Most Americans away from the West Coast only have a modest sense of Elvira® , Mistress of the Dark™ – from her appearances in an occasional Halloween beer commercial or her role in a pair of low-budget horror comedies, perhaps – but her longest running gig has been as the hostess of Elvira's Movie Macabre, a somewhat syndicated (though it's never aired anywhere near this writer) horror movie showcase featuring the busty actress making commercial-break quips about the cheapies on display.

This year, Shout Factory released three DVD sets of her show for Halloween, each featuring two movies. Of the offerings, the one that looked most promising to this cheesehead was the two-disc package featuring Count Dracula's Great Love and Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks. The first is a 1972 Spanish horror flick featuring South of the Border horror megastar Paul Naschy, while the second stars South Pacific lead Rossano Brazzi as "Count" Frankenstein in a '73 Italian bare breasts showcase. Guess which one I watched first?

Freaks is an engaging piece of nonsense centering around Frankenstein's experiments with the body of a Neanderthal man who has inexplicably been found roaming around the countryside. Holed up in his castle, the good doctor is assisted by a quartet of assistants – most notably Michael Dunn, playing the sinister dwarf Genz.

Every other one of Frankenstein’s assistants loathes Genz, for reasons that aren't entirely made clear, so when the group of 'em go out a-grave robbin' one night, major-domo Hans ("Alan Collins") makes sure that one of Genz's footprints is not erased in the dirt. This catches the keen eye of the investigating Prefect Ewing (a clearly slumming Edmund Purdom), who at one point brings a wax copy of the print to Castle Frankenstein to show to the Count. "The resemblance is perfect," Frankenstein sez, but by then Genz has already been kicked out of the castle to hook up with a second Neanderthal man named Ook (the movie's American distributors actually gave this Italian actor the name "Boris Lugosi"!) hiding in the caves nearby. There, Genz has been instructing Ook in the gentle art of kidnapping and raping village girls.