Mandrake – review

Director: Tripp Reed

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

First things first, this is a Syfy film and so you can gauge the quality on that fact. I watched it primarily because I thought it might fall into the realm of vampiric plants and it does, kind of, it is arguably a vampiric landscape but… And there is a but… we might see some death by plant but there is little indication of blood drinking. The dialogue does steer us that way though.

It starts with a woman running through the jungle. After a while she backtracks carefully, to hide her retreat by stepping backwards onto her footprints and then peels off to the side. She is being hunted by two somethings and they appear to be monstrous – later they are revealed to be Yambarri (the indigenous tribe) warriors in elaborate helmets etc. Despite her ruse she is caught.

the team

A group of travellers arrive at a small Latin American airport, they have been paid to help locate treasure in the jungle and so one, Lin (Wayne Pére), is an archaeologist and another, Carla (Jon Mack, Drakul), an anthropologist (and linguist). The third is a soldier for hire, McCall (Max Martini), and it is he that the border guard are not happy about until their contact, Santiago (Nick Gomez, Vampire Riderz & Vampires Suck), greases the wheels. The area they are heading in to is contested ground between government and rebels but the rebel leader has given an undertaking to be out of the area for a couple of days.

the dagger

They don’t head to basecamp, rather they are sent orders to go straight to the area where the artifact they are looking for is meant to be. That artifact is a conquistador’s dagger that the businessman who has bankrolled the expedition, Harry Vargas (Benito Martinez), covets as it belonged to an ancestor. They reach the area and find an indigenous graveyard and find the one tomb mispositioned (laying North/South rather than East/West. It has glyphs on the stonework but Lin doesn’t wait for Carla to translate and opens the tomb. Inside is the remains of the conquistador and the dagger buried in the position of the heart.

stabbed by vine

Removing the dagger causes something like a seismic shock to hit the area, Lin ends up strung up in a trap and Yambarri warriors attack them. The group gets split up and McCall is dismissive of reports of the jungle attacking the others – until he sees it himself. So, what’s happened? The story as it comes out is the Yambarri were invaded by the conquistadors and so their shamans summoned something to save them. This appears to be the jungle brought to life in the form of a kind of plant/animal hybrid. Having said that it also appears that the jungle itself attacks the invaders. However the creature was a killing machine attacking invaders and Yambarri alike and so they created a totem using the hilt of the conquistador’s knife attached to a Yambarri blade and, by stabbing the invader in the heart, they made the beast dormant. Removing the blade awakens it… so kind of a stake equivalent but using sympathetic magic (stabbing a sacrifice rather than the creature itself).

sacrifice

This doesn’t quite add up as the woman from the beginning was part of a team sent in first (that our guys didn’t know about). The team are dead and she was held – and then sacrificed to the creature (though, again it might be more to the jungle itself) once it was awakened but the inference was they sacrificed outsiders anyway. The sacrifice sees them tied to a sacrificial stone, the shaman (J. LaRose) summoning the creature and vines cocooning the victim who is subsequently ripped in half by the vines.

J. LaRose as the shaman

What we do not see is blood drinking, however we get reference to it. The shaman, when telling the backstory, translated by Carla, suggested the creature was summoned to drink the blood of the invaders. The warning glyphs mention this too but say that the jungle feeds on the blood of invaders. The team, at one point, use fire, which it doesn’t like but it doesn’t kill it (and as an avatar of the jungle, if that’s what it is, then it wouldn’t) – ultimately, they must find a way to make it dormant again. A couple of points, reminiscent of vampiric plant film Ruins had the area devoid of animal and bird noise and a person stabbed by a vine subsequently having vines moving below the skin.

the creature

It isn’t a great film, the creature cgi looks poor for a start, and it has some awful moments – such as Carla attending to a leg wound (where the vine has stabbed into a character) whilst saying she knows about field dressings and then applying a tourniquet below the wound rather than above. We also get a moment where a camp worker hears something in the undergrowth (that sounded like Keyop from Battle of the Planets) and is grabbed and dragged off. Was it the Yambarri or the jungle itself? The film doesn’t say. Incidentally the film didn’t seem to mention the (not indigenous) mandrake of the title, so I’m not sure why the film has the title it does. However, as a Syfy flick it is about right. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Vamp or Not? The Quatermass Xperiment

When I looked at the Hammer films I obviously looked at the traditional vampire films, and of course Hammer were masters in such things, producing some of the best vampire films. However I am always open to the suggestion that there may be others.

Step in the Quatermass Xperiment. Quatermass (fully Professor Bernard Quatermass) was a character created for the BBC by Nigel Kneale and they had run a six part serial entitled the Quatermass Experiment in 1953. This 1955 film, directed by Val Guest, was a remake of that – though Kneale was supposedly less than impressed – disliking the fact that Quartermass seemed to lose his first name (it’s mentioned on the IMDb credits but not uttered in film) and being unhappy with the casting of American Brian Donlevy as the titular character. It was Hammer’s first real foray into horror.

Hammer's first horror

So why are we looking at it? Well that’s because of Paul Meehan’s book the Vampire in Science Fiction Film and Literature. In it he says “The infected astronaut, who is the film’s vampire, fuses the science fiction notions of the vampiric plague carrier and the extraterrestrial bloodsucker into a single character.” Well that, and the fact that it is a Hammer film, prove enough to make me want to have a look-see. And after some doom-laden music over the opening credits the film starts proper…

it's coming from the sky

A couple are walking along a country lane and end up frolicking in a haystack when they hear something. They see something hurtling towards the earth and the girl, Maggie (Margaret Anderson), runs, with her boyfriend (Eric Corrie) not far behind. They reach the farmhouse and are ushered in by Maggie’s father, George (Henry B. Longhurst). There is an almighty crash and some of the ceiling caves in but the three are fine. George goes out of the farmhouse, with shotgun over arm.

the rocket

Soon the entire lane and nearby town are packed with people who have come to see the rocket that has crashed in the field. The police and fire brigade keep them at a distance as a car with Quatermass, some of his people, civil servant Blake (Lionel Jeffries) and Judith Carroon (Margia Dean) arrives. Blake is less than impressed, Quatermass tried the spaceflight without authorisation. They lost contact with the crew but eventually managed to bring it back down. Judith is the wife of one of the astronauts.

"help me"

When they arrive the ship is still too hot to touch and they cannot make contact with any of the crew. Suddenly they detect a knocking and Quatermass – despite the danger – has the rocket dowsed with water so they can get the survivors out. I have to say, Quatermass comes across as a detached and arrogant character, driven by the need to succeed at all costs and careless of human lives. Anyway, that aside, the door opens and Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) falls out. Inside they find the other two astronauts’ pressure suits linked up but empty. Quatermass goes to Carroon in the ambulance and he manages to say “Help me!” Let us gloss over the fact that the only family member they brought along was Carroon’s, after all she was plot necessary.

treating Carroon

So Carroon has been in to space and we have to remember that this was six years before Yuri Gagarin got there. When they examine Carroon his living status is a miracle – perhaps in doubt. His heart rate and blood pressure are too low, his skin has coarsened and it is suggested his facial bone structure and fingerprints have changed. His skin is icy cold to touch. He is being given blood transfusions, but they seem to make no difference, and he is awake but unresponsive – though he shows some reaction when Judith pricks her finger (to the blood we assume).

Christie post-attack

Later we see him try to get up – with some flowers being his goal – but he falls and is, finally, taken to hospital. Judith, however, is not happy with Quartermass and tries to have a PI named Christie (Harold Lang, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors) sneak him out. During this Carroon smashes a cactus and, in a lift, attacks Christie. When Christie is found his face is smashed, his body desiccated and police inspector Lomax (Jack Warner) suggests that he has had the “life drawn right out of him.”

meeting the lifeform

Later Carroon kills a pharmacist (Toke Townley, Scars of Dracula) in the same way and we see that his arm is a sort of human cactus hybrid. He also drains a whole bunch of zoo animals and Paul Meehan points out that this is reminiscent of the way victims would die in the later Lifeforce. Working from in capsule film footage, the scientists work out that the ship has encountered some form of energy life form in space. It killed the other two astronauts (and reduced them to a small cube of gelatinous material) and merged with Carroon.

the final form

Carroon became little more than a vehicle for the lifeform (with the caveat that at least a little of him survives) and it then merged the animal life of the human with the vegetable matter of the cactus. It eventually becomes an almost octopus like creature (that leaves a slimy trail behind, a little like a slug). As Meehan noted the similarity to part of Lifeforce, I should point out that the book the latter film was based on, the Space Vampires, had its alien creatures have a true form that was octopus or squid like – a coincidence I’m sure. Because of the merging of animal and plant the scientists have to stop it before it releases spores and reproduces.

Carroon and the chemist

So, whilst he becomes something new this has an astronaut turned in to, what might be called, a vampire. He is dead – for all intents and purposes, as his vital signs are too low to maintain life – and yet aware and active. As I said above, we could assume that something of Carroon remains as he doesn’t attack his wife (though she essentially goes mad having seen his arm) or a little girl he meets. The alien presence gives us a possession aspect, I suppose. I was reminded of the later the First Man in Space - whilst that was not an alien life force but some strange space substance and cosmic rays, both pieces were based on the anxiety of what leaving this planet might bring. The later film had the vampire drink blood – in this Carroon drains all the body’s liquids it seems – but I still think there is enough here to class this as Vamp.

I mentioned that it was based on a BBC series and I should also mention that the series was remade in 2005, done as a live broadcast. When I get opportunity I will, of course, compare and contrast those.

The imdb page is here.