Your Daily Dracula – Jerry Cormier Jr as ‘Drak’, Franky and His Pals (1990)

Your Daily Dracula – Jerry Cormier Jr as ‘Drak’, Franky and His Pals (1990)

For an independently-made, self-distributed oddity from the straight-to-video 1990s, Franky and His Pals is surprisingly full of contradictions.  All-round auteur Gerald Cormier, sometime producer of schlock like Alan Rudolph’s Barn of the Naked Dead, makes a joke of how many times his name appears in the credits and ends the movie with a wink to camera about how audiences will have to watch the sequel (some hope) to find out where the eponymous monster gang have been sent by a time machine.

Cormier, whose son plays Dracula, scores the resources of at least a small-scale professional movie – it’s a rare shot-on-video feature to use crane shots, for instance – but his script is the kind of thing you might expect from high-schoolers.  And no one ever settled on tone, so different actors seem to believe they’re in two wildly different actors with the same cast – a goofy kid-friendly Munsters style comedy about nice guy monsters searching for treasure under the town of French Gulch after escaping from a cave and a raunchy gross-out comedy with a talking monster mummy penis, a gay Wolf Man and his pick-up Clover (as in ‘anyone can get lucky with …’), farting Frankenstein, a bikini-and-thong contest, peeing jokes for Franky and the Wolf Man, a lot of sexual activity (but strictly no nudity) and the kind of gags a Porky’s sequel would scratch out of a first draft.

The general clumsiness extends to a rap number barely twenty minutes into the film which sums up the plot we’ve just seen via repeat footage and terrible terrible lyrics.  Five (arguably six, counting Apophis the mummy penis) monsters are trapped for reasons in a cave – they play poker most nights – until a Frankenfart blows away some styrofoam boulders and they wander into town, spooking two gravediggers who are the only black characters, idly hoping that a treasure map from the cave will lead to a fortune.  Meanwhile, the town council find a shortfall in funds because they underestimated values while levying a property tax – this sounds a) surprisingly like a drawn-from-life issue and b) is so unbearably dull that the film just forgets the squabbling councillors until its very last minutes and has the monsters wander into a big costume party where they are taken for clods in fancy dress and get into romantic, farcical or slapstick scrapes.

The roll call is Fred Gwynne tribute act Franky (Eric Weathersbee), Christopher Lloyd soundalike Drak (Cormier), horny hunchback Humper (make-up man Keith Lack), the Mummy (Richard Sumner) and a Wolf Man (Wilson Smith) … the makeups are a little more elaborate than pull-on masks.  With the possible exception of the Wolf Man’s arc – impotent with a woman, he hooks up with Clover and improvises a gay love song to the screeching ballerina cowboy (Shane West) – none of the monsters do much more than stumble about and Cormier Sr never really decides what Dracula adds to the team except being irritated by the others’ ineptitude.

Shot in Redding, Ca., it brings on a local band to contribute music.  It’s rubbish, but kind of hard to dislike – for all the crassness, it’s fairly sweet (even its gay stereotyping doesn’t come over as homophobic) and for all its technical shortfalls it plays better than the average cynical Troma effort.