Fangs (1981)

Original title: Anyab

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a young couple, planning to get married (after they’ll find an appropriately cheap apartment), find themselves stranded in the countryside during a rain storm. Thanks to a helpful yet somewhat sinister hunchback, they make their way to a creepy – yet awesome – mansion. There’s a very peculiar party going on inside, and the host tries to sweep the female part of the couple right off her feet.

Only in this case, the party is a masquerade of vampires who like to wear Halloween masks, and the host isn’t a sweet transvestite but Dracula (Ahmed Adawiyya).

Mohammed Shebl’s pretty mind-blowing horror musical comedy Fangs is the sort of thing we would have described as “psychotronic” in ye olden times. Produced on a low (low low low) budget but gifted with the nearly manic enthusiasm of a true believer in the power of popular cinema, this takes elements of Western pop culture and puts them through the blender of a very personal set of interests and obsessions in a cultural remix. The influences, quotes and re-works start with the obvious Rocky Horror (minus the LGBTQ material, though I suspect because this would have been a bridge too far for an Egyptian movie, not because Shebl didn’t want to), move over to Dracula (there’s an incredibly awesome-awkward restaging of the Count crawling up a wall you need to see to believe and love), and certainly do not end at using cheaper versions of the Biff! Bang! Pow! thought bubbles of the Batman TV show.

Shebl must have had quite the encyclopaedic knowledge of and nerdy interest in very different forms of – mostly US and British - pop culture, for his quotes and interests reach from the most obvious to the obscure. I can’t quite speak to the way these elements interact with the specifically Egyptian and probably pretty political parts of the movie, but forty years later and many kilometres away, there’s no mistaking -  this is a film made with total love for the material it borrows from.

Shebl also carries in his heart a sweet and probably abiding love for the fourth wall break: the plot, such as it is, is regularly interrupted by a gentleman in his private library who at first focusses on exposition and melodramatic pronouncements like a very serious horror host but eventually gets into a discussion with Dracula on the reality of vampires. Which in turn leads to the narrative coming to a screeching halt in favour of a number of absurdist skits that suggest a rather clear connection between vampires and capitalism.

In the main plot, Dracula will get into trouble for his autocratic leadership style as well, so even this non-80s-Egyptian viewer smells a degree of satire there.

However, between the fourth wall breaking, the quotes and everything, this is also a gorgeous, often utterly bizarre horror musical that makes up for a certain lack of budget through the virtues of imagination and natural weirdness. The film’s actual music should be on various hipster turn tables with its mix of disco, “Egyptian”-sounding percussion, synths and vocal lines that remind me more than a little of 70s Bollywood. Shebl needle-drops a variety of certainly copyrighted music as well, and there are as many clever gags based in the use of borrowed music as there are visual ones.

From time to time, Fangs even puts some emphasis on the “horror” bit of its multi-genre descriptors, and suddenly there’s genuinely icky vampire gore between the songs and the general strangeness. Clearly, Shebl liked a lot of things, and aimed to put them all on screen in the same movie – one never knows if it isn’t one’s first and only, after all.