BEFORE: Well, this is either a horror movie or the worst fashion line ever created - "House of Dracula". Their tagline is "We hope you like capes, because that's all we sell. Capes and those weird vests that go under the capes".
Still moving backwards in time through the Dracula films I haven't seen before, essentially playing clean-up here, because I'd like to clear the category, so next October can be devoted mainly to mummies and zombies, plus whatever random monsters and demons are left at that point.
No actor link today, I'm counting on the character of Dracula carrying over to see me through.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "House of Frankenstein" (Movie #2,473)
THE PLOT: Count Dracula and the Wolf Man seek cures for their afflictions, while a hunchbacked woman, a mad scientist and Frankenstein's monster have their own troubles.
AFTER: Just about two years ago, I watched the first of Universal's monster mash-up movies, and now finally I can follow up with the other one. In "House of Frankenstein", Boris Karloff played a mad scientist who wanted to put the brains of his enemies into the bodies of the Wolf Man and the Frankenstein monster, for some reason. Here the Wolf Man came to him, looking for a cure, and the doctor's answer was a brain transplant? OK, that officially counts as not helping. Meanwhile, Dracula's body was discovered in a carnival side-show, and someone pulled the stake out, just to see if the Count would come back to life, and he did. OK, now we know - DON'T DO THAT. But then Drac couldn't get back to his coffin before the sun came up, so his part in the movie turned out to be rather short.
At the start of this film, Dracula is alive again (somehow) and going under the name of Baron Latos. This time it's Dracula who seeks out the help of the mad scientist, to see if modern medicine could come up with a chemical cure for his vampiric condition, because I guess he's tired of always getting the stake through the heart, or getting turned to dust by the sun. I would imagine that both of those things would be very painful for him, and by the way, maybe his whole life is very painful for him, what with his medical handicaps and all that. (Dracula as victim? I'm not sure that's gonna fly...).
Dr. Edlemann thinks that he can cure Dracula by giving him transfusions - but wait, doesn't he sort of get a transfusion every time he drinks a victim's blood? I don't know if this doctor is on the right path here, and putting Dracula in the same room as a couple of hot nurses is not exactly a way to keep him from finding new female victims to seduce. Something tells me this plan will not succeed.
Shortly after this, Lawrence Talbot shows up at the same doctor's office - he must have gotten the same referral from his primary physician, just like Dracula did. He wants a cure for his lycanthropy, since the brain transplant in the last film didn't go as planned. (That never would have worked, plus his HMO - healthy monster organization - didn't approve it, so he would have had to pay out of pocket...). Dr. Edelmann suggests that his Wolf Man condition is not caused by the full moon, but instead by pressure on his brain. I've got to call a NITPICK POINT here, because of all the other Wolf Man films that show Talbot turning hairy JUST as the moon comes out, so there's plenty of empirical evidence to show a cause-and-effect relationship here. Besides, there's a simple fix to reconcile the two diagnoses, just say that just as the full moon affects the tides, it also affects the liquid in Talbot's brain, therefore creating pressure that turns him into the Wolf Man. Jeez, do I have to fix all the plot holes myself? And if it's NOT the full moon, then why, after getting the operation, do they have to wait until the next full moon to be sure that the procedure was a success? A-HA!
This doctor has found some spores that produce a certain mold, and this gives him the ability (again, somehow) to re-shape bone. He was going to use this mold to fix the hunchback on the otherwise attractive nurse, but she agrees to wait until the next batch of mold can be grown. Or maybe she wants to see if the mold will really do what the doctor says, and not make the patient even sicker. Or maybe she just doesn't want some strange mold being put in her body, and I can't say that I blame her. Some of those black molds are toxic, right? Ewww. That stuff scares me more than vampires and wolf men do.
Meanwhile, Talbot (as the Wolf Man) hides out in the cave below the castle (oh, yeah, the mad doctor's office is in a castle for some reason...) and accidentally discovers a dark, humid place which is the perfect spot to grow some mold faster! Umm, Hurray, I think? Oh, and they find the body of the Frankenstein Monster (don't call him Frankenstein...) down there too, this is where he and the body of the last mad scientist ended up, after drowning in quicksand in the last film. The Monster is only "mostly dead", and so Dr. Edelmann has the option, nay, the obligation, to plug his electrodes into an outlet and bring him back to life!
This doctor's got a lot going on, trying to cure two monsters while reviving another - plus he's got to deal with Count Dracula putting the moves on the hotter (non-hunchbacked) nurse, which is very forward of him, to stamp out the sexual harassment when he sees it. He might be able to cure Dracula's vampirism, but there's no medical cure for him being a sexual predator. So, he has to die, even though that makes all the work trying to cure him rather pointless. But hey, there's only so much that the magic mold can do, and we've got to have our priorities.
But the Doctor doesn't know that Dracula reversed the flow of the transfusion, which is another unnecessarily added plot point. All they had to do was to say that there was some cross contamination during the transfusion, and this would explain why later on, Dr. Edelmann started acting like a vampire himself. Because NITPICK POINT #2 says that during a direct, person-to-person transfusion, they would logically connect an artery from the donor (Edelmann) to a vein of the recipient (Dracula) because that's how blood flows. You can't just flip a switch and "reverse the flow" of a transfusion, because the IV tube is connected to the donor's artery, and blood doesn't flow backward into an artery like that. Arteries take blood away from the heart, and wouldn't suck blood back in as seen here. Sorry. My point here is that there were easier ways to get the Mad Doctor infected with vampirism (Dracula biting him would have been just one way), instead of forcing a transfusion to fail in a way that they just can't.
But hey, maybe it's the moon or the pressure in Dr. Edelmann's brain that makes him think he's become a vampire. Or maybe he felt guilty about killing Count Dracula, so he had a hallucination where he became a vampire to take his place in the world. Anyway, it sort of becomes a shout-out to a "Jekyll & Hyde" situation when Edelmann starts acting like an evil vampire, and then resurrecting the Frankenstein Monster the rest of the way to defend him from the Wolf Man and the angry mob.
Tempers flare among the townspeople, and finally all the real action of the film takes place in the last 5 minutes as all the pieces of the monsters' storylines come together. People get electrocuted, things start catching on fire, and the only one who really comes out on top here is the Wolf Man, because we never see him turn hairy again, so maybe he's cured? Everyone else doesn't fare so well here. And if the ending here feels very rushed, that would be correct - essentially this film didn't even have a real ending of its own, they just re-used footage from "The Ghost of Frankenstein", which is both cheap and a form of cheating. This is proof, though, that all of these monster films tend to end the same exact way - so why shoot a new ending if you can just use an old one?
(NOTE: The poster still has the nerve to describe the picture as "All New..." which is a lie, if they re-used footage from a previous monster film. This should have been amended to "All New...except for the ending" but I can see how that might have turned away some movie-goers.)
Starring John Carradine (last seen in "The Hound of the Baskervilles"), Onslow Stevens (last seen in "Them!"), Lon Chaney Jr. (last seen in "House of Frankenstein"), Glenn Strange (ditto), Martha O'Driscoll, Jane Adams, Lionel Atwill (last seen in "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon"), Ludwig Stossel, Skelton Knaggs (last seen in "Terror by Night"), with a cameo from Boris Karloff (also last seen in "House of Frankenstein") in the flashback sequence.
RATING: 4 out of 10 hissing cats
No comments:
Post a Comment