Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), Blu-Ray review

Very few of Hammer’s movies have been reviled as much as Dracula A.D. 1972, Christopher Lee’s second last outing in a Hammer Dracula movie. It’s easy to see why. Diehard old school Hammer fans violently disapproved of the idea of transplanting Dracula in Swinging London in the early 70s. Mainstream critics who didn’t much like Hammer movies anyway saw this as an opportunity for cheap mockery. The attempt to depict early 70s youth culture, fashions and music made the film look very dated within a few short years. It’s really easy to take pot shots at this movie.

Nonetheless Dracula A.D. 1972 has its defenders and I’m one of them.

The movie opens in 1872, with poor old Dracula once again being vanquished and destroyed in the kind of clever and original style that had become a trademark of Hammer’s Dracula movies. A mysterious young man fills a vial with some of the Count’s ashes and takes his ring. We then get a very good transition as the camera pans up from a late 19th century graveyard to a passing jet airliner. Suddenly we are in 1972.

There’s a groovy party going on. It was supposed to be a very staid respectable party but Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame) and his way-out friends crashed it and turned it into a wild orgy. And I do mean wild. Nobody actually takes their clothes off but there are couples kissing and girls go-go dancing. Some of these young people are clearly having fun. Total depravity.

Johnny Alucard and his clique are starting to get bored. They need new highs. New kicks. Johnny decides to give them something that will really shock them out of their boredom - a Black Mass.

Not all his followers think this is a good idea. Young Jessica (Stephanie Beacham) has her doubts. She’s pretty sure her grandfather wold disapprove. Her grandfather knows about the dangers of such things. Her grandfather’s name is Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing. He’s played by Peter Cushing.

Johnny convinces his friends that it will be a good laugh. And he’s found a deconsecrated church that will provide the perfect setting.

Johnny gets rather carried away. He wants Jessica to participate in the ritual. She’s too frightened to do so but Laura (Caroline Munro) thinks it’s a great idea. We already know that Laura is a bit of a bad girl. She likes dancing.

The summoning scene that follows is extremely well executed, with all the gothic trappings and an atmosphere that manages to be genuinely creepy and over-the-top. The first appearance of Count Dracula is wonderfully evocative.

Of course now that he’s managed to revive Count Dracula Johnny Alucard will have to provide him with some blood. That’s where Laura comes in. Laura is hysterical but there’s not much she can do about it. A nice touch is the look on Carline Munro’s face as Dracula bites her - it it horror or bliss?

As I said earlier it’s a movie that was always going to look dated within a few years. Seeing it now, half a century later, that’s very much a part of its charm. What makes it even better is that Hammer (like Hollywood when it tried to cash in on youth culture) got the 1972 youth culture totally wrong. So now it’s like a bizarre time capsule of a 1972 youth scene that only ever existed in the minds of the middle-aged men running Hammer Films at the time. It makes the movie great fun.

As for the idea of dropping Dracula into the world of 1970s sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, it was really a pretty reasonable idea. Vampire movies in 19th century settings were becoming a pretty tired idea. Hammer were struggling and they had to do something. The only other options would have been to ramp up the gore very significantly or to ramp up the sex and nudity way beyond the levels with which Hammer felt comfortable. There were lots of vampire movies around that time in contemporary settings (Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, Jose Larraz’s Vampyres, Count Yorga Vampire, etc). Vampires in contemporary settings were very much in tune with the zeitgeist of the 70s. Hammer decided to put their own distinctive twist on the idea by putting their vampire among the crazy with-out groovy kids of the time.

You have to consider the historical context of this movie. Throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s the British gutter press enjoyed whipping up moral panics about the occults, with articles in the Sunday papers about witches in suburbia and that sort of thing.

This was also a time when Dennis Wheatley’s black magic occult thrillers were huge bestsellers and at the beginning of each book there was a warning to the reader from Wheatley - a warning not to dabble in the occult, otherwise really really bad things would happen.

This was also a time of regular moral panics about the “permissive society” - there was a real fear that young people were learning to enjoy themselves and that was something that needed to be stopped. The movie takes the same kind of pompous moralising line but that ends up adding to the fun.

So overall 1972 must have seemed like a very good time for Hammer to make a movie like Dracula A.D. 1972.

One interesting thing about Hammer’s Dracula movies is that although on the surface they take a very conservative moralistic stance Dracula always wins. He gets destroyed at the end of each movie but you know he’ll be back for the next one, fully revived and as lively as ever. It’s also noticeable that the vampire hunters in the Hammer movies are not overly sympathetic. Father Sandor in Dracula Prince of Darkness is pretty horrifying. Van Helsing in Dracula A.D. 1972 is a grim, humourless dusty old killjoy. Dracula by contrast is sexy, dangerous and exciting. It’s hard to imagine the target audience for this movie rooting for Van Helsing.

Having the police conducting a conventional murder investigation while Van Helsing knows it’s vampires they’re dealing with is a nice touch.

One criticism that has been made of the film is that Dracula never leaves the deconsecrated church. I think that was actually a wise idea. Dracula roaming around 1970s London would have looked silly, but having lurking in the church, like a spider in his web, increases the sense of menace.

This is a very visually impressive movie with some nice sets and some great cinematography.

One minor weakness of this movie is that the vampires are much too vulnerable. It seems like just about everything kills vampires. Even against an old man like van Helsing they just haven’t got a chance.

The Warner British Blu-Ray release is barebones but looks pretty good.

Dracula A.D. 1972 has its flaws and perhaps it doesn’t work in the way Hammer intended, but it works in its own way and it’s an entertaining slightly offbeat 70s vampire movie. Highly recommended.