Resurrected by his servant Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame) in contemporary London, Dracula (Christopher Lee) seeks vengeance on the Van Helsing family, scholar Lorrimer (Peter Cushing) and his niece Jessica (Stephanie Beacham).
A reboot of the series, with returning stars Lee and (for the first time since 1960) Cushing, Dracula AD 1972 is a strange beast.
Despite the familiar faces in their familiar roles, these characters are meant to be completely different from the incarnations we have seen previously.
This review is going to be a lot shorter than the previous ones - frankly, this is the point in the series where my interest and enjoyment dipped.
It starts promisingly: After opening with a high-energy confrontation between Van Helsing (this time, Lawrence) and Dracula on top of a speeding carriage, the action segues to 1972, with a shot of a plane flying overhead and the crash of an electric guitar on the score.
It is a solid entree, but once we hit the present, the film has the feel of middle-aged men trying to write for the ‘yoof’.
Our introduction to Jessica and her friends is a party (with the camera ogling a young gyrating midriff). While the elderly guests look on aghast, the young people carouse (including a couple has sex under the dining table), before the police break it up.
This scene is rather over the top, setting the kids up as rebels - but they spend the rest of the film sedately sitting in their local coffee shop. It seems like the filmmakers’ inspirations ran out fairly quickly.
Christopher Neame is the one arresting part of the film, as Dracula’s young familiar.
Johnny Alucard foregrounds the queer subtext previous films had hinted at - he chews his fingers lustily while watching Dracula bite a victim.
Once he has been turned, his own first victim is a man.
Neame manages to evoke the youthful libertine far more effectively than Ralph BAtes did in Taste the Blood of Dracula, and gives the effete killer a purring malevolence that gives the film a sliver more tension than it deserves.
It is a pity his showdown with Van Helsing is so unintentionally farcical - undone by natural light and a running shower.
Cushing is in good form, and it is interesting to see him play an intellectual forced to become a man of action.
However, there is little to latch onto. The final fight is cursory - more should have been made of Van Helsing’s lack of experience. It is there in Cushing’s performance - he seems genuinely terrified of Lee - but there is nothing to the scene.
With a disastrous score, Dracula AD 1972 is a nothingburger of a movie. Somehow, worse than Scars.
Related
Dracula Has Risen From The Grave
No comments:
Post a Comment