Ahead of the fifth film in Hammer’s Dracula series, Christopher Lee’s reluctance to play the role any more and his understandable demands for a more appropriate fee for his work didn’t go down well with Hammer. They tried to continue the series without him, minting a new character, the aristocratic Lord Courtenay, who would take over from Dracula as the company’s new vampire anti-hero. But their American producers at the time, Warner Bros., made it very clear that a Hammer Dracula film needed Lee on board and they would accept no substitute. Hammer tried to hedge their bets by retaining the Courtenay character – now renamed Courtley – but hand Anthony Hinds, writing under his usual pseudonym John Elder, insert Dracula back into the script. Presumably this was just a matter or retooling Courtley’s dialogue to suit Lee and killing off the young upstart fairly early on.
An arresting prologue sees a comic relief snow globe salesman (Roy Kinnear) expelled from his carriage in the middle of nowhere and stumbling across footage from the closing minutes of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968). He gathers samples of Dracula’s revoltingly viscous blood after it turns to powder and later, in London, sells it to decadent young aristocrat Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates), who promises three pleasure-seeking and outwardly respectable middle aged men, William Hargood (Geoffrey Keen), Samuel Paxton (Peter Sallis) and Jonathon Secker (John Carson) that he meets on one of their regular trips to an East End brothel. Using his own blood, Courtley reconstitutes Dracula’s blood in a ceremony in a deconsecrated church. The men refuse to drink the blood as Courtley commands them and when he does and starts choking, the terrified trio beat him to death and flee. Courtley’s body transforms into Dracula (Lee) who swears vengeance on the men, targeting their children – Alice Hargood (Linda Hayden), Paul Paxton (Anthony Corlan – it wouldn’t be a Hinds script without a “Paul”), Lucy Paxton (Isla Blair) and Jeremy Secker (Martin Jarvis). With Alice under Dracula’s spell and Lucy and Jeremy turned into vampires, the fathers are brutally murdered and it’s down to Paul to rescue Alice and see off Dracula.
Taste the Blood of Dracula was the first feature film for Hammer by the Hungarian Peter Sasdy who’d been in Britain since the late 1950s, toiling away in television, where he made two episodes of Hammer’s anthology series Journey to the Unknown, The New People (1968) and Girl of My Dreams (1968). He’d go on to make the disappointing Countess Dracula (1971) before redeeming himself with the excellent Hands of the Ripper (1971). He draws a line very early on between himself and his predecessors on the Dracula series, particularly Terence Fisher, rejecting his glorious, lush colour palette in favour of something cooler and more subdued.
Here, Dracula is motivated by revenge for the murder of his acolyte (the thrill-seeking middle-class fathers transform into a feral mob, kicking and beating Courtley to death like demented savages, their fear stripping away even the thin veneer of respectability that they’d been clinging to) and it’s difficult to work out why he should care. It’s unlikely that Dracula knew Courtley in “life” and he’d never shown much affection or loyalty to his underlings before so why he should spend time avenging his death is a bit of mystery. Prosaically it’s because as originally envisioned, Courtley would still have died but would have been reborn as the “new” Dracula and taken his own revenge. It’s a sticky plot point that the film never really tinds a way to resolve satisfactorily.
But Hinds uses Dracula’s vengeance as a way to tease out the hypocrisy of the society that the Count now finds himself in (this is the first Hammer Dracula set in Britain). Piously preaching standards and morals while lying to their own families to indulge in sex, drugs and alcohol fuelled bouts of wild bacchanalia in London’s East End, the three fathers are a hateful bunch – all craven, hypocritical and cruel to varying degrees – but none more so than the loathsome and controlling Hargood, with his unhealthy interest in his teenage daughter’s sex life and threatening to take a riding crop to her when he can longer control her. Sasdy cannily presents him in one shot in the way that Dracula and his various acolytes had been presented in earlier films, half in silhouette standing in a doorway – he’s as much the monster here as Dracula, if not more so. And when, under Dracula’s influence, Alice stoves his head in with a shovel it’s a genuinely cathartic moment and there would surely very few in the audience that would feel any pity for him.
As well as being a scathing expose of the rank hypocrisy of God-fearing Edwardian polite society, the film also makes a play for the younger audience and plugs into the widening schism between the young and older generations that had opened up at the tail end of the 1960s. The instruments of Dracula’s revenge would be the young, repressed and abused, held in check by their uptight elders and rushing into the arms of the exotic stranger who frees their libidos and their pent-up rage against their parents.
Ralph Bates was being groomed by Hammer as a potential replacement for Lee and Cushing but although he was a good actor when had the right material (he was great in John Sullivan’s sitcom Dear John (1986-1987)) but Hammer rarely found him anything that suited his talents. He was good as one half of Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971) but Courtley really needed to have been played by someone with more imposing and commanding than Bates could muster and although the rewrite to accommodate Dracula doesn’t really work, it does spare us any more of him. Whatever his talents elsewhere, it’s hard to buy Bates as the decadent young aristocrat and he resorts to shouting when he needs to command a scene.
The supporting cast is good value though – Keen, Sallis and Carson are excellent as the fathers, Linda Hayden suitably seductive as the liberated Alice and Isla Blair genuinely chilling as the vampirised Lucy. Michel Ripper has an all too brief cameo as a jovial, down-to-earth copper (“it’s nasty that… nasty…”) and there’s a brief turn from Madeline (credited as Maddy) Smith making her first appearance for Hammer as one of the girls in the bordello.
But there’s no escaping that the ending is a mess – just what is going on there? It’s completely baffling as Dracula retreats to the deconsecrated church where he was revived only to find that it’s suddenly become reconsecrated again and ends up scrambling around the walls (that’s stuntman Peter Brace doing the literal heavy lifting), heaving organ pipes at Alice and Paul before he falls onto the altar and dissolves into dust again. It’s a real head-scratcher (how does Paul have the power to reconsecrate a church?) and an unsatisfactory ending, a real deux ex machina that robs audiences of the thrill of seeing Dracula bested by his foes. He dies almost as a result of his own clumsiness and how the church suddenly becomes re-sanctified will likely forever remain a mystery.
But for all its faults, Taste the Blood of Dracula is an impressive entry in the Dracula series and compared to what was to come next it was nothing short of a masterpiece. Sasdy directs with real energy, giving Lee some impressive low angel shots as he looms menacingly over the dying fathers, intoning “the first,” the second” and “the third” and if he can’t do much with a ridiculous ending he gives us quite the exhilarating ride on the way there.
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