Dracula - Black Wings Over Translyvania 7" (2014)

I don't think it's any big secret that Australians Dracula are a group openly paying tribute to the earlier works of King Diamond and Mercyful Fate, so let's get kick the elephant out of the room right up front: Dracula sounds a lot like King Diamond and Mercyful Fate. Foremost, the vocalist uses the same falsetto style as the man himself, although you might pick up on marginal differences due to the Count's underlying accent and natural timbre. There's also the intentional implementation of dingy, throwback production values that strap the two tracks here into an 80s time machine, for better or worse. They're not just about aping the actual musical style, but relying heavily on their audience to share in the nostalgia. Do you remember the first time you heard Fatal Portrait? Melissa? Don't Break the Oath? Where you were? What you were doing? Who you were with? What shoddy cassette deck or record player you were using? I'm not at all trying to exclude younger fans who first encountered the Danish gods on CD or in digital format, but Black Wings Over Transylvania is certainly a 7" which seeks to dredge up the flaws, imperfections and by extension the personality of those old recordings and the environment in which they were initially experienced.

Tinny, dramatic rhythm guitar hooks draw a mix of comparisons to Denner, Shermann and LaRocque, at times swerving a little more closely to the playing of one or the other sides of the KD legacy but ultimately finding a happy medium, with both the meanness of Fate and the gloss and glamer of the solo band. Fed from the same trick or treat basket of NWOBHM, speed and proto power metal as their influences. Leads are even airier, tinny and piercing, and they use a lot of briefer flights of melody to glitz up the verses in the title track. Bass lines here are a bit primitive and tend largely towards just pumping along with a few notes misplaced from the rhythm patterns, par for the course of their times, but not terribly significant. The drums are solid in the first track but felt a bit more cluttered in "The Baroness", largely because that has a looser structure through part of its run where the guitars are drawing atmosphere unto themselves. Count Hawlok's falsetto doesn't deviate much, it's tonally appropriate to the brightness of the guitars below it, but he doesn't intersperse a lot of lower-range, grimy character here like Diamond does on some of his classic recordings, nor does he shriek out much by the way of the memorable lines that built a 35+ year career for their forebear.

As drifting back ground music, Black Wings Over Transylvania is a passable paean to the masters which doesn't really suffer from any delusions of purpose, but where so many such loving Xeroxes of classic records fail is that they don't write music that can really stand on its own beyond just that niche crowd which is looking to catch up with its childhood through a source other than the one that was....you guessed it, actually there during that childhood. Kingdom Come might have borrowed the aesthetics of Led Zeppelin to an unhealthy extent, but at least for a few years there they were writing absolutely fantastic songs in that style. Primal Fear has more Priest in its DNA than some might wish to admit, but they put such power into it that it occasionally felt like you were hearing the original at a new, contemporary level. Put quite bluntly, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to listen to these two songs when you've got a copy of anything Kim Peter Bendix released in the 80s on hand, because even the least impressive songs of that hot streak eviscerate anything in these two. That's not to say that I think Dracula are bad, or that the material has any major issue beyond its obvious derivative nature, but when you've already got groups like In Solitude, Portrait, Attic and Trial which managed to start with such a strong KD/Fate influence and then spin off into fresher strains, a project like this faces a steep uphill battle, one it hasn't yet even begun to scale.

Verdict: Indifference [6/10]

Dracula (1931)

It's all about the stare. The stare that has persevered eight decades, terrifying or enchanting many generations of new fans to the Universal pictures classic Dracula. Bela Lugosi, who was very nearly NOT cast in the role (imagine that), brought his stage vampire persona to the big screen adaptation of Stoker's masterpiece and the rest is cinema history. How many times has his heavily accented Romanian inflection met reprisal through celebration or caricature? How many pale, ghoulish gentlemen do you witness at your average Halloween get together sporting capes, fake fangs and blood dribbled on their chins like a bite of an errant bite of raspberry pastry? They owe it all to this particular film, whether they're die hard advocates of the Bram Stoker text or True Blood aficionados trying to be all cute.

Yes, Lugosi's brightly lit, mind controlling glare might be the single most pertinent image that stands to memory here, but Dracula is loaded with beautiful set pieces, elegant design and a traditional 'haunted castle' aesthetic that, while cheesy in retrospect, was quite impressive for its day. A giant cobweb serves to set up a metaphor from the Count about the relationship of prey and predator, it's architect then scuttling up the far wall. Floppy, fake bats are near constants in the film, usually the Count himself on a house call. Wolves howl off in the distance, setting up one of the greatest lines in all film: 'Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make.' Both the Transilvanian and Carfax Abbey, London locales are efficaciously Gothic, ripe with a foreboding grandeur that feels timeless despite being filmed a grandparent's lifespan ago. And let us not forget the omnipresent fog. I'm a huge fan of black/white films for their lighting. Hell, I might live in a black and white world if given the opportunity, so naturally I revel in this.

If Dracula feels like a stage production with a set no Broadway venue could hold, that's really what it was. Film had only recently begun to evolve out of the silent features of the 20s, and thus a good portion of this functions on imagery alone. In particular I really enjoyed the sweeping, ominous motions of Dracula's wives, the iconic still shot of the castle, or the scene of Dracula and Mina confronting Renfield on the old stone stair while he pleads for his life. This movie is over eighty years old, so a lot of its horrors were 'implied'. For example, we don't actually see the vampire's bites, he'll usually just lean over a victim and then it cuts to the next scene. We hear screams off in the backdrop, and have to guess what might be happening.

A classic, to be sure, but I do have some quips with the film, even allowing for its age. For one, the final death scene of Dracula is not played dramatically, but anticlimactically: the practical staking at the hands of Edward Van Sloan's Van Helsing. This might honestly seem a 'realistic' approach, but considering how much time was just spent building up this powerful, mythic figure, a closing 'glare' or a few spit lines of dialogue might have seemed more consistent approach. Also, some of the sea footage was borrowed from a previous reel (The Storm Breaker, 1925) and I might have lived without the clip of Tchaichovsky's "Swan Lake" over the opening credits. These are minor details, granted, and the studios of cinema antiquity had to make budget decisions like this, could not likely afford a full original score, etc, but it still seems the equivalent of finding a hair in your soup, that anything was derived from an outside source.

Fortunately, you can actually watch this today with the Philip Glass score commissioned in 1998, for which he used the Kronos Quartet. Purists will probably avoid this like the plague, and yet I can't help but feel Glass did a stellar job here and it should not be ignored. At the very least, it helps distract the modern audience away from some of the old tape hiss in the audio which might turn off those used to the advancements in the medium. But either way, Dracula deserves every iota of praise it receives, for it is unquestionably one of the most influential works of Hollywood in the 20th century. Is it better than its blood sucking predecessor, Nosferatu? That I cannot say, because F.W. Murnau's silent epic is far more resonant and horrifying to me personally. As much as I enjoy Lugosi's shit-eating grin and Carpathian charm, he is no Max Schreck (but then, no one is). In the end, though Dracula is undeniable a work of wonder, its magic forever engraved upon the consciousness of pop culture within its horror genre and beyond.

Verdict: Epic Win [9.25/10]

Dracula (1992)

Of course best known for the Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's try at Bram Stoker's classic remains one of his noteworthy endeavors. Though it had some fairly questionable casting decisions, Dracula stuck fairly close to the novel despite what you might think with Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves starring. Luckily they are buoyed by the chameleonic Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, and some very high quality art design and set direction among other good performances.

First of all, the problems. Keanu Reeves' performance. It seems as if he sat down a night before the first scene and pounded out a rudimentary British accent and, contented, slept. Needless to say it's clumsy and ridiculous, and he does not do much else to bring Jonathan Harker to life. Winona Ryder's is not much better, but she is still much more believable as Mina Harker. The film is riddled throughout with screenwipes and transitions that seem out of place. It is as if a student learning these techniques is just finding excuses to squeeze them into his work but in a film like this they are distracting.

Aside from that, I am a huge fan of Dracula. Do not mistake it for some of the embarassing 'vampire' movies these days that can only be called this in the loosest sense of the term. Gary Oldman's Dracula is what a vampire should be, a ferocious warlord who returns from victory against the Turks in the opening scene to find his wife has committed suicide, only to forsake God and literally become pure evil. He is at turns a London gentleman, garish and yet ominous in his tophat and cane, a disturbing old Count, or a werewolf-like beast, among other forms.

Anthony Hopkins is Van Helsing, giving you exactly what you would imagine Anthony Hopkins would playing a doctor/vampire hunter. A relatively small but important part is nailed by Tom Waits, the former law clerk who loses his mind under Dracula's corruption, Renfield. Jonathan Harker (Reeves) is sent to replace him, finding himself in Transylvania, in a disturbing old castle full of malice. He is trapped by ravenous wolves and the Count, in flowing red robes with his white hair in an elaborate bouffant, without eyebrows and utterly pale.

Count Dracula leaves Harker to his luscious, evil brides and ventures to London where both the plot and the twisted sexuality of the movie picks up steam. The story is fairly complex and does not leave room for much action, but it is more than made up for in eye grabbing sets, terrific detail and not-so-carefully cultivated mood. Dracula is somewhat overwrought in certain ways, but never as a detriment. It is a glorious spectacle for the senses.

Do yourself a favor, enjoy Dracula this Halloween with some good wine in your belly whether you've already seen it or not.

Verdict: Epic Win [9.25/10] (I have crossed oceans of time to find you)