Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 6 (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: Transylvania)

Indiana Jones vs. Count Dracula. That's what this is, on the tin. It feels pertinent to start with that pitch, and wonder just how in the hell we got here. The answer is my pal Mike, who asked for this. It turned out to be 45 minutes long, so what the hell, a little quickie to bang out on an off day because yesterday was full of six parts of Classic Who and then two hours of talking about it for the Internet. Where this comes from is a little bit interesting, though. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is, again, exactly what it says on the tin. A prequel Indiana Jones series done on a TV budget, and from a brief glance at the Wikipedia episode summaries it seems like it does a lot of Quantum Leap-style kisses with history where the young Indiana Jones will meet some famous historical dude or lady. That kind of sort of happens here, except the historical dude is the actual Vlad Tepes who is an immortal vampire. From what I gather, this show was a fun little side gig for George during the 90's wherein he got to push special effects forward a little bit more to the digital age, before he went back to Star Wars near the end of the 90's. Let's not re-litigate that, I have enough horror to last me the month. Instead let's talk about INDIANA JONES AND THE VAMPIRES.

Which, fun fact, doesn't appear to actually have been aired on broadcast TV initially. This is one of the last episodes of the series, and I guess it got cancelled early? Or maybe it was too gnarly to be aired. There's a lot of dripping blood and dismemberment and ghouls with missing body parts. It gets a little intense for a TV show! These are the best parts, though; the middle of the episode in which young Indiana Jones and his squad of allies explore a haunted castle and see all kinds of gnarly shit. Impaled bodies, sentient balls of lightning that blow doors and windows wide open, rooms that are either boiling hot or freezing cold, blood dripping from the ceiling... It's really great spooky stuff. Oh yeah, young Indiana Jones has a squad. He's a spy during World War I looking for some missing POWs along with a bunch of other intelligence agents. You may wonder why Indiana Jones is running around with a whole posse instead of just like, one or two folks like in the movies, and the answer is twofold. One, this isn't a fully formed Indiana Jones yet, so he's not as hypercompetent as Harrison Ford. Indeed, he kind of does very little to move the proceedings forward here. I know nitpicking nerds will say that about Indy in Raiders, that if he did nothing the movie would have still happened, but even then he still got into fights and used his wits to do an archeology or get out of peril. This Indy doesn't do too much of that. He grapples up the side of the castle and falls down, only for the other guys to just find the door. You might think that when he gets captured and Vlad Tepes is going to kill him, he might fight back and save himself and the girl... but she saves his ass and tells him what to do to kill Vlad! He may be wearing the hat, but he's not quite Indiana Jones yet.

The second reason there's a squad is so this horror-themed episode has people it can kill off. An army captain gets fucking vaporized from the boots up, and I'm not sure what the fuck happened to him or what that has to do with vampires. The smart guy turns out to be a German double agent but the girl gets him with a knife. Then the big guy gets strapped to a table and eviscerated by Vlad. It all happens behind a curtain so all you see is some splotches of blood, but by god it works. It's the old adage of what you can't see being scarier. Oh yeah, and the POWs got turned into fucking vampires. They don't ever say the word vampire, but they're drinking blood and one of them gets up after being shot. They're fucking vampires. Vlad himself is more Nosferatu than Dracula (and played unrecognizably by Muldoon from Jurassic Park), and him getting staked in the heart at the end leads to a pretty cool effect. Honestly, this is a very strange episode of television for me. I'm not sure it entirely worked, given how little young Indiana Jones contributed to the proceedings and the stopping of Vlad. Moreover, it really takes its time on building up the espionage plot and the mission and getting there and all that. The show is about halfway done by the time they get to the castle. There are neat flourishes here, like the tarot reading Indy gets in Venice (Ah, Venice...) or climbing a cliffside, and there are some great gothic visuals. The credits even play a montage of scenes in black and white, making it feel a little bit vintage horror. In the end, it's fine. It's not incredibly dodgy like, say, Temple of Doom and it doesn't overstay its welcome. Good job against that fucking vampire, Young Indy.

Also if he'd had the whip in this episode, this would totally be a live-action Castlevania adaptation and you know it.