Empire Down: The Brides of Dracula/Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll

The Brides of Dracula sees Hammer once again taking a page from Universal, in this case doing a Dracula sequel without the Count, focusing instead on female characters. Instead of hampering the movie, Dracula’s absence liberates Brides of Dracula, at least for a little while.

In Brides of Dracula, Dracula is almost like Gil-galad or Elendil, a deceased hero whose fall has deeply wounded many of the characters. The prince of darkness’ absence is the biggest tribute Hammer could pay to Christopher Lee: he’s the button on the waistcoat of this dark world. Without him, everything comes undone.

And for the first act of the movie, this works brilliantly. The first 30 minutes or so are peak Hammer, playing with the neuroses and psychological fears of Bram Stoker even more than the 1958 Dracula did. Vampirism in this is a way for men to grouse at women and shake off the perceived shackles of possessing women. Its understanding of misogyny is closer to Jack Torrance than to Bram Stoker at times.

Sadly, the movie trails off quickly. The plot becomes a daft runaround after the first act (notably Jimmy Sangster got rewritten extensively for the first time, sacrificing the usual impeccability of his scripts). And the central vampire is just bad. The highlight of the last hour of the film is the climactic scene where Cushing’s Van Helsing pushes a windmill so it’s standing vertically like a cross, casting a cross-shaped shadow on the new vampire and killing him. It’s a sillier but giddy version of Dracula’s demise in the first film, and if Brides of Dracula is overall weaker than its predecessor, it’s hard not to be glad this movie exists.

Then we have The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, Terence Fisher’s first total misfire. As a later Hammer, it could pass as fun trashy exploitation cinema. Where it is, it comes across as tonally confused. Blessedly, it doesn’t just try to adapt Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, it instead goes for a trite and tiresome sex comedy about pseudo-Freudian ids and egos, which was already exhausted by the time the film came out. There’s a bit where Jekyll witnesses a little girl pushing a boy for stealing her flower, and remarks on the inherent violence of human beings. It’s deeply stupid, has terrible makeup, and just isn’t any fun.