While we've enjoyed our last several movies, we've been hoping for something with a little more substance. Tonight we got it, with an obscure but very well made film called "The Vampire"(1957). As the movie opens, Dr. Campbell, a research scientist, is working in his lab inside an old Victorian house in Culver City. It looks like the kind of place where Anthony Perkins would feel at home. A delivery boy rides up on his bike with a package for Campbell, but he doesn't answer the door. The kid then enters to find him nearly passed out at his desk. "Get Dr. Beecher", he whispers.
Paul Beecher (John Beal) is a physician who also works out of his house, a couple of blocks away. He's a widower with an adolescent daughter (Lydia Reed) who dotes on him, and a knockout nurse (Colleen Gray) who mans the living room lobby. When the delivery boy comes running, Beecher leaves immediately for Dr. Campbell's house. Campbell is on his deathbed by this point. Just before he dies, he hands Beecher a small bottle. "It's the pills, Paul. Take them away from me"!
It turns out that Dr. Campbell was engaged in animal experiments, as we can see by the cages that line his laboratory. Dr. Beecher notices that all the critters are dead, except a cage full of bats.
The next day, two new researchers are sent to replace Dr. Campbell. One, "Dr. Beaumont" (Dabbs Greer), is a psychologist. The other, "Henry Winston" (the great James Griffith) is a zoologist like Campbell. Dr. Beecher knows Beaumont, and inquires about the nature of the research. "Oh, we'll be picking up where Dr. Campbell left off. He was studying the effects of a serum on the various animals he kept here. It was intended to regress them to their most primitive behavioral states, sort of a way to reverse the process of evolution. But as you can see, something went wrong".
I have to butt in to say : "Hmmm, haven't we heard the same thing in a recent movie"? Was it "The Neanderthal Man"? I think so, haha.
At any rate, Dr. Beecher finds the whole thing curious, but he has his own practice to attend to, so he heads home. Later that evening, feeling the onset of a migraine, he calls to his daughter in the next room : "Betsy, would you please bring me my headache pills? They're in my coat pocket over by the door". She does this and he swallows his pill. "There, that should help". Betsy is glad, she loves her father and takes good care of him. "I hope you feel better Daddy. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes". But by dinner time, he's only feeling worse. It's not just a headache; he feels dizzy and rotten all over. When he starts moaning, Nurse Carol rushes in. She has him rest for the remainder of the evening.
The next morning, Dr. Beecher is informed that one of his patients died during the night. "Marion Wilkins? Oh, I was afraid of that. She had a heart condition. I was supposed to see her this morning". But then he gets a call from the local Sheriff, suggesting it was not a routine death. "Hello, Paul? Yes, I'd like you to come over to the morgue right away. There's something very unusual about the body, I want your opinion". Beecher knows everyone in town, it seems, including his old pal Sheriff Donnelly (Kenneth Tobey). At the morgue, an attendant (Paul Brinegar aka "Wishbone" on "Rawhide") wheels out the corpse of Marion Wilkins. "You say she had a heart condition"?, asks the Sheriff.
"Yes, that's correct".
"Could that in any way account for the loss of blood in her body"?
"How much blood"?
"Every drop".
Of course, no heart condition could cause such a thing. If I had been Beecher, I'd have said "could it have been a Vampire"?, because that seems the most obvious conclusion, but Beecher doesn't say that. He's a Man of Science and doesn't believe in such things, not at the moment anyway. The blood loss remains a mystery. Sheriff Donnelly continues to investigate. Dr. Beecher returns home feeling worse than ever. When he gets there, he pops another migraine pill, but once again it only worsens his condition. He checks the bottle, then checks his coat pocket, where he finds........his bottle of migraine pills.
Oh man. Holy Smokes and Great Jumpin' Jiminy, what the hell has he been taking? This is decidedly not good. He calls his daughter into the room : "Betsy? Do you remember last night, when I asked you to get me my pills? Is this the bottle you brought"?
"I think so, Daddy". Poor Betsy is mortified. The bottles look exactly the same. Neither is labeled. Beecher has a sudden realisation. The pills he's been taking are the ones Dr. Campbell gave to him before he died! OMG! Now he's feverish and in agony. "Oh, Daddy I'm so sorry. Please don't me mad at me". "It's okay, Honey. Just let me rest now and I'll see you in the morning". But in the morning, the news comes down that there's been a murder at the laboratory. Henry Winston, the zoologist, is dead and the place is trashed. I have to butt in again to say, "why did you hire the great James Griffith if you weren't gonna use him"? I mean, he's playing a very interesting character here. You've seen Griffith a million times, he's a tall skinny guy with sharp features who usually plays bad guys in Westerns. But this time, he's a quiet, mysterious animal researcher who wears shades, even in the dark laboratory, because of a radiation accident that ruined his eyesight. All that character development, and then they go and kill him off. Right when you're beginning to wonder if he's the Vampire. I don't understand it, but then, I'm not the freakin' director.
Anyhow, as upset as Beecher is by Griffith's murder, he's equally worried about the content of the pills he's been taking. Worst of all, he's now hooked. He keeps the bottle with him at all times. Back at the lab, he talks to to Dr. Beaumont, the psychologist. "Doctor, just before Campbell died, he handed me a bottle of pills. Then he said something strange, 'take them away from me', as if they were what killed him. Do you know what they were for"?
"Yes, Paul. Campbell was using them on the test animals. They contain the serum I told you about, the regression formula. Why do you ask"?
"Because I've been taking them myself, by mistake".
"Oh, Paul.....that's bad, very bad. They're made from the hormones of Vampire Bats, the ones right here in these cages. Have you still got the pills? Throw them away immediately"!
But it's too late for that. Beecher will get very sick if he stops taking the pills, so sick he might die like Dr. Campbell. But if he continues to take them........what then? And what about these deaths? What about the blood loss in Marion Wilkins? The body of James Griffith can't be examined because the killer dumped him in the lab's incinerator, but Beecher imagines they'd have found the same thing : a total loss of blood. He's tormented by thinking he could've done this.
First, he tries confessing to Dr. Beaumont. "I'm the one who killed Griffith. It's those pills - they changed me! I probably killed Mrs. Wilkins, too. Doctor you've got to help me! I can't quit taking them, the withdrawal would mean death"! Beaumont tells him it's all in his mind : "Look Paul, the serum didn't turn you into a murderer. It might be making you ill, but it would have no psychological effect on a human being. Go home and rest, allow your body to detoxify". But Beecher knows that won't be the end result.
In a last ditch attempt, he enlists Nurse Carol to help him. First, he arranges for his daughter to go stay with relatives. Betsy is heartbroken (their "goodbye" scene has real pathos). Then, he tells Carol the same thing he told Dr. Beaumont : "I'm the one they're looking for. I killed Henry Winston, and likely Mrs. Wilkins, too. I need your help, or it'll happen again. It's these pills! I need you to to hold them for me. But I also need you to stay with me tonight, to make sure I don't get sick"! That's a pretty tall order for Nurse Carol, but she's loyal to Dr. Beecher so she agrees to do it. This sets up one heck of a thrilling finale, in which several things are taking place at once : The Sheriff is exhuming the body of Marion Wilkins, to test it for Vampire Bat Serum, on the theory that it has something to do with her death. Nurse Carol is sitting in an all-night restaurant with Dr. Beecher, in an effort to keep him from "turning" yet again, and Dr. Beaumont is in the lab trying to find Dr. Campbell's lost files, which might hold the key to what happened to Campbell. Did he regress himself? If so, what happened?
"The Vampire" is not your typical Dracula flick. The changeovers are more akin to "Jekyll & Hyde" once again, and the allegory to drug addition seems deliberate. As "Dr. Beecher", actor John Beal puts himself through the wringer to show his anguish, both at his own predicament (having ingested the pills by accident), and by what he's caused - the grisy, unspeakable deaths of two others. He's no suave Count, but an ordinary man at his wit's end, and no amount of psychobabble from the well-meaning Dr. Beaumont is going to dissuade him that he's responsible for what's happened.
It's a very well written script, with many layers. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the writer made the effort to develop the characters, so they aren't just cardboard cutouts. I'm still upset over the early departure of James Griffith, haha, but I can live with it in a movie this good. I give "The Vampire" Two Big Thumbs Up. See it for an entirely different take on the subject. Highly recommended! ////
That's all for now. It's Monday night and I'm just now finishing this review.....I'm getting behind, lol. Gotta get back on track, which I will attempt to do tomorrow. See you then, at the Usual Time.
Tons and tons of love! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment