Sucked Up By The Meatheads

MOVIES

Sucked Up By The Meotheods

by Henry Edwords

This may look like somebody’s idea of a good time, but who goes to Atlanta just for a bite on the neck? Not Henry Edwards.

DRACULA Directed by Freddie Francis (Cinernation)

Since I had volunteered to go to Atlanta, I did not feel it was my privilege to complain about visiting one of this fair city’s least distinctive shopping centers. Atlanta shopping centers, however, even if they do have a local movie theatre tucked into the center of their gut, are not among the eight wonders of the world. Atlantans, though, are wondrous. They will eagerly take to a promotion, smiling, grinning, and applauding, whenever the newsreel cameras are thrust in their direction. Today, they are smiling, grinning, and applauding because a new film, Son of Dracula, is about to make its midnight debut in their local shopping center grind house and the film’s stars, Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr, are in residence to celebrate the event. Imagine Nilsson as Count Down, Dracula’s twit of a son; imagine Ringo as a decrepit and senile Merlin; imagine a film so bad it has to make its debut wedged between the Delmonte peaches and Birdseye frozen peas.

I once lived in Aspen, Colorado for the summer. Aspen had clover, fresh air, an abundance of fancy ✓ restaurants, globs of anti-semitism, and two local movie houses. One showed classy foreign imports and first-run Hollywood product. The other showed junk. Here I saw Troy Donahue eagerly insert a snorkle in his mouth; ! saw Joan Fontaine grapple with a cult of semi-nude witches behaving as if they were auditioning for the Martha Graham dance troupe. I saw Sonny and Cher attempting to have Good Times’, I saw a fabulous German dubbed-into-English sci-fi flick during which people were shrunk to cockroach size, placed in attache cases with built-in respiration units and exported to an asteroid to provide cheap slave labor. The first movie theatre showed CRAP; the second showed crappe. Son of Dracula should break all house records in Aspen’s No. 2 film house; It is Grade-A crappe of the highest order.

The film has been directed by the legendary Freddie Francis. Freddie is the dear sweet soul who sleeps in a pine box in England’s Pine wood Studio and has directed all those Tales From and Vault of horror flicks which have proved that schlock can have style. Freddie is the man who taught Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing their best steps. Freddie, however, has never directed a “rock horror” film before. He has undoubtedly learned that Nilsson is not Cushing and Ringo no Lee. Francis’ film is stupid in some places, too stupid in others, clever on occasion, and is even witty once or twice down the way. Little Bo Dullness also makes an entrance, kicking up her heels, proving again that rock stars do not automatically movie stars make.

Simply, this film tells the tale of Dracula fils who comes to life and decides that he’d rather drink Coke than blood. An entire netherworld, including everyone’s fave rave monsters, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man et. al, and a collection of dwarfs and spastics conjured up by a makeup department that must have been in heat, prays that Count Down will become its king. Because of — you guessed it — love, Down demurs. He has his fangs pulled by a kindly M.D. (or is it vet?) who also purifies his blood. Along the way, he also sits down at a piano whenever one is available and knocks out a Nilsson tune accompanied by a standard rock band that seems to have stumbled into Dracula’s lair after a hard night at the Speakeasy, These musical interludes will never be compiled in a That’s Entertainment of contemporary musical movies. Harry Nilsson is no Esther Williams.

Yes, the editing, color, and photography are crisp, but this crispness does not disguise the fact that the film’s stars cannot act. Harry acts as if he were a night student at a community college who tried out for a production of The Diary of Anne Frank, not because he wanted to reveal a talent for emoting but because he thought this was the only way he could meet girls and get laid. Ringo’s performance, on the other hand, seems to have nothing to do with getting laid. How can one think about sex when one is having tremendous difficulty remembering lines? One can’t scold Ringo too badly though; he has always been adored because of his goodnatured ineptness.

And that’s the crux of the whole thing. If Harry and Ringo had announced that they were spending $800,000 to film a jerking off contest, and then invited the world to join in the revel, it would be one thing. But these kids are dead earnest. They don’t know film; they don’t know acting. What they do know is that they are superstars and therefore, can do what they like. Fine! But don’t expect the world to automatically respond.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE ROLLING STONES Directed by Rollin Binzer (Musifilm/Chesco — Bingo/Butterfly)

%Ladies and Gentlemen the Rolling Stones ” is a film concert rather than a concert film, this distinction being that while most films of concerts cover an event, this film is the event. In the tradition of all great road shows, the film will play only consecutive limited engagements in individual cities, carrying with it its own self-sufficient unit of equipment and personnel. The use of quadraphonic sound in the film, i.e., the re-creation of the atmosphere at an actual Stones concert with sight, sound, and excitement, equivalent to front row center.

from the press kit

First of all, it’s nothing like being at a Stones concert. To go to see this movie, you didn’t have to send a postcard in and hope you lucked out enough in the lottery to be able to purchase four tickets at about eight dollars apiece. You haven’t been planning this for months, the time you will arrive, or the drugs you will take. It hasn’t been two or three years since you were last in the same cavernous stockyard as the Stones, and if it has been that long, too bad, because they’re not here now either. You don’t have to keep telling yourself “It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie” because that much is obvious to anyone who can find his or her way to the popcorn stand.

Ladies and Gentlemen is like watching the Stones through a microscope, and some of it is fascinating. Mick is wearing glitter eyelashes, his only compromise with glitter culture. During “Sweet Virginia,” we see drops of sweat all over Jagger’s face, and the glitter seems to wash away. We note that Mick Taylor moves even less than Bill Wyman, if that’s possible.

We also get a peek at the constant banter between Mick and Keith that sustains both of them, but I sense it’s Keith who Mick leans on more. It’s especially noticeable in the first few songs: “Brown Sugar,” “Bitch,”

“Gimme Shelter” and “Dead Flowers,” until we get to “Happy.” That song is basically Keith’s vehicle, as he does the lead vocals, with Mick singing back-up at first, then alternate lines, and occasionally, it becomes a dogfight around the mike, open mouths battling for terrain. It looks great up close, the performance here is fabulous, and Mick shows he knows it: tongue darts quickly in and out of his mouth, he becomes his own logo. He seems to know that, and he grins.

The combination of the visual and the mammoth speaker systems make for further insights. One can actually clearly understand a line or two from “Tumbling Dice” by the combined efforts of lip reading and clear, blasting sound. The occasional shots of Charlie Watts show him to be as effortless as he is brilliant: - clearly, he is the glue that holds the sound of the band together.

After “All Down the Line,” we get to see Mick toast the audience with a big swig of Jack Daniels, but it’s not until the next to last song, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” that we get to see the audience.

And that’s the catch, because not seeing the audience drastically changes the perceptions about who and what the Rolling Stones are. For 90% of this movie, one has to fight a detachment that would never enter the question if one were listening to a Stones album at loud volume, with no visual at all, or if one were really at a Stones concert, with at least five and maybe more senses totally committed.

Picture it as a mutated “In Concert” program, crossed with decent heavyweight championship fight on closed circuit tv, and you get some idea. For all that we get to see the process of Mick getting turned on by The audience and feeding back, the Stories might as well have been on a vacant studio lot, with canned applause mixed into the soundtrack at a later date.

Gimme Shelter showed the Stones to be not merely rnortal, but downright ineffective when the freneticism of 1969 proved to be beyond their control. In the relative safety of 1973, the Stones were still capable of exerting the kind of authority that makes them the most compelling live act in rock ’n’ roll.

Without the audience, though, Jagger is prancing, Keith mugging, Bill Wyman grimacing into a vacuum. And that’s what keeps a really good idea for a music movie from being what it could have been.

Wayne Robins