Scars of Dracula

It’s the early 1970s, and Hammer decides to get with the times: sex and blood (especially the latter) are now daily fare for a public increasingly less squeamish about savage brutality. Dracula himself seems to have embraced the zeitgeist: he sends his minions to profane a church and enucleate eyeballs while he sadistically tortures his manservant and slices and dices the fairer sex like a common serial killer.

Roy Ward Baker directs with his customary professionalism, but the series, already on its last legs, looks like it could collapse at any second. In fact, screenwriter Anthony Hinds (credited as “John Elder”) doesn’t seem to have any real vision about where to take the story, and despite his innovative intentions being evident right from the start (canonical scenes such as the fiend’s resurrection and the assault on his lair by the enraged, torch-bearing mob are quickly and unceremoniously dispatched in a rushed introduction), the film becomes little more than a succession of rather uninteresting characters coming and going through the castle and nearby inn. Among them, special mention goes to Paul, a local playboy with all the luck of Wile E. Coyote: first, he unwittingly gets taken for a ride in Dracula’s carriage, and then, once inside the gloomy abode, ends up getting trapped inside the count’s doorless crypt!

The series will continue its decline with Alan Gibson’s palingenetic “Dracula A.D. 1972” (1972), a film that tries to bring the story into a contemporary setting.