The movie begins with Dracula chasing a hefty, middle-aged man through his stronghold. They struggle, rather feebly I must admit, until the pursued man manages to pull down the drapes and expose the Vampire Lord to the sunlight outside, scorching him into nothing but fleshless bones in the process. After this confrontation we jump an unspecified number of years into the future, where the middle-aged man's (now widowed) wife is experiencing violent premonitions of Dracula at her deathbed. She's attended by her son and two daughters, to whom she impairs the dreadful knowledge that Dracula has risen from the grave - and implores the son to seek the Oak Crucifix, an holy item with the power to stop Dracula once and for all.
Said son, being the modern scientific type, disregards his mothers deathbed rambling about Vampires. But he still manages to find himself ending up in the Counts Mansion though, and has for some unfathomable reason brought his two sisters along with him, whom are exactly the kind of nubile, innocent-faced girls that Dracula likes to sink his fangs into.
I referred to the beloved Count as Dracula, but amusingly enough, the movie averts this well-known name and instead calls him Draculstein! Said vampire also lives in a mansion (despite the establishing footage clearly showing a castle). His presence is rather flaccid, I must say, and the movie never manages to turn the bloodsucking villain into a stirring foe to be combated.
Tonally this movie feels like its positioned in the growing-pain stages of the old and the new. Atmospherically the film very much is reminiscent of those old Universal horror movie, it's black-and- white, there's plenty of fog to go around, Gothic stylings with a general lack of music, as well as an overall subdued and restrained approach towards it all. But there is also a smidge of the more explicit material that Hammer Horror brought to the industry, such as the Counts predatory attitude towards women and a ghastly scene where Igor inserts some sort of sword-cane into a woman's heart.
The movie has it's low-budget charm, to be sure. It's an old-school Vampire feature from a time when the standards where changing. The atmosphere and stylings that means so much to the enjoyment of films like these are competently handled but not much else can be said about it. It's okay, fairly engaging if you are fascinated by this kind of stuff, but all-in-all it's an uninspired production with the characteristic shoddiness and limp storytelling that proliferates among B-films in this genre. I give it a weak 5.
5/10
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