Serial of the Month: The Curse of Dracula
Back when I first started to periodically created ficitional What If…. serials and had the Universal monsters star in my debut effort, it never occurred to me that this segment of the short lived Cliffhangers! TV show might have been an influence on that work. Stands to reason, a cliffhanger of monster hunters fighting the king of the vampires just fires off the imagination doesn’t it?
The Curse of Dracula (1979) starts with Chapter 6 so as to apparently get us into the action that much quicker. In a novel bit that was never used in the original classic serials, Dracula (Michael Nouri) narrates the recap as if he is making an entry into his personal journal. He is living and working his machinations in the modern ’70’s LA, where he is being hunted by Kurt Van Helsing (Stephen Johnson), the great grand son of the Count’s nemesis from the Stoker novel, and Mary Gibbons (Carol Baxter).
They trace one of his coffins to an old barn and plan to destroy it, making one less sanctuary for the monster. But it turned out to be a trap and Dracula sets the barn on fire. Trapped in the burning structure, the two resourceful vampire hunters use the Count’s own coffin to batter open the bolted door and escape to safety. Later back at Kurt’s university office, they manage to decipher a cryptic comment Dracula had made and uncover that he is teaching a night school course in European history at the same college Kurt teaches at (talk a bout chutzpah!).
Mary uses a fake name and infiltrates the class. After the class, Dracula takes some of his class out, including Mary. Kurt follows. Eventually the class ends up at an estate in the hills where Dracula reveals he knows Mary’s real name. Mary tops him by disclosing that she has been tracking him down to revenge herself for Dracula killing her mother.
This little tiid bit makes him want her even more than he originally did when she showed up in his class, nothing like a little hate to get the juices pumping, and starts to stalk her. Mary whips out a cross and gets away from the vampire only to discover that the classmates who had come along are Dracula’s slaves and they easily catch her. Dracula take her upstairs to a bedroom where he prepares to put the bite on her. Right before popping out his fangs, Dracula tells Mary not to count on Kurt coming to the rescue, he has already been taken care of.
Meanwhile Kurt is rushing along the mountain road to get to the estate in time to help Mary if she needs it, not knowing that his car has been sabotaged. Fuel has been leaking into the engine, which ignites from the heat and sets the front of the car on fire. Seconds later the car explodes….
Of the three segments on Cliffhangers! this one was probably the most adult oriented, it was also more horror than action, befiting it’s subject matter, coming off as more an updating of Dark Shadows than a Republic or Universal cliffhanger. The story’s structure also allowed it to be edited into two interconnected but stand alone TV movies, The World of Dracula and The Loves of Dracula.
The serial has a romantic subtext as the villain changes from just wanting to convert the heroine into a vampire to wanting her to be his bride, a motivation that is further complicated when the heroine’s mother, played by Louise Sorel, shows up as a vampire, and former lover of Dracula, who wants to destroy him and prevent her daughter from sharing her own fate. Added into this is the fact that the hero has also fallen in love with the heroine (ah melodrama!).
An interesting addition to the vampire myths put forth in this version is that a person who is bitten doesn’t automatically become a vampire, he needs to administer three bites to accomplish the deed. This allows Dracula to kill victims and not have to worry about dealing with a new vampire on the scene, and adds added suspense for the heroine as she has to keep from getting that final fatal bite that would condemn her to being undead. An added complication is that after each bite she sinks further and further under his influence, making that final bite more and more certain. Which also adds impetus to the hero’s attempts to defeat the villain.
The acting is all pretty good. Stephen Johnson is adequate as the hero, he isn’t going to set the world on fire acting wise but he make for a strong hero, and really sells the fear he is supposed to be experiencing in such cliffhangers and being buried alive or hanging from a railing over a high drop onto some broken spikes.
Carol Baxter starts off as kind of colorless, but as the serial progresses she gets to show quite a range, hate/ attraction for the villain, fear over her increasing vampirism (woman has a great hiss), and a gut wrenching scene where she is being cured at a convent and contemplates suicide. Her stand out scene is when she has to stake her own mother.
She is complimented by Louise Sorel who also gives a tortured performance as a woman who despises her existence and works hard to save her daughter, even attempting to seduce the man who creaated her. The scene were she begs her daughter to kill her is a real tear jerker.
There is an old saying that your hero is only as good as the villain he faces, and Michael Nouri is so good, he blows everybody else off the screen. He makes Dracula a romanticly tragic figure (obviously taking hints from Frank Langella’s portrayal from earlier in the year), mixed with a hint of cruelty befitting his noble status. He also uses a low key but distinctive Eastern European acent without doing a Lugosi impression.
Nouri gets some interesting scenes, such as his teaching history class and wowing a bar with his immpecable jazz piano playing. There are also some nice speeches he makes about the hardships and thrills of immortality. The best one is where the hero is hanging off that aforementioned railing and Nouri conversationally lectures him on how he doesn’t understand the burden that is being Dracula, while slowly and sadistically using his foot to knock each tightly grasping finger of the hero loose, one by one. Now that’s a villain!
This segment of Cliffhangers! has the distinction of being the only one that had the final episode broadcast in the US, it ended while the other two still had one and two episodes left to go which were t be wrapped up in the final show, but never got shown. How’s that for off putting when you’re a kid, not mention a real slap in the face for the number of loyal fans the show had at the time.
But as you see, things worked out and now all three can be enjoyed online, so, all’s well that ends well, which is the perfect sentiment for a serial.
THE CURSE OF DRACULA was so popular that NBC edited several episodes together to run as a special, DRACULA ‘79 (as a defacto pilot to see if it would do well on it’s own), and Universal Edited the serial into two features for yet another package of TV episodes of short run series edited into TV Movies.