Hey, everybody. It's Al's birthday again, so once again, he's handed me a film he didn't want to watch. We're friends. I think. I'm just pretty sure Al misunderstood his parents' lessons on sharing growing up.
Jonathan is a West German vampire movie from 1970 which chronicles the journey of a young man named Jonathan to a vampire's castle. The vampires, who are not vulnerable to sunlight, seem to rule over large parts of the region, though it's never really explained exactly how far their reach extends or whether they're in some kind of formal governing position or just raiding with impunity. There's a lot that isn't really covered in this film, honestly. In any case, with the villagers fed up with their vampire overlords (?), they have a meeting and their leader sends Jonathan to scout out the vampire's castle in preparation for an attack, and to free prisoners that have been taken so they can join up with the villagers and overpower the vampires, driving them into the sea to die.
Aside from sunlight, vampires largely seem to ignore pretty much all the standard weaknesses - they don't seem to mind crosses (until a scene late in the film, I'll get to that) and they don't care about garlic, to name a few. In exchange, they apparently can just be killed by bullets, which makes them far less terrifying. I'm not sure if this is just a regional vampire story difference, maybe, but it definitely feels strange that some of the vampiric weaknesses are removed but then they just appear to be vulnerable to regular weapons. Admittedly I might be misreading things - the people killed by weapons might be human servants of the vampires? The film's reaaaaally not clear.
The setting is appropriately dreary and the film does nicely capture a sense of despair and bleak resolution to fate - most people Jonathan meets just kind of seem to be living day to day, doing nothing more to change their fate than locking their doors or gathering in basements. The land feels lifeless and barren, without hope, and Jonathan never really finds any friendly faces along the way or people actually willing to help him. It's a sorrowful world where even the light of day can't improve things.
The problem is that it's also dreadfully boring.
There just isn't really much that happens in Jonathan. Our hero - who we don't even meet until about 15 minutes into the film, after an extended introductory sequence involving a group of vampires very slowly searching an apartment for a young couple, only for one of them to immediately commit suicide and the other to escape them and get killed by dogs - sets off for the vampire's castle in a carriage, loses his carriage to a vampire attack, and then spends most of the rest of the movie just trudging along the road, running into villages that are already destroyed, accomplishing nothing, until he finally does find his way to the castle.
There are a few events along the way, but they lack any real sense of plot. The only thing that gets a bit interesting is when a vampire (or perhaps a human servant, again, it's unclear) joins up with Jonathan for a bit, pretending to help him, and subtly throws a rock at some villagers to make them attack him and Jonathan and stop Jonathan from being able to ask them for help. That's moderately interesting, at least. That part of things ends soon after, when he offers to take watch for Jonathan as they camp, then waits until morning to suddenly decide to attack. Jonathan kills him, and we're out basically the only other character with any actual development.
Jonathan himself basically does nothing. I'm not just saying "nothing but walk to the vampire's castle," like he does something after that. No, I mean that he does nothing. The hero of the film accomplishes nothing for the entire movie. Not one thing.
I'll explain, but spoiler warning, I guess.
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| And they have very little to do with their time. |
So: Jonathan - after a weird interlude in which he meets some villagers all hiding in a house watching a couple have sex, and then sleeps in a barn until someone comes to sleep with him randomly too - eventually makes it to the vampire's castle and breaks in. He is almost immediately captured, but the lead vampire just lets him roam the castle as long as he doesn't go in any locked rooms. He does, finding the prisoners, but before he can do anything the lead vampire captures him again and throws him in prison this time, where he is tortured.
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| This is, at least, an intimidating shot - or it would be, had it been built to with a proper sense of dread. |
We see Jonathan's fellow villagers on their way to attack the castle. Now keep in mind, it was pretty clear early in the film that their plan won't work without the information Jonathan is supposed to provide and without Jonathan freeing the prisoners to join their assault. That's the point of the meeting scene early in the movie. So, how will Jonathan get free and help the villagers in their assault?
Well, he'll get free when the villagers, halfway through their very successful assault, free him.
Yeah. Basically the villagers just succeed at their plan without him. I guess you could say that since they free him before going to free the other prisoners maybe he told them where to find the other prisoners? But that's a stretch - they clearly figured out where to find him without help, and he appears to be in a far more secluded part of the castle than the others. Jonathan's barely even visibly involved in the final attack - I think he's part of the torch-and-cross wielding mob, but he's never really shown until he sits on the beach at the end of the film. He's absent, in any meaningful way, from the climax. The title character is basically absent.
It feels like if you made Lord of the Rings, but Frodo kind of tripped on the way to Mount Doom and couldn't make it there, but no bother, even though the ring wasn't destroyed the armies of good just kicked Sauron's ass anyway. (That would still be much more interesting, mind, but you get the point.)
It's so bizarre. I can't think of too many other films where the hero or heroine has felt this ineffectual. Only thing that springs to mind is the anime Amnesia, where the heroine spent the entire series being told what to do by others and when she finally did decide on an action, it was the wrong thing to do and accomplished nothing.
There are a few other plots that try to start up in this film, but go nowhere. For instance, the lead vampire lets Jonathan tour the castle openly and drives away other vampires who try to go after him, claiming him as his own. What plans does he have for Jonathan? Who knows, it never comes up again. A vampire takes a baby from a villager and cradles it gently, while the mother screams outside for her child's return. What happens there? Who knows, it never comes up again.
There's repeated scenes of these young girls who dance around and seem to serve the main female vampire in some way, and they're very mysterious and weird and seem to maybe trap this lady that tries to warn Jonathan, but then they stop showing up in the movie, so that never comes up again.
Jonathan's girlfriend is captured like immediately after he leaves town, turned by the vampire lord, but if he ever sees her again in the movie he doesn't really react to it, so I honestly couldn't tell you if he ever does encounter her again. I think she's among the vampires when he's captured, but he says nothing to show he's recognized her or anything.
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| You couldn't just cut open your hand or something, dude? |
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| Even he looks kind of embarrassed. |
Then there are parts of the story that have an ending but don't seem to have a beginning. There's a part late in the film during the battle between the villagers and the vampires where a village woman is repeatedly striking a fallen vampire in the face, even though he's clearly already dead. She beats him bloody and keeps on hitting him. It would be a powerful scene if she'd shown up in the movie even once before and had been built up in some way so we understood why she had a particular level of hatred for this particular guy. Instead, it just comes off as strange because they keep focusing on it like they're expecting us to have some emotional reaction but nothing has been built up.
Oh, they kill a rat, too. Like actually kill a rat, right on camera, stomping it to death. So that was fun.
The handling of vampire lore feels all sorts of weird, both in how the story uses it and in the portrayal of the vampire expert character, the professor who advises the villagers in their hunt. It feels like he's played for laughs - he gives Jonathan a bag with garlic, a tome he wrote, a huge cross rosary, a map, and a dagger. All but the dagger are almost immediately lost and this weird monk in a cabin in the woods is shown playing with the items (again, is he a vampire or not? Not sure), and shown having a collection of crosses that he hangs inverted on his walls. So it looks like the film's saying the professor's knowledge is fake and all these supposed weaknesses don't matter. He even gets run over by accident by one of the carts on the villagers' journey to the castle, which feels like a dark comedy thing. But then he's just kind of fine when they get there and he leads the attack on the castle and succeeds in every possible way, and the villagers' crosses seem to drive the vampires back just fine and his plan totally works. The villagers drive the vampires into the sea and they die just as he'd predicted. So...what was I supposed to be drawing from his character and the lore he was spouting? Was he right? Wrong? Did he just make a lucky guess? Were the characters unaffected by crosses not vampires, and the ones affected vampires? That's my best guess on that part, but the film doesn't really say anything to let the viewer know. And at least one of them has to be a vampire - the old lady, who gets pushed into the ocean with the others and vaporizes - but she's in the presence of a cross early in the movie and it doesn't seem to do anything to her (though she does instruct another person to remove it, so maybe that was meant to imply it would do something?). It's all very confusing.
I'm really thinking about this movie too much.
Look...the point is, this is just a really dull film. It's at least three times as long as it really needs to be, and it feels like the basic outline of a plot without the details filled in. Heck, about 45 minutes in to the film I felt like I was really still watching the introduction. It's like somebody decided to make a movie out of Castlevania but made the entire thing about a Belmont preparing for his journey rather than actually fighting vampires.
It's hardly the worst thing Al's made me watch, but it's just dull and boring and completely uninteresting. It's not produced badly, and it doesn't make any real mistakes from a technical standpoint. It's reasonably well made - there's just absolutely no reason to ever watch it, ever. It's a waste of time and can't even bother to involve it's hero in the conclusion. It's one of those films that makes you watch and think, "well, there's an hour and a half I'll never get back."
Happy Birthday, Al.
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