Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
(On Cable TV, October 2021) What’s fun about Hammer Studio films of circa-1970 is how free they felt to play with the elements of the monster mythos they were inspired by. Having delivered the origin story, they could head in different directions with familiar characters and settings, meaning that we get new stories featuring classic monsters but—this may be the most crucial element of them all—actors that were very comfortable with audiences and with their roles. So it is that Christopher Lee, once more, steps into the shoes of Dracula in Taste the Blood of Dracula—albeit reluctantly and after a good chunk of the film is over, as the producers wanted to head in a different direction but were eventually convinced to get Lee back. The resulting story is disjointed, but it has enough sex (via brothel) and death to make fans happy. The setting is once more somewhere in mysterious 19th century Eastern Europe, but the plot elements will be familiar to Stoker fans. Despite its outlandish title, Taste the Blood of Dracula is not that good, but it is both slightly novel and comfortable at once. The more I’m seeing of that era’s Hammer films, the more I’m convinced that there’s a Hammer Blu-ray collection begging to be added next to my Universal Monster box-set.