Day 11: Scream Blacula Scream (1973), dir. by Bob Kelljan
Streaming Availability: Tubi
Scream Blacula Scream opens with the funeral for a Voodoo priestess and the brief battle for her succession. (We'll get to the vampire stuff soon enough, do not worry.) The priestess's son, Willis (Richard Lawson) demands that he be made leader of the cult by right of primogeniture. But everybody recognizes that Willis is a no good jive-ass deadbeat, so he's kicked out of the group, with Lisa Fortier (the great Pam Grier) made leader instead. Willis then buys bones from a homeless man and uses dark magic involving a poor murdered bird to summon a great, powerful ally. That would be Prince Mamuwalde or as we know him, Blacula (William Marshall), burnt to a crisp after the events of the first movie.
Turns out this was a bad plan. Blacula has no interest in Willis' quest for control of one measly Southern California coven, and bites him right on the neck. Blacula also has no interest in Willis' complaining that he can no longer see himself in the mirror to prepare for a party. In fact, no more parties for Willis, he will now be Blacula's chief ghoul.
In the first movie, the undead Mamuwalde had found a reason to continue living in modern-day Los Angeles by finding his lost true love reincarnated. Now he's found a new love interest, Lisa. (There are worse reasons to continue living than Pam Grier, one of the most beautiful people to ever live.) Mamuwalde wishes that Lisa's Voodoo powers can restore his humanity. The only complications are Blacula's insatiable need to feed, and whether Lisa's boyfriend Justin Carter (Don Mitchell) can catch onto the mysterious spree of murders hitting LA. Carter is an exact copy of Dr. Gordon Thomas from the previous movie, might as well have been the same character.
It is odd from a continuity perspective that nobody in LA remembers how just recently a black vampire terrorized the city. We have to go through the same process again of various protestations that "vampires aren't real", including multiple scenes where Carter argues with his shitty skeptic boss. Notably, just one year after Blacula 1, the franchise has a much more cynical view of the police and their relationship to their black members. Still, going through all this again feels tedious.
And that is a large part of the issue with Scream Blacula Scream. It's the same movie again, just a bit cheaper, and with more slasher moments.
Compared to the first movie, or really every vampire movie we've covered so far, Scream Blacula Scream is packed with kills. Mamuwalde ends up with close to a dozen minions. The first half of the movie is almost non-stop biting scenes, Blacula is stuffed silly by the buffet of victims LA offers. There are two different scenes of Willis' various clueless friends coming up to his house tp get victims. Mamuwalde has a snack on one of Lisa's friends at the party. Willis munches on his girlfriend while giving her a massage. There's even a couple pimps that Blacula kills seemingly for the fun of it. This does lead to a massive show-down where an entire cop legion battles their way through Mamuwalde's grotesqueries, which is a solid climax.
I'm less impressed though with how Blacula 2 is shot. Too much of the movie is filmed locations that are... just somebody's house. I miss the proto-disco clubs from the original movie. Or any of the variety in settings that movie had. In general, this is just a shabbier, flabbier movie with worse effects. One of the worst being the scenes where Blacula transforms into a bat to fly across LA County. They just crudely optically print a bat shape over some stock footage of Sunset Boulevard. The filmmaking does not even try to make Blacula's shift from humanoid to chiroptera seem dynamic or interesting. It's a flat medium shot of man to bat. The Seventies Wonder Woman show put more effort into transformations.
I also miss the drama of Mamuwalde struggling to find his humanity. Sure, Blacula is literally trying to become human again, but in Scream Blacula Scream, he's darker and more conventionally evil character, far more cruel. Lisa can still see whatever humanity is left in the character. Nobody else can. By the end, Mamuwalde's attempts to become human are dashed, having terrified even Lisa with his ferocity, and he fully embraces his darkness. Carter calls him "Mamuwalde" and the vampire responds, "The name is Blacula!"
William Marshall has not lost a step. Pam Grier is great in the movie. There is compelling tragedy in Scream Blacula Scream, however, it isn't enough. Certainly not as tragic as the original. Willis is a funny sidekick, however, nobody is watching a Blacula movie for that chump.
That is the ultimately the problem. Blacula 2 is more Blacula 1 without a particularly good idea as to why you'd make a sequel at all. I wish they had done more with the Voodoo other than offensively treating it as generic movie black magic. And I wish they had done more with generic movie black magic! Imagine a Voodoo-powered vampire! Lisa does kill Blacula with his own Voodoo doll, but that's bare minimum stuff. This could have been so much weirder.
Sadly, this is it for Blacula films. Blaxploitation horror would continue through the Seventies, including the inevitable Blackenstein. For my money, I'd skip that and jump ahead to Rudy Ray Moore's strange masterpiece, Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law. Blaxploitation as a genre fizzled out entirely in just a few years, and by the Eighties, it was already retro style, not a living genre. As for Blacula as a character, he has survived as an icon in his own right, living on as more than just a Dracula pallet swap. Sadly, mostly he's a figure of parody, not much remembered as the completely solid horror villain he actually was.
Next time: a movie often listed as "blaxploitation" but in reality so much more. It's the full-on experimental art horror film, Ganja & Hess.
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