The Satanic Rites of Dracula

Regular Wyrd Britain readers may have noticed that I have a soft spot for the late 60s and early 70 horrors where the gothic was melded with the modern and dusted with a sprinkling of (usually poorly understood) groovy, countercultural cool.  So, it'll probably come as no surprise when I tell you that I'm a fan of Christopher Lee's final two Dracula movies that were made and released in the early 70s, 'Dracula A.D. 1972' and 'The Satanic Rites of Dracula' (presented below with it's awful US title) despite their well deserved reputations.

Written by 'Doctor Who' ('Inferno', 'The Mind of Evil'), 'Ace of Wands' and future 'Sapphire and Steel' writer Don Houghton, who'd also written the previous movie and who would subsequently write the following one,'The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires', the film incorporates distinct spy-fi elements - giant computers, tiny tape recorders and weaponised plagues - mixed with ostentatious occult dialogue - "Evil rules, y'know - it really does! .. Nothing is too vile; nothing is too dreadful - too awful; you need to know the terror, the horror, Lorrimer; to feel the threat of disgust - the beauty of obscenity!" - in an attempt to revitalise the series, it didn't work. 

Dracula, for me at least, works best on a human level as a man who's just looking for love and lunch and so this version of him as the enigmatic head of a genocidal global cabal seems odd and Lee made a much more likely world dominating villain as Scaramanga in the following years' 'The Man with the Golden Gun' and had made his disatisfaction with the movie known long before release.  Peter Cushing, reprising the role of Lorrimer Van Helsing, is, as always, perfect and it's always a treat to see him and Lee together even in the scene where one of them is doing a terrible Bela Lugosi impersonation but the stand-out scene is with Freddie Jones who, in his brief appearence as Dr. Julian Keeley, delivers the lines quoted above to a Cushing who's slowly realising the depth of his friends madness.

You have to admire Hammer and Houghton's ambition but the film just doesn't have the necessary spark to do what they wanted it to and has the feel of an ambitious but overlong TV pilot along the lines of 'Baffled!' or 'Spectre'. Shorn of his gothic trapping the Count looks a little silly and much of the plot feels entirely pointless but there's an overabundance of energy with the likes of Joanna Lumley, Michael Coles, Richard Vernon and William Franklyn fighting bikers, snipers and biters whilst fashioning improvised stakes and crosses before the movie ends with the single most novel (note I didn't say good) take on a Dracula staking ever filmed, death by prickly thorns (and fence).   But as I said at the start, I kind of love it.  For me what it is far outweighs what it isn't and what it is is fun, not at all horrifing or terrifying or even suspenseful and it is, in so many ways, just bad but I still love it.

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