Set 100 years after Lawrence Van Helsing killed Count Dracula in the midst of a thrilling carriage chase, A.D. Hammer as the world knew it then didn’t really survive the 1970s, but after 50 years, this film and others like it stand as a testament to the bonkers ambition of a studio throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck, and that imbues the whole endeavor with a joyful, unpredictable charm. 1972 is often as clunky as its title, but five decades after its release there’s a weird charm still hanging over the film and its mismatched elements. On paper, it was primed to be an epic, updated showdown between Hammer’s most recognizable male stars, set against a backdrop of youthful experimentation and sin in 1970s London. To sweeten the deal, the studio decided to reunite Christopher Lee’s Dracula with Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing for the first time since 1958’s Horror of Dracula, hoping audiences would latch onto the classic pairing. encouraged the studio to look at modern adaptations of their iconic monsters, which led screenwriter Don Houghton to draft a tale which followed Dracula’s resurrection in modern-day London. Inspired by the success of American International’s Count Yorga, Vampire, Hammer distributor Warner Bros. Eventually, even the tried-and-true 19th-century settings of most of Hammer’s best-known horror films went away, which brings us to the strange, uneven effort that is Dracula A.D. The violence got just a bit more graphic, and the once-suggested sexuality of early Hammer Horror shifted into full-on nudity with films like The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil. Hammer’s formula, while still effective to the devoted, wasn’t casting the same spell over the jaded general audience anymore. Tastes had shifted through the psychological, slow-burn terror of Rosemary’s Baby and the DIY brutality of Night of the Living Dead. The movie landscape was shifting everywhere thanks to the 1960s and the dawn of films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, and horror films were not exempt. Hammer Studios was far away from Hollywood, but the New Hollywood movement changed it all the same.īy the 1970s, the legendary British film studio that struck gold in the 1950s with a series of revamps of classic monster movies overflowing with bright red blood and cleavage had begun to decline.
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