Man, what a title. Better than the original one, Dracula is Dead…and Well and Living in London, which upset Christoper Lee so much that he was outspoken at the press conference that introduced the movie: “I’m doing it under protest… I think it is fatuous. I can think of twenty adjectives — fatuous, pointless, absurd. It’s not a comedy, but it’s got a comic title. I don’t see the point.”

The eighth Hammer Dracula movie, the seventh and final to star Lee (John Forbes-Robertson played Dracula with David de Keyser as the voice in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires) and the third and last to put Lee’s vampire against Cushing’s Van Helsing (they would appear in only one more movie together, House of the Long Shadows), this is pretty much the end of an era.

Every time I think of this movie, I remember Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum excitedly saying to me — after we saw the trailer at a drive-in — “It’s not enough that Dracula is a vampire. Now he has an entire army of Satanists and he wants to rule the world and he has a plague!”

It turns out there’s a government occult conspiracy that only Van Helsing can stop, and he’s bringing along his granddaughter, Patsy Stone, err, Jessica Van Helsing.

As the cabal prepares for the Sabbath of the Undead, their mysterious fifth member is revealed to be, of course, Dracula, using the identity of reclusive property developer D. D. Denham and operating out of the very same churchyard where he died in Dracula A.D. 1972.

Somehow, this is more of an Eurospy science-fiction movie than a traditional horror film, and that’s kind of the beauty of the whole thing.

Somehow, this fell into the public domain in the U.S. That’s why it’s on so many Mill Creek sets under this title and the edited TV version Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This is based on a true story, as The Red Barn Murder refers to an 1827 murder in Polstead, Suffolk, England. There, a young woman named Maria Marten was shot dead by her lover, William Corder, at the Red Barn, which was a local landmark. The two were going to elope, and afterward, Corder sent letters to Marten’s family claiming they were married and living on the Isle of Wight, but that she was not well. Maria’s stepmother had a dream that Maria had been murdered, and soon, her body was discovered in the barn. 

Corder wanted to keep his relationship with Marten a secret, but she gave birth to their child in 1827 and wanted to be his wife. He may have killed the child, but still agreed to the wedding. The murder was investigated by James Lea, who was one of the police officers who tried to find the legendary Spring-Heeled Jack later. 

In this, Tod Slaughter is Corder, who murders the pregnant Maria (Sophie Stewart) and buries her beneath the barn. She had another lover, Carlos (Eric Portman), who found and brought Corder to the law.

Slaughter debuted on screen in this at the age of 49!

The honest Maria Marten already had two children out of wedlock and “was notoriously free with her affections.” Carlos isn’t a real person; as for the stepmother’s dream, research today believes that she was an accomplice to the murder. As for how old Corder is, that’s also made up, as well as his being a rich man.

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A series of murders happens with a face appearing at each victim’s window, the image of what people begin to call the Wolf Man. A bank clerk named Lucien Cortier (John Warwick) is blamed, which pleases Chevalier Lucio del Gardo (Tod Slaughter), as he’s the real killer. 

According to Wikipedia, “Slaughter’s blood-and-thunder films were too British in theme, too old-fashioned and broadly played for mainstream audiences, and thus they were not released by any of the major film companies. Instead, they were handled by independent distributors in New York (usually Select Attractions or Arthur Ziehm, Inc.), and they did attract a specialized following among horror fans.”

The fourth time this story had been filmed — it started as a play by F. Brooke Warren and was also made in 1919, 1920 and 1932 — it did play on TV in the U.S. American Broadcasting Company’s short-lived First Nighter Theatre aired it in New York City on November 15, 1950, while it also played Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Philadelphia on the Friday TV Thriller. 

There’s also a scientist, Professor LeBlanc (Wallace Evennett), who wants to use electricity to stop the murders and even uses a zap of the juice to bring a dead person back to life! Obviously, none of this movie is based on reality and that’s how I like it.

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Daphne Du Maurier wrote the books that Hitchcock based Rebecca and The Birds, as well as this, his last British movie. Those two are way better, trust me. 

Mary Yellan (Maureen O’Hara), with her Aunt Patience (Marie Ney) and Uncle Joss (Leslie Banks), works at the Jamaica Inn, which kind of does what Antonio Bay did to ships full of lepers: lure them to the rocks, shipwreck them and take whatever they have. Sir Humphrey Pengallan (Charles Laughton) is the one making it happen, and Mary soon learns that her family is involved. Only lawman Jem Trehearne (Robert Newton) can help.

This is an entire movie of Laughton mugging and being out of control. If you like that, good news! Everyone else is in a different film, a more serious one! It looks great, though. The ships are gorgeous and, well, O’Hara is beautiful.

Hitchcock said he felt caught between Laughton and the actor’s business partners; he stated that he didn’t direct this movie as referee, but as a director. Laughton also asked to be filmed only in close-ups, as he had not yet learned how his character should walk. Ten days into filming, he started to waltz.  

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Il mostro dell’isola (The Monster of the Island) brought Boris Karloff to Cinecitta Studios to play Don Gaetano, who may speak softly but is also the leader of a gang of black market thieves and drug dealers who have kidnapped Fiorella (Patrizia Remiddi), the daughter of Detective Mario Andreani (Renato Vicario), who has come from America to Ischia, a small island off the Italian coast. Yes, that same undercover man’s wife, Giulia (Jole Fierro), has come along as well, jealous over her man and putting everyone in danger.

If his wife had stayed home, Mario would be romancing Gloria D’Auro (Franca Marzi), a member of the gang who sings at a nightclub. Don Gaetano may seem like a kindly man who runs a home for sick children, but he has no worries about straight-up kidnapping the little girl, even if she’s dubbed by an adult and it sounds like she’s related to Bob from The House by the Cemetery. For some reason—a lack of synced sound—Karloff is also dubbed, and it’s the most low-level impression of him ever.

Director Roberto Bianchi Montero would go on to make Una donna per 7 bastardi and The Slasher…Is the Sex Maniac!, as well as Caligula’s Hot Nights, Savana: Violenza carnale and Le notti segrete di Lucrezia Borgia. He wrote it with Carlo Lombardo and Alberto Vecchietti. There’s no monster, but you already figured that out.

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Jerry Warren sat on this movie for two years before playing it with Teenage Zombies. Shot in Colossal Cave in Tucson, Arizona, the monster costume looked so bad that Warren didn’t use it. Let’s think about that for a minute. An effect so bad that Jerry Warren wouldn’t use it.

Professor Millard Wyman (John Carradine) has sent Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor), Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan) and Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coates) to the bottom of the ocean, but their vehicle becomes lost. They swim — in scuba suits at crushing depths — into a cave where only Matheny (George Skaff), an old sailor, is still alive.

Professor Wyman’s brother, Jim (Joe Maierhauser), has luckily built another vehicle, because Matheny is looking at the ladies like a man who has been in a cave for more than a decade and suddenly has a gypsy girl from” Beast from the Haunted Cave” and Lois Lane right within staring distance. Before he can say, “You know, I killed a man,” a volcano goes live, he dies under some rocks, and all the white scientists celebrate their good fortune above the surface, and no one gets the bends.

Warren sold this with “A Nightmare of Terror in the Center of the Earth with Forgotten Men, Monsters, Earthquakes and Boiling Volcanoes!” I mean, yes, it has those things, but it’s…maybe not as exciting as the ads make it sound. The petrified world is the movie itself.

You can watch this on Tubi.