DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN

Jess Franco knows you know these monsters. He just wants to dream about them. So DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN wastes little time on introductions, explanations or even dialogue, and heads straight for the images that make monster movies irresistible. A castle looms through the fog. A coffin opens. Lightning flashes over a laboratory. Howard Vernon’s corpse-faced Dracula rises from the dead. Frankenstein’s Monster stalks the countryside. Beautiful women wander through the night. And just when the dream seems complete, the Wolf Man comes howling into it.

Dennis Price’s Dr. Frankenstein presides over this private Gothic universe, resurrecting and enslaving Dracula, commanding a homemade Monster of his own and sending everyone drifting through castles, crypts and desolate landscapes to Bruno Nicolai’s magnificent score. Franco lets plot dissolve into atmosphere and gives himself over to whatever image fascinates him next, his camera zooming compulsively toward faces, windows, animals and strange details in the landscape. Nothing needs to look realistic to feel uncanny here. A rubber bat is still a rubber bat, but when Franco sends it flapping across a real Gothic landscape, somehow the whole world gets stranger (and better).

This is Jess Franco in concentrated form: cheap and beautiful, crude and hypnotic, made in a hurry by a filmmaker who trusts his own obsessions more than the rules of conventional filmmaking. Part Universal monster rally, part comic book, part lost silent film in delirious color, DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN strips monster cinema down to the things Franco loves most and rearranges them according to the logic of a dream. Frankenstein looks handmade. The bat has a wire. The camera zooms like it’s possessed. The Wolf Man seems to have wandered in from another movie. And the whole thing is beautiful enough to bring tears to your eyes.

“The movie F.W. Murnau might have made if Universal had hired him to direct HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in color." - Tim Lucas