Your Daily Dracula – Ahmed Adiwiyya, Anyab (Fangs) (1981)

Your Daily Dracula – Ahmed Adiwiyya, Anyab (Fangs) (1981)

Most ‘Dracula on film’ reference books list Haram Alek, a 1954 Egyptian remake-ripoff of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in which thanks to the lack of a vampire movie tradition in Egypt the Dracula character becomes a wicked hypnotist.  However, this actual Dracula movie – an Egyptian remake-ripoff of The Rocky Horror Picture Show – is less well-known.  It was a passion project for director/co-writer Mohammed Shebl, who struggled to get horror films made in a cultural environment which viewed the genre as un-Egyptian trash, and has something of the try-anything feel of self-indulgent horror-comedy-musical-satire exercises like The Vampire Happening or Son of Dracula (1973).  A long interlude in which the Brad and Janet characters flash forward to married life and being ripped off by a series of plumbers, mechanics, etc who all turn out to be a money-grubbing Dracula is apparently a skit on the Egyptian economic situation in the early 1980s – though you can find ‘idle worker’ jokes like this in British culture (‘The Gasman Cometh’ by Flanders and Swan) in pretty much any decade.

It opens with caped masked figures dancing in a ring and the real decapitation of a chicken, which is liable to be a deal-breaker for audiences who feel murdering animals onscreen isn’t the best way to kick off a comedy of any stamp.  Then a song about fangs is sung by some disembodied Pat Quinn-ish lips and a version of the criminologist (Hassan Al Amam, Egypt’s most prolific director) introduces Ali (Ali El-Haggar) and Mona (Mona Gabr), a naïve young couple en route to a New Year’s Eve party.  Their car stalls in the rain and they trudge past the Grim Reaper to a castle where in lieu of Riff-Raff and Magenta they’re greeted by hunchback slave Shalaf (Haddey Saddekk) and an unnamed minion with Ziggy Stardust face make-up (Tal’tt Zean) who resembles a slimline Blacula (at one point, he puts on a Rocky Horror t-shirt).  The Transylvanians dancing here are vampires who wear movie monster masks over glam-rock make-up and favour cloaks over leotards with chest emblems which evoke the many knock-offs of the 1966 Batman show (we get sound effects captions later).  The racket wakes up Dracula (Ahmed Adiwiyya), who rises from a tomb surmounted by an impressive gold dragon statue and strides through a lot of indoor dry ice to the dance floor – where he’s instantly smitten with Mona, who reminds him of some lost love.  The Dracula has a Bollywood hero look, gold boots, a gold gaudy waistcoat and optional cloak and fangs.  He has portraits of Vlad the Impaler, Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu and Christopher Lee to establish his pedigree – and the narrator says Dracula is an overused element of bad foreign movies (so there).

Given the censorship regimen of Egypt, even a film as far out as this can get away with only the barest trace of camp – Slim Blacula nearly takes his tights off in the shower – and it takes quite a bit of contrivance to eliminate all sexuality from a Rocky Horror remake.  Changing the transvestite decadent Transylvanians into vampires underscores the fact that Richard O’Brien lifted quite a bit of plot from Hammer’s The Kiss of the Vampire in the first place – and horror fan Shebl throws in parodies of scenes from Hammer Films (the crawl-up-the-wall from Scars of Dracula is accompanied by James Bernard music) and some visuals which evoke Jesus Franco’s vampire charades.  He overuses Kubrickian fisheye lenses which give the later stages, where the comedy is dropped in favour of straight action-horror, some creepiness.  Dracula casts the fluence over Mona, who appears as a vampire bride in a wedding cake fantasy, and there’s a sequence where Dracula and Blacula wrestle all over the house.  In the end, the hunchback saws off his ball and chain and gets his revenge by pulling down the curtains and letting the sun burn up the whole vampire company.  Dracula’s dragon coffin explodes and – as in a passage Bram Stoker deleted – his death causes his castle to fall down, which is bad news for the real rats and snakes who have masonry fall on them in this scene.

The songs (by the El-Eman Brothers) are lively if unmemorable – certainly none as catchy as O’Brien’s score – and it seems not enough of them were written.  Dracula makes an entrance not to a ‘Sweet Transvestite’ analogue but ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and a whole stack of LP soundtracks were raided to fill out the rest of the music – the use of the Pink Panther and 007 themes is just about parodic, but we get straight lifts from the scores for A Clockwork Orange, The Omen, Jaws, The Munsters, etc.  Of the cast, possibly Gabr – who models some sweet bat hair-grips – probably comes off best.  Sadly, Adiwiyya’s tubby, smug Dracula is the weakest performance on offer.