Blacula, Beeeyatch

A fine night indeed. I don’t know which idea came first: fried chicken and waffles for dinner, or a viewing of Samuel Z. Arkoff’s 1972 classic Blacula. Either way, both ideas collided, meshed, and harmonized in my mind once they were in there, together, and I decided that it had to be a combination of the two. One, a tribute to Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles , an L.A. landmark and heart-attack dispenser, and a Blaxploitation take on the legend of Dracula.
I stopped at the Hollywood Video on the way home from work. I don’t go there too often anymore since I found that they edited their movies for content without noting so on the box. Examples: Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy , Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes, and Auto Focus, the biopic on Bob Crane of Hogan’s Heroes. They seem to have a problem with sex. Violence is OK, rape is fine, child abuse, etc. Saw, A Clockwork Orange and Hostel are available in their un-rated formats, but thou shalt not portray excessive sex or show multiple images of gigantic penises.
I figured that they couldn’t get their puritanistic mitts on an old 70's flick, so I felt safe going this route, for the sake of convenience. I hit the grocery store after and picked up the goods–chicken, canola oil, flour, syrup, and lemons and headed home.
It was a quick job whipping up the fixings and then the Shoe and I sat down for some artery clogging goodness with an awesome film to accompany us.
For a bad movie, Blacula is pretty damn good. It beats the hell out of any other vampire movie I’ve seen, with the possible exception of Near Dark. I tend to avoid the genre because vampires always seem to be melodramatic, badly dressed weenies who mope around a lot and try to come across as sophisticates when really all they are is a weepy pack of velvet-wearing sociopaths. This film, however, gives us a pissed off African Prince who gets ‘converted’ by the original Count Dracula in 1780 when he visits Transylvania. In chillingly perfect English the Prince attempts to recruit The Count into an anti-slavery movement. The Count isn’t down with the whole ‘no slaves’ thing, the Prince is slighted, the Count is in turn slighted as well, and he ends up biting the Prince and locking him in a coffin to fiend for blood forever. He also leaves the Prince’s wife in the tomb with the Prince to slowly starve to death.
Fast forward a couple hundred years and we get two screamingly homosexual antiques dealers/ interior decorators who are buying everything out of the castle. They end up with the coffin, unleash Blacula, and you can figure out the rest.
Blacula finds a woman that looks like his wife and attempts to woo her, and she falls for him quite easily. They meet in a club that has the best performance of a band in a feature length film EVER. The Hues Corporation rocks the house with their funky brand of soulful disco pop stylings. Watch the back-up singer on the right (your right, dumbass). He is into it, giving it his all. He steals the damn show with his facial expressions and I am now on a quest to locate him and hire him on full-time as my own personal back-up singer to everyday life. He’ll go to work with me, ride the train, cook dinner, shoplift porn... whoops. Ixnay that last one.
Blacula appears to have done a lot of studying while locked up for hundreds of years. Maybe he received handbooks from vampires in the future on the state of things because he expresses no surprise whatsoever over being in down town Los Angeles. An African Prince, locked in a coffin for 200 years in Transylvania, which may as well be as African village (but with mono-brows), shows up in downtown L.A. and doesn’t once say, "What the fuck is this shit?" when he gets hit by a cab, or sees a building, or sees a telephone booth for that matter. He is one cool cat. Blacula ain’t fazed by a damn thing.
He also seems to have inherited some werewolf genes as well as his eyebrows grow into his sideburns and he grows those hideous patchy tufts of fur that malnourished and doomed people grow on their cheeks when they are trying to grow a beard and shouldn’t or are living on the streets and can’t shave off the unsightly growths. He goes from suave to goddamned ugly in the blink of an eye.
A periphreal character whom I fell in love with was some pseudo-pimp named Skillet, played-oh so-pimpishly by Jitu Cumbuka, who appeared in the club whenever anyone opened a bottle of alcohol. His only purpose seemed to have been to be a moochy turd and to say, "Say man, that is one straaaaaange dude" in reference to Blacula. I would like to nominate him for a lifetime achievement award regardless of the fact that no one has ever heard of him. A moochy pimp named Skillet? Genius, my friends.
The film also gives our world a great line to be repeated ad nauseam by bored teenagers and 20-something hipsters. It’ll be up there with, "Don’t have a cow, man!" and "Badges? We don’t need so stinking badges." It pops up when the cops discover one of the dead interior decorators has disappeared. They aren’t hip to the fact that they are being confronted with the living dead, so they treat it as a typical Los Angeles body-snatching. The chief of police quips, "Who the hell would want a dead faggot?"
The days before the P.C. bomb dropped were amazing things, the halcyon days of bigotry and intolerance. But fuck, even if it offends you, you have to admit that that line is the kind of gold actors yearn for.
One thing that piqued my curiosity was that all of the police officers wore helmets. Mind you, these weren’t motorcycle cops, but normal buddy cops driving around in cop cars. Every one of them had a helmet on. I’m going to look into that one and see what the requirements were for LA cops in the 70's.
So it was a great night of food, companionship and blaxsploitation. I had been putting off this movie for decades, but now that I’ve seen it, well, I don’t kick myself for never renting it before. I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it as much as a young boy. But now, it is cinema gold and I plan on renting the sequel, Scream, Blacula, Scream, as well as another movie I ran into while searching the shelves, Blackenstein. More to come on those in the future.