Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)

A year after Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) is killed by freezing him in the rivers of the mountain where he keeps his castle, the people of the surrounding town still feel his presence.  In fact, they will not even attend the local church because the shadow of the castle falls upon it.  Monsignor Ernest Mueller (Rupert Davies) intends to do something about this and forces the local priest (Ewan Hooper) to guide him to the castle so he can perform the rite of exorcism.

The Monsignor succeeds, but the priest takes a drunken fall and the ice in which Dracula is encased shatters.  The priest's blood falls into the Count's mouth and... well, you can pretty much guess from the title.  Dracula quickly makes a Renfield out of the priest, but is not too happy about the cross on his doorstep and decides to take revenge against the Monsignor.

Thinking that evil has finally been banished from the town the Monsignor returns to his own house with his sister Anna (Marion Mathie) and her daughter Maria (Veronica Carlson).  Maria is being courted by a young student named Paul (Barry Andrews) who does not impress the Monsignor at all due to the fact that he is an atheist.

The priest leads Dracula to the Monsignor, and the count quickly goes about his business, possessing the barmaid Zena (Barbara Ewing) and using her to bring Maria to him.  After that fails, Zena is dispatched and Dracula decides to take care of things himself, drinking from Maria in her own house.  The second attempt is thwarted by the Monsignor, but he is stopped in his pursuit of Dracula by the priest.  Now his only hope of saving Maria lies in trusting Paul, despite his lack of faith.

This is definitely one of the best entries in Hammer's series of Dracular films.  Christopher lee is menacing, the makeup work (Lee's bloodshot eyes, the infected bites) quite advanced for the time period and there is quite a bit of general humor as well as action here.  Yes, it is a typical Dracula story, in some ways mirroring Stoker's original (the priest is Renfield, Zena is Lucy, etc.).  Only problem I have is the moralistic Christian bent, but that was to be expected.

My wife and I had a discussion about who was the best Dracula.  I think we both came to the agreement that it is Lee over Lugosi (although I wanted to argue Gary Oldman did a hell of a job), and this particular film goes a long way to sealing that argument.  And I should mention that this is the first movie ever to be rated by the MPAA.  It's rating?  G.  And it makes the limp PG-13 stuff made these days look like Disney films.

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Time: 92 minutes
Starring: Christopher Lee, Barry Andrews, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson
Director: Freddie Francis


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more