Blood of Dracula (1957)

AIP's 'other' teenage monster movie from the fifties, Blood of Dracula (1957), whilst not usually recognised by most writers on the subject as part of the cycle, is most definitely a follow-up to the first, I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1956).  Indeed, it shared its writers, most of its plot and some of its cast with the earlier film, and was originally released on a double bill with I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957).  Both films were directed by Herbert L Strock, (who also co-wrote all three films).  Blood of Dracula is very much a gender (and monster) switched version of I Was a Teenage Werewolf.  Both films feature a troubled teenager with anger management issues being used by an unscrupulous adult authority figure as a subject for their experiments.  While in Werewolf counsellor Whit Bissell had tested his new drug that could regress subjects back to their primitive instincts on Michael Landon, Blood of Dracula we have science teacher Louse Lewis using Sandra Harrison as a subject for her experiments in tapping into the primal energies locked inside humans.  In both cases, the adults use hypnosis to try and control their victims, who both periodically regress into a bestial state and murder fellow students.  In fact, while Harrison is meant to be turning into a vampire, her make up actually makes her look a lot like a less hairy, female version of Landon's teen werewolf.

Unfortunately, Blood of the Vampire is nowhere near as entertaining a film as I Was a Teenage Werewolf, despite being patterned on that film.  For one thing it is painfully slow, never getting above walking pace and even at only sixty nine minutes, seriously drags.  Most of the action is confined to a private girls' boarding school, which, I'm guessing is intended to help give the film a claustrophobic skill, increasing the tension through the fact that the monsters and victims are effectively trapped together in a remote, enclosed, location.  Sadly, production values are so low, the sets so cheap and the direction so flat the film fails to generate any atmosphere.  The performances are also highly variable - while Lewis makes for a convincing villain, Harrison and the other twenty five year old 'schoolgirls' are all too one-dimensional to elicit any audience sympathy.  The whole production seems somewhat perfunctory, as if it was made simply to pad out a double bill.  Which, of course, it was.  The truth is that director Strock and the rest of the production team seem to have expended most of their effort on producing I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, which is by far the superior of the two films, featuring a better script, a more original plot, better production values and stronger performances.  Of course, Strock directed a further film connected to the 'teenage monster' cycle, How to Make a Monster (1958), which critics tend to regard as a legitimate sequel to Werewolf and Frankenstein, despite the fact that, unlike Blood of Dracula, it actually isn't thematically connected to them, despite featuring the monster make-ups.