The Satanic Rites of Dracula

Hammer's last throw with Christopher Lee who refused to do another Dracula after AD 1972. He regarded the last Hammer's as such a departure from Stoker as to be sacrilegious. This replaces horror with a thriller. Dracula in a thriller? French Connection was a thriller. How does the suave and deadly Count become transplanted into a more style which uses more realism? He cannot, he is incongruous. Consequently Dracula makes almost no appearance until the last 15 minutes. The rest of the film is a chase between his henchmen and Cushing with the police. The quality of the Dracula films had deteriorated in their glamour and stylishness and transferring to the modern day was an attempt to inject glamour again. The most interesting piece of this film is the satanic rite of the title. Its images and practises have been used by the Church of Satan and other occult groups. The actor, scientist and parapsychologist Stephen Armourae has referred to it in articles and the actress Mia Martin has appeared in some of his drawings and paintings. Oddly despite such a high profile release none of the actors including Pauline Peart and Mia Martin did anything since despite their glamour and looks.

Scared me at the age of eleven. The best thing I can say about this film. It should probably have been renamed 'A Stake Too Far' as by this time the Christopher Lee Dracula franchise had been bled dry.

Watch it by all means. But whilst you're watching ask yourself this: The fundamental plot line has Dracula and his cohorts wanting to wipe out the entire human race by releasing a deadly plague. If everyone's dead, on whose blood are they going to survive?

Saw Satanic Rites last night for the second time, and paid more attention this time. The film, if you`re waiting to see a lot of Dracula will be a bit of a let down (but let`s face it, since Taste the Blood of Dracula, I don`t think Christopher Lee has had 30 minutes screen time with all of the Dracula films joined together.) The movie starts slowly, with, for once, no Dracula resurrection scene. He`s just back, and does not appear until well into the film. (He appears in a scene obviously stuck in because they realized he had not made an appearance at all so long into the film). When Peter Cushing appears, you start to feel like this is a proper Hammer film after all. Peter Cushing really does this one justice. Then from the time he visits D.D.Denham, it is a pretty good Dracula picture. The action between our hero and villain gets going, and builds up to a reasonable finale. This is better than Dracula AD 1972, but as I have said before, the whole series should have stayed in Victorian times. Joanna Lumley is radiant as Jessica, who's character returns from the previous film. It is a pretty scary premise. Dracula, finally sick of being resurrected for 2 or 3 days at a time, wants to end it all, but in doing this, he wants to take everyone with him. THE WHOLE WORLD! It is a good plot which just happens to have Dracula as the figure-head. For once Christopher Lee gets a reasonably decent script and delivers his lines beautifully. A couple of points. In some of the Dracula films, we are introduced to new but apparently tested ways of dealing with the fanged one. Dracula, Prince of Darkness introduced clear running water, as used at the end of DPOD, in Dracula AD 1972, and in Satanic Rites. Then in AD `72 we are introduced to the fact that the good Count can be knobbled with a silver bladed knife. Handy, since Van Helsing has one. Then in this movie, Van Helsing introduces the Hawthorn bush, from which Christ recieved his crown of thorns. Guess where Drac ends up near the end? Do these things really work? Or is it just that sunlight and the old stake are boring now, and the writers just make these things up? I feel a bit cheated when someone like Dracula can be beaten by lightning, drowned in a moat (NOT running water), or overcome in a church (whereas he had already killed a girl and placed her body in a full blown God worshipping church.) This film, when it gets going, is a pleasing finale to the Christopher Lee years as Dracula, and to boot, Peter Cushing delivers a really good performance too.

The last of the Christopher Lee Dracula series [the Count would make one more brief return for Hammer in the guise of John Forbes-Robertson in The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires] is not exactly a success, but it's a good deal more interesting than the shoddy Dracula AD 1972. There are quite a few new ideas in this one, although they are not organised well and it does become a bit of a mess. However, dull it isn't, unlike the previous one.

We have satanists practising sacrificial rites, a mad scientist with a deadly virus, a Howard Hughes-type recluse who turns out to be....., biker assassins with guns, you name it. Much of it has an Avengers feel, and Dracula is unsurprisingly hardly in the film, with only one brief appearance until the final twenty minutes. There's more action than horror, but two vampire scenes in a cellar are well done. The effects of Dracula's death sequence are excellent, although the scene is silly, with this most accident prone of vampires simply walking into a rose bush.

Not really a good film, but kind of fun. It does suggest interesting pathways which Hammer might have taken the series if the response to this had not been so poor.

This rather odd entry in the Count Dracula film cycle finds the count (Christopher Lee) positioned as the head of a corporate conglomerate that has a group of high-level mucky-mucks enmeshed in a plan to unleash a new strain of uber-virile plague on the world. Why Count Dracula wants to kill off the world's population and therefore eliminate his food supply is never made clear; indeed, when vampire specialist Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) poses that very question to him, the count looks like he'd never thought of that before. The screenplay tries half-heartedly to explain it via some psycho-babble about the count really subconsciously wanting to bring about his own destruction and put an end to his tortured soul, etc. Nice try, but it doesn't fly.

The film is pretty short on atmosphere or scares, but there's some fun to be had anyway. Cushing is so assured in his performance that he almost makes you feel like you're watching something of substance, while a young Joanna Lumley is buxom and fetching as Van Helsing's in-peril granddaughter.

Grade: B-