Free Vampires by Charles Butler

that he could still save Alice who is not yet;
    “His sister in blood!”
    He collapses at his desk from loss of blood. Jeremy enters the room and, before he can wake his father, he sees Lucy knocking on the window. She bites Jeremy in the throat and disappears into the night. As Secker revives he is met by Jeremy, now turned, who stabs him with a dagger.
    Paul Paxton is given Secker’s correspondence by the Inspector (Michael Ripper), and sets off to save his fiancée from the clutches of Dracula. Lee’s Dracula is his own worst enemy in this film as he destroys his servants just when he needs them the most. When Lucy turns Jeremy, the Count drains her body completely in an unexpected paroxysm of anger and leaves her floating in the river. When Paul corners him in the church, he makes the dumbest move ever by telling Alice that he has no more use for her. They say Hell hath no fury ….and that is certainly true in this film as Alice helps Paul to defeat the Count once she h as been spurned. Dracula is defeated when he is overcome by the ornamentation of a church and recalls the Priest’s prayer from Dracula Has Risen From the Grave.
    Taste the Blood is the last in the series of Hammer’s first ongoing cycle of Dracula movies. The most notorious story surrounding the film is the one involving the script. A screenplay titled Dracula’s Feast of Blood had been submitted to and then rejected by Hammer films. It had been written as a direct follow on from the previous success and the author, Kevin Francis, realized that Taste had quite a few incidents that had been in his original screenplay. Anthony Hinds had rejected the script and John Elder had written the eventual screenplay. Mr Francis revealed that Hammer had to pay him a lot of money before they released the finished film.
    Watching the film as a teenager, I remember wondering how, in fact, the Count had died? He hadn’t been staked or decapitated, just singed from a piece of stained glass. The fall from a great height didn’t convince and I was left feeling a little cheated when he crumbled to dust. Also, what happened to Jeremy? The inspector was portrayed as a very narrow-minded fellow and certainly wasn’t going to swallow Paul Paxton’s tale about a rigorous battle with the undead Count. But the film for me, the first Hammer Dracula I recall seeing as a child, still remains the most memorable.
    Linda Hayden had made her film debut at the age of 15 in the movie Baby Love (1968) and would go on to star in Tigon’s excellent shocker, The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970) while hero Anthony Corlan would play the head vampire Emil in Hammer’s own Vampire Circus (1972).
    Ralph Bates became something of a Hammer regular in the early 1970s, appearing in Horror of Frankenstein (1970), Lust For A Vampire (1971) and Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971). As Caligula in the BBCtv production of The Ceasars (1969), he had caught the company’s attention and they began to view him as a successor to Peter Cushing. Bates drifted back into TV work with excellent credits in Poldark (1975) and the John Sullivan scripted comedy, Dear John (1986-87). He was married twice and died in 1991 of pancreatic cancer.
    Director Peter Sasdy made Hands of the Ripper with Angharad Rees and Eric Porter. He would team with Ralph Bates again for the confusing devil movie, I Don’t Want to be Born (1975) before being forced into TV work. A director much better than his material, Sasdy, born in 1935, is still alive and his last screen credit was The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole in 1987 .
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

    Scars of Dracula (1970)
    Christopher Lee as Count Dracula . Dennis Waterman as Simon Carlson. Jenny Hanley as Sarah . Patrick Troughton as Klove . Anoushka Hempel as Tania . Christopher Matthews as Paul Carlson . Michael Gwynn as The Priest. Michael Ripper as The Innkeeper and Bob Todd as The Burgomaster . Screenplay based on the character created by Bram Stoker; John Elder (Anthony