together they meet in a fight of fright

how could you go wrong with a film titled dracula v. frankenstein? surely such a movie would bring in the bucks from the drive-in crowd. but how to get that crowd interested in seeing such a concoction. film a trailer of course and that will be the hook with which to reel the suckers in.

the hook is sharp and almost 40 years later it is still reeling them in. at least it still reels me in. the filmmaker, al adamson, was a hack par excellence and his films mined the substrata of popular culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. adamson got down-on-their-luck old hollywood actors whose stars had faded to a dim sheen. for this movie we have john carradine, briefly, j. carroll naish, russ tamblyn, lon chaney jr, and jim davis in a film that is a study of post-modernist fragmentation. adamson put together the fragments of what looks like 3 different films: cheap hippy psychedelia, the dracula film of the title, and a mash of horror clippings starring naish as the mad scientist.

question is does the film work. short answer is no of course. if you want to watch a good movie then stay away from this flick. however, if you love a kind of movie-making designed to be screened only at the drive-in when the filmmakers knew that most of the audience would be doing many things other than watching what is onscreen, then this is the shit. i can't recall if i saw this movie at the drive-in when i was only a lad but i certainly recall the trailer, and it is a doozy.

for i love trailers as much as the features themselves. what i find refreshing is that this trailer comes from the ghetto inside poverty-row. so cheap is it that the filmmakers, and i can't be sure it was adamson who made this turkey, used stills in many places with very light-colored fonts for the actors' names, so faint are they that you can't even read them. the film stock looked like throw-aways and i'm sure that the trailer looked old even when it was brand new.

in other words, this is my kind of filmmaking where the art happens out of accident and necessity. the film was successful in part because of its title and also because it was almost immediately vaunted to the top tier of it's-so-bad-it's-good movies. you don't have to watch the film to enjoy adamson's style of exploitation movie-making. you just simply have to sit back and dig this trailer.