“My revenge has spread over centuries and has just begun!”

Hard on the heels of the experimental Dracula AD1972 came this - often thought of as an Avengers episode in disguise, but perhaps more of a riff on Doctor Who. 

Peter Cushing (Lorrimer Van Helsing) has the role of a “scientific advisor” to a shadowy Government organisation. He has a young female assistant (Joanna Lumley), and is helped by a chap who likes nothing more than mixing it with an assortment of supernatural foes.

If that isn't basically what was going on on our television screens every Saturday night in the early 70s, I'll eat my shapeless felt hat (and for pudding I'll have a long multicoloured scarf). 

Just to put the flashing light on this particular wobbly wooden TARDIS, you also have Christopher Lee supposedly playing Dracula, but in fact coming over like The Master (he even calls himself this at one point). 

Satanic Rites is part of Hammer’s (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to move away from the Gothics with which the company had made its name, into the more fashionable modern-set horror realm being spearheaded by the Americans.

It ups the action and uses the increased pace to paper over the dafter aspects of the nonsensical script.

But as had been gradually happening in its Hammer predecessors, it does suffer from some very easy to despatch vampires. Now they can be dissolved by water…