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Will Dracula rise again? With a title well ahead of you is 1968's Dracula has Risen from the Grave. A Hammer horror film directed by Freddie Francis, it features Christopher Lee as Dracula but no Peter Cushing this time around. His adversary is a steadfastly honest young baker played by Barry Andrews, a dead ringer for Roger Daltrey.



I kind of hoped it was Daltrey when I saw him, despite not seeing Daltrey's name in the credits. The Who versus Dracula? I'd be down for that. But Andrews is charismatic in his own right.

The story feels suspiciously like a screenplay originally written without Dracula or even supernatural horror in mind into which Dracula was inserted. Screenwriter Anthony Hinds seemed preoccupied with the worth of honesty. Paul, Andrews' character, wants to marry the daughter of the Catholic Monsignor (Rupert Davies) who's just gotten home from putting a big crucifix on Dracula's castle, to make sure the Count never, ever rises from the grave. Along the way, he inadvertently attracts the eye of Dracula, who has already risen from the grave.



Paul's father is played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper, once again playing a tavern keeper. He advises his son that honesty isn't always the best policy, that he should know when to play things close to his chest. Unfortunately, Paul wants nothing to do with tact, and when the clergyman he hopes will be his father-in-law asks his religion, Paul happily owns himself an atheist.

You'd think the rest of the film, in which Paul's fiancee (Veronica Carlson) and the buxom tavern wench (Barbara Ewing) are both bitten and enthralled by the famous vampire, would cause him to reexamine his beliefs. But the plot proves to be more about the monsignor accepting Paul as his daughter's chosen.



Freddie Francis delivers the goods again as one of the better Hammer directors. I particularly like a rooftop set/matte painting combination he uses repeatedly throughout the film, making it the choice location for battles or even just the routine route for clandestine young lovers.

Dracula has Risen from the Grave is available on HBOMax, one of four Hammer films, the others including Hammer's first Dracula film, their first Frankenstein film, and the Hammer version of The Mummy. I'd say The Mummy is the best of the group with Frankenstein in second but, despite loving Hammer movies, I've never been fond of their first Dracula entry. It's a shame Warners doesn't have some of the better Hammer films on HBOMax, like Frankenstein Created Woman, Rasputin the Mad Monk, The Brides of Dracula, She, or The Vampire Lovers.

I'd think it difficult to be led astray by the title of 1964's Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. Though as a matter of fact we never see Dr. Terror's house--but it is a satisfyingly lurid horror anthology film, the first of a series for which British studio Amicus would become famous for in the 1960s and 1970s. Like most of those films, it features Peter Cushing, joined in this case by his friend and frequent Hammer co-star Christopher Lee. Both effectively play against type and the film's greatest flaw, its thoroughly illogical screenplay, even kind of contributes to how good it is. It's almost nightmare logic.



The framing story takes place on a train, not a house, where Dr. Schreck, played by Peter Cushing, tells the fortunes of five men in the car with him, one after another. Each story ends in doom for its subject, one of the movie's logical problems being that no-one asks if they can't avert fate now that they've been given foreknowledge. Though an unsurprising and effectively strange conclusion to the film arguably solves this problem.



Schreck's name means terror in German and Cushing plays the character with a thick accent and a lot more hair than is usual for him. A bigger departure, though, is Christopher Lee as one of the compartment occupants.



His story, the penultimate, is about revenge in the art world. "Disembodied Hand" bears a lot of resemblance to a story from the Tales from the Crypt comics, "The Maestro's Hand". Lee plays a vicious and conceited art critic named Franklyn Marsh who's embarrassed when an artist named Eric Landor (Michael Gough) tricks him into praising a painting by a chimpanzee.



It seems meant to prove a point he'd been making when Marsh had been publicly bashing an exhibition of Landor's paintings--Landor makes the argument that art is totally subjective and that its power resides in the viewer. Marsh's view of art as a measurable skill is rocked by the revelation of the chimpanzee artist so thoroughly that he goes quiet and literally runs away whenever Landor enters a room. As such, a disembodied hand that tries to strangle Marsh later in the story might be interpreted as a manifestation of repressed psychological issues.



And that's supported by Lee's nervous, fussy performance and it's really a highlight of his virtuosity to watch this alongside his natural and exuberant performance as Rasputin in Rasputin: The Mad Monk. Though I wonder if it really would've been so hard to say maybe a chimpanzee has talent. The fact that the ape's art is better than Landor's might have been a nice way to turn the insult around, Marsh really had to put his foot in it to make Landor's prank work, a slightly unlikely scenario, another thing that seems dreamlike.



Maybe the most dreamlike story in the film is the second one starring Benard Lee as a scientist trying to save a man and his family from a carnivorous vine inexplicably attacking his house.



There's no explanation for it, the plant just seems to've gone crazy one day. It's also difficult to understand why it's so hard to defeat.

The final story features Donald Sutherland as a doctor who brings his French wife (Jennifer Jayne) home to New York with him. The story is about vampirism and makes absolutely no sense, filled with motivations that turn on a dime. Sutherland is weird to watch, contemplating the murder of his wife with a wooden stake with only vague, mild distress.



There's absolutely nothing in this story to make you think it was shot anywhere near New York--apart from Sutherland, all the American accents are unconvincing and every scene was clearly shot on a sound stage.



But I like the look of it, the Technicolour in this movie is sort of gorgeously brash, particularly in the first story which is a sort of combination werewolf and haunted house story set in Scotland (again, mostly sound stages).



The film also features a story about a musician punished by supernatural forces for stealing a melody from a Haitian Voodoo ceremony, the weakest story in the film but weird enough to be enjoyable. The whole film is slightly unhinged fun.

Twitter Sonnet #1053

Two rivers make an absent third alive.
A sibling text appeared in pairs of notes.
A quiz delayed'll fade the brain's archive.
A grey and quiet crew deploy their boats.
Descending sizes stretch the cauldrons out.
In boiling clocks the hands are useless oars.
The gentlest tree contorts for leafy gout.
And ev'ry eve a cat conducts the tours.
The shadow horns replaced the scales in mind.
Ouroboros in human hearts decayed.
Expanding lungs of darkened walls rewind.
And slowly lids of metal eye cascade.
As straw inside investors try to birth.
A metal ice revisits corp'rate Earth.

They say there are few things that lighten the heart so much as the laughter of Christopher Lee. Well, I'm sure someone says that. I say that, at least as far as 1966's Rasputin the Mad Monk is concerned. After seeing him in other Hammer horror films as a dour edifice playing Dracula or the Mummy it's refreshing seeing him in this hairy, gregarious role, booming with mirth and dancing with a barmaid. The movie someone resembles the real story of the historical Rasputin but in an effort to avoid political awkwardness, and to make a villain of a man best known for having been murdered, Hammer made Rasputin into an evil wizard, something that never quite ties in sensibly with the rest of his personality. But Lee sells the character and the usual Hammer atmosphere works well.



We learn that Rasputin (Lee) makes regular appearances in a rural village where no-one knows his name or where he comes from. He just shows up at a tavern, drinks an impossible amount of alcohol, makes merry, and vanishes--there are several scenes where the man effortlessly drinks other men under the table.



This is how he gains his key ally, Boris (Richard Pasco), when he comes to St. Petersburg. He's forced to flee the monastery after he heals the wife of an innkeeper but then kills a man for attacking him while he makes out with the innkeeper's daughter. The makeout session was consensual but it's implied it might not have been after the attacker was killed. Still, it's a little unclear why the rural innkeeper is suddenly angry at the man who brought his wife back from certain death.



In St. Petersburg, Rasputin seduces a noblewoman, Sonia (Barbara Shelley), a lady in waiting to the Tsarina (Renee Asheroson), then uses hypnosis so that she'll "accidentally" injure the prince. He can then step in and use his miraculous healing powers to win the favour of the Tsarina who gives him a mansion in thanks.



Apart from the hypnosis and magic healing powers, the story's vaguely close to the real Rasputin who gained popularity as a mystic in the Zsar's court, particularly among women. Instead of the political intrigue that was the real cause of Rasputin's protracted demise, here he's once again beset by the jealous lover of the woman he seduced.



It's never really clear why a man before contented with drinking and love making suddenly became so ambitious. Lee makes it seem like Rasputin is totally amoral and considers the world and its people but trivial playthings. In this, he's effectively frightening, but it would've been kind of nice just to have a big hairy Christopher Lee who liked having a boisterous but perfectly innocent good time.

Twitter Sonnet #1045

In bulky webs the garment fell to rocks.
In craggy cuts, horizons pale the sky.
The healthy play with iron keys and locks.
A careful plan remakes a frozen pie.
In raisin clothes the chic's beneath the sun.
To stitch appointed tonsils tin's supplied.
Connected towels abridge what tans've done.
The autumn beach with fire now implied.
Triangle eyes assess potential burns.
In dancing lights a vision took the hills.
Conveyed in stone and twig the lizard learns.
The corn is ground beneath the scratching wheels.
A minty gasp precedes the ice and rain.
A portrait stared along the watching main.