TRANSYLVANIA 6-5000

US, 1985, 82 minutes, Colour.
Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr, Joseph Bologna, Jeffrey Jones, Geena Davis, Joh Bynum, Carol Kane.
Directed by Rudy de Luca.

Transylvania 6-5000 is a light parody of the traditional horror films.
It was written and directed by Rudy De Luca who co-wrote a number of films with Mel Brooks including Dracula, Dead and Loving it and Life Stinks. He has a guest role as the son of the old crone, caught in the bushes, thought to be the wolf man.
Norman Fell appears as the editor of a kind of National Enquirer scandal-sheet who commissions one of his writers, hired to improve the vocabulary of the paper, played with wide eyed ingenuousness by Jeff Goldblum, along with the editors son, a rather slow Ed Begley Jr., to find a Frankenstein monster who was filmed by a group of American tourists in Transylvania.
Goldblum considers it as a holiday, Begley is all earnestness. When they arrive in Transylvania, they find it normal, everyone eager to exploit American tourists. However, Goldblum finds an American tourist and her daughter and pays court to her. Meanwhile, Begley involves himself in a whole range of silly situations. Jeffrey Jones appears as the mayor of the town as well as the owner of the castle.
There is some silly slapstick, which may appeal to some, with John Bynum as a kind of Igor character, continually flustered by the cook assistant, over played by Carol Kane.
They meet a mad doctor who is conducting experiments, Joseph Bologna, which involves trying the depilation of the wolf man, reconstructing somebody injured in an accident, which makes him look like Frankenstein, and a glamorous woman who wants attention, inserting vampire teeth, pretending to be a Dracula. She is infatuated with Begley. She is played by Geena Davis who starred with Jeff Goldblum in Earth Girls are Easy and The Fly and was married to him for some time. There is also a known old crone, mother of the wolf man, who tells fortunes.
After some scepticism, Goldblum becomes involved in trying to sort out the situation, Begley is overcome and tied up and there are all kinds of shenanigans in the laboratories, eventually going into the town square where the truth is revealed and everyone lives happily ever after, perhaps.
The film is in the vein of the kind of parodies that Mel Brooks wrote and directed in the seventies and eighties. However, it works more on thelowest common denominator rather than the highest common factor and is spasmodically amusing, depending on senses of humour.