Back in the 40s, Universal gave the world “Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man”, which saw two great movie monsters do battle. In 1971, we got the cheap and lousy flick called “Dracula vs. Frankenstein”. This looks and feels a world away from some of the classic monster movies Universal gifted the world. This movie is literally one of the darkest movies I have ever seen as you genuinely cannot see what is going on a lot of the time.

In this movie, Dracula (Zandor Vorkov) joins forces with a descendant of Dr. Frankenstein. That’s pretty much all the plot there is as this was not originally intended to be a film with Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster, they just got thrown in later on. Lots of the scenes do not really connect so it feels like watching several different movies.

Dracula only appears in a few scenes and he is pretty pathetic. He does not even turn into a bat in this film. This film features arguably the worst version of the Frankenstein Monster that I have ever seen. Lon Chaney Jr. (“The Wolf Man”) somehow gets dragged into this mess, which is pretty sad considering that this was his last movie.

The acting is terrible, the special effects are really bad and the film makes little to no sense. However, I do have to admit that I was amused by a lot of it because it is so laughably bad. The final fight against the two monsters is so dark that it becomes almost impossible to figure out what is going on. You almost wish you were watching “Alien vs. Predator” or “Freddy vs. Jason” instead. Fans of the two iconic monsters will have to look elsewhere unless they are really in the mood for a ridiculously bad monster mash.