cult film freak: CHRISTOPHER LEE & LINDA HAYDEN 'TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA'

Christopher Lee, Linda Hayden & Isla Blair Taste the Blood of Dracula Year: 1970 Rates: ***1/2

Foreshadowing GHOST STORY with three older, wealthy, distinguished, sophisticated Victorian Era gentlemen who, with a curious penchant for the macabre, become involved in a strange, semi-accidental murder before being stalked and picked off one by one...

And not by Christopher Lee, returning in Hammer's TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA in which he seeks vengeance against these fathers of one young man and most importantly, two token girls/women he bites and hypnotizes... this time for a particular reason other than eternal enslavement...

Credit for Taste the Blood of Dracula

His goal's to entrance the daughters (and one son) to kill their dads... starting with one of the most effective Hammer ingenues, and, with girl-next-door blonde beauty Linda Hayden, there's a twist...

Initially punished for dating a young man by her overly religious father, who had ironically attempted the demonic seance involving hammy Hammer Christopher Lee-surrogate Ralph Bates as Dracula's flamboyant patsy, who winds up murdered...

Linda Hayden in Taste the Blood of Dracula

It's never clear why he's important enough for Dracula to seek such complicated revenge... but what really works is how Linda Hayden's character, initially seeming like the more vulnerable and sheepish of his female conquests, winds up a goading/giggling lunatic that makes her part victim, part Renfield...

Meanwhile, slightly older, voluptuous Isla Blair's the most impatiently obsessed and desperate for Dracula's attention... but overall pales to Linda's natural ability to speak her mind without posing, oblivious to her striking beauty, like a platonic friend and girlfriend combined, making her possible future with token handsome lad Anthony Higgins really matter...

John Carson and Peter Sallis in Taste the Blood of Dracula

Higgins (who'd wind up a Nazi in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK) does a better job than the usual benign 11th hour hero, leading up to the inevitable race-against-time/saving-the-girl-before-she's-fully-transformed showdown within a spooky dark church that crams Hammer's Gothic aesthetic into what otherwise seems more like a proper period-piece melodrama...

So during Christopher Lee's sporadic, fitfully menacing appearances (once again a guest star in his own titular vehicle), TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA also provides doomed dads Geoffrey Keen, Peter Sallis and John Carson the kind of masterful character-actor roles that helped form the studio in the first place.