classicsoncall Review of Vampire Over London

Vampire Over London (1952)

"Personally, I think we are dealing with a dangerous character."

[4/10 · 22 January 2023]

Forget any pretense that this is a horror movie, or even a vampire movie for that matter. The only concession to the title has Bela Lugosi emerging from a coffin after taking a nap. Otherwise, Lugosi's character, Professor Von Housen, admits that he's a scientist who fancies himself a vampire, descended from a real vampire ages ago. A better description of the film might be slapstick comedy, with Arthur Lucan portraying the only character he ever appeared as in over a dozen movies and a TV series. If you didn't know it beforehand, you might actually think that Old Mother Riley was a woman because his drag bit appears fairly effective. He certainly fooled me, as this was the first time I ever caught him and his gimmick. The story itself here is pretty innocuous, with Von Housen attempting to take over the world with an army of fifty thousand robots, but he's only made one so far. And he doesn't even have it on hand; it had to be crated and shipped from Ireland! No explanation offered so you just have to take it on faith like a lot of these old time flicks. Anyway, it's a pretty frenetic story with lots of slap-dash chaos and a sub-plot involving a kidnapped young woman (María Mercedes) who has a chart of South America stashed on a cruise ship with the locations of uranium deposits, needed to create Von Housen's robot army. Look, it probably didn't have to make sense, relying on Lugosi's presence to sell the picture. I did get a kick out of one of Von Housen's lines when he took a pot shot at a rival monster character when he described his own robot creation - "No Frankenstein with all the weaknesses of the flesh!" I wonder what Karloff would have had to say about that.