I’d always heard the name of Al Adamson mentioned in the same breath as that of the acknowledged King Of Bad Movies, Edward D. Wood Jr.; having now watched an effort from him – and one that, by all accounts, is his own nadir (or zenith, if that’s your bag) – I can certainly appreciate the comparison! <br /><br />Some might enjoy the inherent campiness of the film – belatedly turned into a nod to the classic Universal monster cycle by pairing its two most popular characters (and featuring a couple of relics from that by-gone era in J. Carroll Naish and Lon Chaney Jr.) – but it’s hard to overlook the sheer awfulness of the whole enterprise…not to mention the way it demeans two reliable actors and the legacy of Dracula and Frankenstein in the process! To be fair, Naish does try as the mad scientist – delivering the expected quota of crackpot theories throughout; but it’s painful to watch Chaney here, reduced by alcoholism and cancer to thankless parts of brutish mute assistants. You ain’t seen Chaney until you’ve watched him giddy with anticipation for his ‘fix’, or go cold turkey when he’s deprived of it; on top of that, in order to provide Naish with the body parts necessary for his experiments, Chaney’s character – named Groton (perhaps an amalgam of gross cretin?) – is turned every once in a while into a rabid axe-wielding murderer! <br /><br />But, then, what of the monsters themselves?: as played by one Zandor Vorkov – obviously a pseudonym, and with a look apparently inspired by Frank Zappa – this has to be the most ineffectual Dracula on record (made even worse by his inexplicably resounding voice)!; on the other hand, the Frankenstein monster is saddled with such a (literally) squashed appearance – generally recalling Charles Ogle from the very first, i.e. 1910, adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel – that I kept expecting Naish (or someone) to inflate it to a presentable form! That said, the film contrives to dispatch its two horror stars well before the end (Naish’s is undoubtedly among the clumsiest ever devised) to make way for the ‘fireworks’ promised by the titular bout (which was too dark on the print I watched anyway!) – reportedly, this was only thought of late in the game and actually replaced the climax Adamson originally shot – but it only proved to be a dire conclusion to a pathetic film!! To add insult to injury, the recognizable tri-tonal Gill Man theme kept cropping up on the soundtrack all through this sequence.<br /><br />Unsurprisingly, the rest of the characters are even less engaging and only serve to raise the yawn factor: the heroine – who sets the plot in motion by going in search of her missing sister – is introduced while doing an idiotic vaudeville number in Vegas with two dubious hunks and, apparently, was the director’s own wife in real life; the cop on the case is played by a bewildered Jim Davis; helping the girl are a trio of hippies, and harassing the lot are a gang of bikers (led by a spaced-out Russ Tamblyn sporting a huge head of hair and whose scenes were seemingly intended for another film, a sequel to Satan’S SADISTS [1969] from the same director!); last, not least but decidedly the shortest is Angelo Rossitto, Hollywood’s perennial ‘little man’ of Horror, who’s also on hand as a carnival-barker for Naish’s “Creature Emporium”.