Films: 1970s
(1972) Dracula A.D. 1972
Thursday, January 01, 2015
Dracula A.D. 1972
Director: Alan Gibson
Released: 1972
Peter Cushing's Van Helsing and Christopher Lee's Dracula battle for control of a runaway coach until the vehicle crashes and the Count is impaled on shattered wheel spokes.
Van Helsing, bloodied, drives home the wood and then collapses.
Only a passing gentleman is witness to the double fatality – and his witnessing is a promise to the future: Dracula will return.
It is then a valid narrative move with the context of the Hammer franchise, on director Gibson's part, and on the part of writer Don Houghton, to vault the story of Bram Stoker's vampire into modern day London.
What Gibson fails to arrest, in "Dracula A.D. 1972," is the same issue that plagues most of the later Hammer Studios Dracula films – not enough ink and film is spent on the most important characters.
Instead, as is Hammer's wont, "Dracula A.D. 1972" develops a cast of alternate characters around which the story revolves.
There is the typical Hammer device of Satanism.
This time, lordly Johnny Alucard (the charismatic Christopher Neame saddled with a transparent and tired post-Universal inversion of Dracula's name) has inherited the ashes of the slain Count.
Johnny leads a band of hippie drug-addled followers to a deconsecrated church and performs a ceremony that yanks the 19th century dark master into the 20th. Young ladies begin to die, and only the latter-day Van Helsing's granddaughter Jessica (Stephanie Beacham) has her head on straight enough to recognize a real threat in the urban forest.
But hipster dialogue and post-"A Clockwork Orange" character sketches can't make up for the fact that the single most compelling interaction in the Stoker-milieu – at least in its cinematic incarnation – is the Cushing-Lee/Van Helsing-Dracula conflict.
Houghton and Gibson pursue a could-be brilliant path, recasting the descendant Van Helsing as a consultant to Scotland Yard, but the wood carving of Dracula on his library wall does not make up for the fact that Lee is given almost nothing to do, again (it became a perennial complaint for the actor while wearing the cape for Hammer).
Houghton and Gibson are clearly more fascinated with Johnny Alucard, who also poses some interesting development points.
His lust for power and his vying for Dracula's approval and embrace suggest a paternal and homoerotic duality. Johnny begs for power, first seeking unattainable praise from the resurrected monster, then claiming he could more easily trick his female targets with the gift of the undead.
Dracula resists, until a final and oddly awkward scene when the vampire consents to convert the disciple.
There's not much more to the Alucard-Dracula dynamic, unfortunately. Van Helsing dispatches of him in a bathtub and the story never again addresses the ache that blonde Neame injects into his egomaniac betrayer of humanity.
Was the handsome young Londonite never satisfied with his pick of any young lady? Was his never-mentioned family situation the force that left his so empty that the darkest of masters seemed his last resort?
Gibson moves on. Much of the film is spent on encouraging a perception of relevance between the familiar 1970s cultural signifiers of rock bands and drugs and the Victorian trappings of old churches and monsters in the shadows.
Jessica is the only functional youth among Dracula's stock of prey. She explains carefully to Van Helsing, early on, that she doesn't do drugs and she doesn't sleep with her boyfriend.
Thus, there may be a relationship in Houghton's script between drug use, free love and summoning devils – but if it is intentional it proves slight and provides little ballast.
And that leaves the audience again with the elemental lack of the two driving characters – the yin and yang of Dracula's occult power and Van Helsing's spiritualist's science.
Given the generations of Van Helsings that have pursued the Count, and the century of frustration Hammer's Dracula has endured at the hands of that singular family – there is little personal feud injected into "Dracula A.D. 1972."
Only in the next Houghton/Gibson Dracula collaboration – "The Satanic Rites of Dracula" -- would the relationship be brought to some kind of head. For the term of this film, it is the mechanism by which the story reaches another, now inevitable, stop motion dissolve to bone for the vengeful vampire.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Dracula A.D. 1972
Much of the film is spent on encouraging a perception of relevance between the familiar 1970s cultural signifiers of rock bands and drugs and the Victorian trappings of old churches and monsters in the shadows.
