Showing posts with label Alan Gibson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Gibson. Show all posts

Sunday, August 31, 2025

The Dracula Story, Take 25

Film: Dracula A.D. 1972
Format: DVD from Mokena Community Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

There are a lot of basic stories that crop up on this blog over and over. It seems like there’s a Holocaust movie every year, for instance. Nothing shows up here more than Dracula, though, although there may be more zombie films overall. Dracula is probably the most frequently mentioned character, though, and that’s especially the case if you include Count Orlock as essentially the same character. With Dracula A.D. 1972 we are once again diving into the Dracula story, with the only real difference being the setting. If you have to have something to separate your Dracula movie from all of the rest, having cars and 1970s technology is at least a start.

After the original Dracula story where the Count goes ham on Mina Harker, all of the Dracula stories are essentially variations on a theme. Dracula, who was killed in the previous film (or in this case, simply killed in the past) is resurrected in one way or another. He hyper-fixates on a young woman, kills a few others to gain strength, makes a few lesser vampires to assist him, and generally speaking dies just as he is about to turn his obsession into his newest vampiric creation.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Off Script: The Satanic Rites of Dracula

Film: The Satanic Rites of Dracula
Format: DVD from personal collection on rockin’ flatscreen.

Christmas money is a wonderful thing. Give me a $50 gift card and a used DVD store and I’m a happy man. I’m even happier when I locate a two-disc set of something like The Satanic Rites of Dracula for a good price (I got And Now the Screaming Starts! and a few others, too). I’m of the opinion that you can’t have enough Hammer horror, Peter Cushing, or Christopher Lee in one’s personal collection, so I snapped it up.

I can’t say I’m having buyer’s remorse, but it is certainly one of the oddest films in my collection. Yes, it’s a vampire film as the name would suggest, but this is not one of those Hammer films that tries to get all gothic on things. It takes place in the time it was filmed, so it’s a modern Dracula with modern henchmen and modern detectives working a case. Oh, there are certainly some acknowledgments of the source material beyond Dracula being the main foil and being played by Christopher Lee. After all, you can’t have a Dracula film starring Lee without putting Peter Cushing on the cast list as Van Helsing, can you?