Director: Lambert Hillyer
Cast: Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Edward van Sloan
Have I Seen it Before: I acquired a big box-set containing as many films featuring the classic Universal Monsters several years ago. It took me a number of years to get through all of the films featured—indeed, every sub-set focussed on a particular monster had a copy of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)—but as this came right on the heels of Dracula (1931), I watched it very early in the process.
Did I Like It: It is a slight movie, and yet more cinematically inventive than the original. That’s not hard, as the original Dracula—despite it’s seminal image of Lugosi as the Count—has all of the inventive camera work of a C-SPAN marathon.
Lugosi is long gone by this point—indeed, he only ever resumed the role in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)—and the real heat in the monster movie was on Frankenstein, as the superlative Bride of Frankenstein (1935) had thoroughly dominated. We’re stuck with some follow-up to the original story, and that legacy is largely put on the shoulders of Professor van Helsing (Sloan).
And from there, the story unfolds largely the same. There’s a square jawed hero, a damsel in distress, and more than enough flimsy looking bats on wires. Holden provides a suitably spooky image as the new vampire, but as memory fades after just a couple of years between screenings, even that can’t lift the film up like the original.
One can’t imagine why they didn’t resurrect the Count for this story. Maybe there was a problem with Lugosi, but even still, so many people have played the role, and it wasn’t like Universal was squeamish about recasting Frankenstein’s Monster after Karloff swore the part off. They could have still used the daughter. Use both of them!