Dracula, Prince of Deadness

It's a convention of vampire films that Dracula starts dead, and ends up dead. In Hammer productions he is usually ended by a member of the Van Helsing family, but his nemesis can also be a callow youth or a monk who likes to warm his arse on an open fire. In 'Taste The Blood Of Dracula' he just gets giddy from being in a church and falls off a ledge. Fact is, Dracula is very much a bully. He's cock of the walk when biting young, vulnerable girls, but he crumbles when faced with any real opposition. Literally. That said, he'll be back. He always comes back.  

RIP, Sir Christopher, you pompous old marvel. See you again soon.

Where Science & The Occult Clash!

‘Nothing But The Night’ is a bit of a one off, which is wholly appropriate given that it was the sole product of Charlemagne Films, a company set up to make intelligent horror films but lost so much money that they folded before they could make a follow up.   

The narrative takes a while to come together but, ultimately, it turns out to be a curious mix of (to paraphrase the US poster) science and the occult, with some lovely Highlands and Islands scenery and a great cast, including Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors, Kathleen Byron, Keith Barron, Fulton Mackay and Cassandra out of ‘Only Fools & Horses’ as a kid who WILL-NOT-STOP-SCREAMING and, ultimately, will utter the greatest lines ever spoken on film by a child:

"You've destroyed my dreams. I curse your cruel God"

At its core is a rather disquieting tale of child abuse in a remote orphanage, but perhaps not in the way that you might immediately think. There’s also a marvellous sequence in which dear old Diana Dors (playing a crazy, shouty clairvoyant) goes feral, running around the countryside evading the authorities like a chocolate munching Ray Mears in a ginger wig and red leatherette rain coat.

Little seen, somewhat neglected, this film always reminds me of a pleasing mix of ‘The Damned’ and ‘Scream and Scream Again’, and although it’s no kind of masterpiece, it nevertheless has strange ideas and weird horror at its core, and that’s like Turkish Delight on Toast for me.     

Nothing But The Night

Coming Soon...

Drink A Pint Of Blood A Day

‘Taste The Blood Of Dracula’ is a bit of a funny old Dracula film. Apart from a prologue which rehashes the end of 'Dracula Has Risen From The Grave' to include a scene in which Drac shares a scene with Roy Kinnear (finally!), the  undead one doesn’t even show up for forty five minutes and, when he does, everything goes downhill quickly from there.

The main story concerns three rich middle aged men (Geoffrey Keen, John Carson and, ulp, Peter Sallis) who, bored with life, have formed a kind of Saga Hellfire Club, and spend their time pursuing the ‘ultimate thrill’ (prossies, mainly, some drug abuse - 'cracking opium, Grommit!'). Overindulging in the flesh has left them jaded, however, and they yearn for something different. Enter super decadent fop Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates), a man so dastardly that working girls pay him for sex. Courtley offers the men a bargain: if they give him a thousand quid he will include them in a satanic ritual which will give them eternal life.

Intrigued, slightly turned on, they willingly fork over the cash only for Courtley to immediately give it to Roy Kinnear who, many years after his encounter with the Count, has kept his cloak, clasp, signet ring and a phial of his dried blood. With these unearthly artefacts in his possession, Courtley enacts some unspeakable rites in a deconsecrated church, climaxing in him adding blood to the dried Dracula blood and making a horrible looking cocktail with which the men are expected to drink. Thrills are thrills, but this looks like red Complan mixed with dog shit, so the men demur and, refusing to follow Courtley’s example and drink, instead beat him to death.

Courtley doesn’t stay dead too long, of course, his corpse soon transforming into Count Dracula who, for whatever reason, immediately vows revenge on the three men, a petty vendetta that seems slightly beneath him. In fact, this reincarnation of Dracula is marked by how pathetic he is: stumbling around in an ill-fitting black wig (occasionally resembling Nicolas Cage), he seems remarkably powerless, getting teenage girls (Linda Hayden and Isla Blair) to bring victims to him and, indeed, to do most of his dirty work. The climax, in which he is thwarted by a skinny kid with a couple of crucifixes, is one of the poorest of all Dracula deaths: he seemingly dies of fright, like one of those weird goats that has a heart attack if someone makes a sudden movement.

In an ideal world, this needn’t have been a Dracula film at all, it could have just been about the horrible revenge of the undead Courtley. It would have been great if he’d rampaged around killing the men in ingenious ways and introducing their daughters to all sorts of depravity before being sent back to hell by an angry mob or a priest with a shotgun or something - but then that wouldn’t have had Dracula in the title, and that’s the crux of the matter: the brand gets the audience in the cinema – after that, well, that’s their problem.

Taste The Blood Of Dracula

Obviously

When you think about it, 'Dracula Has Risen From The Grave' could have been the name of every Hammer Dracula film, as every Hammer Dracula film relies absolutely on Dracula doing just that. Oh, and being destroyed at the end. Well, semi-destroyed, waiting to rise from the grave again. That said, we would have missed such splendid titles as ‘Taste The Blood Of Dracula’ and ‘The Satanic Rites Of Dracula’, so, overall, I’m happy.

That pointless digression leads us to the actual ‘Dracula Has Risen From The Grave’, a singularly snappy and rather cool offering from 1968. Apart from a bit of a sag in the middle, it fairly whips along, chucking in some gruesome murders, a bit of vampiric folklore, plenty of bosoms (courtesy of Barbara Ewing and Veronica Carlson) and a bloody ending in which the Prince of Darkness ends up impaled on a huge golden cross.

One of my favourite Hammer Dracula films, it’s full of energy, and, in using the Bray Studio ‘city’ set, takes the Count into an urban setting, albeit a nice chocolate box-y one. Christopher Lee has a few lines, but spends most of his time smirking, as if he can’t quite get over how naughty he is. He reminds me of my ten year old nephew, who is also a bit of a twat.

Slaying duties eventually fall to gawky Barry Andrews (the hapless Ralph from ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw), although he is hampered by the fact that, as an atheist, he is unable to say the prayers required to seal the deal. In the end, Dracula’s unwilling and increasingly disgusted acolyte, a Priest, breaks the spell long enough to say the necessary incantations and send the bloodthirsty bewigged bastard to Hell. Again. For a bit, at least.

Dracula Has Risen From The Grave

Island Of The Burning Damned

‘Night Of The Big Heat’ was known as ‘Island Of The Burning Damned’ in the USA, a ridiculously hyperbolic title for what is, unfortunately, a terribly tedious film.

Set on the remote Orkney Isle of Fara (actually uninhabited since the sixties), the premise is quite intriguing: the island is experiencing an incredible heat wave which has put all the phones out of order, killed all the sheep and left all the men with enormous sweat patches. That sort of weather is unusual enough for Scotland, of course, but it’s absolutely unheard of in November.

Stupefied from the heat, the villagers mainly gather around the local pub and bicker with each other. Peter Cushing is there, inexplicably wearing a jacket that looks like it’s just had a bucket of water thrown over (take it off, Peter, just take it off). Visiting rude twat scientist Christopher Lee is up to something strange, but is too rude and twattish to let the islanders in on it. The pub landlord (Patrick Allen, always good value) is also a writer, and his life is complicated by the arrival of his ex-lover, who is posing as his secretary and spends most of her time exposing parts of herself to him. As if it wasn’t bloody hot enough. It doesn't sound a lot on paper, but I had high hopes for it.

From here on in, however, the film very, very, very slowly degenerates into something extremely dull indeed. There are half a dozen deaths and, ultimately, a dynamite attack on an extraterrestial race who resemble rocks with lights in them but it’s all done at such a draggy pace that even the supposedly exciting climax is like watching the proverbial pigment grow parched. In the end,  it starts to rain and the hot rocks, having travelled thousands of light years to take over our world, are killed by it. Yes, that’s right, aliens who can be killed by rain decided to start their invasion of Earth in Scotland. Idiots.

From the same crazy fools who brought us the magnificently titled ‘Island of Terror’, ‘Night of The Big Heat’ has no particular real reason to be so dull, it just is. Perhaps the temperature got to them all.

Some notes on Patrick Allen:

Allen is a proper old school actor. He’s not particularly good at the dramatic stuff, but he has a wonderful, sonorous voice and a very expressive physiognomy. His straight face is so straight it’s almost funny, which is why he keeps it mobile. I never believe that he believes it, he's just glad to be there. In this film, there’s a scene where he’s driving along and he just seems full of childlike joy, as if he can’t quite believe that someone is paying him to kiss girls and attack aliens and pretend to be driving along. There’s no method for Patrick, his motivation is that it’s his job, and it's fun. He specialises in capable, rough hewn types who ladies like and men respect, the sort of man who can tie knots, rig up a generator, make a boat out of a fallen tree and smoke a hundred cigarettes and kill a dozen Germans before breakfast, all whilst wearing extremely tight trousers. I miss him.

Night Of The Big Heat

Burn, Baby, Burn

'The Wicker Tree’ is nowhere as bad as I expected it to be, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is any good. Robin Hardy’s somewhat belated follow up to the 1972 classic ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘Tree’ is not a sequel so much as a rather arch attempt to recapture the spirit of the earlier film, but without the clever script, strong performances and genuine shock and surprise of its predecessor. What we’re left with is an uneven mix of horror and comedy, a kind of modular construction where key scenes from the earlier film are recreated – badly – as a foundation and vastly inferior elements are bolted onto the shaky framework. It falls over long before the end.

It’s not all bad, of course, but the worst is awful, and the good merely average. Christopher Lee’s utterly pointless cameo sort of sums up the whole misadventure – it serves no purpose and makes no narrative sense – it only works as a nod to the original, which, under normal circumstances would be okay but slightly indulgent - but here, when everything is a nod to the original, it just seems like a waste of forty years.

The Wicker Tree