Dracula A.D. 1972 review.
This Dracula A.D. 1972 review is written in celebration of the film’s 50th anniversary. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing return to Dracula franchise for a movie that sells itself on a new concept…and then squanders it completely. Dracula jumps 100 years into the future…which is now 50 years in our past in Dracula A.D. 1972.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Dracula A.D. 1972
Directed by Alan Gibson
Written by Don Houghton
Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame and Michael Coles
Dracula A.D. 1972 Review
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing famously played Count Dracula and Van Helsing in Hammer Film’s Horror of Dracula in 1958. 14 years later they reunited in those roles for Dracula A.D. 1972. Well…kind of. Lee is still playing Dracula…for as little as we see him in the movie. Cushing spends most of the movie playing a descendant of his Van Helsing character living in 1972. I’ll keep pointing out that the movie is set in 1972 because the movie itself keeps forgetting it.
We begin in 1872. Dracula dies at the hands of Van Helsing. Van Helsing also dies in the encounter. This isn’t a recap of the ending of Horror of Dracula…and it doesn’t even make sense since Horror of Dracula is set in 1885. Anyway…a group of teens resurrect Dracula in 1972. Well…one teen who wants to bring him back and become a vampire does anyway. His friends are just there for the party.
One of those friends is Jessica Van Helsing. She would be the grand daughter of or 1972 Peter Cushing Van Helsing…and the great great granddaughter of the 1872 Van Helsing. I may have missed a great in there, but the movie doesn’t deserve it anyway. Dracula feeds on some teens while modern Peter Cushing Van Helsing works to save his granddaughter and stop Dracula once and for all. This isn’t confusing at all.
The main issue with Dracula A.D. 1972 is that there is almost no reason for it to even take place in 1972. Yes, it allows them to do some stuff with descendants of characters. But if I told you there was a movie coming out where a 19th century Dracula was brought into the modern day you would have a very different movie in your mind than Dracula A.D. 1972 gives you.
Dracula spends the whole movie just hanging out in a decrepit old church. Actually, he spends most of it not being on screen at all…but when we do see him it couldn’t look less like he has come to the modern world. The marketing was clearly centered around putting these classic characters into a modern tale. They don’t even bother to tell a modern story. Dracula doesn’t walk around discovering the differences between his time and this one. He doesn’t do much of anything but wait for his new sidekick to bring him a snack.
To make matters worse he is easily and swiftly defeated in the end…by…Van Helsing’s grandson? To be fair, this modern Van Helsing has studied all this and isn’t walking in blind…but what the hell? It takes him minutes upon finding the legendary vampire to finish him off. We also begin with an action sequence where Dracula is defeated. That at least comes with the understanding of it is happening at the end of a long battle with his arch nemesis that has gone on for years. Now he can’t survive his arch nemesis’s grandson for five minutes.
This movie feels like someone came up with the idea and managed to sell Lee and Cushing on returning…and then forgot to write a script. If you aren’t going to have Dracula in modern times…why bring him into modern times?
Time manages to compound these problems. Now 50 years on from the release of Dracula A.D. 1972 modern London looks like an aged relic not much out of time with the Dracula stories set a hundred years earlier. We can tell the difference when we are outside in the public square of course. Horses and buggies replaced by cars and all. But indoor settings look straight out the time period we are told we have left this time around. It’s an odd choice.
Aside from some of the unintentional humor of watching young British hippies overact their parts…there’s not a lot of fun going on here. What the movie has going for it is, unsurprisingly, the performances of Lee and Cushing. When the movie bothers to put them on screen, anyway. Lee still has his charismatic intense Dracula portrayal down. Even when the script is lacking. Cushing is always great as well. There just isn’t enough of either to make the slight, predictable script hum.
Scare Value
With talent like Lee and Cushing on board there is a floor to how bad a Dracula movie can be. Dracula A.D. 1972 finds it. Wasting its setting when it’s the main selling point is an odd choice. Why move Dracula into (then) modern times only to see him hang out in old buildings anyway? The concept of Van Helsing’s descendent having to slay a Dracula preying on the modern world is a strong one. Dracula A.D. 1972 does almost nothing with it.
2/5
