Your Daily Dracula – Jerusalem’s Lot week #2, Andrew Duggan as Judge Axel, A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987)

Your Daily Dracula – Jerusalem’s Lot week #2, Andrew Duggan as Judge Axel, A Return to Salem’s Lot (1987)

Pointedly entitled ‘A’ Return to Salem’s Lot, this rejects almost entirely the premise of Stephen King’s novel. Larry Cohen, who was one of many scriptwriters to attempt to hammer King’s novel into shape for TV, takes a few situations-an adult writer and an obsessed young teen as twinned heroes, the booby-trapped stairs to the cellar where the vampire’s coffin is concealed-from the novel, but otherwise plays the basic premise of a vampire-dominated town in Maine to very different ends. When Cohen approached Warner Bros. with an idea for a third It’s Alive film, they asked him to make it back-to-back with a sequel to another property they owned and, after toying with the idea of Exorcist I II, he opted for this project. Cohen’s forte has been wittily offbeat rethinkings of the basic formulae of monster movies: conflating Godhood and monsterdom in Demon and Q, presenting innocent monsters in the It’s Alive series, having a monster you eat rather than one that eats you in The Stuff. So, rather than import the ancient evil of a Stoker-style vampire to Maine, he creates a well-rooted vampire community, patterned after Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, that exists quite cosily amid the peaceful New England countryside.

As in all his monster movies, Cohen seems far more interested in filling in the background than in telling his ostensible story. In the vampires’ school, which is open from dusk till dawn, a class of ageless, well-dressed children recite their history-we also see a poster for the class play, Dracula (Our Version)-of fleeing from persecution in Europe on the “Speedwell”, supposedly lost sister ship to the” Mayflower”. The impeccably folksy Judge Axel takes Joe on a tour of the town, showing off the cattle he would prefer his followers to drink from because human beings are prone to mainline heroin and transmit AIDS (his wife, who persists in the old ways, confesses to “a drinking problem”), and trying to represent the vampires as a respectable community of bedrock Americans. The most intriguing thing about the film is its equation of vampirism with small-town Republican values in a perverted manner. Cohen’s Salem’s Lot is a place of ceremonies by night-a secular wedding in which the bride and groom appear to be tenyear-olds, a recital of the Oath of Allegiance before class, the orgies of bloodletting-and insidious banality by day, as the abused and exploited human ‘drones’ look after the antique stores and guard the coffins.

While the depiction of a vampire life style is effective and interesting, Cohen still has trouble with plot and pacing. Too many transitions give the impression that scenes have been missed out, and the characters’ viewpoints change to suit the plot. In the opening, Joe defends a native ritual murder with “their society, their rules”, but he never seems tempted as an anthropologist to study the vampires. Crucially, Ricky Addison Reed is inadequate as Jeremy, especially in the lastminute change of heart that redeems him for humanity, and the relationship between Joe and Cathy goes nowhere. But also as usual, the writer-director is adept enough to cast players whose personal eccentricities and humorous touches keep the film going when the plot sags. Michael Moriarty is another nervous, wisecracking hero (“I thought you said this was a fertility ritual” a photographer objects to a heart-ripping sacrifice in a South American jungle; “It is”, Joe replies, “that guy knocked up the chief’s favourite wife”), and Sam Fuller, who used to live in the house now owned by Cohen which recurs as a location in Dial Rat for Terror, Black Caesar and It’s Alive, has his best role as the half-Dutch, halfRumanian vigilante. The late Andrew Duggan gives an elegant, creepy performance as Judge Axel, but the film’s most memorable moments, aided by fme cinematography and a subtly shivery score, simply capture the ambience of dead-in-the-daytime Salem’s Lot, where enslaved humans shuffle and cows placidly await their next bleeding.

[from the Monthly Film Bulletin]