Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) Deluxe Collector's Edition (2001 Troma DVD) in Very Fine condition. This rare and out of print DVD is from my personal collection from a smoke free environment. The DVD case has a broken spindle so I have the DVD inside in a slim line jewel case inside the case.
"This is one Grade A, cheesy stinkfest of a film, as anyone should reasonable expect from Al Adamson, King of Gouda, as it were. I find myself curiously unable to summarize the 'plot', which very well could stem from a veritable lack of coherent story, but that's half the fun of these Grade Z classics, anyway. I do want to spend a moment here to about the qualities that make this a true prize for fans of the truly horrible monster movie genre, of which I count myself at the forefront.
Adamson didn't have much money when he made this film (obviously) so his strategy was simple: get one star and the remainder of the cast could be relatives, friends, street people, etc. In this case, poor Lon Chaney gets the nod to play the extremely cliche mute (and dumb) lab assistant to J. Carrol Naish, a wheelchair bound, garden variety mad scientist, who severs people's heads off and tried to bring them back to life. He is befriended by the worst Dracula EVER (Zandor Vorkhov), who I think looks like Frank Zappa on uppers. Dracula just happens to have a business proposition for Naish involving bringing Frankenstein's Monster back from the dead because he just happens to have part of the original monster lying around his house. Of course they do this with wires and electricity, and what emerges is a monster truly worthy of this Dracula, in other words, laughable. He appears to be the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man with extremely bad acne, whose only real power is walking like Jimmy Cagney.
Into the mix come a few meddling kids, one of whom is on a search for her little sister (actually a prisoner of Naish) and a guy she brings along, who has the ugliest pants I have ever seen in my entire life. After showing us a gratuitous Nazi motorcycle gang rape scene thwarted by Lon's ax, and a wretched 'walk on the beach' scene with an unbelievably bad piece of music, none of which has any particular relevance to the rest of the film, we get back to the central story (as it were) by having the good guys (big sister and ugly pants guy) go to the freak show where Naish works. Eventually they confront Naish, who reveals the sister, and says a bunch of stuff about her making the exactly right kind of plasma (I'm actually a bit fuzzy on the science angle of all this, sorry.) A midget carnival barker enters the fray and drops Lon Chaney's puppy into the basement, which irritates Lon, so he falls onto an ax face first in one of the lamest 'special effects' I have ever seen.
This is quickly followed by Naish getting a gun, but wheeling inadvertently into his own guillotine, where, of course, he gets his head chopped off. The movie then has people running around all over the place (kind of reminiscent of the laboratory scene in "The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman") and eventually Dracula ties the big sister to an oil refinery; ugly pants guy frees her by scaring off Frankenstein's monster with a sparkler; Dracula melts the ugly pants guy with a very bad special effect beam from his ring of evil; blonde girl, the monster and Dracula all run around in the woods a while, end up at an entirely new location where the monster and Dracula fight over the girl (at least that's what I believe was happening), the girl shrieks a lot, and Dracula runs through the woods some more to a church (?), where he collapses and is burned up by the sun. OK, any questions?
Yes, it is THAT kind of movie. I am sure that there are some subtle nuances that I didn't capture in the above summary, but you get the general idea. The movie was rated "GP", which was the direst precursor to "PG" (really), and doesn't really have what I would consider realistic gore, more like gruesome tastelessness. There is a very small bit of nudity (breast) on a 'patient' in the crazy doctor's lab, but that's really the only thing objectionable. Well, except for the plot, direction, production values, casting, and continuity, anyway.
If you like cheesy bad movies, it is hard to top Adamson, and this is one of his best (worst). I gave it four stars simply because of length. It is fairly long for this type of film (I didn't time it, but trust me, it is long, or at least feels that way) and drags in a few places, notably in the running around in the woods scenes. Also contributing to the loss of one star was the dreadful music video style beach walk montage sequence, which showed mostly waves and seagulls for about three years, I mean minutes, while excremental music was being played in the background.
If you like bad, and I mean really bad, movies, this is not to be missed." - Robert I. Hedges
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