Retaste The Blood Of Dracula

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
Directed by Peter Sasdy
Screenplay by John Elder (Anthony Hinds)

Go on, try the powdered blood of Dracula.  Taste it.  Savor it.  Tastes like talc and licorice? 
Seeing this film again reminds me that some of it is really delightful and some of it is just tedious.
Taste the Blood of Dracula marks a shift in style in the Hammer vampire films and in Hammer films in general.    

This film is about the boredom of decadence.  The staid elders of the society Hargood, Paxton and Secker are secretly members of a thrill seeking club that is constantly escalating.  While some of them seem content to get together every so often and head over to the cathouse for some exotic dancing and hanky panky William Hargood is bored to tears by hookers, booze and a woman dancing with a python (or a boa).  The other two guys seriously seem to be okay with what they've got, but Hargood looks like he needs something more.  It doesn't help that the bad boy Lord Courtley shows up and steals his girl.  Courtley doesn't even have to pay.  All the girls want to give him freebies.  In a different film this would lead to Hargood sleeping with Courtley in order alleviate the boredom. 

While this film maintains a Victorian/Edwardian time period (still no motor cars or dirigibles) it finally moves us over to England where things can be quite decadent and richer than the Central European milieu of the earlier films.  Here the elders have failed the call of civilization.  They are decadent hypocrites, seething at the inequity of Courtley's aristocratic behaviour even as they employ similar attitudes toward those lower than them on the class/status/wealth totem pole.  If anything, the younger generation are more pure and idealistic even while living up to the general ideals of morality.  The young Hargoods, Paxtons and Seckers are not the ones running around snorting cocaine, swilling booze, watching dancing girls put pythons in their mouths, having sex with prostitutes or drinking bubbling vampire blood and kicking people to death.  It's the old folks who are doing this, which is a serious inversion of expectations.  The symbolism is completed when the young Paul restores the altar pieces in the chapel where Courtley held the "Black Mass" where the thrill seekers killed him and unwittingly resurrected Count Dracula.  Paul and Alice are left to reconstitute society with their restored moral universe which at that point has been cleansed of their immoral progenitors, albeit with some serious collateral damage.

Speaking of that collateral damage, one of the things that really gets short shrift even in slasher sequels is how the decimated survivors go on after all their friends have been eaten by vampires.
Certainly they'll have to make some new friends, but how does that conversation go?
"It's so nice to meet you.  I don't understand why you don't have any other friends."
"Oh, all of our friends were killed by a vampire last year."

The storytelling here is an interesting jumble.  It's the kind of thing that I suspect would make a screenwriting workshop go apoplectic and that alone is a reason to like this film a little more. 

Cast
Weller -- Roy Kinnear
Count Dracula -- Christopher Lee
William Hargood -- Geoffrey Keen
Martha Hargood -- Gwen Watford
Alice Hargood -- Linda Hayden
Samuel Paxton -- Peter Sallis
Paul Paxton -- Anthony Corlan (Anthony Higgins)
Lucy Paxton -- Isla Blair
Jonathan Secker -- John Carson
Jeremy Secker -- Martin Jarvis
Lord Courtley -- Ralph Bates
Inspector Cobb -- Michael Ripper
Betty, Hargood's maid -- Shirley Jaffe
Felix -- Russell Hunter
Dolly -- Maddy Smith (Madeline Smith)
Chinese Girl -- Lai Ling
Snake Girl -- Malaika Martin
Redheaded Prostitute -- June Palmer
Bordello Girls -- Amber Blare, Vicky Gillespie
Vicar -- Reginald Barratt

Music by James Bernard
Cinematography by Arthur Grant