The Satanic Rites of Dracula

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?

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.

Hammer's penultimate Dracula film and the last one to feature a tired Christopher Lee in the title role.

This is a significant improvement over Dracula A.D. 1972, but Peter Cushing is used significantly less in the fight scenes (which are not particularly good anyway).

The story, which revolves around a revived Dracula (in disguise) getting government ministers and leading doctors to help him take over the world with the plague has its merits. Infact, the story is well-paced and it's content is refreshingly varied (bike chases, cellars with female vampires, a plague victim etc).

Freddie Jones turns up with a superbly jittery performance as a scientist (he was also excellent in "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed").

Christopher Lee doesn't get enough screen time, but his scenes with Peter Cushing are, as you might expect, good (n.b. the scene in the tower block where Van Helsing goes to expose D.D. Denham as Dracula). Lee, also gets a chance to utter the immortal lines "..my revenge has spread over centuries and has just begun..." (which is apparently from the book).

If you go into this film with an open-mind, you won't be too disappointed - there is certainly plenty going on, even if the plot is not very tightly structured.

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-

I definitely feel a bit out of synch with the general consensus here because this entry in the Hammer Dracula series is one of my favourites. I would say I even enjoy it more than the original, which is doubtless tantamount to sacrilege in some people's eyes. I don't know, this movie just successfully entertains as far as I'm concerned.

The setting is in contemporary times, early 70's London. The story has the evil count gathering together various industrialists, politicians and scientists as part of a nefarious plan to wipe out civilization. He bases his operations from a remote house where satanic rites are practiced, involving these aforementioned individuals plus a number of female vampires who are chained up in the basement. Professor Van Helsing is on hand as usual to attempt to thwart his nemesis's plans.

There's just so much going on in Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride that it simply never gets boring. While it may lack the lush Gothic setting of most of the other entries in the series, I actually think it gains a reasonable amount from the 70's vibe. The idea of Dracula living under a false name in a tower block in the middle of London is a strangely good one, and some of the other locations are well utilized too, like the basement full of vampires for example – the scene where Van Helsing's grand-daughter comes into contact with these creatures is well orchestrated. There's a pleasing over-all smattering of action, nudity and gore throughout the picture to keep genre fans happy, while the film is on occasion quite stylish as in the scenes of the satanic ceremony. And of course it is never a bad thing to have Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing together in a film.

I would suggest that this is a movie that doesn't really deserve its poor reputation. I certainly find it a very enjoyable bit of fun. I do somewhat think that Hammer's 70's productions in general have been given a worse rap than they deserve. For anyone who enjoys British horror films from the period, I think this one is worth seeing.