Yes ladies and gents, it's Hammer time here in the Tomb Of Anubis. No, MC Hammer (or "Mc Hammer" depending on your sense of humor) isn't making a return to these hallowed Hells, as the "Funky Headhunter" was banished long ago for not bringing me tithings of parachute pants on his last visit back in 1993… no one comes to my Tomb without gifts damn it… Where was I? Oh yeah, Hammer Studios. Sorry, parachute pants have a tendency to pull daring daylight heists on my train of thought at times like this. Right, anyway, for those keeping track, this is in fact the first movie from England's fabled Hammer House Of Horrors to ever be reviewed on this site. It's appropriate too, considering it's probably their most well-known and most fan-beloved flick to come from the archives. It also stars their two big sellers, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in one of their many collaborations, so that doesn't hurt the flick's plus points neither. However, is this all lip service? Have these praises been sowed by a couple of REALLY ambitious people who just like Cushing and Lee for no apparent reason and have nothing else to do with their lives? Well, I'm about to discover if these two Limeys are really worthy of their status as horror legends, so let us venture now into the lair of darkness. Careful, the bats don't suck blood around here, but they leave wicked hickies.

It's the good ol' days of 1885, the year the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Army joined forces to quell an uprising by a rebellious group of Metis and Indians, hanging their leader, Louis Riel, and pissing off a lot of French-Canadians. 1885, when you might have been witness to a baseball game between the Philadelphia Quakers and the Boston Beaneaters and neither team had a player worth more than $5 a game. One person that wasn't concerned with Canadian revolutions or National League teams with quirky titles was Mr. Jonathan Harker, as he was too busy in Transylvania's Carpathian Mountains. Why would someone be busy in the Carpathian Mountains? Well, for Mr. Harker, it's employment he seeks in them haunted hills, though not as a miner or a shepherd or even as the guy who blows those big horns and shouts "Riiiiiiiiiiiiiicolaaaaaaaaaa!". No, Johnny's got his sights set on a far more illustrious career as a librarian to a local baron! Yep, from now on he'll be rollin' in the good life, washin' his pits with the spoils that come with sorting books in some eccentric's castle! Trust me guys, you're all jealous, you just don't realize it yet, cuz it takes time for shit like this to sink in to a non-librarian's head. So, like I was saying, Mr. H has a new gig librarianizing for a very important occupant of the Carpathian neighborhood. And the name of that very important gentleman? Why it's Count Dracula of course, you thunderously ignorant dolts! Why the fuck else do you think the movie's called "Horror Of Dracula"?! Seriously kids, sometimes your ignorance and short attention spans annoy the crap out of me, moreso than my own ignorance and short attention span… what was I saying? Oh, right, Dracula. For those who didn't believe me when I was hyping Harker's librarian job, you're soon shown the folly of your ignorance when John's approached by a rather busty brunette! She's all over our wormy little hero like Ron Jeremy's man juices on his latest XXX intern! But, don't enroll yourself in book keeping school just yet guys, because this woman's more interested in getting John to help liberate her from the castle than she is for some of that infamous librarian lovin'. But, before the lovely lady can reveal to us what the crazy old rich guy with the fangs has been subjecting her to, speak of the devil and he shall appear. Scaring the pair of swollen mammaries with lips away, Drac introduces himself to his new young ward, then escorts him to his bedroom… no, the guest room in which he'll be staying, not the Count's "House Of Man Love And Leather Bondage" room… honestly, the things your enfeebled, perversion driven minds can come up with… now, imagine a female midget in a tooth fairy costume having anal sex with a giraffe… What?! I didn't say anything…

After the Count excuses himself and leaves John to his own devices, Harker has a little "dear diary" time, which helps to inform us that, unlike his previous cinematic incarnations, this guy KNOWS what Dracula really is! Not only that, but he intends to put an end to his nocturnal ways to boot, meaning that he's no mild mannered practitioner of the Dewey Decimal System, but a wormy little vampire hunter! In his effort to stay up all night like a little kid on Christmas, John's distracted from his duties by that same paranoid brunette, whom he doesn't yet realize is actually one of the Count's brood. She tries seizing the moment and sticking her own pair of elongated canines into the hero, but is neckblocked when her master once again interferes, bitch slapping her like a circa-1970s pimp before choking out Harker. Mr. H wakes up later in his bed, fresh perforations on his jugular vein and doomed for eternity. He won't go quietly though, as he's determined to travel out into the sun's radiation to find Dracula's hidden resting place and stake him before the next night falls. It's not exactly an Easter egg hunt to find Drac's resting place either, as Jonathan locates the tomb with almost no effort, bringing with him the standard wooden stakes and mallet. He pulls a major boner though, when he opts to kill the she-beast first instead of the head cheese (mmmmm, head cheese), alerting the count to his presence and sealing his spot on the vampire's list of hapless victims. The daylight disappears in an instance (hmmmm, must be those 2 hour days that Transylvania's famous for) and Dracula's soon hovering at the entrance, his eyes bloodshot to Hell, seething at the mouth as "the hero's fucked" music plays in the background. Sorry John, you might as well be trying to pitch a tent with that stake and mallet, cuz you're royally screwed now. Having killed Drac's woman, you know he's going to be looking for a new personal bitch for late night feedings and luring new guests, and I wouldn't want to be John in that position… in any sense of the word.

The following day we meet the film's real hero, Jonathan's pal, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, "Abe" to his friends, "Dr. Van Helsing" to his patients and "a secure line of paychecks" to Peter Cushing. The good doctor appears at a local village inn to an unfriendly welcome, especially when he makes mention of his search for friend Jonathan. However, amidst the sea of crooked stares and unhappy frowns, he does meet a waitress who helps out by giving him a little something… no, not one of those… no, she gives him John's diary, which she uncovered at the nearby crossroads leading to Dracula's 19th century swingers pad! Making haste to the castle, Abe's nearly turned into street casserole by a runaway horse-drawn carriage upon arrival! No surprise comes when the carriage also happens to be carrying an ivory casket… Despite this event, Abe enters the palace like it was his own, letting himself in (must be a friendly neighborhood for them to leave the front gate unlocked like that) to search for his friend John. After finding a broken picture frame holding a torn photo of John's fiancé Lucy, Abe discovers what's left of John down in the cellar, stiff, pale and chilling in a casket… get it, "chilling"?! Hahahahahahahahah!… find, don't laugh… you're only hurting the feelings of a psychotic axe murderer you'll never meet… you hope… and what kind of guy murders axes anyway? Also in the basement, Van Helsing finds the still decaying remains of the broad John put his wood to before his demise… guess the garbage men don't make many trips to pick up Dracula's trash, do they? Before he leaves, Abe stakes his friend and spares him the "torment" of life as an immortal being with incredible powers… gee Abe, if you did that to me, I'd haunt you for the rest of your life… then I'd haunt your children for the rest of their lives, and make your attractive young daughter fall in love with me and drop out of medical school so she could get a job as a waitress supporting me and the 4 kids of mine she bares while I sit home all day eating Nachos, drinking Yoohoos™ and watching repeats of "The Price Is Right".

Arriving back in his home offices in London England, Abe is besieged by the paranoid questioning of Lucy's brother and her sister-in-law, who want to know what's become of John and why. But, where's the Count in all of this? Why, in John's absence he didn't want Lucy to go without a big strong man to take care of her, so he's planted his own claim on the pretty young lady's "tracts of land", at least once since Abe's been gone. SO, while Abe's busy talking to himself and reviewing his notes on the mythos of the lecherous undead, Dracula's using his suave old rich guy powers to lay the woo down on Lucy's tender mercies. As a result, the local physicians decide Lucy's recent state of paler-than-normal skin and her lack of plasma (say a few quarts?) are a result of anemia… which she apparently just picked up somewhere… right, and I bet these guys would've labeled the Black Plague as bad pink eye infestation. Anyway, when Abe hears about this he offers a second, almost as unbelievable diagnosis: vampirism. This does little more than get his legitimacy as a doctor questioned by everybody in town, but just in case, Lucy's family is given specific orders to follow to help prevent any further undead STDs from coming her way while he goes around looking to exterminate the cause of the problem. Sure enough, to prove the incompetence of "the help" and ruin their profession for real maids and butlers everywhere, the family's housekeeper disregards the doctor's orders when Lucy complains of uncomfortable reactions to the garlic and wolfsbane dressing her bedside. She goes even further to embarrass herself and endanger her employers when she opens the big balcony window at Lucy's proclamation of it being "stuffy" in her room and she needs fresh air. NO shock when she's found dead in her sheets the following daybreak, and even less shock when her dickweed brother Arthur places all of the blame squarely on the thin and dainty shoulders of Dr. Van Helsing, until the doc shows Arthur John's diary, making the nit a believer and introducing him to the reality of the nightmare he's just been entered into… I hate it when people prove me wrong like that. They don't just prove me wrong, but they basically say, "hey, not only are you wrong about this, but your dog's dead and your wife's been cheating on you with your sister" while doing so… and I'm not wearing any pants while this is happening either…

Being snob's, Lucy's family doesn't do the right thing and burn her corpse. Instead they let her rest shortly before coming back as a vampire herself. Her first target upon her transformation is her niece Rachel, proving that men aren't the only one with the disturbing potential to attack the weak and underaged. Her mealtime is denied her though, as Abe intervenes in typical heroic fashion (i.e. "at the last minute), brandishing an overly gaudy silver crucifix with which to fend off the sick bloodsucker. They don't call him honest Abe for nothing!… oh wait, that was a different Abe… Abe Vigoda! Heh heh…. Nevermind. After staking Lucy, Abe and Arthur read over John's diary once more and Abe brings Arthur up to speed on the truths and myths of Dracula and his "unholy cult"… hmmmm, a one man cult… if Chuck Manson had done that, he'd have been laughed at and treated like a clown… and not in the John Wayne Gacey definition of a clown either. While Abe and Arthur set out on their two man mission to uncover Dracula's hiding spot and finish this once and for all, Arty's wife Mina gets a message to meet him at the local funeral home.. even for a naive 19th century British tart, this woman's ignorant beyond her own reach. I'll bet even you Scream pussies out there can guess who she finds really sent her the message when she arrives at the funeral home… go on, guess, it's not a hard one… ok, fine, I'll tell you, she finds Dracula, are you happy now? I hope you're proud, you've ruined Christmas AND my review. The following day, it appears that Abe and Arty have narrowed down their adversary's hiding spot to the local mortician's business, but when they search the basement, they find his nifty ivory casket has disappeared. So, uhm, now where'd he go?! While pondering this quagmire back at vampire hunter headquarters (i.e. Arty and Mina's house), something peculiar happens to clue in the good guys that something's really wrong here: Mina's hand is burned by her husband's crucifix. Yes, now that they know she's Drac's latest lady of the night, Mina's used for bait to lure the Count back for the final kill. Problem being though, when the two manly (well, as manly as a couple of British guys can be I guess) men are out patrolling the grounds of the property, Mina STILL gets a visit from her new stiff corpse lover boy! How can that be possible?! Unless he's been inside the house all this time to begin with… say in the basement? I can understand how Arthur probably feels in this situation. When my wife not only has affairs with zombies, but says it's okay for them to move into our basement, that's where I put my foot down and firmly (but politely) ask that the proceedings stop… to which she always laughs… well, at least we've got an understanding and an open line of communication, so I guess our relationship's not completely bad…

With his secret uncovered by the proverbial Sherlock and Watson collaboration of Abe and Arthur, Dracula and his bloodshot eyes grab Mina and make the great escape back to his castle with the help of his speeding funeral carriage. I'd say it's gotta be almost 1200 horse power, but there aren't nearly that many equine escorts… yes, bad one, I know, and I deserve a 12 inch sliver of oak to my left lung for it too, but we'll talk about that later. At the castle, Dracula buries his lady in a shallow grave for semi-safe keeping until the sun can rise, ending the night and making Mina just another one of his long-toothed 'hoes. Before that can happen, our dynamic duo make the save, as Abe and his arch-enemy brawl it out, soccer hooligan rules, to some of that classic old skool frantic chase music. The fight finally comes to a close though, when Van Helsing uses a makeshift crucifix out of two silver candlesticks to pin the count down as the sun rises and flash fries the fiend in a scene that actually makes me long for modern day make-up FX. If I ever become a vampire, remind me never to stock my lair with shit that can be used against me, like silver candlesticks. As for Mina, she's cured of her illness and the day is saved for a slew of sequels to lag along behind as Hammer's first chapter of the Count's sorted exploits comes to a close. First things first, I like the end of this movie, not because it signal's the film's ending, and certainly not for the horrible FX work as Dracula is turned to an ashen corpse, but because it's the most lethal use of a pair of candlesticks this side of a Clue™ tournament gone ugly! But, again, it doesn't seem too smart of a big deal Nosferatu like the Count here to have silver decorative items, since the 47th Element of the Periodic Table is supposed to be one of the banes of the undead. Well, like I always find myself saying in times of defense: just because he's the king of the dead doesn't mean his common sense hasn't expired like so much spoiled milk. One non-story based thing that stuck in my ass like a crown of thorns in this flick was one of the rooms in Dracula's castle. The rest of the place looks like a perfectly normal castle: dark, stone, torches, feeling of being really old but still really sturdy, like the bloodsucker himself, yet there's this one room that's featured prominently in terms of set usage that just doesn't fit the rest of the motif! In what I can only refer to as the lobby to Castle Dracula, we see this horrible '60s art-deco theme going on, with blue velvet drapes (and no, it's got nothing to do with David Lynch), a wallpaper that looks floral in pattern, and a row of low hanging arched doorways that are just there in the middle of the room, not as part of a wall or anything. Additionally, there are also these decorative pillar structures that resemble large sticks of Little Caesars ("Pizza! Pizza!") crazy bread with a coat of white paint. My guess is that Drac hired an interior decorator to spruce up his place a little, but when he got back from vacationing in Aruba and discovered the limp wristed fruit in charge was turning it into a sleazy '60s gay swingers' club, he flipped his shit and made a meal out of him! I was wondering where Renfield was after all… Odd thing too, considering this is 75 years before the 1960s even began…

Professionally, things could've been better handled from my P.o.V. As for the acting, the guy who plays Arthur is a little overly hammy. He's so serious to the point that, well, it's not really even serious anymore! Then of course there's Christopher Lee, a man whose career has pretty much been made from him looking menacingly at the camera with bloodshot eyes and blood dripping from his maw. Big deal, I look like that after a couple healthy bong hits and an overly ketchuped Oscar Mayer to calm my munchies, so how come I'm stuck sitting here poisoning my reproductive system with computer monitor radiation while the 80 year-old Lee is still enjoying huge success, playing an economy sized part in three of the biggest movies from in the past year (Star Wars: Episode II and the first two installments of Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings Trilogy)?! Bah, fuck it. As for the rest of the cast, everyone seemed to work to their necessity, with Peter Cushing taking the show as the cool headed slayer of beasts Abe Van Helsing… though Anthony Hopkins would play a much more imposing version some 30+ years later in Bram Stoker's Dracula. The direction was effective, albeit a little suburban by today's standards of dizzying action shots and crooked panning. But, take into consideration this was over 4 decades ago and it's none too shabby. Director Terence Fisher went on to full schedule after Horror Of Dracula, doing many more movies in the years until his death in 1980, including of course a meaty fistful of more features for Hammer. As for my final judgment? Horror Of Dracula works on a fair number of levels, which is a feat alone when you consider the hundreds upon thousands of flicks based on Stoker's original horror tome. But, the over-hyping of the movie by fans and my confusion over how this small and near speechless role could get Christopher Lee more fanfare for a few strands of his 80 year old ass hair than I could get for my entire Godly wrath just cuts off more of the praise. Maybe it's me. Maybe I just don't "get" the Hammer movies. Whatever the stories the psychoanalysts will tell at my Supreme Court trial, I just think it's all overrated, and so stands the ruling of Anubis, God of Death, Embalming and Spooky Roller Discos the cosmos over!

Also Known As: Dracula

Sequels: The Brides Of Dracula; Dracula: Prince Of Darkness; Dracula Has Risen From The Grave; Scars Of Dracula; Taste The Blood Of Dracula; Dracula A.D. 1972; Satanic Rites Of Dracula

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: Dracula or Curse Of Frankenstein