Next, for some odd reason, this movie is in a copyright gray area, so I've actually embedded a version someone's posted on youtube. Don't watch it a work- it is a Hammer film, and not five minutes into the movie there's a nekkid woman. Under the 74 ratings standards, it was an R. Now, it's more like pg-16.
As the last "real" Dracula movie from Hammer Studios (Satanic Rites was followed by the Legend of the Seven Gold Vampires, with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, but without Christopher Lee as Dracula), The Satanic Rites of Dracula has more of a feel of a thriller than a horror film.
Satanists, upper class Devil Worshippers, are part of a plot involving biological terrorism.
The British intelligence investigating the them is stuffy, stuffy, stuffy, like something out of a John LeCarre novel, having to disavow the investigation into the cult because of politics, so they send in a detective from Scotland Yard with help from Peter Cushing's Van Helsing, the descendant of Van Helsing from the period Dracula films.
Christopher Lee as Dracula doesn't even show up until and hour into the movie, the big reveal kind of spoiled by, well, the opening credits.
A pleasant surprise is a very young Joanna Lumley as Van Helsing's neice.
A fun bit is the panorama shots of London, groovy London of the early seventies.
I had planned on watching the Hammer movies in order, but I've decided to just watch them when the mood hits me.
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