Vamp or Not? Dragon against Vampire

This was a Lionel Leung directed movie from 1985 and, despite the title and its place on many a vampire filmography, I found myself quickly questioning whether this was a vampire movie. Then again one filmography I checked stated that this was “an incoherent mess” and it wasn’t wrong. There is, perhaps, a good reason why you can pick this up for just 10p on Amazon Marketplace!

We start off with three rogues running through the forest. They are Albert, Tony (Elton Chong) and Martin. Now I realise that these are not particularly Chinese sounding names but this has everything to do with the fact that this is the sort of badly dubbed Hong Kong movie your mother warned you about. Anyway, these are escaped criminals and a supernatural element seems to be following them (as well as a gaoler).

The element that I talk of is a hand that seems to reach out of the ground, trying to grab Martin. Who or what this hand belongs to isn’t answered, at all. In fact the hand from the ground seems lost from this point on. Elsewhere, in what appears to be a restaurant, there is talk of a monster stalking young girls and we see the wanted poster for the criminals.

Their crimes? Well primarily it appears that they are grave robbers and we see Martin and Albert dig open a grave but the corpse has no gold teeth. They tell Tony to refill the grave. He looks at the corpse more carefully and finds a manji pendant. The manji is commonly known as the swastika and is often a symbol used, in Buddhism, to protect from evil spirits and is also an alternate sun symbol. In this case it seems to have held the corpse in place as, when removed, it grabs at Tony and then vanishes.

In the restaurant, one of the girls is in the bath but is stalked and taken by a magician. He states that he brings happiness as she is a virgin. It then appears that he uses eye mojo as she starts to smile at him. So could it be that he is the vampire of the piece?

No (ish, I’ll explain the ish later) Yes, he has eye mojo and he seems to be after virgins, for their blood, but he simply stabs her. Following this we get a protracted scene with Martin catching a dog – that ends up as dinner. We see a man trapped in a cavern and then the gaoler attack the criminals in a slapstick fight (as I said the film is incoherent) Tony escapes either on the back of a giant turtle or holding a motorised log… it was difficult to tell.

Anyway, the criminals find a house (belonging to the magician it appears) and within it a coffin. Tony looks inside and we see the ‘vampire’… it would appear. Tony has his eyes closed so declares it empty. The men sleep there and Albert is grabbed and killed. The magician appears and Tony and Martin run into the night, Tony falling into a cavern with the bearded man.

It appears he is a Shaolin master, held prisoner by the magician. He tries eye mojo on Tony but he is immune (this might be due to the manji). The Shaolin master is held prisoner as the magician wants to learn a spell that he knows; he also only ever walks on his hands as he is permanently in lotus position. There is a confusing moment with the ‘vampire’ and the gaoler during this particular sequence.

Long story short, Martin and Tony end up at the restaurant and, as Tony falls for the sister, Fanny, they end up helping fight the magician and the ‘vampire’. Is he a vampire?

Well he has an odd look; face clay making him seem lumpy. We never see him bite or drink blood and then… well it isn’t face clay, it is a rubber mask, or so the filmmakers would have us believe, and the magician wears it. It is actually quite Scooby-Doo as it seems to be a villain wearing a rubber mask to scare the locals (and to cover up his murders… it appears he needs virgin blood for his spells).

We get some blood drinking… a possessed Fanny (controlled by the magician) beheads a chicken and drinks its blood. Why? If only I could tell you. It might have been useful if the film had actually explained anything within its running time, instead the viewer is left to pick at the bones of badly dubbed, badly written dialogue that may or may not have had anything to do with the original script whilst trying to divine a scrap of meaning.

Is it vamp? I have no idea but I doubt it. If anyone can tell me otherwise then I will gladly hear why (other than the title) this should be classed as a vampire film because, for the life of me, I just cannot see it. There are, in fairness, what appear to be resuscitated corpses but no evidence that these are vampires.

The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mentions – Pandemonium

This is an Australian flick, directed by Hayden Keenan and released 1988, and… well it is just difficult to know where to start. This is absolutely surreal, an antipodean dreamscape with lashings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show – at least in the campy atmosphere/performances.

The film begins with the escape of Kales Leadingham (David Argue) from a lunatic asylum. He evades the warders, scales a wall and sits by a girl at a bus stop – at which point he commences to tell his tale. A tale of his younger days when, to make ends meet, he was a surveyor. His job took him to a ‘disused’ movie lot, where he was supposedly surveying the property for owners EB (Esben Storm) and PB De Woolf (Arna-Maria Winchester).

Around this time the Dingo Girl (Amanda Dole) came back to civilisation – via Bondai Beach it seemed – and headed to the studio. Being a Dingo Girl she spent much of the film in various states of undress. The de Woolfs were her parents – though EB mistakes her as an aspiring actress and tries to have his way with her. PB recognises her as the girl she abandoned in the desert (at God’s urging).

The studio is home to many a strange creature/character including a pair of incestuous Nazi lesbian twins (played by Rainee Skinner and Kerry Mack), whose reason for being there is to look after a Hitler clone named Little Adolph (Ashley Grenville). Most of the occupants find a reason to need Dingo Girl and in this case, as she is virginal, the twins want to breed her and Little Adolph.

Of course Kales falls in love with her and also realises that the studio is at an aboriginal dreaming spot. In the meantime the viewer is left wondering just what is happening. We get a wide range of weird characters thrown at us from the moose, which is EB with a moose head stuck on his head for a large chunk of the film, to the vampire cited below.

So... the vampire character... This is the Count (Henk Johannes) and, when we first see him – for about five seconds, he is sucking blood through a straw. We do get references to vampires later, including a line that suggests that “Behind each door (of the lot) lurked blood sucking fiends”. If the film had kept his appearances at this I think we might have had too little even for a honourable mention.

However, he makes another appearance later, for a minute or so when he decides she (Dingo Girl) has the ‘secret of sacrifice’ (no, I didn't get that either) and fights accountant turned ape man Kong (Pete Smith) for her as a bride. The fight uses guitars as a weapon of choice (as clubs and not instruments) and we do not see the conclusion, as such – just the aftermath of Dingo Girl in bed with Kong.

As a side entry to this we should mention Morticia (Mercia Deane-Johns) a witch, it would seem, who is trying to create a formula to remain young and has discovered that she needs to use a foetus not born of man – there was a degree of the Erzsébet Báthory to the character, at least a smidgeon.

Really odd stuff and, trust me, what I have mentioned doesn't even touch the weirdness of the finale. The imdb page is here.

Devil Bat’s Daughter – review

Directed by: Frank Wisbar

Release date: 1946

Contains spoilers

This is, allegedly, a sequel to the 1940 flick The Devil Bat. Now The Devil Bat might have been a, so called, poverty row flick and it might have been preposterous in its story, but it did star Bela Lugosi and it was great fun, managing to achieve both atmosphere and tension despite itself.

I have that first film on a DVD called Great Bloodsucking Vampire Movies an inclusion that has always perplexed me. You see the DVD also has the classic the Last Man on Earth and the perhaps not so classic Satanic Rites of Dracula but the Devil Bat is not a vampire movie. In it Lugosi plays Dr Paul Carruthers, a mad scientist who creates giant bats and trains them to attack a certain pheromone, which he then adds to cologne that he gives to his enemies.

Bats, yes, Lugosi, yes, but vampires… not at all. It is strange then, on the surface at least, that Devil Bat’s Daughter should be classed as a vampire flick. But then, as we shall see, it is perhaps stranger that it is classed as a sequel at all. You see, this is one of those ‘vampire flick without a vampire’ movies and it is all about someone believing (or being made to believe) they are a vampire. This is no great spoiler as the film single handily fails to create any form of atmosphere, tension or sense of mystery.

The film begins with the examination of Nina McCarron (Rosemary La Planche) by town doctor, Dr Elliott (Nolan Leary). She stares, eyes open but unresponsive – he tells the sheriff (Ed Cassidy) that she is unconscious. She was found by a farmer, who is less than helpful in identifying her, but a cabbie tells them that he took her out to the old Carruthers’ house.

They go to the house and (as well as seeing a paper stating Carruthers was a murderer called the Devil Bat – strange as the film then tells us that they did not conclude this until his bats attacked and killed him, so why would the paper be in his house) find her grip – her passport reveals her name, she is from Scotland (the part of the country that has no Scottish accent, obviously) and McCarron was her mother’s maiden name. Her father was Carruthers.

Things to note at this point. The location of the film has moved from Heathville, Illinois, to Wardsley, New York. Carruthers’ old place used to look castle like with secret rooms. This looks like an old basement. Carruthers was said to be Romanian – interesting as although Lugosi was Hungarian, his home town is now, due to border movements, in Romania I understand – who moved to Scotland, fathered Nina and then left four years later when the locals accused him of being a vampire, due to his work with bats. It is also noted that it is assumed that Carruthers set the bats on his enemy – in the first film they had conclusive proof.

Elliott contacts psychiatrist Dr Clifton Morris (Michael Hale) who manages to break her out of her hysterical stupor. She is sleeping at night when she awakens from a nightmare of a bat at her window. The bat may or may not have suffered from crap bat syndrome – everything is too blurred to tell. I was less than impressed with the dream sequences, preferring the way they were done in Daughter of Dr Jekyll. She goes rushing to Morris’ home and is found by his wife Ellen (Molly Lamont). Unfortunately Morris is in New York – actually with his lover Myra (Monica Mars) – but Ellen phones him and says that she will let Nina stay.

It is clear that Morris is not happy with his relationship with Ellen. We discover later that he was with Myra (who is a friend of Ellen’s) but left her, marrying Ellen for her money. Myra wants him to divorce her friend, but he won’t. Ellen’s son, from a previous marriage, Ted (John James) is in the army, but when he is discharged we discover he dislikes Morris – a lot. Clearly Morris is going to manipulate Nina into believing her father was a vampire to get at Ellen. Also, quite clearly, Ted and Nina are going to fall in love.

The vampire rules we hear are that vampires are the dead who are alive (not the best description) who must drink blood to maintain life and are destroyed via the old stake through the heart. We also hear that they can possess the living. Morris manipulates Nina so that she believes she is possessed by her father’s vampiric spirit and things look bad when she awakens, holding bloody scissors with Ted’s dog dead. Now earlier the film had her playing with the dog, on the surface to let us know she loved the mutt but, actually, to have an excuse to have a down blouse cleavage shot of the former (1941) Miss America.

Nina is to be moved to a sanatorium but awakens the next day at the bottom of the stairs, scissors in hand and Ellen murdered. Morris is quick to blame inherited “criminal tendencies”. As a trial looms and the papers accuse her of being a vampire murderess, Ted decides to prove his love innocent. This involves finding Carruthers’ papers (which Morris has stolen) that prove he was not a murderer. If Morris had shown Nina this she wouldn’t have been convinced that her father was a vampire and, of course, there can be no inherited criminal tendencies. This, of course, is completely out with the first film as Carruthers was a murderer in that.

The main proof, however, comes from the drugs Morris was feeding Nina – which means the entire plot regarding her father being innocent was irrelevant and just served to further undermine the previous film. The performances and script were mediocre and conspired to make this an obvious and insipid experience. The characters are so stereotyped, from the get go, that they may as well have called Morris by the name Mr Bastard the murderer* and renamed Ted as Mr Gormless the puerile hero.

Not a great film and worse as it undermines the previous film, which might have been a poverty row B, but had a thick layer of class. 2 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

*gag stolen!

Updates and News

You, hopefully, saw the review for Diagnosis Murder’s vampire episode that I posted yesterday, but did you spot that it was airing? If you go to the very bottom of the page you’ll see a new function on the blog – the Vampire TV Diary.

Now, a few things to note. This was of the brainchild of PaulW and kudos to him (I know you’ve said I don’t need to keep giving you credit Paul, but I think this time it is most definitely warranted).

It is being created/maintained through a google function and is only as accurate as Paul, I and the other recruits he has working on it are. Essentially, as we spot things they will be added to the diary. If we miss things, then we miss them.

Finally it will feature UK listings only; anything else would have been way too onerous a task. Disclaimers aside, I think this was a great idea and I hope it’ll be of use to those site visitors from the UK.

If you want the embed code for the calendar for your own site, go here.

In other news.

I am not overly impressed by the news that one of Bram Stoker’s descendants is to co-pen a sequel to Dracula. Of course, if it is good then all is well but I think the fact that the gentleman in question is a descendant of the original author doesn’t actually mean that much accept a bit of publicity for the project.

I am even less impressed that Francis Lawrence and Will Smith are to make a prequel to the 2007 version of I am Legend. The recent flick missed the point of the novel by quite a stretch and the idea of the prequel just smacks of Will Smith toting a gun and survival horror – with no tension as we already know he and the dog survive to the end of the prequel and anyone he meets will not.

Finally, what’s going on over in Sweden – and whatever it is, keep it going because I, for one, like it. Not content to have us on tenterhooks awaiting Let the Right One In, we now have the Swedish vampire film Not Like Others (Vampyrer) on the horizon. The synopsis runs thus:

"One night two vampire sisters, Vera and Vanja, make a fatal mistake that forces them to run and fight for their lives while being chased by a biker-gang. On this particular night Vanja has also promised herself to share a life-changing secret with her sister Vera; Vanja is ready to try to give up the outcast vampire life, adjust to the real world and live amongst the humans. Vera, her sister, is frightened by a vampire-life in solitude and is willing to do almost anything to stop her sister from leaving her behind. At the same time the biker gang is closing in..."

Nip on over to Quiet Earth to see the subtitled trailer for this classy looking flick. Click here for the official website.

Diagnosis Murder – the Bela Lugosi Blues – review (TV Episode)

Directed by: Lee Philips

Originally aired: 1995

Contains spoilers

Okay, my friend Vannevar told me about this one and said I had to see it. Now Vannevar is a connoisseur of, shall we say, cheesy TV. To me, and it is not the first time I have said this on the blog, Diagnosis Murder is the lowest common denominator in daytime TV. However it has a vampire in it and so… But wait, then Vannevar informed me that the vampire in it was a real vampire, not someone pretending or thinking they were a vampire. Now the show might not be that grounded in reality… Dick Van Dyke, who plays Dr Mark Sloan, was to me a little too old to be a hospital chief of staff, surely at 70 he’d have retired? Then again who would have thunk that Chachi from Happy Days would have grown up and changed his name to Jack Stewart (Scott Baio) and become a doctor… hmmm… but real vampire….

I dutifully kept me eye out for this and then it aired on the Hallmark Channel. So here we go… I am going to completely spoil it as we need to investigate this real vampire, and all I can say, before we get going, is, “The things I watch for the sake of vampires!”

The show starts off with a moon shot and then we see a woman, Moriah Thomas (Julie Carmen), crossing a park area; it is misty and the whole thing is very melodramatic. She is followed by a man. She seems panicked as she reaches a fence and he fumbles at a box. He can’t open the catch and backs away, falling down a ditch. She smiles and approaches. Cut back to moon as we hear the man scream. Now this is going to be the case all the way through this – we never see an attack.

Steve Sloan (Barry Van Dyke), cop and son of Mark, sees his dad about the body that the police have just found. It appears the victim was killed by blunt force trauma to head and neck but there is no cranial haemorrhaging and the body has been drained of blood. The box was found, empty with an indent in the inner lining. It’s a mystery alright.

Chachi (oh come on, what else can I call him) has been put forward as Bachelor of the Year, by the hospital, as a publicity stunt. He goes to the house of Ivan Brock (William Coverse-Roberts). Now I wondered what was going on with the accent here, Brock sounded awfully like Nick Cage in Vampire’s Kiss but I suspect that was coincidental. Chachi seems to be getting on awfully well with the magazine editor, who happens to be Moriah. Then another contestant, singer Vic Danton (Andrew Williams) cuts in and gets invited to her bedroom.

The next day Steve has another corpse, identical to the first, but this is Danton. Mark checks the bodies in the morgue and notices that the blunt force wounds hide two little punctures either side of the jugular – surely not enough for a bleed out. He and Steve go to Brock’s and bluff/bully their way into the house. Moriah is sleeping but Mark seems curious about a painting. They reach a locked storeroom, Brock claims he has no key (luckily Steve has lock picks, what a good cop). Inside is a coffin, a Halloween prop Brock claims, before it can be opened Brock falls and they help him out of the room.

The reason Mark was interested in the artwork was because it was clear something else had hung there. Checking magazine photos he discovers it was a mirror. Colleague Amanda (Victoria Rowell) realises where Mark’s theory is going… can he be serious… vampire! Obviously someone who thinks they are one. Mark goes to the next eligible bachelor party and, after Moriah has been shown a picture of the guy from the beginning, dances with her. He mentions vampires and she laughs… ha ha.

The next day another bachelor, Terry Broadhurst (Tim Dunigan), is found dead. Just so happens that Brock held his contract as a sportsman and has a $20M life insurance on him – Brock becomes Steve’s prime suspect but Mark isn’t so sure. He manages to get a solo nosy around the house. The coffin seems to have gone until he finds it in Moriah’s bedroom – it is empty. However, with Chachi due to go on a date with her (does Joanie know?) Mark is worried.

He gets to the house when Chachi has nipped up to the bedroom and is able to confront Moriah. We get most of our lore around here. Moriah has already said to Chachi that “sometimes I get so lonely I feel like opening the drapes and staring at the sun until I melt.” Melodrama or killed by sunlight – the show doesn’t say. She tells Mark she is four centuries old and her passport expired in 1938 (indeed she is killing the bachelors to obfuscate the murder of Terry on Brock’s behalf, in order to get a passport from him).

She claims that she sleeps in a bed (the coffin is for travel purposes) but then says she is strong. To prove it she lifts Mark and throws him right across the room. She then floats towards him. Right, super strong and floats… vampire… okay but my suspension of disbelief has floated right out of the window at this point. Not because she is a vampire but because there is no way Dick Van Dyke was going to survive being thrown across the room, at his age, without (at the very least) losing one hip… come on.

She tells Mark that she is another species at this point and then lobs him again (there goes the other hip), when Chachi comes in and belts her with some errant furniture. She throws him too. She aims for Chachi, going for the kill, when he turns, bringing said wooden bit up... and we have an accidental staking. Now it should be noted that it is through the stomach, not the heart, but isn’t it so very often the case! Now staking will kill whether you are human or a vampire, to be fair, and we do not see a kill nor do we see fangs… but the strength and floating was enough evidence for me.

As she dies she confesses (again) that she killed the men on Brock’s behalf and then disbelief becomes a muddy quagmire where sense is lost forever. Seemingly the courts will accept the testimony of the two men who killed a woman (allegedly in self defence) in respect of her deathbed confession. They will not be bothered that two men, one young – though the other was old, felt it necessary to defend themselves against said woman (who wasn't even a prime police suspect) with extreme prejudice. Her deathbed confession, which can only be collaborated by her killers, will be enough to put another man away for life!

Of course, there is the fact that she was a vampire and super strong but… they aren’t going to tell the courts that. Even when the labs reconstruct the indent in the box from the beginning into a stake – that is just deemed as a joke. Bad… bad… bad.

No this wasn’t good programming, but it was a vampire. 2 out of 10, and it gets that because the entire thing had some degree of kitsch and the episode title was actually very good.

The imdb page for the episode is here.

Starsky and Hutch – the Vampire – review (TV Episode)

Directed by: Bob Kelljan

First Aired: 1976

Contains spoilers 

Most reading this will know of Starsky and Hutch, older readers will remember the series and younger ones will, perhaps, more think of the, quite frankly, risible film remake. Cops Hutch (David Soul), the educated one, and Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), the tough guy, became – along with their Gran Torino and funky snitch Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas) – the epitome of 1970s cool. They also met a ‘vampire’ in this series 2 episode.

Now there is a distinct genre pedigree running through this episode, but not because three years later David Soul would go on to star as vampire hunter Ben Mears in Salem’s Lot. No, the distinctive pedigree I speak of stems from the fact that director Bob Kelljan also directed Count Yorga, Vampire, the Return of Count Yorga and Scream, Blacula, Scream - indeed you can positively see the Yorga element in one oft repeated shot that I’ll mention later.

After a mood shot of the moon we see, in a room above the Playhouse theatre, a man speaking to a portrait of Maria. He speaks of bringing her back from the dead and we see he has fangs. The man is later revealed to be Rene Nadasy and is played by John Saxon. Saxon had faced an intergalactic vampire in Queen of Blood and, in years to come would cameo in genre favourite From Dusk till Dawn and appear in portmanteau Trapped Ashes facing a vampiric witch. The inclusion of a portrait as plot point is often a gothic mainstay but in this was used quite differently.

A woman gets off a bus. A bolt of lightning rips the skies, which is amusing as through the majority of the shot the sky seems clear of any storm. She is watched from the bushes by the vampire and the shot of him stalking, as it were, was nicely done (though lightning lit, it would appear). Now this scene had several elements within it both good and bad, the lightning was amongst the bad as it was too clichéd.

As the girl walks by a fountain it has an appearance of, perhaps, a fountain of blood. This looked really good, it was clearly a lighting effect and one would hope deliberate on Kelljan’s part. It would, in another episode, had just looked like red light reflected off a fountain but, given the subject of the episode and the melodramatic elements Kelljan had already added it was a classy piece of lighting work. This was, of course a good element that was about to be smashed.

The vampire attacks and he runs at the girl, holding a cape out behind him. The run, and the way it was shot, was quite simply not good but it was pure Kelljan. Referring to my ‘the Return of Count Yorga’ review I mentioned “Yorga spends a lot of his time running at people with his arms outstretched and it just doesn’t seem dignified.” Well, okay, Nadasy is holding the cape out with his arms a little more, but the same principle applies. He does it several times in the episode and it looks plain undignified again. The cape has a silver lining, the same as Yorga’s cape, one wonders if it were the same prop!

Huggy Bear is looking after a bar, the Play Pen, and Starsky and Hutch are there on their night off looking to pick up some ladies. Their Captain, Dobey (Bernie Hamilton, who worked with Kelljan on Scream, Blacula, Scream), rings them and gets them to go down to the morgue. The girl, Honey, has been found. She was, we discover, strangled and then two sharp prongs were forced into her jugular post-mortem. She had saliva on her neck and is missing blood. It is the same MO as another murder a month earlier.

She was a dancer at a place called Slade’s Cave and the cops head there. Having talked to Slade (G. W. Bailey, who played Rizzo in M*A*S*H) they end up going to the playhouse theatre were they meet Nadasy, he is giving ballet lessons. What we notice is that it is daytime, he has a cane and walks with a limp (from an accident that ended his promising ballet career) and he has no fangs. There is a portrait of a ballet dancer, she has the same face as the earlier portrait and we discover she was his wife.

It's time that we looked at lore and Starsky is clearly the superstitious one of the duo, researching vampires and leaning to the theory that they are looking for a real one. He tells Hutch that the last execution for vampirism was in England in 1949 (this is most likely in reference to John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer. In more sensationalistic tellings of his story there is a vampiric aspect added in but it was likely a calculated lie to escape execution by feigning madness) and that Dracula was based on a real person. Hutch is highly amused to discover that Starsky is wearing a garlic clove and, whilst it meant nothing when the episode aired, with hindsight it is amusing to see ‘Ben Mears’ so dismissive of vampires.

There is a great comedy moment with Huggy Bear preparing vampire hunting kits for sale ($7.50 a kit, which now-a-days sounds like good value), including a mirror (if you can’t see him behind you, you’re in trouble!), a cross, a garlic garland and a hammer and stake. Later, in an episode coda gag, he comes up with a hoodoo cure for vampirism as he believes Starsky has been tainted with the curse of the undead.

Unfortunately, with regards our actual vampire, the lore is light. Clearly this is a man deluded. I mentioned the portrait of his wife and whilst this seems to be a ritual to bring her back there are unexplained moments. The use of the portrait is clever, when he selects another victim he watches her jugular (standard genre shot) but the portrait imposes over the shot – presumably she is selecting the victims (in his head). Slade, who is a Satanist, has a photo of Maria and apparently has led Nadasy to the ritual (and thus the delusion) but that is more supposition as it is not explicit in the dialogue.

Nadasy was injured years before, hence the limp, and claims an alibi for the nights of the attack. The alibi is checked, or checking it is mentioned in passing should I say, but the results are never relayed to the audience and thus we do not know how he created the (obviously false) alibi (simply bad cop show scripting). Worse we do not know how he is able to dance and run given the injury (that they never verified to our knowledge) or whether the injury simply did not exist. He is chased at one point and seems to jump a 25 foot roof gap. Hutch is incredulous but suggests that he flew and yet we don’t ever know how he did this. The inference is that he drank the blood of his victims (we never find that he simply harvested it, which is the alternative possibility) and yet if, as a human, he drank as much blood, as it was hinted he had, then he would have been physically ill.

This is the episode’s problem. It has the characters, the car, the funk and the attitude. But the lore is badly handled and the exposition is terrible both as a vampire episode and a cop show episode. 4 out of 10 reflects that the style lifts the poor aspects as it makes the episode very watchable – so long as you don’t engage your brain.

The imdb page for the episode is here.

Get Smart – Weekend Vampire – Review (TV Episode)

Director: Bruce Bilson

First aired: 1965

Contains spoilers

To be truthful I wasn’t really aware of the Get Smart series and so, when I got opportunity to watch this episode, I entered into the experience blindly and with no baggage. A comedy, and amongst Mel Brooks earliest work (he co-created the show with Buck Henry), that centres around inept Secret Agent Max Smart (Don Adams) – also known as Agent 86. He works for Control and is helped by Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) in the fight against the evil organisation KAOS.

This episode starts with Max and Agent 52 (Don Ross) playing chess. Max gets up to pour coffee and we see a shadow rise over Agent 52. Now the use of shadow in the vampire genre is a staple that goes all the way back to Nosferatu and there is also the noir use of shadows. This therefore worked in a double sort of way. We hear a strange melody and then 52 clutches at his neck.

Max, of course, hadn’t realised the man was dead at first but eventually the crime scene is looked over by him, the Chief (Edward Platt) and Professor Sontag (Ford Rainey). This is the third agent to die this way, with fang like marks at the throat, and the deaths always occur on a weekend. The press speculate about vampires and Sontag isn’t as dismissive of the theory as you’d expect. Max doesn’t think it’s a vampire, werewolves leave marks on the neck, he explains, vampires go straight for the throat.

The papers have again printed about vampires and Max has done some research into the subject. Having tried, unsuccessfully, to discover what the melody was – with the detectotune – Max and 99 head down to the lab to get the autopsy reports. When they get there Sontag is on the phone to his predecessor, Doctor Drago (Martin Kosleck). Max hears that Sontag takes long weekends and he is less than forthcoming about the case. Max and 99 decide to follow him.

He heads to Drago’s castle and Max decides they need to check Drago out. He is dismissive of 99's idea of saying their car broke down (as a cover story) until the car breaks down. Using the kits in the boot of the car they disguise themselves as a honeymooning couple and head to the castle. Drago has a coffin in his study and they meet the mute hulk of a manservant, Hugo (William Baskin).

Many of the gags, then on, are standard haunted house type ones, with revolving wall, portrait with eyes (and mouth) cut out and so on. There are also some spy type gags (Max suggests he and 99 put on pyjamas – they’re bullet-proof he explains) and gadgets such as the expanding rice and ignitable toothpaste that allows them to blow a lock of a door. Max has a theory about why vampires sleep in coffins “Well, if you go around biting people on the neck, I guess you'll do just about everything.”

Of course the ‘vampire’ is Drago but he isn’t a vampire, just a disaffected member of ex-staff. The coffin is the entrance to his lab, the melody comes from a double flute that fires two poisoned ice darts when it hits high C. Whilst not a real vampire, the use of genre standard concepts, for me, places this within the genre.

I said I didn’t have baggage watching this, it also means that I didn’t have rose-tinted glasses. Humour wise it was all right but a little gentle for my tastes. I can see how this would have inspired Police Squad but the later programme, to me, worked so much better on a comedy level as it really pushed the envelope comparatively. Humour, however, is rather subjective.

Humour is the name of the game here, however, and whilst I always score these type of one-off episodes in respect of their vampire element, this one does rely on the humour. Gentle humour then, amusing but not wildly hysterical. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.