Though I am a committed Bela fan, I have growing but still grudging admiration for Christopher Lee's version of the Count at Hammer. His Dracula is the opposite of Lugosi's in that while Lugosi depended on the power of the word to compel, Lee found himself depending on something less civilized and more visceral. That's because Lee's Hammer Dracula rarely talks, and sometimes is even rarely seen. He's a force more than an individual, and Lee does what he can with that, which is considerable.
In Jess Franco's Count Dracula Lee gets the chance to perform Dracula with a different twist. While the animal aggression is still very much present, this Dracula talks and some of the speeches are spectacular, especially at the beginning when Harker is at the castle. Lee is Dracula as an old man, who becomes younger as he drinks the vital blood of his victims, this is from the novel.
But aside from getting Dracula's motivations down, there's little to suggest this version of the story is particularly more or less accurate than Hammer's earlier one. They both keep about the same proportion of the original Bram Stoker novel, but just use different bits. Some critics say this one is boring, I'd say it's just quiet and restrained, a necessarily an evil in a good horror flick.
Given Franco's reputation, the movie is much less lurid than I expected. There's some blood, but it's well within the bounds of taste, at least taste in a vampire movie. Klaus Kinski is famously in this as Renfield, but while I found his eccentric take on the old fly-eater interesting, it doesn't really add much to the unfolding story. He's largely outside the tale in this version, aloof and isolated in his madhouse. The ending is pretty weak as well, having something of a hasty quality to it and not really delivering on the atmosphere that had been established earlier.
But all that said, this is a well acted version of the story and features perhaps Lee's best Dracula performance.
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