MonsterHunter

When you see that this movie is a co-production between Spain and West Germany, it begins to dawn on you that what you are about to see isn’t so much a movie about Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster whupping up on each other, but an experience in awful editing, bad dubbing, non-existent acting, and a storyline that vaguely calls to mind the all-star Godzilla opus, Destroy All Monsters. Of course, this movie isn’t going to be executed anywhere near as skillfully as the surprisingly lackluster Destroy All Monsters. The Spanish and German peoples aren’t very well known for making monster tag-team efforts. The scariest part of all this though is that Dracula vs. Frankenstein is the fourth in a series of nine movies starring Paul Naschy as a werewolf named Waldemar Daninsky, a film character almost as well known as German legends Perry Rhoden and Dr. Mabuse.

Things get off to a miserable start when I notice that my $3.00 video release by those dirtbags at something called 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 (a) the voices were muffled, (b) the accents were atrocious, (c) the editing was so bad that some of the dialogue was simply cut off in midstream and (d) I had fallen asleep after about thirty minutes of this and kept thinking what I was hearing was my mom telling me I would be late for school if I didn’t get up.

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.

These aliens leader is named Olaf Warnoff. He’s a tall, old dude that looks like the kind of guy you would hire if John Carradine had already appeared in his 28 films for that particular year. 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, being either a West German alien or a Spanish alien doesn’t have access to Toho’s line of colorful characters so he has to make do with these generic brand Universal Studios Monsters. You’ve got Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Werewolf. (I guess the Wolf Man is trademarked or something.)

The aliens get Dracula’s skeleton from a carnival and the Mummy gets rousted from his tomb somewhere in Egypt. It was a pretty easy expedition to Egypt since they just had to knock down two walls in a tomb. I don’t remember how they got the Monster. They probably just contacted the Werewolf’s agent to see if he was interested in appearing in another awful movie.

The aliens also kidnap a couple of women and Olaf makes some comments about an army of beautiful women (now that sounds like a plan with promise!) and that no one could resist such an army and he would use mind control, but then he sort of just uses these two as assistants in his secret monastery lab like they were just a couple of college girls doing some workstudy.

The missing women sparks the interest of the police and one of the cops gets the okay to follow his hunch, so he goes to library to read about werewolves and questions a woman that survived a werewolf attack. She doesn’t seem to know anything, but she says her father had some dealings with werewolves in the past so they fly out to meet him and I don’t have any idea what he had to do with it, but he comes back with the cop and his daughter.

This cop also manages to hang out at the same inn where Olaf heads when it’s beer-thirty at the secret lab! He also thinks he sees Dracula there. This cop finds out Olaf owns the monastery so he goes there. 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.

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. Somehow they recapture him and Olaf hooks up whoever it was that didn’t keep an eye on him to the electro-shock machine. 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 basically a pasty-faced loser that probably hoards Victoria’s Secrets catalogs in the garage apartment he rents from his parents, the stare is particularly disconcerting.

Olaf also has a problem because his two alien buddies having an affair with one another. I think this resulted in Olaf having the Monster choke the guy out while Olaf hooked the woman up to the 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. Woof!

Our cop hero shows up to confront Olaf and gets himself captured. Olaf informs the cop that he will die a horrible death. He has the cop chained up in a dungeon full of hungry bats. When they wake up, they will fly at him and peck his eyes out! Then we have scenes where the cop tries to duck out of the way of the bats. Outside in West Germany or Spain or wherever this takes place, an angry mob shows up at police HQ 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 end of this 77 minute abomination can’t come too soon. The Werewolf goes on a rampage and manages to set the Mummy on fire and dump him on a giant hamster wheel or something. The cop (I think it was him, could’ve been the Werewolf - the picture was really bad) somehow escapes his bat guano fate and wrestles around with that pansy Dracula until he drives a stake through his guts. I don’t even remember how the Frankenstein Monster bought it or what finally happened to the Werewolf, I was just happy that it was almost over.

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? I mean, you’ve got Dracula who can come out only at night, the Werewolf who should only be able to come out during a full moon, the Monster who is a big puss when it comes to fire and then there’s the Mummy. The three-hundred and seventy-five pound chick that lives two trailers down from me could outrun the Mummy! 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? We already beat them once! (Well, if you watch all the Universal movies, we beat them about fifty times, but who’s counting?)

© 2008 MonsterHunter