Todd’s Movie Blog

Since I highlighted a vampire movie last week, this time I thought I would go with a Frankenstein film.  Staring Sara Bay as the title character and acting legend Joseph Cotton as Baron Frankenstein, the film has Tania Frankenstein returning home from college and informing her father she knows all about his experiments and wants to help.  Later, after hiring a couple of unsavory characters for some middle of the night grave robbing to get material, they revive a new monster who immediately kills his creator and then wanders off to cause mayhem in the nearby village, killing the two grave robbers for a start.

At this point Tania comes up with a brilliant plan, knowing the late middle aged assistant who helped her father has had an unrequited love for her over the years, she easily convinces him to allow her to put his brain into the hunky body of their dim witted handyman, giving him the advantage of strength and smarts to take on the monster, in exchange for Tania’s favors after the monster has been taken care of.  All goes sort of as planned, the monster is defeated in a slobber knocker that destroys the lab and Tania gets it on with her creation, but the villagers have had enough of this craziness and set the castle on fire.  The film ends with the Tania being strangled to death by her own creation in the middle of their passionate love making while the castle burns down around them.

Despite it’s insane plot, the film holds together rather well as a horror flick with some effectively done scare moments, the ending fight is pretty exciting, Sara Bay is hot, Joseph Cotton makes the most of his limited screen time, and oh did I mention that Sara Bay is hoooooot.

Usually around this time of year I make a list of alternative films to watch for Halloween, but I thought that this year I would be different and instead of suggesting non-horror films with a suspenseful or scary undertone and just go with actual horror films that might not be familiar to the casual horror fan, as opposed to the horror fanatic who will probably know every film I’m going to highlight.  Also as a change up, I’m only going to feature one film each week.

This week I have chosen Count Dracula’s Great Love.  Starring the Spanish Lon Chaney, Jr., Paul Naschy, who apparently decided to take a break from playing his usual werewolf role and try out being the king of vampires.  The plot  involves a group of travelers, four women and one man, who have their coach break down in the middle of nowhere and end up accepting the hospitality of a mild mannered writer who is living in an abandoned sanitarium to do research on it’s history.  Over the course of several days, the writer beds down with the women, who disappear soon after , along with the other guy, from being attacked by a vampire prowling the grounds, and when the writer finds a virgin who has fallen in love with him, he reveals he is really Count Dracula, who needs a virgin to give herself willingly to him in order to bring his daughter back to undead life and rule the world.  Sadly, just when he is on the brink of success, Dracula finds he has fallen in love with the woman and can’t bring himself to convert her into a vampire.  Full of despair, the king of the undead ensures his great love’s safety by staking himself, ending his own undead life.

As with most of Naschy’s films it has a real Hammer look about it and is full of creepy atmosphere, but is also full of more nudity and gore than you usually get in an early seventies film (a regular complaint against Naschy’s films at the time), plus some just plain out and out S & M laced weirdness.  Not for everyone’s taste, but I have an affection for Naschy’s work for their homage to classic monsters from Universal and Hammer.