The Friday Night Fright: Count Dracula
In 1970 Christopher Lee made two appearances as Dracula, Taste the Blood of Dracula, his fourth appearance in the Hammer series, and Count Dracula that teamed him with director Jess Franco.
The attraction of the film for Lee was the chance to play Dracula true to Stoker’s original book rather than the almost feral interpretation of the Hammer films in which he had hardly any dialogue. Things start off well enough with Harker making the journey to Dracula’s castle. Lee, playing the part sans cloak and with a full moustache, makes the most of these early scenes, delivering his lines as if they were Shakespeare. He even gets to do the famous “children of the night” line but given the cheap nature of the film those children are played by German Shepherds rather than real wolves.
After this impressive opening it all goes down hill, with Lee reduced to popping up just to nibble on the occasional maiden’s neck, in much the same way as the Hammer films he so resented doing.
When it come to casting Renfield it’s hard to think of a better choice than Klaus Kinski. The fly eating insane asylum inmate seems tailor made for the batty German actor but with no dialogue (according to Franco, Kinski said he could convey what was needed without words) and little screen time a great opportunity is wasted.
The films third major star is Herbert Lom as Van Helsing. Lom probably comes off the best of the three but that isn’t saying much. He’s confined to a wheelchair towards the end of the film, the explanation given being an off-camera stroke, though it was probably due to Herbert being incapacitated for some reason. There is a confrontation between Lom and Lee at the film’s climax that should have been one of the few high points but as the actors shot there scenes completely independent of each other any spark between them is lost.
The films best scene, for entirely the wrong reasons, has the intrepid vampire hunters Harker, Seward and Morris, terrorised by a room full of stuffed animals. It’s unintentionally hilarious and brings to mind the dear’s head in Evil Dead but manages to make that film look like a big budget Hollywood blockbuster by comparison.
In an interview on the DVD, Franco berates both Coppola’s Dracula and the Hammer series, claiming that his is the better and more faithful film. While the film may be more faithful than those versions, after its opening sequence it’s far from true to the book and as a piece of cinema can’t hold a crucifix to most other versions of the film.
