In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

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 )

This film came at the end of what had felt like a long week, so I was in something of a state of torpor on the sofa by the time it came on and don't think I really engaged with it very productively. But I also don't think the problem was entirely me - it just wasn't really up to much, and I'm afraid has only confirmed my existing view that few horror comedies really are.

( 20. The Comedy of Terrors (1963), dir. Jacques Tourneur, broadcast 6 May )

And the credits roll. That was well-shot, had some great stars (not the least of which was Orangey / Rhubarb the cat) and gave them some decent individual lines. But overall it's confirmed my view that horror-comedy usually fails on both fronts. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd

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!

AND FINALLY (for now), this is a fairly standard narrative about a dysfunctional family bumping each other off for an inheritance with Frankie Howerd thrown in for comic relief, which I watched with lady_lugosi1313 after it was screened on Talking Pictures recently. It wasn't awful, but it dragged a lot more than it should have done given the suspenseful potential of the plot. Frankie Howerd was relatively toned down, perhaps so that he would fit appropriately into a story about family murders, but it ended up feeling like an unhappy compromise - neither funny enough nor horrific enough to entertain. To be fair to it, the sets and a lot of the cinematography were actually very good, and we had fun spotting all the cliches and guessing what was going to happen. But it wasn't a patch on comparable British horror comedy Carry on Screaming.

Since no more need be said about this film, I hereby declare myself UP TO DATE with reviewing at long last. That's basically taken me the whole of the bank holiday weekend, but it was a worthwhile investment. Who knows what crazy things I might get up to now!

I saw the first Iron Sky film in the cinema when it came out in 2012 (LJ / DW). This one, the sequel, did get a cinema release, but in Leeds only one cinema offered a showing if enough people signed up in advance and not enough did, so lady_lugosi1313 and I watched it via Google Play instead.

I was surprised as we watched by how very little I remembered about the first film, but now I've realised it came out in 2012 I'm less so. (If you'd asked me to guess its release date before I checked, I would have said 2015.) It left me a bit at sea at the beginning of the film, as we were evidently meant to recognise some of the characters as descendants of people from the original film, but I couldn't remember anything about their parents so lady_lugosi1313 had to remind me. It didn't really matter too much once things got going, though.

Like the first film, it was funny and knowingly silly. There's a lot to be said for a film whose climax features a fake alien lizard-Hitler riding a tyrannosaurus rex through a moon colony. It was fun to see a fake alien lizard-Caligula crop up briefly part-way through, too. But I see looking back at my review of the first film that I complained about its unsubtlety in some areas, and I felt like that again this time about their parody of Apple cultism, in which a slavish adoration of Steve Jobs and everything he ever produced had become the main religious cult on the moon base. It would have been OK as a one-off passing joke, but as things are it was over-played. Still, it made for a fun afternoon.

A coda to the 1940s Universal Mummy sequels I saw recently, and really just a note to say I did, because lady_lugosi1313 was quite right - this ain't up to much. Abbott and Costello's slap-stick farce and jokes which depend on implausible misunderstandings just isn't my sense of humour, and here a lot of it is both weak and desperately over-played. The Mummy himself is barely in it, when he is he looks more like he's wearing a boiler suit than bandages, and multiple scenes of characters (usually Costello) oblivious to the fact that he is right behind them rely too heavily on him stopping when they stop, rather than pressing on relentlessly as was the whole point of him in the first place. It's just fundamentally a mistake to put monsters into a film like this and expect them to retain any frisson of real terror or even make any sense at all.

Since I watched it for the sake of seeing how the series ends up, though, I will note that the plot set-up is broadly like the four 1940s sequels, but the Mummy's name has changed from Kharis to Klaris and his princess' from Ananka to Ara. So far, so par for the course - after all, their followers change part-way through the 1940s sequels from the priests of Karnak to the priests of Arkam. The tenuous continuity built up over the sequels has gone, though - we're back in Egypt rather than the USA, and the old back-story about the Mummy being condemned to burial alive for trying to resurrect his princess is long forgotten. There is one weird and probably accidental form of silent continuity, though, in that her burial-place in this film is located in front of (what must be a blown-up back-drop photograph of) the ruins of Karnak. I'm sure it's just because those are some of the first ruins anyone will see when searching through photo archives for pictures of ancient Egypt, but hey - it creates a little in-story nod back to the name of the original priesthood, all the same.

The film does contain an excellent lady villainess (Marie Windsor as Madame Rontru) who is after Princess Ara's treasure, two nice dance sequences (by a troupe which I learn was called Chandra Kaly and his dancers) and a rather random but very good jazz number (Peggy King singing 'You Came A Long Way From St. Louis'). Otherwise, though, it's entirely missable.

This is a New Zealand horror comedy which lady_lugosi1313 gave planet_andy on DVD for his birthday, and which I watched with them just before Christmas.

On one level, it's about mutant zombie sheep. On another, it's about the conflict between GM (and similarly interventionist approaches to farming) and good old-fashioned tradition. But mainly, it's about mutant zombie sheep.

The production values on the sheep themselves were actually very high, so that it was difficult to tell the difference between the real sheep they had filmed running around menacingly and the zombie sheep puppets they had created, except by their behaviour on screen. They'd done an impressively good job of rendering people being turned into mutant zombie sheep or getting torn apart by them, too.

Along the way, we got lots of nice evil scientists and capitalists, some very earnest environmental activists, plenty of kick-ass action and at least one sheep-shagging joke. I am confident that this is the only horror film I have seen so far, and probably the only one I will ever see, in which the monsters are eventually defeated by setting fire to a sheep's fart.

Not much else to say about this, really, except that it was excellent silly fun. BUT this is actually my final film write-up for 2017, and that is truly liberating. I will start on 2018 forthwith...

Another little blast of these ahead of the new Sherlock at 8:30.

13. Jane Eyre (1943), dir. Robert Stevenson
Seen with ms_siobhan at the National Media Museum in Bradford. It has fantastic sets, plenty of nice Gothic bleakness, some lovely frocks, and Orson Welles doing an excellent line in demonstrating exactly why Mr. Rochester is a complete and utter twat.

14. City of the Dead aka Horror Hotel (1960), dir. John Llewellyn Moxey
Also seen with ms_siobhan, round at her place I believe. I've seen it before, and indeed own the DVD, but had not watched it for at least 10 years, probably a fair bit more. It features Christopher Lee and a folk-horrorish plot involving a small American town with a history of witch-craft that turns out to be not so very confined to the past as the young female protagonist might hope. In fact, now I come to think about it, there is a lot here in common with The Curse of the Crimson Altar, watched not long before this and reviewed here. For a while, it looks like it might be quite committed to female emancipation, as Nan Barlow (the main character) sets out on an original academic research project despite her boyfriend and brother advising against it, but of course she then dies as a result, so it is just good old-fashioned Stay In The Kitchen after all.

15. The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), dir. Guy Hamilton
Watched because it was on TV and I needed distraction. I think I may still have been on bereavement leave at this point, or else technically out of it but still treating myself very gently as much as possible. Anyway, obviously again the main attraction was Christopher Lee and he delivers in very fine form in this one! Scaramanga's combination of malevolence, sexual potency, superficial charm and brute violence suit him very, very well indeed. It is a very episodic film, which could almost have worked nicely as a TV mini-series, with distinct events taking place on Scaramanga's island, in Beirut, Macau, Hong Kong, and Bangkok and finally back on the island again. I suppose most Bond stories are to some degree, but this more than most, I think.

16. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), dir. Peter Jackson
I started 2016 with the first of these films, and later followed up with the second, even though this time Christopher Lee is not featured. I enjoyed the elf-orc battle as Bilbo and his friends escaped in wine-barrels down the river, the icy goings-on in Laketown, and the confrontation between Bilbo and Smaug inside the latter's enormous treasure-trove. I have the final film on DVD from Lovefilm, but seem to be taking a while to get round to actually watching it.

17. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), dir. Mandie Fletcher
Seen with ms_siobhan at the Cottage Road cinema. It was good fun and kept us entertained throughout, although I'm afraid I probably only recognised about half of the cameo roles which I was obviously supposed to recognise. Joanna Lumley's body-language as Patsy is just splendid, and she was definitely the highlight of the film for me.

18. Ghostbusters (2016), dir. Paul Feig
Also seen with ms_siobhan (I think?), probably at the Cottage too. Splendid fun, and great to see both an all-female lead cast and lots of slashy potential between almost all of the main characters. The one thing I could have wished to make it better was that Erin Gilbert (the academic one played by Kristen Wiig) had been fully self-confident in her job at the beginning, and actually delivering a huge and important lecture to a crowded room, rather than practising for doing so, when she is approached by the guy with a copy of her unwittingly-published book about ghosts. That would have made her a full-on identification character for me, as well as giving her a much stronger character narrative for the movie - the woman who was not only a fully-functioning successful academic but also a believer in the paranormal. But no.

Here we get to films 19-23, which I already wrote up as part of my review of the Starburst Film Festival, which is frankly pretty good going. I still have an hour before Sherlock starts as well! Let's see how many more I can do...

24. Beat Girl (1960), dir. Edmond T. Gréville
Taped off the telly and watched chez moi for the usual reason - viz, it has Christopher Lee in it. I've seen it before, but years ago, and never reviewed it here. It's a youth culture film, but rather unsure about whether youth culture is something to be celebrated and glorified or indulged in moral panic over - primarily the latter, though. The main character, Jennifer, is resentful of her father's new not-much-older-than-her wife, and pruriently fascinated when she discovers the wife's past as a stripper. Soon, looking for teenage rebellious kicks, she begins flirting with the world of shady underground strip clubs herself - and Christopher Lee is the sleazy strip-club manager who is there to greet her when she does. It's not a particularly great film on the whole, and the teen characters' dialogue is seriously cringe-worthy, but I do love the music in the climactic scene when Jennifer strips at a house-party. No need to worry about what you might see if you click on that link, BTW - it's from the early '60s, so she doesn't get any further than a cast-iron bra and some knickers your gran would probably think were a bit frumpy.

25. Madhouse (1974), dir. Jim Clark
Seen with ms_siobhan round at her place, this is an absolutely cracking Vincent Price film which I can hardly believe I hadn't seen before. As in Theatre of Death, he is basically playing himself ('Dr. Death', a type-cast film-star), to the extent that clips from his character's supposed past performances were taken from footage of the real Vincent Price performing in Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films. Around the story of his declining stardom, a murder-mystery unfolds, featuring Peter Cushing, lots of lovely Seventies clothes, and even some charming Seventies children. Just marvellous, and I will gladly watch it again any time.

26. The Wicker Tree (2011), dir. Robin Hardy
This is the film version of Hardy's novel, Cowboys for Christ, which I read and reviewed some years ago. Having read the novel, I had very low expectations for the film, with the result that I actually quite enjoyed it. It is pretty straightforwardly the same story, but probably a better film than the novel is a book - unsurprisingly, really, since that was how Hardy always intended it, and the novel was only what he did to get the story out while attempting to secure backing for the film. Christopher Lee appears, but only fairly briefly in a flashback, and that's probably for the best. Not as awful as it could have been, but a very poor shadow indeed of The Wicker Man. It's unwise to even think of the two as being in any way connected, really.

OK, just six more reviews to do in order to get up to date now - on films at least! But I think that's enough for one evening. Time to tag, format and heat up the last portion of the Christmas pudding ready for tonight's televisual treat...

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Start of term = busy = also tired when not actually busy = still haven't finished writing up the Starburst Film Festival I attended in late August. Friday and Saturday are covered at the links; the schedule for Sunday is here, with what I did below.



( Space-flight and puzzle games )

( Interview with Toby Whithouse )

( 23. Aliens (1986), dir. James Cameron )

( Red Dwarf series XI: exclusive first episode preview and interview with Doug Naylor )

Finally, it was time to depart, sad that it had already all come to an end, but already making plans for future fantastic film-related adventures as we bid one another goodbye. I'll certainly come back for another Starburst festival if they do it again next year.

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Watched because shingles, and because magister noticed I had not seen it, and therefore lent me the DVD. It is a pastiche story about a washed-up super-hero, who was America's golden boy in the 1940s, but then fell foul of McCarthyism and ended up drinking meths in the gutter. When his arch-nemesis, Mr. Midnight, makes a re-appearance, steals a government-developed hypno-ray and uses it to gather all of New York's ethnic minorities into a new housing project so that he can blow them up, Captain Invincible has to be brought back into shape to save the day.

It's quite funny, and a perfectly acceptable way to spend an hour and a half, but I think there's a sort of cap on how funny feature-length pastiches can be - generally the joke tends to wear thin after a while, and this is no exception. There are hints also that the script aspired to being more bitingly satirical than it actually is, but that the ideas weren't followed through. This applies especially to the notion of the US government developing a hypno-ray, and Mr. Midnight's declared belief that the 'pure genetic Americans' will applaud his ethnic cleansing of New York and carry him into the White House as a result. Obviously both of those ideas are scathingly critical of America's government and its voting public (the film is Australian, BTW), but they aren't really worked through properly, so that the critique fizzles out rather than hitting home, and the eugenics project in particular just feels weirdly distasteful. In the end, the plot boils down to a standard good vs. evil story, with Captain Invincible saving the day and getting the girl.

Lee plays Mr. Midnight, of course, doing exactly what he normally does best in this sort of role - playing the villain with deadly serious professionalism, yet with a little twinkle in his eye that lets us know how much he is enjoying pushing the performance just as notch or two over the top. He also gets to sing, as the film is a musical comedy. On the whole, the songs aren't up to much, and have that quality of feeling like they are just interrupting the story which is the hall-mark of a weak musical. But Lee's turn close to the end in the alcoholic pun-based 'Name Your Poison' is justly famous, and this Youtube video (which also includes a minute or so of confrontational dialogue between Mr. Midnight and Captain Invincible) captures pretty much everything which is worth seeing about his part in this film:

In short, once you've seen that video, you can safely skip the rest of the movie.

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