Film review: Dracula's Daughter (1936)

This one's in the box set of Universal Monster Movies we got a while back, and it's an oddity.  It begins basically the moment Dracula ends, with (buffoonish, comic-relief) British bobbies showing up to discover Renfield dead outside and Van Helsing over Dracula's staked corpse within.  They take both bodies away for safe-keeping and arrest Van Helsing.  Van Helsing is shipped off to headquarters, leaving the two bobbies to guard the coffins.  Then one of them goes to meet the representative of Scotland Yard who's coming on the train, and the remaining one is surprised by a strange woman whose face is hidden except for her eyes, who demands to see Dracula's body.  The bobby (who looks and acts like a cockney Nigel Bruce) tries to stop her but is hypnotized by her giant jeweled ring and the other cop and the Scotland Yard officer find him in a trance with the coffin missing.  Cut to out on the moors (or somewhere) and the strange woman is burning Dracula's body and throwing salt on it, in the belief that this will rid her of the curse she's under.  She returns home (to her house in London) and is happy, although her manservant, Sandor, seems determined to poor cold water on it.  She starts playing happy music on the piano to show that she is rid of the curse, but it very soon changes into ominous music, as Sandor is pleased to point out.  (This sequence is, frankly, silly.) And indeed it turns out that she is not free of the curse and is compelled to go out and hypnotize some poor man who is later found drained of blood and who dies on the operating table.  Meanwhile, however, Van Helsing has asked that his friend (and mentee) psychiatrist Jeffrey Garth be brought in as a witness to testify that he (Van Helsing) is not mad, which the chief of police frankly doubts, given all Van Helsing's vampire talk.  We are thus introduced to Garth and his independently-wealthy secretary Janet, who have a playfully antagonistic banter, as she comes to drag him back to London from a grouse hunt in Scotland.  When he returns, he is introduced to the mysterious Countess Zeleska, supposedly Hungarian nobility visiting London.  She, of course, is our vampire, but on hearing of Garth's profession, she wants to see if he can cure her.  She wants him to do it that night, but he can't, and she (of course) can't visit him during the day, so it's postponed... tragically for Zeleska's next victim, Lilli.  She is contemplating suicide on a foggy London bridge the next night when Sandor persuades her to come and "pose" for his artist mistress.  Cue very racy scenes of Lilli stripping to her undergarments and pushing her slip straps off her shoulders (the picture is a "study" of head and shoulders) as Zeleska moves in with a lascivious glint in her eye.  The sapphic undertones are just barely under (which is surprising given that 1936 is too late for pre-code).  Anyway, things come to a head: Garth starts to put two and two together (particularly after shocking poor Lilli awake and then hypnotizing her to get info about how she lost blood), Zeleska gives up on being cured (when she finds out that Garth's method involves hypnosis with mirrors) and hatches a new plan to lure Garth back to her castle in Transylvania and be converted into her eternal lover.  To effect this she kidnaps Janet and slips the country.  Garth follows and we have a showdown in the castle, with Sandor feeling betrayed because he thought he was going to be the eternal partner.  Wooden-shafted arrow replaces stake, and a rather moody adult Universal outing draws to a close.  Very little horror, rather downbeat (our "villain" is a tragic figure), and focused on imagining how we would really deal with vampires in our contemporary world.  Everyone's good in it and it zips along, but as I said, not very monster-y.  The bobbies were good comic relief, though.