BEFORE: I feel like maybe I did October a bit backwards this year, because ideally the movies should get scarier as I approach October 31, and this year the opposite is the case. Since I started with "Crimson Peak", "It" and "The Mummy" (2017) in the first week I guess maybe there was no place left to go but down. Then I watched the scarier (or at least gorier) Hammer Studios "Dracula" films before moving backwards in time to the much sillier Universal films that were sequels to the Bela Lugosi film. I'm not sure how I could have flipped it - but after I finish these Dracula films I'm going to move back to ghost stories, maybe one or two of them will be scary. First I'm going to take a week's vacation, though, and then finish the month with two films when I get back.
Lon Chaney Jr. carries over from "House of Dracula", where he played the Wolf Man.
THE PLOT: Count Alucard finds his way from Budapest to the swamps of the Deep South; his four nemeses are a medical doctor, a university professor, a jilted fiancé and the woman he loves.
AFTER: If all goes well, this Saturday I'll not only turn 50, but I'll be getting on a plane to fly to Dallas for a week's BBQ Crawl (oh, great, another sequel...) that will take us from Dallas down to New Orleans. Now, while I'm not a fan of cajun food - you can take gumbo, jambalaya, po'boys, grits and blackened catfish and throw them in the Gulf of Mexico for all I care - but I have heard tell that Louisiana BBQ does exist, you just have to look a bit harder to find it. Plus we're going to take one of those "Spooky Tours" around New Orleans, since we'll be there just a few days before Halloween.
The Son of Dracula was apparently thinking along the same lines, since he pulled up stakes (literally...) in Europe and headed for the Bayou himself. Don't let the gray hair fool you, he might look old, but in vampire years, he's still just a teenager - why else would he head over to NOLA for spring break? Hey, this makes a little bit more sense than Dracula heading out to sunny Southern California, right? New Orleans is the home to voodoo, and many above-ground cemeteries, and also some of Anne Rice's vampire stories that came decades later were also set there. And oh, yeah, "True Blood" was also set in Louisiana, but I never watched that show.
But let's start with the basic questions - when did Dracula have a son? Are we talking about a real son, or a figurative one? Does this mean Dracula had sex with a woman, instead of just seducing her via mind control? So many questions about this, like who was the son of Dracula's mother? Was she a human or a vampire? Do vampires reproduce sexually, or do they just create more vampires by infecting people via blood exchange? Wikipedia, on the other hand, says that this is the SAME role that Bela Lugosi played in "Dracula", so what gives there? Is this the first Count Dracula or the second Count, is he the son of the original, or just the original going under another name? Or does "Son of" in the title just mean "Sequel to"?
Funny thing, the movie never gets around to answering any of these questions, which is a damn shame. But we do see Dracula ship himself to America again, so I've got the same NITPICK POINTS here that I did for "The Return of Dracula". Was Dracula inside the coffin for the whole trip to New Orleans? If so, then why did he buy a train ticket? And did he not drink blood during the entire trip? Because that's like a week of not eating, and can he do that? He sure didn't look any thinner once he got to his destination. And if he did come in and out of the coffin, which was inside of a large crate, how did THAT work? This is why Dracula needs to travel with an associate like Renfield, someone who will open the crate every night so that Dracula can get out of his coffin, and seal up the crate during the day so nobody can look inside. Dracula traveling alone, however, doesn't seem possible. More to the point, did he ship his own crate via DeadEx, or Boooo P.S.?
Also in this film, Dracula travels under the name "Count Alucard", and the problem here isn't that people can't quite seem to make the connection via backwards spelling, it's the fact that the ones who DO make the connection don't seem to do much about it. I mean, come ON people, get with the program, if you spell something, SAY something! But the general problem here among the townspeople seems to be a proclivity for over-analyzing and over-stating things, like they always seem to have to belaboring every point at least three times before taking any action. It's very possible that the movie was running very short, so they asked the actors in every scene to say each line multiple times, and they all ended up in the film to stretch things out.
What, exactly, is the problem with these townspeople? They KNOW that Dracula means evil, that on the evil scale he's right between Satan himself and whoever wrote that "Kars for Kids" jingle. Why can't they stop talking about doing something and start DOING something? How much proof do they need that a vampire walks among them? Even after the dead woman starts walking around again, and they find her sleeping in a coffin, they're STILL not convinced. The vampire expert, Professor Lazlo, checks off every box that there is, and still people aren't sure what to do about Count Alucard. Is this because they live in the Deep South, or is everyone in Louisiana some kind of born skeptic?
I'm used to seeing Lon Chaney as a Sad Sack, when he played the Wolf Man he was always complaining about his condition and how nobody would help him. He's a completely different character as Dracula, he's more confident, much more of a go-getter, he's not afraid to take charge and hypnotize women. But still, there's something of a disconnect with Chaney as Dracula, because he doesn't have anything close to the signature European accent that Lugosi had, or even the one Frances Lederer had. We expect Dracula to sound foreign, and here he just doesn't, so that's a big disappointment. And then near the end, when he finds his coffin burning, Chaney slips into that "helpless" character again that seemed to come so easily to him. Count Dracula wouldn't scream at the guy who just set his coffin on fire to get help to put the fire out, he'd hypnotize the guy to make him extinguish the flames.
Throughout this whole movie, nobody seems to know what to do when something is on fire. I guess back in 1943 the fire extinguisher hadn't been invented yet, so people's first inclination was to pick up a board and try to beat the fire out? This seemed very weird, like didn't they know back then how to go get a bucket of water?
Also starring Robert Paige, Louise Allbritton, Frank Craven, J. Edward Bromberg, Patrick Moriarity (last seen in "The Lost Weekend"), Evelyn Ankers (last seen in "The Pearl of Death"), Adeline De Walt Reynolds (last seen in "Shadow of the Thin Man"), Etta McDaniel (last seen in "The Thin Man Goes Home"), George Irving (last seen in "Sergeant York"), Samuel S. Hinds, Cyril Delevanti, Robert Dudley, Jack Rockwell, Walter Sande.
RATING: 4 out of 10 shadows on the wall
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