Horror of Dracula (1958)
Obviously I've heard of Hammer horror movies, and obviously I've heard of Christopher Lee's Hammer Dracula movies, but this was my first experience with either. With what I'd gleaned over the years I was expecting something not quite B-rate but still cheesy and over-the-top, but instead what I got was something that was obviously a product of its budget and presumably short filming schedule, while also being taken too seriously for its own good.
Most of the problem was probably in its acting which, rather than being hammy and fun, was in fact the opposite: rigid, overly polite, and unemotional. This was not due however to just plain ****ty acting, but because it seems that nobody told the all-British cast to stop being British at each other for five whole minutes. I'm honestly surprised that the words "goodness", "gracious", and "me" were not uttered in that exact order at any point during the movie.
That being said, even though the fact that this movie is nearly sixty-years-old has dated its horror and violence, there are a few scenes that were legitimately cool, most especially Dracula's death; and prim and proper though the cast may have been the rest of the movie had a surprising amount of grit to it. Just too bad it was at odds with the acting.