Vampires by Charles Butler

previous film to become a mature woman with more than a passing interest in her grandfather’s work than she showed earlier. Joanna Lumley is more convincing in the role of Van Helsing’s grand daughter and one of the first gutsy women in a horror movie although she does seem to have a mental lapse as she is reintroduced to Inspector Murray and doesn’t recall her adventure from the previous film. In true Purdey style, she traipses along the English countryside with Murray to Pelham House and invades the cellar where lie the sleeping vampires. While secret service officials are being shot down by invisible snipers, she is being mauled by Dracula’s fanged amours and she is later hypnotized and draped on Dracula’s altar to join him in his insane vendetta to destroy the world.
    Ms Lumley has an incredible list of accomplishments under her belt as a former model, a voice over artist, an author, a Human Rights activist and of course, an actress. Still constantly in work today, she began her acting career without formal training in 1969 and shot to fame in many British TV serials including The New Avengers , Sapphire and Steel and Absolutely Fabulous. Screen credits include On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), an uncredited role in Amicus’ The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and James and the Giant Peach (1996). She was awarded an OBE in 1995 and she is also a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society (FRGS). At the time of writing she is scheduled to appear on the big screen in Martin Scorcese’s crime drama, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) with Leonardo De Caprio.
    To give the film a James Bond feel there is able support from William Franklyn in turtle-neck sweater and sports jacket as head of the secret service. Like the police in Dracula AD1972, however, he doesn’t permit a full on raid on Pelham house when he realizes that snipers on motorbikes roam the area and vampires hide in the cellars. Again, someone in the continuity department obviously lost their hold on the plot. He is killed by a sniper’s bullet while on stakeout along with James Bond regular Richard Vernon. Dracula only gets to sink his fangs into one beauty in this movie. She is Jane, played by Valerie Van Ost, a government secretary who is nabbed by the bikers and held prisoner in one of the rooms in Pelham House. Dracula appears – this time followed by a swirling, suffocating mist – and turns her into one of the undead. Her death is still one of the most memorable of the Dracula series. When Jessica Van Helsing invades the cellar, Jane is shackled to the wall and staked savagely by Michael Coles and William Franklyn. This offers the adolescent viewer great titillation as a gory breast is revealed. Excellent.
    As the new wave of horror hit the USA with The Exorcist (1973) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) et al, The Satanic Rites of Dracula didn’t appear on their cinema screens until 1979 as Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride . This was in the wake of the vampire rush begun by John Badham’s rethink of the Hamilton Deane stage play Dracula and starring Frank Langella.
    For Christopher Lee it was definitely the final straw. He had played Dracula in all his guises. As well as his Hammer input, he had starred in Jess Franco’s clumsy El Conde Dracula/Count Dracula (1970), advertised as a faithful retelling of Stoker’s tale and in 1972 had starred as both Bram Stoker’s monster and the historical Vlad the Impaler in Pedro Portabella’s In Search of Dracula (1972). The Satanic Rites of Dracula would be his final Dracula movie. In 1976 he appeared as Les Prince De Tenebrae in Dracula, Pere et fils / Dracula and Son. He was knighted in 2010 and in 2011 he appeared in a film for the new Hammer studio, The Resident and was honoured with a BAFTA Fellowship. He had a small role in the revised version of Dark Shadows (2012 ), directed by Tim Burton and starring his friend, Johnny Depp as Barnabus. Lee