At The Movies with Bryan, the Wannabe Filmmaker

The Brides of Dracula is the best of the eight sequels to the 1958 Hammer film, Horror of Dracula, even though the legendary Count is nowhere in sight. Instead of a blood shot eyed Christopher Lee with blood dripping from his fangs, we are given a rather foppish villain in David Peel as he attempts to seduce French beauty, Yvonne Monlaur. It was rather a bold move by Hammer to make a sequel to Horror of  Dracula without Dracula, but it works surprisingly well.  This is largely due to the performance of Peter Cushing, reprising his role as Dr. Van Helsing from the previous film. Cushing's specialty was obsessive authority figures; during this time period he also played Baron Frankenstein.  Yet, despite their superficial similarities, his Frankenstein and Van Helsing are worlds apart. Cushing's Frankenstein is an extremely cold and distant man, who believes that the end justifies the means (even if it involves murder). He is so detached from mankind that, in Frankenstein

Mesa of Lost Women is regarded as one of the worst movies ever made and with a good reason; it's an extremely incompetent piece of cinema. It is so inept that the "Lost Women" of the title are fairly incidental to the actual plot of the movie. This is the IMDB synopsis of movie: A mad scientist named Aranya is creating giant spiders and dwarfs in his lab on Zarpa Mesa in Mexico. He wants to create a master race of superwomen by injecting his female subjects with spider venom. This isn't entirely incorrect, except that Aranya has probably less than ten minutes of actual screen time, despite Jackie Coogan's top billing.  When we first meet Aranya, he is showing off his experiment to fellow scientist, Leland Masterson. He hopes to make a race of superwomen by injecting them with a venom taken from a giant spider. This venom has made these women almost indestructible, yet unfortunately, it has transformed Aranya's male test subjects into dwarves.  Dr. Aran