We’re not even though the opening credits of Dracula A.D. 1972 (from, um, 1972) when the average viewer will know whether or not this is for them. By the time the word “Dracula” is on the screen, we will have seen Christopher Lee, as the titular vampire, and Peter Cushing’s Dr. Van Helsing, wrestling on top of a runaway carriage in 1872. After it crashes, Lee is impaled through the heart by a partial spoke of a broken wagon wheel.
My brain will not allow me to even consider how that is possible. Even weirder is Christopher Neame riding up on horseback and taking Dracula’s ring and then scooping some of the count’s ashes (did I mention he immediately turned to dust after expiring?) into a glass vial he had on him, as apparently people did at all times in the late 19th century. The camera tits upward to the blue sky and a jet plane flies into frame, where “Dracula” is followed by “A.D. 1972”. Oh, I see what you did there!
Given the first scene we see 100 years later, Lee probably wishes he had stayed in powder form. We see a swanky party being crashed by swinging young people straight out of central casting. It appears they are there as fans of Stoneground, the band which is performing there to the dismay of the stuffy old people who presumably hired them for this gig. Something I found weird is the singer on the second of the band’s numbers is Sal Valentino, formerly of the Beau Brummels, of which I am a big fan. I wonder if the Brummels’s appearance in cartoon form on The Flinstones was more gratifying.
After the “fuzz” comes to apprehend the party crashers, a group of these crazy young people reconvenes at their hangout, The Cavern coffee house. At least half of this group is women, so it would be wrong to call them droogs. Still, I could not help but detect the influence of the previous year’s A Clockwork Orange, not just in the weird visual design of this place but also the young people always looking for new and bigger “kicks”.
The leader of the group is a descendant of Neame, but played by the same actor. He proposes they perform a black mass to summon Satan. As always, I’m not sure why anybody would want to do that, but Caroline Munro sure is enthusiastic. Naturally, she is the first one to be dined on by the resurrected Lee. Neame failed to mention that, among the evil beings he claims to attempt to channel in the ritual, he was really only interested in Dracula.
Seems to me the first hint should have been the last name of Neame’s character is Alucard. There is an unintentionally hilarious moment where Cushing’s professor and descendant of the original Van Helsing takes waaay too long to figure out that name is just Dracula spelled backwards, including the painstaking diagraming of the reversal of the letter order, as if this is some very difficult anagram.
Stephanie Beacham is Cushing’s granddaughter and Lee is obsessed with turning her, so as to exact his revenge against the Van Helsings. Cushing has been nagging her to bring her friends home but she refuses to have them in this “mausoleum”. Odd thing to say when she is going to a decommissioned church for that black mass. That seemed to be much closer to a tomb than Cushing’s home. Scarier than the black mass is almost everything she ends up wearing at it, whether it is purple velvet bellbottoms or some sort of outfit which I suspect was inspired by a nightmare had by a Soviet block peasant woman.
Dracula A.D. 1972 is one of the more enjoyable of the later Dracula films Lee did for Hammer. It somehow balances parts of sheer goofiness, without self-awareness, and a similar quantity of winking camp. It has Neame say, with a completely straight face, “Dig the music, kids!”, but later have him tell the friends of Drac’s first victim, “She’ll be there. A bit drained, but she’ll be there.” It may not be essential Hammer, but it looks even better when compared to the dire fare the studio would be releasing shortly thereafter.
Dir: Alan Gibson
Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray