Crew
Director/Screenplay – Jose Prendes, Producer – David Michael Latt, Photography – Mark David, Music – Harry Manfredini, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Makeup Effects – Monique Paredes, Jake Porath & Eric Yoder, Production Design – Fabio Del Percio. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Michael Madsen (Dr Frankenstein), Ethan Daniel Corbett (Count Dracula), Emma Reinagel (Elisabeta Dracula), Erik Celso Mann (Boris), Adam Slemon (Ramses), Gabriel Pranter (Hawley Griffin), Kevin Hummel (Charles Conliff), Maddie Lane (Vivian), Anna DeRusso (Pia), Michelle Bauer (Browning), Bix Krieger (Mila Severin)
Plot
Count Dracula returns to find that his daughter Elisabeta has been abducted. She is imprisoned by Dr Frankenstein. In captivity, she forms a friendship with Frankenstein’s brutish monster Boris. Dracula discovers that Frankenstein has been using Boris to obtain parts from various other monsters – the mummy Ramses, the invisible man Hawley Griffin and the werewolf Charles Conliff. They combine forces to track down the whereabouts of Frankenstein and set out to rescue Elisabeta before Frankenstein combines their various parts to create one vast monster.
The Asylum is a low-budget production company that has been active since the early 2000s where they have put out a prolific output of films, ranging from their Mockbusters – films made with titles that resemble high-profile theatrical releases – along with a body of disaster and monster movies, in particular killer shark films with their ongoing Mega Shark and Multi-Headed Shark series and the B-movie hit of Sharknado (2013) and sequels.
Universal Studios had great popularity with their monster movies during the 1930s and 40s. In a search for novelty, they came up with the idea of a team-up between their in-house monsters with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). This proved sufficient success that they continued on through House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945) and then went for comedy with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). There have been numerous other such variations since from Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), The Monster Squad (1987), Van Helsing (2004) and the tv series Penny Dreadful (2014-6), and for comedic effect in the Mexican comedies Castle of the Monsters (1957) and Frankenstein, The Vampire and Co (1961), the children’s puppet film Mad Monster Party? (1967) and Hotel Transylvania (2012) and sequels, among others. See Crossovers.
Certainly, The Asylum had dabbled in individual movies about the monsters featured here before with Frankenstein Reborn (2005) and Dracula: The Original Living Vampire (2022), although this is unrelated to those. Monster Mash is also a far better film than the other attempts at crossover The Asylum conducted with the pitiful Avengers Grimm (2015) and sequels, which attempted to create a Marvel-like team-up between fairytale characters.
Most monster bashes since Abbott and Costello have been silly comedies or Halloween shows. The title here, clearly referencing Bobby Darin’s hit 1962 song, makes you think are in for another comedy treatment. Oddly enough, Monster Mash takes itself seriously and works. The film places the monsters in a plot and gives reasonable reasons for them to all come together and form a team united against a particular threat – I far enjoyed this more modest original than the ludicrously over-budgeted Van Helsing. The film also includes a Fright Break, a gimmick borrowed from William Castle and his promotion for Homicidal (1961).
The results are quite impressive. As Dracula, Ethan Daniel Corbett has a wonderfully icy detached presence – but also one that is allowed to thaw somewhat throughout. Director Jose Prendes gives us great shots of Corbett with scarlet red eyes or sitting in the inn with his pale face illuminated by a narrow band of light and surrounded by shadow. The one piece of casting that does not work at all is Michael Madsen as Dr Frankenstein. Madsen has been appearing in some real junk lately and is looking worse for wear – he now seems to be taking over the roles that usually went by the late Tom Sizemore in the last days of his career. Madsen looks less like a mad scientist and more like an aging Mafia thug playing macho, delivering all the dialogue in his characteristic raspy voice.
A slight sense of modernism turns up – The Invisible Man is written with a flip, cocky attitude and is the joker of the pack, while the mummy gets to talk far more than in all of the Universal films put together, along with jokes from the barmaid about using goat milk to soften his skin. For that matter, you reach the end of the film unclear as to whether it is meant as a contemporary film or a period piece. The film’s sense of place is all over the map – there is talk about Frankenstein’s castle left over from fighting the Turks (which places the film in Eastern Europe but no further west than Austria), while there is mention of Highgate Cemetery, which is an existing location in London. Other than that, Monster Mash is a charming delight.
Monster Mash was the eighth film directed by Jose Prendes. Prendes started out making several of his own low-budget genre films with the likes of The Monster Man (2001), Corpses Are Forever (2004), The Divine Tragedies (2015) and even Unspeakable Horrors: The Plan 9 Conspiracy (2016), a documentary about Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). He directed his first film for The Asylum with The Haunting of Whaley House (2012) and went on to make Headless Horseman (2022), The Exorcists (2023), Heretics (2024), Evil Nun (2025) and Morgan: Killer Doll (2025) for them. Prendes also has a number of credits as a screenwriter beginning with Song of the Vampire (2003) and The Asylum’s Countdown Jerusalem (2009), The Haunting of Winchester House (2009), The Terminators (2009), Hansel & Gretel (2013), Hansel vs. Gretel (2015), Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark (2015) and Housemaid (2026), as well as The Legend of La Llorona (2022) for other companies.
Trailer here