While Dracula and Van Helsing senior battle it out on the top of a runaway carriage, the score's main heroic theme is introduced embryonically and the orchestral style is somewhat more traditional in style.
Having said that, Vickers holds them back during the prologue set in Hyde Park in 1872. These are replaced by a quartet of saxophones, and they've never sounded fruitier than on this very well-engineered recording. It's Vickers’ job to tell us how things have changed, and one of the ways in which he updates the proceedings is by abstaining from that staple of the symphonic film score, the first and second violins. The CD puts the record straight and does credit Bernard, which is important, for although it's only a short nine-second cue, it serves to remind us of how things were. The film starts with James Bernard's famous (and uncredited) Dracula theme as the Warner Bros. Everything in the manuscript score is also here on this CD – and more. However, the fact is that everything which he so expertly composed for it was laid into the soundtrack by Hammer's formidable music supervisor, Philip Martell, exactly as Vickers intended. The score was equally well-performed, but over the years there have been doubts about exactly how much of Vickers’ music was actually used in the finished film.
Skilfully directed by the talented Alan Gibson, time has given Dracula A.D. They both gave terrific performances, as did Stephanie Beacham, who played Cushing's granddaughter, Jessica, and there was even a small role for a very young Michael Kitchen as one of the really rather respectable hippies who decide to dabble in a little devil worship. Their latest release brings Mike Vickers’ complete score for the company's first, once very underrated, modern-dress Dracula tale, which brought Peter Cushing's Van Helsing and Christopher Lee's Dracula back together again after a fourteen-year break. Larson, a liner note version of Van Helsing if there ever was one.Since their first release just over ten years ago, GDI records have consistently revealed the high musical standards of Hammer films. And you can understand why he’d want to end it in this thoroughly fun combo of the truly scary and the swingingly Shagadelic, RITES that are given fun tribute by Randall D. But the composer’s even cooler cape trick is bringing in such horror music tropes as an organ, bat-like string gestures and haunted house orchestrations into the ultra-70’s jam, music at once rooted in the classic thematic Hammer tradition as much as it’s in a with-it world that Dracula never made. Sure you might hear John Shaft as easily as you’d imagine Dracula, given Cacavas’ infectiously funkadelic talents. These SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA would also turn out to be the swan song for Christopher Lee playing the Count at Hammer films, though his nemesis Peter Cushing would go at leat another round there as Van Helsing.
Cacavas applied an even groovier approach the next year to one of history’s greatest fiends, hearing him in service to an even more evil master as The Count tries to wipe out humanity with the bubonic plague.
DRACULA RESURRECTION SOUNDTRACK MOD
Future KOJAK composer John Cacavas made a notable horror scoring debut aboard 1972’s HORROR EXPRESS, a classic thrill ride that combined mod rock stylings with an orchestral sensibility as old as a fire-eyed Siberian missing link.
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