A Mummy, a Vampire, and a Creature Walk into a Hotel

I am a devoted fan of the classic movie monsters. If you have a movie with DraculaHe's the great undead fiend, the Prince of Darkness, the monster based on a real historical figure. He... is Dracula!, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and/or other creepy creatures in them, I will show up and relish every minute of screen time. The films don’t have to be good for me to get my enjoyment out of them because, deep down, I just love seeing these creatures on screen. Hell, I’ve probably spent more time on my Castlevania site, The Inverted Dungeon, talking about movie monsters than I have the main game series. I saw an excuse to discuss these creatures and I ran with it.

Just because a movie makes a nod towards these beasts, though, that doesn’t make it a horror film. You can have delightfully dumb kid comedies, like The Monster Squad, featuring the monsters and they work just as well as deep and scary horror cinema. The creatures bring presence, but it’s what the filmmakers do with the critters that sets the tone. And with a film like Transylvania 6-5000, you don’t even have to have the real monsters in the movie to still be able to have fun with the concepts they bring.

Released in 1985, Transylvania 6-5000 (its name a parody of the big band track “Pennsylvania 6-5000”) is a deeply silly film. It sets up an idea that movie monsters could exist in real life in, of course, Transylvania, and then it has fun finding all the ways it can parody and play with these beings. Although, really, the ones truly being mocked and played with are all the villagers and other “normal” people in the film. It’s a movie designed to subvert audience expectations while also mining as many laughs it can from the absurdity of everything. Because, let’s face it, movie monsters are absurd and, in the right context, they can even be incredibly funny.

Jack Harrison (Jeff Goldblum) and Gil Turner (Ed Begley Jr.) are journalists for The Sensation, an over-the-top tabloid. While Gil is perfectly fine writing trash for the paper, especially since his father, Mac (Norman Fell), runs the paper, Jack is a serious journalist that only wants to write the truth. He can’t stand the kind of articles he’s forced to research and, in fact, refuses to crank out the kind of tabloid trash he was hired to write. This puts the writing duo on thin ice, and Mac gives them one more chance: head to Transylvania and write about the sightings of Frankenstein’s Monster that people have been talking about.

Jack, naturally, dismisses this whole thing as a waste of time, but the two head to Transylvania anyway just to poke around. Gil manages to find traces of the monster, while also seeing other weird creatures – the sex crazed vampiress Odette (Geena Davis), the hairy wolf man Larry (Donald Gibb), and more – but Jack is never around to see them so he doesn’t believe his friend. That said, Jack does suspect something is going on, with the town, the mayor (Jeffrey Jones), and the whole police force. The two have to investigate both sides of the story, the mysterious monsters and the people apparently trying to cover it all up, if they have any hope of getting to the reality of this strange little hamlet.

Transylvania 6-5000 comes from the parody school of film, but it’s not a parody of any single film. It’s best to call it a parody of classic movie monsters in general, without specifically playing to the plot of any one movie. It’s more specific in its storytelling than, say, the Scary Movie films and their ilk, but it doesn’t mirror any one story like Spaceballs or Airplane!. It’s more like Blazing Saddles or History of the World, Part I, which clearly play to a genre of film (westerns and historical epics, respectively) without stealing their direct storylines. If you like monster movies, or are at least familiar with them, then you’d more than likely enjoy the rampant silliness of this movie.

With that said, I think Transylvania 6-5000 probably played better 40 years ago (when it was made) than it would today. This is based on the fact that the Universal MonstersThis franchise, started off with Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, was a powerhouse of horror cinema for close to two decades, with many of the creatures continuing on in one-off movies years later. are not as famous or renowned a brand as they once were. Outside of a few one-off movies that aren’t related, and a poor attempt at launching the Dark Universe, Universal has not kept these monsters in the public consciousness the way other mainstream heroes and villains have been maintained. The monsters don’t have the cultural cachet of superheroes from DC or Marvel (see the DC Extended UniverseStarted as DC Comics' answer to the MCU, the early films in the franchise stumbled out of the gates, often mired in grim-dark storytelling and the rushed need to get this franchise started. Eventually, though, the films began to even out, becoming better as they went along. Still, this franchise has a long way to go before it's true completion for Marvel's universe. and the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe.), the continuing editions of James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time., the awe inspired by the likes of Jurassic ParkWhile ever kid has dreams of seeing dinosaurs, Michael Crichton gave that dream a reality, at least on paper. His two Jurassic Park books spawned a movie franchise that's gone five movies strong (with no signs of slowing down), all because people love seeing dinosaurs made flesh.. The latter of which is also controlled by Universal and that studio seems to care far more about that franchise than their monsters.

I mention this not because I struggled with the film (I didn’t, and neither did my wife, probably because she’s been overexposed to the Universal Monsters due to my own interests) but because I know people in my age range, and younger, who don’t really know or care who the monsters are. You mention Dracula or Frankenstein to them and they get the reference, but if you say, “and they used to have their own shared universe in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s,” they get this confused look on their faces. I’ve seen it repeatedly enough to realize this is actually a trend. It wasn’t common back in the early 1980s to not know who the Monsters were but now… it’s a trend that’s only worsening.

As such, it feels like a parody movie like this, as much fun as it had, might have also reached its shelf life. Which is sad because this film is an absolute goofy charmer. I enjoy the two leads, from the cool and collected Goldblum conning his way through the town to find the story, to the nebbish and stammering Begley, Jr. It’s actually funny to see the two of them here playing roles that I’d often consider for their opposites. Goldblum spent a long time as the rippled abs heart throb (weird as that is to say now) and he could handle cool and confident so well so it’s surprising that he went the more stammering, nebbish route later in life.

The rest of the cast is filled out with solid character performers and enjoyable comedians. I love watching the two “Igors” in the film, John Byner as Radu and Carol Kane as Lupi, and seeing them play off each other. I mean, come on, how can you go wrong with Carol Kane? You can’t. Geena Davis clearly enjoys vamping it up (some pun intended) as the vampiress Odette, in one of her first movies. Heck, even Michael Richards is amusing here, playing another bumbling servant at the creepy old mansion (which, in this film, is also turned into a new “themed” hotel). The side characters are as delightful as the leads.

But that also raises one other obvious point about this movie: not all the actors featured in the film have the best reputations now. Richards went on quite the racist rant in a stand-up performance and has basically been persona non-grata ever since (for good reason). Meanwhile, Jeffery Jones plays the mayor here and while he’s amusing enough, he was later convicted for having child pornography and soliciting an under-age boy. Yes, he’s a monster, but not in the context this light-hearted film was going for.

I think, for all these reasons, Transylvania 6-5000 is a film of its era that doesn’t necessarily carry on in the modern realm. It’s aged too much, losing the audience and cultural cachet of the works it was one parodying. If you’re like me, and you still know these monsters and like a good parody of them, then I think this film will play for you. For everyone else, well, this film is probably going to be a mild amusement before you turn it off to go watch something else.