D: Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972)

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.

October 9, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

C: Count Dracula’s Great Love (1973)

Dracula (Paul Naschy) moves into a deserted castle and immediately starts making vampires. He is aided in this by by a carriage-load of young hotties suddenly stranded by an accident and the death of their driver. Vampire stuff ensues.

Count Dracula’s Great Love is a quite unusual vampire story; although the setup above points toward a typical Hammer-style gothic tale, it quickly unwinds into novel territory. Great Love‘s central conceit is that Dracula’s immortality is not based on eternal life, but instead on a cycle of reincarnation, with the Count living and dying over and over again until a virgin falls in love with him for himself.

Also, she gotta take a knife to the neck.

One of our hotties falls for him but, alas, she is no virgin. There is another, however, who fits the bill, and that is where things start getting really weird. There is a subplot about reviving Dracula’s daughter, even to the point of kidnapping a local girl and sacrificing her to revive said daughter, but his Great Love doesn’t like that, so he abandons it. Sorry, local virgin!

Eventually, Dracula has killed all the other vampires in his employ and the virgin still won’t give in, so Dracula stakes himself to start the cycle all over again and the virgin is sorry, boo hoo hoo.

“Your coffins are right this way. ROOMS! Rooms. I meant rooms.”

Snarky recaps aside, this is held up as a high point for Naschy as an actor and Spanish horror in particular. Those are both true, and it has to be admitted, this most unusual twist on the mythology was refreshing, and certainly worthwhile.

October 8, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

B: Blair Witch (2016)

Which reminds me, one of these days I’ve got to watch Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows before the DVD rots in its case.

So it’s 15 years since those three intrepid student filmmakers went into the woods and disappeared, but now a memory card has been found in those woods and the hectic surviving footage seems to take place in that strange deserted house in the end of that movie. Heather’s brother James (James Allen McCune) thinks he caught a glimpse of Heather in that footage, so off we go to the woods again, with James’ friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), who is making a documentary about James’ search, and two cannon fodder friends (Corbin Reid and Brandon Scott)

Perhaps you thought “Now wait a minute” about James’ hope of finding Heather after fifteen years. Hold that thought, you’re going to be needing it again.

I hope you got it laminated so it doesn’t wear out.

They meet with the couple who found the memory card (Wes Robinson and Valerie Curry), who insist on going with them. Say goodbye, everybody!

“Goodbye, everybody!”

James’ main objective is to find this mysterious house, which has eluded search parties and other investigators. It is fifteen years later, so we have new tech, like trail cameras and a drone to help.

None of these are going to help (as you surmised).

Now, I like found footage movies – when they work, I find them very involving. Director Adam Wingard works the new tech angle for all its worth, and even adds a bit to the lore by having the Witch fuck around with time as well as space. This also seems to be the year for filmmakers punching my claustrophobia in the head and taking its lunch money, the bastards. But still, Blair Witch is going to make you use that phrase “Now wait a minute” so many times that honestly, that should have been the subtitle.

Though I admit Blair Witch: Now Wait a Minute would have been a hard sell.

October 7, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

A: All Eyes (2022)

Allen (Jasper Hammer) has a top rated radio show/podcast called “UN/Sane” which seems to be mainly exploiting people with paranormal experiences, sort of a combination of Art Bell and Alex Jones. A returning video caller who in a previous episode claimed to be followed by “shadow people” now claims to have caught one. When he points his phone at a locked door, we hear the voice of a woman pleading to be let out. At his point, the caller starts brandishing a gun, and if you’ve seen The Fisher King, you know where this goes.

The ensuing tragedy loses Allen his show and his job, but his producer, Kim (Danielle Evon Ploeger) retrieves his box of story leads (labeled “Box of Freaks”) and visits him with it. She thinks she can get Allen back on the air, but she needs a redemption story. In the Box of Freaks is a letter that stands out: a farmer in Oklahoma claims to have a monster living in the woods behind his house, and if Allen does a show about the monster, well, there’s an unsigned check for $25,000.

So Allen finds himself in the almost literal middle of nowhere in the company of Bob (Ben Hall), a farmer who despises him and his show, but Bob’s deceased wife loved it, so he seemed the logical choice to tell the story of Bob and his monster, which he claims has already eaten all the livestock on the farm. His one remaining goal is to kill the monster (which he calls “Eye” because it is covered in eyes), which is why Allen also finds himself on a farm in the middle of nowhere which is festooned with booby traps. “Just try to walk where I walk!”

Bob’s drawing of the monster.

If you’re familiar at all with movies, you know that Allen and Bob will eventually reach some level of accord, especially when it turns out that somebody else is hunting Eye in the woods, and they’re calling it “Number 878“.

It seems that this movie is going to be all talk and no action, until there is a hell of a tone shift in the third act, and the less you know about this, the better. But All Eyes proves itself to be a rather unique horror movie in that it demonstrates it has a heart, covered with a bunch of monster stuff, and that gives it a lot more staying power. Recommended.

 

October 6, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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