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DRACULA A.D. 1972
Rating: 
UK. 1972.
Director – Alan Gibson, Screenplay – Don Houghton, Producer – Josephine Douglas, Photography – Richard Bush, Music – Michael Vickers, Songs – Stoneground, Special Effects – Bowie Films, Makeup – Jill Carpenter, Production Design – Don Mingaye. Production Company – Hammer.
Cast:
Peter Cushing (Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing), Christopher Lee (Count Dracula), Stephanie Beachem (Jessica Van Helsing), Christopher Neame (Johnny Alucard), Michael Coles (Inspector Murray)
Plot: Dracula is destroyed in a confrontation with Van Helsing in 1872. One hundred years later, Johnny Alucard, a teenage descendant of one of Dracula’s disciples, performs a black magic ceremony in the abandoned, deconsecrated St Bartholomew’s church and restores Dracula to life. Dracula builds up a new horde of disciples from amongst Alucard’s swinging teen friends, one of whom is Jessica Van Helsing, granddaughter of Lorrimer Van Helsing, the current descendant of Dracula’s old nemesis and also a vampire hunter. As Lorrimer is drawn into the fight, Dracula plans to take his revenge on the Van Helsing family by turning Jessica into a vampire.
Thanks in large part to Hammer’s own efforts, vampire films were making somewhat of a comeback in the late 1960s and early 70s. Hammer had themselves spun out six Dracula films by the point of Dracula A.D. 1972, as well as various distaff cousins such as Countess Dracula (1970) and the softcore Karnstein series begun with The Vampire Lovers (1970). Elsewhere the vampire was emerging in strong flight, although the crisis the genre was facing was how to modernize the vampire. The image of the dinner-suited Bela Lugosi-type vampire seemed an increasingly outmoded figure in modern surroundings. Initial variants like tv’s Dark Shadows (1966-70) avoided the issue altogether by setting their vampire in a Gothic world that seemed an isolated pocket of the past living in the modern day, while other efforts like Hammer’s Karnstein series and Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1973) simply added modern sex and gore in period surroundings. More successful were the likes of Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Blacula (1972) and sequels to either, The Night Stalker (1972) and Salem’s Lot (1979), all of which uprooted the traditional vampire image, cape and all, and transplanted it the modern day. But the fight for a modern-day traditional vampire was starting to seem like a losing battle. After George Romero’s remarkable deconstruction Martin (1976), the classic vampire was never the same anymore and by the time of Love at First Bite (1979) the concept of the dinner-suited vampire in the modern day was openly recognized as anachronistic and played entirely for laughs.
After the unexpected success of Count Yorga, it was no surprise that Hammer’s next Dracula entry followed suit and brought Christopher Lee’s Dracula into the modern-day too. It may well have been an act of creative novelty – the Hammer Draculas were starting to seem stale and could never find much to have Christopher Lee do once they revived him. There was also the increasing in-roads being made by the youth movement at the time. Hammer were making concessions to this by casting younger leads and overturning the conservatism that underlay many of their films in favour of open sexuality. Dracula A.D. 1972 looked promising. It boasted the return to the series of Peter Cushing who had not played Van Helsing for twelve years since The Brides of Dracula (1960). There was also a new director in Alan Gibson. But instead Dracula A.D. 1972 was a major disappointment – indeed, it is the low-point of the Hammer Dracula series.
Whereas films like Count Yorga and Love at First Bite poked gentle amusement at the idea of a traditional be-caped vampire in the modern world and later films such as Salem’s Lot, Fright Night (1985) and Near Dark (1987) made a strong and confidant attempt to show us vampires having adjusted to the modern world, Dracula A.D. 1972 avoids any of its conceptual promise whatsoever and keeps Christopher Lee’s Dracula within the confines of a Gothic church for the entire running time of the film. Some of the transpositions with the disciples are a little more successful – the shower as a handy source of running water, for instance. But the incorporation of Swinging London into the Hammer Dracula milieu borders on the laughable: “Listen to the music, man,” says one of the teens during a black magic ceremony in one particularly cringeworthy line. It was an attempt to appeal to the Swinging 60s London youth movement made by people that weren’t a part of it, and something that seemed already dated even by the time the film came out. There’s a terrible 1970s rock score on the soundtrack.
There are minor positive aspects. There’s a good opening confrontation with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing fighting aboard a coach that crashes, whereupon Dracula is impaled upon the shattered spokes of a broken cartwheel. It’s a sequence you could easily imagine as the climax of one of Terence Fisher’s florid Dracula entries, which specialized in setting up spectacular dispatches for Dracula. But Christopher Lee probably has the least to do of any of his Dracula airings, although Peter Cushing comes out suitably distinguished and a young Stephanie Beachem is an energetic addition to the canon.
The American version of Dracula A.D. 1972 contains a three-minute sequence at the opening by Donald Glut inviting audiences to join the Dracula Society.
Hammer’s other Dracula films are:– Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Brides of Dracula (1960), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Scars of Dracula (1971), The Satanic Rites of Dracula/Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires/The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (1974).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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