Being an avid horror movie maniac and also collector, I enjoy watching movies in general, but horror is my first and greatest love. My favorite horror subgenre are golden era slasher 80-ies horror, found footage and all those Hammer Horror classics. This is one of those old school legendary house´s British horror movies featuring Christopher Lee in his most legendary role and for me being best Dracula with tight choice between Bela Lugosi and Gary Oldman, who are my top three besides Lee.

This is fourth installment in Hammer´s Dracula series and it revolves around story of a priest Monsignor Ernst who returns to Castle Dracula to perform an exorcism which would expell evil forever although Dracula is dead and gone. As it often goes, Monsignor fails, awakes Dracula who is very angry because of the cross left barring the doors of his ancestral home. Dracula wants revenge and follows priest to the town with help of disgraced local drunkard priest. Simple? Perhaps naive and thrashy? No matter, Hammer movies had charm, charisma, story and they did not depend on cgi effects like today´s horror do. Chris Lee is just fantastic and charismatic, but besides just staring and being evil, he also talks quite a lot in this sequel apart from the ones prior and after. I enjoyed the atmosphere of Transylvania, of old school horror and blood spilled from the most legendary vampire of all. The ending is kind of poetic but leaves place for further sequels. The one thing that I did not enjoy is kind of main good character, young baker Paul, portrayed by Barry Andrews, who went on my nerves with his every facial expression and sentence he said. Maybe it is just me, who knows.

6,5/10