Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) - One Fan's Memory

Long ago (1979 or 1980) CBS showed late-late movies, and one dark cold Friday night they showed Dracula A.D. 1972 , so being about ten years old and a monster fan I snuck down stairs and watched it on the only color TV in the house. My memories of that watching consists of being scared (but that was the fun of it) and wanting to see more of Christopher Lee as Dracula.

Now, in my late-late thirties, I decided to re-watch the movie for the first time since that dark and cold Friday night many moons ago. Of course I'm viewing the movie through a different lens now. The time of 1972 is 38 years in the past now, where it was only eight years in the past when I first watched it. The culture shock is more pronounced today after seeing those 1970's fashions and hearing the music of the Stoneground.

Also, after studying horror movies and the people that made them I have more insight into the movie and can place it in it's proper historical context. That's fancy talk for I know more than I did then.

The movie has Dracula, Lord of the Undead, in the hip and happening London of 1972 after his ashes were buried in unsanctified soil next to a church a hundred years before. Wanting revenge on the Van Helsing family, he seeks to make the great great grand daughter of the Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham) who killed him his vampire bride.

The great Peter Cushing plays both Van Helsings (1872 grandfather and 1972 grandson). He would play Van Helsing two more times, in The Satanic Rites of Dracula and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. Lee would be a Hammer Dracula only once more for Hammer (in the Satanic Rite of Dracula). Christopher Neame is devilish as the disciple of the Dracula Johnny Alucard (get it, Alucard) who raises him using a satanic ritual. There's a police detective character who does nothing but supply exposition to Van Helsing, which is a waste. Also wasted with too little screen time (but looking sexy in a black dress) is Caroline Munro, who should of been used more in this film.

So why did Hammer put Dracula in 1972? Much has been written about it, but here is my thoughts on the subject. First, coming into the 1970's Hammer was starting to loose money, a situation which would eventually shut them down (although they, like Dracula many times before, they have been resurrected recently). As a matter of fact I think they did only three more period movies before going into their long slumber from making films. It's more cost effective to set a movie in modern times than period settings, I'm sure the producers were thinking about that.

On the creative end, I'm sure they were running out of ideas of what to do with Dracula. Putting him in (then) contemporary London makes sense if you want to rejuvenate the franchise. Unfortunately, they never take advantage of it. All Dracula does is hang out in an abandoned church the whole time. Neame has to bring him victims to suck, you never see Dracula going out and hunting down Londoners in the streets or in the trendy clubs like Blackula or Count Yorga did. Why bring Dracula to 1972 if you're not going to make the most of it?

On this my ten year old self and I agree, we needed more Dracula. My late thirties self also thinks we needed more of Caroline Munro in a skimpy black dress, but we'll address that at a different time.

The band the Stoneground, who I didn't think were a real band until I looked this film up on Wikipedia, actually serve a purpose in this movie. After the opening set one hundred years before, they help set the movie in 1972 for the audience, then and now. And man do we know it's 1972 from the scenes after the opening credits. Oh, that early seventies music! Oh, those early seventies fashion! What was probably hip then is cheesy now, but ads to the charm of the film.

One scene I remember well, is of the modern day Van Helsing racing through the streets of London to save his grand daughter. At ten, this was a thrilling sequence that made me root for Van Helsing. Today I found myself yelling at the TV, upset that they made poor frail Peter Cushing run in the cold streets at his age. Poor, poor, Peter.

The big memory of this movie is the Resurrection ceremony in the old church the group of friends unwittingly attend, thinking it will be a far out scene to dig (oh, that early seventies slang!). That creepy music (White Noice's Black Mass: an Electric Storm in Hell ) stuck with me for a long time.

So, after all is said and done, ten year old me loved being scared and loved the movie. And you know what, for all it's faults it's still a fun movie.

Until Next Time, Stay Insane!

From Beyond The Grave (1973)

(Correction 10/10/09 -I mistakenly attributed The Monster Club as an Amicus Production in this blog post, which I thought it was for years. After doing a little research for an upcoming blog on the movie I discovered it was in fact NOT an Amicus. Amicus dissolved in mid seventies and The Monster Club came out in 1980. I think the fact that Milton Subotsky made The Monster Club threw me off. Sorry for the confusion.)

From Beyond The Grave from 1973 ended a run of anthology movies put out by Amicus that started with Dr. Terror's House of Horrors in 1965 (The Monster Club didn't come out until 1980 so I don't consider it part of this cycle of movies). Now I remember seeing it back in the high school, either on TV or from the video store, but I didn't remember it all that well. So I sat down, lights off in the middle of the night, to watch it again.

This movie, like Monster Club, takes it's stories from R. Chetwynd-Hayes for it's four main segments. I can sum up the each part like this:

1)The Gatecrasher-It was okay. I liked the idea of a soul trapped in a mirror making a person commit murder to free him. Part of it was badly edited out of sequence in one spot, having David Warner laying in bed wearing a bloody shirt before he's actually murdered the woman whose blood covers it.

2)An Act of Kindness-Confusing. Donald Pleasence is wonderful along side his daughter Angela Pleasence, who is just creepy in this. But the story's payoff doesn't make sense, and I went back and watched it three times to make sure I didn't miss something.

3)The Elemental-Below average. The story, about a man who has a dangerous invisible demon on his shoulder that wants to take him over, is the humorous story to cleanse the palette after the other frights. Felt like an episode of Tales From The Darkside towards the end of their run when they were running out of A type material.

4)The Door- This was actually my favorite segment out of all of them. A man buys a demonic looking door that can open a doorway to a evil man's castle. A negative is it felt too rushed and I wished it could of been developed more, but still out of all of them this was the best.

Peter Cushing is the old proprietor of "Temptations", a sort of antique shop with item that come with a surprise with every purchase. Cushing, who mourned the death of his wife in 1971 to the day he died, looks gaunt and skeletal. You can tell he wasn't taking care of himself, and he even admitted later that he thought of committing suicide out of grief. Still, ever the trooper, he ties these uneven tales together and gives a great performance.

This is not my favorite Amicus anthology, as a matter of fact it probably is towards the bottom of the list, but not as bad a The Deadly Bees. Re-watching it made me realize why I didn't remember it that well, I didn't want to. I collect my favorite movies so I can watch them over and over again, this one isn't going to make my collection.

Just so you know, this DVD doesn't come with any extras, just the movie and the trailer. Something else, like a documentary or commentary, would have been nice. Warner Bros. really went cheap on this, not even having the a original poster as the DVD cover, instead opting for a generic skull that says nothing about the movie.

Below is the trailer from the movie from Youtube.

Until Next Time, Stay Insane!

Asylum (1972) Review

It's rare that there is a horror film from Amicus Productions that I didn't see, but Asylum was one of them. For some reason I had never come across it either on T.V. or in the video store during my youth in the 1980's. I knew of it, I remember a photo of a sinister toy robot creeping up behind an unsuspecting Patrick Magee, but never got to see it. This weekend, thanks to NetFlix, I finally did.

This production, written by Robert Bloch and directed by Roy Ward Baker, is a fine entry in the Amicus horror anthology line (as if there was a bad horror anthology from Amicus). The framing device had Robert Powell as a doctor coming to an asylum and interviewing four patients, all of which tell him their deranged stories.

This was a very minimalist movie, with each episode have just a few sets (mostly a single setting) and at most three actors per story. The tightness of the script by Bloch works here. There is no fat, no unnecessary characters, no scenes wasted, nothing to get in the way of the movie making.

Peter Cushing is great, if a little under used in the second story. But even with a small part (I think his screen time is less than five minutes) he shines and makes an impact. They don't make them like him anymore.

Usually there is one weak story that ruins the flow of the movie for me in anthologies, but here even the weakest story kept my interest. I do have to say my favorite episode was the first one called Frozen Fear.

Pros: Robert Bloch script, great direction from Roy Ward Baker, of course Peter Cushing and a neat little twist at the end that would make M. Night Hasabeen jealous.

Cons: Too short (I wanted more, but that can be a Pro too), weakest story telegraphed the surpirse (making for no surprise) and those horrible 1970's fashions.

On the Cinema Insane Sanity Meter this gets 9 straitjacket's out of 10.