Hammer-Time!: Dracula AD 1972 (Dir Alan Gibson, 1h36, 1972)
What is clear is that by the early 1970s, Hammer were in trouble. Part of this, to be entirely fair, was a more general trend in the British film industry-the arrival of colour TV at the end of the 1960s badly affected British cinema, and slashed box office revenues-with a business model that had always skewed towards older audiences in their search for the X-Certificate, so Hammer found themselves having to diversify-one of those strands, teaming up with Hong Kong action masters, the Shaw Brothers, will be our focus in our final week of Hammer films, but much of their other work of the early to mid 1970s relies on-in polite terms-gimmickery, or "spicing up" the formula. Their films, by market demand, either had to be more violent, racier, both, or carry some new and exciting trick that other studios of 1970s Britain and beyond had not already seized upon. Cue, for example, the production of several female vampire movies, including the Karnstein trilogy (1970-1971), the first, and best, of which is 1970's The Vampire Lovers, swapping Lee's Count for the eroticism of the lesbian vampire, Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt).
Few films, however, had the lavish sets, nor inventiveness of this break in the formula, and most of Hammer's work of the 1970s is either charmlessly violent or pushes taste, and the X-Certificate to its limits. In short, Hammer was slowly succumbing to age, its lifeblood all but spent, a relic of another age, one of its last true moments of glory an Oscar nomination for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)'s special effects. It's thus understandable, for budgetary reasons, that much of Dracula AD 1972 is, indeed, set in 1972: what isn't is largely Hammer by rote, despite a surprisingly fun coach chase through Hyde Park that ends with Dracula staked through the heart with a broken wheel, Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, once again), dead, and the remains of the vampire covertly buried by one of his followers (Christopher Neame) near to Van Hellsing's grave.
A hundred years pass, in a smartly done hold and pan up on the elder Van Helsing's grave, to reveal a jet plane going overhead, and we are thrust into the middle of early 1970s London, and introduced, as they gatecrash an upper-class party, to our protagonists. If nothing else, the film certainly does, though it occasionally borders on pastiche, capture the contemporary teenage culture around it, or if one wants to be blunter, the late 1960s rather than the early 1970s-the band soundtracking the scene are Stoneground, a last minute replacement for the Faces, indicating how far Hammer's star had fallen, whilst our protagonists are largely disaffected hippies, from our heroine, Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham) out, only unhurriedly leaving the party they've steadily derailed once the police are called. It's here, at a loose end, in their local coffee shop-there's something appropriately verité to the way that much of 1970s London is used as a background, grounding the increasingly supernatural plot-that one of the group, Johnny Alucard, suggests a new thrill-Satanism.
Johnny Alucard (also Neame), is the best thing about this film-that's half the film's problem, as we'll get to shortly, but Johnny is a impressively nasty and modern vampire menace, half Alex DeLarge delinquent, half rock-star (Neame especially seems to be channelling Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones), who has already ingratiated himself with the group, and dares them to attend the ritual at the now deconsecrated church at which both Van Helsing and Count are buried. This scene, if nothing else, depicts the identity problem the film has-it's not sure wherther to lean fully into the campy sensibility of High Gothic Hammer, with Johnny incanting the names of multiple demons whilst eerie noises (actually electronic music pioneers, White Noise) echo through the deconsecrated church, or to play this more modern, as sinister character piece of the seductive and cultish Johnny, or as pastiche of the former, Johnny eventually laughing off the entire thing as a prank.
This tonal problem rears its head in myriad ways-the soundtrack really wants to be Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack to Super Fly (1972), full of blaxploitation funk, which would be fantastic were the film set in North America, but on the streets of London feels woefully out of place but for a few moments of high action. The biggest problem though, is with the two veterans, (Lee and Cushing). For, what the ritual does do is resurrect Dracula, in a decent, if clearly budget-strapped bit of effects work, arriving out of billowing smoke, and here we arrive at the biggest tonal problem, the film's largest flaw. The problem with Dracula AD 1972 is that Dracula is in AD 1972...and the film does nothing with him. Lee is essentially parked in one location, brought prey by Johnny Alucard, largely women that he has seduced from the group, and only becomes active in the last ten minutes, by which the competency of Cushing's Van Helsing is once more on the scene.
It gives the film a certain symmetry, but the idea of the Count haunting London in the present day, as he does in the sequel, the spectacularly named (and little else) The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). Worse, it does little with Cushing (returning as a descendant of Van Helsing, and Jessica's grandfather), whose role in the film essentially seems to be to impart warnings of the occult to both Jessica and the police investigate, and to briefly return to role of vampire hunter, as Johnny's diabolic plot-to bring Jessica to Dracula to be his bride-unravels, leading to some fun, if largely forgettable action set pieces. Whether it be because Hammer was increasingly cash strapped, Cushing (who appeared in seven horror films in 1972) and Lee (four, but also busy bringing The Wicker Man (1973) to production) were busy, or the film simply wanted to focus on a younger audience, but the film has a curiously bipolar sensibility, reluctant to let go of the figureheads of the Dracula franchise, but equally reluctant to let them do anything.
There's the feeling of an era ending in Dracula AD 1972; Lee and Cushing would reunite one final time the following year to make the aformentioned The Satanic Rites of Dracula but this would be largely bloodless and bordering on parody. Yet, Dracula AD 1972, for all its cumbersomeness, its attempts to bank off previous successes whilst leaving its twin iconic stars largely on the periphery, and its...1970s-ness, has some surprisingly fun ideas-the idea of a classic horror monster roaming the streets of the capital would be brought to bloodily impressive fruitition in 1981's An American Werewolf in London, but even in 1972, the films occasionally has moments that, shorn of having to be a Dracula film, and attached to a film in which a modern vampiric menace stalks the streets of London, would have been far more effective, the vampire movie reborn for another era. What we have is at once a glimpse backwards of where the genre, where Hammer had been, and where, but for trends, and the state of British Cinema in the 1970s, they could have gone.
Rating: Recommended
Dracula AD 1972 is available to watch online in the UK via Amazon Prime and Apple TV and on DVD from Warner Bros It is currently available to stream via HBONOW, and on DVD from Warner Bros in the United States.
Next week, we bid a fond farewell to Hammer Studios, as Dracula heads to Hong Kong to meet the Shaw Brothers in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
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