The Prince was Back

So I started at the bottom of the pile of my recently recovered Hammer films and I watched 1966's Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Supposedly, star Christopher Lee, who returned to the role of Dracula after first playing him in Hammer's 1958 Dracula, thought the dialogue was so bad he refused to utter any of it. So he's basically a silent part. It's not one of Hammer's best Dracula movies but I do like it better than the first. There's not really any depth or interesting sexual subtext to the four English tourists who wind up in Dracula's castle and resurrecting him. I do kind of like that it's the asshole among them, Francis Matthews as Charles Kent, who manages to survive. Fussy prude Barbara Shelley gets recruited by Dracula and becomes a lot more fun as a ham-handed temptress.

The fact that Dracula never speaks somehow makes it even funnier that he's constantly annoyed by how she jumps the gun. Just a couple words of greeting thinly spread over clear, weird lust and then she pounces on Diana (Suzan Farmer).

But the best stuff happens in the last portion of the film set at a monastery. The first film didn't have a proper Renfield character but this one has Ludwig, played by Thorley Walters, who's usually comic relief.

He has no jokes here except when he hastily swallows a fly before some people enter his room. And that works out to be nicely disturbing rather than funny. He seems like he inspired a fair bit of Coppola's Renfield played by Tom Waits.

Another thing I think Coppola took from this movie was Dracula having a girl suck blood from his chest.

I wonder if this was in fact the first vampire movie to do this. It really is disturbing, too.

It's a shame Dracula is defeated by running water in this film. Hammer rarely seemed to treat Lee's Dracula with the respect he deserved.

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