HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2019: Rockula (1990)

Our sponsor!

The opening day of this year’s Halloween Horrorfest is sponsored by the great Los Angeles based film critic William Bibbiani.  Please go to the Critically Acclaimed website to listen to the great podcasts he does with his podcast brother Witney Seibold, and support their patreon for even more podcasts, commentaries and more.  They are both horror-positive, lots of fun and all of their work is highly recommended....

....and I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that William chose this little slice of bizarreness to open festivities, as he’s talked about it often on those aforementioned podcasts.

This is technically a comedy musical, but there are vampires and reincarnation in it, so there’s that.  I allowed it because it’s one of these films that sort of got swallowed by oblivion due to it being made at the end of Canon Releasing’s lifetime.  It certainly is....something.

Not a very good something, but something.

I have a theory about how this film got made.  Writer/Director Luca Bercovici must have had access to some great musical talent thanks to his composer brother Hilary--we’re talking about a movie that features Bo Diddley, Toni Basil, and Thomas Dolby in major roles as well as a cameo by legendary Los Angeles disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer--and told them they could do whatever they wanted, and built the film around what they wanted to do....these people certainly didn't do it for the cash.

Which I guess means Bo Diddley wanted to dress up in a yellow tank top, black shorts, a cape and diddly-boppers ending in bats and dance awkwardly to a rap called ‘(He’s The DJ) I’m The Vampire.’

Dean Cameron plays Ralph, a virgin vampire--even though we don’t see him do anything vampire-ly except turn into a weird bat-puppet the credits call ‘Bat Dork’--who is cursed.  Not only is he mocked by a reflection of himself, he is fated to meet the woman of his dreams every 22 years on Friday the 13th, who will in turn be killed by a pirate with a peg leg wielding a hambone on the following Halloween.  This time, the woman is Mona (Tawney Fere), an aspiring singer who is being Svengali’d by Stanley (Dolby in his only major film performance and boy, does it show), a mortuary magnate.  To impress her, Ralph forms Rockula with some friends at the local bar and is torn between actively spurning the curse or trying to save Mona from an increasingly unhinged Stanley.

This is a low budget film that I think is supposed to take place in New York City--there’s the Tri-State Area and a scene that seems to take place in (a blurred out) Times Square--and it shows.  Bercovici, who co-wrote the script, willfully doesn’t give any thought to giving his characters any depth or nuance to a point where it is impossible to take anything except on surface.  There are frequent moments where I was confused as to why these things were happening.  There are also moments where I was baffled as to the choices the film makes, and that bafflement kept me from being involved in the story.

I say that to say this: I can certainly see why William and others like him love this film and why it should have garnered a cult following.  As ill-defined as everyone and everything is in this world, it is obvious the cast and crew are having a ball doing what they’re doing.  There is a joy to watching Toni Basil doing a dance that she choreographed dressed as some sort of 50‘s Goth Hula Dancer or Thomas Dolby gleefully pushing a number of ‘customized’ caskets while two chorus girls argue in the background or Susan Tyrell dressed in what appears to be nothing but tribal body paint playing the bongos because they are obviously Having Fun and Not Giving A Damn that for some people is more than sufficient.  There is a bizarre ‘What The Hell’ attitude to the film that I can see as appealing.  The exuberance people are feeling in letting lose like that is palatable all throughout the film’s ninety minutes.  This is the type of film tailor made for people to pass on to others in whispered promises in the hopes of widening its notoriety and bonding over its oddness.  While I may not like the film very much, it is not a film that repelled me in the way that some others that have cult followings (I’m looking at you, Dark Backwards) have.

I should mention the music, which ranges from genuinely great (Basil’s one number is lots of fun) to kinda good (Fere’s numbers work fairly well in a ‘Prince protege’ kinda way) to the simply okay.  The only out-and-out stinker is the aforementioned rap, which is actively painful.  The film also wisely scores its major Third Act Crisis Montage to Dolby’s lush ‘Budapest by Blimp,’ which reminds us that the mugging goofball threatening the female lead with a hambone is actually an amazing composer.

I more than understand that this film deserves an audience; I just discovered with this watch (I saw it back in the early 90's on video) that I’m not in that audience.  If any of the details I’ve disclosed--and I haven’t mentioned the finale, where an Elvis suited Cameron vigorously performs a vampire themed rework of ‘Bo Diddly Was A Gunslinger’ backed up by a trio of hot black women who seemed to have walked out of a Motown documentary--sounds like it would appeal to you, you should seek it out.  Chances are you will dig it.  You will dig it a lot.

William, I hope you’re not too upset I didn’t like this film so much.  We’re still pals, right?

Tomorrow our sponsor is one of the true Giants of Ozploitation, the director and raconteur Brain Trenchard-Smith.  He has chosen the 1963 Robert Wise ghost story The Haunting.  To say I am jazzed about watching and writing about this seminal flick is an understatement.

If you’d like to get me to watch a movie of your own choice during the Halloween Horrorfest, please consider joining the Domicile of Dread Patreon at the $3 Tier or greater.  Each new patron gets a free slot in this Gauntlet of Ghoulishness!