Scars of Dracula

This one, yeah, this one doesn't have any type of continuity.

The one before this, Scars of Dracula, had some very vague non-continuity, but it kind of was a little bit continuity.

Remember, they moved his body somewhere else where he's resurrected, similar to how he looked when he died, but his body was in a place that didn't make a lot of sense.

Yeah.

yeah yeah

so i always considered that the whole that the way that they did this is this is just one alternate story within the long timeline of dracula films that we like you said there's a previous movie we just didn't see uh it's interesting that you thought that the lawrence uh from the very big opening sequence of this film could be the exact same one from horror dracula i never put that together like that i never thought of it that way that's That now will make me think of it differently when I rewatch the movie.

It's fun to imagine that because then if you put all of them, maybe let's pretend that Scars of Dracula takes place in its own weird parallel universe.

If we just make those movies, all the movies except for that canon, then that means that at some point, like after the first movie, Lawrence von Helsing decided to go abroad and probably went vampire hunting in China where he fought...

The, the idea was to reboot their two big franchises.

So they did Scars of Dracula, which was meant to be a reboot of, of Dracula, but didn't quite work out that way because Christopher Lee decided, "Yes, I will do another one."

Yeah, that's right.

[laughs]

...

I'm, I...

It's got to be said, I think that Elise, just like Julie was in Scars of Dracula-

Mm-hmm

In this podcast, Kevin and I are watching and discussing every horror film in Hammer's back catalog.

And this week we're up against bad bats and a much more chatty Christopher Lee as he returns in Scars of Dracula, which in case you couldn't tell from, uh, Kevin's voicemail message-

[laughs]

... he's not the hugest fan of.

[music]

Our Hammer Time discussions are all spoilerific, and we go into plot details and chat about the endings of the films.

So if you'd like to watch Scars of Dracula before you listen to the episode, it's available all over the place.

You can stream it on Prime, Apple TV, Sky, and StudioCanal Presents, uh, and it's on Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD if you wanna watch it really shiny from StudioCanal.

He's exposing hypocrisy.

Next comes The Scars of Dracula, which is also 1970. and Hammer's increasing the violence.

Dracula is more openly sadistic.

There's more blood, more physical cruelty, and can almost feel the studio thinking audiences want strange horror.

And

it's not as efficient a killing machine as batting the bat from Scars of Dracula.

No,

no, no, no. but

They've done maybe half of them.

There's a

lot of them that they haven't done yet because they've only done if they did Scars of Dracula.

Yeah.

Again, there's one thing I remember about, yeah, some of the earlier movies is like, oh, him actually having some cool over-the-top death scenes and stuff, so yeah, these just feel pretty lame.

Yeah, Scars of Dracula had him get struck by lightning while he was holding a pole or whatever, and he gets set on fire.

That was a cool-ass way to go.

That was

Interesting.

In fact, when they did, um, The Scars of Dracula, Horror of Frankenstein double bill, James Carreras was in the, um, in the trade papers in Britain proudly trumpeting the fact that they'd teamed up with AMI, and for the first time in years it was a fully British film.

Mm.

I'm not quite sure given the quality of those films that was something to trumpet, but-

[laughs] Amazing.

[upbeat music] Thanks for listening to Hammer Time.

We'll be back next week with Christopher Lee again in Scars of Dracula.

Still in 1970.

Yeah, I particularly really like the first one.

I really like Scars of Dracula.

I just like the setting of that one.

But, yeah, they're all great.

[laughs]

... and the other one's Scars of Dracula, but we'll get to that when we-

[laughs]

... we, we, we come to it in, I think two weeks' time.