The Lake Of Dracula is the second Toho vampire movie on The Bloodthirsty Trilogy set from Arrow Films. It's a 1971 film, the script is by Ei Ogawa and Masaru Takesue and Michio Yamamoto is the director. Like all the films in the set, it's in the style of a Hammer horror picture. It does a good job capturing that look and feel, yet the film is still very Japanese. I thought I had read somewhere that this was the first time this film had been released in the US. When we sat down to watch it, Greg said he'd seen it and has a VHS tape somewhere. I looked that up and sure enough the two Dracula titled films in the box were released on VHS by Gateway in the early 70s. The films were pan & scanned and trimmed a bit. You can see the box art at this site.
This story is about a woman called Akiko who had an encounter with a vampire when she was a child. As an adult she believes it to be a dream. Sadly the vampire from her past comes visiting, his coffin is delivered to a local handyman. The chompin' starts right up and the handyman is the first under the bloodsuckers spell. It's the usual sort of running about and screaming as the characters try to figure out what's going. There's a bit of gore, the gag with the flesh of the dead guy stuck to the table was praticularily entertaining. Sets and locations were good and moody, a nice score added to that. The scenes by the sea were very nice. The story isn't anything new here, Dracula ancestor comes to a sticky end, but I enjoyed it. I'm pretty much sold on getting a set but I might wait a bit to see if it comes down in price a bit. It's about $32 on Amazon right now.
I doubt I would need to buy the Blu-ray of Island Claws. It's a 1980 film that has a script co-written by Ricou Browning. He played the Gill Man in the underwater scenes in The Creature From The Black Lagoon and sequels. He's a writer who co-wrote, with Jack Cowden, Flipper and Salty. He directed 37 episodes of Flipper and some other TV. The movie was directed by Herman Cardenas, he co-produced the film with his Dario Cardenas and co-wrote the story the script was based on with Colby Cardenas. He was a local businessman who wanted to make a movie. He hired Ricou and Jack to write the screenplay.
Herman did pretty good for a first time director but Island Claws a still a bit below average, not too surprisingly it's the only movie he made. It hasn't many votes on the IMDb and a lot of them are a 4. I gave it a 5 because of the giant crab and it's not really a 6. Sadly, there's a bit too much character development and not enough giant crab. It takes a while to get to that big crab but it's pretty good when it we do get there. Not great, just pretty good. The giant crab they built doesn't move around a lot but it is huge. Before we see that behemoth, we see plenty of regular size critters running around, the little scuttlers are ganging up on the humans and getting their own back. Eventually the big beast is defeated and the town goes back to normal. Like I said, I don't think I'll bother getting on. Too many others to pick up first.
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