Review of House of Dracula (1945) by Jason H — 25 Mar 2009

Oh my...this movie is kind of a mess, but it's also a bit of a fun mess. It's far too short (at just over an hour) to be offensively bad. It is advertised as some kind of monster showcase (like it's direct prequel, House of Frankenstein) which will feature all the big name monsters.

While we get a decent Carradine Dracula for about half the film, we only get 2 scenes of the Wolf Man and about 2 minutes of the Frankenstein Monster. You have your obligatory mad scientist, hunched lab assistan (a bit of a twist in that one though), a crazy townsperson, a torch weilding mob, and of course a cop played by Lionel Atwill.

The basically tried to stuff 14 years of Universal Horror cliches into one hour. It only uses continuity with previous films when convienent for the plot and it's attempt to explain Dracula and the Wolf Man scientifically is kinda dumb.

However it's not as bad as it could have been and it's nice to see the Universal Monsters get a kinda sorta sendoff...until they meet Abbott and Costello that is...thats a whole other story though.