Dracula's Daughter

Dracula's Daughter (1936)

Runtime: 71 minutes

Directed by: Lambert Hillyer

Starring: Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill, Edward Van Sloan, Gilbert Emery

From: Universal

It's been awhile since I've seen a movie from the 30's and since I also felt like something completely different, why not the first sequel to Bela's Dracula?

This starts immediately after the 1931 classic ends, and Edward Van Sloan returns as Van Helsing. The coppers catch him with those dead bodies and needless to say, they don't believe the whole vampire story. Van asks for the help of a psychiatrist friend, Jeffrey. Unfortunately for Jeffrey, he meets up with Dracula's daughter, who claims to be a Countess. The Countess wants the help of psychiatry to try and cure her vampirism, but that goes about as well as you'd suspect.

This had more humor than I anticipated... most of it was at least OK. The movie as a whole was pretty good as it was only 71 minutes long, had some nice atmospheric scenes, and the psychiatry angle was at least an interesting direction to go in. Gloria Holden did a nice job as the titular daughter as she had a mysterious air to her... but another highlight was Marguerite Churchill as Janet (dammit), who as Jeff's secretary had a love-hate relationship. There's even a scene with obvious lesbian overtones so this was not a boring 71 minutes by any means.