DRACULA A.D. 1972

DIRECTED by Alan Gibson.

SCREENPLAY by Don Houghton.

STARRING  - Peter Cushing as Lawrence Van Helsing/Lorimer Van Helsing,  Christopher Lee as Count Dracula,  Stephanie Beacham as Jessica Van Helsing,  Christopher Neame as Johnny Alucard/The Disciple,  Marsha Hunt as Gaynor Keating,  Caroline Munro as Laura Bellows,  Janet Key as Anna Bryant,  Michael Kitchen as Greg,  Michael Coles as Inspector Murray,  William Ellis as Joe Mitcham,  Phillip Miller as Bob and featuring STONEGROUND as themselves.

PLOT - London 1872 - Mortal enemies Count Dracula and Lawrence Van Helsing do battle for the final time. They are fighting atop a speeding out of control horse drawn carriage. The carriage crashes - Dracula is impaled upon a broken carriage wheel and dies once more - his body decomposes into ash, Lawrence Van Helsing succumbs to his injuries and also dies. A disciple of Dracula gathers up the vampire Count's ashes, he waits until the day of Van Helsing's funeral and buries the ashes of Dracula outside the consecrated grounds of the church.

London 1972 - it is the present day. London is now a city of swinging young hipsters.  A bored group of teens led by a young man named Johnny Alucard are looking for kicks. Alucard suggests a midnight seance at the ruined church - St Bartolph's. The group agree - only Jessica, great grand-daughter of Lawrence Van Helsing is reluctant but she is soon persuaded to join in by her boyfriend Bob. 

That night the seance takes place and something unholy is ressurected...Count Dracula himself - back from the dead, ready to feed and ready to enact his final vengence on the Van Helsing bloodline.

Very soon the bodies of Dracula's victims are turning up all over London  - corpses drained of blood with two puncture marks on thier necks. The Police call upon Lorimer Van Helsing (grandson of Lawrence) to help them solve the case. Can Lorimer finish the job started by his grandfather a century before and destroy the Lord of the Undead once and for all ? Otherwise his grand-daughter Jessica's soul may well be forfeit...

DIALOUGE  - Joe "Okay okay...but if we do get to summon up the big daddy with the horns and the tail - he gets to bring his own liquor, his own bird and his own pot !"

PERFORMANCES  - Ah...the 1970's. A time when indolent young hippy swinger teenagers (who looked about thirty five) used to hang out in trendy Chelsea coffee shops, smoke pot, shag birds, go to parties with live performances by psychedelic folk rock bands and summon up dark Lords of the Undead in desecrated churches. They did this by playing what sounds suspiciously like Syd Barratt era Pink Floyd tracks whilst messing around with goblets full of blood. Good times. Or at least if you watch this film then that's what you would be led to believe 70's teens got up to at any rate.

Johhny Alucard (Christopher Neame) leads the gang of juvenile delinquents. Well, I say "juvenile delinquents" but they don't seem that rowdy to me. We first meet them at a posh party they've gatecrashed and they've even bought a rockband with them to aid in the mayhem. That band is STONEGROUND (for some reason I feel that thier name needs to be typed in upper case letters). STONEGROUND entertain the gyrating masses of overaged "teenage" flesh, as they shock horror - DANCE and KISS and generally HARMLESSLY ENJOY THEMSELVES whilst shocked and disgusted middle aged, middle class people look on in abject horror...

The whole thing is hilariously well behaved and restrained, it's more like a Top Of The Pops performance than a wild party. Jesus, if the filmmakers think THIS is what "hellbent crazed teenagers" get up to then they should have seen some of the parties I went to in my late teens and early twenties...

Anyway, Johhny Alucard is clearly a bit of a wrong 'un - he wears frilly shirts and smoking jackets and a hat cocked at a jaunty angle - his surname is also "Dracula" spelt backwards (he also looks suspiciously like Dracula's disciple that we saw in the prologue set 100 years ago - whether he's the same person transported through time or just a descendant is never explained, but I'm going with future relative as it makes more sense).

Neame is great as Alucard - his performance reminds me a bit of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange - he's got the same bizzare dress sense and preening, strutting arrogance that McDowell's Alex De Large has in that movie. He's also massively incompetent (especially when he becomes a vampire later on in the movie) but somehow always manages to pull off at least looking like he's on top of things, especially to his band of bored teen sidekicks.

Amongst Alucard's followers is Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham) - Jessica is a privileged rich kid slumming it with this band of hoodlums. She spends most of the film either dressed like a Swedish milkmaid (those CRAZY 70's fashions) or convincing concerned grandfather Lorimer (Peter Cushing) that she doesn't spend her time "shooting up Heroin and smoking pot" (like the two are even in the same ballpark). 

Joking aside, Beacham does have some nice scenes alongside Cushing. They do make for a convincing grandfather and granddaughter - the bond between the characters is authentic and heartfelt and forms the emotional core of the story in what is an otherwise pretty daft movie.

The two main stars - Cushing and Lee - are of course as brilliant as ever. Cushing's Lorimer Van Helsing is a lot more careworn than his earlier portrayal of Lawrence Van Helsing was. The fact that he has a wayward grand-daughter to care for on top of his usual vampire hunting duties somehow makes him seem more vulnerable. Dracula now has a new front on which he can attack Van Helsing, this gives our hero a weakness his previous incarnation didn't have and increases the dramatic tension. The fact that Cushing is visibly older and frailer looking than he was in the earlier films also helps.

Lee as Dracula is great. The Count seems really REALLY pissed off in this one. This may be in part due to Lee's irritation with the role. He'd frequently berated the producers in the past for churning out Dracula movies that strayed too far from the original novel. Seeing as this is the movie that probably strays as far away from Stoker's novel as its possible to get I can't imagine that Lee was very impressed with it. Whatever, this new even angrier Dracula definitely works.

SFX - Not a lot in the way of effects. Just some good old fashioned blood and fangs...

We also get not one - but two - scenes where Dracula decomposes into a skeleton and then ash. First in the prologue scene set in 1872 and second in the final scene when Dracula is killed again.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - In 1872 we get the fatal hansom cab crash. Dracula gets impaled on a huge wagon wheel...

Lawrence Van Helsing finishes him off and then drops dead himself from his own injuries...

In 1972 - Alucard and his mates ressurect Dracula using a goblet full of Alucard's own blood. Caroline Munro as Laura gets the blood splashed all over her tits (FACT - in the UK the British Board of Film Classification used to cut films that had "blood on breasts" imagery as it was considered to be a potential "rape trigger", WHAT ???)...

Dracula then ressurects and drains Laura of blood...

Laura's drained corpse is later found dumped on a building site by a bunch of snot nosed 70's children who all look like they're auditioning to be in a public information film about the dangers of playing on building sites.

Next up Drac snacks on Gaynor - another of Alucard's gang. Alucard is then himself turned into a vampire and kills a woman who is walking home from a late night laundrette. Alucard then goes on to turn Jessica's boyfriend Bob into a vampire. Bob doesn't last long though as he accidentally walks out into the sunlight, presumably forgetting he's now vulnerable to it - he should have watched more vampire movies otherwise he'd have known better.

Next Alucard battles Lorimer. He dies by - get this - falling into a bath full of water and accidentally turning on his shower. Running water apparently kills vampires but a SHOWER ??? SERIOUSLY ???

Now its time for the final battle. Lorimer stabs Dracula with a silver knife but Jessica (who is under Dracula's power) pulls it out. After this failed attempt Lorimer is more successful a few minutes later. He lures Dracula out into a graveyard and causes him to fall into a handy pit of stakes that he'd prepared earlier. Lorimer finishes him off by pushing him further onto the stakes with a nearby shovel. Dracula is dead once more (until the sequal at any rate)...

RATING  - Dracula A.D. 1972 is a flawed, silly but deeply fun movie. It's bright, fast moving and full of 70's cheese. It's probably one of the most 70's films ever made, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is entirely dependent on your own tastes. 

Personally, I love it. I always find it highly entertaining to watch. Some parts are a bit lame (particularly Alucard's death scene which is like something from a Naked Gun movie) but overall it's a decent enough little film. I'm giving it 4 and a half time displaced vampires out of 5. Dig those groovy kids man.

POSTER/VHS/DVD ART  -