In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

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 )

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 )

38. Death Line (1972), dir. Gary Sherman

This is a firm favourite which I've written about in detail before (LJ / DW). I still very much stand by that previous review and indeed can only add minor points to it. One is a nice piece of narrative construction which I don't think I'd previously noticed. At the start of the film, the reason there is a policeman around in the underground station at all to approach for help when the young couple find James Manfred, OBE, unconscious on the platform is precisely because of his actions in the previous scene, as the copper is talking to the sex worker whom Manfred had propositioned before being attacked. Another is that the last surviving tunnel-dweller only says the words "mind the doors" to surface-dwellers, not for example his fellow tunnel-dweller who dies part-way through the story. So it's not just that that is the only English-language phrase he knows how to say, and which he uses in all situations - he specifically thinks of it as 'their' language, and is trying to use it in the appropriate context to communicate with them. It's another example of the very thoughtful and humanising characterisation used to create him.

The only small plot issue which niggles at me with this film is the question of when exactly the survivors of the original roof-fall broke back through the blockage, allowing the man we see in the present day to get through to the platforms and attack his victims. You would assume that if it had happened while any of the original generation of construction workers were still alive, they would have wanted to come out and return to normal life rather than stay underground, but it's also rather hard to believe that digging their way out would have taken that long, as it really doesn't appear to be a very large roof-fall in the film. The best explanation I can come up with is that they had been there long enough to have become so disillusioned with the society which had caused the fall and then abandoned them that they chose not to return to it. In that scenario, the main motivation for digging through the roof-fall would have been (or become if it wasn't initially) simply to reach a food source, rather than to escape.


39. Therapy for a Vampire (2014), dir. David Ruehm

I'd never heard of this film until Joel suggested watching it, but it's really lovely and was well worthwhile. It's a horror comedy about a vampire in 1930s Vienna who goes to Sigmund Freud for therapy. He's unhappy with his marriage, largely because his wife is driven mad by her inability to see her own face in the mirror and desperate for any kind of reassurance that she is still beautiful. Sigmund offers the services of a struggling young artist to paint her portrait, but the vampire is more interested in the painter's girlfriend. This is for a reason which I often find annoying, in that she is the reincarnation of his lost love, Nadilla, who died centuries earlier. However, in this context it's a trope which is knowingly undermined, so it was all part of the film's lightly-satirical approach to its subject matter. The story overall is quite touching, and it's very nicely shot, with a slightly fantastical style achieved via strong colours and contrasts and well designed sets. Some scenes even struck me as not just coincidentally being set in the same city, but deliberately designed to recall The Third Man, such as the cafe where the girlfriend works and a street fountain.


40. The Invitation (2022), dir. Jessica M. Thompson

Seen with Joel at The Light, using some free Vue cinema vouchers which are one of a choice of perks you can get with the bank account I have. Briefly, the heroine, Evie, is American, and working in temporary catering placements when the story begins. She discovers via a DNA test that she has English relatives, who prove to be an aristocratic family and invite her over to their mansion at their expense for a wedding. There, she meets the supposedly extremely attractive (but actually hugely skeevy) head of the household, Walter De Ville, but soon also begins having scary and unexplained experiences. It turns out he's a vampire, and she has been brought over to be converted into a vampire herself and complete his coven of three brides.

It's supposedly 'inspired by Dracula', which was why we went to see it, and in fairness there are plenty of references to Stoker's novel. One branch of the family is called the Billingtons and are lawyers from Whitby; the name De Ville is used by Dracula as a pseudonym; he also mentions that he was once known as Son of the Dragon; and lines from the novel (or close paraphrases of them) crop up periodically (e.g. "Tonight is mine, tomorrow is yours"). The basic set-up in which a mixed-race, working-class American woman gets to defeat a load of literally and metaphorically vampiric British aristocrats is obviously also good fun.

However, it spends rather too much time lingering over the rom-com it's initially supposed to appear to be rather than getting on to the vampirism. The plot set-up means it kind of has to, because if Evie really understood her true situation at any time before the wedding feast where it is finally revealed, she would obviously never have agreed to go into the room. So to preserve that big moment of revelation, as the producers obviously wanted to, she can only experience a few relatively minor doubts and concerns before that point - hence being stuck in boring rom-com mode for too long before going from zero to full blast on the horror. It's also just extremely unsubtle in almost every respect. The Dracula references are all repeated multiple times, Walter De Ville is blatantly villain-coded from his very first appearance, and it's full of jump scares rather than tension and atmosphere.

But what all that comes down to saying is that it was not produced for us, seasoned horror-viewers and massive Dracula geeks. It was made for the other people who were there in the cinema auditorium with us - c. twenty-year-olds with no particularly strong adherence to the horror genre. Whether it actually worked for them, I don't really know, but I guess for us it did at least assuage our curiosity about the latest entry in the ever-expanding universe of Dracula-inspired narratives. Lord knows, I have seen plenty of shitty films in my time in pursuit of that goal!

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 )

This was both a Christopher Lee and a Hammer film which I hadn't seen before, which is always going to be a pleasure. I've been meaning to watch it for a while, and then Talking Pictures helped by screening it, so I synchro-watched it with lady_lugosi1313 and we had a grand old time. It's appropriate that it should have been the thirteenth film I watched this year, too, as it rather goes to town in that sort of direction. The eponymous Man of the title (Dr. Georges Bonnet, played by a slightly hammy Anton Diffring) is a doctor and sculptor living at no. 13, Rue Noire in a smoggy Paris, where we first encounter him giving a party for a crowd of swanky Parisian art-lovers.

The story is a pretty transparent effort to repeat the success of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), with Diffring engaged in dubious experiments in his attempts to cheat death, and having much the same kind of arguments with his (ostensibly) older mentor about their morality. There's quite a touch of Jekyll and Hyde to it too, which Hammer hadn't yet released an adaptation of, but given that they did in 1960 it must have been already in the works. Certainly, Dr. Bonnet turns very nasty, and indeed green, when he doesn't get his special potion.

This was the first of two Hammer films in which Lee played a character called Dr. Pierre Gerrard (the other being Taste of Fear), which must have made life easy for him. The character and his performance bear a lot of resemblance to his Paul Allen in The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, too - which is to say rather wooden and affrontedly bourgeois. lady_lugosi1313 will attest that I did not approve of his moustache - I rarely approve of facial hair on Lee, but this one was particularly bad, and as she noted, not even symmetrically stuck on. He appears to be fully on board with Diffring's immoral experiments, but in a twist reveal it turns out that he did not actually perform the operation he wanted. As he puts it, "I made the incision but did not perform the operation." This is probably for the best, because both of them seem to have a distinctly sketchy grasp of the thyroid gland's location.

Many other familiar faces were on board, including Roger Lloyd Pack, Hazel Court and Francis de Wolff. In the visual department, Jack Asher was hard at work on the cinematography, and everyone had exquisite period costumes. We also recognised the same doors with panels made of glass roundels as we had seen recently in The Snorkel and were used also in Revenge of Frankenstein, a blue chafing dish which gets around rather a lot in Hammer films of this era, Bonnet's fireplace, and the stairs down into his cellar, which had been reworked from both Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula. Presumably he was also using a lot of Frankenstein's science equipment and Dracula's books, too.

By the standards of Hammer's other classics in this era, it's a bit disappointing, being hide-bound in particular by an almost total absence of any exterior location footage. But everything ended with Diffring getting his comeuppance and the horrible legacy of his experiments being consumed in a flaming inferno, which is always satisfying.

This is one of four films in which Christopher Lee plays a spoof version of his own performances as Dracula. The others are Tempi Duri per i Vampiri (1959), Dracula père et fils (1976) and One More Time (1970), which I haven't seen.

It's a comedy (obviously), in which the main characters are played by Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr. I must say I'm no fan of Peter Sellers. Dr. Strangelove and Being There are both very good films, but mainly because both are dark political satires. In my experience, the more straightforwardly 'funny' Sellers thinks he's trying to be, the less I want to watch him.

This one is surreal and experimental, in a way that could only really have come out of the late 1960s. It's perhaps all too easy to label it 'proto-Monty Python', given that it literally has both John Cleese and Graham Chapman in it, very shortly before the first series of actual Monty Python aired, but it does feature a lot of their sort of humour. Examples include the helicopter pilot called Pontius, a scene in which the central characters go to the theatre to see Hamlet, and the person in the title role starts doing a strip tease complete with raunchy music and neon signs during the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy scene, and an escalating absurdity gag in which they go out with rifles to shoot game birds, but quickly upgrade to machine guns, rocket launchers and tanks.

It has a central plot, in which Peter Sellers' character, Sir Guy Grand, adopts Ringo Starr's, who begins the film as a homeless person sleeping in the park, but is given the name Youngman Grand by his new adoptive father. Guy Grand is so immensely rich that he can basically do whatever he likes, and his main interest seems to be performing experiments to explore the effect of money on other people. As he puts it, everyone has their price. So he goes round bribing a parking inspector £500 to literally eat his own ticket, offering an art dealer £30,000 for a (possible) Rembrandt before cutting it up in front of his eyes, bribing a team of Oxford dark blues to turn the Boat Race into a fight, and scattering fresh bank-notes into a vat of blood, urine and faeces adorned with a sign saying 'FREE MONEY HERE' and then standing back to watch as a lot of City types with bowler hats and umbrellas wade in to retrieve them.

But these episodes are exactly that - episodic. Where many another film about a person from the top of the social hierarchy adopting someone from the bottom would concentrate closely on those characters, developing them and showing us scenes in which they at first clashed or failed to understand one another, but then eventually reached a common ground and were reconciled, there is nothing of that here. Indeed, you don't even hear the dialogue in the initial scene when Guy goes up and introduces himself to Youngman in the park - just see it from a distance. After that, the adoption is simply a done deal, and Youngman follows Guy around the place as he requires, not doing much other than observing and saying 'Yes, Dad' as a lot of strange things happen to them.

Quite a bit of the humour reflects the era's growing awareness of sexual and ethnic minorities, in ways that generally side against the 'squares' who aren't au fait with such matters, but not necessarily with the minorities in question. At one point, two boxers all squared up for a big macho fight in front of the TV cameras surprise everyone by kissing instead of punching each other (not that we see it directly), whereupon the commentator observes: "The crowd seem to be sickened by the sight of no blood." Later, Yul Brynner as a transvestite cabaret artist delivers a sultry performance of 'Mad About the Boy' which culminates in him lifting off his blonde wig to the horror of a hitherto-entranced patron. And a passenger on the cruise ship from which the film takes its title is heard making reactionary racist remarks shortly before discovering that the evening's entertainment is a pair of Mr Universe body-builders, one Afro-Caribbean and one Causcasian, who strut their stuff to a song about 'Black and White', and are later seen dancing together at the ship's disco.

As for Christopher Lee, he's one of many, many star cameos in the film, some others of which I've already referenced above. He initially appears on the cruise ship dressed in a smart ship's waiter's uniform, delivering a tray of drinks to a female passenger, and I suppose the original audience would have assumed at first that he was no more than that. But the surprise twist is so utterly blown now that it's the very reason I watched this film - in fact, he turns out to be a vampire, who first bares his teeth and bends over the woman to help himself to a drink of his own, before striding down the corridor, cloak billowing, to follow up with a chaser of the captain. The corridor scene in particular is very effectively shot with a backwards-tracking camera in slightly slow motion, and in some ways perhaps captures the essence of his Dracula performances better by dint of being an overblown parody than Hammer could ever quite manage when presenting him seriously. He and Hammer were absolutely at the apogee of them at this point, churning out an average of roughly one a year, and the cameo must have felt like quite the snapshot of the contemporary zeitgeist.

But it's all over in a few seconds, though it is quite crucial to the plot, as it's also the cue for everything in the ship to descend into total chaos and anarchy. Soon afterwards, it turns out never to have left the dock at all, but to have been shut up in a warehouse in central London all along, while its passengers underwent a fake cruising experience. Guy Grand's group barely notices.

There's a sort of charm to the movie as a whole, but probably not the same charm its original viewers were expected to feel. The Beatles' 'Come And Get It' is the centrepiece of the soundtrack, usually played straightforwardly, but sometimes picked up by e.g. a marching band for a bit of variation. For a song which I'm pretty sure was meant to sound full of youthful spirit and joie de vivre, it somehow comes across as sad and wistful in this movie, much as I often find is also the case with Hanoi Rocks songs (none of which I ever heard until well after Razzle had already died in Vince Neil's car). It's all very obviously a relic of a bygone age.

Anyway, for those who might like to see Christopher Lee's scenes, but can't be bothered with the whole movie, if you have a FB account they are all included in this video of the climactic scenes on the cruise ship. Indeed, if you don't even want to sit through 7 minutes and 22 seconds just for about 30 seconds of Christopher Lee (however good those 30 seconds might be), his bits start at 02:52 and 04:48. Enjoy!

I cannot tell you how excited I am finally to have been able to see this film, screened yesterday evening on Talking Pictures TV. It's one of Christopher Lee's earliest films - not the very earliest of his I have seen, which is Corridor of Mirrors (LJ / DW) - but his earliest substantial role, which saw him third in the billing and playing the part of the main villain, no less! It is still very small beans in the scale of things, being a low-budget B-movie only 47 minutes long, but it's an important moment in his career history.

The BFI provide a nice overview of the film and its points of interest here. It's basically a detective story with two threads: Inspector Carson of Scotland Yard who is trying to crack a secret ring of people helping Nazi war criminals escape Europe, and Jonathan Blair (Lee), who produces a weekly newspaper cartoon strip based on drawings of a live model named Penny. They are tied together by two things: Carson's secretary and Blair's model are flat-mates, and Blair turns out to be part of the criminal ring, conveying secret messages to the escaping war criminals via the hair-styles which he draws for Penny in the strip.

This means Lee appears in the film in two modes. Early on, while we still believe he is an ordinary comic-strip artist, he is urbane and charming, much in line with what he'd already done in Corridor of Mirrors, and speaks in a light, high voice which I barely recognised as his (even allowing for the imperfect sound-recording technology of the time). But once his true identity is revealed he adopts a harsher, brusquer manner, his voice drops and becomes much more like the one we all recognise, and he literally ends the film wearing a leather trench coat, toting a gun and delivering what I believe to have been his first ever cinematic death scene. He comes across as a little mannered and wooden throughout, but these were early days. Certainly, templates were being laid down. He makes the same transition from apparently-charming to (admittedly much more) ruthless in Dracula, while he would don many another leather trench-coat in later roles as literal or analogous Nazis. It's all very charming to see.

Around him, the film is nicely structured and perfectly competent given its budget, with a few moments of humour and a decent chase scene towards the end, though nothing particularly powerful or profound. It comes pretty close to passing the Bechdel test by dint of having three speaking female characters (Penny, the comic strip model, Molly the Scotland Yard secretary and Mrs Hodgson, Blair's cleaning lady), and including at least four substantial conversations between Penny and Molly over the course of the film. Penny is fascinated by Molly's job and asks lots of questions about it, but because Molly's boss and colleagues and the people they are trying to bring to justice are all men, this means that even a conversation about Molly's working life and both women's aspirations is inherently still about men. Molly herself is played by Diana Dors, in a surprisingly dowdy role given her later image, and not the last time she would co-star with Christopher Lee either.

Not a film I would have watched for its own sake, but a welcome stop on my ongoing tour through Lee's screen career.

Fairly obviously, I am in a state of high excitement about the new adaptation of Dracula which starts this evening on BBC1. But also a little nervous, because it's Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and their co-productions often seem stylish and attractive at first glance but then collapse into insubstantial disappointment on closer inspection.

The trailers look promising:

Watch on YouTube

Dracula is clearly going to be both extremely sexy and extremely evil, which is exactly what I'm after from him. It evidently won't be following the novel very precisely, but Dracula as a story has enjoyed such success since its publication in large part because its adaptations never have done. In this case it looks like one change will be additional female characters with purpose and agency, which is good. (Maybe even a person of colour ditto, but it's hard to be wholly sure from the trailer.) And it's clearly going to be visually stunning - the sumptuous, gory logic of the Hammer aesthetic turned up to eleven and with the benefit of overseas location shooting and good CGI.

My main niggling worry at the moment is about the use of quips. There's one in the trailer I've embedded above - Dracula with his cane self-consciously swaggering (even though he seems to be sitting down) and saying "I'm undead; I'm not unreasonable." This Conversation article by Catherine Spooner (a Gothic literature specialist) who saw a preview screening of the first episode suggests there will be quite a few more. She gives some examples, and notes: "There are more zingers to come as Bang quips his way across Europe like an infernal James Bond."

This could work. If set off effectively against Dracula's malign motivations and brutality, it could throw them into sharp relief and make them more effective, in a similar way (though with a different palette) to the contrast between Christopher Lee's suave, gentlemanly welcome when Jonathan Harker arrives at his castle in Hammer's Dracula and his snarling hurricane of bestial rage later on. It might even reflect thought-provokingly on our own current climate of political discourse, in which superficial cleverness and deliberately-cultivated buffoonery seem to function as effective masks for power-hungriness and a disdain for the suffering of others. Then again, it might turn out to just be superficial cleverness in itself, there to distract us from other weaknesses in the script and only diluting the impact of Dracula as a character. I don't yet know, and I'm going to try to keep an open mind about it.

Certainly, and again as Catherine Spooner notes in her Conversation article, comic relief has a long-standing place in Gothic horror, and in Dracula stories in particular. Stoker put in plenty of it, particularly in his characterisations of people of lower social status than his main characters. This description, sent to Seward by a colleague he has left in charge of his asylum while he is away, of his encounter with two men who had been attacked by Renfield while delivering boxes of earth to Dracula's house at Carfax, always makes me laugh:

The two carriers were at first loud in their threats of actions for damages, and promised to rain all the penalties of the law on us. Their threats were, however, mingled with some sort of indirect apology for the defeat of the two of them by a feeble madman. They said that if it had not been for the way their strength had been spent in carrying and raising the heavy boxes to the cart they would have made short work of him. They gave as another reason for their defeat the extraordinary state of drouth to which they had been reduced by the dusty nature of their occupation and the reprehensible distance from the scene of their labours of any place of public entertainment. I quite understood their drift, and after a stiff glass of strong grog, or rather more of the same, and with each a sovereign in hand, they made light of the attack, and swore that they would encounter a worse madman any day for the pleasure of meeting so `bloomin' good a bloke' as your correspondent.

Hammer, too, in whose footsteps Moffat and Gatiss are clearly following at least as much as Stoker's, also have a grand tradition of comic relief characters. Their Dracula gives us the easily-bribed Frontier Official who gets his toll barrier broken twice during the final climactic chase back to the castle, and Miles Malleson's wonderful absent-minded undertaker with a black sense of humour.




That's quite a long way from having Dracula himself cracking the jokes, though. Stoker has Dracula mock and gloat at the human characters, but not indulge in knowing word-play. Hammer gave him the occasional ironic line, as in Satanic Rites when he brushes off Van Helsing's enquiries about the deadly strain of plague bacteria which he has commissioned by explaining that he has political goals, and that "To lend weight to one's arguments amid the rush and whirl of humanity it is sometimes necessary to be... persuasive." Not quips, though. Still, Catherine Spooner is right that Bela Lugosi's most famous line - "I never drink... wine" - shows that Dracula can indulge in devilish self-conscious humour without undoing his menace. Let's hope that will remain true this evening.

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.

I watched this because it is a Hammer film with Christopher Lee in it. Well, I mean and Michael Ripper and Oliver Reed and Marie Devereux (too briefly!) and Andrew Keir and Desmond Llewellyn and a bunch of other favourites - but mainly because of Christopher Lee. It isn't a horror film, though, but rather one of Hammer's swash-buckling adventures, as the title suggests. And for all the pirateyness, it involves the minimum possible amount of screen-time set on board ship, because obviously Hammer couldn't have dreamt of affording that. Rather, they bought in some stock footage for the beginning, built an interior cabin set, commissioned a matte painting of a sea-scape for the end, and set the rest on an island which is very obviously Black Park with a few half-dead palm fronds stuck around the place.

This means that the plot feels more like a Wild West adventure set on the Pitcairn Islands than anything else - although in fact both the islanders and the pirates who come to attack them are French. The islanders consist of a Huguenot colony who have been living in isolation for several generations now, and a fundamental tension has developed amongst them between the strict and traditionally-minded elders of the community and the younger generation who want something different and less oppressive. The analogy here for the real-world contemporary tensions between the pre- and post-war generations is obvious, and there's some interesting stuff about how both sides have their own competing interpretations of what the colony's original founder (old Symeon) stood for. But ultimately this aspect of the story rather peters out, eclipsed by the attack of the pirate gang (led by the lovely Mr. Lee) who come to raid the settlement and abscond with the treasure which they are (rightly) convinced it must be hoarding.

The sexual politics are very typical of Hammer during this period, in that they are playing around with the flouting of traditional values, but ultimately don't quite want to condone their overthrow. Early on, we are invited to sympathise with a young woman (Marie Devereux's character), who is afraid of her brutal husband (one of the traditionally-minded village elders), and has fallen in love instead with one of the young idealists. But ultimately these two cannot be allowed to have a sustained relationship or happy ending, because that would be to condone adultery. Instead, she isn't quite killed directly for her sins, but in trying to escape a crowd of villagers bent on punishment, she runs into a river where she is devoured by piranhas (hence the 'Blood River' of the title). Effectively, then, she is punished by God - or whatever divine agency you might want to imagine.

Christopher Lee is of course absolutely great as the pirate captain, who obviously has enough education and breeding by comparison with his men to convince the same young idealist that he will help him to overthrow the village elders and create a better community, but is in fact utterly ruthless and ready to sacrifice anyone at all in pursuit of the treasure he desires. In other words, it is the perfect Christopher Lee role. He gets a good death scene towards the end, which involves him being pinned to a tree with a sword (though it was obviously cut in the version I saw on Talking Pictures), which along with the piranhas and some sadistic punishments dished out to the young idealist after he has been sent to a prison camp by the village elders would have delivered the sorts of thrills Hammer audiences came to see. It's a pity, though, that Lee was obviously asked to play the captain as having one shrivelled hand. Nothing ever comes of that plot-wise, and indeed I don't think it was ever mentioned in the script, but obviously it's another one for the Evil Cripple file. Similarly, there are a couple of black pirates in his gang, presumably to help convey the exoticism of the settings, but they never get to speak.

The dullest parts of this film for me were the fight sequences, which I am Just Not That Into - especially an extended blindfolded fight sequence between two of the pirates, which just seemed to go on forever to little effect, and was ultimately only over which of them was going to be allowed to rape one of the village women anyway. In fact, this never happened as a rescue party arrived in time, but it gave an already very boring fight an unpleasantly icky edge. It also seemed to me that a lot of the strategies employed by the pirates were downright stupid, such as attacking the village en masse from the front, rather than sending a small party round the side while the villagers were all busy holding off the main attack; or stopping to sleep in the forest after they have seized the treasure and thus allowing the villagers to catch up with them, rather than just ploughing the hell on through the night to reach their ship and escape. But whether this was 'meant' to appear stupid, as a way of characterising the pirates as a not particularly effective force, or was simply the result of insufficiently careful script-writing, I'm not sure.

Anyway, worth watching overall as part of my general long-term exploration of both Hammer's oeuvre and Christopher Lee's, but I would be surprised if I found myself rushing back to watch it again.