dean stockwell

Famous Monsters Gone Off-Brand

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One of The Prytania’s Classic Movie selections this Halloween season was the 1958 Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee as the famous vampire. It’s a gorgeous picture in the exact way that most Hammer Horrors are, but it’s also one that doesn’t take a lot of risks in its transformation from page to screen, to the point where its US release had to be retitled The Horror of Dracula in order to distinguish it from the decades-old Bela Lugosi classic from Universal. If anything, Hammer’s Dracula film goes out of its way to streamline and normalize the Bram Stoker source material, consolidating characters and skipping over the novel’s strange fixations on real estate deals & oceanic travel. As a result, I greatly enjoyed looking at The Horror of Dracula but didn’t think much about it after leaving the theater, since it deliberately made itself more inconspicuous so as not to be dismissed as a silly novelty. I believe this was a mistake. By the 1950s, the first run of the Universal Monster movies had established a concrete canon of iconic horror villains in Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the Gill-man (with no offense meant to my egomaniacal bestie the Invisible Man). Those famous creatures’ early outings in the Universal Monsterverse defined the look, feel, and tone of horror cinema (if not only by bringing some dark German Expressionist magic to Old Hollywood), so that any reiteration in subsequent decades would have to stand out as a silly novelty in order to stand out at all. Restaging Dracula in sumptuous 1950s Technicolor is not enough; you need a fun, memorable gimmick to zhuzh up the material. Even Universal knew that by the 1950s, when they regularly dispatched their Famous Monsters to terrorize Abbott & Costello in a series of slapstick comedies for children. And so, I left The Horror of Dracula craving the goofier, zanier side of Count Dracula in a novelty take on the character, and I’ve spent the rest of this Halloween season tracking down similar goof-offs from his Famous Monster brethren.

Of all the silly Dracula-adjacent novelties that called out to me this month, 1977’s Dracula’s Dog barked my name the loudest. In this far-afield deviation from the original novel, the Dracula surname has carried down through multiple generations all the way to Michael Dracula, a suburban dad who loves spending quality time with his middle-class family in sunny California. During an especially sun-dappled camping trip, Michael Dracula and the rest of the Dracula clan are attacked by a vampiric Doberman that once belonged to his ancestor, the Count Dracula of Dracula lore. The undead, ever-loyal Doberman attacks whomever has the misfortune of crossing his muzzle from scene to scene, but the real way he continues his former owner’s legacy is by biting and converting all nearby dogs into his canine vampire army, further ruining Michael Dracula’s family vacation on an escalating scale. You won’t be surprised to learn that Dracula’s Dog (aka Zoltan . . . Hound of Dracula) is not an especially well regarded addition to the Dracula canon, but I think that’s a shame. Anytime the hellhound Zoltan leapt out of his little doggie coffin to expose his bloody vampire fangs and gently nibble on his victims’ exposed necks, I experienced pure childlike delight, and that’s exactly what the Famous Monsters are good for. Sure, Zoltan and his loyal vampire-dog army trap Michael Dracula in a locked car and viciously attack him from all sides in a living-nightmare sequence straight out of Cujo, but any movie with the title Dracula’s Dog is going to feel like it was made for children, regardless of its content (a dissonance that director Albert Band would later push to further extremes with this son Charlie under the Full Moon home video brand). It’s not as controlled nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror take on Dracula, but it’s undeniably more memorable. You’ll never get the details of Dracula’s Dog mixed up with other Dracula adaptations in memory. For better or worse, it’s its own thing.

Maybe if the goofier, off-brand versions of Famous Monsters are going to primarily appeal to children, it’s best not to torment the little tykes with nightmare fuel like Dracula’s Dog; maybe the kiddos should just be pandered to. Universal realized this as early as their Abbott & Costello Meet The Monsters series in the 1940s & 50s, and they continued the tradition through the end of the millennium with another kiddie-friendly IP in 1999’s Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein. By then, the appeal of marketing directly to children was that their little brains are soft and malleable for advertisers, which is why this direct-to-video Frankencomedy doubles as a tourism ad for the Universal Studios theme park. You see, while Alvin and his band of chipmunk brothers are between rock gigs at Universal Studios, they discover that the real Dr. Frankenstein has also been employed by the park’s haunted house attraction and, of course, has released his lumbering undead creature into the wider park. Selling children on the timeless fun of the Chipmunks brand, the Famous Monsters brand, and the in-house amusement park brand, this disposable Halloween Season novelty is more a relic of shameless corporate synergy than it is a sincere addition to the Universal Frankenstein canon (even if its black & white opening positions it as a direct sequel in the James Whale lineage). By the time Alvin and the boys are performing a high-pitched Ozzy pastiche or rapping about fighting the monsters under their bed, however, the artistic merit of the project becomes a secondary concern. Much like Dracula’s Dog, it’s funny enough that it simply exists. Not for nothing, it also works as a great educational tool for young children who have not yet met everyone’s good friend Frankenstein and don’t know that he can be a big old sweetheart if you don’t treat him like a monster. Once loose, the creature quickly proves to just be a big, dumb kid, much like the suckers in the audience who begged their parents to buy this promotional video in the first place.

The next year’s follow-up, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet The Wolfman, was a bit of a letdown in comparison to the Frankenstein one, but that disappointment can be a useful educational tool for children too. It sets healthy expectations for what kids will find when they’re old enough to watch the actual Universal monster movies; the Wolf Man is kind of a drip. 1973’s The Werewolf of Washington is aware of this, making sure that its lycanthropic protagonist is recognizable as a dipshit putz long before he’s bitten by a werewolf. Dean Stockwell stars as a Washington D.C. political reporter who’s sent on assignment to Eastern Europe, where he annoys the local yokels until one of them gets fed up and bites him during a full moon (while disguised in werewolf form, of course). Back in Washington, he becomes increasingly fraught & paranoid as he transforms into a werewolf himself, in what gradually reveals itself to be a caricature of Richard Nixon’s then-deteriorating mental state. If it had been released a few years later, The Werewolf of Washington might be understood as a parody of the era’s political paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor or All the President’s Men. Instead, it’s just one of that genre’s goofier contemporaries, complete with very silly jokes about mixing up the words “pentagram” and “Pentagon,” among other groaner one-liners. And because Universal’s Wolf Man movie starring Lon Chaney Jr. established so much of the core iconography of the werewolf genre, it frequently pays homage to that specific iteration of werewolf lore, including fixation on the werewolf-smiting power of a silver-handled walking cane and its own low-budget recreation of Jack Pierce’s time-elapse makeup transformation effects. Like Dracula’s Dog, The Werewolf of Washington is both too preposterous to take fully seriously but also frequently too beautiful to dismiss as a throwaway novelty. Both movies are built on ridiculous premises, but they play them admirably straight for all they’re worth.

As much as the Wolf Man is a remarkably bad hang in the Universal Monsters crew, the Mummy is the biggest bummer of all. Most of the Mummy movies in that monster’s initial run are so punishingly boring that they’ve been forgotten to time entirely — their memories replaced with visions of Brendan Fraser & Rachel Weisz looking hot & sweaty in the big-budget desertscape of the late-90s reboot. The Mummy is the only Universal Monsters movie whose cultural memory has been surpassed by its derivatives’ and, as a result, most of the more prominent Mummy knockoffs are to be found in that late-90s era. Take for instance 1998’s ridiculously titled Bram Stoker’s The Mummy, a double-edged mockbuster of the then-upcoming Mummy remake and the long-cooled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “starring” the third-billed actors from some of the 90s’ blandest sitcoms (Caroline in the City‘s Eric Lutes, Home Improvement‘s Richard Karn; Tubi is a truly magical place). Better yet, take 1999’s even more ridiculously titled The All New Adventures of Laurel & Hardy in For Love or Mummy: an Ernestless outing from Jim Varney collaborator John Cherry, improbably cashing in on the era’s Mummy revival by resurrecting Laurel & Hardy from the dead to star in their own Abbott & Costello Meet the Monsters comedy. Now that’s what off-brand Famous Monster movies are all about. Never at any point in For Love or Mummy‘s runtime do you believe that it exists or that you’re spending your precious time on this Earth watching it. It’s also, admittedly, pretty funny. “Laurel” (Bronson Pinchot) & “Hardy” (Gailard Sartain) fit right into the Dumb & Dumber mold of the era’s comedic sensibilities, landing easy laughs as they prattle & pratfall their way through their run-in with a magically resurrected Egyptian mummy. The mummy itself has a pretty cool design to it too, even if it is a remarkably stupid one. The head from a sarcophagus is propped up on a traditionally-bandaged mummy body like a giant papier-mâché mask in an image that would feel more at home in a Saturday morning cartoon than in live action. It’s just the right kind of dumb.

The knockoff Gill-man movies of the 1960s are even dumber. During the era’s beach-party craze, the latecomer Universal Monster was resurrected for two cult-classic creature features in 1964’s The Horror of Party Beach & 1965’s The Beach Girls and the Monster. Together, they teach the ultimate lesson to studios like Hammer and, more recently, the failed grim-dark Universal Monsterverse reboots: have fun. It turns out that making movies is easy. All you need to do is pay some twentysomethings to dance in bikinis to surf rock and point the camera in the right direction. The only hard part, really, is convincing them to also let you pour chocolate syrup on them while getting pawed at by a man in a rubber suit; it sounds sketchy out of context. The monsters in these two beach-party monster movies are both instantly recognizable as direct descendants of the Gill-man. More specifically, the one in The Beach Girls and the Monster looks like a child’s crayon drawing of the Gill-man (complete with goofily round eyeballs) and the one in The Horror of Party Beach looks like a wax figure of the Gill-man that has melted in the beachside sun, but they’re both honorary Gill-men all the same. The Horror of Party Beach even goes the extra mile by including some underwater cinematography in wimpy homage to the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, demonstrating in time-elapse photography how fish DNA, human skeletons, and nuclear waste have mixed to create its not-quite-Gill-man creature. The resulting monster looks a little like if Big Bird’s cousin was a fish and his only known photo was taken at the height of a hotdog eating contest. Then, the goofy beach party fun goes sour during his routine monster attacks, wherein the chocolate-syrup blood looks shockingly brutal in black & white contrast. The Beach Girls and the Monster puts less effort into its own monster mayhem, but it hits just about every other entertainment metric you would want out of a so-called Bad Movie. Its performances are perfectly stilted, its knockoff Gill-man is perfectly doofy, and anytime they’re not sure what to do between kills everyone starts aggressively go-go dancing to surf rock & stock footage. Perfection.

None of these Famous Monster knockoffs are nearly as handsome nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, but they’re all much more memorably bizarre. Why make Dracula’s tactics & motivations more logical & methodical when you could also choose to mount him on a surfboard while bikini babes go-go dance on a nearby beach, cheering him on? The original run of Universal Monster movies are not only perfect pieces of pop art, but they’re also warm, unrepeatable introductions to cinephiles’ best friends. We’ve already met Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and Gill-man in their prime, and we’ll always primarily remember them as they were in that black & white heyday. So, my impulse with their later films is to watch my ghoulish friends have a little fun. Let them enjoy time with their family pets or get into buffoonish mishaps with the biggest dum-dums within striking distance. There’s no need to take any of this kiddie stuff at all seriously. Now, please remember to excuse my hypocrisy when I fall in love with Robert Eggers’s super-serious “werwulf” picture next month, negating everything I just said.

-Brandon Ledet

The Player (1992)

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Every time I search for a particular review from At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on YouTube, for the next month, the algorithm suggests other episodes from the duo for me. And I love it! After checking in to see what the two late film critics had to say about Miami Blues (normally, when the two are not aligned, I side with Roger, but Siskel liked the film and Ebert didn’t, surprisingly), their “Best of 1992” episode popped up in my recommendations. As one would expect, both men loved Robert Altman’s The Player, a neo-noir inverted mystery set amongst the wheelings and dealings of high profile Hollywood studio bigwigs. Although the film is very much a product of the early 1990s, with stars who were household names at the time (playing characters or cameoing as themselves) and may or may not be recognizable to a modern audience, the story itself is still very accessible even if the culture is somewhat alien to us now, nearly thirty-five years later. 

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is an executive who is respected at his studio for being the “writer’s guy,” liaising between upper management and the screenwriters who come into his office to pitch their ideas, preferably in twenty-five words or less. His long day of hearing concepts as scintillating as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” “Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate,” and a sequel about Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross’s daughter called The Graduate II (pitched by Buck Henry himself in a cameo) is interrupted by the latest in a series of threatening postcards from a writer who believes Griffin has blown him off. Sensing potential impending career troubles as the result of an up-and-coming exec, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), abandoning ship at Fox, coupled with the unplanned visit of tacky junior executives from the bank that finances the studio, Griffin combs through his files to try and figure out who might be sending the poison pen notes. 

Concluding it must have been a writer named Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), Griffin visits the man’s house and calls from his cellphone, surreptitiously spying on Kahane’s girlfriend, a painter named June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), when she answers. He flirts with her, and she tells him that Kahane has gone to a repertory screening of The Bicycle Thief. Griffin then unconvincingly “accidentally” runs into Kahane there, and the normally teetotal Griffin agrees to talk business over drinks at a local karaoke place. There, Kahane grows increasingly frustrated with Griffin’s apparent condescension and the two part ways, but when they encounter one another on the street, a scuffle ensues, during which Griffin ends up killing the screenwriter. Coming to his senses, Griffin makes it look like a mugging and flees the scene. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Detective Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) tracks him down, and she’s clearly not convinced by his protestations of innocence. His girlfriend, story editor Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson), can also tell that something’s off, even before he goes to Kahane’s funeral and ends up beginning an affair with June. Perhaps worst of all, Griffin continues to receive threats from his stalker, which means he did it all for nothing. 

The film is, despite the presence of this murder, a fairly soft satire of the film industry. Mockery is made of the contemporary studio system’s flaws: an overreliance on test screening feedback, the inherent difficulties of trying to create art in a hypercapitalistic system, and the resultant way that catering to the sentiments of the lowest common denominator (especially with regards to demands for happy endings and uncomplicated morals) damages artistic integrity. It’s sharp, but it’s not necessarily cutting. As Altman himself noted, there’s not a single agent in the film, just actors, writers, executives, and the occasional director. Just like Griffin himself, he’s not “afraid of ‘political,’” only of “radically political [and] political politica.” Ultimately, it’s very cynical about the world that undergirds the movies that we all love so much, but it never quite becomes as mean spirited as it might have. Although he kills a man in a fit of paranoid, drunken rage, the most cutthroat things that Griffin does are cutting loose his the devoted, professional, and loyal Bonnie for the younger, more buxom, blonder June and deliberately allowing Larry Levy to take credit for signing on a film that Griffin recognizes is impossible, so that he can later swoop in and save the day, thus saving his own career. The most salient thing that the film does is have an intentionally absurd happy ending despite all that comes before, just as the film with the film, Habeas Corpus, originally a downer awards-baiter, ends with a one-liner and a kiss. 

The Player goes more for the darkly comic than the noirishly gritty, but what it sacrifices there it makes up for with its nearly constant stream of witticisms and dependably funny players. Fred Ward is a lot of fun as the studio’s fixer who also waxes poetic about the golden years of Hollywood; Richard E. Grant is as impeccable as ever as a director with a grand vision for an unworkable Oscar bait film (alongside a typically hyperactive Dean Stockwell as his manager); even country musician Lyle Lovett gets in on the action as the unsettling man following Griffin around the city in a role that feels like it was written for Crispin Glover. The only place where this really falls flat is in the performance of Whoopi Goldberg, who is not on her A-game in this picture. The actors who appear in cameo roles were encouraged to ad-lib their dialogue, which offers up great opportunities, like when an unprompted Malcolm McDowell insults Griffin, leading to real befuddlement on the part of Robbins, but Whoopi does several painfully unfunny bits that all seem to go on forever, especially the one about trying to find her tampons. It’s also worth noting that Greta Scacchi’s performance here is nothing to write home about either, but at least that’s potentially an intentional acting choice, as her general blank slate nature allows for Griffin to project whatever he wants onto her. In contrast to loyal, flat-chested Bonnie, June is forever dressed in silks and thin fabrics that do nothing to disguise her nipples. She is breasting boobily at all times, and she play-acts at having depth through her art. When speaking of her late boyfriend, she says that she never really thought of him as talented, ironically standing in the midst of several “artworks” that are composed of the word “ice” surrounded by cool colors. I might not be giving Scacchi enough credit for making her such an effective representation of a boring-but-hot woman trying to seem deeper than she is, but if it’s a deliberate choice, it’s relatively successful. 

In a modern context, the most off-putting thing that an audience may have trouble with isn’t the murder of Kahane, but getting lost in trying to keep up with the cavalcade of stars in the film, and tracking who’s playing themselves and who’s playing a character within the film itself. I’d also wager that an uninitiated viewer may find themselves distracted by the never-ending series of cameo appearances, especially for those whose stars have diminished in the intervening decades. Any audience would still know Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Burt Reynolds, and Cher, of course, but Sally Kirkland, David Alan Grier, and Robert Wagner? If you’re reading this, then those names are probably at least somewhat familiar to you at the very, very least, but to the under-thirty set? Probably not so much. The best advice I can give to someone coming to this film so long after the film’s release is to just go with the flow and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Paris, Texas (1984)

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There are some major film-world names attached to the 1984 road trip drama Paris, Texas. If nothing else, it is the Harry Dean Stanton movie, the most memorable example of the notoriously unfussy character actor stepping into the leading-man spotlight. Even so, German model-turned-actress Nastassja Kinski threatens to steal the whole movie from under him in a just a couple scenes buried late in the third act; Kinski radiates enough It Girl beauty & cool that the film’s most iconic stills are of her modeling a pink sweater dress, not of Stanton wandering the American sands. German director Wim Wenders obviously looms large over the production as well, gawking at the dust & concrete vastness of the American landscape with the amazement of an astronaut exploring an alien planet. Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller puts in career-defining work here too, dwelling in the ombre gradients between the natural light of dusk and the neon glow of roadside motels. This is the kind of movie that’s so stacked with big, important names that even its credited Assistant Director, French auteur Claire Denis, is an art cinema icon in her own right. And yet, the name that was most on my mind while watching the film for the first time this week was American painter Edward Hopper, whose work’s melancholic sparseness is echoed in each of Wenders & Müller’s carefully distanced compositions, to great effect.

Of course, it turns out my association of this 40-year-old movie with one of this nation’s most accomplished fine artists was not an original thought. After the screening concluded, I immediately found an article titled “How Edward Hopper Inspired Wim Wenders, David Lynch, and More” that detailed Hopper’s artistic influence on Wenders in clear, direct language. Most importantly, it includes direct quotes from Wenders himself, who explained in his 2015 book, The Pixels of Paul Cézanne: and Reflections on Other Artists, “‘All the paintings of Edward Hopper could be taken from one long movie about America, each one the beginning of a new scene […] Each picture digs deep into the American Dream and investigates that very American dilemma of appearance versus reality […] [He] continually reinvented the story of lonely people in empty rooms, or couples who live separate lives together without speaking […] In the background are the impenetrable façades of a hostile town or an equally unapproachable landscape. And always windows! Outside and inside are the same inhospitable and unreal living spaces, radiating a similar sense of strangeness.’” I could have written the exact same thing about Paris, Texas that Wenders says about Hopper in those quotes. I just would have worded it in clumsier, less articulate phrasing.

Paris, Texas is a solemn 1980s road trip through Edward Hopper’s America, conveniently relocated to the great state of Texas via interstate highway. Harry Dean Stanton stars as a weary, severely dehydrated traveler. He seems to be operating under a magic spell that compels him to walk through the Mojave Desert until he forgets everything about himself and where he came from. When his estranged brother (sci-fi convention regular Dean Stockwell) rescues him from that aimless mission to wander his identity into oblivion, it takes days for him to rebuild his persona from the ground up. He has to relearn how to talk, how to dress, how to act around relatives, and so on — recovering one personality trait at a time until he can recall who he was before he fucked off into the desert for a four-year eternity. As soon as he remembers, he immediately wishes he could forget again. It turns out he chose to obliterate his former self, because that man was an abusive, alcoholic prick. It’s an epiphany that inspires one last road trip, as he attempts to make right by reuniting his young, abandoned son with the young, abandoned wife he used to physically abuse (Kinksi). The effort is bittersweet. It disrupts all of the healing that’s accumulated in the years of his absence just so he can seek some personal absolution, but his heart is at least in the right place, seemingly for the first time in his life.

Like many great movies, Paris, Texas is very slow, very sad, and very beautiful, with many humorous little grace notes throughout. As cute as it is to watch Stanton mimic Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp while bonding with his sweetheart son, the full weight of his past sins sits heavy on that memory by the final scene, when he abandons the boy a second time. Those sins also create an impenetrable barrier between him and Kinki’s mother figure. The former lovers can only communicate via phone on opposite sides of the peep show booth where she now works, barely able to stomach the sight of each other. Müller’s Hopper-inspired landscape photography underlines that isolation in every exterior. While these European filmmakers seem wryly amused with the fast food, billboard ads, and novelty roadside attractions that define American kitsch, they also emphasize the sparseness of the country’s sprawling landscape to portray the characters within as isolated, lonely, broken people. The Edward Hopper of it all is a studied observation of physical distance, where people are only connected to each other through long-reaching shadows, interstate concrete, and telephone wire. Even the wandering Stanton’s Norman Rockwell daydream of his reunited family is framed within a vast, vacant lot in the titular Texan town, where nothing awaits him but dust.

Paris, Texas screened at The Broad in New Orleans this week, presented as a new 4k restoration by Janus Films. It was the final screening in this year’s Gap Tooth Cinema program, which is now on break until the first week of January. The screening sold out early, then was moved to the cinema’s largest theater, then sold out again. Like most of my experiences with Gap Tooth’s programming, it was wonderful to see such a gorgeous picture for the first time so big & loud with such an engaged, respectful crowd. I recently put together a Letterboxd list of my favorite new-to-me film discoveries from this year, and Paris, Texas was just one of many titles I got to see theatrically thanks to Gap Tooth: namely, Black Narcissus, Nashville, High Heels, Juliet of the Spirits, The Lovers on the Bridge, and the ephemeral America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. They’re doing great work, and if you live in New Orleans you should be making time for their screenings in your weekly schedule. Just, you know, please wait until I can purchase my ticket first.

-Brandon Ledet