Tag Archives: Bela Lugosi

My Memories of Dracula

6 Feb

February 6th, 2013

Vlad Dracula

The story begins with a man named Jonathan Harker. We know his name is Jonathan Harker because it turns out that we are not reading Dracula at all, we are reading The Diary of Jonathan Harker. (This book is totally misnamed.) Anyway, Harker is on his way to Transylvania, a wild and desolate place that in the distant place was the center of the US automobile industry but now stands deserted, with crumbling buildings and rampant crime and horror. Oh, sorry, that’s Detroit. Take out the part about the auto industry and the rest still stands. Neither is a place any sane person would want to visit.

Harker is going to see a man named Count von Count Dracula. The Count loves to count things and lives in a filthy castle full of his beloved trash. He is also a vampire, although Harker doesn’t know that. What Harker does know is that every single person he meets tells him not to go to Detroit- I mean Dracula’s castle. They urge him to turn back, they warn him of the evils and horror that await, they tie him up and try to ship him back to England in a box, all to no avail. You see, Harker is a traveling salesman and he is there to sell Amway to Count von Count Dracula and those Amway salesmen don’t take no for an answer.

Things got off to a strange start when Harker’s ride to the Count von Count’s castle arrived. The coachman was wearing a hood pulled low over his face and a pair of Groucho nose/glasses. As Harker later found out, it was none other than The Count himself. Turns out he had fired all of his servants when they ran out of blood.

Things did not go well in Count von Count Dracula’s castle. The food was spoiled, the days were boring and the nightlife sucked… so to speak. Eventually it became clear to Harker that Dracula was not interested in buying any Amway. Problem was he didn’t realize it until Dracula had already departed for London and left Harker locked in the basement with his ex-wives.

Meanwhile, in another book I mean back in England, Miss Lucy Westenwhore was torn between her three lovers. One was a rich American Texan, one was a rich English nobleman, and one was rich, nothing else matters, does it? Well, yada yada yada, nothing much happens for a long time except that Lucy’s friend Mina, who happened to be Harker’s wife, began to wonder where her husband was. She didn’t wonder too loudly, however, being surrounded by rich single guys.

Meanwhile, in a complete and total coincidence of the sort only found in these types of novels that feature complete and total coincidences, right next door to our main characters is an insane asylum. Now if you are anything like me you’d think having a nuthouse next door would be a deal breaker and no way would I live there, but back in those days it was considered pretty cool and as more and more areas of London got gentrified insane asylums popped up everywhere. They were the Starbucks of their time.

About now I should mention that Dracula has been printed all over the world in dozens of languages and editions. If you are reading the black and white 1931 Universal Studios edition, Dracula wears very elegant evening clothes, as if he is on his way to dinner with the Queen and not actually on his way to dig himself out of his filthy grave. If you are reading the 1958 Hammer Studios version, Dracula is written in color and looks like Christopher Lee.  In neither version does he sparkle.

Count von Count“Long story short” is an often overused cliché but in this case it is totally accurate. Depending on the edition you are reading, and this is true, Count von Count Dracula does not appear in the middle of the book for almost 200 pages. This is no joke. A lot of the dialogue is like “where’s Dracula? We have to find Dracula” and “where can Dracula be? We have to find him before the sun comes up.” See? Long story short. I just saved you 200 pages. (And somewhere along the way Lucy dies and comes back as a vampire and then really dies. That’s a spoiler, sorry.)

Here is the story in convenient bullet point format. (Convenient for me- less typing.)

  • Dracula comes to England by boat and gorges on the all-you-can–eat buffet
  • Dracula is invited into the mental asylum by one of the inmates and- hold on to your hat- one of the main characters is a doctor who also lives there, giving Dracula free reign of the house.
  • A lot of people get attacked, including the residents of a ghetto who see Dracula in his bat form and try to capture “the black chicken.”

Meanwhile, Dr. “Van” Helsing, the one important character whom I should have mentioned long before this arrives and teaches the Scooby Gang how to defeat a vampire.

HOW TO KILL A VAMPIRE

  • Drive a wooden stake through his heart
  • Cut off his head
  • Trap him under running water
  • Expose him to sunlight
  • Force him to watch Twilight
  • Didja notice the bullet points again? I am so lazy when it comes to typing. Which begs the question of why I am still typing this thought. Hmmmm….

It is also interesting to note that any and all of those methods will also kill a mugger, except maybe that sunlight thing. Just throwing that out there in case you get into trouble.

Anywho, for no reason other than he’s running out of places to hide (in London of all places!) Dracula flees back to his trash-filled Transylvania castle, pursued by the rich white guys who follow his every move by using a strange psychic connection between Mina and the Count. It turns out that they came up as matches on J-Date and that site is never wrong.

Dracula makes it thisclose to his castle and freedom when, again depending on the version you are reading, he gets his head cut off outside the castle, he gets staked in his coffin, or Peter Cushing chases him into the castle where, using a pair of candlesticks held together as a cross, forces the Count into the sunlight where he crumbles into dust, except for his ring, which somehow later turns up later in Detroit on Hardcore Pawn.

This is the first of a series of Count von Count adventures, in which Count von Count Dracula moves to a typical American soundstage and takes up residence in a trashcan, emerging only to teach kids how to count before draining their blood on public television.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A New York Minute (17)

14 Mar

March 14, 2011

Before the New York Minute begins I’d like to take some time to jump on the bandwagon and begin my own serialized pulp drama. Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Hollywood Russell in The Case of the Virtuous Vixen.

Chapter One.

Hollywood Russell entered the room. His steely eyes twitched to the left, then the right.

To be continued.

And now, your New York Minute.

Hollywood may be the movie capital of the world, but New York might be Hollywood’s favorite city.

In 1908 The Thieving Hand was shot in Flatbush Brooklyn, and the upcoming Avengers will be set in New York, though mostly filmed elsewhere. In the years between Hollywood has taken us to New York’s past in Gangs of New York, New York’s future in Escape from New York, and gave Charlton Heston the New York surprise of his life in Planet of the Apes. New York’s trains have been hijacked in The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, chased in The French Connection, helped a gang escape to Coney Island in The Warriors, and crashed in Die Hard with a Vengeance. 

Yes, Hollywood has made its fair share of New York films and more than its share of fair to mediocre at best New York films. And that brings me to The Bowery Boys. During the 1940’s and 1950’s Hollywood cranked out dozens of B-movies featuring a rotating cast of juvenile delinquents from New York. Since these films were comedies these youthful offenders, led by the increasingly not-so-youthful Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey, never smoked dope or ripped off a liquor store. The Bowery Boys were more likely to get mixed up with Nazi spies, spend a night in a haunted house, accidentally break up a crooked boxing syndicate, or somehow help the police track down a foreign princess. They were also known at various times as the East Side Kids, the Dead End Kids and, early in their history, The Little Tough Guys. People usually only change their names that often to avoid creditors. In at least two quote unquote memorable films they met Bela Lugosi, demonstrating in just which direction his career was moving.

Of course, any student of history will tell that history lies, and any student of the movies will tell you that Hollywood lies with every agent’s breath, so it is a sad fact that the real Bowery Boys were nothing like the bunch of clumsy nincompoops featured onscreen. 

The Bowery Boys were an anti-Catholic, anti-Irish gang based north of the Five Points section of Manhattan in the mid-19th century. This was a time of great Irish immigration. They gang was based in the Bowery section of New York, hence their name. It was said that the gang was so strong and even popular during its time that many of the smaller or weaker gangs in Bowery followed their lead. One of their main rivals was a gang called The Dead Rabbits. I don’t know about you, but I think The Dead Rabbits is a lousy name for a gang. But I would never say it to their faces.

The Bowery Boys were young men who frequented the saloons and brothels of the Bowery and dressed in black stovepipe hats, red shirts, black flared trousers, high-heeled boots and black vests, with slick hair. I mention this because they were generally well-dressed and most of them even had respectable jobs. One famous member of the Bowery Boys was William Poole, also known as Bill the Butcher. As far as I know, none of them were named Satch, Slip, or Glimpy. It took Hollywood to come up with those brilliant monikers for The Bowery Boys films. Their most famous leader was known only as Mose the Fireboy, and some research suggests that he may have simply been a tall tale or urban legend. Ballads and songs were sung of him in the Bowery and his name was a common battle cry among the Bowery Boys throughout their existence. He was supposedly eight feet tall and had the strength of ten men. It was sort of like if Paul Bunyan joined the Crips.

At this point I would like to mention that I never saw and refuse to see Gangs of New York, despite how good I hear it is. But I digress.

Some odd facts popped up while researching The Bowery Boys. For example, they ran their own local fire department. They were fiercely patriotic and were actually allied with the Metropolitan Police Department. This makes sense when you realize that New York had two competing police departments. The Metropolitan Police Department had a feud with the Municipal Police. Over the course of two days in 1857, fighting between the two police departments, The Bowery Boys, The Dead Rabbits, and several smaller gangs left eight people dead,. That was only the official number. Unofficially the body count may have been much higher.

The gang was cruel and violent. During the New York Draft Riots of 1863, the Bowery Boys took part in much of the looting while fighting with rival gangs. The brawling was so bad that the military was called in to stop it.

Eventually infighting and other disputes caused the gang to splinter and weaken and they eventually disappeared into history, with only their name carried on in such films as Spook Busters and Dig that Uranium. Sigh. History may forget you, but it takes Hollywood to insult you.

This has been your New York Minute.

An audio version of this legend recently appeared (or is about to!) in the amazing FlashPulp website. Check them out for awesomeness and goodies!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →