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The Satanic Rites Of Dracula
[Hammer/WB]
197?; color
Directed by Alan Gibson
Starring: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Coles, William Franklyn, Freddie Jones & Joanna Lumley
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Satanic Rites Of Dracula marks the final pairing of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as our favorite blood sucking Count and his perennial nemesis, Dr. Van Helsing. This time around it's present day England (as with the previous picture in the series, Dracula, A.D. 1972) and the Count has set himself up with a group of followers, almost all of whom are elite intellectuals, politicians and other people in notable positions of power. For reasons never fully explained this group has begun to attract the attention of British Intelligence and after the agent they'd assigned to infiltrate is caught and tortured before escaping and relating all the things he saw, they call in a detective from Scotland Yard for help. Once hearing a tape of the now-dead agent relating stories of weird blood rites in the mansion where all this has been going on, the detective suggests consulting with Van Helsing, because of his expert knowledge of "The Black Arts and, you know, other things." From this inference, and the detective's knowing smirk, it's clear he's already thinking vampires. With Van Helsing on board things really start to pick up. Not only is he a colleague of one of the men in question, a Nobel-winning chemist; his niece, Jessica (a character introduced in the previous film) turns out to be none other than Joanna Lumley, AKA Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. (I'm not sure how many of you out there who are fans of Hammer horror are also fans of AbFab but… ) Van Helsing figures out that Dracula's master plan is no longer merely assembling an army of vampires, his new master plan is for total population destruction by spreading a new, ultra-virulent strain of the Plague. At the same time, the Intelligence officer gets killed while on surveillance at the mansion, the detective with him gets knocked out and Jessica (who's hanging around for some reason) gets kidnapped by Dracula's suede vest-clad goons. Eventually things wind around from a corporate headquarters in London back to the mansion in the country and we're treated to a conflagration that leaves all of the Count's followers dead and the Count himself being killed by a combination of a stake through the heart and a briar bush holding him virtually immobile. This is the only Hammer Dracula flick (except for the first) where there's no resurrection scene, he's just there all along even though he doesn't appear until almost 40 minutes in. (In all fairness it is a pretty damn good entrance.) Lee also gets tons more dialogue in this picture than a few of the previous ones and that's always a good thing. Unfortunately, by the time this film rolled around the Dracula franchise as envisioned by Hammer was all but dead, and it shows. The studio only made two more vampire films after this one (Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter and the Hammer-Shaw Bros. co-production Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires) and, arguably, they're both better efforts than this.
—the Kommandant
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