Deafula
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Deafula Young Deafula |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English , American Sign Language |
| Publishing year | 1975 |
| length | 95 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Peter Wolf |
| script | Peter Wolf |
| production | Gary R. Holstrom |
| camera | J. Wilder Mincey |
| occupation | |
| |
Deafula (also Young Deafula ) is an American vampire film by the deaf director Peter Wolf from 1975. The film depicts the transformation of a theology student into a vampire. The dialogues in the film were almost exclusively signed in American Sign Language . It was shot in black and white.
The title of the film is a play on words with the English term for deafness and the name of the literary character Dracula .
action
After a series of around 20 gruesome murders, the suspicion of the young blond theology student Steve Adams that he was the culprit is increasingly hardening. Adams embarks on a journey into his own past to discover the cause of his regular transformations into a dark-haired bloodthirsty vampire.
While he is being chased by the police, he finally learns that his mother, who was then pregnant with him, had been seduced by Dracula. One of the policemen hunted him down firmly believes that he himself is the British vampire hunter Van Helsing, although he is obviously an American.
After Adams was introduced by his dying father into the background of his memory gaps, which reached back to childhood, he subsequently tries to find the vampire's coffin in order to break the curse. After Adam finds Dracula resting place, he pulls the stake out of his chest, by which the vampire had been knocked out for years, in order to investigate the secret of his mother next.
Signscope
Defula is the only film that has ever used the Signscope process to use sign language as a cinematic stylistic device instead of traditional dialogues. For the hearing, the signed dialogues were explained by an off-screen voice.
Reviews
The film received very mixed reviews and fell short of economic expectations.
“How this movie has managed to avoid infiltrating greater cult circles is a mystery to me. The availability of the movie has probably been limited to sign language schools and community centers catering to the hearing impaired. [...] It is high weirdness like few movies, occasionally exhibiting the style of other low budget vampire movies from the era such as [...] Jess Franco 's Female Vampire (aka Loves of Irina, Bare Breasted Countess, etc.) working without any of the constant nudity and explicit sex scenes or the strange, dreamlike films of Jean Rollin . [...] The end result is a lot more like Manos, The Hands of Fate than Rape of the Vampire . Strictly for fans of psychotronic movies, Deafula is the rarest kind of video novelty. "
“The movie itself is all over the board; it jumps from gritty to campy to moving to comic to pretentious so often that I don't really know what to make of it. "
“Deafula is an indescribably demented film. [...] Undoubtedly, the most bizarre aspect of this film is that the dialogue — every single word — is performed in sign language. There's also a dubbed-in vocal track providing a literal (way too literal) translation for hearing audiences. As you might expect, this vocal track is as unintentionally hilarious as any poorly-dubbed martial arts film. "
“Thematically, the film proves accessible to a wide audience, as vampires are a firmly established fixture of the cinema. Additionally, shooting MOS saves on costly equipment and dampens cut-rate acting. DEAFULA appears to be a straightforward low budget black & white horror film. [...] It took a while for me to realize that DEAFULA wasn't taking itself very seriously. Aside from Deafula's prominent proboscis and an in depth conversation about eating peanuts with the shells on, it wasn't until a 'signer' with metal cans at the end of his arms instead of hands showed up that I knew DEAFULA was definitely made with comedy in mind! "
Background information
The film was shown in around 500 cinemas. Wherever possible, massive bass loudspeakers were placed on the screen to allow the deaf to have a physical sense of the rhythm. Hearing and deaf viewers reacted very differently to the film.
Web links
- Deafula in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- rottentomatoes.com (cover) (engl.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ quoted from In Transylvania, no one can hear you scream. Deafula. , cinema-suicide.com .
- ↑ quoted from The B-Movie Catechism: Deafula .
- ↑ cf. The Agony Booth: Defula .
- ↑ cf. Mike White: Cashiers du Cinemart Issue 13 ( Memento of the original from February 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
- ↑ cf. Interview with the producer Deafulas Gary Holstrom under Mike White: Cashiers du Cinemart Issue 13 ( Memento of the original from February 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .
