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57%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #5,387
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Dracula arrives at Dr. Edelman's office asking for a cure to his vampirism. However, this is a ruse by Dracula to get near Dr. Edelman's beautiful female assistant and turn her into a vampire. Meanwhile, a sincere Lawrence Talbot, AKA the Wolfman, arrives seeking a cure for his lycanthropy. When Dr. Edelman's first attempt fails, Talbot tries to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, but instead finds a network of underground caves where Frankensteins Monster is in stasis. Chaos ensues as the three monsters fight for dominance of each other.
--IMDb
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Review by Crispy
Added: April 21, 2016
As terrible as House of Frankenstein was, there's no denying it brought in the dollar signs and Universal was quick to repeat. It still banks heavily on novelty, but there's no denying that House of Dracula is leagues better than its predecessor.
Several years after Dr. Niemann resurrected the Frankenstein monster in Visaria in a quest for revenge, Dr. Edelmann has set up shop with his two nurses, Melizia and the hunchbacked Nina, and began cultivating a mold that could revolutionize the world of medicine. His reputation is so well known that Dracula himself decides to pay the doctor a visit to have his vampirism cured. While initially skeptical, blood samples don't lie, and Edelmann puts his mold's spores to the test. Soon after, he finds another supernatural visitor at his door: the wolfman Lawrence Talbot. When he learns that it will take a few months to cure him of his affliction, he's overwhelmed by despair and tries to kill himself by jumping off a nearby cliff. That night Dr. Edelmann recovers the man from a cave at the bottom of the cliff, discovering the body of Frankenstein's monster in the process. Meanwhile, despite his attempts to become human, old habits die hard and Dracula has begun seducing Melizia in an attempt to feed. Edelmann quickly makes moves to protect his nurse, but can he stand up to such absolute evil?
It should be fairly obvious that by this point Universal didn't give a shit anymore. At the end of House of Frankenstein, both Dracula and Talbot were dead and yet they show up at Edelmann's door without the slightest explanation. While the Frankenstein monster's appearance is related to its demise in the last movie, it once again pops up in the final five minutes for no other reason than so they could include it on the marketing. Hell, even Nina was including on the posters as "Hunchback" on the monster list, so they weren't even trying to hide that "quantity over quality" was the name of the game. With that said, there was actually a decent foundation to this movie. Unlike last year's travesty, which just gave us twenty minutes of each monster in rotation, the concept of a doctor working to cure the monsters of their calamities was actually an interesting idea. We even got some scientific explanations for both vampirism and lycanthropy. Had this remained the focus of the movie, we might have had something worthwhile.
Unfortunately, they just couldn't go the "less is more" route. About two thirds of the way through they made the decision to swap Dracula out with a new monster. I just don't get it. Like I said in my last review, John Carradine isn't quite as menacing as you want your main villain to be but he was a lot better here than last time, and it's still no reason to drag your whole story through the mud. In a perfect world, they would have axed the Frankenstein's monster and ended this with a confrontation between the wolfman and Dracula, with Edelmann working all the while to restore the humanity of these two monsters.
Underneath it all, there was a really good idea here. Too bad it all went off the rails at the end. While the Universal monsters would later appear in various Abbott and Costello flicks, this was the close to their classic horror line. At a whopping sixty-seven minutes long, it's certainly worth checking out as long as you don't set your sights too high. 5/10.
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