Your Daily Dracula – Nishi Trishna (1989)
Apparently the first Bengali vampire movie, this cobbles together bits and pieces from western genre films – mostly from Hammer’s Dracula series – and fits them around expected Indian cinema concepts like random cheerful songs and characters who sort of knock around and drift into things without us ever catching on who they are beyond goodies and baddies. Directed by Parimal Bhattacharya, it’s in black and white – which harks back to some of the 1950s/60s Hammer knock-offs from Italy or Mexico – and hard to believe as a more recent movie than, say, Near Dark. Quite a lot is head-scratchingly hard-to-follow (autotranslate on youtube is only approximately helpful) even as the whole thing is relatively simplistic.
It opens with a photographer getting pictures of a bikini girl while a horsedrawn carriage trundles through the night – the girl is waylaid by something unseen and evil, and a funeral scene a bit like the one in Kiss of the Vampire shows that Mili the Model has fangs as she’s buried (we presume she’s a Christian – the film is a little shy of showing crucifixes or other traditional vampire-repelling western objects) and she later pops up Lucy-like to vamp a minor character but is otherwise forgotten by the film and left undead to continue rampages at the end (like Lucy in the 1931 Dracula).
A whole bunch of characters have reason to visit shunned, haunted Garchampa Palace – a known haunt of ghosts and ‘blood ghouls’ – where the sinister, spectacled ‘Mr John’ (Shekhar Chatterjee) ogles the women and strides about like he owns the place – though it turns out that he’s the Klove-like living minion of the Dracula analogue, a nameless vampire with gruesome rotting cheeks, huge fangs, starey eyes and a stiff brush of hair who pops in occasionally to bite people. Shimli (Moon Moon Sen), a gypsy girl, is reunited with her twin sister Kumli, a vampire victim, via elementary splitscreen and hero Paul (Prasenjit Chatterjee) sings songs and looks handsome. Late in the film, a woman doctor narrates a flashback which sort of explains how the corpse got turned into a vampire and Mr John was enslaved … then the goodies just waltz up to the palace, open the coffin (its lid moves by itself thanks to off-frame stagehands) and stake the vampire, who has a death scene then turns into a skeleton. They polish off Mr John – who has been doing a crap job of guarding his master’s resting place during the daytime – in a scuffle/shoot-out and there’s almost a poignant moment suggesting the lady doctor and the vampire minion used to be an item but the story is tied up with near-indecent haste.
It has the tendency found in later Hammer Dracula sequels to have the vampire lurk and attack in self-contained scenes while the rest of the cast carry the exposition, as if they only had the actor who plays the monster for a couple of days … it works in the Hammer films because Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula is a known quantity to the audience and his presence carries a lot of weight – despite the acceptable fright face and some committed glowering and gnawing, the unnamed (so far as I can tell) character and hard-to-identify actor (anyone out there know who it is?) don’t have equivalent screen weight. Still, an interesting curio. The title translates as Night Thirst.
Here’s the whole film …
