I don't know if I've ever seen a bad review of Al Adamson's Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Those that I have seen have usually been by people who watch--ugh--good movies and can't stand anything that suggests that there is a cinematic economic class below that to which they are accustomed; or by folks who have confused it with the 1970s Dracula vs. Frankenstein made by Jess Franco, which is a life-draining experience. Adamson's film is the jewel in a crown which also contains wonders like Brain of Blood--it makes him a fond memory in the mind of trashsters the world over, and indeed, Dracula vs. Frankenstein has a strange archetypical quality about it that really does make it feel like a foundational pillar for trash cinema. As Top Hat is to musical films, Dracula vs. Frankenstein is to movies made by wide-eyed movie nerds with loads of ambition but not a penny to their name. Indeed, estimates suggest it took Adamson five years to make this film due to continuous budgetary issues. Which makes the final flick fascinating indeed--why, it almost feels like a real movie!
Dr. Durea runs a museum of wonders in a tacky seaside carnival. With the assistance of Grazbo, his Little Person carny barker who eats money and Grodim, his brain-damaged bruiser of a lab partner, he ekes out a cheap living privately trying to bring the dead back to life until he runs into Count Dracula. Dracula reveals that Durea is a descendant of the Frankensteins, and that he can help him get revenge on all the scientists who have snubbed him--after all, he has the original Frankenstein's Monster, and he will help Durea bring it back to life. Durea can hardly refuse, but the awful activities of the two will hardly go unnoticed. Friends of some of Grodim's victims begin closing in on Durea, until inevitably all falls apart, and the Monster of Frankenstein turns on the King of Vampires...
With a premise like that--dishonored son of House Frankenstein wants revenge, leading to teamup with and battle against Dracula--does really help sell the idea that this movie belongs somehow, doesn't it? Isn't that the exact plot of one of the later Universal movies? I can never keep them straight, and that's because this film is better than all of them combined. To me, Dracula vs. Frankenstein ends up becoming a paradox: it embodies the exact model of a series of movies that I hate (and I will make it no secret on these pages that I'm not fond of actually watching the Universal monster movies), and yet is one of my favorite movies of all time. I can't ignore the fact that it is bettered by arriving about thirty years too late, and by being an outsider to the studio system, for all its faults and glories. By using the Universal formula in 1971 (or earlier, depending on when Adamson commenced filming), the movie has a touching self-awareness about it that never makes it drop down from celebration to parody. It is indeed a celebration; Adamson, I think, presents himself as a '30s and '40s horror nerd by sheer merit of the film's plot. But in case you don't believe me, then examine this movie's casting decisions. Dr. Durea (pronounced Durray, Duhr-ee-AY, Drury, or Dray variously throughout the film) is J. Carroll Naish, of such Golden Age creepers as Dr. Renault's Secret, The Monster Maker, and House of Frankenstein. Grazbo is Angelo Rossitto, from Freaks and The Corpse Vanishes. And as you may already know, Grodim (or Groton, or Grahtim, or Groban) is the last appearance of Lon Chaney Jr. We also get Forrest J Ackerman, comic book writer/editor/superfan, as a character named Dr. Beaumont (which may be a reference to Edmund Gwenn's character from the 1936 horror film The Walking Dead--IMDB flat out claims they're the same character).
That someone as cheap as Adamson ended up with a cast like this definitely contributes to the memorability of the film. I have my own thoughts on each of them. Naish generally brings in the best performance in the whole damn thing, even when he's clearly reading cue cards, in a way that strangely precedes Marlon Brando's shockingly good work for Island of Dr. Moreau. (I'll get to that film soon enough.) He gives Dr. Durea both serious gravity and a hammy accent that suggests he's having the time of his life with the part. Rossitto has some of the strangest dialogue in the movie and for that I enjoyed his appearance greatly. He also plays a more sadistic "Evil Little Person" stock type in Brain of Blood who also gets some truly excellent stuff to say. That he flat out fucking eats a dollar bill not five minutes into the movie shows that we're in good hands. As for poor Lon Chaney, then: I can't be the first person to comment on how it is sad that the very last thing we see of the star of The Wolf Man in movies, forever...is him falling off a roof like a bag of mashed potatoes. Prior to this all he gets to do is mug and strike an Of Mice and Men impression. After watching this movie for this review, I continue my winter study of Bela Lugosi's career by watching The Black Sleep, an aptly-titled snoozer which features the admittedly impressive teamup of Lugosi with Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Tor Johnson, and yes, Lon Chaney Jr. And sure enough: Chaney basically plays Grodim in that movie, too. It's really odd that in the early parts of Dracula vs. Frankenstein, which were presumably shot first, Chaney looks no older than he did when Black Sleep came out in 1956, fifteen years prior to this film--and in that movie, he looked roughly the same as he did in The Wolf Man, released fifteen years before that! For someone who hit the booze and cigarettes as hard as Chaney famously did, he was well-preserved, or at least, well-made-up. In the later scenes, Chaney looks a much older and harder man, but that works to his advantage as the film implies and later forgets that he is a werewolf. Constant sweating, grunting, and panting definitely benefits the strain of trying to hold back such a transformation. And finally there is Ackerman; almost a nonentity in the film, he's a fun addition simply because I can thus pretend that this movie takes place in the same universe as Philip Jose Farmer's duology Image of the Beast and Blown, where Uncle Forry is kidnapped by sex aliens.
Whew! I could go on about this movie, but suffice it to say that I can hardly describe the pseudo-grandeur the casting obtains without offering the counterweight of the movie's trashiness. It still looks like a Nathan Schiff movie, and definitely feels like one too (perhaps by way of Waldemar Daninsky). Adamson's scripts feel unfinished, or more properly, nonexistent. We get odd moments where a man says to his girlfriend: "I wish I could hold you in my arms right now." Except...he does so while holding her in his arms, right then. Add that to the fact that none of Dr. Durea's technobabble makes sense from a grammatical or scientific standpoint. There are also several key points which ground this movie firmly in the '70s: namely, there are bikers, and at one point, the bikers try to rape someone. There are also hippies, who get dialogue like, "His body was chopped up all into little pieces! Man, it's a real bummer!" Perhaps it's these elements which further spare the '40s callbacks--they add to the fact that what we're looking at is a living comic book, replete with monsters, mad scientists, and awful haircuts. The dips through trashy weirdness make the film immune to the torrents of boredom, overhype, and insipid Abbot-and-Costello non-jokes of the Universal films it's based on.
Welcome to the A-List in 2017. If this is what my year looks like...I'm glad to be back.
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