The Satanic Rites of Dracula

Oh! Look at the month! It's October, so it looks like, over the next 30 days, I'll be dumping a bunch of the horror films I've saved up over the year. You have been warned.

Oh! And Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day.

The Satanic Rites of Dracula (aka Dracula and his Vampire Bride)(Alan Gibson, 1973)  The last of Christopher Lee's appearances as Dracula in the Hammer series is in this scraping-the-bottom-of-the-coffin sequel to Dracula A.D. 1972. The same writer. The same director. And Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are in it, as well as Michael Coles as Inspector Murray and the character of Van Helsing's granddaughter Jessica returns, although not played by Stephanie Beachum this time, but by Joanna Lumley. If you'll recall, in the previous entry, Dracula died after being pushed into a pit conveniently filled with stakes, with the added help of Dr. Lorrimer Van Helsing (Cushing) using a shovel to push the stakes deeper into him, and him turning to ash on the spot.

 

This movie's aim is so low they don't even explain how Dracula gets resurrected from that outcome—he just shows up at the 31 minute mark of the movie as if nothing had ever happened. At this point, you'd think the man would learn to avoid anything sharper than a rubber ball!

The exploitation level is very high—so much so that Lee's Dracula is barely in it—and there's less of a Dracula plot and more of a spy-thriller aspect to it, as least initially, as an agent from MI6 escapes captivity while downstairs four prominent Englishmen are taking part in a ritual (presumably to revive Dracula but that runs counter to the timeline laid out in the movie) involving a naked blonde* and the blood of a chicken. It's a long ritual, judging by the simultaneous-event-cross-cutting, that the agent has time to escape, whisked to HQ and burbles a 30 minute tape record of his experience, then dies and the micro-film in his wristwatch camera gets developed by the time it's over.

 

By the time the movie is over, you'll realize that the 'satanic rites" opening and closing the films are irrelevant and Dracula has no vampire bride, making you wonder just what either of the titles had to do with the movie. Did I mention that, although the movie was released in Britain in 1973, it didn't get released in the U.S. until 1978? Not that it was particularly missed.

Anyway, MI6, being so efficient and all, determines they'll need outside help so they contact Inspector Murray "of the Yard" who helps identify the four big-shot Englishmen (one of them's a Nobel Prize winner in biology, but you'd never know it as he's played Freddie Jones in full "gibbering" mode!) and makes the leap to blood sacrifices in order for him to say "Blood? I know somebody who knows a thing or two about blood!"

Cue Peter Cushing as Professor Van Helsing! He agrees it's all pretty suspicious and as the biology genius is an old acquaintance of his, he goes off to visit him, while MI6 agent Torrence (William Franklyn), Murray and Van Helsing's granddaughter Jessica go out to where the dead agent was held captive to blunder about asking questions of whatever suspicious conspirator they can find. They find those, but they also find a coven of vampirettes in the basement/wine-cellar. Crikey, that sounds out-of-place!

Okay, everybody stumbles about, but the upshot is that Dracula has posed as a real estate developer (!) living in the penthouse of the high-rise built on the very spot where he died in the previous film. Living like Howard Hughes and amassing a fortune in downtown London, he has financed the creation of a  form of bubonic plague with enhanced virulency that he plans to unleash upon—dare I say it?—the world. It sounds exactly like a Bond-villain plot,** but Dracula isn't holding the world to ransom—he just wants to do it (BECAUSE he's Dracula!).

Oh, there's stakings, an electrocution, the stronghold being set on fire and Jessica unconscious on a sacrificial altar...again!...before the big fight between Dracula and Van Helsing, which ends with Dracula being caught in hawthorn bushes. Hawthorn bushes. Okay, Wikipedia says that works, folklorically—just like turning on the sprinkler system dispatches the vampirettes in the basement—but, damn!, dramatically, it's a bit underwhelming. Now, I could understand Dracula not having a weed-whacker yet as they'd only been invented in 1971, but...if the guy's so rich he can fund a bubonic plague program, why can't he afford a gardener? It would have kept him from getting stuck—and then staked—by Van Helsing in the end.

Thankfully, nobody built a high-rise on that patch of Earth, as there wasn't a sequel...not with Lee's Dracula, anyway. He wouldn't be back. Cause of death is officially hawthorn branches and multiple stake-wounds. But, I think that's a cover-up. Judging by The Satanic Rites of Dracula, he died of anemia.

* I remember seeing this on one of the Elvira presentations of horror movies and there's so much gratuitous nudity that at one point she interjects "Uh...what's our "blurring" budget on this one?"

 

** Lee would do that NEXT year as the villain in The Man with the Golden Gun.

My Favorite Musical: A Hard Day's Night

A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964) A jangling Fadd9-chord (with a George Martin multi-note slam on his Steinway) reverberates for a few solitary moments on the sound-track before the full-tilt rock song churns ahead, accompanying—maybe for the first time in movies—an action scene; The Beatles (John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, who stumbles in the opening shot, tripping Ringo, to Lennon's delight*) are trying to catch a train, running from a mob of their screaming fans.

Just a typical day in the life of The Beatles

A reporter once asked Lennon what he thought of a particular stop on a tour: "It was a train and a room, a car and a room and a room and a room." That's what scenarist Alun Owen found when he stayed with the four mop-tops during a stretch of concert tours: The Beatles were prisoners of their fame. They were so successful that any chance of a normal life was out of the question. If all four of them were together there was a riot and they'd have to run for their lives, call out security, work out internecine routes. Their lives were led at a runner's pace, with no finish line in sight. It was utter insanity. And if they weren't so young and going through it together, they might succumb to the madness (and who's to say they didn't?)

And that's what A Hard Day's Night is—a dramatic illustration of the life of the Beatles at the height of their success—managed, cajoled, used, stymied, interrogated, trying to be the calm in the center of their own self-generated hurricane.

That it's also a musical is without dispute. The story-line is interrupted every 15 minutes or so with a new Beatles song, and since the through-line of the story is to get The Beatles-collective to a broadcast-venue on time and in one piece, there's ample opportunity for practice and rehearsal. The songs do not necessarily spring out of the material of the story, but when has that ever been a requirement? Critic Andrew Sarris, in his seminal book "The American Cinema," off-handedly remarked that if The Marx Brothers were an insane tonic to a sane if corrupt world, then The cinematic Beatles were the sane tonic to an insane world, and this is true of both Help! and A Hard Day's Night. The worlds of both films seem to be doing everything in their considerable power to stifle joy, through ritual, constraint, and even finding ways to bottle it up and sell it. 

John Lennon snorting Pepsi (as Coke is not available)

In Hard Day's Night, specifically, The Beatles are bright and clever and anarchically up-beat while being herded from one venue to another, caught between strict rules and screaming hysterical anarchy. Each has their own episodes of dealing with the world: Paul, the cheerily shallow cute one is burdened with the responsibility of dealing with his lecherous grandfather (Wilfred Brambell-"He's very clean"), John, the prickly clown, toys with his fame and badgers the management ("You're a swine..."), played by Norman Rossington and John Junkin, as highly fictionalized versions of Brian Epstein and roadies Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, while George, the stonily introspective one, finds himself confronted with the marketing and exploitation of Britain's youth culture. Ringo, the diminutive ugly duckling, possessed of and hiding behind "a large hooter," and shackled to a distancing drum-kit ("They loom large in his legend," remarks George) is depressed and yearns to break free on his own, a dream which is only encouraged by Paul's scheming grandfather.

The sub-text (as it is in their second film with Lester,  Help!) is that the world is conspiring to splinter The Beatles apart, and it is only their efforts as a group—both films' plots involving the rescuing of Ringo—that keeps them together and the world at bay. That's pretty ironic, as the four's own bickering is what led the group to self-destruct and go their own ways once they were no longer forced to go together in the same direction by their hectic tour schedule. The only real idyll they have in A Hard Day's Night is in the antic "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence, where, in a rare moment of freedom, they caper about a play-field, which Lester films in an eclectic helter-skelter array of techniques, formal and informal: sped-up, slowed down, from the air, and hand-held.** Even that ends with an admonition ("I suppose you know this is private property!").

It all turns out right in the end, with the concert accomplished, the boys back together and taking the safest route away from a crazy chaos—up, with a reprise of the opening song that ends with a jangling guitar arpeggio...that never ends, but just fades.

It is a tantalizing, if fictional, glimpse of Beatlemania, that hysterical era when, as Harrison stated in "The Beatles Anthology," the world seemed to be given permission "to go mad." And, in the best description of their situation, goes on to pointedly say that that madness made them rich and set them up for life, and, in exchange, "we gave them our nervous systems."

* 

Where's Paul McCartney, you ask? Well, he's not dead, certainly. Paul's not running in this scene. He's found his own way to avoid the mob, disguised with a moustache...and two "beards" of sorts, the other being his grandfather (played by "Steptoe and Son's" Wilfred Brambell). Since Brambell is accompanying McCartney on the train, you couldn't expect an elderly man to run in the opening. It should be noted that Mike Myers cribbed that joke (with no changes whatsoever) for Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

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** At one point, all rules are broken, and the sequence becomes even more over-the-top when Paul briefly snatches the camera from the director (There's your rock n' roll anarchy for ya, kids!).

Todd Haynes, briefly, does his own tribute to this sequence in the Bob Dylan-house-of-mirrors bio-fiction I'm Not There, as Dylan's meeting with the Beatles (where they were introduced to marijuana) is represented by a distant manic scampering, interrupted by chasing, screaming fans.