Dracula The Unflushable
Taking a bit of a break from politics for a couple of days, even though it’s shaped up to be one of the most exciting few days so far, especially for us Liberal Democrats. Overnight we’ve gone from the party of Hi, We’re Over Here Actually to being the party of FUCK YEAH. Which is nice, but let’s not jinx it. There’s two debates and a long way to go yet and as Paddy Ashdown has warned Clegg, the knives are going to be out for him. (Paddy knows a thing or two about knives, I reckon. I like to imagine him typing with one clenched between his teeth a la HST.)
Dave is reputed to be furious - apparently it was his idea to let the kid in yellow play with the big boys, which he is now bitterly regretting. While Bordon speaks like an Orwellian automaton he looks like a titan, a big burly political beast clutching the sides of the lectern like a louring minister about to tell you you’re going to Hell for picking your nose on a Sunday. He looks bruised and battered - if he were a cat he’d be one of those creatures with ears like old bus tickets and half a tail - not entirely sightly but part of the furniture. As soon as the camera copped a load of Bordon then both of them - Dave in a beautifully cut suit that couldn’t prevent him looking like a bunny in the headlights and Clegg in an appalling suit that made him look like a trendy young headmaster - looked like kids. Unfortunately for Dave, no matter how bad Nick Clegg looked he sounded absolutely terrific, well-briefed, full of statistics, and at one point betraying a genuine desire to actually talk to a member of the audience.
Dave, who spends his time pretending to be a real person with an actual pulse, was visibly disconcerted and attempted to model his next imitation of a human being on Nick Clegg’s example, but it didn’t work out - possibly because of the Tefal-textured flesh-egg atop his neck. Stick a bowler hat on the man and he’d look like something painted by Rene Magritte. Placed next to a genuinely intelligent and human-looking politician Dave looks like what he is - a sickly and vacuous try-hard with less substance than a leprechaun fart. I fucking love it.
But yes. Enough of that. I can’t spend the whole of the weekend shit-talking politicians when I could be talking shit about people who aren’t politicians. Besides, I’ve found something tremendously exciting - one of those Things That Shouldn’t Exist But Do, Leading You To Wonder Whether It Is Worth Carrying On. You know - those things - Creationists, Hetalia, scented tampons, the word ‘staycation’. One of those.
Actually I’m being unfair. The Thing in question is not without a certain cracky charm - a kind of Ed Wood so-bad-it’s-almost-awesome trainwreck quality. It is a book whose fast-paced plot and grasp of historical facts make The Da Vinci Code look like it was written by G.K. Chesterton; its deep and thoughtful contemplation of female sexuality and the struggle of turn-of-the-century feminism would not be out of place in a Russ Meyer movie. Imagine this combined with the horror sensibility of Garth Marenghi, a plot more disgustingly contorted than a Hapsburg’s family tree and all the authentic Englishness of Dick Van Dyke brandishing a chimney brush and well…what more can I say? Close your eyes, think of England or kittens or whatever floats your boat and imagine the whole terrible thing written by Jeffery Archer. Only worse
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Dracula the Undead.
The premise of Dracula the Undead was dodgy enough in the first place. Bram Stoker’s original novel has been fucked seven ways until Sunday by way of numerous naughty copyright infringements - the most notorious being F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, in which they changed a few names in order to avoid a copyright claim from Stoker’s widow, Florence. Quite how they got away with that I’ll never know, but one thing you can say about Nosferatu (Happily available on Google video.) is that it kind of atoned for the sin of copyright infringment by being very very good indeed.
Since Max Schreck vamped, rat-toothed and needle-fingered, up a shadowed staircase the name of Dracula has sold countless novels and films and video-games - some of them superb, others bloody awful, but none of them have poured royalties into the Stoker coffers*. This is certainly unfair, although my sympathy with the Stokers evaporated somewhat when they gave actual permission for this dog of a book to be unleashed and set loose on the unsuspecting world.
Dacre, a great great etc nephew of Bram, teamed up with ‘Dracula historian’ Ian Holt, who is apparently a well known historian. He is also a ‘reknowned screen writer’, possibly the same Ian Holt responsible for the 2005 straight-to-DVD classic ‘Dr. Chopper’. Neither had ever written a novel before in their lives and said so, but were committed to writing the definitive and official sequel to Bram Stoker’s novel. Some might say they should have been committed.
Anyway, leaving aside the authors’ credentials for a moment, let’s take a look at the first Stoker-sanctioned Dracula novel in 112 years.
It opens promisingly enough, with a letter from Mina Harker to her son Quincey Harker - you remember him, right? The podling at the very end of novel, born a year to the day after the final battle with Dracula and named Quincey P. Abraham Arthur Van Jackathon What-the-fuck after all the various men who saved his mother from turning into a vampire. I mean, okay, with a name like that you’d probably have issues but Quincey carries on a bit much.
The letter is dated 1912 and to be opened by Quincey in the event of Mina’s sudden or unnatural death, which I admit is a terrific fucking hook on which to open a novel - what happened to Mina? How did she die? Sadly, this is about as good as it gets. It turns out Mina is very much alive and the letter was opened in a tantrum by Quincey, who is twenty five going on fifteen and quite the most unsympathetic protagonist of a vampire novel since an insipid and unpleasant girl from Arizona started whining about Daddy wanting to buy her a car.
Quincey spends the book in a state of huffing, snarling, door-slamming adolescent rage. He is furious about being sent to the Sorbonne to study law (See what I mean? Bella’s truck-whine pales into insignificance.) because Paris is a perfect torment for him despite providing a variety of exceptional French cheeses to accompany his neverending whine. Quincey wants to be an actor; he’s so good that he’s supporting a young master of physical comedy named Charles Chaplin. (At which point I think the reader is supposed to go ‘Ooooo - could it be…’ Yes, it could. And get used to this.) While fannying about in Paris Quincey is starstruck by the great Romanian actor Basarab, a name which sounds so much like an anagram that it’s a tremendous surprise when you discover that it’s not, but yes, if you were thinking Basarab the brooding Romanian of noble blood might be a bit…fangy of a weekend then you’re not wrong.
Anyway, Basarab is starring in Paris in Richard III, adding another layer of what-the-fuck because I had no idea the French had any time for Shakespeare. Meanwhile Dr. Jack Seward has arrived in Paris after hanging out in Marseilles and witnessing the depraved lesbian sadist Elizabeth Bathory in action. It was a near thing but Jack called upon his friend the aviator Henri Salmet, who flew him to Paris in time for Bathory’s arrival - oh and coincidentally this perilous test-flight inspired Salmet to attempt to fly across the English channel. (I am not joking. I told you, get used to this.)
Bathory, who dresses like Marlene Dietrich and can’t pass a pretty girl without waggling her tongue suggestively and hissing rude suggestions, kills the morphine addled Seward within earshot of Quincey, who is in Basarab’s dressing room mooing over him like the sad, overwrought fanboy that he is. I think this is supposed to establish that Bathory is after Dracula, sorry, Basarab - giving the game away here but it was even more obvious than a clue from the fucking Da Vinci Code. Besides, it’s terrible - you’re not likely to read it, are you? (Although you should. There are some things you have to see to believe.)
So, yes - there’s Bathory. She’s apparently very very angry that she was married off to a fat old pervert when she was a mere girl of fifteen, whereupon she was repeatedly raped and then felt up by her auntie. She hates men and hates God and is generally foaming with rage at the patriarchy. Fair enough, you might say. Except that obviously she is evil and unnatural and twisted and you can totally tell that because she wears men’s clothes and likes the ladies…oh wow, could this be a little homophobic, I wonder? I mean, obviously she’s a bloodsucking creature of the night fond of wallowing in the blood of virgins but it’s clear that her lesbianism is basically there to illustrate her filthy disgusting godless depravity.
Now come on, boys - that’s not very right on, is it? Get it right - she’s a bloodsucking creature of the night fond of wallowing in the blood of virgins, who just happens to be a lesbian.
Actually I’m not sure why she didn’t chow down on spazbot Quincey there and then - okay, so he’s a little too cock-bearing to satisfy her desire for lesbian S&M but he’s surely virginal enough to provide a quick facepack and possibly a titty lift. Everything about the squealing twat suggests he’s in the grip of a tremendous case of blue-balls. Quincey doesn’t do drink or women because that’s all his father does. (Jonathan Harker is now a prossie-fucking lush on account of Mina’s sexual appetite - ie. she has one and it shits him right up.)
Anyway, after all that fuckery in Paris Quincey goes back to London because…um…wait. (Consults book) Oh yes - he’s following Basarab. You know, the boy’s awkward virginity is beginning to make more and more sense. Oh, and we meet Mina Harker, who is oddly youthful on account of having slurped Dracula’s blood twenty five years ago. She is also oddly predisposed to dreams in which Jack Seward writes BEWAR on the floor in his own blood, which is rather pathetic of him. Seriously, Jack, that old Sauniere dude from the beginning of the Da Vinci Code managed to turn his own minor intestine into a whole pointless and annoying scavenger hunt and the best you can imagine is BEWAR? That’s what drugs will do to you. Don’t do drugs, kids.
So, yeah, Mina wakes up from her precognitive dreams, pulls on ‘a matronly floor length woolen dress’ - which is quite remarkable considering she’s a well-to-do lady in 1912 when well-to-do ladies were dressed by their maids and the dressing of them took a good hour or more - and muses on her perpetual youth ‘just like Dorian Gray in Mr. Wilde’s risque story published in Lippincott’s Magazine.’
At this point I had to applaud in much the way I’d applaud a toddler for making poo-poos in the potty; yes, you can read Wikipedia! You’re a big boy now. Dear fucking Christ.
Quincey is discovered lurking in the shrubbery and you can bet this page probably led to the American anglophile authors responding in the Pavlovian fashion of American-anglophiles whenever parrots, shrubberies, spam or cheese shops are mentioned. While Quincey is eating a kipper (Because we’re English, dontcha know.) Mina demands to know why the little shit has baled on his vastly expensive education and Quincey announces that he’s met someone wonderful but not a girl because he’s an actor not a lover. Mina tells him not to be such a ditz and Quincey goes into full on angry-teenager mode about how much he hates his parents. Believe me, Quincey, it’s not nearly as much as I hate you.
We are then introduced to Inspector Cotford, a fat Irish police officer who twenty five years ago was a young constable working in Whitechapel under one Inspector Abberline. For once this isn’t a pointless name-drop and you’ll soon wish it was, because it’s leading off into a sub-plot so stupid that you’ll wonder what the hell the publishers were drinking when they bought this thing.
I could go on but I’ve so far only evicerated less than a quarter of the book. Like one of those really massive turds that catch on the u-bend this beast is going to take numerous flushes and some nifty work with a coathanger. Join me next time as I attempt to break its big brown back in Dracula, SUBPLOT X-TREME!
* Beg pardon - apparently the old Bela Lugosi Dracula got the green light from the Stoker family, which somewhat atones for this.
Dave is reputed to be furious - apparently it was his idea to let the kid in yellow play with the big boys, which he is now bitterly regretting. While Bordon speaks like an Orwellian automaton he looks like a titan, a big burly political beast clutching the sides of the lectern like a louring minister about to tell you you’re going to Hell for picking your nose on a Sunday. He looks bruised and battered - if he were a cat he’d be one of those creatures with ears like old bus tickets and half a tail - not entirely sightly but part of the furniture. As soon as the camera copped a load of Bordon then both of them - Dave in a beautifully cut suit that couldn’t prevent him looking like a bunny in the headlights and Clegg in an appalling suit that made him look like a trendy young headmaster - looked like kids. Unfortunately for Dave, no matter how bad Nick Clegg looked he sounded absolutely terrific, well-briefed, full of statistics, and at one point betraying a genuine desire to actually talk to a member of the audience.
Dave, who spends his time pretending to be a real person with an actual pulse, was visibly disconcerted and attempted to model his next imitation of a human being on Nick Clegg’s example, but it didn’t work out - possibly because of the Tefal-textured flesh-egg atop his neck. Stick a bowler hat on the man and he’d look like something painted by Rene Magritte. Placed next to a genuinely intelligent and human-looking politician Dave looks like what he is - a sickly and vacuous try-hard with less substance than a leprechaun fart. I fucking love it.
But yes. Enough of that. I can’t spend the whole of the weekend shit-talking politicians when I could be talking shit about people who aren’t politicians. Besides, I’ve found something tremendously exciting - one of those Things That Shouldn’t Exist But Do, Leading You To Wonder Whether It Is Worth Carrying On. You know - those things - Creationists, Hetalia, scented tampons, the word ‘staycation’. One of those.
Actually I’m being unfair. The Thing in question is not without a certain cracky charm - a kind of Ed Wood so-bad-it’s-almost-awesome trainwreck quality. It is a book whose fast-paced plot and grasp of historical facts make The Da Vinci Code look like it was written by G.K. Chesterton; its deep and thoughtful contemplation of female sexuality and the struggle of turn-of-the-century feminism would not be out of place in a Russ Meyer movie. Imagine this combined with the horror sensibility of Garth Marenghi, a plot more disgustingly contorted than a Hapsburg’s family tree and all the authentic Englishness of Dick Van Dyke brandishing a chimney brush and well…what more can I say? Close your eyes, think of England or kittens or whatever floats your boat and imagine the whole terrible thing written by Jeffery Archer. Only worse
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Dracula the Undead.
The premise of Dracula the Undead was dodgy enough in the first place. Bram Stoker’s original novel has been fucked seven ways until Sunday by way of numerous naughty copyright infringements - the most notorious being F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, in which they changed a few names in order to avoid a copyright claim from Stoker’s widow, Florence. Quite how they got away with that I’ll never know, but one thing you can say about Nosferatu (Happily available on Google video.) is that it kind of atoned for the sin of copyright infringment by being very very good indeed.
Since Max Schreck vamped, rat-toothed and needle-fingered, up a shadowed staircase the name of Dracula has sold countless novels and films and video-games - some of them superb, others bloody awful, but none of them have poured royalties into the Stoker coffers*. This is certainly unfair, although my sympathy with the Stokers evaporated somewhat when they gave actual permission for this dog of a book to be unleashed and set loose on the unsuspecting world.
Dacre, a great great etc nephew of Bram, teamed up with ‘Dracula historian’ Ian Holt, who is apparently a well known historian. He is also a ‘reknowned screen writer’, possibly the same Ian Holt responsible for the 2005 straight-to-DVD classic ‘Dr. Chopper’. Neither had ever written a novel before in their lives and said so, but were committed to writing the definitive and official sequel to Bram Stoker’s novel. Some might say they should have been committed.
Anyway, leaving aside the authors’ credentials for a moment, let’s take a look at the first Stoker-sanctioned Dracula novel in 112 years.
It opens promisingly enough, with a letter from Mina Harker to her son Quincey Harker - you remember him, right? The podling at the very end of novel, born a year to the day after the final battle with Dracula and named Quincey P. Abraham Arthur Van Jackathon What-the-fuck after all the various men who saved his mother from turning into a vampire. I mean, okay, with a name like that you’d probably have issues but Quincey carries on a bit much.
The letter is dated 1912 and to be opened by Quincey in the event of Mina’s sudden or unnatural death, which I admit is a terrific fucking hook on which to open a novel - what happened to Mina? How did she die? Sadly, this is about as good as it gets. It turns out Mina is very much alive and the letter was opened in a tantrum by Quincey, who is twenty five going on fifteen and quite the most unsympathetic protagonist of a vampire novel since an insipid and unpleasant girl from Arizona started whining about Daddy wanting to buy her a car.
Quincey spends the book in a state of huffing, snarling, door-slamming adolescent rage. He is furious about being sent to the Sorbonne to study law (See what I mean? Bella’s truck-whine pales into insignificance.) because Paris is a perfect torment for him despite providing a variety of exceptional French cheeses to accompany his neverending whine. Quincey wants to be an actor; he’s so good that he’s supporting a young master of physical comedy named Charles Chaplin. (At which point I think the reader is supposed to go ‘Ooooo - could it be…’ Yes, it could. And get used to this.) While fannying about in Paris Quincey is starstruck by the great Romanian actor Basarab, a name which sounds so much like an anagram that it’s a tremendous surprise when you discover that it’s not, but yes, if you were thinking Basarab the brooding Romanian of noble blood might be a bit…fangy of a weekend then you’re not wrong.
Anyway, Basarab is starring in Paris in Richard III, adding another layer of what-the-fuck because I had no idea the French had any time for Shakespeare. Meanwhile Dr. Jack Seward has arrived in Paris after hanging out in Marseilles and witnessing the depraved lesbian sadist Elizabeth Bathory in action. It was a near thing but Jack called upon his friend the aviator Henri Salmet, who flew him to Paris in time for Bathory’s arrival - oh and coincidentally this perilous test-flight inspired Salmet to attempt to fly across the English channel. (I am not joking. I told you, get used to this.)
Bathory, who dresses like Marlene Dietrich and can’t pass a pretty girl without waggling her tongue suggestively and hissing rude suggestions, kills the morphine addled Seward within earshot of Quincey, who is in Basarab’s dressing room mooing over him like the sad, overwrought fanboy that he is. I think this is supposed to establish that Bathory is after Dracula, sorry, Basarab - giving the game away here but it was even more obvious than a clue from the fucking Da Vinci Code. Besides, it’s terrible - you’re not likely to read it, are you? (Although you should. There are some things you have to see to believe.)
So, yes - there’s Bathory. She’s apparently very very angry that she was married off to a fat old pervert when she was a mere girl of fifteen, whereupon she was repeatedly raped and then felt up by her auntie. She hates men and hates God and is generally foaming with rage at the patriarchy. Fair enough, you might say. Except that obviously she is evil and unnatural and twisted and you can totally tell that because she wears men’s clothes and likes the ladies…oh wow, could this be a little homophobic, I wonder? I mean, obviously she’s a bloodsucking creature of the night fond of wallowing in the blood of virgins but it’s clear that her lesbianism is basically there to illustrate her filthy disgusting godless depravity.
Now come on, boys - that’s not very right on, is it? Get it right - she’s a bloodsucking creature of the night fond of wallowing in the blood of virgins, who just happens to be a lesbian.
Actually I’m not sure why she didn’t chow down on spazbot Quincey there and then - okay, so he’s a little too cock-bearing to satisfy her desire for lesbian S&M but he’s surely virginal enough to provide a quick facepack and possibly a titty lift. Everything about the squealing twat suggests he’s in the grip of a tremendous case of blue-balls. Quincey doesn’t do drink or women because that’s all his father does. (Jonathan Harker is now a prossie-fucking lush on account of Mina’s sexual appetite - ie. she has one and it shits him right up.)
Anyway, after all that fuckery in Paris Quincey goes back to London because…um…wait. (Consults book) Oh yes - he’s following Basarab. You know, the boy’s awkward virginity is beginning to make more and more sense. Oh, and we meet Mina Harker, who is oddly youthful on account of having slurped Dracula’s blood twenty five years ago. She is also oddly predisposed to dreams in which Jack Seward writes BEWAR on the floor in his own blood, which is rather pathetic of him. Seriously, Jack, that old Sauniere dude from the beginning of the Da Vinci Code managed to turn his own minor intestine into a whole pointless and annoying scavenger hunt and the best you can imagine is BEWAR? That’s what drugs will do to you. Don’t do drugs, kids.
So, yeah, Mina wakes up from her precognitive dreams, pulls on ‘a matronly floor length woolen dress’ - which is quite remarkable considering she’s a well-to-do lady in 1912 when well-to-do ladies were dressed by their maids and the dressing of them took a good hour or more - and muses on her perpetual youth ‘just like Dorian Gray in Mr. Wilde’s risque story published in Lippincott’s Magazine.’
At this point I had to applaud in much the way I’d applaud a toddler for making poo-poos in the potty; yes, you can read Wikipedia! You’re a big boy now. Dear fucking Christ.
Quincey is discovered lurking in the shrubbery and you can bet this page probably led to the American anglophile authors responding in the Pavlovian fashion of American-anglophiles whenever parrots, shrubberies, spam or cheese shops are mentioned. While Quincey is eating a kipper (Because we’re English, dontcha know.) Mina demands to know why the little shit has baled on his vastly expensive education and Quincey announces that he’s met someone wonderful but not a girl because he’s an actor not a lover. Mina tells him not to be such a ditz and Quincey goes into full on angry-teenager mode about how much he hates his parents. Believe me, Quincey, it’s not nearly as much as I hate you.
We are then introduced to Inspector Cotford, a fat Irish police officer who twenty five years ago was a young constable working in Whitechapel under one Inspector Abberline. For once this isn’t a pointless name-drop and you’ll soon wish it was, because it’s leading off into a sub-plot so stupid that you’ll wonder what the hell the publishers were drinking when they bought this thing.
I could go on but I’ve so far only evicerated less than a quarter of the book. Like one of those really massive turds that catch on the u-bend this beast is going to take numerous flushes and some nifty work with a coathanger. Join me next time as I attempt to break its big brown back in Dracula, SUBPLOT X-TREME!
* Beg pardon - apparently the old Bela Lugosi Dracula got the green light from the Stoker family, which somewhat atones for this.