Saaptember: Cult of the Cobra

 (For whatever reason, my computer won't read this particular DVD, so no screenshots this time.  I'll have to settle for the movie poster.)

 

The plot of Cult of the Cobra (1955) sounds very much like an Indian snake movie: six men traveling in India anger a woman who is also a snake, and she follows them home and kills them one by one.  But it's not an Indian snake movie, it's a Universal horror movie, with all of the careful research that implies.

 

In 1945, six American airmen are exploring a city bazaar in n unnamed Asian country, though the set dressing, costumes and the matte painting behind them all strongly imply India.  The important ones are Tom (Marshall Thompson) and Paul (Richard Long), who are roommates back in America and are both in love with Julia (Kathleen Hughes), and Nick (James Dobson), who is an avid photographer and not very smart.  They meet a snake charmer (Leonard Strong) who poses for a picture with his cobra, and Paul takes the opportunity to expound on the mysterious Lamian cult, snake worshipers who are supposed to live in the area.  The snake charmer reveals that he is in fact a member of the mysterious Lamian cult, and he will sneak them into a sacred ceremony for a hundred dollars.  Everyone agrees, mostly because Paul keeps going on about it.

And it turns out the snake charmer was telling the truth! Fortunately the members of this particular snake cult all wear hooded cloaks, so it's easy to sneak in.  The snake charmer warns them, repeatedly, that they should not under any circumstances try to take pictures.  Cue the dance number (50s B-movie style, not Bollywood style) and Nick starts taking pictures, with a flashbulb.  There's a fight, the temple is set on fire, Nick tries to steal a basket containing a dancer, and the cult's high priest (Edward Platt) curses the intruders.

The airmen make their escape in a jeep, but Nick is missing.  They quickly locate him collapsed in an alley, suffering from snakebite.  They take him to the hospital and it looks like he's going to make a full recovery, but the nurse leaves a window open, and the snake returns and bites him again.  He's dead by morning.  

The rest of the men return to the US.  Julia and Paul become engaged, ending the love triangle pretty decisively.  Tom is devastated, but he gets over it pretty quickly when he meets the mysterious new neighbor Lisa (Faith Domergue).  He offers to show Lisa around New York, and things go . . . okay.  Lisa seems to like him, but she's determined to keep her distance.

And then the airmen start dying one by one, and it's Lisa.  Lisa is the snake woman.  The movie makes no effort to conceal the killer's identity form the audience (and it's just as well, because the movie poster shows Lisa turning into a snake) but the characters haven't figured it out yet, so Tom continues his pursuit of Lisa.  Honestly, he's coming on a bit strong, picking a  fight with an old friend who dared to dance with her at a party and breaking into her apartment.  And against all odds, she starts to fall for him as well.

Paul, on the other hand, is suspicious.  He's noticed that his friends have started dying shortly after being cursed, and while the police aren't willing to accept his "curse" story, they do run blood tests on the dead men and discover that they were all killed by cobra venom.  Lisa realizes that Paul is suspicious and decides to kill Julia for some reason, perhaps because she walked in on Julia reading one of Paul's many books on snake cults.  (Why does Paul have so many books on snake cults?)

In the end only Paul and Tom are left, and the police are starting to close in.  Lisa and Tom attend Julia's new play, giving her one last chance to try and kill Julia before meeting a rather undignified end; turning into a snake is great for stealthy kills, but there are some severe disadvantages when humans know you're there.

Cult of the Cobra does bear some slight resemblance to Indian folklore, but I think it's a coincidence rather than the product of actual research; even the snake cult always refers to Lisa as a lamia, which is the wrong mythology from the wrong continent.  That's just the tip of the iceberg, though; the obvious problem is that "Asia" is a sound stage filled with mostly white actors dressed as people from India; Rama Bai is the only Asian name in the cast list, and she played "Woman in Asian Market Square."  They did have Indian actors in 1955 - Bollywood was thriving at the time, and the highly regarded Shree 420 came out the same year.

However, location shooting and international actors cost money, and this was not a big budget movie.  It was originally released as part of a double bill with Revenge of the Creature, the first sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The low budget is Cult of the Cobra's secret weapon, because atmosphere is free.  The movie draws heavily from Val Lewton's work, and especially Cat People, relying on shadows and intimation rather than flashy special effects.  Lisa takes long walks through the darkened city streets, animals are terrified of her, the lighting shifts across her face as she's torn between her mission and her growing feelings for Tom.  To be clear, this is not as good as Cat People, but emulating Cat People is a great choice given the budget.

The budget means that the movie has one real advantage over India's later snake movies.  There are a few shots of actual cobras, but most of the time when Lisa is in snake form she appears in silhouette or is represented by an unconvincing rubber snake on a string.  Indian snake movies tend to use real cobras and a lot of them die.  I'm happier with the snake on a string.

A circus with bite.

 Vampire Circus (1972) is a movie that delivers on its promises: there is a circus, and there are multiple vampires.  However, if the title makes you think that this will be a lighthearted campy romp, think again; these vampires are specifically targeting children, and this movie gets dark.

Children have been vanishing from the village of Stetl, and village schoolmaster Albert Muller (Laurence Payne) is horrified to discover why.  His own wife Anna (Domini Blythe) has been luring the children through the woods and into the nearby castle, where Count Mitterhouse (Robert Tayman) feeds on them.  There's no real explanation given for why Anna is doing this; she just seems to be really into Count Mitterhouse, so much so that she spends most of her screentime naked.

Muller is a poor teacher from a poor village, so he has limited options, but you don't have to be rich and powerful to lead an angry mob, so Muller leads an angry mob to the castle.  There's a fight, many men die, but in the end Muller manages to stake the vampire, though not before he has a chance to curse the villagers, swearing that their children will die to bring him back from the grave.  The other villagers want to punish Anna for being an enthusiastic accessory to child murder, but Muller asks them to let her go.  This is a mistake; she runs back into the castle, where the Count revives just long enough to send her to his cousin Emil (Anthony Higgins) at the Circus of Night.

Fifteen years later, Stetl is in the grips of a mysterious plague.  People are dying in droves, and the neighboring communities have placed armed men at roadblocks surrounding the village, threatening to shoot anyone who tries to pass.  The influential men of the village gather to debate the cause of the plague and what can be done about it.  Some think it's the work of Count Mitterhouse and his curse, while others, particularly recently arrived Doctor Kersh (Richard Owens) believe it's a disease, and what the town needs is medicine.  And surprisingly, given that this is a vampire movie, we eventually learn that Kersh is right.  It's just a disease which responds to conventional treatment.  Of course, at that point in the movie, Stetl has other things to worry about.

Kersh breaks through the barricade with the help of his teenage son Anton (John Moulder-Brown.)  Anton asks his father to find Muller's daughter Dora (Lynne Fredrick) in the capital and urge her to stay where she is and not try to return to Stetl, because Anton is the only person in the movie with any sense.

Meanwhile the village has visitors!  The Night Circus has arrived, lead by a mysterious and apparently Romani woman (Adrienne Coeri.)  The villagers call her by a different name, but I am just going to call her Anna, because she is in fact Anna.  (It's possible that no one recognizes her with clothes on, but perhaps the fact that she's played by a different actress now has more to do with it.)  It's a small circus, but it hits most of the bases, with animals, a clown (Skip Martin), a strongman (David Prowse), and twin acrobats Helga (Lalla Ward) and Heinrich (Robin Sachs).  They are creepy as hell, but it's not like the quarantined villagers have anything better to do, so every night the show is packed.

And then things start to happen.  Dora shows up in the village, much to Anton's dismay; he loves her, but he would really rather she was somewhere less doomed.  The mayor's daughter Rosa (Christina Paul) is captivated by the show's black panther, particularly when the panther turns into Emil.  The mayor himself (Thorley Walters) collapses after a terrifying vision in the hall of mirrors.  And children start to vanish, because this is in fact a vampire circus.

We are not dealing with the cream of the vampire crop here - Mitterhouse may be a Count with his own castle, but he's also a doofus with bad hair who hangs out in his basement waiting for his girlfriend to bring him children.  Emil has the cool "turn into a panther" power, but he spends half the time lounging in his cage and the other half looking like he's late for Godspell rehearsals.  And Helga and Heinrich . . . well, they're pretty great actually, but they are evil henchmen and spend their time henching evilly.

On the other hand, the villagers are just villagers, without a Dutch vampire hunting scholar or cowboy to be seen.  Anton is brave and sensible and the closest thing the movie has to a hero, but he's just a kid and there's only so much he can do. In the end it's vampires versus villagers, and while most of the village is wiped out by the end of the movie, all of the vampires are destroyed.  Angry mob wins on a technicality.

Bela Lugosi's Dad.

1943's Return of the Vampire was a spiritual sequel to Tod Browning's Dracula, bringing Bela Lugosi back to play a legally distinct version of the vampire who made him famous.  Dracula's Daughter (1936), on the other hand, is the direct sequel to Browning's film, and begins just as the previous film ended, with two comic policemen discovering Renfield's body sprawled across a street in Whitby.  Soon after they find Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) and the body of Dracula (a wax dummy), and Von Helsing is arrested, which means that both films revolve around characters being investigated for the murder of Bela Lugosi.

(And that's not a typo - it is Von Helsing in this movie, rather than Van Helsing.  Apparently the good professor changed his name between movies.)

Von Helsing proudly admits to driving a stake through Dracula's heart, but explains that it can't be murder when Dracula has been dead for centuries.  The police are skeptical, but Von Helsing refuses an attorney, instead asking for Jeffrey Garth (Otto Kruger), a psychologist and former student, as he believes that Garth is the only man in London who could possibly understand what happened.  There's no mention of contacting any of the surviving characters from the previous movie, though Von Helsing should know by now that ignoring Mina is always a mistake.

As it happens, Garth is not in London.  He's on a hunting trip to Scotland complaining bitterly about the women in his life when he's interrupted by his secretary Janet Blake (Marguerite Churchill), who's come up from London to fetch him.  Garth and Janet bicker on the way home.  They're clearly supposed to have a light-hearted and flirtatious relationship straight out of a screwball comedy, but it doesn't really land; Garth comes across as a sexist jerk, while Janet plays silly and sometimes mean-spirited pranks on him.

Meanwhile, Von Helsing's Dracula problem solves itself, as the Count's body vanishes form police custody.  No, Dracula has not risen from the grave; the body was taken by Dracula's daughter, the Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) and her manservant Sandor (Irving Pichel.)  Marya hopes that destroying the Count's body will free her from the curse of vampirism and burns the body on a pyre, but Sandor is pessimistic, telling her that all he sees in her eyes is death.

Marya begins the next night still hopeful, proclaiming that "I can live a normal life now, think normal things.  Even play normal music." But Sandor is correct, as a heartbroken Marya realizes when the lullaby she's playing on the piano turns dark and spooky.  She resumes the hunt.

All murder and no play makes Marya a dull girl, though, so she also mingles with high society, and at a party she runs into Garth, who is expounding on psychological treatments for addiction and obsessive thoughts.  She's fascinated and even hopeful, and makes an arrangement to meet Garth the next night, while Janet and Sandor glower in the background.  

That night Marya tells a piece of her story, talking about dark thoughts and influences brought on by a dead man, and Garth suggests that she try confronting her cravings rather than hiding from them.  Marya takes his advice, and goes to her studio to paint.  Sandor collects a young woman named Lili (Nan Grey) on the street, dragging her to the studio to serve as a model, and Lili relaxes when she sees the Countess, despite the multitude of red flags raised by the situation.  Marya tries, she really does, but in the end she cannot resist and attacks Lili.

The young woman survives and is brought to the hospital where Garth works, suffering from anemia and amnesia.  Garth tries to treat her with hypnotism, but Lili dies after revealing just enough information that Garth realizes it was Marya who attacked her.  After Von Helsing explains things in very small words, Garth realizes that Marya is a vampire.  Marya, in turn, decides that there is no cure for her condition, and plans to go back to Transylvania with Garth; when he refuses she and Sandor kidnap Janet and take her to the old country, thus forcing Garth to follow.

Dracula's daughter is probably best known today for lesbian subtext, and there is definitely subtext.  Marya talks about Garth as her potential consort and companion through eternity, but she does not look at Garth like she looks at Lili and especially Janet; there's a long lingering shot of Marya slowly leaning in to a mesmerized Janet, a long prelude to a kiss that never happens thanks to Garth's sudden arrival.  And the movie is about a woman struggling to overcome or at least conceal her true nature so that she can live like everybody else, though that particular metaphor shatters when you remember that her true nature is "undead monster who must kill to live."  It's tangled and complex, making this a movie that people can and do write papers about.

Marya is also an early cinematic example of the angsty and reluctant vampire, more Louis than Lestat.  It's certainly a compelling performance; Holden's magnetic eyes draw the viewer in, inviting the viewer to sympathize with the monster.  

That said I still have questions about the "daughter" part.  According to Von Helsing, Marya's barely over a century old, while Dracula is well over five hundred.  is she supposed to be his biological daughter, or daughter in the sense of "vampiric offspring?"  Or both?  Either way, she certainly isn't shy about moving into Castle Dracula.

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.

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.