Synopsis
Once The Gate Closes You'll Never Get Out!
Count Dracula and his wife capture beautiful young women and chain them in their dungeon, to be used when they need to satisfy their thirst for blood.
1969 Directed by Al Adamson
Count Dracula and his wife capture beautiful young women and chain them in their dungeon, to be used when they need to satisfy their thirst for blood.
Dracula's Castle, Il castello di Dracula, Αίμα στο Σπίτι του Δράκουλα, Ο Κληρονόμος του Πύργου του Δράκουλα, Dracula, Dracula und seine Opfer, 大破吸血僵尸堡
Um, the moon is feminine? Sheesh, typical appropriating male sacrificial vampire cults.
Zone waaay far out for some eurohorror-style flogging in the...desert? (Cause, like, despite all the dungeon-heavy action, it's not actually euro. Or really much horror?)
Not even late-night-TV standard horror, this is something you'd find at 1 pm on a sleepy Saturday on a basic cable channel, and you'd drift off about a third of the way thru. With practically the same plot as Fangs of the Living Dead, only with the male half of the newly betrothed couple inheriting the castle, I may have drifted a bit here and there myself. But this is still some super goofy fun!
And, hey! No violating the sacrifice! How many times do I have to tell you? #167.
'Please! Let us go!'
'Why? So you can jump back into your coffin and we forget the whole thing ever happened?'
🌓🌔🌕🌖🌗🌘
An obnoxious Hollywood couple inherits a castle currently being rented by a couple of Draculas, as well as a basement full of chained models, the requisite mentally deficient manservant, the Draculas' clean-cut serial killer best friend and John Carradine's butler/High-Priest-of-the-local-moon-cult. Look, you let Al Adamson loose in a California desert castle, you deserve what you get.
Actually, this is considerably more fun and only slightly less sleazy than your average Adamson offering (By my count it indulges at least six distinct upsetting sexual fetishes, including girl-on-sea-mammal). Alexander D'Arcy and Paula Raymond are legitimately charming as a mannerly old vampire couple trying to keep up with modern life, and adding a Ted Bundy prototype to the mix enlivens the proceedings in…
It’s that time where I pick up a box set from Mill Creek and watch everything in it, and this time I went with a more robust pack of 200 movies as opposed to the usual 50.
Incidentally, you could start off far worse than this TERRIBLE transfer (Mill Creek has kinda outdone themselves with the poor quality of some of these. But in this movie there’s JPEG artifacting AND constant (green!) vertical screen tearing that plagues this entire flick but you know what? I ain’t even mad. That’s how Mill Creek rolls and to be honest I dig the Lo-fi, grungy, pseudo VHS like picture quality.
Anyway as I was saying, you could start off worse than a ridiculous vampire movie with John Carradine in it for one of these sets.
Shot in an allegedly cursed So Cal castle (whose original owner committed suicide) and originally intended as a much larger production starring Jayne Mansfield, BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE sits at an (un)comfortable intersection of the DARK SHADOWS and ADDAMS FAMILY TV series, and Andy Milligan's no budget Staten Island horror melodramas, such as BLOOD. Loose, tongue-in-cheek, and featuring an Igor stand-in named Mango (exploitation/POLICE STORY regular Ray Young) who serves the 300-year-old Count, his bride, and their own personal serial killing Renfield (screenwriter and FORBIDDEN PLANET refugee Robert Dix), it's...oddly breezy?
The central conflict? That Dracula is being displaced from his residence of the last 60 years by a hipster photographer and his floozy model girlfriend (Adamson crush Vicki Volante).…
2021 Cult Movie Challenge 25/52
Week 25: Al Adamson Week
I've seen a few Al Adamson films, but I don't recall seeing Blood of Dracula's Castle. Maybe I did when I was younger, but I'm not sure. In all honesty, I found this film to be boring. Although the premise is interesting, none of the characters are particularly likeable. I didn't care about them, and everything moves at a snail's pace. This was most likely the longest 85 minutes I'd ever had to sit through. I'm not sure if Al Adamson prefers to shoot in the dark or if I was just watching a bad copy, but I had no idea what was going on. It was difficult to tell…
This is primo Adamson bullshit. Lots of mindless subplots, though they do all come together. Not a whole lot goes on honestly but I was still pretty entertained throughout. Some frames are extra beat up and give off some serious trashy lo-fi charm. A whole bunch of horror characters. Awesome use of location and a great ending. I’m not hard to please at all with this kind of shit, but regardless another banger from one of the B-movie kings.
Oh, Al Adamson, so close and yet so not quite.
Blood Of Dracula's Castle contains the blandest incarnation of the immortal Count that I've seen to date. And the setting is rather dull. Plus, one of the characters is said to be a werewolf but we never get a werewolf scene.
Nonetheless, there's some good stuff too. There's a massively mute manservant named Mango who abducts women and hangs them up in Dracula's dungeon so the Count can tap a glass of the red each evening. The chained-up women are beautiful and picturesquely haggard in their distress. There's a bikini model. Cool dolphins and seals and walruses at MarineLand. And some hooded-cultist activity.
It all ends with a bit of fire and a conveniently placed axe. Good enough and 'nuff said.
Next!
If you went into your castle's cellar and found a bunch of ladies chained up, would you just calmly introduce yourself?! This is pure schlocky gold right here. Not only is there Dracula and his bride, but as a bonus you get a cultist butler, a Frankenstein-like henchman and a pet serial killer. Maybe it's cause my last Adamson film was so painful, but I really liked this one.
"I love you dearly, dear. But you're stark raving mad!"
After the pre-credits abduction of a young woman by a lumbering henchman named Mango, we meet our heroes who have inherited a castle inhabited by husband and wife vampires, a fugitive werewolf, John Carradine, and a dungeon of unwilling blood donors. The protagonists don't show up again until the 34 minute mark. Master of shlock Al Adamson's unfocused, California desert set spookshow is exactly the type of low rent shenanigans I devour around Halloween time. Count on me viewing Adamson's other mustachioed Dracula flick sometime before the 31st, too.
"They're vampires, that's all. What else?"
Blood of Dracula's castle is a very low budget melting pot of horror movie ideas, you got vampires, cultists, mad men psycho killers, torture, evil butlers, silent lumbering helpers, dungeons, castles, dolphins, the full moon, pretty much everything but the kitchen sink. Sadly even with John Carridine and all the things listed above its painfully dull with production values slightly higher than Manos the Hands of Fate. There is really nothing of note to speak of, I guess the opening song is alright and there are some sixties bikini girls in the beginning. Zero atmosphere along with one of the worst screen Draculas ever make this one to avoid, cheers from Mondo Cinema.
Boy this movie had everything. Apparently Dracula is alive and well, and renting a castle in Arizona with his wife. That's not even weird compared to the rest of the film. Some assholes from California inherit the castle and try to kick the vampires out. They also have John Carradine as the butler who runs a lunar cult. Their house keeper is some sort of mute hunchback who tends to the models they have chained up in the basement. One of the strangest characters was Johnny who was the vampires hitman, and he might have been a werewolf it was unclear, but he killed a lot of people. There is blood sucking, scarifies and horse riding. It's mad silly but I kind of loved it.
Al Adamson movies always seem way older than they actually are. It’s absolutely insane that this came out in 1969, every other movie that was out that year was exploding with sexy hippies and acid parties and bikers and anti-authoritarian anti-heroes, but bless Al’s old fashioned heart, he had creaky John Carradine sitting cross-legged on a comfy chair next to a fire sipping wine and he says something like “still pure” instead of using the word “virgin.” Dracula is played by a guy named Alexander D'Arcy who seems like the sort of mustached wash up that would have a whole chapter in Hollywood Babylon. The goon henchman is named Mango and he carries around a chain mace. The very last scene has a Mango dummy on fire falling off of a tall cliff.