Son of Dracula Review: Can Vampires Suck and be Awesome?

How’s this for a fun and totally worthless fact for the day? It took Lon Chaney Jr. just FIVE years to portray four of Universal’s classic monsters. If Son of Frankenstein had been released one year later, he would have gotten all four at a pace of one per year…neato. Now that we’ve got our totally worthless fact out of the way for the day, we’re going to talk about the role that was almost inarguably the WORST suited to Chaney’s style and the most maligned, even if the movie itself is quite good. Son of Dracula gets a lot of flak due to the miscasting of sympathetic lunk-head Lon Chaney as the nefarious vampire, but perhaps not all of it is deserved. Unlike many of Universal’s old horror films, this is worth watching on its own merits instead of for historical reasons or just “originality.” The movie is a bit difficult to review from a chronological standpoint since we pick up the story kind of towards the middle and the back-story is filled out later on, so if you’ll allow it (and even if you won’t) I’m going to explain some things that won’t become more evident until later in the film for the sake of clarity.

Claire (Evelyn Ankers of The Wolf Man and The Invisible Man’s Revenge) and Kay are sisters of the Caldwell family in the South living on a big plantation conveniently located near a cemetery and a nearly impassable swamp. Kay is engaged to a young man named Frank but you’d barely be able to tell she likes him by watching the movie. It seems instead, that Kay has become a bit more than infatuated with a Count Alucard (Lon Chaney) that she had met while touring around Eastern Europe. In fact, the Count was such a hit from the stories about him alone that the Caldwells have decide to throw a big bash in his honor due to the fact that he is set to arrive in America tonight. You and I would be immediately suspicious of any man whose luggage arrives at a train station without the man himself, especially when the biggest pieces could easily hold full-sized human beings and the name Alucard is tipped on its side to look very easily like Dracula since we’re practically reading it backwards. I don’t know if 1943 audiences were dumb enough to not be suspicious, but I do know that 1943 filmmakers were, as were MOST characters in 1943 films. Everyone passes off the resemblance as nothing; everyone that is, except for a Dr. Brewster, who thinks he may have heard the name Dracula before somewhere.

While everyone is enjoying the party, even if they are waiting anxiously for Alucard, Kay is out in the swamp. There, she meets with a seer of some sort who calls herself Queen Zimba. Zimba gives a fairly troubling fortune, but Kay seems untroubled. In fact, Kay is more interested in the giant rubber bat that’s flying around outside. So mesmerized is Kay by this bat, that she barely even blinks when the thing swoops into Zimba’s shack and buzzes the woman to the point where she literally is scared to death.

Now, with people dying and being mesmerized by giant bats, and others finding man-sized luggage with the backwards name Dracula on them, we are not at all surprised to find Alucard standing in the shadows outside the Caldwell home wearing a black cape. We wouldn’t even be surprised to see him turn into a giant bat if this hadn’t been the first time the effect was actually committed to screen. Alucard does let himself into the Caldwell house, but the party is half over and the old colonel (head of the household) has decided that he’s had just one too many drinks and he had better quit while he’s ahead. Alucard delights in this fact as his first stop is to pay a ‘visit’ to the old colonel. Scenes like this always make me wonder: when vampires suck the blood of people that are drunk, do they feel the effects of the alcohol too? When the old colonel’s body is found upstairs, with two marks on its neck, the guests are all sent home and that’s when Alucard chooses to officially arrive at the party on the front steps. WHAT this last part is saying I have no idea as it never seems to pay off for anything worthwhile…

In any event, when rich old people die, everyone is usually pretty eager to read the will and find out who gets what rather than be in the least bit upset at the death of a family member and this is no exception. When the will is read, they find out that Claire gets all the money, and all the STUFF, and Kay gets all the land. It seems a peculiar way to divide up the assets and the fact that Kay was behind the “fair” dividing of assets makes things even more suspicious. Well, remember when Kay was out in the swamp with Zimba? That scene was establishing that Kay is something of a fan of the occult and this next scene will hammer it home for us.

Kay divided the property that way because she wanted her sister out of the area. Though one might think, “Wait, you need MONEY to pay for the upkeep of all that land!” Kay is one step ahead of you. She plans on marrying Count Alucard (don’t you just LOVE sugar-daddies?) and though we might think being a vampire would be a turnoff, Kay knows Alucard is a member of the undead. In fact, Kay wants to be so close to Alucard because she wants to be a vampire herself! When Frank finds out that his beloved is planning on marrying another man, he doesn’t take it too well. He rushes over to Kay’s house (it is now Kay’s house) but is too late. The justice of the peace has already come and gone. Frank takes this news even worse, and busts out his revolver, emptying it into Alucard. We all know that’s not going to hurt the vampire but what we weren’t ready for is the fact that the bullets go right through the count and many of them strike Kay (who has not yet been vampirized). Frank manages to escape Alucard (only due to some luck involving shadows and crosses) but he’s going to have some explaining to do about the dead woman with bullet holes in her.

Fortunately for Frank, Dr. Brewster has been suspicious of this Alucard guy from the word “go” and he’s been looking into this whole Alucard-Dracula thing. His findings lead him to a Hungarian scholar (J. Edward Bromberg from 1943’s Phantom of the Opera and Invisible Agent) who is going to be this film’s Van Helsing character. Lazlo (that’s the scholar’s name) mentions that there is no Alucard family that he is aware of but he has unfortunately heard the name Dracula before. When he arrives at Dr. Brewster’s house for a meeting (people in these movies must have been ass-backwards rich, they are always flying from country to country like it’s not outrageously expensive), the two come to the conclusion that they just might have a real un-live vampire on their hands…the point of argument becomes moot when Alucard appears out of thin air in Brewster’s study to attempt to kill both men but is driven away by a mere cross…

The bigger problem though, since they think they can handle the vampire come the next sunrise, is convincing the police that Alucard is a vampire and Frank hasn’t killed anybody. This may yet be another moot point as Kay appears in Frank’s prison cell. There, she explains to him that while yes, she is a vampire; she only did it for him. She doesn’t care one whip for Alucard, but just wanted to trick the vampire into giving her eternal life which she could then impart to Frank. The two of them can live together FOREVER as long as Frank can locate Alucard’s coffin and kill the vampire during the daylight hours. When that’s done, Kay will come for Frank the next night and make him a vampire too. Of course, there are a lot of problems with Kay’s plan. First, she has to break Frank out of prison and he has to escape undetected. Then, Frank actually has to kill Alucard. If he fails there, the vampire will surely get revenge on the both of them. Finally, she has to hope Frank accepts the proposal and doesn’t wise up to the fact that being married and having a life sentence is bad enough so why would any man want to be sentenced to ETERNITY!?!?

I think the reason Son of Dracula works so well is that the vampires are actually characters. None of the vampires get relegated to subplots or dropped out of the script altogether, issues which befell Dracula and its Spanish counterpart. Also, the vampires are the MAIN characters and the main focus of the film, unlike Dracula’s Daughter, which featured the countess in an unfortunately underwritten role. In some ways, it excuses Chaney’s oafishness. If Draculalucard (as I’ll dub him for now) were a more imposing, unstoppable, uncaring villain (like say, Bela Lugosi’s version of the vampire) then Kay would be less of a credible threat to the count. By making him a bit of a doof, they make it possible that Kay is not just under some sort of vampire spell and that she can actually make free choices on her own to rise against him.

Another thing I rather like here is that the vampires are involved in their own plots. Far too often in the previous films, one of the vampires left too much of the work out of his or her hands, leaving us to wonder why he or she wouldn’t just do the job. Here, Alucard shows up to try to kill Brewster on his own (and is thwarted…but this also makes people jumping to the ‘vampire’ conclusion more believable as in most of the other films, they just took Van Helsing’s word for it). Kay also shows up to actually divulge her plan to Frank, instead of leaving everyone (audience included) in the dark to draw their own conclusions.

We’re still learning! Today, we’ve learned that Lon Chaney can act neither menacing nor suave to save his life. He is the least European acting European character in the history of cinema and is much more suited to playing lumbering monsters or sympathetic Americans. I said the script makes up for some of his shortcomings, but I still would like to see my vampire as the villain instead of a worrisome, pitiable oaf. We’ve also learned that oftentimes, a cheaply made film can be much more fun to watch than what we’d like to think of as more competent fare. This movie is LIMBURGER but it’s easily twice as fun as Dracula’s Daughter. We’ve also learned that even Dracula isn’t too keen on fire. We already knew Frankenstein’s monster and mummies didn’t care for it, but we can now add vampires to the list too!

It’s got lots of faults, and it’s very cheaply made and cheesy as hell, but Son of Dracula is much more fun than what preceded it in the vampire realm. It is also the last film to feature Dracula (or one of his descendants) and vampires in general as the sole villain in a Universal classic monster film.

Below you’ll find my Final Rating and the end of this sentence features a link to an index of all of my movie reviews and an explanation of my ratings system. CLICK HERE.

This hub is number twenty in my “30 Hubs in 30 Days (PLUS THREE!) Challenge” where I will be reviewing essentially all the old Universal monster movies (the 30) as well as the very first, the very best and the very worst films to feature ensemble casts of ALL the monsters (PLUS THREE) over the period of just thirty (plus three) days. Who “challenged” me? Nobody…well, unless one can challenge themselves. In that case, I challenged me.