The "Other" tag

 You may have noticed that I'm throwing in a few reviews of old horror movies lately.  They don't really fit with our theme or mission statement, but on the other hand it's my blog and I can do what I want.  Going forward, the "Other" tag is for movies from outside of India and Pakistan.

No, the one with Jack Palance.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974) opens just as the novel does, with solicitor Jonathon Harker (Murray Brown) visiting the Transylvanian estate of one Count Dracula (Jack Palance), who is interested in buying real estate in England.  Dracula is brusque, rude even, though he is intrigued when he glimpses a picture of Jonathon's fiance Mina (Penelope Horner), her good friend Lucy (Fiona Lewis), and Lucy's fiance Arthur (Simon Ward.)  Jonathon cheerfully tells Dracula where they all live, because Jonathon is an idiot.

This is a TV movie, though, so they don't have the time or budget for a carefully crafted mood o0f unease and Jonathon's slow descent into inescapable horror, so things move fairly quickly.  Dracula quickly tires of pretending to be human, so when he chases his vampire brides (Sarah Douglas, Virginia Wetherell, and Barbara Lindley), he isn't afraid to show the fangs.  He forces Jonathon to write a letter to his employer, finalizing the sale of the Carfax Estate, and another to Mina saying that he'll be traveling in Europe for a time.  Then Dracula leaves, and Jonathon tries to escape but is caught by Dracula's brides.  RIP Jonathon.

After a quick and atmospheric shot of the wreck of the Demeter, the scene shifts to Mina, arriving to visit an ailing Lucy.  No one knows why Lucy is wasting away, but Arthur has called in another doctor, one Abraham Van Helsing (Nigel Davenport) to help.  Van Helsing has a very surprising theory (it's vampires!) and he is of course completely correct, as events follow the general outline of the book, only on an accelerated timeline and with a smaller cast.  (There's no Renfield, and Lucy is stuck with the most boring of her suitors.  No cowboys here.)

But there is a twist, or at least it was a twist at the time.  This is the earliest example I can find of a Dracula motivated by the search for his reincarnated love.  (To be fair, Blacula got there first, but Blacula is not Dracula.)  This time the reincarnated love is Lucy, and it works much better than a Dracula pining for Mina.  Dracula transforms Lucy, but once she's destroyed he's furious, and only attacks Mina out of spite.

This is an angry Dracula in general.  Jack Palance is perhaps not the best choice for suave and seductive, but he's great at smoldering menace.  This is also the first movie I know of that explicitly makes Dracula the same person as Vlad Tepes, and he brags about his martial exploits.  he also gets a few tacked on action scenes, wading through faithful household servants and an entire hotel's worth of men who try to stand in his way.  

Columbia Pictures and Francis Ford Coppola actually purchased the rights to use the title "Bram Stoker's Dracula," so these days this movie is usually billed as "Dan Curtis's Dracula" or simply "Dracula."  If anything, it's "The Cliff Notes to Bram Stoker's Dracula," but Palance's performance makes up for a lot of literary sins.

Perhaps the real goat fight was the friends we made along the way.

 Chopsticks (2019) is a hard movie to classify.  Is it a comedy that feels like a drama?  A crime story about the importance of being kind to people?  A mockumentary about goat fighting?  An inspirational family drama about safecracking?  Or perhaps it's a simple love story about a girl and her first car.

Nirma Sahastrabuddhe (Mithila Palkar) shares her name with a popular brand of laundry detergent, and she has heard all the jokes.  She'd never complain, though, because she is painfully shy and awkward.  Nirma works as a Mandarin translator, though she isn't happy in her job; all the mean girls in the office get the glamorous assignments, while she's stuck leading groups of Chinese tourists on "reality tours" of Mumbai's slums.  Her parents are overbearing, she doesn't seem to have any friends in the city, and the assertiveness tapes she listens to are not helping, but Nirma does have one thing that makes her happy: a brand new car, bought with her own money.

Or at least she had a car.  She bought the car in the morning, and that same evening, while visiting the temple, she handed the keys to the valet to have it parked.  However, the temple doesn't have valet parking.  Once she realizes what's happened, Nirma goes to the police to report the theft and the police inspector says he'll help, but he doesn't seem very enthusiastic about it.  A friendly thief suggests that she contact a guy named Artist for help, instead.

Artist (Abhay Deol) is a safecracker and occasional con artist, though he enjoys cooking more than anything else.  Most importantly, he knows people, and he's able to use his web of contacts to track down the missing vehicle.  At first is seems that the car has already been stripped for parts, but a picture in the newspaper reveals the truth; the car is in the hands of local crimelord Faiyaz Bhai (Vijay Raaz), who kept the car because his beloved fighting goat Bahubali liked it.  It seems that the only way for Nirma to get her car back is with a crazy scheme, though according to Artist there is always another way . . .

That's the plot, and it's pretty straightforward.  Normally, a Bollywood movie would fill out its running time with subplots, a bit of romance, dance numbers, and maybe Johny Lever mugging for the camera.  Chopsticks doesn't do that.  Instead, the movie takes its time, because the plot is merely a means to an end, an excuse to explore the personalities of its two leads and the friendship that springs up between them.

Nirma's problems run deeper than her name.  She has no confidence, so she's nervous all the time, and the people around her sense that.  Because she's so awkward, she has never had the chance to develop any street smarts at all, which is why she was able to lose her car so easily.  Artist is a much-needed guide, but along the way he helps her to learn how to stand up for herself.

Artist, on the other hand, is very unusual for a Bollywood hero with a shady background.  He's calm, competent and confident, but he's not cocky; he does what he needs to do with a minimum of swagger.  Artist has genuine friends rather than just contacts, and watching Nirma struggle to find her car inspires him to step out of his own comfort zone.  There isn't a hint of romance between the two of them, and that's just fine.  They become friends, and it's more than enough.

In theory, Chopsticks is a comedy, and it's often funny, but everyone takes their situation completely seriously, and it has the rhythms of a drama.  Nirma and Artist travel in some seedy circles, but the movie still feels gentle, and in the end kindness wins the day.  It's also got a different pace than the usual Bollywood fare.  It takes its time, and it doesn't feel bad about it.  It's clearly not a movie for everyone, but if it sounds like it might be for you, than it's worth looking into.

 

Love is *not* a battlefield.

At first glance, Gatta Kusthi (2022) looks like a movie about the battle of the sexes, and there are a lot of ways that that can go wrong, especially since it also doubles as a sports movie.  Fortunately, writer-director Chella Ayyavu does a lot of things right, starting with the decision to let the wrestling be a metaphor for wrestling, and let the rest of the movie handle themes and nuances.

Veera (Vishnu Vishal) is handsome, athletic, charming, and owns his own farm, but he's still single.  The problem is that he was raised by his cartoonishly sexist uncle Ratnam (Karunas), and so he has a long list of expectations.  A proper wife should be less educated than he is, have very long hair, be silent and obedient, and be willing to devote herself entirely to him rather than thinking of a career.   Every time the family goes to visit a potential bride, Veera rejects her for one reason or another, usually the hair thing.  Just when it looks like there's no woman in Tamil Nadu who could possibly meet Veera's standards, Ratman's old friend Ganessh (Munishkanth) appears with a solution; he has a niece in Kerala named Keerthi (Aishwarya Lekshmi) who would be perfect.  The young couple meet, she has hair of sufficient length, and the match is fixed! The young couple marry and soon settle into a happy life, despite Veera trying to follow Ratnam's advice about keeping his wife in line.

However, Keerthi has a secret: it's not really her hair.  She's also a college wrestling champion in Kerala, with the skill and drive to be successful on a national level.  After a video of Keerthi defending her sister (Nikhila Sankar) from Eve teasers goes viral, Keerthi's marriage prospects are ruined.  She doesn't really care, but her father (Gajaraj) suffers a heart attack, so to protect his health she agrees to meet Veera and play demure, and because Veera refused dowry, she agrees to marry him.

Veera and Ratnam are prominent voices on the village council, which has been involved in a legal dispute with factory owner Dass (Ajay).  Dass gets Ratnam arrested on false charges, then goes to Veera's house when he's not home in order to threaten Keerthi.  Veera doesn't back down and wins the case.

At a temple function, Dass tries to take his revenge, sending his goons to kill Veera.  The young man fights bravely, and he does a pretty good job, but he's eventually blindsided and then overwhelmed. Dass is about to finish the job when Keerthi appears and takes the goons apart with surgical precision, sending most of them to the hospital.  On the one hand Veera is safe.  On the other hand, he was saved in public by his wife, which means he has to face some gentle (and some not-so-gentle) mockery.  Keerthi, on the other hand, is treated as a hero and local celebrity.

Despite this, the young couple still have a chance to work things out, at least until Ratnam gets out of jail.  Once he learns what happens, he goes to the house when Veera isn't home to berate Keerthi and her uncle, spewing such a stream of sexist crap that she loses her temper and slaps him.  And that's when Veera arrives.  Because this is the Village of People Who Jump to Conclusions, he throws Keerthi out of the house.

Once she's gone, Veera begins an epic mope.  He's so upset that Ratnam thinks he's helping when he sends Keerthi divorce papers without telling Veera.  Keerthi is also upset, so her family insists that she start wrestling again, which is probably a more healthy coping mechanism than anything Veera is doing.  She starts training under creepy and secretly evil coach Lokesh (Shatru.)  

When Veera and Ratnam find out that Keerthi will be competing in a big tournament, they decide that the only way Veera can reclaim his manhood is to compete in the same (women's) tournament and literally beat her at her own game.  The tournament officials try to turn them away, for obvious reasons, but Lokesh intervenes.  He loves the idea of using a husband-wife match for publicity, so he sets up the match and does everything he can to keep the couple from reconciling.

The stage is set for an old fashioned battle of the sexes, and that's how the people around Keerthi and Veera treat the situation, giving the young couple advice on how to deal with stubborn women/men. Veera's wrestling coach Kodangi (Hareesh Peradi), on the other hand, tells Veera that that's stupid, that conflict is bound to happen if you enter a relationship with a list of expectations rather than just letting the other person be who they are.  And while it doesn't sink in with Veera right away, the movie listens to Kodangi's advice, and points out that the conflict is stupid.  Veera and Keerthi face each other in the ring, but that's not how they settle their differences.  They talk.

Gatta Kusthi has a tricky premise.  There are a lot of ways the movie could have gone wrong, and it wouldn't work at all without engaging leads.  Aishwarya Lekshmi conveys a lot, even when she has to be demure, and the sense of relief when her secret is out and she gets to be her true self again is palpable.  Vishnu Vishal has arguably the harder job, since he has to be likable while still being a sexist jerk.  Veera comes across as also damaged by the toxic ideas about gender that he's absorbed, and once he manages to put them aside, he's immediately happier.  

Of course, any movie that includes a song about the late Mac Mohan, Bollywood's finest movie henchman, is going to get bonus points from me. 

Agra is famous for two things.

 Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya (2000) features some of Bollywood's finest supporting actors, including local favorites Johny Lever and Farida Jalal, but casts two fresh faces as the leads, Abhishek Bachchan and Kirti Reddy.  Abhishek, son of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan, went on to have a long and fairly successful career, and Kirti Reddy . . . . did not.

But that's a story for another time.  In this movie, Reddy plays Pooja Sinha, an advertising executive with a dream.  Right now, Pooja works for stern but avuncular Mr. Oberoi (Kader Khan, doing his best Perry White impression), but one day she hopes to be a successful director.  She has the support of her saintly mother (Farida Jalal) and her flamboyant best pal Maggi (Johny Lever), and she's going to need it, because she's constantly late and on the verge of being fired.  Despite that, though, she manages to catch Oberoi in a particularly avuncular mood and gets permission to take three days off to attend a friend's wedding in Agra.

Agra is famous for two things; one is the Taj Mahal, and the other is Kabir . . . at least that's what Kabir (Bachchan) says.  Kabir is street smart, charming, and a talented musician, but so far he's not really successful.  When we meet him, he's filming the wedding preparations at the behest of his best friend/adoptive father Gaffoor (Paresh Rawal.)  At least, that's what he's supposed to be doing; Kabir spends most of his time filming the mysterious and beautiful lady from Mumbai.  Gaffoor is annoyed and takes over the filming, which frees Kabir up to flirt with Pooja.  She finds him interesting, but he is absolutely smitten.  Still, he never manages to say anything to her, and his grand romantic gesture as she's leaving is to ride a horse through the train station and . . . hand over a nice collection of photos from her trip as a souvenir.

Pooja returns to the office after four days and is handed termination papers; it turns out Oberoi was really serious about the three day thing.  Maggi saves the day by spinning a quick story about Pooja's engagement, showing the boss a picture of Kabir and Pooja as evidence.  Oberoi buys it, Pooja's job is safe, and everything is great.  And that's when Oberoi's son Raj (Sanjay Sure) enters the picture.

Raj is everything Pooja has been saving herself for.  He's rich, he's handsome, he's . . . that's basically it.  Rich and handsome.  (Pooja is not a deep person.)  She immediately falls head over heels for Raj, but as far as everyone at work knows, she's taken.  Maggi has another great idea - just tell Oberoi that Kabir has done something terrible, and he'll insist that she calls off the engagement.  It's foolproof, as long as Kabir doesn't show up in Mumbai, and what are the odds of that?

Meanwhile, Kabir has been brooding about Pooja, and decides to travel to Mumbai to tell her how he feels.  He's accompanied by Gaffooor and Gaffoor's wife Shyama (Himani Shivpuri), and after settling in to their temporary residence, he goes looking for Pooja and winds up saving Oberoi from a band of well-armed muggers, suffering a nasty head wound in the process.  Oberoi realizes immediately that this must be Pooja's Kabir, so he takes the lad to the hospital and then drags Pooja there to see her fiance before she can manage to lie to him.

Kabir is thrilled about the sudden engagement.  He's less thrilled when Pooja takes him aside and explains her situation.  She tells him that it's not enough for him to just break the false engagement and go away; she has to look like the innocent victim, so the only way to fix the mess she created and allow her to pursue the man she just met is for Kabir to publicly humiliate himself and play the villainous buffoon so that Oberoi will insist she end the engagement.  At this point it's clear that Pooja is actually kind of an awful person, but Kabir is a Bollywood hero in love, so he immediately commits to maximum self-sacrifice, and vows not to return home until all of her dreams have been fulfilled.

The noble self sacrifice sounds a bit extreme, but it's actually pretty typical late Nineties Bollywood stuff, and it plays out in the usual way.  Will Kabir fulfill his vow?  Of course, even if he has to become a major celebrity overnight in order to do it.  Will Pooja realize her mistake and realize that Kabir loves her, and that she truly loves him back?  Eventually!  The difference is that usually the person making the noble self sacrifice is doing it by choice, without telling the person for whom they're sacrificing themself.  Pooja asks Kabir to humiliate himself because she is too embarrassed to tell the truth, which makes her look terrible.

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with a woman choosing one man over another, and Kabir would be the first to tell you that his feelings, however powerful, do not oblige her to do anything.  He never even tells her how he feels, and she doesn't find out until her mother explains things.  That's fine, and if she had sent Kabir on his way or even asked him to publicly break off the engagement, there would be no problem.  But that's not what she does.  She asks a man she's known for four days to burn down his own reputation in order to make her look good in front of a man she's just met, in order to clean up the mess that she made.  It's really hard to sympathize with her plight.

Apart from that, Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya is fine.  There are plenty of songs.  The supporting cast is great.  the leads are suitably attractive; it's far from Bachchan's best performance, but he's suitably charming, and Reddy does her very best to bring some pathos to the character she's been asked to play.  Two people find love and everybody learns a valuable lesson, but I think the real lesson is "If your unrequited love with asks you to do something you're not comfortable with, it's okay to say no."

I can't believe it's not Dracula.

 Officially, there's no connection between The Return of the Vampire (1943) and Universal's Dracula.  Yes, both movies feature Bela Lugosi prowling about in evening dress as a sinister vampire with mesmeric powers, only to be defeated by the combined forces of science and faith, but in Return Lugosi is playing the vampire lord Armand Tesla (original character, do not steal) so that's totally different.  Unofficially?  This is as close as we get to Lugosi reprising the iconic character that he defined in a serious horror movie, and the last major studio picture to give him top billing.

The film opens in 1918 at a clinic run by Lady Jane Ainsley (Frieda Inescort.)  One of her patients has contracted a mysterious aliment, and her old friend Professor Saunders (Gilbert Emery) has a shocking theory - the poor woman is the victim of a vampire!  Saunders consults a book written by an 18th century Romanian scholar named Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi), and learns how to identify vampires how to destroy them, and apparently that the vampire in question is Tesla himself!  (It's really not clear how Saunders makes the connection.)

Lady Jane's patient dies, and that night Tesla instead attacks Saunders's young granddaughter Nicki (Sherlee Collier).  She's saved thanks to a quick blood transfusion, but Saunders and Ainsley have to move quickly.  They discover Tesla's lair, avoid his werewolf servant Andreas (Matt Willis) and destroy Tesla by driving a metal spike through his heart, as instructed by the guidebook written by Tesla himself.  Nicki is saved, and Andreas the werewolf is freed from his curse.  Hooray!

Years pass.  In 1942, Lady Jane is still running her successful clinic, ably assisted by Andreas, who has made a full recovery from his lycanthropy.  Nicki (now played by Nina Foch) is engaged to Lady Jane's son John (Roland Varno.)  Saunders has recently died in a plane crash, and his journal detailing the earlier vampire adventure has fallen into the hands of police detective Sir Frederick Fleet (Miles Mander), and that's where the trouble starts.  Fleet doesn't believe a word of this vampire nonsense, but the journal clearly states that Saunders and Lady Jane drove a metal spike through a man's heart, and you can't go around doing things like that even if you do belong to the aristocracy.  Fleet demands that Lady Jane show him the body, and she's happy to do so, because she's expecting the body to be intact and not decomposed, thus proving this vampire nonsense.

However, the war spoils both their plans.  The cemetery was hit by a nighttime German bombing raid, scattering corpses.  A pair of comic relief relief Air Wardens discovered Tesla's body and removed the spike so that they could bury the body again.  DraculaTesla has risen from the grave!

Meanwhile, Lady Jane has dispatched Andreas to collect respected scientist Doctor Hugo Bruckner, who recently escaped from a concentration camp.  Along the way, Andreas is confronted by Tesla.  There's a brief battle of wills, but the outcome is never in doubt; Tesla regains control over Andreas, rewerewolfs him, and dispatches him to dispose of Bruckner and bring the poor man's clothing and ID.  

At the reception that evening, Tesla takes the place of Bruckner.  Lady Jane, who has never met Bruckner and apparently hasn't seen any pictures either, cheerfully extends an open invitation for "Bruckner" to visit the clinic and her home whenever he likes.  Nicki, meanwhile, is fascinated by the stranger, who claims to have known her grandfather for a brief time, when she was a little girl.  And that evening Nicki hears a voice calling to her as the room fills with mist . . .

It sounds like paint-by-numbers vampire stuff, and it is.  The movie is trying very hard to copy the Universal horror style on a much smaller budget, and it does a good job, but the real draw here is obviously Lugosi.  And I will admit that I'm grading on a curve here; the film gave Lugosi a meaty role to sink his teeth into at a time when Universal was going out of their way not to cast him as Dracula.

Still, there are aspects of the film that I find genuinely interesting.  Tesla isn't quite Dracula; both vampires disguise their predatory nature (literally, in Tesla's case), but Tesla doesn't have Dracula's feral charm, so he supplements his mesmerism with more human manipulation.  One of his first moves is to deliver Saunders's journal to Nicki, hoping to convince the girl that she's already tainted and that he's the only one who can accept her as she is.  He's similarly manipulative with Andreas, always trying to isolate his victims and make them think that they deserve what they're getting.  Tesla lies, consistently, to everybody.

And he's countered by Lady Jane, who is absolutely the hero here.  War hero John is an obvious choice for protagonist, but he's sidelined pretty early by an apparent attack from Nicki (at least, that's what Tesla wants everyone to think, but Tesla lies) and instead it's Lady Jane who steps up.  She isn't even at the final confrontation, delayed by another German bombing raid, but she still manages to save the day with her words, and the sense of worth and belonging she's tried to instill in the people around her.  

She does get to confront Tesla earlier, though, in what is arguably the film's best scene.  Tesla boasts of his power.  He claims that Saunders died due to the vampire's curse (though Tesla lies), and threatens to enthrall both Nicki and John, transforming the youngsters into vampires as his final revenge against the woman who once dared thwart him.  Lady Jane plays the organ as he rants, and then moves the sheet music to show that she's been in control all along.  

Count Dracula looms large over the public imagination; he's one of the most recognizable characters in the world, and there have been many versions of him throughout they years, often wildly different from Lugosi's well-dressed mentalist.  But those incarnations are either drawing from or pushing against Lugosi; he's defined vampires in the same way that Margaret Hamilton has defined witches.  It's just nice to know that he had another chance to play the character onscreen without Abbott and Costello stealing top billing.