"It ain't even safe to be dead, anymore!"
The definitive movie vampire, Bela Lugosi, stars in this entertaining Columbia production. Although mired in a downward career spiral of poverty row clunkers, Bela, ahem, rises to the occasion. Among the familiar vampire cliches, we find a unique character in Andreas (Matt Willis), the wolf man familiar that serves the vampire. This guy looks like Lon Chaney, Jr. in full makeup, but he does not go around howling at the full moon. Instead, he shows great restraint and is quite articulate as he speaks rather than growls. His fiendish appearance tells of the soul's evil and the vampire's spell. After a prologue, that shows the vampire's 1918 horror and dispatch, Andreas escapes the dark side with help from a kindly lady scientist (Frieda Inescort). He falls back into dreadful habits after a WWII bombing raid unearths Bela. The scenes in the London cemetery inflicted with bomb damage are surreal images of foggy darkness and the children of the night. The script suffers from some...
"Yes, alive, with the blood of his victims."
After appearing in a slew of poverty row features throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s there's slight sense of renewal in seeing Bela Lugosi donning the role of a vampire in the film Return of the Vampire (1944). Oh sure, his character here isn't the same as the one he most famously portrayed in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), but it might as well be...directed by Lew Landers (The Raven, Condemned Women), based on an idea from Kurt Neumann (Kronos, The Fly), the film stars, as I've mentioned, Bela Lugosi (Dracula, White Zombie). Also appearing is Frieda Inescort (The Alligator People), Nina Foch (Cry of the Werewolf), Roland Varno (Women in Bondage), Matt Willis (The Mark of the Whistler), Gilbert Emery (The House of the Seven Gables), and Miles Mander (Tower of London, The House of the Seven Gables), probably best remembered as his role of Cardinal Richelieu from the classic film The Three Musketeers (1939).
As the film begins we learn the year is 1918, and we're in...
Dracula Ressurrected?
This is a brilliant, underrated picture, featuring Bela Lugosi playing a real vampire for only the second time in his career. Here, he is aided by a talking werewolf who, although looks a little tatty, has rather more character to him than Lon Chaney's more famous lycanthrope. If you let yourself believe in such concepts, you will probably find this film enjoyable and even a little shocking. Lugosi plays Armand Tesla (basically Dracula under another name), who returns to claim the heroine (played by Nina Foch) after 'marking' her when she was a child. However, the werewolf with a heart eventually turns on him and drags him out into the sunlight, where he melts in spectacular fashion. Original touches, such as the inclusion of the very real (at the time) Second World War, the afore-mentioned werewolf and Miles Mander's final words to the camera, are mixed with traditional fog-bound graveyards, howling wolves and long-caped vampires, and are married together with startling...
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