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.