Love at the antipodes (4/1/01)
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Dracula Versus Frankenstein. [Al Adamson, 1971.]
Notes: After a couple of preliminary bloodsucker-in-the-cemetery shots, we relocate abruptly to Vegas, where the auteur’s wife Regina Carrol is doing a song-and-dance for the benefit of a sparse crowd among whom Adamson himself [it’s that Hitchcock thing] is seated. — Then there’s something about a carnival; a house of horrors. — Mad Doctor Frankenstein, played from a wheelchair by J. Carrol Naish, dispatches Lon Chaney Jr. [muta persona: throat cancer, alas; not that he could easily retain his lines in any case here at the end of his long and alcoholic career] to fetch more subjects for the current round of experiments, which seem to require a copious supply of naked dead girls. — Then Count Dracula [played by Adamson’s accountant], who just happens to be in the neighborhood, drops in and expresses an interest in reviving the family monster. — Doctor Frankenstein’s dwarf [an erstwhile star of
Freaks and an old drinking buddy of John Barrymore’s] cackles with delight. — A couple is making out on the beach. Chaney appears and hacks them to pieces with his trusty axe. — But he still loves his puppy. Hmmm. — Abrupt cut to Exterior, Day, Student Protests: for this is a document of the Sixties, after all. — Ms. Carrol reappears here on the beach, apparently in search of her missing sister; it is darkly hinted that the runaway may have fallen prey to the white slave trade. — The crowd of hipsters at the coffeeshop, thinking she must be some kind of nark, put LSD in her coffee. Bummer, man. — Meanwhile our heroes are reviving the monster in the laboratory. A bunch of wires run into a face that looks like mold on cottage cheese. — Appearances are deceptive: far from continuing its obviously advanced decomposition, the monster gets up, goes out for a stroll, and eats the first guy he happens across, who turns out to be the legendary horror geek Forrest J. Ackerman. [A guy who gets great cameos: check him out in
Attack Of The Sixty Foot Centerfold.] — Meanwhile social misfit Russ Tamblyn briefly reprises his role as the leader of
Satan’s Sadists [“the
Citizen Kane of biker films”], but nobody seems to be able to figure out how to insert that movie into this one, and he promptly disappears. — Miss Carrol is revived from her bum trip by Good Guy Anthony Eisley, who offers his services as Virgil to guide her through this weird Dantean hippie underworld. — Romance blossoms. Or blooms, or whatever it’s supposed to do. — Meanwhile to appease the expectations of the drivein crowd that is watching all this, the monster wanders around for a bit menacing couples in parked cars. [This is supposed to scare the girls in the audience and induce them to move across the seats toward the boys.] — Chaney Junior takes his axe/Gives the bikers forty whacks/Since the rushes don’t look great/Gives the cinematographer forty-eight. — Carrol and Eiseley hear something suspicious on the beach at night and investigate; leading them into the carnival, and thus into the lair of Frankenstein. — If you look closely you notice that the dead zombie chicks strapped to the walls in the background keep blinking. — One of the zombie chicks is the missing sister! [But after this they forget about her again.] — Frankenstein explains that he is trying to harness the psychic energy released by traumatic shocks. Unfortunately in the confusion that ensues when he attempts to illustrate this point he gets beheaded by his own guillotine: what could be more ignominious. — Time for a chase: Chaney pursues Ms. Carrol. But gets shot. Dracula appears out of nowhere and takes over, so impressing Ms. Carrol with his unearthly menace that she is stricken with a monumental case of Heaving Bosom. No wonder Adamson married her. Eisley arrives in the nick of time! he saves the day! — No, actually, Dracula turns him into a heap of ash with a lightningbolt. [Dude, that was pretty harsh.] — But now the monster reappears and the two of them drag her off to an abandoned church to contend for her hand. — Big fight. They stagger outside just as the sun is coming up. Dracula is winning. He rips the arms off the monster! just like in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. — Then he rips its head off! game over. - But the rays of the rising sun catch him as he’s trying to get back to his coffin. He evaporates. — Ms. Carrol escapes from the church into the light of the new day and staggers off to commence a life of perpetual therapy. The end.
Adamson having been shipped off to his reward by a psychopathologic cement contractor [but you can watch that episode of the
E! True Hollywood Story for yourself], his old comrade-in-arms and producer Sam Sherman is left to reminisce about the Golden Age of exploitation cinema on the commentary track all by himself, and provides the definitive explanation of the genesis of this cult classic, namely, that the bizarre incongruity of the disparate segments stitched together to assemble the narrative arose from necessity: they started out making one movie, ran out of money, hustled a few more bucks and started making another, got some negative feedback from the distributors, started again, etc., etc. — until when finally they had enough footage to edit into something of feature length [and had spent enough money that they had to], it didn’t make any sense. — When William Burroughs did this, it was supposed to be Art. [For that matter, compare the junk in the genome.] — Uniquely weird and completely nonsensical, and I mean that in the best way. Check it out.
This stands, incidentally, at Number 84 on the IMDB bottom one hundred. Presumably with a silver bullet.
____________Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor (3/30/01)
