BEFORE: Well, this is, more or less, about where I left off with Count Dracula last year - in 2017 I watched three films with the Count, the Bela Lugosi one from 1931, the Frank Langella film from 1979, and the 1970 one with Christopher Lee. I was forced to table the rest, just as I was forced to table most of the mummy movies this year. Nothing's going to get in the way of our vacation.
But those three films had something in common, they all claimed to be based on the original story - only two of them weren't based directly on the Bram Stoker novel, they were based on the 1924 stage play, which helped cut down on the number of sets. You can spot films based on the stage play because Renfield is locked up in the sanitorium, there's a reduced number of characters (Lucy and Mina get combined into the same helpless female) and an increased amount of exposition.
But after watching those three films, I still had an excess of Dracula films to take care of, so here they come - 6 from Hammer Studios, and then I've got four older ones from Universal, which will take me back in time to where I need to be for my next link.
George Woodbridge carries over again, from "The Curse of the Werewolf".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Dracula" (1931) (Movie #2,746) & "Dracula" (1970) (Movie #2,748)
THE PLOT: Jonathan Harker begets the ire of Count Dracula after he accepts a job at the vampire's castle under false pretenses.
AFTER: Like the 1970 film that also starred Christopher Lee, this one's definitely based on the novel. But this means re-boots are not exactly a new phenomenon - the first Hammer Dracula film had Christopher Lee as Drac, along with Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray and Lucy Western, (only here it's Mina Holmwood and Lucy Holmwood, and I guess they're sisters-in-law, so there is some combining of surnames) and then Hammer re-booted their own Dracula series by doing another version of the Stoker novel in 1970. Geez, maybe this is where the trend started - and this is why we've had to watch three versions of Spider-Man's origin in just the last 15 years.
This was Lee's first appearance as Dracula, and Cushing's first as Van Helsing, but they ended up playing off each other in many films, and also in Hammer's Frankenstein films, where Cushing was always Dr. Frankenstein, and Lee occasionally played the monster. (Remember, this Halloween, don't make the mistake of calling the big green monster "Frankenstein", that's the scientist's name, the monster had NO NAME in the novel.).
They did change things up a little bit here, like Jonathan Harker still arrives at Dracula's castle, as he does at the start of the book, but in the book it takes him a LONG time to figure out that something's not right with this guy. Here he seems to know it right away, and he only took the job as Dracula's librarian in order to get close to him and figure out where he stores his sleeping coffin. So he KNOWS already, which takes away some of the suspense, but on the other hand, it does hurry things up quite a bit. (Unlike last night's film, where I had to wait a freaking hour to see a werewolf...)
In addition to meeting the count, Harker meets a young woman who claims to be kept prisoner there, and she pleads for his help, only she can't quite exactly say what the deal is, why she's being kept captive, or the Count's true nature - yeah, that's a big red flag right there. Harker falls victim to the woman, and once he finds the bite marks on his own neck, he knows he's living on borrowed time. So he stakes the thrall, but fails to take out the Count himself. He also made the fatal mistake of showing Dracula a picture of his beautiful fiancée, Lucy - geez, that's even stupider than showing your girlfriend's picture to your platoon-mates if you're in a World War II film.
Naturally, Drac's gotta get himself a piece of that - and so here come the first similarities between Dracula and a modern-day sexual predator. He's got a compulsion, that's clear, and once he sets his sights on a particular woman, he's just got to have her, consent or not. We've been led to believe that Dracula practices a form of hypnotism, but it's also possible that he exudes pheromones, or some other kind of drug is involved. And then once his blood mixes with hers, that woman is under his spell, and in fact his victims often faint from blood loss, but Dracula doesn't seem to mind. No, no, Dracula, this might have been condoned back in the 1800's, but these days this behavior is frowned upon, and is in fact quite illegal. (Somebody needs to do a comedy sketch, if they haven't already, about how the #MeToo movement has affected the classic movie monsters.)
Van Helsing arrives on the scene, following Harker's trail, and a helpful serving woman at the local pub slips him Harker's diary. But there's really no need for this plot element, it was already established that Harker knew Dracula was a vampire from the start, so it stands to reason that Van Helsing probably would have already known, too. After staking the remains of Harker, Van Helsing heads back to break the bad news to Harker's fiancée and her family, and of course he learns that Dracula is one step ahead of him, he's already been to visit Lucy, and she's under the Count's spell. The audience can figure that out just from the fact that she won't wear her crucifix to bed, and suddenly likes to sleep with all of the windows open.
She might have made it, if the stupid maid hadn't agreed to her request to remove the garlic bouquets from the room - but if the maid listened to Van Helsing, then we wouldn't have a storyline. Dracula visits again, and it's curtains for Lucy, but don't worry, she'll be back. That's how the vampire STD spreads, she comes back as an undead and then tries to infect more people, and so on. Van Helsing wants to use Lucy as bait to track down Dracula, which is a solid plan, only it takes too long to convince her brother Arthur that it's a good idea, so she ends up paying the price. (Arthur here is played boy Michael Gough, who went on to play Alfred Pennyworth in the "Batman" films from 1989 to 1997, so it seems his most famous roles were always sort of Bat-centric...)
They did the best they could here with what they had, obviously there were budget constraints, because Dracula's only got a total of seven minutes of screen time, and Peter Cushing doesn't show up until 25 minutes in, and the whole film's only 82 minutes long - then Jonathan Harker's not in the last half at all. They moved Dracula's castle from Romania to Germany, and he doesn't travel to anywhere near London, instead it's presumed that the Holmwoods also live in Germany, no doubt within a bat's flying radius from the castle. And we never even see Dracula turn into a bat or a wolf or even a cloud of mist. (The 1931 film with Lugosi did the bat thing, but the effect looked really cheesy, so maybe it's better to avoid it.)
Also starring Peter Cushing (last seen in "The Mummy"), Christopher Lee (ditto), Michael Gough (last seen in "The Age of Innocence"), Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, John Van Eyssen, Janina Faye, Charles Lloyd-Pack (last seen in "The Revenge of Frankenstein"), George Merritt (last seen in "Young and Innocent"), George Benson, Miles Malleson (last seen in "Stage Fright"), Geoffrey Bayldon (last seen in "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed"), Olga Dickie, Barbara Archer, Valerie Gaunt (last seen in "The Curse of Frankenstein").
RATING: 5 out of 10 improvised crosses
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