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Good old Dracula (John Carradine) decides to make a visit to doctor Edelmann
(Onslow Stevens), the famous scientist with yet another hunchbacked assistant -
this time in the female form of Nina (Jane Adams) - to finally be cured from
his vampiric state. & as coincidences like this tend to happen, at around
the same time Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney jr) turns up too to be cured, but as the
doctor is busy with Dracula Larry runs away in terror (it is full moon you
know) & soon lands in a prison cell, where he transforms into the beast.
Edelmann, who by chance witnesses this transformation, decides to take on
Talbot as a patient as well, but when he has to confess to Larry that the herbs
he needs to cure him from being a werewolf need several months to grow, Larry
prefers to throw himself off a cliff into the local river, but instead of a
watery grave, Larry finds both Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange) and a
cave with the ideal conditions to grow the herbs within a month.
Everything seems fine & dandy, & even Edelmann - scientist that he
is - can be dissuaded from reviving the monster ... but then Dracula falls for
Edelmann's other assistant, lovely Miliza (Martha O'Driscoll) & forgets his
good intentions in favour of using his gtreat hypnotic powers to hypnotize
& seduce her.
However, the doctor & Larry see through Dracula's game & try to
force treatment against vapirism onto him, & when that doesn't work the
doctor exposes him - thinking himself safe in his coffin - to the sunlight,
thus kills him ... but Dracula has left the doctor a nasty present ... he has
transfused some of his blood into the doctor's body, so the doctor slowly
becomes a vampire - & as creature of evil he can of course only have one
goal: to revive Frankenstein's monster (please don't ask why).
With the rest of the benevolence still within him he manages (just) to cure
Larry from his lycanthropy - for which Larry is grateful enough not to tell the
village police (led - once again - by Lionel Atwill) that he has witnessed the
Edelmann becoming a vampire & going to town on a killing spree.
But it is not long before all hell breaks loose once again, with the police
finally tracking Edelmann down as the vampire killer, Edelmann reviving the
monster, & then there's yet another mob iof villagers who carry - would you
believe it - torches.
Needless to say, it all ends in flames ... but this time, the now cured Wolf
Man is permitted to survived.
Another of the 1940's Universal monster gatherings with yet another
very silly & nonsensical script that more often than not unintentionally
borders self-parody (a sequence in which a mad Edelmann dreams about reviving
the monster is particularly funny). It is of curse a far cry from Universal's
1930's horror-classics, but on a pure camp level, it's a hoot.
It would be the last serious entry in the loosely connected Universal
monster series, in 1948 though the monsters would come together for another
round-up in Abbott & Costello meet Frankenstein (with Bela Lugosi
regaining Dracula's cape from John Carradine).
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