Comedy is a lot like politics, all careers eventually end in failure. There have been plenty of Bats versus Bolts matchups on this blog that have been, as one commenter put it “Glass Joe versus Mike Tyson” but this really is a foregone conclusion. On the one hand, Mel Brooks’ 1974 masterpiece Young Frankenstein, which would place in the low single digits on any creditable ranking of the greatest American comedies of all time. And on the other hand we have 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, a movie so critically lambasted on its release that it killed Mel Brooks’ directorial career stone dead, which is a bit like if Frank Sinatra sang a song that was so bad he was never allowed to perform again. I mean it’s Mel Brooks. If he hasn’t earned a mulligan or two, who the hell has?
The Adaptations
In early 20th century America Doctor Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced “Fronkensteen”) is a respected and reputable lecturing physician who has gone to great pains to distance himself from the actions of his deranged ancestor. But, when he learns that he has inherited his family estate in Transylvania, he returns to the old country and meets his grandfather’s old servant Igor and a buxom, beautiful lab assistant named Inga. Discovering his grandfather’s notes, Frederick realises that, far from being “doodoo” his method of bringing inanimate matter to life could actually work.
Assembling a massive body out of different body parts (complete with massive schwanzstucker) he plans to place the brain of noted “scientist and saint” Hans Deblruck into the creature’s brain. Unfortunately, Igor gets the wrong brain and tells Frederick that the brain they actually put in the monster was marked “Abby Normal”.
The monster escapes, recreates a few classic scenes from James Whale’s Frankenstein and then is lured home by the good doctor. Convinced the monster can be educated, Frankenstein puts on an all singing, all dancing reveal of the monster to the world which goes great until the flashing of cameras causes him to go berserk and go rampaging through the town grabbing women and climbing buildings like…uh…what’s his name? Sean Penn.
But, Frederick is able to transfer some of his intelligence to the monster who becomes erudite and reasonable and charms the angry mob of villagers who’ve come to burn down the castle and the movie ends with the monster marrying Frankenstein’s fianceé Elizabeth while the good doctor settles down with Inga.
MEANWHILE:
London lawyer Renfield arrives in Transylvania to oversee the purchase of land in England by the mysterious Count…
It’s the 1930s Dracula. The plot is the same, practically beat for beat with sub-Airplane style gags worked in at every opportunity. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, and it doesn’t really feel fair to judge either movie as adaptations of the source material. So, instead, let’s ask why Young Frankenstein is so revered and why Dracula Dead and Loving It got such a vitrolic reaction? And, does it deserve it?
Well…context matters a whole bunch.
In 1994, Dead and Loving It felt like the last gasp of a once great comedic giant. People seriously thought this was as bad as spoof movies could get. They…
They didn’t know.
They couldn’t know.
Fastforward to 2024, an era where not only spoof movies but pure comedies as a whole are practically a dead genre and yeah, Dracula Dead and Loving It starts looking a whole lot less offensive. Overall it’s fairly weak but there are solid gags and weak gags being sold by very game, very talented actors and it’s never gross or mean-spirited the way really bad spoof movies can be. That said, there are some desperately long, desperately unfunny scenes that are asking for a stake through the heart (or a scissor in the editing room). There’s one long dream sequence that goes on for roughly the length of the Triassic Period where Dracula thinks that he’s been cured of vampirism only to wake up and exclaim “I was having a day-mare…” and no, that’s it. That’s the joke. That’s where the scene ends. Someone looked at that and thought “good enough”.
By contrast, Young Frankestein is…well, it’s Young Frankenstein. I can quote this damn thing from memory. Schwanzstucker! Froderick! Abby Normal! Sweet Mystery of life at last I found you! Blucher!
It’s just wall to wall comedy gold.
So, on the one hand, the disparity between the two movies isn’t difficult to fathom. The script for YF is just orders of magnitude better and (while I absolutely do not want to shit on the DDAL actors) it’s got the kind of cast that Nick Fury would assemble if he was making a comedy film.
But I’d also argue that Mel Brooks’ parodies work better the more specific they are. Young Frankenstein is an absolutely adoring parody of the James Whale original, to the point of reusing sets and props from that film. Whereas DDALI feels a little all over the place. It has the plot of the Bela Lagosi version, the colour palette of the Hammer Films, and a few nods to the then recent Gary Oldman version. This makes the parody feel unfocused and lacking in bite (pun! kill me).
Anyway, we’ve dragged this out needlessly.
WINNER: BOLTS (duh).
The Monsters
Look. I love Leslie Nielsen.
But he was always at his best when he was leveraging the ultra serious gravitas of his earlier dramatic work and placing that in absurd, out there situations. The beauty of his performances in Airplane or the Naked Gun movies is that you could slot them into a serious film and they wouldn’t feel out of place.
As he got older, his comedic style moved into more broad farce and it never really worked as well. Nielsen’s Dracula is by no means offensively bad. Honestly, the dude is just so likeable I’m never unhappy when he’s onscreen. But I think the seventies was definitely the time for him to assay this role. By the nineties he was physically too stiff to be a truly imposing Dracula, and his comedic blade was more than a little rusty.
As for our monster, I kind of feel a little sorry for Peter Boyle, a journeyman comic actor who has to stand out in one of the most stacked casts of bona-fide comic gods ever assembled. And he’s good! He’s very good! But what’s “good” gonna do you when you’re acting against Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Gene Hackman, Marty Feldman and Cloris Leachman? He does, however, get his moment to shine in the end.
WINNER: BOLTS
The Scientists
Alright, something that’s entirely irrelevant but that I just need to get off my chest.
I think Mel Brooks as Abraham Van Helsing looks eerily like Patrick Stewart in Star Trek First Contact.
Moving on.
Brooks’ Van Helsing is a high point of the film, doing his garrulous old Eastern European man persona to great effect. He also has surprisingly good chemistry with Leslie Nielsen, considering this was their only movie together. But, unfortunately for him, he’s up against…
Mini-Mouse once asked me why I consider Gene Wilder to be the greatest actor of all time and I told her that there are three types of great actor:
There are the chainsaws. Towering, thundering forces of nature that carve through scenery and costars alike through sheer, raw acting power.
Then there are the scalpels. Masters of subtlety that can extract universes of meaning and emption from a raised eyebrow, a twitch of the lip, a whispered syllable…
And the third category is Gene Wilder who is a fucking…scalpel-saw. Working either side of the register, he completely dominates.
When making this movie, Wilder and Brooks had so many blazing rows that when it was done they decided that, for the sake of their friendship, they would never do another movie together. They remained best friends until Wilder died in 2016 along with most of humanity’s hopes and dreams.
So they sacrificed one of the greatest comedic partnerships in cinema history for the sake of a pure and true friendship that lasted 50 years.
Fucking selfish, I call it.
WINNER: BOLTS
The Dashing Young Men
Alright, I’ve been kicking DDAL around enough already. Time to give some praise. The supporting male cast in this is excellent. We have long time Brooks collaborator Harvey Korman as stuffy old Doctor Seward and Steven Weber as an unflappably British Johnathan Harker who manages to steal just about every scene he’s in.
But, hands down the MVP is Peter MacNicol doing a wonderfully unhinged take on Dwight Frye’s legendary performance as Renfield. It’s both a quite uncanny piece of mimickry, matching Frye’s inflections and body language, and also just a wonderful comic performance in its own right.
Meanwhile, Young Frankenstein has Inspector Kemp played by Brooks regular player and future King Triton, Kenneth Mars. And of course we have Marty Feldman as Igor, whose unmistakeable visage appeared in many films as well as my nightmares. Every night.
But, call this heresy if you must, I’m actually going to give this one to Bats. Korman, Weber and MacNicol are doing more with less.
WINNER: BATS
The Perpetually Imperilled Ladies
Again, say what you will about late period Mel Brooks, he still knew comic talent.
Amy Yasbeck and Lysette Anthony play Mina and Lucy respectively and in this version Mina has red hair and Lucy has dark hair and that’s WRONG IT’S WRONG!
Sorry.
Anyway, both Yasbeck and Anthony provide some of the finest “Ladies love playing Vampires” acting I can recall seeing. In fact, I’d be willing to give this category to Bats except…
Yeah, sorry. The queen has arrived. We can all go home.
WINNER: BOLTS
Are either of these movies actually, y’know, scary?
I am worried that the vein in Gene Wilder’s forehead is going to burst, but other than that, no.
WINNER: BOLTS.
Best Dialogue:
For Dracula Dead and Loving It I choose:
Van Helsing : The Impaler. He was a blood-thirsty butchah. He inflicted unspeakable tortures on the peasants: cutting off their hands and feet, gouging out their eyes and then impaling them on iron spikes!
Dracula : They had it coming.
For Young Frankenstein…fuck it, let’s just choose a line at random.
IGOR: “Blucher!”
WINNER: BOLTS
FINAL SCORE: Bats 1, Bolts 6
NEXT UPDATE: November 14th 2024
NEXT TIME:
unshavedmouse 
I enjoy Dracula dead and loving it. Mindless fun all round
Agreed. Good comfort watch
Harsh, but fair: I’ve probably bored everyone with this line before, but for my money the key failing in DEAD AND LOVING IT is that Mr Brooks seems to have been happy enough to settle for ‘Dracula with jokes’ rather than working from any specific vision (For my money DEAD AND LOVING IT would have been a much better film if it had the good sense to make it ‘Dracula, but Renfield is our protagonist’*).
Also, he left Quincey P. Morris on the table and that man is Comic Gold (The Man so Texas he was probably born in Connecticut! Van Helsing taking one look at Mr All American and saying “Roll down your sleeve Jack, we have a Red-blooded AMERICAN to help keep Miss Lucy alive! The War on Bats! Spotting a suspicious-looking bat on the windowsill, then proceeding to sneak out so you shoot at it from the other side of the glass … accidentally (hopefully it was an accident) sending bullets into the room where your colleagues have been holding a Council of War!
COMIC GOLD, I tells ya!
*Which, despite a film called RENFIELD having been released in cinemas, is still an angle that I don’t believe has ever been worked by a DRACULA adaptation (Note that RENFIELD does it’s own thing, with only Renfield and Dracula himself popping in from Bram Stoker).
Right, I’ll stop there, but I do honestly feel a considerable fondness for DEAD AND LOVING IT: it absolutely deserved to bow before the Queen, but it’s worth a giggle in it’s own right (I am, in fact, glad to see it receive credit where credit is due – the film’s Doctor Seward probably needed to be conflated with Jonathan Harker but he’s still entertaining and for my money this film is Peak Harker in every respect save Jonathan & Mina not being visibly willing to risk Death & Damnation for each other.
But, hands down the MVP is Peter MacNicol doing a wonderfully unhinged take on Dwight Frye’s legendary performance as Renfield. It’s both a quite uncanny piece of mimickry, matching Frye’s inflections and body language, and also just a wonderful comic performance in its own right.
Agree to disagree here. His performance is good, no doubt. And maybe my opinion is a bit tainted by only having ever seen the movie dubbed. But whenever I see this Renfield on screen, I can never NOT see a post-possession Janos from Ghostbusters II. The performance is, in my eyes, virtually identical, and it eventually started to feel like a drag to me.
No tribute to a YF actor who passed away just this week?…Ok.
DDALI is far from Brooks’ worst film. I’d rewatch it over Life Stinks/Twelve Chairs/Silent Movie any day.
YF is equally as guilty of having drawn-out unfunny scenes that go nowhere (Constable Henry, the darts scene and Destiny! Destiny!)
Brooks said the reason why he never cast Wilder in any more of his films is bc after YF Wilder became so in demand as an actor/director that he simply didn’t have time to be in Mel’s films. Additionally Mel said that the only reason he acted in all his own films from YF onward (which he really never wanted to do) was bc all of the roles he played he wrote for Wilder. Really, Mel? You intended for Wilder to play Yogurt? Pop off, sis.
Speaking of black and white Vs colour, I remain disappointed that no DRACULA adaptation has tried starting in colour, then show Count Dracula’s depredations literally bleed the movie white.
Oh, I could gush for hours about Young Frankenstein, not just as classic movie but as masterpiece of filmmaking. That monologue Froderick does before he attempts to bring the Creature to life is masterful in capturing the right balance of theatrical but wholly authentic.
“From that fateful day when stinking bits of slime crawled from the sea and shouted to the cold stars, ‘I AM MAN!’, our greatest dread has always been the knowledge of our own mortality. But tonight, we shall hurl the gauntlet of science into the frightful face of death itself! Tonight, we shall ascend into the heavens. We shall mock the earthquake! We shall command the thunders! And penetrate into the very womb of impervious nature herself!”
And can we talk about how versatile Peter Boyle is as the Creature? One moment he’s the traditional, barely vocal brute. The next he’s the straight man in a comedy duo with Gene Hackman. And the next he’s charming us with his puppy dog eyes or newfound form of eloquence and none of it feels out of character.
Mel made the right call listening to Gene Wilder and playing the drama as well as the comedy with the utmost sincerity because both helped elevate the other. And getting the actors who could play both sides of that is what makes this the classic today.
On another note, Rest in Peace, Teri Garr.
Actually, I wouldn’t call Dracula Dead and Loving It Mel’s worst film, but it is one that needed a bit more refocusing so everyone could play to their comedic strengths. That bit of dialogue you included about Vlad the Impaler? That’s what it need more of, Leslie Nielsen playing an unrepentant villain with the same straight-faced seriousness that we loved him for. Like Frank Drebin without the smattering of moral consciousness.
Yeah, Drac was never going to win this one. Very few comedies could match Young Frankenstein so the competition was always going to be uneven. But I do have a soft spot for it, and I actually get a bit of a giggle that Mel cast his wife as the grifting gypsy fortune teller at the beginning of the movie.
I actually don’t think it’s his weakest film (I’m not that big on The Twelve Chairs). But you’re right, Mel certainly deserved a mulligan, he certainly proved his mettle as a director, writer and actor and was never one to rest on his laurels.
Totally with you about Peter MacNicol as Renfield, that dude killed the Dwight Frye impression. Most of the DDALI scenes I truly enjoy center on him. Or Brooks, but I would watch Mel Brooks fold laundry for two hours.
I still enjoy DDALI a fair amount, but YF is one of the funniest movies ever made, the best written movies ever made, and the best cast movies ever made.
And a sad RIP to legend Terri Garr, who’s just such a delight to watch in this movie. “Put. Ze candle. BECK.”
Would you like a roll in ze hay?
Sorry Mouse, I don’t do obligate quadrupeds: I’m a strict biped man.
FEATHERLESS Bipeds, to be precise.
(On a genuinely serious note, RIP Ms. Garr: perhaps someday we’ll get the ‘DOCTOR WHO … but STAR TREK, with CATS’ show you did your excellent best to sell the network on via ‘Assignment Earth’).
Aw, in terms of dialogue from Dracula: Dead & Loving It, I would have gone
Jonathan: But Lucy, I’m British
Lucy: But so are THESE!
Another excellent choise
That whole exchange is, so far as I’m concerned Peak Harker – and the film doesn’t even have all that much interest in Friend Jonathan.
“I’m Undead!”
“But I’m not un-engaged.”
Mouse, I wanted to pop in and offer tea & sympathy after the ugly, ugly outcome of this year’s Gunpowder Night: I’d also like to ask if you have any idea who might have handed George W. Bush that monkey’s paw and let him cry “Wish I wasn’t the worst president in history!”, because of all the likely sources of this horrible, horrible mess that’s the one most vulnerable to having their lights punched out.
*low inhuman ullulation like some dread creature of the abyss*