SHORT TAKES

SHORT TAKES

ADMIT ONE

BLOOD FOR DRACULA (Bryanston):: This latest Warhol chopathon is both funnier and an entrail less gory than Frankenstein, which also suffered by a certain stiff prolixity (people riding around in carriages, etc.) that Dracula manages to circumvent with plenty of genuinely humorous dialog and the best mugging (facial variety) seen in any recent film. Udo Keir grimaces with fangs like chrome and retches up blood magnificently, all the women are classically beautiful horny zombies with filmy gowns falling off of them, and Joe D’Allesandro is even better as a Communist than an impotent junkie. In fact he is such a wry nonentity that he easily eclipses the tiresomely solemn Bronson, Eastwood and even Joe Don Baker to become truly larger than life and the New American Hero we have all been awaiting for so long. The scene where Joe fucks the 14 year old virgin up against the wall and then Dracula licks the blood from her hymen off the floor is alone worth the price of admission, and the audience I was with was lapping it up with such noisy gusto that I felt like I was twelve and at the Saturday afternoon matinee all over again.

Lester Bangs

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Paramount):: Agatha Christie’s befuddled detective Hercule Poirot is pitted against a train-full of could-be murderers in Sidney Lumet’s delightfully droll version of Murder On The Orient Express. Movie mystery buffs will be both challenged and amused before reaching some truly bizarre conclusions about who-dun-wot-and-why. Screenwriter Paul Dehn has his fun too, twisting sterotyped characters into meaty roles custom-made for his gallery of stars. Tony Perkins has a ball as a nervous Nellie (ala Psycho) while Lauren Bacall sinks her teeth into a tough-as-nails bitch portrayal. Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Richard Widmark and Ingrid Bergman all join in the skullduggery and are topped only by Albert Finney’s captivatingly amusing performance as Poirot. Brain-teasing fun for mystery maniacs both young and old.

Ed Naha

THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (TaylorLaughlin):: The Trial of Billy Jack is a vanity project and like that other recent vanity project — George C, Scott’s The Savage Is Loose — there’s a Nile of pretension and not even a modest stream of intelligence. Both films will wash away your patience because both are hugely boring. There was a rambunctious liveliness in Billy Jack which kept one interested even when the movie got silly and strained and implausible, but in Trial lectures have replaced improvisation and there are arid stretches of empty liberal rhetoric. Tom Laughlin, when he’s relaxed, is fun to watch, reminiscent of George Segal at his best; when he’s pious, however, he’s lethally dull. Dolores Taylor (Laughlin’s real life wife) was moving and strong in Billy Jack but in this film she’s a dishrag, dripping with platitudes. They’re both crippled by the ghastly script, but after all, they wrote it. They can’t blame their director; Frank Laughlin, their son, directed it. Artistic incest can breed the greatest insanity of all, and The Trial of Billy Jack is almost worth a chapter in Kraft-Ebbing.

James Wolcott