The Curse of Alucard (1973)

D. Alan Gibson
Colour


What kind of pseudonym for Dracula is Alucard anyway? Surely if people are aware of Dracula and what he is – and presumably they are, as why else would he need a pseudonym? – then the good Count could really come up with something a tad more inconspicuous than Alucard. The problem leaps out that it’s such an unusual name itself. It’s a name which is going to make anyone who hears it sit up and take notice. Wouldn’t it be better to go for a Smith or a Jones or even a Jameson? Surely these are better names with which to blend into a crowd. Okay a lot of the times it’s used by acolytes or relations of Dracula, rather than The Count himself, but even then the same problems apply. Look guys, just take a flick through the phone book and see how many Alucards there are in the world and then pick out some other name. Really, it can’t be that hard. I first encountered this ridiculous non de plume ‘Alucard’ as a small child watching Hammer’s ‘Dracula AD 1972’ (although I know it actually comes from Universal’s ‘Son of Dracula’) and even then I didn’t think it was particularly clever. And I was a small child back then, my judgement bar for cleverness was far lower. No doubt that’s the thing which really irritates me about this disguise: that it’s supposed to be clever when it really, really isn’t. It’s no cleverer than that time Mr Burns pretended to be called Snrub, and even the people of Springfield were able to see through that. If Dr Jekyll’s pseudonym had actually been the Welsh (or maybe Polish) sounding Llykej, then the twist for that story wouldn’t have been such a surprise. And okay, Nietsneknarf doesn’t have the catchiness of Frankenstein, but whack a German accent on it and it would probably pass. But no, that doesn’t happen. It’s only Dracula, and the followers of Dracula who decide to be so goddamn obvious with the name.


Here we have Ralph Bates (the face of ‘Hammer – The Next Generation’) as Alucard, the great grandson of the original Dracula (what Alucard’s father and grandfather got up to is never made clear. Perhaps they lived boring vampire domestic lives). In this sort of follow up to ‘Dracula AD 1972’ he builds up a real estate empire in the heart of London, while hypnotising the tasty duo of Caroline Munro and Yutte Stensgaard to be his harem. But Munro’s jilted lover, Hywel Bennett, is stalking them and starts to realise that things are not what they seem with this new man about town in London.


Surprisingly though the name isn’t the first thing that gives it away. It’s almost the end before he twigs what Alucard backwards actually is.


Much like ‘Dracula AD 1972’ there’s a kind of jaded psychedelic to it, a grimness to London in the 1970s that I seem to seem to find myself referring to a lot on this blog. There’s much blood spilling, some nudity (Stensgaard, rather than Munro) and an over the top gory conclusion. Bates is suitably menacing and interestingly, because I didn’t think they became such bogeymen until the 1980s, is first seen working his demonic magic as an estate agent - where this son of darkness fits right in.


And yes Bennett does eventually figure it all out and save everyone, but the audience can’t help thinking that Dracula the Fourth would have got away with the whole thing if he’d just picked the name Harris.