Rubber Spiders with Broken English

Now that most of my friends have real people jobs, I find myself looking for ways to fill my time. The typical person will usually remedy this by getting a pet or volunteering for something. But I hate cats and I don't plan to volunteer for anything until it's court ordered. So that means I'm dusting off the ol' DVD shelf (not literally, of course, I'm too lazy) and watching some of the reasons why I rarely had sufficient funds in my checking account.

Anyway, I watched the original Dracula a couple weeks back. I've seen it probably four or five times but I always seem to forget just how... dull it is outside of a couple things.

No one cares what I think about this, but I'm going to list off my reasoning in an effort to retard my impending illiteracy:

The Good

- Bela Lugosi: Chances are this is a pretty forgotten flick if not for our broken-English-speaking pal Bela. When anyone thinks of the Dracula character now, they think of Lugosi's Dracula: suave, thick accent, charming. They certainly aren't thinking of Bram Stoker's Dracula, who was a decrepit old man with less luck with the ladies than myself.

Lugosi wasn't much of an actor, but his own shortcomings with the English language and the subsequent halting delivery of his lines actually enhanced the Dracula character. The movie's at least interesting whenever he's on screen.

- Dwight Frye: The dude who plays Renfield, the real estate agent who makes the fateful journey to Dracula's castle at the outset of the movie. Most of the actors in the film have the personality of the chair I'm sitting on right now, but Frye's range from the polite gentleman at the start of Dracula to the slithering, deranged mideon of Dracula is remarkable. He almost gets you thinking maybe it isn't so bad to eat spiders.


The Not So Good

- Everyone Else: Like I said, I've seen this movie four or five times. Other than the aforementioned actors along with the character of Van Helsing, I couldn't properly ID anyone else in the movie if you put a gun to my head. Part of this blame probably can go to the static stage direction (read: almost no direction).

- The Direction: Tod Browning made his mark in silent film by churning out flick after flick about social outcasts. And he did a damn find job of it, too. But the guy was clearly out of his element with sound pictures. There is no soundtrack for the movie and with the sparse dialogue you would expect from a director still stuck in the silent film mindset, there are dozens of moments with nothing but static. This will occasionally work in the favor of the film, as it creates a tense atmosphere. But elsewhere, it becomes a source of hazy focus.

Innnnn Conclusion

I surely didn't set out to write hundreds of words about this, but I had to voice my surprise that this is only a key movie because of what it meant for the genre and popular culture, not because of its own isolated greatness.

I still wouldn't mind being a Count, though. Count Alex. Yes, yes. I like the sound of that very much. Maybe I'll go look into purchasing some crumbling castle.