Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952) - film review

Baron Van Housen has grand ambitions.  He intends to build an army of killer robots and take over the world.  He is also quite mad and believes he is descended from a vampire, which is why he sleeps in a coffin and has been busy abducting pretty young women.  So far, the evil baron has built only one robot, which is being shipped over from Ireland.  To build more, he needs uranium, and this he hopes to acquire by stealing a chart which will show the location of a huge uranium mine.  The chart is in the possession of Julia Lauretti, the daughter of the mine’s owner, so Van Housen wastes no time in abducting her and bringing her to his secret hideout in England.  The baron takes delivery of a crate, but instead of his robot, he finds a collection of useless household objects.  Realising that his delivery has been mixed up with another, the baron traces the location of the robot and guides it, by remote control, to his headquarters.  The robot has in fact been delivered by mistake to a grocers’ shop owned by Old Mother Riley, who had been expecting to receive her share of an inheritance from a recently deceased relative.  The robot abducts the old woman and takes her to the baron’s house, where she receives a more than courteous welcome from the baron, since she is his favourite blood group.  Thinking that her host has succumbed to her subtle feminine charms, Mrs Riley agrees to stay at the baron’s house and perform some light cleaning duties, for which she is handsomely paid and generously fed on steak and liver.   When she realises what the baron is really up to, Old Mother Riley flies into a panic.  Teaming up with the housemaid Tilly and her constable boyfriend Freddie she sets out to thwart the baron’s dastardly scheme.  First, there is that homicidal robot to attend to...

The film that was intended to revive the flagging careers of two once legendary personalities proved in fact to be the final nail in the coffin for both of them.  A highly popular musical hall act who had started appearing in films as early as 1937, Arthur Lucan’s Old Mother Riley looked like a relic from a bygone era by 1950 and his/her last few films had been very ill-received.  Likewise, Bela Lugosi, the original screen Dracula, was now well past his prime and had difficulty finding work to stave off encroaching poverty.  The only thing that Lucan and Lugosi had in common (other than the fact that their names began with the same letter) was that they were faded stars who should have been put out to grass years ago,  

Lugosi’s story was particularly tragic.  In the summer of 1951, the 70 year-old actor had hoped to make a comeback in a stage production of Dracula in England.  Alas, the show failed to attract an audience and closed not long after it had opened.  Virtually penniless, Lugosi did not even have enough money to pay for his return trip to the United States and was stranded in England.  It was through the intervention of producer Richard Gordon that Lugosi found his way into the next (and final) Old Mother Riley film.  The stage was set for one of the most unlikely team-ups in cinema history - and one of the most disastrous.

Mother Riley Meets the Vampire marked a new low in Bela Lugosi’s career and was pretty well universally reviled.  Today, it is still widely considered one of the absolute low points of British comedy, with Lucan and Lugosi both looking worn and visibly struggling to make anything of the sub-amateurish material they are lumbered with.  It’s a credit to both actors, and their supporting cast (which includes a fair smattering of well-loved comic performers), that the film holds up as well as it does. 

The chaotic, thoroughly illogical mess that purports to be a script ought to have made the film unwatchable, indeed virtually unmakeable.  Fortunately, the gusto that everyone brings to the film salvages it and makes it passable entertainment.  Director John Gilling deserves some credit for his work, offering a few cheeky nods to the old Universal horror films which had originally made Lugosi a star.  From this far from auspicious beginning, Gilling would go on to direct some classic British horror films, including Hammer’s The Reptile (1966) and The Plague of the Zombies (1966).

Mother Riley Meets the Vampire is not quite so bad as its reputation would have you believe.  Indeed, if you approach it in the right frame of mind, it is actually quite fun.  Had a little more time and thought gone into the script, the Lugosi-Lucan pairing could have worked pretty well.  Lugosi still manages to send a shiver down the spine (thanks in part to some atmospheric lighting and camerawork) and Lucan’s destructive exploits can still extract a good laugh or two.  No one would ever mistake this for a comedy masterpiece but it has a certain charm, and on a sufficiently rainy day, it might be just what you need to lift your spirits.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?