Dracula (Zandor Vorkov, who has an echoy voice and a disintegrating ring) digs up the Frankenstein monster and gets the good doctor (J. Carroll Naish), who runs an amusement park (complete with a house of horrors), to revive it. Lon Chaney, Jr. is his mute assistant who decapitates girls with an axe and Angelo (The Corpse Vanishes) Rossitto is the midget ticket taker who says, “In order to see, you must open your eyes!”
Director Al Adamson’s wife, Regina Carrol plays a Vegas showgirl who teams up with philosophical hippie Anthony Eisley to find her missing sister. When they stumble into his lab, Frankenstein tries to turn them into his next experiment. When they escape, Rossitto falls on an axe, Chaney gets shot, and Naish gets inadvertently gets decapitated! Dracula then kidnaps Carrol and disintegrates Eisley with his ring. He wants to turn her into his vampire bride, but the monster has the hots for her too. The monsters fight (of course it had to be over a woman, right?) in Drac’s backyard and The Count pulls the monster apart limb from limb, but the sun comes out and he crumbles to dust!
This is probably Adamson’s best-known movie and it’s pretty
entertaining too. Whenever the monsters
are onscreen it’s a lot of fun. However,
the hippies, stock footage of protests (“What are we protesting today?”), and
slang date it unmercifully. Co-starring
Russ (West Side Story) Tamblyn as a biker rapist, future director Greydon Clark
as a hippie and Famous Monsters creator Forrest J. Ackerman as a victim (he was
also a consultant). There’s also a cool
credit sequence and good music by Bill Lava, but the familiar Creature from the
Black Lagoon music is used for the final reel.
Not to be confused with the Paul Naschy movie Dracula vs. Frankenstein
from the previous year.
NEW REVIEW: DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN (1971) ***
After sitting through thirteen Al Adamson movies this month, I think it’s safe to say Dracula vs. Frankenstein is his masterpiece. It has all the hallmarks of his best (and worst) stuff. There are parallel narratives that feel like they came out of two entirely different movies, confusing editing, shoddy make-up, and a cast full of his usual stock players, including his wife, Regina Carrol. Sure, it’s just as patched together as most of his work, but there are some downright memorably WTF passages here that will make any lover of B cinema stand up and take notice.
The first ten minutes alone rank as some sort of minor classic. After an awesome title sequence, Dracula (Zandor Vorkov) digs up the Frankenstein monster (John Bloom), then a carnival barker (Angelo Rossitto) leads a couple of hippies through a haunted house owned by Dr. Frankenstein (J. Carroll Naish), before Frankenstein’s mute assistant (Lon Chaney, Jr.) goes on an axe murdering spree, chopping off a woman’s head. The showstopper though is Regina Carrol’s Vegas song and dance number about packing too many things in her suitcases, which enrages her wimpy back-up dancers who can’t carry it all. Incredible.
Things start to get erratic once Russ Tamblyn enters the picture. In fact, all the biker shit in the movie feels out of place with the monster plotline. However, this does lead up to a great scene where he doses Carrol with acid, and she has a big freak-out sequence in which she imagines herself on a giant spider web. Even Salvador Dali himself would get a kick out of this scene.
I think I should also mention that Kenneth Strickfaden loaned the production his lab equipment from the original 1931 Frankenstein. Everyone made a big deal when Mel Brooks used it in Young Frankenstein, but Al Adamson did it three years before him. Adamson also used some equipment from Horror of the Blood Monsters for variety’s sake, I suppose.
AKA: Revenge of
Dracula. AKA: Blood of Frankenstein. AKA: They’re
Coming to Get You. AKA: Teenage Dracula.
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