Taste the Blood of Dracula
by Peter Sasdy
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Christopher Lee, Geoffrey Keen, Gwen Watford, Linda Hayden, Peter SallisDirector: Peter Sasdy
Brand: LEE,CHRISTOPHER
Cinematographer: Arthur Grant
Editor: Chris Barnes
Producer: Aida Young
Writer: Anthony Hinds
Writer: Bram Stoker
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 91 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-04-27
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Taste the Blood of Dracula
Movie Review: One of the best vampire movies Hammer ever made.
Summary: 5 Stars
Taste the Blood of Dracula is, without a doubt, one of the best vampire films Hammer ever produced. That such a daft piece of dreck as Dracula A.D. 1972 can garner the same overall rating as Peter Sasdy's thrilling achievement is truly dispiriting. Even more astounding is the fact that the kiddies who lap up that film have the nerve to refer to this one as "cheese." (God, how I hate that word: it's right up there with "b-rated" and "campy.") But then this is a film that has only been truly appreciated by English critics (and even some of them claim it's over-rated). Ignore the scoffers: Taste the Blood of Dracula is one of the most revealing examinations of the Dracula myth and its relevance to Victorian society, and is fit to be placed alongside Sasdy's two other masterpieces: Countess Dracula and Hands of the Ripper.
Christopher Lee has alleged that starting with Dracula, Prince of Darkness, the screenwriters started plugging Dracula into scenarios rather than building the scenarios around Dracula. But this is not quite true: it only seemed this way to Lee because he apparently expected Dracula to take center stage. In point of fact, the sequels merely followed the format established in the original story: a narrative which presents us with a group of characters and which details their interrelations, with the figure of Dracula acting as a catalyst that unleashes dark psychic potentials in these good, upright Victorians. Granted, Hinds's screenplay for Taste the Blood pushed this approach about as far as it could go, so that Dracula becomes a pure sounding board against which the Victorian family could be examined in its relation to the sexual implications of vampirism. Still, what did Lee want? Sequels that would allow Dracula to chew the scenery, dissipating his effectiveness and turning him into a silly clown a la Freddy Krueger? Lee is a great actor and an intelligent man, but his attitude was simply too conservative. Thankfully, Hammer's screenwriters were more adventurous: if you risk nothing you get nothing in return.
Equally frustrating is Lee's complaint that they didn't go back to the book for Dracula's dialogue. This, too, confounds me: these are brand-new stories, despite the occasional scene or motif not used in Fisher's original film. Should the writers have crammed in Stoker's dialogue whether it fit the stories or not? It's not as if the Count has a surfeit of dialogue from which to draw: after the opening in Transylvania, his lines in the book are few and far between. Furthermore, Lee was charging by the line during the filming of this movie, which contributed to the paucity of screen time for his character. If they had gone back to the book and appropriated all the unused dialogue, would he have waived his fee?
The problem with half-witted films such as the aforementioned Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (a slight improvement over the other) is not so much the approach that was taken as that Hammer was no longer fabricating worthwhile scenarios relevant to the Dracula myth - largely due, no doubt, to the inferior writer-director team of Houghton and Gibson.
The movie that followed on the heels of Taste the Blood was Scars of Dracula. Some years back I dismissed it unfairly as low-rent and tawdry: in recent years I realize it's an impressive, though uneven, film, not quite equal to the sum of its parts. It's the one sequel which places Dracula at center-stage, much like Stoker's opening four chapters of the original novel. That Scars is not as successful as Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Taste the Blood of Dracula only confirms, to my mind, the sound approach taken by those two films, although I would place it on par with Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. Ironically, Lee has lambasted Scars because of its violence, the same old-fashioned attitude which caused him to recoil in dismay from Mario Bava's wonderful Twitch of the Death Nerve.
Well, that's my two cents, somewhat desultorily expressed, I admit. Now I urge you to buy this movie!
Summary of Taste the Blood of Dracula
No Description Available.Genre: Horror
Rating: PG
Release Date: 27-APR-2004
Media Type: DVD
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