Dracula Week Day 5: Dracula: Dead and Loving It

Always leave 'em laughing

Mel Brooks started his directing career with a brilliant movie called The Producers. He followed this up with a string of spectacularly good genre parodies: Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, the very underrated Silent Movie and High Anxiety (between The Producers and the parodies he did a movie called The Twelve Chairs which falls into that genre technically known as “movies I have not seen”).

Then Mel Brooks entered the Eighties, and decided to stop making good movies. He made bad movies instead: History of the World Part I and Spaceballs. Yes, Spaceballs is a bad movie. Many people have great affection for this film, which is baffling. Go watch it again, guys. It’s not as funny as you thought when you were ten.

In the 90s, Mel Brooks made a rubbish movie called Life Stinks, and then a sort-of-OK movie called Robin Hood: Men In Tights. The latter has a lot of real cringe, roll-your-eyes bits, but also bits that made me and my friends laugh like hyenas in high school, and frankly still do today. It’s nowhere near a return to the form he hit in the 70s, but he was inching a little closer.

The thing is, you get the feeling that when Mel Brooks parodies something, he does much better if the thing he’s parodying is something that he appreciates, understands, and even loves. Mel Brooks, you feel, is a fan of westerns, of silent films, of Universal horror movies. He is not, you feel, a fan of Star Wars, which is why Spaceballs comes off like an old man making jokes about Taylor Swift’s outfits.

I think Mel Brooks is a big fan of Dracula movies, especially the 1931 Bela Lugosi one. That’s why Dracula: Dead and Loving It is, while still not as good as the 70s hits, much better than the intervening films in his catalogue. It’s a shame it was the last film he directed: he may have been on the verge of a renaissance.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It mostly spoofs that Lugosi version of the story: the character relations are the same, with Dr Seward being Mina’s father, Renfield visiting Castle Dracula at the start etc. It also mixes in some general parodies of Dracula tropes, and a little bit of Coppola: mostly incorporating Gary Oldman’s dumb wig from that execrable flick (see yesterday’s entry).

It is not a parody on the lines of Young Frankenstein: Brooks has not gone to any lengths to lovingly replicate the style here. It’s a bit of a shame, but then again if he had, it would’ve looked a lot like Young Frankenstein, so maybe he didn’t want to repeate himself that way. Or maybe he was just twenty years older and couldn’t be arsed.

The great thing about this movie is, simply, that it’s just very very silly. In that beautifully Brooks way. It has less cringey, try-hard moments than his Robin Hood, and possesses the courage and confidence to be wildly stupid in the name of getting a laugh.

Brooks himself is not a great actor, but given a certain kind of role he can be utterly brilliant. Thus he is here, as van Helsing, introduced deliberately trying to make his medical students pass out with a revolting autopsy. He gets to do a silly accent and go way over the top at every opportunity, which suits him fine. It’s like an elongated version of his mad scientist in The Muppet Movie, which is still probably Brooks’s best performance.

The whole cast joins in, which is key. Old Brooks ally Harvey Korman as Dr Seward is reliably wonderful, playing lines like “Yes, we have Nosferatu! We have Nosferatu today!” with the kind of conviction only a true old-school vaudevillian can muster. Amy Yasbeck as Mina plays basically the same role she did as Maid Marian in Robin Hood: Men in Tights: ridiculously over-the-top posh accent (actually quite reminiscent of Carol Marsh in 1958’s Dracula, actually) and chewing up scenery with relish. As does Lysette Anthony, pushing forward her cleavage and living it up as vampire sexbomb Lucy.

Peter MacNicol plays Renfield, and there’s never been a more perfect Renfield. Though he plays Renfield for laughs here, he could easily step into the role in a serious adaptation: if Tod Browning had had access to MacNicol in 1931 he would’ve been hard-pressed to choose between him and Dwight Frye. Indeed., MacNicol had really already played Renfield: in Ghostbusters II he plays a weaselly little man who falls under the spell of a demonic Eastern European - that IS Renfield. MacNicol is naturally weaselly, with that lovely squeaky ferret voice, and can do put-upon and sucking-up beautifully. The fact that he also gets to be gleefully stupid is a bonus.

Then there’s Steven Weber, who’s a much better actor than the fact he was in Wings might lead you to believe. He’s the stiff-upper-lip, wilfully repressed Jonathan Harker: a complete idiot but terribly British. He’s wonderful when acting shocked at Lucy’s advances (“But Lucy…I’m British” “So are these!”), or when saturated in the absurdly massive gouts of blood spewing forth from the staked vampire’s body.

Strangely enough, perhaps the least impressive cast member is Dracula himself. Leslie Nielsen was a comic genius, but this role doesn’t necessarily play to his strengths. He gets to do a funny accent, but doesn’t get to do the comic self-seriousness of Frank Drebin or Dr Rumack. He’s fine in the part: he just doesn’t have the opportunity to have as much fun with it as the rest of the cast.

A small mention for Brooks’s wife Anne Bancroft in a tiny role as a gypsy who gives a sinister warning to Renfield before he goes to the castle. She is hilarious.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It is not, you may guess, a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel (just one example: in the novel, when Dracula turns into a bat, he does not retain a tiny human head). However, it’s probably as faithful as most other movies. Certainly, the character of Dracula is closer to Stoker’s than Francis Ford Coppola’s version…but we’ve been over that. What it is, is very funny. It’s only occasionally too dumb to make you laugh - mostly it’s just dumb enough. The great attraction of it, basically, is to see a bunch of actors given free rein to over-act outrageously, and having the absolute time of their lives doing it. There’s a great joy in that.

A little bit of Monty Python, a touch of American-styled Carry On, and a movie that brings back at least some of the spirit of Brooks at his best. Recommended.