Things get off to a miserable start for Dracula vs. Frankenstein (AKA Assignment Terror) when I notice that my $3.00 VHS release by United American Video is probably the worst print of a movie I’ve ever seen. The picture is like watching something recorded off a television forty years ago. It’s fuzzy, it’s washed out, and leeched of any color other than sickly blues and greens. The sound may actually be worse. Most of the time I had no idea what was happening because the voices were muffled, the accents were atrocious, the editing was so bad that some of the dialogue was simply cut off in midstream and maybe most of all because the film is the third in a series of twelve movies starring Paul Naschy as a werewolf named Waldemar Daninsky!
Another problem was that sometimes we’d see newspaper headlines which probably moved whatever plot there was along. The catch was that these were either in Spanish or German!
Keeping all that in mind, I was able to decipher the following about this movie. In a very abrupt first scene (so abrupt, I needed to review the write-up on the back of the box to see what had happened) some smarty-pants scientists have been killed and their bodies taken over by aliens.
Their leader is an named old tall dude named Olaf Warnoff. Olaf has a plan for world domination. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. He is going to resurrect the world’s greatest monsters and use them to build an army to destroy our civilization, presumably so his lazy alien race can roll in and move into our crib.
We’ve previously seen this in Destroy All Monsters where the aliens were going to use Godzilla and his rubber suited pals to wreck everything. Olaf doesn’t have access to Toho’s line of colorful characters so he has to make do with the generic versions of the Universal Studios Monsters. You’ve got Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Werewolf. (“Wolf Man” must be trademarked.)
The aliens also kidnap a couple of women and Olaf makes some comments about an army of beautiful women and that no one could resist such an army and he would use mind control. Instead of a D-Cup Delta Force though, he sort of just uses these two as assistants in his secret monastery lab like they were a couple of college girls doing some workstudy.
The missing women spark the interest of the police and one of the cops gets the okay to follow his hunch, so he goes to the library to read about werewolves and questions a woman that survived a werewolf attack. This cop also manages to hang out at the same inn where Olaf heads when it’s beer-thirty at the secret lab!
This cop finds out Olaf owns the monastery. I still don’t have a clue as to why anyone connected the old monastery and Olaf to this alien-backed monster invasion, but the cop goes there anyway. It will surprise no one that the cop is captured.
Back at the secret lab, Olaf and his plan are running into some problems. First of all, the werewolf managed to escape and terrorize and maybe kill some people a couple of nights back.
Then there’s the problem with Dracula sneaking into one of the women’s bedrooms and trying to seduce her with his powerful stare. Since this Dracula is a pasty-faced loser, the stare is particularly disconcerting.
Olaf also has a problem because his two alien buddies are having an affair with one another. This resulted in Olaf having the Monster choke the guy out while Olaf hooked the woman up to an electro-shock gizmo. He gives her one of those “this isn’t to punish you, it’s for your own good” speeches. Then he zaps her. Thanks Dad.
There is also an affair going on between the Werewolf and one of the women prisoners. This is pretty ridiculous as they try to portray the whole “star-crossed lover” thing with these two. Their relationship basically consists of some clinching, longing looks, and him humping her leg.
Meanwhile an angry mob shows up at police headquarters and demands that an angry mob be formed to storm the monastery. Once again I don’t know how they figured out what was going on there, but angry mobs are usually right so the police agree, but on the condition that the angry mob obey police orders during the storming.
The ignominious ending to the plan (and the film) doesn’t need any recounting beyond the fact that it featured among other things, the werewolf setting the Mummy on fire. Can you imagine the smell?
An awful experience the viewer will try to forget immediately. The story was beyond stupid. How would having a few movie monsters running around help you take over the world? You’ve got a slow as molasses Mummy, Dracula who can come out only at night, the Werewolf who should only be able to come out during a full moon, and the Monster who is a big pussy when it comes to fire! It’s not exactly the Fantastic Four! Didn’t it tip Olaf off that all these monsters were so pathetic in their evil-doing ways that they had to be brought out of retirement?
© 2010 MonsterHunter
