Your Daily Dracula – Carlos Espejel, Chiquidracula (1985)
A fairly excruciating Mexican comedy/soap which sends off some seriously mixed signals. We’re used to Just William-style naughty/anarchic kid heroes with good hearts, but Carlitos (Carlos Espejel) comes across more like a smirking sociopath with braces – no wonder the other neighbourhood kids want to slosh him with water at every opportunity. His major issue is that his Grandad (Adalberto Martinez) is a pulque-addicted alchoholic – and he gets in trouble when his first attempt at dealing with the problem is throwing a stone through the window of a liquour store … after a lot of other agonising business, some involving his Mom (Tere Velazquez) and the lush she works for (Ana Luisda Peluffo), Carlitos visits a wax museum where he imagines the figure of Dracula coming to life and scaring his abuelo sober. He also briefly imagines himself as Mexican screen comic idol Cantinflas (Passepartout from the 1956 Around the World in 80 Days) and does an impersonation. Eventually, he cadges a cassock from a quite creepy priest and has a local seamstress turn it into a Dracula outfit – then he sets about terrorising his errant grandparent in scenes which seem more cruel than funny but still aren’t interesting … it works, so his Mom’s boss’s husband (Sergio Ramos) hires him to de-alcoholise his wife too.
Comedy drunks are nothing new, and it might even be a workable approach to have a lovable old soak of the kind found in numberless old movies wrenched into a real world of broken families, shattered health, crippling expense and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings … but this just blithely has Martinez stagger from old jokes about booze to raving with winos in filthy alleys and looking sheepish but unashamed at self-help groups. Even with that going against it, the worst thing in the film is the kid lead – who has that mix of petulance, aggression, doltishness, treachery and selfishness we might recognise as not uncharacteristic of real children but can hardly be expected to find entertaining or amusing for an hour and a half.
This was a film spinoff for a character Espejel first played in a kids’ TV show called Chiquilladas in 1982. Three years before the movie, he was funnier (and smaller) in blackout sketches than he is in his big vehicle. Espejel has several times returned to the Chiquidracula outfit as a grown-up, which is kind of creepy on its own Baby Jane level. In Mexico, the character is well-known enough for a football referee to be nicknamed Chiquidracula and voice public resentment about it.
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