After his death, Bruce Lee finds himself in the underworld, where he
teams up with Popeye, Caine (from Kung Fu), and the One-Armed Swordsman
(the protagonist of a Hong Kong film series) to battle “the Exorcist,” “the
Godfather,” James Bond, Emmanuelle (the main character of a series of erotic
films), Clint Eastwood (dressed as the Man with No Name), Zatoichi, and Dracula
(who leads an army of zombies that look suspiciously like guys in skeleton
costumes.) This film was part of the “Bruceploitation” subgenre that had actors
playing Bruce Lee after his death in unauthorized martial arts films. The film
explains the difference in Lee’s appearance (and, one presumes, the other
characters’) via a character stating that human beings’ features change when
they die and enter the underworld. In the CU, James Bond was still alive in 1977, when this movie was made. Therefore, it obviously takes place in an AU.
Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate an apparent haunting on an island near
Cornwall. Inspector Lestrade is also there, investigating events that occurred
on the island twenty years ago alongside Constable Poldark of the Truro county
police. Winston Graham wrote a series of novels about a
Cornish family named Poldark. We can assume that the Constable is meant to be a
member of Graham’s Poldark family, if not directly descended from Ross Poldark
and his wife Demelza.
The
half-Chinese Kung Fu expert Victor Mace was murdered by the same group that has
captured Richard Camellion. Mace
was the protagonist of the five Kung
Fu novels written by Joseph Rosenberger under
the pseudonym “Lee Chang,” published in 1973-1974. The fourth Kung Fu novel mentioned both Camellion and another
series character of Rosenberger’s, the Murder Master.
The third novel in Mick Farren's Renquist Quartet series. Nosferatu Victor Renquist visits England at the request of a female troika of his
fellow undead, and becomes a witness to the Urshu known as Taliesin the
Merlin’s emergence from his centuries-long hibernation. Merlin’s cocoon was
unearthed in a mound excavated by students from Wessex University. The Duke de
Richleau led a task force of specialists against occult forces utilized by the
Nazis during World War II. Renquist thinks of the few English nosferatu,
such as Sir Francis Varney, Barnabas Collins, and Lord Ruthven. A member of the
female vampire troika, Marieko Matsunaga, used her powers of persuasion to
seduce one of the Wessex students at a pub in Casterbridge in order to
investigate the findings at the mound. Marieko is aware of Renquist’s encounter
with Cthulhu, one of the monstrous Old Ones. Renquist thinks that the Scottish
vampire lord Fenrior may preside over the largest community of their kind since
a group of nosferatu and humans caused the dissolution of the Theatre
Raoul Privache in Paris. Wessex is a fictional region of England appearing in several novels by
Thomas Hardy, including The Mayor of Casterbridge. The Duke de
Richleau is featured in a series of novels by Dennis Wheatley. According to
Farren, the Duke died in 1997 at the age of 93, whereas Wheatley’s Dangerous Inheritance had
the Duke dying in the 1950s, when he was in his eighties. Renquist must have
been mistaken as to the Duke’s age and time of death. Sir Francis Varney is
from James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire. Farren claims that Varney
was impaled by a vampire hunter called Dr. Feisal in Persia, whereas Rymer’s
novel had Varney committing suicide by throwing himself into a volcano. However,
Frank Schildiner’s story “Fear from Above,” set in the 1930s, reveals that
Varney survived plunging into Mt. Vesuvius, while Simon R. Green’s novella “The
Big Game,” set in the 21st century, elaborates on the circumstances
of how he survived. Travis Hiltz’s story “The Mark of the Red Leech” depicts
Varney’s destruction in World War I, while Donald F. Glut and Jesse Santos’s
comic book story “Dracula’s Vampire Legion” features Dracula resurrecting
Varney and other infamous vampires in the 1970s. Varney must have been
destroyed and resurrected several times. Barnabus Collins from the television
series Dark Shadows is American, but the tie-in novels by “Marilyn Ross”
(pseudonym for Dan Ross) have Barnabas visiting England after first becoming a
vampire, and only later returning to his native Collinsport, Maine. Lord
Ruthven is from John Polidori’s “The Vampyre.” Farren claims that Ruthven was
captured by the Greek Orthodox Church and exposed to sunlight, killing him.
However, Polidori’s story had Ruthven walking around in the daytime. Perhaps
the Church conducted a ritual that removed Ruthven’s immunity to sunlight. If
so, then Ruthven’s destruction was not permanent either, given his resurrection
in “Dracula’s Vampire Legion,” as well as his appearance in the movie Countess
Dracula’s Orgy of Blood. Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones are from the stories
of H.P. Lovecraft; Renquist and his coven encountered Cthulhu in the second
novel in the series, Darklost.
Raoul Privache is the vampire from John Metcalfe’s short novel The
Feasting Dead. Although there is no theatre in Metcalfe’s novel, a Theatre
Raoul Privache in Paris appears in Kim Newman’s The Bloody Red Baron.
The Theatre mentioned in More Than Mortal must be the CU version of the
Theatre in the Anno Dracula Universe. Taliesin the Merlin’s portrayal does not
fit with other versions of Merlin in the CU, and therefore he is likely one of
many individuals to use that name.
