Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
Posted: October 28th, 2022, 9:58 am
And a more recent BBC article on Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972):
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/202 ... he-hippies
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/202 ... he-hippies
No argument from me about the inferior quality of Hammer Films' final two Dracula flicks. That said, I have a fondness for Dracula A.D. 1972 because of the memorable circumstances under which I saw it.jameselliot wrote: ↑April 22nd, 2023, 12:15 pm AD and Satanic are two Hammer Draculas I have no interest in rewatching. In AD, he never leaves the dilapidated church and enters the modern world. Most of the run time is Alucard and his Mod girlfriends. The opening fight is the only interesting moment. The Yorga films handled the concept of a European Dracula-style vampire in then-current society with some freshness. While I'm not a Hammer expert like Richard Klemensen, I would guess that the box office take of Yorga influenced Hammer to produce AD.
"At first I honestly thought that the 70s setting wouldn't work for Dracula, that he's strictly a 'period' character. Then I thought, the novel, written in 1897, was contemporary to its time, and that only in retrospect do we see the character in period. But can we really have Dracula riding on a bus? I thought that, within limits, it might work. The series certainly needed something new. Dracula was kept isolated in a Victorian setting, the church, while modern London existed outside, which gave us, I thought, the best of two worlds. We kept Dracula in the church and brought 1972 to him. Those scenes -- because Peter [Cushing] was in them -- worked. The rest didn't. The whole idea of 'swinging London' was already dated, and the clothing, mannerisms, and dialogues of the 'teenagers' was all wrong. Some ideas simply look better in the script than they do on the screen." -- Christopher Lee, The Christopher Lee Filmography