Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971)

‘You see! You must open your eyes to see things!’

Dr Frankenstein runs a ‘House of Horrors’ at the local fairground, whilst carrying on monster experiments assisted by the psychopathic Groton. A blonde nightclub singer searches for her missing sister along the beachfront and Count Dracula turns up for some reason or other.

This film is often cited as a bad movie classic and director Al Adamson’s ‘masterpiece’. Actually, it started life as a sequel to his biker flick ‘Satan’s Sadists’ (1969) and footage was shot of the motorcycle gang and their leader, the returning Russ Tamblyn (continuing his spectacular career nosedive). The gang are being investigated by Regina Carrol, who is looking for her sister. The detective assigned to the case is ‘Jock’ from ‘Dallas’ but she’s not impressed with him at all.

Sometime later, Adamson decided to ‘re-imagine’ the project as a horror movie (i.e. he got some more money) and recruited two-time Oscar nominee J Carrol Naish to star along with genre icon Lon Chaney Jr. Dwarf actor Angelo Rossitto provided support and Ken Strickfaden brought the original lab equipment he’d designed and built for ‘Frankenstein’ (1931). Rossitto had worked with Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre and Laurel & Hardy back in the day but had to make ends meet by running a Hollywood street corner newsstand for many years. At 7’ 4” John Bloom was the tallest man ever to fill the Monster’s concrete boots while Dracula was played with a mouthful of plastic teeth by the intriguingly named Zandor Vorkov. He was actually a stockbroker named Roger.

This was the last time out of the gate for both Naish and Chaney. Both were in very poor health at the time. Naish acted from his wheelchair and had to read the lines from cue cards. One of his eyes was glass so only the other one moves. You can also clearly hear the clicking of his false teeth when he delivers his lines. Chaney didn’t get any dialogue at all but that was because he could no longer speak, rendered mute by the throat cancer that would kill him a short time later. His character has a thing about puppies, a curious echo of Lennie’s love of rabbits in Chaney’s breakthrough role ‘Of Mice and Men’ (1939). It would be nice to think that was the actor’s own idea.

‘Could I interest you in a hedge fund? It’s perfectly safe…’

Proceedings are understandably chaotic and owe a lot to Universal monster mash ‘House of Frankenstein’ (1944), in which both Chaney and Naish had starred. The monster’s face looks like a pizza someone has stepped in and Rodge fires animated lightning bolts from his Dracula ring, when we’d pretty much forgotten he was in the picture at all. Old Pizzaface isn’t stopped by police bullets, especially when you only hear them on the soundtrack and the cast aren’t bothering to fire their prop guns. The climatic wrestling match between the Monster and King Vamp is lame at best, with Old Pizzaface ending up like John Cleese’s Black Knight in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ (1975). Naish obviously hadn’t used enough superglue or was pretty rubbish with a needle and thread.

Adamson was able to get actress Regina Carrol to return to film the new ‘horror’ scenes and that does help makes sense of the storyline a little. Mind you, they were married at the time so he probably had to do all the washing up for a month and promise to put the toilet seat back down when he’d finished.

This is a seriously bad film but, given the circumstances, that outcome was pretty much inevitable and it’s certainly not in the same wretched league as Adamson’s own ‘Horror of the Blood Monsters’ (1970). Splicing together mismatched footage shot at different times has produced far more incoherent films than this one. Take almost anything made by Jerry Warren for example, or David L Hewitt’s epic ‘The Lucifer Complex’ (1978), or even ‘They Saved Hitler’s Brain’ (1964) for that matter!

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