Grade: D+
Synopsis: After a nobleman’s murder, a professor (Lionel Barrymore) suspects a vampire (Bela Lugosi).
Mark of the Vampire is director Tod Browning’s disappointing remake of his silent feature London After Midnight (1927). Browning, who directed the classic Dracula (1931), had 20 minutes of footage cut by the studio after the film’s premier. Due to the box office failure of his previous effort, Freaks (1932), Browning couldn’t fight the cuts and thus we’re left with a film full of dangling plot points and gaping plot holes.
The biggest victim of these cuts appears to be Bela Lugosi, whose character of Count Mora spends the entire film with an unexplained bullet hole in his head. The original script explained that he’d had an incestuous relationship with his daughter, played by Carroll Borland, and committed suicide. That’s a whole lot of characterization tossed out the window, along with who knows what else.
Maybe those missing twenty minutes would have made film’s ending a bit easier to swallow. Maybe they would have distracted from the string-mounted bats and other cheesy special effects. Maybe they would have made the film make sense. But we’ll never know.
As it stands, Mark of the Vampire is a curiosity at best. Lugosi fans will likely find the re-teaming with Browning irresistible, and indeed, if you’re patient and forgiving enough, you can see there’s a lot of potential in the premise. Lugosi is good in his limited role, as is Carroll Borland, but Dracula, this isn’t, and anyone expecting anywhere near that level of excellent will be sorely disappointed.
