This starts so well - Chris Lee is wonderful, it's easily one of his best performances, eyes blazing, long beard, mystical, magnetic, clearly good in bed, up for a dance. Barbara Shelley is good too.
The film gets less good as it goes on - it seems to lack vision and focus. It has Hammer pleasures - the colour and sets - but doesn't feel cohesive. Francis Matthews is introduced too late to the story.
Lee seducing Shelley is great but we don't get a proper Shelley story - she has no death scene. Richard Pasco is a Renfield style doctor.
It's definitely of interest because of Lee's performance but watching it I kept being frustrated because it is had been done better it could have launched a whole bunch of racy Hammer biopics eg Caligula, Cleopatra. There's no reason why you couldn't do a really fun Hammer style biopic full of cleavage and so on - this just didn't do it well.
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