Mentally scarring (Scars Of Dracula (DVD))

Member Name: Wolfzilla

Product:	Scars Of Dracula (DVD)
Date:	11/09/08 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Jenny Hanley does have an incredible cleavage. Uh...

Disadvantages: An absolutely pointless, by-the-numbers attempt at milking some cash out of fans

One of my favourite things about horror and monster movies from the 1960s and 70s is their nonsensical titles. If they featured a household name monster, and all the sensible sequel titles were already taken, studios just seemed to pick random words vaguely related to the character, stuck them together and a film title was born. Given that Hammer's original Dracula picture was retitled 'Horror of Dracula' they actually managed to do a decent job of coming up with names for sequels, especially when you consider Universal had already taken up some of the more obvious ones like Son of Dracula and Dracula's Daughter. Yet by the 4th sequel, Taste The Blood Of Dracula, things were beginning to run out of the realms of sensibility, and 1970's Scars of Dracula is probably my favourite of all the daft Dracula film titles. Dracula has no visible scars in it, and though I suppose you could put forth an argument that it comes from the torture wounds on the back of his manservant Klove, the aforementioned scene is short and absolutely irrelevant to the film's plot, so they would have been as well calling it Dracula Climbs The Wall or Dracula's Mysterious Coach.

You should probably take some indication of the quality of a film when I just spent an entire paragraph rambling about how silly it's title is. Indeed it wouldn't be wrong to say Scars of Dracula isn't one of Hammer's better Dracula movies. Or movies full stop. It actually has some fairly good credentials behind it. Director Roy Ward Baker was behind the lens for Quatermass & The Pit, one of Hammer's more celebrated efforts, as well as sleazy favourite The Vampire Lovers, and there's few that would argue Christopher Lee's place as one of the finest onscreen Draculas of all time. But Scars was made at a fairly difficult time for Hammer. They had revolutionised the Horror genre, giving the old gothic tales Universal had already made so gloriously well in the 1930s a new lease of life with an injection of sex 'n violence. Yet by the 1970s, Hammer's brand of sex 'n violence wasn't anywhere near as shocking as it was 10 years prior, not to mention the fact they had run out of stories to adapt and were actually having to write their own misadventures for Dracula and Frankenstein and co. to get involved in, and lets just say that with all respect to him, Scars writer Anthony Hinds wasn't quite on the same level as Bram Stoker when it came to writing Dracula.

As such we have a rather bizarre film, somewhat lost with where it wants to go. We open in traditional fashion, villagers with pitchforks, torches and garden rakes storming Castle Dracula and attempting to burn it down. We then take a sudden jump, its never made clear how long passes, to the city, where we have an engagement party between a young couple, Simon (Dennis Waterman) and Sarah (Jenny Hanley) as they ponder where Simon's brother Paul (Christopher Matthews) is. It turns out Paul is a bit of a rogue, and is on the run from the police, basically for his rampant bedroom antics with a burgomaster's daughter. While on the run he stumbles upon the local inn, with obligatory "we don't want no trouble" patrons. After being shunted out, he carries on down the road and finds himself at Castle Dracula, where he barely escapes becoming a snack of a female vampire by climbing down to a mysterious window ledge.

Shortly afterwards, Simon and Sarah try to trace his footsteps and also wind up at the castle, where Sarah becomes the object of both Dracula and Klove's desires, only to escape back to the inn where they aren't welcomed by anyone but the local priest (Michael Gwynn) who agrees to help them go back to the castle to try and find Paul, and perhaps put an end to Dracula once and for all...

The plot is fairly threadbare, and it really does struggle to hold interest for its 96 min running time. It basically seems to go through the motions, throwing in all the necessary ingredients for a Dracula film; castle, sexy female vamp, beautiful innocent girl, creepy manservant, suspicious locals, slightly mad priest - yet doesn't actually have anything new or exciting to do with them. Thus the film drags on aimlessly never offering anything at all to make the film stand out, it just roughly regurgitates the plot to the Stoker novel, throws in a bit more sex and some absolutely hilarious attempts at 'gruesome' scenes. Now the 2 sequences I'm talking about are very bloody, but they are so absurd it completely ruins any effectiveness they may have had. The first one involves this absolutely terrible fake bat that that shockingly has almost about as much screen time as Lee, killing a victim via repeated bites to the face. What ruins a potentially squirmy scene is the fact the victim in question makes absolutely no attempt to fight the bat off (probably out of fear of breaking the terrible prop) which just makes the scene a bit laughable. Even worse is when Dracula kills his bride for attempting to prey on Paul. He does this via stabbing her repeatedly with a knife. This is ridiculous for 2 reasons. First of all the knife is patently rubber, and bends upon impact, and second of all...uh he kills a vampire by stabbing her with a knife. Isn't one of the perks of being a vampire the whole impervious to most forms of attack thing? For what it's worth, the one bloody scene that does work, the righteous villagers return and discovery at the church, is actually very well done, and arguably the film's one standout (from a good perspective) scene.

In case you haven't gathered, the film's special effects are pretty grim. Now I know it was 1970, and made on a tight budget, but seriously that bat is out of order. Some of the painted backdrops work, such as the view looking down out of the castle window, whereas others, such as the backdrop of the castle itself, look pretty awful. I guess Christopher Lee's makeup could also count as an effect, and its just as bad as that damn bat. Speaking of Lee, his clearly obvious stunt double at the film's end isn't too great, though come to think about it, everything about the film's ending (which I don't want to spoil, but trust me it's possibly even sillier than killing a vampire with a butter knife) is fairly daft. Potentially the worst thing about it though is the film's complete ineptitude at portraying night. Good god they don't even try to disguise the fact it's daylight for the duration of the film! Is Dracula even meant to be a vampire? Or just an evil guy with pointy teeth and bloodshot eyes seeing as he can freely walk about in daylight, but can be killed by the most stupid of means.

The acting is also a real let down. Despite the fact it's an unusual talkative part as the Count, Lee seems completely disinterested in proceedings. Which actually inadvertently works in some scenes, as Dracula comes across as arrogant and disenchanted, but in scenes where he's meant to be angry or active, Lee's complete lack of effort betrays them. Dennis Waterman, of Minder fame, just seems a bit lost, while you get the feeling Hanley, whose voice was dubbed by another actress, was hired on the basis of how firm her breasts were. Potentially the saving grace comes in the form of Patrick Troughton as Klove. It's hard to tell if he's just great at playing a bitter old weirdo or if he also genuinely doesn't want to be there and can't hide how much he hates the film.

When all is said and done, it's really hard to find anything to recommend Scars of Dracula on. In fact, the fact it squanders a decent cast actually makes it seem like even more of a waste, it had the potential to be good, but really comes across as a lazy attempt to wring some cash out of the franchise before it lost steam. Those out to see all the Hammer horrors will probably want to see it for completions sake, but to anyone else there really isn't much of a point, it really is a wasted opportunity, and one of the most disposable genre entries the studio churned out.

Summary: Scars of Dracula is a lazy production that disappoints in almost every aspect