American Mary

(2012, Dir. by Jen & Sylvia Soska.)

After their debut feature, the unmistakably titled Dead Hooker in a Trunk, I felt like big things might be in the future for twin Canadian filmmakers Jen and Sylvia Soska. I was a fan of that film as a raw and bombastic piece of grindhouse fluff, and I could see them continuing to push the envelope while finding fun and unique ways to present carnage.

I underestimated them.

I came to this realization tonight while finally checking out their follow up feature, American Mary - which is conveniently available on DVD and blu-ray all over North America for the first time.  The sisters show a dramatic growth in their writing and their direction, and the result is a new kind of horror film that seems endlessly fascinating to me right now.

Katharine Isabelle stars as the title character, a medical student who wants to be a surgeon until her professional progress is derailed by a devastating act. Mary finds a home in the unique underground scene of body modification, working out of a seedy adult club that seems like the real world version of Hellraiser III and making new friends and enemies along the way.

Mary is a special character. Part of this is because the actress is so talented - Isabelle is hitting all the right notes and hasn't been better since her breakout performance in Ginger Snaps 13 years ago - and part of this is because the character fills such a unique dramatic role. Mary exists in the film as both a victim and a villain, allowing Isabelle to recapture the feral energy that made her so dangerous in Ginger Snaps while alternately making her a sympathetic being that is something of a fallen angel.

The film is open to plenty of interpretations when it comes to our characters, starting with Mary and trickling out to all of the souls she touches. The club's seedy manager also seems to have a sweet affection for Mary. A modified stripper with an affection for Betty Boop initially creeps Mary out, but becomes the film's most sincere and altruistic character as the story moves forward. A slew of patients come through Mary's door - including the directors, who offer a sinister cameo - but the viewer never seems to be forced to any judgment of these characters' worth.

The film's willingness to show us a strange world without pushing narrow-minded values is perhaps the most fantastic thing about American Mary. The Soskas offer plenty of blood and push plenty of visual boundaries, but the answers to questions about what is right or wrong are left up to us. I've already read a few discussions in which viewers debate what some characters deserved and what other characters did well, and I can tell that I'm going to love seeing people's reactions to each character in the film after they experience American Mary for themselves.

It's this restraint that really makes me appreciate what the filmmakers have done here. The Twisted Twins have brought back the same chaotic energy and unpredictable flair that made their first film so much fun, but they've added an artistic touch that pushes American Mary into a fascinating place. I'm not sure everything fits together perfectly as the parts of the film crash off of each other in the final act, but the events that unfold are never dull and mostly thought provoking. Combined with a powerhouse lead performance and a eerie visual style, American Mary is a must-see piece of original horror that should propel its directors and its star to greater heights.

Midnight Movie of the Week #180 - The Howling

I will admit that I am often far too dismissive of The Howling, which is one of the better horror movies that was released in the 1980s. The biggest faults I have with the movie - which are faults that only exist within myself - is that it doesn't work for me in the same manic and exciting way that similar films of its era do. The Howling is a great werewolf movie, but it doesn't stand above An American Werewolf in London for me; and it's a great film by director Joe Dante, but it doesn't stand above Gremlins or The 'Burbs for me. This shouldn't be a problem - there's plenty of room in the world for very good werewolf movies - but I still find myself occasionally forgetting how good The Howling is anyway.

I open with all of that because I wanted to make myself aware of it as I sat down to revisit The Howling this week. As much as I want to compare The Howling to movies I like more, there's really not a lot of reason to compare what is actually on screen to anything else made in the '80s. Dante's film, co-written by the brilliant John Sayles, pushes the boundaries of werewolf legends and manages to create a new and modern tribute to The Wolf Man without sacrificing its place as a serious horror film. All of those films I mentioned earlier offer their horror with a heavy dose of comedy, but The Howling maintains a straight face in almost every scene.

Dee Wallace stars as a television reporter who gets too deep in an investigation of a killer and finds herself face to face with a madman who doesn't seem entirely human. She is unharmed, but the trauma of the event leads her psychiatrist (named after Wolf Man director George Waggner and played by the fantastic Patrick Macnee) to recommend some time away at a secluded colony down the coast. This colony isn't exactly calming, and Wallace finds herself surrounded by odd and devious characters and deeper in legends about good old fashioned werewolves.

Dante is more well known for making his films playful about their darkness, and the biggest difference between The Howling and what we expect from the director is that the dark side of his story gets preferential treatment this time out. There are some humorous moments and a few macabre and ironic events, but The Howling is first and foremost a cruel horror film. The best example of this comes in the form of Eddie Quist, the antagonist played by a nearly unrecognizable Robert Picardo. In what might be the film's best sequence, a nosy friend of the lead, played by Belinda Balaski, is pursued by a creature that reveals itself to be Eddie and transforms before her eyes. Picardo is a Dante favorite who has been primarily used in comedic or light hearted roles, but his performance as Quist is unhinged and devilish. Sayles and co-writer Terence Winkless give him a couple of gems in the one-liner department as well - after being called crazy he snarls "Oh, I'm much more than that!", for example - which helps Eddie stand out as a neat new twist on the werewolf legend.

Picardo isn't the only shining star in the supporting cast, as the inhabitants of the colony make up one of the more memorable horror clans this side of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Elisabeth Brooks is the visual standout as Eddie's sister who seems to be in heat, while classic names like Slim Pickens and John Carradine add a little bit of fun to the community.  Perhaps the biggest treat of the film is another Dante regular, Dick Miller, reprising his "Walter Paisley" character name as the owner of a book store who happens to know as much about werewolves as his books tell him. It's a neat little twist to have Miller filling in the pseudo-Van Helsing role, and his few scenes help establish the film's balance between modern horror cynicism and classic horror reverence.

Near the end of the film, Carradine's elder member of The Howling's community proclaims "You can't tame what's meant to be wild...it just ain't natural" and does a pretty great job of summing up what this movie does for the werewolf subgenre. Wallace is a perfect foil to this big bad wolf tale, and her ability to emote from opening scene to her big finale reiterates that this sect of werewolves is wild and dangerous. Horror movies that are more tame can work and work well, but there's something pretty great about The Howling's willingness to be wild and primal as it offers it's tribute to werewolves of the past.

Midnight Movie of the Week #179 - 10 to Midnight

Rumors of "that slasher movie with Charles Bronson" were more than enough to send me on a hunt for the 1983 thriller 10 to Midnight, and the end result does not disappoint. The slasher label (and even the label of this being a horror movie) could be debated - I would say its closest slasher comparison is to the original When A Stranger Calls - but that doesn't stop 10 to Midnight from being that perfectly half-serious/half-cheesy early '80s movie that is dripping with charisma.

The plot follows a veteran detective - Bronson, of course - who teams up with a younger and more "by the book" partner to track a serial killer who loves to get naked, run around the woods, and slice up attractive young women. The killer's identity is no secret to the viewer - he's a sexually frustrated office worker who's played with a sterile smirk by Gene Davis - which allows 10 to Midnight to skip the air of mystery that many crime movies embrace. In its place is a perverse morality tale that makes a deadly game of cat and mouse feel like a popcorn movie.

J. Lee Thompson (who had just made one of my favorite slashers, Happy Birthday to Me) also directed Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum in the original Cape Fear, and there's a little bit of the same tone here. Bronson's Leo Kessler quickly deduces the killer's identity, but legal loopholes and lack of evidence allow the feud between the two men to get personal, with Kessler's daughter (Beverly Hills Cop co-star Lisa Eilbacher) becoming the killer's next target. Fans of Bronson's work in the late '70s and '80s know what to expect from the star here, and also know that getting this dedicated tough guy on your trail is a recipe for violence and carnage.

Both Bronson and Thompson seem to have been in something of a safe mode at this point in their career. Including this film in 1983, Thompson would direct six Bronson films in six years before retiring in 1989.  The star isn't doing anything out of his comfort zone either, playing off the Death Wish formula that defined his late career by once again hitting the city with a gun in his hand and a chip on his shoulder. But 10 to Midnight doesn't subscribe to the formula that you might expect from this duo, mostly due to the supporting cast and their place in the unique script.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of that script is how it seems to shift back and forth from one idea to another. The tone does not change, but the film moves from scenes like "maniac chasing naked woman in woods" to "cops arguing the ethics of the legal system" in a carefree manner. The mixture probably shouldn't work as well as it does, but the actors seem comfortable in their roles and the pacing is top notch. This is one of those movies that feels a lot shorter than it is, because there's always something different and engaging going on on the screen.

Davis' performance as the killer is probably the biggest success in the film, and this killer - whose face we know from the beginning and whose frustrations are spelled out for the viewer - gives the film something that sets it apart from more paint-by-numbers police thrillers. Most comparisons to the slasher genre certainly arise from his eerie, tortured performance in the film and the few wonderful stalking scenes that crescendo to a bloody and violent dorm room finale. The film also does a good job of keeping the killer seeming human, focusing on his frustrations with women and later teaming him with a sleazy lawyer who is wonderfully realized by the great character actor Geoffrey Lewis. This balance between knife wielding stalker and confused and repressed twentysomething is handled in a much better manner than a movie like this often deserves.

And, on the other side of the coin, fans of the star will surely be pleased with the results too. Bronson was still on top of his game when this film was made in 1983, and fans will be treated to a movie that shows off his trademark toughness while never seeming stale. Adding him to the script and pitting him against a unique villain is more than enough to lift 10 to Midnight to surprising heights, pushing the entertainment value of this one-of-a-kind crime drama/slasher movie farther than the parts of the film probably deserve. If you're looking for a pulpy thriller that's never dull, 10 to Midnight will probably entertain you from the opening scene to the final gun.

Midnight Movie of the Week #178 - The Oblong Box

Every year, on May 27th, I celebrate three birthdays. One is my sister's, which is inconsequential here unless we are speaking of Clownhouse.  The others belong to Sir Christopher Lee - who turned 91 AND released a heavy metal album on Monday - and his late companion in horror villainy, Vincent Price.  So this week, I celebrated another year of love for two of horror's greatest stars with a viewing of their first on-screen collaboration, The Oblong Box. (I celebrated with the sister too, sadly without Clownhouse.)

The film is an adaption-in-name-only of an Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, which tells of an ill-fated sea voyage and the dark secret locked away in one piece of cargo.  The film, on the other hand, dabbles in voodoo, grave robbing, revenge, and madness with Price starring as a man whose brother is disfigured thanks to a curse by an African tribe and condemned to live locked up in one room on the family estate. Driven mad by circumstance, the brother - played by the primarily masked and character actor Alister Williamson - is made to appear dead by another witch doctor, and escapes from his brother's reign after being buried alive in a coffin that is - you guessed it - oblong in shape.  (By the way, this guy gets my respect for trusting a witch doctor AFTER he's already been cursed and deformed by a witch doctor. That's some surprising trust.)

What follows is a neat horror story that lives somewhere between Frankenstein and the modern slasher film that may have drawn some inspiration from the German "krimi" films of the 1960s. The devious and disfigured brother, Edward, is risen from the grave by his co-conspirators and then dons a red mask and goes on a spree of madness against those who wronged him (and the occasional shifty prostitute who tries to overcharge him for ripping her breast from her gown).  He's actually a pretty fantastic villain, spouting rage-filled dialogue from behind the hood and showing off his imposing size as he moves through the film. Lee co-stars as the doctor who unwillingly takes in Edward and provides him a home, and perhaps the most lasting image of the film is how it manages to make us think Edward is towering over and dominating the 6'3" man who made Dracula seem taller than Godzilla.

The Oblong Box is directed by Gordon Hessler, who would make two more films with Price the following year - Scream and Scream Again and Cry of the Banshee being the others, and the director brings a vision that seems more in tune with the pulse of its era than many other Gothic horror films of the time. The film is not exceedingly violent, even by the standards of 1969, but the masked killer is something quite different for the time period. And the fact that he is made to look stronger than both Lee - who spends much of the movie trying to sound tough but never really threatening Edward - and Price - who is in that "tortured soul who would be good if it weren't for his secret" role that he does so well - does wonders for the film. We don't expect to see Christopher Lee and Vincent Price both losing out to one villain in a horror film, and the fact that Hessler offers that for much of this film is a bold and kind of brilliant twist on the viewer's expectations.

Though the film was produced on a low budget for American International Pictures, there's definitely a grand feeling to the story at times. The script is attributed to two writers: Lawrence Huntington, who died at the age of 68 in the year before the film's release, and Christopher Wicking, a twenty-six year old writer who re-wrote the script that Huntington and original director Michael Reeves (who also died during production) had put together. Despite the number of contributors and the unfortunate circumstance around the film, it still offers some interesting twists. There's a bit of psychological play - led by the strange sexual relationship between the killer and pretty young servant and some late film showdowns between Price's character and his brother - and I definitely felt like the film was turning toward the new breed of horror that had been started by films like Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary's Baby in 1968. I am a big fan of Price/Poe films like those made by Roger Corman, of course, but it's easy to see that The Oblong Box was conceived from a different mindset than those films.

The end result is a macabre piece of horror that manages to create something new without wasting the talents of its two iconic stars. It's funny to me that the thing that drew me to this film was the pairing of Lee and Price, and yet it's probably the thing I'm least interested in talking about right now. If you're a fan of these icons you know what you're getting from them (Repeated Warning: it's not the dominating villain role for either, so check your expectations accordingly), which makes it important to know that most of the things around them - particularly Williamson and whoever provided his character's voice - are fantastic on their own. The Oblong Box is not what you might expect, but if you expect good horror cinema you could do a whole lot worse.

Midnight Movie of the Week #177 - Wendigo

When I look back at the early part of the 2000s, one of the first things that comes to my mind is all the independent and/or "art house" cinema I found myself watching. I was a college kid with too little to do and too much internet to read, and I found my way to a lot of films that now seem rather drab and uninteresting to me. But this time period was not a waste by any means; I found plenty of relatively unknown films that I still love to death by spending my time at the theater and rummaging through the rental section at the video store. There were a lot of ambitious and effective low-budget winners that I found, but unfortunately very few of them came from the horror genre.

One of the primary exceptions to this rule is Wendigo, which was my first exposure to current indie horror producer/director/actor extraordinaire Larry Fessenden. Fessenden has been involved in a lot of FMWL's favorite things over the last ten years - acting in I Sell The Dead, directing former MMOTW The Last Winter, and producing things like The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers under his Glass Eye Pix company - and along the way I kind of forgot how impressive Wendigo is as a dramatic, poetic piece of storytelling.

Jake Weber (Dawn of the Dead 2004) and Patricia Clarkson (lots of stuff) star as a couple who, along with their son Miles (Erik Per Sullivan, aka the big ears kid from Malcolm in the Middle), head to a desolate house in the Catskills for a quiet weekend outside of the city. Anyone who watches horror movies knows quiet weekends are never quiet, but what follows here is not the cliche you might expect.

I'll get to the mythical creature from the title in a minute, but I'm going to do the same thing the film does and first mention the film's human aggressor. His name is Otis, and he's an unhinged country guy played by John Speredakos. Speredakos has shown up in a lot of films produced by Fessenden - including all four of the movies I mentioned when talking about the director - but his performance as Otis is a real standout in his career. Speredakos manages to pose a believable and realistic threat with little effort, and the conflict between his gruff character and Weber's passive aggressive father is easy to understand and incredibly tense. 

None of these characters are incredibly original, but the three adult leads are talented enough to give each of them depth. The real focal point of the film, however, is little Erik Per Sullivan as Miles. The son becomes caught up in the legend of the Wendigo, a shape-shifting deer-like creature that - according to a Native American man that only young Miles seems to see - is always hungry and generally destructive. Miles' focus on the creature blurs the line between what is real or not, and much of the film raises questions about whether Otis or the Wendigo is the bigger threat to Miles and his family. I'm rarely wild about child actors in cinema - too often have the tried to ruin an otherwise good film - but Wendigo packs a strong dramatic punch in part thanks to its youngest star.

Like he did in The Last Winter, Fessenden has a little bit of a monster problem in Wendigo. The creatures that we are shown in both films are not going to make their way into a lot of nightmares - partially due to bad special effects, partially because they're abstract and bizarre - but the director's eye for creating tension and building up concern throughout the film overshadows these flaws. As we get to know the characters there are very few moments that don't build some kind of conflict, and Fessenden's patient control over the film draws us in to the mystery. So what if he's got more "giant deer monsters" to his name than any director ever.

Fessenden's recent colleague Ti West has become the poster boy for the "slow burn" horror film, but Wendigo is a fantastic example of how to turn a family drama into a creepy thriller. If nothing else, Wendigo shows as that a strong set of characters, a moody setting and just enough conflict is all you need to create horror - and that once you've done that it won't matter if you create a monster by dangling sticks in front of the camera and chasing a child around the woods. There are still a couple of cheesy moments when the monster gets involved, but for the most part Wendigo works and the fantastic final act cements its status as as the all-too-rare perfectly mature horror film.

Midnight Movie of the Week #176 - The Quiet Earth

The "last man On Earth" storyline has been played out a few times in sci-fi history, but rarely with the conviction that lies within The Quiet Earth. Produced in New Zealand in 1985, The Quiet Earth is a powerful sci-fi film that overcomes several faults thanks to an ambitious script and a fantastic performance by co-writer/star Bruno Lawrence. Modern film fans will immediately see some similarities to 28 Days Later (right down to the "guy wakes up totally naked to the camera when we meet him" aspect of each film), but The Quiet Earth is pretty much the tonal opposite of Danny Boyle's horror epic.

Lawrence is Zac Hobson, a scientist working on something called "Project Flashlight" in an underground lab - that is until he wakes up at 6:12 one morning and realizes everyone else has vanished from the world around him. What follows in the film's first act is a collection of Zac's reactions to his newfound status as "the President of the Quiet Earth" - which primarily consist of representations of his changing emotional state and a ton of interesting shots that show how small he is compared to the empty city that surrounds him.

Zac is an interesting character primarily because we can tell that there had to be plenty wrong with his mental state before "the event" that left him to fend for himself in the world. I've no doubt that most of us would go a little mad if we woke up alone in the world, but Zac seems to slip into previously untapped desires and urges very quickly. Part of his journey seems innocent - one of my favorite bits shows Zac admiring a model train set, followed immediately by a grinning Zac taking a full size locomotive for a spin - but it does not take the film long to show Zac slipping away from reality. It takes less than a half hour of screentime for us to find Zac wearing women's clothing and addressing a crowd of cardboard cutouts that includes Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon, and that's gotta be some kind of record.

The character is obviously unhinged, and that's interesting in it's own right. But Lawrence's powerhouse presence really takes the film to a new level during the first act, in which he works to come to terms with his predicament. The commanding presence should remind genre fans of actors like Klaus Kinski who dive into a role and never look back, because Lawrence never seems to waver in his portrayal of a man who is on the edge of extinction. The first 35 or so minutes of the film are gripping and bizarre, and almost all of that is thanks to the man in the lead.  It wouldn't be wise for the film to put this much of a bizarre burden on Lawrence for the entire film, however, which leads us to the film's second and third major life-changing events.

As you might ahve guessed, Zac isn't alone entirely. The film's most touching moment is possibly the one where a female survivor named Joanne (Alison Routledge) finds Zac's location. After a brief standoff, the two instinctively move into a comforting embrace, and the relief that each has to feel the presence of another seems to pour off of the screen. The film follows with a brief reprieve from insanity for Zac and Joanne, but this too is a short lived feeling of peace.

Everything changes for a third time when Api (Peter Smith), an imposing Maori man finds the duo and becomes the third member of what's left of humanity. Two guys and one girl is always a crowd - one that's been exploited by movies of all genres - and tension quickly develops. Zac is also increasingly concerned that another major change is coming thanks to his old project, which leads to a few awkward sequences where the film struggles to balance the sci-fi threat and the desires of these three characters. It seems like the easy way out for the film to go ahead and create a love triangle, but when you think of what's at stake here (the fate of humanity, for example) it makes sense that these people would get caught up in a few petty games. I don't mind the story adding this tension - it's essential in Zac's journey - but it throws a few cogs in the machine as we try to follow what's going on with the experiment that may have ended humanity.

It doesn't seem like I should say that the film goes through another major change - I think I've said enough about the plot thus far - but if there's one thing that becomes completely obvious throughout The Quiet Earth, it's that that Zac Hobson is something of a catalyst for mayhem. There are some pretty fantastic theories out there about what The Quiet Earth actually means (this is one of the rare times when I've actually found intelligent and interesting discussion on an IMDB message board, if that means anything) and the film works as a fantastic "AND THEN...." movie. (Meaning, of course, that every time the movie seems to be slowing down the screenwriters said "and then this happens!" and started the film down a new path.) At the middle of every development is Zac Hobson, and Bruno Lawrence always seems to give him the perfect response to whatever is going on now in the film's twisty universe.

 

It's abstract and it's bizarre, but The Quiet Earth sure knows how to keep a viewer's brain moving in the best way. It's not always profound - that love triangle and the tension that comes from it seems to fill too much of the final 40 minutes - but it always seems to have one more trick up its sleeve. If nothing else, the ambiguous ending is a jaw-dropping addition to the film, and the discussions that can be had after the credits roll are well worth the 91 minutes that precede them. The film's unpredictable nature, beautiful cinematography and fantastic lead performance are all great reasons to seek out The Quiet Earth, which still stands as one of the most unique science-fiction classics of the 1980s.

(If you're up for it, here's the full movie on YouTube. Do not, I repeat DO NOT, go watch the trailer. It spoils everything. This is a movie you must see blind.)

Midnight Movie of the Week #175 - Dracula: Prince of Darkness

Considering what I know now, it's a little bit hard for me to recommend Dracula: Prince of Darkness to people. The first sequel to Horror of Dracula that brought Christopher Lee back to the franchise is slightly infamous due to Lee's attitude toward the production. But I still kind of love the movie, and I don't really feel bad about that. I suppose I could use the term guilty pleasure, but I feel no guilt for disagreeing with one of my favorite actors on this one. Instead, I find that Dracula: Prince of Darkness works as something of a case study into how a film can succeed despite all of the troubling things that happen along its journey through production. 

(RANDOM TANGENT: By the way, I'd never use the term "guilty pleasure" anyway. It's one of those things I wish we could disinvent. There is no reason you should feel guilt over liking a movie. If you take things so seriously that you have guilt....you probably have some personal problems and you might wanna talk to somebody. Life's too short, be happy about movies.)

It's widely documented - I posted an interview in which Lee confirms it just last week - that the star was so disappointed by the film's script that he refused to speak any dialogue in this film. The result is that there are some moments where we briefly forget that this is a Dracula movie, because the film is forced to spend a lot of time on other characters who vary from the very bland to the interesting-only-as-a-caricature. 

One of my favorite theories about sequels that a friend and I once came up with - and this is gonna veer in a non-horror direction, so stay with me - is that you often find sequels scrambling to replace one or two major parts of the first film's success with a larger number of smaller parts. If you saw Moneyball you can think of it as the same thing Brad Pitt did in that movie, but apply it to movies. For example, The Fast and The Furious had Vin Diesel as a criminal/cohort of Paul Walker who was undercover. Vin left and Walker became the criminal, so they had to add Tyrese as a cohort, Cole Hauser as a criminal, and Eva Mendes undercover. Simple math dictates that they needed three people to make up for the loss of Vin Diesel and for the change in Paul Walker's character's profession.

The same thing happened with Dracula: Prince of Darkness, which meant that Hammer Films' stable of writers and director Terence Fisher - who, by the way, does not get enough credit for holding together some standard horror productions and making them better than the sum of the parts (He might have been the Billy Beane of horror movies!) - had to think of new ways to make the movie go. Without Peter Cushing or the Van Helsing character (because you don't just replace Cushing!) and without Dracula as more than a silent force, Fisher and company added some unique characters to the mix and took a step even further away from Bram Stoker's novel.  (That last step might be a negative to some people - Lee particularly - but for the rest of this article I'm going to accept it. Again, life's too short.)

My favorite development in this sequel is the focus on what most vampire mythology refers to as "familiars" - the humans who serve Count Dracula for reasons unknown to most men.  At the front of this development is Klove, played by Philip Latham, a pale and grey-haired servant who maintains Dracula's castle and is responsible for the ritual that allows the previously perished Count to return and terrorize the family that wanders into his home. Klove fascinates me thanks to Latham's quiet and assured performance, and the sequence in which he carries out the blood ritual that resurrects Lee is one of the highlights of the franchise. There's a methodical, religious aspect to the character - watch how the actor pauses and slightly bows before the altar which holds Dracula's ashes - that builds up Dracula's power over the week. If nothing else, Dracula: Prince of Darkness does a really good job of making us recognize the power that Dracula can have over the weak.  (Klove would randomly return two sequels later in Scars of Dracula, but in this version the character is more desperate and pitiful while being played by The Omen's Patrick Troughton.)

Aside from the few familiars involved, this sequel offers a couple of other notable additions to the cast. Barbara Shelley does double duty, spending the first half of the film as an uptight and skeptical member of the group that enters the castle before becoming Dracula's female companion after a mid film bite.  She does a good job of selling both aspects of the character, cementing the fact that this movies is going to spend its time showing Dracula's impact on others. This is also hammered home by co-star Andrew Keir, whose addition to the film as a monk that knows all about Dracula and vampirism is clearly covering for some of the things we'd expect to hear from Van Helsing. It's a one-note character, but Keir's strong presence helps give the film a little more weight.

I probably shouldn't find Dracula: Prince of Darkness to be as interesting as it is, especially when I look at some of the obvious flaws in the production, the biggest of which is being a Dracula movie that doesn't have much Dracula in it. And yet, the way the movie has been put together and the amount of effort that appears to have been expended is somewhat infectious. I gain a lot of respect for everyone involved - even Lee, despite his objections - when I watch this movie because it's such a large challenge to replicate what Horror of Dracula did eight years earlier. Yet you can still see the wheels churning and no one seems to be resting on the name value of the film, and the final result is a vampire tale that is far from perfect but still good looking and a bit charming.