Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) - film review

England, 1872.  Lawrence Van Helsing and Count Dracula are locked in a life-and-death struggle atop a runaway coach.  When the coach crashes, Dracula and Van Helsing are flung to the ground, and the latter just manages to impale the vampire on a coach wheel before he dies from his injuries.  One hundred years later, Van Helsing’s descendent lives in Chelsea, London, with his granddaughter, Jessica.  Whilst Van Helsing buries himself in his studies of the occult, Jessica fritters away her time with a group of hippies, gate-crashing posh parties and hanging out in beer cellars.  One of the group, Johnny Alucard (!), persuades his friends to participate in a Black Mass at an abandoned church.  The ritual proves to be more gruesome than the hippies had imagined and flee in horror, leaving Johnny and one of the group, Laura Bellows, behind.  Johnny succeeds in reviving Dracula and offers Laura to him as his first meal in a century.  However, far from showing gratitude, the miserable old git of a vampire tells Johnny that he must find the granddaughter of Van Helsing.  Only then will his vengeance be complete...

Hammer hit a new low with Dracula A.D. 1972, the seventh and, arguably, weakest in their run of eight Dracula films.  This was one of several attempts that the studio made to move away from the, by then, stale and predictable Gothic formula, in the hope of reviving their ever-dwindling cinema audience.  It could be argued that such tinkering with a tried and tested formula was doomed to fail and merely served to hasten the demise of Hammer, although the truth of the matter was that cinema, certainly in Britain, was a dying art, thanks to the supremacy of television.    

Hampered by a truly diabolical script and directed with no real flair or intelligence, Dracula A.D. 1972 is a hideous Frankenstein creation, a cobbled-together mishmash that includes an obvious rehash of the first half of Hammer’s earlier Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), a plodding crime investigation and a virtual reprise of Lee and Cushing’s first clash in Dracula (1958).  This is cut-and-paste cinema at its worst, and the end result looks like a compilation of Hammer’s earlier films, chaotically spiced with a low budget TV crime drama.  Diabolical is indeed the mot juste.

On a more positive note, the sequences in which Dracula and his nemesis Van Helsing appear are compelling – how could they not be, with such charismatic performers as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing?  Admittedly, Lee’s dialogue is, as ever, atrocious (begging the question: why did Hammer find it so hard to put words into the mouth of its main vampire attraction?) but this is one flaw we can overlook, as we relish the spectacle of two great actors once again locked in mortal combat. Unfortunately, Lee and Cushing get too little screen time and for the most part all we get is a band of dull juveniles and even duller detectives doing the kind of dull things that dull juveniles and dull detectives do.  It isn’t so much a horror flick as a cod documentary about youth culture in the early 1970s. 

Unlike the previous Dracula films, which are all set in a fictitious Gothic past, Dracula A.D. 1972 feels lamentably dated (and so insipid that the nostalgia factor is negligible – could the 1970s really have been that dull?).  The contemporary setting is partly to blame for this, but the real offender is the funk-style music, which is painful to listen to and absurdly incongruous for the scenes in which Dracula and Van Helsing fight to the death.  The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the next (and last) film in this Dracula series, was moderately more successful, although this too failed to recreate the magic of Hammer’s earlier vampire offerings and would be the final nail in the coffin.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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