Taste The Blood Of Dracula

Offspring Breakers

Taste The Blood Of Dracula
UK 1970
Directed by Peter Sasdy
Hammer/Warner Archive Blu Ray Zone A

Okay, so the time has come for me to revisit the very first of the Hammer Dracula films I saw as a kid. I think I was about six years old when Taste The Blood Of Dracula got it’s first TV screening in the UK but it was a big deal as I think I’d only seen the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula before this. I remember it was one of two films (the other being Dr. No) where we actually walked up one night to the next street from where we lived back in those days, to my uncle’s house... as he was one of the few family members who actually possessed a colour television set as opposed to our black and white model. I really liked this film then and, as a consequence, despite being somewhat less thrilled by it this time around, it’s always going to be the Hammer Dracula movie that holds a special place in my heart for this reason. Not my favourite (that would get a release in 1972, I review it here) but certainly the one that most brings with it a strong sense of nostalgia.

And though it is actually quite a ploddy film in a way, I have to say that the way the story evolves over the course of the picture is yet a slightly different angle into the various ‘Dracula killing sprees’ which are the prime ingredient of the movie.

The film actually opens just before the end of the last movie, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (reviewed here), with a travelling salesman, played by British comedian Roy Kinnear, being knocked unconscious and abandoned on the road following a somewhat traditional Hammer opening of a stage coach filmed in the local forest. When he awakens, he stumbles into Christopher Lee’s Dracula’s death scene from the last movie and, it transpires later, collects the amulet, the cloak and some of the powdered remains of his blood for their ‘resale value’.

We then switch to the plot proper, as three disloyal fathers, played by Geoffrey Keen, Peter (It’s cheese, Gromit!) Sallis and John Carson meet on the last Sunday of every month in their little three man secret circle, to while away the rest of the evening in the company of the charming ladies of a bordello (including the young Madeline Smith in her first role for Hammer), run by Russell Hunter (who played ‘Lonely’ in TV’s hit show Callan, opposite Edward Woodward). As importantly, we meet their respective children played by Linda Hayden (from Blood On Satan’s Claw, reviewed here), Isla Blair and Lucy Paxton. And also Anthony Higgins as Ms Hayden’s worried and disapproved of boyfriend.

We then get into some business where the three brothel boys fall in with the son of a lord played by Ralph Bates, in the first of his films for Hammer. He dabbles in black magic and gains the aid of the three, in the guise of providing them with thrills beyond what their now jaded minds can think of. In this case, he urges them to purchase Dracula’s cloak, amulet and powdered blood at great expense so they can sell their soul to the devil but, when things take a dark turn and only he drinks Draculas blood mingled with his own, before being beaten to death by the others, he is abandoned at the site of the ritual.

However, because of his loyalty to Dracula, his body is suddenly covered with some special spooky dust, which forms a kind of shroud around him, before he rips free of the shroud and is revealed to be a reborn Christopher Lee as Dracula. Now, I suspect Bates must have felt a little hard done by at this point because he was originally supposed to be playing the lead role after Lee’s reluctance to return to the character but, the distribution deal with Warners Seven Arts would go up in smoke without Lee in the part so he was, eventually, lured back to the role and the story rewritten for the return of the original Dracula.

After that, the film becomes a simple cat and mouse game as Dracula takes revenge on the three who beat his ‘servant’ to death by mind controlling their offspring to kill their relevant fathers, before Ms. Hayden’s boyfriend finally rescues her from his clutches and somehow kills Dracula in a bizarre moment which I had to look to Wikipedia to explain to me and, well I’m still not really sure why he dies here but it is spectacular, despite not really being reliant on the forces of logic. It’s a bit of an unsatisfying ending, to be honest but, I liked it well enough when I was six years old so I’m not going to start knocking it now.

The film is, as I said, a little bit ploddy... for instance, it’s over a third of the way in before the characters and supernatural elements are set up enough to be able to credibly bring Dracula back from the dead for the audience. However, there’s some nice photography in this to keep the visual interest up throughout. Sasdy manages to deal with crowded frames quite well... for instance, when the three fathers are all crammed into a shot with Bates and Kinnear, Sasdy positions them so the three fathers are vertically aligned in terms of height in the frame on the left of shot with the other two more to the right of the shot... which gives it a nice sense of balance.

This is also the first Hammer Dracula film in my memory (I might be wrong in this so please hit me up in the comments if I am) to feature a solitary, bare female breast for a few seconds in the bordello scene... so that’s kind of interesting. I was a little disappointed that the fathers are more or less marked as ‘bad people’ for two timing their wives to visit their monthly fix of scrumptious harlots... thus making their later murders morally acceptable to an audience... but I guess they weren’t quite there yet when it came to completely innocent bystanders being killed (although, certainly, one of the daughters meets an untimely demise at the hands... well, at the teeth... of Dracula himself).

The film is significantly bolstered by a score from James Bernard, who wrote the original Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula) score for Hammer, so he uses his three note motif for Lee’s vampire all over the show, to great effect.

And there’s not much more for me to say about this Proustian rush of a movie that is Taste The Blood Of Dracula. A bit dull in places but ultimately an entertaining entry in the series and, while not one of the best it’s certainly not the least of them either. The film has a great title too, ushering in a tag line parodying the British milk adverts of the time... Drink A Pint Of Blood A Day... so, yeah, it’s a nice little slice of Hammer Dracula, make no mistake. I’m not looking forward to the next one in the series so much though, from what I remember of it.