Dracula

Tod Browning, 1931
Rotten Tomatoes score: 91%

With old movies like this, it's obvious that Rotten Tomatoes is not a perfect reflection of what people really thought of the movie. They manage to dig up a handful of contemporary reviews from Time magazine, the New York Times, and the like, but mostly what you get is a bunch of reviews written decades after the fact. So for a movie that has become a "classic," Rotten Tomatoes is full of latter-day praise that may or may not reflect what audience and critics really thought of it.

The result of this is a strongly positive bias. Rarely does a modern-day critic go back and review an 80-year-old movie just to give it a thumbs-down. If the movie is remembered at all, it will be remembered fondly. So imagine my surprise at discovering that there were in fact three negative reviews of this movie, all written recently.

The first, published on the website Reel Film Reviews (not to be confused with the well-known Reelviews), begins: "Based not on Bram Stoker's tedious novel but instead on a 1924 play . . ." Wow, he didn't even like the book? (I've never read the book, so I will say no more.)

The second negative review acknowledges the movie's "classic" status because of its lasting influence, but concludes that it is not a good movie in itself. This review is published on a Blogger page called "Antagony & Ecstasy"--hey, wait a second. Blogger reviews can go on Rotten Tomatoes? Why am I not on Rotten Tomatoes? Maybe you have to have readers first.

Anyway, I can't read the last one, because there is no link provided, but it's by someone named Stefan Birgir Stefansson. That's a great name, so I will assume his review is lucid and thoughtful.

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There's not a whole lot to say about this movie, because I think most people who are interested have already seen it. Bela Lugosi plays Count Dracula, who, to my disappointment, never utters the line, "I vant to suck your blood." He buys an abbey in London for some reason, and then he journeys there to suck people's blood and sleep in a box of dirt.

The special effects are of course very dated, but they don't look too bad. The flying vampire bat looks ridiculous, but not distractingly so. The scenes in Dracula's castle are truly bizarre, with opossums and armadillos crawling around, and a bee crawling out of a tiny coffin. The internet is full of speculation about these things, suggesting that the producers used armadillos and opossums instead of rats, and that maybe the bee was supposed to be a giant bee crawling out of a regular coffin. I have no idea if any of that is true, but if so, it doesn't make it any less weird.

Even though I haven't read the book, I am aware that lots of things were cut, starting with the last two syllables of Jonathan Harker's first name. (What could possibly have motivated that change?) There were also additional characters involved in the killing of Dracula in the novel, and the movie cuts an entire plot point where the heroes chase Dracula back to Transylvania before they kill him.

In fact, the movie ends in an astonishingly anti-climactic way. Dracula has abducted Mina (whom he has already turned into a dracula) into his hideout in the abbey, and John Harker and Professor Van Helsing pursue him. Faced with the threat of two men who know how to kill him, Dracula makes the brilliant tactical decision of going to sleep in a box. Van Helsing finds Dracula, drives a stake into his heart, and kills him off-screen. Meanwhile, John rescues Mina, who has transformed back into a human. (I guess Dracula has to exert a constant mental effort to make sure that all new draculas remain draculas, so as soon as he dies they all change back.)

The strangest thing about this movie, from a 2013 perspective, is that there is no music in it. The Swan Lake overture plays during the opening credits, and there is one scene where the characters attend a symphony, but there is no background or incidental music in any scene. A lot of old movies were like this (I think music was invented around 1935), and for the most part you don't really miss it, but it results in completely silent scenes whenever no one is talking. Some people think it's scarier that way, but I don't know about that. I don't really mind either way.

Most of all, this movie is famous for Bela Lugosi's performance as Count Dracula. Everyone nowadays just inherently expects a vampire to speak and act this way, so it's hard to appreciate that it was a novelty at the time. The characters in the movie, of course, don't know he's a vampire, but it's easy to forget that and wonder why everyone is palling around with Dracula for the whole second act. Don't they know he's a dracula? Can't they tell by his long black cape and his accent?

If you don't mind old-timey movies with no music, and you've never seen this one before, go ahead and watch it. Like The Wolf Man, it's very short, which is a plus. The three dissenting reviews have not convinced me, but in view of the other 91% of reviews, this one is clearly

I offer no apology for my use of the word "draculas" in this review.

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Did You Know?
There were no wild armadillos in Transylvania in the 1930s.

The Wolf Man

George Waggner, 1941
Rotten Tomatoes score: 94%

This movie is often lumped together with Frankenstein and Dracula as one of the major Universal Studios monster movies. But in fact, The Wolf Man is different from the others in two big ways: First, it came out 10 years later; and second, it wasn't based on a book. And actually, there was a previous Universal movie about a werewolf (Werewolf of London, 1935), but no one seems to remember it, and I've never seen it.

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This movie is the story of Larry Talbot, a Welsh gentleman who has just returned to his family home. It's not clear where he's returning from--his accent would suggest he grew up in America, but in this movie lots of Welsh villagers speak with American accents for no discernible reason.

Larry is welcomed home by his father Sir John, and he soon learns to enjoy local pastimes, such as astronomy and spying on strange women through shop windows in broad daylight. In an effort to hit on an engaged antique shop owner named Gwen, he makes small talk while buying a silver-handled cane. Gwen and every other human being in the village recite a weird poem about werewolves, but Larry thinks it's silly.

He learns better when he, Gwen, and Gwen's friend Jenny go walking in the woods in the middle of the night. They encounter a gypsy camp, where they meet an old fortuneteller and her son Bela Lugosi. Unfortunately, Bela Lugosi is a wolf man, and when the moon rises, he transforms into a wolf and attacks Jenny. Larry bludgeons the wolf to death with the handle of his cane, but not before it somehow bites him in the middle of the chest.

The fortuneteller tells Larry that anyone who is bitten by a wolf man and survives will become a wolf man himself. Larry thinks this is nonsense, but he is puzzled when he discovers that the dead wolf has transmogrified back into Bela Lugosi. The police believe that Larry has murdered Bela Lugosi, but nothing really comes of this plot point.

Larry turns into the Wolf Man and kills an innocent person, and eventually the fortuneteller persuades him that her story is true. He then spends a long time trying to persuade his father and others that he is the Wolf Man, but they all think he's crazy. The murder the Wolf Man committed is preposterously blamed on a real wolf (preposterous because the Wolf Man always kills by strangulation--you know, just like a wolf).

(This is as good a place as any to point out that, when Bela Lugosi transformed, he looked exactly like a real wolf. But when Larry transforms, he looks like a hairy guy with wolf teeth. I always imagine that a wolf person becomes more and more wolf-like with each transformation, so that after many years Larry will look just like a wolf. Unfortunately, the movie never gives this or any other explanation.)

Eventually, the Wolf Man tries to murder Gwen (because of a convenient rule that wolf men always kill their beloved), but Sir John gets a hold of the silver cane and kills the Wolf Man. The police discover Larry's dead body and brush the whole thing off without investigation, John withholds the truth, and the movie ends, all within 15 seconds. It's the most abrupt movie ending I've ever seen, and it's great. I wish more movies would just suddenly end, instead of dragging things out. Actually, this whole movie is only 70 minutes long, which is a huge relief in a world of three-hour King Kong remakes (we'll get to that).

Speaking of overly long remakes, there was a new version of this movie in 2010. It changed most of the story, and there was a surprise twist where Sir John was also a wolf man. Oh, sorry, spoiler alert. I guess you don't have to watch it now.

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Did You Know?
There were no wild wolves in the British Isles in 1941. (There were only werewolves.)