Make no mistake, Dracula AD1972 is a work of genius. OK, the Hammer purists - of which I myself used to be one - don't like it, and compared to, say, Horror of Dracula it is all rather silly. But the bottom line is that it's one of the most enjoyable horror films ever made. It's just so much fun!.
The dialogue is brilliant ("Yeah, tell us about the blood, Johnny,"; "Murder, Jessica - ghastly, horrible, obscene murder!"). It has Cushing and Lee together, for the penultimate time (the last, 'The Satanic Rites of Dracula', is dross). The prologue is really atmospheric and authentic. The modern day stuff, while certainly cheesy, is actually very funny in places (all the bits at the party with the Stoneground, for example), and the scenes in and around St Botolphs are really quite creepy. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack rocks!
I really like Michael Coles' Inspector Murray, and Christopher Neame's Johnny Alucard is one of the best performances in a Hammer film ever (although his death scene is a bit pants). And of course, it goes without saying that Caroline Munro is utterly gorgeous.
AD72 is flawed, no doubt. There are big holes in the plot, some resulting from savage last-minute editing (eg of the scene where Jessica's boyfriend gets offed, which was cut late on, leaving him lying inexplicably dead in the graveyard), and surely Lawrence Van Helsing is Jessica's great-great-grandfather, not, as she says when she sees his gravestone, her great-grandfather? But the real reason this film is such a splendid entry in Hammer's Dracula canon is presence of the gentleman of horror, dear old Peter Cushing. Don't you just wish you had a grandfather like Lorrimer Van Helsing?! Cushing never sinks into parodying or ridiculing the material, as, say, Vincent Price would have done. He plays it straight, and gives it a dignity it would certainly otherwise have lacked. I know Christopher Lee thought it was a bad idea bringing Dracula into the modern day, but he still banked the cheque, didn't he?
Requiescat in pace ultima!!!
The dialogue is brilliant ("Yeah, tell us about the blood, Johnny,"; "Murder, Jessica - ghastly, horrible, obscene murder!"). It has Cushing and Lee together, for the penultimate time (the last, 'The Satanic Rites of Dracula', is dross). The prologue is really atmospheric and authentic. The modern day stuff, while certainly cheesy, is actually very funny in places (all the bits at the party with the Stoneground, for example), and the scenes in and around St Botolphs are really quite creepy. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack rocks!
I really like Michael Coles' Inspector Murray, and Christopher Neame's Johnny Alucard is one of the best performances in a Hammer film ever (although his death scene is a bit pants). And of course, it goes without saying that Caroline Munro is utterly gorgeous.
AD72 is flawed, no doubt. There are big holes in the plot, some resulting from savage last-minute editing (eg of the scene where Jessica's boyfriend gets offed, which was cut late on, leaving him lying inexplicably dead in the graveyard), and surely Lawrence Van Helsing is Jessica's great-great-grandfather, not, as she says when she sees his gravestone, her great-grandfather? But the real reason this film is such a splendid entry in Hammer's Dracula canon is presence of the gentleman of horror, dear old Peter Cushing. Don't you just wish you had a grandfather like Lorrimer Van Helsing?! Cushing never sinks into parodying or ridiculing the material, as, say, Vincent Price would have done. He plays it straight, and gives it a dignity it would certainly otherwise have lacked. I know Christopher Lee thought it was a bad idea bringing Dracula into the modern day, but he still banked the cheque, didn't he?
Requiescat in pace ultima!!!