Second, December is already here, and I hoped I would have this done long before Christmas. I have a forthcoming 2017 Top Movies list slated at the end of the year when my #104for2017 movie list finally comes to a conclusion. If I can reach my extended goal from 104 movies for the year to 250, then I am planning to pick the top 25 off that list and give my thoughts on how much I enjoyed them.
Part 6 - Dr. Heckyl & Mr. Hype (and Other Broadcast TV Memories)
Brief Aside: An Argument for MST3K's KTMA Season
This little section was not planned but fits rather nicely into the theme of the moment. Between my previous post and this one, too much time has passed, but it has been an important time of reflection. Between these two posts, another Thanksgiving has come and gone, in which time I enjoyed another large binge of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes that included but were not limited to the annual MST3K Turkey Day marathon. A few days later, I celebrated the anniversary of one of MST3K's chief inspirations and one of my favorite kaiju, Gamera. Still deep in a Halloween horror host and broadcast television mood, I chose another marathon viewing of the original KTMA-23 Gamera episodes of MST3K. This quickly sent me down the rabbit hole to watch almost the entire KTMA season again, and I get in a mood to watch a few of these episodes rather frequently. I have met few fellow MSTies who can stand to watch these episodes more than once. Of course, there is always a MSTie or a fan of anything in general with at least one episode that is at the bottom of the list. I have known fans who got angry at the mere suggestion of watching Manos or Santa Claus a second time. I used to loathe The Beatniks and Teen-Age Crimewave because certain characters in those movies irritated me more than the riffing could make me laugh. I eventually came back to them and have a greater appreciation for them than I did, and it became hard to pick a least favorite episode. For me, gun to my head, I think that would have to be Mad Monster. I never seem to remember the plot, and I do not think that I have made it through the entire episode even once without falling asleep. In terms of the Gamera and other Sandy Frank movies, the argument typically is that the Season Three episodes are better. The problem with judging the KTMA episodes is that there is too often an attempt to compare them to the cable syndication episodes in some shape or form, and this does not work.
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| Any show that begins with puppets watching puppets deserves a little more scrutiny. |
The KTMA episodes were a different animal entirely and should not be compared to the other seasons (except for Season One and Season Eleven, maybe). The syndicated cable episodes were scripted, rehearsed, and had a bigger budget. The original cast and crew themselves look upon the local network episodes with a slight cringe and pass them off as imperfect and unpolished ad-libbing, which is exactly what they were. The KTMA episodes, however, dug into the very soul of what inspired the show's creation in the first place: the TV horror host and the network broadcast television movie distribution package. They did not need to be perfect or polished. They did not need to have a huge and colorful set. The KTMA episodes had exactly what they needed to give birth to a new kind of TV movie host. This was the essence of Charlton Heston sitting in the movie theater in The Omega Man. This was the essence of Bruce Dern on a lonely satellite with his robot friends in Silent Running. This was a comedy show, but, in its inception, it came from a different place. It was the Saturday afternoon local network TV movie. It came from Joel's childhood. It came from the childhood of which Gilbert Gottfried speaks with such fondness on his podcast when he talks about classic movies and Universal Monsters. It came from my childhood. It came from the youth of two generations of people growing up with television as a new and evolving social and family staple. It came from a place that was a little more uncertain, and escaping some of that uncertainty or stress in the day to day world was why so many of us would tune in. Joel and the Bots in the KTMA season did the same thing for the Minneapolis/St. Paul audience that Dr. Paul Bearer did for the Tampa/St. Petersburg audience, Svengoolie for the Chicago audience, Elvira for the Los Angeles audience, Sammy Terry for the Indianapolis audience, Dr. Morgus for the New Orleans audience, Major Gunn for the Houston audience, Fritz The Nite Owl for the Columbus audience, and so on. The occasional riffing during the network MST3K episodes made them different from other horror hosts, but the riffing was not the rule. The movies were the rule. Even Manos.
The local network season gave us almost a real time view of MST3K trying to figure out what it wanted to be. Every movie of the week was an experiment, but the real experiment was in each cast member hitting a stride, developing a personality for their characters, and getting progressively more practiced at the art form they were creating. As a result of the show's original structure, the KTMA episodes were more sparse running commentary during the movie than riffing, leaving a lot of space for the audience to follow the movie for its own merits, if any. That space between riffs seems to create a divide between some fans. The KTMA season has a smaller following due to its limited exposure, but that base seems smaller still because the local season does not have enough riffs. It might feel a little boring to some to watch those earlier episodes after already experiencing the syndicated episodes. Season One and Season Eleven share more than a few similarities with "Season Zero" because both following seasons feel like a cleared slate with the constant and overshadowing doubt that the show would get picked up for another season afterward. Season One drew from the establishment of its characters in the KTMA season and hit the mark with them right away, but it had several missteps of its own in the in-theater presentation. Instead of five Gamera movies in a row, they featured Radar Men From The Moon in nearly every episode and then dropped the serial halfway through the ninth of its twelve chapters. It was so close. The riffs were expanded and polished, but the comedy experimented with a number of new ideas like sight and sound gags that did not translate well.
Season Eleven on Netflix is a fresh topic at the moment, which makes me feel a little less comfortable discussing it. It can be too easy for some to accept or dismiss something new. I have seen this happening on both sides already, but I think the eleventh season suffers most from having too many riffs and adhering too strictly to some of the original formula. The Netflix episodes feel like they clutter their movies to keep the joke cutting room floor clean, some almost overlapping each other as they try to fit them all in, and it distracts from observations in the movies that inspire those jokes. Everyone is here to hear the jokes, though, right? The movie does not feel quite like the rule here. It sounds like the in-theater riffing was not done literally in-theater as the original show did it. Many of Season Eleven's riffs sound like they were recorded separately and then edited together to fit the time rather than having the entire group sit together and roll them out with the timestamps as the original MST3K crew can be seen doing in the rough cut episodes. Some lines are re-dubbed, but no one is sitting in separate sound studio booths to have the same conversation. The sound studio option is probably more practical for today's crew, but it stands out to the ear. Some of the Season Eleven riffs simply sound more like cut and paste audio editing and less like natural dialogue. Criticism aside, this same argument gives me higher hopes for the confirmed Season Twelve because I think that this group can hit the same sort of stride as they progress and feel more comfortable. Time will tell.
Perhaps the local Minneapolis season's greatest strength was young J. Elvis Weinstein. He shined in his ability to come up with very funny spontaneous riffs. Joel was there as a sort of film buff mentor to offer references to other movies and insights into the flaws and virtues of a scene. He was there to watch the movie and not simply to comment on it. Trace Beaulieu's Crow became less robotic and more rebellious as his existential crisis gave rise to his creativity, growing into the Crow we knew and loved on Comedy Central before the KTMA season reached its end. As The Mads, Trace and Josh set a standard for self-foiling villains, but, out of everyone in the KTMA season and even the first cable season, Josh's Servo was my favorite character and gave me the biggest laughs.
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| Just like classic television, Servo was best when he was in monochrome. |
When I met the cast at the Cinematic Titanic screening of The Wasp Woman in Dallas years ago, I wish that I had been able to tell him that personally. Instead, I got him confused with Josh Weinstein of Mission Hill (I still do not know how that happened with my mind for trivia at the time). I was both nervous and suffering from severe bus lag that evening, and by the time I made it down the cast table to Trace, I think I was about to pass out. Josh was the last one on the row. I already felt the dark cloud overhead when I mumbled to Trace, "Thank you so much for years and years of... everything." Those exact words with the pause, and I am not sure he heard them. I hope not. Meeting Frank, Joel, and Mary Jo had taken almost all I had left. When Josh corrected me, my brain locked up completely. The last words out of my mouth before walking away in shame was that the writing on America's Funniest Home Videos was better when he was working on it. I remember a slight glance of attention toward us from Trace Beaulieu when he heard me mention AFV. I still wonder what he was thinking in that moment. Although I truly did enjoy the writing in AFV when Trace and Josh were on the staff and felt like I could hear their comedic voices in several of the jokes, it was no less a tongue-tied and forced substitution for an incorrect compliment on my part and not the high compliment Josh deserved from my heart. I have carried that fractured fanboy moment with me for a long time. It is my most painful celebrity meeting memory, even more painful than when Megumi Odaka signed my Godzilla vs. Biollante poster twice.
As the KTMA season progressed, the quality of riffing and performances progressed with it. Their final two episodes, The Last Chase and Legend of the Dinosaurs, were the culmination of all that practice and pursuit of the show's identity. They found it, but then things changed. The move to The Comedy Channel and Comedy Central was a reboot. It felt like they needed several episodes in Season One before they succeeded in hitting that stride again, and that first cable season recycled a great deal of KTMA host segment material including Servo's classic blender flirtation segment. It was a better-written reboot with different movies but a reboot nonetheless with many of the same flaws of fledgling production and uncertainty. I could argue it took them until Season Three before they truly got where they wanted to be with all hits and no misses. Season Three is undoubtedly my favorite MST3K season but not without a couple of drawbacks. I credit much of its success to the intimacy they had with the Sandy Frank catalog to remake those KTMA episodes and to make them even better, and the non-Sandy Frank selection in Season Three was very similar to the KTMA season with its inclusion of a few pieces of Made-For-TV fodder and some television shows repackaged into movies. Stranded in Space and Master Ninja especially felt like local network episodes, and both "Season Zero" and Season Three shared the distinction of having a painful Sax Rohmer film tacked on near the end of their run. On top of that, they had some of the best Roger Corman and Bert I. Gordon material available and hit the ball out of the park with their earliest short films. Unfortunately, they had lost Josh along the way. I love Kevin Murphy, but I missed Josh's charm and attitude. Even worse, in my opinion, was that they left Humanoid Woman and Legend of the Dinosaurs out of their second assault on Sandy Frank entirely. They were the odd-man-out Sandy Frank releases, a bleak Russian space opera and a violent Toei dinosaur horror movie clearly mismarketed alongside the "friend to all children" and a bunch of re-edited Japanese children's science fiction television shows like Starwolf and Army of Apes, and I think that tackling those missing movies a second time in Season Three could have resulted in two of the best episodes of all time. Sentimentally, the final KTMA episode is still my all-time favorite. I loved it so much I cut together a little fan trailer nearly twenty years ago that I shared with a few online friends and never wanted the whole world to see. Someone put it on YouTube, and the first person who put it there had to disable the comments section due to hundreds of comments that I am thankful I never got to read. People really suck sometimes...
On the same token, I feel like a second KTMA season would have been better than the first syndicated season simply because they had become more comfortable with their work. I think that the show could have become what it wanted to become much sooner if that had been possible, but then it might not have escaped the local broadcast market. It might have remained locked in Minnesota, the same as Svengoolie did in Chicago for twenty years before he became syndicated on MeTV, and MST3K might have been forevermore a quirky local flavor that no one outside Minnesota, including me, would have been able to see and appreciate. Despite my feelings for what the KTMA season was and could have been had it been allowed to continue, I am thankful that it made the move that it did into the greater public eye.
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| And then there is that other problem: degraded VHS recordings.. |
The surviving KTMA broadcast recordings that I have seen are not in the greatest of shape, and, in a few cases, different copies of the episodes that have floated around were missing footage. A VHS copy of the KTMA version of Gamera vs. Zigra I acquired years ago was missing the entire last monster battle, and I just saw that missing footage for the first time on YouTube a few days ago as of this writing. Uploading a video to YouTube, of course, also causes a gradual degradation of quality no different from copying a copy of a VHS tape over and over again. I was not sure if alternate recordings of these episodes existed at all to know whether this footage was missing intentionally or not. I was happy to discover that complete versions did exist. The same goes for the Superdome episode. The version that was available (and the version on YouTube) was missing the final host segment, but this managed to resurface as well thanks to the local viewer whose letter was featured in that last host segment. Such human error in recording these broadcasts was and still is the state of "Circulating the Tapes," but the Digital Archive Project became my favorite place in my early days on the Internet. They did a fine job of preserving many of these shows in the best quality to be found, and they helped me to amass a 95%-complete MST3K episode collection long before there was a "Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Volume 1" on DVD, not to mention their preservation of The Dennis Miller Show and one of my favorites, Space Ghost's Cartoon Planet.
To me, the best treat to come out of the "Bring Back MST3K" movement was the discovery of the missing first two episodes of the KTMA season, Invaders from the Deep and Revenge of the Mysterons. I know the master tapes for the rest of the local network season still exist. They must, and, unfortunately, the third KTMA episode of Star Force is still missing. I would be among the first to buy a MST3K "Season Zero" DVD set if it were made commercially available. At the very least, I would hope for the entire catalog of KTMA season master tapes to become available for streaming through Shout! Factory or some other outlet instead of just sitting in a shoebox under Jim Mallon's bed so that the masses have the opportunity to see them in their best possible light, either to cherish them as I do or to dismiss them ultimately as inferior.
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| "I can view this coolly... dispassionately. It's just that you're so incredibly stupid and wrong. Just so INCREDIBLY STUPID! AND WRONG!!" - Dr. Forrester, Invasion USA |
Broadcast Television Memories
One thing about the local network season of MST3K that made it special was that it came out of that poignant era of broadcast television replay value. Several of the things I love the most would not exist today at all if not for that. The horror hosts and cable networks relied upon the public's willingness to see a movie again and again, and Nick at Nite sprang forth from the increasingly-threatened nostalgia of the classic TV rerun as newer shows kept pushing older shows out of circulation. There is some irony in that so many of those broadcasts were instantly obsolete and often never seen again unless someone recorded them on Betamax or VHS. The movies or shows themselves might become available commercially or air again, but the presentation of that moment in time occurred only in that moment in time and then disappeared forever. That was the magic of television. The promotional commercials changed. The channel logos and crawling text bugs went through periodic design changes. The commercial breaks and sponsors shifted. Nickelodeon's logo changed from a silver sphere to an amorphous and shapeshifting blob. Reruns of shows like Spectreman aired for a very short span of time and then disappeared without warning when the broadcast license ran out. One broadcast of the same movie or show never was 100% the same as the one before it, and you were lucky if a few presentations aired a second time at all, especially with network movie host shows like Dr. Paul Bearer or KTMA's MST3K season. Even Svengoolie does a new mailbag segment every week even when he is showing a movie rerun. Some tiny little editing tweak is made somewhere every time, even if you do not notice it. It could be something as seemingly insignificant as changing a movie still in a trivia segment, and I have seen that happen.
If you grew up in the 1990s, 1980s or prior, then I probably am not telling you anything that you did not experience yourself, but explaining something like this to my twelve-year-old nephew can be an interesting endeavor. When he was about six or seven years old, I pulled out some preserved Saturday morning cartoon blocks from the 1980s, and he got lost in that strange world. He forgot momentarily that this was not live television, and he was jarred from reality at seeing the toy commercials I grew up with and the different cast of characters that appeared in, say, an average McDonald's commercial. He wanted the Happy Meal toys, and he was crestfallen to realize they had been discontinued thirty years ago. He wanted me to look for them on eBay.
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| Food, Folks and Fun ain't what it used to be. |
Those nostalgia time capsules of television history shaped me in so many ways, and I, not unlike my nephew watching cartoons from the '80s with me, found my love for them in watching reruns of movies and shows made years before I was born. It fascinated me to see how television came to be what it was in my early life, and I took very seriously some of the little things that most would disregard. I was an observant kid. Take this local television title sequence, for example:
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Even a die-hard fan of the Poltergeist franchise probably would not care to have this broadcast in a home collection when some scenes are edited out and a DVD or Blu-Ray is out there with pristine quality, but what I wouldn't give to have a set of these master tapes of Dr. Paul Bearer's show instead of the deteriorated broadcast recordings. Would anyone be that disappointed to know that Alan Alda's broadcast promo for the final episode of M*A*S*H (which I have in my possession through some strange coincidence) is not available in the DVD extras of a M*A*S*H complete box set? Would anyone bother to argue that the box set is not truly complete without it? Would anyone care if I uploaded it to YouTube at all? If you were not there when it aired and did not see it, then did it matter that it happened? Did you need Alan Alda to tell you the final episode of M*A*S*H was about to come on your local station? Did the falling tree make a sound? Did they load it on the chopper after it fell and fly it to a M*A*S*H tree surgeon unit? Do you need to be loaded on a chopper after how badly I hurt you with that joke?
It is impossible to preserve all of this material. A great deal of it is lost already. YouTube never will be able to scratch the surface even if everyone who recorded something on a VHS tape uploads all of it tomorrow, and there is no market to preserve them commercially. It is tantamount to hoarding to suggest that these little pieces of television history be preserved across the board, and only a small handful of TV geeks like myself are doing it. But, in the same argument, it is the disregard for the historical value of some of this material that led to some of the lost movies and shows that some viewers will not see again, such as episodes of Doctor Who and several other British television shows like All in the Family's predecessor that the BBC simply destroyed because, like the above graphic, television was created to exist within each unique moment of its broadcast time and then to disappear into the ether to make room for the next unique moment. Almost the entire catalog of a few local horror hosts are confirmed lost forever. I lost almost 500 VHS tapes to flood damage years ago, most of which are irreplaceable. I have mentioned in a previous post that I am thankful for the website FuzzyMemories.tv. They take this preservation of broadcast history even more seriously than I do, even going so far as to preserve technical difficulty drop-outs of movies and television shows that occurred on a particular channel on some random day.
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| I know I have gone on and on about this long enough, but we already are entering a generation that is not going to understand this joke from The Simpsons. Even they didn't use the same technical difficulties graphic twice. I weep for the loss of that history. Rant over. |
As a child of insomnia and ingrained family dysfunction, I found much of what I needed and what shaped me through television, and by the early 1980s, as I mentioned in an earlier entry, both local network and fledgling cable channels were looking for more filler and less of an excuse to switch on a test pattern. Theatrical movies began to appear more and more often on select stations, and Made-For-TV became a movie genre within itself. It is virtually unheard of today for any channel, local or otherwise, to go off the air for any length of time, but I wish more of them would. Today, the night time channel guide is filled to the rim with infomercials and other paid programming. I did not realize in my childhood and early adulthood that I was seeing a profound shift in the Age of Television. I developed a greater appreciation for that material of the past as I got older, and, depending on the mood, I am willing to revisit a movie through an old broadcast recording just as easily as pulling out a DVD or Blu-Ray. It may not even have a host. It might be something like the network television premiere of Halloween with a bunch of old commercials and a few alternate scenes, or it might be a regular movie-of-the-week broadcast of Jaws from sometime in the '80s. Something that does not seem special or significant but undoubtedly had some impact on someone in its audience and was possibly the first time they ever saw the movie. I know that the first time I saw both Halloween and Jaws were on network television broadcasts. Although I acquired these recordings from other collectors, it is highly possible that this specific moment captured in time was the exact moment I first saw Jaws. I am willing to bet that the network premiere of Halloween was the exact first time I saw it as well, and preserving the way you saw a movie for the first time is something special. A moving photo album.
Going back to the insomnia I suffered as a child, the late night network movie was a big deal for me. There were a few times when I could sleep but did not want to miss something that rarely aired, but, much of the time, sleep eluded me and I would watch whatever random material was on a channel without a test pattern. Some nights, I listened to the radio as I went to sleep, but usually the television was on. My parents forced me to ease gradually into the idea of having access to television. I could watch television in the living room almost any time I wanted, but it was for the entire family. I got my first television for my bedroom when I was seven, and it was an antique. It had built-in rabbit ears, a six-inch black-and-white screen, and two huge dials that made a loud thunking sound every time you changed a channel. At the time, we still had cable, so I had the benefit of the cable box that sounded like a bicycle wheel with playing cards in its spokes every time I changed the channel. At night, however, it did not matter that the television was black-and-white or that changing channels was noisy because I usually kept it on Nick at Nite. When my family discontinued cable and the cable company conveniently neglected to retrieve the coaxial adapter for the Disney Channel, I would stay up all night on weekends watching old reruns of shows like The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro, hoping that any of those nights would bring some of the rare and obscure broadcast filler I came to love and, in some cases, never saw again. I still have that little gold cylinder somewhere. I wonder if they still want it back.
Had I not existed in some of those unique moments in time as one television moment overlapped into the next, then I would not be here writing this entry from the perspective I have. I probably would not be here writing it at all or spend the amount of time I have on the subject. I have spent so much time on it here that it feels a bit awkward to try to shift into movie reviews and not save them for the next entry, but long-winded segues are nothing new from me. Despite cable, my bedroom television spent several nights a week tuned in to a local network movie. I have mentioned KTMA and WTOG a lot, but my earliest call letters were KTRK, KPRC, and KHOU, the three major network affiliates for ABC, NBC, and CBS, respectively, in Houston, Texas, while many of my early movie and television experiences on a local station, including Spectreman every day after Kindergarten, were brought to me courtesy of KHTV 39 if memory serves. Spectreman went off the air about the same time the station decided to start calling itself "39 Gold." They already had the Spectreman gold, but they threw it away. KTRK's 11PM Late Movie was another staple. One of my strongest childhood memories is the end credits of All in the Family. In those days, you young whippersnappers, the end credits were the background music for a local station announcer telling you what was coming up next, right after Rob Reiner told everyone that the show was recorded in front of a live studio audience. I heard the synopsis of quite a few movies to that piano tune. Pretty much all of the surviving KTMA MST3K broadcast recordings had this as well, promoting other movies KTMA had in store later while the "Love Theme" played. I might never have tracked down The Friends of Eddie Coyle if not for hearing about it at the end of an old KTMA MST3K episode recording. Great movie.
As much as I loved looking in a TV Guide, I knew that whatever was going to be on after All in the Family or Barney Miller or Good Times or Benson or Too Close for Comfort was very likely to be something that I would enjoy. It would be something to drown out the silence in the dead of night and the noise in my brain, and it was more than likely to be some sort of crime thriller, giant monster sci-fi or horror movie. I could count on seeing most of the Tsuburaya/Rankin-Bass "trilogy" with The Last Dinosaur and The Ivory Ape, or I could catch a classic like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three or The Odd Couple. I still remember watching The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao and The Glass-Bottom Boat, and I remember trying to stay up late one night to watch Ghidrah, The Three-Headed Monster at 2AM with the sound turned way down. I got caught and only got to watch a few minutes of it. I tried the logical argument that I was already wide awake and that the movie was already on, but that did not get me anywhere. If the local station needed a lot of filler, I could see something like The Poseidon Adventure, or I could see special one-night-only rerun blocks of shows like Here Come The Brides that were packaged for and aired during what usually was an all-night movie slot. I could have sworn for years that Here Come The Brides was just a really long movie because I never saw the show any other time than on that one night. And I came to love a lot of horror movies like Burned at the Stake, Who Slew Aunty Roo, Tentacles, and The Devil's Daughter. Shelley Winters seemed to pop up in a lot of those late night movies.
Vampira AKA Old Dracula
In the earliest days of Nick at Nite, I marveled at the comedy of Laugh-In. I loved watching these performers and had recognized a few of them from their movie careers that followed. Among that amazing cast was the late Teresa Graves, whom I had seen on Get Christy Love on at least one old rerun airing of the show or the movie. I do not remember which. What I remember is how easily I was drawn to her smile, and I loved being able to see different people crossing over from one role to another. For classic movie network reruns, I had become familiar with the face of David Niven very early. Although I did not have the sophistication to sit through too many classic movies as a child, black-and-white comedies and dramas from the 1930s and 1940s were plentiful. My memories are sketchy, but I know that I saw bits and pieces of Niven films like Bachelor Mother, Raffles and Dodsworth, but I also knew Niven's work well as a child from Around The World in 80 Days, The Canterville Ghost, and The Pink Panther (for the record, I rank David Niven above Peter Sellers). During one of those special moments in time, I happened to be awake on a night when a local station had a rare treat in store for me: a Dracula movie starring both Teresa Graves and David Niven under the title Vampira. One short promo commercial, and I was not going to sleep that night. I had to see it.
I thought that I would have more to say about Vampira AKA Old Dracula than I did after this October 2017 viewing. It had been at least thirty years since I saw it for the first time, and, sadly, it did not hold up for me as much as I had hoped. It remains a sentimental favorite, but it is a rather tame and very British entry in the Blaxploitation sub-genre. As a vampire comedy, it holds its own in quite a few spots but jars its audience violently away from the laughs when some of its horror elements come forward. The disappointment in Vampira comes from the fact that its screenplay was written by Jeremy Lloyd ('Allo 'Allo, Are You Being Served?, Laugh-In). Lloyd had experience with highbrow and progressive humor in the 1960s, but this endeavor into 1970s Blaxploitation dropped into a few areas that were beneath the dignity of David Niven, Teresa Graves, and even Christy Love. Clive Donner's direction makes it even more thoroughly British in its humor and sensibility, and perhaps that is what causes it to fall short. The positives? We have the great Carry On stable actor Bernard Bresslaw, excruciating 1970s decor, Dracula's cane with a secret pop-out knife tip, and zip-up travel coffins. Has any other vampire movie done zip-up travel coffins? Not even Mel Brooks did zip-up travel coffins. Brilliant.
Although deadpan is one of the things I love most about Niven in his other films, his deadpan here is a bit too dead. Niven's Dracula is tired and bored, and his bouts of apathy and downright impracticality are his greatest obstacle to his goal to revive his bride. The cringe factor increases looking at it from a 2017 perspective because Dracula is kind of a racist. Sure, he was undead, drank the blood of the living and was a murderous warmonger who displayed his enemies impaled on spikes, but that racist thing... *biting lip* Much of Lloyd's race humor feels deliberately simplistic. Dracula revives his bride with a blood transfusion from an African-American Playboy playmate, and her skin and and personality change color to match. The cheap gimmick gives us Teresa Graves as a vampire queen with not nearly enough screen time because the focus is too much on Niven's displeasure with the change. The few parts she has are inspiring, regardless of the easy joke about her embracing her new look after seeing a Jim Brown movie, but she created a new vampire aesthetic years before Grace Jones came along with Vamp.
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| Vampira fails as a title when Old Dracula takes all of the focus away from her majesty. |
Had Graves been given full reign over the plot, then this could have been something special. A sequel focusing on her alone could have been vastly better, and I still remember my biggest complaint the first time I saw it was that Graves did not have the attention she deserved. A few other tweaks, and Niven might have escaped it with his dignity intact.
*SPOILER ALERT*
*END SPOILER*
Keenan Ivory Wayans should remake Vampira. He could fix it. And have Rihanna star in it. That is all I have to say on that.
Dr. Heckyl & Mr. Hype
Whew. Finally we come to the focal point of this entry that I intended in the first place. I saw Dr. Heckyl & Mr. Hype only once sometime around 1985 or 1986, and I never forgot it. At the time, I did not know that one of its stars was the same man who had brought Spectreman to me years earlier, the great Mel Welles (see my previous entry), nor did I know that its writer and director, Charles B. Griffith, had contributed to some of my earliest experiences in B-movie classics such as It Conquered The World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Death Race 2000, and Little Shop of Horrors. I also did not understand much of its adult humor at that young age, but that never stopped me. The majority of what needed to be understood in the plot, however, was simple and out in the open. Even at the age of seven or eight years old, I understood "don't judge a book by its cover." Children pick those things up quickly, and I had seen The Elephant Man for the first time earlier that year as well. Perhaps John Merrick made Henry Heckyl have a more profound effect on me, so I cannot tell for sure if this movie changed me the way that I think it did or if The Elephant Man inflated my perception of its merits. This horror spoof was a reversal of the classic Jekyll and Hyde story starring Oliver Reed as Dr. Henry Heckyl, a depressed and physically deformed podiatrist. Another doctor in his office, played by Mel Welles, had concocted a new chemical formula intended to bring out one's true internal self. Heckyl, suicidal over his appearance and an oblivious attitude toward the acceptance of his peers despite his looks, sees the only two possible ways out of his sad state of life and steals the potion for himself, but he seems to hope more for death than a cure. In many ways, the end result is a spoof that is too smart and progressive for its own good, and it does not help matters that the head honchos of Golan-Globus were pulling strings at the very top to dilute the ideas in the plot and rush the film's release.
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| Oliver Reed and Mel Welles discuss the many dilemmas of curative medicine. |
Dr. Heckyl & Mr. Hype is just as much a horror spoof as Jeckyll & Hyde... Together Again, but the latter focuses more on slapstick and silliness. Heckyl spends more of its time on internal monologue, trying to be more thought-provoking and to take itself a bit more seriously for a deadpan effect while still being silly in the right places. Without executive interference, it could have been a completely different movie. Oliver Reed is, of course, Oliver Reed. His deadpan humor is closer to Shakespeare than Robert Louis Stevenson, and Griffith himself apparently had issues with that. Oliver Reed as Dr. Heckyl is an immediately likable main character. He is sad, sympathetic, and intelligent, and you want to be his best friend. He channels that notion of the Hunchback and the Beast in that true beauty is on the inside, and he does so flawlessly. He is so immersed in his own depression that he cannot see that others around him accept him for what he is. The attitudes of many people are tongue-in-cheek and lead to some comments on his looks. A few people even scream, but no one is truly repulsed. His colleagues respect him. People continue to share space with him, but, of course, Heckyl longs to share more intimate space and wants to end his own life because he cannot experience love.
"Good-looking people can get away with murder." This should have been the film's tagline. Enter Mr. Hype, the extreme representation of Heckyl's true inner self: insecure, overly concerned with his appearance, and 100% unfiltered Oliver Reed. With Heckyl's flawed physical appearance erased, Mr. Hype is a homicidal narcissist. His wish for true love becomes a lustful hunger, but he is unable to act upon any of his carnal urges because his insecurities drive him to murder every woman with whom he comes in contact because she does not compliment his perfect features to his satisfaction. The murder scenes, sadly, detract from the movie, and this is coming from someone who watches a lot of gore. The first murder scene, a hair-raising electrocution, is on the mark for this sort of spoof, but there is something about the exchanges and the timing that feels off. One murder scene in particular, the mirror murder, was among the most disturbing kills I have ever seen in a horror movie. Hype slams a woman's face into a mirror with such force that her face is completely crushed, but the mirror does not break. You see the image of what looks like a squished strawberry pie staring back from the reflection, and it was at this point that the local network cut away to a commercial the first time I saw the movie. I was thankful for the recovery time, but it gave me quite a memorable nightmare when I finally got to sleep that night. I dreamed that my neighbor had killed his mother with a clown hammer to the face, and my mind's eye created an image even more gruesome than the one in this movie. That face haunted my mind for a long time. I did not want to see it, but I could not stop seeing it in my imagination. But I digress.
*SPOILER ALERT BUT I RECOMMEND READING ON ANYWAY*
I do not think that I have mentioned it in great detail in this blog because it can be more personal than I like, but, through my tumultuous relationship with my aunt, I became aware of the LGBTQ community at a very early age. My aunt came out of the closet as a lesbian when I was about five years old, shortly after divorcing her husband, and I did not have a great deal of curiosity about it other than the mechanics involved. Stories like La Cage aux Folles and Victor/Victoria, two of my favorite movies, showed me a sense of tolerance that I think I already had from the start. I have struggled with my own identity in a number of ways in my life, but the important thing is that I have held a firm belief all my life that love takes many forms. It is something that comes from the chemistry of that true inner self rather than an attraction to physical appearance, but, above all else, it should not matter whether or not a man loves a man or a woman loves a woman. If you truly love each other, then all the best to you. The rest is useless noise, and I still have a hard time understanding why it makes such a big damn deal to some of you out there. The bigotry is baffling. Many of my aunt's friends (and lovers) were my friends as well through much of my life, and I was often a better friend to all of them than she was. I was more accepting of them for who they were than she was most of the time. In part, perhaps, I was accepting of them because they had the strength and confidence I did not have to be accepting of myself, but this is not a therapy session. This is a movie review. Several of those friends (the ones she did not drive away herself with her abusive behavior) we lost to AIDS, drug abuse, and suicide, and none of those issues in the LGBTQ community have gone away.
This brings me to one specific character who caught my eye during this October viewing, and I saw the character from a new perspective as I have gotten older. One of Dr. Heckyl's colleagues is a man named Dr. Hoo (nyuk, nyuk). Hoo does not have a large part in the movie, but his scenes paint a strong picture. When we first see Dr. Hoo, he seems to be a misogynistic bully, attacking the character of the office receptionist, Nurse Finebum. Nurse Finebum is, of course, intended to be seen as very attractive, and Dr. Hoo treats her with disrespect and attacks on her character as a woman of loose morals. Hoo seems deliberately stereotypical in his attitude, and he is not set up to be a likable character. His gimmick among many gimmicks in this doctors' office is tickle therapy, and he is simply a hateful and goofy spectator with only that much character development to be a woman-hater and carry a feather around with him everywhere.
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| With a smile and a tickle, Dr. Hoo makes your pain go away while masking his own. |
Everything changes when we see Dr. Hoo for the last time. Hoo drinks the potion and transforms into his true inner self: a woman. Not only has Dr. Hoo had a complete sex change after drinking the potion, but he also has transformed into the perfect image of the woman he wanted to be: Nurse Finebum. I looked back on my first impression of Dr. Hoo in shock. The tickle therapist lashed out at Nurse Finebum out of a combination of jealousy, admiration, and self-loathing. On the inside, Dr. Hoo was a woman, but Dr. Hoo was very much not a woman on the outside. Dr. Hoo embraces her true identity and turns her affections towards the object of male perfection that is Mr. Hype. They seem perfect for each other because their narcissism seems to balance itself out. After a lustful exchange, the female Dr. Hoo and Mr. Hype both revert back to their original selves. The male Dr. Hoo seems to be disgusted that he swapped spit with Dr. Heckyl, but it is more apparent that he has suffered a complete nervous breakdown because he finally grasped that unattainable true inner self only to lose it. In a move that is intended to be silly but struck me hard beneath the surface, Dr. Hoo commits suicide by tickling himself to death with his own feather. The method is absurd, but the reality beneath it is horrifying. For 1980, the subtext was ahead of its time. I had witnessed a transgender person committing suicide in a comedy horror spoof, and it put a spotlight on the many underlying morals to this story that the movie itself was unable to convey to the best of its ability.
Golan and Globus were out to make a buck, not a social statement. I wonder how much more powerful some of these messages could have come through if Griffith had more freedom. Nevertheless, there is some deep-cutting satire and social commentary embedded in this movie, and I do not think that it gets the appreciation that it deserves. Its flaws can be a distraction, but Griffith creates something good here despite not having the proper outlet for it. I find myself coming back to this one every so often. Cannon Films did not deserve this movie any more than they deserved Tobe Hooper. There was too much talent going on there.
Up next, we reach the final entry of my October 2017 highlights with a few Halloween odds and ends I enjoyed outside of my Twitter thread, a few thoughts on some of the things I did not watch this year but were on my list, and a list of my favorite first-time horror viewings for the month (a precursor to my year-end top movies list).
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