That's it. Dracula has defeated me. I've nothing to say. It's not a great movie by Hammer (or any) standard, it's not terrible (as grade B horror goes). It just...is.
Christopher Lee makes his fifth appearance as Hammer's Count Dracula, 6th film in the series, a rush job debuting a mere half a year after Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1970. Seems longer, many years longer, in human years, long enough for Christopher Lee to have lost his vitality. His Dracula is now a dough-faced stay-at-home who sends his manservant Klove for take-out. He doesn't scowl, he doesn't lust or smirk. Worse, he doesn't engage. In order for the movie to serve up any victims people have to oblige the script by wandering into his ruined abbey through contrivance, and even for them he can't muster any enthusiasm. He reads his lines at them, not to them. Watching the movie makes me feel the same way.
How did this happen? The last film was bright in image, color, and idea with lively characters in an engaging premise. Hammer must have spent it's vampire budget for that year, because the production values for Scars are immediately revealed to be low. The first life onscreen is a rubber bat vomiting red paint in one of the Count's less memorable resurrections. That's followed by a string of threadbare interior sets, some obvious painted backdrops, a model castle, and no establishing shots to lend a sense of locality. Not that the photography is terrible, just severely curtailed. We still get a few beautiful shots of English forest, and splashes of vivid reds and purples. And warm cleavage, of course, Hammer has not forgotten itself.
Scars is not a loss, entirely...I suppose...if one were to look at it as an example of Saturday night horror schlock then it does hit the obligatory notes. It's certainly better than many B-grade genre offerings. By Hammer standards it is horror on auto-pilot. When I first bought the DVD I was happily surprised that it wasn't as awful as I'd been led to believe. On the contrary, it passes the time well in spite of it's limitations. Ah...but this is now my third or fourth go-round for the movie, and like the Count it no longer engages. The Satanic Rites of Dracula earns disparagement as well, I've not been kind to it myself, but at least it has a fascinating idea behind it (we'll get to that review eventually). Scars tries to get on by ramping up the graphic bloodshed. It makes for a shock but not for a story.
For that you've got your standard protagonists-who've-wandered-afield plot. It works well enough, it always does.
One of our heroes is Paul, a charming young rogue and scoundrel who every woman he meets wants to bed. See, that's supposed to be Dracula's provenance. No wonder the Count looks so demoralized. His own film series has robbed him of his identity.
Paul has blundered into a film contrivance that takes him from a burgomaster's manse (more specifically, the bedroom of the burgomaster's daughter) to a birthday party to the border of the nation and beyond. It doesn't get any clearer than that, really, the slashed budget means being pointedly vague as to cities, towns, hamlets, and borders. Paul's transport was a carriage yoked to a pair of spooked horses. Must've been pretty spooked to have hauled Paul across two countries, or maybe the mansions were already out in the boonies. Dunno. The horses ditch Paul near a small village (which we also don't see), and he is quickly run off by townsfolk who've had it with wandering strangers rousing the damn vampires. Paul makes it to a small studio set that hints that the ruins of a castle must be nearby. You won't see the castle either, although a scale model of a castle helps you imagine what it might look like if there were one. Paul's brother Simon and the woman he loves, Sara, will come looking for him and meet the same welcome.
They will meet the town's priest, a dispirited man who lost his courage when a previous attempt to rid the town of Dracula led to a mass slaughter of the raiding party's loved ones. That could have been interesting to explore but the priest isn't a good hook for the target youth audience so we get Sara and Simon instead. Then there's Klove (Patrick Troughton), Dracula's hapless slave, who takes a liking to Sara. Dracula likes Sara. Simon likes Sara. Sara pines for Paul. No, seriously, it's not a sex farce. Really. There's no subtext, no theme, nothing of depth transpires. The story moves at a pace, and Hammer asks nothing more of it. If you're happy with horror that checks all the ingredients then Scars will be enough for you. It leads to a fittingly uninspired finale in which Evil is felled by his bad judgement in exposing himself to the weather.
As game as most of the actors are, there is a brighter spark of life in the unlikely form of a landlord played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper. He's a brusque, unfriendly man who reluctantly reveals to his barmaid that he is driven by fear and precaution. He'd like to protect her and alienates her instead.
From the Stoker novel, we finally have our shot of Dracula traversing the side of his castle bat-wise, and the mysterious window that can only be reached by bedsheets tied together. Don't look for continuity, this production has no ties to the rest of the series. Even Klove is a different character than appeared in Dracula, Prince of Darkness.
Scars was directed by Roy Ward Baker, who also helmed the superior Quatermass and the Pit and The Vampire Lovers., both for Hammer Studios. Script was by Anthony Hunds (credited as John Elder). Hinds had written many previous Hammer films including the prior Dracula sequels (uncredited on the best of them, Brides of Dracula). I would have guessed that a less taelnted outsider to Hammer had penned Scars.
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