Classic Horrors Club

For the first few minutes of Transylvania 6-5000 (1985), I had real hopes that memory wasn’t served and it was going to be better than my preconceived notions. Those were a precious few minutes that soon became a long, agonizing hour and a half that I had to split over the course of two evenings.

Writer-director Rudy De Luca supposedly created it as a television movie after he saw Bosom Buddies with Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari. Hanks was rejected because the producers hadn’t heard of him. I can only imagine what a different film this could have been with the chemistry of those two actors…

…a chemistry that Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr. don’t have. I’m not sure I blame them. De Luca apparently let them loose for a scene without any blocking and allowed improvisation for at least one scene with John Byner and Carol Kane. In both cases, it’s obvious that they have no guidance and that funny people aren’t always funny.

That’s a crying shame for Transylvania 6-5000 because it features so many funny people: Jeffrey Jones, Michael Richards, and Norman Fell, besides the ones already mentioned. It also features two actors that have been in funny movies, but I don’t consider to be comedians: Joseph Bologna and Gena Davis.

The plot is a little thin, but could have compensated with genuine humor. Newspaper editor Mac Turner (Fell) sends his son, Gil (Begley Jr.) and Jack Harrison (Goldblum) to Transylvania for a story about a reported sighting of the Frankenstein monster, which, of course, everyone calls simply, “Frankenstein.”

They’re fish out of water and I did find humorous the way the locals perceived Americans. This is demonstrated once they arrive, and while I appreciate beating a dead horse, the gags are never as funny as they are in the early scenes. At their best, the relationship of Jack and Gil evokes nostalgia for Abbott & Costello.

I did like that Transylvania 6-5000 creates a sort of monster mash-up for characters mostly overlooked during the Slasher age of horror. Besides “Frankenstein,” there are takes on Dracula, the wolf man, and the mummy. However, opportunities to include more parody are squandered. Calling the wolf man’s alter ego, “Lawrence Malbot” doesn’t cut it.

While the monsters fare OK, the servants to Mayor Lepescu (Jones) at the castle where the Americans are staying do not. Fejos (Richards), Radu (John Bynes) and Lupi (Kane) are painfully unfunny with their slapstick routines. What about their character names? Am I missing something or would Malbot-like plays on names be funnier?

Reading that Transylvania 6-5000 was financed by the Dow chemical company to burn funds that had to be spent in Yugoslavia tells me all I need to know about it. Of course, I don’t know for sure, but I get the impression De Luca had a script nobody wanted to produce, and it was made to benefit a big company. Well, at least it got released.