Word: renfield
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...latest to join the California wine rush is Piper-Heidsieck. Two weeks ago, the French firm announced a $6 million ménage à trois with Renfield Importers and Sonoma Vineyards that will create a sparkling son of Heidsieck to be called Piper Sonoma. It will sell for $10-$12 a bottle, vs. $17 or more for the company's Continental bubbly...
...without. It is intended to prove that nothing is sacred to the film makers, but it just plays uncomfortably. There is also a flatness about Stan Dragoti's direction that prevents the film from realizing all its comic potential. But the performances (including that of Arte Johnson as Renfield, the count's bug-eating assistant) are uniformly jolly, the parody of the basic Dracula formula well observed and its social commentary deliciously off the wall. The production's genially tatty air enhances its anarchical mood and encourages one to go with its goofy yet often shrewd comic...
...best performance in the show comes from Kevin McClarnon, who plays the mad but not-so-mad patient Renfield, given to eating flies and (instead of the original spiders) fieldmice. He has an expressive face, and skillfully captures both the comic and pathetic facets of this disturbed character. An admirable piece of work...
...word of praise goes to the solid set and the dramatic lighting; also to the special effects: the fog, the puffs of smoke, the trickling blood, the bat that flies over the audience, and the fieldmouse that jumps out of Renfield's hand and scurries across the floor into the fireplace. There is fun, too, in the soundtrack: chilling animal calls in the distance, snippets of Debussy and Mahler and Holst, and a wonderfully ominous neo-Wagnerian leitmotif for tuba and timpani...
...only character worth watching is Renfield, a touched (in the head, if not the neck) patient of Dr. Seward. Richard Kavanaugh in the role compulsively swallows flies, swoops onto sofas reposes upside down and babbles madly about the Master...