Mel Brooks Was Proudest of A Scene From One of His Least Popular Comedies
Mel Brooks wrote and directed three of the greatest movie comedies of all time: The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. But when Brooks was asked about his favorite scene that he ever directed, he named a comedy bit that wouldn’t come up on most fans’ top 10 lists. “Let me give you one of my movies that I love. I’m really proud, for sure, of this insane comedy I made called Dracula: Dead and Loving It,” Brooks boasted to the Daily Beast, via Far Out. Don't Miss The scene in question? “Steven Weber is driving a stake through Lysette Anthony’s heart. Mel Brooks is playing Van Helsing. I say to him, ‘Drive the stake through her heart! Hit her hard.’ So he drives the stake through her heart.”What happens next is Python-esque in terms of gross-out physical comedy. “There’s an incredible gush, an incredible fountain of blood that sprays him. He just gets covered in blood. I say, ‘Hit her again.’ There’s an even bigger, 20-foot fountain of blood all over him that comes out of her. And then he’s standing there drenched, the blood dripping from him. He can’t believe it. I say to him, ‘She’s not dead yet. Hit her again!’ He looks at me and says, ‘She’s dead enough.’” In his memoir, All About Me, Brooks continued to praise the scene. “When I said ‘cut,’ I never heard such a loud laugh in my life,” he wrote. “The entire crew collapsed in laughter.”Unfortunately for Brooks, Dracula: Dead and Loving It didn’t resonate with moviegoers or critics. One problem was Leslie Nielsen as Dracula — he was hilarious when playing it straight in the Naked Gun series of comedies, but the more he mugged and tried to be funny in other films, the less he connected. At this point in his movie career, Brooks also seemed to have lost his magic touch. “If any movie proves that Mel Brooks’ genius for skewering creaky genres has evaporated, it’s this anemic attempt to draw new blood from low-flying vampire high jinks,” opined USA Today. “Not to venture forth some sort of radical idea,” offered the Los Angeles Times, “but aren’t comedies supposed to have jokes?” Empire put it much more succinctly: “Rubbish.”But Brooks, still years away from becoming a Broadway darling with his musical version of The Producers, didn’t waver about the greatness of his blood splatter scene, no matter what the critics had to say. “It was a great scene. It was irresistible for laughs for the audience,” he insisted. “It’s one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever gotten in any movie.”
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