I've gone through many phases in my many years of horror fandom, and Hammer films are my most recent passion. Hammer studios, for its time period, was very cutting edge stuff; the Universal monster movies of the '30s and '40s left a lot of the bad stuff up to your imagination, but Hammer gave us full color, gore in droves, and plenty of big breasted lasses to stare at. So, I guess you could say that this British film company was the precursor to slasher cinema. The hallmark of Hammer, though, was its love for the classic literary monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein, and their never-ending movie series that featured said characters behaving in ways we weren't used to seeing them behave.The Dracula films that Hammer produced definitely rank right up there with the best that the studio has to offer. A little over a year ago, I inducted the original film in the series Horror of Dracula into the now-defunct International Horror Registry. See, to get talk on Jon Lickness' blog site in the month of October, a few parameters must be set in place - it has to be genuinely scary, it has to be atmospheric, and it has to lend itself well to Halloween season viewing. That movie definitely fits all those criteria, and this flick isn't too far behind. While the second movie in the series (titled Brides of Dracula) had the plot thread of Peter Cushing as famed vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing laying the smack down on a few of Drac's disciples, Dracula: Prince of Darkness is more or less a direct sequel to the first film, and in a few ways tops it.
The film opens with a few shots of the closing moments from the original film, as Cushing disintegrates Count Dracula (Christopher Lee, still to this day the definitive Dracula in my book) into dust. Nearly ten years later, a young woman's dead body is being carried away by a small group of villagers for a precautionary staking before burial, as she is believed to carry the curse of vampirism. That's the thing about these Hammer Dracula films; vampirism is treated as either a cult, with small bands of hardcore vamps plotting to control Europe, or something, or as some sort of curse that people are destined to have. It's a refreshing change of pace from the way it's usually portrayed on film, at any rate.
Well, before the staking can be performed, Father Sandor (Andrew Keir) rides up to stop what he dubs a heresy. Immediately proving himself to be the Peter Cushing of Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Sandor warns four English tourists (two husband-and-wife combos, made up of brothers Charles and Alan and their wives Helen and Diana) staying at a local inn not to go to Carlsbad castle. Since this is a horror movie, you know how warnings from eccentric old priests work, and the four set out for Carlsbad. Along the way, their stage coach driver becomes frightened when the castle is visible and promptly dumps them in the middle of the woods before a driverless carriage shows up to take them to the creepy old castle in the distance. All signs pointing up for our heroes, huh?There's a whole tedious section here where the Kents skulk about the castle and strange things pile up (a table set for four people, and their golly-gee briefcases, which had been left on the carriage, located in the guest quarters). Soon enough, a mysterious man named Klove (Philip Latham) appears and serves them dinner in a way very much befitting the classic creepy butler character. He also admits that his former master (who is "dead now") was Count Dracula. The other thing that this scene is noteworthy for is that the female Kents finally remove their proper Victorian hats revealing that the actresses portraying them (brunette Helen, played by Barbara Shelly, and especially young blonde Diana played by Suzan Farmer) are perfect busty Hammer hot chicks.
In the middle of the night, Helen's husband Alan (Charles Tingwell) investigates a strange noise emanating from somewhere deep in the house and goes to investigate. Yes, this staple of bad horror film decision-making goes back pretty far. He's stabbed and killed by Klove, who then turns his body upside down and reveals that he has saved the ashes of Dracula from the original film. Then, in a move that had to be considered VERY shocking by 1966 standards, Klove slices the throat of the deceased Alan and watches the blood pour down onto the ashes, which resurrects the Count in a very Freddy Krueger-like sequence. He immediately makes quick work of Helen, giving her the ever-popular transforming bite before the screen fades to black.
Much as he is with pretty much all of the Hammer Dracula films, Christopher Lee plays your main villain and does an amazing job. He actually has ZERO spoken lines in this particular movie, and there's conflicting stories out there as to why this is. Lee himself claims that the scripted dialogue was horrible and refused to speak it, while writer Jimmy Sangster says that the character himself was badass enough that dialogue was unnecessary. My words, not his. At any rate, considering that we're in the middle of an era of romantic vampires who are (1) dreamy, and (2) sympathetic, it's always nice to go back and watch an unapologetically evil vampire the way that Lee portrays him in these films. A+++ for him.Soon enough, the remaining couple Diana and Charles (Francis Matthews, who kinda-sorta looks like Jude Law) do some deep searching for their traveling companions that lasts all of one minute before Klove shows up in disguise to transport them away from the castle. Of course, Klove has tricked them, promptly taking them back to the castle where they run into reanimated Dracula and Helen (who just like all women in this series is MUCH hotter in vampire form) for the first of many tense sequences. In short, the duo escape, and eventually make their way back to the monastery where Father Sandor (remember him?) resides, setting up the final act of the film.
The director of this movie is Terrence Fisher, a pretty well-known luminary to fans of British horror in general. He also helmed the two films that precede this one in the Hammer Dracula chronology, as well as many other films in the Hammer canon. I touched on it in the review for Horror of Dracula, but the guy is just ungodly when it comes to creating atmosphere, making the European countrysides and dark castles that make up the settings of this movie seem vibrant and alive when they need to be and all-consuming and constricting when the time comes for things that go bump in the night. As a result, this is definitely a film series, as a whole, that lends itself especially well to Halloween season viewing; it's the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (the short story, not that interminable Tim Burton movie) of the movie world in terms of atmosphere.
Of course, for more well-versed Hammer fans, this movie is a treat by doing many of the same things that other films in the series do. Watching this series was very much akin to the '80s Friday the 13th experience; you knew what you were getting, and you knew it was gonna be good. Much of it has to do with Lee; in the mind of this reporter, he's the definitive big-screen Dracula, as I've always found Bela Lugosi's portrayals to be very overrated. This guy is seductive without being emo, and in the many scenes where he seems to have some kind of hypnotic power over the big-breasted women who populate the Hammer universe (see above for photographic proof), you buy it completely, because the guy's presence is just that strong. And he's a bad motherfucker in scenes where he's beating the crap out of the stodgy character actors who make up his enemies. It's a delicate balancing act, I tell ya.Not to say that this movie is perfect. The two guys playing Charles and Alan Kent, while doing their damndest, come across more as pale imitations of the immortal Peter Cushing and Michael Gough tandem from Horror of Dracula. In addition, the storyline isn't quite as compelling overall; Horror is fascinating in the way it that it twists around the characters and roles from the novel, while Brides deals more directly with the "cult of vampirism," which makes the movie a little bit more interesting in and of itself. Dracula: Prince of Darkness is an exercise in simplicity; it's the most badass of the badass Draculas vs. Victorian times films once again, but as we see in the good moments of this film (and there are plenty - the resurrection scene, the battle in the castle crypt, and the finale where Dracula gets his being standouts), sometimes familiary isn't a bad thing.
*** 1/2 out of ****. In a movie series consisting of nine feature films and being the virtual [i]Friday the 13th[/i] of its time period, it's still the best sequel in the series and a prime slice of classical vampire action.
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