The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 13-19
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Directed by Freddie Francis
This movie adheres to a slasher template that had yet to be invented: even though he was killed in the last movie (drowned in ice, in 1966’s Dracula: Prince of Darkness), its unstoppable killer is miraculously back, setting his bloodshot eyes on a pair of sexually active unmarried women: first, the busty young wench who shows more cleavage than any gal in town; then, the monsignor’s niece, who also happens to have just lost her virginity (or so you should infer) to the atheist she loves. In Anthony Hinds’s script, however, the monster enforces no reactionary moral code; the bad guy is a priest, and the unbelieving hero, Paul (Barry Andrews, hideously British, like Roger Daltrey), gets away with refusing to pray, even when Dracula is spinning around with a wooden stake in his heart, and Paul is told it’s the only way to finish him off. Instead, Paul uses a giant cross as a physical weapon, for impaling, and leaves the praying to priests, defying Hollywood piety (from across the pond).
This was Christopher Lee’s third time taking on Dracula, and he plays him lusty, debonair and world-weary, an early influence on our modern hunky bloodsuckers. He barely speaks; the whole performance is in his sexy, over-it eyes. Francis was known as a director of both schlocky English horror and a cinematographer of respectable Hollywood fare, including David Lynch’s mainstream films (Elephant Man, Dune, The Straight Story). Here he creates appropriate atmosphere—a damp stone church, a fog-shrouded forest, a Gothic castle on a rocky peak—and adds a bit of cheeky humor, but it’s most notable visually for one neat effect: whenever Lee appears, the edges of the frames are weirdly rainbow-tinted, a trick Francis first employed, as cinematographer, in 1961’s black-and-white masterpiece The Innocents. Henry Stewart (January 15-17, midnight, at IFC Center’s Christopher Lee tribute)