Hammer Dracula: Dracula A.D. 1972 + The Satanic Rites of Dracula + The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1972/73/74, dir. Alan Gibson/Roy Ward Baker & Chang Cheh, UK/Hong Kong) by Kymm Zuckert

Yes yes, I know, it’s November now, but only just barely, and I have three Hammer Dracula films left to do, so I’m squeaking them in under the wire of the end of spooky season!

“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.”

At last, after 12 years, Peter Cushing is back as Van Helsing, and after 14 years, he’s back with Christopher Lee as Dracula. 

The film starts not in 1972, as promised in the title, but in 1872, on a coach with the horses galloping away, and two stuntmen trying hard to hide their faces while fighting furiously in the brightest of all possible sunshine. I mean, they don’t even try. 

As the voiceover explains that this is occurring in Hyde Park, the coach crashes into a tree and the wheel breaks, impaling Dracula, because it’s as good as a stake when you come right down to it, and he dissolves into dust. Van Helsing dies, and a creepy looking young man comes galloping up, takes the stake and the Drac dust and his ring, and then buries the dust outside the hallowed ground of the church graveyard during Van Helsing’s funeral, smiling in a sinister fashion the whole time. This may be important later. 

And finally, FINALLY, Christopher Lee gets top, single card, over the title billing! Peter Cushing also is over the title, second billed, and I assume that’s why Lee is over the title. Cushing was over the title in The Horror of Dracula, way back in 1958, and he certainly wasn’t going to go backwards, but it would be ridiculous for him to be over the title and Lee not, so thanks to Cushing, Lee got his due. 

Besides that, the opening credits are super clever. After the star names, with the shot held on Van Helsing’s gravestone, with the death date 1872, DRACULA appears in a gothic font, then the camera tilts up to the sky, and a jet plane flies over, and under DRACULA, in a modern font, appears A.D. 1972, and groovy music starts playing. Why do I have a feeling that it’s going to be hippies v. Dracula? God, I hope so. 

Stephanie Beacham is third billed. She became famous in the States for being in Dynasty in the ‘80s, but here she’s 25 years old and this was one of her earliest films.  

And there they are!! The hippies! Shaking their booties, dancing up a storm, all modern and free, while the old fogies look on in disgust. 

A band called Stoneground sings cheerfully, and hippies have sex under tables, and dance on the piano, and there’s a young man looking on with an extremely familiar sinister smile, so I guess that original character procreated. 

The fuzz come to break up the party, and the hippies make a run for it. Everyone complains that the scene is a bore, and Mr. Sinister, whose name is Johnny Alucard (so subtle) (Christopher Neame) suggests a way to spice things up would be to have “a date with the devil, a bacchanal with Beelzebub.” This sure sounds like Lord Courtley in Taste the Blood of Dracula! And it worked out so well for him. 

Jessica (the aforementioned Stephanie Beacham in an astoundingly cheap blonde wig), part of the group but clearly has the innocent maiden role in this film, protests that it sounds dangerous, but she gets overruled by these hippies, who clearly haven’t spent enough time watching Hammer films. 

Jessica goes home to her anthropologist grandfather, who is Peter Cushing! So Jessica is actually Jessica Van Helsing, a fact that I’m sure will be significant. He catches her reading a book about the Black Mass, and he scolds her for not taking it seriously. She rolls her eyes at the spook stuff. Not for long, I’m sure!

The gang of krazy kids meet up for the Black Mass at midnight at a de-sanctified church, where Jessica and her boyfriend find the grave of the Van Helsing from the beginning of the film, her great grandfather, who died 100 years ago to the day. Well, no wonder Johnny wanted to have the ceremony that night in that spot, as Van Helsing wasn’t the only one who died 100 years ago to the day. 

They all go in for the ritual, and Johnny turns on a tape of all rhythm and drums, you know, the devil’s music, and everyone writhes around, while Johnny, wild-eyed, keeps urging them on, “That’s it! That’s it!” He calls on demons and tries to get Jessica to join him, but she refuses and another girl volunteers. I’m pretty sure she chose poorly. 

Johnny pours out the dust and slices open a vein, mixing it into the dust, and by golly, it’s tomato soup time again! He pours the soup all over Laura, (Caroline Munro), the volunteer, who screams, the earth outside the church undulates meaningfully, and all the others runs away. I think it’s time for Dracula to join the new century, and that volunteer will be a light snack after 100 years as dust in the ground. 

The next day, after my old bus from when I lived in London, the number 11 to Fulham, drives by (an Easter egg just for me), the gang gets together, all wondering where Laura is. Johnny comes by and does a really unconvincing, “Boy did I fool you, and by the way, Laura’s gone to Ramsgate!” and everyone eventually is like, well, I guess it’s okay then! 

Meanwhile, Laura’s exsanguinated corpse is found in the rubble that was the church, so I guess that Ramsgate yarn won’t last forever. Except that the cops are on the case, and the gang really aren’t interested in having anything to do with the whole fuzz situation. Johnny tries to get Jess to go with him to a jazz concert, but she turns him down, and another girl wants to go, so I guess that’s who Drac will have for supper tonight.  

The fuzz consult Van Helsing, of course, what with him being the spook expert, but also because they discover that Jessica is one of Laura’s known associates, so I’m thinking that the gang may discover pretty soon that Laura did not catch that mythical train to Ramsgate. 

Obviously, what Dracula wants is to destroy the line of Van Helsing, and what Van Helsing wants is to destroy Dracula and make sure that his granddaughter lives to see another day, so let the battle begin! My money’s on Van Helsing. 

“Jessica is my right hand, sometimes I think she knows more about my work than I do myself. There’s little sense in trying to keep secrets from her. She has and ingrained curiosity, the hallmark of a true scientist.”

“Do you take milk and sugar in your coffee, Mr. Torrance?”

The very last Dracula pairing of Lee and Cushing was The Satanic Rites of Dracula or, as it is called in the version I saw, “Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride,” which is the US title. I wonder why? Satan was super big in horror films in 1973! Aha, according to IMDb, this film was only released in the States in 1978, and by then, Satan was old hat. 

And in the credits, both Lee and Cushing are now below the title! How did that happen? Sacrilege! 

This seems very well-titled, at least originally, as the first scene is a literal satanic rite. With boobies! This is the first frontal nudity I have seen in a Hammer Dracula film, previously only some backal nudity by the Burgomaster’s daughter in Scars of Dracula. I guess they were trying to goose the audience a bit, as orgasmic neck biting had been done to death by then. (Get it?) 

Meanwhile, in another room, a man tied to a bed rather poorly, escapes and kills his guard. This all takes place in a very fancy house. As he sneaks out of the house, an alarm rings, and all of the Satanists start frantically scrubbing the crosses of blood off of their foreheads! Priorities.  

The man, who is badly injured, runs out to a car, the person in the car shooting his pursuers. Back at the police station, because the man was undercover, he tells them about the rituals, which include a government minister, who happens to oversee the police department, so that’ll be a situation. Then he dies. 

After putting together all of his pictures and recordings, the secretary is sent home to rest, but is instead kidnapped by the goons from the satanic ritual house. 

The cops discuss the case, and finally, one of them mentions bringing in Van Helsing, so at last we are getting back to our old friends. 

This is the first film that appears to be more of a direct sequel to the previous, in that it contains the same characters of Van Helsing, his granddaughter Jessica (played here by Joanna Lumley, pre her big break in The New Avengers a few years later), and the police inspector (Michael Coles).

They play the recording of the man who died telling about the whole ritual, including both the killing of the nekkid girl, and her bouncing happily back to life again. 

Van Helsing mentions the cult of vampirism! Haven’t heard that for a few movies, but it’s still part of the bingo card or drinking game. Take a shot! 

Jessica comes into the room to give everyone coffee, and Van Helsing tells the police that Jessica is his right hand, and that she knows as much or more than he does about the subject in question, so she has changed a lot from hippie chick in the last film, but I guess your gang of friends either being killed by vampires or turning into vampires will do that to a girl.  

Jessica recognizes one of the the men in the pictures of the ritual participants, turns out that he and Van Helsing went to Oxford together, so they decide that he should see what info he can get out of him. 

In the next scene, Van Helsing walks by the Royal Albert Hall, where I used to work when I lived in London, just like the number 11 bus was in the last film, so clearly Hammer is trying to send me messages, or I’m up quite late as I watch them and am getting loopy. Either explanation is as likely as the other, as far as I’m concerned.  

Van Helsing stops by all casual like to see his old pal the biologist , who is acting crazy as a bedbug, and is working intensely on a mysterious project.   

Back to the kidnapped secretary, whom I had entirely forgotten by this point, and she is in a creepy room and there are weird noises, and suddenly the door bursts open, and who should come in? Why it’s Dracula, of course, looking a trifle peckish. She seems extremely pleased to see him. 

So, for the first time in all these films, they didn’t bother figuring out in what crazy way they were going to resurrect Dracula this time, and just did it before the film started. I guess they had run out of ideas. 

Back to the biologist and Van Helsing, turns out that his big project is a newer and better bubonic plague, so things are frankly getting super weird in this here picture. Van Helsing demands to know who commissioned this atrocity, then a goon comes in and shoots Van Helsing, doesn’t check to see if, as one of the stars of the film, he wasn’t entirely dead yet. When he wakes up, he sees the biologist hanging from the ceiling, and the plague samples gone. 

The cops go to the satanic ritual house, telling Jessica to wait in the car. Jessica does not wait in the car. Why they brought her in the first place if they only wanted to have to wait in the car, I know not, but instead she sneaks into the basement. She turns on the lights, because she’s not terrific at sneaking, and finds the secretary chained to the wall, with a surprisingly pointy set of teeth. Then some other fangy ladies crawl out of coffins, and Jessica really should have waited in the car. 

She screams, and the cops run downstairs and improvise a stake to kill the secretary, and we see more boobies. Soooo… the jig is up, if the cops and Jessica can actually escape. 

Van Helsing figures out that a mysterious wealthy industrialist who allows no pictures and gives no interviews is in charge of the whole evil thing, and that it’s totally Dracula, and he plans on spreading the plague over the earth in just two days. Who is going to stop him? We know who is going to stop him. He’s pretty reliable, our good old Van Helsing! 

“I need your mortal coil. I need the form of your miserable carcass. I need your vile image. 

For The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, the very last of the Hammer Dracula films, Christopher Lee had had enough of the frankly pretty terrible scripts, and swanned off to do The Wicker Man and The Three Musketeers and The Man With the Golden Gun and Airport ‘77 and stuff, so if looks like he chose wisely. Peter Cushing had some more iffy horror films in his immediate future, but then a little picture called Star Wars popped up in a couple of years, so he didn’t do badly himself.  

But in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Cushing was still Van Helsing-ing all over the place, and God bless him for it. 

The film starts out in Transylvania in 1804, where a Chinese man (Shen Chan) staggers through the bright sunlight, so it’s sure to end up being the middle of the night, as it usually is in these pictures. He goes to what is certain to be Dracula’s castle, because who else has a castle in Transylvania, may I ask? 

Cheap looking bat puppets bounce on strings over his head, as he prostrates himself before Dracula’s coffin, and some dude who is clearly wearing a full face of drag makeup including bright red lipstick and is way closer to SCTV’s Count Floyd than Count Dracula, rises from the coffin. Somehow, the Chinese man doesn’t fall down laughing.

He explains to the worst version of Dracula ever to be committed to celluloid (John Forbes-Robertson), that he is Kah, the High Priest of the 7 Golden Vampires in the province of Szechwan in China, and everything was super cool when the vampires walked, but now they sleep and nobody pays attention to him anymore! So apparently he came all the way to Transylvania, over 6000 kilometers, to whine at Dracula. Cool, cool. 

Dracula says that he will totally go wake the 7 Golden Vampires, but he will do so by taking over Kah’s body and go as him. Which is not precisely what Kah had in mind, but that’s Dracula for you. I hope this means we are done with John Forbes-Robertson. 

Titles, Cushing is back below the title, which is pretty insulting after all these years. 

So this seems like it’s probably going to be a kung fu movie, which makes sense, since Enter the Dragon was released just the year before, so it was just time for the cheap knockoffs

Now we are in Chung King, and 100 years has gone by, it being 1904. And here is Van Helsing, right at the top of the film, lecturing on vampires as per usual. He’s kind of a Johnny One Note, frankly. He tells the story of a simple farmer who went to kill the vampires. 

There are many women wiggling on slabs, one is topless, and one is the simple farmer’s wife. Things don’t go perfectly, and a bunch of people in bad skull masks pop out of the ground and chase him. 

I’m not far into this film, but I can stoutly aver that it is by far the worst of these Hammer Dracula films, Peter Cushing or no Peter Cushing.  

There is much chasing and riding, and vampires in golden masks, and the farmer gets killed, but manages to bring down a Golden Vampire. Leaving six. 

Then the audience to whom Van Helsing was telling this story jeer and scoff at his stupid stories for peasants and all walk out in disgust. The last one somewhat reluctantly.  

And now, there is some lantern-jawed dude, whose name is also Van Helsing (Robin Stewart)! He has a son? But what happened to Jessica? I know, I know, it’s 1904, this guy is Jessica’s great grandfather, if my math is correct. No matter, I still object strongly to Jessica being kicked to the curb. I mean, she mostly just spent her time getting kidnapped by Dracula and his various minions, but I still was a fan. I don’t know about this Leyland fellow. We’ll have to see about him. 

The last man who exited from the lecture comes to Van Helsing’s place and tells him that the man he spoke of was his grandfather, and he lives in the village ruled by the six remaining Golden Vampires, with his brothers. 

Leyland escorts a rich widow home, and they are attacked by a bunch of guys in black, and rescued by a bunch of guys in grey, who turn out to be the brothers! There are seven of them altogether, plus a sister who is also pretty good in a fight.

They all decide to go to the village, the rich widow, Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege) financing the journey. They are attacked along the way by the Tong that attacked them in Chun King. There is a big dumb fight, while the widow and Van Helsing hang onto horses and look on with concern.  

They travel farther, then rest in a cave with…six bats on the ceiling. They fly down, and who is it but the 7 Golden Vampire minus one! They fight while Van Helsing helpfully yells to strike that their hearts. They kill several of them. The title is becoming less and less apt as the film goes along. 

They have three more Golden Vampires to kill, plus Kah/Dracula what do you think, are they going to manage it? 

And thus endeth the nine Hammer Dracula films, this was a fun ride, though it kind of ended with a whimper rather than a bang, it was still worth the journey. Looking forward to next year, I hope you are, too! 

Kymm Zuckert is an actor/writer/native Angelino. When Kymm was a child, her parents would take her to see anything, which means that sometimes she will see a film today and say, “I saw that when I was eight, I don’t remember any of that inappropriate sex stuff!” Check out her entire 365 day blog @ https://365filmsin365days.movie.blog