11 and 12. Hammer double bill at the Stockport Plaza

[strange_complex]

I saw these with lady_lugosi1313 and HickeyWriter in June at the Stockport Plaza, a very splendid Art Deco cinema which looks like this:



11. The Devil Rides Out (1968), dir. Terence Fisher

I've seen this one at least twice before, but surprisingly a search of my LJ / DW archives suggests not since I started reviewing all of the films I watch here systematically. At least, that is to say, I've half-watched chunks of it several times on the Horror Channel during that time, but not sat down and paid full attention from beginning to end of the film, which is my criterion for whether I then write the film up 'officially' or not.

Anyway, it's obviously great, in ways no-one particularly needs me to recap here. But I will note two things. One is that I became irreverently obsessed with the fate of the Eatons' car. We're primed for a casual attitude to cars by the Duc de Richelieu's response when Rex asks to borrow one of his - "Yes, take any of them" - but the Eatons have made no such offer when Rex arrives in it at their house with Tanith, and she takes the first available opportunity to slip into the driver's seat and escape. That's literally all they've ever seen of Tanith, but they are good people who trust and like Rex, so when he then asks to take their car in order to chase after her, they generously agree. I decided to pay careful attention to the outcome of all this, and the answer is that he then totals the car in the forest at the end of a high-speed chase, and when he and the Duc de Richelieu return to the Eatons' house (with Tanith and in yet another car), he says nothing at all about it and they don't ask about it, then or indeed ever at any point for the rest of the film. It's one of a few loose ends or unexplained transitions in the film, another being why Rex becomes so committed to helping Tanith in the first place, and led me to comment at the end that I felt the film must have been heavily, and not always entirely successfully, compressed from Dennis Wheatley's novel. HickeyWriter, who has read it, agreed.

The other thing which struck me was about how the special effects during Mocata's (remote) attacks on the magic circle look on a big screen. Several of these effects have been pilloried over the years, and indeed a Blu-ray version in which they have been CGI enhanced was released in 2012. I'm pretty sure we were seeing the original, unenhanced version, but nonetheless the Angel of Death in particular actually looked really good and impressive to me on a big screen. It's to do with the angle of vision and the size of the image when you are sitting in a cinema seat, which together mean that it really looms over you as the horse is rearing and snorting. I think we too often forget this sort of factor when criticising special effects in vintage films - they were designed to capitalise on the spatial set-up of a cinema auditorium, and inevitably lose a lot of that impact the moment they are transferred to a home viewing environment.


12. Plague of the Zombies (1966), dir. John Gilling

This one I have reviewed here before (LJ / DW), so I won't repeat myself. But it was great to be able to drink in the fine details of the sets thanks to the big-screen image, which also made Dr Thompson's nightmare about being surrounded by zombies in the cemetery particularly effective.


We left on quite a high at the end of the night. Seeing the two as a double bill was splendid, although coming after the paciness, wit and crackling performance of Devil, Plague did come across as a shade more pedestrian and B-movieish (as indeed it and The Reptile avowedly were next to Dracula: Prince of Darkness and Rasputin). Still, more Hammer double bills in cinemas within a reasonable distance of my house will always be a good thing.

Comments

[poliphilo]

Plague of the Zombies is one of the very few movies that has ever scared the Bejasus out of me.

[strange_complex]

It clearly left quite an impression, as you said the same last time I posted about it! Can you remember why?

[poliphilo]

I was a young teenager in a room full of young teenagers and I suspect there was a element of group hysteria involved.

It was the dream sequence in the graveyard that did it. Everything after that was a bit anticlimactic.

[strange_complex]

Yes, that sequence is quite something! As I've mentioned above, it was particularly good to see on a big screen, making me feel quite tense. It's the most horrific scene in the movie, where you're suddenly witnessing a level of existential threat that nothing before it has quite prepared you for, and of course until you find out it's just a dream you don't know any better than to assume this is the direction the whole movie is going in now. A very clever little instance of playing around with the audience.