The Horror 29!?: Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride aka Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)

Count Dracula leads a satanic cult that plans to destroy mankind through use of a mutant strain of the bubonic plague. His arch enemy Van Helsing and his granddaughter, a Scotland Yard inspector and a few secret agents are trying to stop him.
The last Hammer Dracula film and the second that tried to modernize the series by dragging the Count screaming into the light of the modern day. Only here, quite in opposition to Dracula A.D. 1972, it actually was the modern day of its time and not what an eighty year old of the time thought about the modern world. What I like most about Satanic Rites is that this update does not try to drag Hammer's old style of horror into the Seventies but goes to great length to find a new formula for the series by crossing it with the spy movie genre, or to be more precise, British spy television shows like The Avengers or Secret Agent Man.
Most viewers seem to hate the film for exactly that reason, while I find myself more or less convinced by its idea and execution.
The acting, as was always the case with Hammer, is solid to great (although Christopher Lee really hams it up this time), the script tight but not great, the production values not as high as they used to be in the studio's golden age, but still used with obvious care. Only Alan Gibson's direction is a little pedestrian, though solid enough to make for a very fun movie.
The movie's commercial failure is a little tragedy, not only because it marked the beginning of the end for Hammer, but also because it deprived us of a lot of copy cat movies in the Occult Spy Film genre that never was. Just to think was Roger Corman or Jess Franco would have made of it!