Uzuki goes off to college in big city Tokyo, waving goodbye to her family at the train station. She sits down and places her hand on the window, as if to touch her now former life one last time.
She lies down in her still unfurnished apartment, wistfully soaking in this new space and its exciting possibilities.
From her interaction with the movers, we see that Uzuki is shy, awkwardly attempting to help them but just getting in the way.
It’s now the first day of school, and one by one the students stand up and introduce themselves. Uzuki waits nervously for her turn, afraid of revealing too much and risk embarrassment. When her turn comes, she says she’s “cheerful by nature” and that she likes listening to records, an answer that would seem to beeffectively vague and innocuous. However, the students ask follow-up questions while she nervously plays with the hair, and one student playfully chides her uncool sweater, but this only compounds her embarrassment.
A classmate tries to befriend her at lunch by asking her if she wants to hang out sometime, but Uzuki claims that she is too busy, what with school and getting aclimated to a new life. Then again, maybe she’s just looking for an excuse to be left alone.
However, this same classmate later convinces Uzuki to join the fishing club. This allows Uzuki to finaly integrate herself socially with the student body, despite not having any previous interest in fishing.
If she had actually opened up, she might have revealed that her real passion is reading.
In fact, she repeatedly bikes down to the local bookstore alone to browse.
The boy that works there catches her eye, but she can’t bring herself to say anything to him.
She heads back home and, perhaps realizing that she needs to get over her shyness, invites her female neighbor over dinner.
Uzuki eventually musters up enough courage to head back to the book shop and strike up a conversation with the boy.
What follows is described as “a miracle of love” by Uzuki, but certainly not in the Hollywood sense. We get the impression that she speaks not of happy endings, but of finding herself.
If you have nothing better to do during Super Bowl weekend (and you don't, I'm sure), head over to the great blog Rupert Pupkin Speaks and read my post listing my "favorite film discoveries" of 2012. Are these movies I unearthed from caves and dug out of pits during the past year? Of course not dummy! It's simply a short list of older films that I saw for the first time in 2012 that I feel like recommending, accompanied by little blurbs about why I think they're awesome. So, if you're looking for some obscure gems to watch or maybe can't get enough of my typed foolishness, click on this thing: http://rupertpupkinspeaks.blogspot.com/2013/02/favorite-film-discoveries-of-2012_2.html If you aren't already, you should follow Rupe's blog. It's a treasure trove of lists like this one and other cool stuff. For example, here are all of the "2012 Film Discovery" lists that he's compiled from contributors. Check 'em out!
Many
people have trashed disco over the years (quite literally in the case of the
Disco Demolition) as a fad best left forgotten, but the fact is, there are tons
of folks out there who like to have something to mindlessly dance to. They grab on to a beat for a few years, throw
it away, and then grab another, mocking the previous beat as ridiculous. Personally, I don’t make much of a
distinction between mindless disco dancing or mindless techno dancing or people
mindlessly banging their heads to Nickleback or whatever.
Like a lot of fads, disco was so popular in the late 70’s that you ended up with disco variants on pretty much everything. There were disco clubs, disco shirts, disco drugs (cocaine), and even disco Kiss songs. So, it only seems natural to me that there would be a disco horror vampire movie. A lot of pop culture seems bizarre when distanced by time and divorced from drug use, but this kinda thing would have made perfect sense at the time I’m sure.
The Gloria Gaynor theme
song aside,
our disco vampire star (Nai Bonet) appears at first glanceto be a rather typical female vampire, gliding through
a dark castle wearing a flowing nightgown, the supple fog caressing her undead
skin. Accomplished cinematographer Mac
Ahlberg provides these atmospherics, making the movie initially look like a 70’s
vampire movie that’s all euro-gothed out to the gills. However, things quickly shift when the house
servant Theodore (played by Brother Theodore, so I guess he’s playing himself)
begins spouting dialogue. If you don’t
know Brother Theodore, he’s a spoken word maniac that excels in what he terms “stand-up
tragedy”. Boy, I wish I had come up with
that term. Fucking beautiful, yet so
simple.
Brother
Ted hams it up in his own bizarre, performance art fashion; wonderful in it’s own way
but totally incongruous when contrasted with the willowy horror atmospherics on display in the
beginning of the film. It’s like a
British horror villain played by Patrick Magee, but amped up
ten times and ran through a diseased mind riddled with tragic mania. My favorite line of his in the movie is “as
long as there is death…there is hope”. I
don’t know what that means but it sounds pretty metal.
This
performance contrasts greatly with our lead vampiress, who not only acts like
she has never acted before, but speaks like she has never spoken before. It’s like she memorized the lines
phonetically and slowly unfurls them in comatose fashion, but her accent isn’t
heavy enough for one to think she doesn’t have a decent grasp of English. She also does a lot of dancing in the movie,
but that consists of her spinning around basically. If you’re wondering how she got the role
despite an apparent lack of talent, she actually produced and financed the
movie. I will give her this though;
unlike other inexplicable movie stars like Paris Hilton, Nai does smile a
lot. So her talent is smiling I guess.
If you’re wondering how Brother Theodore was cast in a fluffy disco vampire movie, I have absolutely no answer for you. However, there is no question how they got John Carradine to play Count Dracula, grandfather of Nocturna; they paid him money. Give John a paycheck, and god knows he’ll throw on the ‘ole cape and fangs and strut his stuff one more time, whether the terrible comedy Vampire Hookers or the silly no-budget Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. Anyway, listening to the Count’s dialogue, another angle to the movie becomes apparent; it’s a comedy! He throws out some one-liners and even has denture fangs! The humor is passable as a series of sub-Munsters groaners, maybe the best line being the one during the “Bloodsuckers of America” meeting where a vampire lady complains about fat kids eating a lot of sweets because they’re a problem for diabetic vampires. Humor and stuff!
Well,
the plot finally kicks in when a disco group auditions for Nocturna’s castle
disco, singing a song with a decent beat but a tunefully troubled chorus. Yes, her castle has it’s own disco, and I
imagine it’s pretty popular considering there wasn’t much to do in late 70’s
Transylvania except run away from vampires.
Anyway, the guitar player is a blonde studmuffin named Jimmy who catches
Nocturna’s eye. We figure this out
because the camera zooms in on her smiling face like three times as she stares
into his eyes. He reciprocates with puppy
dog glances, and even starts dancing with her in the middle of the song he’s supposed
to be performing. I guess the electric
guitar is at the bottom of the disco rhythm section totem pole and is therefore
easily expendable. Afterwards, Nocturna
introduces herself and reveals that her name is a Transylvanian word that means
“of the night”. I think that’s supposed
to be a joke, but it might actually be true.
Whatever.
Anyway,
these two fall in love and disco dance, and Nocturna wants to run off with
Jimmy to New York to disco dance some more and then do some disco dancing after
that. However, vampires are not supposed
to cavort with humans, so this angers granddaddy Dracula, who forbids her to
have anything to do with him. She
ignores his wishes and joins him on a horse carriage trip to New York City…from
Transylvania. Why not.
Meanwhile, Theodore lusts after Nocturna and
her “90 lbs of quivering flesh” (I think he’s underselling her a bit in the weight
department). This is clearly conveyed
with lines like “if only I could get into her coffin”,“I’ve always been interested in loose women,
there is so much you can do with them”,and “I’ll keep her pregnant and
barefoot and let her eat under the table”.
However, Nocturna is in love and certainly doesn't have an interest in being an
at-home slut for a raving lunatic, so something’s gotta give. That is what is known as a “dramatic setup”.
Much
to Jimmy’s libidinous chagrin, Nocturna stays with a fellow vampire (of course played
by Yvonne DeCarlo), who lives in a vault under the Brooklyn Bridge. She quickly becomes bored listening to Yvonne’s
one liners so she…heads to 42nd Street to dance! When in Rome, as they say.
This provides a rad look at late 70’s 42nd street and, even radder, Nocturna bumps into vampire pimp Sy Richardson, who is
basically just regular Sy Richardson but with plastic fangs hanging from a gold
chain and collars for miles and a fancy hat.
I mean that as a compliment; if you hire Sy Richardson to be in your
movie, you want him to bring as much Sy Richardson-ness to the role as
possible. You don’t want to lose any
potential Sy Richardson-ness at the expense of the creation of a character or
some bullshit like that.
Anyway,
you can figure out the rest. Dracula and
Theo travel to New York to break up this emerging disco power couple, but their
plan won’t succeed because love conquers all and disco ain’t nothin’ to fuck
with. This escalates in a pretty awesome
Saturday Night Fever finale, complete with authentically coketastic gyrations
from the locals, which ultimately ends in Jimmy taking care of the Count in
fucking ingenious and brilliantly appropriate fashion.
Oh yeah, the movie also has some fancy special effects.
If you can't tell by now, this movie is a pretty awesome but incongruous collection of elements that were never seen before and will never be seen again. In other words, it's original folks. The biggest problem with Nocturna is Bonet herself, both in her line readings and the fact that a good chunk of the movie is her spinning around on the dance floor. Jimmy is captivated by her at every turn, which is not very believable considering I don’t think she used her laser sparkle power to hypnotize him (that’s where there’s a sparkle of light in her eye accompanied by laser sounds). I guess that’s the main component of a vanity project; to make the star seem like the most talented person in the world even if the only thing they can do is smile while spinning in a circle.
Either way, the important “arc” is that Nocturna wants to become human so she can be
with her one true hot dude, and in order to become human she has to DISCO
DANCE! Yes, normally her reflection
can't be seen in a mirror, but it DOES appear while she’s dancing. So, it’s basically a story that says “the pinnacle
of humanity is to disco dance as much as possible with a hot person and then
have sex with them afterwards and repeat ad nauseum”. Anything else is dehumanizing and monstrous;
jobs, rock and roll, family tradition, etc. In
1979, this was a perfectly legitimate outlook on life.
