Vampires by Charles Butler Page A

beneath the earth in unconsecrated ground. The camera moves up as the credits roll and an airplane tears across the sky. One hundred years later and a group of friends led by the mysterious Johnny Alucard decide to have fun by calling on the Devil through a black mass. Johnny is the descendant of Dracula. One of the friends is Jessica Van Helsing. In the course of the ritual, Johnny calls on Jessica to join him as the sacrifice, but a friend, Laura, decides that she wants to be the sacrifice. When the blood starts flowing, the teenagers exit the old church but Laura is bitten by the newly restored Count. The next day, Johnny Alucard tells his flock that Laura has taken a trip out to see her parents, but schoolchildren find her body discarded on a building site, drained of blood. When Jessica is questioned, her grandfather, Lorrimar Van Helsing, realizes the dangers involved. More girls disappear and Johnny Alucard is given power by Dracula. He kidnaps Jessica and is destroyed by Van Helsing who tracks him down to his student digs and drowns him in the shower. Asking the police for one hour before sunset, Van Helsing sets a trap for Dracula in the shape of a pit primed with stakes. Jessica lies on the sacrificial altar as Dracula rises. Van Helsing stabs the Count with a silver dagger, but the hypnotized Jessica removes the blade. Van Helsing runs out into the churchyard and Dracula falls into the freshly dug pit to be impaled on the stakes and to wither down to dust. Jessica revives from her hypnosis and is comforted by her grandfather .
    Review
    Urged by the failure of Scars of Dracula, Hammer ingested fresh blood into the franchise yet again. It begins ominously with an adventure situated in the Victorian era, 1872, as Professor Lawrence Van Helsing battles frantically atop a runaway coach with his nemesis Dracula.
    “The year 1872,” intones the voice over, “And the nightmare legend of Count Dracula extends its terror far beyond the mountains of Carpathia, to the Victorian metropolis of London. Here, in Hyde park, the final confrontation between Lawrence Van Helsing and his arch enemy, the demon vampire, Dracula!”
    This frantic set-piece is obviously geared towards the fans who had enjoyed Terence Fisher‘s original stories. Cushing’s Van Helsing wears a fetching gray wig and sideburns that gives a nod to Bram Stoker’s original character as opposed to the efficient Cambridge MD of earlier treatments. One wonders that if we ever got the chance to hear him speak, would he use the Dutch intonation that he shirked from in 1958? These questions are left unanswered as the coach slams into a nearby tree. The occupants are thrown clear and the professor wakens to realise that his foe has been impaled on the spoke of the broken wheel. Using enormous effort, Van Helsing snaps the wheel away to leave the debris piercing the monster’s heart. Dracula dissolves pre-credits as Van Helsing dies at the scene. Racing along the same country road is an unidentified young man in the service of Dracula. Giving a contemptuous glance to Cushing’s fallen hero, he scoops up the blood of the vampire in a glass phial, depositing it in the foundations of a newly built church next to the funeral that is being performed for the fallen vampire kller, Lawrence Van Helsing:
     
    Gravestone legend:
     
     
    Lawrence Van Helsing
    Born July 12 th 1814
    Died September 18 th 1872
    “Requiescat In Pace Ultima”
    As the camera pans to the sky, we see a jet airplane appear and a rousing hip score begins on the soundtrack. We are propelled forward 100 years in a matter of seconds to London 1972, specifically Chelsea; or, more specific, a Chelsea that seems to have been forged from the hype of the swinging sixties. The characters in AD1972 are as unbelievable as the concept of a vampire living in a nearby deconsecrated church. Hammer was trying very hard to bring Dracula to modern times in answer to the Count Yorga and Blacula movies of the early