Your Daily Dracula – Pepper Martin, Ghost Fever (1987)
It’s a long way down the list of things that are inexplicable about Ghost Fever that a voodoo curse which turns sadistic Confederate slave owner Beauregard Lee (Pepper Martin) into a vampire turns him into a specific vampire – which is to say a cloaked, fanged and permed Count Yorga lookalike who doesn’t even have an accent. He’s also just one element thrown into this ragged horror comedy, the sort of much-hashed-about project which drives a director (Lee Maddin, of The Night God Screamed) to slap an ‘Alan Smithee’ credit on it.
In Georgia, Sheriff Clay (also Martin) sends schlubby cop partners Buford (Sherman Hemsley) and Benny (Luis Avalos) to the old Lee plantation to evict any residents since non-payment of taxes mean it can now be possessed by the state and torn down to make room for a freeway. The ghosts of Jethro (Hemsley), Buford’s slave ancestor, and Andrew Lee (Myron Healey), the heir who freed him on the old man’s death, pass comment as the timid cops overcome superstitions and visit the place, where they are welcomed by sisters (Deborah Benson, Diana Brookes) who might also be ghosts.
I suspect the initial impetus was to make and Abbott and Costello type comedy with Hemsley (from The Jeffersons) and Avalos (from the Electric Company) as a team – several old dark house routines are cribbed from A&C, and a climax which gets on a whole other track as Benny needs supernatural help to win a boxing match against Terrible Tucker (Joe Frazier) is simply a lift from Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. But somehow it’s hard to keep up the good cheer when the backstory involves Beauregard’s penchant for torturing slaves and Hemsley gets stuck in a Rube Goldberg device designed to teach him hip-swivelling by stabbing his private parts. Jennifer Rhodes swans through as a mad medium in fabulous gowns.
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