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.

The Monster

Dwarf Spirit

The Monster
aka I Don’t Want To Be Born
aka The Devil Within Her
aka Sharon’s Baby
UK 1975 Directed by Peter Sasdy
Network Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has all the spoilers.
If you don’t want to know, don’t read.

I’ve been wanting to see I Don’t Want To Be Born aka The Monster aka The Devil Within Her aka Sharon’s Baby for some time now and regular readers of my blog can probably guess why... yeah, that’s right. One of my favourite people in the world, Caroline Munro, is in this one. So when Network brought out a Blu Ray edition of the film last year, I was very keen to get my hands of a copy (thanks @cultofthecinema and a Merry Christmas 2021 to you too). Now, although it’s been released under the title The Monster by the company, I’d only ever heard of this as I Don’t Want To Be Born. Trying to find it under any of these titles on the IMDB though (at time of writing) proves a bit of a slog. You’ll find it listed there under the completely ludicrous title, Sharon’s Baby. Why is that a ludicrous title? Well for starters, there’s no character called Sharon in the movie so... yeah.

Okay, the film starts strongly with a pregnant Lucy, played by Joan Collins, screaming her head off as the credits roll and Dr. Finch, played by Donald Pleasence, tries to extract her baby from her. The kid puts up quite a tussle and it’s at this point that Dr. Finch exclaims to his assisting nurse (played by none other than a very young Floella Benjamin), that it’s like the baby doesn’t want to be born. Something which, later on in the movie, he’s reminded of when someone says that, um, it’s like the child never wanted to be born. All I can say that, even at the first utterance of this, I was pretty sold on I Don’t Want To Be Born as being the one, truly genuine title for this film. I mean, I’ve talked about the non-existent Sharon but, did I also mention the baby Lucy gives birth to is a boy? So, you know, calling it The Devil Within Her is a little over the top if alluding to the child and, if it’s not, then it’s certainly only in Joan Collins character for about two minutes before it’s born into the world. Born into the world and, apparently, half scratching Lucy’s face off and looking like it wants to drink more of her blood. So, yeah, this is not the best delivery the good doctor’s seen in recent years.

Okay, so Lucy’s husband Gino, played by Ralph Bates attempting to do an Italian accent, collects gal and sprog but it’s not long before the little tyke is causing a ruckus and, eventually killing people. Lucy’s friend Mandy, played absolutely brilliantly and naturalistically by my heroine Caroline Munro (it’s got to be one of her best performances... she doesn’t just hold her own with Joan here, she acts her off the screen), can’t really suggest much in the way of help but maybe her boyfriend Tommy (played by John Steiner, with a brilliant cockney accent here) whom she works for as a stripper, may know what the answer is. Well, Lucy remembers it might be something to do with when she used to work and sleep with Tommy at a strip show too, where she rejected the advances of Hercules the dwarf (played by George Claydon) and so said little person put a curse on her.

Meanwhile, Gino’s sister Albana (played by Eileen Atkins), who really is a sister with her nun’s habit and holy ways, recognises something amiss with the little darling child. Maybe it’s the fact that it manages to somehow go on a killing spree and do things like chop Donald Pleasence’s head off with a couple of well placed blows with a garden spade... or that time it killed its dad, Gino, who has apparently ‘gone missing’. At the end of the film, after the toddler who shouldn’t be able to even crawl yet has chased mummy with a knife and stabbed her to death, Sister Albana exorcises the demonic spirit from the baby... which also somehow affects Hercules (who somehow was manifesting as the child... not sure how that works), causing him to die of a heart attack on stage at the strip show, due to having his dual spirit exorcised from the kiddies body. It makes about as much sense as anything else in this movie but, well, here’s the thing...

Call it a guilty pleasure, if you like, but I really had a good time with this one. It’s not the fact that Sasdy’s use of camera movement to wander away from a honed in set up to pan somewhere else (which I’m sure I’ve seen him do in some of his Hammer films) or his interesting compositions are all that special. It’s not even the acting which, was quite good from some people and not great from some others... honestly, Caroline was the best thing about this movie for me... and it’s not even super cool Ron Grainer’s wildly catchy but, let’s be honest here, mostly inappropriate score for the movie (which I would love on CD please record companies?). It’s the fact that it’s such a wildly ambitious idea to have a killer baby going on the rampage before CGI was even a thing. I mean, this is literally, you see a knife coming at the camera or a spade coming down towards camera or a window or cot bashed apart and then... cut to cute picture of a completely immobile toddler to somehow show that it was the baby committing all these crimes. It’s just so wildly funny... I hate to say it but, it’s hugely entertaining because of how silly the execution of the premise is (and there have been much better killer baby movies done in the intervening years, of course).

But there you are... a film with some strange influences at work in its genetic make up... intentionally or not. So obviously trying to ride the wave of The Exorcist but, also, that Grainer music is played through in a way almost against the visuals and running as an accompaniment rather than an illustrative score... much like Italian groups like Goblin or Libra might provide for a giallo or horror movie. I thoroughly enjoyed... hmm... I’ll refer to it as I Don’t Want To Be Born... and Caroline Munro looks absolutely stunning in this, as well as being at the top of her game. So, there are good reasons to have this title but, for me, it’s just a fun experience.

Lust For A Vampire

Bosom Vladdies

Lust For A Vampire
UK 1971 Directed by Jimmy Sangster
Hammer  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoiler at the end.

Lust For A Vampire is the second installment in a trilogy of films put out by the Hammer Studios based loosely on Sheridan Le Fanu’s 19th Century gothic, lesbian vampire tale Carmilla. The first in the series, The Vampire Lovers (which I reviewed some time ago here and which can now be found in a much better Blu Ray version), was the first of a short series of attempts by Hammer to spice up their films with partial nudity and sex in an attempt to reclaim some box office after the company, if memory serves, had started its decline... at least in terms of generating revenue.

The results of their new approach to a more ‘sexified’ horror genre can be seen straight away in the amount of nudity and syrupy sapphic seductions in The Vampire Lovers which was, I have to say, still fairly faithful to the original story. For this direct sequel... well, things are much less connected to the source material other than the central character of Mircalla, who is of course an anagram of her real name Carmilla Karnstein, the vampire at the heart of Le Fanu’s story. However, there’s definitely a continuity problem in terms of the female lead here...

After her death in the last film... almost a century ago, some of her surviving vampire family who were somehow not mentioned in the last movie resurrect her from the skeleton she has become in a black magic ceremony. When she sits up in her coffin in one of two fairly iconic Hammer Glamour shots in the company’s history to be found in this movie, she looks nothing like Ingrid Pitt, who played her in the last film. That’s because in this one, she’s played by the equally beautiful Yutte Stensgaard who looks spectacular and does an okay job with the script she’s given to work with. However, the role was originally offered to Ingrid Pitt to reprise her turn from The Vampire Lovers but after, she’d read the script to Lust For A Vampire, she turned it down and went on to make Countess Dracula for Hammer instead (reviewed here).

After a few scenes in a church and a public house which serve to introduce us to young male hero of the film, Michael Johnson as novelist Richard Lestrange, the majority of the rest of the movie is set in a finishing school for young ladies in the locale of Carmilla’s old castle... as Mircalla starts to seduce and eat her way through the school in a fairly sedate fashion. Until things finally catch up with her and she and her family are cornered in the church by a proper, traditional ‘angry mob’ armed with lighted torches and so on.

And it’s certainly an entertaining ‘romp’ for sure. Not actually a good film in any shape or form but I certainly had a good time watching this one. Why is it not a good film? Well, let me list some of the things here... I know director Sangster was an eleventh hour replacement, as were some of the cast and I know some people were less than enthusiastic about being in it... especially after they’d seen the final product.

Let’s start with the acting. The one really good actor who looks like she actually wants to be here is Suzanna Leigh, playing the ludicrously named fitness teacher Janet Playfair. Yes, that’s right, fitness teacher as the girls in their flimsy clothing slowly move around seductively to the sound of a harp in front of the school. If ever there was a film which gives the ‘male gaze’ a bad name, it’s surely this one.

By contrast, Johnson seems to be less enthused by his place in things and the other male lead, local history teacher Giles Barton, is played by Ralph Bates in a way that would certainly cause anyone to think that this was definitely not his best work. Mr. Bates thought it was the worst performance he’d done in the worst movie he’d been in, by all accounts. It’s interesting because he seems to be playing him in the same way that George Lazenby played a certain aspect of James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here). In that film, Bond assumed the identity of an English scholar played by Stanley Baker and he uses a well spoken accent and a timidity which looks and sounds vaguely ridiculous (despite it being the greatest James Bond movie ever made). I believe Baker even overdubbed George Lazenby’s impersonation in the finished film. So we have Ralph Bates coming across as a fop, regardless, in his personal obsession about the fate of the Karnstein family. Actually, I believe the role was originally written for Peter Cushing, which makes much more sense but Cushing had to be ‘let off’ the role when he had to go and care for his very sick wife. Which is unfortunate.

And then there’s Mircalla herself. Stensgaard looks great in the role, despite looking nothing like the version of the character from the previous film, when Ingrid Pitt played the role as a very confident young vampire, manipulating her victims to her own ends. Here, she’s the absolute opposite and comes across as an innocent victim being made to live up to her family name. Not Stensgaard’s fault of course, if that’s the way the script portrays her in this then she just has to say her lines and take her clothes off at suitable intervals and her job is done. It would have been nice if it had gelled better with the previous film, however.

And then there’s all of the sex and nudity, which was pretty much the mission brief for Hammer at this point. The Vampire Lovers was never exactly subtle about the unclothed state many of the cast found themselves in at regular intervals but Lust For A Vampire really outdoes itself for inserting inappropriate material and comes across, a lot of the time, as a vampire movie mixed together with a Mary Millington flick. Honestly, any excuse here and they’re all at it...

For example, when a young girl is placed on a church altar to be sacrificed early in the film, she is placed face up in front of the camera with her head hanging upside down and taking up the bottom half of the shot while her prominent bosoms are thrust up towards the top of the frame. Like I said, there’s not a lot of subtlety within this one.

Another historically iconic shot of Yutte Stensgaard sitting up topless in bed comes about when she’s simply massaging her neck and the student with whom she shares a bedroom offers to take over. The next thing you know, the movements about her neck causes her diaphanous night wear to inexplicably fall towards the floor, leaving her hanging, so to speak. It really is just like those old Kenny Everett sketches from the 1970s and early 1980s when he played a Hollywood starlet who used to constantly proclaim, “when suddenly, all my clothes fell off.” Yeah, this movie certainly is fun, for sure.

It’s not just the ‘schoolboy erotica’ content of the film which make it such a pleasure to watch either.

For instance, there’s a member of the Karnstein family who mostly just looks sinister and can be found lurking in the background to a lot of scenes. There’s one shot of two women kissing in a pool and we suddenly cut to a real non-sequitur of a shot depicting him standing with his hand on his hips at a funny angle while the music suddenly gives us this real, over the top howler of a stinger to tell us that what we’re looking at is really bad... although, I have to be honest, without that musical cue I would never had realised anything bad was happening in the scene at all.

And talking of musical stingers... the sequence where Mircalla tries to seduce our buxom Miss Playfair is accompanied by what I can only imagine was supposed to be the ethereal sound of her hypnotic gaze. However, it kinda just comes across as a bit of an over-the-top, speeded up, higher pitched version of the sound the ants make in the movie THEM! so, yeah, again it’s quite hilarious, I have to say.

There’s some nice stuff too.. with a dream sequence using shots from the movie washed out into single colours, a little like the posterised, opening sequence to The Monkees movie Head... and there’s a nice moment in a sequence where the footage of vampire bites revealed on a woman’s neck from earlier in the film is tinted out into a pale green with the bites shown up as a vivid blood red against everything else... which was nice. Unfortunately, the whole dream is accompanied by a truly, hilariously inappropriate song singing of the character’s ‘Strange Love’ and, yeah, I’ll just stop there. And it’s nothing compared to the bizarre faces Miss Stensgaard makes when the camera is focused on just her eyes... which sometimes become cross-eyed when she is emoting her ecstasy at the carnal things Mr. Lestrange is doing to Mircalla ‘out of shot’. How she kept a straight face doing that I’ll never know.

And goodness knows why they have the same actor who played the butler in the previous film as a police inspector in this one. He’s actually quite a good little character actor by the name of Harvey Hall. He wasn't in much but he even turns up, playing yet another character, in the next film in the sequence, by the looks of it.

Anyway, not much more to say about this one apart from one of the vampire characters, I’m not saying which, having a somewhat unusual but nevertheless stupid death whereby the pointy rafter from the burning roof of a church splinters off and drops to stake said vampire through the heart. The film keeps running through the end credits to remind us that these particular vampires can’t be hurt by fire and thus it’s a thread that can be yanked on for a sequel, although this is not actually used in the next one, from what I understand. I’ll let you know for sure very soon.

As was set up in the earlier Karnstein film, these particular vampires are quite happy to walk around in sunlight but the unfortunate thing Hammer have done with the Carmilla character is they’ve not based any of this on Le Fanu’s source (which is fair enough, they already did that in the last movie) and without that, this becomes just another vampire movie which could easily be told with any old vampire in the lead. Which is a shame but, despite the films shortcomings... or rather, because of them, Lust For A Vampire is a very entertaining affair and I have to say this is definitely something I’d watch again a number of times in the future. Perhaps best recommended only to fans of a certain period of British produced horror films but yeah, I kind enjoyed this one. Looking forward to seeing the third movie in the series, Twins Of Evil, very soon.