told that everything he knows is a lie, he's quick to doubt his own experience for the word of a stranger who acts like an old comrade.  Blake used to be a rebel leader, and they tend to be charismatics, firebrands, even True Believers.  The Roj Blake we meet in The Way Back is no natural leader, but he does have the makings of a True Believer who will embrace an ideology at the drop of a hat and run with it.

Is Blake's 7 going to be run--of-the-mill science fiction or something that will subvert our expectations?  I don't think creator Terry Nation chose to set the adversaries as "The Federation" as a coincidence but as a direct response to Trekdom's utopian vision.  This may be a  reactionary program about reactionary people.

We have two more protagonists in the advocate who takes on Blake's case, and the advocate's wife.  The more Tel and Maja Varon investigate, the more they doubt their client's assured guilt.  As the episode unfolds they begin to take the spotlight from the eponymous hero with a warm chemistry and empathy, and bewilderment at the corruption they're suddenly opening their eyes to that makes them more likable characters than Blake himself.  I can see following them for a few seasons.  
The exonerating evidence mounts.  Victory races the clock as Blake is hauled to a transport to a penal colony.  Blake's vindication is at hand as Act III is surely about to begin...and that's where the episode ends with Tel and Maja lying dead at Dev Tarrant's feet and Blake on his way to life in a penal colony.

The writing is sharp on some counts, less so on others.  For example, science fiction has always had a weak spot for shortcuts, and trial scenes are usually whoppers.  The one in The Way Back is one of the less convincing, letting the arguments to be weighed by data globes instantaneously so we the audience don't have to sit through them.  Fans of due process should be tearing their hair out. It doesn't harm the show too much, and does reinforce the degree to which this society has twisted against its citizens to secure the state.  A longer episode might have wrung more out of it for satire but not without slowing the pace of the space opera, and the tone set by The Way Back is oppressively humorless.

The production and fx of The Way Back are a marked improvement on Doctor Who.  There is a shot of the transport ship on an arrival/departure platform that had me expecting to see names in the credits associated with Space: 1999.  It was that good, budget discrepancies in mind.  So is a sequence leaving a protective city-dome behind in the night.

8 Magic 8-Balls of Judicious Wisdom. 

The abrupt ending is in line with a more serialized program but I couldn't help thinking it felt like one of those two-part pilot movies that's been chopped in half for syndication. 

Do the Varons seem  too incredulous about what they're learning?  That might be the machinations of the show trial, allowing Blake to have honest representation by lawyers chosen for their inexperience and naivety.

Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

That's it.  Dracula has defeated me.  I've nothing to say.  It's not a great movie by Hammer (or any) standard, it's not terrible (as grade B horror goes).  It just...is.

 Christopher Lee makes his fifth appearance as Hammer's Count Dracula, 6th film in the series, a rush job debuting a mere half a year after Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1970.  Seems longer, many years longer, in human years, long enough for  Christopher Lee to have lost his vitality.  His Dracula is now a dough-faced stay-at-home who sends his manservant Klove for take-out.  He doesn't scowl, he doesn't lust or smirk.  Worse, he doesn't engage.  In order for the movie to serve up any victims people have to oblige the script by wandering into his ruined abbey through contrivance, and even for them he can't muster any enthusiasm.  He reads his lines at them, not to them.  Watching the movie makes me feel the same way. 

How did this happen?  The last film was bright in image, color, and idea with lively characters in an engaging premise.  Hammer must have spent it's vampire budget for that year, because the production values for Scars are immediately revealed to be low.  The first life onscreen is a rubber bat vomiting red paint in one of the Count's less memorable resurrections.  That's followed by a string of threadbare interior sets, some obvious painted backdrops, a model castle, and no establishing shots to lend a sense of locality.  Not that the photography is terrible, just severely curtailed.  We still get a few beautiful shots of English forest, and splashes of vivid reds and purples.  And warm cleavage, of course, Hammer has not forgotten itself.

Scars is not a loss, entirely...I suppose...if one were to look at it as an example of Saturday night horror schlock then it does hit the obligatory notes.  It's certainly better than many B-grade genre offerings.  By Hammer standards it is horror on auto-pilot.  When I first bought the DVD I was happily surprised that it wasn't as awful as I'd been led to believe.  On the contrary, it passes the time well in spite of it's limitations.  Ah...but this is now my third or fourth go-round for the movie, and like the Count it no longer engages.  The Satanic Rites of Dracula earns disparagement as well, I've not been kind to it myself, but at least it has a fascinating idea behind it (we'll get to that review eventually).   Scars tries to get on by ramping up the graphic bloodshed.  It makes for a shock but not for a story. 

For that you've got your standard protagonists-who've-wandered-afield plot.  It works well enough, it always does. 

One of our heroes is Paul, a charming young rogue and scoundrel who every woman he meets wants to bed.   See, that's supposed to be Dracula's provenance.  No wonder the Count looks so demoralized.  His own film series has robbed him of his identity. 

Paul has blundered into a film contrivance that takes him from a burgomaster's manse (more specifically, the bedroom of the burgomaster's daughter) to a birthday party to the border of the nation and beyond. It doesn't get any clearer than that, really, the slashed budget means being pointedly vague as to cities, towns, hamlets, and borders.  Paul's transport was a carriage yoked to a pair of spooked horses.  Must've been pretty spooked to have hauled Paul across two countries, or maybe the mansions were already out in the boonies.  Dunno.  The horses ditch Paul near a small village (which we also  don't see), and he is quickly run off by townsfolk who've had it with wandering strangers rousing the damn vampires.  Paul makes it to a small studio set that hints that the ruins of a castle must be nearby.  You won't see the castle either, although a scale model of a castle helps you imagine what it might look like if there were one.  Paul's brother Simon and the woman he loves, Sara, will come looking for him and meet the same welcome. 

They will meet the town's priest, a dispirited man who lost his courage when a previous attempt to rid the town of Dracula led to a mass slaughter of the raiding party's loved ones.  That could have been interesting to explore but the priest isn't a good hook for the target youth audience so we get Sara and Simon instead.  Then there's Klove (Patrick Troughton), Dracula's hapless slave, who takes a liking to Sara.  Dracula likes Sara.  Simon likes Sara.  Sara pines for Paul.  No, seriously, it's not a sex farce.  Really.  There's no subtext, no theme, nothing of depth transpires. The story moves at a pace, and Hammer asks nothing more of it.  If you're happy with horror that checks all the ingredients  then Scars will be enough for you.  It leads to a fittingly uninspired finale in which Evil is felled by his bad judgement in exposing himself to the weather. 

As game as most of the actors are, there is a brighter spark of life in the unlikely form of a landlord played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper.  He's a brusque, unfriendly man who reluctantly reveals to his barmaid that he is driven by fear and precaution.  He'd like to protect her and alienates her instead. 

From the Stoker novel, we finally have our shot of Dracula traversing the side of his castle bat-wise, and the mysterious window that can only be reached by bedsheets tied together.  Don't look for continuity, this production has no ties to the rest of the series.  Even Klove is a different character than appeared in Dracula, Prince of Darkness.

Scars was directed by Roy Ward Baker, who also helmed the superior Quatermass and the Pit and The Vampire Lovers., both for Hammer Studios.  Script was by Anthony Hunds (credited as John Elder).  Hinds had written many previous Hammer films including the prior Dracula sequels (uncredited on the best of them, Brides of Dracula).  I would have guessed that a less taelnted outsider to Hammer had penned Scars.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker - Horror in the Heights

The older one gets, the more one relies on others.  You need your crew - your friends and your community.  If your community lets you down, your friends are all you've got.  Ask the people of Roosevelt Heights.  Swastikas are showing up all over this Jewish neighborhood.  The city authorities have given up trying to get rid of the rats.  The police have grown apathetic to the devoured bodies that appear regularly each night, and when the media notices it's  to do  little more than lament "what a shame".  Yeah, your friends are all you've got getting you by.  Pray for Roosevelt Heights, because those friends are turning out to not be what they seem.

Ask Buck Feinman, night guard at a meat rendering facility.  Better yet, ask his friend Harry Starman, 'cuz Buck's dead now.  He left his poker party to get clean drinking glasses, and when they went to see what was keeping him found him among the rest of the gnawed meat.  The police pass it off as natural causes (old age) compounded by the environment (local rodent population).

Ask Harry Starman, he's got another idea.  There's this crazy Hindu, see, new to the 'hood, he's the one that's been spray-painting graffiti swastikas everywhere.  He's opened his own Indian cuisine restaurant.  In a Jewish community, no one wants any.  Crazy, I told ya.  Guy showed up with the first of the deaths.  Did you ask Harry Starman?  Too late now, he's dead too.  Pretty thoroughly chewed in under a minute.  Pretty fast work even for rats. 

Harry had been talking to reporter Carl Kolchak.  No, literally, talking to him the very moment he was killed.  Funny thing, though, poor Harry had thought he was talking to two Kolchaks at the same time.  One had jumped the back fence to the Indian stranger's residence, and the other came sauntering down the alley.  The Kolchak in the back yard heard Harry die but couldn't see it.  Stranger still, a pair of patrol officers died nearby, rumor has it they both had spotted people they trusted in an alley moments before they went in.  One saw a fellow cop.  One saw his mom.  Kolchak sees a story.

Horror in the Heights, penned by Hammer veteran Jimmy Sangster, is one of the best stories offered in The Night Stalker series.  The nature of the threat is made apparent but audiences are kept guessing about why it's happeneing and who or what is responsible.  Xenophobia plays a role in the story, both fear of other cultures and generational alienation, but Sangster introduces his themes observationally instead of being heavy-handed about them (he doesn't hammer them home, if you'll pardon the pun).  for the usually comically leavened series it's a pretty grim hour,  with dry and weary character-driven humor that isn't much relief and is certainly not camp.  Kolchak himself isn't developed much (he is driven throughout by simple decency both in his job then later his heroism) but the portrayal of his editor, Vincenzo, is laudable -  when Kolchak hands in a death notice for Feinman, Vincenzo tells him not to editorialize: if there's a story, do the job right and investigate. We also get to see Vincenzo stand up for his staff against bullying by the police.  In short, he's written as a professional who knows and deserves his job, which doesn't happen with him that often on K:TNS.  He's usually a timid gasbag and butt of jokes.  It's refreshing to see him written  with respect.

Miss Emily gets some character development, rounding out the episode's treatment of the elderly and demonstrating them to be both physically and mentally fit and active.  She's writing her advice column for inspiration as she aspires to write a novel, and she's not averse to making a new romantic connection should one appear.  Ron Updyke gets the second-best laugh of the night just by being himself, interjecting with an unasked-for lesson about culture clash and the invention of the longbow, confuzzling his colleagues.  He is upstaged only by the Hindu, who explains that he is hunting a Rakshasa.  He says to Kolchak, "One must be honest and brave - maybe you?" He pauses a moment and gives Carl a looking-over.  "Um, you'd best go home."

Rakshasa are  a Hindu legend, human-devouring shapeshifters that can appear human, presented on K:TNS as a monster that fools it's victims into seeing it as someone close or trusted. It's not a creature most in the Western Christian world are likely to be familiar with, and Sangster makes brilliant use of it re: his themes.  Its episodes like this that convince me that the series could have survived a few years longer given scripts of this caliber.  It's not the ideas that ran out, it's the budget and the patience of its star.  Sangster never lets us guess where he's going, nor does he let on that we're being schooled in diversity.  For example, the swastika is commonly recognized today as a symbol of human evil and hate while in fact it was already a far older sigil for good in Hindu faiths.  Thanks to the Third Reich, it can no longer be seen that way again.  I learned that as a child watching The Night Stalker and I'd bet a lot of others did as well.

This episode's guest cast includes Phil Silvers as Harry Starman, hired for his geniality but not his comedic talents, and young TV veteran Barry Gordon (another Barney Miller alum) as a friendly waiter at the restaurant kvetching on about his crazy boss and ragging on the entrees.

Creep factor is high with a highlight being the death of Starman only feet away from Kolchak.  There's something especially affecting about horror when it's tied to the exotic, as the servant of Brahma's home is: the ugliness of the swastikas (as we take them in the moment), the beauty of the beads at the entrance, the sitar for incidental score all make a scene that is alluring and upsetting in its tension.  We make wrong guesses just like most of the characters, out of ignorance.  We're often scared of the wrong things.  It's a lesson that's always current.

The mistrusted agent of Brahma is an old man who has no one left.  He must rely on the kindness, understanding, and goodness of a stranger, Kolchak, who is intelligent enough and concerned enough to have sussed out the truth of the situation.  The story is brought back to its theme...and then Kolchak, self-styled loner that he is, faces Miss Emily in a dark alley and has to decide an issue of trust.  He must be getting older.

10 flaming sword dances in tight spaces. 

Asides: how can it be rumored that the two cops thought they saw aquaintances when no one else was nearby when they died? 

I keep misremembering this ep as having the Hindu hero die in bed.  He is ill, certainly, but Kolchak confronts the Rakshasa on his way to getting medical help for him.  No more mention is made of what becomes of the old man.  I assume he lived. It's the nod to 'passing on the torch' that makes me stop at 'passing on'.

If the Brahman thought the Rakshasa was appearing to him in the form of Kolchak, whom he's never seen before, that doesn't suggest good things of his relationship to his employee.  Too bad, they both seem like nice people who'd get along.

Kudos to Jimmy Sangster for showing the younger writers how to do it right.

Taste the Blood of Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1970)

*******SPOILERS Included*******

Do you remember Jaws: The Revenge?  That was the fourth in the series, in which the shark avenged itself on the Brody family in Jamaica, quietly intoning after each of its victims, "The fuhst", "The second", "The thuhd"...  Taste the Blood of Dracula is at essence a pretty good movie but it suffers a number of missteps, and one of them is making Dracula as mechanical as Bruce the shark.

Picking up where Dracula Has Risen From the Grave ends, a merchant happens upon the (un)dying Dracula as he disintegrates.  The merchant, Weller (Roy Kinnear) gathers the vestments and some of the blood, which has turned to powder.  He knows who Dracula is, and his instincts tell him it's a mistake...but the mercenary in him can't turn away from a sure sale.  Someone is going to want these. 

Cut to an unknown time later.  A trio of family men and respected elders spend one Sunday night a month in secret debauchery.  These are monied men, to be sure, the finest that polite society can offer.  One of them, Hargood (Geoffrey Keen)  treats his wife and daughter especially cruelly in his guilt.  Secker (John Carson) is a decent man, learned, traveled, experienced: in a word, jaded.  He's the closest thing to a Van Helsing character in this movie, full of useful knowledge and will voluntarily  do the right thing, but it;s not his vocation.  Paxton (Peter Sallis)  is the weakling, easily cowed into going  along with anything the alpha dogs want.  Problem is, they've grown bored withe the same old thrills. 

Enter young Lord Courtley, snotty, arrogant, and much farther along their path than they reckon.  Courtley lives for satiation and offense.  His latest quest is to meet Satan himself - or, if not Satan, then the closest thing to him.  To that end he needs the unholy treasure waiting to be purchased in Weller's shop: the blood of Dracula.  To get it, he'll need the money of the three thrillseekers.  Lucky for him they want his services in guiding them into darker pastures. 

Pretty good stuff so far, right?  The movie doesn't actually belong to them but to their children, innocent bright young things with bright untainted futures ahead of them.  They laugh and smile and talk of their pending marriages and elopements.  Paul Paxton and Alice Hargood are madly in love with each other.  Neither can comprehend why the elder Hargood hates Paul with such depth.  That Paul's offense is simply being the son of Hargood's partner in vice is lost to them.  The film has a Christian theme that is a little muddy - the sins of the fathers and all that.  Children and parents alike are going to pay.  Like the previous Hammer Dracula, this one is targeted at the older adolescent audience but this time trusting them with stronger meet and an earned adult rating (stronger material, an early glimpse of nudity for Hammer, and more bright red blood).  The darker nature of the film is leavened by the forthright sweetness of the kids, backed by a tender ballad from composer James Bernard (replacing his usual theme for Dracula) and by beautiful locales.  Taste the Blood is the series peak for cinematography,  with natural colors, almost no use of gels, and baroque art design. Every frame is full of details and textures to keep your eyes busy. 

Courtley performs a ceremony at a lonely, abandoned cemetery  (Highgate Cemetery provides the exteriors, a highly photogenic location).  This involves flattering himself by donning the Count's cape, clasp, and ring.  Assembling his three conspirators, he fills their goblets with Dracula's powdered blood revivified into a foul brew with a few drops of his own.  If the drink looks muddy, the plot is even muddier on the mechanics of Dracula's resurrection.  Courtley doesn't know precisely what is supposed to happen, and is taken by surprise when the potable gives him intense pain.  Hargood, Paxton, and Secker had already balked at drinking, and when they see Courtley felled they proceed to kick and beat him to death in their horror and revulsion.  They go home vowing the night never happened. 

Into dead Courtley arrives Dracula, helped by a dubious fx shot.  Courtley's corpse transforms into Christopher Lee who vows revenge on the three who have destroyed his servant.  Let me stop there for a moment, because I've got a few questions.  First, drinking Dracula's blood has always been a part of every adaptation, but it already had a function - it seals the bond.  Hammer was never concerned with continuity, though, and here it seems to have a different use...and the script is unclear just what that is.  If Courtley wasn't supposed to die by the ceremony alone, then was Dracula not meant to return in person?  Else, what's the difference?  He's got a body, what's he bitching about?   A servant isn't much use if he's sharing his body with you.  And what of the other three who were supposed to imbibe?  Would this have resulted in four Christopher Lees running around London spouting wooden dialog and glaring a lot? 

In any case, Chris Lee is reduced to glowering a lot.  He's out for revenge, just like the last film only with even less flair.  There's is none of the usual lust for life, the passion, the ferocity.  When he drinks from a woman, the pleasure he takes from it is fleeting, almost perfunctory.  He's the addict whose fix no longer satisfies.  Like Hargood, Paxton, and Secker he's grown bored, his thrills are no longer strong enough.  But, no, actually, that's reading into it a more interesting film than it really is - he's just badly utilized by an otherwise engaging script, and played by an actor who really  is bored by what his script offers.  That's the biggest flaw in this Hammer entry, it's a Dracula film in which Dracula is a mere engine to get us from A to Z.  He's the least interesting thing in his own movie.  He gets by on Lee's presence alone. 

That's too bad because his revenge is an interesting idea to explore.  His choice is to use the children against their parents.  In short, he corrupts them before their parents can and aims them homeward again as killers.  The earlier theme of vampirism as sexual liberation is out the window for a more puritan take, as patricide becomes a DeSadean pleasure for the girls.

Taste the Blood comes to a close with more muddled writing, in which the grand conflict sees Dracula ineffectually throwing bits of church from as much distance as he can get inside the church.  Pretty disappointing from a led villain.  He's been using this crypt as a hangout as it's long since been desecrated by the likes of Courtely holding black masses.  We know he can't be on hallowed ground.  This makes his demise one of the more interesting, and had the potential to be satisfying were it handled better - the church is re-consecrated with him inside it, trapping and killing him.  That's the idea, anyway. but it's Paul doing the re-consecrating.  Not a priest, not anyone at all qualified...ah, that's okay, Jesus would instruct that all it takes is faith, and anyone is worthy, but the movie never builds Paul as a man of any particular faith.  In fact, all he does is light a couple of candles and that seems to redeem the whole building. 

I've identified three problems, all of them found in the writing.  A little tweaking would have helped. none of these flaws touch the core story, yet are enough to blunt the movie as a satisfying whole.  It took me time to warm to Taste the Blood.  Today I find the bulk of it to be worthy...more weighty and fully formed than Dracula: Prince of Darkness or Dracula Has Risen From the Grave.  It's just too bad that Dracula himself is upstaged by...just about everybody.

"The first!  The second!  The third, Aaaah-HA-HA-HA-HAAA!"

*     **     **     **     **     **     *
On a personal note, I'm more of a Secker than a Van Helsing (See review for Hammer's 'Horror of Dracula').

I am in the process of moving and have not had internet access for a while now, except a few minutes each week.  Also, a few of my titles are packed away.  So, I won't be putting these up in chronological order...pretty sure Jess Franco's Dracula should have been up before this.  Also, still no decent screencap capacity.  Apologies for the lack of shots.

Mystery and Imagination presents Dracula (Patrick Dromgoole, 1968)

At the cinemas Christopher Lee was the reigning Count Dracula, an increasingly mute and brooding predator of base impulses: revenge, hunger, and reproduction.   Television was getting in on the Stoker act as well.   British anthology playhouse Mystery and Imagination offered their take with Denholm Elliott as a more social monster.  It was an adaptation that, while truncated, was the first to include a few details from the novel that had been neglected before, and for a TV production was more frank with sexuality than even Hammer had been. 

A patient known only as Thirtyfour (for his room number at Doctor John Seward's sanitarium) escapes confinement and crashes the dinner party Seward is hosting.  Guests at the party include the Weston mother and daughter, a count from Transylvania, and arriving late will be Mina  Harker.  Thirty-four throws himself at the feet of Count Dracula, calling him "Master".  The Count declares they have never met, and Thirtyfour immediately walks it back and returns meekly to his cell.  The party goes on, Dracula dominating the room (and young Lucy Weston's gaze) with his presence. 


You may know Denholm Elliott from the Eighties as Marcus Brody, the schoolmaster who employs Indiana Jones, or as the butler to Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, or from any number of other character parts both more and less prestigious.  That's when he hit my own radar.  It's not easy to picture him as Dracula until you see the younger and slimmer Elliott rocking a Van Dyke and shades (eat your heart out, Gary Oldman).  Elliot's Count is highly urbane and has a confidence that's almost snide, quiet until talk of his heritage fires his angry pride.  If you think you know Denholm only from his late career, check this out. 

Dracula is the man of the hour.  Thirtyfour is easily swayed by a few words from him when the sanitarium guards are no match for the patient; Lucy breathlessly attends his every gesture, oblivious to her fiance Seward;  Seward has to hide his annoyance that his guests the Westons extended their invitation to the unexpected and unwelcome Russian royalty who has swayed them.  Mina is eager to meet the Count as her husband Jonathon Harker has gone missing after a stay at Dracula's home in Transylvania.    It's not the only question surrounding the Count - Thirtyfour was a passenger on the ship Demeter on the same voyage that brought Dracula to England.  After Dracula came ashore early the ship met with tragedy, the unidentified patient the sole survivor. 

Thirtyfour isn't just an amnesiac but a maniac obsessed with devouring insects and small animals for their life force while he awaits the arrival of "the master".   Seward consults his mentor,  esteemed Professor Abraham Van Helsing.  Mina meets the man, and things begin to fall into place.  Dracula sets his eyes on Lucy and begins to visit her each night.

What's interesting about this Dracula is that he comes across as a fairly skilled social manipulator, except for the lies that are easily exposed.  Seward is the first to suspect the Count of driving the tragedies that are unfolding around his clique, but Dracula has set him up to look the jealous lover and so his suspicions are dismissed by all.  Lucy and Thirtyfour are pitted against each other through yet more jealousy, the patient's for his lost place as the Master's favored pet.  Lucy's frail mother becomes a plot device as the vampire exploits her fears for her daughter (this is taken from the novel, and had never appeared onscreen before in earlier adaptations).  Later, after Lucy has become a vampire, Dracula will play off of Mina's grief and her depression, having driven her and her fiance apart. 

Under hypnosis, Thirtyfour recounts a little of his meeting with "the Master".  We see this in a dreamlike flashback in which three ghostly women stalk and  attack him in a castle.  The sequence is nearly silent but for the hissing of the women and the patient's narration.  The sequence stands out from otherwise staid camerawork and direction - not dull but not innovative.  The brides also stand out for their overt sexuality: for a television production, their sheer robes are shocking.  Now, I'm watching this on a bootleg disc made from an unrestored copy, so the image is not pristine...and that's from a production that had a constrained TV budget.  Its in black and white.  Plus, that sequence is murkily lit.  All the same, I can see that the the gowns become opaque only strategically, allowing glimpses of the actors' breasts that are nearly complete.  I couldn't get a screenshot to prove it.   Hammer took audience's breath away with decolletage - British TV took it further.  No one remembers.  Only Hammer is still known.

Later on Dracula will assault Lucy as she sleeps.  This is another sequence that is surprisingly frank for television.  Lucy writhes in bed, asleep and having a clearly sexual dream as Dracula kneels and watches.  When finally he penetrates her throat she climaxes.  Strong stuff for 1968 television. 

As the plot heats up, Dracula uses the undead Lucy as a proxy to seduce Mina.  The lesbian (well, bi really) attraction between them is undisguised for television.  Happily, this is depicted without bias, there is no vilification of sexuality in the film.  It's simply erotic. 

Looking back to the novel,  this is also the first production to allow the Count's facial hair, and the first time Lucy and Mina meet the old man Swales at the cemetery, where he engages in spirited talk of the town's seemier history.  In this, a colorful but inconsequential bit of the novel (a bit of mood-setting and character development) is spun into a clever twist that helps streamline the movie. 

I like this Dracula.  It's talky but neither slow nor stagebound (despite obvious, low-budget sets), and took me by surprise for a number of reasons: its sporadic fealty to the novel, its unadulterated sexuality, the revelation of Denholm Elliott.  More substantially, Dracula's crafty manipulations are given as much weight as his supernatural abilities, an innovative advance for the character.  Performances are good across the board - Bernard Archard is an engaging Van Helsing.  Corin Redgrave is a little affected as Thirty-four, suggesting he's more a stage than a screen actor.  James Maxwell (Seward) and Susan George (Lucy) are natural and fluid, easily sympathetic.