The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Now there's a great title. It's pretty much a sequel to Dracula 1972 A.D. but instead of hip and groovy young people there is a cult of doughy old Englishmen and busty ladies working together to bring about a new plague. Dracula's big scheme is to take the entire world out in order end his own cursed existence. Van Helsing calls it "a last blaze of utter horror and violence, a ghastly annihilation of an entire planet." It's the ultimate murder suicide. And it's ironic that Cushing would be annihilating planets in Star Wars a few years later.
It has all the important ingredients of a 70s satanist/occult movie: pentagrams, black masses, old men in robes, blood, boobies, bad haircuts. But it also throws Dracula and Van Helsing into the mix for good measure. Peter Cushing once again gives an entertaining performance as Van Helsing. The more movies I see him in, the more I'm starting to believe he can do no wrong. Even if he is in the background of the most mundane scene, he can still grab my attention with something he's doing. He can deliver the absurdest of dialogue and make it seem authoritative.
Christopher Lee is back as Dracula. He gets to have fog machine assisted entrances and cool lighting but he also gets to sit behind a desk like a James Bond villain, which, coincidentally, he actually was in The Man With The Golden Gun.
I haven't seen all of the Lee/Cushing Dracula movies but I bet they all try to have a new twist on killing the bloodsucker. Stakes through the heart are fine and dandy the first time around. By the eleventh or twelfth outing it might get stale. So this time around we learn that Dracula gets really annoyed by thorns. Because Jesus wore a crown of thorns. And he didn't like it either. This information comes in handy when Van Helsing lures Dracula onto his own front lawn and through the big patch of prickly bushes. With all of the minions and henchmen that Dracula had in this movie you would think he would have had one of them do some landscaping around the compound. Maybe remove some of the things that are harmful to the eternal, blood-drinking undead. Instead Dracula gets tangle like a sap and Van Helsing stakes him.
Speaking of the minions . . . in addition to the pasty old Englishmen in robes Dracula has these guys who all wear matching sheep vests. One of them gets shot off of his motorcycle in an early scene and sends it crashing through a gate. It's pretty sweet. And we get a pretty good "guy on fire" stunt towards the end. For bonus points the guy on fire is simultaneously rotting away from the super bubonic plague.
There are also the brides of Dracula chained up in the cellar. Drac's big plan is to deplete his food source by ridding the world of humanity and possibly end his own existence. But if it doesn't work it will only be he and his wives living in an empty planet. He'll spend eternity doing "take my wife, please" jokes to an auditorium of skeletons he set up one afternoon. Hi yo!
I mentioned that thorns can hurt Dracula. Silver is also detrimental to a vampire's existence. Van Helsing gets an awesome scene where he makes his own silver bullet. He makes the tiniest little bullet you've ever seen. And then he loads it into the tiniest pistol you've ever seen. It's really funny. And of course Peter Cushing pulls it off and you believe he can go and kill Dracula using this thimble with a trigger. It's such a gentlemanly threat seeing Van Helsing with his teeny gun. High school girls with Hello Kitty backpacks would buy these tiny bullets at Newbury Comics because they deemed them "cute."
It's a 70s occult horror movie dressed as a 70s vampire movie. Check it out if that's your thing. Or if you are a fan of very little guns. I'll give The Satanic Rites of Dracula today's arbitrary rating of 9 tiny little silver bullets out of 15.
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