Review of Son of Dracula (1943) by Byron B — 05 Nov 2010

Deals with some interesting metaphysical concepts. Count Alucard (Ha!) travels to the American South. Lon Chaney Jr. has some strong moments, but generally doesn't fit the role. This time another morbid woman, Katherine, wishes for the undead eternal life that being a vampire can offer. Instead of the Count seducing the woman with his eyes and diving right in to bite her neck like a beast, he tries to blend in as a gentleman. Dracula is becoming more and more gentlemanly rather than monstrous. The woman leads the Count to believe she loves him, while leaving her fiancee, Frank, puzzled, and they visit a justice of the peace before planning a consummation that would fulfill her desire to be undead. Frank confronts them and in trying to kill his rival Alucard, nee Dracula, he fears he has killed Katherine, but he is confused. He seeks the help of another doctor and turns himself in to the police. The doctors in these horror movies always have the ridiculous combination of being a trusted scientific mind in the community and believing in the supernatural. This Dr. Brewster seeks the knowledge of Hungarian professor Lazlo who knows the legends. The two of them lead the charge to stop Dracula's plot. They don't realize the extent to which Katherine is responsible for the plot and not Dracula. She loves Frank and wishes to get rid of anyone in their way.

It is difficult to judge one movie in this Dracula Legacy Collection as being better or worse than another. Each has some stronger and weaker elements, but I think most balance out, so I had to rate them the same. The writing and acting was pretty strong. This addition to the Universal Dracula series took itself seriously enough that it did not fall into cheesiness. Visual effects showed improvement too. The rubber bat was more controlled and there was at least a primitive attempt at showing the transformation from bat to man. Dracula finds a better hiding place for his coffin in the swamp, rather than being an easy target in the basement of whatever large house he is living in. As usual the rules are always being changed in these old horror films, so now we have it clearly stated that vampires can be killed by a stake through the heart or by burning their casket with their native soil before they can return to it at daybreak. Also vampires can transform into a cloud of smoke now besides a bat, werewolf (though this is never explored to keep it separate from Universal's other franchise), or rat (this being only used up to this point by Nosferatu). The death of a vampire is finally shown more explicitly too. But it doesn't matter because these monsters always live again to appear in another flick.