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3
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10
= Highest Rating |
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One
of the silliest Dracula movies ever made.
Though efficiently helmed by
veteran director Albert Band (I
Bury The Living), Zoltan's
goofy plot is guaranteed to provoke more laughs
than chills. Vampire dogs are one thing... but
vampire puppies? Just too cute 'n' cuddly
to be scary, even with the 'glowing eyes' effects
and extra-large fake fangs. There's simply no
way the filmmakers could've taken a moment
of this seriously... Yet they did.
A pre-titles sequence takes
place in Romania, at the time a communist Warsaw
Pact nation behind the Iron Curtain. Conspicuously
long-haired Soviet military engineers are doing
some blasting when they uncover an unknown tomb
of the Dracula family. One unlucky soldier is
assigned overnight guard duty at the tomb. An
earth tremor dislodges a coffin in which the soldier
finds a body wrapped in cloth, with a wooden stake
protruding from it. For absolutely no reason whatsoever
the soldier removes the stake —
certainly something one would want to do in Dracula's
tomb, right? He looks on in fascination as the
cloth-wrapped form begins to stir. (Extremely
dumb move # 2.)
Suddenly a huge black dog springs from the coffin
and attacks the soldier, biting him in the neck
and draining his blood. Zoltan, Hound of Dracula,
lives again.
To provide some backstory to Zoltan's origin as
a supernatural creature the dog actually
has a flashback. (I'm not kidding.) Many decades
earlier Zoltan was bitten by Count Dracula himself
(played by Michael Pataki in what looks like a
Wal-Mart Halloween costume) while the King of
the Undead was in bat form. In need of a human
servant as well, Dracula also put Zoltan's owner,
a farmer named Veidt Schmidt (Mark
Of The Devil's Reggie Nalder), under his control.
Schmidt is turned into a sort of quasi-vampire,
without the thirst for blood and able to move
about in daylight. (You still have to stake him
to kill him, however.) Apparently Schmidt was
such a loyal servant to the Dracula clan that
he, too, was buried in the family crypt. The now
resurrected Zoltan pulls Schmidt's casket from
a niche in the wall, opens it, and removes the
stake from the corpse's chest. (Good doggie!)
Schmidt is revived, and together he and Zoltan
set out to find a new master to serve —
the last living descendant of the Dracula line.
The location of this Dracula
heir is inadvertently disclosed when Schmidt eavesdrops
on Inspector Branco (The
Being's Jose Ferrer), Romanian police
detective and vampire expert. Branco is brought
in by the Soviet authorities to investigate the
tomb and the guard's mysterious death. He knows
that the last of the Dracula line is an American,
one Michael Drake, who was taken to the United
States as a child and raised there oblivious of
his heritage. Branco, worried about the two empty
coffins in the tomb, asks for authority to travel
to California and warn Drake that he's in danger.
But Schmidt and Zoltan get there ahead of him.
Not knowing that the deadly duo is stalking him,
Drake (also played by Pataki) packs up his wife,
children and the family dogs —
including a
litter of puppies —
for a wilderness vacation on the coast in their
RV. Meanwhile Schmidt steals a hearse and, with
Zoltan resting in his doggie casket (!) during
the day, trails the Drakes to their camping ground.
Can Insp. Branco reach Drake in time before Schmidt
and Zoltan destroy his family and convert him
into a vampire?
Pretty tame stuff for a late
'70s horror, Zoltan: Hound
Of Dracula will have you snickering with
laughter when you're not bored by the interminable
driving scenes (the Drakes in their camper; Branco
tooling up the California coast in his rented
convertible) or annoyed by the lame TV show-quality
music score. There's only one gory scene in the
movie, in which an innocent camper is torn to
bits by Zoltan for noticing Schmidt's hearse parked
in the woods. (Still, it only barely merits EC's
'Blood 'n' Guts' icon. Otherwise the flick is
strictly PG material.) Though Zoltan himself is
played by a fairly intimidating (and obviously
well trained) pooch, director Band relies primarily
on Reggie Nalder's scarred, skull-like countenance
for chills —
I couldn't begin to count the number of shots
in the film focused solely on Nalder's less than
handsome face as he mugs villainously for the
camera. The Austrian-born Nalder (1911-1991),
who apparently suffered terrible burns sometime
in his life (a World War II wound, perhaps?),
is damned creepy looking, but his sinister
appearance isn't something you can build a film
around. Except for a few spoken lines during Zoltan's
flashback (I still can't get over that!), his
dialog consists entirely of telepathic voice-overs
to the dog: "No, Zoltan,
no!," "Yes, Zoltan,"
"Zoltan, it is is time",
etcetera. The rest of the cast performs gamely
despite the ridiculous dialog, particularly Pataki
(Sidehackers), a
veteran TV and film character actor who must look
back with a measure of chagrin that this
was one of his few starring roles.
As mentioned, Zoltan himself
is a pretty fierce looking beast; he would've
made a great Hound
Of The Baskervilles. But the notion of a vampire
dog having to sleep in a coffin is rather silly,
as are the scenes in which Zoltan hypnotizes other
dogs preparatory to biting them. (He forms his
own 'Blood Pack' of vampirized canines!) How Jose
Ferrer —
Best Actor Oscar winner for his celebrated performance
in 1950's
Cyrano De Bergerac —
was able to
keep a straight face while driving stakes into
dogs I'll never understand.
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an Anchor Bay title the Zoltan
DVD is an atypically bare bones affair, with only
the theatrical trailer as an extra. (An audio commentary
with Pataki and effects creator Stan Winston would've
been interesting.) Picture and sound quality are
very good, however; the mono audio track is particularly
strong and clear. The widescreen (1:66.1) transfer
is anamorphically enhanced for 16x9 TVs.
2/08/03 |
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