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Dracula A.D. 1972
[Hammer/WB]
1972; color
Directed by Alan Gibson
Starring: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame & Caroline Munro
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One of Hammer's final entries in the Dracula canon, A.D. 1972 was a mostly failed attempt (box office-wise) to put the Count in a modern setting. But where the movie fizzled at the ticket booth, in retrospect, in the ensuing three decades since it's debut it's become a campy-cult classic of sorts. We get a nice bit of back story in the beginning, as the opening sequence is a battle between Dracula and Van Helsing (played by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing respectively; this was their next-to-last teaming in these roles) on top of a runaway carriage in the English countryside in 1872. Van Helsing ends up being thrown from the carriage just before it strikes a tree, and as he looks up from the ground he sees Dracula staggering around with a carriage wheel protruding from his chest. In a final act before he dies from his injuries, Van Helsing rams one of the wheel spokes stuck in the Count's chest until it comes out the other side, thus killing the vampire for good. Or so he'd like to think. A solitary rider on horseback has been following the carriage, and when he comes upon the post-wreck carnage he scoops up a vial of by-now-disintegrated Dracula dust, along with the Count's ring, and buries the dust next to the church graveyard where the Van Helsing funeral is being held. He marks the spot with the very wheel spoke that did the count in. Then the camera pans up to the sky and we see a jet cutting across the screen, all of a sudden it's 1972 and we're in swingin' London. A group of friends (whose fashion sense is so questionable I suspect people were laughing at their outfits within a year of the film's release) are crashing a high society party. (They're with the band.) Their game is to cut out seconds before the cops arrive, thus evading arrest. Later, when they're hanging out at their favorite club, one of the alpha males in the group, Johnny Alucard, coaxes everyone into participating a black mass at an abandoned church. One girl, Jessica, shows up late with her boyfriend. As they're traipsing through the graveyard adjacent to the church, Jessica spots the tombstone of her great grandfather, Lawrence Van Helsing. Realizing his death date was 100 years ago to that very day, she gets a bit freaked out. Nonetheless, she and her boyfriend go in and the fun begins. Johnny, who's up on an altar, starts chanting a whole bunch of stuff and invoking all sorts of evil spirits while everyone else sits in a circle around a pentagram drawn on the floor. As the intensity builds, Johnny calls for Jessica to be baptized in blood. She's far too freaked out though, but Johnny's girlfriend Laura (played by proto-Goth beauty Caroline Munro) is more than willing. Johnny complies with his lady, but after he slits his wrist and starts pouring blood all over her neck and torso she gets freaked out as well. Unfortunately, things have already gone beyond the point of no return and the whole crew runs out in fright, leaving Johnny on the altar and Laura paralyzed with fear and screaming for help from the center of the pentagram. Johnny goes outside and pulls the wheel spoke from the smoking ground (I LOVE how it was never disturbed in 100 years) and, as if you didn't see it coming, Drac is back. He immediately dispatches Laura, and sends Johnny on a mission to get Jessica; his ultimate goal to wipe out the Van Helsing lineage. Johnny, as his right hand man (he's also, apparently, the great grandson of the man who scooped up and buried the dust), procures victims for the master and demands to be given "the power." He gets it, puts the bite on a couple more friends, and eventually kidnaps Jessica and has her prepped on an altar for the Count. While all this has been going on, Jessica's grandfather, Lorimer Van Helsing (Cushing) has been helping the police solve the grisly murders. He keeps telling the cops that it's Dracula, and of course no one listens, but eventually he ends up saving his granddaughter and, naturally, killing off the old boy once and for all. (Again.) While the premise remains fairly ridiculous, the more times I see this movie, the more I like it.
—the Kommandant
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