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Scientists die in several accidents and "fiendish" aliens take over their
bodies. The aliens "devise a diabolical, world threatening plot" to bring
back all sorts of monsters, including the Mummy, Dracula, the Werewolf and
Frankenstein. They are going to use them to "build a vicious army to conquer
the human race." Things go wrong when the monsters attack one another. "The
alien empire explodes in total devastation" ending the film. 1969, 77 minutes, VHS
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. What's
beautiful about all this is that this movie is the fourth in a series of nine
movies featuring a werewolf by the name of Waldemar Daninsky, a film character
almost as well known as German legends Perry Rhoden and Dr. Mabuse. A guy by
the name of Jacinto Molina plays Daninsky though you may well know him by his
more popular name - Paul Naschy. If that name isn't familiar to you, count
yourself lucky. Naschy is supposedly the king of Spanish monster movies or
something and I guess in this case he also the king of West German monster
movies. Naschy basically makes all these awful Spanish horror movies and
people heap praise on him for his low-rent efforts. I even saw on a web site
that there were photos were this dude got to meet the king and queen of Spain.
I guess when you have a country that still has royalty, you have to give them
something to do, but isn't this kind of like having Charles Band meet George
W.? The other thing you'll notice is that Naschy wrote (ahem) the script for
this fiasco. He's the only guy in the history of the world to write under his
real name so that no one will know it was him.
 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, that I got on the
clearance shelf at Wal-Mart is probably the worst print of a movie I've ever
seen, including bootlegs of various genre movies and the Diamond release of The
Last Man On Earth. The picture is like watching something recorded off a
television forty years ago. It's fuzzy, it's washed out, leeched of any color
other than sickly blues and greens and generally feels like watching a video
clip I took on my fifty dollar digital camera. 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 West German because I couldn't make heads or tales of that baby talk those
two places have for what passes as a language. 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 consist of two guys and a girl (I think).
There is the head guy who is called Olaf Warnoff (I say he's called that,
because that could never be anyone's real name, not even in West Germany).
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. He
takes orders from something or other at his secret base in a monastery
somewhere (probably either Spain or West Germany).  Olaf has a plan for world domination. Now, 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 there and move into our crib. This is, of course, the same plot
fromDestroy All Monsters where the aliens were going to use Godzilla and his rubber
suited pals to wreck everything. Well, it didn't work then, and I don't think
I'm talking out of school when I tell you that Olaf's plan is flimsier than the
excuse Bobby Brown floated for his most recent collapse and subsequent trip to
the emergency room (dude, rehab ain't so bad, you probably could even get a
room with your wife). 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 Monster knock-offs. 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 (so that's were that was!) and the Mummy gets rousted
from his tomb somewhere in Egypt. It was a pretty easy expedition, they just
had to knock down two walls in a tomb and there he was! What a lucky break! I
don't remember how they got the Monster or the Werewolf (probably just
contacted his 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 on workstudy or something. The
newspapers tell us that something is up, probably having to do with missing
women and this sparks the interest of the police and the Fox News Channel.
Somehow one of the cops gets the okay to follow his hunch, so he goes to library
to read about werewolves or monsters or something 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. Also, this cop 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
and watches a lot of Buffy in the garage apartment he rents from his parents,
the stare is particularly disconcerting. There is also the problem that Olaf
has with 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 (unless she was an alien). 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. Stellar, just stellar. I also think
they kidnapped his girlfriend somewhere in there as well. 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 (hehehe). 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. Olaf's
masters are understandably disappointed that this dim-witted plan worked about
as well as the faith-based initiative plan or drilling in the arctic plan or
the campaign
finance reform plan. So they make the woman Olaf was zapping for doing the
other
alien disappear (she was smiling so she might not have been killed or maybe it
was just gas). Then they blow up Olaf and the monastery. The explosions
resemble really smokey fireworks and the monastery looks like it was just
superimposed over top of a few flames to give that "on fire from alien
destruction" look. Nothing redeems this movie. 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?). The make-up on these monsters looks like one step
up from the face painting these old hags do at Wal-Mart when they're trying to
raise money to fight liver spots or something. The movie was so indecipherable
that you couldn't even muster any fun because you had no idea what you're
supposed to be watching. It was like a really bad dream! Images all fuzzy and
jumbled. People drifting in and out of the picture for no apparent reason. Me
screaming my fool head off, wishing it would end. That sort of thing. I can't
fathom any reason that anyone would want to see this movie. In the future,
Spanish royalty would do well to review some of these films before they go and
fete the filmmakers. Even Bill Clinton would have blanched at being associated
with Paul or Jacinto or whoever he is this week.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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