Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

Posted on May 30, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

“I haven’t beaten you since you were a little girl – have I, Alice?”

So murmurs William Hargood, a church-going, highly-respected figurehead of the community – while he confronts his daughter in her darkened bedroom, stumbling toward her with a mean-looking hunting whip in his hand. Drunk, unsteady on his feet, his eyes dip toward her breasts in the middle of his slurred sentence. “If you touch me, father, I’ll never forgive you,” she says, but he grabs hold. She wriggles out of his sweaty hands and escapes out the window. He begins to chant, “I’ll whip you, Alice,” over and over, chasing her out of the house and through the garden, where he suddenly encounters Alice’s new friend. He’s tall, with hellfire in his eyes; has a black cape with red lining. The man seems to have had a transformative effect on Hargood’s daughter. “Now,” says the stranger, and Alice, smiling, strikes her father hard in the head with a shovel; he collapses and lies still, blood oozing from his brow. Clearly, this was not your typical Hammer film, nor your typical monster movie.

Christopher Lee, reincarnated (against his will) as Dracula.

But you would have figured that out by now, for the hour leading up to this murder has been just as unusual. This is partly a result of its troublesome birth. Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) was the fifth film in Hammer’s successful Dracula franchise, kicked off, of course, by the classic Horror of Dracula (aka Dracula, 1958), which, along with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), launched Hammer Horror and established Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as genre icons. But Taste the Blood was only the fourth film to feature Lee, since Cushing embarked on a solo Van Helsing adventure in the superb sequel Brides of Dracula (1960); it was eight years from the first film before Lee was convinced to don the cape (and trademark signet ring) again. He was doing his best to avoid typecasting: in the intervening years he’d played the Mummy, Sherlock Holmes, Fu Manchu, pirate captains, even the Devil. After playing Dracula two more times for Hammer, he felt enough was enough. A script was prepared which would go the Brides of Dracula route – with a younger vampire, a fresh face. That would be Ralph Bates, already being prepped as the new Hammer Horror star; he was quickly slated for major roles in Horror of Frankenstein (1970), Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971), and Lust for a Vampire (1971). According to Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes in their illustrated history of the studio, The Hammer Story, Warner Bros. protested they had bought the film on the condition of Lee’s name on the poster. Producer Aida Young returned to Lee and sweet-talked him into returning for just one more Dracula picture. He’d make three more after that.

Peter Sallis, John Carson, Geoffrey Keen, Ralph Bates, and Roy Kinnear inspect the remains of Dracula.

That’s not including Count Dracula (1970), his film for Jess Franco which he ran to willingly on the promise that it would be a more faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel (which Lee adored). Released the same year as Taste the Blood of Dracula, the Franco film by comparison seems – well, bloodless. Taste is the last great Dracula film from Hammer, and Lee was right about one thing: it ought to have been the last. It’s richly designed, with an intelligent script and one of James Bernard’s most lushly romantic scores. Despite its somewhat anticlimactic finale, I’d rather the series have ended here than in the micro-budgeted, lackluster films that followed (I confess, I do enjoy the comic book silliness of The Satanic Rites of Dracula). Director Peter Sasdy was a television director here making an impressive big-screen debut; Hammer recognized his potential, and would bring him back for Countess Dracula and Hands of the Ripper (both 1971). If you missed the opening credits, you’d be forgiven for thinking Terence Fisher was at the helm. Consider Sasdy’s assignment. The quickly rewritten script by Anthony Hinds (under his Hammer pseudonym of John Elder) still features Bates’ character, but goes to such lengths to justify transforming him into Lee’s Dracula that the Count doesn’t make his first appearance until about halfway through the film. That this works to the film’s advantage is something of an achievement. Dracula is not the main character here, nor is he the most interesting. So the story is forced to contort itself away from the familiar and clichéd and into something new.

Linda Hayden as Alice Hargood, holding the stake while her friend Lucy - now a vampire - hammers it into the chest of her father.

One of the appealing facets of the series is that nearly each film picks up where the last left off, even if Dracula’s castle might move from one country to another, even if his resurrection might become increasingly unlikely or absurd – the continuity is dream-like. Here the familiar character actor Roy Kinnear (Help!, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) is a traveling salesman/charlatan named Weller who becomes lost in the woods, where he encounters footage from the previous Dracula Has Risen from the Grave: Lee impaled by a cross, tears of blood running down his face, his body gradually disintegrating (again). The camera zooms into the blood for the opening titles – but then Sasdy abruptly changes the tone, shifting to some beaming families leaving church on a Sunday morning. Bernard’s music obliges, almost swooning over the scene before, just as the credits end and the Hargoods arrive back home, the sinister notes of Dracula’s signature theme intrude to darken the mood. But here the darkness comes in the form of Alice’s father (Geoffrey Keen, of Born Free and several James Bond films), whose upstanding exterior crumbles inside the home to reveal a sadistic tyrant. He immediately berates Alice (Linda Hayden) for flirting with her love Paul (Anthony Higgins): “He’s still a young man and you’re a young woman – a sexually mature young woman – and I will not have you displaying yourself in that provocative manner.” He calls her a harlot and banishes her to her room. Never mind that her collar is buttoned practically to her chin. The pall of domestic abuse hangs over Taste the Blood, a subtext the film embraces when finally William Hargood nearly rapes his daughter, and she, under the spell of the resurrected Count, retaliates and kills him. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. When Hargood’s wife (Gwen Watford) offers to make dinner, she’s batted away by William when he reminders her that it’s the last Sunday of the month – the time he’s set aside for “charity work in the East End.” What this really means is carousing at a brothel with his friends Jonathon Secker (John Carson, The Plague of the Zombies) and Samuel Paxton (Peter Sallis, later the voice of Wallace in the “Wallace and Gromit” films). The hypocrites three are eager to find the latest taboo sensation – and decide that evening to dine with the intriguing young Satanist Lord Courtley (Bates) for inspiration. And Courtley has just the thing.

Alice recoils from her drunken father, who prepares to beat her with a hunting-whip.

Lord Courtley has ambitions to resurrect Count Dracula by purchasing his last remains (a clasp, a signet ring, a cape, and a vial of blood which has turned to powder) from the merchant, Weller. A ritual in an abandoned church in which the three are urged by Courtley to go ahead and taste the blood of Dracula results in some supernatural happenings that spook the occult pretenders; in a panic, they attack Courtley, and as a group they beat him to death. After they flee the crime scene, Dracula reincarnates through Courtley’s body in a not-quite-convincing special effect. Ralph Bates has become Christopher Lee. (Not bad, but practice makes perfect: in Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde, he becomes Martine Beswick.) Seeking revenge for Courtley’s death – I’m not quite sure why – Dracula begins hunting down Hargood, Secker, and Paxton. The twist: he’ll destroy them through their children. After mesmerizing Alice into killing her father, he turns her friend Lucy Secker (Isla Blair) into a vampire. The two girls lure Lucy’s father Samuel back to the church, where, in a reversal of the Hammer formula, the vampire drives a stake through its victim (Alice holds the stake still while Lucy brings down the hammer). But just as the children prove to be the downfall of their authoritarian, deceitful fathers, they’re also capable of fighting back against the Count – it’s Alice and Paul who save the day, their love defeating Dracula’s corruption. So the story has a counterculture message: youth will overcome.

"You're free, Alice, free to choose good or evil!" Paul (Anthony Higgins) breaks Dracula's spell over Alice.

Filmed in 1969 and released in the spring of 1970, Taste the Blood of Dracula is something of a transitional film for Hammer. It still resembles the thoughtful Gothic romances of Terence Fisher which typified the studio’s late 50’s and early 60’s output, but it also takes strides toward the more risqué vampire films in the studio’s immediate future: The Vampire Lovers (1970) would be released in mere months, and offer a new commercially successful model to follow. Without being fully committed to sensationalism, Taste the Blood can apply its exploitation elements with…well, taste. Hayden, who had just starred in the controversial Baby Love (1968) as an underage sexpot destroying her adopted home, here plays an innocent whose sexuality – that which her father dreads, but guiltily yearns for – is let loose by Dracula. Soon both she and Lucy are sporting the requisite Hammer cleavage as they lure their victims with saucy smiles. Nudity would soon become a requirement as well, but the film only uses it where it makes logical sense: prostitutes glimpsed in the brothel. It sharpens the contrast between the two worlds which the three old men inhabit: the church (we see them leaving down the path with Bibles clutched to their chests) and the whorehouse, where they watch a lewd performance of an Eve and her snake. But most welcome of all is the wit of Anthony Hinds’ script, on display from its opening pre-credits sequence (with a wonderful Kinnear) to the almost elegant manner in which it undermines the viewer’s expectations, beginning with the simple idea of turning its heroine into a killer, and allowing the audience to root for Dracula, for once. Sadly, Hinds would part from Hammer within the month. Gray skies were ahead for the once-innovative horror studio, and new, more shocking films were hitting the market. But Taste the Blood of Dracula proves that Hammer, too, could think outside the coffin.

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Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

Posted on May 25, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

I understand that sometimes it’s just too difficult to leave something alone. You love it too much, and you have to express it, even if it might embarrass the one you love, and even if you might look like an ass. Such is the case with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). I’m sure that everyone involved in this film loved Sgt. Pepper (well, except perhaps George Burns…he looks a little bemused by the whole thing). In a way, that’s endearing, and I can’t hate this film. Every single moment declares “We love the Beatles!” – just as it declares even more loudly, “It is the 70’s!” The original album remains unscathed, and the movie became an instant time capsule, a head-scratcher to be wondered at for generations of Beatles fans to come. It was not the first (there was also 1976’s All This and World War II, a stock footage compilation set to Beatles covers), and its existence hasn’t prevented further indulgent tributes, from Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas act Love to Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007), which has Eddie Izzard in the Mr. Kite role instead of Burns. Look, I like Across the Universe just fine (despite a story that’s no less clichéd), and I’m surprised to discover, after years of deliberately avoiding the thing, that I don’t mind the Sgt. Pepper film all that much. The reason is the Beatles. It’s hard to mess up these songs, although damn if director Michael Schultz (Car Wash) doesn’t try.

Alice Cooper, as Marvin Sunk the Sun King, sings "Because."

Even Schultz is not entirely to be blamed. The project began first as an off-Broadway musical in 1974 directed by Hair‘s Tom O’Horgan, and since that iteration is no longer with us, it’s worth excerpting the opening of TIME Magazine’s review, before the “To read the entire article, you must be a TIME Magazine subscriber” message cuts us off. Really, this is all of the review you need: “If a medical dictionary of the theater should ever appear, one entry would be a grotesque disease known as O’Horganitis. Its chief aspect is the metastasis of spectacle over substance. Its subsymptoms are bloat, inanity, hallucination, sexual kinkiness and contagious vulgarity. The disease reached plague proportions in the late ’60s, but sporadic outbreaks still occur; and if one wishes to be mortally infected, the place to go is Manhattan’s Beacon Theater where Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…” Anyway, critical loathing be damned, the title of the property presented such mass commercial appeal that a film adaptation came into being four years later. “Fifth Beatle” George Martin, who had produced all of the Beatles albums but one, was hired as musical director of the film, and Geoff Emerick, the band’s innovative sound engineer, came along to serve a similar function. For the starring roles, the producers turned to the biggest musical acts of the day: the Bee Gees – who had been around for over a decade, but had only recently become superstars with their soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever (1977) – and Peter Frampton, whose Frampton Comes Alive of a few years earlier was the biggest-selling live album of all time. Expectations were sky-high. I recently came across a novelization of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in a used book store. If you think you can sell a novelization of an almost dialogue-free musical based on a 60’s concept album, that’s confidence.

Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, and George Burns sing "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" in the fictional town of Heartland.

There may not be much dialogue, but there’s a narrator – Burns/Mr. Kite – who rasps a quick history of the Sgt. Pepper legend, as reinvented here: a WWI hero/bandleader awarded a medal for “music above and beyond the call of duty,” and who continued to inspire his hometown of Heartland for half a century. After his death, he left his medal to his grandson Billy Shears (Frampton), who would continue his legacy and recreate the Lonely Hearts Club Band with the brothers Henderson (played by Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb, aka the Bee Gees). Their music becomes popular enough to attract the attention of the music industry, personified by the corrupt B.D. (Donald Pleasence, with hair) and seductive rock star Lucy (Dianne Steinberg). Meanwhile, Mean Mr. Mustard (British comic actor Frankie Howerd), “a demented ex-real estate agent,” plots to take over Heartland by destroying the band with the help of his two wig-wearing robot assistants. This plot involves abducting Billy’s girlfriend Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina) and selling the band’s prized instruments to the crazed surgeon Maxwell Edison (Steve Martin) and Marvin Sunk the Sun King (Alice Cooper). As I mentioned, there’s little dialogue, just a narrative propelled by Burns’ exposition, Mr. Mustard’s computer spouting directives, and songs, songs, songs. Our heroes don’t so much act as mug in the camera’s direction. When Strawberry Fields is killed during an Aerosmith cover of “Come Together,” Frampton seems helpless to create an expression of grief upon his face, staring at her dead body with apparent indifference. He’s rescued in the next scene, in which he sings “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight” with a face so dampened by tears that it looks like he was just trying to fix a hole where the rain gets in.

Billy Preston, singing "Get Back," saves the day with fingers that shoot sparkling special effects.

So much to see here. Steve Martin, in “King Tut” mode, singing (badly) “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” while grabbing cash from a group of elderly patients on a conveyer belt, then smacking them on the head with a hammer and a flash of sparkly light to turn them all into boy scouts. He uses the hammer to battle Frampton in one of the strangest Star Wars homages you will ever see. Alice Cooper is a Reverend Sun Myung Moon type…I guess…who is first presented as a giant levitating head singing “Because,” which is not necessarily the first Beatles song you would think to have him cover. Most of the songs come from Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road, George Martin’s two favorite Beatles albums, so you’re a bit at the mercy of his opinion. Burns creaks his way through “Fixing a Hole” (thankfully, he doesn’t get very far); Pleasence sings (or speaks) “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”; Howerd does “Mean Mr. Mustard,” of course, but to the atrocious accompaniment of his robot companions. There are some good renditions, too, particularly those sung by Farina, including “Here Comes the Sun.” The Aerosmith performance is solid, as is a late, if mind-blowingly strange, cameo by Billy Preston (“Get Back,” a Beatles song to which he originally contributed back in ’69). As for Frampton and the Bee Gees, their covers are respectable and occasionally quite good – which proves that if you can just hand great songs to talented singers, you’re in safe territory: witness Barry Gibb tackling “A Day in the Life” with minimal cinematic silliness around him, and emerging with a decent little music video. Robin Gibb, who died this past Sunday (leaving Barry the sole surviving Bee Gee), has a fine moment with “Oh! Darling,” as well. Ultimately, of course, the film can’t move beyond pure kitsch. The finale has a slew of 70’s celebrities posed in imitation of the Sgt. Pepper cover, singing the reprise version of the title song, and – look, there’s Carol Channing. Look, there’s Dame Edna. Look, there’s Dr. John and Sha Na Na. You’ll have to read the ending credits to figure out the entire “We Are the World”-style celebrity roundup. It’s a pointless spectacle, really – just a bunch of famous people gathering together to say they love the Beatles. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that; I’m okay with it. But it will happen again, I promise you.

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Queen of Blood (1966)

Posted on May 23, 2012 at 6:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

In today’s world of globalization and internet file-sharing, you couldn’t really get away with what American International Pictures was doing in the mid-60’s: cutting up Russian special effects epics, inserting new American footage with different plotlines, and releasing them under titles aimed at drive-in exploitation. The visually stunning Russian originals were essentially inaccessible to Americans; to salvage them for scrap parts was deemed acceptable. Among these were Battle Beyond the Sun (1963, spliced together by Francis Ford Coppola at the behest of Roger Corman) and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965). The latter was assembled by Curtis Harrington, who had directed the remarkable, Val Lewton-esque Night Tide (1961), as well as some experimental films; Harrington was a friend of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren and a former collaborator with the mad genius Kenneth Anger (who, after a falling-out, issued a Satanic curse on Harrington). He was fascinated by the occult and Gothic romanticism – Poe was a favorite, and his last film was an adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” – but he had to find work as a filmmaker, and so he found his way to working under a fellow Poe fan, Corman, at AIP in the 60’s. After Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, for which he used the pseudonym of John Sebastian (after Bach, and not the Lovin’ Spoonful frontman), Harrington was tasked with repurposing footage from the Russian films Nebo Zovyot (1960) and Mechte Navstrechu (1963). The films were essentially propaganda for the Russian space program, but Cold War be damned, Corman needed their budgets for his own B-movie epics. Never mind that the letters “CCCP” on the side of a spaceship might creep into a shot here or there.

"Queen of Blood" is front-loaded with visually arresting footage from the Russian films "Nebo Zovyot" and "Mechte Navstrechu."

Harrington’s answer to this challenge was Queen of Blood (1966). The source films dealt with a journey to Mars and contact with an alien race, and so does the American version, though eventually Harrington sidelines the plot into AIP territory with a space vampire feeding on a crew of too-trusting astronauts. Most of the borrowed footage unspools in the first half of the film, which presents a curious problem. For one thing, these shots are visually spectacular, with bright colors, impressive model work, and inventive optical effects that are borderline-surreal (all this is par for the course for Russian fantasy filmmaking of the 50’s and 60’s). On the other hand, to string them together, Harrington relies upon the dry procedural approach that typified American space exploration films of the 50’s, such as Destination Moon (1950), Rocketship X-M (1950), and Project Moonbase (1953). So you can be dazzled by the effects and either amused or bored by the bland characters and techno-babble dialogue. It helps that the casting is interesting, with Basil Rathbone as a brilliant but callous scientist, John Saxon as the square-jawed captain, and Dennis Hopper – a friend of Harrington’s, and star of Night Tide – as one of the more sensitive crew members. They may not have much to work with in the film’s first half, but at least, as a viewer, you can pass the time by playing the “Oh, look, it’s…” game. There’s even a significant cameo by Famous Monsters publisher and genre legend Forrest J. Ackerman, playing Rathbone’s assistant.

Paul Grant (Dennis Hopper) offers some liquid sustenance to their alien passenger (Florence Marly), though it's not the type she's seeking.

After a few eerie, dreamlike (and somewhat disjointed) scenes in which the crew explores a derelict alien ship on a Martian moon, recovering an extraterrestrial survivor (Florence Marly), the plot proper finally kicks in. They’re surprised to find that the alien is humanoid, although the mute creature may have more in common with vegetable than animal: she has green skin and silver hair shaped like the bud of a flower (“Her skin…appears to have a high chlorophyll content,” comments one crew member, making the most of some very cheap makeup). She also seems to have telepathic powers. She mesmerizes the male crew into silent gaping when they first examine her, though the sole female astronaut, played by Judi Meredith (Jack the Giant Killer), is unmoved. At night, the alien uses her powers – including glowing eyes – to hypnotize her victims before drinking their blood, an almost sexual seduction that seems to be inspired by Hammer’s Dracula. John Saxon joins Meredith in distrusting the creature, but even he lowers his guard, and Meredith discovers his half-conscious body lying on the floor while the alien “queen” sucks blood from a gaping wound in his wrist.

Forrest J. Ackerman cameos in "Queen of Blood," admiring a collection of the Queen's pulsating, slime-covered eggs.

There’s a genuine anticlimax when it’s discovered that the Queen of Blood can be slain by simply scratching her; the creature, which Saxon diagnoses as a hemophiliac, subsequently bleeds to death. Has there ever been an easier way to defeat an alien menace? Nonetheless, when Saxon discovers that the alien has been laying eggs in every single compartment in the ship (she’s been very busy while the crew slept, apparently), he dreads an alien invasion and suggests exterminating all of them. Only with great reluctance does he decide to submit to Meredith’s suggestion, and leave the specimens intact for Rathbone’s scientists to study. Harrington’s script hits all the expected tropes, but the final shot adds a touch of welcome humor – an assurance that the film is not to be taken that seriously. These days, Queen of Blood might be of greatest interest for genre fans as a predecessor to Ridley Scott’s Alien (although it more closely anticipates Tobe Hooper’s outrageous space vampire epic Lifeforce, in truth). It bears much in common with It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) and especially Mario Bava’s terrific Planet of the Vampires (1965), a film Harrington hadn’t seen. But Queen stands on its own as one of the strangest mash-ups the AIP exploitation factory produced in the 60’s.

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