Vampires (8 page)

Spending 1000 guineas on a peculiar set of items from Weller, the three gentlemen embark on the most horrific night of their lives. Lord Courtley conducts a satanic ritual of blood. Sprinkling the curious powder that is Dracula’s blood into three goblets, he opens his hand with a dagger. As his blood touches the powder in the cups, the liquid swells and the cups runneth over. Courtley orders them to drink but the men are repulsed:

“You drink it! You drink the filth!”

Courtley does without hesitation and is taken with wracking pains. He screams at the men for help, but they beat him to death with boots and walking sticks. Swiftly exiting the old church, they vow never to speak of this again. But they have reckoned without the power of the black arts. Lord Courtley’s body is covered by a sand swept dust. As the dust breaks, we see that he has transformed into the vampire, Count Dracula.

“They have destroyed my servant. They shall be destroyed!”

Dracula immediately begins his onslaught on Victorian hypocrisy. Unfortunately, after this great resurrection sequence, he is further reduced to staring out from the blackness as his hypnotized servants destroy their parents. Originally there were no scenes written for Christopher Lee as Ralph Bates was supposed to rise from the carnage as a new Count for the seventies, but Warner Bros. had only agreed to finance a film that starred Christopher Lee. Lee decided to waive his fee for a percentage of the profits made in the USA, but Hammer wouldn’t hear of it.

The story itself is not uninteresting and moves at a fairly brisk pace. We learn that Hargood rules his family with an iron rod and has incestuous designs on his nubile daughter, Alice. When Dracula appears on the scene he interrupts a scenario where a drunken Hargood is getting ready to whip his daughter with a riding crop. The tables are turned as Alice rushes into the garden into the arms of the Count. At his command, she kills her father with a garden shovel. At his funeral, she entices her friend
Lucy to take a coach ride to the old church where Dracula is waiting. The girl is vampirized almost immediately. Paxton – a great turn by Peter Sallis, the voice of Wallace of
Wallace and Gromit
fame – takes his fears to Secker who has studied the black arts and is well versed in the rituals of destroying the vampire. Paxton is convinced that Courtley has returned and the two men venture to the church. Once there, they find Lucy Paxton sleeping in a coffin. Secker finds a stake to put her at rest, but Paxton has brought a gun and chases his friend from the church after wounding him in the shoulder. As the sun sets, a sniveling Paxton decides to drive the stake home. Lucy awakes however looking more toothsome than usual and Paxton is staked by Lucy and Alice.

Secker revives in the churchyard and lumbers home while losing much blood. He hastily compiles a letter to be given to Paul Paxton, outlining the terror of Dracula and the ways to defeat a vampire. The letter also states that he could still save Alice who is not yet;

“His sister in blood!”

He collapses at his desk from loss of blood. Jeremy enters the room and, before he can wake his father, he sees Lucy knocking on the window. She bites Jeremy in the throat and disappears into the night. As Secker revives he is met by Jeremy, now turned, who stabs him with a dagger.

Paul Paxton is given Secker’s correspondence by the Inspector (Michael Ripper), and sets off to save his fiancée from the clutches of Dracula. Lee’s Dracula is his own worst enemy in this film as he destroys his servants just when he needs them the most. When Lucy turns Jeremy, the Count drains her body completely in an unexpected paroxysm of anger and leaves her floating in the river. When Paul corners him in the church, he makes the dumbest move ever by telling Alice that he has no more use for her. They say
Hell hath no fury
….and that is certainly true in this film as Alice helps Paul to defeat the Count once she
h
as been spurned. Dracula is defeated when he is overcome by the ornamentation of a church and recalls the Priest’s prayer from
Dracula Has Risen From the Grave.

Taste the Blood
is the last in the series of Hammer’s first ongoing cycle of Dracula movies. The most notorious story surrounding the film is the one involving the script. A screenplay titled
Dracula’s Feast of Blood
had been submitted to and then rejected by Hammer films. It had been written as a direct follow on from the previous success and the author, Kevin Francis, realized that
Taste
had quite a few incidents that had been in his original screenplay. Anthony Hinds had rejected the script and John Elder had written the eventual screenplay. Mr Francis revealed that Hammer had to pay him a lot of money before they released the finished film.

Watching the film as a teenager, I remember wondering how, in fact, the Count had died? He hadn’t been staked or decapitated, just singed from a piece of stained glass. The fall from a great height didn’t convince and I was left feeling a little cheated when he crumbled to dust. Also, what happened to Jeremy? The inspector was portrayed as a very narrow-minded fellow and certainly wasn’t going to swallow Paul Paxton’s tale about a rigorous battle with the undead Count. But the film for me, the first Hammer
Dracula
I recall seeing as a child, still remains the most memorable.

Linda Hayden had made her film debut at the age of 15 in the movie
Baby Love (1968)
and would go on to star in Tigon’s excellent shocker,
The
Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970)
while hero Anthony Corlan would play the head vampire Emil in Hammer’s own
Vampire Circus (1972).

Ralph Bates became something of a Hammer regular in the early 1970s, appearing in
Horror of Frankenstein (1970),
Lust For A Vampire (1971)
and
Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971).
As Caligula in the BBCtv production of
The Ceasars (1969),
he had caught the company’s attention and they began to view him as a successor to Peter Cushing. Bates drifted back into TV work with excellent credits in
Poldark (1975)
and the John Sullivan scripted comedy,
Dear John (1986-87).
He was married twice and died in 1991 of pancreatic cancer.

Director Peter Sasdy made
Hands of the Ripper
with Angharad Rees and Eric Porter. He would team with Ralph Bates again for the confusing devil movie,
I Don’t Want to be Born (1975)
before being forced into TV work. A director much better than his material, Sasdy, born in 1935, is still alive and his last screen credit was
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole
in 1987
.

Scars of Dracula (1970)

Christopher Lee as
Count Dracula
. Dennis Waterman as
Simon Carlson.
Jenny Hanley as
Sarah
. Patrick Troughton as
Klove
. Anoushka Hempel as
Tania
. Christopher Matthews as
Paul Carlson
. Michael Gwynn as
The Priest.
Michael Ripper as
The Innkeeper
and Bob Todd as
The Burgomaster
. Screenplay based on the character created by Bram Stoker; John Elder (Anthony Hinds). Director; Roy Ward Baker.

Synopsis

A bat flies through the window of Castle Dracula and dribbles blood on the Count’s remains. The Count revives. Later the villagers headed by the local Priest and the Innkeeper trick their way past the servant, Klove, and set fire to the castle. On their return to the village, they discover that Dracula has sent a swarm of bats to kill their kinfolk. Sometime passes and we see Paul Carlson escape from the Burgomaster after seducing His Excellency’s daughter. Paul is on his way to his fiancée, Sarah’s, birthday party. In his pocket, he carries a special framed photograph of Sarah. Arriving at the party and being greeted by Sarah and his brother, Simon, Paul has to leave early as the police come searching him out. He escapes into the forest and comes across the Inn. The innkeeper refuses to let him stay and he ventures out into the forest again. A coach stands in a glade and Simon sneaks inside and settles down to sleep. The coach belongs to Klove and Simon is involuntary taken to Castle Dracula. He is welcomed by a mysterious girl named Tania and the Count and Klove sets him up in a room in the castle. Klove spots the photograph of Sarah and falls in love with the girl. Paul meanwhile is seduced by the beautiful Tania. When she awakens next to him, she reveals fangs and proceeds to bite him in the throat. Before this can happen, Dracula appears and stabs his bride to death and throttles Paul into unconsciousness. Klove decapitates Tania’s body at his master’s bidding. Paul wakes in a stone room that holds a coffin that in turn holds the body of Dracula. Meanwhile, Simon and Sarah have become uneasy as to the whereabouts of Paul and venture into the forest. At the Inn, they find everyone bar a serving girl, very unfriendly. The girl informs them that he went onto the castle and both he and Sarah set out on their way. When Klove spots Sarah, he recognizes her as the girl in the photograph and refuses to remove the cross at her breast for his master. Dracula burns his back with a white hot sabre. Simon discovers Paul’s body mutilated and takes Sarah back to the village to be guarded by the Priest. The Priest is attacked by the bat however and is torn to pieces as Sarah bolts back to the castle. Dracula corners the young pair on the battlements of the castle and Simon realizes that resistance is useless as the iron spike he throws like a javelin impales Dracula, but the Count simply removes it. Holding it high, it is struck with lightning and the Count flares up in flames and falls from the castle turrets. Sarah, now in love with Simon embraces him at the fadeout.

Review

Christopher Lee is given more screen time than in any other Dracula film in the series. Tania is the stunning bride played by Anoushka Hempel and Klove returns from
Dracula, Prince of Darkness
as a kind of satanic handyman and played with a mistrustful edge by Patrick Troughton, while Priest Michael Gwynne sports a wig that steals the film on its own. John Elder’s script takes the Count back to his origins as an icy host holding sway over a terrified populace and the inconsistences in the franchise are glossed over by some brutal death sequences. With no attempt made at continuity from
Taste the Blood of Dracula,
we see the ruined form of the Count laid on an altar in the castle. A ridiculous looking bat flies in through the window and dribbles blood from its mouth onto the remains. Lee is reconstituted and in no time at all, the local villagers, led by Hammer stalwart Michael Ripper, trick their way past Klove and set the castle on fire. However, the canny Count has an ace up his sleeve. He can telepathically control the animals and, as the townsfolk return to their church, they find their loved ones torn to pieces by a horde of ravening and very unconvincing bats. The only real link in the whole movie is provided by a portrait of Jenny Hanley. Viewed by several different characters, it sustains a break in the glass frame that is in a different position every time the camera picks it out. Klove falls in love at first sight of the picture and pockets the artifact as his own when Paul is murdered by Dracula.

Paul Carlson is played by Christopher Matthews, a philanderer who seems to be killed because he over indulges his excesses. All the girls in the film fall for his charm, but it was obviously lost on the studios as this remains his only big screen credit. Michael Ripper holds the villagers together while grieving over the loss of his wife at the hands of the Count’s marauding bats. The other Hammer Michael, Michael Gwynn, is the priest and seems to spend his days sat in the corner of the inn mixing his Holy waters until someone asks for his services, possibly remembering the great days of Hammer and, particularly, his role in the marvelous
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
as the creature.

The highpoints of the film are the very graphic treatments that Dracula inflicts on his servants. When Tania intends to bite Paul, Dracula unexpectedly appears and stabs her numerous times with a dagger and then has Klove dismember her corpse with an axe before feeding it to the stove. Later, as Klove refuses to remove the cross from Sarah’s throat and allows her to escape, the Count brands his back with a burning hot sword for his treachery. Perhaps this is where the scars of the title got their name?