Hammering the Stake Through Dracula’s Heart

Hammer’s Dracula movies may well be their most famed series, thanks to the excellent casting of Peter Cushing as Van Helsing and Christopher Lee as Dracula – though it’s notable that in a nine-movie series, once you discount footage from earlier films repeated in later films to remind the audience of what’s previously transpired, Cushing and Lee only faced off against each other in three of the nine movies in the series; two of the movies has Cushing’s Van Helsing facing either a different vampire or a different actor cast as Dracula, and the other four movies have Christopher Lee as Dracula without Cushing being involved.

As with other Hammer series, the sequels may well be the most interesting ones to explore – after all, once you’ve done your riff on the original Bram Stoker story, it becomes necessary to come up with your own tales. And as usual for Hammer, the results are… mixed.

The Brides of Dracula

Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur), a schoolteacher from Paris, has been offered a post at a posh girl’s school in Transylvania. As she is travelling to the school, her superstitious coachman (Michael Ripper) abandons her – coach drivers are extremely unreliable in this sort of thing, aren’t they? Alas, there’s no room at the inn, but she receives an invite from local aristocrat Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt), the local aristocrat, to stay at her castle overnight.

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Chatting over dinner, the Baroness reveals that she has a son – who has gone mad, and committed unspecified dire acts, in the wake of which he has been confined to his chambers in the castle so absolutely that the outside world believes him to be dead. After she witnesses through her bedroom window the young gentleman (played by David Peel) apparently contemplating suicide, Marianne’s compassion compels her to enter his rooms and attempt to console him.

The young man tells Marianne that he is the true Baron Meinster – his mother having usurped him of the rightful title. Marianne chooses to help the Baron escape his rooms, but as soon as he’s free he kills the Baroness and ditches Marianne – for it turns out that he’s a vampire, one of the spawn of Dracula. It’s down to Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) to swing into action again to save the day – especially when the Baron traces Marianne to the girls’ school she’s been sent to teach at and sets to work among the students.

This is a movie which is largely saved by Peter Cushing’s always-reliable performance as Van Helsing. His steely determination to stamp out the “cult of the undead” is impressive, as is his ability to launch into an action sequence at a heartbeat and then return to his usual calm, unflappable self immediately afterwards.

Of course, the iconic foe for Cushing’s Van Helsing is Christopher Lee’s Dracula. It’s clear that Hammer were trying to have the destruction of the Count at the end of their original Dracula stick. Maybe Christopher Lee didn’t want to reprise the role, maybe Hammer didn’t want to pay him to do it – but either way, David Peel is in the lead vampire role here. Bless him, he just isn’t up to it: it’s not his fault, the list of people whose screen presence could measure up to Christopher Lee is certainly a short one, and Peel’s name just isn’t on it.

Terence Fisher as director and the cast and crew do the best they can, though, despite a script which ended up being something of a nightmare to finalise – a first draft by Jimmy Sangster ended up going through additional passes at the hands of Peter Bryan, Edward Percy, and an uncredited Anthony Hinds before making it onto the screen. The whole “girl’s school” angle is potentially dodgy, but this is largely averted when the Baron focuses his attentions not on the students but the teachers; the worst part of the script is probably the insistence on cramming in some highly annoying comic relief in the form of Dr. Tobler (Miles Malleson), who accompanies Van Helsing to the school.

Beyond this and David Peel’s utter failure as the lead villain, the movie offers decent performances all round, and once the horrors start rolling it’s really quite fun – the part where a mother, insane with grief, coaxes her vampire daughter out of the grave is especially memorable.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness

Perhaps realising that a Dracula movie that doesn’t actually feature Dracula is going to be a disappointment to many, Hammer put the series on ice until 1966, when this movie brought Christopher Lee back to the title role, directed once again by Terence Fisher from a script by Jimmy Sangster (credited, at his request, as “John Samson” since he was dissatisfied with the final shooting script).

We kick off with a flashback to 1958’s Dracula, showing Van Helsing confronting and destroying Dracula – a welcome glimpse of the Cushing/Lee double act, which we’re otherwise deprived of for the rest of the movie. The first non-recycled footage is the funeral of a girl suspected of being killed by a vampire; the mourners very sensibly plan to both stake her through the heart and burn her on a pyre in broad daylight. However, they are interrupted by a rifle-toting monk – Father Sandor (Andrew Kier), who presides over the local monastery. Sandor insists that she’s no vampire and forces the locals to bury her in the churchyard.

Meanwhile, the Kents from England – Alan (Charles Tingwell), his brother Charles (Francis Matthews), Alan’s wife Helen (Barbara Shelley), and Charles’ wife Diana (Suzan Farmer) – are enjoying a nice holiday in Central Europe. They encounter Father Sandor that evening in a local inn as he rants about the locals refusing to accept that Dracula is destroyed forever, even a decade after Van Helsing’s triumph. Turning on the charm, he invites the Kent to swing by his monastery – and warns them off climbing the scenic mountain at Karlsbad, one of the next stops on their route.

Karlsbad is, naturally, the mountain where Dracula’s castle still sits – and even though the abbot believes Dracula is dead and gone, he fears the consequences of anyone tampering with it. Inevitably, the family end up going to the castle, and having been abandoned by their coachman decide to spend the night in the place, seeing how it’s in excellent condition due to Dracula’s butler, Klove (Philip Latham), keeping it in good condition for guests. Predictably, resurrections and bloodsucking ensue.

In Hammer Horror – and, really, most horror films of a certain vintage regardless of studio – there’s a rather stilted style of acting which can be a bit off-putting, and that’s the case here. It’s as though all the actors are doing their best to make sure that they are only presenting obvious facsimiles of emotion, rather than acting in a manner which might cause you to think they were actually scared.

This acting style comes across as very “stagey” – though of course such exaggeration is somewhat more justifiable onstage, where a subtle bit of acting which only the people in the front row can see is going to be totally lost on most of the audience and you need to bear in mind you need to convey your character’s emotions and actions to people watching from a range of different angles and from quite some distance. It’s much less justifiable in a cinematic context, where the camera angle is carefully controlled and everything can be picked up.

When the actor in question is someone like Christopher Lee or Vincent Price, this sort of cheesiness it’s a joy – I could watch them hamming it up for hours – but most of the cast this time around deliver completely forgettable performances, with only Barbara Shelley able to genuinely project fear (and even then her performance is kind of patchy). Shelley’s Helen is the first to be turned vampire, and Shelley has plenty of fun in the role, including some lesbian implications (paving the way for the much more explicit The Vampire Lovers) when she coos “You don’t need Charles” to Diana whilst baring her fangs.

Once Dracula is resurrected the standard of acting improves all around – all the cast member suddenly become capable of emoting properly, almost as though the mere presence of Christopher Lee is enough to improve the chops of everyone else tenfold. And Lee doesn’t get a single line! To be fair, he doesn’t need to in order to be the best actor present. Lee claims that he didn’t deliver any lines because he refused to read the dialogue in the script; Jimmy Sangster claims this is nonsense, and he hadn’t written any dialogue for Dracula at all, going for a more animalistic take on the count. Of course, given that Sangster washed his hands of the shooting script, it’s entirely possible that both were telling the truth here: new lines for Dracula may have been added without Sangster’s knowledge, Lee might have slapped them down.

Outside of Lee and the Kents, the standout member of the cast is Andrew Kier, whose performance as Father Sandor is enjoyable all the way through. Thorley Walters also offers a good turn as Ludwig, the madded bookbinder, who with his fly-swallowing habits is this movie’s Renfield equivalent. Still, once you notice that Ludwig is a repurposed Renfield and Sandor is a more religiously-inclined Van Helsing, and the Helen/Diana dynamic is very reminiscent of Lucy and Mina, the whole story starts to feel like it’s been cobbled together from scenes from the original story with the serial numbers filed off.

Still, the resurrection sequence this time is pretty awesome, despite the fact that the bright red blood used for fake blood in movies of this vintage tends to look very unrealistic. The way Dracula is trapped by running water at the end, whilst clever in some respects, also feels a bit too neat and exposes a pitfall of piling in too many of the classic vampiric weaknesses into a single story – defeating Dracula then becomes a matter of rules-lawyering him to death.

Taste the Blood of Dracula

This 1970 piece, directed by Peter Sasdy is the fifth film in the Hammer Dracula series. After the runaway success of The Devil Rides Out, Hammer decided that it’d be a grand idea to up the occult content in all their movies, under the theory that a little bit of Satan improves any film. Taste the Blood of Dracula attempted this with their Dracula series, though at least there was some mild precedent for it in all of Van Helsing’s talk of the “cult of the undead” in Brides of Dracula and the ritualistic resurrection in Dracula: Prince of Darkness.

It opens with international snowglobe salesman Weller (Roy Kinnear) traipsing around a Transylvanian forest when he stumbles into the final scenes of the previous movie in the series, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, and witnesses Dracula’s death. Like any sensible person, he immediately sets about looting the corpse, making away with Dracula’s cloak, dog tags (seriously, he has a big gold necklace with “Dracula” written on it, presumably so Weller would know he was Dracula), and an extensive sample of Dracula’s dried blood. (Which, before it dries, looks a lot more viscous and has far more pips than blood usually does, but I suppose Taste the Jam of Dracula would be a stupid name for a film.)

Back in England, young Alice Hargood (Linda Hayden) is clashing with her father William (Geoffrey Keen), since he disapproves strongly of her flirtation with Paul Paxton (Anthony Corlan). Little does she realise that William wants her to keep away from the Paxton family because William, Paul’s father Samuel Paxton (Peter Sallis), and their friend Jonathan Secker (John Carson) comprise the membership of a three-man secret society of libertines, devoted to hanging out in brothels drinking and taking drugs and fucking anyone or anything the ridiculously camp brothel manager places in front of their penises, and William doesn’t want a marriage between Paul and Alice complicating this.

Having become jaded, the members of the club are looking out for new thrills, which walk into their life in the form of young Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates), an aristocrat of dubious reputation who is reputed to dabble in black magic. Seeing in Courtley a scandalous sin they haven’t indulged in (Satanism, not homosexuality, they blatantly checked that box ages ago), he soon convinces them to buy him the implements he requires to perform a Black Mass in honour of Dracula himself – the cloak, dogtags, and aforementioned blood.

However, it turns out that the libertines are all too scared to Taste the Blood of Dracula, and so only Courtley drinks; he immediately has a fit, and the terrified trio beat him to death as a precaution and run away. After being consumed by Dracula’s blood, Courtley’s body becomes the raw material for a gruesome resurrection which sees Dracula returning to life; offended by their harsh treatment of his servant Courtley, Dracula swears revenge on the three – and it’s through their families that he gets it.

As you can see from the length of the recap, this has a rather convoluted setup – Hammer needing to resort to increasingly imaginative means of bringing Dracula back to life for his next sequel. (The idea of letting him survive a movie does not seem to have occurred to them.) The trio of libertines are treated interestingly; whilst both Paxton and Secker are presented as reasonably sympathetic characters, Hargood is a brute, embodying the absolute worst aspects of the stereotypical Victorian father. This is an unusual setup – you’d expect them to either make the libertines all essentially harmless fops, so you could root for them, or all complete monsters, so you could root for Dracula.

As it is, the film expects you to root for Dracula early on when he’s gunning for Hargood, and then root for Paxton and Secker as they try to survive the wrath that has been unleashed against them, which is a reversal that could have gone badly wrong but just about works – not least because the way Dracula uses the characters’ own families against them is pretty abhorrent.

The Black Mass sequence is quite well-realised; it’s certainly more low-key than the occult ceremonies in The Witches or The Devil Rides Out, with less of the “mass outdoor rave” feel that those two movies had and instead offering an atmospheric and furtive ceremony whispered in an abandoned church. That said, whilst the church set is good and Hammer were usually pretty solid with the sets and locations they used, some of the outside locations are clearly filmed on modern, tarmac-covered streets with electric street lights, which feels incongruous given that the vaguely Victorian setting of the movie seems to call out for cobblestones and gaslight.

Other discordant factors aren’t the movie’s fault so much as an inevitable consequence of some of the cast members having had much more recognisable roles later in their careers. I found it really distracting to watch Peter Sallis play one of the libertines, because I kept expecting him to exclaim “It’s the wrong vampire, Gromit!”, and the whole “Peter Sallis has misadventures with his friends who are all old enough to know better” schtick makes me think of Last of the Summer Wine (Last of the Summer Blood?).

Other cast issues include Corlan’s unconvincing turn as Paul, since he just isn’t very convincing as a romantic lead; the way he begs Alice to elope with him crosses the line from “impassioned plea” into “entitled, babyish whining”, and the bit where after a frustrating conversation with a policeman he turns around and slams his hand down on a piano makes him seem less like a brooding romantic hero so much as a petulant dorkboy. He’s not much fun as a vampire hunter either, since he can’t quite muster any firey determination or cold-blooded sense of purpose or inspire us to root for him; the best he can manage is an angry pout.

That said, Secker’s son Jeremy (Martin Jarvis) comes across as a complete fool, though this is down to the script presenting a scenario which nobody could convincingly pull off. Picture this: hewalks into his father’s study whilst his dad is slumped over his desk with a large bullet wound on his arm. Lucy Paxton (Isla Blair) is knocking on the French windows, grinning like a creepy lunatic. His instant response is to go over to her for a makeout session rather than yelling “WHAT THE HELL LUCY MY FATHER MIGHT BE DEAD HERE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CALL A DOCTOR”. It says a lot about this movie that I can buy the whole “Black Mass to resurrect Dracula” deal, but the human beings in the movie behave so absurdly that I can’t suspend disbelief any more.

Scars of Dracula

Hammer decided to stop fucking about with long pre-resurrection sequences this time around. This next sequel, directed by Roy Ward Baker, opens with a Transylvanian castle. The altar that Dracula died on at the end of Taste the Blood of Dracula has been teleported from the church in England it was originally located in to here, with Dracula’s remains still strewn on top of it. (No, this is never explained.) A shitty bat puppet emits a series of ear-piercing shrieks and dribbles blood on the remains, causing Dracula to reform unharmed (it’s like the bat puppet is the world’s most ludicrous alarm clock or something). Come morning, yet another Transylvanian peasant is trudging morosely through the forest carrying his dead daughter, her necks bearing the titular Scars of Dracula as the credits play.

Our mourning dad delivers his daughter’s corpse to the local pub, and his fellow yokels are duly appalled; soon an angry mob is forming up to go and dispatch Dracula before night falls, the local priest (Michael Gwynn) reluctantly agreeing to come along for the ride. But as the mob puts Castle Dracula to the torch and runs around looking for some Christopher Lee to stake, the bat puppet returns and starts yelling at Dracula to wake up again. Having been alerted, Dracula escapes from the burning castle (which is burning in broad daylight… never mind).

When the villagers head home in a triumphant mood to check on their wives and children, who they’d left in the village church for safety’s sake whilst they went on the Castle Dracula raid, they find that Dracula has preceded them and massacred them all (in one of the goriest scenes ever seen in a Hammer film to this point). Apparently all those crucifixes he was deathly allergic to in the previous film caused him absolutely no problem this time, and apparently we are also to believe that all those weaknesses that he was established as having in previous movies were bullshit.

We cut to a wonderful birthday party for Sarah Framsen (Jenny Hanley). The studly Carlson brothers are competing for her affections – Simon (Dennis Waterman) is the elder brother, a nice safe law student who wants to make an honest woman of her, whereas young Paul (Christopher Matthews) is a womanising cad who turned up late to the party because he was busy fucking the mayor’s daughter.

When he does manage to get to the party, Paul barely has time to give Sarah his gift before the mayor’s goons turn up intent on teaching him a lesson. Paul goes for a daring leap out of the ballroom window and crashes through the roof of a carriage, spooking the horses and prompting them to haul him halfway across the country – to the very village that suffered the massacre at the start of the film. His efforts to get a free bed for the night by seducing the inn’s barmaid are disrupted by the return of the innkeeper (Michael Ripper), so Paul declares that he’s going to go to seek shelter at the Castle, despite the barmaid advising against it.

Then he goes and finds a carriage and decides to go to sleep in that instead, only for Dracula’s loyal servant Klove (this time played by Patrick Troughton) shows up and drives the carriage to the Castle anyway. This feels like a significant continuity screwup, since there’s really no point in Paul declaring he’s going to go to the castle, deciding he’s not going to do that, and then ending up there by accident anyway. Either the lines about him going to find shelter at the castle should have been cut, since he plainly doesn’t make much effort to go there, or the bit with the carriage should have been cut.

Either way, Paul arrives to find the castle in perfect repair, Dracula apparently having had time since the start of the film to renovate the place and recruit a new thrall, Tania (Anouska Hempel). It feels like the bulk of the movie takes place some time after the prologue, with the village having learned to accept its new overlord, but it’s really bad at signalling this.

Anyway: the expected vampiric shenanigans ensue. Paul’s stay at Castle Dracula, with Talia and Dracula fighting over who gets the first nibble, is a rehash of Harker’s stay in the original novel – but with the added spin that both Simon (with Sarah in tow) and the authorities of their home town are looking for Paul, so sooner or later they’ll end up descending on the castle to come and find him.

Christopher Lee gets to be much more verbose this time around than in many of the previous Hammer Dracula adaptations, though there’s good uses made of silence here. For instance, when Tania, a fellow vampire, makes her entrance Dracula falls silent and they stare at each other for a while, and they do a great job of putting across the impression that they are communicating via vampiric telepathy somehow.

As I mentioned, Patrick Troughton plays the character of Klove this time around, and whilst in Dracula: Prince of Darkness the Butler of Darkness was just some ordinary butler, this time he’s presented as a creepy hermit living in the ruins of Castle Dracula. He’s a particular treat in the role, especially later when his infatuation with Sarah makes him a liability to Dracula and Simon both.

Unfortunately, he is wasted on this material. The script by Anthony Hinds is astonishingly sloppy. In terms of plot points, the mayor’s daughter falsely accusing Paul of rape to get out of trouble with her dad over her liaison with him might have seemed funny at the time, but for obvious reasons has dated poorly.

Some incidents come across as inadvertently funny. Dracula hypnotising Sarah so that she swoons, picking her up, and strolling away with her without another word whilst Simon looks on helplessly is particularly silly, as well as the bit where Dracula summons Klove to remove the cross from about Sarah’s neck so that he can nom.

That latter point is particularly irksome when one considers how sloppy and inconsistent the film generally is about Dracula’s various weaknesses. Yes, the previous films had established so many that it becomes a pain to keep the straight. Still, since he was killed by sunlight in the original 1958 Dracula, so it really behooves the filmmakers to avoid a situation where he’s clearly going a broad by daylight as in the prologue.

Likewise, crucifixes are still established here as being a vulnerability (and in the 1958 movie, Van Helsing forces Dracula to step into the sunlight by making a makeshift cross out of two crossed candlesticks), but apparently he can enter a church just fine despite the fact that this is hardly going to be a place where is a shortage of crucifixes, or people with faith in God to deploy them under the circumstances.

In short, between this and the altar teleportation, this film treats the audience like they’re complete dullards who not only can’t remember what happened in the previous movies, but also can’t remember what happened in the first few minutes of this movie. This would be annoying even if this had been separated from the previous sequel by a span of some years, but this came out in 1970, around six months after Taste the Blood of Dracula. Even though this was before the home video era, so unless a movie happened to have an accompanying novelisation you wouldn’t know what had happened to it if you didn’t see it in the cinema or catch a repeat on television, imagining that audiences wouldn’t catch on to the disparities is astonishing.

The rest of the execution also has issues. The set design seems not just unusually low-budget by Hammer’s standards, but is at points nonsensical. For example, why would Dracula sleep in a room with an extremely large window open to the sky? Surely that’s just asking for sunlight-related trouble. And the special effects this time around are… not good. Sorry Hammer, I don’t care how many blue lights you flash at us, watching a vicar being nibbled to death by a flappity bat puppet just looks silly.

Dracula A.D. 1972

This Alan Gibson-directed mess opens with the ending of a much better Dracula film which Hammer never actually made: it’s 1872, and Dracula and Van Helsing are fighting atop a runaway carriage as dawn breaks. Dracula flings Van Helsing off, but almost immediately afterwards the carriage smashes straight into a tree. Impaled on one of the carriage-wheels, Dracula is weakened, allowing Van Helsing to drive one of the wheel’s spokes into his heart and slay him. Dracula crumbles to dust, with only his silver ring remaining behind; Van Helsing remains conscious for just long enough to watch his immortal foe die, before succumbing to his own wounds. And a mysterious interloper steals away Dracula’s ring, and a small sample of his ashes…

Then we transition to 1972 and the opening credits… and the first problem appears. If you close your eyes and listen to the opening music, it doesn’t sound like an artifact of 1972 – it sounds like a middle-tier spy film from 1967. Dracula A.D. 1972 is specifically making an effort to be hip, except by the early 1970s Hammer just weren’t hip any more, so the overall effect is a bit like that Simpsons episode where Homer tries to convince Bart’s friends he’s still cool by playing Grand Funk Railroad albums at them.

Case in point: the very first scene at the credits include a bunch of totally freaky and out there hippies who’ve invaded a high-class society party thrown by young Charles (Michael Daily), who proceed to have one of their freaky and hip freak-out things that apparently they used to do back when my Mum was a teenager. It involves, like, dancing. And having sex underneath the hors d’œuvres table. Also there is an incredibly forgettable band tagging along with them called Stoneground, who seem to have been formed to cash in on the whole Woodstock scene just as Altamont and the Stooges knifed the 60s in the back and set fire to their dog. This is the sort of thing which was par for the course in teen movies from the mid-to-late 1960s but surely seemed astonishingly dated in 1972.

Anyway, so it turns out that when Stoneground turned up to play the party (because apparently Charles is so addled from aristocratic inbreeding he doesn’t know the difference between a sedate little chamber music act and a 10-member hippy band), they brought along Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame) and his droogs, who specialise in gatecrashing parties where Stoneground is playing and indulging in a little light theft to spice up the whole free love and dancing bit. After escaping from the police – I’m sorry, the “fuzz” – they discuss how they’re feeling jaded with their wild and crazy lifestyle, and want something to jazz things up. Johnny suggests dabbling in the occult, and thinks that a black mass in an abandoned church would be the perfect thing to add excitement to their lifestyles, which are totally hip and modern and fashionable for 1972, and completely aren’t holdovers from 1967 in any way.

As you might expect, seeing how the premise is ripped directly from Taste the Blood of Dracula, shit ends up hitting the fan, and it’s no surprise when it turns out that Johnny knew exactly what was going to happen – because he has inherited the ring and ashes of Dracula from his ancestor, who retrieved them from the site of the last battle. (The name “Johnny Alucard” is a bit of a clue there.) It’s lucky that the grandfather of Jessica (Stephanie Beacham), one of Johnny’s droogs who isn’t so cool with this vampirism jive, happens to be Lorimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), direct descendant of the original…

The big problem the movie has is that so many elements were out of fashion before it even started production. This would not be such a problem if it were a period piece, as with the previous Dracula films. It’s have been a bit of a problem, sure, because whilst Hammer’s in-house style had become a little stylistically out of fashion at the time, but at least such a movie would at least have managed to sit within the classic Hammer style and have some nostalgia value as a result.

However, the movie is so out of touch with the zeitgeist that this becomes a major problem for a movie which, right down to its very title, seems to be trying to be a comprehensive update of Hammer’s in-house style to appeal to a more modern audience. Johnny’s crew is meant to be all cool and hip, but they’re still dressing like refugees from Austin Powers rather than people living in the era of Ziggy Stardust and Black Sabbath. I’ve seen cooler-looking and more fashionable people in photos of my parents from 1972, for crying out loud, and it’s biologically impossible to regard your own parents as being cool.

That said, Peter Cushing as the modern-day Van Helsing in this is brilliant, easily the best feature of the film, mainly because he dresses and acts exactly like Van Helsing from the classic era Hammer Dracula movies and combines that with a permanent expression of utter disdain for the entire affair. You know this bullshit is beneath his dignity, he acknowledges it, but he’s soldiering on anyway – and it’s less disruptive than Alec Guinness eye-rolling his way through Star Wars, since the part does call on Van Helsing to be all square and disapproving of the kids’ antics. (He’s also the only one who works out the Alucard/Dracula connection, although hilariously he actually needs to work the thing out on a piece of paper because Hammer still seem to be treating their audience like utter morons.)

Christopher Lee is also able to do a good job – again, because his role allows him to express his contempt for the production as much as he sees fit, through the medium of his contempt for Johnny and the droogs. He swooshes around looking permanently pissed-off, as though he can’t believe he’s doing another Dracula film (he was increasingly grumpy about the role at this point), just as Dracula presumably can’t believe he has to make do with a bunch of kids who are desperately trying to pretend the spirit of the 60s didn’t die with Hendrix, Morrison and Joplin.

When you think about it this way, it’s astonishing that none of the sequels to the 1958 Dracula brought the Cushing/Lee double act back as Dracula and Van Helsing, considering that they’re always such a joy to watch when they’re onscreen together.

Neame also does a fine job as Johnny, his fanatical devotion to Dracula overcoming the silliness of the people he surrounds himself with, and admittedly the idea of a servant of Dracula’s gathering to themselves a clique of impressionable, air-headed thrill-seekers in order to resurrect the great man himself is a good concept – yes, it was used in Taste the Blood of Dracula, but it actually works better here because it’s more believable that that particular plan would work with a gang of easily-led stoners than a group of rich and powerful men who are used to taking the lead in their own lives.

I also liked the way Johnny ditches his hippy threads once Dracula comes back for a stylish all-black wardrobe. The mental image of Dracula giving Johnny fashion tips – “Trust me, Johnny, over the centuries I’ve discovered that black is always in” – is irresistible; less flippantly, it’s actually the one thing about the distinctly 1960s aesthetic of the droogs that really works. Johnny’s aesthetic shift to a more severe appearance feels reminiscent of the shift in the counter-culture from the hopes and dreams of the Summer of Love to the creepier, cultier aspects like the Manson family and especially the Process Church (with some of Johnny’s all-black ensembles resembling their style in particular).

That said, the hippy aesthetic does result in one of the goofiest occult rituals Hammer would ever depict. The Black Mass to summon Dracula starts out with the droogs playing a tape of a diabolically shitty drum solo (or, to be less needlessly redundant, “a drum solo”) whilst they all wave their heads about as though they are totally tripping and Johnny intones “Dig the music, kids! Let it floooooooooooooow to you!” That said it does get good when Johnny slashes his own wrist and pours the blood into a chalice containing some of Dracula’s ashes (the rest having been buried just outside the churchyard), and then pours the mixture of blood and ash all over Laura (Caroline Munro), the hippie girl who was foolish enough to volunteer to lie on the altar and be the centrepiece of the Black Mass.

Once the police get involved, we’re suddenly in 70s cop drama land and all of a sudden the film feels less dated – well, it’s dated now obviously, but it at least comes across as being more plausibly 1972-vintage stuff, rather than stale 1967 material reheated. The interactions between Van Helsing and the police are probably the aspect of the film which works the best, with Van Helsing offering advice based on his years of research on the subject and conducting his own investigations whilst the cops use the tried and tested police tactics.

That said, it really doesn’t help that climactic scenes are set to a funk-heavy porn movie soundtrack, or that the final fight between Van Helsing and Dracula unfolds to music more suited to a chase scene from an early Bond film. It’s a real shame that a movie which leans this hard on the hip new sounds of 1972 ended up with a soundtrack that misses the mark so often. Apparently The Faces were going to appear in this, which would have made the party seen infinitely cooler and less dated, but they pulled out.

Other aspects of the production seem similarly threadbare. The movie is particularly blatant about using crucifix shots as pretexts for presenting us with close-ups of the actresses’ breasts, for instance. There’s a bit where they’re filming out on the street where I swear a random passer-by recognises Cushing, doesn’t realise that there’s filming going on, and starts to follow him trying to strike up a conversation.

On the whole, this is an interesting attempt to refresh and update the series, but fails on a number of fronts, with the result that it has dated even worse than the earlier movies in the sequence. In particular, simply transferring Dracula into the modern day does not seem to me to be enough to jettison the baggage of the series to date; the overall approach to writing these movies needs to be updated to, with an eye to dialling back on or eliminating bad habits or annoying tropes which had become overplayed.

For instance, there’s a bit here where one of the vampires is defeated by being shoved into a bath and the shower turned on, due to the whole running water clause. Again, this feels like rules-lawyering a win out of the vampires by playing on their long grocery list of weaknesses, as established so far in the series. If Hammer had been really feeling courageous, they could have just done a hard reset and moved away from this baggage, but they didn’t, and the end result is this mess.