Vampires (16 page)

Review

When
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
and
Dracula
/
Horror of Dracula (1958),
changed the face of the modern horror movie, Hammer was pressured to keep hold of its title as the house of horror as low budget horror movies and vampire imitations were being churned out with alarming rapidity across the world. Works by Mario Bava, Jesus Franco and Antonio Margheriti would help to capitalize on the dark-cloaked vampire in the Dracula image and add their own individual stamps to the fantasy genre. Bava’s
La Maschero Del Demonio/Black Sunday (1960),
would give further notoriety to the genre by receiving an outright ban by the censors and Spain had already given birth to its own vampire hero in the shape of German Robles Count Lavud of
El Vampiro (1957)

The Brides of Dracula
had held many incidents that were dropped from the original screenplay
Dracula II.
John Elder, a pseudonym for producer Anthony Hinds, worked the excess into this pleasing Draculoid thriller. A honeymoon couple is enticed by the evil Count Ravna (Noel Willman) and his satanic followers. It falls to Clifford Evans grieving hero Professor Zimmer to rescue them both by setting loose thousands of bats to invade the castle. To give weight to this flimsiest of storylines, Hammer hired Australian director Don Sharp. Sharp had no inkling of the horror genre and literally took a crash course in Dracula and vampires by viewing Hammer’s earlier efforts. He came to the conclusion that a vampire film is best viewed when the audiences are not familiar with the cast. Stylish and evocative set-pieces such as the
bal masque
stand out as the heroine, Jennifer Daniel, is tricked into becoming a tasty snack for the lecherous Count Ravna. Zimmer himself is bitten by a vampire who tries to resurrect his dead daughter and cauterizes the wound with whisky and a burning hot brazier. He had staked his own daughter with a shovel in the pre-credit sequence that ranks as one of the best openings of any vampire movie. Other highlights to watch out for are the inclusion of an incredibly zestful vampire in Isobel Black who obviously enjoys her time as one of the undead. She would turn up very underused as a victim in Hammer’s later movie
Twins of Evil (1971).

Noel Willman’s Count Ravna is more personable than either Count Dracula or the confused mummy’s boy, the Baron Meinster. He is witty, entertaining and shares Father Sandor’s cynicisms on social
etiquettes
. He and his son and daughter throw swanky midnight balls in his Bavarian retreat. A telescope alerts him to new arrivals in the town that he is draining and he seduces any young lady that appears in his vicinity. He fangs the local’s daughters but still keeps a hypnotic hold over the grieving parents and they help him to procure the new talent by hiding all signs of his devilry. A husband wakes to find all evidence of his wife missing from the holiday hotel
where they were staying and the landlord denies that the man arrived with his spouse. When they are finally reunited, Ravna instructs the wife to disown her confused husband and swear undying allegiance to him. His son and daughter help him by seducing the guests like the plot from some Shakespearian tragedy; luring them in with music and friendly wiles before striking like deadly adders. The wife is led to a secret chamber where Ravna gives her the fabled
Kiss
of the title while the husband gets drunk at the party in the main hall.

Ravna is on the whole a short substitute for Christopher Lee but has m
ore lines and more to do. Noel Willman felt that the material was beneath him and boasted to co-star Edward de Souza that he would not change his expression once throughout filming. A Northern Irish actor and theatre director his films included;
Androcles and the Lion (1952), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Dr Zhivago (1965)
and
The Odessa File (1974).
He won a Tony Award in 1952 for his direction of Robert Bolt’s play
A Man For All Seasons
on Broadway. Born in 1918 in Derry, Northern Ireland, he died in 1988 in New York City USA aged 70.

Filling in the gaps as the vampire slayer is the gruff Clifford Evans, previously seen in Hammer’s best horror film,
The Curse of the Werewolf (1960).
His Professor Zimmer is an unfocused black magician come bereaved drunkard. The vampires have taken his daughter and now he drowns his sorrows at the bar at the local hotel. Ramming a spade through the coffin lid and the corpse of his daughter in a great opening featurette, he masochistically cauterizes his arm with a burning brazier and whisky when bitten at his daughter’s graveside. His conscience is pricked when a honeymooning couple fall victim to the vampires in the hilltop castle and he is spurned into action when the raving husband pronounces that his wife is missing. Zimmer puts his whiskey to one side and grimly recants an occult prayer to raise the bats from Hell itself to destroy the vampires as they indulge in their sadistic Black Mass. The iconic image of bats circling the castle would be reworked in later films, most notably in Robert Rodriguez’
From Dusk Till Dawn (1995),
and looks very efficient here until we get a close look at the bats. Like all the bats in Hammer movies, they are pretty stagnant and were purchased from Woolworths stores. With Don Sharp’s deft direction, however, they fill their roles admirably as their jittering bodies take down the vampires in the finale. Professor Zimmer is a grim, haunted and very memorable addition to the Van Helsing group of vampire killers.

Clifford Evans was born in 1912 in Camphilly, Wales and served in the Non Combatant Corps in World War 2 as he was a conscientious objector. He began acting in 1934 in an Open Air production of
A Midsummer Nights Dream
and appeared in many British films of the 1930s. He was married to actress Hermione Hannen. Although he appeared in many television shows and dramas, Don Alfredo Caredo in
Curse of the Werewolf
and Professor Zimmer in
Kiss of the Vampire
are his most famous roles. He died in 1985.

Rarely seen these days and very difficult to track down,
Kiss of the Vampire
is one of Hammer’s better excursions into vampire territory and skillfully blends Satanism with vampires. Don Sharp brings an unnerving realism to Ravna’s mind games whilst indulging in some cheesy shots of fangs moving slowly towards the camera. He would go on to direct Hammer’s
Rasputin, the Mad Monk (1965)
with Christopher Lee and
The Face of Fu Manchu (1965)
and the sequel,
The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966).
He also directed the cult hits
Witchcraft (1964)
and
Psychomania (1972).
He died in 2011.

Noel Willman and Jennifer Daniel would appear together again in Hammer’s
The Reptile (1967).

Countess Dracula (1971)
Ingrid Pitt as
Countess Elizabeth Nadasdy
. Nigel Green as
Captain Dobi
. Sandor Eles as
Imrie Toth
. Maurice Denham as
Master Fabian.
Patience Collier as
Julia
. Peter Jeffrey as
Captain Balogh
. Lesley Anne Down as
Ilona
. Screenplay form a story by Alexander Paul and Peter Sasdy, based on an idea by Gabriel Ronay; Jeremy Paul. Director; Peter Sasdy.
 

Synopsis

Countess Elizabeth Nadasdy begins killing virgins to bathe in their blood when she discovers that it restores her youthful beauty. She hires kidnappers to hold her own daughter, Ilona, and takes on her guise to romance a young hussar, Imrie Toth. She is grudgingly aided by Major Domo, Captain Dobi and her lifelong nanny in procuring young girls to the castle. When the wrong choice is made and a prostitute’s blood fails to have the desired effect of restoring her youth, she is held to ransom by the historian, Master Fabio, who informs her that only the blood of a virgin will achieve the results that she craves. Fabio is found hanged and the young Imrie Toth is threatened with conspiracy in the many murders that take place unless he marries the Countess. Captain Dobi, in love with Countes Elizabeth, secretes her own daughter, Ilona, in the dungeon as her next fix. The confused girl escapes with Julie, but gatecrashes the wedding that is taking place between her own mother and Imrie. The countess begins to age and slashing the air with a dagger to reach her daughter, inadvertently kills the young soldier. Countess Elizabeth is walled up in her castle as the peasants verbally condemn her as a devil woman and the Countess Dracula.

Review

I don’t want to elevate
Countess Dracula
to a higher pinnacle than it actually deserves. At best, it is a great opening movie at the bottom half of a splendid double bill. At worst, it is a horror film that fails to capitalize on the horrific content involved even though the great Peter Sasdy is at the helm. For me it features Ingrid Pitt in her greatest role as the demonic matriarch willing to slice up her own daughter so that she can regain her youth by bathing in her blood. I freely admit that the ending resonated in my mind for years when I first saw it on late night television in the mid 1970s.

The story is derived from the Valentine Penrose historical novel,
The Bloody Countess
which fictionalizes the alleged crime catalogue of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory who was walled up in her own castle for the murders of over six hundred young women, although she was only tried for eighty. The legend persists that the Countess had an insane belief that bathing in their blood rejuvenated her youth and set in motion her heinous crimes with unrelenting sadism. It conjures up storybook images in much the same way as
The Brides of Dracula
and
The Curse of the Werewolf
. It is a gothic fairytale that could have been illustrated by Hieronymous Bosch. Sasdy concentrates on the theme of the family breakdown that he began in
Taste the Blood of Dracula
and would continue to pursue in
Hands of the Ripper
.

Pitt stars as the Countess Elizabeth Nadasdy and the story begins as we witness the reading of her late husband’s will. Among the bereaved is a young Hussar, Imrie Toth (Sandor Eles), who had saved the life of Nadasdy and benefits greatly from the will. It is made obvious by this opening sequence that Elizabeth already has eyes for this brave young soldier. Later, while dressing, she boxes her handmaiden’s ears and blood from the girls wound spurts onto her face. When the blood is wiped away, the skin on her cheek shows no wrinkles. She orders that the servant be brought to her and she becomes her first victim. Introducing herself to Imrie as her own daughter the film threatens to become a hopeless romance that is offset by some gruesome, but very sparse murders. While the real Ilona (Lesley Anne Down) is safely tucked away in a ramshackle cottage with a blithering idiot, Elizabeth recruits her old Nanny Julia (Patience Collier) to administer to her needs which she does all too willingly as it is great to see her mistress so happy. Captain Dobi (Nigel Green) is a reluctant addition to these grisly shenanigans but the promise of some passion with the countess in her young guise spurs him on, even to the point of killing the old librarian Master Fabio when the old man’s curiosity gets the better of him.

The jealous Dobi coerces Imrie to take a whore the night before his wedding after Elizabeth’s promises to Dobi have backfired when she withered back to her old self. Dobi carps at her suggestions of an amorous liaison;

“With you looking like this? The two of us fumbling away at each other?”

Imrie is too drunk to perform and the prostitute is discovered by the Countess. When her blood fails to rejuvenate her youth, she searches for the book on blood rites and discovers the pages torn out. Fabio’s information that only the blood of a virgin will suffice, costs him his life. The disoriented soldier wakes to the horror of seeing Elizabeth bathing in the blood of a peasant girl and is shown the corpse of the prostitute so that he will keep his mouth shut and continue with the planned wedding. But Dobi has another plan, as the Countess takes her marriage vows she begins to disintegrate beneath her wedding veil. The real Ilona, who has no idea why her mother hasn’t seen her and who has been locked up in the tower, blindly gatecrashes the party and is met with the sight of her mother wielding a knife. Imrie is stabbed in the confusion and the Countess is arrested when many of the missing young girls of the village are found in her cellars.  Ingrid Pitt handles the Jekyll and Hyde concept very well, going from a stunning model to a vengeful old crone with psychotic intentions in seconds. Although she was a little put out when she discovered that her voice had been dubbed on the finished film.