| Product: |
My Son the Vampire (DVD) |
| Date: |
02.05.08 (60 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: It's mildly amusing on a Scooby Doo level
Disadvantages: It's not nearly funny enough to sustain a whole film.
A review of just the film. This is in the public domain and inexpensive DVDs are not hard to come by.
This was a British quota quickie made in 1954. (In the olden days there was a law that a certain percentage of films screened in Britain had to be made in Britain, hence the 'quota quickies', low budget films churned out to play in double bills with much better films.) It's one of the most famous quota quickies, mainly because it stars a slumming Bela Lugosi, formerly the star of Universal's Dracula, but now in his Ed Wood, morphine addict days. As such it has a car-crash fascination for fans of classic horror.
This was originally released as 'Mother Riley Meets the Vampire'. Old Mother Riley was a music hall drag act, real name Arthur Lucan. S/he made a whole series of cheap but apparently popular comedies from the 30s to the 50s. This was his last film. Bela Lugosi was in the UK at the time touring with an ill-fated stage version of Dracula (he was a bit of a one-trick pony); rumour has it that, when the stage show bombed, he needed to make this film to earn his passage back to America.
So the Mrs Riley character runs a grocer's shop in South London somewhere (might as well be anywhere; South London is one great, faceless stretch of nothing). Meanwhile, a mad scientist known as the Vampire is kidnapping women, building robots, and trying to discover the location of a uranium mine. He has decided to use the alias 'Riley'. Can you guess what happens? (Actually no, you can't. But you almost did. Well done.)
This is a very, very peculiar film. On the one hand we have a bizarre parody of a 40s mad scientist plot, of which Lugosi had made dozens already. On the other, we have a vehicle for the Mrs Riley character. The plot crams an awful lot in, and at least manages to get everyone in the right places at the right times, but it's too busy, and there are too many incidental characters (Lugosi's entourage contains a hoodlum, a suave foreign henchman, a lesbian housekeeper, a robot and a dwarfish, giggling butler, which is at least one minor villain too many).
Although Lugosi's character apparently believes himself to be a vampire and sometimes wears his famous old Dracula cape, he never seems to drink anyone's blood (although it's hinted that he's murdered 30 women. Hilarious). Instead he's a bog standard mad scientist, which suggests that the producers only wrote in the vampire angle when they hired Lugosi. Obviously it doesn't try to be frightening at all, but although it's cluttered and over the top, it's not a bad approximation of the kind of cheap mad science films the Americans had given up on by this point. The director, John Gilling, went on to direct some classic horrors in the 60s, including Plague of Zombies, but (unsurprisingly) shows little flair here.
I'm not entirely sure what Mrs Riley's comic persona is meant to be - drag acts are usually about being very rude, somehow getting away with things as women the performers could never have said as men. There's no hint of this at all here. Instead she drinks (but not really to excess), is a bit of a battleaxe, is somewhat clumsy and isn't particularly articulate. Oh, and she has what I really hope is a false nose. She never looks like anything other than a man, and I guess she was just cruising along on well-worn mannerisms. The same is true of Lugosi, looking decrepit and unwell, but still running through the old Dracula shtick without exerting himself (the scene where Lugosi tries to come on to Mrs Riley probably represents an all-time low for the notoriously unlucky horror star). The rest of the cast are just about adequate; a youngish Hattie Jacques and Dandy Nichols are in evidence early on.
The humour itself is poor. It's full of lousy one-liners and bits of mild slapstick that don't come off. At one point Mrs Riley launches into a comic song about rent arrears, but sadly the music drowns out a lot of the lyrics. But the comedy fails in a somehow quite endearing way. Any film that has a large, ticking robot dragging around a struggling woman (actually a man) in a sack, being given a lift by a drunken aristocrat who *never notices that his passengers are at all odd* can stake a claim to being inherently loveable. There's an extended slapstick fight routine towards the end that had me giggling, although I'd have to admit that it wasn't actually very funny. It all concludes with a comic chase scene and a ludicrously abrupt ending, but that's OK - Will Hay's films all end in the same way, and everyone loves them.
It's dirt cheap, so really, don't expect much from this. It feels old-fashioned in a way that even much earlier films don't. The music is mostly cheap spooky/comedy stuff (one comic horror scene is accompanied on the soundtrack by someone blowing a swanee whistle over and over again). The American release, the easiest to get hold of, renames it 'My Son The Vampire' for no reason at all (Lugosi is the oldest person in it by some distance and never alludes to his parents). It also slaps a terrible comedy theme song at the beginning, which is bad beyond belief and actually goes on for a minute after the film starts, blotting out all other sound. Weirdly, the American opening credits don't mention Mother Riley or Bela Lugosi, so what people who went to see it were expecting is anyone's guess.
I realise hardly anyone will be interested in this, but even though it's dumb and really not funny I have a soft spot for it. If nothing else, it's proof that absolutely anything can get released on DVD.
Summary: A peculiar and not terribly successful British horror spoof.
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