Dracula is doing Dracula stuff so Dr. Seward stakes him in his vampire basement lair, turning the Count into a dead bat. Soon after, Frankenstein moves in, finds the bat, and revives Dracula with blood. Frankenstein seems to hope to somehow parlay his new vampire toys into his ultimate goal, a perfect being, which probably thrills the Monster to no end. After the Monster tries to kill Seward, the injured doctor is nursed back to health by gypsies. Complicating matters is the fact that Seward and Frankenstein are both idiots and didn’t check any of the other coffins in the basement so there is a rogue vampire lady running around.
The gypsy fortuneteller tells Seward that he will be the one to conquer the bad guys right after the wolfman comes to help. The wolfman is actually of little help, but Frankenstein decides fuck this noise and stakes Dracula again (this time reducing him to a skeleton, which just shows you can’t trust Seward with anything), kills the Monster with electricity (is this even possible?), and then vanishes from the movie so Seward can come in with his torchbearing gypsies to find that all the work has been done the end.
The Wolfman sees the synopsis above and wonders “Who writes this crap?”
It would be tempting to call Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein a fever dream of a movie, but in fact it feels like a movie of a fever dream experienced by a sick child after watching a Halloween marathon of classic Universal horror movies. It has that nonsensical flow – especially the inclusion of a werewolf just because. Howard Vernon’s Dracula always has the same expression, which is as unnerving as it is absurd. Count Dracula as Halloween mask.
I have spent my adult life simply waving off Jess Franco movies, and welp, here I am, trying to deal with his work in a more accepting manner. There is no denying that he knows where to put his camera and how to use stuff like camera dollies and the like. It has been put forward that the first act of the movie is largely dialogue-free and could have easily been a tribute to silent horror movies. Then Franco gets his hand on the zoom lens and all my good intentions get enraged all over again.
I’m going to try Franco again in a few letters, and maybe I’ll finally see what other critics I respect seem to see in the guy. This time, I do have to say I was never tempted to just shut it off, which is progress of a sort.
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