Vampires (10 page)

“Bring them here to this mausoleum?”

Interestingly, this is the same adjective that John Forbes-Robertson’s Count would later use when describing his castle retreat in Transylvania in
The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires
where Cushing would play his final Van Helsing characterization. Jessica states that they are just a group of friends, but Michael Coles’ Inspector Murray dockets their crimes and has Laura’s prints on file for possession of marijuana. Jessica confides to granddad that she
“never drops acid, never shoots up and is not sleeping with anyone at the moment”
Van Helsing swallows her explanations and her admittance of drinking the odd half pint of lager every now and then. The film never explains what became of Jessica’s real parents, or even what happened to Van Helsing’s lineage. He keeps an oil portrait of himself looking more like the Baron Frankenstein in his study next to a woodcut of Christopher Lee’s Count, but there are no pictures of baby Lorrimar with Mum and Dad at Brighton Beach for example. In fact, Van Helsing seems to have grown up in the one room studying his vampire and waiting for the inevitable confrontation. The script tells us that he has helped the police in the past with a case involving witchcraft and blackmail but he is as much a prisoner amongst his studies as is his nemesis in the unhallowed ground of the deconsecrated church. Both are characters out of their time. Van Helsing describes in detail that “
the vampire abhors silver”
and that “
garlic is not 100 percent reliable
.” He also adds the tidbit that vampires can be revived if someone removes the stake from their hearts and changes his overcoat for a snazzy suede jacket and gloves to combat them.

The ‘
group of friends’
spend their own time drinking in The Cavern, the club made famous in the sixties by being patronized by The Beatles who played almost 300 gigs there but, in 1972, had already disbanded two years
previously. Johnny Alucard is their leader and his name spelled backwards is Dracula. This obvious alias was first used in Universal’s
Son of Dracula (1942).
Johnny is a real cad, but Christopher Neame plays the role very well. Sat amongst his partying friends like
A Clockwork Orange’s
Alex DeLarge, he is sly, silent, slimy, conceited and ever watchful. No one knows where he came from or even where he lives, but he does live life on the very edge. He sleeps in a trunk in his bachelor pad that is located upstairs so that the sun can shine straight into the bathroom while he showers! He can pinpoint exact the time it takes the police to raid a house before everyone has to scarper to listen to a more modern band than Stoneground and he enjoys upsetting old ladies by breaking their best china, just when they think that he is going to leave it be. Before he is fanged by Dracula, his chat up technique consists of the offering of tickets for the
Jazz Spectacular at the Albert Hall!
The film never tells us if this is the same man who scooped up Dracula’s blood and ring in the prologue. Although played by the same actor it would mean that Alucard is nearly as old as the Count, but he keeps nattering to Christopher Lee to be given the power. And, he does have the ability to charm these gullible youths into a black magic ceremony,
A Bacchanal with Beelzebub,
to revive his ancestor in over-the-top Gothic menace. Christopher Neame was at one time being viewed as a successor to Christopher Lee by Hammer, as Ralph Bates was for Peter Cushing. However, like most of the seventies Hammer stars, he is outdone by his own decadence and the only other vampire movie he starred in was
Lust For A Vampire
as he tried to romance Kirsten Lindholm with little success.

Once revived, Christopher Lee’s Count Dracula manages to exude great menace from his prison and vows vengeance on the house of Van Helsing forever. The old through the young and he has chosen Johnny Alucard as his instrument of revenge. When Alucard announces that he brought the vampire back, Lee counteracts him:

“It was my will!”

He brandishes his signet ring that had been on Alucard’s finger. The Count then goes on to sink his teeth into the delectable Caroline Munro and forms a small community of vampires without ever leaving St Bartolphs church. He gives power to his underling, even though he keeps bringing back the wrong girls, and he misquotes Bram Stoker in his standoff with Van Helsing’s grandson:

“You would play your brains against mine? Against me who has commanded nations?”

As the good doctor nails him with a silver dagger, he uses presence of mind to hypnotize Jessica to pull the knife from his heart, but he isn’t prepared for the cursed vial of Holy water that Van Helsing carries in his vest pocket. Caught off guard, he slips and falls into a pit primed with stakes and goes into the second meltdown of the film. Again, the film shows Lee just going through the motions, but he is demonically memorable for all of that and is aided by some creepy blowing winds that announce his presence.

Stephanie Beacham plays Jessica Van Helsing, the instrument of the Count’s revenge. She hangs out with her friends who gatecrash parties and spend their time smoking pot and getting smashed. She has little interest in her grandfather’s studies and doesn’t even know where her family tomb is located. When quizzed by the police over the death of her friend Laura she begins to have nightmares about the tall man in black. She almost helps Dracula to defeat her grandfather when she pulls the knife from his black heart. This was Miss Beacham’s only Hammer appearance, Jessica Van Helsing would appear as Joanna Lumley in the sequel
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973).

Another continuing character is Inspector Murray played by Michael Coles. A by-the-book policeman, who, on closer scrutiny, isn’t very efficient, After hearing Jessica’s statement about St Bartolphs
’ church, you would think that he would have the presence of mind to raid the whole site and have cops,
“”the fuzz”,
swarming all over the place. After all, a mutilated girl has just been found amongst the bricks and bulldozers of the nearby building site in one of the film’s most unforgettable images. In fact, the only time we see the local constabulary in action is at the beginning of the movie as they raid a party, but only one solitary policeman guards the Cavern whilst the vampires play inside. Murray does have the gumption to call in Van Helsing on the case, even though his granddaughter is a suspect who is not even held for the obligatory forty eight hours. But these are minor gaffes that are rampant in fantasy cinema and Inspector Murray would be pivotal in Van Helsing’s return for the sequel.

The Cavern club is situated in Matthew Street Liverpool England. Originally a jazz club, it opened on Wednesday 16
th
January 1957. The Cavern was the central club to the music renaissance in Liverpool in the early 1960s when the jazz was dropped and replaced by Rock and roll that had taken hold on the
nation. From 9
th
February 1961 to 3
rd
August 1963, the Fab Four made 292 appearances. But John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Brian Epstein had already appeared in solo performances before this. Other famous acts to grace the club include, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Kinks, Elton John, Queen, The Who and John Lee Hooker. Cilla Black worked as a hat-check girl and the last to play there were Dutch group Focus before the club was shut down in May 1973. It was taken over briefly by Liverpool FC player Tommy Smith and was rebuilt using many of the original bricks. It occupied 75% of the original site, but had to close in 1989 because of Liverpool’s economic climate. In 1991 two friends, Bill Heckle and Dave Jones reopened the Cavern and still run it today, being the longest owners in history. Paul McCartney returned in 1999 to publicize his then new album,
Run, Devil Run.
The club still has around 40 live bands – both tribute bands and original bands – performing there every week. The Wall of Fame removed the bricks of disgraced pop stars Gary Glitter and Jonathon King in 2008.

On its release in the USA,
Dracula AD 1972
was accompanied by a small featurette in which actor Barry Atwater – Janos Skorzeny from
The Night Stalker
– rose from a coffin and swore the audience in as members of
The Count Dracula society
. Originally - and rightly so - battered by the critics on its release, it has now received an incredible cult following and is a lot of fun to watch – again and again.

The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
Christopher Lee as
Count Dracula
. Peter Cushing as
Lorrimar Van Helsing.
William Franklyn as
Torrance
. Michael Coles as
Inspector Murray
. Joanna Lumley as
Jessica Van Helsing
. Freddie Jones as
Professor Keeley.
Barbara Yu Ling as
Chin Yang
. Valerie Van Ost as
Jane.
Screenplay: Don Houghton. Director: Alan Gibson

Synopsis

Professor Lorrimar Van Helsing is called in to aid Scotland Yard and the British Secret service when it is revealed that Satanists are performing bizarre rites at an out-of-the-way country house protected by afghan-clad bikers. Van Helsing recognizes an old friend, Professor Julian Keeley, as one of the members and pays him a visit. As they talk, Van Helsing discovers that Keeley is growing the bubonic plague in petri dishes. The professor is killed by the biker/storm troopers and Van Helsing is wounded in the forehead. Van Helsing’s daughter and a Scotland Yard detective investigate the house and find vampires in the cellar and snipers in the fields. A silver bullet is made and Van Helsing pays a visit to the D D Denham group of companies and discovers that the leader of the Satanists is none other than Count Dracula himself. Van Helsing is captured as is his granddaughter. Dracula has the girl hypnotized on his altar. He makes his servant release the plague virus as a fight from within the house causes an electrical malfunction and the house bursts into flame. Dracula flees into the woods with Van Helsing hot on his heels. He traps the vampire on the spines of an hawthorn bush and stakes him through the heart with wood from a picket fence.

Review

Dracula is dead…and well…and living in London.
Clearly, with an original title like that, Hammer was being very tongue in cheek concerning their latest movie starring the dark seducer. The film itself, with practically the same production team as
Dracula AD 1972,
is more geared towards being a prototype for the TV series
The New Avengers

Christopher Lee returns for the final time under protest as he made clear in a promotional press conference in 1973. Condemning the film as being
“fatuous, pointless, absurd!”
What he probably didn’t realize is that he actually had something to do in this one. He is the mysterious D D Denham. The hermit tycoon in charge of the D D Denham Group of companies that has been built on the site of St Bartolph’s church and his activities draw the suspicions of the secret service after an agent (Maurice O Connell) has escaped from his out-of-the way retreat known as Pelham House. The dying man recalls a black mass ceremony with noted guests – a government minister, a peer of the realm, a general and a famous Nobel prize-winning scientist – putting on robes to conjure up the devil. A naked girl lies on an altar and is stabbed through the heart by the oriental housekeeper. The girl’s eyes fly open and she sits up again as the wound magically disappears. Dracula is planning Armageddon and the most important addition to his party is the scientist professor Julian Keeley – Freddie Jones, wonderful – who is growing the bubonic plague in his refrigerator. In the cellars of Pelham house are vampire ladies whom Dracula has had the presence of mind to chain them to the wall to stop them getting into mischief.

Michael Coles’ Inspector Murray is again brought into the case and his first instinct is to recruit Lorrimar Van Helsing (Peter Cushing).
The chain smoking Van Helsing jumps into action immediately when he realizes that his old friend professor Keeley is mixed up in the Count’s plans for world domination. Cushing’s professor rethinks the whole vampire myth and mixes up his lore with that of a werewolf as he intends to nail Dracula with a silver bullet. Before this, however, he visits his old colleague and, when Keeley lovingly shows him his latest project growing in petri dishes, Van Helsing is attacked by an afghan-clad storm-trooper under the Count’s command and is grazed in the head by a bullet to knock him unconscious. On waking he finds that Keeley has been hanged for his troubles. Deciding that the only course of action
is to face the Count head-on, he ventures to the Denham corporate building where;

“No one sees Mr Denham. Ever!”

The security guard is surprised when the mysterious employer gives the all clear for Van Helsing to proceed to his penthouse office. Not being fooled for a minute by the bad Bela Lugosi accent that Dracula uses, Van Helsing unmasks Denham as the most evil man in history, and holds him at bay with a crucifix and a gun loaded with his homemade silver bullet. His shot is deflected however as his hypnotized hordes drag Van Helsing to Pelham house for the satanic ritual hinted at in the title. As Murray causes havoc upstairs, the vampire becomes eager to get the party started early. Dracula hypnotizes his minion to break the phial that holds the deadly plague as everyone scarpers. A contrived fire destroys the house and the man infected with the plague as Dracula makes his own exit but not before misquoting Bram Stoker again:

“My revenge is spread across centuries and has just begun!”

Van Helsing follows the vampire into the woods and realizes that his shrubbery is composed of hawthorn bushes. He deduces that Christ’s crown of thorns was assembled from the Hawthorn bush and the trap is set. Calling the vampire’s name in the dark, the two eventually meet on opposite sides of the shrubbery. From where I was sitting, I believe that the Count could have simply walked around the shrubbery and snapped Van Helsing’s neck. Dracula, however, tries to grab his enemy through the bush and tangles himself up in it. The scene is a really bad case of misdirection. As his foot becomes fast on the thorns, Van Helsing simply plucks a stave of wood from a nearby picket fence and stabs his enemy through the heart. The credits zip up the screen as the professor holds Dracula’s signet ring, which Christopher Lee claims, once belonged to Bela Lugosi.

By Van Helsing’s side is his granddaughter Jessica who has matured from her hip-swinging days from the previous film to become a mature woman with more than a passing interest in her grandfather’s work than she showed earlier. Joanna Lumley is more convincing in the role of Van Helsing’s grand daughter and one of the first gutsy women in a horror movie although she does seem to have a mental lapse as she is reintroduced to Inspector Murray and doesn’t recall her adventure from the previous film. In true Purdey style, she traipses along the English countryside with Murray to Pelham House and invades the cellar where lie the sleeping vampires. While secret service officials are being shot down by invisible snipers, she is being mauled by Dracula’s fanged
amours
and she is later hypnotized and draped on Dracula’s altar to join him in his insane vendetta to destroy the world.

Ms Lumley has an incredible list of accomplishments under her belt as a former model, a voice over artist, an author, a Human Rights activist and of course, an actress. Still constantly in work today, she began her acting career without formal training in 1969 and shot to fame in many British TV serials including
The New Avengers
,
Sapphire and Steel
and
Absolutely Fabulous.
Screen credits include
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969),
an uncredited role in Amicus’
The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)
and
James and the Giant Peach (1996).
She was awarded an OBE in 1995 and she is also a
Fellow of The Royal Geographical
Society
(FRGS). At the time of writing she is scheduled to appear on the big screen in Martin Scorcese’s crime drama,
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
with Leonardo De Caprio.

To give the film a James Bond feel there is able support from William Franklyn in turtle-neck sweater and sports jacket as head of the secret service. Like the police in
Dracula AD1972,
however, he doesn’t permit a full on raid on Pelham house when he realizes that snipers on motorbikes roam the area and vampires hide in the cellars. Again, someone in the continuity department obviously lost their hold on the plot. He is killed by a sniper’s bullet while on stakeout along with
James Bond
regular Richard Vernon. Dracula only gets to sink his fangs into one beauty in this movie. She is Jane, played by Valerie Van Ost, a government secretary who is nabbed by the bikers and held prisoner in one of the rooms in Pelham House. Dracula appears – this time followed by a swirling, suffocating mist – and turns her into one of the undead. Her death is still one of the most memorable of the Dracula series. When Jessica Van Helsing invades the cellar, Jane is shackled to the wall and staked savagely by Michael Coles and William Franklyn. This offers the adolescent viewer great titillation as a gory breast is revealed. Excellent.

As the new wave of horror hit the USA with
The Exorcist (1973)
and
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) et al,
The Satanic Rites of Dracula
didn’t appear on their cinema screens until 1979 as
Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride
. This was in the wake of the vampire rush begun by John Badham’s rethink of the Hamilton Deane stage play
Dracula
and starring Frank Langella.

For Christopher Lee it was definitely the final straw. He had played Dracula in all his guises. As well as his Hammer input, he had starred in Jess Franco’s clumsy
El Conde Dracula/Count Dracula (1970),
advertised as a faithful retelling of Stoker’s tale and in 1972 had starred as both Bram Stoker’s monster and the historical Vlad the Impaler in Pedro Portabella’s In
Search of Dracula (1972).
The Satanic Rites of Dracula
would be his final Dracula movie. In 1976 he appeared as Les Prince De Tenebrae in
Dracula, Pere et fils
/
Dracula and Son.
He was knighted in 2010 and in 2011 he appeared in a film for the new Hammer studio,
The Resident
and was honoured with a BAFTA Fellowship. He had a small role in the revised version of
Dark Shadows (2012
), directed by Tim Burton and starring his friend, Johnny Depp as Barnabus. Lee wasn’t a vampire, but a New England fishing Captain. Still working at age 91 and still married to his wife of 52 years, Bergit Kroncke, he has vowed to remain acting for as long as he can. 

Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires aka The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (1974)
Peter Cushing as
Professor Van Helsing
. David Chiang as
Hsi Ching/Hsu Tan Yang
. Julie Ege as
Vanessa Van Buren.
Robin Stewart as
Leyland Van Helsing.
Shih Szu as
Mai Kwei.
John Forbes-Robertson as
Count Dracula.
Robert Hanna as
British Consul.
Chan Shen as
Kah.
Screenplay: Don Houghton. Directors; Roy Ward Baker, Chang Cheh (uncredited) 
Synopsis
In the Ping kwei province of China 1904, the spectre of Count Dracula rules over the oppressed people with the aid of the fabled the Seven Golden vampires. Hiding in the body of a determined slave, Dracula makes his vow for world domination. On hand to stop him are the seven kung Fu martial artistes and the incomparable Lawrence Van Helsing. The professor is recruited by Hsi Ching whose grandfather had been murdered by the vampires, but stole one of their amulets, a large golden vampire bat, and crippled their number as the bats are the vampire’s life force. With the monetary assistance of Scandinavian socialite Vanessa Buren, the Professor and his fighting allies brave the domain of the vampires and Dracula is destroyed forever in a final battle with his most hated foe, Lawrence Van Helsing
.