During last year's run of 31 DAYS OF HORROR, one of my goals was to cover all of Hammer's Dracula series, but it turns out that I neglected one of them. I knew I had seen all of them, most quite recently at the time, but upon reviewing all of the entries I noted that SCARS OF DRACULA slipped my mind. I watched it again the other day by way of a refresher, and I now understand why I forgot about it. It's not bad by any means, but for what one expects from a Hammer Dracula film, it's well-mounted but utterly generic. It reads as a how-to guide for how to construct one of these shockers, with only a few elements being true highlights.
Count Dracula has been destroyed and his desiccated remains lay atop an altar in an impenetrable tower of his castle. A puppet bat arrives and pukes blood onto the pile of ashes where the Count's head would be, and in no time Christopher Lee is back as cinema's most majestic and imposing iteration of Bram Stoker's arch-villain. He of course immediately embarks on slaughtering hot, bosomy young women, so the local villages take up their torches, pitchforks, and a good amount of highly combustible fuel and storm the castle. There they encounter Dracula's slave, Klove (well-played by Patrick Troughton, best known as the second Doctor on DOCTOR WHO), who tries to keep the throng at bay, but his efforts are unsuccessful as the villagers torch the castle. Dracula, however, is untouched by the conflagration, and he immediately revenges himself upon the townsfolk by slaying all of the town's women, who thought they were safe by being sequestered in a church.
Meanwhile in another town, studly young rakehell Paul Carlson (Christopher Matthews) is falsely accused of rape by the mayor's nubile daughter when he opts to leave her very welcoming bed to attend his brother's fiancee's birthday party, so Paul flees the home of the irate mayor (which allows us generous glimpses of his daughter's juicy bare backside) with the constabulary hot on his heels. He drops in on the party, only for the fuzz to arrive, so he escapes out the window and into a convenient carriage. The carriage bolts off without a driver, eventually coming to a halt in the town plagued by the count. It's just after dusk so Paul seeks refuge at the tavern owned by the leader of the torch-wielding peasants. He is gruffly turned away, only to wander into the nearby woods and find a driverless coach. Paul boards the coach and falls asleep, but the coach is not driverless. It's driven by Dracula's slave, Klove, and upon arrival at the ruined castle, Paul is greeted by the Count and Tania (Anouska Hempel). He is shown to a room and given lodging for the night, but Paul is soon visited by a clearly terrified Tania, who states that she is both Dracula's mistress and a prisoner, and she begs Paul to "love" her. Paul, knowing a good thing when he sees one, obliges and eagerly puts the bone to Dracula's sex slave. When the rumpy-pumpy is over, Tania attempts to put the bite on Paul — I'm impressed that she enjoyed his attentions enough to wait until after to do the undead suckface thing — but Drac bursts in and, none too pleased, savagely stabs Tania repeatedly with a dagger.
The Count gets uncharacteristically stabby.
While Paul is relegated in one of the tower's inescapable rooms, Klove dismembers Tania body and dissolves its components in a tub of acid.
Paul's utter stiff of a brother, Simon (Dennis Waterman), sets off in search of his ne'er-do-well sibling with chaste fiancee Sarah (Jenny Hanley) in tow, and in no time they make their way to the hostile pub from which Paul was turned away, and they make their way to the Count's castle. You can guess the rest.
Other than some very alluring women in the forms of the mayor's cheeky daughter, a very friendly tavern wench (who tried in vain to warn Paul away from going to the castle), and the horny vampiress, the film is very much by the numbers, though Paul makes for a fun quasi-protagonist. He's more lively than damned near any other mortal male who finds himself crossing paths with Dracula (Van Helsing notwithstanding, but he's not present for this one), and he gets extra points for being an unrepentant poon-hound who beds a hot vampire and survives (though he does meet a nasty fate later on). Tania the vampire is a blend of the eerie, the alluring, and the tragic, and I genuinely felt bad when she got done in so cruelly. Klove is by far the most interesting of Dracula's slaves throughout the series, enduring some horrific cruelty from the Count yet being helpless to do anything other than serve him faithfully.
Unlike some of the previous entries, Dracula actually speaks a good deal in this one, which is always welcome as Christopher Lee is far more than just an imposing visual. We also get a bit cribbed straight out of Stoker, specifically the bit where Dracula is see crawling up the castle walls like a bat making its way to its nest. It's creepy as hell and I wish there had been other such bits to be had.
Like I said, SCARS OF DRACULA is not bad, but rather a case of "here we go again" with little new being put on the table. I first saw it during a late-night airing on New York City's Channel 5 one weekend when I was twelve and I liked it quite a lot. It may have been my first Hammer Dracula, and it was definitely a breath of fresh air from the less-visceral Dracula flicks from the times before the advent of Hammer's specific style and flavor, but it's definitely a mid-level entry among the Christopher Lee era. When it comes to the studio's Christopher Lee-led undead suckface movies. 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE is by far the standout, with the non-Lee BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960) being perhaps the best of Hammer's Dracula franchise, so seek those out instead.
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