Linda Hayden keeps devoted watch over her undead Lord and Master (Christopher Lee) in TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA.
elements (the Baron’s injured hands) dropped and then brought back as the plot needs or even ba- sic inconsistencies like Frankenstein’s nationality (once Swiss, MUST BE DESTROYED implies that he’s “Bohemian”). Given that they are both scripted by Hinds/
Elder and share many plot elements (a disciple for Dracula, generation gap squabbles that allow the vampire an “in” to society, the Count’s need to avenge himself on rival father figures, Dracula tossing the original occupant from a coffin to pro- vide himself with a resting-place, last-scene de- feat by apparent divine intervention), it’s odd how different in tone Freddie Francis’ DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE and Peter Sasdy’s TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA are (especially notable when the last scenes of the former are spliced into the prologue of the latter). Partly, it’s a matter of learning from mistakes: after the elabo- rate ritual of PRINCE OF DARKNESS, which re- quires the complete exsanguination of a victim, HAS RISEN (paradoxically, given the stress of the title) resurrects the Count with ludicrous ease as a mere trickle from the cut forehead of a cringing priest (Ewan Hooper) is enough to work the magic; TASTE spends a long first act working up to the resurrection and takes care to establish a corrupt world in which Dracula might flourish (this was recycled in A.D. 1972). Much of HAS RISEN’s run- ning time is deathly dull business with the clod- dish student hero Paul (Barry Andrews) at odds
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with the Monsignor (Rupert Davies) who won’t let his niece Maria (Veronica Carlson) marry an avowed atheist, whereas TASTE takes a similar situation and plays it as a much-tighter, more in- triguing set-up where another Paul (Anthony Corlan, later Higgins) is rejected as a suitor for English miss Alice (Linda Hayden) by her father (Geoffrey Keen), a Victorian patriarch who is os- tensibly a pillar of the church but actually a hellraising hypocrite (whose glance at his grown child has something of the incestuous lechery Charles Laughton implied when he played the simi- lar father in THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET). Elder’s writing is sharper, but so is the direction and the playing: even the blander char- acters in TASTE are more vivid than the stick- figures of HAS RISEN. Francis was never a director to bother with
hashing over script problems, but could always be counted on to stage an impressive moment, and HAS RISEN is saved from stodginess by a succession of them: the FANTOMAS-derived coup of shoving a corpse inside a church bell (Hinds’ Dracula has an especial grudge against the church), Lee’s visits to Carlson’s pretty-pretty bed- room (the girl clutches and then drops a china doll as she is bitten), a daring addition to the lore which requires religious faith on the part of the stake-driver to make the vampire-killing method work (it doesn’t quite make sense, but it is a jaw- dropping development when Dracula plucks the
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