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Wednesday, October 17, 2007Devils of Darkness Release Year: 1965Country: England Starring: William Sylvester, Hubert Noel, Carole Gray, Tracy Reed, Diana Decker, Rona Anderson, Peter Illing. Written by Lyn Fairhurst. Writer: Lyn Fairhurst Director: Lance Comfort Cinematographer: Reg Wyer Producer: Tom Blakeley Music: Bernie Fenton Alternate Titles: Talisman Availability: Buy it from Amazon  .So let's say, just for the sake of argument, you're a vampire. Not one of those post-Anne Rice vampires with the leather trenchcoat and the bad poetry and the ill-advised appreciation of Pigface. No, I'm talking about one of those older, more distinguished vampires. Not too bad, huh? I mean, yeah, there are drawbacks. I, for one, would miss the sun and a good day's surfing. On the other hand, if you were to become any monster, a vampire would be pretty sweet. A mummy or Frankenstein monster would be the worst, of course. Mummies only have one outfit, and they have to spend the entire afterlife shambling around in pursuit of some dame who looks like some other dame the mummy loved back in ancient Egypt, and then a dude in a tweed jacket sets you on fire. And Frankenstein monsters have to do pretty much the same thing in terms of shambling, though at the very least they get to smoke cigars and drink wine. As for werewolves -- sure, cool power, but you have no control over it, it only happens once a month, you can't remember anything afterward, and your clothes are constantly getting ruined by your transformations. But vampires -- vampires are all right. Yeah, there's the sun thing. And you're going to have to put up with the occasional fat goth girl who calls herself Cassandra and wants to read you her Lestat fanfic. But luckily, when that happens, all you have to do is turn into a bat or some mist and get out of there. And like Keifer Sutherland, or maybe Wilford Brimley, said, you won't get any older and you won't ever die. Not unless someone kills you in one of the various ways a vampire can be killed -- but honestly, what are the chances of that? Have you seen the people who believe in vampires? They're not all Blade-y and full of kungfu fury. They're fat goth girls who call themselves Cassandra and want to read you their Lestat fanfic they wrote in their notebook with the Sisters of Mercy logo drawn on the cover. And what's the deal with all the kungfu fighting with vampires? Seriously, who fights a vampire with kungfu? All the vampire has to do is turn into some fog and wait it out while the vampire killer spin kicks himself into a state of exhaustion. Plus, you're like ten times stronger than a human anyway, so big deal with your kungfu.
So let's say you are a vampire who has survived through the ages. Also, your name is Sinistre. That would be a pretty cool name, at least until you realize that a vampire might have trouble being named Sinistre, because it's the kind of name that sticks out. You might as well be called Spooky McGhoul or Gregor O'Bloodsucker. I think if I was a vampire named Count Sinistre, no matter how cool that would look in album liner notes, I'd probably change my name to Steve Smith or Mike McGill in order to maybe not stand out as much and attract the attention of Cassandra. But that's neither here nor there, and I've been over the territory of fruity vampire names before (hint for all vampires: no one is named Tristan anymore except for porn stars). You're a vampire, and your name is Count Sinistre. Pretty cool, right? But no, you're not satisfied with just being a vampire named Sinistre with all your vampire named Sinistre powers like flying and commanding the will of rats. Like a greedy corporate raider, you want more, more, more. And so you also appoint yourself the head of a Satanic cult comprised largely of mod young hipsters and sophisticated older folks who, when they aren't busy gadding about in bright red devil cloaks, like to talk about antiques and collectibles, sort of like if The Monkees, Anton LaVey, and Antiques Roadshow all got in a car wreck. But such is the ambition of Count Sinistre, menacing vampire leader of the Satanic cult in Devils of Darkness, a previously forgotten horror film in the vein of AIP's Poe films or Hammer fare like The Devil Rides Out. Devils of Darkness pits our sinister Sinistre against -- well, basically, it pits him against a dad from some early 60s sitcom in a veritable whirlwind of opera capes and devil cloaks versus cardigan sweaters and well-pressed slacks. This is the sort of movie where square-jawed everymen sit on couches with their legs crossed and stare intently at their cigarettes while saying things like, "Vampires? But this is the 20th century!" and everyone seems to know a guy who happens to be a professor of the occult. You know, I went to college, and all I learned about was physics and John Adams and whatever the hell it was I didn't pay attention to in that macroeconomics class everyone was required to take to get into the school of journalism. As far as I know, there were no professors whose entire tenure at the university involved them sitting around giving speeches about Pazuzu and magick circles, but maybe I just didn't take the proper classes. Or maybe by going to a public university in America, all I got to learn about was the coefficient of friction and the tragedy of the commons while guys at upper-crust British colleges got to learn about wizards and Ouija boards and how to set rampaging mummies on fire.
Lucky for me that I love movies where guys in sweaters sit around in well-appointed dens, smoking cigarettes and saying, "But you can't entirely discount the stories of vampires" as they drink brandy or some other beverage only Peter Cushing drinks. Lucky for me that I love movies where people put on bright red devil cloaks and hang around in old basements, drawing circles on the floor and lying out scantily clad kidnapped women on stone altars. Devils of Darkness is exactly the kind of fun, old fashioned horror film that makes me happy, so I was pretty happy watching it. William Sylvester stars as the aptly named Paul Baxter -- these guys always have exactly the sort of name you expect them to have -- on vacation with friends and loved ones in some remote part of France where gypsies frolic and dance and emerge from the shadows to point at you and administer ominous proclamations regarding your fate. You know -- the usual gypsy stuff. It turns out that this quaint little vacation village is lorded over by the sinister Count Sinistre, played with Udo Kier-like effete weirdness by Hubert Noel. The exact nature of the seemingly benign Sinistre is called into question when all of Paul's friends start vanishing or turning up dead. Unfortunately, the local police are no help, and when Paul attempts to have the bodies returned to England for examination, all the coffins go missing. Luckily, while all the French are busy being hypnotized and submitting to the will of Sinistre, Paul and some other guys in England are on the case. But then, so is Sinistre, who trails Paul to England to retrieve a talisman and set up a new cult with acolytes culled from the bored and decadent fringes of wealthy society. When Paul falls for an aloof model, Sinistre targets her to become his next bride, something vampires are always doing. How many times did Dracula try to seduce the daughter or granddaughter of some rival? These guys would die a lot less often if they could lay off trying to marry the daughter or girlfriend of their arch enemies. If you like the old style horror of Roger Corman's Poe films, or if you like what I'll call the Hammer B-Team (meaning, not Dracula or Frankenstein) movies from the 60s, then I think Devils of Darkness will please you. It's brightly colored, especially when everyone throws on their devil cloaks, solidly lensed, and ably acted by a cast of B-movie stalwarts who never turn in anything less than a professional performance. William Sylvester is a bit stiff as Paul, but since Paul is a bit of a stiff, that suits him well. Sylvester was a veteran television actor with some notable appearances in a couple B-movie faves, including Devil Doll and Gorgo. His role with the highest profile was probably as Dr. Heywood Floyd, creator of HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, though honestly, who remembers any of the human characters besides Dave from that movie? As the straight man fighting the occult and going to the library to look up ghoulish subject matter, he's all right.
The star of the film is the villain, of course, and as Sinistre he's perfectly creepy and menacing even though he doesn't have the sort of build one would consider menacing. Hubert Noel. Noel was an accomplished actor in France with appearances in a ton of films, often period pieces, that I've never seen but would like to, because they all seem to be full of cavaliers and highwaymen. Like many continental actors tapped to play vaguely menacing, vaguely effeminate villains, the strength of their native career doesn't really translate into international stardom, unless you count the apt appearance of Noel as "Citroen Driver" in an episode of CHiPs. Still, as Sinistre, he's pretty great, and he's convincing as a guy who could work some magic on ladies, especially when he backs it up with his vampiric mojo. The female spotlight is on two actresses: Tracy Reed plays Karin, the model for whom Paul falls, and Carole Gray plays Tania, the gypsy woman who was Sinistre previous main squeeze until Tania came along. Karin barely registers, as she shows up, wears some sunglasses, then spends the bulk of the film lying in a bed or sitting listlessly in a trance. But Carole Gray's gypsy Tania is a fireball of beauty and rage, introduced to us via one of those colorful gypsy dance numbers that are always happening. She didn't have much a career -- a couple appearances here and there on television shows like The Avengers and The Saint, a role in Brides of Fu Manchu -- and I can't understand why, because she's quite engaging in her role here as the vampire woman scorned.
The rest of the cast is comprised largely of people who have to chant about Satan and wear devil cloaks, or make speeches about the possibility or improbability of vampires in modern society. The basic philosophy is summed up by Paul Baxter's professor friend, played ably by Eddie Byrne (The Mummy, Hammer version). As he explains, there were trials for witchcraft up until the 1920s, and in many places, belief in the supernatural remains the mainstream rather than a fringe belief as it would be in modern London. Vampire movies that attempt to transport a basically Victorian character into modern times have to tackle the "unstuck in time" aspect of their character in a variety of ways. Dracula A.D. 1972 does it by confining Dracula to a single location, which happens to be Gothic in design. Satanic Rites of Dracula does it by dropping pretty much everything that made Dracula Dracula and turning him into a pulp novel style super-villain straight out a James Bond movie. Devils of Darkness takes the same route as the American Count Yorga films, allowing Sinistre to operate first in a somewhat small (though by no means remote) village where he can exercise his will over the locals and leverage the innate superstition of the local gypsy population. When he comes to London, he survives by moving in relatively small circles on the fringe of polite society -- rich decadent freaks, the kind I want to be friends with so I can sit around in posh dens, smoking hookahs and debating philosophy and the supernatural in a bored tone as a naked girl covered in body paint flowers dances on a table in front of me. I have failed at so many of my former life goals.
Sinistre covers his vampire tracks, more or less, by becoming a member of a social circle that values odd behavior and late nights. Anything out of the ordinary he may say or do is casually disregarded (yes, this means that those vampires who hang out in industrial clubs are a logical evolution of guys like Sinistre, but there's still no excuse for their woe-is-me self-ildulgences). He is an artist, after all, and an eastern European. He further controls his environment and expands the power of his influence by tightly controlling where he is seen and by whom. He hangs round an antique store, goes to parties at the pad above the store, and holds his Satanic rituals in an old, remote farmhouse near a cemetery. By and large, he has adapted well to his surroundings -- it is unclear whether he has been around for hundreds of years, changing with the times, or whether he has recently been resurrected by some ritual that involves, frankly, little more than the lighting of a candle that causes his stone sarcophagus to collapse, presumably on Sinistre's face. What parts of modern society to which he has not been able to adapt he has keenly excised from his life. Once again, you find a similar evolution of the vampire in Count Yorga, who hangs around a remote farmhouse and befriends people who are already flaky and into the occult.
As with many B-movies, there are points at which you can poke around and find some flaws in the film. In particular, the script by Lyn Fairhurst places an undue amount of importance on Sinistre's talisman. It is pegged as the source of the vampire's influence over others, so valuable to Sinistre that he would risk coming all the way to London and exposing himself on order to retrieve it. And yet, the loss of the talisman doesn't seem to have any impact whatsoever on his power. He still manages to hypnotize and convert a whole room full of revelers in a remarkably short period of time, and once he fixates on Karin, he forgets the talisman almost completely. I think he just thought it was cool and was afraid Paul would pull some nonsense like putting it on a thick gold chain and wearing it around. And as is often the case, everyone from Paul to the police are pretty quick to shrug their shoulders and go, "Yep, must be a Satanic cult lead by a vampire." Additionally, Baxter and Sinistre never really go toe-to-toe. There is no battle of wits or battle of fists, and when the final showdown does come Sinistre is quick to turn and run. Dracula usually turned and ran, too, but he would hiss while he was doing it, and usually take at least a little time out to throw Peter Cushing across a table. But all in all, I think the story for Devils of Darkness is well written and executed. It could be simply because I like movies of this sort, but even though much of the film is research and guys sitting around, smoking cigarettes, and talking about vampires, I didn't feel the movie dragged. The tight direction by Lance Comfort (sounds like a character from a romance novel, the less threatening cousin of Rock Slabchest) adds to the feeling that something is happening even when very little is. There is almost no on-screen violence and very little blood, but Comfort's eye for composition is great, and he creates an otherworldly atmosphere that carries the otherwise dialog-heavy film. Additionally, though this was a low-budget affair, Comfort had access to Pinewood Studio's massive pile of old sets, and so he could pilfer the goods from much more expensive films to dress him own modest production in much fancier duds than it might otherwise have had access to.
Although the main villain is a vampire, this is much more like Hammer's The Devil Rides Out than it is any vampire film. Sinistre feels similar to Charles Gray's ominous Mocata than he does Dracula. He's sort of like a dry run for Mocata. Not nearly as imposing but still ominous enough despite his slight build. William Sylvester's Baxter is certainly no Duc de Richleau, but then Duc de Richleau was one of Christopher Lee's best roles. It's also very similar to AIP's color horror output, both in look and execution. Corman's Poe films were always heavy on dialog and atmosphere, and the juxtaposition of bleak, decaying sets with vivid colors. Like the Poe films, Devils of Darkness moves slowly until the enthusiastic finale when all hell -- literally, more or less -- breaks loose. Ultimately, it may be a lesser devil cult film, but it was one of the earlier "vampire in post-war times" movies, and one of the only "vampire leads a Satanic cult" movies. It may far short of the mark set by two of the best examples of occult thriller's -- Hammer's The Devil Rides Out and Jacques Tournier's Night of the Demon (which I would assume was a major influence on Devils of Darkness), but I still think Devils of Darkness, especially if you like the AIP Poe films or don't mind lots of dialog, is a good old-fashioned occult thriller that winds up being a great way to spend midnight, provided you don't have any decadent rich parties that devolve into an orgiastic ritual lorded over by a vampire to attend at midnight. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Satan, Horror: Vampires, Year: 1965 posted by Keith at 3:06 PM | 5 Comments Thursday, October 11, 2007Satanic Rites of Dracula
1974, England. DIGG THIS ARTICLE. Starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Coles, Joanna Lumley, William Franklyn, Freddie Jones, Richard Vernon, Barbara Yu Ling, Patrick Barr, Richard Mathews. Written by Don Houghton. Directed by Alan Gibson. Buy it from Amazon
 .What a long, strange trip it's been for Hammer Studio's lord of the undead, the prince of darkness, the king of vampires, Count Dracula. When first we met him back in 1958, he was a snarling beast, a barely contained force of nature that ripped into his prey with lusty abandon and was explained by his arch-nemesis Dr. Van Helsing in purely rational, scientific terms. Dracula, and vampirism in general (as expounded upon by Van Helsing in Brides of Dracula), was nothing more than a disease, like any other disease, and what we regarded as "supernatural" was really nothing more than an explainable part of the rational world that humanity had simply not yet learned how to explain. As Hammer's Dracula series progressed, however, Van Helsing faded from the picture and was replaced by a procession of forgettable guys named Paul, usually in league with some sort of religious authority figure. In Dracula, Prince of Darkness, we have a monsignor who seems to have some degree of faith in faith's ability to defeat Dracula, but he's far more reliant on his trusty bolt-action rifle than he is on the Lord Almighty. With the next film after that, however, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Van Helsing's assertion that Dracula could be defeated by reason and science was beginning to fade. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is a transitional film, one in which an atheist who would seem to share Van Helsing's belief that vampirism is a virus and not a function of the supernatural, begins to doubt his faith in science just as he begins to doubt his doubt of Christianity. When Dracula is felled by a bolt of lightning, we are left to wonder: is this science -- a metal lightning rod, an explainable weather phenomenon -- or an act of God -- lightning strikes being the most common weather-related act of God, after the rain of frogs. After that film, however, there is no doubt as to Dracula's nature. In Taste the Blood of Dracula, he is recast as a satanic demon, summoned by black mass rituals. This trend of "religionizing" Dracula continued in Dracula AD 1972 despite the return of a Van Helsing to the scene. Where as the Lawrence Van Helsing of Horror of Dracula and Brides of Dracula regarded vampirism as a scientific issue, his descendant Lorimar Van Helsing sees it as a mystical issue of the occult, like witchcraft or devil worship. Dracula is once again summoned by occult rituals (not to mention Caroline Munro's half-clothed writhing), and where you might think that placing the Victorian vampire in a modern setting alongside a modern Van Helsing, would prove an opportunity to revive the concept of Dracula as scientific problem and biological oddity, it never really happens. I think there is one token utterance of, "Vampires? But surely you must be joking, man! This is the 20th century!" but that is quickly dismissed as everyone from Van Helsing to the police are quick to accept the supernatural and rattle on endlessly about the occult. At this point, Dracula is less a vampire and more a full-fledged demon, perhaps even the embodiment of Satan himself.
One would assume, then, that with a title like The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the sequel would follow in the footsteps of turning Dracula into a religious anti-icon. But then, honestly, what more can be done to make him Lucifer incarnate than having him summoned by rituals and pentagrams and strange runes? Are they going to make him don a silky red Danskin and gad about with a pitchfork? Dracula AD 1972 was already a rehash of Taste the Blood of Dracula, and while Hammer's Dracula films have never shied away from rehash, it seemed like the evolution of the count was complete. What was left to do? The correct answer is, "Nothing." Just don't make another Dracula film. Make Christopher Lee happy, and just lower the curtain on the series. It had a good run. A few missteps here and there, sure, but all in all, Hammer's Dracula films were a pretty solid lot, even at their worst. Dracula AD 1972 had been a somewhat desperate attempt to modernize the franchise, and it was met with mixed reactions, at best. So just let the sleeping corpse lie, this time. Christopher Lee was already printing up his leaflets to be dropped from a plane over London, explaining to any who found them that he was never going to play Dracula again, ever. Save the guy some effort, people said, and maybe he'll start talking about something else besides how everyone just talks to him about Dracula, instead of mentioning some of his other classic work, like Circus of Fear. Come on -- Chris Lee and Klaus Kinski? That's a power duo, my friends. But Hammer had nowhere else to go. They couldn't get new stars or new franchises launched. The entire British film industry was in a tailspin, and Hammer was even worse off than most. Not knowing what else to do, they commissioned Dracula AD 1972 writer Don Houghton and director Alan Gibson to make yet another Dracula movie, causing Christopher Lee's eyes to turn blood red as he launched into a furious string of interviews about how awful the Dracula movies were and he sure as hell wouldn't...look, seriously. By this point, you know how this ends, right?
So with "nowhere" no longer being a viable answer to the question of where Dracula goes from AD 1972, what would Houghton do? Could they serve up the same old, same old one more time and get away with it? Unlikely. In fact, it was unlikely they could get away with anything they served up. Dracula was DOA at the box office no matter what they did. This last movie was just going to be a post-mortem nervous twitch. So what the hell? Why not bring the whole thing to its oddly logical extreme, the only place left for Dracula to go? And so, despite the occult title meant no doubt to cash in on the sudden popularity of devil worshiper films (working titles for the film included Dracula and his Vampire Brides and Dracula is Dead and Well and Living in London), Satanic Rites of Dracula takes the persistently undead vampire from satanic bogeyman and propels him into the realm of the James Bond villain or, perhaps more appropriately given the quality of the final film and the return of Christopher Lee to the role of Dracula, Fu Manchu. No longer is Dracula a savage beast. No longer is he a biological mutation. No longer is he a ghoul lurking in the overgrown corners of shadowy gothic buildings. No longer is he a demon. With Satanic Rites of Dracula, he becomes a super-villain, complete with a secret lair, henchmen, kidnapped scientists, and dreams of global conquest. That the film really does contain satanic rites is superficial. This movie begins, like Dracula A.D. 1972, with the action already in progress. A determined Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, once again) chases the murderous vampire Count Dracula into a swanky London nightclub jammed wall to wall with zoned-out teens dancing to some nondescript psych-funk like you were wont to find in films from the 1970s that couldn't afford to license songs from established artists. In an attempt to blend in with the youthful revelers and shake his pursuer, Dracula dons a big, bulbous pair of sunglasses and a paisley print cap. Finding himself hemmed in by the revelers, Van Helsing discovers that the only possibility he has of making his way across the dance floor to Dracula is by dancing his way across. And so we get the now immortal scene of Peter Cushing, still dressed more or less like a guy from the Victorian era even though this is the 1970s, doing the Watusi across the crowded nightclub, while dazed ravers look on in admiration and even begin mimicking Cushing's spastic moves.
OK, maybe not, That is not a scene from The Satanic Rites of Dracula. It's actually from a different movie, called Dracula Goes Mad in Chelsea, but since prints of that movie are almost impossible to find, we won't speak any more about it (even Christopher Lee himself has admitted to be unable to find a copy on any format for his personal library). However, given the unintentional camp value of Hammer's Dracula A.D. 1972, one could half expect that, when Hammer announced a sequel film also set in the 1970s, we would get scenes as corny as Dracula in mod sunglasses and an exasperated Peter Cushing doing the mashed potato with some cute young chick as he tries to explain the importance of leaving the dance floor to continue his pursuit of his arch-nemesis. When it was further announced that the writing-directing team of Don Houghton and Alan Gibson would be returning for the sequel, such scenes seemed almost inevitable. It was not the case, however, leaving the scenes of Van Helsing cutting the rug and Dracula smoking a bong to appear in the obscure Dracula Goes Mad in Chelsea, which some people refer to mistakenly though not inappropriately as Dracula Goes Mod in Chelsea. No, this film actually begins with a satanic rite, some gratuitous nudity to let us know this is the 1970s, and then an action sequence in which some guy who looks like a cross between Burt Reynolds and Saddam Hussein escapes from a building guarded by bikers with droopy Louis Tiant mustaches and sheepskin vests. They totally look like something out of Marvel's Tomb of Dracula comic book, and in fact much of what happens in this movie seems far more at home in the pages of Tomb of Dracula than it does in a Hammer Dracula movie -- which I guess is the trick. When you keep making Hammer vampire movies, everyone complains about it being just another stodgy old Hammer vampire film. When you switch it up and do something new, everyone complains that it's not enough like a stodgy old Hammer vampire film. Although my initial assumption was that this escaping guy was some horrific experiment concocted by Dracula (possibly with the help of Frankenstein) to combine the iron will and ruthlessness of Saddam with the down home sex appeal and amusing laugh of Burt Reynolds, thus creating the ultimate world conqueror (sort of like Serpentor, but with a big mustache). It turns out that this guy is actually an undercover agent sent in to investigate the mysterious Pelham House rituals, which seem to include a group of the richest, most powerful men in England. The problem is that the head of the group investigating Pelham House also happens to be one of the guys attending the Pelham House rites, thus making an official investigation impossible. So they call in Inspector Murray from the last film, reprised by Michael Coles. Coles, in turn, hears the agent's crazy ranting about rituals and blood sacrifice and devil cloaks and immediately places a call to Van Helsing, played once again by Peter Cushing, who smokes his cigarettes with more intensity than ever. Cushing sure knew how to smoke a cigarette on screen, but he didn't just smoke a cigarette; he smoked the hell out of a cigarette, with lots of clenching and staring at it in quiet contemplation. I think the biggest problem with Star Wars is that they didn't let Peter Cushing smoke on the Death Star. Honestly, you could make a whole movie of nothing but Peter Cushing smoking cigarettes and flipping through books and peering through a magnifying glass, and I'd probably think it was pretty good since he did those things with such conviction and more gusto than most actors would put into an action scene.
While Van Helsing investigates an old colleague who is among the Pelham House acolytes, Murray and Jessica Van Helsing (being played this movie by Joanna Lumley of New Avengers and Absolutely Fabulous fame) go to investigate Pelham House itself. Van Helsing discovers that his old friend has created a super-plague for someone at Pelham House. Murray discovers that the basement of Pelham House is full of half naked vampire chicks. Jessica screams. And of course, we eventually discover that the shadowy billionaire recluse behind the Pelham House plot is Dracula! It seems that even Dracula is getting tired of being revived and has decided that the only way he can end his existence is to end all life on earth. That way he will have no one feed on, and he won't have to worry about cocky mods or Chinese women summoning back up through goofy rituals. Dracula has used his powers of persuasion to control the aforementioned most powerful men in England, and he intends to use them to spread the plague throughout the world and finally put an end to everything. But despite his Fu Manchu aspirations and new corporate benevolent society, Dracula can't entirely let go of the past. Pelham House is an uncomfortable mix of 70s sci-fi stuff and Victorian frilliness, and he still wants to piss off Van Helsing by turning Jessica into Dracula's vampire bride. At least Dracula's final solution is a super-virulent strain of bubonic plague. As far as super-villain super-weapons go, that's a pretty good one. Plus, it's a vampire distributing the plague, and not just some bald guy in a fancy jacket, as is usually the case. It's much better than if Dracula had scheduled a meeting with Van Helsing at the office (which does happen, by the way) and unveiled a new super laser that can blow airliners out of the sky! But still, all this plague talk is far, far away from the expected Dracula territory. He surrounds himself with the trappings of previous Dracula hobbies: the vampire brides in the basement, for example, and floral print wallpaper of questionable tastefulness, but his heart hardly seems in it this time. And yeah, he throws the cape on and appears in backlit mist to scare someone, but he doesn't stick with it throughout the movie. Even his plan to irk Van Helsing by marrying Jessica seems more like something he feels like he has to do than something he wants to do. Just another item on his corporate CEO to-do list.
In a way, I suppose this plays in with the plot of the movie, that Dracula is sick of it all, maybe even sicker of it all than audiences watching his movies, and despite Van Helsing's best efforts, people just keep bringing Dracula back. His resurrection in Satanic Rites of Dracula takes place well before the film begins, but one can almost assume that when it happened, Dracula looked at himself and just thought, "Seriously? I mean, seriously?" There are almost as many ways to bring this guy back as there are to kill him in the first place, and Dracula seems positively suicidal this time around, scattering his house with bits of old wood and such. But ultimately, he knows a stake in the heart will probably just kill him for a little while, so all of mankind must be destroyed so the lord of the dead can get some fucking sleep. Even the final showdown between Van Helsing and Dracula seems suicidal. Dracula is lured into some Hawthorne bushes, which being the thorns that were used to make Christ's crown of thorns, are deadly to a vampire. And Dracula gets caught in the bush basically because Van Helsing stands on the other side and yells, "Hey, come get me!" Surely Dracula knows about the bush. I mean, Van Helsing knows all sorts of ways to kill Dracula, so you'd think that Dracula himself would have researched the subject, although I will admit that every time he dies in a new way, he seems surprised, sort of like, "Are you kidding me? This, too? I can be killed by this, too?" Whatever the case, Dracula plunged headlong into the thorns, which is something most people wouldn't do even if they weren't' prone to turning into a time-lapsed decaying corpse as a result. Despite the fact that Satanic Rites of Dracula was written and directed by the same crew and has largely the same cast of adults, it bears little resemblance to AD 1972 or any of the previous Dracula films. Not just because of the Fu Manchu plot, but also because it entirely eschews the colorful nature of past films and opts instead for an oppressively bleak atmosphere populated by washed out skies, overcast days, and tired looking men in drab flared suits. Like Dracula, like the audience, everyone just seems worn out. Not that they aren't game for another go-round, mind you. This is a solid British cast, after all, and no one is going to do anything but their best. Cushing is as he always is; Lee is the same; Michael Coles is a welcome familiar face from the last film, someone to whom we can relate, and while Joanna Lumley is fine as Jessica, she really has little to do beyond scream and warn people about vampires too late. So I guess it's not so much a tiredness as it is a...let's say world-weariness. I don't want to read more into the film than there is, but it really does give off a sense of the meta, that the threadbare worn-out nature of the series is reflected in the characters.
As a Dracula film, I can't call it a success. Dracula has always been a supporting player his own movies, but here he's less like Dracula than ever before, taking on instead the role of Howard Hughes meets Blofeld (or, alternately, Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever). As a whacked out sort of spy film, it almost works. It's a bit too boring and far too serious to really capture the spirit of that genre, though. Instead, we have a beast that is neither fish nor foul, and not very good at doing much of anything. There are embers of a good movie here, meaning that I can't entirely dismiss it, but you have to blow on those embers pretty furiously to generate any sort of warmth. The initial idea, that of turning Dracula into a tired man whose sole final option is to destroy everything in order to destroy himself, is worth exploring, but where Don Houghton come sup with a great premise, he can't really deliver a great script. It plods along, and there are even more holes and contrivances than usual. I feel like, had this movie been written by someone like Brian Clemens (who wrote Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, and because of his experience working on The Avengers, would have been more at home with the loopier aspect of Dracula-as-Blofeld), it would have had a much better chance for success. At the very least, had it been a bit less heavy-handed and plodding, it could have gotten by on the quirkiness of the premise, maybe even been something like Scream and Scream Again, a film (featuring Lee and Cushing, no less) that mixes espionage thrills, science fiction, horror, and general weirdness far better than Satanic Rites of Dracula. Instead, Houghton's no-nonsense but not well written script doesn't do the high concept justice. If there is a highlight to the film, other than Peter Cushing's emphatic smoking of cigarettes, it's the theme song and ensuing score, which have far more life in them than the movie itself. Following the lead of Dracula AD 1972, John Cacavas contributes a theme song that is even cooler and funkier than the last one. It deserves to be played over a scene where Dracula -- still in his cape and black suit, of course -- fights a gang of drug dealers in slow motion a la Superfly. The rest of the score is variations on this theme, and it's pretty good stuff. Cacavas also wrote the score for Horror Express, one of my very favorite horror-meets-scifi films, also starring Cushing and Lee and released around the same time as Satanic Rites of Dracula, which could have really used Telly Savalas in a big Cossack coat swaggering onscreen and punching out those dudes in the sheepskin vests. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Satanic Rites of Dracula is that it lacks a sense of finality. Given the plot, given Dracula's admittedly effective monologue about wanting to die and watch the whole world burn with him, the final act is sorely lacking. When the end comes, it's pretty much a blase, "Oh, so it's a Hawthorne bush this time then, is it?" It's no different than any of Dracula's other many deaths. I don't expect that Dracula would be allowed to succeed in some way with his mad scheme -- though that sort of cynical conclusion wouldn't have been out of step at all with the current trend in horror films, where the bad guys very often won -- but after all the apocalyptic talk, after the world-weary feeling permeating the film, at the very least what I wanted from the end was something that said, once and for all, it really was over this time. As it stands, Satanic Rites of Dracula ends in a way where Dracula could be getting resurrected yet again a week later, same as always.
For Lee, this really was the end, but it's hard to claim he finally made good on his boasts. More than likely, had Hammer made another Dracula film, he would have shown up, under protest no doubt but present never the less. Instead, Hammer went out of business after allowing Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1974 and To the Devil...A Daughter in 1976 to effectively kill the company off. Like Dracula, they deserved better at the end, but if they'd had better, it probably wouldn't have been the end, so what can you do? Cushing reprised the role of Van Helsing one more time, returning to the Victorian era but this time to China for the completely nonsensical but still fun Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. That film does feature Dracula, but since he transforms into a Chinese guy at the beginning of the film, and since the film itself doesn't really jibe with the continuity of the previous film, it's not really part of the Dracula series and instead plays out like an alternate universe take, similar to The Evil of Frankenstein. Both Cushing and Lee would go on to make much better horror films than this one, as well as few that were much worse. It's not a great way to end a series that gave us so many wonderful films. With the relatively poor performance of Dracula AD 1972 at the box office, distributors suddenly weren't interested in Satanic Rites of Dracula. It took years before it found its way to American screens. Where as a Dracula film starring Cushing and Lee would have been a simple sell even a few years earlier, by 1974 it was all over, and the quality of Satanic Rites of Dracula is a perfect example of why. It's too bad the series couldn't muster a better send-off, because while the concept isn't bad and the idea was good, the final execution simply lacked the sophistication, energy, and magic that the film deserved. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1974 posted by Keith at 3:38 PM | 19 Comments Monday, October 08, 2007Dracula A.D. 1972
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1972, England. Starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame, Caroline Munro, Marhsa Hunt, Michael Coles. Written by Don Houghton. Directed by Alan Gibson. Buy it from Amazon
 .And so we enter the dire straights of Hammer Films in the final throes of a long, drawn-out death much like those experienced by Dracula himself. As has been detailed elsewhere and will be summarized here, by the 1970s, England's Hammer Studios -- the studio that pretty much defined and dominated the horror market through the 50s and 60s -- had fallen on hard times. The old guard had largely retired or died, and the new blood was flailing about, desperately trying to find the direction that would right the once mighty production house. The problem was that everyone felt like they needed to update their image, but no one actually knew how. In retrospect, though they may have seemed painfully antiquated at the time of their release, many of Hammer's releases during the 70s were quite good and often experimental (by Hammer standards, anyway). This movie isn't really one of them, but it's still pretty enjoyable in a completely ludicrous way. Unfortunately, even Hammer's good films in the 1970s simply weren't in step with contemporary trends in horror films. No one wanted to see a gothic horror anymore, not in this new era of slasher movies and stuff where devil worshipers listlessly chant about Satan and then hassle Warren Oates and Hot Lips Houlihan.
Hammer tried to launch several new properties that were variations on their old themes, and several of these showed considerable promise. Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter was a spectacular horror-adventure film that mixed classic Hammer atmosphere with a more playful, swashbuckling tone. Although Twins of Evil is best remembered for the prominent assets of its two Playboy Playmate co-stars, underneath the cheesecake nudity is another very good film. And Vampire Circus was one of Hammer's most experimental vampire films, integrating a hallucinogenic, dreamlike state into Hammer's formerly all-business approach. But these films either didn't perform well at the box office, or studio executives didn't have any faith in them. In the end, Hammer decided to return to the same-old, same-old, and audiences got new Dracula, Frankenstein, and mummy movies. With each of these, Hammer tried something different. The mummy movie, 1971's Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, was adapted from a Bram Stoker novel and deals with a mummy's curse but contains no actual mummies. 1974's Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell was roundly lambasted for its ridiculous monster make-up (a hairy caveman design featuring a face mask where the lips don't move when the actor talks), but if one can get past that, it's an exceptionally well thought-out final entry for the series, completing Baron Frankenstein's journey from slightly cold man of science on the verge of a miraculous breakthrough to completely disconnected butcher engaged in pointless, crude retreads of his old experiments. And then there was Dracula. Hammer's Dracula series started out with a promising entry, 1970's Taste the Blood of Dracula. The original idea behind that movie had been to, as with Brides of Dracula so many years before, make movie in which Dracula is an ever-present force and invoked name but not an actual on-screen character. Distributors balked at the idea of a Dracula-free Dracula movie, especially when there was no name star onto which they could hook their wagon as an alternate. Brides may not have featured Christopher Lee as Dracula, but at least it had Peter Cushing reprising his role as Van Helsing. Taste the Blood, on the other hand, revolves around young Ralph Bates, an actor Hammer had hopes of turning into their next big thing, though it never really happened. And so Hammer somehow convinced Christopher Lee to sign on yet again for one absolutely final appearance as the count. The result is a great entry in the Dracula series, and sensing that there was still some gas left in the tank, Hammer decided to give it another go. Scars of Dracula is a pretty bad movie, a major step backward after a good movie, showcasing Hammer filmmaking at its most profit driven, but it also stands out as the only film where Dracula is a major character, with lots of screentime and lines. It was enough to do the trick at the box office, and so to the well once again -- but this time, Dracula was gonna get funky!
In 1970, American International Pictures -- a studio that built a franchise of horror films based loosely on the writing of Edgar Allen Poe by copying Hammer's gothic horror films -- released a movie called Count Yorga, Vampire. It was an attempt by AIP to transfer the feel of their gothic Poe films into a modern setting, and a vampire -- given its longevity provided it can stay away from Peter Cushing -- was the perfect creature for the experiment. You could still deck his pad out in all sorts of frilly Victorian hoo ha, but you had a reasonable explanation for why he was still hanging around in 1970, listening to his old Edison Cylindrical Phonograph device and complaining about how modern music was crappy and modern fashion was ridiculous. Count Yorga also had the good sense to turn poke subtle fun at the idea of this out-of-touch Victorian style character dropped wholesale and unchanged into what was then modern time, as if the intervening hundred years or so hadn't caused the vampire to change in the slightest. But what do I know. I'm writing this review win 2007, and I'm listening to the same music I listened to in 1987. What's another eighty years? Yorga, no doubt with some help from Hammer's early 70s vampire output, sparked a bit of a vampire revival that really came to a boil in 1972. Marvel Comics released their outlandishly ridiculous but imminently enjoyable Tomb of Dracula comic book, in which modern-day descendants of Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and Dracula himself team up to battle a revived Count who would explain his entire life history every time he got a word bubble to himself. Only Doctor Strange showcased the potential to ramble on and spew as much purple prose. The comic book was a whirlwind of bell bottoms, tweed blazers, and jumpers, not to mention vampire hunter Blade's bizarre combo of lab goggles, a raincoat, and some swashbuckler boots. When they updated him for the movies, it's a shame they didn't keep the original outfit and afro. And if Dracula's flowery long-windedness, punctuated as it often was by the phrase, "Foolish humans!" and "I, Dracula..." was a little much to swallow, wait until you get a load of Blade running around calling the count a jive turkey and "baby."
In the same year, AIP released Blacula, a blaxploitation twist on the Count Yorga theme which, despite the jokey title, turned out to be a remarkably good and thoughtful film that managed to deliver vampire thrills and make comments on race relations, ghettos, and drug abuse without it coming across as overly heavy-handed. Plus the character of Mamuwalde (Blacula, to you) was an exceptionally complex villain/hero inhabited by a great actor in William Marshall. Once again, a movie got to play with the idea of a Victorian era character revived in the modern era -- with plenty of light jokes about fashion. Lucky for the vampires, the early 70s were such a jumbled mish-mash of outrageous fashion trends that even a guy running around in a vest and opera cape didn't really stand out, though he could often be mistaken for a pimp. In a classic example of "student becomes the master" flip-flopping, Hammer looked to AIP for inspiration and released their own "vampire in modern times" movie in 1972. The idea was hatched that Hammer, too, should make a modern day vampire tale, one that would easily lend itself to integrating modern settings with classic the Hammer gothic trappings. And since Hammer already had Count Dracula hanging around in the shadows, he was the most obvious choice. Of course, there remained one problem: Christopher Lee was absolutely, positively, entirely unwilling to do another Dracula movie for Hammer, not when he was having so much fun making high quality films for Jess Franco, like Eugenie... the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, all those Fu Manchu films, and...oh hey! What do you know! Jess Franco's Dracula. I doubt anyone at Hammer was actually worried that they wouldn't be able to get Lee to reprise his role as Dracula. After all, he announced after every single Dracula movie that they were awful and he'd never make another one in a million years. And then a few years later, there he is again, donning the cape and red contact lenses for another go round which, upon completion of principal photography, he would run to the press and complain about, announcing that he would never do another shitty Dracula film again. Blah, blah, blah, Chris. And you know what? He still complains about it. Dude, no one thinks you're Dracula anymore. The only people who bring it up are a few cult movie fans and you. Everyone else thinks your Saruman or whatever the hell your name was in those awful Star Wars films. I've theorized in past reviews of Hammer Dracula films and Lee's whining that the entire thing was a ruse devised by Hammer and Lee to drum up controversy and business. After all, if your star is out there bad-mouthing his own film and saying stuff like, "Well, the last one may have been gory and tasteless, but this one is so much worse that I can't stand it!" is going to do wonders for getting folks interested in seeing the movie.
The other option is that Christopher Lee is just pompous and annoying. And I say that as a guy who enjoys Christopher Lee's work. But while I may love many of the films in which he's been in, there's no denying that his filmography has considerably more "worst film ever made" candidates and parts in it than anyone short of Michael Caine. But, like Caine, Lee gets the British Actor's Golden Pass -- that coveted ticket that allows a British actor to emerge unscathed from a career of mostly utter garbage and still have people think they are incredible. I mean, Tom Cruise has one flop, and his career is pronounced over. But Michael Caine? He gets to be in Jaws IV, Blame it on Rio, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and The Swarm, and he comes through like he's coated in Teflon. Similarly, while Christopher Lee was busy bitching about the lack of class in his Dracula movies, he found time to make The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, To the Devil...A Daughter, and Chuck Norris' An Eye for an Eye, yet he remains one of the most revered actors of our time. Not even Vincent Price, who was far more talented and made just as many great films (and just as many crummy ones) commands the respect that Lee gets. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it. What I'm saying is, Chris -- shut the hell up about Dracula. You made a lot of really awful films to go with your good ones, so quit picking on Dracula, the character that made your career. You should be more like Michael Caine. He shows up, does his job, and then moves on without running to the press to bitch about the last job he had or how everyone only things of Carter or Harry Palmer or ol' Peachy or whoever Michael Caine is typecast as. I think he's actually typecast as Michael Caine. All of Christopher Lee's complaining, still going on to this day, coupled with the fact that no matter what he said, he always went back and did another Dracula film, means that, if this wasn't a clever marketing ploy by Hammer and Lee, then Lee is just sort of a...you know. If I ever meet him, I'm going to call him Dracula non-stop. Great. You know, among my goals when I started Teleport City, I never counted "talk shit about Christopher Lee" to be among them.
So whatever the case, after swearing he'd never do another one, Christopher Lee was never the less coaxed back into the series, perhaps because of the promise that, for the first time since 1958's Horror of Dracula, he and Cushing would be teamed up as Dracula and Van Helsing. Also, I'm sure they threw some money at him, and a couple rare editions of Shakespeare books or whatever the hell Christopher Lee likes more than making Dracula movies. There are, of course, sundry other problems facing Dracula A.D. 1972, but we shall address each of those as we come to them in the course or this article. The pre-credit opening sees us joining the finale of a film that was never made, but looks like it was pretty good. Dracula (Lee) and Van Helsing (Cushing) are locked in mortal combat atop a carriage that is careening out of control across London's Hyde Park. Remember that Cushing and Lee hadn't been paired together as Van Helsing and Dracula since the very first film back in the late 1950s, so seeing them together again should have been a big deal, at least bigger than a pre-credit sequence that feels like, "We now join our regularly scheduled vampire fight already in progress." But we'll let that slide, because it really is a fantastic opening, and one that can fool you into thinking Hammer's Dracula is back with a vengeance. After both Dracula and Van Helsing keep over dead, a mysterious third man rides up and scoops some of Dracula's ashes into a little glass vial and takes Drac's signet ring. Then, at Van Helsing's funeral, the guy dumps some of Dracula's ashes into a little hole in some far-off corner of the graveyard, and plunges the stake that killed Dracula into the ground. The combination of seeing Van Helsing and Dracula together again after so many years and the high-energy action of the scene is really fun, and like I said, perhaps they should have just made this movie instead. Given that Taste the Blood of Dracula sees the Count transported for the first time to London, a movie in which Van Helsing and the ace bloodsucker tangle with one another one last time on Hammer's home turf would have been a movie to get excited about. And I guess technically, that is what Dracula A.D. 1972 is, in a weird, convoluted way. After Van Helsing dispatches Dracula and keels over dead himself, we get the funky Dracula A.D. 1972 theme song by Michael Vickers. And here is where Hammer lost a good many of the remaining traditionalists that were hobbling on their walkers out to the theaters, no doubt trailing their colostomy bags behind them, to see Hammer productions. Up until this point, every Hammer Dracula theme song had been written by James Bernard, the man who defined the Hammer score the same way Hammer itself defined the gothic horror film. Bernard's scores were bombastic and powerful, with the conductor explaining that in every song you could hear the syllables of the movie's title (and it's true). But with Dracula A.D. 1972, Hammer was trying to create an amalgamation of their past glory with something new. With Lee and Cushing serving as the links to the past, Bernard's theme writing services were not tapped. Instead, Michael Vickers turns in an attempt to blend classic Hammer horror music with a more modern film theme sound, something more along the lines of Lalo Schifren or Roy Budd. The dramatic shift from the thoroughly old-fashioned Hammer opening to this theme song full of horns and wah-wah guitars jarred many people, though they are lucky I didn't make the movie because I would have accompanied this completely bad-ass theme song with shots of Christopher Lee -- wearing a black flared-leg suit and platform shoes (and his cape, of course) high steppin' down the street with a magic cane, using it to turn fat women thin and bring dead people back to life in front of grieving relatives. That's right, people. You should be thankful Hammer's movie is what it is, because if I had my way, it would have been...well, it would have been Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law, but with Dracula. Which just makes me think that we really should have had a movie where Dracula is revived, hisses out his token line, "Who dares disturb the sanctity of Dracula?" only to have Rudy Ray Moore step in with a Thompson machine gun and say, "Dolemite, mother fucker!"
After our funky theme song, the action jumps a hundred years to the groovy, mod setting of London in the swingin' sixties. Except, you know, it's 1972 and all. A bunch of groovy young mop tops are skulking about London, holding "freak outs" and the most tame "horribly out of control" parties I've ever seen -- and I've been to some really tame parties. Leading this merry band of pranksters is one Johnny Alucard, trotting out the Alucard "puzzle" for the millionth time. We get it! Who, by this time, doesn't get the Alucard thing? Imagine if Frankenstein had tried that instead of just cleverly calling himself Dr. Frank or Dr. Stein whilst incognito. Actually, I guess Nietsneknarf isn't any worse than many actual German words. Johnny happens to be the owner of Dracula's ring and some of his ashes, passed on we assume from his nefarious ancestor from the beginning of the film. And one of his friends happens to be the grand-daughter of the latest Dr. Van Helsing. And if you think they're all going to end up in an abandoned churchyard summoning up Dracula, then you don't really earn yourself a prize. Actually, Johnny Alucard is less a reincarnation of Dracula than he is a cheap knock-off of Malcom McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. In fact, many of the sets and situations in this movie feel cribbed from Kubrick's film, which is only fitting, I suppose, considering the outfits Malcom McDowell wore in A Clockwork Orange. So OK, now my movie has a jive walkin' Christopher Lee as Dracula (with a magic cane, remember...and a big floppy pimp hat) battling Dolemite and trying to possess Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Seriously, why does no one ever give me development deals? How does Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave get funding, but my Dracula/Dolemite/Malcom McDowell movie languishes in limbo, alongside my ideas for Cobra-Shark vs. Croco-lion and Great White Squid, a movie about Wings Hauser fighting a genetically engineered giant squid that has great white sharks for tentacles. Somewhere, my friends who bother to read this site are going, "Oh God, is he on about the Croco-Lion thing again?" Johnny (Christopher Neame) convinces the gang that what would really be fun would be to hold a black mass. Having nothing better to do, the gang agrees, in some cases reluctantly so. It is at this point we learn that one of the groovy gang is Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), great grand-daughter of Lawrence Van Helsing, slayer of Dracula, and current grand-daughter of Professor Van Helsing -- played by Peter Cushing, because in movies no one thinks it's weird when you look 100% identical to one of your distant relatives. Genetics tells me that I should look less and less like my relatives the further removed from them I get, but in movies, people are always the spitting image of some great grandfather or third aunt or whatever, and no one ever thinks that is weird. Hell, the mummy built his entire career of resurrections on randomly stumbling across women who looked exactly like their ancestor from thousand of years ago. No surprises here when Johnny summons up Dracula during their black mass ritual -- which takes place in a desanctified church that happens to be the same place Lawrence Van Helsing and Dracula were buried. You'd think that, given that the current Professor Van Helsing has a portrait of his grandfather in his study, collected all the man's books, and remains himself an expert on the occult, that he would know where his idol and close relative was buried. But whatever. All that's important is Dracula is back and he's going to...well, he's going to hang around the church and send Johnny out to kidnap Jessica Van Helsing, because Dracula knows how to hold a grudge. Meanwhile, as members of the gang disappear -- including the lovely Caroline Munro (Captain Kronos, Starcrash) and the equally lovely Marsha Hunt (you may recall her hairy werewolf boobs from Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, also starring Dracula) -- the police become increasingly convinced by Van Helsing's tendency to blame the murders on a vampire. There are a few things people tend to harp on when criticizing this film. The first, most obvious, and dumbest argument is that the film is dated. I think I may have said before that "it looks dated" is one of my most hated complaints about any movie. It's cheap, ignorant, and shallow, and it has no merit as an observation. That a film is a reflection of the time in which it was made hardly strikes me as anything inherently negative, and I utterly detest whenever someone trots out that hoary old cliche and expects us to have any respect for their opinion. Oh, so Dracula AD 1972 contains slang and crazy fashion. Big deal. I look at those things as assets more than as detriments. So if your complaint is that the movie is dated looking, well we may still be friends, but I'm certainly going to regard your opinion on any film from here on out with a tremendous degree of suspicion. The second most common complaint is that Dracula is hardly in the movie at all, and when he is, he does nothing. I can understand this complaint a little bit more, but honestly, if at this point in the series, you are mad that Dracula isn't on screen and doesn't do very much when he is, then you haven't watched any of the previous films in the series, except perhaps Scars of Dracula, which is the only film where he has anything approaching substantial screentime or more than two lines. Not to say that it isn't disappointing. One can't help but want scenes of Dracula cutting lose in modern London, even if those scenes don't involve him dancing down the street with a magic cane or fighting machine0gun toting kungfu pimps. Still, it would have been nice if he did a little something more than stand around in the desanctified church. Dracula's confinement to the church is representative of Hammer's difficulty with updating their image. They want to figure out a way to enter the modern era, but in the end, they imprison their title character in a Victorian set and don't ever figure out exactly how to bring him out.
Previous Dacula films have always relied on the rest of the cast, with Dracula looming in the background as everyone's motivating factor. Unfortunately for Dracula AD 1972, it's a pretty weak supporting cast, comprised primarily of inexperienced young actors who aren't bad but don't really contribute much that is memorable. They spend most of their time either sitting around being bored, or sitting around talking about how they are concerned, then most of them head off to a party and are never heard from again. Stephanie Beacham as Jessica Van Helsing obviously has a more substantial role, but only if you consider substantial to be screaming, then being put into a trance. As the menacing Johnny Alucard, Christopher Neame is all right -- equal parts spooky and pathetic -- but he's basically playing Malcom McDowell, as I said. Dracula AD 1972 is more or less a remake of Taste the Blood of Dracula, complete with the bored circle dabbling in the black arts, the mysterious outsider spurring them on and summoning Dracula, the vial of Dracula remains, the kidnapped woman, and so on. But Ralph Bates was a much more charismatic actor, and Taste the Blood of Dracula had a much more compelling cast of older character actors to propel it forward in between scenes of Dracula showing that he can count to four or five. Dracula AD 1972 lacks that, and although the young cast is perfectly acceptable, the characters they inhabit just aren't interesting. Plus the jackass who wears the monk's cowl around the whole time was intensely annoying and yet escaped death. Shame on you, Dracula! Shame on you for not killing the odious comic relief. Caroline Munro has a small but memorable part as one of the gang of youths seduced by Johnny Alucard's ability to mimic what he's seen in A Clockwork Orange, but she would quickly become one of the most beloved cult film actresses of all time. She got her start on the horror scene playing Vincent price's dead wife in the Dr. Phibes films, though I'm not sure lying there dead for every one of your scenes earns you a whole lot other than other parts where you do nothing but lie there. She at least gets to talk, writhe, show off heaving breasts, and get blood dumped all over her in this film. Her career took off shortly thereafter, and she has a much more substantial role in Hammer's superior Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, as well as major roles in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, At the Earth's Core, the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, and of course the infamous classic Starcrash, featuring what was no doubt her most memorable outfit. She was still working, albeit only occasionally, up until 2006, and if you've seen her lately, in her late fifties, then you know she's still ridiculously gorgeous and awesome. A shame she doesn't have more to do in this film, but even a little Caroline Munro is worth watching. As the current Van Helsing, it's great to see Peter Cushing back in action, and naturally he goes at the role with absolute conviction. Unfortunately, the character is written as Van Helsing Lite, and most of his scenes are pretty dull. He spends a lot of time tracking down clues to the one thing he already knows. Everyone knows where Dracula's base of operation is, and yet Van Helsing spends half the movie trying to track down clues to the location of Dracula's hide-out, which he already knows! And once again, he decides to go fight Dracula at night, instead of swinging by and staking the bloodsucker when Dracula is asleep in his coffin. Why oh why are vampire hunters always waiting until dark to go fight vampires? I guess a movie where vampire hunters swing by during the day, stake Dracula, then head down to the pub to celebrate wouldn't be as long, but it'd be a nice change of pace. Other than that, Cushing is always Cushing. He comes in and does his job well, or as well as he can with what he's given. The final common criticism of this movie, then, is that it's not very good, and I guess that's a fair assessment. The script needed more work. You can tell the hip young lingo was written by old men who didn't really know what they were doing. The plot is a bit of a letdown, especially considering that it's the first time Van Helsing and Dracula have been on screen together since the first movie. And despite all that, I really quite like Dracula AD 1972. I like the young cast. I like the awkward attempt at being hip. I like the outlandish counter-culture fashions. I like the attempts at freak-out cinematography. I think the movie is fun regardless of its faults, though I recognize that I may be in the minority here. By no means is this the film to save Hammer, and by no means is it as good as the previous film it rips off, Taste the Blood of Dracula. But it's not an entirely bad effort and has much to recommend in it, at least for me.
Screenwriter Don Houghton didn't have a terribly deep resume at this point in his career, his primary credit at the time of this movie being a stint as a writer for Doctor Who. And in fact, he had very little in the way of a career after Dracula AD 1972. He went on to write The Satanic Rites of Dracula, and two of Hammer's co-productions with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers studio -- the crummy Shatter and the pretty good if sloppily written Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, in which Peter Cushing reprised his Van Helsing character one more time, this time on a trip to China to stop Dracula from raising an undead army. Despite the appearance of Dracula in the movie, Christopher Lee did not sign on, possibly because he was to busy making the James Bond film Man with the Golden Gun. Or The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Houghton was in his early forties when he wrote the screenplay for Dracula AD 1972, and while that's not really all that old, it is a little too old to be trying to write hip teen lingo. I'm only thirty-five right now, but I wouldn't consider myself adept at writing slang-heavy dialog based on modern teens. They say...what? Like, "sweet" and "cuckoo,man, real cuckoo" right? Despite the faults, Dracula AD 1972 managed to turn a profit, which meant that Hammer was going to make another one, even though Christopher Lee swore this was the worst movie ever and he would never play Dracula again. That follow-up, another film set in the 1970s, was The Satanic Rites of Dracula, and if you want to see a genuinely awful film, that is the one you should be watching. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1972 posted by Keith at 6:16 AM | 7 Comments Monday, March 05, 2007Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1985, United States/some Eastern European country. Starring Christopher Lee, Annie McEnroe, Reb Brown, Marsha Hunt, Sybil Danning, Judd Omen. Directed by Phillipe Mora. Written by Gary Brandner and Robert Sarno. Buy it from Amazon  . There are those among us who, in a moment of moral weakness, find themselves unwilling or unable to turn away from a grisly situation. As to the psychological motivations behind this tendency, they are legion and vary from person to person. Perhaps it is a desire to affirm that someone is worse off than you, that even though your rent is overdue and your daughter is hopped up on the goofballs, at least you're not a corpse being yanked out of some twisted, smoldering wreckage along the interstate. Perhaps, instead, it is little more than a reflex reaction symptomatic of the seemingly insatiable human hunger for spectacle, however grim it may be. Perhaps, in some, it is a genuine perversity, a wicked satisfaction gleaned from witnessing the suffering of others. And finally, it may be that some of us look out of guilt -- that we are torn between not making a gawking spectacle of suffering and ignoring suffering. Whatever the case may be, the urge is there, commonplace, and hardly solely the purview of the misanthropic. It manifests itself in a variety of forms, everything from slowing down to stare at a traffic accident to gathering on the street corner to gawk at a crime scene to greedily devouring the sensationalist news about the sordid downfall of a celebrity. Or, in my own peculiar case, it manifests itself in a complete inability to not watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf every single time I run across it on television.
I have no reasonable explanation for my addiction. At least heroin makes you feel good for a little while. I garner no pleasure from my addiction to Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. There is no benefit to me in staying up until three in the morning yet again just because Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf happens to be on. And yet there I am, never the less, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf on the television, a tumbler of bourbon in my hand to help dull the pain, and a deep-seated loathing of myself gnawing away at my very soul as I catch myself tapping my foot in time with that horrid pseudo new wave band that appears in the opening scene. But as much as my hate myself in the morning, as much as my addiction may cripple me socially and bankrupt me morally, I can still go to bed at night with a single dab of salve to soothe my troubled conscience: at least I wasn't in the movie, which is more than venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee can say.
In 1981, up and coming horror film luminary Joe Dante (who would give the world one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time in 1984, and had already given the world Piranha) teamed up with writers Terence Winkless and John Sayles (of all people!) to direct The Howling, an updated werewolf tale released at roughly the same time as John Landis' An American Werewolf in London. It was a good year to be a werewolf (better than the year in which Van Helsing was released, anyway), because both films were greeted with enthusiasm by fans and praise from a number of hot shot critics. Sequels were in order, but while Landis' film had to wait roughly sixteen years to get its first godawful sequel, Dante's own werewolf film wasted no time. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, also known as Stirba: Werewolf Bitch, was released in 1985 and quickly went down in history (and flames) as one of the worst goddamned movies anyone had ever seen. I'm not really one to argue -- almost nothing about this film resembles anything remotely close to competence. The script by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandner (who's never written anything but Howling scripts) is dreadful. Direction by Phillipe Mora is passable, but there's a reason he didn't go on from here to direct movies that weren't Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills. The acting is almost uniformly awful, anchored as it is by none other than our good friend Reb Brown, last seen on Teleport City back when we reviewed Yor, The Hunter from the Future, and an embarrassed venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who must have been thinking that all those Dracula roles he bitched about his whole career were looking pretty good now that he had appear in movies like this or the one where he fights Chuck Norris. Oh, there's also Sybil Danning as the alternate title titular werewolf queen (or bitch), Stirba. And some chick named Annie McEnroe who was in Warlords of the 21st Century.
And yet, as undeniably bad as it all is, there I am, every time it's on television. And what makes it worse is that I own the DVD! I own the goddamn DVD, and still I watch it whenever it's on television. Let this be a lesson to anyone who ever takes my advice on anything; if you ever find yourself faced with a difficult decision and ask yourself, "What would Keith from Teleport City do?" then your immediate next thought should be, "Who cares? That guy watches Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf all the time." Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is one of those early movies, alongside classics such as Beastmaster and Revenge of the Ninja that I got to see thanks to a friend with cable television (I couldn't just have him tape them for me though, because while he had a newfangled VHS machine, my family went Betamax). But even nostalgia can't excuse my adoration of this truly unwatchable film. Things start out OK. Venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee shows up to harass Ben (Reb Brown), who is supposed to be the brother of one of the chicks who turned into a werewolf in the first movie. Ben and and his girlfriend Jenny Templeton (Annie McEnroe) don't take too kindly to this nine-foot-tall guy lurking around the cemetery during the sister's funeral, constantly walking up to them and, in gravest tone imaginable, delivering the line, "Your sister is a werewolf," over and over. When, during the next full moon, the sister does spring forth from her tomb and make with the lycanthropy, they are more disposed toward believing venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, whose character is named Stefan Crosscoe (oh good grief -- did a spooky high schooler come up with that name? At least it wasn't Chris I. Fixtion or something).
Somehow through a series of events I don't care about, they all end up going to Transylvania together, because it is the heart of werewolf power. But they don't do that before venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee gets to go to the punky club and put on a pair of those plastic wrap-around new wave sunglasses. If any scene justifies watching this movie, this is it. But when, "venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses" is the high point of your movie, you know you're in trouble. Actually, pretty much everyone agrees that if there is a high point in this movie, it's "werewolf orgy," but we haven't gotten to that part yet, and honestly, it's not as good as " venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses." When "werewolf orgy" isn't as good as "venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses," you're in ever deeper trouble than you were when it was just " venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses."
So next we're in one of those secret warehouse clubs where the usual assortment of movie punks/new wavers/dominatrixes/neon freaks are hanging out listening to a crummy band called Babel -- and by "crummy," I mean, yes, I did search around for mp3s. I couldn't help myself. While the band goes through their wolfy song about howling (what a coincidence!), a hot chick named Mariana picks up a couple of typical goofball movie punks who I'm sure had names like Razor and Chainlink and Puke. She shows them her boobs (quite nice of her), then turns into...I guess it's a werewolf. It looks more like one of those monkey men from 2001 though. Anyway, she gets all hairy and toothy and rips them apart. When The Rolling Stones wrote the song "Brown Sugar," it was about Marsha Hunt, the actress who plays Mariana. I bet they didn't envision her turning into a hairy monkey-woman werewolf, but then, maybe they did. I mean, it is the Stones, after all. Whatever, she's still dead sexy, had a huge 'fro in the 1970s, and we all saw her die in Dracula A.D. 1972, though I doubt she and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee looked upon Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf as a grade-A reunion. It turns out that Stirba, the queen bitch of the werewolves, lives in a castle in Transylvania, which in this movie is a country rather than a region or town, and the seat of werewolfery (which I prefer over lycanthropy) rather than the seat of vampirism -- but whatever, man. Any chance to needle venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee about the Dracula movies is worth taking. Venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, Ben, and Jenny must unite to destroy Stirba and her werewolf legion, which includes Brown Sugar and Mickey the escaped con who hung out with Pee Wee Herman. That actor's name is Judd Omen. Seriously, man, if they had named one of the characters Judd Omen I would have complained about that, but then it turns out there's really a guy named Judd Omen. I hope he hung out at some point with Thurl Ravenscroft. When Stirba and her minions aren't messing around with punker dudes at new wave clubs in Los Angeles, they're busy having werewolf orgies where they all grow lots of hair but don't quite turn into werewolves, then writhe about on the big ornate bed in Stirba's antechamber. It's sort of like watching a bunch of hirsute hippies makin' out, except with more growling.
While this is going on, our trio of half-assed vampire killers, err, werewolf hunters, show up and, in one of the movie's most nonsensical scenes, stumble upon a car wreck out in the middle of nowhere. While all the colorful, toothless local peasants vanish into thin air, Jenny, Ben, and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee are attacked by werewolves. In broad daylight. And after venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee battles the murderous locals, he sort of just randomly wanders off and says, "We'll meet back in the village." But aren't they all going to the village right now? Why the hell does venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee wander off at random, except to go weep quietly behind a nearby tree? Sure enough, as soon as he's gone, one of the dead daylight werewolf things springs back to life to menace our remaining heroes for a little while. When we finally get to the town, it's one of those typical bad Eastern European movie towns where everyone is a medieval peasant clad in a colorful array of rags and potato sacks and ill-fitting wool suits, and they all spend every waking hour cackling insanely and making "crazy eyes." We spend a lot of time watching people wander around the town square or chase midgets in disturbing Punchinello masks. I'd say it's pointless, but this movie pretty much lost any point it might have had right after venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee took off those sunglasses. So basically, after some random town nonsense, some lame werewolf ambushes, and that werewolf orgy seemingly playing on loop, we discover that Stirba and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee are brother and sister (oh SNAP Stefan Crisco or whatever your name is -- your sister is a werewolf, too!), and it is his destiny to put an end to her reign of terror, which seems to consist largely of killing jerks at new wave clubs and inconveniencing the local fall festival or whatever it was that was going on in that town. Eastern European towns are always having some sort of festival in the town square, complete with medieval era puppet shows instead of discotheques and David Hasselhoff concerts like actual Eastern Europeans like. No matter what year it is, they're always watching medieval puppet shows, and no matter what time of year it is, they're having a festival. It's sort of how any film that has a chase scene through a Chinatown will run into a lion dance or dragon parade or something, no matter what time of year it is, like they have those things every day in Chinatown.
Oh folks, it's just terrible. And when I sit down and try to write about this film, it becomes even more evident just how bad it really is. And when the true depths to which this film plummets become thusly crystal clear, my fondness for it is only amplified. In fact, right now, I'm sitting here, writing this, and thinking to myself, "Man, this movie really is horrible. I wish I was watching it right now." This week, I will have the choice to either go out and get a lapdance from a cute Cuban chick or stay home and watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, and right now I can't decide!!! I guess we should go step by step, and start with the acting. I don't think I really need to even comment on Reb Brown. I'm pretty sure the big lug might not even know he ever had a film career. He goes through pretty much every film with the same dazed look of confusion on his face, and he doesn't stretch his acting chops here. Man, I wish someone had put him, Sam Jones, and Miles O'Keefe in the same movie. That would have been a classic. And as for Annie McEnroe -- really, do you even care? She looks like Jamie Lee Curtis' little sister, and neither she nor Reb serve any real purpose than to spout lines like, "What's going on?" and "Stefan!" Similarly, Brown Sugar and Mickey from Pee Wee's Big Adventure are mostly there to wear a leather catsuit (what self-respecting canine would wear a catsuit???) and a jaunty circus knife-thrower gypsy outfit respectively. Sybil Danning is in the film primarily to preside over her werewolf court, then rip her bodice open. Oh, and she wears possibly one of the worst outfits ever made -- the pointy-hipped baggy leather catsuit covered in angular mirrors. What in the the hell???
Sybil Danning has never really done it for me. From all I hear, she's a spectacularly friendly and charming person, and I would love to hang out with her for hours on end and listen to ridiculous stories about the making of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf or Panther Squad. But I'd like to do that with David F. Freidman, too, and I certainly don't think of him as a sex symbol. But as a sex object to fawn over, I think I was turned off by her frizzy blonde 80s hair. No matter how nice the boobs and legs may be -- and on Sybil, they are both spectacular -- frizzy blonde 80s hair will kill it for me. I'm sure Sybil Danning stayed up crying late into the night because some twelve-year-old kid thought to himself, "No, I would rather jerk off to Marsha Hunt." But still, the makers of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf must have known that Sybil's boobs were a much bigger potential attraction than her flashy animated laser beam showdown with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, because her bodice-ripping scene (or whatever you call a leather halter top plastered with giant mirrors) is repeated over and over in the movie -- twice during the end credits alone. I guess they paid her for a boob flash, and this was their way of getting their money's worth out of that couple of seconds of upper nudity. And if it seems like I'm base and degrading because I'm talking about Sybil's boobs instead of her acting in this movie -- trust me. I am doing her a favor. And then there's venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who intones every single line with -- well, honestly, it's pretty much the same acting job he always does. No more, but no less, even though the material isn't just below him -- it's also below Reb Brown. "Material not worthy of Reb Brown" is really something, but venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee still gives it the ol' college try and treats every single line, no matter how ludicrous, as if it was the single most important line of dialogue ever uttered. That said, venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's acting style is not well-suited to making this movie more tolerable, and here in lies the big difference between him and fellow venerated horror film icon Vincent Price. Price would have had a field day with this movie. Lee is way too solemn, which is my polite "I respect venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee" way of saying he's boring. In the right role, his booming voice and towering presence is extremely effective. But it's pretty much the only trick he has. He lacks the versat |
