Roman Polanski wrote, directed, and starred in this movie, so it’s kinda hard to avoid talking about him. This would be more awkward if I liked the movie but I don’t, so I have no problem stating that despite being a very good director who’s made many movies I enjoy he’s also a pedophile who fled the United States to avoid prosecution and I think less of anyone who’s worked with him since 1978.
Having such a major director and his backstory looming over the movie doesn’t exactly do it a disservice, but it does make it seem too important. I found 1967’s ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck’ exactly as funny as the full title makes it sound. Beyond the involvement of Polanski, and the fact that this is the movie where he met and fell in love with Sharon Tate, there’s no real reason for this to be be remembered as more than a middling comedy by a director whose talents lay decidedly elsewhere. It wasn’t that he never directed movies with comedy in them, but this is arguably his only movie where it’s intended to be primarily a comedy. It would be only one year later that Polanski directed ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ not exactly a laugh riot.
I don’t particularly want to dwell on Polanski but this does mark a very interesting moment in his career. This was his fourth full feature after ‘Knife in the Water (1962), ‘Repulsion’ (1965), and ‘Cul-de-Sac’ (1966) and his third collaboration in a row with writer Gérard Brach. It’s the first time he shot in color and is arguably his first attempt at mainstream success. The American cut of the movie was rather infamously mangled, retitling the movie from the original ‘Dance of the Vampires,’ having 12 minutes cut from it, causing Polanski to claim it as incomprehensible, and adding an animated short at the beginning to explain the plot. This cut seems to have never been issued on home media and the more-or-less original cut with the UK version of the credits and title seems to now be the standard. It’s also what brought him to the attention of producer Robert Evans, who pitched ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ to him.
It’s very hard to seriously criticize the plot of a comedy movie so I’ll just describe it as what it is, the framework to hang the ostensible funny on. The self-styled vampire killers are Professor Abronsius and his assistant Alfred. Abronsius is played by Jack MacGowran, primarily a television actor, and Alfred is played by Polanski himself. They arrive at a small inn deep in the Transylvanian mountains during winter. They notice the inn is strewn with bulbs of garlic and the professor is delighted that he seems close to finding vampires. The first thirty five minutes are meeting the residents of the inn, including Shagal, the inn-keeper, and Sarah, his daughter. After a long series of supposed comical misadventures in the inn where Alfred creeps on the women of the inn and the professor mugs at the camera Sarah is taken by the local vampire lord, Count von Krolock, and Shagal is killed and turned into a vampire after he runs off to get her back. The duo chase off the vampiric Shagal and follow him to the castle of the count.
They slowly sneak into the castle, comedically, until they eventually run into the Count and seemingly fool him into thinking they’re just animal researchers and are thus invited to spend the night. The next day they again sneak around the castle, Abronsius trying to find the vampire crypt, Alfred trying to find Sarah. They find the crypt but Alfred is too squeamish to do any actual killing and Sarah refuses to flee the castle, so eventually they end up on the castle wall where the Count explains he knows exactly who they are and what they’re trying to do but doesn’t particularly care, as an entire graveyard beneath them empties itself of fancy vampires who then proceed to thow a big ball. The vampire killers infiltrate the party, grab Sarah, and run away, holding off the vampires through the now-established trick of taking two straight things, in his case swords, and turning them into a makeshift cross. They then ride a sledge away into the night, where Sarah bites and turns Alfred while the narration informs us that “Thanks to him, this evil would at last be able to spread across the world.”
I left out a lot of side-business, like Shagal’s attempts to ingratiate himself into the vampire’s high-class castle life, the Count’s flamboyantly gay son who just exists to be a visual punchline and set up gay-panic jokes, and at least twenty minutes of the eponymous duo just wandering around what is admittedly a very nice looking castle. The vampire ball is an impressive set piece with a lot of decently intricate choreography, and it culminates in a great shot where, having stolen the clothes from a couple of elderly vampires to infiltrate the ball the duo and Sarah start to dance their way away from the vampires only to end up in front a wall mirror that shows just the three of them and not the dozens of vampires behind them, causing their cover to be blown. It being 1967 and all the effect was done by just literally recreating the ballroom on the other side of the ‘mirror’ and using body doubles. Not bad stuff at all.
I guess the best defense the movie can put up against my not liking it is that humor is subjective and people who are probably not lying are on record as saying that they found the movie hilarious. There were a couple of parts that were conceptually fine, like Abronsius getting stuck in a narrow window and forcing Alfred to have an entire ten-minute mini-adventure while he takes the long way around the castle trying to get back to the window to get him out. There's maybe the first time anyone’s made the joke that crosses don’t affect Jewish vampires. But all of these scenes just weren’t shot with comedy framing or comedy timing and they didn’t work for me. The entire thing has the weirdest tone to it. The performances are broad and exaggerated, working Three Stooges territory, and the dialogue is generally made up of muttered asides, like early Popeye cartoons, but the shot composition is wide and ponderous with the occasional random bit of wacky sped-up motion. It doesn’t work together.
It doesn’t help that the characters are not particularly pleasant to follow. Professor Abronsius is fine, all in all, just a cartoon smartypants professor more interested in theory and books than paying attention to what’s around him, and Count von Krolock at least has a personality, is fairly menacing, and bothers to say why he’s keeping the duo around: he looks forward to academic conversations with Abronsius and his son is fond of Alfred (sigh). But all of the other male characters are various shades of creepy or offensively stereotypical and the women aren’t actual characters, either grotesque parodies of unattractive wives or buxom young women that are pawed at by the males characters or killed off for comedy. This is a movie that thinks peeping through keyholes at women bathing or sneaking into their room in the middle of the night while they’re sleeping are both inherently hilarious.
In the end I didn’t much enjoy ‘The Fearless Vampire Killers’ because I didn’t think it was very funny and I didn’t enjoy spending time with the characters. It’s shot well and the production values are pretty impressive and that’s about it. I’ve always assumed this to be a more parodic movie, directly spoofing the rise of Hammer Horror movies and the horror films of the time, and while it takes a lot of the plot beats of vampire movies it’s nothing close to what we would consider a spoof movie, such as ‘Airplane’ or the like. Instead it takes the framework of a standard vampire movie, exaggerates a couple of the side characters (but not by all that much), and has the actors mug for the camera. This would be the last time Polanski would attempt something this comedic, although an argument can be made for ‘What?’ (1973).
As a side note the movie was later adapted into the stage musical ‘Dance of the Vampires,’ whose American version went down as one of the costliest failures in Broadway history, which seems about right.
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