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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Who let the vampire dogs out?, April 22, 2004
Ah, those Communists; it's all their fault, you know. In Zoltan, Hound of Dracula, the forces of Communism unleash a mean, lean, killing machine in the form of a huge, fanged vampire dog on the good old USA. Sure, the film makes it look like it was accidental, but I have to ask: why was the Red Army going around blowing up holes all over Romania? There can be only one explanation: they were trying to find an ancient vampire tomb so they could bring a vampire back to life and enlist him in their cause. And that comrade who sacrificed his life for the cause? Clearly a ringer. Let's say I'm guarding a newly discovered Dracula family tomb when the earth starts quaking and a coffin slides out of the mausoleum onto the floor? Do I open the coffin? Do I then, seeing a stake projecting from the innards of the shrouded corpse inside, reach right in and pull the stake out just for the heck of it? No. Nobody would do that - unless they were acting under orders (or were just born stupid). What soon emerges from the coffin is a huge black dog (code name: Zoltan) who sates hundreds of years of blood hunger on his benefactor. The vampire canine quickly frees his old buddy, one of Dracula's servants, from another coffin, and the two reunited friends scurry off into the night. The servant is only a partial vampire; the sun doesn't bother him and he has no craving for blood; all he has is a fervent need to serve a master and a really silly expression on his face whenever he supposedly concentrates. Inspector Blanco, played by Jose Ferrer, knows all about the Dracula family, and he knows that the risen servant will go looking for a new master - and there is only one surviving member of the ancestral Dracula bloodline remaining (which is strange when you realize the guy has a son and daughter of his own), a perfectly normal human fellow named Drake living in California. Drake and his family have just begun a two-week camping vacation - it's not one they will soon forget. The family keeps being bothered by and eventually attacked by great big dogs, losing their own dogs in the process. Dracula's servant's master plan is to use his ever-growing number of vampire dogs to get the family out of the way and then take Drake's blood, thereby turning him into the Dracula heir and master he is seeking. The film completely goes to the dogs by the time Inspector Blanco finally finds Drake to warn him about the whole vampire thing. If you think your neighbor's dog barks loudly in the middle of the night, wait until you hear a constant cacophony of huge dogs whooping it up for a full half hour. This isn't a bad thing, though; I rather liked the way the dogs were used in this film, doing all of the dirty work for the weird undead servant. The ending of the film gets a little bit hokey, and then it gets even a little hokier, but I actually enjoyed this film a great deal. I must warn fellow animal lovers out there that some dog characters meet with an unhappy fate in this film. Worst of all, a litter of cute little adorable puppies gets dragged into the whole mess. Personally, I don't care what happens to human characters in horror films - the more gruesome the death, the more I like it. But to bring pain and misery to poor little puppy characters is hard for an animal lover like me to watch. You know, a number of really talented canine actors and actresses basically carried this movie on their backs; they acted their hearts out, looked more like fanged vampire killers than most humans ever do, and for what? For no credits whatsoever, that's what. Sure, the trainer gets his name listed; even the person who supplied the dogs gets to see his name up in lights; yet not one canine actor was given any credit in the making of this movie. You name the movie after a canine vampire, but you won't even list the dog's real name? Where is the justice in this? This is a good horror movie, and credit should be given where credit is due.
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DVD ~ R.G. Armstrong
DVD ~ Paul Kelman
DVD ~ William Marshall
DVD ~ James Brolin
DVD ~ A. Michael Baldwin
