Vampires by Charles Butler Page B

seventies; but, while it is great to see the well shot fanging sequences, it is implausible to think that he can even venture out of the church without alerting everyone to his presence.
    Peter Cushing has his third stab at Van Helsing. This time he plays not one, but two versions of the professor and neither are related to the adventurer of Dracula and The Brides of Dracula . He is brought in on the case when his granddaughter, Jessica, is questioned concerning the murder of her friend Laura Bellows (Caroline Munro), after the previous evening’s satanic ritual inaugurated by the mysterious Johnny Alucard. Laura has been found drained of blood on a building site nearby St. Bartolphs deconsecrated church and Van Helsing immediately suspects vampires are at work. A simple anagram is solved;
    A  L  U  C  A  R  D
    D  R  A  C  U  L  A
    and the professor realizes that his grandfather’s old enemy, Dracula, is the real culprit. The patter between Van Helsing and Jessica is very interesting when one scrutinizes the rest of the film. She has already referred to him as an anthropologist and when Van Helsing asks that she bring her friends to meet him she replies:
    “Bring them here to this mausoleum?”
    Interestingly, this is the same adjective that John Forbes-Robertson’s Count would later use when describing his castle retreat in Transylvania in The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires where Cushing would play his final Van Helsing characterization. Jessica states that they are just a group of friends, but Michael Coles’ Inspector Murray dockets their crimes and has Laura’s prints on file for possession of marijuana. Jessica confides to granddad that she “never drops acid, never shoots up and is not sleeping with anyone at the moment” Van Helsing swallows her explanations and her admittance of drinking the odd half pint of lager every now and then. The film never explains what became of Jessica’s real parents, or even what happened to Van Helsing’s lineage. He keeps an oil portrait of himself looking more like the Baron Frankenstein in his study next to a woodcut of Christopher Lee’s Count, but there are no pictures of baby Lorrimar with Mum and Dad at Brighton Beach for example. In fact, Van Helsing seems to have grown up in the one room studying his vampire and waiting for the inevitable confrontation. The script tells us that he has helped the police in the past with a case involving witchcraft and blackmail but he is as much a prisoner amongst his studies as is his nemesis in the unhallowed ground of the deconsecrated church. Both are characters out of their time. Van Helsing describes in detail that “ the vampire abhors silver” and that “ garlic is not 100 percent reliable .” He also adds the tidbit that vampires can be revived if someone removes the stake from their hearts and changes his overcoat for a snazzy suede jacket and gloves to combat them.
    The ‘ group of friends’ spend their own time drinking in The Cavern, the club made famous in the sixties by being patronized by The Beatles who played almost 300 gigs there but, in 1972, had already disbanded two years previously. Johnny Alucard is their leader and his name spelled backwards is Dracula. This obvious alias was first used in Universal’s Son of Dracula (1942). Johnny is a real cad, but Christopher Neame plays the role very well. Sat amongst his partying friends like A Clockwork Orange’s Alex DeLarge, he is sly, silent, slimy, conceited and ever watchful. No one knows where he came from or even where he lives, but he does live life on the very edge. He sleeps in a trunk in his bachelor pad that is located upstairs so that the sun can shine straight into the bathroom while he showers! He can pinpoint exact the time it takes the police to raid a house before everyone has to scarper to listen to a more modern band than Stoneground and he enjoys upsetting old ladies by breaking their best china, just when they think that he is