Countess Dracula (1971)
"The more she drinks, the prettier she gets. The prettier she gets, the thirstier she gets."
Plot
In medieval Europe, the aging Countess Elizabeth rules over her kingdom with the help of her lover, Captain Dobi. However, one night she inadvertently discovers that bathing in the blood of young virgins makes her young again. She gets Dobi to start bringing her virgins with the promise that she will marry him. However, when she reverts back to a younger age than Dobi, she realises she desires to be someone just as young. Posing as her own daughter to fall in love with a handsome young soldier who was to marry her, the Countess must seek regular infusions of blood in order to keep the façade going.
What do you do when a posh white man with a fake set of fangs, a tatty black cape and more make-up than a drag queen convention becomes boring and unfashionable? Well that was the dilemma facing Hammer Film Productions at the end of the 1960s when their lucrative Dracula series had pretty much run its course. Well the answer was a pleasing one - get Hammer icon Ingrid Pitt in the buff on the big screen and pretend that she's the new threat facing impoverished Eastern European villagers. Sounds like an easy plan! 1970's The Vampire Lovers had seen Hammer dabble with female-fronted vampire flicks to great success and so Pitt was brought back to keep the punters flocking to the cinema.
Technically not a vampire film, Countess Dracula is based on the infamous story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a rich aristocrat from Hungary who is believed to have killed around 300 young girls in an attempt to look younger. The similarities with vampirism are evident enough, the only difference being that the countess here just murders her victims instead of sucking their blood. Slapping the 'Dracula' moniker on the film seems to have been a lame attempt to cash-in on previous successes and you kind of get the feeling the film would have been better off standing on its own two feet. Admittedly, Countess Dracula is a pretty slow and plodding affair - almost as if the flimsy premise of seeing Pitt naked as a 'vampire' was the only note on the script when filming began - and the attempts to bring the Bathory backstory to life (a great story ripe for a proper adaptation it has to be said) just fall flat. Whether it was the studio, the censors or the script, Countess Dracula seems to imply a lot more than actually happens. Yes, Elisabeth does kill a few virgins but outside of the blood baths, this is one of Hammer's least explicit films, a bizarre decision given how horror films were becoming more graphic in both sex and nudity during the 70s. Compared to the far superior The Vampire Lovers in both skin and blood, you'd assume that Countess Dracula had been the earlier of the two films.
Characters are always essential to a good Hammer flick and here is no exception because the bulk of the screen time is given to the two main stars. Ingrid Pitt's Countess Elisabeth is selfish and ruthless who never for once thinks of anyone else during the film, be it her wannabe lover Captain Dobi, her loyal servants and advisors in the castle or even her own daughter, with the way she casually and cruelly disposes of them when she doesn't need them anymore. The way Pitt switches between the role of the older, fragile Elisabeth and the ravishing temptress is one of the highlights here. She was never one of the best actresses, primarily cast as eye candy, but here she has a chance to show that she was better than many give her credit for. Speaking of eye candy, the scene with Ms Pitt giving herself a bloody sponge bath is one that will certain linger in the mind - one of Hammer's more iconic images of it's ‘sexing up’ of horror. It's actually Nigel Green who steals the show here as Dobi, though this is no surprise if you're familiar with Green's work in other films (Zulu and The Ipcress File spring to mind). He's a man obsessed with love and although you can never reason for his actions (kidnapping and murder to name a few), he's always done it for Elisabeth.
As Elizabeth doesn't actually leave the castle, the number of people she is able to engage with is limited though and characters have to go to her, meaning she doesn't do an awful lot except wait around. And this is where a good chunk of the film's problems originate. There's not a great deal of scope in the whole thing. I get the feeling that Countess Dracula could have done with the talented touch of Terence Fisher or even Freddie Francis in the director's chair. That's not to say Peter Sasdy is a bad director, he just doesn't seem to get the look and feel of the film right, especially for a period film. It's got a great set (built for Anne of the Thousand Days) which would have saved some cash in the production department but despite it being bigger, the place looks drab and lifeless. It doesn't help that is seems to confine itself to the same couple of locations, getting a bit tiresome after the third visit to the dining area, the servants quarters or the courtyard.
Countess Dracula runs out of energy around the one hour mark. The pace and the atmosphere are flat and there's barely enough solid material to be eked out for the full ninety-three minutes - no further proof is needed than the final third of the film where it really begins to limp across the finish line. It's a talky film all of the way through, never boring but never exciting either. There's no dramatic set pieces, no scenes of suspense or dread and nothing to really get the pulse racing outside of the obvious eroticism. Some have labelled this as Hammer's worst horror and though that's very harsh, at times Countess Dracula doesn't even feel like a horror film at all. However, if you look at what Hammer was doing around this time with their slate of psychological thrillers like Fear in the Night and Demons of the Mind, you can see they tried diversifying and perhaps this was another example of them losing their horror touch.
Final Verdict
Countess Dracula is a middling Hammer effort, really held back by a lack of depth and scope to the whole thing. It's talky and largely uneventful but come on, they don't make them like this anymore so what's stopping you from watching Ms Pitt take a sponge bath?
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Countess Dracula Director(s): Peter Sasdy Writer(s): Jeremy Paul (screenplay), Alexander Paal (story), Peter Sasdy (story), Gabriel Ronay (based on an idea by) Actor(s): Ingrid Pitt, Nigel Green, Sandor Elès, Maurice Denham, Patience Collier, Peter Jeffrey, Lesley-Ann Down, Leon Lissek Duration: 93 mins |  |
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