EDITOR’S NOTE: Taste the Blood of Dracula was on the CBS Late Movie on September 11, 1981.

The fifth Hammer Dracula, this played double features with Crescendo in the UK and Trog in the U.S.*, where it was the top movie of November 1970. It was released the same year as Scars of Dracula.

A man named Weller (Roy Kinnear) watches Dracula die, impaled by a crucifix — so this is an actual direct sequel to Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and not just another story — and takes the vampire’s ring, a cape and cape.

There’s also three businessmen — William Hargood (Geoffrey Keen), Samuel Paxton (Peter Sallis) and Jonathon Secker (John Carson) — who pretend to have a charity yet really just go to brothels. Good work if you can get it. They meet Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates), a man kicked out of his family for celebrating a Black Mass. He tells the three if they really want an experience, they should buy Dracula’s garments from Weller and bring them to him. He mixes their blood in a big glass and asks them to drink. They refuse, he drinks and loses his mind, leading the three to beat him to death. His body then transforms into Dracula (Christopher Lee) who wants revenge for death of his servant.

Dracula then convinces an abused girl named Alice Hargood (Linda Hayden) to kill her father and lure her friends like Lucy Paxton (Isla Blair) to him. It just happens to be no coincidence that she’s engaged to one of the three men’s sons. He also turns that man, Jeremy (Martin Jarvis), into a servant and destroys Lucy.

It takes reconsecrating the church to defeat Dracula, who becomes dust again. Is it too simple to say it? Dust to dust.

Taste the Blood of Dracula would have had Lord Courtley replace Dracula and become a vampire on his own. Warner Brothers refused to release the film without Christopher Lee and that’s how he came back again. That said — this was one of four movies where Lee played Dracula in 1970. The others? Count Dracula, One More Time and Scars of Dracula.

Directed by Peter Sasdy (I Don’t Want to Be Born) and written by Anthony Hinds, this is a rare R-rated Hammer film.

*Trog also played with Dracula A.D. 1972.