SusannahThe Fearless Vampire Killers Or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck
January 13th 2007 22:51
The Fearless Vampire Killers
Or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck on DVD
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Gerard Brach and Roman Polanski.
Starring: Jack MacGowan, Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski.
I don’t think Roman Polanski is a name I’d ever associate with belly laughs.
However, Fearless Vampire Killers is undeniably a comical movie, yet, for all its pratfalls and comedy accents there is a definite vibe to this film - that queasy, fugue-like quality that permeated so much of Polanski’s early work. But no, nobody ends up dead in a bathtub and no disembodied hands burst out of any walls.
Professor Abronsius (a humorous moustache with Jack MacGowan attached to it) is a disgraced academic, driven from his University by other lecturers that did not take kindly to his obsession with a certain type of mythical monster. The film opens with him drifting through Eastern Europe with his dim and sexually-frustrated accomplice, Alfred (Polanski himself gamely tackles this role) in tow.
They come upon an inn run by the lecherous Shagal and it is here that Abronsius believes he has found evidence of the very thing he was searching for – vampires.
Cue scenes of a hunchback with truly grotesque teeth, the village idiot unwisely mentioning a nearby castle that all the other people in the tavern denied knowing of, lots of jokes about people freezing solid and so forth.
After Shagal’s lovely daughter, Sarah (played by Polanski’s late wife Sharon Tate) is abducted by an impressive figure replete with flowing cape and alarmingly pointy teeth, our two heroes inadvertently infiltrate the castle of Count von Krolock. At this point in the narrative Shagal himself has died and been resurrected with a taste for the red stuff and an undeniable craving for buxom maid, Magda.
Will Alfred and Abronsius unravel the mystery of Krolock and his sexually-ambiguous son, Herbert? Will they get to Sarah before a simple blood transfusion and a lie-down are no longer enough to save her? Will they make any real effort to save Magda from the oily advances of the twittering Shagal? Will they be able to stem the rapidly-breaking torrent of darkness that threatens to consume the land? Well, given that I cannot think of anyone more incompetent than these two alleged vampire killers the answer to all of those questions would appear to be…no.
The film is clearly a parody of all those mock-melodramatic period-horror romps that studios such as Hammer films churned out throughout the sixties and seventies and as such it’s pretty dead-on. The humour itself is, well…quite peculiar really. It kind of feels like Polanski saw Young Frankenstein and decided to make his own version.
While I never found Fearless Vampire Killers to be any less than entertaining I didn’t find myself laughing all that much. That said, it does contain at least one truly hilarious set-piece involving Polanski’s Alfred being pursued by a pant-less gay vampire with only one thing on his frenzied mind (well, maybe two…he is a vampire after all). Another stand-out sequence depicts a Vampire ball, where dozens of ghoulishly made-up extras dance while dressed in rotting period outfits. It’s a visually stunning, and in its own way – immensely creepy, scene.
Special mention also has to go to the film’s wonderfully vicious, blackly comic kiss-off.
Or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck on DVD
Directed by Roman Polanski
Written by Gerard Brach and Roman Polanski.
Starring: Jack MacGowan, Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski.
I don’t think Roman Polanski is a name I’d ever associate with belly laughs.
However, Fearless Vampire Killers is undeniably a comical movie, yet, for all its pratfalls and comedy accents there is a definite vibe to this film - that queasy, fugue-like quality that permeated so much of Polanski’s early work. But no, nobody ends up dead in a bathtub and no disembodied hands burst out of any walls.
Professor Abronsius (a humorous moustache with Jack MacGowan attached to it) is a disgraced academic, driven from his University by other lecturers that did not take kindly to his obsession with a certain type of mythical monster. The film opens with him drifting through Eastern Europe with his dim and sexually-frustrated accomplice, Alfred (Polanski himself gamely tackles this role) in tow.
They come upon an inn run by the lecherous Shagal and it is here that Abronsius believes he has found evidence of the very thing he was searching for – vampires.
Cue scenes of a hunchback with truly grotesque teeth, the village idiot unwisely mentioning a nearby castle that all the other people in the tavern denied knowing of, lots of jokes about people freezing solid and so forth.
After Shagal’s lovely daughter, Sarah (played by Polanski’s late wife Sharon Tate) is abducted by an impressive figure replete with flowing cape and alarmingly pointy teeth, our two heroes inadvertently infiltrate the castle of Count von Krolock. At this point in the narrative Shagal himself has died and been resurrected with a taste for the red stuff and an undeniable craving for buxom maid, Magda.
Will Alfred and Abronsius unravel the mystery of Krolock and his sexually-ambiguous son, Herbert? Will they get to Sarah before a simple blood transfusion and a lie-down are no longer enough to save her? Will they make any real effort to save Magda from the oily advances of the twittering Shagal? Will they be able to stem the rapidly-breaking torrent of darkness that threatens to consume the land? Well, given that I cannot think of anyone more incompetent than these two alleged vampire killers the answer to all of those questions would appear to be…no.
The film is clearly a parody of all those mock-melodramatic period-horror romps that studios such as Hammer films churned out throughout the sixties and seventies and as such it’s pretty dead-on. The humour itself is, well…quite peculiar really. It kind of feels like Polanski saw Young Frankenstein and decided to make his own version.
While I never found Fearless Vampire Killers to be any less than entertaining I didn’t find myself laughing all that much. That said, it does contain at least one truly hilarious set-piece involving Polanski’s Alfred being pursued by a pant-less gay vampire with only one thing on his frenzied mind (well, maybe two…he is a vampire after all). Another stand-out sequence depicts a Vampire ball, where dozens of ghoulishly made-up extras dance while dressed in rotting period outfits. It’s a visually stunning, and in its own way – immensely creepy, scene.
Special mention also has to go to the film’s wonderfully vicious, blackly comic kiss-off.
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