Monster March II: The Batman vs. Dracula (2005)

Leave it to The Cinema King to find a way to work Batman into a month of monster movies. But for so very many reasons, how could we not review The Batman vs. Dracula? It’s got everything I love, with a perfect tie-in for October and an even more perfect excuse for me to check out one of the last corners of Gotham City I haven’t yet visited.

 

When The Penguin (Tom Kenny) and The Joker (Kevin Michael Richardson) break out of Arkham Asylum, their quest for loot leads The Penguin into a desolate Gotham crypt, where he accidentally reawakens the long-dead Count Dracula (Peter Stormare). But there’s only room for one bat-man in Gotham, as Bruce Wayne (Rino Romano) learns when he meets his latest supernatural foe.

 

It may surprise you to learn that I’ve never seen an episode of The Batman (2004-2008), the animated series to which The Batman vs. Dracula belongs. It was made just when I was phasing out of comics and ended just before I jumped back in, and I’ve never quite gotten used to the character designs, which look like inexpensive Saturday morning cartoons compared to Batman: The Animated Series (which, you’ll recall, is much more my jam). It ran for five years and sixty-five episodes, which is a significant investment of time for a project I’m not sure cuts the mustard for me.

 

After watching The Batman vs. Dracula, I’m still not sure if it’s “my” Gotham, per se, but I’m a little more intrigued after having dipped my toe. Still, The Batman vs. Dracula isn’t a new classic in the Gotham canon, a la Mask of the Phantasm or even Batman: Under the Red Hood. It’s perfectly serviceable but a little more shallow than some of my favorite Batman stories. It does exactly what it says on the tin – Batman does indeed fight Dracula – but it does so without the sophistication that might come of pitting two children of the night against each other. Indeed, the script feels very much like what might happen if you gave action figures of Batman and Dracula to a child: simple and straightforward, with a certain charm in its innocuous lack of depth.

 

Even before we meet Dracula, for example, when Bruce Wayne announces that he’s working on a device that will process solar energy, he may as well call it the deus ex machina, since we know it’s going to come up in the third act. Penguin, meanwhile, is relegated to the Renfield role without really doing much of anything else in the film; it’s perhaps just as well, since this Penguin seems to have the mentality of a twelve-year-old, with a scatological sense of humor to match. The Batman’s Joker is an interesting ragdoll of a man, with a husky voice and a colossal mop of green hair; while this isn’t the Joker I’d have written, it’s an intriguing and perfectly valid take on the villain, and Richardson captures that manic energy that makes the Clown Prince so compelling.

 

Then there’s our titular antagonist, and it’s hard to imagine better casting than Peter Stormare as Count Dracula. Stormare’s voice isn’t always recognizable – which is a shame, given how distinctive his line-readings can be (cf., The Big Lebowski, Seinfeld’s “The Frogger”) – but he’s clearly relishing the role, turning every line into a deep-throated snarl. The character is undercooked, only a surface-level interpretation of Stoker’s original, though perhaps anything would pale in comparison to Lugosi or Oldman. Stormare might have fared better in a longer theatrical release; as it is, direct-to-video animation doesn’t give this Dracula ample room to spread his wings. 

 

I’ve said almost nothing about Rino Romano’s Batman, but then again I grew up with Kevin Conroy, and there are very few who can hold a candle to his Dark Knight. Romano (no relation, apparently, to Andrea Romano, who assembled the voice cast that included Conroy) is evidently playing a younger Batman, and the script seems to lean into his inexperience. He assumes, for one, that Joker’s death in the opening sequence is permanent, but then again, the city later assumes Batman has gone rogue based on the word of only one less-than-credible witness. Perhaps this is overall a younger Gotham than I realized? Then again, Romano’s Batman simply isn’t as vocally distinctive as some of his Bat-counterparts, though I may feel differently after watching more of the cartoon.

 

All told, The Batman vs. Dracula is not a great Batman movie, nor is it a great Dracula movie. I can’t imagine it being of much interest to anyone beyond the most ardent aficionados of either franchise. It’s serviceable and inoffensive, and it is transparently a product of its time, a particular era of Saturday morning cartoon that is hard to describe if you didn’t live through it. Its soundtrack, full of wailing electric guitars, makes it feel as much like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as anything else, and at least for this reviewer that’s not a tremendous compliment. 

 

The Batman vs. Dracula is not rated. Directed by Michael Goguen. Written by Duane Capizzi. Starring Rino Romano, Peter Stormare, Tara Strong, Tom Kenny, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Alastair Duncan.

Monster March II: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Seven months ago, we began Monster March on a Mummy Monday with Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, but the first Universal Classic Monster movie was Tod Browning’s Dracula. And so it seems appropriate to return and begin again for Monster March II (cue the spooky music) with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, nominally more faithful an adaptation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gary Oldman as the Count in all his myriad forms. 

I say “nominally more faithful,” because from frame one, Coppola’s Dracula veers wildly from the source material by reimagining the legendary vampire as a Byronic antihero, cursed by his dark past and searching for the reincarnation of his lost love in the person of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder). Alas for the Count, Mina is already engaged to solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and so Dracula’s journey to England becomes less a real estate game and more an amorous quest that just so happens to involve a little bloodletting. 

 

Plainly put, Oldman acts rings around everyone else in the cast, even the delightfully hammy Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing. Oldman plays Dracula in no fewer than four different iterations, and he aces all of them. Bela Lugosi was iconic, but he seems one-note in comparison to Oldman’s more sophisticated portrayal of a vampire who is alternately tortured and torturer, a lusty bedfellow and a carnivorous lover. The image of Oldman never quite supplants Lugosi, however, proof positive of just how primordial the 1931 original remains, yet Oldman’s “Old Dracula” is a close second as he defies the laws of physics, suckles at shaving razors, and commands your attention in a riveting first act.

 

That opening third of the film, in which Count Dracula holds Harker hostage in his castle, is the best the film ever gets, a note-perfect introduction to an adaptation that never quite lives up to its own beginning. The opening is so compelling, in fact, that you’ll almost forget that Keanu Reeves is madly out of his depth as a young British solicitor, encumbered by the worst British accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (and perhaps even worse, given that his greeting of “Count Dracula” sounds more like “Count Chocula”). So good is Oldman, and so spooky is his castle, that Coppola might well have stopped the film there and turned in the best short film about Dracula.

 

After Dracula leaves Transylvania, however, the film slows to a crawl in its depiction of Dracula as romantic foil. Oldman is often too psychotic for the work of courtship, and it’s frequently unclear whether Mina is truly falling for Dracula or whether she’s laboring under his hypnosis, his absinthe, or both. Meanwhile, the film spends a great deal of time with Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), her three suitors (Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Billy Campbell), and Van Helsing, such that it feels like Coppola wasn’t quite sure which film he wanted to make – the star-crossed lovers or the paranormal medical mystery. Of the two, the latter is more compelling, but it never bears Coppola’s full attention.

 

What’s very clear, however, is that Coppola wanted to make one of the most erotic Draculas ever, filling the film with copious nudity and literalized subtext. In doing so, however, much of the tension of the film becomes inert. To borrow an unfortunately apt line from Alfred Hitchcock, the terror is not in the bang but in the anticipation; the sensuousness of Lugosi’s Dracula was all subterranean, where Oldman’s Dracula is, in the biblical sense of the word, openly ravishing. It’s an interesting forerunner to the Twilight films, of all things, with a doomed immortal languishing as an unabashed romantic, but its erotic dimension is so overblown, so baroque, that it becomes fairly ridiculous. 

 

Coppola’s direction, too, is sumptuous and ornate. Often Coppola is attempting to ape the filmic style of Old Hollywood, with dramatic fades and creative camera angles that would make Orson Welles blush with envy. It’s for those reasons, Coppola’s fiendish attention to classical styling, that the film’s exaggerated sexuality and violence end up distracting rather than amplifying. When Dracula licks the shaving razor that nicks Harker’s throat, it’s icky but spontaneous, yet when the vampiric Lucy vomits blood onto Van Helsing’s face, it’s nauseating for all the wrong reasons. 

 

By dubbing the film “Bram Stoker’s” Dracula, there’s an immediate claim to authenticity, an appeal to authority that suggests this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. Hokey reincarnation notwithstanding, Coppola may have succeeded in spite of himself. The film replicates the novel’s obsession with emerging technology, particularly its intersection with the epistolary mode of storytelling, and the script has a keen interest in Stoker’s most likely inspiration, Vlad the Impaler. And Keanu Reeves aside, this Dracula stars as good a cast as any (including the woefully underrated Tom Waits as the sniveling Renfield). Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula tries so hard to be grown up that it loses some of the power of suggestion. Lugosi could say more with a discreet bow than Oldman says by leaping into bed with his prey.

 

Put another way, Oldman is no Lugosi, but it’s worth it to watch him try. Gliding across the carpet and whirling a titanic sword, his Dracula is buckets of bloody fun.

 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rated R for “sexuality and horror violence.” Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Written by James V. Hart. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits.

Monster March: House of Dracula (1945)

As the third monster mash in an ostensible trilogy with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein, it’s hard for me to find a Marvel Cinematic Universe analogy to explain what House of Dracula contributes to the Universal Classic Monsters franchise. Instead, I find myself looking at House of Dracula like Return of the Jedi – a third installment that doesn’t really do anything wrong but neither does it quite excel. There are flashes of brilliance, but on the whole there’s nothing that we haven’t seen before.

Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) receives a strange visitor just before sunrise – Count Dracula (John Carradine), seeking a cure for his vampirism. While the doctor prepares a blood transfusion to cure the count, who is himself conspiring to consume the doctor’s assistant Milizia (Martha O’Driscoll), Dr. Edelmann takes on another patient – Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who believes the doctor can rid him of the curse of the werewolf. Meanwhile, in the caves beneath Dr. Edelmann’s castle lies the lifeless body of the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), and soon it will take all of Dr. Edelmann’s strength to keep these creatures from tearing down his home.

 

My chief complaint about House of Dracula carries over from House of Frankenstein – the monsters never truly meet. After seeing Chaney and Lugosi on screen together for much of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, it’s a shame that Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster are kept at arm’s length from each other. Talbot meets the other two, but it’s a far cry from the elegant way that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein brought the same three monsters together into the same plot. 

 

Instead, what we get in House of Dracula is something akin to the setup for a joke – a vampire, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein walk into a doctor’s office. The plot then becomes a revolving door; when Dracula leaves the office, Talbot enters, and their treatments continue in alternating sequence. I had hoped that there might be some larger string that ties all this together, some way that it all related to a larger plot by Count Dracula, but again the filmmakers seem set on putting the monsters on the same bill without ever featuring them on the same screen. 

 

It's another cash-grab, to be sure, but there seemed to be something more genuine about it in House of Frankenstein. Perhaps it was the legitimating presence of Boris Karloff, who felt like an appropriate thread to unify the whole piece. I hope it’s no slight to Onslow Stevens to say that he’s no Boris Karloff, but there is something a little disingenuous about bringing the whole cinematic universe back together through an actor making his franchise debut in the role. Stevens is perfectly serviceable, at times recalling particularly in his voice a B-movie Orson Welles, but for the most part we’re left wondering what’s so special about this doctor. For one, I’m still not sure what sort of reputation a doctor might have to suggest he could cure both vampirism and lycanthropy, but Karloff never invited that question. Karloff had a presence and a history, but Stevens only has half of one of those. One almost wishes, based on the way the film develops, Dr. Edelmann had instead been Dr. Jekyll – that’d resolve a few of the film’s problems straight away.

There’s the problem of overwhelming coincidence in the film – why is all of this happening now, in this doctor’s office – but there’s a larger problem of continuity, which the Universal Monsters movies have usually been so careful to avoid. For starters, if House of Frankenstein is any indication, at least two of these monsters should be dead. Now I’ll grant you, “dead” is a relative term for this crew, but House of Dracula very carefully and deliberately acknowledges the fate of the Frankenstein monster from House of Frankenstein while glossing over where that film left Dracula and the Wolf Man. The net effect, then, of disregarding continuity – especially at this late date in the franchise, when this is effectively the conclusion of the series before the spoof era begins – is the feeling that none of this matters much, that all of this happened before, and that it was better that time around. There’s something a little cynical about the “do it again but differently” approach in House of Dracula, something that makes me a little sad this is the way it all ended.

That’s not to say, though, that there isn’t good material here. John Carradine acquits himself better as Dracula this time around, particularly in a scene where he seduces a nurse playing “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano – it’s an archetypal image that I’m retroactively surprised didn’t originate with Lugosi. Dracula’s motivations might not make much sense in this film (he wants to be healed, until he doesn’t, and why he leaves his coffin in direct sunlight is anyone’s guess), but at least his presence dials into what the film needs, even if I’m still not convinced he’s the Count Dracula. Indeed, his presence looms over the whole film, as it does on the poster, such that you’re always waiting for Dracula to reenter the picture. That he doesn’t – and that the titular house isn’t even his – is to the film’s discredit.

 

In their respective roles, Chaney and Strange appear, after several movies of doing decent work, to be phoning it in. Chaney is trying, but there’s a weariness in his performance, an overly familiar attitude like slipping into a pair of shoes just before you know they’re about to give out. Just about the only new thing this film adds to Lawrence Talbot is a mustache, along with the unusual revelation that lycanthropy is just a case of pressure on the brain that can be alleviated by fractionally enlarging the skull. As hokey as that sounds, it’s the kind of preposterous balderdash that usually makes these films fun, but when the rest of the film doesn’t hold up, that kind of hokum gets the scrutiny it doesn’t deserve and can’t withstand. Strange, meanwhile, has two settings in this film – comatose and raging – and so there’s little to say beyond his inclusion feeling perfunctory. The film plainly doesn’t know what to do with the Monster; he was at least a vessel for Dr. Niemann’s revenge in House of Frankenstein, but here he’s little more than an action figure pulled out of storage.

 

So falls the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe – in a sense, the House of Dracula, the house that Dracula built back in 1931. We might see this as a case of “how the mighty have fallen,” but on another level we might see that House of Dracula is the moment when these creatures escape the bounds of their respective franchises and enter the level of myth. Unburdened by continuity, these monsters are now free to go wherever the next generation of creators will take them; recall that the Abbott and Costello films made no pretense about being true sequels. Rather, the monsters became mythic nightmares, haunting phantoms from a bygone era that operated not on the level of narrative continuity but as freeze-frame images – a swirling cape or a glinting fang, a lumbering giant, or a primal evolutionary throwback. Maybe that’s what the House of Dracula has been all along: not a literal castle in which the vampire resides, but a conceptual wheelhouse of metaphors and filmic illusions not unlike a waxwork house of horrors. We’ve been tenants in that house for the past month; now maybe it’s time to build our own additions and rewrite our own nightmares. 

House of Dracula is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Edward T. Lowe. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Martha O’Driscoll, John Carradine, Lionel Atwill, Onslow Stevens, Glenn Strange, and Jane Adams.  

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday – the final installment in Monster March – with She-Wolf of London (1945) starring June Lockhart.

Monster March: House of Frankenstein (1944)

If we continue the cinematic universe metaphor, House of Frankenstein is inarguably the Universal Monsters’ version of The Avengers. Although it’s a bit of false advertising – Dracula never actually meets Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolf Man – House of Frankenstein is nevertheless surprisingly fun. The second “monster mash” movie and a direct sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein also finds a way to weave Count Dracula and Boris Karloff back into the mix. Though the plot is rickety and ramshackle, it’s an achievement all the same, the monster movie equivalent of simple and pure popcorn fun. 

Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his hunchbacked assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish, doing his best Peter Lorre) escape from prison and vow to continue the experiments of the late Henry Frankenstein. Through a series of untoward events, Niemann comes into possession of the bones of Count Dracula (John Carradine), who he reanimates in his quest for revenge on his jailers. And on the road to Visaria, Niemann also finds the frozen bodies of Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) and Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who have their own demands on the not-so-good doctor.

 

House of Frankenstein is really two different movies, and both of them are pretty fun. For the first act of its 71 minutes, House gives us the Boris Karloff and Dracula reunion we never truly got to see, yet it’s not Karloff’s Monster meeting Lugosi’s Dracula. That, I suspect, would have been an absolute winner. Instead, Karloff is crowbarred into the film (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) as an unrelated mad scientist with Frankensteinian proclivities, yet there is a warming charm just to see Karloff included again. At 57, he hadn’t played the Monster in five years, so his very presence is almost a legitimating one, with Karloff as the elder statesman of the Universal Classic Monsters universe. Karloff has tons of fun as Dr. Niemann, and there’s a fiery impish glint in his eyes as he plots his next move.

 

As Dracula, however, John Carradine is a touch underwhelming. His performance is exceptionally hammy, with large bulging eyes and vamping – pun intended – posture. Where there was a subtle seductive charm about Lugosi’s Dracula, Carradine plays the magnetic allure like literal hypnosis, and his skeletal appearance is a far cry from Lugosi’s full-bodied menace. In short, it’s hard to accept that this is the Count Dracula, up to and including the continuity error that his bones are said to be resting in his coffin after we saw Countess Zaleska cremate his body in Dracula’s Daughter. (Perhaps, though, the filmmakers were already perfecting the art of the retcon – which, in the case of Dracula’s Daughter, suits me just fine.)

 

Continuing the grand recast is Glenn Strange as Frankenstein’s monster. There’s a moment in Ed Wood when Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau) opines, “You think it takes talent to play Frankenstein?! It’s all make-up and grunting – mmrrrghh!” It’s a reductive comparison, one which the real Lugosi may or may not have believed, especially given that Lugosi had himself played the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. We know, however, that Karloff did so much more with the character in his three films, proving that he had left unfillably big shoes (in more ways than one). On the spectrum, Strange acquits himself better than Lon Chaney Jr. did, and the editors of House don’t cut his bulky feet out from under him as they did Lugosi. However, the fact remains that Strange isn’t given much to do beyond looking imposing, but he gets a few shining moments when he accesses the Monster’s twin childlike senses of wonder and terror at a world he cannot comprehend.

 

Finally, Lon Chaney Jr. is back as Lawrence “Wolf Man” Talbot, and every time I say a negative thing about Chaney in another monster role, he reminds just how reliably good he is as Talbot. From the moment Talbot thaws out of the ice, Chaney elevates the movie, giving another deeply human embodiment to a character that could just as easily have been a lame caricature of an idea. Although his plotline is largely a retread of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – Talbot feels guilty about his lycanthropic curse and wants to die – Chaney brings his trademark pathos to the role, especially in scenes with the Roma girl Ilonka (played with winsome charm by Elena Verdugo), who is herself encumbered by the question of whether she should help relieve the sympathetic Talbot of his burden.

 

All of this comes to a crescendo in an increasingly dramatic climax that includes electrocution, horse-whipping, and defenestration before the most abrupt ending I can recall seeing since White Heat. It’s the sort of ending that desperately leaves you wanting more, and indeed I was left fairly frothing at the mouth aching for more from House of Frankenstein – more Karloff, more monsters, more/any Lugosi, more of the characters bumping into each other. But it wasn’t a question of starvation; my desire for more was akin to hitting the bottom of the popcorn bucket and wanting a refill. Sure, it’s a campy cash-grab, and certainly it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it tastes good and leaves you wanting more. Isn’t that the most we can ask of the Universal Classic Monsters?

 

House of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Curt Siodmak and Edward T. Lowe. Starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, J. Carrol Naish, Glenn Strange, and Elena Verdugo.

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) starring Jon Hall.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, it’s She-Wolf of London (1946), starring June Lockhart. For the continuing saga of Lawrence Talbot, though, join us next Tuesday for House of Dracula (1945).

Monster March: Son of Dracula (1943)

A few months before Monster March – perhaps even the dark and stormy night that this month-long marathon first came to mind – I found myself watching Svengoolie. If you’ve never seen Svengoolie, it’s a Chicago-based program that airs horror and science-fiction movies, often of (shall we say) the less critically favored variety, with jokes and zingers thrown in the commercial breaks. It’s all in good cornball fun, and a majority of the films probably benefit from some gentle ribbing. I had hoped that such would be the case for Son of Dracula, but the truth is that Svengoolie’s lame puns did their level best to save Son of Dracula – in isolation, it’s a dreadful bore, maybe the worst of the Universal Classic Monsters thus far.

When a train pulls into a New Orleans station, all anyone can talk about is who’s not aboard – Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr.), late of Hungary. Plantation heiress and voodoo dabbler Katherine Caldwell (Louise Allbritton) awaits the arrival of her foreign beau, spurning her American sweetheart Frank Stanley (Robert Paige). Once Alucard arrives, he and Katherine are swiftly married, but Frank protests; a scuffle breaks out, and Frank opens fire on Alucard, only for the bullets to pass through the count and strike Katherine. But is Katherine actually dying? Or is she already among the undead?

 

Let me set the stage a bit. I prefer to watch these movies late at night, with all the lights out – it really sets a spooky mood. I try to imagine what it must have been like to see these movies in their initial releases, as the horror genre and the very notion of a shared cinematic universe were evolving before the audience’s eyes. (And unlike our themed sequence of Monster March, I’ve been watching them in release order.) Usually these films have surprised me in one way or another, be it in establishing genre canon or in entertaining me more than I anticipated. With Son of Dracula, we have a first – it’s the first time I very nearly fell asleep during a Universal Monster movie. It was a genuine struggle to jolt myself out of a stupor even as the credits rolled. Son of Dracula is boring, boring, boring.

 

In terms of plot, Son of Dracula is largely confounding, and the parts that make sense don’t entertain in the slightest. For one, I’m still unsure if Count Alucard is the son of Dracula or if he’s Dracula himself. Unlike many Universal Monster movies, there’s no nods to continuity with previous films, nary a mention of Lugosi’s vampire or of Countess Zaleska, Dracula’s daughter. Just about the only thing we know is that Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards – and we know this because it’s explicitly explained on screen twice, almost as though writers Curtis Siodmak and Eric Taylor wanted us to know just how clever they are. It’s also unclear why Alucard has chosen Louisiana as his next stomping grounds; it’s implied that his Hungarian neighborhood has gone to pot, suggesting that this film might as well have been Dracula Moves to the Suburbs. Or it could be that he just happens to have found the dumbest woman in the world, who just happens to be set to inherit a plantation of her own. (Though why Dracula would trade a castle for a swampland plantation, I’ve no idea.) Then again, Katherine Caldwell is merely using Alucard to gain immortality for herself – which is in itself heroically unwise.

 

It would be unfair for me to single out Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as terrible, because in truth nearly every performance is lamentable. As the headliner, though, Chaney leaves much to be desired. He was so terrific as Lawrence “Wolf Man” Talbot, but every ounce of charisma in that performance is entirely absent from Count Alucard. If Chaney is attempting to do a Transylvanian accent, it isn’t working; instead, his dialogue comes off as stilted, stiff, and unnatural (and not in a good way, like Lugosi managed). It’s as though he’s trying to read cue cards phonetically for an audience that doesn’t quite understand English. Moreover, his presence lacks any semblance of menace; he is, in short, terrifically dull.

 

As I said, though, the rest of the cast fails to rise above Chaney’s soporific turn. Louise Allbritton is practically sleepwalking through the film as Katherine Caldwell; you’d think a southern belle with a voodoo fetish might be a cause for some intrigue, but her delivery is lackluster and her motivations are frankly ludicrous. As her sister, Evelyn Ankers is equally disappointing. She had such fine chemistry with Chaney in The Wolf Man, but here she’s largely forgettable; indeed, I’m struggling to remember why she’s in the plot at all. Meanwhile, Robert Paige plays Frank like a Dollar Tree Gomer Pyle, again without the kooky voice, and he becomes unhinged so quickly in the film that you can’t help but wonder if he’d been mad the whole time. The only performance that’s mildly engaging is J. Edward Bromberg as Professor Lazlo, though only because he’s playing a watered-down Van Helsing – and Bromberg is no Edward Van Sloan.

 

Very little about Son of Dracula rises above the level of a B-movie, which actually makes it a perfect fit for Svengoolie. The acting is hammy, the script is ramshackle, and the whole film is borderline unwatchable because of the nonstop pipe organ soundtrack that seems to be straight out of a Firesign Theater parody of itself. But you’ve got to hand it to Son of Dracula, if only for being the first film to depict Dracula/Alucard transforming into a bat on screen. The effects are more clever than a bad 1943 movie has any right to possess, and so I won’t spoil how the effect is done (though you’ll know right away when you see it done).

 

It was Thumper’s father who wisely instructed the little rabbit in Bambi that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” and so it may surprise you that I do have something nice to say about Son of Dracula: the ending is so well-constructed that I wish the rest of the film lived up to it. In the moment when Alucard discovers that Frank has set fire to his coffin, Chaney really comes alive, and his portrayal of the desperate and furious Count is handily the best acting in the film. The purely visual storytelling that follows – with no expository dialogue to hold the audience’s hand – ends up giving us easily the most downbeat ending of the Universal Monsters canon. Maybe there’s a bit of schadenfreude at play, because it’s darkly gratifying to see things end so horribly for every character in the film, but I also have to admit that director Robert Siodmak stages a truly compelling conclusion to a film that neither earns nor deserves it.

 

Son of Dracula is not rated. Directed by Robert Siodmak. Written by Curtis Siodmak and Eric Taylor. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Louise Allbritton, Robert Paige, Evelyn Ankers, Frank Craven, and J. Edward Bromberg. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with House of Frankenstein (1944) starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, and Glenn Strange.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, enter freely and of your own will into the House of Dracula (1945), starring John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Onslow Stevens, and Glenn Strange. If you need your vampire fix sooner, though, join us tomorrow for House of Frankenstein (1944).

Monster March: Dracula's Daughter (1936)

On the surface, there is much that should be intriguing about Dracula’s Daughter. It represents the last Universal Monsters film before a hiatus and renewal, it follows closely on the narrative heels of Dracula, and it expands the Dracula mythos by introducing a daughter to the world of the vampire’s curse. Even better, Edward Van Sloan is back as Van Helsing (here, inexplicably, Von Helsing). Yet for a good amount of Dracula’s Daughter’s brief runtime, I found myself bored amid what sounding like a promising premise.

Immediately after driving a stake through Count Dracula’s heart, Professor Von Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) is arrested for murder. Scotland Yard scoffs at his tale of vampires, so his only hope for exoneration lies in proving his sanity. He calls on his friend Jeffrey Garth, a psychiatrist, to join his legal team, but Dr. Garth is slowly falling under the quite-literal spell of Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden), the secret daughter of Count Dracula himself.

 

Typing that synopsis out, Dracula’s Daughter sounds like a real winner. I was perhaps unreasonably excited to see Edward Van Sloan return, as he was my second favorite from Dracula (behind Bela Lugosi, naturally). Thanks to Van Sloan, the first reel of Dracula’s Daughter is dynamite, though I concede that I was half-expecting a courtroom drama in which Von Helsing defends his innocence by proving the existence of vampires – though I grant you, that probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I was therefore disappointed that Von Helsing’s significance to the plot dwindles as the film goes on, to the point where his arrest for murder is never actually resolved (though we hope and presume that Scotland Yard believes him after settling the strange case of Countess Zaleska). Sadly, the film reduces Von Helsing to an exposition machine, down to repeating a great deal of dialogue from the 1931 film. (What’s more, Dracula’s Daughter actually reuses a shot from 1931, the operating room when Lucy Weston passes, here subbed for one of the Countess’s victims.)

 

Unfortunately, then, Von Helsing is not the focus or even a primary concern of Dracula’s Daughter. In a classic case of wasted potential, Von Helsing never even meets Countess Zaleska. Perhaps that’s for the best, though; where Edward Van Sloan had crackling chemistry opposite Bela Lugosi, it’s hard to imagine him getting blood from the stony performance of Gloria Holden, who is, I’m sorry to say, a bit of a bore. At first, she seems promising, scheming to free herself of her father’s dreadful curse, yet as the film elapses and the poor Countess surrenders to the selfsame curse, Holden’s performance dries up, and she spends most of the rest of the runtime – pardon the pun – vamping. There’s very provocative subtext (especially for 1936), if terrifically clichéd, about the female vampire being coded as lesbian, which makes her budding relationship with Dr. Garth a real mystery. Is she planning to bite him, or does she hope he’ll hypnotize her out of her vampirism? The film leans more toward the second possibility, though I’m not sure that’s how vampires or hypnosis work.

 

Surprisingly, some of the best parts of the film have nothing to do with Countess Zaleska or with vampires in general. Equally if not more compelling are the sequences between Dr. Garth and his secretary Janet, played by Marguerite Churchill. The pair have a wonderful sense of interplay, reminiscent a bit of a discount William Powell and Myrna Loy. (Indeed, I’m certain I would have loved Dracula’s Daughter if Powell and Loy had played in it.) These scenes are light and breezy, and Churchill plays what could have been a thankless role with spunk and good humor.

 

Dracula’s Daughter does represent something of the end of an era. It’s the last Universal Monsters film for three years – the cinematic universe would be, appropriately enough, resurrected in 1939 with Son of Frankenstein – and it’s the last to bear the influence of studio bigwig Carl Laemmle and his son, Carl Laemmle, Jr. It certainly feels of a piece with its predecessors, stodgy and stagey for better and for worse. Its pace is deliberate, often slow, and the monstrosity of the story is largely restricted to the imagination. In a sense, the key is again Edward Van Sloan; though Dracula’s Daughter takes place moments after Dracula, Van Sloan certainly appears to have aged at least five years, with his hairline receding and his presence more sedate than before. So too perhaps did the studio feel the monster movies had run their course; Universal certainly felt that way about ousting the Laemmles.

 

But if we’ve learned one thing over the course of this Monster March, it’s that you can’t keep a good creature down for long. In the case of the vampire, it would only take seven years for the Son of Dracula to rear his head; fortunately for you creatures of the night, it’ll be a scant seven days.

 

Dracula’s Daughter is not rated. Directed by Lambert Hillyer. Written by Garrett Fort and Oliver Jeffries. Starring Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Irving Pichel, and Edward Van Sloan. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, if Dracula’s Daughter can’t git-r-dun, this looks like a job for the Son of Dracula (1943), starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Assigning yourself the task of watching thirty monster movies in a row can feel like a chore, especially toward the end of the assignment, when you’ve seen all the good monster movies and far too many of the bad ones. Within minutes of starting Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, though, I was smiling and laughing. Not five minutes went by without a good chuckle, and by the end of it I found myself thinking, “Was that so hard?” How it took a comedy duo to finally get the monster mash right, I’ll never know – but I’m very glad they did.

Chick Young and Wilbur Grey (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello) are baggage handlers on a routine delivery to McDougal’s House of Horrors. Against the advice of a phone call from Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), Chick and Wilbur open the crates to discover the bodies of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange). Wilbur suspects the bodies are still living, much to Chick’s chagrin – and Talbot’s arrival from London only complicates matters when the bodies disappear and the full moon rises...

 

I don’t want to spoil things too much for the coming weeks, but “monster rally” movies like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula cheat a little bit by including all the monsters in the same movie without them ever sharing the screen together. Three/four years after those films, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein fixes that problem by embroiling the holy trinity of monsters in one unified plotline, and it’s frankly genius to pit Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster against the Wolf Man so that the monster mash becomes a proper monster smash by the third act. Funneled through the dynamic of Abbott-as-skeptic and Costello-as-rube, you have the perfect formula for hijinks. As an entry in the cinematic universe, it’s debatable whether this is a proper sequel or whether it’s merely a standalone riff. It’s not quite a horror film, but it is fairly spooky with an emphasis on zany, and that makes for a very fresh new take on characters that, quite frankly, had grown stale over twenty years.

 

Moving away from the horror and toward the comedic is a shift in tone that seems to anticipate the likes of Scooby-Doo, who debuted in 1969. Indeed, I’d venture to say that Scooby-Doo wouldn’t exist without this film’s blend of mystery, monsters, and slapstick comedy. The sequence in which all five main characters chase after each other through a hallway of doors, for instance, is exactly the kind of gag that the Scooby-Doo crew would make their signature gag years later, at times even with versions of the Universal Classic Monsters. (Of course, Abbott and Costello are lightyears funnier than anything the makers of Scooby-Doo could dream up; I defy you to find eight minutes of Scooby-Doo anywhere near “Who’s On First,” but that’s beside the point.) In fact, moving into the realm of parody/spoof is in a sense the natural evolution for the Universal Monsters; the two House movies, for example, have their tongues planted firmly in their metaphorical cheeks, so it’s a short putt to outright punchlines. 

 

As for the monsters, I can’t overstate how good it is to see Bela Lugosi back as Count Dracula; if it did nothing else, the film could ride that nostalgia wave for eighty minutes and still be a home run. We’ll see a number of vampires during Monster March – Carlos Villarías, Gloria Holden, John Carradine, even Lon Chaney Jr. himself – but Lugosi remains the gold standard. Even with seventeen years away from the role (and to be fair his age does show), Lugosi slinks right back into the character, and he is magnetic. Indeed, perhaps the film should have been called Abbott and Costello Meet Dracula because he’s the undeniable monster star of the film. As before, his hypnotic stare extends beyond the proscenium of the silver screen; with a waggle of his fingers and a glint in his eyes, he captivates the audience as well as the soft-minded Wilbur. (As for the fact that this Dracula casts a reflection in a mirror – well, let’s just pretend we didn’t see that, hmm?)

 

After not having much to do in his preceding outings, Glenn Strange gives what is probably his best performance as Frankenstein’s monster, though the make-up looks to be a closer cousin of Herman Munster (debut, 1964) than before. It’s also a relief to hear the Monster speak again, having fallen silent once more after Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. As iconic as Karloff remains, I couldn’t help feeling that a great deal of the modern idea of the Monster is encapsulated in Strange’s performance here – the stilted voice, the thudding walk, the arms outstretched (inherited from Lugosi). With this film becoming a legend almost overnight, one wonders how much this film cemented the common conception of the Monster, taking what all the other performers had done before and rolling it into one iconic interpretation.

 

And in his swan song as the Wolf Man – attaining the unusual status of being the only performer to play this particular monster – Lon Chaney Jr. remains compelling. His make-up seems bushier than before, and his proclivities are a bit bloodthirstier, but this is still Lawrence Talbot, the same good performance Chaney had given in the past. He’s in the odd place of being the “straight man” of the monsters, fighting against the other two, but that puts him on a path where Abbott and Costello are his best allies, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t get more frustrated with that turn of fate. Instead, he remains surprisingly patient, confident that these two buffoons are his best hope at saving the world from Count Dracula.

 

What makes Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein a hit is that it’s both a monster movie with comedy and a comedy film with monsters. Both tones are balanced with dexterity, and the comedy is especially funny after more than seventy years. Costello’s underhanded self-deprecation, Abbott’s quick wordplay, even the physical comedy that’s gratifyingly never at the expense of the monsters doing their spooky stuff – this film has it all. I’ve silently been keeping a note all throughout Monster March about which movies I never need to watch again, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein ain’t one of them. It’s so good, I might work it into an annual rotation for Halloween – that is, if I can’t get Monster March to stick. 

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Charles T. Barton. Written by John Grant, Robert Lees, and Frederic I. Rinaldo. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange, and Lenore Aubert. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week, we’ll see what we can see when Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Arthur Franz.

Monster March: Drácula (1931)

Today’s monster movie, to borrow a phrase from Rod Serling, is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of review. As prolific as international films have become and as sophisticated as modern dubbing might be, we may find the genesis of Drácula somewhat mystifying. Shot in Spanish, using the same screenplay as Tod Browning’s Dracula, Drácula was filmed strictly at night while Browning’s crew used the same sets during the daytime. We don’t quite have anything like this for the other installments of Monster March, so Drácula is a bit exceptional. It’s also very nearly a better film than Browning’s Dracula, aside from one essential omission – it doesn’t have Lugosi. 

Carlos Villarías stars as El Conde Drácula, a more genial and more sensuous vampire than Lugosi. After arranging a real estate deal with the mad solicitor Renfield (Pablo Alvarez Rubio), Drácula travels from Transylvania to England, where he preys upon socialite Eva Seward (Lupita Tovar), her fiancé Juan Harker (Barry Norton), and her physician father (José Soriano Viosca), who has already enlisted the help of Professor Van Helsing (Eduardo Arozamena) in understanding the unscientific maladies plaguing London since the Count’s arrival.

 

Drácula uses the same script as Browning’s film, but it’s more than twenty minutes longer because its script wasn’t “censored” in the way that Browning’s was. We spend more time with Eva and Juan, establishing their relationship and their reactions to the grim circumstances befalling them; consequently, they’re much more interesting here than Mina and John were in Dracula. There’s a much longer sequence where Eva begs Juan to leave her to her fate, and the moment when she very nearly bites him is much more intense and erotically charged.

 

Indeed, at the risk of indulging a caricature, emotions are running much hotter overall in Drácula. Eva is lustier than Mina, El Conde is more overtly passionate than Lugosi’s slow-burn charisma, and we actually see the physical evidence of Drácula’s bite – his kiss, if you will – multiple times. In fact, Drácula is entirely less coy about the erotic dimension of El Conde’s kiss, perhaps because Villarías is ten years younger than Lugosi. Surprisingly, though, Drácula is missing the brief sequence where Dracula menaces a flower girl outside a London theater, almost as though this Drácula is much too sophisticated to indulge in a quickie with an anonymous victim. Yet there’s an additional death in Drácula; where Dracula left the fate of Lucy Weston largely unresolved, Drácula makes sure to let us know that the vampiric Lucía has been staked by Juan and Van Helsing.

 

In a bit of performance review, Lupita Tovar is very nearly better than Helen Chandler as Eva/Mina, though in part because she’s given so much more to do (or at least, so much more of her work made it past the editor’s desk). Eduardo Arozamena plays Van Helsing as more avuncular than Edward Van Sloan, who you’ll recall made that movie for me. Yet in a real surprise for me, Pablo Alvarez Rubio steals the show as Renfield, whose descent into madness is more drastic than Dwight Frye’s. Renfield comes off much more sympathetic in Drácula, as we see him wrestle with his vampiric possession amid genuine concern for Eva’s wellbeing (only glimpsed in Frye’s performance). Yet when he’s mad, he’s mad; the sequence aboard the boat is all the more chilling in Drácula because it’s scored by Renfield’s unbreaking and genuinely alarming shrieking cackle.

 

With so much about Drácula emerging as more engaging than its better-known English version, it’s almost a shame to say that Carlos Villarías just doesn’t live up to Bela Lugosi. In fact, like poor George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Villarías ends up being the one actor you can’t help but wish had been cast with the original. To be fair, Villarías is perfectly serviceable as Conde Drácula, his bug eyes and vamping posture suitable for any creature of the night. Instead of the pinprick spotlights that gave Lugosi his haunting stare, Villarías is granted extreme close-ups on his eyes, the sort of editing trick that Dziga Vertov must have loved. But having just seen Lugosi do the same performance, and make such weirdness out of it, permits this vampire to fall a bit flat.

 

Director George Melford (who, incidentally, didn’t speak a word of Spanish) apparently had access to Tod Browning’s dailies, and it does show. Melford’s direction is more cinematic than Browning’s, and he has better command of the film’s soundscape, most notably in the creaking doors and coffins that are silent in Browning’s version. Melford also interposes a musical refrain every time Drácula rises, a Wagnerian game with the audience to let us know that this motif means danger.

 

Drácula is not without its supporters, and there are many who feel it’s infinitely superior to the Tod Browning version. I’ll say it’s certainly more watchable and by far more cinematic, but without Lugosi it’s not the hit it could have been. If anyone with technical savvy can “deepfake” Bela Lugosi into Drácula, then I’d say we’re really onto something. Without him, though, it’s an engaging enough sidebar for Monster March to indulge.

 

Drácula is not rated. Directed by George Melford. Written by Baltasar Fernández Cué and Garrett Fort. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker, and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. Starring Carlos Villarías, Lupita Tovar, Barry Norton, Pablo Álvarez Rubio, Eduardo Arozamena, and José Soriano Viosca. 

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with Werewolf of London (1935) starring Henry Hull and Warner Oland.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, it’s all in the family with Dracula’s Daughter (1936) starring Gloria Holden. For bonus Dracula shenanigans, Silly Sunday has Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: Dracula (1931)

Viewing Dracula is a bit like remembering a dream you might have had. I can’t recall if this was my first time sitting down to watch the film front to back, but there were moments that stood out vividly in my memory. Other parts, though, seemed strange and foreign, diversions from the Bram Stoker novel I know so well. It is, then, like the old line from Inception, a half-remembered dream – and the half you remember is very, very good.

Bela Lugosi stars as Count Dracula, the role that made him infamous and the role that he made famous. After arranging a real estate deal with the mad solicitor Renfield (Dwight Frye), Dracula travels from Transylvania to England, where he preys upon socialite Mina Seward (Helen Chandler), her fiancé John Harker (David Manners), and her physician father (Herbert Bunston), who has already enlisted the help of Professor Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) in understanding the unscientific maladies plaguing London since the Count’s arrival.

 

It is not quite the first vampire film – that honor most likely belongs to 1922’s Nosferatu, itself the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit brought by the Stoker estate – but Dracula is certainly the archetype. I don’t think I’m overstating things to say that just about every visual impression you have of the Dracula myth starts with this Tod Browning adaptation. He’s cribbing liberally from the Stoker novel (by way of the Deane/Balderston stage adaptation, about which more in a bit), but the definitive visual stamp of Dracula gives one the acute sense of déjà vu. If you haven’t seen the Browning film, shame – but also, in a sense you always already have, because it’s become a kind of cultural shared memory. This deep primordial memory is never clearer than in the film’s riveting first act, set in Transylvania; though the film places Renfield in Castle Dracula (rather than the novel depicting Jonathan Harker’s descent therein into madness), everything else about this opening sequence is uncannily familiar – the demented carriage ride, the castle itself, Dracula’s three brides and his own hypnotic stare.

 

Indeed, if the film can be said to succeed at all, it’s because of the inspired (or perhaps cursed) casting of Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire. Lugosi would only play Dracula once more, in 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but it was a role that haunted him and typecast him. But typecasting only really happens when one is exceptionally good at a particular role, and Lugosi is Dracula. This performance works on every level – the look, the posture, the voice, the mannerisms. Even the line “I never drink... wine” (which originates here) has become a central precept in the Dracula gospel, right down to Lugosi’s distinctive intonation. When he’s on screen, the movie is solidly arresting, almost as though Lugosi is himself hypnotizing the audience.

 

When Lugosi’s not on screen, though, unfortunately Dracula becomes a bit boring. None of the other performers is as charismatic as Lugosi, so when the script turns its attention to Dr. Seward and the London social scene, the film slows into a snooze. Similarly, where Browning’s direction is electric and moody during the Dracula scenes, the sequences without the vampire are stagy and dull, doubtless a consequence of the film’s shared DNA with the stage adaptation. The momentum of the film winds down considerably, as though the very projection reels grind to a crawl. Just about the only saving grace in this middle act is Edward Van Sloan’s turn as Van Helsing, which he plays a bit like a cross between the screen presences of Anthony Hopkins and Max Von Sydow – fiery and wise. The immediate adversarial nature established between Dracula and Van Helsing is never more riveting than when Van Helsing quickly realizes that Dracula casts no reflection, followed swiftly by Van Helsing’s modest ability to resist the Count’s hypnosis.

 

However, the push and pull between Lugosi and Van Sloan never quite takes over the third act of the film the way one might hope. Instead, the film becomes an unquestionable product of its time when it focuses on John Harker’s quest to free his beloved Mina from Dracula’s thrall. Here, Helen Chandler is suitably convincing as the possessed Mina, though David Manners is forgettably milquetoast, even for a pre-Hays Code film. Yet despite the film predating the Hays Code by more than three years, its climax is straight out of the playbook, with its focus on ensuring a happy ending for a soon-to-be-married couple, while the nefarious foreigner is dispensed with off-screen. Browning (or perhaps cinematographer Karl Freund, who is largely assumed to have taken control of the picture) stages the final shot as an ascent from Dracula’s dungeon – unfortunately, he leaves the two most interesting characters in the catacombs.

 

For what is essentially the first monster movie, Dracula is a real trailblazer, and it’s not hard to draw a straight line to nearly any other creature feature. Browning was working without a map here, but he ended up playing cartographer to an entire genre. And at the edge of the map he drew, we can faintly read the inscription, “Here be monsters...” Whether any of them could live up to Lugosi’s mantle is, perhaps, a question for the rest of Monster March.

 

Dracula is not rated. Directed by Tod Browning and Karl Freund. Written by Garrett Fort. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker, and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. Starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye, and Edward Van Sloan.

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday, with The Wolf Man (1941) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week for Transylvania Tuesday, let’s do it again but in Spanish this time, with Drácula (1931) starring Carlos Villarías and Lupita Tovar.