In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Hammer films watched in my life so far

2025-01-19T17:55:24Z

I did something I've been meaning to do for a while today: grabbed Wikipedia's list of Hammer films and went thought it bolding all the ones I'd seen and additionally noting those I've seen in the cinema (well - on a big screen, not always in a traditional cinema). The answers are that I've seen 68 out of 175, mainly but not exclusively gothic horrors, of which 16 on the big screen. I am not going to try to link from this list to the other posts where I have reviewed many of them here. That's too big a task. But I will keep updating this post as I go along!

( Complete list under here )

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Films watched 2024

2025-01-19T14:58:34Z

A full list of the 102 films which I watched in 2024, mainly with Joel. Includes 24 films with Christopher Lee in them and 21 Hammer films. My most-watched director was Terence Fisher with 5, while Freddie Francis, Mario Bava and Roger Corman are equal second place with 3 each. There's at least one film on the list for every decade since the 1910s, peaking at 21 each for the 1960s and '70s.

1. Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), dir. Jean Rollin - amazing lesbian vampire film executed with the trippy crushed-velvet excess only possible c. 1970.
2. Daughter of Darkness (1990), dir. Stuart Gordon - not to be confused with Daughters of Darkness (1971). An American woman goes to Romania in search of her father, who turns out to be a vampire.
3. Transylvania (2006), dir. Tony Gatlif - a portrait of the region, focused especially on the Romani people there, seen through the eyes of a Romani-Italian girl who goes there in pursuit of a lost boyfriend. Very rich and human.
4. Il mostro dell'opera / The Vampire of the Opera (1964), dir. Renato Polselli - a vampire haunts a neglected old theatre in which an opera troupe are rehearsing a new production. Not particularly good.
5. Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (2023), dir. Adam Sigal - about this case. Trying to do something about the reasons why people are drawn to belief in the supernatural, including a personal character arc from scepticism to a desperate desire to believe on the part of Fodor, but somehow a bit flat in the delivery and not really that profound in the end. Good to spot location footage in the Victoria pub, Leeds and Whitby harbour, though.
6. The Woman in Black (1989), dir. Herbert Wise - the ITV version, which now has quite the status of a cult classic in vintage horror circles. Very good, and delivering sustained creepy, squirm-inducing scares in a way that modern jump scares can't really match.
7. Blade II (2002), dir. Guillermo del Toro - I didn't think I'd seen this, but it turned out I had. I just knew I'd only seen one Blade film and assumed it had been the first. Good cyber fun, very of its era.
8. Once Upon a Spy (1980), dir. Ivan Nagy - terrible American wannabe James Bond movie with Christopher Lee as a mega-villain threatening the world with a shrink-ray!
9. The Woman in Black (2012), dir. James Watkins - the revived Hammer version, which I saw in the cinema when it came out. Doesn't have the same atmosphere as the 1989 version, and even the jump scares weren't as effective at home as in the cinema. Still, had a good cast and looks nice.
10. Dark Places (1973), dir. Don Sharp - little-known contemporary-set horror film in which a man inherits a house with money hidden somewhere within it, but is haunted by the tragic legacy of the previous owner, with Christopher Lee in a minor role. Pretty solid psychological horror, better than we were expecting.
( 92 more films under here )

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Films watched 2023

2024-02-11T20:38:38Z

So help me, it's a list of every single film I watched in 2023. I've put notes where I could remember anything particular about the film or the viewing circumstances, but haven't tried to do that consistently. This is more about record-keeping than reviewing now.

1. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher - deliberately chosen as our first film of the New Year so we'd be starting it out right!

2. Fright Night 2 (1988), dir. Tommy Lee Wallace

3. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968), dir. Freddie Francis

4. Hellboy II (2008), dir. Guillermo del Toro

5. The Vampire Bat (1933), dir. Frank R. Strayer

6. Vampire in Venice / Nosferatu a Venezia (1988), dir. Augusto Caminito - would be an amazing film about decay and ageing, if it didn't also have Klaus Kinski being actively peedy in it.

7. Caligula (1979), dir. Tinto Brass, Giancarlo Lui and Bob Guccione - the fullest, unexpurgated version, seen at Wharf Chambers as a Pervert Pictures screening, complete with a contextualising introduction. It's the logical extreme of the decadent Rome trope.

8. The Company of Wolves (1984), dir. Neil Jordan

9. Dracula Bloodline (2013), dir. Jon Keeyes

10. The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964), dir. Michael Carreras

( There's another 94 under here )

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10-17. The rest of my Cellar Club tweet-alongs to date

2022-04-18T17:25:12Z

Onwards with the Cellar Club tweet-alongs... Films 6 to 9 of 2022 were a bunch of Hammer vampire rewatches connected with the live webcast I did about them, and I wrote those up separately at the time (LJ / DW). So this entry covers 10 onwards.

( 10. Burnt Offerings (1961), dir. Dan Curtis, broadcast 18 February )

( 11. Theatre of Blood (1973), dir. Douglas Hickox, broadcast 25 February )

( 12. Scream and Scream Again (1970), dir. Gordon Hessler, broadcast 25 February )

( 13. Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), dir. Bob Kelljan, broadcast 11 March )

( 14. The Vampire Lovers (1970), dir. Roy Ward Baker, broadcast 18 March )

( 15. Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), dir. Curtis Harrington, broadcast 25 March )

( 16. The Return of Count Yorga (1971), dir. Bob Kelljan, broadcast 1 April )

( 17. The House of the Long Shadows (1983), dir. Pete Walker, broadcast 15 April )

YES I DID IT! 🥳 I am now up to date on my film write-ups. Just a honkin' great pile of books to tackle... 😬

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1-5. Early 2022 Cellar Club tweet-along catch-ups

2022-04-17T16:55:33Z

It's Easter Sunday, and I am transferring a few more Cellar Club Twitter threads over here so I can find them more easily in the future. I really want to get up to date with these so that they're no longer hanging over me and I feel like I can watch new films of my own choosing.

( 1. Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), dir. Vernon Sewell, broadcast 7 January )

( 2. I, Monster (1971), dir. Stephen Weeks, broadcast 14 January )

( 3. Quatermass and the Pit (1967), dir. Roy Ward Baker )

( 4. Doctor Blood's Coffin (1971), dir. Sidney J. Furie, broadcast 4 February )

( 5. The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), dir. Roger Corman, broadcast 11 February )

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18-20. The Wicker Man, Island of Terror and A Candle for the Devil

2022-03-27T21:15:19Z

It's been a lovely weekend. I've done some errands, gone shopping, lounged about in lady_lugosi1313's garden, worked out some ideas for a lecture on Dracula I've been asked to deliver, eaten some lovely food and of course live-tweeted the latest Cellar Club film. Just the kinda stuff a girl can do when she's no longer devoting all her evenings and weekends to a largely hopeless cause! Anyway, talking of live-tweeting, I thought I'd get another few Twitter threads down here.

( 18. Sing-along-a-Wicker-Man in Sheffield, 20 November )

( 19. Island of Terror (1966), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 26 November )

( 20. A Candle for the Devil (1973), dir. Eugenio Martín, broadcast 10 December )

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1. The Abominable Snowman (1957), dir. Val Guest

2021-01-09T17:28:20Z

I recorded this off the Horror Channel relatively recently, and watched it last weekend. The story is more or less what you would assume from the title and the time, involving a group of white western explorers who go searching after the 'Yeti' in the Himalayas, and the local monastery community and guides with whom they interact. The Hammer film is based on an earlier now-lost teleplay by Nigel Kneale, and having built up a picture of his style from various iterations of the Quatermass stories and The Stone Tape, I certainly recognised various signature characteristics here. There is a sensitive soul who is particularly susceptible to the calls of the Yeti up in the mountains, who isn't a woman because no women go on the expedition in the first place but is rather a Scotsman, perhaps telling us something about how Kneale perceived them. Later on, the one woman in the film also demonstrates her great sensitivity by doing a mad dash up the mountain to rescue her husband because she can tell from the monastery that he's in danger. There is also the idea that the Yeti are primeval beings who are / were perhaps superior in wisdom and intelligence to homo sapiens, though for once they don't also turn out to have been aliens all along. The story ends with the main identification-character and only survivor of the expedition (John Rollason, a scientist played by Peter Cushing) insisting that he never saw any Yeti up in the mountains in order to cover up their existence and protect them from further human interference.

The whole set-up of the story is colonialistic. Quite apart from the pursuit of the Yeti, the western characters treat the locals as mere servants (at best) or superstitious savages (at worst). But there is some effort at least to portray the people at the monastery (who I assume are meant to be Tibetan, as they are headed by a Lama, though it's never specified) as having a real and valuable culture of their own, e.g. via early establishing scenes in which their Lama shows a local knowledge of plants unknown to John Rollason's science. There is also certainly a fully developed critical contrast between Rollason's scientific curiosity, driven by the desire to achieve a greater understanding of humanity, and capitalistic greed encapsulated by an American member of the expedition, Tom Friend. Friend in some ways appears ahead of Rollason in recognising the capacity of media like television for opening up mass access to knowledge. But ultimately he just wants to show the Yeti on TV for his own benefit, as we realise when he turns out to be happy to claim that a monkey they've trapped is the real Yeti, and then also causes death of another expedition member by giving him blank ammunition so he can't harm a real Yeti in the process of trapping it.

Cushing is of course everything you'd hope for as Rollason. There is a lovely example of his famous facility with props early on, when he is presented with a purported Yeti tooth while still in the monastery, and rather than just turning it over in his hand while delivering his dialogue, he immediately whips a tape measure out of his pocket and takes its dimensions. This is followed by a very interesting editorial cut directly from a close-up of the tooth to the mask of some kind of mythical being with one tooth missing being shaken in the air during a religious ceremony in the monastery courtyard, perhaps designed to suggest that the circumspect locals know of and venerate the Yeti. Though Cushing had already done The Curse of Frankenstein by this time, Hammer were still using colour only for their horror pictures. This one is more in the line of fantasy / action, so it remains in black and white, but conveys its Himalayan setting via some very impressive location footage filmed with stunt doubles at La Mongie, a ski resort in the French Pyrenees. Combined with sets at Bray (the monastery) and Pinewood (the mountain top locations) for the actors and a matte painting for long shots of the monastery by Les Bowie, it does a pretty decent visual job by the standards of its time.

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5. Sonya Taaffe (2018), Forget the Sleepless Shores

2020-08-30T18:19:30Z

This is a collection of short stories whose author is known in this parish as sovay. I hope she won't mind if I proceed to just call her S for the rest of this review, a) to save myself having to keep typing out the code for sovay, and b) to signal that I'm writing about her in a different way here anyway, which bridges both sovay, the DW friend, and Sonya Taaffe, the author.

We've been DW friends for a few years now (probably about four-ish?), and I have been following S's writing career all that time. It is obviously a big passion and a serious commitment for her - she regularly posts to say that she has had an individual short story or poem published, attends readings and cons to present / talk about her work (in pre-COVID times anyway), and of course reported the publication of this book a couple of years ago. I've been a little slow to get round to acquiring and reading it, but not because I had any doubt that it would be good. I'd already read a couple of the individual stories in it anyway which S had shared, and been extremely impressed. I'm just slow, is all.

I've never met S in real life, as she lives in Boston, but she tells her DW readers a lot about herself, and has clearly put a lot of the same self into her stories too. So I had very much the same experience reading this book as I did when reading my friend Andrew Hickey's novel Head of State (LJ / DW) of recognising the person I know through DW in the stories. S's passion for the sea, knowledge of Classical myth and literature, Jewish heritage, and queer identity are all here, combined with a fine-detail observation of urban landscapes and a sense of colour and the best words for conveying it vividly which really struck me in the first of her stories that I read.

I'm not going to write about every single story, because there are twenty-two in the book altogether, but ( here are some notes on my favourites ones and what I liked about them )

In short, a very impressive and enjoyable collection which I highly recommend. S has a real gift for taking established literature, myth and history, combining it with close observation and transforming it into something completely new and unexpected. Here's to her further success as a writer.

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10. Dracula: AD 1972, dir. Alan Gibson

2020-06-06T21:03:28Z

I synchro-watched this film with lady_lugosi1313 this afternoon. It is one of my absolute favourites in the Hammer Dracula cycle - so much so that I apparently watched it once every two years at the beginning of the last decade: 2012 (LJ / DW), 2014 (LJ / DW), 2016 (LJ / DW). A four-year gap since my last viewing is therefore a long time for me!

It is so good, though, and rediscovering it today in all its vivid immediacy was just brilliant. The more I see it, the more I realise how much my personal fashion concept was shaped by it, and Stephanie Beacham's outfits in particular. Quite apart from the flares, the smock tops and the floppy hats, she is wearing purple in almost every scene. I listen to the soundtrack CD regularly in the car too, but there is a quite a lot of what must have been library music in the film itself which isn't on that CD, and which I've never successfully been able to identify via Shazam or similar - flute music as Bob and Jessica are driving around, the record Johnny puts on for Gaynor telling her the band were all stoned when they recorded it, and the music playing as Johnny stalks Marjorie Baines in the laundrette. I would love to find out more about all of those some time, but meanwhile will have to satisfy myself with exploring more of the music of Stoneground instead. I can see there is quite a lot of it on YouTube.

I don't want to repeat things I've written about this film in previous reviews, but I see that although I mentioned that it has "extremely competent cinematography" in my 2014 review, I didn't give any specific examples. Some of the sorts of shots I mean include Johnny seen through a bus window from across the road as he approaches the Cavern the day after the big ritual, his car approaching his flat seen through the square entrance-way, or Van Helsing viewed in a discarded shaving-mirror after his big battle with Johnny. But those are only a few examples. Throughout, the street scenes, the Gothic church set, and the many smaller interiors are really brought out to their best effect through interesting angles, focus pulls, panning etc. The man responsible deserves credit - and to have been given a better name by his parents than Dick Bush.

I also see that despite working it all out in my head about six years ago, I have never written out here my Very Fannish Theory for how this film actually fits perfectly effectively into the overall Hammer chronology. The apparent problem is that in this film we see Dracula being killed in 1872 and only resurrected in 1972, yet Dracula (1958) takes place in 1885, with Prince (1966), Risen (1968) and Taste (1970) all following on from it in a direct sequence. How, we might ask after seeing AD 1972, can he have been alive for all those stories in the intervening period? My explanation for this rests on the premise that in 1872, Dracula was not alone in London. Rather, Valerie Gaunt's character was there with him. She turns into a woman with the appearance of being in her 70s or 80s when Jonathan stakes her in 1885 (in Dracula 1958), so he probably bit her and turned her into his bride about 40 or 50 years before that - i.e. c. 1840. Perhaps he came to London around about then, and they were living there together perfectly successfully until they managed to come to Lawrence Van Helsing's attention in 1872?

Once you have her in the picture, you can flesh out the story of what happened on that fatal night in 1872. After Van Helsing kills Dracula, we see on screen Johnny Alucard's ancestor coming to collect and ritually bury some of his dust. But he certainly doesn't collect all of it. There is plenty left behind for, for example, Valerie Gaunt to come along after Johnny, and conduct a resurrection ceremony immediately. Naturally, after a traumatic event like that, Dracula and Valerie would choose to leave London for the safety of Dracula's native Transylvania - which is where we meet them both, thirteen years later, in Dracula (1958). By 1972, Valerie is long gone and Dracula has undergone many adventures, including a trip to India in the 1930s, but he has returned to London, not least because he knows he left instructions to his disciples to carry out a resurrection ritual in that year. But it isn't actually a resurrection ritual as such. Johnny thinks he is resurrecting Dracula, but we don't see any actual regeneration scene, as we do in some of the other films - just a load of smoke and then Dracula walking out of it. In fact, he was already alive and watching the ritual unseen as it unfolded, and stepped forward at the end to reclaim a small amount of his own lost strength, left behind with his dust a century earlier (the smoke) and his lost ring. Job done.

This still doesn't explain how Dracula can have gone to China in 1804 in the body of a monk and been killed there by Van Helsing in 1904 in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. I have to resort to "It must be another member of the Dracula family who is also a vampire and was imprisoned in that castle by the Christopher Lee Dracula" to deal with that. But it's all doable if you think creatively enough.

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7. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher

2020-04-26T16:03:04Z

I synchro-watched this with lady_lugosi1313 yesterday afternoon, as we were in need of some comfort-viewing. I've reviewed it a bunch of times before (previous reviews all linked from here: LJ / DW), so won't say too much about it here. We mainly spent the time squeeing over its many wonderful features - the pineapple, Lee's swishy cloak, the resolution of the Cushing finger and the expansive feel of the sets. And occasionally discussing the continuity questions it raises, like how come it is May when Harker arrives at Dracula's castle, but 1st December when Dracula's hearse goes through the customs post at Ingstadt.

lady_lugosi1313 did raise the interesting question of whether the Bride means it on any level when she talks about what an evil man Dracula is, and how he is keeping her a prisoner in the castle. That is, is it all wholly a ruse to get Jonathan Harker to come close enough to her for her to bite him? Or is it to some degree a true reflection of how she feels about having become a victim of Dracula herself at some time in the past and been condemned to vampirism because of it, which the vampire possession now affecting her can easily mobilise precisely because it is true? I suspect that probably is part of what is meant, in the same way as we later see Lucy calling Tania to play with her and greeting Arthur with a request for a kiss - both things she would have wanted to do in her human life, but now hideously twisted to a demonic purpose.

Also, I'm not sure I'd picked up the full implications of the 'we' in this little exchange between Arthur and Van Helsing before:

ARTHUR: There's so much in Jonathan's diary I don't understand. Can Dracula really be as old as it says here?

VAN HELSING: We believe it's possible.

I do know that he goes on to say "I've carried out research with some of the greatest authorities in Europe and yet we've only just scratched the surface" only a few lines later, but there he distinguishes more carefully between himself acting as an individual ("I") and the combination of that self and the authorities he has worked with ("we"). Meanwhile, the earlier "we believe" doesn't quite work to mean "Jonathan and I believe" by this point either, given that both characters in the scene know that Jonathan is dead, so he'd be more naturally spoken of in the past tense. Obviously I am vastly over-reading dialogue which only ever aspired to be fit for purpose here, but anyway to me it speaks of a team of active vampire hunters, of whom Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing are the two who happen to have been selected to go and deal with Dracula, but whose numbers are greater and who form a separate and distinct group from the greatest authorities in Europe whom VH has also consulted in the course of their work. That's what I like to think, anyway.

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19. Vampirella (1975 / 2019), staged reading at the Regent Street Cinema, London

2019-11-02T22:45:20Z

A General Election has been called, and I am the chair of a Liberal Democrat constituency party in a very, very winnable target seat. So I am unlikely to get much time for LJ / DW until after it has finished. BUT I've recently been to three very cool performances of different kinds, so I am damn well going to make the effort to record them before they entirely disappear from my memory.

This first one was another staged reading of an unproduced Hammer script held at De Montfort University's Cinema And Television History (CATH) Research Centre, similar to the ones I have been to before of The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula (LJ / DW) and Zeppelin v. Pterodactyls (LJ / DW. This time, though, rather than being part of the Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham, it was produced by kierantfoster, who has just completed a PhD on the unmade scripts, and got some postdoctoral funding to put it on. He told me he would be doing this at the Vampire Festival I went to in July (LJ / DW), so I kept a careful eye out in the months that followed, leapt on the tickets when they came out and enthusiastically recommended it to all my horror-loving friends. Kieran even commissioned a special poster by Graham Humphreys just for the event:

JohnJJohnston was kind enough to offer me crash space at his flat in south London for the night, so we met up beforehand for a bite to eat, strolling through Soho past Hammer House (where the studio's offices once were) on the way:

Then it was on to the cinema where more or less everyone who was involved with Hammer and is still with us was there - Caroline Munro of course, because she had a part in the reading, but also Judy Matheson, who had contribute a voice-over, and Madeleine Smith and Renee Glynne (script supervisor), I assume just because they wanted the fun of being at a Hammer performance, not to mention all the people who do Hammer art, and books, and run Facebook groups.

The set-up for the reading itself was similar to the other ones I've been to - a cast of actors, most with one major part and a couple of minor ones, reading the script with appropriate body-language and accents, with occasional music and animations projected onto the screen behind them to help the story along. Here is Jonathan Rigby doing a bit of opening narration, before settling down into his major role for the evening of the ageing, alcoholic stage magician Pendragon:

Having read up a bit on the history of the script and its various woes before the performance, I found that the most pressing question I had for kierantfoster in the bar before things began was, "Is it actually a good story?", to which he replied "Er, it is now." From this I gathered that judicious editorial work had been done - but I still have to say that the plot-line was pretty bonkers and hard to make much coherent sense of. Besides which a fortnight has already passed since I saw it, so my memory of it may not be particularly sharp.

Still, these are the outlines as far as I can remember. The story is set in mid-70s (when the script was originally written), and the major locations are Bermuda and London. Bermuda beach, we gradually learn, is where Vampirella first fell to Earth, in the form of a bat, after an alien race called Akrons destroyed her home planet, Drakulon, where the rivers run with blood. There, she met alcoholic stage magician Pendragon, who helped her adjust to life on Earth and took her to London where her alien powers lent his act a new lease of life. But she cannot fully remember who she is or where she came from, and is only able to access her past in scant fragments via hypnosis with the help of her boyfriend, Allan. Meanwhile, planes and ships are disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle. They are scooped up, scanned, and then either returned or destroyed. And in London, a scientific organisation called Space Operatives for Defence and Security (SODS), of which Allan is a part, are trying to work out the cause of multiple cases of apparent mass murder and mutilation across the globe.

Early in the story, Pendragon and Vampirella perform their show at a London casino, but we also notice that a strange blue-eye man is tracking Vampirella. He turns out to be one of the Akrons who destroyed her planet, who is also operating the alien base which has been plucking vehicles out of the Bermuda triangle. Vampirella inevitably ends up captured and transported to the base, where she sees horrible visions of brains in jars, but initially she is returned to SODS, where the team are struggling to get their supercomputer to help them work out the cause of the mystery deaths. Their efforts, though, are undermined when their chief (played by Caroline Munro, though in a role originally intended for a man) turns out to be an alien infiltrator, whereupon Vampirella kills her. Vampirella is transported to the alien base again, where she this time confronts the blue-eye man and learns about her past and his role in destroying her planet. He suggests that they should team up and become all-powerful together, but instead she reveals the identity of the base to SODS, who destroy it. Vampirella escapes back down to Bermuda beach, where Pendragon is sitting, and they leave together.

Vampirella as a character originated in a series of comic books, and the story sort of makes sense on that level - casinos, aliens, teams of scientists, kidnappings, supercomputers etc. Indeed, it may have worked best not as a live-action film, as Hammer were planning, but as an animation, where the very staccato story with sudden jumps from one scene to another without much obvious logic behind them might have seemed less surprising. I think it also suffered pretty badly from just having too many characters in it, so that none of them was very well-developed. Still, the core pairing of a washed-up but charmingly paternalistic Pendragon (a role originally intended for Peter Cushing) and a resourceful but out-of-place Vampirella was sound.

For me, the most effective scene by far consisted of a party hosted in their echoing old ballroom by two elderly sisters, Gloria and Constance, who have sent their man-servant out to invite their society acquaintances of the past without realising that they are all long dead. Instead, Pendragon and Vampirella show up, for plot reasons which I can't now remember, followed shortly thereafter by a motorbike gang who get right into the spirit of the party. The sisters are mainly just delighted that anyone has come, while Vampirella uses her alien powers to conjure up visions of the guests they had originally invited, who dance with them for a while, but then gradually fade away. I got the impression from the script that this was intended as visible fading, in which they would become more and more transparent before disappearing, but in my head it was done via edits - each time the camera cut to a new angle on the room, there were just fewer and fewer dancers until only the living ones were left.

Vampirella is a very different kind of vampire from Hammer's more usual gothic variety, both in that she is actually an alien and in that she behaves largely like an ordinary human being, only killing when people deserve it (e.g. the alien who has infiltrated SODS). But I was pleased to find that the story was designed to dovetail with the Dracula 'universe' nonetheless. This was partly done through two characters called Adam (the father) and Conrad (the son) Van Helsing, who come after Vampirella as though she were a typical Hammer vampire, but fail when garlic proves to have no effect on her. I like to think they are maybe the brother and nephew of Lorrimer from Dracula AD 1972. Also, at the end of the film, as Vampirella and Pendragon walk off Bermuda beach, a horse-drawn hearse pull up and its driver informs them that his Master invites them to perform at his castle, whereupon a hand wearing a ring embossed with a D extends from the coffin inside. ♥

The linking narration from the original script was shared out between the various members of the cast when they weren't busy with other roles, and was similar to other Hammer scripts I've seen or read in the quantity and quality of descriptive detail. Indeed, it included some quite nicely worked out linking devices, like a from-space view of Earth switching to life on the planet by cutting from an image of the globe to a spinning bicycle wheel. I missed Jonathan Rigby's narratorial voice as we'd enjoyed it in The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula a little bit, but he was great as Pendragon (pronounced as PENdra-gon rather than the more usual pen-DRAgon), channelling Peter Cushing quite uncannily in the role. This wasn't just about his vocal delivery, but something about his stance and the angle of his head which almost made the shape of his face seem to change and acquire a Cushing-esque gaunt profile and long nose.

Georgina Dugdale, whom I didn't even realise until afterwards is Caroline Munro's daughter, played Vampirella, interestingly choosing to do her as sweet and demure (but deadly when she needed to be), rather than the default sexy superhero that the character's comic art suggests. Caroline Munro herself unfortunately stood out a bit as less in command of her role than the others, and she obviously felt it hadn't been her best performance. I chatted to her briefly in the bar afterwards, as I was wearing a T-shirt with a big picture of her in Dracula AD 1972 on it, and a Hammer super-fan who knows her quite well insisted on taking me over so she could see it, and when I asked her if she'd enjoyed it she said straight away that she wished they'd had more rehearsal time. But she has such a lovely warm personality, and was so gushingly proud of her daughter (with good reason!) that no-one could possibly mind.

I came away feeling that it had probably never been a terribly good story, and there were probably good reasons why it was never made, but that it had been a brilliantly fun evening watching it come to life with an audience of appreciative people, and having the chance to reach that conclusion for ourselves. There is plenty more yet to be discovered in the Hammer script archive, and I for one will be there next time it's tapped into.

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13.-15. Films seen at the International Vampire Film and Arts Festival, Highgate

2019-08-25T16:32:29Z

I've already written up the International Vampire Film and Arts Festival which I attended in July in its own right (LJ / DW), but deliberately saved reviewing the films I had seen there until I'd written up a large back-log of earlier viewings first. Now, their time has come.

( 13. Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974), dir. Brian Clemens )

( 14. Interview With The Vampire (1994), dir. Neil Jordan )

( 15. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher )

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8. Incense for the Damned, aka Bloodsuckers (1970), dir. Robert Hartford-Davis

2019-08-11T17:58:43Z

This one I learnt of at the Polidori conference I went to in April (the one I never wrote up but did upload some pictures from). It was mentioned in a paper about Byronic vampire narratives of the 1960s, and although the speaker said quite explicitly that it wasn't a very good film, they also said that it featured a character going off to Greece and becoming involved in occultism, Peter Cushing, a scathing speech about reactionary Oxbridge academia, and a random psychedelic orgy scene which had clearly been tagged onto the rest of the movie in a desperate attempt to attract audiences. Though I like a good horror film as much as anyone, I also have a lot of time for brilliantly inept horror films, especially ones made in the 1960s and '70s, so this sounded fantastic to me. Luckily, lady_lugosi1313 agreed and had a copy, so we watched it.

It was indeed gloriously terrible. Not even the combined forces of Peter Cushing, Patrick Macnee and Edward Woodward could save it. The plot was confusing, most of the acting was dreadful, there were all sorts of continuity errors (like a lady going out of her apartment without any jacket on, but miraculously having acquired one as she stepped out into the street), and the dialogue was clearly written by someone who knew the sexual revolution had occurred but hadn't had any direct personal involvement and furthermore absolutely insisted on 'no homo'. lady_lugosi1313 actually wrote down some of the choicest examples of this at the time, which included:

"I'm not a homosexual, you know."
"Now let's skip the rather special case of the homosexual vampire."
"You have your voyeurs, transvestites, narcissists, bestialists..."
"Vampirism is a sado-masochistic sexual perversion affecting frigid women and impotent men."
"Are you trying to tell me that a girl sucking blood from a man's neck can induce an orgasm?"
"Some men can only make love in a coffin."

Somewhat oddly, it also made pretty good use of location footage in Oxford and (I was surprised to realise half-way though) both Kyrenia and Salamis in Cyprus, which I visited with rosamicula two years ago. A nice collection of shots of both from the film is visible here, but I'm afraid I did the same with the Cyprus trip as the Polidori conference - uploaded pictures here, but never wrote a post to put them into. I guess I may as well at least drop a couple of the ones which match up best with the film in here:

All in all, we had a mightily enjoyable evening watching this, eased along by the good offices of a couple of vampire cocktails apiece. Our only disappointment was that the shoe-horned psychedelic orgy scene turned out to have been excised from the cut of the film we watched - but luckily it was included as an extra on the DVD. Marvellous.

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20. Cash on Demand (1961), dir. Quentin Lawrence

2018-07-15T14:45:56Z

This is one of Hammer's non-horror films, shown recently on the excellent TalkingPicsTV channel. It's a crime drama, and for Hammer was clearly a B-feature: you can tell because it is in black and white, despite them having moved definitively into colour for their horror pictures several years earlier, and according to Wikipedia the total budget for it was £37,000 (contrast £81,000 for Dracula three years earlier). It's an absolute cracker, though, with well-scripted characters masterfully acted by Peter Cushing, André Morell and the like, and a beautifully-paced plot which keeps you guessing right up to the end. I sort of watched it with lady_lugosi1313, although not quite in the usual way of being present in the same room together. She was in her house and I was in mine, but as we both knew the other was watching it we exchanged texts as we went along, marvelling at the wondrous talents of Mr Cushing and the twists and turns of the plot.

Because of those twists and turns, I'm going to put the rest of this review under a cut, just in case there is anyone out there who might wish to watch it unspoiled. I do heartily recommend doing so if you have the opportunity. But if you've already seen it or don't care about spoilers and do want to know what it's like, ( click on... )

All in all, a thoroughly good evening's watch, and a strong reminder that there are still many Hammer gems awaiting me, both within the horror genre and without.

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4. Dean Owen (1960), The Brides of Dracula

2018-05-13T22:15:14Z

This is a novelisation of the Hammer film Brides of Dracula (1960), which is bloody great and which I've reviewed in its own right here: LJ / DW. I've read and reviewed two other Hammer Dracula novelisations before – John Burke (1967), Dracula, Prince of Darkness (LJ / DW) and Angus Hall (1971), Scars of Dracula (LJ / DW) – and from comparing the Scars one in particular with a copy of the shooting script, I'm confident that it was normal practice for the authors to write them from these scripts. That makes them fascinating reading, especially in cases where I can't access the script itself, mainly for what they reveal about the creative decisions made during production but also to some extent because they can clarify and flesh out details which were intended by the original scriptwriter but didn't really come through in the final film. In addition, they can add extra details supplied by the novelist which I am at liberty either to incorporate into my personal Hammer Dracula head-canon or to reject (according to preference), and when they are well-written they are just good and enjoyable takes on stories I love anyway.

Unfortunately, this one isn't particularly well-written. In fact, it is a particularly egregious example of a male writer writing for a male audience without the faintest notion that women are sentient human creatures who might potentially pick up and read the novel as well, and wish not to be portrayed as male playthings within it. We're all familiar by now with the classic 'breasted boobily' caricature of such writing:

Well, here is Marianne, the main female character, being introduced on the first page as the carriage in which she is travelling thunders through dark Carpathian forests:

Her trajectory through the story is largely the same as in the film, but at almost every step the extra detail which the novelist adds is utterly skeevy in tone. A series of male characters tell her that a girl as pretty as she is shouldn't be travelling alone in this part of the world, size her up to see if she actually is as pretty as they thought, and contrive to get their paws all over those curves we heard about when we first met her. Shockingly to anyone familiar with Peter Cushing's utterly gentlemanly performance in the actual film, this includes Van Helsing himself, who full-on shags her within two pages of bringing her back to the Running Boar after finding her unconscious and (again unlike the film) half-naked in the forest. Those who have any respect for women, and particularly those who are also Peter Cushing fans, may wish to skip over the following passage, but I feel compelled to share it nonetheless just to demonstrate that I am not making it up – although the absence of either character's name from the passage also rather suggests that it is actually a generic sex-scene which the writer had stored away waiting for next time he would need one.

Don't get me wrong – Hammer also very definitely sexualised and objectified their female lead characters. But because they were British and had to respect the rulings of the censors in order to ensure a general release, they did it all with rather more decorum and style than this. So far as I can tell, this novelisation was written and published by an American company for an American market, and I would hazard a guess that the author had never actually seen a Hammer film. After all, they were only just establishing their reputation for gothic period horror at the point when he must have written it. So it is a bit of an oddity and comes across much less like a precious supplement to the film and much more like a badly-mangled version of it compared to the Prince and Scars novelisations. But then again it does have an awesome pulp fiction cover (again bearing no relation to the film), so there's that:

Meanwhile, somewhere beneath the surface of this misogynistic and off-tone novelisation still lies ( the shooting script that I'm really interested in )

Alas, of the Hammer Dracula films only this, Prince and Scars were ever novelised, so I have read them all now and it's a pity to have ended up on this one which is a) badly written and b) reveals at more or less every step of the way how much better the final film was than the pre-production shooting script. However, that's interesting to know and makes me appreciate what the production team did all the more. Apart from the slight weirdness of Marianne getting engaged to the Baron when she ought to know he's mixed up in some pretty weird business and might well be a murderer, the film is one of Hammer's strongest, and the characterisation of the Baroness, the existential threat posed by the Baron and the business with both Gina's coffin-clasps and what she says to Marianne after she has come out of it all contribute a great deal to that. Thank goodness for the creative drive towards perfectionism which everyone who worked at Hammer seems to have subscribed to at this point!

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31. Zeppelin v Pterodactyls (1970 / 2017), staged reading at the Mayhem Film Festival

2018-01-28T21:01:11Z

A little over two years ago, I went to a staged reading of an unproduced Hammer script held at De Montfort University's Cinema And Television History (CATH) Research Centre entitled The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula (LJ / DW), as part of the Mayhem Film Festival in Nottingham. This was essentially the same deal – a line-up of actors giving a live reading of a script based on unproduced material from the Hammer archives as part of the 2017 festival. In this case, though, there had never been a fully-developed original script. Instead, what the archive had to offer was a 13-page story treatment put together in 1970 by David Allen, but never taken any further.

For the purposes of the festival, Steven Shiel and the Mayhem team had worked that story treatment up into a full script, consciously aiming as they did so for something in keeping with the kind of film Hammer would have produced at that time, if they had developed this one for release. As for the Dracula reading I went to, they had also put together a nice set of opening credits, various evocative stills to project onto a cinema screen behind the actors during the reading, and some sound effects. The actors themselves had also broadly dressed correctly for their parts, without looking too much like something out of a fancy-dress shop, and occasionally did some body language or actions to match what was going on in the script – for example, removing braces or undoing shirt buttons when hot.

Again, as for Unquenchable Thirst, I came equipped with a notepad and basically wrote continuously throughout the production to capture an outline of what was going on, because I knew the production was a one-off and that there was no guarantee I would be able to experience the story again. I'll provide a ( brief plot outline )

Once again, as for Unquenchable Thirst it was a real thrill to experience this story fresh on its first telling, with no idea at all what would come next. Hammer films generally are so thoroughly discussed nowadays that if you are at all interested in them, and thus read relevant books and discussion forums, it is more or less impossible to go into any of their films without a bunch of preconceptions and expectations. So one of the biggest gifts the Mayhem team are giving us is the ability to escape that, and experience (would-be) Hammer films raw for the first time. They and the acting cast certainly all did a great job of bringing this one to life for us, and I know I was captivated throughout. It's nice and pacy, and has also sorts of lovely little character moments and comic sequences to offer (which I've largely omitted from the outline above for the sake of brevity, but which were very enjoyable at the time). Certainly, lady_lugosi1313 and I had a grand old time on the front row roaring our heads off at what is basically an adventure-comedy story, albeit with SF elements.

It belongs to a specific genre, neatly encapsulated by the two Wikipedia pages on Lost World films, and Lost World novels, which isn't as close to my heart as gothic horror. So while I can certainly see how it relates to some of the other Lost World stories I have half-watched, I can't set it very precisely within its genre. I could, though, see how, like most such stories, it is inherently colonialist – as for example emerges in the motif of Fulmer, the British explorer, staying behind at the end to 'develop' the Dallick civilisation (i.e. make it more like his). Probably that's part of why I am not all that into Lost World stories generally – well, that and because they essentially boil down to Men, Men, Manly Men having Manly Adventures and either winning women as trophies or telling them to stay in the kitchen.

On that particular front, Zeppelin v Pterodactyl isn't actually too bad – at least as scripted and performed at Mayhem. In fact it sort of works through the issue in the person of Ruth Imrie, a newspaper photographer. The Captain of the Helios initially grumbles about how the ship / expedition is 'no place for a woman', but in fact she proves nothing but an asset throughout, and is certainly very unafraid and self-determined. There is a nice scene where she is dressing rope-burns on her hands caused by a harpoon rope which she had fired at a pterodactyl during an attack on the zeppelin. She is saddened because men from the crew still died despite her best harpooning efforts, but at this point the Captain remarks that she did what she could, constituting a recognition of her value and resolving his earlier misogyny. Ruth herself them explains how she dressed the wounds of soldiers at Mons in the war, and saw good men die – but, for the same reason, she also knows that there can be miracles. So we have a quite rounded picture there of a woman who has become experienced and independent as a direct result of exactly the circumstances which did have that very effect for many women in the First Word War and its aftermath. How much of that is actually present in the original 1970 Hammer story treatment, and how much creative embroidery by the Mayhem team is difficult to say. But my guess is that there was an outline of a 'strong woman' already there, which Steven Shiel worked up to its best effect, where potentially that might not have happened in a real 1970s production.

I'm not sure either whether some of the gorier moments in the script are original or were the Mayhem production team's attempts to recreate what Hammer were doing in the early '70s accurately. I certainly know that I enjoyed hearing about two pterodactyls pulling apart a zeppelin crew-member between them, before one of them is shot and the other drops his bloodied corpse down into the valley below, though! I also liked the use of Classical motifs for the name of the zeppelin (Helios) and for the arena games which characterise the decadent society of the Sithar. And I was reminded of the Doctor Who story The Daleks both by the name of the villagers (Dallicks) and by the broader set-up of simple villagers living outside an advanced city inhabited by hostile mutants, including scenes of people going through caves to infiltrate it. The resemblance puzzled me initially because influence tended to flow from film to TV in the '60s and '70s, not the other way round. But then I remembered that that particular Doctor Who story had also been made into an Amicus film starring Peter Cushing – so of course anyone writing a story treatment for Hammer in the late '70s would have been aware of it, and liable to rework elements from it.

Anyway, a great evening all round, and I will certainly be continuing to keep a close eye on the Mayhem film festival and any further Hammer manqué productions.

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28.-30. Three films featuring Christopher Lee

2018-01-07T17:06:13Z

28. I, Monster (1971), dir. Stephen Weeks

This is an Amicus version of Jekyll and Hyde, and one of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee's 24(ish - it depends how you count) film pairings. It isn't generally very highly regarded, largely because of problems stemming from its production context. Writer/producer Milton Subotsky had managed to convince himself that he could produce a 3D effect on the cheap by keeping the camera constantly panning from left to right, but that turned out not to be true, and meanwhile the tussles over that took everyone's eyes off the core issues of plot and characterisation. Despite all that, lady_lugosi1313 and I both felt on re-watching that it's not as bad as people often tend to suggest. It has some really good sets and locations which are often very nicely photographed. Cushing is as crisp and professional as ever, and Lee's physical transformations into Blake (this production's name for Hyde) are excellent - although I'm afraid I felt that in his 'straighter' scenes as Marlowe (this production's name for Jekyll) he was rather dialling it in. The story also tries to engage directly and explicitly with the Freudian implications of the Jekyll / Hyde motif, although unfortunately the way that comes out isn't very logically coherent. Marlowe is supposed to realise that his potion is doing the same thing to all of his subjects, despite radically different results, but it also seems clear from other dialogue that what it is actually doing is destroying the super-ego in some people and the id in others - which isn't 'the same thing' at all. The behaviour of his Blake isn't consistent either. Sometimes he seems utterly self-confident and to take full pleasure in his crimes, whereas other times he is shamed when people laugh at his experience or seems guilty about what he has done - and it's not at all clear what make the difference in each case. In short, the script needed another edit for consistency and clarity, but I guess all the 3D kerfuffle is why it didn't get it.

29. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), dir. Alan Gibson

Seen a few times before, obviously, and reviewed in full here (LJ / DW). Rather like Scars of Dracula, I know it's one of the weaker films in the Hammer Dracula series, and as such I can tend to slip into thinking of it in the abstract as 'not very good'. But it is still a Hammer Dracula film, of course, so the effect when I actually watch it is usually to be pleasantly surprised. I do especially like the whole D.D. Denham business magnate set-up, which is absolutely logically what Dracula would do in a modern setting. Peter Cushing's confrontation scenes with his old academic pal Dr Julian Keeley (Freddie Jones) are very good as well, offering an extremely believable and well-conveyed sequence of stages of realisation and emotion on both sides as Keeley's story comes out. In fact, now I come to think of it, there is something both quite M.R. Jamesian and quite Tom Lehrer-esque about Keeley's character, as an academic happy to turn a blind eye to the dark implications of his work in return for the temptations of unlimited funding - not to mention disturbing resonances for those of us trying to negotiate the profession in the present day. It also has some beautiful outdoor location footage of London, and especially of Peter Cushing walking past the Albert Hall.

30. Valley of the Eagles (1951), dir. Terence Young

Taped off the telly and watched because it has Christopher Lee in it. This is pretty early in his career, but it's a very characteristic role for him. He's a police detective, operating as a right-hand man to an inspector named Peterson, and as such gets to be clipped and a little bit intimidating while wearing a fedora and pointing a gun at people. Sadly, however, he works in Stockholm (where the story begins), but after about half an hour of screen-time it develops into a chase up towards the Finnish border which he does not come along for, and so his character is absent from the rest of the film. The main tension at the heart of the story is essentially civilisation vs. nature. Though it starts off as a crime investigation into the theft of a crucial piece from a cutting-edge scientific invention (hence the involvement of the police characters), this is only really a ploy to get the scientist whose work has been stolen up into Lapland with a group of reindeer-herders, attempting to track it down. He himself says he has half-forgotten about the equipment by the time a few days have passed, and instead he is drawn into a world of reliance on reindeers and fending off wolves, where he loses his glasses (very symbolic!) and falls in love with a beautiful young Laplander woman. The fairly conventional story of love overcoming a cultural gulf which unfolds from here was given a rather icky edge for me by some dialogue about him needing to be convinced that the Laplanders aren't 'savages', and having this question resolved to his satisfaction when he comes across the young woman reading the Bible to the children in her care. I found that all too reminiscent of white colonialist missionary attitudes to countries full of non-white people. Otherwise, there's some nice footage of snowy landscapes, but much of this actually consisted of pre-existing film shot by the National Geographic Society - so you might as well just watch a nature documentary, really.

The next item on my to-review list is a little bit special and I think needs a dedicated entry of its own, so I will stop there.

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12.-15. Over-due film reviews

2017-12-27T17:05:28Z

Christmas was very nice, involving a soft new dark purple dressing-gown, this book, a roaring fire and a roast duck. Today we have been out in the melting snow to saw up a wardrobe and take it to the tip, and now I've got a couple of hours of quiet time before a family friend comes round to dinner. So let's get started on those over-due reviews I mentioned. A batch of films first, the first two of which must date back to at least June, because I saw them before I went to Australia at the end of that month.

12. Nothing But The Night (1973), dir. Peter Sasdy

This one I watched with ladylugosi_1313 because we just fancied a bit 1970s Cushing-Lee action (a fairly permanent state of mind for us). I've seen it before, and my review from last time (LJ / DW) does not exactly brim over with enthusiasm, but we actually found it better than either of us had remembered on a re-watch. Much of my complaint last time was that it suddenly seemed to switch genres in the final 10 minutes or so, whipping out a supernatural explanation for what had until then appeared to be a perfectly ordinary murder-mystery story with little time to process it or understand why a child was suddenly burning her own mother to death. But of course if you know that supernatural explanation from the beginning, it doesn't appear quite so incongruous when it comes, and you can pick up small ways in which it had actually been telegraphed much earlier on in the film.

There's still a problem with the ending, though, even after the supernatural explanation for all the strange goings-on has been revealed. Basically, the story drives itself into a moral corner by putting a bunch of grown adults who have all done terrible things and therefore need to get their come-uppance into the stolen bodies of children. The dilemma is that because they look like children, it would be a hard sell to convince the audience that it would really be OK for the heroic point-of-view characters we have been following throughout the narrative to gun them down, destroy them in a blazing inferno, or deploy any of the other methods typically used to defeat villains in fantasy movies. However much the audience might have been told that they are adult villains, the visuals of horrible deaths being visited on people we instinctively see as innocent just wouldn't be good. So the solution chosen instead was for the children to enact justice on themselves by deciding to jump off a cliff en masse at the first sign that their plans had been rumbled and they might shortly have to face justice. Unfortunately, though, this just doesn’t ring true at all given the lengths they have already gone to to secure immortality, and contributes a lot to the sensation I'd experienced last time of just feeling that the entire film had plunged spectacularly off the rails in the final few minutes.

Oh well, it still has Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in it, and lots of great '70s period detail, so watching it certainly wasn't a waste of time. But I doubt it will ever be terribly high up my list of their best pairings.

13. Son of Frankenstein (1939), dir. Rowland V. Lee

This was another one watched with ladylugosi_1313, quite possibly on the same night (I can't remember). It features Basil Rathbone as the title character, returning to his father's castle to restore his reputation - except that this includes reviving his Creature, and things start to go horribly wrong when the local Ygor (Bela Lugosi) uses the Creature to wreak revenge on the men who once sentenced him to a hanging (a fuller plot summary is on Wikipedia). Everyone is very good in it - perhaps especially Lugosi as the shaggy, conspiring Ygor - and Basil gets an excellent, athletic swinging-on-a-rope moment at the end to knock the Creature into a sulphur pit and save the day. But the absolute stars of the production really are the wonderful sets, and especially this beautiful pair of matching fire-places in the main living area:

14. Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974), dir. Brian Clemens

I watched this one on the plane from the UK to Thailand, mainly because it was available on Google Play Movies, so I could easily get it onto the tablet which I had bought especially for that trip and watch it when offline. I had seen almost all of it before, but never all sequentially or while properly paying attention. It’s a creditable go at a fresh take on the vampire film on Hammer’s part, and it has some good sequences. I like the scene in which Kronos and Grost have to find out how to despatch the semi-vampirised Dr. Marcus by experimentation, with him urging them on all the while. It offers a good note of black humour and a fun tongue-in-cheek dig at the conventions of the vampire genre. Caroline Munro also does a very good job of experiencing a creepy night in front of the fire at Durward Manor (the vampires' strong-hold). But I find Kronos himself a bit characterless, and Caroline Munro isn’t given enough to do beyond looking scared, wenchlike or sexy. Her performances as both Laura in Dracula AD 1972 and Margiana in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad show a capacity to convey a sense of adventure and vitality which wasn’t given enough outlet here.

15. Dracula: The Dark Prince (2013), Pearry Reginald Teo

Another one downloaded onto my tablet before my Australia trip, and watched in a hotel in Brisbane. I straight-up loved it! It belongs to a particular sub-genre of Dracula stories which are sort of about the historical Vlad as a vampire, but which treat 15th-century Wallachia as a generic Game of Thrones-ish medieval fantasy world rather than making any very serious attempt to situate him in a real historical context. Dracula Untold is on the edge of this field, although it makes more effort than most with the historical setting, and the opening scenes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) are of course what really kicked them all off - but most are novels or comic books. Although I haven’t read any of those, I'm aware enough of the genre to recognise it here, and I have a lot of respect for the approach. It basically takes all the fun bits of the various branches of the Dracula mythos, and doesn't let historical or literary purity get in the way of constructing epic Gothic adventures out of them. Quite right too! This particular film it isn’t anything very much to write home about as far as scripting, acting, direction or cinematography are concerned, and nor does it win any prizes for its representation of gender relations, ethnic diversity, disability or anything else. But as Gothic brain candy it is wonderful and uplifting and enchanting, and I definitely want more films like this, please. I might even explore some of those novels or comic books at some point...

That will have to be enough reviews for today, though, as it is time to get in the shower and then help with getting dinner started.

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6.-11. Various horror films watched with lady_lugosi1313

2017-11-12T19:51:02Z

Apologies in advance if these film reviews are not very inspired. I watched the films in question between about February and May of this year, and didn't take any notes about them at the time. So I'm now more or less reduced to reading the Wikipedia entries (vel. sim.) and trying to remember what I thought of them. I'm just noting down that I watched them, really.

6. House of Frankenstein (1944), dir. Erle C. Kenton

This is one of Universal's multi-monster stories, featuring Dracula, Frankenstein's monster and the Wolfman. Somewhat confusingly, Boris Karloff is in it, but not as Frankenstein's monster: Glenn Strange takes that role, while Karloff plays quasi-Frankenstein figure Dr. Gustav Niemann instead. lady_lugosi1313 suggested we should watch it primarily because it includes a portrayal of Dracula, here played by John Carradine in what I think is the first time I've seen him in the role. He's pretty good while he is in it, doing some nice evil seduction stuff on a young lady, but he gets killed off quite early, so that his story doesn't overlap very much with those of the other monsters (or creatures), and he doesn't get much chance to interact with them. The rest of the film was enjoyable in itself, though, with good castle sets and some dramatic deaths at the climax.

7. The Ghoul (1933), dir. T. Hayes Hunter

This is another Boris Karloff film, in which he plays a paranoid ageing Egyptologist who lives in a gloomy isolated house and is nearing death. Taking his inspiration from the rituals and beliefs of the Egyptians he has spent his life studying, he has built himself a huge neo-Egyptian tomb, complete with a statue of the god Anubis, whom he worships and believes will grant him immortality in return for the offering of a magical jewel. For a long time, the film maintains ambiguity over whether apparently supernatural events are 'real' or not: we see Karloff apparently dying, being interred in his tomb and returning as a vengeful ghoul, and the hand of the Anubis statue appearing to become animated in order to clutch the jewel. But eventually all is revealed to have non-supernatural explanations: the statue's moving hand was actually a servant reaching through a hole in order to steal the jewel, while Karloff turns out to have slipped into a cataleptic trance and then revived. Meanwhile, there is a lot of detective work dedicated to discovering what is going on, and plenty of other strange and gothic happenings. Karloff is absolutely superb in the title role and the whole film a real treasure. Definitely highly recommended.

8. Tendre Dracula (1974), dir. Pierre Grunstein

Oh my! This is one bizarre film. Peter Cushing stars as an ageing horror actor, who wants to move from horror into romance roles. Two scriptwriters are sent by their producers to his home, a crumbling chateau, to persuade him to change his mind, taking their girlfriends with them. There, increasingly bizarre things happen to them all. Is Cushing's character playing an elaborate series of jokes on them all, or is he actually somehow imbued with supernatural powers and they are in for some terrible fate? And what sort of film is this even supposed to be? The weirdest moment is when he puts one of the girls across his knee and starts spanking her, all the while continuing with his conversation as though nothing were out of the ordinary. But that moment is not actually shockingly or strikingly weird compared to what else goes on around it - it just edges slightly ahead of the pack. lady_lugosi1313 may have scoffed at me (perfectly fairly!) for watching Eugénie... the Story of her Journey into Perversion (LJ / DW) just because it has Christopher Lee in it, but now that I have sat beside her watching this film just because Peter Cushing was in it, I feel we are even after all.

9. The Monkey's Paw (1948), dir. Norman Lee

This is a shortish (only just over an hour) adaptation of the classic horror story by W.W. Jacobs which lady_lugosi1313 had recorded off the telly. The print quality was a bit smeary, but we both thought it was very good, and probably had looked pretty beautiful in its original condition. It is updated to the present day of the production, so that the son dies in a drag-car racing accident rather than at a factory, but otherwise follows the story fairly straightforwardly. There are some good working-class characterisations in it, and the sense of dread and fear as the unseen Thing knocks at the door to come in was very effective, if maybe slightly over-played.

10. The Legend of Hell House (1973), dir. John Hough

A haunted house movie starring (amongst others) Roddy McDowall, of whom I have been a great fan ever since I first saw him as Octavian in Cleopatra (1963). The premise is that a group of people made up of scientists and psychics agree to stay for a week in a haunted house where terrible events occurred twenty years earlier, in order to try to document and investigate the possibility of supernatural survival after death. Given the genre, the ghosts soon start to oblige, and given the date of production in the early '70s, many of their manifestations are distinctly sexual. That is, it's basically a load of schlocky, sexy, technicolour nonsense. However, much the the cinematography was absolutely exquisite, the score and sound effects were co-produced by Delia Derbyshire (of Doctor Who theme and the music during the resurrection ritual in Dracula AD 1972 fame), and Roddy McDowall certainly did not disappoint. He delivers a genuinely compelling performance of a character at first riddled with anxiety from his own traumas of twenty years ago, but gradually growing in strength and confidence until it is he who confronts the domineering spirit at the root of all the trouble, reveals his shameful secret and thus disempowers and exorcises him. Also includes a surprise cameo appearance from Michael Gough, who is always a bonus, although he doesn't do very much!

11. The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), dir. Peter Weir

Pretty different from the others listed here, and perhaps more accurately described as a cult film rather than a horror film. It's Australian produced and set, so I was keen to watch it partly with a view to my trip there in the summer, but also because it's a classic which I've always wanted to see anyway. It is quite Wicker Mannish in its portrayal of an outsider who finds himself alone in a deviant community, and perhaps also a little The Prisonerish as he tries to figure out what is going on, everyone reassures him that everything is absolutely fine, and he discovers that he is unable to escape. But, unlike those examples, our point-of-view character is pretty naive and lacking in confidence, while there is internal trouble within the community itself, between the ostensibly repectable mayor and his circle and a subculture of punky rebels. It is only after open violence breaks out between these two sides that the outsider character is eventually able to escape. Along the way there is a lot of tongue-in-cheek comedy about small-town / rural Australian life, and some good black humour around the horrific deeds which the townsfolk are getting up to. Far from a run-of-the-mill mainstream movie, this definitely deserves its reputation as a cult classic, and is sure to surprise more or less whatever you are expecting of it.

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