The release of this interesting little curio is another triumph for DVD. Hailed as the first Pakistani horror film, it looks like it was made in the ’50s, and clearly was made after Hammer’s 1957 Dracula aka Horror of Dracula, of which this is in the main an often shot-for-shot remake. Even so, I was shocked to learn the film was made as late as 1967.
Because Pakistan has no folkloric vampire tradition, this begins as a Jekyll and Hyde sort of more sci-fi tale. (This continues, in such touches as the vampires by killed by knife thrusts to the heart.) A doctor looks for a serum that will give him immortality. After getting a mild Mentos-in-Diet-Coke reaction, he immediately proclaims he has it, despite not, you know, having tested it or anything. He drinks it, and dies. His assistant / maid / girlfriend / whatever finds him, and following his written request, has the body laid in the basement in an open-air coffin. (!!) Needless to say, the doc comes back as more or less Dracula, and from then on his powers and vulnerabilities are clearly supernatural in origin.
A visitor arrives years later at Dracula’s new secluded house, and the Horror of Dracula remaking kicks in. The Dracula figure even looks like Lee—actually, he looks like a cross between Lee and Humphrey Bogart, so that the early part of the film more recalls Bogart’s mad scientist antics in The Return of Dr. X—and shares his outfit and widow’s peak.
Past that, the film follows its predecessor pretty closely, save for in the inevitable and hilariously inappropriate musical numbers that Pakistan, like India’s Bollywood, apparently puts in all their movies. The film also takes place in modern day Pakistan, and mixes in music from various sources, including by the end stealing Horror of Dracula’s classic themes outright. Shot in black and white, and cutting down a good bit on Hammer’s robust bloodiness–although they also implicitly feature a vampire about to dine on a baby–this is nothing earthshaking, but is a bit for fun for vampire movie buffs.
The disc includes a decent but not spectacular print of the film, which was considered lost for a long while, and tosses in a so-so commentary track on the picture, as well as a much more interesting half hour documentary on the eye-popping Pakistan genre films of the ’80s. Good stuff.
