Your Daily Dracula – Bongo Wolf’s Revenge (1970)

Your Daily Dracula – Bongo Wolf’s Revenge (1970)

Barrie Pattison listed this docu-oddity in the filmography of his influential book on vampire movies, The Seal of Dracula, in 1975 and Pattison’s information byte – ‘the drummer/hero/lecturer visits the Count Dracula Society’ – has dutifully been carried over by many subsequent reference books.  But the film hasn’t been around, so no one could say anything more about it.  At present, it’s available online on youtube thanks to the lostreels organisation, whose mission is unearthing obscure or orphaned media.  It’s directed and (at least notionally) written by Tom Baker, who isn’t the Doctor Who actor or the screenwriter of Michael Reeves films but is the 1960s alternative artscene habituee who co-starred with Valerie Solanas in Andy Warhol’s I, A Man (1967) and was played by Michael Madsen in Oliver Stone’s The Doors – as an actor, he has bit roles in the likes of Angels Die Hard, Candy Stripe Nurses, Two-Minute Warning, Rollercoaster, More American Graffiti and American Hot Wax (often as cops).

In 1970, Baker built a loose film around Donald Grollman aka Bongo Wolf, who stood out among the hairy weirdoes of the LA rock scene by wearing a suit and tie, sporting a pudding bowl haircut, and occasionally sporting homemade werewolf fangs.  Wolf plays bongos with PJ Proby, Jim Ford and Mike Bloomfield in jam sessions and studio recordings – all of which are thronged with hangers-on, musos and hippie chicks.  In an awkwardly improvised press conference, he proudly or shyly admits to his many enthusiasms – for science fiction, the occult (werewolves and vampires in particular), dirty books, bongos, etc – all represented by the objects he carries around everywhere in his prized hold-all.

The monster theme is carried through – we see rows of Don Post masks and a lot of Wolf’s monster drawings – including what would now be listed as werewolf erotica.  The film has invaluable actuality footage of bookstores, newsstands, a meeting of the Los Angeles Count Dracula Society and Hollywood streetlife.  In rambling, conversational sequences Wolf and Severn Darden (already a familiar film face) double-date a pair of beautiful twins (billed as Gemini) and Wolf is set on by a hustler who does a weird Mick Jagger accent and lures him back to a pad where two girls try to get to his wallet as the hustler monologues.  You need a tolerance for a kind of artfilm dropout vibe to get through this stuff, which tends to go from engaging to excruciating but then make how irritating it is the point of the scene.  Contemporary reviews use terms like ‘natural eccentric’ to describe Wolf, though it’s fairly obvious now that he’d be classified on the autistic spectrum – it’s kind of sweet that almost everyone he’s involved with is accepting of his tics and quirks (like he’s into his own thing, man) and he’s even a successful musician.  One of the cinematographers was Lewis Teague (billed as Louis), later director of Alligator and Cujo.  Baker persuaded his pal Jim Morrison to let him use ‘People Are Strange’ on the soundtrack.