No doubt about it. This film is very bad - very, very bad. But it, as other viewers have noted, is also a very watchable and fun bad movie. Alex D'Arcy and Paula Raymond play Count and Countess Dracula. They live in a castle in the middle of the Californian desert where their servants collect wandering beauties for the blood they can supply the vampires and as eventual sacrifices for the god Luna or Mango, a hideously deformed hunchbacked mute, to use in his bed. I'm sure either way they are crushed - or fired up at the very least. John Carradine lends his name cachet as George the family retainer, and for Carradine he gives a restrained performance mostly. He spouts lines with the best making the most out of any old tripe. D'Arcy looks way too sensitive and weak to play Dracula. He almost appears to lisp. Raymond isn't much better as both look like they just got back from watching polo. Along for the ride in the family way is Johnny, played by Robert Dix the son of Richard Dix, who just escapes from prison and enjoys killing anything that moves. Just getting to the castle he kills one guard, a beauty swimming by herself in a stream, shoots a man trying to hitch a ride, and then drives a car over a deep cavern cliff with its owner recovering from a blow in the backseat. He says several times in the movie that when the moon comes out he gets a desire to kill...hmmmm. Anyway, this film is a real hoot for fans of le bad cinema. It has hokey dialog like Carradine's opening line to a girl being carried in on the back of Mango from the opening sequence(with a very catchy tune playing as another reviewer noted). He looks deadly serious and then says, "You have had the misfortune of encountering Mango." He then takes a blood sample. She looks disinterested and then, as if on cue, breaks down. At least she had her looks going for her. The two main leads are played by...like it really matters. One is a beautiful woman with her dolt of a fiancée seeing the castle as property they just inherited. You can guess where the story goes from there. Some bright spots of incompetence or interest include the death scene for Mango - wow! I never thought he would die. Johnny gleefully laughing as he murders. The chained blood bank in the basement. Ms. Bishop in a two-piece at Sea World. Carradine spouting his loyalty to the moon god Luna. And my favourite - the end of D'Arcy and Raymond in what has to be the most passive end to Count Dracula. This film, as I said before, is very bad, but if you like fun bad movies then this one is for you. It was directed by Al Adamson, and almost all his movies are real bad but almost all are very enjoyable. That cannot be said for everyone to be sure.

Like many of the movies I've been writing reviews for, Blood of Dracula's Castle is part of a twelve movie boxed set from Mill Creek, a company that deals in very cheap (and sometimes public domain) films. The transfer isn't great. In fact, when I first started watching this, the screen was so completely covered with green lines (from wear) that it reminded me of The Matrix. Personally, though, I believe this adds to the aesthetic of the movie; something about the apparent age of the film makes it that much more enjoyable to watch.

In some ways, this movie reminds me a bit of a 60's version of The Addams Family, as it features a sophisticated, middle-aged couple that lives in a rented castle and are quite open about their vampirism (or their being "the living dead," to be grammatically correct). In addition to a standard manservant (George, played by the great John Carradine), they also keep around an orange-skinned feral guy named Mango around, who roams the surrounding wilderness, hunting and capturing the bikini-clad young women who, for some reason, seem to be in abundant supply in this area. The young hotties are collected and contained in a dungeon, where they are harvested for their blood. Occasionally the charming vampire couple also let Mango have one of the babes for his own purposes, which are thankfully never shown or fully described. They also have a younger friend, Johnny, who is an open and quite charming serial killer who goes nuts when the moon is full.

Enter into the picture a young couple, the incredibly condescending Glen and his fiancé Liz. They enter the scene because Glen has inherited the castle from some relative, and the two stumble around in a manner not unlike Scooby-Doo and the gang, slowly discovering the danger that surrounds them. It's actually very cute, in a campy sort of way. The dialog between the spooky castle residents and the innocent young couple is so corny, it could have been penned by Ed Wood himself.

Okay, so the whole premise of this flick doesn't make a lick of sense. And the print the DVD was made from is terrible. And the crazy man-beast that everyone keeps talking about is named after a tropical fruit which does, of course, prevent him from ever being taken as a serious threat to anyone. It doesn't matter. What matters is this is good, cheesy fun for the whole family, if your whole family is plenty drunk.