Blacula

Blacula (1972)

[Yeah]
Extremely Trashy

The story of a man (William Marhsall) who is turned into a vampire by Dracula in the 1700s and sealed inside a coffin in the bowels of the castle. Cut to the modern day. A couple of antiques dealers buy a bunch of junk from Dracula's castles, including the coffin containing our hero. When they open it up, they unwittingly loose Blacula on Los Angeles.

Then he, like, finds the reincarnation of his murdered wife (Vonetta McGee), which is pretty sweet, but is pursued by a sort of modern day Van Helsing (Thalmus Rasulala - by far the coolest name ever but unfortunately not the actor's birth name).

This movie was a fairly standard update of the vampire legend. The guy hangs out in all the grooviest clubs but everyone thinks he's weird. Probably because he insists on wearing a cape, and talks really slowly. He actually had a really nice voice though, my God. It was really deep.

Anyway, a lot of the stuff in this movie was totally ridiculous, as is to be expected from a cheezy 'modernaized' vampire flick. There are also some pretty funny lines such as 'I will curse you with my name - you shall be... Blacula!'. Although the fact that it's even called Blacula is enough to suggest how ridiculous everything is.

It was also disgustingly '70s. I'm sorry, I always thought the '80s were the low point in human culture but I'm starting to think that the whole decade was just a recovery period from the '70s. The clothes, the hairstyles, the music... all was totally groovy, man. Egh.

This movie is sort of interesting mainly as my introduction to blaxploitation movies (it's a pretty good place to start I guess). Also, outside of the Scary Movie saga which doesn't really count, gay characters aren't depicted that often in mainstream horror flicks (not the ones I watch anyway) so it was sort of unusual but cool to have a gay couple in this movie.

Moving on, I kind of liked William Marshall and Thalmus Rasulala so this movie was at least watchable despite the awful music and poor sound quality.

END

Directed by: William Crain. Written by: Raymond Koenig and Joan Torres. Starring: William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, Thalmus Rasulala, Denise Nicholas, Gordon Pinsent, Charles Macaulay.