Ah, 1931, a golden age, when Bela Lugosi was Dracula and Hollywood thought that possums were actually giant rats.
I is a rat. Grr!
My roommate (Gareth) Gareth’s Mom and I just finished watching the 75th Anniversary Edition of Dracula. We had seen the parodies and the references to it, but we had never actually seen the original movie before. It was pretty entertaining for a black and white movie with no background music. I usually try to avoid watching movies that were originally books that I’ve read, because I tend to complain about the differences. (It was Jonathon who went to Transylvania in the beginning, Hollywood, not Renfield.) But I am willing to let it slide because, well, this was a classic. It gets the senior treatment. Like when Grandpa says something racist and you just smile and nod because things were different back then.
Though I would like to know why there were armadillos in Dracula’s castle
So, the movie was over and, as per usual, Gareth’s Mom flips over to the special features. And what did we see? The Spanish version of Dracula. Oooooo!
For those who don’t know, when they were filming Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, they were simultaneously filming a Spanish Version with an entirely different cast. The English speaking cast would pack up each night and then, like Dracula himself, the Spanish cast would sweep in and film until dawn.
It was late, but we told the Spanish version to play anyway, figuring we could fast forward through the boring parts.
I hadn’t laughed so hard in a long time.
Renfield enters the dusty, spiderweb shrouded castle……a bat swoops….he turns and sees…..
THIS
The mug handle ears…the overbite….those bulbous, peeping-tom eyes…. There was a stunned silence in the room that lasted perhaps half a second before we all burst out laughing. The rest of the evening was spent fast forwarding the DVD to get to the parts where “Derpula” (or Dracu-derp, as the ladies call him) would fumble another of Lugosi’s famous scenes.
Here he is “recoiling” from Renfield’s cross.
No dramatic shrinking away with his cape raised in horror, no silent hiss; just an expression of vague dislike and disgust, like he had just bit into an old lemon. He made this face often throughout the movie, and it quickly became known as the “Lemon face.”
“I’m not ‘aposed to eat da crosses”
This guy was about as scary as the nerd who sat behind you in Algebra class. Yeah, he was a mouth breather and you didn’t want him touching you, but he didn’t make you fear for your immortal soul.
The comparison between him and Bela Lugosi is laughable. Which is why we laughed.
He’s a Dark Prince, come to steal your women
He looks vaguely constipated.
Now, Bela Lugosi was in a lot of B horror films. He could turn a horrible script into a masterpiece just by being onstage. This guy had a similar skill. He turned a horror script into a comedy with a few simple expressions. That, and he was speaking Spanish with a Castilian accent. That particular accent pronounces S’s as Th’s. That’s right. The Spanish Dracula had a lisp.
“I vant to thuck your blood”
Okay, okay, the Spanish version sort of stunk. But it wasn’t just Carlos Villarias’s fault (Yes, that’s his name, I just made Gareth look it up because he’s hogging the internet-connected computer). The entire movie had the feel of a remake made by a bunch of teenagers that had been let loose on the set. It was fraught with over-acting, under-acting, and just plain old bad-acting.
With one exception.
Enter Lupita Tovar, who played the Spanish Dracula version of Mina. For some reason they renamed her Eva and dressed her in a slinky piece of nothing that showed her cleavage every other scene. But the point was she was ten times better at playing a distraught semi-vampire than her English-speaking counterpart.
And she was just that much hotter too
Where little miss Mina looked vaguely uncomfortable and mildly interested, Eva was horrified and intensely focused. It was like comparing Garfield to a Bengal tiger. Lupita really should have been in the English version; She and Bela would have been amazing together. Then again, maybe that’s why she wasn’t; those old-timey televisions they had back then probably would have exploded had that much sex appeal appeared in one movie.
So, to summarize, this is a derp:
Did I leave the kettle on?
This is not a derp:
Pictured: The exact opposite of a derp
And this is the other picture of Lupita that I have:
See? Tits! And in the 1930s too. Scandalous.
So what have I learned from gathering all of these pictures of Classical Dracula? One important thing: Bela Lugosi was freaking adorable when he wasn’t busy being scary.
Yeah, I’d tap that.
