All He Does Is Drink Your Blood, ‘Cause He Don’t Like Ginger Ale (original) (raw)

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – This is a weird and often sad movie about a teenage girl who plays an online game that has something to do with the World’s Fair, but we never learn how the game works, or even why it has that name. All we really know is that it’s a horror game. She starts by doing something called the World’s Fair Challenge, which involves poking herself with a pin, then makes a series of disturbing videos. Another player, an adult man who goes by JLB, sees her videos and is concerned that she might be serious about some of the things she’d said. Both of them watch videos made by other people as well, but there isn’t really any discernible theme other than all being spooky, including someone getting pulled into his computer, a guy pulling carnival tickets out of his arm, and a woman with demonic wings on her back. And at one point, JLB plays a pixel game that seems to consist entirely of repeatedly typing “I want to go to the World’s Fair.” At the end, JLB tells a story about meeting up with Casey in person after she spent some time in a mental institution, but there’s no confirmation on whether this actually happened.

The Funhouse – The movie starts with references to Halloween and Psycho in close succession, with someone wearing a mask to stab a girl in the shower, only for it to turn out to be her little brother with a rubber knife. The girl, Amy, then goes to a carnival with three of her friends, where they proceed to heckle the performers. One of them decides it would be a good idea to spend the night inside the haunted house ride, which he calls a fun house even though that’s not usually what I’ve known people to call them. Exactly why anyone would suggest that isn’t clear, although he is stoned at the time. While there, they witness a physically deformed and mentally challenged carnie kill the fortune teller after trying to proposition her, and his father trying to clean up the mess. One of the teenagers makes things worse by stealing his money, and only Amy survives. What’s kind of strange is that the film starts with Amy’s brother, and then he sneaks off to the carnival, making it seem like he’d be significant to the plot. But all that really happens is that his parents pick him up and he doesn’t bother telling them that his sister is there, even though he saw her go into the ride. So he’s definitely terrible, but not terribly relevant.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Francis Ford Coppola’s big-budget production with a lot of well-known actors was a big deal back in the early nineties, but I’d never seen it before. It even inspired the hairstyle for Mr. Burns as a vampire on The Simpsons, although I don’t think that segment otherwise specifically referenced the movie.

Gary Oldman plays a weird old Dracula who later grows younger by drinking blood, Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker and Winona Ryder as Mina have rather labored English accents, and Anthony Hopkins is Van Helsing. It does include characters and situations that weren’t in other adaptations of the novel, which I read years ago. For instance, Quincy Morris, the cowboy from Texas, was here. And it referenced how the novel was made up of correspondence. At the same time, it also worked in references to earlier adaptations that weren’t in the book, particularly in terms of the Count’s back story. I believe Stoker tied Dracula to Vlad the Impaler as kind of an afterthought, but in the movie it goes into a lot of detail about the Wallachian prince and his pact with the forces of evil before getting into the story proper, and it’s a major plot point that he considers Mina to be the reincarnation of his wife. As with a lot of revisited stories focusing on villains, the backstory is an attempt to make the Count more sympathetic, although it didn’t go as far in that direction as some such takes do. There’s also a mention of Renfield being Jonathan’s predecessor as Dracula’s real estate broker, as was in the case in the Universal film. That character was played by Tom Waits, wearing tiny glasses for some reason.

The whole look of the film was quite impressive, with a lot of fancy costumes. I also noticed that a shadow puppet show in London was reenacting the battle that Vlad fought in during the prologue. I believe Dracula and his Brides were speaking Romanian to each other, but it’s not like I know any of that language. And we saw a fair amount about how horny vampires are.

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