Cult Movie Reviews: Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

Transylvania 6-5000 is a 1985 horror comedy that tries so very hard. It really pulls out all the stops in an effort to get laughs, with mostly disappointing results. It’s a movie I tried really hard to like. I’ve grown to like 80s comedy. It sounded like a worthwhile idea – a comedy set in Translvania in the present day with just about every Universal monster putting in an appearance. I like Jeff Goldblum a lot. I like Geena Davis a lot. But no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t really warm to this movie.

I suspect that writer-director Rudy De Luca, having written movies for Mel Brooks, thought he was some kind of genius and that Transylvania 6-5000 was therefore going to be hilarious madcap fun. But the Mel Brooks movies he wrote were the less funny Mel Brooks movies. And when it comes to directing, well let’s just say that he doesn’t have Brooks’ comic instincts.

Jack Harrison (Jeff Goldblum) and Gil Turner (Ed Begley Jr.) are reporters for one of those National Enquirer-style trash tabloids. Their editor sends them to Transylvania with orders to come up with a story about monsters. The story will go to press under the headline Frankenstein Lives.

Jack hates his job. He wanted to be a real journalist, not a trash tabloid reporter. He spends most of his time tying to chat up pretty American single mother Elizabeth Ellison (Teresa Ganzel). Gil is keen to get the story. Especially when a beautiful mysterious vampire lady (played by Geena Davis) suddenly appears in his bedroom. That convinces him that he’s on to something.

The mayor and all the townspeople steadfastly deny that there are any monsters in their town but Jack and Gil soon discover that there most definitely are monsters there, and that the monsters have something to do with mad scientist Dr Malavaqua (Joseph Bologna).

Jack and Gil have to figure out what’s really going on in this town, and that’s pretty much it for the plot. Which is fine. With a movie such as this you don’t want to get too bogged down with plot.

There are good things in the movie. Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr makes a reasonably good comic team. When they’re together they’re amusing. It’s when the other cast members enter the picture that the movie starts to drag.

The first half of the movie is painful to watch. Things do improve in the second half, but it’s a movie which consistently fails to be as funny as it thinks it is.

So what went wrong? The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with writer-director Rudy De Luca which provides some clues. It appears that he just set up the camera and let the cast members improvise. The problem with that is that most comics think they’re geniuses when it comes to improvisation, but they aren’t. The worst offender is Michael Richards (later to find fame as Kramer on Seinfeld). He apparently improvised constantly and the results are excruciatingly unfunny.

Some of the cast members do have comic ability but they needed a director who would keep them on the rails and tell them when their efforts at improvisation were falling flat. That obviously didn’t happen.

A major problem is that Geena Davis is given hardly anything to do, which is a pity since she really is a talented comic actress, in fact she’s much better at comedy than most of the other cast members. Why have Geena Davis in the cast if you’re not going to make full use of her talents? She isn’t given a single really funny line. She does however make an incredibly sexy lady vampire and her costume is revealing to say the least. She’s at least very pleasant to watch. It’s almost worth watching just for that reason.

The monster makeup isn’t overly impressive. Of course it’s a comedy so there’s no need for the monster makeup to be terrifying.

The movie was shot in Yugoslavia but it doesn’t make particularly good use of the locations. They found a castle but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. There’s also not much in the way of spooky atmosphere. Even a horror comedy needs a bit more spookiness.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray provides a good transfer. The aforementioned audio commentary is the only extra.

This movie does have a few amusing moments. There just aren’t enough of them. There are lots of gags, but not enough of them are truly funny.

Comedy is of course a very individual thing. Some people might think that Michael Richards slipping on a banana skin is hysterically funny. Perhaps this is just not the sort of comedy that works for me.

Transylvania 6-5000 is, sadly, a misfire. Even Geena Davis looking smokin’ hot as a female vampire isn’t a good enough reason to watch this movie.