| Product: |
Scars Of Dracula (DVD) |
| Date: |
30/10/07 (133 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Patrick Troughton's pretty funny
Disadvantages: This is a pretty bad film
Suppose you’re walking, alone, though a wood at night. You’re lost, you’re a little bit spooked, there are noises you can’t identify. I’m sure we’ve all been there – those “shit, was that a squirrel?” moments. Then imagine that an empty coach and horses arrives and stops *right next to you*. What would you do? Would you keep walking, determined not to let it panic you? Would you run as fast as you possibly could, convinced that the very devil himself was after you? Or would you think “What a stroke of luck, this obviously-not-haunted coach will be the perfect place to sleep”?
I only ask because Scars of Dracula has *two* characters who think nothing of approaching strange coaches when they’re lost in the woods in the middle of the night. Could it be that my own instincts are hopelessly wide of the mark, and that mysteriously empty coaches are well known ports in a storm? Or could it just represent lazy plotting?
This is a DVD from ‘The Hammer Collection.’ And it’s a real stinker; it has the reputation of being one of Hammer’s very worst. Released in 1970, it shows all the hallmarks of a film company that doesn’t know where it’s going. It tries to combine the things that made Hammer successful a decade earlier with what early 70s audiences were demanding. The result is a schizophrenic film. In its first 20 minutes it lurches from trad Hammer vamp shenanigans to gory massacre scenes a la Peckinpah, followed by some Confessions-style sexual misadventures and a coach chase that the music tells us is supposed to be really exciting. It eventually settles down into the usual Hammer Dracula stuff, but with rather stronger violence than normal.
Plotwise, what do you need? Dracula is resurrected for the umpteenth (well, fourth) time. An oversexed young man vanishes after visiting Dracula’s castle. His brother and brother’s girlfriend come looking for him. Dracula takes a shine to the girlfriend; Drac’s servant *also* takes a shine to the girlfriend. The local priest gets involved and there’s an unfriendly innkeeper who says “We’ll have no trouble here.”
It’s the same plot as the much better Dracula Prince of Darkness, but with more gore. It ticks all the usual Hammer boxes – the music and use of colour are OTT enough to please all but the most jaded; the set design, while cheap, is evocative; and the bit parts are the usual mixture of stolid middle-aged men and dolly birds in period costume. But it falls down on so many other levels. The plotting is terrible, not just in the double use of the ridiculous coach device – why does Dracula’s servant *keep* letting people into the castle when he knows they want to kill Dracula? Why do we get intrusive comedy policemen just when the film shows signs of becoming atmospheric? The script is also poor, although there’s a mildly amusing tendency for characters to yell the names of things that are particularly worrying them: “The cross!” “The bat! The bat!” and (best of all) “The broth!!!”
The direction lacks any flair at all – it really is just point-the-camera-and-shout-action stuff. Roy Ward Baker directed better films for Hammer, including the marvellous Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, but he must have been having an off day. The special effects are pathetic. The bat-on-a-wire is barely competent, the castle an obvious painting, and the ever-present day-for-night photography as unconvincing as ever. No attempt is made at realism – it’s the kind of film where men put the corpses of their vampirised daughters onto tables very gingerly, for fear of hurting the actresses. The gore, although more plentiful than usual, and a little more sadistic, isn’t any more convincing than in other Hammer horrors. There’s some very fleeting nudity at the beginning, but this is an oddly coy film for this stage in Hammer’s history. There is a hilariously gratuitous slow zoom into the leading lady’s bloody cleavage, though.
Dracula gets a lot more to do than in most of his Hammer films. Normally he lets his human servants do most of the dirty work, but here he gets to crawl up a wall, have a fight, stab someone to death, and flog his manservant (that last one isn’t a hideous euphemism, although frankly the film might have been better if it were).
The problem is, this all rather diminishes him as a threat. To see Dracula repeatedly stabbing a lady vampire with a rubber knife just doesn’t seem that sinister, or at least not sinister in the usual Dracula style. And the fact that he seemingly resorts to poisoning someone’s soup seems more petty than evil. It’s not helped by one of Christopher Lee’s more phoned-in performances as the Count. I’ve a lot of fondness for Lee, a very good actor when he wants to be, but he was always the laziest of the major horror stars, visibly putting no effort at all into films that didn’t interest him. Here he lets his imposing height and sonorous voice do all the work. He also needs a shave in most scenes, and wears so much makeup that he at times resembles a thinner Liberace.
If there was a top-notch supporting cast surrounding him this might not matter so much. Unfortunately there isn’t. A very young, polite and well-spoken Dennis Waterman is the hero. He’s too wet to seem a credible threat to Dracula and it’s difficult to take his RP accent seriously after all those years of Minder. His girlfriend is played by Jenny Handley, but she’s a typical Hammer simper-doll – why does Dracula always go for the most uninteresting women? The roguish brother is a bit more likeable, but they should have gone the whole hog and cast Robin Askwith. There’s also some prime bad acting from the barmaid at the inn.
The more mature cast members do a little better. Perennial Hammer supporting player Michael Ripper is good as the typically surly innkeeper. Michael Gwynn plays the priest exactly as Peter Cushing would have done, but it’s hard to see past his astonishing, bouffant hair. Dracula’s servant, Klove, is played in unrestrained fashion by a post-Dr-Who Patrick Troughton with incredible glue-on eyebrows. He does everything short of winking at the camera to let us know just how unimpressed he is with the whole thing, but at least he’s fun to watch.
It’s not a good film; not by Hammer’s standard, nor by anyone else’s. It’s clearly the work of a company stuck in a rut. The two main questions it raises: why is Dracula always wearing clothes when he gets resurrected? And why on earth is the film called Scars of Dracula, given that he has no scars?
The picture quality on the DVD is pretty good. It includes a trailer (not a good one, but it would have taken something pretty special to sell this). There’s also an image gallery (including some good posters). The main feature is a commentary by director Roy Ward Baker and Christopher Lee. Lee dominates, and as ever, he’s not shy of telling us just what he thought of most of his Dracula films. I was actually hoping for ninety minutes of Lee just moaning about how Hammer never paid him enough, but unfortunately it quickly settles down into the usual kind of commentary, both men recalling old colleagues with fondness and bemoaning the state of modern horror films. The main surprise is when Lee starts quoting Benny Hill sketches. It’s a decent enough extra if you find these things interesting, although at times it seems to be slightly out of synch with the film, which is annoying.
So there it is. A terrible film. I regard it with more fondness than it really deserves, mainly because I remember seeing it when I was a lot younger. Hammer did make some cracking little horror movies. This ain’t one of them. Rated 15. £6 on amazon if you really feel you can’t do without it.
Summary: One of Hammer's worst, but at least the DVD's cheap
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