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Sunday, October 21, 2007

Count Yorga, Vampire

Release Year: 1970
Country: United States
Starring: Robert Quarry, Roger Perry, Michael Murphy, Michael Macready, D.J. Anderson, Judy Lang, Edward Walsh, Julie Conners, Paul Hansen, Sybil Scotford, Marsha Jordan, Deborah Darnell.
Writer: Bob Kelljan
Director: Bob Kelljan
Cinematographer: Arch Archambault
Producer: Bob Kelljan and Michael Macready
Music: Bill Marx
Alternate Titles: The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire
Availability: Buy it from Amazon.

So far, our examination of old fashioned vampires in modern day settings has covered Dracula, in the Hammer Studios films Dracula AD 1972 and Satanic Rites of Dracula, and some guy named Count Sinistre, from the previously obscure British horror film Devils of Darkness. But this trend of placing traditional vampires in a modern (well, 1970s) setting actually started in America, with a low-key film called Count Yorga, Vampire. At the time of Yorga's release, there were very few people making vampire movies. Hammer was pretty much the only game in town, and they were still setting their vampire films in the Victorian era. Devils of Darkness was one of the first vampire films to transport a vampire into the current era, at least since the 1932 Tod Browning production of Dracula, which was set in what was then modern-day London. However, one can argue that the differences between the London of 1870 and 1932 is markedly less than the difference between 1870 and 1970, and so for our purposes here, Devils of Darkness is more substantial to our little foray than Dracula. It's also less substantial because almost no one saw Devils of Darkness, and without a dedicated distributor or studio, it quickly faded from memory and was almost totally forgotten until it finally found its way to DVD (its first home video release) in 2007.

Which means that Count Yorga, Vampire, is really where we can say this short-lived trend began. There was obviously still interest in vampire films. Hammer's late 60s Dracula films still made money, even if it was obvious that the foundation was beginning to crumble. All it would really take was finding a successful way to modernize the monster without completely divorcing it from its Victorian roots (that would come later, after this transitional stage). Leave it to American International Pictures to step up to the plate and take a swing. AIP is a familiar studio for anyone who follows the world of cult films. They were a B-movie behemoth, and a testing ground for a host of directors and actors who would go on to superstardom. But the real linchpin in their creative machine was a guy named Roger Corman. First as director, and later as producer, Corman proved to be amazingly adept at scouting talent, stretching a dollar, and compacting a shooting schedule. One of his specialties was shooting a film, wrapping it early, then realizing that he still had three days left on a rented set or a contract for Boris Karloff. So he'd make another movie, from concept to script, to final shooting, in those three days.

AIP's standard operating procedure was to crank out cheap, black and white, double feature movies, and it worked well for them. In 1960, however, most likely heavily influenced by the surprising success of Hammer's big three of Horror of Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein, and The Mummy, Roger Corman approached AIP executives and pitched them the idea for a more lavish color film with a longer shooting schedule and more ambitious scope. AIP didn't exactly jump at the prospect, but the combination of Hammer's success with serious, color horror films and Corman's proven track record as a director who could crank out decent films that always turned a profit for the studio eventually swayed them, and Corman was given a whopping three weeks and the services of Vincent Price to shoot The Fall of the House of Usher. It was designed very much in the style of the Hammer Gothics, full of vivid colors and costumes placed against a bleak and crumbling backdrop. It was a huge hit for AIP, so much so that Corman was given free reign to shoot a whole series of similar films, each starring Vincent Price and based --often extremely loosely -- on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Despite their modest roots, Corman's Poe films remain some of the best written, most sumptuous American horror films ever produced.

By 1970, however, the tables had turned. Hammer was starting to resemble one of the crumbling old castles they so loved to set their movies in, while AIP was increasingly nimble and able to adapt to changing tastes and trends in pop culture. When they felt their Hammer style horror films were becoming too old-fashioned, they started spicing things up with more cynical scripts and more liberal displays of nudity. They successfully branched out far beyond horror to produce a massive array of drive-in and B-movie fare, as well as a second series of Poe films, still starring Price but this time directed by Gordon Hessler. It was AIP that decided the vampire film could find new blood by being adapted to a modern setting, and this time, it was Hammer who ended up following AIP's lead. AIP, at least in the realm of horror, was a child of Hammer, but Dracula AD 1972 would never have existed if not for AIP's Count Yorga films. Of course, many would argue that we would have all been better off without Dracula AD 1972, but I'm not one of those people. Point is, this was a classic "student becomes the master" reversal.

Oddly, the initial idea for updating the vampire tale was to make it a saucy softcore film. Many people claim that the original version of Count Yorga, Vampire -- then bearing the title The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire -- was meant to be a porno film. Not so, though it was meant to flaunt the bare breasts and other things you could get away with thanks to the increased liberalness of the 1970s. When AIP picked up the independently produced film for distribution, they demanded that the sauciness be trimmed in order to achieve a more teen-friendly GP (PG to you young bloods) rating. Some remnants remain, at least in the current version of the film (which is slightly longer than the original theatrical version), but there must have been a considerable amount left on a cutting room floor somewhere, though some production stills of the unused scenes remain in circulation.

With increased sexiness out, Count Yorga's next and far cleverer method of updating the vampire film was to approach it with a more cynical attitude. All of these movies have to feature a variation on the, "Vampires? You must be joking! This is the 20th century!" line, but Count Yorga takes the line to heart. You really must be joking. A vampire, cape and all, in 1970's California? Ridiculous! And Count Yorga's attitude is basically, "Yes, isn't it?" even as the film is biting you on the neck. It's a tricky tightrope act, to both poke fun at and respect the classical vampire film, but what makes Count Yorga special is that it manages to pull it off.

We first meet Yorga, played with acerbic perfection by Robert Quarry, as he presides over a seance attended by a typical group of jaded young couples. As with Sinistre in Devils of Darkness, the long-lived vampire is able to adapt to modern times and fit in by traveling in small circles where quirkiness and strange behavior is easily dismissed. Yorga himself is a bit of a prick, though it's entirely understandable given the fact that the guy has been alive for hundreds of years and probably had to suffer all manner of fools. Quarry is great in the role, mixing this biting sarcasm with a world-weary melancholy to create a character that is undeniably a villain yet oddly sympathetic. Hammer attempted, with far less success, to inject this same sort of world-weariness into Dracula in The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but they didn't study Yorga's game plan close enough to really pull it off. Christopher Lee's Dracula was always a presence but rarely an actual character, even when he was on screen. Yorga, on the other hand, is much more complex and much more human, and thus his attitude is far more understandable. His disillusionment with pretty much everything around him in the "normal" world is an interesting counterpoint to the same disillusionment the modern couples have with the supernatural. "What a bunch of pointless nonsense," both sides seem to be thinking.

Nonsense or not, the supernatural bears its fangs when one of the couples gives Count Yorga a lift. The movie's humor is very subtle, very dry, and best characterized by things like a vampire having to bum a ride home after a seance or Yorga's wonderful, "I believe I had a cape" line as he prepares himself to leave. These moments aren't entirely played for laughs, and the film doesn't desperately scream at you and point out things that are supposed to be funny. It's really up to you to decide whether or not you think it's amusing.

Yorga continues to chew his way through the women in the circle of friends, just as the men struggle to come to grips with the idea that there really could be a vampire praying upon them and their girlfriends. This culminates in a bout of verbal sparring in which our principal heroes, Michael and Dr. Hayes, visit Yorga at his estate and attempt to engage the count in one of those battles of double entendres and "I don't know what you really are...or do I?" types of conversations. Yorga is visibly bored and irritated by the whole thing, and the confrontation ends just before sunrise, with Yorga basically doing nothing more than kicking the guys out. The proper finale follows shortly thereafter, in which Yorga's home is raided in an attempt to recover the kidnapped and hypnotized Donna, and Michael and Dr. Hayes discover a bit too late that Yorga's pad is crawling with hungry vampire chicks.

As with any low-budget productions, Count Yorga, Vampire has a number of obstacles to navigate in an attempt to turn budgetary limitations into assets. For starters, the concept of an old world vampire in a new world setting is very limited in its scope. There are no scenes of Yorga hitting the town or going to a club. Instead, the film is limited to a few sets, revolving around Yorga's mansion, creating a feeling of claustrophobia and timelessness despite the intrusions of modern trappings like vans and telephones. Yorga is keen to control his environment and keep himself in a setting over which he can exercise more effective control. In the same sense, it allows him to survive in modern times but surround himself with comfort items from his past, like an old fart sitting in his den listening to pre-Rollins Black Flag records and complaining about how punk rock is so crappy now. Yorga can survive because he has learned how to shrink the modern world into a controllable sphere where he can exist on the very fringes, reaching in to pluck out a victim every now and then but generally remaining below the radar of modern society. He relies additionally on the jaded nature of modern people -- obviously, a vampire attack is utterly preposterous. Like all vampires in these movies, though, he eventually screws up and picks on a group of people who are slightly more open to the possibility and also happen to have one of those doctor friends who happens to know a lot about the occult.

Despite the low budget, Count Yorga, Vampire manages to succeed based on the wit of the script and the strength of Robert Quarry in the lead. There are bumps in the road with the script, most likely because of the quick rewrite from softcore titillater to GP horror film, but overall they are pretty easy to ignore. As I said, some remnants of the softcore version remain. Yorga whiles away boring nights by sitting on a throne in his basement and watching his vampire brides make out with one another -- a scene that was probably considerably longer and didn't cut away right before the lip lock and fondling in the original vision of the movie. Additionally, there's a make-out session in the van, because what else are you going to do when you get your van stuck in the mud on someone's private property if not go at it in the back? I mean, that's what you got a van for in the first place, right? Ultimately, and despite erroneous claims that this was originally going to be a porno film, I assume The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire would have ended up looking like Hammer's saucier 70s vampire fare like Twins of Evil and Vampire Lovers. It wouldn't have harmed the film any, I don't think, but ultimately, I think it works pretty well in the final form, as a very low-key, slow-moving, but hypnotically entrancing study of a jaded vampire that doesn't lapse into either self-indulgent pity or over-obvious satire. How you ultimately react to such a film depends entirely on how you feel about such movies, whether you consider them engrossing or just boring. I really liked it, and I thought that it was wonderful at creating a sort of weird, claustrophobic, and moody atmosphere.

Not that the movie is entirely comprised of guys sitting around debating vampirism. This is a low-budget horror film distributed by AIP, after all. So in between the soul-searching and pondering and Yorga sneering at the mere mortals around him, you get scenes like a woman eating her own cat and plenty of vampire attacks. It’s just that ultimately you come for Robert Quarry's performance as Yorga. Everything else is just dressing. Sweet, bloody dressing. Quarry was a steadily employed television actor before being cast in the role of Yorga, and he really shines here in what is probably his most triumphant role. Many people among the population of those who tend to rank such things, rank his portrayal of the bored and always somewhat irritated Count Yorga as one of the best on-screen vampires of all time. Casting an older, solid actor in the role is a prime example of what movies like this to right that so many modern movies do wrong. When Quarry plays Yorga as a long-lived and jaded vampire, he is able to lend the character the appropriate sighing surrender mixed with annoyance. Yorga has an abundance of life (or afterlife) experience, and Quarry communicates that in a way the current crop of much younger actors cannot. Quarry continued to work well through the 80s and 90s, often in low-budget horror and exploitation fare, before more or less retiring in 1999. however, it looks like his services are being called on once again, as he is apparently appearing in a movie called The Tell-Tale Heart, which also stars scream queen staple Debbie Rochon and another legend of 70s vampire films, Ingrid Pitt, who starred in 1970's Vampire Lovers from Hammer, which contained the nudity and softcore content that was nixed from Count Yorga.

Writer/director Bob Kelljan, whose only directing credit before Count Yorga was the naughtily titled Flesh of My Flesh (he had previously been an actor in both television and low-budget drive-in fare), crafted a tightly framed minor horror classic that manages to be well-paced despite the dearth of action. He used Yorga to become a successful television director, working steadily until his death in 1982. He makes Yorga into a creepy little film that never sacrifices its downbeat atmosphere and general creepiness in the pursuit of comedy, and yet manages to produce a number of -- if not funny, then certainly witty -- moments that will make you smile. It's wicked, and at times, it's even kind of scary, especially if you're watching it late at night -- which is more than can be said for most horror films.

Count Yorga, Vampire ended up being a solid money-maker for AIP, and so a sequel was commissioned with a slightly larger budget. Kelljan and Quarry returned, as did some of the rest of the cast, despite the fact that the original's downbeat ending pretty much leaves everyone dead. The Return of Count Yorga is more or less the same movie, only with Craig T. Nelson as a cop. It's quite enjoyable as well, even if it is a rehash but with Craig T. Nelson. Count Yorga's greater effect was to launch that mini-revival of vampire fiction that saw everything from Hammer's two Dracula movies, Marvel Comic's Tomb of Dracula, and two Blacula films that put a blaxploitation spin on the modern vampire story (the second Blacula film was actually even directed by Kelljan). Although largely forgotten and relegated to the back waters of cult film fandom today, Yorga was influential and successful during its time, and DVD has helped a lot of new viewers rediscover this unique twist on an old tale.

Labels: Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970

posted by Keith at 2:46 PM | 3 Comments

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Satanic Rites of Dracula

Release Year: 1974
Country: England
Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Coles, Joanna Lumley, William Franklyn, Freddie Jones, Richard Vernon, Barbara Yu Ling, Patrick Barr, Richard Mathews.
Writer: Don Houghton
Director: Alan Gibson
Cinematographer: Brian Probyn
Music: John Cacavas
Producer: Roy Skeggs
Availability: Buy it from Amazon
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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 (and by obscure, I mean "entirely made up") 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.

Still, I suppose things could have been worse.

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, 2007

Dracula A.D. 1972

Release Year: 1972
Country: England
Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame, Caroline Munro, Marhsa Hunt, Michael Coles.
Writer: Don Houghton
Director: Alan Gibson
Cinematographer: Dick Bush
Music: Michael Vickers
Producer: Josephine Douglas
Availability: Buy it from Amazon
Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us

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.