It's kind of weird and I certainly did not expect this but I simply enjoyed watching this movie. It was all some good fun for the genre buffs and as an horror- and part of the Dracula franchise it's a quite original movie with a different approach.
This is certainly a B-movie but surprisingly enough you don't really see this back in the movie its look. The movie is way more horrible with its unintentionally funny dialog and silly plot holes and other stuff that just doesn't really make sense.
As ridicules as the main concept might sound, it actually is the strongest point of the movie. The evil dogs really play a big and significant role in the movie and I really think they did a great job with using the dogs as the main ingredient for the movie its horror. The movie is filled in which the dogs get to do their evil stuff and attack the human characters. They used some great animal trainers for this movie, fore the dogs really become characters in the movie that act out their scenes. Still it's a bit funny to hear the dog's their howling and barking, since it obviously got done by a human voice.
I can certainly understand why people would call this a bad movie, since yes well, the movie just isn't truly standing out with a good story, or great dialog and characters. However when you are into this genre, you'll see that this movie is actually one of the more entertaining but also original ones, even though it just isn't all done that very well.
Always a weird sight to see once great actors turn up in these sort of movies at the end of their careers. It happened to quite a lot of actors that were big and well known in the '40's and '50's. Big name that appears in this movie is José Ferrer, who once received an Academy Award for his role in "Cyrano de Bergerac" and starred in many more great and well known movies of the '40's and '50's. He plays the sort of Van Helsing role in this movie, though he seems to be more like the Sam Loomis character from the Halloween movies, of which the first one got released during the same year as this movie. This movie still got released a few months earlier though, so I don't think this movie did actually get 'inspired' by that movie. Also a good role is being played by Reggie Nalder, who is perfectly cast as a servant of the old count, who has rising from the grave. Nalder looks as if he had rising from the grave himself and he looks halve death to be frank. He still lived for another 13 years though after this movie and actually reached a respectable age of 84. He just looked much older, sicker, close to death, pretty much for most part of his career. Pretty much how Peter Cushing looked like from the '70's on, like halve a skeleton, halve man.
I really liked watching this movie, despite of all its all too obvious weaker elements.
7/10
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