Review: "BLACULA" Can't Stop, Won't Stop Rising from the Grave

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 47 of 2023 (No. 1936) by Leroy Douresseaux

Blacula (1972)

Running time: 93 minutes (1 hour, 33 minutes)

MPAA – PG

DIRECTOR:  William Crain

WRITERS:  Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig

PRODUCER:  Joseph T. Naar

CINEMATOGRAPHER:  John M. Stevens (D.o.P.)

EDITOR:  Allan Jacobs

COMPOSER:  Gene Page

BLAXPLOITATION/HORROR/ROMANCE

Starring:  William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, Denise Nicholas, Thalmus Rasulala, Gordon Pinsent, Charles Macaulay, Emily Yancy, Lance Taylor, Sr., Ted Harris, Rick Metzler, Logan Field, Ketty Lester, Elisha Cook, Jr., Jitu Cumbuka, Eric Brotherson, and The Hues Corporation

Blacula is a 1972 American blaxploitation vampire horror and romance film directed by William Crain.  Originally released by American International Pictures, the film was a hit and inspired a wave of blaxploitation (black exploitation) films, including its own sequel, Scream Blacula Scream.  Blacula focuses on an 18th century African prince-turned-vampire who awakens to find himself in modern day Los Angeles.

Blacula opens in 1780, in Transylvania at Castle Dracula.  The African prince, Mamuwalde (William Marshall), has traveled there with his wife, Luva (Vonetta McGee), to seek the help of Count Dracula (Charles Macaulay) in suppressing the African slave trade.  Dracula refuses and after some insults and violence, he bites Mamuwalde and curses him to an immortal existence as the vampire, “Blacula.”  He imprisons Mamuwalde in a sealed coffin in a crypt hidden beneath the castle, where he also leaves Luva to die.

In 1972, Blacula emerges from his coffin and begins a reign of terror and death.  However, he is shocked to discover a young woman named Tina Williams (Vonetta McGee) who looks exactly like his long-lost Luva.  Initially hesitant, Tina warms to Blacula, who introduces himself as Mamuwalde.  In turn, Tina introduces him to her sister, Michelle Williams (Denise Nicholas), and her boyfriend, Dr. Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala).

A pathologist for the Los Angeles Police Department, Dr. Gordon has been investigating the deaths of people whom he suspects are victims of a vampire.  Teaming with LAPD's Lieutenant Jack Peters (Gordon Pinsent), Gordon must discover the force behind these deaths before its too late, even as Tina finds herself irresistibly drawn to Mamuwalde / Blacula.

I have seen Blacula several times, but I had previously not attempted to review it.  I have seen several “Black vampire films,” but I have previously only reviewed Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014), although I have not seen the film it remakes, Ganja and Hess (1973).  Of course, I have reviewed all the films in New Line Cinema's Blade franchise that began with 1998's Blade.

When I discovered that Blacula was available on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) via Spectrum On-Demand, I decided to view it again with an eye towards writing a review.  I must say that I'd forgotten how good the music is, especially the funk score by conductor, composer, and record producer, Gene Page (1939-98), which was one of the first of its kind for a vampire film.  The songs:  three performed by the pop-soul trio, The Hues Corporation, and one by the short-lived L.A. soul group, The 21st Century Ltd., are quite nice.

Something I noticed for the first time is that Blacula depicts a world in which African-American professionals are equal to their white peers.  In fact, it isn't even a question that they are not.  For instance, Dr. Gordon Thomas is respected and his orders are followed without question.  The only time that his opinion is questioned involves the obvious – telling people that there is a vampire loose in Los Angeles and that he is murdering people.  Obviously, a blaxploitation film would feature a cast of black leads, but the film isn't really about them being “Black.”  Blacula, in a way, is a movie about humans fighting the forces of darkness; this time, the lead vampire killer is a black man.  Sometimes, I got the feeling that Blacula was almost nonchalant about the characters being African-American.

Of course, Blacula could not pass as an ordinary vampire film when the late, great stage, television, and film actor, William Marshall (1924-2003), played the title role.  Marshall doesn't play Mamuwalde as a victim, which he is (of Dracula); rather, he is a man (or creature) awakened to new circumstances, and as he did in his former life (based on assumptions), will live it to the fullest.  I like that Mamuwalde / Blacula is a man who gets what he wants.  Perhaps, that is what makes Mamuwalde so memorable to African-American audiences.  He isn't a tragic or misunderstood monster; he is a king.

I have believed for a long time that given the space and runtime, Blacula's screenwriters, Joan Torres and Raymond Koenig, with William Marshall adding his ideas, could have made a greater film.  Still, William Crain's deft directing and Allan Jacob's precision film editing allow Blacula to breeze past its shortcomings.  I love Blacula, obviously, and I can't wait to see it again.

B+

7 of 10

★★★½ out of 4 stars

Friday, October 20, 2023

The text is copyright © 2023 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved.  Contact this blog or site for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

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Review: "Last House on the Left" (Remembering Wes Craven)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 156 (of 2003) by Leroy Douresseaux

Last House on the Left (1972)
Running time:  84 minutes (1 hour, 24 minutes)
MPAA – X
EDITOR/WRITER/DIRECTOR:  Wes Craven
PRODUCER:  Sean S. Cunningham
CINEMATOGRAPHER:  Victor Hurwitz (D.o.P.)
COMPOSER:  David Alexander Hess

HORROR/THRILLER with elements of crime and drama

Starring:  Mari Collingwood, Lucy Grantham, David Hess, Fred Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler, Gaylord St. James, Cynthia Carr, Marshall Anker, and Martin Kove

Last House on the Left is a 1972 horror and exploitation film written, directed, and edited by Wes Craven.  The film was inspired by the 1960 Swedish film, The Virgin Spring, directed by Ingmar Bergman and written by Ulla Isaksson.  Last House on the Left focuses on the murder of two teenage girls by a quartet of psychotic criminals and the subsequent vengeance of one of the girls' parents.

Horror master Wes Craven’s (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream) first film, Last House on the Left, is nothing like his later work.  A film of unflinching brutality, it is shocking in the immediacy of its horror, and it is matter-of-fact in the way it portrays murder.  As a horror film, Last House on the Left is not supernatural, nor does it have any of the conventions of the “slasher flicks” that would grow to mass popularity in the late 70’s and into the late 90’s, including films that would be the work of Craven.

Mari Collingwood (Sandra Cassel) is celebrating Sweet Sixteen with her rebellious friend, Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham), when the pair encounters a gang of sadistic criminals.  The evil bunch  kidnaps them, and when the girls try to escape, the gang members hunt and kill them.  They disembowel Phyllis, and the lead thug, Krug Stillo (David Hess), rapes (in probably the sloppiest and most pathetic rape scene in film history) and shoots Mari.

Later, the gang unwittingly stumbles upon the home of Dr. William (Gaylord St. James) and Estelle Collingwood (Cynthia Carr), Mari’s parents, and become their guests.  When the parents discover that their daughter was murdered at the hands of their guests, the couple quickly and savagely begins to slay their daughter’s murderers.

The acting is nothing short of remarkable.  Combined with Craven’s documentary style of filmmaking, Last House on the Left seems very real – kind of jerky, shaky and bloody.  Watching it is like being in the middle of some crazy incident and then having to run madly from one corner to another to find safety.  From the prolonged torture of the teenage girls to the speedy dispatching of the bad guys, Last House on the Left is a jolt of a violent voyeurism.  Part crime drama and part thriller, it is a horror movie like no other.  Disquieting, it is a shunned corner in the mirror of its time – the dirty and worn ends of the hippie era.  At times, it seems too raw and too unpolished, but the movie still leaves you shaking your head and saying, “What the hell…”

7 of 10
B+

Revised: Monday, August 31, 2015

The text is copyright © 2015 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

Review: "Cries and Whispers" is Incredible Intense (Remembering Ingmar Bergman)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 78 (of 2003) by Leroy Douresseaux

Cries and Whispers (1972)
Viskningar och rop – original title
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Sweden
Running time: 91 minutes (1 hour, 31 minutes)
MPAA – R
WRITER/DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman
PRODUCER: Lars-Owe Carlberg
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Sven Nykvist
EDITOR: Siv Lundgren
Academy Award winner

DRAMA

Starring: Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullman, Inga Gill (voice), Anders Ek, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, and Georg Arlin

The subject of this movie review is Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop), a 1972 drama written and directed by legendary Swedish filmmaker, the late Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). The film follows two sisters who watch over the deathbed of a third sister and all the complicated history between the three women. At the time, Cries and Whispers was only the fourth foreign-language film to be nominated in the “best picture” category at the Academy Awards.

Ingmar Bergman is one of the world’s most renowned film directors, and his 1972 film Cries and Whispers influenced much of filmmaker Woody (Annie Hall) Allen’s work. This is the first Bergman film that I’ve ever seen and, as the film’s tagline says, it, for me, was a haunting and shattering experience.

Two sister, Marie (Liv Ullman) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin), take care of their terminally ill sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), all under the watchful gaze of Agnes’s loyal servant Anna (Kari Sylwan), in Agnes’s Swedish manor, circa 1900. The sisters’ relationship, like the relationship of real people, is complicated, and Agnes’s looming death forces them to confront each other, as well as forcing Marie and Karin to relive painful moments with their husbands from the recent past.

Cries and Whispers starts off quiet slowly; in fact, it takes much patience on the part of the viewer to stick with this film. However, about a third of the way into the movie, you can catch its deliberately languid rhythm. Bergman gives every scene such astonishing individual attention that his film becomes a composition of pictorial frames. Each frame is like a separate painting that when viewed with the aid of light and speed becomes a complex and engrossing story. Director of Photography Sven Nykvist (who won an Oscar for his work here) washes the film in vivid, dark colors, especially red, so that the movie looks like one continuous oil painting.

Of the many things that I got from this film was Bergman’s fidelity to the visual purity of film. His dialogue, which is sparse, is efficient and rich in telling the story. However, so much of the film story is dependent upon what the viewer sees on the screen, be it in the facial expressions and gestures of the actors or the lavish and colorful settings. From actors, to props, to settings, each one creates a mood conveyed through sight that communicates to the viewer. Bergman, like the great painters, is telling a story with his canvas, and his entire painting doesn’t just contribute to the story, it is the story, from the frozen expression on a character’s face to the overwhelming crimson that covers the manor’s walls. It’s a visual feast that harkens back to silent films, before sound corrupted the purely visual sensations of cinema.

As much as Bergman’s prowess is on display in the story and composition of the film, the acting is superb, first rate, and award winning work. They’re all good, and each actor tells his or her part of the story, using the human body as an artistic tool. My favorite is Kari Sylwan as the maid Anna. She is the film’s moral center, the loyal servant who steadies Agnes in her suffering, her sickness being the catalyst for this tale. Hers is a quite and bravura performance, one of the best supporting roles that I’ve ever had the pleasure to watch.

Anyone who seriously loves cinema as an art and as a visual artistic experience has to see Bergman, and this, though not his most famous work, is a good example of what a film artist can do in the medium. I won’t provide spoilers of the story, but there are many scenes that could shatter the nerves and unsettle the viewer.

9 of 10
A+

NOTES:
1974 Academy Awards: 1 win: “Best Cinematography” (Sven Nykvist); 4 nominations: “Best Costume Design” (Marik Vos-Lundh), “Best Director” (Ingmar Bergman), “Best Picture” (Ingmar Bergman), “Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced” (Ingmar Bergman)

1974 BAFTA Awards: 2 nominations: “Best Actress” (Ingrid Thulin) and “Best Cinematography” (Sven Nykvist)

1973 Golden Globes, USA: 1 nomination: “Best Foreign-Language Foreign Film” (Sweden)

1973 Cannes Film Festival: 1 win: “Technical Grand Prize” (Ingmar Bergman)

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Review: Yes, "Pink Flamingos" is Culturally Significant (Happy B'day, John Waters)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 154 (of 2006) by Leroy Douresseaux

John Water’s Pink Flamingos (1972)
Running time: 93 minutes (1 hour, 33 minutes)
MPAA – NC-17 for a wide range of perversions in explicit detail (re-rating for 1997 re-release)
PRODUCER/WRITER/DIRECTOR: John Waters
EDITOR/CINEMATOGRAPHER: John Waters

COMEDY/CRIME

Starring: Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Danny Mills, Edith Massey, Channing Wilroy, Cookie Mueller, Paul Swift, Susan Walsh, and Linda Olgierson

Pink Flamingos is a 1972 black comedy and exploitation film from director John Waters. Controversial upon its initial release, because of its depiction of perverse acts, Pink Flamingos went on to become a cult film because of its notoriety. The film follows a notorious female criminal and underground figure who resists attempts to both humiliate her and to steal her tabloid reputation.

Divine (Divine) lives on the outskirts of Baltimore in a trailer with her degenerate son, Crackers (Danny Mills), her dim-bulb mother, Edie (Edith Massey), and her “traveling companion,” Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce). She lives under the pseudonym Babs Johnson, and in local outsider community and to its news press is known as the “Filthiest Person Alive.” However, local couple, Connie (Mink Stole) and Raymond Marble (David Lochary), also vies for that title. The vile Marble clan launches an unbridled assault on Babs Johnson’s reputation and on her home. But Babs and her family fight back in a small war that breaks just about every taboo in the book: incest, drug trafficking, bestiality, castration, murder, cannibalism, etc.

It seems impossible that (regardless of what other films he has directed in the past or may direct in the future) John Waters will be best remembered for any film other than Pink Flamingos. Cheaply made with a cast of amateur actors and locals from the Baltimore area (from where Waters originates), this is the kind of film that would normally merit a review of “no stars” or a grade of “F,” simply because it isn’t like a “normal” film (at least not one from Hollywood). However, Pink Flamingos may be the ultimate low budget trash movie, the ultimate camp experience, and a supreme ode to bad taste. Fun, vile, and also disgusting to the point that many people might turn off the TV early in the film (or walk out the theatre), Pink Flamingos is an object – a piece of art by someone who wants to put his thumb in the eye of American values. It doesn’t matter if its working class, middle class, church-going, God-fearing, or baseball-mom-and-apple pie American values, John Water made Pink Flamingos an assault on decency.

New Line Cinema, the film company that distributed the movie in 1972, released a trailer for Pink Flamingos that did not include scenes from the film, so in that vein, I won’t give away more about the movie. I will say that no serious fan of movies can go without seeing it.

8 of 10
A

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

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Review: "Deliverance" Still Delivers (In Memoriam, Bill McKinney)

TRASH IN MY EYE No. 179 (of 2006) by Leroy Douresseaux

Deliverance (1972)
Running time: 109 minutes (1 hour, 49 minutes)
MPAA – R
PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: John Boorman
WRITER: James Dickey (based upon his novel)
CINEMATOGRAPHER: Vilmos Zsigmond (director of photography)
EDITOR: Tom Priestly
Academy Award nominee

DRAMA/ADVENTURE/THRILLER

Starring: Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, Bill McKinney, Hebert “Cowboy” Coward, Billy Redden, and James Dickey

Four suburban friends: Ed Gentry (Jon Voight), Lewis Medlock (Burt Reynolds), Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty), and Drew Ballinger (Ronny Cox) take a canoeing trip down the Cahulawasse River in Georgia at the behest of Lewis who wants them to see what’s going to be destroyed in the name of progress (The river’s being dammed to produce electricity). What began as a fun adventure, however, turns horrific when redneck locales (alternately referred to as “crackers” or “hillbillies”) descend on the quartet and brutalizes one of the party and threatens to kill the rest. [The most memorable is the “Mountain Man” (Bill McKinney) who demands that Bobby Trippe “squeal like a pig.”] Before long the river trip becomes a race to escape this heart of darkness, and one of them learns that he must kill or be killed if they’re to make it back to civilization.

Director John Boorman’s 1972 film, Deliverance, carries with a bit of infamy due to a particular assault that occurs just before the film’s midpoint. It remains, however, one of the great American films about survival. Based upon the novel by James Dickey, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, Deliverance covers all the classic conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself, and, in the end, even approaches a bit of man vs. society. One could also view the film as a battle of the New Man against the Old Man – American modern versus American primeval.

Regardless of how the viewer approaches conflict, Deliverance is the razor’s edge of storytelling about the struggle to survive and those battles against interior doubts and physical weakness that impede the struggle to survive. The film’s main stars: Voight, Reynolds, Beatty, and Cox personify this struggle in their characters, and through each one we watch the logical outcomes of how different men approach their dilemmas and to what extend they win, lose, or draw. The pivotal performance is Voight’s. Of the four characters, only Ed Gentry is directly connected to each of his three partners, and the others are strangers to one another. So much of this movie’s philosophy and plot line run through him, and Voight carries it well with a subtle, layered performance.

It’s a testament to Boorman’s direction and Dickey’s script that they allowed the actors to largely tell us this story. For all its intensity, Deliverance is free of theatrics, but rich in human drama, which comes when good actors take the plot and setting and construct a great story.

8 of 10
A

NOTES:
1973 Academy Awards: 3 nominations: “Best Picture” (John Boorman), “Best Director” (John Boorman), and “Best Film Editing” (Tom Priestley)

1973 BAFTA Awards: 3 nominations: “Best Cinematography” (Vilmos Zsigmond), “Best Film Editing” (Tom Priestley), and “Best Sound Track” (Jim Atkinson, Walter Goss, and Doug E. Turner)

1973 Golden Globes: 5 nominations: “Best Director - Motion Picture” (John Boorman), “Best Motion Picture – Drama,” “Best Motion Picture Actor – Drama” (Jon Voight), “Best Original Song” (Arthur Smith-music, Steve Mandel-adaptation, and Eric Weissberg-adaptation for the song "Dueling Banjos") and “Best Screenplay” (James Dickey)

2008 National Film Preservation Board: National Film Registry

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