“He won’t die. He is the devil. I’ve tried to kill him, but he won’t die.”

Mad? He was bloody furious, I can tell you. Hammer's over-wrought entry into the almost-straight historical drama-cum-horror genre is actually a bit of a masterpiece, despite being saddled with low production values and a galloping lack of actual historical accuracy.

It's also Christopher Lee's finest Hammer hour, as he finally gets the chance to cut loose and do what he does best.

Lee's performance as the original hairy krishna is actually what makes the film so good. From his overpowering entrance into the bar at the beginning (he looks huge) to his eventual over-the-top murder, he overshadows everyone else (literally, at some points). It's the part he was born to play, and he knows it. Whether he's out-drinking an entire pub, seducing and then abandoning Barbara Shelley, or plotting the murder of the Tsarina, he's never less than brilliant.

Unfortunately, Lee's powerhouse performance is pretty much the whole film. Produced back-to-back with Dracula - Prince Of Darkness, Rasputin shares identical sets, the same cast and even the same wardrobe (by the look of it), which tends to detract from the proceedings slightly. When the Tsarina eventually does get thrown from the castle walls, you half expect him to land on Dracula as he frantically scrabbles to stay afloat on his ice floe. They're that similar.

And as Russia's greatest love machine hypno-murders, acid-chucks and hand-lops his way through the cast, you tend to find yourself on the side of the far more interesting and less cardboard-like Lee. All the other characters are just there to be mutilated, driven insane or chucked off the battlements.

The final scenes are fantastic, though, as everyone finally decides they had enough of the by-now bonkers (never mind just mad) Monk, who, in best Jason Vorhees-style, refuses to lie down when apparently killed.

Rasputin - The Mad Monk may be mild compared with the excesses of the other stuff Hammer was chucking out at the time (there's no throat cutting, staking, zombie beheadings, or hideous snakebites to contend with), but where it scores is in its (shaky) basis in historical fact, and Lee's powerhouse performance.