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Monday, June 09, 2008At the Earth's Core Release Year: 1976Country: United States and England Starring: Doug McClure, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Cy Grant, Godfrey James, Sean Lynch, Keith Barron, Helen Gill, Anthony Verner, Robert Gillespie, Michael Crane, Bobby Parr, Andee Cromarty. Writer: Milton Subotsky Director: Kevin Connor Cinematographer: Alan Hume Music: Mike Vickers Producer: John Dark Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us So there have been a couple reviews now, possibly more, where I've claimed that the crummy movie in question would have been much improved had the two leading stars been replaced by actor Doug McClure and actress Caroline Munro. I figured, then, it's high time I reviewed a crummy movie that did cast McClure and Munro in the lead roles, and when one's talking crummy films featuring either of those stars, it's hard to find one that's much crummier than At the Earth's Core, a low-budget attempt by England's Amicus Studio to bring to life Edgar Rice Burrough's Pellucidar series of novels. Pretty much every pulp fiction writer, from Burroughs to Verne, wrote a hollow earth, adventures beneath the surface of the planet adventure. Burroughs, in fact, wrote several, and these attempts to do Journey tot he Center of the Earth one better comprise the Pellucidar books. Burroughs wrote seven books in total, one of which is actually a cross-over adventure with Burrough's most famous creation, Tarzan. And in 1976, a guy named Eric Holmes, with the blessings of the Burroughs estate, wrote a brand new Pellucidar adventure. He did it again in 1980, though that time, he seems to have forgotten to get permission, and the publishing of the book was blocked by the Burroughs estate until 1993. I've always thought Burroughs' writing seemed to be fairly well geared toward adaptation into film. But for some reason, almost every adaptation of his work ends up being either so different that it hardly even relates to the source material (the Tarzan movies) or is just ends up being a colossal failure. At the Earth's Core, an attempt to adapt the first of the Pellucidar novels, falls into the latter category. Well, it falls into the latter category for the greater portion of humanity. I, however, and probably not surprisingly, happen to enjoy the film. I don't love it, but I am certainly charmed by its offbeat tone, its astoundingly inept special effects, its plot that manages to be both incredibly streamlined and meandering at the same time, and most of all, its game performances from a trio of genre stalwarts who give it their all despite the fact that they must know this movie is, to steal a description from Douglas Adams, a load of dingo's kidneys.
Peter Cushing stars as bumbling doctor Abner Perry, a turn of the century (that'd be the turn of the 20th century, whippersnappers) inventor who has built himself a gigantic drill he intends to use...well, it seems like he mostly intends to goof off with it by boring through a mountain on a bet. But one assumes that there are more visionary applications for the world's most amazing drilling car. Accompanying Perry on the trip through the mountain is American financier and all-around lovable man of action, Doug McClure. Well, technically, his name is David Innes, but when has Doug McClure ever been anyone but Doug McClure? Sound of mind, able of body, good looking in that "lovable lug" sort of way, and just as capable of piloting a magnificent drill-o-kabob as he is punching a caveman in the face. In short, if you are doing anything -- from drilling to the center of the earth to exploring a lost world populated by rubber dinosaurs -- McClure was the man you wanted along for the ride. And it's a good thing Perry brings Innes along, because it doesn't take long for the drill to prove too effective, sending the unlucky duo tearing through the earth's crust and into Pellucidar, a fantastical kingdom that exists within the hollow earth. Hollow Earth theories have been around for...heck, how long? Probably for as long as there have been theories about the Earth. Considering the incredible depths of some of the world's caves, and the often bizarre creatures one sometimes sees issuing forth from their mouths, it's not hard to understand how pre-historic -- end even more recent -- man would have conceived of some source for these creatures, some hitherto unseen world deep below the surface of the known world. In a time before caving technology, lights, and Iron Moles, even the largest of caves was an impenetrable, black abyss, and the surface of the earth itself could be no more than scratched by man. But at times, it would open up in earthquakes, spewing forth smoke and lava (and, presumably, monsters) and swallowing people whole. As such, the center of the earth becomes the location of countless mythological underworlds, from the Greek Hades to the Christian Hell.
As a movement, however, the hollow earth theories really gained steam in the early 1800s, when a cat named John Symmes Jr. put forth the notion that the Earth consisted of a crust 800 miles thick, with massive openings at either pole. Beyond the crust exists a habitable inner surface, with the core of the earth actually acting as a sun. Symmes intended to mount an expedition to one of the poles to prove his theory, but nothing ever came of it. Another expedition was planned by a newspaper editor and explorer named J.N. Reynolds, who actually managed to visit Antarctica, though not the pole itself. When, later in the 1800s, people started actually making it to the poles, the theory that there were openings into the hollow earth, hundreds and hundreds of miles wide, didn't quite pan out. But history is full of beliefs that continue to find adherents long after pretty much every piece of evidence collected has disproven them, with the mantra of "cover up" always being a convenient defense against, "We went to the North Pole and there was no giant hole leading to a world that exists inside the earth." Dismissed by actual science, hollow earth theories found new purchase among the pulp writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. As each subsequent writer took a crack at this world-within-a-world concept, the claims regarding what was actually inside a hollow Earth became more fantastic. Famed science fiction pioneer Jules Verne probably did more to sensationalize and spread the hollow earth gospel than any crackpot scientist or explorer when he published A Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864. Several years prior, in 1838, Edgar Allan Poe used hollow earth theories as the basis for his story , The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. And even before that, in 1825, Faddei Bulgarin wrote Improbable Tall-Tale, or Journey to the Center of the Earth, in which he wove a description of three concentric layered societies existing within our planet. And in 1914, with the publishing of At the Earth's Core, Burroughs seized on the hollow earth idea and used it as the basis for his series of involved and detailed adventure novels.
Despite setbacks in the scientific realm, however, hollow earth theories did not become the sole pervue of the science fiction authors. They enjoyed and, in fact, continue to enjoy sudden flare-ups in popularity from time to time, fueled by the fact that even the deepest hole in the world isn't very deep. The Russians initiated the Kola Superdeep Borehole in 1962, an attempt to reach the point in the earth's composition where the crust meets the mantle -- the "Moho" as it's known. After twenty-five years of drilling, the project was terminated after reaching a depth of 7.5 miles -- about 1.7 miles short of the goal. But even so, it'd take a lean and hungry man to drop down the hole and see what was to be seen, as it's only nine inches wide. Picking up where the Russians left off, and spearheaded by Japan, the international Integrated Ocean Drilling Program seeks a similar goal but made the task easier by starting on the ocean floor, building upon work done by the Deep Sea Drilling Project and the Ocean Drilling Program. A similar scientific expedition was attempted, I think, in the early 1980s, when me and my buddy Robby decided we were going to dig the deepest hole ever. We hiked way out into the woods down by this caves and began our glorious attempt. I think we got about a foot down before we hit bedrock. Shortly thereafter we all saw Red Dawn, and convinced that nuclear annihilation was unavoidable but that we would somehow survive, along with the girls on whom we had crushes, he revived the hole project with the intent of turning it into a bomb and nuclear fallout shelter. It never got any deeper, but we made it wider, covered it with a warped piece of plywood, and stocked it with important supplies, like a pocket knife, a canteen full of water (that had been in the canteen for probably two years), and some Star Crunches. The war with the Russians didn't come, of course. Well, not yet. When it does, I'm sure the shelter will still be there, ready to protect us so that we might emerge from the rubble and build society anew, preferably a society involving sexy cavegirls. The IODP, incidentally, employs the services of one of the largest research ships ever built -- nicknamed Godzilla Maru. There are, obviously, untold secrets yet waiting to be discovered. Psychic pterodactyls ruthlessly oppressing a race of stone age humans may not be among these secrets, but they make for better movies and adventure novels than if we'd had a movie in which Doug McClure extracted core samples from the Kola Borehole and discovered interesting things about the rate at which the temperature increases as one drills through the crust. Yes, fascinating from a scientific standpoint, but more fascinating than Caroline Munro in a tiny loin cloth?
Psychic pterodactyls actually aren't that far off from what some modern-day proponents of hollow earth theory claim exists within the crust of our planet. Some claim that it is the realm of ascended spiritual masters; others say it's where UFOs come from. Atlaneans live there. Some even claim that at the end of WWII, Hitler and the remaining members of the Reich escaped to the hollow earth. Last I heard, the entrance to the hollow earth realm -- which someone decided to name Agartha, since it needs a suitably cornball new age name -- was at Mount Shasta in California. But this could have been updated to Nepal, Tibet, or some other suitably mystical location. I believe according so leading scientific researches, the only way to get there is to astrally project. And although hollow earth theories have persisted for centuries, it is perhaps no big shock to learn that the most ridiculous and new agey "facts" sprung up fully formed in the late 1960s. Back in Pellucidar, however, Innes and Perry have their own troubles to contend with. It turns out that this realm within the earth is populated by all manner of poorly realized prehistoric creatures. As soon as Perry and Innes venture forth from the Iron Mole, they are attacked by dinosaur-like monsters that make the dinosaurs from The Land that Time Forgot seem amazingly lifelike. These creatures are realized by having a man in a monster suit stomp around a jungle set in slow motion, while McClure and Cushing sort of hunch over and dart back and forth for what seems like an eternity. Soon, the two begin to unravel the mysteries of the society that exists in this strange land. The Mahars are a race of psychic pterodactyl looking things, and they rule over a race of stone age humans, including one scantily clad Caroline Munro as Princess Dia. When they handed out princessing duty, Dia got the short end of the stick, being appointed princess of a race of slaves. Keeping the cavemen in line is a third race of pig-faced thugs.
Needless to say, when a couple Victorian-era bad-asses from the surface come to Pellucidar, armed with an umbrella and cigars, there's gonna be a whole lot of whoop-ass and Doug McClure getting the puffy sleeves ripped off his Dr. Frankenstein shirt. Innes and Perry are captured and forced to join the slave march, during which Innes commits a social gaffe that causes him to get on the wrong side of Dia. But you know things are going to work out for them, and until they do, Innes is going to spend his days escaping and punching stuff, and Perry is going to try to unravel the mysteries of the Mahar's power over Pellucidar. And then there's going to be a big revolution. Well, as big as Amicus can ever afford to mount. And probably, a volcano or something will erupt. At the Earth's Core was released in 1976. The next year, Star Wars was released. If ever there was a crystal clear illustration of the quantum leap forward in special effects technology that film represented, this was it. At the Earth's Core is dirt cheap, albeit in a fun and imaginative way. The monsters are man-in-a-suit effects that wouldn't have passed muster in even the cheapest Japanese Ultraman series. Hell, even 1970s Doctor Who probably felt a little bit embarrassed to see what At the Earth's Core had to offer. And yet, it's precisely because they fail so spectacularly that the effects succeed. Coupled with a really weird score by Michael Vickers (who also wrote the ultra-funky theme song for Dracula A.D. 1972), the sets and monster suits lend the movie a completely phantasmagoric atmosphere. At the core (ha ha), it's really a very simple movie, and one we've seen countless times (b-movie stars run around in cave sets until something blows up), but it takes on a completely bizarre, hallucinogenic mood that lends the film far more power to engross than it might otherwise have had. In other words, a movie this bad needs to be this bad. If it had been competent, it would have been dull beyond the point of enduring. But because it fails in such a charming, weird way, it becomes much more than it would otherwise have been. Burroughs' original novel was a sprawling epic, and there was no way Amicus was going to be able to bankroll such a story. However, this movie strips it down to its core (ha ha) while still managing to reach far beyond its means. This is, of course, sort of the defining aspect of director Kevin Conner's filmography. He populates his films with tons of special effects that would have been considered crude if they'd been a movie released ten years earlier. Amicus was the perfect home for him. They were the cheap version of Hammer, and if you know how cheap most Hammer films were, that's really saying something. The big difference was that the boys at Hammer knew how to work within their limitations without looking like they were working within limitations. Amicus aims for the special effects stars and comes back with a paper mache pterodactyl.
Aside from the charmingly inept special effects, At the Earth's Core has a few other things going for it. By this point, it should be pretty obvious that I'm a fan of b-movie and television staple Doug McClure. He gives the exact same performance here that he did in his previous Amicus outing (The Land that Time Forgot) for the same director. I can't claim that there's anything special about McClure's performances. He's just this dude, and when crazy fantastical shit starts happening, he deals with it. He has charisma without trying. And he makes a good paring with Peter Cushing, who turns in a believable if somewhat irritating performance as the proverbial absent minded professor. Perry is somewhere between Will Hartnell era Doctor Who and Grandpa Simpson, with a dash of the Doctor Who character as played by Cushing himself in the two technicolor feature film adaptations produced by Amicus. It can get on the nerves a bit, to be honest, but Cushing does get the films' two best moments: he takes on a dinosaur whilst armed with nothing but his crazy old professor umbrella, and when the Mahars are trying to use their psychic powers on him, he gets to proudly proclaim, "You cannot mesmerize me. I'm British!" If that's not the greatest movie line ever, it's only because Cushing also gets to say, "Monsters? But we're British!" in Horror Express. And then there's Caroline Munro.
OK, yeah. You're right. She doesn't really have much to do in this film other than slink around in a furry micro-bikini while coated in a thin sheen of sweat, but oh is she ever good at it. Who wouldn't punch out Jubal the Ugly One to win her affections? Caroline represents everything that was good and right with starlets in the 60s and 70s. Yes, she brings the sex appeal, but she also brings an affable warmth and agreeability to the proceedings. There's no hint that she feels this material is beneath her (and Munro could certainly perform at a much greater level than demanded of her in this film), no need to sneer or seem above it all. She's in it and having fun, and there's nothing about her that doesn't make her the easiest girl in the world with whom to fall in love. Or whatever emotion governs a reaction to gorgeous cavewoman princesses with killer smiles. Paired with the really weird LSD atmosphere of the movie, the cast simply makes At the Earth's Core a treat despite its many impossible to ignore faults. Many times, I've been able to dismiss a film's short-comings and justify my adoration of it by spinning some yarn about how I saw the movie as a young boy, and blah blah blah. Not so with this one, though. I first saw At the Earth's Core when I was in college. Realizing that i was witnessing something completely weird, I threw a tape into my VCR and recorded about 70% of the film. It became one of the most cherished gifts I ever gave my stoner buddy Ken (the other cherished gift was Young Taoism Fighter). But I can't even play the "dude, I was so wasted" card, because I was stone cold sober at the time. Granted, I hadn't slept in like three days, and I'm pretty sure this was during the time when I was doing an experiment that involved eating Taco Bell for breakfast every morning after not sleeping. Whatever the case, At the Earth's Core succeeds for me when it just as easily might have failed, thanks largely to the freaky feel and an able cast. Sometimes, you just like a bad movie. Well, most of the time, if you are me. Labels: Director: Kevin Conner, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Stars: Caroline Munro, Stars: Doug McClure, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Amicus, Year: 1976 posted by Keith at 5:46 PM | 1 Comments Friday, April 04, 2008Arabian Adventure Release Year: 1979Country: England Starring: Puneet Sira, Oliver Tobias, Christopher Lee, Milo O'Shea, Emma Samms, Peter Cushing, Capucine, Mickey Rooney, John Wyman, John Ratzenberger, Milton Reid. Writer: Brian Hayle Director: Kevin Conner Cinematographer: Alan Hume Music: Ken Thorne Producer: John Dark Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us In my review of The Phantom of Soho, I talked about a few of the over-arching themes that run throughout everything we do here at Teleport City. I'd like to mention, for this review, another of the many themes that define what we do here: the idea that my level of intelligence and sophistication has evolved very little since I was ten years old. The years 1976 to 1986, roughly spanning ages four to fourteen for me, seem to be when I discovered the bulk of what I would end up liking for the rest of my life. At the time, my enthusiasm for entertainment that was sometimes, to be charitable, of dubious merit, could be chalked up to simple naivety -- the juvenile tastes of a juvenile. Perfectly acceptable, even if it did mean that I was prone to celebrating things like Treasure of the Four Crowns and Gymkata. However, years -- nay, decades -- later, I find that when I go back and revisit these films so beloved in my youth, rather than having a quiet chuckle at how silly I was back then, I actually enjoy them just as much. And sometimes even more. Time after time, I've sat down to be disillusioned, or to wonder how I could have liked such lowbrow fare when I could have spent my time brushing up on classic works of literature, only to find myself hooting with glee and running about the room in unabashed glee as I witnessed some fantastical orgy of ninja gore or oiled-up barbarians. Think of it as my childlike sense of wonder, if you are feeling generous, or shake your head in sorrow as you realize that I did indeed completely stop growing mentally at age fourteen. Still, one must assume that even I have my limits, and there must be a film at there that I loved as a kid and would not still love as an adult. I was told countless times by many people I trust that the 1979 fantasy film Arabian Adventure would be that film. Because make no mistake about it -- I loved this film when I was it in the theaters. Looking back on it, I could remember very little. I don't think I ever saw it again after that first time. All I could recall about the film was a genie, something about Mickey Rooney inside a giant golden clockwork robot, and magic carpet dogfights. Heck, I didn't even remember that it starred venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee. I have no idea why I didn't remember him but did remember Mickey Rooney. I don't think I was a big Mickey Rooney fan in my youth. In fact, I think I've only ever seen two Mickey Rooney films in my entire life.
Anyway, for years I snooped around, hoping to discover that Arabian Adventure had suddenly appeared on home video in some format that wouldn't require me to shell out $30 for someone's crappy VHS bootleg with a label hand-written in pencil. But for one reason or another, it always seemed to be MIA, and so I was left celebrating the merits of the film while all those around me who had seen it more recently made with the ominous proclamations of, "You're going to be disappointed with that one, chief." Impossible! I mean -- seriously: magic carpet dog fights! Finally, after years of waiting outside a temple, seated in the lotus position and refusing both food and water, ignoring the rain, the snow, the scorching heat, the jackals, the police telling me to move along, after all of that, one day I performed my hopeful little search on Netflix, and low and behold, there it was. Arabian Adventure! Needless to say, I had to bump certain classics, like Kickboxer IV (oh, the things I'll do for Michelle Krasnoo...the things I'd let her do to me...), a little lower on the list, but it was worth it to move this long-awaited gem from my youth to the top of the queue. Finally, the moment of truth had arrived. Would Arabian Adventure prove to be, as has been predicted by soothsayers and friends with my best interests at heart, a massive disappointment, forcing me to call into question everything I've ever held dear, permanently casting a gloomy shadow of resentment and melancholy over my childhood? Or would my seemingly indefatigable ability to pleased by damn near anything triumph, reinforcing the idea that I see the world through the rose-colored lenses of a child and also have the brain of a seven-year-old?
Well, I've rewatched the movie now, and let me say this: magic carpet dogfights. Yes, it's true; my bottomless lack of taste (I'm watching Navy SEALS as I write this) and sound judgment wins again! I enjoyed Arabian Adventure to no end, reveled in every clunky special effect, thrilled to scenes of guys gliding around on magic carpets suspended by wires, and looked with the kind eyes of an old friend upon the visage of Mickey Rooney running around inside not one, but three giant golden clockwork robots. And then there's venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee as the evil caliph Alquazar, doing his usual shtick and sporting a big ol' mustache. And then there's a kid with a monkey, a beautiful princess, a dashing prince, a scheming fat guy, some chick who lives inside a sapphire, Peter Cushing as the world's least convincing Arab, and did I mention that this movie has magic carpet dogfights? Yes, I did. And what makes my adoration of this film all the more shameful is that it has all these things, but doesn't do anything particularly interesting with them. The prince and princess are boring. Mickey Rooney is irritating and seems to have been bitten by a radioactive community theater performer and thus been imbued with all the proportional over-acting and hamming abilities that come with such a position in life. The special effects,while ambitious, are rarely any good. The entire movie plays like a fan-made "greatest hits of the Arabian Nights" highlight reel. And none of that seems to matter to me.
So here's the deal. The film begins with young Majeed (Puneet Sira) and his pet monkey arriving in a matte painting of the ancient Arabian city of Jhador, populated primarily by second unit stock footage of camels and guys sitting around in doorways. Majeed has arrived in the middle of sweeping events. People are plotting the overthrow of the ruthless Caliph Dracula (venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee), while Caliph Dracula himself is plotting to recover the mystical Rose of Elil, a sacred artifact that will, in some vague way, grant him the ultimate power to rule over the world, or something to that effect. Artifacts that grant you the power to rule the world are rarely clear on exactly how they plan to go about it. They are, in that way, very much like your modern politician -- all full of promises and rhetoric, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, the promises tend to fall apart. But that's small potatoes to worry about for a guy who has somehow managed to imprison his own soul in a fire pit and spends his free time taunting it. For its part, the soul spends most of its time being sort of petulant and whiny and generally making you understand why Caliph Dracula imprisoned it in the first place. Unable to retrieve the rose himself, for it must be plucked by a pure and righteous hand, Caliph Dracula enlists the aid of dashin' Prince Hasan (Oliver Tobias), who has fallen in love with Princess Zuliera (Emma Samms) despite having never actually seen or met her, and who seems completely oblivious to the fact that Caliph Dracula is evil and enjoys crushing his subjects beneath the iron fist of his mad tyranny. But he looks damn good in his swashbuckling Arabian prince outfit. Majeed ends up in possession of a magic gem that contains a trapped sorceress (Capucine) who, grateful for him releasing her, grants Majeed three life-saving wishes. Through typical movie convolution, this results in Majeed suddenly appearing on the back of a magic carpet piloted by dashin' Prince Hasan and Khasim (Milo O'Shea), a spy assigned by Caliph Dracula to accompany dashin' Prince Hasan and stab him in the back (literally) once he has the rose. Needless to say, Khasim is vexed that this half-naked young rascal has suddenly appeared out of nowhere on their magic carpet, and so he spends the bulk of their flight trying to knock him off.
Their quest for the magic rose leads them on a variety of adventures that involve a murderous genie (big Milton Reid, sporting weird googly eyes), a trio of fire-breathing monsters that end up being controlled by Mickey Rooney, and a lake of guys who try to grab your legs. As far as trials go, I have to admit, I've seen more challenging. I mean, Hercules had to clean stables that hadn't been cleaned in dozens of years, and dashin' Prince Hasan has to defeat Mickey Rooney? That hardly seems fair -- especially when Majeed does all the work. I mean, maybe the psychotic laughing genie would have posed a threat if he had been able to hit the broadside of a mosque with his magic firebolts, but he proves incapable of hitting a squirming fat guy all of five feet away -- and then he gets defeated when dashin' Prince Hasan tips over a bottle! That's Scooby Doo quality adventure right there. The quests get more challenging when Khasim pulls his power play. Before too long, dashin' Prince Hasan and Majeed find themselves leading a revolution, rescuing a princess, fighting with Caliph Dracula in a lake of fire, and engaging in magic carpet dogfights with Caliph Dracula's all-carpet air force of guy's who primary skill seems to be to wave their swords awkwardly at dashin' Prince Hasan, while he waves his sword awkwardly at them, causing hem to fall off their magic carpets. Someone should look into seat belts or something for those things. Lyz at And You Call Yourself a Scientist -- one of my absolute favorite movie sites on the web -- said of Arabian Adventure, "It is hard to imagine any but the least discriminating of viewers -- of any age -- really enjoying this film." And I can't really debate her on this matter. Instead, about all I can do is admit that it has been my goal to live the sort of life and put forth the sort of opinions that would result in my eventual tombstone reading, "America's Least Discerning Viewer." My other choice for an epitaph was, "It Took a Dozen Texas Marshals to Finally Bring Him Down." Anyway, I freely admit that pretty much all of the criticisms that someone could lay at the feet of Arabian Adventure stick with the tenacity of an extra-gooey Wacky Wall Walker fresh out of the gum machine capsule. None of these should come as any shock if you are familiar with the writer-director team who brought you this movie. Because the last couple of movies they brought you were were just as bad or even worse (and yeah -- I liked them, too).
Director Kevin Conner and screenwriter Brian Hayles are responsible for a trio of Edgar Rice Burroughs inspired fantasy adventure films: At the Earth's Core, starring Doug McClure, Caroline Munro, and Peter Cushing (and featuring one of the single greatest lines and deliveries in movie history: "You cannot mesmerize me! I'm British!"), and the one-two punch of The Land that Time Forgot and The People that Time Forgot, both starring just Doug McClure. Hayles and Conner (they toured with Seals and Croft, I think) also made Warlords of Atlantis, which stars Doug McClure but is not based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs story . It does often get me confused when I think it's War Gods of the Deep, which featured Vincent Price and Tab Hunter -- and buddy, Tab Hunter is no Doug McClure. Oliver Tobias, also, is no Doug McClure. Anyway, the films of Conner and Hayles are almost universally reviled by everyone except, apparently, me. And I have loved every last one of them. Even The People that Time Forgot. Even Arabian Adventure, though it could have really used some Doug McClure. In fact, given that the wooden dullness of our prince and princess is one of Arabian Adventure's greatest weaknesses, the film could have been improved immensely if dashin' Prince Hasan had been played by Doug McClure and Princess Zuleira played by Caroline Munro. But I guess Doug McClure was too rugged and Joe Don Baker-esque to play a dashing prince (since he specialized in playing cool Americans in British films), and Caroline Munro had already been an Arabian princess in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Still, man that would have been awesome, or at least more awesome than Oliver Tobias and Emma Samms -- both of whom look the part but offer very little in the way of charisma.
As bad as Conner and Hayles' previous movies may have been, at least each of them had something that could keep people from being totally cranky about watching them. Land that Time Forgot enjoyed the services of Doug McClure and features WWI German U-boat guys fighting dinosaurs, and that's enough for me. People that Time Forgot enjoys the services of Doug McClure with a caveman beard and Sarah Douglas in expedition jodhpurs. And At the Earth's Core? My Lord! It's got Doug McClure fighting night immobile paper mache monsters, Caroline Munro in a loin cloth waving a knife around, and Peter Cushing in one of the most hilarious "absent minded professor" roles ever. Plus, it has the line "You cannot mesmerize me! I'm British!" -- which is bested only by Cushing's line in Horror Express where, indignant at the suggestion that he could have been possessed by the monster stalking the train, exclaims, "Monsters?!?! We're British!" Arabian Adventure does not have the benefit of charismatic players like Munro, McClure, or Peter Cushing -- which is an odd thing to say, since it features Peter Cushing. Cushing is one of a handful of "special guest stars," which is a nice way of saying that they owed Conner some sort of a favor or something. Cushing appears in a bit role as a holy man imprisoned in Caliph Dracula's dungeon, and as an Arab holy man, Peter Cushing is a very convincing 19th century British scientist. The other guest stars -- Mickey Rooney and Milo O'Shea -- have larger parts and even pass themselves off fairly believably as Arabs (by the standards of fat Irish guys pretending to be Arabs), but each one seems intent on outdoing the other in the field of hammy over-acting. I suppose that's good, because no one else seemed all that interested in putting any effort into their parts. Actually, that's not true. I firmly believe that Oliver Tobias tried really hard. But he's the film's Keanu Reeves. He's earnest, good looking,and really wants to do a good job; he just can't. But at least the script gives him some chances to shine, even if he fails as an actor to rise tot he occasion. He gets to have badly executed sword fights, fly around on magic carpets, jump over stuff, and tip over a genie bottle. Poor Emma Samms is saddled with a character so thinly written that the poor actress was doomed to be boring before the first frame was ever shot. Her princess is a sheltered woman who has never left the confines of Caliph Dracula's palace. She has nothing to do but walk from room to room, and eventually sit around and listen to Caliph Dracula's imprisoned soul complain about being imprisoned. Eventually, dashin' Prince Hasan rescues her. Or really, Majeed rescues her and dashin' Prince Hasan happens to be int he same general area and of legal age, so what are you gonna do?
Speaking of which, although I apparently didn't mind them as a kid, as an adult I usually hate movies starring children. I don't care for children in general, so watching a movie about one just seems pointless to me. But young Indian actor Puneet Sira seems possessed of all the charisma and charm that is lacking in Samms and Tobias. It's hard not to compare him to Sabu, the young Indian star of films like Arabian Nights and Thief of Baghdad. So let me compare him to Sabu. As a Sabu stand-in, he's exceptional, and we should be thankful that Conner at least took the time to find a likable and talented child instead of just casting Sabu, then in his...oh. Umm, then in his grave. OK, backing away from whatever Old Man Sabu joke I was hoping to make... Which leaves us with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee. Although his character is called Alquazar in this film, I prefer to refer to him as Caliph Dracula for two reasons. First, I know doing stuff like that irritates venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee (who I'm sure reads this site all the time) to no end, and any chance I have to irritate venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee is a chance I can't let pass me by. Second, he basically gives the exact same performance he gave in Satanic Rites of Dracula, and Dracula AD 1972, and the Fu Manchu movies (they apparently let him keep the mustache from those films, because he has it on here), and honestly -- most of the movies he's ever been in. Don't get me wrong -- he does it very well most of the time, but it does tend to get a tad familiar. His character here is given very little to do other than wait around in his lair while his minion does all the hard work (a la Dracula AD 1972), so venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee doesn't really seem to be giving it his all.
Eventually, he gets in a really clumsy battle with dashin' Prince Hasan, then chases Majeed up a rock, but that's about it. Oh, and he turns a fat guy into a frog. But he doesn't seem to be enjoying it very much, and once again, I can't help but think how much better this film would have been if they'd cast someone else -- Vincent Price, for example. Oh, now there's a movie! Vincent Price, Doug McClure, and Caroline Munro! If I had myself a magic sapphire genie, that would be my first wish. My second wish would be that venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee wrote me an email about how my jokes hurt his feelings, and then he ends the email with a sad face emoticon. Of course, my third wish would be that George Clooney was my friend. We're both Kentucky boys, after all. Since Doug McClure is, sadly, no longer with us, I'd let Clooney be in my remake of Arabian Adventure. I don't know who I'd get for Alquazar. Luckily, Caroline Munro, now nearly 60, is every bit as hot and talented as she was in her 20s. Maybe I could cast Alec Baldwin as Alquazar. Or venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee! So you may be asking yourself how I can spend the bulk of a review talking about how crappy a film is, then use that as criteria for concluding that I love the movie. Hey, this is Teleport City, baby, and the scientific method simply does not apply. And yeah, Arabian Adventure fails on a lot of levels for a lot of people. But not for me, because I had as much fun watching it today as I had watching nigh those many years ago. The lack of charisma in the leads doesn't bug me. The fact that venerated horror film icon is giving a "just collecting a paycheck until I can go on to better films like Howling II and An Eye For An Eye" performance doesn't bother me. The weak effects don't bother me. The film is childish and clunky, and I love it. I love the magic carpet dogfights. I love the crummy sword fights. I love all the opulent but obvious matte painting backgrounds.
Speaking of obviously painted backgrounds, now is as good a time as any to breach the subject of the special effects. In 1977, as you may have heard, Star Wars was released upon the unsuspecting masses, and whatever its merits as a film (and I'm not trying to seem edgy by being a Star Wars hater -- I loved it then and I love it still today), there's no real credible way to deny the profound impact it had on special effects. It represented a quantum leap forward, and while you can say that nothing was ever the same after that, the fact is that there were a few stragglers that came in post-Star Wars but with very pre-Star Wars effects. Sometimes this had to do with the effects supervisor. Sometimes it had to do with the budget. In the case of Arabian Adventure, I'm pretty sure it was both. Like most sci-fi and fantasy films that came in the wake of Star Wars, Arabian Adventure billed itself as a Star Wars like special effects extravaganza. If Star Wars was like watching Harry Houdini make an elephant vanish, Arabian Adventure was like watching a clumsy kid try to pull off a trick from his Blackstone the Magician illusion set. It's cute, even charming in its way, but also sort of awkward and embarrassing. Special effects supervisor George Gibbs shoots for the moon and ends up a fair distance from his target. He was early in his career, having worked previously with director Kevin Conner on Warlords of Atlantis, and then doing some model work on Richard Donner's Superman before moving on to this film. Hamstrung by a small budget and limited resources, I think he intended to rely heavily on the gee whiz quaintness of his approach and on the untrained eyes of young children. The most ambitious effects are the magic carpets, realized through a combination of rear-screen projection, hoisting guys around on wires, and then letting little plastic guys tear around scale models of the city. None of these work terribly well, but there is a charm to watching little action figures on flying carpets wobble about in between scale model minarets. The other big effects are the genie -- which is simple superimposition and animation, and sahib Rooney's giant monsters, which are miniatures that rely on forced perspective shots that are sometimes effective and sometimes make Majeed look like a giant.
Still, I always appreciate a crude effect, and Arabian Adventure is endearing in it's unwillingness to live within its means. This film certainly didn't kill Gibbs' career, and he went on to create all sorts of wildly uneven visual or effects for everything from 1980's Flash Gordon to Conan the Barbarian. Obviously, the got got really good at his craft pretty quickly, and he went on to work on films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Brazil, Alien 3, and more recently, From Hell and Doom. His work in Arabian Adventure is without a doubt a throwback to effects that probably weren't even considered all that good in 1969, let alone 1979, but like I said -- they're sort of cute. In fact, pretty much everyone who worked on the effects for this film went on to very successful, and in some cases award-winning, careers. It goes without saying that none of those awards were for Arabian Adventure. I have a tremendous weakness (one of many) for fantastic romanticized visions of ancient Arabia, and as pedestrian as some may find it, Arabian Adventure manages to satisfy the kid in me. I mean, don't misunderstand -- this film is nowhere near the caliber of the old Arabian Nights film, or either the Douglas Fairbanks or Sabu versions of The Thief of Badhdad. And it's not in the league of the 1960s Sinbad movies with effects by Ray Harryhausen. But as dumb Saturday matinee fare, I still enjoy Arabian Adventure despite the sundry flaws. It would make a perfect double bill with Sinbad of the Seven Seas starring Lou Ferrigno.  Labels: Action: Adventure, Director: Kevin Conner, Fantasy, Netflix Diary, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Year: 1979 posted by Keith at 4:46 PM | 4 Comments Monday, March 24, 2008Night Creatures Release Year: 1961Country: England Starring: Peter Cushing, Yvonne Romain, Patrick Allen, Oliver Reed, Michael Ripper, Martin Benson, David Lodge, Derek Francis, Daphne Anderson, Milton Reid, Jack MacGowran, Sydney Bromley. Writer: Anthony Hinds, John Temple-Smith Director: Peter Graham Scott Cinematographer: Arthur Grant Music: Don Banks Producer: John Temple-Smith Original Title: Captain Clegg Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Although England's Hammer Studio made a variety of films, the trio of Horror of Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein, and The Mummy solidified the direction of the studio and its identity with the public for the remainder of its life. And not without good reason. In their heyday, and even long after the studio had fallen into disrepair, Hammer showed a panache for producing lavish looking gothic horror that was simply unmatchable. America's AIP came close with Roger Corman's Edgar Allen Poe inspired cycle of films starring Vincent Price, but no one could approach Hammer's consistency and longevity in producing world-class horror. Starting in 1958 and continuing throughout the 60s, and into the studio's final days in the first half of the 1970s, Hammer produced an unbelievable string of incredible horror films -- almost every one of them a hit -- buoyed by the one-two punch of venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's Dracula films and Peter Cushing's Frankenstein series. It's understandable that Hammer would focus on the genre that helped define them as a major player on the global film production scene, but even as the monsters and madmen were overrunning the studio, Hammer was still doing its best to make non-horror fare, including some noir-style thrillers, war films, and a series of swashbucklers. Over the years, these films have been largely overshadowed by the horror product, and in fact most have been extremely difficult to get a hold of them, with very few being released on home video, at least here in the United States. Thus, they became all but forgotten, even though they often used the same directors, writers, and stars (specifically Cushing and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee) as the horror films and were often films worth remembering.
With the bulk of Hammer horror films now released on DVD (with the exception of Twins of Evil and Vampire Circus, both of which remain curiously MIA in the United States), and with these releases bringing in some new fans and revitalizing interest among the older fans, distributors have begun dipping into the vast body of Hammer's non-horror work. Over the past year or two, two volumes of Hammer noir and crime films were released, along with some of the more obscure psychological thrillers. And in early 2008, it was announced that Hammer's collection of swashbuckling pirate movies was finally going to be released. With any luck, the near future will also see the release of Hammer's war films and the remaining caveman adventures (oh When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, where are you?). The first of Hammer's pirate films to make it to DVD in the US was Captain Clegg, a curious beast of a film that got released first primarily because it was marketed in the US, at the time of its original release, as a horror film. Appearing under the title Night Creatures, the movie found its way onto a recent double feature release with The Evil of Frankenstein. And while Night Creatures does contain an element of horror, anyone who goes into it looking for scares is going to be confused. Hammer's dalliance with pirate films began in 1961 with the release of The Pirates of Blood River, starring venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, 7th Voyage of Sinbad's Kerwin Mathews, and Hammer bit player Michael Ripper in a rare feature role. Hammer's production values were never higher than they were in the first half of the 1960s, where seemingly everything they touched came out looking astounding, and The Pirates of Blood River benefits from Hammer's attention to detail -- not to mention from venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee in one of his best Hammer performances and a chance to see Michael Ripper doing more than playing "the suspicious barkeep."
It also starred young Oliver Reed, for whom 1960-1961 was an exceptionally good year. His first film as the lead -- Curse of the Werewolf -- came out in 1960, and he was charged with the task of supporting the film entirely on his own, in the middle of a Hammer horror frenzy that was defined almost entirely by Cushing and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee. For Oliver Reed, a totally untested leading man, to be trusted with the lead in Hammer's first color horror film that didn't star Cushing or venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee was both a tremendous opportunity and a huge gamble. It paid off, though, and although Curse of the Werewolf never attained the iconic status of the Dracula and Frankenstein films, it became one of the most respected. From there, Reed was paired with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee for The Pirates of Blood River, and then, that same year appeared alongside Peter Cushing in Captain Clegg, the second of Hammer's pirate outings. But while The Pirates of Blood River was a somewhat more traditional swashbuckler, Captain Clegg is a crazy mix of pirate, horror, and detective films. Things start off piratey enough, with the mutilation and stranding of a crew member (big Milton Reid -- one of those actors you know by sight if not by name) for attacking the wife of the captain, a mysterious and ruthless pirate by the name of Clegg. Leaving the dastardly crewman to his fate sans food, water, ears, or tongue, the film then skips ahead a number of years to the remote British town of Dymchurch, which is being visited by no-nonsense British Navy captain Collier (Patrick Allen and his magnificently manly chin -- only Chuck Conners stands a chance against him) who suspects the small hamlet of being an offloading center for liquor smugglers. But Dymchurch hardly seems to be a den of smugglers and rapscallions, populated as it is by jolly coffin makers (Michael Ripper), upstanding squires (Derek Francis), upstanding squire's sons (Oliver Reed), and the benign local parson, Blyss (Peter Cushing). Collier, however, is an experienced hand at flushing out smugglers, so he's hardly taken in by innocent looks alone. However, a number of surprise inspections and raids lead to nothing but property damage and the ruffling of the town Squire's feathers as Collier and his men accuse various townsfolk of ill doings only to come up empty handed every time. At this point, the film resembles a thriller or mystery far more than it does a pirate adventure.
Parson Blyss himself remains cordial with the captain, reminding the townsfolk that the man is just doing his job, but even the kindly parson is offput when he is attacked by one of Collier's crew -- the very man stranded and mutilated by Clegg, it turns out. Collier apparently discovered the man shortly after Clegg abandoned him, as Collier was hot on the trail of the pirate at the time. Since then, they'd kept him on as a crewman for heavy lifting, menial tasks, and amusement, even though the former pirate is prone to getting drunk and attacking people. Collier's pursuit of Clegg, ironically enough, ended in Dymchurch, where the wily pirate was finally captured and hanged, Blyss himself delivering the final rites and convincing the local church to allow Clegg a proper burial in exchange for an apparent change of heart the pirate had while incarcerated. Plus, Blyss just likes to believe int he good of everyone. Clegg isn't the only dead man causing Collier. Legend has it that the marshes around Dymchurch are haunted by phantoms. In fact, a man was recently killed by them. Collier, ever the enlightened man of reason, sees little reason to believe in the phantoms, and in fact he is highly suspicious of them since the man most recently killed by them happened to be Collier's own man, who had previously tipped the captain off to the smuggling going on in Dymchurch. And it isn't very long before the viewer is clued in to the fact that smuggling is going on, and pretty much the entire town is in on it. Blyss is the brains behind the operation, coffin maker Mipps the operations man, and any daring-do that needs to be performed is handled by the Squire's son and lookout, Harry Cobtree. Using a series of secret compartments and tunnels centering around the church and Mipps' coffin shop, the town regularly runs illegal French wine, even under the very nose of Collier. The phantoms -- glowing skeletal horsemen -- are, naturally, just members of the local smuggling ring, who find the threat of ghostly marsh phantoms to be advantageous to the smuggling profession. Things start to get complicated for our merry smugglers not just because Collier is so persistent in his investigations, but also because one of their member is lusting after a barmaid, Imogene (Yvonne Romaine), who is in love with Harry Cobtree. In a drunken rage, he attacks the young woman and, when rebuffed, reveals to her than she is actually the daughter of the notorious Captain Clegg, and that furthermore, he is willing to expose the smuggling operation to Collier. Imogene is terrified by the revelation that she is Clegg's daughter, for fear that this knowledge will spoil her in the eyes of young Harry, who should already be forbidden from her on account of their different classes. But Harry is hardly phased by such outdated constraints, and Imogene discovers that he and Blyss already knew she was Clegg's daughter. Blyss, sensing that Collier is close to unraveling their smuggling plot, begins arranging for Harry and Imogene to be wed then escape the town before the net is drawn closed around them. When Harry is wounded while serving as lookout for one of the operations, Collier launches an all-out attack on the smugglers, but Blyss and Mipps are his equal, and a game of cat and mouse ensues that comes to a dramatic end inside Blyss' chapel. Despite the fact that the revelation at the end of the movie is hardly a surprise, Night Creatures succeeds in being a cracking good yarn that draws its suspense not from the solving of the mystery -- the smugglers are all named very early in the film -- but by developing those people as characters then allowing you to revel in the race and maneuvering against Collier. Captain Clegg was originally meant to be called Dr. Syn, a remake of an earlier film which itself was based on Russell Thorndike's novel, Dr. Syn. But by a strange coincidence, Disney happened to develop an interest in this otherwise forgotten novel and film from the 1930s at the same time as Hammer. Needless to say, Hammer wasn't in a position to challenge Disney, who had already obtained the rights to the Syn title and character. However, Disney was willing to play ball with Hammer, and aside from requiring that they change the name of the title character, Disney was more than happy to allow Hammer to proceed with production.
Disney's version, called The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh but also known as Dr. Syn Alias The Scarecrow, was released in 1963 and featured Patrick McGoohan (of The Prisoner fame, among other things) in the lead role. Being a made of television movie, it was decidedly more family-friendly than Hammer's version, with its horse-mounted ghouls, exhumed bodies, mutilated pirates, and other such trappings. Still, there's very little in Captain Clegg to prevent being a rip-roaring good time for young and old alike, and any foolhardy young lad such as I was would have been delighted by it (remembering, of course, that there was a time when children's films could contain murder, shrieking ghosts, drunks, and Sean Connery punching people in the face). I've not seen the Disney version, and I won't dismiss it out of hand because Disney has been known to produce some damn fine pirate and adventure entertainment (such as the three Treasure Island films). Although Disney's competing version kept Captain Clegg off the American radar, these days Hammer's version is the one you can find on DVD, while Dr. Syn Alias The Scarecrow has become wickedly hard to track down. It was released on VHS a long time ago and played at some point on the Disney Channel (as bootlegs bearing the channel's logo attest to). I know there has been some word of the old Wonderful World of Disney series -- of which Dr. Syn was a part -- finally finding their way on to DVD, so one can only hope that this little pirate adventure sees the light of day once again. Night Creature's script by Anthony Hinds (one of Hammer's most reliable producers-turned-screenwriters, having penned Curse of the Werewolf, Kiss of the Vampire, and a number of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Mummy movies) is expertly paced and hues closely to the original film. Even though it never really becomes a swashbuckling adventure (although Peter Cushing does get to swing from a chandelier) or a horror film, Hinds exploits the trappings of both genres to create a thrilling hybrid driven by strong characters and solid British acting. Although Cushing is the star attraction (and rightfully so), most Hammer fans are overly delighted that Michael Ripper gets such a meaty role. Ripper's career is defined by tiny roles, almost always as a cranky innkeeper or barman who refuses to give our hero a room for the night, then makes a horrified face when someone says the name Frankenstein or Dracula. Despite the brevity of each of these roles, Ripper never gave anything that his absolute all. With Night Creatures, he gets a meaty role, and he makes the most of it. In fact, despite Cushing being the headliner, the bulk of the on-screen action is in the hands of Ripper and young Oliver Reed. Neither lets the film down, just as the script doesn't let them down. It's hard to believe that Reed was so inexperienced an actor. He exhibits an easy charisma and likability that pulls you in and really makes you care about the character. Reed's career was a rocky and uneven one, owing primarily to a fondness for the drink. In the 1960s, Hammer was hungry for someone young to augment the team of Cushing and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee. Reed seemed to fit the bill perfectly, and indeed after turns in Curse of the Werewolf, The Pirates of Blood River, Captain Clegg, and some of Hammer's psychological thrillers, it seemed like Hammer had a winner on their hands. Good looking, athletic, and possessed of abundant charisma that could be channeled with equal skill into warmth, intensity, and pathos, Reed was a star on the rise. He was even on the short list (which actually seems to have been very long, given the number of people that are always mentioned as having been on it) to replace Sean Connery as James Bond, and the thought of Oliver Reed in On Her Majesty's Secret Service -- well, I liked Lazenby, and I love that movie, but had Reed been allowed to bring that deadly combination of charm and smoldering intensity to the role, I think he would have done then what wasn't really accomplished until Daniel Craig took over the role in Casino Royale.
Unfortunately for Reed, his professional successes were balanced with personal trials. Stormy marriages were one thing, but when Reed was forced to endure endless barrages of questions about his drinking. Such interrogation by TV hosts and reporters often lead to the actor losing his temper, and his reputation for a drunk and a hothead plagued him for years, even when he was still making quality films. Unfortunately for Hammer, Reed never became the pair of shoulders that could carry the studio through tough times, as he was by then on to different opportunities. The task of being Hammer's "next big thing" then fell on the shoulders of Ralph Bates, who certainly had the chops. But by the time Bates was on the Hammer scene, it was too late, and nothing was going to stop Hammer's collapse. Reed enjoyed success throughout the 60s and into the 70s, but by the 1980s, his star had faded considerably. Reed seemed to take it in stride. Although he continued drinking, he seemed happy to settle down to a relatively quiet life with his wife, at least until 1999 when Ridley Scott came knocking and offered Reed a part in Gladiator. It ended up being one of those rare parts perfectly suited for reviving the career of an old hand who had gone through stormy times and emerged older and wiser, ready to take on the role of elder statesman. Sadly, it was not to be for Reed, and he died of heart failure during the making of the film. Still, it must have felt good to be in the saddle again, and although it is done so posthumously, his role in Gladiator ended up being one of his best. Of course, none of this praise for Ripper or Reed is meant to sell the rest of the cast short. It's just that, in the case of Peter Cushing, do you really need me to tell you how good he was? It's Peter Cushing, for crying out loud! He was always good. As the resident piece of Hammer glamour (I spell it with a "u" for England), Yvonne Romain doesn't have terribly much to do other than look pretty (which she does with ease -- if not for Caroline Munroe, she might be the prettiest of all Hammer's starlets), but I always found the Hammer beauties to be as able at acting as they were at being eye candy, and when she's given something to do, Romain is as solid as the rest of the cast. She was already experienced with both period adventure films and horror, having appeared in such cult favorites as Circus of Horrors, Curse of the Werewolf (where she co-starred alongside Oliver Reed), episodes of The Saint (which, granted, pretty much every actor in England appeared in at some point), and Patrick McGoohan's espionage series Danger Man. And let's not leave off poor ol' square-jawed Patrick Allen as Captain Collier. It would have been easy for this film to make us root for the smugglers by making Collier a grade A jerk, but instead, Collier is ever noble, if a bit stiff, and the smugglers are forced to make us like them by force of their own character rather than depending on him as a foil. Collier is nothing other than completely honest and straight-forward, a model officer of the British Navy. And Allen is perfectly cast, not just because he has that incredible jaw and an air of authority. His accomplishments as an actor are too numerous to list, and long with Cushing, he's probably the most experienced of the cast members. He even showed up in the Japanese sci-fi film Gorath! Director Peter Graham Scott wasn't a Hammer films regular, working primarily in television, but he does an excellent job here with a script that allows him to wander between creepiness (the marsh phantoms, the old windmill and the scarecrow) and adventure. This is really an actor's movie, though, as many Hammer films were, and the chief function of the director in these cases was to know what he was doing and do it without getting in the way -- which is exactly what Scott does. As such, he's not a name a lot of people know, but sometimes the best director for a movie is the one who can make you completely unaware of the director. He does lend the film rather a unique look for Hammer films of the time by shooting on location and outdoors, rather than relying entirely on the Bray Studio sound stages.
I'm looking forward to the release of Hammer's other pirate films, because while this one may be tangential at best to the swashbuckling genre, it still manages to be a superb adventure film with a real "boy's own adventure" feel to it. What with long dead pirates, ghosts in the swamp, scarecrows, secret passages, and smugglers, it could have easily been a Hardy Boys adventure. I feel a bit guilty that I haven't said more about Peter Cushing, but like I said, what more can you say? The man went into everything with total commitment, and Captain Clegg is one of his finest roles. The script plays wonderfully off Cushing's slight appearance. When first we meet him in this film, he looks dainty and frail, and hardly the sort of man who could command a band of smugglers prone to dressing up like skeletons and galloping through the swamps. But when it comes time for him to take charge, the transformation is remarkable, and you absolutely believe him as the leader of men. "Absolutely believing him" is pretty much the very definition of Cushing's film career, as he was remarkably gifted at making whatever was happening, no matter how outlandish, seem absolutely real. Here, he benefits greatly from Hinds' script, which affords him a degree of complexity and depth very similar to what he enjoyed and challenged audiences with in the Frankenstein movies. He is ostensibly the bad guy, heading up a smuggling ring, killing off informers, and foiling Collier's attempts to do an honest man's work. But if he's a bad guy, Cushing's Blyss is hardly evil, and his scenes with Oliver Reed and Yvonne Rainer allow him to radiate warmth and care. As with the movie itself, Cushing's role here is not among his iconic performances, but it probably should be. We'll have plenty of chances to talk further about Peter Cushing. It's not every day that you get to say more about Michael Ripper than, "he was excellent as the grumpy bartender." Whether you call it Captain Clegg or Night Creatures is unimportant. By any name, it's top notch adventure all the way around. Labels: Action: Adventure, Guys Dressed as Skeletons, Netflix Diary, Pirates, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1961 posted by Keith at 11:58 PM | 8 Comments Thursday, October 11, 2007Satanic Rites of Dracula Release Year: 1974Country: England Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Coles, Joanna Lumley, William Franklyn, Freddie Jones, Richard Vernon, Barbara Yu Ling, Patrick Barr, Richard Mathews. Writer: Don Houghton Director: Alan Gibson Cinematographer: Brian Probyn Music: John Cacavas Producer: Roy Skeggs Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us What a long, strange trip it's been for Hammer Studio's lord of the undead, the prince of darkness, the king of vampires, Count Dracula. When first we met him back in 1958, he was a snarling beast, a barely contained force of nature that ripped into his prey with lusty abandon and was explained by his arch-nemesis Dr. Van Helsing in purely rational, scientific terms. Dracula, and vampirism in general (as expounded upon by Van Helsing in Brides of Dracula), was nothing more than a disease, like any other disease, and what we regarded as "supernatural" was really nothing more than an explainable part of the rational world that humanity had simply not yet learned how to explain. As Hammer's Dracula series progressed, however, Van Helsing faded from the picture and was replaced by a procession of forgettable guys named Paul, usually in league with some sort of religious authority figure. In Dracula, Prince of Darkness, we have a monsignor who seems to have some degree of faith in faith's ability to defeat Dracula, but he's far more reliant on his trusty bolt-action rifle than he is on the Lord Almighty. With the next film after that, however, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Van Helsing's assertion that Dracula could be defeated by reason and science was beginning to fade. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is a transitional film, one in which an atheist who would seem to share Van Helsing's belief that vampirism is a virus and not a function of the supernatural, begins to doubt his faith in science just as he begins to doubt his doubt of Christianity. When Dracula is felled by a bolt of lightning, we are left to wonder: is this science -- a metal lightning rod, an explainable weather phenomenon -- or an act of God -- lightning strikes being the most common weather-related act of God, after the rain of frogs. After that film, however, there is no doubt as to Dracula's nature. In Taste the Blood of Dracula, he is recast as a satanic demon, summoned by black mass rituals. This trend of "religionizing" Dracula continued in Dracula AD 1972 despite the return of a Van Helsing to the scene. Where as the Lawrence Van Helsing of Horror of Dracula and Brides of Dracula regarded vampirism as a scientific issue, his descendant Lorimar Van Helsing sees it as a mystical issue of the occult, like witchcraft or devil worship. Dracula is once again summoned by occult rituals (not to mention Caroline Munro's half-clothed writhing), and where you might think that placing the Victorian vampire in a modern setting alongside a modern Van Helsing, would prove an opportunity to revive the concept of Dracula as scientific problem and biological oddity, it never really happens. I think there is one token utterance of, "Vampires? But surely you must be joking, man! This is the 20th century!" but that is quickly dismissed as everyone from Van Helsing to the police are quick to accept the supernatural and rattle on endlessly about the occult. At this point, Dracula is less a vampire and more a full-fledged demon, perhaps even the embodiment of Satan himself.
One would assume, then, that with a title like The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the sequel would follow in the footsteps of turning Dracula into a religious anti-icon. But then, honestly, what more can be done to make him Lucifer incarnate than having him summoned by rituals and pentagrams and strange runes? Are they going to make him don a silky red Danskin and gad about with a pitchfork? Dracula AD 1972 was already a rehash of Taste the Blood of Dracula, and while Hammer's Dracula films have never shied away from rehash, it seemed like the evolution of the count was complete. What was left to do? The correct answer is, "Nothing." Just don't make another Dracula film. Make Christopher Lee happy, and just lower the curtain on the series. It had a good run. A few missteps here and there, sure, but all in all, Hammer's Dracula films were a pretty solid lot, even at their worst. Dracula AD 1972 had been a somewhat desperate attempt to modernize the franchise, and it was met with mixed reactions, at best. So just let the sleeping corpse lie, this time. Christopher Lee was already printing up his leaflets to be dropped from a plane over London, explaining to any who found them that he was never going to play Dracula again, ever. Save the guy some effort, people said, and maybe he'll start talking about something else besides how everyone just talks to him about Dracula, instead of mentioning some of his other classic work, like Circus of Fear. Come on -- Chris Lee and Klaus Kinski? That's a power duo, my friends. But Hammer had nowhere else to go. They couldn't get new stars or new franchises launched. The entire British film industry was in a tailspin, and Hammer was even worse off than most. Not knowing what else to do, they commissioned Dracula AD 1972 writer Don Houghton and director Alan Gibson to make yet another Dracula movie, causing Christopher Lee's eyes to turn blood red as he launched into a furious string of interviews about how awful the Dracula movies were and he sure as hell wouldn't...look, seriously. By this point, you know how this ends, right?
So with "nowhere" no longer being a viable answer to the question of where Dracula goes from AD 1972, what would Houghton do? Could they serve up the same old, same old one more time and get away with it? Unlikely. In fact, it was unlikely they could get away with anything they served up. Dracula was DOA at the box office no matter what they did. This last movie was just going to be a post-mortem nervous twitch. So what the hell? Why not bring the whole thing to its oddly logical extreme, the only place left for Dracula to go? And so, despite the occult title meant no doubt to cash in on the sudden popularity of devil worshiper films (working titles for the film included Dracula and his Vampire Brides and Dracula is Dead and Well and Living in London), Satanic Rites of Dracula takes the persistently undead vampire from satanic bogeyman and propels him into the realm of the James Bond villain or, perhaps more appropriately given the quality of the final film and the return of Christopher Lee to the role of Dracula, Fu Manchu. No longer is Dracula a savage beast. No longer is he a biological mutation. No longer is he a ghoul lurking in the overgrown corners of shadowy gothic buildings. No longer is he a demon. With Satanic Rites of Dracula, he becomes a super-villain, complete with a secret lair, henchmen, kidnapped scientists, and dreams of global conquest. That the film really does contain satanic rites is superficial. This movie begins, like Dracula A.D. 1972, with the action already in progress. A determined Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, once again) chases the murderous vampire Count Dracula into a swanky London nightclub jammed wall to wall with zoned-out teens dancing to some nondescript psych-funk like you were wont to find in films from the 1970s that couldn't afford to license songs from established artists. In an attempt to blend in with the youthful revelers and shake his pursuer, Dracula dons a big, bulbous pair of sunglasses and a paisley print cap. Finding himself hemmed in by the revelers, Van Helsing discovers that the only possibility he has of making his way across the dance floor to Dracula is by dancing his way across. And so we get the now immortal scene of Peter Cushing, still dressed more or less like a guy from the Victorian era even though this is the 1970s, doing the Watusi across the crowded nightclub, while dazed ravers look on in admiration and even begin mimicking Cushing's spastic moves.
OK, maybe not, That is not a scene from The Satanic Rites of Dracula. It's actually from a different movie, called Dracula Goes Mad in Chelsea, but since prints of that movie are almost impossible to find, we won't speak any more about it (even Christopher Lee himself has admitted to be unable to find a copy on any format for his personal library). However, given the unintentional camp value of Hammer's Dracula A.D. 1972, one could half expect that, when Hammer announced a sequel film also set in the 1970s, we would get scenes as corny as Dracula in mod sunglasses and an exasperated Peter Cushing doing the mashed potato with some cute young chick as he tries to explain the importance of leaving the dance floor to continue his pursuit of his arch-nemesis. When it was further announced that the writing-directing team of Don Houghton and Alan Gibson would be returning for the sequel, such scenes seemed almost inevitable. It was not the case, however, leaving the scenes of Van Helsing cutting the rug and Dracula smoking a bong to appear in the obscure (and by obscure, I mean "entirely made up") Dracula Goes Mad in Chelsea, which some people refer to mistakenly though not inappropriately as Dracula Goes Mod in Chelsea. No, this film actually begins with a satanic rite, some gratuitous nudity to let us know this is the 1970s, and then an action sequence in which some guy who looks like a cross between Burt Reynolds and Saddam Hussein escapes from a building guarded by bikers with droopy Louis Tiant mustaches and sheepskin vests. They totally look like something out of Marvel's Tomb of Dracula comic book, and in fact much of what happens in this movie seems far more at home in the pages of Tomb of Dracula than it does in a Hammer Dracula movie -- which I guess is the trick. When you keep making Hammer vampire movies, everyone complains about it being just another stodgy old Hammer vampire film. When you switch it up and do something new, everyone complains that it's not enough like a stodgy old Hammer vampire film. Although my initial assumption was that this escaping guy was some horrific experiment concocted by Dracula (possibly with the help of Frankenstein) to combine the iron will and ruthlessness of Saddam with the down home sex appeal and amusing laugh of Burt Reynolds, thus creating the ultimate world conqueror (sort of like Serpentor, but with a big mustache). It turns out that this guy is actually an undercover agent sent in to investigate the mysterious Pelham House rituals, which seem to include a group of the richest, most powerful men in England. The problem is that the head of the group investigating Pelham House also happens to be one of the guys attending the Pelham House rites, thus making an official investigation impossible. So they call in Inspector Murray from the last film, reprised by Michael Coles. Coles, in turn, hears the agent's crazy ranting about rituals and blood sacrifice and devil cloaks and immediately places a call to Van Helsing, played once again by Peter Cushing, who smokes his cigarettes with more intensity than ever. Cushing sure knew how to smoke a cigarette on screen, but he didn't just smoke a cigarette; he smoked the hell out of a cigarette, with lots of clenching and staring at it in quiet contemplation. I think the biggest problem with Star Wars is that they didn't let Peter Cushing smoke on the Death Star. Honestly, you could make a whole movie of nothing but Peter Cushing smoking cigarettes and flipping through books and peering through a magnifying glass, and I'd probably think it was pretty good since he did those things with such conviction and more gusto than most actors would put into an action scene.
While Van Helsing investigates an old colleague who is among the Pelham House acolytes, Murray and Jessica Van Helsing (being played this movie by Joanna Lumley of New Avengers and Absolutely Fabulous fame) go to investigate Pelham House itself. Van Helsing discovers that his old friend has created a super-plague for someone at Pelham House. Murray discovers that the basement of Pelham House is full of half naked vampire chicks. Jessica screams. And of course, we eventually discover that the shadowy billionaire recluse behind the Pelham House plot is Dracula! It seems that even Dracula is getting tired of being revived and has decided that the only way he can end his existence is to end all life on earth. That way he will have no one feed on, and he won't have to worry about cocky mods or Chinese women summoning back up through goofy rituals. Dracula has used his powers of persuasion to control the aforementioned most powerful men in England, and he intends to use them to spread the plague throughout the world and finally put an end to everything. But despite his Fu Manchu aspirations and new corporate benevolent society, Dracula can't entirely let go of the past. Pelham House is an uncomfortable mix of 70s sci-fi stuff and Victorian frilliness, and he still wants to piss off Van Helsing by turning Jessica into Dracula's vampire bride. At least Dracula's final solution is a super-virulent strain of bubonic plague. As far as super-villain super-weapons go, that's a pretty good one. Plus, it's a vampire distributing the plague, and not just some bald guy in a fancy jacket, as is usually the case. It's much better than if Dracula had scheduled a meeting with Van Helsing at the office (which does happen, by the way) and unveiled a new super laser that can blow airliners out of the sky! But still, all this plague talk is far, far away from the expected Dracula territory. He surrounds himself with the trappings of previous Dracula hobbies: the vampire brides in the basement, for example, and floral print wallpaper of questionable tastefulness, but his heart hardly seems in it this time. And yeah, he throws the cape on and appears in backlit mist to scare someone, but he doesn't stick with it throughout the movie. Even his plan to irk Van Helsing by marrying Jessica seems more like something he feels like he has to do than something he wants to do. Just another item on his corporate CEO to-do list.
In a way, I suppose this plays in with the plot of the movie, that Dracula is sick of it all, maybe even sicker of it all than audiences watching his movies, and despite Van Helsing's best efforts, people just keep bringing Dracula back. His resurrection in Satanic Rites of Dracula takes place well before the film begins, but one can almost assume that when it happened, Dracula looked at himself and just thought, "Seriously? I mean, seriously?" There are almost as many ways to bring this guy back as there are to kill him in the first place, and Dracula seems positively suicidal this time around, scattering his house with bits of old wood and such. But ultimately, he knows a stake in the heart will probably just kill him for a little while, so all of mankind must be destroyed so the lord of the dead can get some fucking sleep. Even the final showdown between Van Helsing and Dracula seems suicidal. Dracula is lured into some Hawthorne bushes, which being the thorns that were used to make Christ's crown of thorns, are deadly to a vampire. And Dracula gets caught in the bush basically because Van Helsing stands on the other side and yells, "Hey, come get me!" Surely Dracula knows about the bush. I mean, Van Helsing knows all sorts of ways to kill Dracula, so you'd think that Dracula himself would have researched the subject, although I will admit that every time he dies in a new way, he seems surprised, sort of like, "Are you kidding me? This, too? I can be killed by this, too?" Whatever the case, Dracula plunged headlong into the thorns, which is something most people wouldn't do even if they weren't' prone to turning into a time-lapsed decaying corpse as a result. Despite the fact that Satanic Rites of Dracula was written and directed by the same crew and has largely the same cast of adults, it bears little resemblance to AD 1972 or any of the previous Dracula films. Not just because of the Fu Manchu plot, but also because it entirely eschews the colorful nature of past films and opts instead for an oppressively bleak atmosphere populated by washed out skies, overcast days, and tired looking men in drab flared suits. Like Dracula, like the audience, everyone just seems worn out. Not that they aren't game for another go-round, mind you. This is a solid British cast, after all, and no one is going to do anything but their best. Cushing is as he always is; Lee is the same; Michael Coles is a welcome familiar face from the last film, someone to whom we can relate, and while Joanna Lumley is fine as Jessica, she really has little to do beyond scream and warn people about vampires too late. So I guess it's not so much a tiredness as it is a...let's say world-weariness. I don't want to read more into the film than there is, but it really does give off a sense of the meta, that the threadbare worn-out nature of the series is reflected in the characters.
As a Dracula film, I can't call it a success. Dracula has always been a supporting player his own movies, but here he's less like Dracula than ever before, taking on instead the role of Howard Hughes meets Blofeld (or, alternately, Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever). As a whacked out sort of spy film, it almost works. It's a bit too boring and far too serious to really capture the spirit of that genre, though. Instead, we have a beast that is neither fish nor foul, and not very good at doing much of anything. There are embers of a good movie here, meaning that I can't entirely dismiss it, but you have to blow on those embers pretty furiously to generate any sort of warmth. The initial idea, that of turning Dracula into a tired man whose sole final option is to destroy everything in order to destroy himself, is worth exploring, but where Don Houghton come sup with a great premise, he can't really deliver a great script. It plods along, and there are even more holes and contrivances than usual. I feel like, had this movie been written by someone like Brian Clemens (who wrote Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, and because of his experience working on The Avengers, would have been more at home with the loopier aspect of Dracula-as-Blofeld), it would have had a much better chance for success. At the very least, had it been a bit less heavy-handed and plodding, it could have gotten by on the quirkiness of the premise, maybe even been something like Scream and Scream Again, a film (featuring Lee and Cushing, no less) that mixes espionage thrills, science fiction, horror, and general weirdness far better than Satanic Rites of Dracula. Instead, Houghton's no-nonsense but not well written script doesn't do the high concept justice. If there is a highlight to the film, other than Peter Cushing's emphatic smoking of cigarettes, it's the theme song and ensuing score, which have far more life in them than the movie itself. Following the lead of Dracula AD 1972, John Cacavas contributes a theme song that is even cooler and funkier than the last one. It deserves to be played over a scene where Dracula -- still in his cape and black suit, of course -- fights a gang of drug dealers in slow motion a la Superfly. The rest of the score is variations on this theme, and it's pretty good stuff. Cacavas also wrote the score for Horror Express, one of my very favorite horror-meets-scifi films, also starring Cushing and Lee and released around the same time as Satanic Rites of Dracula, which could have really used Telly Savalas in a big Cossack coat swaggering onscreen and punching out those dudes in the sheepskin vests. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Satanic Rites of Dracula is that it lacks a sense of finality. Given the plot, given Dracula's admittedly effective monologue about wanting to die and watch the whole world burn with him, the final act is sorely lacking. When the end comes, it's pretty much a blase, "Oh, so it's a Hawthorne bush this time then, is it?" It's no different than any of Dracula's other many deaths. I don't expect that Dracula would be allowed to succeed in some way with his mad scheme -- though that sort of cynical conclusion wouldn't have been out of step at all with the current trend in horror films, where the bad guys very often won -- but after all the apocalyptic talk, after the world-weary feeling permeating the film, at the very least what I wanted from the end was something that said, once and for all, it really was over this time. As it stands, Satanic Rites of Dracula ends in a way where Dracula could be getting resurrected yet again a week later, same as always.
For Lee, this really was the end, but it's hard to claim he finally made good on his boasts. More than likely, had Hammer made another Dracula film, he would have shown up, under protest no doubt but present never the less. Instead, Hammer went out of business after allowing Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1974 and To the Devil...A Daughter in 1976 to effectively kill the company off. Like Dracula, they deserved better at the end, but if they'd had better, it probably wouldn't have been the end, so what can you do? Cushing reprised the role of Van Helsing one more time, returning to the Victorian era but this time to China for the completely nonsensical but still fun Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. That film does feature Dracula, but since he transforms into a Chinese guy at the beginning of the film, and since the film itself doesn't really jibe with the continuity of the previous film, it's not really part of the Dracula series and instead plays out like an alternate universe take, similar to The Evil of Frankenstein. Both Cushing and Lee would go on to make much better horror films than this one, as well as few that were much worse. It's not a great way to end a series that gave us so many wonderful films. With the relatively poor performance of Dracula AD 1972 at the box office, distributors suddenly weren't interested in Satanic Rites of Dracula. It took years before it found its way to American screens. Where as a Dracula film starring Cushing and Lee would have been a simple sell even a few years earlier, by 1974 it was all over, and the quality of Satanic Rites of Dracula is a perfect example of why. It's too bad the series couldn't muster a better send-off, because while the concept isn't bad and the idea was good, the final execution simply lacked the sophistication, energy, and magic that the film deserved.  Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1974 posted by Keith at 3:38 PM | 19 Comments Monday, October 08, 2007Dracula A.D. 1972 Release Year: 1972Country: England Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame, Caroline Munro, Marhsa Hunt, Michael Coles. Writer: Don Houghton Director: Alan Gibson Cinematographer: Dick Bush Music: Michael Vickers Producer: Josephine Douglas Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us And so we enter the dire straights of Hammer Films in the final throes of a long, drawn-out death much like those experienced by Dracula himself. As has been detailed elsewhere and will be summarized here, by the 1970s, England's Hammer Studios -- the studio that pretty much defined and dominated the horror market through the 50s and 60s -- had fallen on hard times. The old guard had largely retired or died, and the new blood was flailing about, desperately trying to find the direction that would right the once mighty production house. The problem was that everyone felt like they needed to update their image, but no one actually knew how. In retrospect, though they may have seemed painfully antiquated at the time of their release, many of Hammer's releases during the 70s were quite good and often experimental (by Hammer standards, anyway). This movie isn't really one of them, but it's still pretty enjoyable in a completely ludicrous way. Unfortunately, even Hammer's good films in the 1970s simply weren't in step with contemporary trends in horror films. No one wanted to see a gothic horror anymore, not in this new era of slasher movies and stuff where devil worshipers listlessly chant about Satan and then hassle Warren Oates and Hot Lips Houlihan.
Hammer tried to launch several new properties that were variations on their old themes, and several of these showed considerable promise. Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter was a spectacular horror-adventure film that mixed classic Hammer atmosphere with a more playful, swashbuckling tone. Although Twins of Evil is best remembered for the prominent assets of its two Playboy Playmate co-stars, underneath the cheesecake nudity is another very good film. And Vampire Circus was one of Hammer's most experimental vampire films, integrating a hallucinogenic, dreamlike state into Hammer's formerly all-business approach. But these films either didn't perform well at the box office, or studio executives didn't have any faith in them. In the end, Hammer decided to return to the same-old, same-old, and audiences got new Dracula, Frankenstein, and mummy movies. With each of these, Hammer tried something different. The mummy movie, 1971's Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, was adapted from a Bram Stoker novel and deals with a mummy's curse but contains no actual mummies. 1974's Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell was roundly lambasted for its ridiculous monster make-up (a hairy caveman design featuring a face mask where the lips don't move when the actor talks), but if one can get past that, it's an exceptionally well thought-out final entry for the series, completing Baron Frankenstein's journey from slightly cold man of science on the verge of a miraculous breakthrough to completely disconnected butcher engaged in pointless, crude retreads of his old experiments. And then there was Dracula. Hammer's Dracula series started out with a promising entry, 1970's Taste the Blood of Dracula. The original idea behind that movie had been to, as with Brides of Dracula so many years before, make movie in which Dracula is an ever-present force and invoked name but not an actual on-screen character. Distributors balked at the idea of a Dracula-free Dracula movie, especially when there was no name star onto which they could hook their wagon as an alternate. Brides may not have featured Christopher Lee as Dracula, but at least it had Peter Cushing reprising his role as Van Helsing. Taste the Blood, on the other hand, revolves around young Ralph Bates, an actor Hammer had hopes of turning into their next big thing, though it never really happened. And so Hammer somehow convinced Christopher Lee to sign on yet again for one absolutely final appearance as the count. The result is a great entry in the Dracula series, and sensing that there was still some gas left in the tank, Hammer decided to give it another go. Scars of Dracula is a pretty bad movie, a major step backward after a good movie, showcasing Hammer filmmaking at its most profit driven, but it also stands out as the only film where Dracula is a major character, with lots of screentime and lines. It was enough to do the trick at the box office, and so to the well once again -- but this time, Dracula was gonna get funky!
In 1970, American International Pictures -- a studio that built a franchise of horror films based loosely on the writing of Edgar Allen Poe by copying Hammer's gothic horror films -- released a movie called Count Yorga, Vampire. It was an attempt by AIP to transfer the feel of their gothic Poe films into a modern setting, and a vampire -- given its longevity provided it can stay away from Peter Cushing -- was the perfect creature for the experiment. You could still deck his pad out in all sorts of frilly Victorian hoo ha, but you had a reasonable explanation for why he was still hanging around in 1970, listening to his old Edison Cylindrical Phonograph device and complaining about how modern music was crappy and modern fashion was ridiculous. Count Yorga also had the good sense to turn poke subtle fun at the idea of this out-of-touch Victorian style character dropped wholesale and unchanged into what was then modern time, as if the intervening hundred years or so hadn't caused the vampire to change in the slightest. But what do I know. I'm writing this review win 2007, and I'm listening to the same music I listened to in 1987. What's another eighty years? Yorga, no doubt with some help from Hammer's early 70s vampire output, sparked a bit of a vampire revival that really came to a boil in 1972. Marvel Comics released their outlandishly ridiculous but imminently enjoyable Tomb of Dracula comic book, in which modern-day descendants of Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and Dracula himself team up to battle a revived Count who would explain his entire life history every time he got a word bubble to himself. Only Doctor Strange showcased the potential to ramble on and spew as much purple prose. The comic book was a whirlwind of bell bottoms, tweed blazers, and jumpers, not to mention vampire hunter Blade's bizarre combo of lab goggles, a raincoat, and some swashbuckler boots. When they updated him for the movies, it's a shame they didn't keep the original outfit and afro. And if Dracula's flowery long-windedness, punctuated as it often was by the phrase, "Foolish humans!" and "I, Dracula..." was a little much to swallow, wait until you get a load of Blade running around calling the count a jive turkey and "baby."
In the same year, AIP released Blacula, a blaxploitation twist on the Count Yorga theme which, despite the jokey title, turned out to be a remarkably good and thoughtful film that managed to deliver vampire thrills and make comments on race relations, ghettos, and drug abuse without it coming across as overly heavy-handed. Plus the character of Mamuwalde (Blacula, to you) was an exceptionally complex villain/hero inhabited by a great actor in William Marshall. Once again, a movie got to play with the idea of a Victorian era character revived in the modern era -- with plenty of light jokes about fashion. Lucky for the vampires, the early 70s were such a jumbled mish-mash of outrageous fashion trends that even a guy running around in a vest and opera cape didn't really stand out, though he could often be mistaken for a pimp. In a classic example of "student becomes the master" flip-flopping, Hammer looked to AIP for inspiration and released their own "vampire in modern times" movie in 1972. The idea was hatched that Hammer, too, should make a modern day vampire tale, one that would easily lend itself to integrating modern settings with classic the Hammer gothic trappings. And since Hammer already had Count Dracula hanging around in the shadows, he was the most obvious choice. Of course, there remained one problem: Christopher Lee was absolutely, positively, entirely unwilling to do another Dracula movie for Hammer, not when he was having so much fun making high quality films for Jess Franco, like Eugenie... the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, all those Fu Manchu films, and...oh hey! What do you know! Jess Franco's Dracula. I doubt anyone at Hammer was actually worried that they wouldn't be able to get Lee to reprise his role as Dracula. After all, he announced after every single Dracula movie that they were awful and he'd never make another one in a million years. And then a few years later, there he is again, donning the cape and red contact lenses for another go round which, upon completion of principal photography, he would run to the press and complain about, announcing that he would never do another shitty Dracula film again. Blah, blah, blah, Chris. And you know what? He still complains about it. Dude, no one thinks you're Dracula anymore. The only people who bring it up are a few cult movie fans and you. Everyone else thinks your Saruman or whatever the hell your name was in those awful Star Wars films. I've theorized in past reviews of Hammer Dracula films and Lee's whining that the entire thing was a ruse devised by Hammer and Lee to drum up controversy and business. After all, if your star is out there bad-mouthing his own film and saying stuff like, "Well, the last one may have been gory and tasteless, but this one is so much worse that I can't stand it!" is going to do wonders for getting folks interested in seeing the movie.
The other option is that Christopher Lee is just pompous and annoying. And I say that as a guy who enjoys Christopher Lee's work. But while I may love many of the films in which he's been in, there's no denying that his filmography has considerably more "worst film ever made" candidates and parts in it than anyone short of Michael Caine. But, like Caine, Lee gets the British Actor's Golden Pass -- that coveted ticket that allows a British actor to emerge unscathed from a career of mostly utter garbage and still have people think they are incredible. I mean, Tom Cruise has one flop, and his career is pronounced over. But Michael Caine? He gets to be in Jaws IV, Blame it on Rio, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and The Swarm, and he comes through like he's coated in Teflon. Similarly, while Christopher Lee was busy bitching about the lack of class in his Dracula movies, he found time to make The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, To the Devil...A Daughter, and Chuck Norris' An Eye for an Eye, yet he remains one of the most revered actors of our time. Not even Vincent Price, who was far more talented and made just as many great films (and just as many crummy ones) commands the respect that Lee gets. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it. What I'm saying is, Chris -- shut the hell up about Dracula. You made a lot of really awful films to go with your good ones, so quit picking on Dracula, the character that made your career. You should be more like Michael Caine. He shows up, does his job, and then moves on without running to the press to bitch about the last job he had or how everyone only things of Carter or Harry Palmer or ol' Peachy or whoever Michael Caine is typecast as. I think he's actually typecast as Michael Caine. All of Christopher Lee's complaining, still going on to this day, coupled with the fact that no matter what he said, he always went back and did another Dracula film, means that, if this wasn't a clever marketing ploy by Hammer and Lee, then Lee is just sort of a...you know. If I ever meet him, I'm going to call him Dracula non-stop. Great. You know, among my goals when I started Teleport City, I never counted "talk shit about Christopher Lee" to be among them.
So whatever the case, after swearing he'd never do another one, Christopher Lee was never the less coaxed back into the series, perhaps because of the promise that, for the first time since 1958's Horror of Dracula, he and Cushing would be teamed up as Dracula and Van Helsing. Also, I'm sure they threw some money at him, and a couple rare editions of Shakespeare books or whatever the hell Christopher Lee likes more than making Dracula movies. There are, of course, sundry other problems facing Dracula A.D. 1972, but we shall address each of those as we come to them in the course or this article. The pre-credit opening sees us joining the finale of a film that was never made, but looks like it was pretty good. Dracula (Lee) and Van Helsing (Cushing) are locked in mortal combat atop a carriage that is careening out of control across London's Hyde Park. Remember that Cushing and Lee hadn't been paired together as Van Helsing and Dracula since the very first film back in the late 1950s, so seeing them together again should have been a big deal, at least bigger than a pre-credit sequence that feels like, "We now join our regularly scheduled vampire fight already in progress." But we'll let that slide, because it really is a fantastic opening, and one that can fool you into thinking Hammer's Dracula is back with a vengeance. After both Dracula and Van Helsing keep over dead, a mysterious third man rides up and scoops some of Dracula's ashes into a little glass vial and takes Drac's signet ring. Then, at Van Helsing's funeral, the guy dumps some of Dracula's ashes into a little hole in some far-off corner of the graveyard, and plunges the stake that killed Dracula into the ground. The combination of seeing Van Helsing and Dracula together again after so many years and the high-energy action of the scene is really fun, and like I said, perhaps they should have just made this movie instead. Given that Taste the Blood of Dracula sees the Count transported for the first time to London, a movie in which Van Helsing and the ace bloodsucker tangle with one another one last time on Hammer's home turf would have been a movie to get excited about. And I guess technically, that is what Dracula A.D. 1972 is, in a weird, convoluted way. After Van Helsing dispatches Dracula and keels over dead himself, we get the funky Dracula A.D. 1972 theme song by Michael Vickers. And here is where Hammer lost a good many of the remaining traditionalists that were hobbling on their walkers out to the theaters, no doubt trailing their colostomy bags behind them, to see Hammer productions. Up until this point, every Hammer Dracula theme song had been written by James Bernard, the man who defined the Hammer score the same way Hammer itself defined the gothic horror film. Bernard's scores were bombastic and powerful, with the conductor explaining that in every song you could hear the syllables of the movie's title (and it's true). But with Dracula A.D. 1972, Hammer was trying to create an amalgamation of their past glory with something new. With Lee and Cushing serving as the links to the past, Bernard's theme writing services were not tapped. Instead, Michael Vickers turns in an attempt to blend classic Hammer horror music with a more modern film theme sound, something more along the lines of Lalo Schifren or Roy Budd. The dramatic shift from the thoroughly old-fashioned Hammer opening to this theme song full of horns and wah-wah guitars jarred many people, though they are lucky I didn't make the movie because I would have accompanied this completely bad-ass theme song with shots of Christopher Lee -- wearing a black flared-leg suit and platform shoes (and his cape, of course) high steppin' down the street with a magic cane, using it to turn fat women thin and bring dead people back to life in front of grieving relatives. That's right, people. You should be thankful Hammer's movie is what it is, because if I had my way, it would have been...well, it would have been Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law, but with Dracula. Which just makes me think that we really should have had a movie where Dracula is revived, hisses out his token line, "Who dares disturb the sanctity of Dracula?" only to have Rudy Ray Moore step in with a Thompson machine gun and say, "Dolemite, mother fucker!"
After our funky theme song, the action jumps a hundred years to the groovy, mod setting of London in the swingin' sixties. Except, you know, it's 1972 and all. A bunch of groovy young mop tops are skulking about London, holding "freak outs" and the most tame "horribly out of control" parties I've ever seen -- and I've been to some really tame parties. Leading this merry band of pranksters is one Johnny Alucard, trotting out the Alucard "puzzle" for the millionth time. We get it! Who, by this time, doesn't get the Alucard thing? Imagine if Frankenstein had tried that instead of just cleverly calling himself Dr. Frank or Dr. Stein whilst incognito. Actually, I guess Nietsneknarf isn't any worse than many actual German words. Johnny happens to be the owner of Dracula's ring and some of his ashes, passed on we assume from his nefarious ancestor from the beginning of the film. And one of his friends happens to be the grand-daughter of the latest Dr. Van Helsing. And if you think they're all going to end up in an abandoned churchyard summoning up Dracula, then you don't really earn yourself a prize. Actually, Johnny Alucard is less a reincarnation of Dracula than he is a cheap knock-off of Malcom McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. In fact, many of the sets and situations in this movie feel cribbed from Kubrick's film, which is only fitting, I suppose, considering the outfits Malcom McDowell wore in A Clockwork Orange. So OK, now my movie has a jive walkin' Christopher Lee as Dracula (with a magic cane, remember...and a big floppy pimp hat) battling Dolemite and trying to possess Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Seriously, why does no one ever give me development deals? How does Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave get funding, but my Dracula/Dolemite/Malcom McDowell movie languishes in limbo, alongside my ideas for Cobra-Shark vs. Croco-lion and Great White Squid, a movie about Wings Hauser fighting a genetically engineered giant squid that has great white sharks for tentacles. Somewhere, my friends who bother to read this site are going, "Oh God, is he on about the Croco-Lion thing again?" Johnny (Christopher Neame) convinces the gang that what would really be fun would be to hold a black mass. Having nothing better to do, the gang agrees, in some cases reluctantly so. It is at this point we learn that one of the groovy gang is Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), great grand-daughter of Lawrence Van Helsing, slayer of Dracula, and current grand-daughter of Professor Van Helsing -- played by Peter Cushing, because in movies no one thinks it's weird when you look 100% identical to one of your distant relatives. Genetics tells me that I should look less and less like my relatives the further removed from them I get, but in movies, people are always the spitting image of some great grandfather or third aunt or whatever, and no one ever thinks that is weird. Hell, the mummy built his entire career of resurrections on randomly stumbling across women who looked exactly like their ancestor from thousand of years ago. No surprises here when Johnny summons up Dracula during their black mass ritual -- which takes place in a desanctified church that happens to be the same place Lawrence Van Helsing and Dracula were buried. You'd think that, given that the current Professor Van Helsing has a portrait of his grandfather in his study, collected all the man's books, and remains himself an expert on the occult, that he would know where his idol and close relative was buried. But whatever. All that's important is Dracula is back and he's going to...well, he's going to hang around the church and send Johnny out to kidnap Jessica Van Helsing, because Dracula knows how to hold a grudge. Meanwhile, as members of the gang disappear -- including the lovely Caroline Munro (Captain Kronos, Starcrash) and the equally lovely Marsha Hunt (you may recall her hairy werewolf boobs from Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, also starring Dracula) -- the police become increasingly convinced by Van Helsing's tendency to blame the murders on a vampire. There are a few things people tend to harp on when criticizing this film. The first, most obvious, and dumbest argument is that the film is dated. I think I may have said before that "it looks dated" is one of my most hated complaints about any movie. It's cheap, ignorant, and shallow, and it has no merit as an observation. That a film is a reflection of the time in which it was made hardly strikes me as anything inherently negative, and I utterly detest whenever someone trots out that hoary old cliche and expects us to have any respect for their opinion. Oh, so Dracula AD 1972 contains slang and crazy fashion. Big deal. I look at those things as assets more than as detriments. So if your complaint is that the movie is dated looking, well we may still be friends, but I'm certainly going to regard your opinion on any film from here on out with a tremendous degree of suspicion. The second most common complaint is that Dracula is hardly in the movie at all, and when he is, he does nothing. I can understand this complaint a little bit more, but honestly, if at this point in the series, you are mad that Dracula isn't on screen and doesn't do very much when he is, then you haven't watched any of the previous films in the series, except perhaps Scars of Dracula, which is the only film where he has anything approaching substantial screentime or more than two lines. Not to say that it isn't disappointing. One can't help but want scenes of Dracula cutting lose in modern London, even if those scenes don't involve him dancing down the street with a magic cane or fighting machine0gun toting kungfu pimps. Still, it would have been nice if he did a little something more than stand around in the desanctified church. Dracula's confinement to the church is representative of Hammer's difficulty with updating their image. They want to figure out a way to enter the modern era, but in the end, they imprison their title character in a Victorian set and don't ever figure out exactly how to bring him out.
Previous Dacula films have always relied on the rest of the cast, with Dracula looming in the background as everyone's motivating factor. Unfortunately for Dracula AD 1972, it's a pretty weak supporting cast, comprised primarily of inexperienced young actors who aren't bad but don't really contribute much that is memorable. They spend most of their time either sitting around being bored, or sitting around talking about how they are concerned, then most of them head off to a party and are never heard from again. Stephanie Beacham as Jessica Van Helsing obviously has a more substantial role, but only if you consider substantial to be screaming, then being put into a trance. As the menacing Johnny Alucard, Christopher Neame is all right -- equal parts spooky and pathetic -- but he's basically playing Malcom McDowell, as I said. Dracula AD 1972 is more or less a remake of Taste the Blood of Dracula, complete with the bored circle dabbling in the black arts, the mysterious outsider spurring them on and summoning Dracula, the vial of Dracula remains, the kidnapped woman, and so on. But Ralph Bates was a much more charismatic actor, and Taste the Blood of Dracula had a much more compelling cast of older character actors to propel it forward in between scenes of Dracula showing that he can count to four or five. Dracula AD 1972 lacks that, and although the young cast is perfectly acceptable, the characters they inhabit just aren't interesting. Plus the jackass who wears the monk's cowl around the whole time was intensely annoying and yet escaped death. Shame on you, Dracula! Shame on you for not killing the odious comic relief. Caroline Munro has a small but memorable part as one of the gang of youths seduced by Johnny Alucard's ability to mimic what he's seen in A Clockwork Orange, but she would quickly become one of the most beloved cult film actresses of all time. She got her start on the horror scene playing Vincent price's dead wife in the Dr. Phibes films, though I'm not sure lying there dead for every one of your scenes earns you a whole lot other than other parts where you do nothing but lie there. She at least gets to talk, writhe, show off heaving breasts, and get blood dumped all over her in this film. Her career took off shortly thereafter, and she has a much more substantial role in Hammer's superior Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, as well as major roles in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, At the Earth's Core, the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, and of course the infamous classic Starcrash, featuring what was no doubt her most memorable outfit. She was still working, albeit only occasionally, up until 2006, and if you've seen her lately, in her late fifties, then you know she's still ridiculously gorgeous and awesome. A shame she doesn't have more to do in this film, but even a little Caroline Munro is worth watching. As the current Van Helsing, it's great to see Peter Cushing back in action, and naturally he goes at the role with absolute conviction. Unfortunately, the character is written as Van Helsing Lite, and most of his scenes are pretty dull. He spends a lot of time tracking down clues to the one thing he already knows. Everyone knows where Dracula's base of operation is, and yet Van Helsing spends half the movie trying to track down clues to the location of Dracula's hide-out, which he already knows! And once again, he decides to go fight Dracula at night, instead of swinging by and staking the bloodsucker when Dracula is asleep in his coffin. Why oh why are vampire hunters always waiting until dark to go fight vampires? I guess a movie where vampire hunters swing by during the day, stake Dracula, then head down to the pub to celebrate wouldn't be as long, but it'd be a nice change of pace. Other than that, Cushing is always Cushing. He comes in and does his job well, or as well as he can with what he's given. The final common criticism of this movie, then, is that it's not very good, and I guess that's a fair assessment. The script needed more work. You can tell the hip young lingo was written by old men who didn't really know what they were doing. The plot is a bit of a letdown, especially considering that it's the first time Van Helsing and Dracula have been on screen together since the first movie. And despite all that, I really quite like Dracula AD 1972. I like the young cast. I like the awkward attempt at being hip. I like the outlandish counter-culture fashions. I like the attempts at freak-out cinematography. I think the movie is fun regardless of its faults, though I recognize that I may be in the minority here. By no means is this the film to save Hammer, and by no means is it as good as the previous film it rips off, Taste the Blood of Dracula. But it's not an entirely bad effort and has much to recommend in it, at least for me.
Screenwriter Don Houghton didn't have a terribly deep resume at this point in his career, his primary credit at the time of this movie being a stint as a writer for Doctor Who. And in fact, he had very little in the way of a career after Dracula AD 1972. He went on to write The Satanic Rites of Dracula, and two of Hammer's co-productions with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers studio -- the crummy Shatter and the pretty good if sloppily written Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, in which Peter Cushing reprised his Van Helsing character one more time, this time on a trip to China to stop Dracula from raising an undead army. Despite the appearance of Dracula in the movie, Christopher Lee did not sign on, possibly because he was to busy making the James Bond film Man with the Golden Gun. Or The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Houghton was in his early forties when he wrote the screenplay for Dracula AD 1972, and while that's not really all that old, it is a little too old to be trying to write hip teen lingo. I'm only thirty-five right now, but I wouldn't consider myself adept at writing slang-heavy dialog based on modern teens. They say...what? Like, "sweet" and "cuckoo,man, real cuckoo" right? Despite the faults, Dracula AD 1972 managed to turn a profit, which meant that Hammer was going to make another one, even though Christopher Lee swore this was the worst movie ever and he would never play Dracula again. That follow-up, another film set in the 1970s, was The Satanic Rites of Dracula, and if you want to see a genuinely awful film, that is the one you should be watching.  Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Stars: Caroline Munro, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1972 posted by Keith at 6:16 AM | 7 Comments Monday, December 20, 2004Evil of Frankenstein
1964, England. Starring Peter Cushing, Sando Eles, Katy Wild, Kiwi Kingston, Peter Woodthorpe, Duncan Lamont, David Hutcheson. Directed by Freddie Francis.
The story to this point: the good doctor of questionable moral standards, one Baron Victor von Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) escaped the guillotine he was facing at the end of the first film, Curse of Frankenstein, only to find himself beaten to death by angry amputees at the end of the second film, Revenge of Frankenstein. Luckily, his apprentice in that film, Hans, turned out to be a most capable student and was able to bring Frankenstein back from the dead, making him, in effect, the first man to successfully pull off Frankenstein's experiment with reanimating corpses. So there you have the first two Frankenstein films from England's Hammer Studio, two of the company's best films and two of the best horror films ever produced. Well, you can forget all that, because although the third film in the series, Evil of Frankenstein once again stars Cushing in the lead role, and although there is a helper named Hans, just about everything else established up to that point by the previous films is chucked out the window for some inexplicable reason. Perhaps if we step back and look at some of the events that lead up to this film, we can comprehend why it seems such an oddity in the overall Hammer Frankenstein series. Or maybe we won't. Either way, you're getting the story, so you might as well sit back and make yourself comfortable. When Hammer made Curse of Frankenstein way back in.aww, heck now, when was that? Nineteen hundred and fifty-seven? Fifty-eight? You know, at my age the years all just sort of mix together. Anyway, when Hammer made that film, most folks were still thinking of Frankenstein not as a classic of gothic horror literature penned by Mary Shelley, but as a series of movies produced by Universal and starring Boris Karloff or a parade of actors attempting to look like Boris Karloff. Hammer was determined to remind people of the film's literary origins, and besides, the Karloff monster make-up devised by Jack Pierce had been trademarked, so Hammer had to make certain their monster bore no resemblance to the Universal version. What they came up with in the end was spectacularly frightful, and while Christopher Lee's monster may not be the instantly recognizable global icon that Karloff's is, it is in my opinion the creepier and more nightmarish of the two. After Revenge of Frankenstein, in which the monster was almost completely human in appearance save for his otherworldly Lyle Lovett hair, Hammer hatched some sort of a deal with Universal that gave them the rights to recreate the famous Karloff make-up. This would seem, thematically, to be incongruous with the progress set forth by the previous film in which we see that Frankenstein has mastered the procedure almost to the point of perfection. There'd be no reason for him to create anything as ungainly as a Karloff-type creature. But still, you can't help but want to take advantage of the chance to use the Universal likeness, so Evil of Frankenstein devised a script in which the baron encounters a previous creation of his frozen in ice. This in itself would have been very easy to work into the timeline of events set down by the first two films. There is a gap between Curse and Revenge into which this creature could have slid nicely without wreaking havoc. Unfortunately, they chose to cast this new creature as the original creature despite looking nothing like the Lee incarnation. In addition, no mention of the death and rebirth of Frankenstein at the end of the second film is ever made, and this particular Hans seems to have none of the skills possessed by the previous Hans. And just to make matters even more confused, a flashback sequence retells the story of the original creature, but with a completely different ending, one in which Frankenstein is merely exiled from the town of Karlstadt rather than sent to the guillotine. Ultimately, you either have to ignore some of the bits and pieces of plot in this third film, which would then allow you to accept the flashbacks as being to some adventure after Curse but before Revenge, or you have to think of Evil of Frankenstein as a completely self-contained story unrelated to the previous two films, which is irritating in a way. Or you can just not worry about any of this. It's just that when you have two films as good as and as connected to one another as Curse and Revenge -- which picks up exactly where the first film ends - you want the third in the series to fit into the puzzle instead of being some weird anomaly sitting off to the side. It could be that the chance to use the Universal appearance of the monster meant that Hammer figured they might as well make a little self-contained episode that is more of a salute to the old Universal films than a pure Hammer movie. Thus the revised back story, and thus, for that matter, the entire plot of this film, which feels much more like a throwback to the old Universal Frankenstein sequels than it does an entry into the Hammer canon. If anyone has simply asked someone from Hammer why the film was handled in this manner, I've yet to find the quote. But I'm confident it's out there somewhere. So there's the behind-the-scenes gibberish. How about the movie itself? Well needless to say, it doesn't measure up to the previous two films, but very few horror films can. As a self-contained "further adventures of Baron Frankenstein," it's acceptable at its best but has so many things wrong with it that didn't plague the other films. We'll come to them in due time, but let's dig into things properly. The film begins on a solid foot with a great body-snatching scene that culminates in Frankenstein being run out of whatever town he settled in this time. Strapped for cash and devoid of equipment, he decides the only course of action is to sneak back to his old home and gather up some of his priceless belongings to sell. Why, exactly, he assumes the manor of a mad scientist who was executed and/or run out of town after creating a monster out of the body parts of corpses and then letting that monster go on a rampage would still be intact is a bit unclear, but I figure he's been inhaling a lot of fumes from all those mysterious beakers full of colored liquids mad scientists are so fond of, that he isn't really thinking straight. Hans, this time played by Sandor Eles -- an actor whose name sounds like a character from one of these movies - thinks that maybe going back home isn't such a good idea, but Frankenstein is confident no one will even remember exactly what he looks like or be that interested in the arrival of two travelers. This seems in stark contrast to the fact that every time he gets caught dabbling in the domain of God, his persecutors all remember everything about his infamous story. As one would guess, Castle Frankenstein has been looted, and the fact that a local mesmerist keeps mentioning the dreaded Frankenstein by name still doesn't seem to convince Peter Cushing that people will recognize him. Eventually he discovers the local mayor is the proud owner of much of the stolen Frankenstein booty, which leads to the beleaguered doctor fleeing town once again, this time with the help of a beautiful wild deaf mute girl played, fittingly, by Katy Wild. It just so happens that in her cave is the frozen body of Frankenstein's old monster, just waiting to be spirited away for revival. At this point, Frankenstein's ransacked lab is miraculously in working order again, but we can ignore that since we're going to be busy marveling at how monumentally godawful the monster make-up job is. Look, I'm already being easier on this film than a lot of Hammer fans tend to be. It's not up to the standards of the Frankenstein series, but taken on it's own it isn't really all that bad. But no amount of politeness can change the fact that this is some of the shoddiest make-up work Hammer has ever slapped together. You'd think with the rights to the Karloff look secured, they'd make some effort to make it look like something at least a little bit better than what a high school horror fan might come up with given ten minutes, ten dollars, and no materials other than paper mache, a packet of Quaker Oats, and a Sharpie marker. I mean, this is bad, bad stuff. Far worse than you might even guess if you haven't seen it. It can stand up to neither the Jack Pierce original or the Christopher Lee version Hammer dreamt up for their first Frankenstein film, and if this is the best they could do, then it's a shame they even tried at all. Come on, man! If all those crappy Universal sequels can get the make-up right, then surely Hammer could come up with something passable. This is the sort of garbage that never should have even been allowed into make-up test shots, let alone the finished product. Saddled as he is with clunky, fake looking make-up, there's not much Kiwi Kingston, the man under the mess, could do even if he had the talent to do it. Both Karloff and Lee proved how much you could do with the character without even having dialogue, and in the previous Hammer entry, Michael Gwynn provided us with a fully human "monster." Kingston and the disaster he has plastered to his face are a major step backward. The make-up allows for almost no facial expressions at all. We can't seen anything but the actors lips and eyes, and Kingston doesn't know what to do with those. The rest of his body language is hampered by bulky clothes and those big metal shoes, so there's nothing worth noting there either. He is a completely unsympathetic creature who generates no emotional attachment whatsoever, and as anyone who knows Frankenstein movies can tell you, that's death for a movie. Even thought he Hammer films concentrate on the man more than the monster, you still have to have a good monster. In one scene where the monster is supposed to tumble through a railing and off a stairway, you can even see Kingston take a few steps back to get a running start before plowing intentionally into the railing like a football linebacker rather than some out of control creature in torment. The best Kingston can do is to stomp about and emit a shrill, irritating shriek that makes you long for the monster's death simply so it'll quit screeching. He does a lot of that screeching because he was shot in the head, and apparently Frankenstein didn't do as good a job fixing the ol' brain up as he thought he did. When he finally quiets the big lug down, it's only because the monster goes into a coma. Frankenstein and Hans decide to enlist that local mesmerist, himself in trouble with the law, to help reawaken the creature's mind. This whole plot turn feels very similar to the sub par (but not entirely unenjoyable, mind you) Universal sequels that always had the monster getting involved with traveling carnivals and hypnotists and sideshow carnies carting around Dracula's bones. Naturally, the hypnotist Zoltan has his own designs on controlling the creature to extract a little revenge upon the cops who keep hassling him. Are all carnival hypnotists named Zoltan or Zandor? It's almost as chronic a problem as goth girls who call themselves Cassandra, or hippies who name their dog Zoe. My beef with the whole hypnotist plot isn't that it's kind of corny or "Universal." I don't mind that. My problem is the fact that it causes Hammer to forget what made their first two movies great, and that's Peter Cushing. In both films, Frankenstein is the main character, and the films focus on exploring the complexity of his personality and the mentality that leads him to abandon the concept of morality in favor of relentless pursuit of scientific research. Here, Cushing's doctor takes on more of a supporting role with little more to do than Hans or the wild beggar girl. The focus shifts to Zoltan, played competently by Peter Woodthorpe, who later went on to star with Peter Cushing in The Skull before doing the voice of Gollum in the Ralph Bakshi animated version of The Lord of the Rings, which also featured Hammer stalwart Andre Morrell as Elrond. Saddled with a load like Kingston's unengaging and even downright annoying monster, this plot simple collapses. There's nothing to keep you interested. We know Zoltan will die for his treachery, and well, the creature always dies. There's nothing intense, nothing to pull you in the way there is in exploring Frankenstein himself. Despite being relegated to supporting player, Cushing performs up to his usual high standards. The most interesting twist on the character allowed to come out in this film is the few glances we see of Frankenstein as a tired man. We know him as driven, undefeatable in his own way, but from time to time we get to see in Evil of Frankenstein a man who simply wants to be left alone. There's no real conflict in him here, though, which keeps him from being as compelling as he has been in the past. In previous films we had to balance his charisma and good intentions with the fact that he was willing to murder or perform unnecessary amputations if it would advance his research. Here, he gets mad about the burgomaster stealing his stuff, but that's about it. That does however lead to one good scene between him and the burgomaster's hysterically screaming wife. Unfortunately, there is nothing urgent in the character. It's almost as if Cushing could tell this film was little more than just a breather between official installments and decided, while he was still going to be the best thing about the movie, he could also afford to take a bit of a breather himself. The primary reason, undoubtedly, for the shift in the focus of the story is the fact that Jimmy Sangster, who wrote the previous two films, was replaced this time around by Hammer producer-turned-writer Anthony Hinds. There's no real faulting Hinds as a producer. He is, arguably, the man who defined Hammer, and once he left in 1970, the studio began it's sharp downward spiral. As a scriptwriter, he was also quite accomplished, and the studio's best films that weren't penned by Sangster usually bear Hind's name or one of his pseudonyms. Curse of the Werewolf, Kiss of the Vampire, some of the Dracula movies before the wheels fell off that franchise - damn good movies. And while he's written a decent movie here, he hasn't written a decent Hammer Frankenstein movie, if you know what I mean. It's as if he simply missed the point of the series and took it in the wrong direction. Also replaced with director Terence Fisher, who had helmed the first two films as well as the other films that helped define Hammer, Horror of Dracula and The Mummy (both written, incidentally, by Sangster). Cinematographer Freddie Francis took over with generally good results, though that special something Fisher brought to the table is notable in its absence. Still, Francis manages a number of memorable scenes, his best being the opening scene of body snatching. That the film, as of this writing, remains missing in action on DVD means that I've only been able to see the film on pan and scan VHS, so a full assessment of Francis' accomplishments isn't entirely possible. But I can say that, as was par for the Hammer course, the film looks beautiful. The baron's crumbling castle is gorgeously realized and the air of decay lends thematic gravity to the proceedings. Supporting players are uniformly good. Katy Wild gives of a strange Bjork vibe, but I guess any Bjork-type vibe is going to be strange. She gives the high quality mute performance that should have been coming from Kiwi Kingston as the monster. Plus she's dangerously beautiful. It's a shame she didn't pop up more often. Her connection to the creature is only explored in a rudimentary fashion, but I reckon it's better than nothing at all. As Hans II, Sandor Eles is fine. There would end up being as many Hanses in these movies as there were Kloves in the Dracula films. Evil of Frankenstein is a movie that is a bit hard to like if you are a fan of the previous two films. It just doesn't make sense why they decided to conflict so heavily with the established continuity when one or two little changes would have made everything more or less into place. What's done is done, though, and the result is that Evil of Frankenstein enjoys a rather rotten reputation as the worst of the Hammer Frankensteins, which I reckon is technically true. But the other films are all so good - though Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell does boast a monster design every bit as rotten as what's on display here - that you can be the worst of them and still be a decent film. I don't think Evil of Frankenstein deserves quite as much venom as is sometimes flung its way. It's a misstep, sure, and a disappointing experiment, sort of like one of the doctor's many unsuccessful attempts at breathing life into the dead. But it has good performances from everyone who isn't the monster, a good score, a decent amount of action, the usual brain surgery gore, and a few really wonderful moments. If all bad ideas were this watchable, we'd be better off. So I recommend you take a deep breath, disconnect it from the other films, and enjoy it for what it is: a throwback to the Universal days. As such, it's really rather enjoyable in its own ugly way, and anyone who thinks it's the worst Frankenstein movie Hammer produced obviously never sat through Horror of Frankenstein. Labels: Horror: Frankenstein, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1964 posted by Keith at 12:29 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, October 09, 2004Horror Express
1973, Spain/UK. Starring Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alberto de Mendoza, Silvia Tortosa, Julio Peña, Georges Rigaud, Ángel del Pozo, Víctor Israel, Helga Liné, Alice Reinheart, Juan Olaguivel. Directed by Eugenio Martín. Available on DVD from Amazon
It didn't take long for the genres of horror and science fiction to start mingling. It's a natural marriage, after all, and the two often blend seamlessly, the best and among the earliest example likely being the first two Universal "Frankenstein" movies. Throughout the 1950s, horror and science fiction were frequent bedfellows as atomic terrors ran amok across assorted landscapes. Increasingly, however, it was the science fiction element of the films that was in the forefront, with the horror placed in the background unless one was genuinely terrified of superimposed grasshoppers. By the middle of the 1950s, science fiction was still enjoying the occasional big budget celebration a la This Island Earth (1955) and Forbidden Planet (1956) while horror films were becoming increasingly cheap, b-movie quickie affairs. Not that that means there weren't plenty of gems in the mix, but compared to science fiction, horror was lagging. It was in this setting, however, that England's Hammer Studio decided to mix the two together once again in what they hoped to be a high-class concoction, first as a television series and then as the film The Quatermass Experiment. Although horror was often regarded as a dying genre, Hammer proved that handled properly and with respect, fans were still ready to turn out for a good horror-scifi half-breed. Two more Quatermass films were made, the latest being 1967's superb Quatermass and the Pit, which sees the good doctor and investigator of all things extraterrestrial and paranormal grappling with an alien carcass discovered beneath London and possessed, seemingly, of a Satanic nature as well. Which brings us nicely, if rather half-assedly, to Horror Express, a film that seems to draw from both the feel of a Hammer film as well as that of a ripping HG Wells story without actually being from either source. The idea of gods, angels, and devils as space aliens is no longer especially new and novel, though few serious (or even comical) studies of the notion exist in film. It's a favorite of conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists, however, with the best-known proponents of the idea being those who believe that "ancient astronauts" visited Earth thousands of years ago and helped with everything from the erection of the Egyptian pyramids to the construction of Incan, Mayan, and Aztec pyramids to the carving and raising of the ominous heads on Easter Island. Apart from the notion that aliens were jetting through the cosmos showing off their masonry and stone-carving skills is the theory that so-called holy beings, your Jesus and your various angels and maybe even a Greek god or two, were beings from another planet whose miraculous powers were rather run-of-the-mill back home but really something here on Earth where we didn't have the ability to turn water into wine. Thus these creatures would be perceived as gods and angels, and the naughty ones as demons and devils, by us backward shepherds here on planet Earth. It's not a completely daft idea, as far as such theories go, at least no more so than Jesus being the son of a supreme being who created everything out of nothing and, with the entire universe at his disposal, whiled away the centuries picking on Job and pulling stunts like, "Abraham, sacrifice your son! No just joking! Dude, I can't believe you were really going to sacrifice your son." The idea that these angels, that perhaps even Jesus himself were aliens isn't entirely insane, especially when you take into consideration the power of Jesus to appear as a blond-haired, glowing white guy despite his Jewish-Arabic origins. Horror Express is not a Hammer film, it could easily pass for one thanks to its quick pace, period setting, and the presence of Hammer's two biggest stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and while it doesn't present us with the scenario of our deities being space travelers, it does rely heavily on the notion that beings from other worlds have visited this planet long before the presence of mankind in our current form, and that if said beings were perhaps trapped in the body of a monkey for two million years only to find themselves awakened on a train going through Siberia, they'd be annoyed. Lee stars as Professor Saxton, an intrepid scientist-adventurer the likes of which we simply do not see enough of these days. On an expedition to the far north of china, his team uncovers the remarkably well-preserved mummy of an humanlike ape Saxton assumes to be the missing link, not to mention being one of the greatest anthropological or archaeological discoveries of all time. Hey, consider that some people think of a particularly nice chunk of pot shard to be one of the greatest discoveries of all time, and you can understand why Saxton is so excited about his Peking Man. Sexton immediately returns to the city with his find and books passage to Europe on board the Trans-Siberian Express, only to discover that much to his chagrin his number one scientific and one-liner rival, Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing), is also along for the trip and keeps bugging Saxton about seeing what's in that padlocked box. A Chinese thief at the station doesn't see fit to badger Saxton and, assuming the crate is full of jewels or fine women's lingerie, goes about taking a peek. When the police find him, he's dropped dead with blood pouring from his sockets and his eyes turned completely white. Saxton, being a fine, condescending British scientist, doesn't think much of the incident. The guy was a thief, after all. A mad Russian monk with wild unkempt hair and beard (is there any other kind of Russian monk), however, sees the entire affair as a sign that whatever is contained within the crate must surely be the work of Satan. To prove his point, he attempts to draw a cross on the box, only to discover that being the wooden container of all things Luicferian, the cross will not show up. Whether or not something less holy, like perhaps, "Springsteen 4 Ever!" would have showed up is one of the mysteries that shall remain forever unanswered. Although the cross incident impresses the locals, Saxton dismisses it as a simple parlor trick, and points out that the guy is bugging his eyes out and ranting and raving about Satan. So all aboard the horror express, including Saxton, Wells, the crazy monk Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza, who acted in Fulci's Lizard in a Woman's Skin and One on Top of the Other, among many European cult films), a suspicious Russian police inspector named Mirov (Euro-cult veteran Julio Pena, who also starred in films like Horror Rises from the Tomb, Werewolf Versus the Vampire Women, A Pistol for a Hundred Coffins and Sergio Corbucci's The Mercenary), a mysterious female spy, two Russian nobles, and a whole host of other people whose only job is to fill up the dining cart. In other words, it's a regular Agatha Christie gathering, the kind you always get on these old trains but rarely, if ever, on modern trains. See, therein lies the problem with modern rail travel: not nearly enough intrigue. Used to be that for the price of a ticket, you'd get spies menacing one another with stilettos, upper-class society types embroiled in murder mysteries, and alien-possessed monkey-men throwing things at Peter Cushing. No more. Maybe instead of offering the usual "first class, second class, et cetera" nonsense they should offer something like, "first class, second class, and turn-of-the-century intrigue class." Needless to say, it isn't long before the ape-man claims another victim, this time a porter whom Wells had bribed to take a peek into the box and report back to him. Then the ape-man picks the lock and disappears, much to Saxton's annoyance. Faced with no other reasonable possibility, Inspector Mirov and the two British scientists are forced to assume that a two-million year old ape man has somehow been revived, learned to pick modern locks, and is currently at large and turning people's eyes white. An autopsy on the baggage handler also reveals that the brain is as smooth as a baby's bottom, disregarding then the obvious statistically rare and dismissible occurrence of an ugly, pockmarked baby bottom. It's clear that this is no ordinary two-million year-old missing link. As the list of victims grows, Wells, Saxton, and Mirov join forces to uncover the mystery at the heart of the creature's rampage. Things only get harder when they realize that the creature itself is not the ape-man, but an entity inside the ape-man which is able to leap from one body to another when the need arises. This revelation prompts the best line in the entire movie, in which Mirov turns accusingly to Saxton and Wells and proclaims, "Even one of you could be the monster!" to which Cushing's Wells replies indignantly, "Impossible! We're British, man!" Eventually, it is discovered that the entity is a space alien, marooned on the planet millions of years ago and really keen on getting the hell out of here. The creature's trump card in attempting to get Wells and Saxton not to kill it is that it's seen millions of years of earthly history prior to being frozen and can provide them with knowledge immeasurable. It's a tempting Faustian deal, but one the stolid British researchers resist, though the crazed monk, fearing that this beast is Satan himself, decides to cast his lot with the side whose physical manifestation is running amok on the train. AN impromptu stop at a remote Siberian outpost allows Cossack soldier Telly Savalas to board the train with his troops and either get to the bottom of things in a quick and efficient manner or provide more corpse fodder for the creature, who also reveals an ability to revive the bodies of its victims and send them, zombie-like, shambling through the claustrophobic train cars in a final horrific onslaught against the living. You guess which eventuality comes to pass. Horror Express is a ripping good yarn with a fast pace and a snappy wit. Cushing and Lee are superb in one of their countless pairings, and each horror veteran crackles with energy as they dig deep into their characters and revel in the story around them. Though there are a couple tongue-in-cheek touches to the film, the film itself is never completely tongue-in-cheek. Rather, it simply relies on clever twists and a wicked sense of humor to carry the admittedly zany plot. There is plenty of ammunition on hand for those who wish to pick apart the logic of a film about an ancient alien consciousness riding the rails with Telly Savalas, but the spirit of the film is so high and the performances so winning that one scarcely has time or cause to pause and think about the absurdity of the blood from the eye of the creature acting as sort a microscopic slideshow. That the creature's memory is contained in the fluid of the eye is in itself not a bad idea, but the fact that Lee and Cushing can extract a drop of blood and look at it under a microscope to enjoy various pictures of dinosaurs and the earth from outer space is, well, you know, as outlandish as the fact that people are only mildly surprised when a two-million year-old monkey mummy springs back to life and starts killing. There are also a series of coincidences that the alien must have been eternally thankful for - such as the fact that it needs to figure out how to get out of the locked box, only to be able to absorb the skills of a Chinese thief. And it needs to learn some way of building a rocket capable of escaping earth's atmosphere only to be put on a train alongside a female spy stealing a sample of an indestructible metal to be used in the construction of, perhaps, rockets. And that the creator of the metal, the formula of which is so secret that only he himself knows it, is also on board. But honestly, none of this matters, because what Horror Express wants to be is a faced-paced, fun horror-scifi thriller, and that's exactly what it is. Cushing's Wells is hilariously pompous yet thoroughly likable, and Christopher Lee gets to play yet another stern but heroic man of reason, something he proved considerably adroit at in The Devil Rides Out. The supporting cast is comprised of Eurocult veterans, largely from Spain, all of whom have extensive experience in horror, historical adventures, and spaghetti westerns, among others. And then there's Telly. Although a big enough name thanks to turns as Kojak on television and as Blofeld in On Her Majesty's Secret Service so that he's never been identified as a horror film icon, there's no denying that when Savalas made a rare appearance in such a film, it was usually going to be pretty good, not to mention pretty weird. In the same year as Horror Express, Savalas appeared in Mario Bava's superb mindwarp of a horror film, Lisa and the Devil. He goes pretty far over the top here as a sadistic Cossack soldier, but his performance, while bordering on camp, works within the context of such a playful film. I only wish he'd shown up earlier, but I guess too big a dose of his character would have ruined the performance. Part of the reason Horror Express got made was that the producer purchased the model train that was used in the bigger budget historical epic Nicholas and Alexandra and figured, heck, if he owned this really keen train set, he might as well make a crazed scifi-horror film around it. Exteriors are appropriately bleak and hopeless looking, bringing to mind when combined with the mind-stealing alien life form the sci-fi classic Thing from Another Planet, remade in the 1980s by John Carpenter simply as The Thing. Horror Express shares quite a bit with Thing from Another Planet, in fact. From the icy setting to the alien to the claustrophobic interiors and growing sense of paranoia that infects the passengers. Much of the film is beautifully shot, with exquisite sets and decoration, and some of the scenes are genuinely eerie, the most prominent being the horde of white-eyed ghouls shambling through the darkened train cars as the remaining passengers scramble for safety. Cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa has a ton of horror, science fiction, and spaghetti westerns to his credits, and he works wonders within the confined spaces of the train. Coupled with a superb score, the film has a nearly overwhelming sense of dread that is tempered only by the spriteful performances of Lee and Cushing. The monkey man make-up is neither dazzling nor awful, and though we probably get too clear a look at it too often for its own good, it's hardly of a quality that would destroy a film, especially one so heavy with wit and stand-out performances. There are some fairly gory special effects, but nothing out of the ordinary for what other studios, including Hammer, were doing at the time. Some bleeding eye violence, some gratuitous brain surgery, that sort of thing. If you miss the days when horror and science fiction, while not exactly being intelligent, were at least willing to play with lofty ideas and theories and mix them together with charm and drollness, then by all means hop on board the Horror Express and please forgive me for statements like that. I hadn't sent he film until I sat down to watch it for this review, and the only reason I don't regret having missed out for so long is that it gave me the chance to have such a wonderful, rollicking good time at the horror films to discover. Labels: Horror, Netflix Diary, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing posted by Keith at 4:47 PM | 0 Comments Monday, September 20, 2004Scream and Scream Again
1970, United States/England. Starring Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alfred Marks, Christopher Matthews, Judy Huxtable, Yutte Stensgaard, Marshall Jones. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
What the hell? It's rare these days that I have that reaction to a film. By this point, I really have seen just about everything, and the one thing that keeps that from being a depressing revelation is that sometimes something will pop up to remind that I haven't seen anything. This movie was apparently based on a book called The Disoriented Man, and while watching it, that was definitely an apt description of me. Scream and Scream Again seems for much of its running time to be three completely different movies. By the end, of course, things will be tied together, but not in a way that necessarily makes much sense. The end result is not unlike watching one of those Thomas Tang/Godfrey Ho ninja movies where they'd buy bits and pieced of a couple old Hong Kong films, splice them together with some scenes from some unfinished Italian action film, then stick in a series of newly shot scenes featuring white guys in red and yellow ninja outfits with headbands that say "Ninja!" on them and call the whole hideous Frankenstein's monster a movie. If I lean a little heavily on plot summary for this review, please forgive me. I do try and avoid that these days, but sometimes you just have to tell people what's happening. Film number one in Scream and Scream Again begins during the opening credits, as a jogger sprints about London without a care in the world until he keels over and wakes up in some weird hospital room where a silent nurse in six pounds of make-up keeps insisting that he keep that spittle vacuum hooked to his lip. When she leaves, he struggles to sit up, throws back the covers, and realizes with horror that one of his legs is gone. Truth be told, it's a comical but unsettling and effective way to kick off the film, which goes from there straight into the second film, in which the most British cop in the world, Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks), harrumphs and mumbles like a character actor turned to eleven as he investigates a series of grisly murders in which young women are found to be completely drained of blood, though there's no pool of blood at the scene. No sooner have we been introduced to this plot thread than we pick up a third plot, in which agents of some make-believe Eastern Bloc (do I have to tell the kids what that means?) nation obviously modeled after East Germany, sit around in a room discussing vague plans until one of them whips out the touch of death and kills his leader. Eventually this requires Peter Cushing to come into the room and smoke a cigarette before he, too, has the touch of death put on him. Now I'm going to probably get some of the series of events out of order as I forget at what point the film switches to one of its three plots, but it really doesn't matter all that much. Meanwhile, Bellaver goes to interview the former employer of one of the serial killer's victims, and that turns out to be esteemed research scientist, Dr. Browning (Vincent Price). Then another girl gets killed. While that guy in Fake Germany is using his weird Vulcan Nerve Pinch to make Peter Cushing drip blood from his mouth, the cops set up a sting operation using an assortment of pretty female police detectives scattered around London's swinging clubs in hopes that one of them will be picked up by whoever is doing the vampiric killing. Sure enough it works. But wait, I think maybe before that, the guy from the beginning of the movie woke up and found that his other leg had been removed as well. The police find their vampire killer and engage in one of the longest chase scenes ever committed to a cheap nonsensical horror thriller. That the vampire killer is a young mop top in a frilly lavender Medieval Faire shirt make sit all the more fun. He leads the cops on a car chase, then a foot chase, then a climbing chase before finally falling down, getting handcuffed, ripping off his own hand, and starting the whole thing over again. Eventually he ends up in Vincent Price's barn, where he escapes the cops by jumping into a giant vat of acid hidden beneath the floor. But no, no, no! There's so, so much more! That Fake German guy with the touch of death seems to be taking over the country in the easiest coup ever staged, since various people in his way on the path to glory just get invited into the room with him, where he kills them with his magic fingers. After that, no one seems to raise any questions as to why the leaders of the country keep dying when they go into a room alone with him. Eventually, Christopher Lee shows up to talk about this guy. Wait, no. Let me give them names. The touch of death guy is Konratz, the most Commie fake Russian-German name they could come up with. He's played by Marshall Jones, who would also show up as a priest to help Vincent Price torture Pagans in Cry of the Banshee before finally having acid thrown into his face by Herbert Lom in Murders in the Rue Morgue. Really, you know one of the things I like about both Hammer and AIP films is that after a while, it's all one big family and everyone becomes a familiar face. Christopher Lee plays Fremont, an agent in the service of the British secret police. While we're getting know them, that one guy wakes up and finds that now his arms are missing. The hell? And that nurse still insists that he keep the spittle vacuum firmly attached to his lip. This is the guy you're going to feel most like while watching Scream and Scream Again. This is also a good movie for those who appreciate hot naked women in really baggy, ill-fitting bald caps. How can this movie possibly pull together its three plots and five or six genres? Well, how about by revealing that the vampire killer is a superman who has been constructed in Vincent Price's lab using various body parts collected from unlucky joggers is experiments funded by that weird Fake Germany country so that they can take over England and then the world with their race of supermen, that is unless secret agent Christopher Lee can stop them. Unless he, too, is a synthetic being. Or something. Man, don't look at me. And if you are wondering why that one guy can make Peter Cushing spit up blood or why the guy in the purple poet shirt drinks blood or why the movie spent so much time on two people trying to escape Fake Germany (one of whom is Yutte Stensgaarde, who we'll see much, much more of in Hammer's Lust for a Vampire) when they have no connection whatsoever to any of the other plots, well then you're just going to have to be happy with the fact that Scream and Scream Again managed to tie together as much as it did. To give the film some final sense of having come full circle, just about everyone in the cast who is alive by the final scene ends up in that pit of acid into which the vampire killer jumped. Adding to the overall sense of chaos is the fact that there is no central character. With three horror heavy hitters in the line-up, you'd think at least one of them would be a main character. But Cushing is killed off in one scene, and Price and Lee have about an equal amount of time in their separate plots. Konratz isn't really a main character, nor is Inspector Bellaver. I guess the closest thing we have to central characters are the young Dr. Sorel (Christopher Matthews, who would go on to battle Christopher Lee the following year in Hammer's Scars of Dracula) and his policewoman girlfriend. Sorel is the man who shows up at the end so Vincent Price can give his mad scientist speech (and it's a good one) as several of the disparate plots are loosely tied together, or more accurately, brought together in that sort of tangle that happens to the cord of your headphones when you take them out of your bag. So while you can't say it doesn't make sense, since by film's end it has drawn together in a wildly convoluted fashion, you can at least say it doesn't make very good sense. If the plots aren't enough to make your head spin, then take into account that it's all set to a jazzy lounge score with occasional bouts of acid rock. That means nothing about this movie is menacing, and even what I assume were supposed to be suspenseful or heavy scenes come across as light 'n' breezy. At it's best, Scream and Scream Again feels like something taking place in the Avengers universe, where a combination swingin' 60s meets espionage meets horror meets sci-fi meets Frankenstein meets police thriller meets political caper would be right at home. The sheer weirdness of this movie makes it enjoyable, though there are a number of things that could tick off the ill-prepared viewer. Chief among these annoyances is that they took three screen legends and once again keeps them separated. Cushing appears with neither Lee nor Price. As they would in The Oblong Box, Lee and Price have one scene together, again with minimal dialogue and only lasting a minute or so. But if you've ever wanted to watch Christopher Lee stare at Vincent Price in "hypno-eyes" fashion, then this is the moment for which you've been salivating. Lee has next to nothing to do and wouldn't make an impression if he weren't Christopher Lee. Peter Cushing gets to smoke a cigarette and talk about how important public relations are to a military dictatorship. Only Vincent Price gets a chance to strut his stuff during the aforementioned mad scientist speech. The rest of the cast performs in suitably hammy fashion. Inspector Bellaver in particular is in serious jeopardy of crossing into Monty Python's Mr. Gumby territory as he Cockney's his way through a variety of lines about san'wiches and 'oigh tinsel steel. Given the utter absurdity of just about everythign that happens, Gordon Hessler's direction is shockingly dull. He doesn't do anything wrong. He just does everything so...competently. And competent is fine most of the time, but subject matter this ludicrous demands something more daring and innovative in the direction department. But then, maybe it's Hessler's matter-of-fact workman's job of directing that makes the film seem even more unsettled, like some weird old man telling you the foulest, most twisted story imaginable but in a very sane and calm and rational sounding voice. Scriptwriter Christopher Wicking split his time between AIP and Hammer, and his work on both sides of the Atlantic was equally bizarre and uneven. In a way, he seems to have been the perfect match for Hessler, and the duo worked together on Scream and Scream Again as well as the previous three AIP gothics we've reviewed: The Oblong Box, Cry of the Banshee, and Murders in the Rue MOrgue. His Hammer credits include the exceptional Blood from the Mummy's Tomb and the film that is alternately known as "the film that destroyed Hammer" and "the film that showed us full frontal Nastassja Kinski nudity," To the Devil...A Daughter. If you're not worried about a film making very little sense until the very end, and even then just barely, then Scream and Scream Again is a pretty enjoyable romp. It's absolutely cracked in the head. As long as you're not bothered by huge chunks of film that have nothing to do with anything else or big blaring questions that remain unanswered or the fact that the police catch a vampire killer then leave him unattended so they can all go stand around the captain as he calls in a report, then Scream and Scream Again will have you giggling with confused and bewildered glee. It doesn't matter if you have high, low, or no expectations for this film. It will manage to confound them all. Labels: Horror: Just Plain Weird, Netflix Diary, Stars: Peter Cushing, Stars: Vincent Price, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 11:44 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, August 19, 2004Revenge of Frankenstein
1958, Great Britain. Starring Peter Cushing, Francis Matthews, Eunice Gayson, Michael Gwynn, Lionel Jeffries, Oscar Quitak, Charles Lloyd Pack, John Stuart, Margery Cresley, Anna Walmsley, George Woodbridge, Michael Ripper. Directed by Terence Fisher. Available on DVD from Amazon
Are you getting tired of Hammer horror dominating the content of the parade these past few updates? Well, I sure hope not, because I'm not tired of it, and there's more to come as I continue to feed my seemingly insatiable appetite for Peter Cushing in a high-collared shirt and Inverness coat. I tell ya what, all these Hammer movies are kind of making me want to strut around town dressed like some Victorian era country gentleman, which would be fun and cool except for the parts where people would refer to me as Goth. Somehow, "I'm not a goth! I'm a Peter Cushing fan!" doesn't seem a particularly powerful defense. When last we saw Baron Victor Frankenstein, he was being marched to the guillotine to face a beheading for the murders committed by his man-made man, not to mention the murders in which he himself dabbled. Well, you can't keep a good mad scientist down, and there are none better or madder than Cushing's Frankensetin. With the help of a prison attendant who wants access to the Baron's peculiar talents, Frankenstein escapes the execution and sets up a new identity and a new medical practice in another town. Hey, cheating death is what Frankenstein is all about, right? All seems to be going well for the doctor, who has a bustling private medical practice and a generous public hospital for the poor. Sure he draws the ire of the local medical society when he refuses to join their ranks, but all in all, this new Dr. Stein seems to have turned over a new leaf and started working for the good of mankind. But wait…wasn't that what he thought he was doing the last time around?
Sure enough, it doesn't take long for Frankenstein to show us he's still up to his old tricks. He's unduly enthusiastic about amputating various body parts from his impoverished charity cases, even when the injuries seem unserious and, from time to time, not entirely existent. When a young doctor by the name of Hans Kleve (Hammer stalwart Francis Matthews) recognizes Stein and the legendary and presumed dead Frankenstein, but rather than wanting to turn him in, Hans practices a bit of friendly blackmail to get himself taken in as Frankenstein's pupil and assistant. Kleve is an interesting opposite of the previous films moral crusader Paul, and the lack of Paul's "tampering in God's domain" speeches and self-righteous aggrandizing is welcome as Hans Kleve throws himself enthusiastically and entirely behind Frankenstein's work. Rounding out the office is Karl (Oscar Quitak), the crippled man who assisted Frankenstein's escape from the guillotine in exchange for Frankenstein's promise that he would transplant Karl's brain into a healthy, custom-made body. And of course, since things have to be complicated and include some bosoms and a Cockney rapscallion, there's Eunice Gayson as a woman working as an assistant at the charity hospital and George Woodbridge as the sleazy janitor. With Hans' help and Karl's willing donation of a clever brain, things seem to be going well for Frankenstein. The transplant is a smashing success. Frankenstein's man-made body sewn from the various parts of unlucky hospital patients looks like an actual man, with only a few noticeable scars and no hideous hazy eye or rotting flesh. Well, things are going well until Karl finds out that he'll end up being paraded around like a zoo animal to be examined and prodded by various doctors and scientists. A tussle with a night watchman causes Karl, now played by Michael Gwynn, to start suffering side effects from his days-fresh operation. Among other things, he starts having homicidal rages, and his body begins to contort back into its original half-paralyzed shape. As with the first film only more so, this is Peter Cushing's show. This is a film about Frankenstein the doctor, the man of science who is forever blinded to morality by his singular dedication to research at any cost Although the character was solid the first time around, here Cushing and the script invest even more depth in the doctor. He commits no murder, but he also mercilessly pillages the ranks of the lower class when he needs an arm or an eyeball. You would think with no one to reel him in a la Paul in the first film, he'd go even crazier, but having a willing accomplice in Hans seems to temper the doctor's tendency to kill off the occasional human obstacle. But he's no less obsessed, and once again it is merely the means that fascinate Frankenstein, not the ends. Everything bad that happens in the movie could have been avoided if Frankenstein had simply stuck around to keep an eye on his new creation. Instead, no sooner has Karl regained consciousness than Frankenstein takes off for his lab to continue tinkering on a new project. His interest isn't in the discovery, but in the pursuit of the discovery. Cushing once again manages to make you sympathetic against your better judgment to a character who crosses the line time and time again without remorse or even awareness that what he's doing might be wrong. Hammer was wise to stick with Cushing's doctor as the main character rather than going the Universal route that focused on the monster with a cast of interchangeable and generally forgettable Frankenstein descendants. Cushing owns the film and the character and pulls you in completely. The lack of Christopher Lee only seems important before you see the movie. It is, after all, a tale about the doctor, so it makes sense that we would see a procession of different "creatures." And as Karl in his new body, Michael Gwynn is absolutely incredible. Where as Lee's creature was a shambling mess who could not speak, Karl represents Frankenstein's evolving skill and assistance from two sharp and willing accomplices. He is very nearly a regular man, so Gwynn is allowed to do a little more than Lee and, in doing so, creates a fully sympathetic "creature" who is not a creature at all. The scene in which he desperately struggles to destroy his old body, both to wipe the memory of it from his mind and avoid being put on display next to it in Frankenstein's "before and after" diorama, is among the best in the entire series. His inevitable degeneration into "the creature" is as heart-breaking as anything Hammer ever filmed, and his final appearance at a society event - the sort of appearance that cliché demands should end in some sort of a rampage or carrying off of the woman - instead turns into a poignant piece in which Karl simply stumbles weakly toward Stein and pleads with him, "Frankenstein - help me!" Likewise, Matthew Francis is tiptop as Hans, a sort of "Frankenstein in training" only without the doctor's acidic bad temper and lack of social graces. It's perhaps worth noting that it could be his slightly more agreeable attitude that helps Hans become in effect the one and only man in the entire series who, during the film's epilogue, successfully completes a brain transplant and the creation of a new man. Unlike Frankenstein, Hans cares as much for the outcome of his work as he does the process by which he achieves it. It's a good part, and Francis is wonderful.
The supporting cast is up to the usual Hammer standards, though Eunice Gayson is given precious little to do, as was the case with the women in most Hammer Frankenstein films except, obviously, Frankenstein Created Woman. There's a sexual dynamic to the film that was never fully explored in my opinion. Where as the Dracula movies make it more overt, the tale of a sexual predator with red eyes and fangs who seduces simply to destroy, in the Frankenstein movies it's less animalistic and more political. Frankenstein is, after all, attempting to eliminate women from the process of making life. He shows open disdain for them most of the time, and at his best is merely tolerant of their existence. Where the Universal movies frequently took the "tampered in God's domain" line of philosophy, Hammer films seem more secular in their life politics. It's not God he's upsetting; Frankenstein is tampering in woman's domain. He sees Karl, ultimately, as just another experiment to be filed away once completed (Frankenstein talks of showcasing his creation, but of course never gets the chance, and one wonders if he'd actually take the time or simply lose interest and launch off in pursuit of some other mad scheme instead). When Eunice Gayson's Margaret discovers Karl recuperating in the hospital, her immediate instinct is to befriend and help me; if not to treat him as a mother would, then to at least treat him as a fellow human being. While Revenge of Frankenstein is subtle in its approach to this battle of the sexes, it definitely builds upon the concept and carries it over from the previous film. There, Frankenstein was kind but condescending and ultimately uninterested in his wife while using the maid purely for pleasure and, one would assume, her cooking and cleaning skills. He doesn't go off and murder a woman in Revenge of Frankenstein, but he has a much more unpleasant opinion of them in general. If Margaret represents Frankenstein's continuing battle against women, then the hospital's janitor and the elitist members of the medical union represent his equal contempt for class. Frankenstein exists in a classless society, one in which the only people he truly respects are those who are smart and daring enough to embrace his work. Although initially introduced as a charitable doctor aiding the disenfranchised, we quickly learn that Frankenstein's love of the lower class goes no further than seeing them as a cheap and easily accessible population of limb and organ donors. He is openly sneers at the hospital janitor and berates him for no good reason. The janitor isn't a particularly nasty fellow. Unwashed, yes, and maybe a little sleazy, but he certainly doesn't deserve the abuse that the doctor directs toward him. On the flip side are the doctors of the medical board and a local duchess, all of whom represent the high society Frankenstein plays at being a part of. In fact, he's even more contemptuous of them than he is of the poor. He masquerades as one of their ranks simply so that he can get away with what he does and not be questioned. Status is his best disguise. He pretends to be an aristocrat so he can have access to their freedom from suspicion, but at heart he is a technocrat, a man who believes bold men of science should lead society via their technical prowess. In fact, he's a technocrat in both the positive and negative sense of the word, encompassing both the romanticized notion that the best educated should lead while also fulfilling the criticism of technocracy that claims the decisions technocrats make are often inadequate because they are made based on science and theory and do not take into account the actual parameters of a given situation.
Free from the obligation to adhere, at least loosely, to a pre-existing novel, scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster is free to indulge in the doctor's curious character and does so with brilliant results. As with the first film, Revenge of Frankenstein seems on the surface and if it was simply recounted to you, to move slowly. Most of the scenes consist of Frankenstein and Hans fiddling with strange scientific apparatus. The monster is very human looking. But none of this equals any degree of boredom. Fueled by the power of Cushing's performance, by the earnestness in which he handles everything, and by the obvious adoration and sincerity he has for exploring the depths of this madman's obsession, Revenge of Frankenstein moves at a fast pace without insulting its literary heritage. I appreciate any horror film, or any film in general, that doesn't try and boil everything down to a series of dumb action sequences. Sangster's crowning achievement is the remarkable twist ending. In keeping with the film's overall theme of class conflict, Frankenstein's final undoing (at least until the next movie) comes not in some fiery showdown with his monster gone mad, but instead with the poor house patience who realize he has been using them as nothing more than a body part farm. And of course the final shot of Hans' own creation was just magnificent. Rather than rest on his laurels and turn in a quickie sequel, Sangster worked hard to maintain, and perhaps even exceed, the fine quality of the original film and keep everything fresh. Terence Fisher's direction is, again, beautiful. As one expects of a Hammer film, it's simply ravishing to behold. He never gets a chance to create anything as memorably chilling as the scene from Curse of Frankenstein in which Christopher Lee's bandaged monster is initially revealed or the scene of the monster wandering through bleak late autumn woods, but his direction remains high quality and inventive, playing a lot with light and shadow. For my money, the double whammy of Curse of Frankenstein and Revenge of Frankenstein represents the high water mark for Hammer horror productions. They're simply wonderful films, perfectly connected to one another without the sequel being a derivative rehash. I like Christopher Lee's Dracula movies as much as any Hammer horror fan and there were plenty of non-series films of high quality, but there is such heart, such macabre beauty, and such craftsmanship in the Frankenstein movies that they are, in my opinion, the absolute best examples, past or present, of gothic horror movie making. The Frankenstein series as a whole represents Hammer at their best, though the next film, The Evil of Frankenstein was a misstep that, thankfully, didn't misdirect the entire series of films. It remains, as of yet, unavailable on DVD, so we'll be skipping it anyway. Labels: Horror: Frankenstein, Netflix Diary, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer posted by Keith at 6:19 PM | 0 Comments Friday, August 06, 2004The Mummy Release Year: 1959Country: England Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Yvonne Furneaux, Eddie Byrne, Felix Aylmer, Raymond Huntley, George Pastell, Michael Ripper. Writer: Jimmy Sangster Director: Terence Fisher Cinematographer: Jack Asher Music: Franz Reizenstein Producer: Michael Carreras Alternate Title: Terror of the Mummy Availability: Buy it from Amazon  .Ahh, Sangster and Fisher. If you want my opinion, and you must or else you'd go read a much better website that this, that screenwriter-director team is as integral to the success of the Hammer horror films as the Cushing-Lee acting team. When you make a list of the best films Hammer produced, the Fisher-Sangster duo comes up quite frequently. The whole quartet is at it again with this, Hammer's third reimagining of a classic Universal Pictures horror icon. By now, there was no real gamble involved in the Hammer formula. Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula had proven the effort, and Hammer's only challenge now lie in maintaining the high standards set by those two films. With two Universal legends left, those being the mummy and the Wolfman, Hammer decided to go all old Egypt and bring the bandaged avenger of desecrated tombs into the Technicolor world of Hammer horror. The first two gothic horror films established a successful order to things, and Hammer saw no reason to tinker with it. Fisher directs, Sangster writes, Cushing takes the lead as a scientist, and Christopher Lee must again command the monster role without speaking a word, or at least very many words. And once again, it all works out wonderfully, though as much as I like this film, I like it less than the Frankenstein and Dracula films that preceded it. Actually, no. Scratch that. I like it less than Curse of Frankenstein and about the same as Horror of Dracula. The script is as smart as ever, and Cushing owns the film once again, but some of the ancient Egyptian sets leave a little to be desired. But we'll get to all that in due time.
The story is pretty much the same as the story in every mummy movie that has ever been made. Archaeologists disturb the tomb of a Egyptian princess, which awakens her mummy guardian (and invariably, her former doomed lover and high priest) to seek revenge on the desecraters while a guy in a fez makes ominous predictions about the fate of those who defile the tombs of the ancient ones. Yeah, that old chestnut. With these movies, it's not the newness of the story but the freshness with which you present it, and Hammer's approach is as fresh as you can get with a guy who's been dead and stuck in the wall for a thousand years. The movie takes a while to get going, but once it does get going, there's no stopping it. Sangster's dialogue is again top notch, and Cushing and crew manage to deliver it in a way that makes even the most ludicrous monster movie statements seem serious and believable. As would be the case with all of their early gothic horror films, it would have been easy to allow them to sink into the level of camp or winking self-parody. And as with the other films, Hammer refuses to indulge in what modern filmmakers can't seem to get enough of. The Mummy remains serious and seriously delivered, which makes it believable and convincing no matter how outlandish the action on screen becomes. Everything is delivered with such faith and conviction that it pulls you in, which is why these films work even when there is a lot of talking involved. In fact, the film's best scene is an exchange between Cushing's Dr. Banning and George Pastell as Mehemet, the controller of the mummy, in which they debate the merits of digging up ancient tombs, with Mehemet trying to make an impassioned argument that it's nothing more than grave robbing while Cushing attempts to egg him on in hopes that he'll get frustrated and reveal something sinister about the mummy that's been killing everyone involved with the old expedition. When the action does come, it comes fast and bloody, as Hammer has established it would. Christopher Lee's mummy may be a little stiff in the joints, but he's no lumbering slowpoke. He can move at a fair clip, smash through windows, and kick down doors. Once again, Lee is wonderful at acting in a part where not only does he not get to speak, but he is also covered up in pasty-face make-up and bandages. He does get to utter some lines in a flashback to ancient times scene, but they're little more than incantations delivered in typical ancient incantation tone. His primary tools as the mummy are his eyes, which he uses wonderfully, and his height, which allows him to tower menacingly over everyone else in the cast. Peter Cushing once again shoulders the burden of carrying the film and does so as admirably as he had in the previous two Hammer horror outings. This movie has a lot of talking in it, but Cushing is the kind of actor that can make you want to listen as he goes on about ancient curses and burial rites. It's a pretty physical role for him as well, featuring lots of mummy fighting and being flung about. Although Christopher Lee has emerged over time as the number one icon of these horror films, watching them makes you realize that Cushing, the eternal 45-year-old (he was actually 45 when made this one), was the real foundation upon which the Hammer house was built.
The supporting cast of character actors perform as they always did and generally always would. Yvonne Furneuax is great as Isobel, Doctor Banning's wife and, inevitably, the spitting image of the priestess Christopher Lee's mummy was in love with so long ago. How is it that every mummy manages to be awakened from its eternal slumber by someone who just happens to know a woman who is the spitting image of the mummy's old flame? I guess those past life regressionists are correct. I always thought it was odd that in their previous lives, everyone was an Egyptian princess or some other lofty figure instead of being just some serf or the village idiot. But given the number of times mummies come back from the dead to extract horrible revenge on tomb desecraters only to run into a double of their ancient Egyptian love, I guess there are a lot of latter-day reincarnations of princesses walking around. It's a lucky thing, too, otherwise we'd have nothing with which to distract the mummies. As the requisite "mad Arab," George Powell acquits himself well. It's a tricky role, especially by modern standards where cultural stereotyping is a more sensitive subject. However, you can't help but sympathize with Mehemet, who sees British archaeology as nothing more than pompous, condescending white men stealing the bodies and art of another culture for their own amusement. Cushing's Banning argues that it is through such acts that we learn of the past and fill in the gaps, but Mehemet remains convincing in his argument that it is more about prestige and low opinions of "the natives" than it is about filling in the gaps of history. Sympathetic though he is, when it comes time to solve the problem, he has no qualms about sending his mummy out to choke people and ruin their expensive bay windows. On a final cast note, I was almost convinced by the voice of Eddie Byrne, who plays Inspector "I deal in facts" Mulroony that it was a young Fred "Herman Munster" Gwynn. He even looks a little like Gwynn, but the voice similarities are uncanny.
Sets are, for the most part, typically top notch, though the Egyptian settings are pretty unconvincing. The tomb walls look light as cardboard, even when characters are pretending they weigh a lot, and everything is spotless clean and looks like it just came from the prop department. When recreating Victorian England, Hammer was unmatched, but they're out of their element and/or budgetary constraints with their Egyptian sets. Still, they're at least pretty, and the rest of the movie is good enough to make it not matter all that much. As is the case with both Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein, one can't help but compare it to the old Universal film. I'm a big fan of Karloff's The Mummy, and I'm a big fan of this one. I think they're different movies for different times, and I don't really see any point in trying to figure out which one is "better." Just enjoy the fact that they're both available to you on DVD. Hammer's mummy film is as brash, daring, and energetic as their previous two efforts, and as with them, it's a real treat. The studio's fate was sealed after the release of this film and it was all horror, all the time from there on out. Not a bad thing, though I'd be interested in seeing some of the studio's pre-Quatermass war films. As with Dracula and Frankenstein, several sequels followed in the footsteps of The Mummy, though none were as good as some of the Frankenstein or Dracula sequels. Hammer would also go one to try their hand at the final Universal monster, resulting in the superb Curse of the Werewolf, which because it didn't star Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing, gets less attention than the other three films, though it is no less a picture even though Oliver Reed's Wolfman is spectacularly ugly. Mummy sequels included Mummy's Shroud and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, but none featured the Fisher/Sangster/Lee/Cushing crew again. Labels: Horror: Mummies, Netflix Diary, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer posted by Keith at 5:52 PM | 0 Comments Curse of Frankenstein
1957, Great Britain. Starring Peter Cushing, Hazel Court, Robert Urquhart, Christopher Lee, Melvyn Hayes, Valerie Gaunt, Paul Hardtmuth, Noel Hood, Fred Johnson, Claude Kingston, Alex Gallier. Directed by Terence Fisher. Available on DVD from Amazon.
Technically, this should have been the first Hammer horror film I reviewed, if for no other reason than the sake of some chronological order running through this ongoing journal. This is the one that started it all. Well, no, technically I guess Quatermass Xperiment started it all, but this is the one that really made "all" all that much more. But in our zeal to watch a good vampire movie, we skipped ahead a bit and went for Horror of Dracula first. A faux pas, perhaps, but thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks and the web, you can always read this one first then skip on back to the other one. Or you can do what most people are probably doing anyway, and just not worry about it. 1955's Quatermass clued the folks at Hammer in to the fact that maybe they had something on their hands with this horror and sci-fi business. They rushed out two more horror-scifi amalgamations, then in 1956 went to work on what was to be their first in a series of films that were, depending on who you are, either adaptations of classic works of British gothic horror, or remakes of old Universal Pictures horror films. The four biggest films in the Universal pantheon of horror were Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff, Dracula with Bela Lugosi, The Mummy again with Karloff, and The Wolfman with Lon Chaney Jr. For their first crack at the legends, Hammer went with Curse of Frankenstein. It was a bit of a gamble, what with the Karloff film being one of the great iconic films not just of horror, but of movies in general. Hammer was going to have to figure out a way to do something just as good but totally innovative, something that would at once hearken back to and be largely different from its legendary predecessor. To start things off they assigned studio director Terence Fisher to the project, then furnished him with well-known television star Peter Cushing to portray Frankenstein. A good start, but if the Karloff film had taught anyone anything, it was that whoever plays the Monster will be the focal point of everyone's attention. Hammer had a long series of auditions for a variety of big, hulking men before finally deciding on a tall but relatively lean actor by the name of Christopher Lee. Lee already had a decently long filmography under his belt, but most were small parts in small films, so he was more or less an unknown at the time. So an unknown director directs two seasoned but obscure character actors in a film based on a character that had more or less been made into a parody by the time Universal was finished with it, all at a time when interest in old gothic horror was at an all-time low in favor of whiz-bang science fiction adventures. No problem. There were other hurdles to clear. Universal was none too happy about someone making a new Frankenstein film. Although they didn't create the character, they reasonably argued that when the average moviegoer heard the name Frankenstein, they didn't think of Mary Shelley's novel; they thought of the Universal movie. Hammer could have argued back that nothing they were going to do could have been any worse than some of those Frankenstein sequels that Universal pumped out during the 1940s. But that would have been rude to bring up. Universal threatened to sue Hammer if their monster came out looking anything remotely like the Karloff Monster, so Hammer went about stitching together, if you will, an entirely new look for Frankenstein's frightening creation. Hammer also decided that, rather than focus on the tragic tale of the Monster and "tampering in God's domain," they'd focus, like the book, on the title character and his obsession with research. The gambles paid off in spades. Christopher Lee's monster, while never the icon that Karloff's was, looked hideous and creepy because, for the most part, it looked so real, like a ghoulish, pallid man who had been created out of sundry body parts from other corpses. And the focus on Frankenstein himself allows Peter Cushing to shine and give audiences a doctor who is as memorable as the creature was in the original film. At the center of the film is Frankenstein's own mania regarding research. As one character points out in the film, minutes before being pushed to his death by Frankenstein so the mad doctor can have a fresh, genius brain, some scientists have trouble with becoming obsessed with research then quickly growing bored with the outcome. Cushing's Frankenstein is obsessed with research to the point that he really doesn't care about the outcome. When he and his assistant Paul revive a dead dog, thereby making the single greatest achievement in the history of science, all Frankenstein is concerned with is taking the research to the next level. And when that next level is achieved, when he has created a man from the parts of dead men, all Frankenstein is interested in is yet more research, further pushing the boundaries of what he's doing all day and night locked up in that lab. Cushing's portrayal is brilliant. He plays the doctor not as a mad scientist who turns remorseful and attempts to atone for his transgression, as was done by Colin Clive in the original, but instead as a man so engrossed by his research that he completely lacks any concept of the notion of good or evil. He doesn't willingly violate taboos; he simply doesn't comprehend that they even exist. Everything he sees is either an aide to or obstacle in his research. He is utterly amoral, but never evil. Cushing strikes the proper blend of British reserve and over-the-top histrionics. A role of this nature requires one to go over the top at certain moments, but there are a lot of different grades of over the top. Lesser actors simply ham it up and look ridiculous. Cushing, however, pushes it to exactly where it needs to be. The story revolves around him, and he's more than up to the task of carrying its weight. He's surrounded by a superb supporting cast. Robert Urquhart is wonderful as Paul, first Frankenstein's mentor and later his colleague, a man torn between a sense of decency and morality and a sense of curiosity about just what this brilliant madman can achieve. He suffers the car wreck syndrome, wanting to turn away but unable, too enticed by the doctor's bizarre experiments just as he is repulsed by them. Hazel Court, who would go on to star in a handful of the Edgar Allen Poe adaptations that came from AIP and Roger Corman, is featured as Elizabeth, Frankenstein's hapless bride-to-be who finds herself loyal to the baron even as he ignores her utterly in favor of his research. And then there's Christopher Lee, charged with turning in a world-class performance as the monster without uttering a line of dialogue beyond "Arrhhh!" Karloff was able to do it in 1931, and Lee repeats the feat by giving us a monster that is not nearly as gentle and innocent as the Karloff creature but still plenty pathetic and tragic. His make-up and outfit are truly ghoulish and eerie. I remember seeing a picture of him long before I'd ever seen the movie, back when I was in the second or third grade and bought a set of monster movie books through that Troll Book Order thing that made us so happy at the end of every month. There were four books in the set: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, and then a general one about space monsters. I don't recall there being one about mummies, but I could be forgetting, though everything else about the books remains vivid. I was already a huge monster movie fan by that time and had devoured the old Universal movies and Godzilla, but these books opened up a world I'd never seen. I was particularly impressed by the woodcut print of Vlad Tepes with all those impaled guys around him - you know the one. It shows up in any and every book or documentary about Dracula. But the thing that really scared the heck out of me was the full-page picture of Christopher Lee as Frankenstein's Monster, in that black coat with the ragged skin and the misty eye. Freaked me out, and I still think it's the most effective Frankenstein make-up there's been. Man, I sure wish I still had those books. I remember they had black covers with a picture of the signature monster on them. There was this picture in the space monster volume of some guy in a weird black spacesuit kneeling over another guy in a black spacesuit who has been reduced to a skeleton. I've looked for years for that movie, but I have no recollection of the title, and that one photo isn't much to go on. The appearance of the creature is, of course, of thematic importance and always has been. Frankenstein goes on about how he will create man from scratch, perfect in every way, with the hands of an artist, the body of a hero, and the brain of a genius. And in every adaptation, this one included, the best he can do is a shambling flesh mound with homicidal tendencies. For Curse of Frankenstein it's a symbol of the fact that the doctor doesn't care about the ends so much as he does the means. All he wants to do is build and research. He's created life, after all, and he's blind to the eventual repercussions or its position as something of an abomination. The attention to set dressing is wonderful as well. The film looks gorgeous and would set the high standard that would become one of the trademarks of Hammer films. If it's not historically accurate down to the very last detail, it's at least suitable convincing and complex. Frankenstein's lab is, naturally, filled with all manner of scientific gadgetry, including a spinning turbine that makes that "mad scientist lair" whir, though I can't help but think his experiment might have ended up better if he'd had a Jacob's Ladder on hand. Fisher's shot composition is wonderful as well. The scenes of Lee's monster ambling through bleak, yellow-and-brown fall forests is still incredibly creepy, as the scene in which Paul takes aim and blows off a goodly portion of the monster's head remains shocking. The script by Jimmy Sangster is wonderful, literary feeling without being slow, and with several nods to the Shelley source material, though like all adaptations of both that and Bram Stoker's Dracula, it plays it pretty loosely with what was in the book versus what goes up on screen. Curse of Frankenstein manages to be suitably bombastic with subtle touches, and because like subsequent Hammer gothic horrors it takes itself so darn seriously, it never devolves into the arena of camp. This is, after all, a film based on a famous work of literature, and so it is lent the proper weight and respect. The film never lagged for me or got boring, and this is a testament to Cushing's command of the screen and the sharpness of the dialogue and pacing. It's a film that realized you don't have to pack in a generic "thrill a minute" to keep audiences interested so long as what you are saying is reasonably intelligent and engrossing. Curse of Frankenstein was a smash success. Audiences went wild for the film's brazen mixture of gothic horror, vivid Eastmancolor, and gore. It opened the door to several sequels and established Hammer as the preeminent name in horror the world over. It revived the entire concept of the gothic horror movie, paving the way for such coming innovators and history makers as Mario Bava and Corman's Poe films with Vincent Price. It launched the careers of both Lee and Cushing into the stratosphere, though it would be several more movies before Christopher was allowed to really use that theatrical, booming voice of his on more than a few lines. The success of Curse of Frankenstein also convinced Hammer to try their hand at reinventing a couple more classic Universal monsters thought flogged to death during the '30s and '40s. And once that started, everything else at the studio was put on hold as they became the Hammer House of Horrors, so to speak. Their resurrection of Dracula, previously covered here on July 25th, was another smash. To complete their cycle, they would then turn once again to the team of Fisher, Cushing, and Lee and give the world The Mummy. Labels: Director: Terence Fisher, Horror: Frankenstein, Netflix Diary, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1957 posted by Keith at 5:49 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, August 01, 2004Brides of Dracula Release Year: 1960Country: England Starring: Peter Cushing, Yvonne Monlaur, David Peel, Martita Hunt, Freda Jackson, Miles Malleson, Henry Oscar, Mona Washbourne. Writer: Peter Bryan, Edward Percy, Jimmy Sangster Director: Terence Fisher Cinematographer: Jack Asher Music: Malcolm Williamson Producer: Anthony Hinds Availability: Buy it from Amazon When people talk about the sequence of films that make up Hammer Studio's "Dracula" series, a good many of them make the eight-year leap from the first film, 1958's Horror of Dracula to Dracula, Prince of Darkness in 1966. It's quite a jump, indeed, but one that seems to land you just about where you need to be, with the latter film beginning with a quick recap of the climax from the former. What gets lost in between the two films is the actual first sequel to Horror of Dracula, which is a shame because it's one of the best in the series, and one of the best vampire films Hammer ever produced. 1960's Brides of Dracula gets skipped over primarily for two reasons. First, it is the one of the only Hammer Dracula films not represented by a DVD release as of this review. This means that fans amassing a Hammer collection have a notable hole in the series that some of them might not even realize exists. The second reason Brides of Dracula tends to lurk in the shadows is because, while it sees the return of Peter Cushing as Dr. Van Helsing, it is Dracula - and Christopher Lee - free. Upon seeing how popular he was in the role, Lee was keen not to play the count again lest he be typecast and never get to play anything again besides Dracula or some cheap public domain variation thereof. The phenomenal success of Horror of Dracula and the first two Hammer Frankenstein movies showed the producers that audiences were hungry for the Hammer brand of Gothic horror, and another entry in the Dracula series was a given. But where to go when your Dracula doesn't want to do it again? That was the question facing Hammer as they set about creating a sequel to Horror of Dracula. Without Lee, where do you go? The most obvious option would be to cast another actor in the role. That Dracula was destroyed in the finale of the first film was meaningless. Hammer could make up any number of ways to resurrect the count if they had the right man in the cape. But dropping another actor in, even another very good actor, just wouldn't do. Hammer was smart enough to recognize that a big part of the reason Dracula was so popular was because of Christopher Lee. Replacing him would almost surely result in fan backlash. So Hammer went with the second option, which was to attempt to handle the franchise the same way they were handling things in the Frankenstein movies. Going into Horror of Dracula, Peter Cushing was the big name, and Christopher Lee was still an unknown commodity despite his appearance as the creature in Curse of Frankenstein. Coming out of Horror of Dracula, if Lee wasn't quite as big a name as Cushing, he was inarguably a big name. Hammer had progressed to a second Frankenstein film without Lee, focusing the series on Cushing's Baron Frankenstein instead of the monster. Perhaps, then, they could do the same with Dracula, and focus the film on the reoccurring character of Cushing's Dr. Van Helsing and his conflict with a parade of vampires. Assembling the remaining key players from the first film - director Terence Fisher and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster - Hammer went about creating the sequel to Horror of Dracula without Dracula or Christopher Lee. Initially titled Disciples of Dracula, the film soon became Brides of Dracula because even if Dracula isn't it, that doesn't mean you can't have his name in the title. Bruce Lee could tell Dracula a thing or two about that. The movie begins with fearless Hammer beauty Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur, also in Circus of Horrors and Hammer's Terror of the Tongs) finding herself stranded in one of your standard-issue creepy little villages with an ominous secret. She's desperate to make it to the academy where she's to start a new teaching job since showing up days late with stories about villagers giving you the evil eye rarely endear you to the headmaster. Naturally, no one is willing to go out after dark though no one will explain exactly why. And they're not willing to give her a room at the inn, which is often the case with these grumpy locals, though I can't for the life of me figure out why. The landlord yells at you not to go out after dark and then, a breath later, yells at you to get out because he'll not rent a room to ye! What does he get by not renting out the room? I mean, they're often shown later regretting their decision and going, "Well, what you have had me do?" How about give her a room and then see her off in the morning with a smile? Marianne eventually finds a sour old woman named Baroness Meinster who is willing to give Marianne a place to stay for the evening. Now all of a sudden the landlord has all sorts of rooms for rent and pleads with Marianne not to go. What's with these guys? If you went and ordered a pint of ale from them, they'd yell, "We've no ale for likes of you!" as they were serving you up a pint of ale. Every one of them is loopy as a shithouse bat. Not wanting to stay with the gruff and apparently crazy innkeeper, Marianne graciously accepts the Baroness' invitation to spend the evening in a posh mansion. Of course, we all know this'll lead to trouble, and it soon does. The Baroness seems to act weirder and weirder the longer Marianne is there, and before too long, Marianne even encounters the Baroness son, who the Baroness keeps chained to the wall in another room. Obviously this woman is as loony as the innkeeper, so Marianne agrees to free the young Baron Meinster (David Peel). Well, wouldn't you know it? The guy turns out to be a vampire, though Marianne herself is unaware of the fact. Marianne gets where she's going with the help of one Dr. Van Helsing (Cushing), who happens to be passing through the area on his never-ending quest to study, understand, and drive a stake through the heart of the undead. Meinster, meanwhile, spends his time out of the grave preying on the local beauties, as well as the girls at the finishing school in which Marianne now works. As young lovelies start dropping dead then crawling back out of the grave, it's up to Van Helsing and Marianne - but mostly Van Helsing - to put an end to Meinster's reign of terror, thus putting one more nail in the coffin of the horrible disease of vampirism his old arch-foe Dracula has spread throughout the world. Although a Dracula film without Dracula sounds like it should be a misfire, Brides of Dracula works even better for the absence of the titular neck-biter. David Peel's Baron Meinster isn't in the same class as Christopher Lee's towering prince of darkness, but he's plenty good and looks well scary when he starts to get all lusty and vamped out with bloodshot red eyes. Peel didn't have a lot of credits to his name before or after this film, but that doesn't reflect on his performance here. He is superb, tender and sincere-sounding when he needs to be, and ruthlessly animalistic once he's free to show his true colors. He wisely decides not to attempt a Christopher Lee impersonation and instead come up with a unique vampire character that has some obvious similarities stemming from the fact that the blood of Dracula runs through all vampire veins. As Marianne, Yvonne Monlaur is acceptable - another in the long line of Hammer beauties who were picked for their looks instead of their skills, but who never the lass manage to come off relatively well, or at least well enough so as not to ruin the scenes in which they appear. Though her agreement to marry the Baron comes almost out of nowhere, we can write that off as Victorian-era female innocence and the desire to be swept off one's feet by a dashing prince, or baron as the case may be. Too bad he's the baron of evil. Despite the occasional girlish foible, Monlaur has one of the better sketched-out female roles in the Dracula films. She is surrounded by women who, one by one, succumb to Meinster's charms, to say nothing of his fangs, and she rarely resorts to screaming and running down unless it's absolutely necessary. The focal point of the story, however, and the link to the first film, is Peter Cushing returning as the intrepid Dr. Van Helsing. He is here as he was the first time around: authoritative, kind, and believable. The sort of chap you'd really want looking after you if a vampire was chasing after you. From interviews I've read with his co-stars and directors, Cushing was fiendishly devoted to every role he had and did mountains of work before the cameras started rolling. The result on screen is that he makes this type of role look utterly effortless and thoroughly convincing. Hammer films have about as much half-baked mysticism and "occult anatomy" in them as the average episode of Star Trek has half-baked techno-babble, but coming from Cushing, you'd never dream of questioning his theories on vampirism not so much as a function of the supernatural, but as a social or sexual disease, very much a part of the rational world. Cushing is also very good in the action scenes, of which there are several. The finale of the film, in which Van Helsing goes one-on-one with Meinster in a burning windmill is at least as good as the climax of the first film, and perhaps even a bit better, especially given the ingenious way Van Helsing eventually defeats his undead foe. It's one of the best scenes in a film that is full of great scenes. Speaking of which, two of the other great scenes in the movies belong to the other two standout performers. Martita Hunt is wonderfully creepy as the mysterious Baroness Meinster, who seems at first to emerge as the villain of the film until we comprehend the reasons for her cruelty to her own son. The scene in which she beseeches Van Helsing to kill her after her son has turned her into a vampire (something Van Helsing seems to liken to a form of incest) is outstanding. The other scene involves Freda Jackson as the Meinsters' servant. She seems to be on the side of the Baroness, but it's soon revealed that her true loyalties lie with the vampire in the secret room. The scene in which she, in full ranting hag mode, coxes a young victim of the baron out of the grave is positively chilling. Sangster's script is well-constructed and keeps a quick pace as it navigates the many twists and turns that establish everything. The complex path upon which we're carried that leads to the freeing of Baron Meinster is quite exciting and well put-together - intricate without being convoluted. There are also a number of clever surprises in the film, not the least of which would be the fact that Baron Meinster gets the better of Van Helsing and puts the bite on him. We can guess that Van Helsing will have some multi-step ritual to reverse the infection of the bite, but even so it's a major shock when we see him actually get bitten. This script seems to have been the result of some serious rewriting when Cushing apparently reacted very unfavorably to the initial draft and said he thought that he, like Lee, might want to have nothing to do with it. Although there are some small holes here and there, the story is all the better for whatever amount of revisions they made to keep Cushing happy and on board. It's handling of vampirism from a less supernatural, more social, approach is inspired. The one short-coming in the story is that although Van Helsing is the nominal focus of the film, he doesn't show up until the halfway point, leaving the first half of the film on the shoulder of the supporting players. Luckily, they are more than capable supporting players, and so ultimately it doesn't harm the film any. Still, it would have been nice to see Van Helsing a little sooner. Fisher's direction is once again top notch. The film is filled with the various requirements of Gothic horror as set down by Hammer itself. Misty forests, decaying cemeteries, shifty peasants, and the mincing dark old house up on the hill are exploited for their full power by Fisher's expertly guided camera. Along with cinematographer Jack Asher, Fisher paints another gorgeous picture for Hammer and further solidifies the studio's emerging look and style. Asher it as much responsible for defining the look of Hammer horror as Fisher, perhaps even more so given Fisher's reportedly easy-going style of direction. Asher had already worked on the big three - Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, and The Mummy - as well as the equally superb Revenge of Frankenstein and The Hound of the Baskervilles. His work in Brides of Dracula goes a long way to establishing the increasingly menacing mood developed by Sangster's script. If Brides of Dracula is the forgotten Dracula film, I can't imagine it will stay that way for very long. It's simply too good. Maybe not quite as good as the original, but definitely the equal of the next sequel, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, which saw the return of Christopher Lee to the role of Dracula. Brides of Dracula may even be better than that film. It's certainly a real gem in Hammer's filmography. Almost everything about the film works perfectly, and the few parts that don't work are easy to overlook. Cushing is magnificent, Peel is solid, and in the Baroness and her servant we have two of the best supporting characters in the whole series. A proper DVD release would seem inevitable given that pretty much all Hammer horror material is making its way to the format. At that time, Brides of Dracula should be able to take its rightful place next to Hammer's best horror productions. Labels: Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1960 posted by Keith at 12:33 AM | 0 Comments Sunday, July 25, 2004Horror of Dracula
1958, Great Britain. Starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, Olga Dickie, John Van Eyssen, Valerie Gaunt, Janina Faye, Barbara Archer, Charles Lloyd Pack. Directed by Terence Fisher. Available on DVD from Amazon.
Embrace the Darkness II rears its ugly head of comparisons (huh?) once more. Maybe for the last time? We can only hope. But I can't help but bring it up at least this one last time since it was one of the worse vampire films ever made (and most vampire films are among the worst vampire films ever made) and Hammer Studio's Horror of Dracula is, without a doubt (at least in my mind), the absolute best vampire film ever made, and quite simply one of the finest examples of proper Gothic horror that's ever been filmed. It was a busy couple of years for Britain's Hammer Studio. In 1955, their sci-fi/horror thriller Quatermass and the Pit became a smash hit, and the studio soon learned it was because audiences were hungry for shocking, boundary-pushing films of the fantastic and horrible that still handled themselves with a degree of wit, intelligence, and dignity as would befit a rousing British tale of terror. Inspired by that film's success, execs turned to studio director Terence Fisher to rework Mary Shelley's classic tale of gothic horror, Frankenstein. It was a risky move for any number of obvious reasons, not the least of which was the fact that Universal's Boris Karloff version of the monster was practically a global icon. Hammer had to come up with a completely new approach to the monster's appearance, since the Universal version was copyrighted, and they figured that while doing so, they might as well ratchet up the sex and violence and see just how much they'd be able to get away with in a horror movie. Well, we'll cover all the details of that film shortly, since it's on the block for next week, but the short of it is that the film was a huge hit for the growing British studio. It turned TV-star Peter Cushing and relative unknown Christopher Lee into bona fide sensations, and it inspired Hammer Studio to try its hand at another gothic masterpiece turned Universal Pictures horror film, Count Dracula. Even with the initial ground broken by Frankenstein, Dracula would be no less of a challenge, and Bela Lugosi's performance as the blood-sucking count was no less iconic and cherished than Karloff's as The Monster. Fisher was once again the director, and Lee and Cushing were signed again as the stars. Hammer basically repeated the same formula with a different monster, turning up the blood and sex as much as an X rating would allow them, and then seeing if they couldn't turn it up just a little more. Critics were aghast at the results, and many condemned the film as perverse, disgusting, vile, and any number of the usual adjectives applied to such a film. A few critics responded more favorably, thanks largely to the wonderful sets, direction, and acting, but ultimately, none of the critics opinions amounted to a hill o' beans. Audiences turned out for the film in droves, perhaps even encouraged by the reviews that didn't so much say the film was bad as much as they just vilified it for being so bloody and dangerous and evil. Nothing drives patrons to the theater quite like the promise of shattered taboos. Years after the fact, as taboos have been pushed far further than Hammer could have done in 1958, the film is easier to evaluate on its merits as a film than as a sensation. Chrsitopher Lee stars as Dracula, Eastern European count, dweller in a big creepy castle, and as you should well know by now. Once again, as with Macbeth, I implore you to get out and grab a copy of the book is you haven't already read it. I assume that Teleport City visitors are avid readers (you're reading this, after all). Stoker's Dracula was the first book I ever read that flat-out terrified me. I must have been nine or ten when I first cracked it open, and it kept me up late at night even long after I'd finished reading it by flashlight underneath the covers. As a late-night addict to Louisville's "Memories of Monsters" show on Saturday nights at midnight, I was also a huge fan of Bela Lugosi's film. It wasn't until years later, when I was in high school, that I saw the Hammer version for the first time. It fully blew me away at the time, and revisiting it again as a grown man has seen it lose none of the visceral impact it held that first night I saw it and realized this was an altogether different sort of bloodsucker than Bela's reserved, debonair aristocrat. Christopher Lee's interpretation of the count, based as fast and loose on the book as every other cinematic adaptation, has an air of sophistication about him, but it is quick to dissolve as Dracula acts more on his animalistic impulses. Here he is a monster, through and through, ferocious and terrifying. He does not woo the women; he simply takes them. He does not dazzle salon audiences with his wit and intelligence. He is a beast, a stalker, a predator without remorse or pity. In short, he's the Dracula you thoroughly believe will kick your ass. My number one complaint about vampires, besides the fact that modern tales of vampires so often give them silly names, is that they're generally played up as lonely, tortured souls given to self-indulgent whining about the sad state of their damnation. They're not as likely to overpower and kill you as they are likely to bore you to tears with their moping and reading of bad teen angst poetry. Blame it on a couple generations of Anne Rice fed goth rockers who play up the sappily romantic and "erotic" side of the vampire while forgetting everything else. End result? Tom Cruise in a Renaissance festival shirt. But here is a vampire who, for my tastes, does everything right. Christopher Lee isn't a man or a monster so much as he is a barely contained forced that overpowers anything with which it comes into contact. He is strong, towering, and above all, menacing. When Christopher Lee as Dracula shows up, you believe with every inch of your soul that's he going to put the serious hurt on you, not ask you to waltz or listen while he reads some verse to you. When this Dracula looks at you, he sees nothing but food. That Lee's performance is so mesmerizing, so memorable, is testament to how good it truly is - he is on screen a total of less than ten minutes, and only has a handful of lines at the very beginning. His foil in this tale is the actor who would appear alongside Lee in more films than a sane man would care to count, the man who made a career out of lines like, "But surely you can't be serious, man! I saw him die myself!" and finally the man who was born 45 years old, Peter Cushing. Cushing stars here as Van Helsing, fearless vampire killer and all-around enemy of the undead. Just as previous and later films enjoy giving us a Dracula who is suave and debonair and practically a Victorian era Rat Packer, these same films enjoy turning Van Helsing into a tortured soul, an alcoholic or drug addict. You know, a man who enjoys the occasional shot of absinthe. It's because we so often like to make our heroes into villains and our villains into heroes. But here, Cushing plays Van Helsing straight, a determined vampire hunter and caring doctor. Cushing sinks his teeth into the role (because it was far too easy to use that line about Christopher Lee) with the utmost conviction; you believe him when he says something, no matter how fantastical. In fact, the conviction with which Cushing goes about the business at hand is indicative of the entire feel of the movie. Part of the reason it's so good is that it never lets up. It never winks at you or makes a joke. It's impossible, it would seem these days, to make a movie without a comic foil or a bunch of so-called sly self-referential jokes. But everyone involved in Horror of Dracula is completely serious, and the film takes no time out for comic relief. Everyone treats the story as it should be: as a piece of literature. Lee in particular seemed very adamant about this, fan of classical literature that he is. Horror of Dracula does almost everything right, and its few missteps are forgivable if not unnoticeable. Most obvious of the foibles comes when Johnathan Harker confronts a slumbering Dracula and his bride. Harker has traveled far and risked much, including being bitten himself, to destroy Dracula. The day is waning. Completion of his task is within his grasp, so what does he do? Walk over and stake the woman first instead of doing what everyone else in the world would have done, which is take care of the six-foot four lord of the undead first, then worry about the lady. Sometimes I think horror movies do this sort of thing intentionally, just to get people worked up and shouting at the characters. The film's other misstep is debatable, and that would be how much screen time is devoted to Dracula. A fair number of people complain that he's so scarce in this film, show up mostly to either walk in on or choke Van Helsing. While I agree that I'd like to see him do a little more than just step through a doorway, then run off or run over and throw someone, I think Dracula's limited screen time keeps him as an ominous shadow looming over everything, present even when he's not actually onscreen, especially since almost everything that happens in the movie revolves around him or having conversations about him. He remains mysterious and savage and does not get overexposed. This leaves the pace of the film up to Peter Cushing's Van Helsing, and he is more than up to the task. Horror of Dracula is not a long film, and it rarely stops for a breath. Even during scenes in which there's nothing more going on than Van Helsing dictating notes to himself, the film doesn't slow down. It shows that you needn't jettison the plot or character development in order to have a briskly paced film. The success of this film cemented Hammer's position as the preeminent producer of quality horror for the next ten years. Considering that most American horror films at the time were bargain basement cheapies, the vivid color and lurid content and promise of a daring time set the country on fire and opened the way for Roger Corman and AIP to ape the style of Hammer in a series of horror films revolving around the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. But no one could match Hammer for the sheer force of atmosphere. Horror of Dracula crawls with Gothic eeriness. It clings to the film like a graveyard mist. Costumes and sets are rich and lavish even here at the relative beginning of the horror arc. They would grow more so as the films got bigger, and the look and style of a Hammer film would become as much a trademark as the blood, the buxom beauties bursting out of their bodices, and Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing chasing after one another and wearing those Victorian overcoats. Horror of Dracula was such a phenomenal success that Hammer was keen on rushing out a sequel. It happened eventually, in the form of 1960s Brides of Dracula, but without Dracula and without Christopher Lee. He and the infamous count wouldn't return until years later, with 1966's Dracula, Prince of Darkness. That movie, however, lacked Peter Cushing. No worries though, because the two would appear alongside one another in countless other Hammer horror classics, including their third re-invention of a classic Universal horror icon in 1959 with the release of The Mummy. But those are all movies for the coming weeks. Hammer films - we love them, and thankfully this Netflix project has given us the kick in the seat we needed to get some of them reviewed on this site. Labels: Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Netflix Diary, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer posted by Keith at 11:49 PM | 3 Comments |
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