Satanic Rites of Dracula

Rating:
Summary: Dracula is really dead or is trying to be
Review: This has to be the worst of the Lee-Cushing Hammer Draculas. One has to wonder if they had a film - lame - and they said - HEY lets put Lee in his cape in here and we will make money. Idiots! Sorry, I love Lee, Cushing and the other Dracula films but Hammer was in it for the bucks here and nothing else. The fact it was released under various titles tells you something, Satanic was one, but there was "Dracula is Dead and Well and Living in London" or uninspired "Count Dracula and his Bride". I mean that is ALL they could come up with?

Sequel to A.D., charming Joanna Lumley takes over from Stephanie Beacham as Van Helsing's granddaughter. Cushing is back as well. So bad it's sort of good...lol. Count Dracula decides to wipe out mankind with a super-plague so he can finally die? Well, I am sure they thought it sounded good on paper.

Of interest to Lee-Cushing fans, but others will yawn.

Rating:
Summary: Nonsense but Great Fun.
Review: This is a very 1970s affair. It was a time when `Rosemary's Baby was the last big thing in horror movies and Dennis Wheatley was a best-seller: so werewolves and vampires were out, Satanism in. So here we get a Wheatley-esque story of powerful people sucked into devil-worship grafted onto an old fashioned Dracula story. The other main way it's of its time is hinted at by the presence of Joanna Lumley: the best way to enjoy this is just to think of it as, to all intents and purposes a feature-length episode of `The Avengers'. For that's exactly what it's like in all its very 70s silliness, with Dracula, now a mysterious big businessman, guarded by murderous young men on motorbikes sporting afghans, shades and extremely out of fashion moustaches, dividing his time between a high tech towerblock and the obligatory creepy old house with his harem of lady vampires in the cellar. (Here rather feeble lady vampires - I know of no other film where vampires can be killed by sprinklers.) My favourite bit is where the doorman of the creepy towerblock makes it clear that he has two standing instructions:
1. Nobody to be allowed to see Mr Denham, under any circumstances, ever.
2. None of Mr Denham's visitors to be allowed to carry cameras.
It's really desperately silly and you'd have to be a very frightened rabbit indeed to find it terribly scary but, hey, it's such fun. Here for the last - and admittedly not the best - time together are Christopher Lee's Dracula and Peter Cushing's van Helsing, the latter infinitely cooler than Hugh Jackman's witless portrayal could ever dream of being, especially when he is wielding what must surely be the smallest gun in cinema history. (Arnie would have used a rocket-launcher.) Nonsense on stilts then but quite tremendous fun.


Rating:
Summary: Stay away from this turkey!
Review: This is it, the very last Christopher Lee as Dracula film to appear in the U.S. Take Dracula, biological warfare, political plots, Satan worship, and biker gangs. Mix them together with limp writing, stilted acting, and painful music and you get quintessential 1970's kitsch. While few of the Lee/Cushing films will ever be dramatic masterpieces, this is possibly the worst of the bunch. It is very definitely the worst horror film I've ever seen.

But that's really the point, isn't it. Christopher Lee has built a career out of a toothy grin and 20 lines per film. Peter Cushing is the archetypical overly serious destroyer of creatures of the darkness. We watch them to laugh at our own fears, not to dwell on them. The kind of film watching that is best as a group of friends watching the movie as they chat and make fun of it. A true cultural ritual.

The only painful part of the film is watching a pair of actors who have brought much entertainment to the world at what is very clearly the end of their careers. Somehow, you have to think that they deserve better than this. Old, tired and totally typecast, it would have been nice to have their last film be something more meaningful. Oh well, I did like the biker's sheepskin jackets.

Rating:
Summary: Decent horror movie
Review: This movie is a sequel to "Dracula 1972 AD". Peter Cushing (Van Helsing), Christopher Lee (Dracula) and Michael Coles (Inspector Murray) reprise their roles here. Joanna Lumley replaces Stephanie Beacham as Van Helsing's daughter, Jessica. Overall, I thought this was a decent horror movie, with an interesting plot. One thing I'd like to add. My DVD copy was distributed by a company called Platinum Disc Corporation. A few times throughout the movie, they insert their company logo in the bottom right of the screen. It's not a big distraction, but I don't expect to see commercial ads during a movie that I paid for. I guess that's the tradeoff for such a cheaply priced DVD. Finally, many people have criticized the ending as lame. Well, it's not terribly dramatic, but Dracula has been killed so many times, I guess the producers were looking for something new.

Rating:
Summary: The Worst of Hammers Dracula Films
Review: What can I say that I bet hasn't been said about Satanic Rites of Dracula that hasn't been said before. By now Hammer had run way out of steam with there Dracula films, and Christopher Lee wanted badly to get away from the role. While the film isn't the worst Dracula/Vampire film ever made, it in no way adds up to the other Dracula films that Hammer made. As a matter of fact it's sad that in the same year Hammer's Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter came out, which in my mind could have saved Hammer and there vampire films for good, giving them a new hero and line of vampire films to play with, this film and the VERY VERY BAD Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires had to come along and put the nail in Hammer's coffin. Oh well, at least for the last time we get to see the always great Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing play roles that they by now had down pat, even if the lines and set up are campy as hell. Watch this one just for a good laugh to see how low Hammer Films had gone from it's heyday in the 50's and 60's to the low points of the 70's. This films gets 2 stars just for the fact that it has Lee and Cushing in the film.