Zoltan... Hound Of Dracula

Boneward Hound

Zoltan - Hound Of Dracula
aka Dracula’s Dog
USA 1977 Directed by Albert Band
EMI/Kino Lorber Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Spoilers, I guess.

Wow, this is a terrible film but, you know what? Even though it’s not stood the test of time very well, it’s still kinda watchable and for people of a certain age, like myself, the nostalgia of revisiting this strange movie will probably more than make up for the somewhat pedestrian pacing and dull bits.

I must have been around twelve years old when I was allowed to stay up late and watch Zoltan... Hound Of Dracula on TV (my parents elected to go to bed instead). And so I watched a film which was so, mostly, unexciting that I’d always assumed that it was a made for TV movie. It was a title that also kinda haunted me over the years because nobody I could remember for the longest time, until the internet came along decades later, could even remember the title. Watching it now, it’s still mostly dull but I can appreciate it a little more and it’s certainly far from incompetent... just a little plodding in places.

The film starts off with an offshoot of the military, presumably in Transylvania, blasting open a crypt where they find a load of coffins of the House of Dracula. While one guy sits and guards the site overnight, a coffin breaks loose from its crypt and said guard foolishly removes the stake from the sheet covered corpse he finds inside. Then, quick as a flash, the titular vampire dog jumps on him and fangs him up on the neck before pulling out another coffin and freeing his master, Veidt Smith, played by Reggie Nalder. Genre fans may remember Nalder in such roles as the spy posing as an Andorian in the first series of the original Star Trek, as ‘Mr. Barlow’ the Nosferatu looking vampire in the original TV mini series of Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot (reviewed here) and even as an assassin in Dario Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (reviewed by me here). He and Zoltan go to America to find the last living descendent of the Dracula family, to bite him up so he becomes his own master. Now, personally, I would have thought he’d have made things easier on himself if he just opened all the other Dracula family members in the crypt and revived them all instead but, hey, 1970s movie logic, I guess.

Hot on his trail is Inspector Branco, played with considerable presence, it has to be said, by José Ferrer. He also goes to America to try and locate Dracula’s descendent Michael Drake, played by Michael Pataki (who also plays the main Dracula in some of the flashback scenes, including a ‘Zoltan origin scene’ where he changes into a vampire bat and bites the poor pooch on the neck). As luck would have it, Michael, his wife, his two kids and their four dogs (two adults and two puppies) are on a camping holiday in the wilderness. They immediately start having trouble with missing dogs during the night, when Zoltan starts biting them up to grow Smith’s army of vampire hounds... intending to ‘Draculise’ Michael when they can get near him. Can Inspector Branco locate and save the Drake family before it’s too late?

Well, the film is a bit basic, it has to be said. There’s too much of the ‘idyllic family camping’ montage with saccharine soundtrack at the front end of the movie and, there’s a bunch of local camper encounters (who, of course, have their own dogs to get bitten up and added to the ‘vamp pack’) which all feel a bit light weight and padded. But there’s at least a consistent tone to the production, even if the scene where Drake and Branco are holed up in a cabin for a night while attacking vampire dogs try to eat their way through the walls and roof seems to go on just as long... that is... all night.

However, you do get to see and then wonder at why vampire dogs would be scared of the Christian symbol of the cross (maybe the term ‘old faithful’ means just that) and there’s a nice touch where Zoltan, on seeing the cross worn by Drake at the end of the picture, backs up over a cliff edge, only to be impaled on the fencing below, staked through its doggy heart.

Yeah, okay... it’s nonsense but it does hold together quite well and, with the added nostalgia rush I was getting from this, I did kind of enjoy this one. Ferrer probably comes off the best here, driving around in his black sports car and wearing his French resistance style beret. And there’s even a silly punchline at the end where the camera follows a trail of a decapitated owl and a half eaten rabbit carcass to come upon one of the kids’ puppies, who has now got glowing eyes, suggesting it’s been vamped up by the titular hound.

And yes, Zoltan... Hound Of Dracula is not a film I would probably recommend to most, if any people but, if this is a film that people of a certain age remember from when they were a kid, well, all I can say is that Kino Lorber’s Blu Ray transfer looks pretty good and, despite how it looks, the aspect ratio and odd scene of bloody carnage can attest to the fact that my initial instincts in the early 1980s was wrong... this one definitely had a theatrical release back in 1977. So, yeah, not the most spectacular film but I suspect some people reading this would benefit from knowing it’s on a US Blu Ray presentation (I don’t expect something like this to get any kind of release over here in the UK, that’s for sure). Glad I caught up with this one... might well watch it again some day.