Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

“I’m the Chosen One. And I choose to go shopping.”

OK, I know. This is four horror films in a row, sort of. It’ll be something very different next time, I promise.

I’m saying nothing about how soon I’ll be reviewing Buffy and Angel on TV for this blog(!), but suffice to say that I’ve seen every episode before, although a few years have passed. And that makes this film a very odd experience indeed. And I’m not just talking about the presence of an absurdly young Hilary Swank and David Arquette.

For a start, there’s the absence of that theme tune. This is film, not TV, so exposition needs to be over with quickly; hence the flashback at the start. We quickly move to the present day, though (well, the early ‘90s) and to Southern California, although not Sunnydale.

I’m sure that for most Americans reading this blog, the institution on the American High School was a formative experience in your life. But to me, a foreigner, it’s something defined entirely by popular culture, and a huge chunk of it Buffy-related. All the tropes of the American high school- cheerleaders, strange sports of which I know nothing, those strange jackets, jocks, nerds, stoners, senior proms, homecoming queens (whatever they are) are just that: tropes from film and TV.

And we start right in the middle of this sort of thing, with a bunch of cheerleaders and some teenage boys playing basketball. Even in the early lines in these scenes it’s apparent that we’re going to get a very witty script indeed, which should come as no surprise as the writer is Joss Whedon. In fact, I’d argue that the script is pretty much entirely brilliant, and the film’s many shortcomings are due to other factors, but more of that later.

Anyway, Buffy and her friends are, like, totally a bunch of Valley Girls, with dialogue which sounds like it could have come straight from that Frank Zappa song (which is, as if it needed saying, my soundtrack to writing this!). I could listen to them talking all day.

It all looks a bit cheap, though, and there’s little focus to the succession of scenes we get; vampires, Rutger Hauer as “The Master” (that gets re-used!), Pike and Ben. In fact, we’re introduced to so many different similarly-aged characters that it takes some time to get used to who’s who.

Eventually Buffy meets her Watcher, Merrick, played by Donald Sutherland, whose accent seems all over the place. Is he trying to sound British or something? Is he even attempting the same accent in every scene? It doesn’t feel like it. He’s certainly phoning in his performance, which is a shame; like everyone else in this film, he gets great dialogue. Kristy Swanson, on the other hand, is actually quite good, but her performance it pitched too far towards pure broad comedy. But that’s the main problem with this film; Joss Whedon’s scripts are invariably funny, but they’re more effective if played mostly straight.

Merrick exposits at Buffy until she’s convinced, and tells her of Lothos, the “Master” we met earlier. He shows her some real vampires and she stakes them. This being a low budget film, though, they don’t disintegrate. They just fall down rather unconvincingly.

Ben is vamped, and calls on his friend Pike. Fortunately for Pike, he doesn’t invite his former friend in, because he’s acting weird. By floating in mid-air, for one thing, although this apparent ability of vampires is never referred to again.

We get the usual sort of plot for this sort of movie, really; protagonist gets called from humdrum life to do Great Things; protagonist refuses but is persuaded to continue; protagonist meets Big Bad and gets arse whupped; mentor figure gets killed; protagonist gets big final showpiece battle. But here, the fact that we pretty much expect all this to happen means the emphasis can go on witty dialogue such as “All I want to do is graduate from high school, go to Europe, marry Christian Slater and die.” It’s a shame the characters feel so wooden, and I don’t think that reflects any fault in the script.

Merrick persuades Buffy to continue by showing her that she has superhuman strength and reflexes, something which she’s unaccountably failed to notice until now. We then get an unintentionally hilarious montage scene, complete with rubbish music, which goes on for aaaaages.

At last she gets a proper vampire fight, or at least the nearest we’re ever going to get in this terribly directed movie in which all the fight scenes are slow, ponderous, entirely lacking in oomph and full of characters standing around talking mid-fight. Here she discovers that “My secret weapon is PMS!”, and Merrick discovers that Buffy can’t even make a decent cup of tea.

Buffy then rescues Pike, who by this point is obviously going to be the love interest. After pausing to see Rutger Hauer about to eat a little kitten (awww!), we then get shown how alienated Buffy is becoming from her rather shallow friends. Still, that night, she chooses cheerleading over slaying. I think my favourite character in the film is the team coach (“Assert your personhood! Actualise! Actualise!”), the most stereotypical Southern Californian ever.

Soon a vamp comes on to the pitch, or court, or whatever it is that basketball gets played on, and Buffy gives chase, with motorbikes and everything. Here she meets loads of vampires and the Master himself, but for some bizarre reason they don’t actually want to kill her as she’s “not ready”. How very sporting of them.

Merrick, who has suddenly turned up, gets suddenly killed and, in a rather bathetic scene, dies in Buffy’s arms, telling her with his last words to keep doing it “wrong”. It’s such a shame this doesn’t really work. Yes, it’s badly directed, like the whole damn film, but there never was any chemistry between the two of them.

After this, Buffy has a crisis of confidence, and gets a bit of a pep talk from Pike. It’s a nice reversal of the usual gender roles from Whedon’s avowedly feminist script but, again. It would be nice if there was some semblance of chemistry between the two of them.

It’s obvious that the school dance is going to be the scene of the final confrontation, and it’s a scene that could have only taken place in 1992 and no other year. Even the DJ looks like he should be a member of Faith No More. Buffy’s not happy; her boyfriend has humiliated her by publicly dumping her in from of her smug and mocking friends, but Pike has gatecrashed the party. She’s glad to see him, they dance together, and they kiss. Inevitably, this is when the vampires attack- and I notice this is the exact point where the music suddenly changes to the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Halford. If this is the effect that vampires have on music being played on dancefloors, then frankly I think there should be more of them.

Fortunately, Pike has remembered to take all Buffy’s stuff, and we get a series of long, talky and uninvolving fight scenes. The Master suddenly turns up playing a violin, which makes me momentarily feel that we’re about to segue into the music video for Come on Eileen. This is a very silly scene for something that’s meant to be a climax; the annoying vamp’s slow and “ironically” badly-acted death is just embarrassing, and for someone who’s supposed to be the Big Bad the Master poses absolutely no sense of threat whatsoever. He even dies with an “oops”.

This film is entertaining enough, but this is entirely due to the excellent script. Not only is this badly shot, you get the sense, from the fact that many of the actors here are perfectly good elsewhere, that the big problem with this movie is a director who simply can’t give direction to actors. A sadly wasted opportunity. Fortunately, though, there was to be another chance…

Dracula (1958)

“Sleep well, Mr Harker…”

We get a statement of intent very early on, with some blood spattering on to a coffin- these early Hammer horror films certainly like their bright Technicolor red blood!

We're in some vague part of Horror Film Mittel-Europa in 1885. As with Curse of Frankenstein, this is a stylised and intentionally vague setting.  Jonathan Harker is heading to Castle Dracula and, in a slight nod to the epistolatory nature of the novel, this part of the plot is narrated through his diary. The inside of the castle is at the same time luxurious and bleak, with the large rooms marked by harsh straight lines and a total absence of carpets or any hint of softness.

After a brief and disturbing encounter with a woman whom Dracula is apparently taken prisoner, Harker finally meets Christopher Lee’s Count who, although sinister, appears polite enough, to the point of complimenting a picture of Harker’s fiancée, Lucy Holmwood. It seems Harker, a scholar, is to work as his librarian, but it soon becomes apparent that Dracula is only available during the hours of darkness, and that Harker’s door is locked during the night.

But Harker, we learn, has ulterior motives, and is here to kill the notorious Count, who from this point on ceases to be a character and just becomes a monster, never speaking another line for the rest of the film. But poor Harker is doomed; he agrees to help the temptress he met earlier, and gets bitten in the course of a vamp-fight between her and the, er, vampire. Both she and Drac look great, and there’s lots and lots of blood.

Harker, himself doomed to become undead, manages to make it to the crypt before sundown, but chooses to stake the woman before the Count himself. WHY?

The inevitable happens, and we cut to Peter Cushing in one of those Hammer inns where all the locals stop talking as soon as a stranger enters. Still, armed with Harker’s diary, he’s soon delivering the news of Harker’s death to Arthur Holmwood (played by Michael Gough, later to play the Celestial Toymaker in Doctor Who and Alfred in Tim Burton’s Batman), brother of Harker’s fiancée, and his wife Mina, future star of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s splendid The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He receives a frosty reception, however, and Lucy can’t be told the news as she’s very ill with anaemia.

We soon see the reasons for this, however; Lucy is delivering her windows open at night and removing her crucifix, allowing Dracula to come in and bite her, night after Night. The erotic charge is so electric here that I’d be tempted to say “get a room, you two” except… they have. For the first time in the film we have the obvious use of vampirism as a metaphor for sex, and as we’ll see this tells us quite a lot about the sexual mores of late Victorian times as opposed to the late 1950s. On the surface this is an unhealthily puritanical message about sex but I don’t think the film is quite playing this straight. Like Curse of Frankenstein there’s something camply humorous about this film, even if it’s played very, very deadpan.

It’s a bit jolting to see Van Helsing listening to audio recordings of himself, even if it is from an ancient-looking gramophone and even though his butler seems to be amazed. There are plenty of audio recordings from the 1880s on Youtube (look for Gladstone and a very drunk Robert Browning!) but none of them have anything approaching this sound quality.

Van Helsing uses this rather obvious expository device to inform us that vampire bites are addictive and that this eventually results in death through loss of blood. Consulted by Mina, he soon discovers that this is what is happening to Lucy. He orders the windows to be closed and Lucy’s bed to be surrounded by garlic, but this is not adhered to and the girl dies.

Van Helsing now has no choice but to let Arthur into his confidence, especially as the undead Lucy is now walking the grounds of the house, threatening their daughter Tania. Arthur catches the undead Lucy the following night, and is only saved from being bitten by Van Helsing. These scenes are atmospheric, effective, and really bring home how this film is set in a dreamlike, stylised world of cemeteries, castles, inns, sleepy border guards and nothing else, which feels culturally German, Slavic and Romanian all at once, and vaguely evokes the cultural mix of Habsburg Austria, yet is full of characters with English names.

Lucy is stakes, and Van Helsing and Arthur have a bit of a chat in some comfy chairs with some brandy, as gents in Hammer films are wont to do. It seems that vampires cannot in fact turn into bats; evidently the budget won’t stretch that far. But, just as our heroes are beginning to get a grip, Mina is lured to Dracula’s base of operations, and from that point onwards is under his spell. Again, there’s a sexual subtext here, and in this case it’s a rather emasculating one for poor old Arthur; apparently he’s not satisfying her. Actually, given the blatant eroticism of what can only be described as the sex scene between Dracula and Mina, I’m not sure the word “subtext” is entirely appropriate…

Arthur’s implied emasculation is even more tragic as he’s clearly a decent and loving husband, as we see him selflessly donating an alarming amount of blood to save his wife, who presumably shares the same blood group. Understandably, he’s a little sapped after this, but Van Helsing has some sound medical advice: “Now, you need plenty of fluid. Tea, coffee or, better still, wine.” Yes, that’s right, Van H. Wine isn’t in any way dehydrating, is it?

We finish with a chase, incorporating a bit of comic relief at the border, and Dracula’s final gruesome death by sunlight. An excellent film, this- atmospheric, just erotic enough, just gory enough and very well-acted indeed.