Too Hot For TV
A podcast dedicated to the expanded universe of your favourite franchises.
Too Hot For TV
S01 E05 - Shouting at the Wireless
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Dylan is joined by Ross from The General Witch finders to look at the expanded universe of Dracula. First up they discuss the BBC audio adaption of the unmade Hammer film 'The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula' adapted and directed by Mark Gatiss. Then they look at the Big Finish audio play 'Dracula's War' Written by Jonathan Barnes, starring Mark Gatiss and Deirdre Mullins.
Welcome back to To Hot for TV. We are the podcast that looks at all things expanded universe. Today it's the turn of Dracula, and I'm joined by Ross from the General Witchfinders. Ross, hello, welcome. Hello, Dylan. How are you? I'm very well, thanks. Thanks for joining me today.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02Is all well with you?
SPEAKER_01Yes, well we've had a pre-show chat and I've I've vented on that, and now I feel as light as a feather and I'm I'm good. Yes.
SPEAKER_02Excellent. As always, we're looking at the expanded universe of our subject today, which is Dracula. So Dracula obviously started life as a book, published way back in May of 1897. It's been adapted many times in virtually all forms of media and has been adapted for film, television, video games, and animation over 700 times, with nearly a thousand additional appearances in comic books, on the stage, in audios, things like that. And Dracula has appeared twice as many times as Sherlock Holmes.
SPEAKER_01Wow, and we're going to go through each one of those in order tonight.
SPEAKER_02It's going to be the world's longest podcast. It's going to last a week.
SPEAKER_01And when you say extended meetings, is that anything apart from the novel is basically going to be extended in this?
SPEAKER_02Yes, exactly. You know, look, the format for this podcast now is very, very loose. It starts life as one thing, and I'll explore it anywhere else. So we're going to cover two audio productions today, although one of them started life as a potential film. But presumably, you do a podcast about folk horror, British horror, horror films, horror TV. You're a Dracula fan, I take it?
SPEAKER_01Yes. I was thinking about when did I get really into Dracula because I thought this might come up. And it was when the Bram Stoker's Dracula movie was coming out. And um, I think I had a paper round at the time, and I mainly did the paper round in order to get to have money to buy comics, and the guy in the shop would only buy American comics if someone bought all of them, so I would I had to get enough money to buy every version of Spider-Man Thor, Fantastic Thor, all that kind of stuff, even though I was only interested in Spider-Man. But then I saw that they had a Dracula comic, uh comic adaptation of the of the movie, which was uh drawn by Mike Benolo, and it's absolutely brilliant. So if anyone can can find that, check that out. But there was also a magazine, and it was called something like The Ultimate Dracula, or something like that. And I was more like into like the comic girl, bought that because it was a cool looking comic, but I bought this magazine as well, and it was it was just basically a little bit about the making of the um the Francis Ford Coppola movie, and but there was all about all these other different adaptations of Dracula, and it was all about like the the Spanish version when they made the Bella Legosi a one, and uh there was a whole thing about Anne Royce which I had never heard about, and uh and I thought, oh, this sounds interesting. Oh and and we I I won a uh a prize at school, and they and it was like you can have a book, and I got Interview of a Vampire as my books three, because I thought this uh and it just opened up this whole world attracted it to me. And when I was very little, my dad used to record all the uh there must have been a season of Universal Horrors, and my dad used to record all those for me, and I was shit scared of vampires. I really I used to sleep with the covers over my head, making a crossing sign with my fingers. And every software I'd get up in the night and put my finger in my brother's mouth to check he hadn't grown fangs. So vampires really scared me when I was younger, and I had that sort of like in my kind of like um messed up child DNA, and finding this magazine which just showed me this whole world of vampires. I think I just I I just I read all of the Ann Rice books. I I got my dad to take me to see Brabus Oakers Dracula. I think I was nearly 17 or just 17, so I I was really got really nervous about sneaking in to go and see it as well. Uh I bought the Annie Lennox single, and then I used to start going to go to graveyards and drawing Weepin' Angels, basically, and then doing babies of them at school. Yeah, so I got draquified from that point on. Yeah, and and I'm I don't know what it is about it, but it was and also reading the book. It was just like I just read that over and over and over again. I think it was the first book I ever read which was made up of diary entries and newspaper reports, and and it just felt for such an old book, it just felt like revolutionary for to me. It was just like a an eye-opening moment for me.
SPEAKER_02I think there's something quite alluring about Dracula and Vampires when you're a teenager and you feel like you don't fit in as all teenagers do. The universal thing of teenagers is they don't fit in, but yet like they're surrounded by people that don't fit in. And it's one of the few things where the villain is the protagonist, you know, almost the person you want to be.
SPEAKER_01Like, well, you kind of became that, isn't it? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02No one wants to be Van Helsing. Like there's nobody aspiring to be that guy until until they do like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I feel, or something like that. So I think it's quite a natural thing because you're drawn to it and there's a sort of sexuality to it as well, when you're most likely a teenager and not shagging anything, even though you want to.
SPEAKER_01So when I I never got that, because I never sort of understood I I think I might have just been too shouted as a a teenager, because reading those magazines and stuff that everyone was always going on about, like how sexy vampires were, and I just found them more scary than sexy. And I was just I I just never saw the connotation between penetration with fangs and penetration with other things and stuff. Because it always felt to me like it really confused me as a teenager.
SPEAKER_02Well, I guess in terms of the time it was written, it's very much a subtext, even though now we would see it almost as just text.
SPEAKER_01Text, yeah.
SPEAKER_02But then when you get things like the Hammer Horror films and stuff like that, where not only is there the sort of that hypnotic thing he does, but it's very much about attraction and by you know, sort of three films into their Dracula run, it's tits, tits, tits everywhere.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and all girls mix sighing when they get bitten and all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. But that's drawn out of the book and just sort of expanded on and expanded on. And then as as we get more into sort of the the eighties and nineties, the vampires it becomes this thing where they turn into this really grotesque thing, which I think does it I I can't say for certain where it starts, but the Francis Ford Coppola one is the one that sort of sticks out as the start point, and then you get into like dust till dawn and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01Where that sort of screwed up face-looking vampire.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula was my big in. Like I don't think any of us could put our hand on our heart and go, when was the first time we heard of Dracula or vampires? It's just so part of uh popular culture. Yeah. Like it's just there from day one.
SPEAKER_01The groovy ghoulies and stuff like that when you were growing up, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Even like count docula, things like that. Um the count in Sesame Street, like it's just it's just there.
SPEAKER_01But I've got a picture, a school photographed, I must have been about seven. And for some reason, I put my hair into a widow's peak like Dracula, and and the school photographer didn't change it, and then they they gave it to my mum for free because I looked so mental in it. And I got a school picture of me with Dracula hairstyle. So it's just always there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it just has been. So the Coppola film for me came a few years later when it got its big ITV or BBC one premiere.
SPEAKER_01But you're just a youngster when you're doing it.
SPEAKER_02Well, there's a there's there's what? There's only like four or five years between or something like that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I I do feel like you're dad though.
SPEAKER_02But when you're a teenager, the difference between being a 17, 18-year-old and being a 12, 13-year-old in terms of what you get to see film-wise, is is is very different, whereas, you know, not so much now. And from there, I remember because it was a big deal, because that's how television functioned back then, of like the premiere of this on national television, there was documentaries and time programmes and things like that. And then I'm sure within it felt like a week, but it could have been a year, there there was a run on BBC Two or Channel 4 of Hammer Horror Dracula films, and I was recording them.
SPEAKER_01And at that point, I was just in and the world went vampire crazy for a little while, didn't it? Yeah, vampire came out, uh, the the movie, and Buffy became a thing, and it was just yeah, that was just everywhere.
SPEAKER_02Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, Dust Till Dawn, and Interview with a Vampire are like very formative films.
SPEAKER_01They were owned on video in my house, and we played them again and again and again because of the And Lost Boys of Us as well, and the Lost Boy soundtrack just on loop all the time. It was it was just so cool. And I got for as a present the the rule book for um Vampire the Masquerade roleplay game and had no one to play it with. So I'd just like spend ages reading the rules of the city. I would have played it with you, mate. Yeah, and I'd make up character sheets and all that kind of stuff, and just like hoping one day someone would come and take me down the graveyard and and bite me, yeah. Savour me from it. Anyway. See, I didn't I see I I I I'm not into the sex side of vampires, yeah, anymore.
SPEAKER_02So it's just been there for my entire life, I think, and if I'm ever at a loss, it's between the first things I'll look up is vampire films or post-apocalyptic films that I haven't seen before, or ones I have seen and just want to revisit. Because someone's always making an okay vampire film or an okay post-apocalyptic film. Doesn't have to be amazing, but it'll hit enough things that you'll be like, oh, I didn't know that came out. There's no reason why you should. It went straight to Netflix and it w languished in the bottom there. But you will always find something when you're bored. So it's just one of my go-tos, and I think it it will be until the day that I die.
SPEAKER_01But uh are you like me though, but I feel like because I think that the Franciscal Copler version of Dracula, it was so overwhelmingly good. And I think it was just like the music in the cinema, it was and like the blood and the design and the colour, it was and it was like nothing I'd ever seen before.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's like I can't see any other adaptation of Dracula, and I'm thinking, oh, this is not any good. Like I went and saw um Nosferosso recently and I was like, pfft, yeah it's not not as good as that.
SPEAKER_02I can see new versions of it that are old and be fine with them, but anything that comes after that version, I'm comparing it against the Francis Ford Coppola version, and you're right, like I did not care for Nosferatu and any other versions. So at that point, I much prefer Dracula or vampires in new stories, because I feel like the Bram Stoker version has been done for me to the definitive level.
SPEAKER_01And I feel like as it gets older, it just gets better because it it it it just the look of it is so of that time.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And it I I can't I can't explain what I'm trying to say, but it it just it just looks amazing. I watch it every couple of years and and I'm like just blown away by it still.
SPEAKER_02The spectacle of that, that film at the time just felt like nothing you'd ever seen. But as you say, now you look at it and it is of its type.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But it's just very stylised for that era, and I can completely see why there's some 17-year-old who saw Nosferatu and got obsessed with it, and then they'll go and watch Francis Ford Copper's version and go, Well, that's not good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's it's it's the first one to wow you, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and but also it's the first one that didn't look like Dracula, you know, it didn't look like Bellolo Ghost. Everyone copied up and it was just we're just turning up. This is just us talking about that film now. We we've got to talk about it.
SPEAKER_02We're doing them all. All 700, remember?
SPEAKER_01Sorry, yeah, yeah, all 700. But it's just I thought it was such a brave film, and and the casts are amazing. And I even like Keanu in it. I think um I think he can do no wrong.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I know I I'm with you. I th I think it all works, it all works. But Dracula does have a lot of other adventures in films, gets a lot of sequels, be it the universal one, Dracula's daughter, and many other things, or the hammer horror films getting many and many sequel, including a hammer horror film that was never made, called The Unquenchable First of Dracula.
SPEAKER_01Oh, well done.
SPEAKER_02See that? It's a link. It's a link. Yeah, it's great. Which eventually made its way into the public as a radio player on BBC Radio 4 on the 28th of October 2017 at 2 30 in the afternoon, no less.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_02Okay, considering some of the things in it. It was directed by Mark Gatis. It was produced by Lawrence Bowen, presumably not Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen.
SPEAKER_01Maybe, because yeah, he was involved with League of Gentlemen, wasn't he? Was he? And and he and he he was in Yeah, and and he loves dressing up like the Dracula, doesn't he? So maybe it was.
SPEAKER_02Oh wow. And the script was adapted for radio by Mark Gatis and Lawrence Bowen. Now, at the time, we are steeped in IP, nostalgia, and superheroes in terms of what's going on in the cinema and on television. So in the cinema, we've got things like Logan, The Last Jedi, Blade Runner 2049, Alien Covenant, The Mummy, Resident Evil Final Chapter, then a load of superhero films, including Wonder Woman, Justice League, Guardians of the Galaxy, exciting horror film out there. The only really exciting new one I could find was Get Out on television. Again, loads and loads of superheroes. It's the Defenders, it's Flash, it's Gotham. And then we've got 12 Monkeys, The Allville, Star Trek Discovery, and Doctor Who series 10. So this is like pre-COVID genre essentially is at an all-time high. And everybody just loves a bit of genre.
SPEAKER_01Happy times, and you know, it's just we're just all gonna be happy forever, and every superhero film is gonna get better than the last, and have even more people coming to see it. Oh, brilliant.
SPEAKER_02Well, that was the year that it all goes wrong with Justice League, doesn't it? And everybody goes, oh, maybe, maybe not all superhero films are good.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And uh it's been a slow spiral down ever since then. In British India 1934, Penny, a young English woman, travels by train to discover the fate of her missing sister. She meets Prem Lakshmi, siblings engaged to perform at the palace of the Maharaja and his Rani, where a mysterious European guest is staying. Penny accompanies them to the remote palace and learns that her sister has been drawn into a secretive blood cult operating in caverns beneath it. The cult is preparing a sacrificial ritual to serve Count Dracula, who has travelled east and placed the palace under his sinister influence. When the ritual begins, Penny and her allies disrupt the ceremony. The cult is destroyed and Dracula is confronted and ultimately slain. The cavern collapses, ending the vampire's reign and the cult's practices, and Penny escapes alive, finally learning the truth about her sister's fate as the nightmare is brought to an end. As I said, this starts life as a script in the 70s for a film, but it makes its way to radio. I think it's quite fitting it makes its way to radio at this point where we're mining popular culture and nostalgia's a very powerful thing. Have you heard this before?
SPEAKER_01No. Um you you helped me find this when we were thinking about doing it for um General Witchfinders, but the other two guys are too hard to uh control and and ended up doing something else.
SPEAKER_02They just watched canine and company, but they're not gonna listen to this.
SPEAKER_01I know, I know, but they it all came down to how long is it? But I I screwed it away because I thought that I definitely and we were talking that we might do something Dracula related at some point, so I thought I'd hold it back. I'm really glad we listened to it because it's really interesting, and I think that if they had made it, it probably would have been one of my favourite hammer Dracula. Because I do like Dracula stuff, but I find it quite hard to find anything which is any good because there's just so much stuff. Yeah. I think the problem with Dracula adjacent things is they seem to want to make him like this all-powerful uh king of the vampires, or like someone who's it's it's almost like them I know this is not got too too hot for TV, but it's it's a similar problem where someone was uh a character has been popular in the past. Yeah. Everyone loves that character, and when they bring it back, they go, he's really powerful, and he's like the most powerful thing version of this in the for in the world, and um every story you put in him now has got to be like world-changing consequences. So Anna Dracula, that book um by um Kim Newman, he's gonna be the the the king or king of England and he's gonna have all these armies and all that kind of stuff. When the actual story is just basically something happening to a group of friends, yeah. There's kind of implications that if he gets to London, stuff might start kicking off. But he's he's not cut he's not there coming I I'm coming to become to take over the British Empire so much. It's just he he's just a horny guy who wants who's wants to go and shag John Farker's wife because he saw a picture of her. Um we've all been there. Yeah. So I'm I'm quite quite wary of like looking at new Dracula related things because you feel like it's just gonna have Dracula in it, but he's got not gonna be the character. It's not gonna be a small story about a small group of people. So this is quite a good prospect for me because it's something from the 60-70 sort of time where people hadn't blown him up out of all proportion to be something bigger than he is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think there's something interesting about the Hammer films, and there are there are six or seven with seven with Christopher Lee, I think, and then various other we end up arguing about this all the time.
SPEAKER_01What's an official Dracula film?
SPEAKER_02But within those films, Dracula's just doing his thing. Ultimately, he is a horny guy who wants to drink the blood of busty maids. And even when characters within the later Hammer films put him on a pedestal, including this one, he's not interested. He doesn't want to be the ruler of the world. There is the one film towards the tail end, Satanic Rights, where he's thinking of destroying the world, but that's maybe because he's just so sick of all this bullshit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and losing all the time. It's like every time I come back, you kill me. Yeah. So, like, fuck this, I'm just gonna destroy the destroy everyone. But even then I in uh Satanic Rights of Dracula, I feel like, and this is how like if I was gonna do dru it dracular-related stuff now, and like they kind of imply some in this story, he's being used by other people because they think, oh, there's there's something powerful here, let's use it. But then the uh like you said, he's not that interested in in doing the things which the people who are kind of like facilitating him. He just wants to do, you know, do whatever he wants, really.
SPEAKER_02Let's jump a little bit into the background of the of this film and stop me if you know anything different. So it was originally conceived as a follow-up to Scars of Dracula and it was written around 1970. Hammer had uh contractual obligations with Warner Brothers to give them first refusal uh on the Dracula stuff, but EMI's distribution of scars caused friction. The Hammer Warner Brothers program was supposed to get back on track with the unquenchable thirst of Dracula. Ultimately it didn't, uh, and it was put to one side for a little bit. But Warner Brothers essentially had a large amount of rupees frozen in an Indian bank account.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I love filmmaking from this era, it's amazing.
SPEAKER_02Because Hammer are in this period, I think, where we call it the decline of Hammer. They do make films for you know pretty much most of the the 70s.
SPEAKER_01Like just looking for money from anywhere, basically, aren't they?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And so it's why you can't get like a definitive Hammer box set on DVD or Blu-ray. Yeah. Because different studios own different films.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02At some point, the script's not working, they're not quite able to get it off the ground, so they make Dracula AD 1972, which is an amazing film you've covered on your podcast with Dracula in the 70s.
SPEAKER_01It's interesting because like um Scarce of Draca was a a bit of a reboot for them anyway. Yeah, and it wasn't great. This really looks awful in it. And some of the and like the bats are terrible. That's the one with um Minder in it as well, isn't it? Yes. And uh be interesting because this doesn't feel like it's a sequel to Scarza Dracula, it feels like it's an yeah, it's another reboot. But it's interesting that this is another reboot, but it's it's a period reboot. Whereas when they you get to the the last two, not talking about the Kung Fu Dracula one, but the last they suddenly had the idea of putting it into the into the m modern day. And I think that was a brilliant eye. It sounds obvious to us to do that, but it w it was a stroke of genius for them, and I feel like that just gave it a complete new lease of life. Um because I I think that they were just just re-treading the same ground over and over again, um uh up until this point. And I think rebooting um Scales of Dracula and just basically just doing the same thing again but cheaper and a bit shitter, which was not the way forward. The way they ended up going was like bringing it to modern day, but doing this by sending it Dracula and the Temple of Doom, I think that would have been a great idea. Like Dracula turning up in different countries or different scenarios and stuff would have been a really good way of doing it.
SPEAKER_02I think those two modern day Dracula films, AD 72 and Satanic Rites of Dracula are brilliant and I could have seen that continuing on and on and on. But for many reasons it doesn't. And you're right, it does get away from all the Dracula films before that that Hammer do sort of have this thing of a village somewhere is under terror, a bunch of people end up in a castle, they get picked off one by one, and the climax of the film is all set in a castle. So they do well to sort of shake things up. Even if AD 72 largely follows that format it's just modern day London and an old church.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's just like funky 70s London though.
SPEAKER_02But it's stylistically different, the directorial style's different so while 72 and satanic rites are happening, this is floating around in the background and it's handed over to Don Horton who also wrote the Doctor Who stories Inferno and Mind of Evil. And he starts kicking around ideas. After Satanic Rites of Dracula we get the legends of the seven golden vampires which was basically Warner slash hammer cashing in on the Kung Fu craze and I think they partner with the Shaw brothers or a company similar to make this awful vampire kung fu film that just doesn't really work.
SPEAKER_01And it doesn't tie in with like the other ones apart from Scars you could almost see it as like a a continuation.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Whereas this just feels like it's just something which has just been dropped anywhere. Even Christopher Lee wouldn't do it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So we get a really camp Dracula at the start.
SPEAKER_01Who then transforms himself into some kind of um Chinese monk. It's an absolutely awful film. But there are some interesting bits in it. They're having like the like in Chinese culture like uh vampires like hop and like seeing the hopping vampires in it it's just like that it's just mad and it it it and it looks really interesting. And them coming out of the uh out of the ground in a kind of like the Plague of the zombies way is about is actually quite creepy. But yeah so th there's some merits to it. Also Peter Cushion wear I think he's wearing his Doctor Who costume in it, isn't he?
SPEAKER_02It's very similar.
SPEAKER_01Yeah very similar so it's you could you could almost if you squint this could be Doctor Who versus Chinese vampires as well.
SPEAKER_02Well now you say it like that. It's a classic.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02After that Warner is still trying to get hold of these rupees that got frozen. And it sort of makes sense of like okay so we've done them in China let's go back to India. But by that point because Seven Golden Vampires didn't do that well everybody just sort of lost interest in the idea. So we end up with this script being completely abandoned. Yeah. And instead they start focusing on a film written by Ice Warrior's creator from Doctor Who Brian Hales who had written a drama for radio about Vlad the Impaler and they try and turn it into something called Lord Dracula but that doesn't materialise either and so the unquenchable first of Dracula which was also sometimes known as the insatiable first of Dracula is lost until 2017.
SPEAKER_01Oh insatiable sounds better than unquenchable isn't it? Yeah. Yeah because unquenchable just feels like he's thirsty.
SPEAKER_02Yeah it's it's like when you're hung over and you drink two litres of water and you're still thirsty.
SPEAKER_01Well at the time I was really hung over on in Brick Lane and the shop was open I just bought the first can of anything not realizing it was full of big lumps of tapioca and having that when you're very very hung over and not expecting big lumps of stuff going down your throat it was just it came straight back out again. Well that's exactly what would have happened to Christopher Lee in India I'm sure yes it would yeah so that's that's another thing would he have done it because like he was really coming off of this but yeah I don't know maybe if it was a free holiday if they actually filmed it in India as well that he he might have been tempted. But if it was like carrying up the Kyber and it was just filmed somewhere in England with lots of blacked up like English actors it would have been terrible.
SPEAKER_02Well I mean say what you like about seven golden vampires but you know it was a co-production that's what they're aiming for for this so I imagine it would have been filmed on location in India so it would have at least had that authenticity because judging by this I'm sure they would have tried but I don't know how you get away with it in the UK. But this radio production then does it feel like a hammer horror film?
SPEAKER_01It feels like when you were a kid did you get the tape and book adaptations of films? Yeah where you would have yeah so it feels like they've made this film and then that this is the the tape and book version of that film. So I in my mind I kept expecting like R2 D2 to so when you hear the the chirp of this droid, turn the page now.
SPEAKER_02That's what it felt like you've got the C60 tape that you know the film is 90 minutes and you're like ha they're gonna get it all on here and it's like the narrator's going to speak very fast and explain some key bits.
SPEAKER_01Yeah and and those of the voices are going to be just people doing weird impressions of of the people out of the films. For years my version of Star Trek the motion picture was the book and take version. And I've got to say it it the movie version being probably like twelve times as long I much prefer the the the book and take version of it.
SPEAKER_02For me it feels like a hammer horror. There's a sort of heightenedness to the acting but they're not parodying no but it's very much like performances you would have given in the 70s not that you give now but I think they've tried to take it as seriously as possible like there's always something that's aged badly in a hammer film or that's maybe slightly being sent up by one of the performers giving a more comical performance but there's no there's no real comedy in this I don't think or any sending up.
SPEAKER_01There are weird bits of it where you feel like oh this is the bit where there would be a booby dance. And there's even a bit like so like there's bits where women are made to get scantily dressed and dance for for m for men. Yeah. And there's even a bit like he does it and then he go it again you feel like you don't need to do it again. Yeah. Yeah I I we're not even getting to see this dance happening.
SPEAKER_02Yeah but yeah you that's the exploitation bit of the film isn't it like that you just don't get on radio. Although who knows there was in the reptile there's a weird sitar scene where nobody gets their tits out.
SPEAKER_01Maybe it would have just been that it's very strange that where the um the dad makes his daughter do it. Yeah. Looks like he's getting turned on then smashes up a sitar.
SPEAKER_02It was indeed so does it work as a radio adaptation? You've talked a bit about the narration and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_01It's an unusual way of doing it but I'm used to sort of forecast big finish and and and if anything I I think I kind of I like that this version of it because um you you don't have people sort of describing what they're seeing. Yeah. You just cut to a Michael Sheen dis describing it and he was doing a really good job. And I thought he the way the way he was narrating it the way he was speeding things up and slowing things down i it it gave a nice pace to the to the action and and it was really good.
SPEAKER_02They've obviously embellished some of the stage directions but it feels pretty much I mean maybe they crossed a few problematic lines and things like that but it felt very much like they'd gone oh we can actually tell the story by just the script's stage directions and we might need to embellish this bit more and that bit more. And as you say like don't underestimate Michael Sheen's ability to narrate it because he go he gives it a certain welly and a certain pace at the higher points.
SPEAKER_01Yeah yeah yeah and there were bits in it like like we said with where they got the the dancing in there and and this way they describe where some of the women as being and she was very attractive different like Patrick Stewart and extra sort of describing some of his um encounters so what about the story?
SPEAKER_02Does it feel like it moves the Dracula franchise on from where it was in Seven Golden Vampires?
SPEAKER_01Definitely I think because you got a female protagonist at the at the the beginning which is which is great. It's not something which we really see too much, isn't it normally like a male hero in it and I think just having it in in an another location and having it sort of like ambiguous to who the obviously Dracula's the bad guy but there was like an organisation I got this sort of like a sort of death cult very similar to uh um Temple of Doom I've I felt I was thinking Temple of Doom all the way through. But this was written before Temple of Doom wasn't it yeah so there's a def death cult who are basically using Dracula they think to sort of um as part of their kind of rituals but then they get to the point where they're starting to get a bit sick of him and sort of uh there's a bit of a power play between them and that that's interesting. There's a bit in it where they sort of they they're they're bringing if it does feel really convoluted that like they they send people out to find women to sort of like transport them quite a long way in order to sort of have them dance around in front of him and then kill them. Do you feel like why are you going to all this well he's got a larder hasn't he?
SPEAKER_02That's what they say at one point and he's got just loads of women in this larder and it's like why do you need more like kill those ones once they're drained will get you another one but you're just drawing attention to yourself mate.
SPEAKER_01But I did feel like it did feel quite Epstein-y to me it did feel like these are people who have got shit loads of money and they're bored and it's just like well how can we make our life interesting or let's just let's just make this really really convoluted our sort of um weird pervy kind of uh um entrapment of women you know but so but we've also got this mystery as well uh at the beginning which it felt to me like why is she hiding the fact that she's looking for a sister so the the main lady I'm really bad with names Penny I thought she was brilliant um performed it really well as well but we see her and she's just she's acting as if like I just decided to go on on holiday to India. I don't know why and I just uh I it was too hot so I asked where was a call a place ago and I it's just on the train but she's actually secretly looking for a sister. But I it was quite ambiguous because it felt to me like it they were kind of implying that maybe she was being drawn there by Dracula because they they kept having these kind of like they felt like flashbacks but later on we find it's it's her remembering some of the correspondence she's been having with her sister. That that was a little bit ambiguous and I I found that a little bit confusing. But that just might also made me think of Nosarasu because I I still don't really understand why Count Ulock Orlock Orlock is it in Noserasu It was kind of implied that he was brought he was conjured up by Johnny Depp's daughter but I didn't really understand why or how but it just but she's just she was a lonely goth so she can't conjured up like a a stinky old um cossack to come and um terrorise her.
SPEAKER_02I'm digressing back this yeah about Penny's sort of mission and reason for being there like there is no reason to keep it keep it quiet like in fact if you're looking for someone you should really be shouting about it for Yeah and asking for help exactly I think the story just about holds together like in this radio version. I think it's got a great pace and I can see it all the narration the acting and I I'm seeing it in a hammer horror style complete with bad choices every now and then I'm sure but I I just think they've managed to capture it so well and you know big shout outs to the narration as I said because it just it just works so well. I think placing it within Indian culture's interesting and now I don't think that's very shocking you know like because there are like big cultural differences although as we become more global the cultural differences sort of fade away a little bit and everything gets intertwined. But in the 70s you might have had an uncle or a dad who worked for the British Empire in a colony somewhere in somewhere like India and considered them all sort of savages you know or something like that and just this bizarre culture that they had there. So it's it's the reason why the Temple of Doom world feels so bizarre. It's but actually like because it's sort of pulling on those stereotypes of all the monkeys heads of the stuff those savages.
SPEAKER_01I I'm trying to think yeah when I was watching it I was thinking oh this is this Temple of Doom that's cool then I thought oh hang on is Temple of Doom problematic now I'm and I was trying to work out should should I think it's problematic?
SPEAKER_02I think I probably I think I I think I should just I think I I think it's a representation of India that's told through a white prism of people who came back from there and told stories of how bizarre everything is but you know now they're walking round they're watching Netflix driving a car and looking on their iPhone so it's it may look slightly different and there's religious and cultural things that are different here but they show up to England and go, you do what? Who fucking who knows? Yeah yeah yeah it's born from that world where we were all told that Western culture was like proper and everything else was weird it's a bit weird isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah yeah yeah. Um I thought the guy playing Dracula was r really good. Yeah it was he he gave enough of Chris Rallye that I could see him in my mind and I really liked like the sounds he was making when he was like kind of like being aggressive. Uh it's better than the hissing in the next thing we watch is is just they just hiss all the time whereas it he he felt like he sounded like um powerful and uh and frightening. But did you see what his uh his other main acting credit was it was Dead Ringers is what I got. Yeah posterman Pat.
SPEAKER_02He's the voice of postman Pat apparently oh wow so he's he's very much an audio actor.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_02To be honest I'm surprised Mark Gates didn't cast himself in the role but I guess he was going for authenticity and this guy as you say he brings Christopher Lee it's not an impersonation so it is different but he certainly channels Lee's Dracula in a way that other performers bring their own takes if you know what I mean. He's just got it like no I'm trying to be Christopher Lee.
SPEAKER_01He probably had more lines than Christopher than the last four Pam horror films as well. There was also an interesting portrayal of Dracula there's a bit where he's he's fed once ready he's coming back to look for the woman he's fed upon and they've killed her and they and they say show him like lapping the blood up off the floor. Yeah and that made him feel to me like slightly pathetic and and like he's not that all powerful. Yeah. You can take his food away and then he's he becomes desperate and I quite like that.
SPEAKER_02There's an interesting power play between him and uh the Rani. The Rani, yes. Rani and the Maharaja essentially who are in league with Dracula. But they're sort of keeping him prisoner but they also know Dracula can get one up on so there's there's an interesting power play and I think that's much more interesting than Dracula being all powerful or then holding him captive and we know he's gonna escape. They're in it together but they've also got their own agendas and at different points the other person has the the other hand.
SPEAKER_01And also like the the Rani and the Maharaja have got like this this sort of army of cultists as well. So that it's also the Dracula isn't all powerful like like I said modern recent retellings of that character make him I think too powerful. Sometimes in Hammer stuff it's almost like he could be killed by anything. But it's almost we say you have to do a different way of killing him each time so that ends up that like no ends up being get caught in a bush or uh a a shadow of a cross goes across him and get and it it becomes almost ridiculous at how how vulnerable he actually is but it was here like that you know he is dangerous when it's like maybe him against like half a dozen people but if you had a shitload of cultists there that yeah he's screwed at that point. So I I quite like that that he he's a a a danger but also sort of something which you could potentially beat.
SPEAKER_02Although in this isn't he stopped by a bullet?
SPEAKER_01No it he gets he gets put up on up on the top of that tower doesn't he? Does he get shot?
SPEAKER_02I think he gets shot.
SPEAKER_01He gets hurt and then he runs up there's this as there's a tower which they talk about at the beginning which where I think the Hindu people put their bodies to be picked clean by vultures.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01He gets hurt and um chased up this tower which part is thinking can't he fly? I'm sure that he we've seen him as a bat many times before but yeah he they they say he's tending his wounds up on the on the top of this tower and then as the sun comes up he gets attacked by vultures. Right sounds cool we've seen how bad they are doing bats in in hammer so them trying to have Chris Release on a tower being attacked by stuffed vultures would have been awful but in my mind this version it was um it was a a really quite cool ending for him.
SPEAKER_02Yeah absolutely how does it compare to the other Hammer Dracula films?
SPEAKER_01Like I said I think this would have been probably my favourite if if they pulled this off and it was like half as good as I always imagined it while I was watching it. I think it would have been a really good take and I think it would make sense that if he was getting a bit of heat in Europe he would just go right I'm gonna fuck off the Turkey or India or something like that where I can just lay low a bit you know that there's maybe like the uh I'm I'm doing quotes here civilized world is getting a little bit like hot for me so I need to go somewhere where maybe they're a little bit more superstitious or that I can sort of you know im embed myself a bit more but yeah I've I I would have loved to see you know Dracula in India just him turning up in unusual unexpected places and and you haven't got Van House in there it's another thing I was thinking there's no like expert there's in other film there's always like someone who's like this is how you kill vampires who turn up and and but there's you don't have any of that people just have to deal with it.
SPEAKER_02You've got a couple of dancers the woman looking for a sister they go to the police at one point and immediately the police goes no how dare you accuse the Maharaja of being up to no good and and that's it. They're just like okay we're on our own then there's a an interesting moment towards the end isn't there where there's a big car crash and there's like a big festival on the street and I actually got a little lost at that point. I wasn't quite sure I listened to it a couple of times I wasn't quite sure what was going on.
SPEAKER_01So he's trying to escape uh in the c in the car and then there's a bit of a car chase I think there's a crash he falls out and there's a bit where he he's got some like street children and he's offering it to somebody's bit he's trying to get someone to to eat the child uh so to so they would become a vampire too and and and then they refuse and I think yeah someone gets shot or something. I listened to it twice as well but and I literally probably a couple of hours are it go in it it's not has it all gone in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah that it was it's interesting because I think it does such a good job at setting the scene for the first sort of two thirds of it and the end makes sense but there is a little bit in the final third.
SPEAKER_01I remember now there's some giant like mobile temple. Right it gets run over he gets run over by that I think yeah.
SPEAKER_02I think having listened to it twice perhaps there's a little confusion there in terms of I'm sure it would have made sense on screen, but in terms of sort of the radio adaptation perhaps just being a little bit off at that point we've also had three hours of this other thing which has probably pushed all the good stuff out of our minds. Well quite do you have much more you want to say on the unquenchable thirst of Dracula?
SPEAKER_01I just I think they set it up at the end because basically all the um uh's her name Penny Penny yeah Penny goes back to free her sister who's like down like some oubliette with like in Dracula's Lard or of lots of other women so you think oh that's it she's um saved a day. Uh all those women are actually vampires they come out and they they vampirise her as well and it kind of implies that the story's gonna go on with this kind of um all these female vampires and I thought that's that's pretty cool. I like that sort of um twist to the end.
SPEAKER_02Yeah absolutely it has enough twists and turns in it in general that ultimately we know at the end of the day Dracula's gonna end up dead at the end of it and but you're never quite sure where it's going to go in the in sort of the 90 minutes whereas some of the other Hammer Dracula films are a bit more like well they're gonna die, they're not gonna die and you know by the end of it there'll be what two people left alive.
SPEAKER_01But I think um in our podcast we're sort of going through quite a lot of like old hammer stuff and there's so many unmade scripts um but also there's so many characters you say well these these guys could have their own like series you know yeah and I would love there to be a like an ongoing like hammer universe done in this style. I I think it it it works really well. Like global vampire hunters almost yeah don't give it to big finish we we're gonna see what they do with with Dracula but but do do like a series of um uh the hammer universe with like this it'd be great so if you John Gore John Gore if you're listening th that this is the way to go but you you're never gonna get another hammer movie off the ground.
SPEAKER_02Look I had a great time listening to this it was a lot of fun. It's something I will revisit it at some point much like I do the the hammer films that were made but we must rate it is it a clanger a banger or an average meander?
SPEAKER_01It's a a Bengal banger.
SPEAKER_02A Bengal banger for me too uh it was as good as it could have been without it being the real thing I think. Yeah well if it if anything better than some of the real things so the next thing we are doing is Dracula's war which is another audio production from Big Finish Productions. It was released in September of 2020 recorded on the 27th to the 30th of August and the 3rd and 4th of September 2019 at the Moat Studios. It was written by Jonathan Barnes and produced and directed by Scott Hancock. Now we're a few years later from our previous release COVID 19's happened we're in the middle of a pandemic and there's been a bit of a downturn in the amount of releases and TV shows and things like that. So the things that are going on in genre at That time, we've got Bill and Ted's Face the Music: Colour Out of Space, The Invisible Man, Possessor, The New Mutants, Tenant, and Sonic the Hedgehog. On TV, we've got Dark, What We Do in Shadows, The Boys, and Dracula by Mark Gatis and Stephen Moffat. And then we've got Star Trek Picard and Discovery and Doctor Who, series 12. Now, obviously, some of that is down to the pandemic, but you're seeing a turn there. There's much more of a mix of new stuff versus oh we're doing the same old IPs again and again.
SPEAKER_01There's some of my favourite things ever you were mentioning there. That's brilliant. I love Dark.
SPEAKER_02I've never seen Dark.
SPEAKER_01Oh man, you've got to watch it. It's one of my we're just I was just going off about that work again today. I think they're sick of me talking about that programme. So good. I mean, you gotta watch it.
SPEAKER_02What we do in Shadows was like an amazing moment. This fantastic thing of what do you do with vampires, Dracula, whatever, let's do a s a sitcom. And it works so well. They never drop the ball at any point during that series.
SPEAKER_01I was so sad when that ended.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, me too. Because it I would quite happily. The sad thing about that is, had that been made 20 years before, there would have been 24 episodes a year for 10 years, and you could just jump in and out. But what can I say? All the episodes are perfect.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I keep going to a church with my kids and then forgetting those masturbation jokes in the very first episode.
SPEAKER_02What are they doing? No, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. But a great year for horror films, I think, and genre fiction starting to look a bit forward again instead of back, unless you include Bill and Ted and Sonic the Hedgehog.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm Tennet was going forward and back.
SPEAKER_02England, 1917, the height of the First World War, decades after the events of Transylvania, as the nation's desperation and mass death create the conditions for old horrors to resurface. Mina Harker and a resurrected Van Helsing become drawn back into a secret plot to create an army of vampires to win the war, which is intertwined with Mina's son's Quincy's fate fighting on the front lines. With Dracula resurrected, a final showdown takes place between Van Helsing, Mina, and Dracula. So we come to Dracula's War. It's a brand new audio. So Big Finish do an adaptation of Dracula, then they do something called Dracula's Guests, and then they do Dracula's War. You've not heard this before?
SPEAKER_01No, and and I thought it was a really good idea, didn't it, to listen to the f the last part of a trilogy without hearing the other bits and just being dropped in the middle of a load of continuity with characters you've got no idea what's happening. Well uh thanks for that.
SPEAKER_02I I didn't quite know that they were so interconnected, because obviously we all know the story of Dracula, so we didn't need to do that one.
SPEAKER_04No.
SPEAKER_02I'll be honest with you, I thought they were three one-hour plays. So I was a little bit surprised to find that it was three one-hour plays in this box set alone. But we both jumped into the deep end on this because I've not heard it before either. Uh and sometimes when you're exploring the worlds of expanded media, you just have to go.
SPEAKER_01You've got to yeah, you've got to start somewhere, haven't you? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You've got to jump in and go, do you know what? I can't do all nine hours of this. And to be honest with you, I don't think doing the previous six hours would have made me love this anymore.
SPEAKER_01No, not at all. Oh, I figure I would have killed myself. Sorry, trigger warning for um discussion of suicide in this episode.
SPEAKER_02Let's jump straight into the script, the story. Because I I do think it's all there. Like there are obviously characters with that if you're a long-term listener, you've met before, but I think it's all there. So this three-hour story, how do we feel about it?
SPEAKER_01Well, you say we could just jump in. I I from the beginning, I was like, oh, there's something missing here. And I was sort of, I was I listened to it, I was like, we went, I said, checked the files, looked at looked at the numbering of the files, went online to say, well, it does does it really start here. I found it incredibly tedious. I I I listened to it, I went to see um some friends in Wales. I listened to it on the way up there, on the way back, and I was saying to my wife today, there were several times when I was just going, Fucking get on with it. Just my God, oh my god, just keep just do do something. And and it was it was it's one of those I was saying there's there's it's audio, so there's no budget restrictions about what where where they can go, what they can do. And it was just bait I I've written down here, before they say anything, they talk about the fact they're about to say it, and then they talk about it whilst they're s what they're saying, whilst they're saying it. They use multiple words to describe everything, and then they have several scenes where so the thing they say they're gonna do, you they think they've done it, and then they come back and they're still doing it, and it's just they're not get nothing's happening in in this thing. It's infuriating. It feels like um a 14-year-old boy is has written this and he's he's just worked out how to use a fosaurus because every time they describe something, they use about four or five different d describing words, and the most obscure describing words you can think of, because it's they f it's almost like they think it's cool that they they use the words which you never heard of to describe that thing. And I don't know if it's true they're trying to emulate the style of like of the of the Dracula books, but it's I think they are it's done badly.
SPEAKER_02It is like it feels to me like not only is the author Jonathan Barnes trying to emulate the style of old literature, which by its nature is dated and progresses, but they still manage to pack a story into two, three hundred pages a lot of the time, not six thousand pages. Cracking it's exciting.
SPEAKER_01They go all over the all over Europe, they're rushed rushing around all over the place, shaking, and it's just nothing happened.
SPEAKER_02And it also feels to me like the commissioners, somebody at Big Finish went, the only way this works is if one person writes it and it's three hours and it's three CDs in the box set, and that's that's a format that's going to work for us with this amount of cast, and you just work with that. Because I think there's a tight one hour in this, because the story itself isn't bad, but it somehow manages to prolong it so much that there's zero tension, zero pace. And then the last 20 minutes or so is quite exciting. And I'm like, oh well, this is what I want from a Dracula stuff. Dracula doesn't show up until disc three.
SPEAKER_01No, but there's a point you go, oh, okay, after the first 45 minutes, something exciting's happened. Oh, okay, now it's just now they're just talking again. Uh like there's it starts off with the King of England at the time describing a dream he's had. And it's like, this character of the king doesn't need to be in it at all. And they keep going back to this guy that that the first sort of um half an hour is about trying to get him to sign a bit of paper so that they can go and do this idea they got that that they're gonna resurrect Dracula and get him to make vampire armies to win the First World War. Brilliant idea. Yeah, but just show that, not just people talking about doing it. And the whole idea that they had to get him to sign a bit of paper in order to able to do that, there's no point anyone goes, Can I see the bit of paper the king signed to say you're like it's just it's it's just useless. I don't know why it did he describe um it's almost like so they can have a cool pre-credit sequence, and it's it and that's quite interesting, but doesn't go anywhere, and it's just interminable.
SPEAKER_02So Dracula's Guests is set 40 years before this, so there can't be that much continuity. There's obviously the thing that Van Helsing has died in Dracula's guests, I guess, because they they resurrect him here, uh, which is quite a nice idea of like, oh, the only way we can fight the living dead is to bring back the person who was trying to kill the living dead at the end.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and they they they wrong foot you because I don't know if I was just being naive, but I I felt I thought the nuns who resurrect Van Helsing were were resurrecting Dracula at that point.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, me too, because I thought that's when the story's gonna properly kick in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I was actually quite like, oh, that's exciting. They brought back Van Housing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but it's all the right story beats there. It's like this in theory is exciting. I'm assuming that those nuns who have taken care of this painting that can resurrect people are in Dracula's guests, but Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Or maybe they just get given the painting at the end of the Yeah. So the painting is essentially a whore crux. Um Dracula seems to have put her bits of himself in a bit of him in the painting. Uh it implies that Mina has been either impregnated by Dracula, because um they have Quincy Harker, obviously named after the uh the Quincy who died in Dracula, is the s uh is Jonathan Harker and uh Mina Harker's son, but they kind of s uh imply that maybe Dracula fathered the child or he put part of himself into the child. It might be in the fact that maybe he he was in control of Mina while oh yeah. Go and listen to the um the rather than just guess what happened. If you're actually that interested, go and listen to it. But that's what the impression I got.
SPEAKER_02I do think if you're doing something like this, it has to be accessible. Because it's not like it goes Dracula's war is volume three, you know? There is Dracula, Dracula's guests, and Dracula's war. You should be able to. Good writing and good marketing is you can jump into these at any point. And the fact that we are struggling with bits of it, I don't know whether it's the lack of continuity or just the incoherentness of this stretched out story.
SPEAKER_01Well, the the amount of that just them talking to each other in rooms, they could have filled in some of that stuff for us. Right, there's a bit of dialogue I've written, and it's also the delivery of it which is infuriating. So here's a bit of um dialogue from Val Helsin. I salute the courage of you both. There is in this place, I have no doubt, some means of egress, but what it is, I have, at this present moment, not the slightest notion. It's rather than saying, I don't know how to get out of this. It was just like they have so many commas in every sentence of like, yeah, just words and words and words and words. Don't like words.
SPEAKER_02I also just don't think people spoke like that. I know language has evolved and changed, but like no one's having a conversation where they're saying the same thing nineteen times over. Like it's just not practical.
SPEAKER_01No, especially when they're it it's in a point of you know, they're in danger. You know, just get to the fucking point anyway. They need these fit these different parts in order to bring Dracula back and different they got these uh these con these convent of nuns who are protecting this this painting. Well that's quite a clever mechanism to have the one of the nuns blind, so therefore there's a reason for everyone explaining to her what what's happening.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And um that worked up then after that point it just got weird that the people describing things where I'm missing Michael Sheen coming in and explaining it to me.
SPEAKER_02Well, Michael Sheen would do it in 30 seconds and with a bit of gusto Yeah. But it cuts between the characters that we're hearing talking, and it's a big cast, so it's not like they need when they jump to the narration, which is essentially diary entries, which I guess, as we said, is trying to be sort of true to the original material. But it just elongates it. It's like this more than anything needed to be a full cast audio drama, and there's no reason why it isn't. I don't need any of those diary entries. I get from the scenes that we have already exactly what's going on. I get no new information, no extra information at all. Yeah, like apart from maybe the author just can't figure out how to describe the action scenes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there isn't a diary entry for every part of it. So but then there is a weird bit where there's a diary entry for a bit where the person who's writing the diary entry wasn't there. So it starts off with saying, I wasn't there, but what I imagined happened was, and then he starts talking about like uh Dracula uh in a half bat form or clinging to the side of the uh train, clu coming through the window, what a discussion between two people characters were, and and and this whole sort of but it's like there's other parts of the um the story where you didn't things like this were happening without people doing a direction. Why did so why put it in a directory and make it out by somebody who wasn't witnessing this? It's it's it was so bizarre. Though who was editing this? Who was there was no one there going, that doesn't make sense, mate. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It strikes to me as someone who's not comfortable with writing for the audio medium and nobody picking him up on it because big finish writers just write shit loads.
SPEAKER_01So was it was he written other other stuff?
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_02Jonathan Barnes has had a couple of novels out, and I I can see why a novelist would have trouble potentially moving to audio, because there's so much you can say on the page in a novel that is difficult to transfer it to the audio movie.
SPEAKER_01I'm really surprised that Mark Gatis was involved with this and didn't stick his oar in because you can see like his um involvement in the Unquenchable First of Dracula. I feel like his hand was he wrote and directed it, didn't he? So, like, is this as someone who knows this stuff inside out?
SPEAKER_02Maybe they went to him with the first one and went to, well, we might do some more. And then by the time they got to the third one, they were like, We're writing another one. Have you got an afternoon free? He was like, I've got an afternoon, so like don't put him in till the end.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02He probably only got the script for the last one. Maybe the other two are better. I'm assuming the first one is at least better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I want to listen to the first one, because I'm gonna I'm gonna do that. Yeah, and also John took the picture on the cover as well, so that's a way then gonna go.
SPEAKER_02Oh really?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So um he's done quite a lot of not so much now, but he did look quite a lot of stuff for Big Fiddish. Um and he spent the afternoon with Mark on one of these recordings, just talking about um Roger Moore and James Bond films and stuff.
SPEAKER_02Oh, amazing. Lucky him. I mean, not if you had to sit through them recording this for Yeah. So, how do we feel about this backdrop of World War One?
SPEAKER_01It's open to endless possibilities and could be so amazing. And and like one of the reasons I thought it'd be great to do this because I felt like the idea of like a an army of vampires led by Draken and World War One would be fucking amazing. The cover looks amazing.
SPEAKER_02Vampires in trenches is such an exciting idea. None of that.
SPEAKER_01And they kind of tease it in that dream that dream sequence at the beginning. Yeah. Uh and and there's no reason not to not to do it because you've got no no restrictions on this at all. And all you get is some uh vampires on a on a a hundred um soldiers on a train turned into vampires.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um which are swiftly taken out by a 45-year-old woman and a resurrected oxygenarian with like an uh enough stakes that they can just carry themselves.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right. And so I was saying to Beck, it's ridiculous that they took out a hundred vampires on that train uh really swiftly as well. So but then Dracula said, I I will only need a hundred men and I'll win the first world war for you. Yeah. But they got taken taken out by these two people with a couple of stakes. So everyone on that um battlefield's got a bayonet on the on there. Yeah. So that they would they were not a formidable force at all. So it it just sort of completely negates the whole premise of the thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's very bizarre because it's the infinite possibility that it's there and it's just squandered on this meandering story, and we're left with a female vampire locked up that feeds off someone and they turn into vampires, and I don't really I don't need any of that. Don't need any of that. Like, by the time we get to the train, uh but but actually by the time we're in the forest in the third one, and they're being pursued by a wolf that is the form of Dracula, and then they get onto the train. I'm suddenly like, okay, this is what I wanted from episode one, and then we'd go somewhere else. Like that that final hour was quite an entertaining story for me, but it just took too long to get there.
SPEAKER_01So for me, that I I that's where I got rid of I never got that that wolf was Dracula. I thought that it's got that had must have had something to do with the origin story of that female vampire, because I think that was her village. Whatever that storyline, because it was another painting, they got put into another painting. So just when it's all kicking off in World War One, sort of like Europe, and there's there's vampires on it, they just take the main protagonists out and stick them in The Village from Scars of Dracula. Yeah, yeah, some fantasy place. And um and it felt to me like they would they were like reliving some kind of storyline from something else which I haven't seen before. Yeah, it was just really bizarre.
SPEAKER_02What do you think about the use of Dracula within it?
SPEAKER_01I thought he was I thought Mark did a uh obviously he's my friend, so I just call him Mark, you know. I think Marky G. Yeah, Mark G, yeah. I thought he was really good, and I think it it's obviously the role he's always wanted to play. Um he can get away with not looking like Dracula at all on audio. Yeah, I thought I thought it was really good. I liked they managed to sort of resurrect him in the body of Mina Parker's son, so that he was like chained up when they resurrected him. So it was quite nice that they brought him back, but they had him contained.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And that was quite cool. And I like the way that he was just like to saying, Um, I see that you've got the uh and I love it when anyone calls Jesus a Nazarene because it was makes me figure the the omen. He said, I see you've got the cross of the Nazarene, and if you ever take that off, I will kill you straight away. Yeah. And it and that was really cool, and I liked the way he feeds on someone and then just opens the door, grabs someone else, and just drags them in and feeds on them as well. I thought he was really good and completely wasted in this. Yeah. But I didn't like all the hissing. I don't like I don't like hissing vampires, it just seems silly.
SPEAKER_02No, I think it's something that's I mean, who was the first hissing vampire? I'm sure it was a hammer horror film or something like that.
SPEAKER_01I'm not sure. We'll have to look that up.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I like that the the use of Dracula, and again, I think trying to use Dracula as a weapon is exciting, and I like the fact that he immediately just sort of within about 10 minutes he's gone. No, I'm not having this, and actually you're all you're under my control.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Mark Gatis is somebody who has been associated with Dracula for me since uh my teenage years, and you know, he obviously wrote the Dracula series for the BBC. He was he played a vampire in being human, I think, as well, in uh one of the later series.
SPEAKER_01I keep trying to get into being human. I I never I never it's Russell Tovey, man. I don't I don't know about him.
SPEAKER_02If he's not shagging a fish, I'm not interested.
SPEAKER_01No, exactly.
SPEAKER_02I loved being human when it was first on, and I think I was just the right age for it to be a really exciting drama, but I would never want to watch it again because I've got such good memories of it. I know it'd be shit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Because I was I was saying to you on WhatsApp they were doing, I started watching Life on Mars, and I don't think I I can't have watched it because it's it it seems so different to what I imagined this program to be, but it's uh it's it's going okay, but I can see my kids are just not getting into it because it's just like TV used to be like lots more episodes of stuff. Yeah. And they're just uh they just want want the storyline of like him being a coma just to get on with that.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01This is the interesting part of the story. Why why are we messing around with like the criminal of the week which they're trying to catch? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01We want to hit we want the mythology, we want the like the overall storyline to be addressed, not any of this stuff which is just like, how can we keep this concept tread in water until we get cancelled and then we'll then we'll wrap up the um the big story.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean it yeah, it's a different structure and a different way of storytelling. And also ultimately, like you're watching it 20 years later. Yeah that's the equivalent of being sat down in 1990 and watching Spearhead from Space.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Uh which, as you know, was the only Doctor Who entirely shot on film.
SPEAKER_01Really? Okay. You should tell the guys from the podcast about it. Yeah, I'm writing that down. That's an interesting bit of um trivia.
SPEAKER_02Uh anyway, Mark Gates' is Dracula works for me, and I I would be interested in hearing the first part that is the actual adaptation to s to hear him in full flow there. But I also feel by the end of it, Dracula's disposed of, Van Helsing's disposed of, and I guess this is the return of the Jedi, right? This is the final part of the trilogy. But it doesn't feel like a big, exciting end to me, like, because the story's just meandered so much to get there in the three episodes we've heard.
SPEAKER_01And just fizzled.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh they kind of imply that they're gonna resurrect him again in America, but that's about it, really. Yeah, well, look out look out for that one, you know? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02What do we think of the rest of the cast? Are there any standout performances? Is there any characters that particularly work for you?
SPEAKER_01There was a a soldier who just kept saying sir the whole time. Like, yeah, yes, sir. Well, of course I'll do that, sir. Oh, sir, why you and it was just like that was what I was shouting at the radio. The radio? The wireless in the calf when I was yeah.
SPEAKER_02For me, this is everything that can go wrong with audio drama in terms of the casting, and there's lots of clearly reasonably posh people, some of them doing working class accents, some of them being posh, all sounding the same.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's what I imagine most people think audio drama is like, which it's not. Like just the last thing we've reviewed. If you listen to any of the the Doctor Who reviews I do on the Doctor Who podcast, there are so much variety and so many varieties of voice and production values and stories you can tell. But this, every voice just sort of blends into one of a bunch of people being a bit posh and sounding a bit too drama school. So it's already up against it for me with with that before you throw in a three hour shit script.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Is anyone still listening to this? Jonathan Barnes. Jonathan's like he's just uh crying. Don't worry.
SPEAKER_02This'll be a smooth twenty minutes in the edit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Think that Dracula could work as an audio series.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Of course it could. It's an amazing story. And we've we've just like we said, we've we just heard a really good first episode of like a Dracula extend expanded universe done really well.
SPEAKER_02It just blows my mind that a company who've made some really great audio stories can just churn this out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It just uh it's just the way they did it w was w was just tedious.
SPEAKER_02I can imagine the synopsis, the pitch being like this is gonna be really exciting, but uh yeah. Just so this review doesn't go on for three hours. Is there anything else you want to say on this?
SPEAKER_01Uh just don't bother with it. It's true. Yeah. Just go and watch um Bram Soker's Dracula again. Indeed.
SPEAKER_02Or listen to the unquenchable thirst of Dracula.
SPEAKER_01Thirst, yes, yes. If you can find it.
SPEAKER_02So we must rate it. A clanger, a banger, or an average meander?
SPEAKER_01It's a banger. No, it's a cla it's an a it's the it's the clangiest of clangers.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's a big clanger for me. It's just missed the mark completely.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Before we wrap things up, I just want to know what do you think makes a good Dracula sequel?
SPEAKER_01Oh man. I like the idea of of that there's this ancient being which has just always been in the shadows and has taken every so often to take his opportunity to go in it and uh fuck up some people's lives. And uh though then the friends getting together and trying to deal with it deal with that. I think there there is opportunities to sort of take that out and then maybe have a bigger story like the idea of using Dracula to make an army in the First World War, that's that's a really great idea. But I think I think we've just got to remember that he's not all powerful, he's not like a god, he's he's pretty vulnerable, and that's I think that's one of the reasons why and if you look at lots of like older stories that vampires do hide a lot of the time because they are very vulnerable. Like they are completely vulnerable during the daytime, and and if you know what you're doing, there's ways of of of dispensing them. So they've got to they've got to be sneaky about what they're trying to do. And and I like the way that Dracula comes from like a a lineage of like um the upper class and it's someone who would prey upon weaker people and and that kind of stuff. And I like and I also like the the way that he's got people who are like his minions. I like the I like the idea of like the having a Renfield, having like uh you know a group of gypsies who are the ones who are gonna move him around and stuff, and and in the book where he's like always just one step ahead of you, like you you think you think you've got him, but then you realize oh he's on the ship and we're gonna go and chase him now, and it's a more of an adventure story. I'm not that interested in he's someone who is after your girlfriend and your girlfriend's actually really got the heart for him. Yeah, so that kind of thing. I think it's something which does work when you bring it into different times because he's immortal. Although one of the things I was thinking is that if you were immortal when you were like thousands of years old, wouldn't you just be bored of this like, okay, and I'm only gonna go I'm gonna go and but I suppose this is maybe a way of him making it more interesting for himself. It's like rather than just I'm just gonna go and eat any feed on anyone, it's like okay, what I'm gonna do is just like get really obsessed with this one person and and I'm gonna like just follow them around, watch them for a bit, follow them around. Maybe that's just makes it more interesting for it for him and that whole thing, right? And what I do, I'll I'll mess up her husband's job and stuff, and and and I'll get like embroiled in in in that and make him come over here for a bit and then like mess around with him with him. I like that kind of cat and mouse kind of thing.
SPEAKER_02I think it's the manipulation that Dracula's able to do or the vampire's able to do of like whether it is a cult or a group of like Satanists who want to who are out for kicks or just some hot young woman or a group of travelers. It's like it's the cat and mouse that's going, I'm gonna fuck around with these people because I've got nothing else to do. I've been alive forever, I read all the books, I've seen all of Netflix on Dracula playing with human lives as I pick them off one by one. It's an interesting game. I think when you put that in with different types of people, different cultures, different places, you can essentially tell the same story again and again and not get bored. So it blows my mind that one of these that we've done did it so well, and the other just sort of fucked around for three hours and in a really interesting setting and just did nothing.
SPEAKER_01When I first watched the Stephen Moffat Margatus Dracula, I was a little bit disappointed because I thought it was just going to be like a a retelling of the Dracula story. And then when it suddenly started twisting around, and then he woke up and he was in the modern day, I was half like excited, but half like, oh no, why are they mess messing around with this story? But now I've gone back recently and watched it, I think this is brilliant, they've done a really, really good job of this, and and and I I think that was one of my my favourite sort of adaptations of it.
SPEAKER_02I really need to re-watch that because I remember really liking the second episode and finding the other two episodes totally a bit weird. But I think I was putting my own expectations on it, and actually I think I just want to go back and re-watch it because a lot of people have said to me, it's so much better when you go back the second time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that I find that a lot, but going back without any expectations on stuff, particularly things which you really like.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Now you guys have got me going back and watching Jody Whitka's Doctor Who, and it's so much better than I remember it because it I was just like it just wasn't what I was expecting and and wanting at the time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I was just like pushing it away.
SPEAKER_02But also Mark Gatis and Stephen Moffat, at that time, it was Stephen Moffat's Doctor Who and their version of Sherlock, which were all like twists and turns of oh, you're not gonna believe what's happened. And actually, it's quite a linear story, the Dracula they tell, even if it's got a time jump, obviously, for that final episode. And it just needs you to sort of put all that, oh, but actually, you know, this is gonna be happening, and that's the subplot. It's like actually no, just follow the story and enjoy yourself.
SPEAKER_01And I think the the Van Helsing in that is my second favourite after um Anthony Hopkins. So I I thought she was really, really good in that.
SPEAKER_02Excellent. I'm gonna watch that again very soon. Right. If people don't know you or your podcasts, where can they find you and your podcasts?
SPEAKER_01So just look up generalwitchfinders.com or type in generalwitchfinders wherever you get your podcasts, and we cover mainly British horror, lots of hammer stuff. And we've also got a zine as well, uh, which uh didn't wrote it in the last one, so check that out as well. Just go to generalwitchfinders.com. And there's some also some cool Dracula t-shirts on that uh website as well, so go and check that out.
SPEAKER_02Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as it helps people to find the pod. Look for TooHot for TV on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at TooHotTheNumber4 Pod. That's Too Hot the number four pod for the latest updates and additional content. Next time I'll be joined by Ian Martin and we'll be talking about the expanded universe of the X-Files. But until then, I've been Dylan. And I've been Ross. And this has been Too Hot for TV.
SPEAKER_01The Francis Fall Copula movie. Cop I said that right. Copula? Copula, yeah. I I think I said it in a way like a cop of fire, yeah. It was like copulation. Oh, like shit loving. What's what's what's a is it um is it cop copulify? Copulafire anyway.
SPEAKER_02Um as always, we're talking about Dracula. Um well as always. No. As always.