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 )

21. The Love Witch (2016), dir. Anna Biller

This was the first film I saw with ladylugosi_1313 after I got back from Australia, and we were both baffled by its apparent critical reputation. According to its Wikipedia page, the director "Anna Biller is a feminist filmmaker whose take on cinema is influenced by feminist film theory" and the consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that "The Love Witch offers an absorbing visual homage to a bygone era, arranged subtly in service of a thought-provoking meditation on the battle of the sexes." We just couldn't see the intelligent, nuanced film these quotations seemed to be speaking of for the life of us – and it's not like we were a hostile audience, because everything on paper said that we should have liked it. It is pitched as a homage to the very horror films we most love from the late '60s and early '70s, after all.

Half the problem, perhaps, was that although it appears initially to be set in the late '60s / early '70s, it transpires not to be. After a bit of scene-setting, characters start driving up in obviously-later cars or whipping out mobile phones, and we are gradually invited to realise that we are actually seeing a community in which everyone dresses and behaves as though it were the late '60s / early '70s, even though it is in fact the present day. If I wanted to be generous about this, and to see how feminist film-theory had informed it, I might suggest that perhaps it is supposed to prompt the audience into an uncomfortable realisation about present-day sexism. All those blatantly-sexist views we hear characters espousing in the film are not actually relics of another age, but – ta-daaa! – happening all around us right now. The problem is that they are such a caricature that they don't ring true even for c. 1970 in the first place, and are also fatally undermined by none of the characters having any obvious warmth, depth or plausibility to them anyway. I didn't have this comparator available to me at the time I saw the film, of course, but in retrospect it felt a lot like the characterisation of the poor old First Doctor as a cartoonish chauvinist in Twice Upon A Time for the sake of a few jokes about embarrassing sexist old uncles, when he wasn't actually at all like that in the first place.

It didn't help, either, that the main character (Elaine) experiences no obvious character growth, despite having gone through a set of experiences which really should have made her consider her life choices by the end of the film, and nor are we ever offered any convincing sense of the allure which that lifestyle held for her in the first place. In short, it just all felt rather pointless, and I won't be bothering to watch this film again. There are plenty of actual late '60s / early '70s horror films I could watch instead, with fully-developed characters in them and satisfying narrative arcs. Speaking of which…


22. Witchfinder General (1968), dir. Michael Reeves

I watched this one with my old chum hollyione when she came to visit me in late August. I have seen it plenty of times before, and reviewed it at least once in these pages (LJ / DW), but it is of course always wonderful to revisit, especially with a friend who appreciates the genre as much as me. Our main query on this viewing was: when Sarah sees Matthew Hopkins torturing and burning women as witches in Lavenham, knowing all that she already knows about him by that time, why on earth doesn't she hide in a cupboard until he's gone, rather than going out and about the place shopping as though she were perfectly safe? Anyway, it doesn't really get in the way of one of the all-time horror greats. They wouldn't be as enjoyable as they are without their occasional plot-holes (a rather different matter from the pervasive implausibility affecting the entirety of The Love Witch).


23. The Sorcerors (1967), dir. Michael Reeves

hollyione and I watched this one together too. She hadn't seen it before, but was interested when I explained that it is one of only a handful of full-length feature films which Michael Reeves completed before his untimely death, and agreed that while quite different from Witchfinder General, it is also very good. Again, I've reviewed it before (LJ / DW), so needn't repeat what I've already said about it. hollyione did comment that the film would probably benefit from a little more time spent on the establishment of Ian Ogilvy's character (Mike) before he goes home with Boris Karloff, and I think she's right. We know that he is bored and directionless, but it would be helpful to have some sense of how much the potential to commit the crimes we see the old couple telepathically commanding him to commit was already within him - i.e. to what extent are they able to do this so easily because he is partially complicit? Some nods to this would have added a little to the moral and pscyhological complexity – but regardless, it remains a very clever story about the temptations of power.


25. Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula (2000), dir. Joe Chappelle

Not to be confused with Dracula: The Dark Prince (which I reviewed a couple of days ago), this is sort of like an earlier shot at Dracula Untold (LJ / DW), in that it largely tells the story of the historical Vlad III Dracula, but also attempts to explain how he became a vampire. The vampire thread is much lower in the mix here, though, coming into play only at the end of the film, and explaining it as a consequence of Vlad's excommunication by the Orthodox Church after converting to Catholicism in order to secure an alliance with Hungary. So, for the most part, it presents itself as a non-fantastical historical drama. Unfortunately, though, it isn't very good on that level. A lot of the history is over-simplified or just plain made up – so, for example, Janos Hunyadi and Matthias Corvinus are merged into one generic Hungarian king (played, rather inexplicably, by Roger Daltrey) and there's a whole invented plot-line about Vlad's wife being driven mad by his atrocities. More seriously, it isn't very good as drama either. The actor playing Vlad (Rudolf Martin) appears to have been chosen more for his dark, Gothic good looks than any ability to express passion or emotional range, and indeed the whole production is much as you would expect it to be given what it is – a made-for-TV movie. The best thing it has to offer is some nice location footage of actual castles and monasteries in Romania. But Vlad Tepes (1979) (LJ / DW) is better history, despite its pro-Ceaușescu leanings, and Dracula Untold is better fantasy.


26. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt ('Berlin: Symphony of a Great City', 1927), dir. Walter Ruttmann

Finally, for a total change of tone, I saw this with lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House, complete with a very interesting introductory talk by the lovely IngridESharp. Basically it is a day in the life of Berlin in its many aspects, covering industry, street-life, transport, office work, leisure pursuits and night-life. Much of it is clearly unstaged, with the cameras simply capturing contemporary real life, but we could see that some elements must have been set up – for example, a fracas in the street which the cameras were just too neatly-set-up to capture in the first place, and during which they cut between different angles. Ingrid's introduction pointed out that some critics have found the film to approach some of Berlin's problems in this period, and especially its massive wealth inequalities, with too much moral neutrality, simply capturing them side by side as though that were just the natural scheme of things. But we felt this wasn't quite fair – at least one scene of a little match-boy having a car-door slammed unceremoniously in his face and being left alone on the pavement as the car sped off seemed to us to have been designed quite deliberately to show up his situation as an unhappy one. Anyway, the footage was enthralling throughout and very beautiful, and certainly prompted much engaged discussion in the car on the way home. It was a pleasure to be able to see it in such detail on the big screen.


Once again, that's it for today, and probably for a few days now as we are off to my sister's for Family Christmas tomorrow. I've still got another ten of these buggers to do before I'm actually up to date, and that's just the films (never mind books). But at least I have made some progress...

(Also known as Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel, The Snake Pit and the Pendulum,The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism and about a zillion other alternative titles. Not to be confused with Castle of the Living Dead, which is completely different. Obviously!)

Another entry here in the series 'Other Gothic Horrors Starring Christopher Lee Which I Haven't Seen, And Which Ideally Feature Him Playing A Character As Similar To Dracula As Possible, And / Or Also Star Peter Cushing And / Or Vincent Price', and this one was a corker! Well, at least, it is a corker by 1960s Euro-horror standards. Here are three reasons why it is worth watching:

1. It is visually splendid. This is mainly thanks to being filmed in Bavaria, and making exceptionally good use of the setting. I was particularly charmed to recognise Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which does a huge amount to create the appropriate fairy-tale atmosphere for The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, and is such a perfect gingerbread town that it is a struggle to believe it can possibly be real. But in all fairness, the set, prop, make-up and costume departments are all performing at a very high level too. It isn't exactly an expressionist film in the full-blown sense of German cinema from the inter-war period, but it definitely has many of the same sorts of visual design touches, and these are some of its biggest strengths. See, however, point 3 on my 'downsides' list, below, which alas means that a film which must have looked absolutely bloody fantastic when it first came out is now difficult to discern through all the dust and scratch-lines.

2. It is utterly unashamed to ramp the Gothic horror clichés up to the absolute max. The basic approach is quite similar to Castle of the Living Dead, in that this film is essentially a pastiche made up of scenes and motifs drawn from successful previous horror titles. This time, the two chief source texts that I could recognise are Edgar Allan Poe's 'Pit and the Pendulum' (very obviously mediated through Roger Corman's 1961 film) and Dracula, Prince of Darkness, which had come out only the previous year. Poe / Corman contribute a castle full of dungeons and torture chambers, where a group of travellers experience new and more inventive horrors at every turn, while Prince contributes an evil Count who is supposed to be dead, but gets resurrected by a creepy and incredibly loyal servant. According to Jonathan Rigby, Mario Bava's La maschera del demonio is a big influence too, and while I haven't seen it myself the Wikipedia description certainly backs him up. Rather than merely repeating or mimicking its predecessors, though, the watchword for this film seems to have been to make everything about them MORE - more blood, more dungeons, more dark and scary forests, more unsettling interior décor, more bubbling potions, more mad villains, more distressed damsels. That's not always a good thing in horror films, because often all the subtlety of the earlier takes on the story dies a horrible death in the process, but somehow here it just came across as really joyous and exuberant and fun. It's like they said to themselves, "Let's not muck about! This is a Gothic horror film. We know what our audience wants, and so do they, so let's do it properly!" And they did.

3. It has Christopher Lee in it, playing a character very similar to Dracula. This is of course a subset of point 2, but it is a very important subset! His character is called Count Regula, which clearly (as for Count Drago in Castle of the Living Dead) was the closest name they could think of to Count Dracula without attracting a law-suit. The film opens with a flash-back of him being executed in the town square 35 years before the main story begins for drinking the blood of 12 women in an attempt to secure immortality. He didn't quite manage it, needing 13, but thanks to some hand-waving and some kind of elixir of life, his servant is able to resurrect him for the main story anyway, so that he can chow down on his final victim and seal the deal. He looks a bit grey about the face, wears a floor-length black coat, and suffers from an aversion to crosses, while his first words to the travellers who have been unfortunate enough to end up in his dungeons are "Welcome to my house". All in all then, he is set up as a first-rate Dracula-substitute, and he utterly delivers the goods in his performance, too - lots of good icy aristocratic vengeance-fixated evil, some nice bursts of anger when he is thwarted, and some fine anguish when everything starts going horribly wrong for him at the end. In short, this film is even better than Castle of the Living Dead if you're after a cheap Lee-as-Dracula fix and have run out of actual Dracula films to watch - which is, of course, exactly my position.

On the down side:

1. The dialogue is all dubbed in post-production. Although Christopher Lee definitely speaks his own lines in the English-language version, and I'm pretty sure most of the other actors do too, still actors recording their lines in a studio almost always come across as wooden by comparison with in-context performances recorded on set. Also, I'm not sure all the actors were of a terribly high calibre in the first place anyway - particularly someone called Vladimir Medar, who plays a highwayman-disguised-as-a-priest comic relief character.

2. The gender politics of it are utterly Victorian. The main female character, Baroness Lilian von Brabant, is actually quite well played by Karin Dor, especially in a scene where she has been drugged and convinced that she is someone else, but gradually comes to realise that something isn't quite right and she can't be who she thinks she is. Nonetheless, the character clearly exists purely to function as a victim and / or sexual object. At one point, I thought she might experience a bit of character growth by having to face up to her fears in order to rescue her male companion (much as Willie does in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), but no - she just ended up fainting with terror instead, while he got on and rescued himself. In fact, at the end of the entire experience, she begs him to tell her that it was all just a dream - and he reassures her that it was. Bah! This sort of stuff is, of course, characteristic of both the genre and the period, but it's not inevitable. Compare, for example, Diana in Dracula, Prince of Darkness (one of this film's sources), who is full of the spirit of adventure from the start, and even grabs a gun and has a good old shoot at Dracula at the climax of the film. Strong women could exist in horror, even in the 1960s - but this film does not have any.

3. The visual quality of the DVD transfer is absolutely appalling, especially at the beginning. I don't normally get particularly exercised by this sort of thing, but what you get if you borrow this movie from Lovefilm is basically an utterly unrestored film projection, complete with visual noise, distorted colours and massive streaks running down the screen, all simply transferred to a digital disc. I don't mind any of those features on an actual original film reel which I'm viewing in the cinema, as there it is all part of the experience of engaging with a vintage print. But I kind of expect a DVD print to have undergone at least some very basic clean-up in the process of being transferred to a digital format, and this just really hadn't.

In short, not perfect, but one of the downsides isn't the fault of the original film-makers, and the other two are pretty much par for the course in this genre, so it's not like anyone who likes this sort of film won't be expecting them. Meanwhile, the upsides more than compensate. Don't expect it to change your life, but do expect it to make for a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

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