Films: 1970s
(1970) Scars of Dracula
Thursday, January 01, 2015
Scars of Dracula
Director: Roy Ward Baker
Release: 1970
Burdened by decidedly lowered production values from preceding chapters, "Scars of Dracula" tilts towards parody.
A gory-mouthed vampire bat resurrects Dracula, dribbling blood onto his ashes, which have been mysteriously transported - cape and all - from Lord Courtley's chapel to Castle Dracula.
Perhaps it was Klove (played with some depth by Patrick Troughton) who brought the remains here, if one were to make the leap for scriptwriter Anthony Hinds.
Regardless, the Count makes haste. The countryside suffers. Finally, Carlsbad villagers and a reluctant priest (Michael Gwynn) travel to the castle and set it aflame.
In Cannenberg, Sarah Framsen (Jenny Hanley) celebrates her birthday with Simon Carlson (Dennis Waterman) and friends - but hopes to see Simon's brother Paul, to whom she is very much attracted.
Christopher Matthews' Paul, however, is bouncing from bed to bed in Cannenberg, and his arrival at Sarah's party is also his escape from an enraged Burgomaster (Bob Todd). In a sort of Rube Goldberg escape sequence, Paul is whisked away from his wild life in to a more sober and gruesome fate at the damaged but undestroyed Castle Dracula.
Simon and Sarah search for Paul, of course, becoming entwined in a bloody plot by Dracula to consume not only the second of two brothers, but the fiancée as well.
Simon finds the tools he needs to fight back in the cowardly mind of the priest, and a final confrontation at Castle Dracula ends with a fiery dark angel plummeting from great heights to presumed final death on the rocks below.
Lee's Dracula performs his familiar post-Fisher role here as Prince of Darkness, "the devil himself," according to Gwynn's priest. But he also extends the arc of dark avenger against the corrupt and the impious Peter Sasdy started in "Taste the Blood of Dracula."
At the hands of the undead Count, Paul is punished, impaled (as he so "impaled," perhaps), on the walls of Dracula's aerie.
Gwynn presents a cipher.
He is either Edwin Hooper's priest from Freddie Francis' 1968 "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave" (also spiritually paralyzed by Dracula's desecration of the village church), or he is a successor facing a very similar problem.
In either case, Baker positions youthful maleness against the priest's aging spiritual impotence and by proximity reenergizes the holy man to take a stand against the evil overshadowing the people of the land.
Baker's is a believer/atheist universe, much as Francis's was, but he fills it with muscular youth less interested in assuming the mantle of their elders and more inclined to reinvent the church's role in their lives. Notably, in "Scars of Dracula," the priest is relieved of duty before the pair reaches the castle.
The young, discovering a true purpose for their parents' rote and dormant Christianity, no longer need the dusty robes of the local father. What they do, they do with their own hands and in their own way.
By this time in his business with Hammer Studios, Lee was frustrated with his ever-diminishing activity in the Dracula films. Hinds and Baker give the Count more lines and more to do, but in the process they rob the vampire of his otherworldly detachment.
Most alarming in the transformation from creature-of-shadows to activator and participant, Dracula dispatches one vampire bride with a knife, not only stooping to conquer but violating the mythology of the creatures. In another scene he tortures Klove with a red-hot sword. Not exactly the subtle and all-encompassing machinations of Stoker's vampire.
Baker betrays canon in other ways. Dracula's open coffin, devoid of native soil it seems, faces an open window during the day. He commands humans while sleeping during the day.
On the other hand, Baker milks Troughton for everything he's worth, lingering while the mortal servant carves up one victim and disintegrates her in acid.
Ultimately, however, there is too little to commend "Scars of Dracula," and too many rubbery awful bats flopping about the tops of the sets. Baker's movie is plagued by flimsy dialogue, and loose – to the point of disconnection -- plot points.
While the whole is unsatisfying, Baker also managed to wrestle at least one excellent moment out of the story: the conclusion of the film is a kind of unintentional, sad, but visually glorious double-entendre.
Dracula, blazing from a lightening strike, plummets from the Castle. He is at once Lucifer thrown back into the pit, and the whole of the Dracula myth going down in flames on a Hammer Studios set.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Scars of Dracula, 1970
On the other hand, Baker milks Troughton for everything he's worth, lingering while the mortal servant carves up one victim and disintegrates her in acid.
