Vampires, Hitchcock, Nazis and witches: movies and TV

BLACULA (1972) doesn’t have the best vampire makeup (though it must have been the first, or one of the first films to show vampires changing their face before they kill) but I still enjoy the story of how Mumuwalde (William Marshall) makes the mistake of trying to enlist Count Dracula’s support in his 1700s anti-slavery campaign, for which the arrogant count bites Mumuwalde, then leaves him chained in a coffin for 200 years. When a couple of swishy gay antique dealers (and there’s a lot of “faggot” tossed around too) buy up Dracula’s furnishings and transport them to Los Angeles, Mumuwalde (the “Blacula” name is only used once in the film) awakens, discovers Vonetta McGee is the lookalike of his long lost wife — now if he can only stop pathologist Thalmus Rasulala and McGee’s sister Denise Nicholas from realizing what he is and stopping his seduction. This is annoyingly inconsistent on the vampire rules (they rise instantly or after dying depending on what the plot calls for) but the leads are strong enough to make it work. Elisha Cook plays an ill-fated morgue attendant. “Look around this room — memorize every corner — for it will be your inglorious tomb!”

Alfred Hitchcock’s THE LADY VANISHES (1938) starts off as a quirky rom-com, with soon-to-be-married Margaret Lockwood stranded at a small European inn where she makes the acquaintance of Michael Redgrave — the most obnoxious, irritating man she’s ever met! — as well as cricket obsessed Brits Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, adulterer Cecil Parker, brilliant surgeon Paul Lukas and May Whitty as an elderly British governess. After Lockwood, Whitty and the others board the train taking them home, Whitty vanishes — but everyone in the carriage with her and Lockwood insists there never was an old woman there. A set-up that’s been reused countless times, this is an excellent mix of romance, comedy and suspense. “It has always been my contention that Hungarian Rhapsody is not their national anthem!”

When kindly Cornish squire Charles Laughton helps innocent virgin Maureen O’Hara reach her relatives at JAMAICA INN (1939), O’Hara is blithely unaware that not only is the inn the center of the local wreckers, Laughton is the secret master; before long, however, she’s working with undercover man Robert Newton (who would later play Long John Silver in Treasure Island, one of the classic pirate performances of all time) to save his life and take down the gang. This was the first of Hitchcock’s three Daphne DuMaurier adaptations, and tanked miserably, as it wasn’t at all what was now defined as a “Hitchcock film.” That said, I did enjoy watching, though it’s definitely not A-list — for Laughton to capture O’Hara at one point she basically has to walk up to him and let him tie her up. This wraps up the Hitchcock DVD set I’ve been watching, but it won’t be hard Netflixing the rest of his films. “Nature has been against you from the start — and everything else has been against you since.”

Taika Waititi’s  JOJO RABBIT (2019) is a bizarre black comedy in which a ten-year-old Hitler Youth discovers Mom Scarlett Johansson has a Jewish girl living in their attic, plunging him into an agony of uncertainty about how to deal with this demonic creature (“They have batwings and climb down chimneys to eat German children.”) — and what if his imaginary BFF Adolf Hitler finds out about it? With Sam Rockwell as a gay Nazi and Rebel Wilson as a proud Aryan Woman (“I have born 18 German babies!”) this definitely isn’t for everyone but it worked for me; I’d probably suggest John Boorman’s Hope and Glory as a double bill for another (but less off-the-wall kids’ eye view of the war. “I don’t want you to kill yourself over me, which a couple of girls have done in the past.”

The TV series MOTHERLAND: FORT SALEM is set in an alternate history where witches ended the colonial-era witch hunts by offering to put their magic in the service of the military. In the present day we follow three teenage witches in basic training — general’s daughter Abigail (Ashley Nicole Williams), idealistic volunteer Tally (Jessica Sutton) and rebellious draftee Raelle (Taylor Hickson). Complicating their struggle to make the grade is the Spree, a terrorist movement dedicated to ending the militaristic use of magic, and whose undercover agent Scylla (Amalia Holm) becomes Raelle’s lover.

I really liked this. It’s an overwhelmingly female cast, sex-positive and just plain good. I’d like a little more on the backstory (we know that the U.S. map is different, and that WW I was fought in 1908-11, but not much more) but the front story holds me fine. And I really like that “the work” (AKA magic) is performed by singing — it makes for a nice change from the usual “magic as psi-power” approach TV takes. I look forward to S2 with pleasure. “Once I forced her to eat part of a dead pigeon.”

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