House of Dracula (1945) - film review

One evening, the eminent surgeon Dr Edelmann receives an unexpected visit from Count Dracula who is desperately seeking a cure for his vampirism.  Whilst Edelmann begins treating Dracula through a course of blood transfusions, he receives another visitor, Larry Talbot, a man who has an unfortunate habit of turning into a wolf whenever there is a full moon.  Fearing that there is no hope for him, Talbot attempts to kill himself by jumping into the sea.  Edelmann goes after him and finds him unharmed in the caves beneath his old house, along with the inert Frankenstein monster.  Edelmann believes he has the solution to Talbot’s condition: brain surgery using a special fungus that he has been cultivating to heal his hunchbacked assistant.  When Dracula proves resistant to Edelmann’s treatment and begins menacing his nurse, the good doctor has no choice but to destroy him.  Unfortunately, he has become infected with Dracula’s blood and periodically he undergoes a change into a homicidal madman.   Although Edelmann succeeds in curing Talbot, his own condition worsens and, in his deranged state, he decides to revive the Frankenstein monster...

The penultimate entry in Universal’s compendium of gothic horror flicks repeats the winning formula of the previous film in the series, House of Frankenstein (1944), reuniting its three most popular monsters – Dracula, the Frankenstein monster and the Wolfman – for another fun-filled horror fest.   The three monsters would endure one more reunion for Universal, in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), but that be would mainly for laughs, not chills.

House of Dracula is often written off as one of the weakest of the Universal horror films, although its production standards are on a par with those of the preceding films, the performances are by no means bad and Erle C. Kenton’s direction is effective at building the suspense and delivering the thrills at just the right moments.  There are also some stylish expressionistic touches – some atmospheric photography that is highly redolent of German expressionism and a creepy dream sequence which includes excerpts from some of Universal’s previous Frankenstein films.

Where the film falls down is its plot, which stretches credibility so far that the spectator really has no option but to disengage his logic circuits if he wants to avoid a life-threatening cerebral overload.  It is quite something when the plot contrivances become even more shocking than the monsters portrayed in the film.  For example: Edelmann follows the wolfman into a cave and within a minute they find Frankenstein’s monster lying on the floor.  "Oh look, it’s Frankenstein’s monster", says the Wolfman casually, as if it were the kind of thing that happened to him every day.  "I know," thinks Edelmann, "I’ll take it back to my laboratory and wire him up to the mains, so that, in the highly improbable event that I become a bit mad and want to destroy the world, I can reanimate him."   Of course, Edelmann then goes mad and does precisely that.  There’s a poetry somewhere in this sheer undiluted lunacy.

Silly as the film undoubtedly is, and this is a film that elevates silliness to a fine art, House of Dracula still manages to be eminently watchable and it is easily one of the more entertaining of Universal’s classic horror films.    As if the combined monstrosity of Dracula, Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s monster isn’t enough, we are also offered a hunchbacked nurse and a variant on the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story.  As the mad scientist (who is clearly related to Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse), Onslow Stevens steals the show, delivering far more thrills than the anaemic Dracula and his jaded monstrous entourage.  This is a film which ought to be unremittingly awful but it isn’t.  It may not scale the heights of Universal’s other great monster movies of the 1930s and ’40s, but it is still an enjoyable, well-crafted horror romp, marred only by its unimaginably daft plot.  After this, it would be a decade before Dracula and company returned to chill the blood of cinema audiences – courtesy of a little known British company named Hammer Films...

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