Classic Horrors Club

As much as I struggled to complete watching Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969) and as many problems as I found with it while doing so, it’s still a masterpiece compared to Al Adamson’s (popular-with-everyone-but-me) Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971.) Repeated attempts to appreciate that one have failed, but with only one viewing, I kind of enjoyed this one.

Blood of Dracula’s Castle shares an inexplicable plot point with another B-movie classic, Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966), in that you have to accept that titular European  “monsters” would take up residence in the American desert. Here, it’s Arizona… so much sunshine, yet so little threat to these vampires.

Then again, the Townsends, Charles (Alexander D’Arcy) and Countess (Paula Raymond) aren’t your typical vampires. Sure, they sleep by day in their coffins, but they bare no fangs and drink their blood out of barware. It’s best to think of them as a modern form of vampire and not the classic Dracula and one of his brides.

It’s also best to think of “Mango the Hunchback” (Ray Young) as simply, Mango. I could discern no hunch on his back. This is a movie where telling us makes it so. Likewise, we never see “Johnny Davenport the Werewolf Serial Killer” turn into a werewolf. He’s more of a Luna, the goddess of the moon, type of monster.

John Carradine is just plain old “George the Butler.” One of the decent accomplishments of Blood of Dracula’s Castle is that he either did his own stunts, or you can’t tell that it’s not him swinging a mace at Glen Cannon (Gene Otis Shane.) When Glen ducks, George spins and topples over the edge of a stone staircase in the dungeon.

Carradine was 60 years old when this was shot in 1966 and, at the same age, I feel like I could swing a mace, spin, and topple over the edge of a staircase, so maybe this is no accomplishment after all. Or, the work of a stunt double is just hidden by the slightly out-of-focus print I watched. It looked like either Super 8 blown up to project in a theater, or a bad transfer of a 1970s TV movie on YouTube.

Glen, a photographer, inherits the “castle” from whence Dracula’s blood is supposed to come, when his Uncle Thomas dies. (“Nothing tragic; he was 108.”) He gets the crazy idea that he can use a castle for a studio, and drags his lovely fiancee, Liz Arden (Jennifer Bishop), to check it out. They have every intention of evicting its current inhabitants, the Townsends.

However, to combat the “inconvenience” of having to move, the Townsends instead detain Glen and Liz just as the full moon arrives and they have their monthly ritual in which one of the women chained in the basement (the source of their blood cocktails) is sacrificed and burned at the stake.

Blood of Dracula’s Castle is as silly as they come. However, other than excruciatingly long “chase” scenes through the hills from time to time, I didn’t dislike it. It’s like a backyard version of one of the Universal House of… films. Dracula! Bride of Dracula! Hunchback! Werewolf! done on a shoestring budget.