Your Daily Dracula – François Giroday, The Phantom Eye (1999)
This Concorde Production was made as a serial run by the American Movie Classics channel during a horror season (MonsterFest), though it plays best as an hour-long feature. It’s fannish homage to classic horror, with a premise slightly reminiscent of Waxwork.
Interns Joey Green (David Sean Robinson) and Catherine Winters (Sarah Aldrich) – her complaint that she could have interned at Miramax sounds double-edged after She Said – encounter Dr Gorman (Roger Corman, having fun) in the basement library of horror films, and are sent off on a quest to locate a print of a movie called The Phantom Eye before midnight … then find themselves dropped into pastiches (smartly done) of classic and grindhouse titles, with Joey and Catherine first playing Jonathan Harker in a Hammer Dracula and Madeline Usher in a Corman Poe pic … tall, bearded François Giroday (credited as ‘Francios Giorday’) is no Christopher Lee, though he has cloak-swishing mannerisms down and does a bit from the book with three ravening brides (Lisa Boyle, Dina Cox, Bobbie Chandler) … and bald, ratty Allen Scotti isn’t really a match for Vincent Price either.
Frank Gorshin is better cast as the whiskery old codger in a 1961 killer plant movie which riffs on Day of the Triffids and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors and there are pretty good turns from David Stifel and Brad Cronce as a Carradine-look High Priest and a Chaney Jr mummy, Linda Porter and Michael J. Anderson as a crone and a killer doll in a 1960s Mexican horror, Timothy Patrick Klein as a silent movie torturer given a long lecture on the objectification of victimised heroines in an intertitle and Jonathan Haze and Jude Farese as useless cops in a beach monster picture. At one point, Joey wanders Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid-style into The Atomic Submarine and encounters its memorable but non-phantom Eye Alien. Anderson returns in the beach movie and sets off a chain reaction of metafictionality as Joey recognises him from Twin Peaks and clocks that this isn’t a real 1963 film but a pastiche 1963 film, which brings us back to the frame story and a cackled punchline Corman really sells.
It works hard on details like art direction, coiffures and costuming, with retro monsters from Robert Hall/Almost Human in the Jack Pierce or Paul Blaisdell tradition. Written by Benjamin Carr and directed by Gwyneth Gilbey.
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