Some people love the needle, some people love the ponies.  Some people love the experience of pain, some people love bringing pain to others.  Me, I love DRACULA AD 1972.

Isn’t that a great title?  Not only is it functional – it tells you who the movie’s about and when it takes place – but by now it’s nearly 40 years out of date and there’s nothing sweeter than topicality that has gone way past its sell-by date.  I don’t really go for the “so bad it’s good” school of film appreciation but DRACULA AD 1972 really is so good because it’s so bad.  Bad-ASS!  Watch the opening titles and you’ll get a sense of how guh-roovy this Hammer Studios joint really is…

There’s a prologue before this sequence, set in 18-something-something, in which Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) and Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) go tooth and nail atop a runaway horse-drawn carriage, which crashes, spilling the combatants, impaling Dracula on the spokes of one of the wagon wheels and mortally wounding the good Professor.  After watching the vampire die, Van Helsing succumbs and we go into the opening credits.

As a kid, it threw me for a loop that the hero of DRACULA AD 1972 dies in the opening reel.  Where, I wondered, are we going to go from here?  Well, as it turns out, we join Van Helsing’s ancestor, Van Helsing, who is about the same age as his forefear was at the time of his own death, as he picks up the trail of the newly resurrected Count Dracula in then-present day London.  A Chelsea hipster Satanist named Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neme) uses a gaggle of coffee shop hippies (among them, Stephanie Beacham, between THE NIGHTCOMERS and DYNASTY and OUT OF AFRICA‘s Michael Kitchen) as Dracula’s personal blood bank, hoping for immortality for himself.

Of course it doesn’t work out for the evil-doers but it’s fun while it lasts.  I don’t really care about the story — it’s standard stuff — but it’s always a joy watching Peter Cushing do his job and just knowing that Christopher Lee absolutely hated, hated playing Dracula by this point makes it kind of compelling.  We all know what it’s like to go to a job we hate but imagine if yours required you to wear a cape, fangs and bloodshot contact lenses.  Imagine that was your drudgery!  Oh, there’s so much about this movie to savor… the fab fashions, the look at London gearing up for the iron fist of Thatcherism, and the dialogue zingers out the whazoo, clearly written by middle-aged cranks with an over-fondness for Yiddishisms who had no idea what it was like to be free, white and 21 in swinging London AD 1972.  Says one hanger-on at a Satanic mass:  “If we do get to summon up the big daddy with the horns and the tail, he gets to bring his own liquor, his own bird and his own pot.”  And here’s the best scene of all…

Oh, it’s so gay that I have to bite myself while watching but I also can’t take my eyes off this scene.  And to be brutally honest, I’ve never been invited to a party that was this much fun.  But that’s kind of the DRACULA AD 1972 experience in a nutshell.  It’s queer, it’s misguided, it’s all wrong… and you’ll never find a better use for 96 minutes of your life.