Doctor Dracula

Doctor Dracula (1981)

BOMB (out of 4)

In 1975 director Paul Aratow made a film called Lucifer's Women but not too much is known about it. It's not clear whether the film was completed and never released or if it was never completed. It's one of those mystery films that ended up being released in 1981 as this film, which features drive-in maverick Al Adamson filming new scenes with John Carradine and throwing it all together. The film never makes too much sense but it has something to do with Dracula working as a shrink so that he can bite on women but there's another man, trained by Svengali, to do battle with him. Dracula vs Frankenstein this is not but I must say Adamson did a very good job at adding the new stuff in because the new scenes really don't stick out and they mix well with the original film. With that said, the film is deadly dull from start to finish without any energy in the movie. The film tries very hard to be dark and mysterious but it never comes off that way. It seems the original film is mainly to blame because we get long dialogue scenes where nothing ever happens. The added scenes at least feature John Carradine hamming it up a little bit. Apparently Adamson also cut out all the nudity from the original film, which certainly wasn't a good thing to do considering how dull the film turned out to be. This is a pretty worthless film but hopefully the history about the original film will come out at some point.