Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

Taste the Blood of Dracula Review
Review # 149

3.5/5 stars

Director – Peter Sasdy

Cast – Christopher Lee, Peter Sallis, Geoffrey Keen, Gwen Watford, Linda Hayden, Anthony Corlan, Isla Blair, John Carson, Martin Jarvis, Ralph Bates, Roy Kinnear

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– follows Dracula Has Risen From the Grave

– followed by Scars of Dracula

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We all know Dracula, the evil vampire and seducer of lore. The most recent movie adaptation of any note was Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula starring Gary Oldman. That is a movie that, while being hailed for its old-time charm and practical effects wizardry, I have yet been able to sit through once. But before Oldman and his famous (infamous?) hairstylings, the character was synonymous with Christopher Lee and his portrayal in the Hammer Productions films.

Christopher Lee is perhaps most famous to modern audiences as the villains Sauroman and Count Dooku, from the Lord of the Rings films and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones respectively. He also makes numerous cameos in Tim Burton movies. But back in the day Hammer films were his training ground, with appearances in The Hound of the Baskervilles and many other non-Dracula roles. His Dracula is suave and commanding, but doesn’t say much, except for counting down the number of victims he has killed. He doesn’t even appear (save one brief scene at the beginning) until 50 or 55 minutes into the movie.

The movie is told from the point of view of three men, friends who like going out on a Sunday night and living a little wild. (In a nice surprise one of these men is played by Peter Sallis, eventual voice of Wallace from Wallace and Gromit, and long time cast member of the BBC TV series The Last of the Summer Wine.) Once brothels start seeming a little tame, they talk to someone rumoured to have been once caught in the act of worshiping in a Black Mass. He is a rich and arrogant young man, and takes them to a remote castle. There he drinks the re-constituted blood of Dracula (after the three men chicken out), and after they flee we see him morph into a familiar fanged form. Dracula vows to hunt the men down. As you do.

The movie is slow to build up, and uneven pacing is its biggest problem. It is a beautiful looking movie, though, and clearly had a decent budget (for movies it its type.) I was intrigued by its way of keeping Dracula off-screen til the half way point. We saw the story through the eyes of three middle-aged gentlemen who realize they are in over their heads, and it was enough of a new take on the vampire genre to interest me. I must admit that other than that the story is fairly routine. The special effects aren’t great (what little there are), with the occasional visible wire or dodgy compositing, but we have to expect that from these productions.

OVERALL

Taste the Blood of Dracula is a solid entry into the Hammer Dracula series, as those movies go. Christopher Lee is back in fine form, but doesn’t have a lot to do, really. I would recommend this to fans of Hammer films, or Dracula films. There isn’t much in it for anyone else, but it does certainly have a quaint charm to it.

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TRAILER 

“Taste the Blood of Dracula” on other websites:

IMDB —– Rotten Tomatoes —– Wikipedia

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