Dracula AD1972: Terrible Movies #170

The film opens to Dracula and Van Helsing struggling atop a runaway carriage. It crashes and Ol' Drac is somehow impaled by a wagon wheel, which is pretty cool, and there's plenty of garish technicolor blood. Dracula turns to dust, Van Helsing croaks, and some dude appears and scoops up some of the vampire dust in the handy glass container he just happens to have in his coat pocket for nineteenth-century-speeding-carriage-battle-crash-spoke-impalement-vampire-dust emergencies, because you never know when you're going to need one of those and he just happened to be in the neighborhood. Cue credits, which are the kind you find in the seventies with gothic lettering and a very brassy score that would be equally fitting for SWAT or Charlie's Angels.



Then suddenly and with very little warning, we cut to a raucous party, where older sophisticated British stiffs stand around and gape at hippies getting groovy. It's a happening, I guess, where generic early '70s rock plays, and people boogie on/under pianos/tables because that how you can stick it to the establishment, and some folks were told it was okay to wear unfortunate headbands or seemingly jaunty hats.



The fuzz arrives and busts up the joint because it was in the script, then the hippies go to an extremely unlikely church, have some sort of blasphemous ceremony, soak Caroline Munro in a chalice full of a frothy technicolor blood/vampire dust concoction and revive Dracula. Cue an hour of largely vampireless plot.

Anyway, the parts I liked I liked, but they're near the beginning and end of the film. I watched it on Netflix.