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From Salem to Berkeley, the sins of the father. "Hey, I came here for a spook show." The opening is set in the vague 1940s and pivots on a deadpan reflection of "necking": Boston frat-dude and coed make out in the cemetery, out of the crypt crawls the desiccated ghoul (Michael Pataki) seeking youth to feed on, he kills him and rapes her. The potential vampire-hunter, a police inspector (Eric Mason), has his head promptly crushed by a coffin lid, the better to focus instead on the Rosemary's Baby-isms of "the Unwilling Mother" (Kitty Vallacher). (She's rejected by the gray-skinned spawn until she pricks her bosom with a knife, blood drips on its ravenous lips.) Dissolve to a few decades later, as the strapping offspring (William Smith) vengefully tacks down the fiend and finds him teaching "folk mythology and the occult" in California. "The night classes are really much more interesting," purrs the student (Diane Holden) with a yen for the morbidly lyrical (cf. Siodmak's Son of Dracula). Unfairly left out of the It's Alive-Deathdream-Martin Seventies canon of radical horror visions, John Hayes' obscure, cruel, potent nightmare has Murnauian oppressions and awakenings, the all-engulfing chiaroscuro of shoestring shooting, the strangulation of family ties. (Nearly three decades before The Sopranos, David Chase wrote the screenplay.) Witch-burnings of yore and guns at the séance, "the circle is closing." The tragic hero sleeps with the reincarnation of his father's beloved (Lyn Peters) but the undead patriarchal order still has the hissing last word ("Be damned!"), here the blood is not on Oedipus' eyes but on his fangs. "Fin—ou peut etre pas." With Lieux Dressler, Jay Adler, Margaret Fairchild, and Jay Scott.
--- Fernando F. Croce |