Retro Review: House of Dracula

-

Synopsis
Count Dracula and the Wolf Man appeal to altruistic Dr. Edelmann to cure what ails them. Chaos ensues. Oh, and Frankenstein's monster is there too, and doesn't do much.

Review
Every Halloween season I watch some of the old Universal Monster movies, seeing them for the first time. I tend to enjoy the cheesier sequels more than the classic originals, so I was hoping this one would be as enjoyable as I found House of Frankenstein (which is so far my favorite). However, these films seem to be real hit or miss: either I really enjoy them, or couldn't care less. This one, unfortunately, fell into the latter category. I lost interest about halfway through.

One of the things I like about these films is that they're all relatively short. This one clocks in at 67 minutes, so I didn't lose much of my life watching it. But a lot of it seemed familiar, to the point of me wondering if I'd ever seen it before. Lon Cheney Jr. is excellent (as always) as the continually tormented Larry Talbot, but his situation has been highlighted in a good many of these films: it's always the same thing (I'm pretty sure he had the exact same plotline in the previous film). Lionel Atwill apears -- again -- as an inspector (the 3rd time in the Universal Monsters series alone). And the ending seemed very similar to Son of Dracula (another one I lost interest in halfway through).

Some fun observations (with mild spoilers):

  • I find it humorous that Dr. Edelmann is billed as "Mad Doctor" on the movie's poster, even though he's not really a mad scientist type.
  • One of Dr. Edelmann's assistants reminds me of Lucille Ball.
  • I don't get Count Dracula transforming from a bat into a man wearing a top hat. I just find the top hat odd.
  • John Carradine plays Dracula in this one, as he did in House of Frankenstein, a film in which Dracula is killed. They don't explain how he's alive again for this one.
While I don't consider this the worst Universal Monster movie (I think I'd award that honor to Son of Dracula -- at least out of the films I've seen so far), this one is largely forgettable, in my opinon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Resolving the "n timer(s) still in the queue" Error In Angular Unit Tests

-
A few months ago one of the developers I work with ran into the below error in an Angular unit test: 1 timer(s) still in the queue The fix was to specify a particular amount of time in the tick() call as shown below: it( 'should set accountConfirmationDetails when getAccountConfirmationDetails is called' , fakeAsync(() => {          // Arrange          let  spyGetAccountConfirmationDetails = spyOn(accountService,  'getAccountConfirmationDetails' )         .and         .returnValue(Promise.resolve(AccountMockData.mockAccountConfirmationDetails));                    // Act         fixture.detectChanges();         tick(15000);          // Assert         expect(spyGetPaymentConfirmationDetails).toHaveBeenCalled();           expect(comp.zone).toBe(42);           expect(comp.hasValidProfile).toBeTruthy(); })); Hoping this helps someone!
Read more

How to Get Norton Security Suite Firewall to Allow Remote Desktop Connections in Windows

-
Image
I ran into an issue recently with RDP connections being blocked by the firewall in Norton Security Suite. I checked the traffic rules under Settings > Firewall > Traffic Rules  and found that it was enabled by default (and couldn't be edited): But during further research, I found  this page  on Norton's support site which discusses the different trust levels of networks and mentions that, for the Public trust level, "This setting also blocks remote desktop connections by default.". I checked my network's trust level, and sure enough, it was set to Public (I'm not sure how/why). (Sidebar: Notice in the screenshot above that allowing Remote Desktop for Public Networks is defaulted to Allow , though that rule is not active). Here's what my network trust level looks like now after changing the setting to Private (accessible under Settings > Firewall > General Settings > Network Trust ): After changing the network trust level t
Read more

How to Determine if a Column Exists in a DataReader

-
I recently had to work on something which required me to query a database, open the results in a DataReader, and check for the existence of a particular column. While the DataReader doesn't have a method to do this, with just a few steps I was able to accomplish this task. Here's how. First, the DataReader has a method named GetSchemaTable() , which returns a DataTable consisting of information regarding the data contained in the DataReader. The first column in this DataTable is named ColumnName , and its value is (obviously) the name of the column. Knowing this, we can loop through the rows in the DataTable, checking the ColumnName column for a value that equals the name of the column we're looking for. To this end, I wrote a static method in one of my classes which takes the DataReader and the name of the column being sought: (C#) public static bool HasColumn(DbDataReader Reader, string ColumnName) {    foreach (DataRow row in Reader.GetSchemaTable().Rows)    {       
Read more

Silent Renew and the "login_required" Error When Using oidc-client

-
I recently implemented the Silent Renew functionality of oidc-client in an Angular application I work on, and was getting reports that the users' tokens were still expiring. This made no sense to me as I'd verified the code was working during development, but yesterday I found the problem and am hoping it will save someone some time. The error we were getting back was "Error from signinSilent: login_required". This indicates that the user's session is no longer active on IdentityServer and they must re-authenticate -- which, of course, is what we're trying to prevent by using Silent Renew. In our case, the problem wasn't with the Silent Renew functionality, but rather the user's session was expired. The reason why  it was expired was because, for some reason, we were setting the session length to 15 minutes instead of the default 10 hours . What was occurring was that Silent Renew was attempting to renew a token after 55 minutes (60 minutes expirat
Read more

Fixing the "Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation" Error In An Angular App After Upgrading to webpack 4

-
I'm currently in the process of upgrading an Angular application which does not  use the Angular CLI from webpack 2 to webpack 4. The incremental upgrade from webpack 2 to 3 was easy, but once I made the jump from 3 to 4, I encountered a lot of problems. I went through them one by one, but the one that had me stumped was the following: Unhandled Promise rejection: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. ; Zone: <root> ; Task: null ; Value: Error: Unexpected value 'MakePositivePipe' declared by the module 'SharedModule'. Please add a @Pipe/@Directive/@Component annotation. The code was transpiling/compiling fine, but this error was occurring when I'd navigate to a page containing this pipe. This code has worked fine under webpack 2 and 3. I made sure that the pipe was being set up as a declaration , which it was. What finally  corrected the issue for me w
Read more