SCOTLAND YARD VS. DR. MABUSE (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I saw the six "new Mabuse" films of the 1960s out of order, so in my review of the sixth and last in the series, I didn't follow how the filmmakers had altered the usual practice of having a star villain return again and again without significant alteration.

In my review of the film that precedes this one, TERROR OF DOCTOR MABUSE, I noted how the filmmakers chose to derive that movie's script from Fritz Lang's 1933 TESTAMENT OF DOCTOR MABUSE, which concluded his original series by having Mabuse die, though his criminal career was taken up by a doctor whom Mabuse brainwashed. TERROR closely follows that template. However, I have no memory that the film definitely stated that "sixties Mabuse" had died, so I didn't comment on that matter in the review. The fifth film in the series, however, makes this indubitably clear. Wolfgang Preiss, who had essayed the role of Mabuse in the other four films, appears in SCOTLAND only as a specter in the mind of Professor Pohland (Walter Rilla), the man who now carries out the dead super-criminal's projects. Whereas in TERROR Pohland was usually concealed by shadows. But in SCOTLAND he's very open about walking around in front of his gang-members and claiming to be Mabuse, and none of the crooks have any problems with it.

SCOTLAND was the only one of the sixties Mabuse films that adapted a published novel for the skeleton of its plot. Bryan Edgar Wallace, son of the famed British writer Edgar Wallace, had just published the second and last of his novels featuring MI-6 agent Bill Tern, and all SCOTLAND did was to make the novel's main villain a secondary figure, whose super-weapon Mabuse co-opts. Amusingly, though the German language version of SCOTLAND pronounces the novel-villain's name "George Cockston" correctly, the subtitled version I saw alter the name to "Lockston."

At any rate, New Mabuse breaks Cockston out of prison and gets hold of his marvelous invention, a mind-control ray. To be sure, the ray has range limitations, so most of Mabuse's  schemes involve sending his agents around with cameras, brainwashing people by focusing the disguised ray-devices on them. Bill Tern, here a policeman from Scotland Yard, is called to Germany to consult on the disappearance of Cockston, but he spends a great deal of time fighting Mabuse's agents and finally coming up with a means to counter the power of the devices.

At the movie's end, Pohland is captured, and he apparently does not remember the things Mabuse's hypnosis made his do. I don't believe the convolutions of "New Mabuse" are even addressed in the sixth and last film.

This entry, directed by Paul May, is an efficient but not especially compelling thriller, though it has some nice human touches one would never see in the slightly later Eurospy flicks.

THE TERROR OF DOCTOR MABUSE (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The fourth in the series of 1960s "Doctor Mabuse" films is a partial remake of Lang's 1933 TESTAMENT OF DOCTOR MABUSE, which itself was a sequel to the well lauded silent films that introduced the character.

I confess that I never saw the 1933 film more than once, and that even the review I did in 2014 was written sometime after the first viewing, mostly from memory. But I stand by my position that TESTAMENT was "a rather crabbed, one-note affair." Lang's scenario was that after Mabuse's defeat in the 1920s, he spent the next eleven years in a mental sanitarium. However, police officers become aware of a series of crimes so well planned that they recall the genius of Mabuse. The big reveal is that although Mabuse has not been able to escape his confinement, he has used his great hypnotic powers to dominate head doctor Baum. Mabuse then uses Baum as a pawn to direct his crooks to execute his crimes. While the basic idea was intriguing, and may have been a shot at the Nazi hierarchy Lang fled shortly afterward. I felt the director was a little too impressed with his own conceit and didn't develop the concept properly, to say nothing of the fact that it was a rather dull sequel.

TERROR was the only Mabuse film directed by Werner Klinger, but producer Artur Brauner probably made certain to keep this installment's level of combative action much higher than the 1933 original. TERROR does start with Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss again) imprisoned in a sanitarium, but he's only been there a few years since his incarceration at the end of INVISIBLE DOCTOR MABUSE. It's no big disclosure to state that once again the head of the sanitarium, Professor Pohland (Walter Rilla), believes that he's in control of the situation, when in fact he's become the pawn through which Mabuse engineers his criminal schemes. The organization this time is a ruthless one, and uses more uncanny gadgets to punish rebels. A member who seeks to turn informer (played by Leon Askin of "Hogan's Heroes" fame) is killed by a backward-firing pistol, and a crook who defies Pohland/Mabuse is electrocuted. (The English dub claims that the mastermind uses an "electric ray," but there's no clear depiction of such a device on screen.) 

In contrast to INVISIBLE, this entry is much improved by the return of Gert Frobe as Mabuse's determined opponent Inspector Lohmann. A touch of humor is also provided by Lohmann's young assistant, who insists of plaguing the inspector with deductions he makes based on whatever detective stories he's read. A palatable subplot, not present in the 1933 film, involves a cash-strapped young boxer who's lured into the Mabuse gang. The boxer's wife is played by a young Senta Berger, a few years before she became a familiar face in such American productions as the 1967 AMBUSHERS. 

THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS (1959)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

At the time Russ Meyer made this shoestring production, the oddball genre of the "nudie-cutie" was still in ascendance. The Hays Code still forbade the depictions of naked bodies in film, but court rulings made an exception for movies that depicted the social activities of nudist camps. Thus exploitation filmmakers whipped out a few dozen flicks in which the denizens of nudist camps gamboled about playing volleyball and other innocent activities. As long as the naked bodies weren't involved in sexual activity per se, grindhouse theaters could get away with screening such fare.

Purportedly Meyer was the first to transfer the nudie-camp experience into a modern urban environment, which would become the dominant format for 1960s sexploitation films (counterpointed somewhat by rural sex comedies). Though Meyer did get some legal pushback, TEAS made a lot of money, in part because the film didn't show any carnal activities, just like the cuties. I'm sure the titular protagonist is not the first cinematic appearance of a sexual voyeur, a fellow who likes pretty women but doesn't want to do anything but look. But the voyeur became a major figure in 1960s grindhouse productions, and Teas is, if not the first of his kind, an extremely influential type.

TEAS was also given the title of MR. TEAS AND HIS PLAYTHINGS, but the "play" exists entirely in the protagonist's mind, and it's almost entirely focused on the pleasure of looking at nude women. As in most nudie-cuties there's no dialogue-track here, just voice-over narration. But whereas the nudist-camp "documentaries" affected a professorial tone in order to justify the subject being filmed, the script for TEAS-- credited to both Meyer and narrator Edward Lasko-- intentionally burlesques such intellectual diversions, as the narrator spends a great deal of time discussing abstruse but irrelevant subjects like the origin of guitars. Teas may have been modeled on the example of popular French comedian Jacques Tati, showing how the protagonist meanders from one low-key absurd situation to another. However, whereas the narration is pretty funny, the vignettes themselves are lackluster, since their only real purpose is to place female cleavage on display.

Teas works as a deliveryman dealing in dental technology, though this is a bare excuse to send him stolidly plodding from one vignette-location to another. Most of the people he encounters are busty women, but though Teas sneaks peeks at their "peaks," he's so self-effacing that none of the females even notice his ogling. Then, something happens that breaks down some reserve on his part, and he spends the rest of the movie vividly imagining women walking around with full or partial nudity-- though without direct genital exposure.

What happens to Teas? Some reviewers had the notion that when Teas visits a dentist's office to have a sore tooth pulled, the anesthetic endowed him with the ability to see through clothes-- albeit only the clothes of gorgeous, stacked women, since Teas doesn't see through anything else. There's no evidence that any drug gave Teas X-ray vision. Yet the dental visit does serve as a demarcation point between Teas looking without daring to imagine what he can't see, and Teas suddenly feeling free enough to fantasize about what all the busty women would look like, if they were just going through their normal routines sans clothing. Possibly the advocates of the "X-ray theory" were fooled by the scene that transpires as soon as Teas leaves the dental office, for he immediately looks through a window and sees a woman un-self-consciously displaying her boobs. For the first and only time in the film, Teas goggles at the sight-- but then, for the rest of the movie, he just goes with it. One might hazard that Teas's mental transformation was meant to suggest the one that a movie-patron undergoes when he enters a movie. Said patron is initially aware of the restrictions of normal life, but as the movie makes clear that nothing bad can happen from enjoying the fantasy, the patron also just "goes with it."

At no time does Teas appear sexually turned on. His surveillance of female nudity-- mostly of the mammary-variety-- just mildly intrigues him. Only toward the end does he make anything like an attempt to get access to one of the busty beauties, in a comic bit where he tries to catch a girl with a fishing-line but only snags her bra. At two points he becomes mildly concerned about his new propensity and visits a psychiatrist. But he selects a hot lady shrink (first seen reading a book collection of the Feiffer cartooon "Sick Sick Sick"), so Teas imagines her nude as well. However, in the film's last scene he visits the shrink again, and the film ends with him ogling the naked doctor while the narrator rationalizes that "it's OK to be sick."

The visual inventiveness of Meyer's oeuvre is on full display here, particularly in the dream Teas has when he's under the anesthetic. The standard "whirling dissolve" as Teas falls asleep becomes a scene in which the dentist is powering his drill by pumping a wheeled device with his foot to generate electricity. Meanwhile patient Teas reclines in the dentist's chair, significantly holding his straw boater over his genitals, while to one side stands the dentist's big-breasted nurse-- but for the first time, Teas imagines her fully nude. One might say that the whole dental experience breaks down Teas's reserve, so that he can fantasize freely. There's one bit of metaphenomenal imagery in the dental dream, for the tooth that gets removed looks big enough to fit some dinosaur's mouth. But this is such a piddling fantasy that it falls within the sphere of the naturalistic.

THEY CALL HER CLEOPATRA WONG (1976)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

CLEOPATRA WONG, almost certainly named as an associative tie-in to the American CLEOPATRA JONES films of 1973 and 1975, managed to surpass their model in that the titular heroine of this Filipino-Singaporean went on to two more exploits.

Cleopatra is played by Marrie Lee, a young woman who won the role despite no substantial previous acting-experience. Lee plays an Interpol agent based in Singapore, though she travels to both Hong Kong and the Philippines in her quest to shut down a counterfeiting ring. Like her American forbear, she gets to sashay around in glamorous outfits and easily fight off any thugs sent to stifle her investigation. In WONG's most memorable scene, Cleo infiltrates the compound of one of her enemies, and the crime-lord forces her to fight three burly male wrestlers. When Cleo bests them all with no sweat, the boss sends about twenty judo students after her. Naturally, as in most similar chopsockies, the students don't rush Cleo en masse but considerately fight her one at a time and get clobbered. When things look a little too hot, Cleo simply runs to an adjoining wall, at least twenty feet tall, and leaps straight up to the top in order to escape.

Despite this feat, Cleo never displays any other "superlative skills," so I don't count her as belonging to that department. However, she does have a couple of uncanny weapons. An online review describes her rifle as a "supergun," and, as seen in the illustration above, the firearm has two big barrels, which image might have been a play on Dirty Harry's big-barreled Magnum. A gun with two big barrels might not be the most practical weapon for a female agent. Even less so is the weapon she uses to take out an enemy helicopter: an arrow with three explosive heads. which doesn't sound very good in terms of aerodynamics.

There's no attempt to spotlight a mastermind responsible for the counterfeiting operation, so Marrie Lee is essentially the only character to watch here, even toward the end when she brings in some backup to help her raze a nunnery taken over by phony nuns. I seem to remember that both of the sequels are better in terms of both stunts and support characters, but time will tell.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though in my review of the 1963 quasi-remake of this film I lavished high praise on the Whale version, I found being less laudatory after re-watching the 1932 HOUSE. 

One basic statement must be put forth: Whale almost certainly made the best of all the "old dark house" movies-- which I suppose comes down to a modern-day, Americanized version of the so-called "rational Gothics" from Europe. The only contender that comes to mind would be Paul Leni's THE CAT AND THE CANARY, which of course has the disadvantage of being a silent film. To be sure, a lot of "odh" films don't have the advantage of being based on a well-regarded book, and though I don't imagine I'll ever read Priestly's BENIGHTED, I've heard it said that HOUSE is an accurate adaptation. HOUSE feels a good deal more "literary" than most "odh" movies, which bestows a certain special merit on the Whale effort.

So we have three groups come together at an old dark house because of a driving rainstorm. A married couple, the Wavertons (Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart), and their friend Pendleton (Melvyn Douglas) take shelter at the isolated mansion of the Femm family. These eccentric aristocrats are initially represented by just the mansion's owner Rebecca (Eva Moore) and her brother Horace (Ernest Thesiger), though they also have a single visible servant, their butler Morgan (Boris Karloff). Viewers will eventually see a couple more weirdos rattling around in the mansion, but for the first half hour these are the only three characters the newcomers meet at the Old Dark House. Then, after an interval in which the innocent bystanders do their best to adjust to the weird habits of their hosts, two more refugees from the storm intrude on the Femm peace: Sir William (Charles Laughton) and his traveling companion Gladys (Lillian Bond). 

The mystery of the Femm house is, what's made the Femms so squirrelly? We're not talking overt weirdness, a la The Addams Family; it's just that the Femms seem "off" in regard to socialization. Possibly the original novel had more overtones of class struggle, but one can't find any such rationalizations coming from the script's two writers, one of whom had collaborated with Whale on his WATERLOO BRIDGE while the other had contributed to Whale's 1930 JOURNEY'S END. I feel sure that some political pundits have reveled in the director's apparent "deconstruction" of heterosexual families, on the theory that Whale was a homosexual with a grudge against "normalcy." But this political aspect also seems absent. If anything, the script for HOUSE seems more like an anticipation of the moral attributed (however accurately) to Sartre's 1944 play NO EXIT: "Hell is other people."

Not a whole lot happens in HOUSE. The mute Morgan regards Mrs. Waverton with open lust and seems frequently on the verge of attacking her. However, this threat doesn't really become a major problem until the last third of the film, when Morgan and Mister Waverton come to blows. Much more attention is given to the way the droll Penderel becomes infatuated with Gladys, who reveals that she really is just a non-romantic companion to the wealthy Sir William, who despite being the film's comic relief has a somewhat tragic backstory. The film's latter section also introduces the other two Femms. The first is the 102-year-old father of Horace and Rebecca, who has one extended scene in his sick-bed talking with the visitors but not really saying all that much. The second is insane brother Saul, who is a male version of "the madwoman in the attic," kept under constant guard because of his propensity for setting things on fire. 

Is Saul the reason for the Femms' terminal weirdness? I don't think his presence explains very much, though again, the novel may offer more clues on the subject. But going purely on what the film tells us, the script seems to be playing games with the audience, teasing viewers with a deep dark secret that will never be revealed. I'm familiar with one comic-Gothic film, the 1995 COLD COMFORT FARM, that exploited such a reticence for humorous effect. But in HOUSE, the non-secret doesn't really have any deeper context-- which is also the case with Whale's gimmick of having the elderly Femm patriarch played by fifty-something character actress Elspeth Dudgeon under a ton of beard- makeup.

HOUSE also doesn't do much with Boris Karloff, who had scored the previous year in Whale's FRANKENSTEIN, much to do beyond lurking about and getting into one big fight. I suspect there was some notion that he was the "Evil Id" of the eccentric aristocrats, but if he's a part of the Big Secret, the script doesn't really deliver any intriguing suggestions. On the whole, HOUSE feels like a rather affected play, but given all the cinematic advantages of varied camera angles and greater facility with set-mounting. I may have called it a classic in the past, but now I just think it's a watchable movie with some good touches and comparative misfires.

I assume the movie ends as the novel does, without the sort of hyper-dramatic "destruction of the corrupt house" that we see both in Poe's USHER and in Whale's slightly later BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. In the end, the Femm house is mostly unchanged from the influence of its visitors, much as the infernal domain remains pretty much the same no matter who passes through it.

INDEPENDENT'S DAY (2016), NAZIS AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (2012)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

Most of the mockbusters from The Asylum Studio are studies in soulless imitation, but INDEPENDENT'S DAY goes the extra two-and-a-half feet, compounding its idiocies with a meaningless pun-title, just in order to coast off the INDEPENDENCE DAY sequel of the same year.

Both the original blockbuster and its underwhelming sequel were at least competent dumb space opera, but the script for INDEPENDENT'S can't even keep up the semblance of superficial logic. This time when the aliens come calling, they almost immediately blow up the White House. Sounds like an automatic call to arms, right? Nope, AFTER doing so, the aliens claim that they have a beneficent plan to evacuate Earthlings to save them from a catastrophe. 

This state of affairs leads to lots of actors (largely unknowns) standing around desks and arguing about the best course of action, particularly in the scenes with the nominal "hero" of the story, American President Raney (Fay Gauthier). Occasional airborne skirmishes between alien craft and Earth planes keep the tedium from being complete, but it's impossible to tell if any of the performers can act, since the dialogue is so dire and ordinary. Oh, and there are a few moments of CGI animation at the conclusion, when Asylum finally tosses a few bucks for the forgettable revelation of the aliens' physical appearance. And how do the lowly humans defeat the superior alien tech? Oh, I don't know.. could it be... A CYBER-HACK...???

            

But though Asylum deserves almost every brickbat tossed at it, they managed to hit a (possibly accidental?) homer with NAZIS AT THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. Lacking any background info about the film's production, I'll venture that, rather than trying to riff on existing major productions, the movie was pitched as a DTV with a spoofy sounding title like a few hundred others on streaming TV.

Despite a limited budget and a shoot-time of four months, writer Paul Bales and director Joseph J. Lawson delivered a high-octane adventure into lunacy. Lawson's IMDB page mentions several influences, but the one that rules over NAZIS is probably that of Sam Raimi, given the story's insistence on souping up even the most minor incidents with a hyper-active camera. Though in other reviews I've opined that visual effects pros often don't make good directors, Lawson delivers the goods here.

A team of researchers in Antarctica, led by the suspiciously named Doctor Riestag (Jake Busey), investigate a mysterious declivity in the ice, they'd abducted by heavily masked soldiers and taken beneath the ice. There they learn that a small band of Nazis has formed a super-scientific civilization for the purpose of conquering the world. Most if not all of the Nazis are actual survivors of World War II, their lives artificially prolonged by their science, albeit with the undesirable effect of giving them all zombie-flesh. Their temporal leader is the historical Nazi scientist Joseph Mengele, though their hidden leader is Hitler himself, who in FUTURAMA fashion has had his head transplanted onto a robot body.

Lawson and Bales strike just the right note of sustained lunacy, as the imprisoned scientists attempt to undermine the invasion plans. There's one problematic exception, for this Mengele indulges in just as many hideous experiments as his original model, and that means some gory operating-table moments. Some might find that the gore distracts from the sort of wackiness one might expect of other Naziploitation fare, such as the venerable THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN. All I can say is that the grossout scenes were too brief to bother me. The nice-guy protagonists succeed for the most part, but for one last thrill, the last couple of survivors have to figure out a way to beat Robot Hitler in a compelling climax. (All that said, neither NAZIS nor INDEPENDENT'S rates as a combative film.)

THE BLOODTHIRSTY TRILOGY (1970-74)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Though I'm utilizing the same "umbrella title" seen on a DVD collection of these three Japanese vampire films, I re-watched all three separately on streaming, so this is not a review of the DVD package.

There's no shared internal continuity between the trio, only a common marketing strategy: an attempt by Toho Studios to mimic some aspects of Hammer Studio's vampire movies. All three films were directed by Michio Yamamoto and co-written by Ei Ogawa, so that all three films also share the authors' attempt to translate the mythology of the European vampire into the context of Japanese culture.

While all three films deliver the goods in terms of basic vampire thrills, as hybridizations between Eastern and Western horror-tropes they're all failures. This may be because, even before the advent of cinema, Japanese culture had a very rich tradition of scary stories, and Japanese cinema of the post-WWII era was not slow to exploit that propensity in attention-getting "art-films" like the 1953 UGETSU. By contrast, a country that had no strong horror-traditions in literature or cinema-- and here I'm thinking of Italy-- found it comparatively easy to mine the mythoi found in England and Germany and produce films strong with supernatural-Gothic associations. 

First up is THE VAMPIRE DOLL, also known as LEGACY OF DRACULA (though none of the films contains a character comparable to Dracula, in the grand tradition of Hammer's BRIDES OF DRACULA). The basic structure is the old chestnut wherein a monster kills someone's relative and that someone spends the movie trying to figure out who's covering up the relation's disappearance, and why. In this case, a man named Kazuhiko, out of the country for some months, goes to a small village looking for his girlfriend Yuko. Shortly after Yuko's mother tells the young fellow that Yuko was killed in an accident, the viewer sees Kazuhiko attacked by a weird female figure. The audience rightly suspects that Kazuhiko's gone for good, but when his sister Keiko and her boyfriend Hiroshi investigate, the late Yuko's mother tells them that the brother left on his own. 

Nevertheless, the duo hang around the area, talking to the locals about suspicious disappearances in the area. One of the script's best fake-outs takes place when the protagonists consult with the local doctor, who claims to be a man of science but claims that he's seen real supernatural phenomena in the past. A Japanese Van Helsing, the reader may well think. But no, he's part of a conspiracy that made the missing Yuko into a predacious vampire-- albeit one who never fangs her victims, but rather cuts victims' throats with a knife and then drinks the blood. The backstory emphasizes that before her quasi-death Yuko had a great deal of anger at events in her life, and my first thought was that Yuko was more in the vein (pun intended) of a Japanese "angry ghost." The doctor used a form of hypnosis to keep injured Yuko alive because he's actually (ta da!) her secret father, but in due time it turns out he's not able to control the "vampire doll" he created. (There's a loose symbolic connection between undead Yuko and a doll that was immured in her grave, but it's not particularly compelling.) The greatest attraction here is the gruesome makeup for the Asian blood-drinker.

Psychologically LAKE OF DRACULA, which quickly followed the box-office success of DOLL, is a little more layered. As in DOLL the director teases the audience with a protagonist's encounter with a horror, but quickly cuts away from identification and lets the rest of the film fill in the blank spaces. This time the protagonist is a child, Akiko, who follows her fugitive dog into a old house near the titular lake. What happens to Akiko, and how does she escape to become mature young woman Akiko? She herself does not recall, having suppressed the experience, though she still has uneasy quasi-memories. On the whole her life with her doctor-boyfriend Takashi seems stable, though Akiko's younger sister Natsuko constantly chides her onee-san, showing signs of covetousness toward Akiko's beloved and trying to embarrass her in one way or another.

It's eventually revealed that one of the beings in the old house was a vampire, and that after he tried to vampirize little Akiko his non-vampiric father imprisoned the unnamed bloodsucker. Some time Akiko has reached adulthood, Lake-Dracula breaks free, kills his dad, and decides he wants Akiko to be his bride. But he vents his thirst on other victims first, and in the tradition of Stoker's count one of his first converts to vampirism is envious Natsuko, the "Lucy Westenra" of the story. 

The monster-ization of Natsuko is much more interesting than the vaguely delineated backstory of Lake-Dracula. While Doctor Boyfriend stolidly investigates the remains of persons slain by blood loss, Akiko has to undergo a sort of anamnesis, a recollection not only of her brush with vampirism but the way in which the near-catastrophe affected her relationship with her parents, who made her their favorite and thus inculcated Natsuko's invidious feelings toward her elder sister. The psychological connection feels tenuous, but it's no worse than one gets from one of Yamamoto's purported influences, since Alfred Hitchcock gave viewers an equally strained psychological wrap-up in 1945's SPELLBOUND. The mystery gets wrapped after Lake-Dracula is slain and Natsuko succumbs to the grave, allowing Akiko and Doctor Boyfriend to return to normal.

EVIL OF DRACULA, released roughly three years after LAKE, is the most ambitious of the three, in part because the script practically broadcasts its intention to transport European vampire-tropes into a Japanese context, via a European Christian who's stranded in Japan of the 1700s.

But of course the film begins by setting its mystery in modern-day Japan of the 1970s. Shiraki, a young teacher of psychology, accepts a position at an all-girls school in a remote Japanese village. But Shiraki's advent is given a grisly accompaniment; the wife of the school's (unnamed) principal dies in a car accident. The principal chooses to keep his wife's corpse at the school, ostensibly to grieve, but this is only a slight oddity next to the principal's disclosure that he plans to groom Shiraki to be his replacement, despite Shiraki's lack of experience.

Since Shiraki's a good looking young dude, three of the young ladies are pleased at his installment. However, from conversation with them the new teacher learns that the girls aren't so pleased when a spooky language teacher watches them afar. Shiraki talks to the man, who shows European leanings when he quotes Baudelaire. Shiraki also learns that one female student has mysteriously disappeared, and he has a weird dream about being attacked by two female specters, one of whom he associates with the principal's dead wife.

Fortunately for Shiraki, a local doctor has compiled a history of weird old legends of the region, and this time, the helpful physician really does serve as Van Helsing Lite. According to legend, a Christian priest was shipwrecked on a nearby shore. However, some locals persecuted the priest for his foreign religion, torturing him until he renounced his faith and spat on his cross. This blasphemy, loosely comparable to a similar vampire-genesis in BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, transforms the European into a bloodsucker, one who abducts a local Japanese woman and converts her to vampirism too. In yet another departure from European tropes, the duo learn how to take on new forms, so the European morphs into a Japanese man, who eventually takes the job of girls' school principal in order to have access to nubile females. (The language teacher is more or less the principal's "Renfield.")

With the help of Kumi, a student who has a strong romantic interest in Shiraki, the teacher unearths the vampires' depredations-- which somehow involve putting flowers in the rooms of prospective victims. If this visual trope was given an explanation I must have missed it, though given the mention of Baudelaire I suspect this was a learned reference to the poet's most famous (and horror-tinged) poetry collection, FLOWERS OF EVIL. There's a lengthy fight between Shiraki and the principal while the reborn principal's wife tries to fang Kumi, and of course the vampires are defeated and the potential romance of teacher and student is left as an open possibility. In one other respect these three Nipponese vampire-flicks resemble a lot of Hammer films, for in both sets of films the female protagonists are almost entirely incapable of defending themselves, even at the most basic level.