Films: 1970s
(1970) Taste the Blood of Dracula
Thursday, January 01, 2015
Taste the Blood of Dracula
Director: Peter Sasdy
Release: 1970
Dracula, in director Freddie Francis' 1968 "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave" became the oppositional force to not only Van Helsing-esque occultists, but to monks, monsignors, and priests. His victims were no longer simply new world urban realists subject to the lurking fear and threat of Old World forces - they were spiritual beings consumed by a satanic malevolence.
Director Peter Sasdy elevates Francis' early dabbling with light and dark to pronounced critical heights in "Taste the Blood of Dracula."
The film, like "Dracula Has Risen From the Grave," wobbles along lines of acting, script, and pacing - but Sasdy directs with an artful eye for unusual shots, some surprising camera movement, and a firm grasp on what he is trying to say about English culture.
Three wealthy Englishmen pursue their ever-waning interest in the extreme by visiting a London brothel the last Sunday of every month. This decidedly darker version of Sabbath dinner is given new direction by the advent of a notorious satanic hedonist - Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates).
Courtley clearly despises the gentlemen's washed up and uninventive lifestyles, but he is a businessman and willingly allows the trio to buy his services as a guide to lands of even stranger and forbidden pleasure. With the cape, crest, and dried blood of Dracula procured from a London curiosity shop, the men gather in Courtley's desecrated cathedral to perform the black initiation to a promised world of infinite experience.
The ritual, however, goes awry - leaving the three would-be initiates shattered and spun-apart. They flee for their suburban estates; sure they've inadvertently killed Courtley on the cathedral floor.
The blood of Dracula reinvents Courtley from the inside out, and the Count begins to track each fled man to his home, undoing their families and ending their lives. The younger generation, still naïve, good, and open-minded, set against Dracula, pursuing him to the cathedral in which he was reborn for a final confrontation not just between the living and the undead - but also between good and evil.
In "Taste the Blood of Dracula," Sasdy launches a direct attack on the bourgeoisie.
His degenerate rich defile the English family, prove hypocrites to English faith, and stand out as pasty and bloated reminders that the idle wealth soaking in a green and pleasant land leads to disintegration.
The vulgar nature of their sexuality makes for a prurient peek into the London underworld.
Sasdy is working with the perfect studio at the perfect time, allowing him to paint the bordello as a hive of rooms - each containing its own bit of fleshly theatre. Women baby, spank, and otherwise demean their rotund clients. Exotic harems collect in rooms adorned with silks, hookahs, and liquor to dance with snakes for the gentlemen's enjoyment. And a painted and precocious man of clearly non-heterosexual leanings (Russell Hunter) runs the establishment is run by. Sasdy is set loose.
And when they go home they return to fireside chairs and doting wives (who they cannot stand). They instruct their daughters against parties and boys. In no other Hammer film is Dracula so subversively a moral avenger.
The Count is ostensibly enraged at the men for his own resurrection.
For reason never justified by writer Anthony Hinds' script, Dracula laments the destruction of "his servant" Courtley, even as the man's demise gave him new life. But on a thematic level, the Count is setting write the great iniquity in the English homes. The double lives of the three hedonists cannot survive the onslaught, and they dissolve first into psychological Hell as their secret proves too great to contain, then into supernatural Hell as their children are turned against them as vampires, and finally ushered by the undead to what one presumes is a literal eternal torment.
Dracula's methodology is also blight upon England, however, in Sasdy's universe – to be right by the surviving young people.
Paul Paxton (Anthony Higgins) loves Alice Hargood (Linda Hayden), the daughter of the English trio's nominal master (William Hargood, as played by Geoffrey Keen).
William and Alice experience by far the darkest leg of the film's journey - becoming locked in a possessive/abusive spiral that reeks of incestuous lust on the part of the father's scotch-fueled unraveling. It ends in patricide, with Dracula guiding Alice's hand.
Paul, however, is a vocal proponent of the human being's ability to choose. Alice's actions have left her deep in thrall to the Count, and stained with the blood of her own family. But like his biblical namesake, Paul brings the Christian teachings of God to Dracula's desecrated church, and re-consecrates what at first appeared forever fouled. Crosses do not simply repel in "Taste the Blood of Dracula," they literally blaze with holy energy. Paul's conviction in the power of goodness is writ so large that it actually causes Christopher Lee's Dracula to see the church in its full holy glory, a vision of the righteous past so powerful it knocks the vampire lord from a balcony and onto the newly reset altar.
The altar dissolves the Devil of Sasdy's film. Paul and Alice are released into each other's arms, with both the duplicitous evil of her biological father dispatched, and the more ancient seduction of the Satanic Dracula rejected.
By the end of "Taste the Blood of Dracula," Hammer Studios has fully transformed the Count from a folkloric evil rising out of Europe into the larger and more universal symbol of evil - the serpent of Eve's garden. He offers knowledge and power to the corrupt souls of England, a satanic herald poised against the Church.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Taste the Blood of Dracula, 1970
Director Peter Sasdy elevates Francis' early dabbling with light and dark to pronounced critical heights in "Taste the Blood of Dracula."
