In a remote European village Count Dracula (Franco regular Howard Vernon of The Awful Dr. Orloff and a zillion others) is roaming the area sucking the blood from some of the local ladies. When Dr. Seward (Alberto Dalbes who starred alongside Paul Naschy in Hunchback Of The Morgue) comes across a the drained corpse of a pretty young woman (Anne Libert of A Virgin Among The Living Dead) he knows who is to blame and what he has to do. Before you know it, Seward has found his way to Dracula's castle and staked the old guy through the heart, causing him to turn into a bat before breathing what Seward believes will be his last breath.

With Dracula out of the picture and his castle up for grabs, Dr. Frankenstein (Dennis Price of Venus In Furs) and Morpho (Luis Barboo who had a small roll in Naschy's Return Of The Werewolf) move in so that they can continue their evil experiments and once again bring life to the undead Frankenstein Monster (Spaghetti Western star Fernando Bilbao of The Erotic Rites Of Frankenstein where he also played the monster!). Their efforts soon bare fruit and soon afterwards the monster runs rampant around the town, first kidnapping a sexy female singer (Josyanne Gibert who shows up in Devil's Island Lovers) and then returning her to his creator so that he can use her blood to revitalize the dead vampire who used to call the castle home.

It would seem all of Dr. Frankenstein's practice has been paying off as his resurrection of the Count is successful. With Dracula under his control, or, as the title says, his prisoner, he sends the vampire out into the town to kill off a few more of the locals which is the first step towards his goal of creating an army of vampires that will obey his every command (one of whom is played by the lovely Britt Nichols of A Virgin Among The Living Dead)! The only hope that the locals have lies with a strange gypsy woman (Genevieve Robert who also appeared in Devil's Island Lovers) and her werewolf servant (played by the mysterious Brandy).

Presented here in its Spanish cut (at least if the title card which reads Dracula Contra Frankenstein and the Spanish language is anything to go by!), the film is a very atmospheric, quiet, brooding picture that, despite the obviously low budget, moves along at a deliberate pace and succeeds in creating some nice, macabre mood. The make up effects aren't very good – you can see where the paint stops on Vernon's face just before his hairline quite obviously and if you drank a beer every time a rubber bat showed up on screen you'd probably die from alcohol poisoning – but there's enough charm and mystique evident in the sets, locations and cinematography that Franco fans should have no problem looking past those flubs even if it is tough to look at the Frankenstein Monster and not snicker a little bit at just how bad his make up looks when close up.

What really makes this movie interesting is the cast, most of whom had either worked with Franco before or would work with him again, and the credits read like a 'who's who' of Franco regulars a few of whom, like Britt Nichols, showed up in other Spanish horror films of note (she was sacrificed to the Templars in Tombs Of The Blind Dead). Price and Vernon get most of the screen time and for good reason as they knew what Franco required of them by this point in time. While the movie gets more and more off as it plays out everyone is able to give reasonably restrained performances here which balances out some of the truly goofy ideas that are bouncing around the movie (whether or not Franco did this on purpose or not is debatable). Price doesn't look to be in the best of shape here and sadly, two years after this movie was made, he'd be dead from cirrhosis of the liver but he at least makes for an interesting Dr. Frankenstein. His lines are delivered by a narrator, likely because he was drunk for the duration of the shoot.

Despite all the strange Franco touches that you'll notice throughout the movie (there's a whole lot of zoom lens action here!), Dracula Prisoner Of Frankenstein plays it fairly safe in the sex and violence department. There's no nudity at all and while a bit of kink is implied here and there, nothing is actually shown which may disappoint those who are only able to appreciate the more exploitative aspects of Franco's filmography. A bit of bloodshed shows up but again, it's tame and the whole movie feels like an absurdist take on the old Universal monster films that so obviously inspired it. Franco would bring Price and Bilbao back for The Erotic Rites Of Frankenstein soon after this production was finished, an equally bizarre take on the old Universal films, albeit this time with more sex and violence.

Video:

To be blunt, Image screwed up this transfer. The film was shot 2.35.1 and although the opening credits are presented that way, the rest of the film is shown non-anamorphic 1.85.1 and the cropping is evident in more than a couple of scenes. Adding insult to injury is the fact that there are compression artifacts present in a few scenes as well as some mild trailing. The picture is dirty in spots and while it's hardly riddled with print damage it doesn't look like much effort was put into cleaning this one up at all. The movie deserves better than this.