Dracula: The Series (1990)

 

Directors: Allan Eastman, René Bonnière, Allan King, Randy Bradshaw, Allan Kroeker, Jeff Woolnough, Michael Sloan, Joe Dea

Screenplay: Glenn Davis, William Laurin, Philip Bedard, Larry Lalonde, Peter Meech, Stu Woolley, Sean Kelly, Pascal Bonniere, Sharon Corder, Michael K. Ross

Cast: Bernard Behrens as  Gustav Helsing; Geordie Johnson as  Alexander Lucard; Mia Kirshner as Sophie Metternich; Joe Roncetti as Christopher Townsend; Jacob Tierney as Max Townsend; Geraint Wyn Davies as Klaus Helsing

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #35

 

Call it very bad work, but between (on an estimate) a start in March to October 30th transpired to just watch one season of television that only lasted for one season and twenty one episodes. That is pretty lazy and could easily resoundingly prevent a decent review of a show being possible. Except that one of the biggest reasons behind this comically long delay between viewing episodes is what is part of this show's weird paradox, one of the show's biggest weaknesses, and yet a contributor to it generating an odd fondness too over this long time with the production.

Mainly, as a Canadian live action horror show for children, it is entirely episodic baring some references back to previous stories. Baring three episodes that link together, this show which is less than thirty minutes long per episode is so conventional that it is repeating the same plot point in new guises for the most part, that it introduces a crisis, runs through it swiftly, and resolves it with normalcy, even in terms of when major characters get turn into vampires. Because normalcy is swift, and the show is very repetitious, Dracula was not a series to try have binged in rapid succession anyway even if I had attempted it.

Premise wise, it updates the Bram Stoker character by making him a yuppie in charge of a huge European corporation, under the alias of Alexander Lucard, the show following two American boys, teenager Chris (Joe Roncetti) and his younger brother Max (Jacob Tierney), living with their uncle Gustav Hellsing (Bernard Behrens), whilst their mother travels for work, and being pulled into Gustav's world of vampire hunting and facing Dracula, who just lives a few blocks down from them in a castle. Add among them Sophie (Mia Kirshner), the young and smart friend of Uncle Gustav, and the resulting narrative is repetitious as a Saturday morning show I myself might have grown up with would have been, where until the final episode everything remains exactly the same with the variety of vampires and peril at hand. It does admittedly lead to the great aspect that, eventually never to get tingaround to killing each other, Dracula and the heroes will start to soften to each other, but this repetition is a huge factor to consider with the show.

Much of the show is populated by archetypes. Chris is a teenager, interested in girls and rock music; Max is meant to be the enthusiastic surrogate for an audience, becoming the one enticed by vampire hunting, but there are entire episodes that transpire only because Max did something dumb to let their household become terrified, like removing a sacred cross over the doorway designed to shot lightning at vampires. Sophie out of the three young cast members is the most dynamic, including a potential romance with Chris; between work with Atom Egoyan, only four later on Exotica (1994), and The L-Word (2004-9), Mia Kirshner's career went on. Her episode when Sophie is turned evil, which is not a spoiler to ruin frankly, does show one of the many scenes where she gets to stand out considerably.

Bernard Behrens as Gustav is also charismatic, playing a charming character in his own right. His is meant to be "vaguely" German, in this Canadian production shot in Luxembourg, which means he likes polka and especially schnitzel, which in this world in "Europe" can be ordered as a late night takeaway from a company with a slogan with too much innuendo involved ("Hot & Steamy") for a kid's show¹. Thankfully Behrens as Gustav, in one of the show's best aspects, gets to play a character who can wiggle around in this stereotype, both the accomplish vampire hunter and the lovably bumbling figure without that even becoming a joke just to bury the character. In fact, for times the show even allows him to contemplate his fear of aging occasionally; sadly due to the short length of the episodes, usually split into a main and subplot, one of the most intriguing is about him meeting an old friend in a care home, who may have dementia but claims there is a vampire killing the residents, one that is left underused until Bubba Ho Tep (2004) tried for a feature with a mummy and Elvis on the premise.

The actor however, alongside the character, which really holds the show up from its many flaws, including the second-to-last episode being a clip show with some new content, is Geordie Johnson as the titular Dracula/Alexander Lucard. He does do a vague "Bela Lugosi-like" accent, but with Johnson, mainly a steward of television, you thankfully have someone who is in all the episodes and is a huge support to the show as a charismatic villain you secretly love. And it is not to undersell Johnson in how important he is for the show, especially with the sense now that sadly not a lot of his filmography would categorise for the material I usually cover, a shame as it would have been great for him to return as an obscure figure to become a fan of and discover more of. The version of Dracula he plays, whilst underexploited in premise, is also inspired - for those too young to know what a "yuppie" is, they came to be as a term during the economic boom in the United States during the eighties, of powerful and affluent businessmen, the term eventually carrying the idea of being corrupt and hateable. Hence, why it is inspired to imagine Dracula, whilst also still feeding off mortals and increasing his vampire servants, would own a vast economic empire which crushed its competition whilst he existed among mortal humans.

A connoisseur of art and cultured, even meeting Pablo Picasso and getting his portrait done by him, Dracula is a chad and a villain but Johnson makes him charismatic. Eventually the heroes keep invading his castle, almost if not every episode, until the point they all develop a mutual bond with each other. There are plenty of moments where this version of the Stoker character gains personality through this version. Such as talking about Stoker, when he and Gustav seem to be doomed to die in an explosion in a room they are trapped in together, finding it good for his career, but wishing Laurence Oliver played him over Lugosi. Admitting he always wanted a room where the walls crushed people after seeing a film, and having the funds to have it built. That he is obsessed with George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, about an intellectual transforming a common woman into an elegant lady, and deciding to try it with a woman who he encounters abruptly in his office. That one entire episode, one of the last, is built around him becoming involved due to his horror at another vampire making inferior zombies from his bitten victims.

The paradox with Dracula: The Series is that it was insanely repetitive and banal a lot of the time, very simplistic and a lot of cheese, yet I think of so many silly moments which hit the mark fully. The episode where Chris and Sophie decide to join forces to help his music career, leading to pretentious spoken word poetry and dancing to his guitar playing as the running joke. The character of Klaus (Geraint Wyn Davies), actually Gustav's son who was turned into a vampire by Dracula; at first it plays almost with homoerotic energy, when he is introduced without any back-story yet shown, where he and Dracula live in the castle together trading Shakespeare quotations, eventually becoming even worse a figure than Dracula and biting the scenery with aplomb. That it squanders many great ideas but still wrings something from them. Dracula helping in solving counterfeit art fraud, or the many vampires introduced wishing to take his power from him. Like this world having its own form of Nosferatu too, or in one of the more memorable episodes, a silent film actor living secretly in an old cinema, turned into a vampire in hope to be an immortal actor but instead a tragic figure as he can no longer be caught on film cameras and is averse to blood. One character is introduced in one episode only is a fascinating figure to have in vampire fiction, a vampire doctor, not defined as one himself, who treats a deathly ill Dracula, chastising him for eating mortal food, walking outside in the daytime, not getting enough sleep and biting anyone regardless of "bad blood".

Even something as utterly goofy can have an unexpected joy, such as an episode abruptly opening up with a parody of the ending of Casablanca (1942), of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman on the airplane strip, but imaging Alexander Lucard as a Nazi vampire and still shot in black-and-white. All the bad aspects - its repetition, lack of threat and many lame plots hastily covered - are a huge detriment and why I hesitated to get through the episodes. Yet there was so much to admire, to the point I nonetheless gain a fondness for the show, like a friend who visited occasionally.

[Major Spoiler] After many episodic episodes, Dracula does at least have an ending. It includes an odd science fiction aspect, which using a gap in the space-time continuum, there is such a thing as "Dracula's space hole" (stealing that joke fully from the Cancelled Too Soon podcast, about cancelled one season shows where I first learnt of this series²). There is a major shift as, with their mother planning to take them back to the United States and Sophie joining them, there would have been a drastic location shift for a second season alongside Gustav entering the space hole, a blue void, with Dracula and Klaus. [Spoilers End]

It is a show which worked on a low budget, though to its credit it was shot in Europe, with the decency to use actual European Gothic locations. Its sense of its industry in found not even just found in figures like Kirshner having a long career as a Canadian actress, but how some episodes are directed by Allan King, a filmmaker of documentaries like Warrendale (1967) who has a following for some, even gracing the Criterion label of film releases to show his reputation, but here working as a journeyman on this Canadian family friendly production among other shows he worked on much later in his career. Again, this is not a great show ultimately, but it has a charm. Whether that is just because of how long it took to watch the series, digging into my thoughts, or with actual virtues is fifty-fifty in the end. Those pleasures were there whilst the experience lasted though.

 

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1) And contrary to all these years believing a schnitzel was a type of sausage, out of ignorance, it is actually cutlets of meat usually breaded and fried, the equivalent which makes every German stereotype of them liking schnitzel also even more out of place and weird let alone offensive. I mean, yes, I am sure you could put a cutlets in a bun, but now knowing what a schnitzel is thanks to this show really makes the particular stereotype of Germans weirder, that someone choose a dish of theirs more practical to eat on a dish with sauces as a way to label Germans as one note.

2) HERE.