Ten Days of Terror!: Dracula (1979)

Films: Dracula (1979)
Format: DVD from Moline Public Library through interlibrary loan on The New Portable.

Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is almost certainly one of the most adapted stories on film, not unlike Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is not even including stories that are more or less the same thing as Dracula (or Hamlet) under different names. Of all of the various Draculas that exist, the 1979 version, titled simply Dracula as many of them are, is probably the first filmed version I ever saw. I would have been 11 going on 12 when it was released, and I’m also pretty sure that I’d seen the stage play before this time (or potentially around this time—this is decades ago, so the time is a bit hazy). Certainly I knew the story going into this.

What this means, like it or not, is that at some level, this version of Dracula is formative for me. It reminded me a great deal of the staged version that I saw in Chicago, which further cemented the idea that this is what Count Dracula should be and look like. Looking at his IMDb page now, I’m a bit gobsmacked that Langella didn’t have a long-standing career in horror after this role; I genuinely thought he did, because I associated him with horror movies for years, such is the strength of this role.

WarGames

Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I made the conscious decision not to introduce my kids to WarGames today. I did this for the simple reason that I didn’t think they would really understand it. I know that Russia is resurgent these days and who the hell knows what’s going to happen in the Ukraine, but the geopolitical realities of the 1980s were very different than they are today. I think you needed to be alive in the 1980s to really grok WarGames or at least have a very deep understanding of the Reagan years to get it at any level. This is particularly true of the technology. I mean, my kids have the equivalent of a laptop computer in their phones. The computers in this movie are the size of rooms.

David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is the complete stereotype of a disaffected, computer-obsessed nerd, save the fact that he looks like 1983 Matthew Broderick and his pseudo-girlfriend Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) looks like a 1983 Ally Sheedy. He’s bright, but also constantly in trouble in school. One day, after poking around in the school computer to change his grades (and Jennifer’s grades, too), David finds his way into an unlisted computer system that happens to be the backdoor of NORAD. He finds a series of games to play including one called Global Thermonuclear War. Since that sounds like fun, he starts up a game not realizing that the computer doesn’t really know the difference between simulation and reality.

Dance Dance Revolution

Film: Saturday Night Fever
Format: DVD from personal collection on various players.

Sometimes it seems hard to believe that in the late 1970s, John Travolta could do no wrong. He was already a face known to the American public in 1977 when he made Saturday Night Fever thanks to his regular role on “Welcome Back, Kotter.” But it was Saturday Night Fever that turned him into a star. If you had a teenaged sister in the late ‘70s, she had the LP of the soundtrack and probably had the iconic poster of Travolta in the white suit with the black shirt on the dance floor. You couldn’t get away from it; that poster was as common in girls’ rooms as the Farrah Fawcett poster was in boys’ rooms. And the Bee Gees were friggin’ everywhere.

Saturday Night Fever is a relatively simple movie. It’s little more than a standard coming of age story set a bit older in the character’s life than is typical for the genre. Tony Manero (Travolta) is a working class schlub in New York. He spends his days in a paint store and one night a week shaking it on the dance floor at a disco called 2001 Odyssey. It’s on this one night a week that Tony really lives. He’s the king of the dance floor and his friends are merely hangers on for the awesomeness that is Tony.