For their seventh Dracula film, Hammer decided wisely, to ignore Scars of Dracula (1970) leaving it as a thoroughly wretched one-off and decided instead to bring the Count into the twentieth century and plonk him down in the latter days of Swinging Chelsea. The result, known early on as variously Dracula Today, Dracula Chelsea ’72 or just Dracula/Chelsea, eventually saw release as the more direct Dracula A.D. 1972.

A great opening sequence set in 1872 finds Dracula (Christopher Lee) and Lawrence Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) battling to the death atop a runaway coach careering through Hyde Park (actually shot in the very un-Hyde Park like Hadley Common in Barnet). The carriage crashes, impaling Dracula one of its shattered wheels and leaving Van Helsing dead from the exertions and wounds of the struggle. An acolyte of Dracula arrives to retrieve the Count’s ashes, burying them in a vial near Van Helsing’s grave in the grounds of St Bartolph’s Church in London. A hundred years later, Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame), a descendant of the acolyte, is a groovy hipster leading a gaggle of irritating trendies in search of thrills, among them Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), the granddaughter of archaeologist and occult expert Lorrimer Van Helsing (Cushing). Alucard persuades the gang to take part in a black mass in the now deconsecrated St Bartolph’s during which he revives Dracula who feeds on Laura (Caroline Munro) after the rest of the hippies flee. Swearing vengeance on the Van Helsing line, Dracula creates a small cadre of vampires, among them Alucard, Jessica’s boyfriend Bob (Philip Miller) and their friend Gaynor (Marsha Hunt) to help him lure Jessica into his clutches. Van Helsing teams up with Inspector Murray (Michael Coles) to investigate a string of murders, including Laura’s eventually coming to the conclusion that the only family nemesis has returned.

Over the pond, Bob Kelljan’s modern day vampire tale Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) had done good business and it surely inspired Hammer to do something similar. Unfortunately, writer Don Houghton seemed to have absolutely no idea what to do with Dracula once he’d brought him into 1972 and strands him in the deconsecrated church for the entire film. Houghton was in his early 40s when he wrote the film and his attempts at “getting down with the kids” are lamentable. It’s clear he’d never spoken to anyone under the age of 25 and burdens his trendy young things with painful dialogue (“It was a tired scene, Joe”) and little in the way of personality.

The performances don’t help much either. The women tend to fair best – Caroline Munro is particularly good in the resurrection scenes, switching from erotically charged writhing on the altar to traumatised sobbing to good effect and both Janet Key and Stephanie Beacham are great as the smartest of the coffee house crowd and Van Helsing’s grand-daughter respectively. But William Ellis as the monk’s habit wearing Joe is just annoying, Philip Miller unmemorable as the supposed juvenile lead and as for Christopher Neame… He was one of a handful of actors being groomed to step into the shoes of Lee, Cushing or both but clearly didn’t have the acting chops at the time. His wild overacting and demented line delivery (“dig the music kids!”) completely ruins what should have been the film’s big set piece, the resurrection scene (scored to the nightmarish strains of White Noise’s Black Mass: Electric Storm in Hell). No-one would have taken any of these posturing buffoons seriously even in 1972 – the real trend-setters of the time were a lot cooler than these unlikable poseurs. The sneer on the lips of singer Sal Valentino during a party scene where his band Stoneground (a late-in-the-day replacement for the better known The Faces) are doing their thing may be as much for the preening coffee-house regulars as for the middle-class straights whose home they’ve invaded.

You might be able to tolerate these annoying young people and their embarrassing patter (“Okay, okay. But if we do get to summon up the big daddy with the horns and the tail, he gets to bring his own liquor, his own bird and his own pot”) and overlook the fact that Dracula skulks about the church as though he’s terrified of setting foot out into the real world, but you’ll want to bang your head on the nearest hard surface when Van Helsing – a supposed expert in this sort of thing let us not forget – has to resort to pen and paper to spell out Alucard’s pseudonym long after most of the audience had figured it out for themselves.

And yet… and yet… Ridiculous it may be, endlessly unintentionally funny and often terribly acted but for sheer entertainment value it’s hard to beat. Canadian director Alan Gibson keeps things zipping long at breathless pace, helping to paper over some of the foolishness by rushing on to the next bit of business before you’ve had a chance to marvel at the last bit of inanity. And it was of course great to have Cushing back in the fold, his Van Helsing as obsessed as ever, treating the silliness with deadly seriousness, helping to anchor the craziness a little. Lee has disappointingly little to do but is more commanding here than he was in Scars (losing that pasty make-up helps no end) and gets excellent book ends in the cracking opening sequence and a grim despatching via animal trap and spade. Dracula is scary again here and has a decent enough mission statement for a change, even if it does again echo Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969) (“I have returned to destroy the house of Van Helsing forever the old through the young”) – if only Houghton had found something for him to do beyond the confines of the church.

Scars of Dracula is guilty of raiding the back catalogue of Hammer Dracula films to an alarming degree, but Dracula A.D. 1972 is hardly innocent on that score either. Not only is Dracula’s plan to punish the older generation through their children straight out of Taste the Blood of Dracula, but the black mass in the deconsecrated church and the gathering of Dracula’s ashes for later use, are both lifted from the same film.

The advertising, particularly in America, seemed unsure how to sell the film and made it look like it was a spoof (“The count is back,” the American straplines tell us,” with an eye for London’s hot pants… and a taste for everything”) but director Alan Gibson commendably plays it totally straight. Sometimes that earnestness can lead to further intended merriment but at least he wasn’t sending it up. He captures some nice snapshots of London circa September 1971 and when he has something to, excuse the phrase, sink his teeth into he does excellent work – that Hyde Park scene is the measure of anything that had come before it.

Dracula A.D. 1972 started its own continuity that would be picked up by the following film, The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), another fun modern-day tale directed by Gibson and written by Houghton who this time finds something useful for Dracula to do. After that, the new continuity was nipped in the bud when Lee finally hung up his cape and fangs for good and Hammer joined up with Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers for Gothic/kung fu hybrid The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974).

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