Browsed by
Tag: Hammer Horror

October Is Hammer Country: The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

October Is Hammer Country: The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

Comments 2 comments

Plague-of-the-Zombies-poster

I wanted to close out my Hammer-for-October articles with The Plague of the Zombies, but hesitated because the movie isn’t easily available in North America. The Anchor Bay DVD has been out of production for more than fifteen years and used copies don’t come cheap. Then, just as I was about to scratch it off the calendar and substitute The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll or Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, the news hit — Shout! Factory will release The Plague of the Zombies to Region A Blu-ray in January. For once, I picked up on the Blu-ray release announcement before making a hasty prediction about a movie never showing up in HD and looking like a dope again. So consider this a pre-release celebration.

Anyway … Zombies! Yes, Hammer Film Productions made a zombie film. The Plague of the Zombies was released in 1966 as the second half of a double bill with Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Although the Dracula film brought Christopher Lee back to the role of the count for the first time since Dracula (1958) and was the main selling point of the double feature, The Plague of the Zombies is the more intelligent and gripping film. Dracula: Prince of Darkness is beautiful but plodding, while The Plague of the Zombies is one of the best of Hammer’s mid-‘60s pictures, with a few memorable shock scenes and underlying themes that have encouraged a range of readings.

…

Read More Read More

October Is Hammer Country: The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)

October Is Hammer Country: The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)

Comments 2 comments

man-who-could-cheat-death-poster

The Man Who Could Cheat Death arrived during the fast and thrilling early days of Hammer Horror. The studio was tearing through Gothic hits from director Terence Fisher and the talented crew at the Bray soundstages: The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula, The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula, The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960). Looking at that line-up, it’s obvious why The Man Who Could Cheat Death hasn’t made much of a lasting impression. Where’s the marquee value character or monster? Also, where’s Peter Cushing, Hammer’s headliner? He’s in all these movies except The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll … and The Man Who Could Cheat Death.

This odd-movie-out of early Hammer came about because of a production deal with Paramount. Once Hammer scored huge international hits with Frankenstein and Dracula films, the major Hollywood studios were eager to make co-financing deals and offer up their best horror properties for the Hammer treatment. But Paramount didn’t have a large catalogue of horror movies like Universal did. What they gave Hammer was a little-known 1944 film, The Man in Half Moon Street, which was an adaptation of a 1939 play by Alfred Edgar under the obvious pseudonym Barré Lyndon. The material was ghoulish enough for Hammer’s purposes: a mad-scientist tale with a touch of The Picture of Dorian Grey. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster switched the story to Paris in 1890 to fit the studio’s Gothic style. Production was ready to roll with Fisher directing, Peter Cushing in the lead, and Christopher Lee as the main supporting part.

…

Read More Read More

October Is Hammer Country: Hands of the Ripper (1971)

October Is Hammer Country: Hands of the Ripper (1971)

Comments 0 Comment

Hands-of-the-Ripper-poster-1“You can’t cure Jack the Ripper!”

Hammer Film Productions was a different place in the 1970s than in the 1950s and ‘60s. And although it was generally a less artistic place after in-house development stopped and the original producers left, it wasn’t an awful place. It’s similar to third season original Star Trek: more bad episodes than before, but what’s good is still damn good. You got “The Way to Eden,” but you also got “The Enterprise Incident.” With Hammer, you got the dreadful The Horror of Frankenstein, but you also got Hands of the Ripper — which, for my money, is Hammer’s best horror film of the decade. It was originally released on a double bill with Twins of Evil, making it the last great Hammer double feature.

Jack the Ripper has fueled many mystery and horror films. Hammer visited the topic in their pre-Gothic days in a 1950 period crime drama, Room to Let. It wasn’t until 1971 that the studio gave the Ripper the full horror treatment. Two treatments, in fact. Hands of the Ripper was shot at the same time as Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde, a sex-change twist on Stevenson’s novel set during the Whitechapel killings. Weird as the Sister Hyde idea may sound, it’s Hands of the Ripper that takes the dramatically more challenging and interesting approach to Jack the Ripper. Rather than set the story during the original killings in the late 1880s, the screenplay by L. W. Davidson (from an original story by Edward Spencer Shrew) shifts forward fifteen years to Jack the Ripper’s daughter, teasing a spirit possession story and giving the Ripper’s gory hands and misogynistic rage to a young woman.

Hands of the Ripper was shot at Pinewood Studios with Hungarian director Peter Sasdy in the director’s chair. Sasdy already had a history with Hammer. He directed the best of the Dracula sequels starring Christopher Lee, Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969); but in 1971 he was coming off Countess Dracula, a bizarrely boring movie based on the story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Re-teamed with producer Aida Young, who worked with him on Taste the Blood of Dracula, Peter Sasdy recovered and made one of his best movies. Young was one of the few women producers in England at the time, and her other Hammer films include Dracula Has Risen From the Grave and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Considering she produced Sasdy’s best films, the two must have shared a powerful creative partnership.

…

Read More Read More

October Is Hammer Country: The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

October Is Hammer Country: The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

Comments 3 comments

phantom-of-opera-hammer-1962-one-sheetAh, October. That means nothing but Hammer Films. All Hammer Horror, All the Time! So let’s start off with one that’s … not so great. (Gotta build up the suspense.)

Once Britain’s Hammer Film Productions received full permission from Universal Pictures to raid their box of monster goodies, a Phantom of the Opera movie was a certainty. Universal had twice adapted the 1910 Gaston Leroux novel. The first is the most famous version, the 1925 silent classic starring Lon Chaney Sr. in his signature role. Its unmasking scene is one of the first iconic horror movie images. Universal mounted a lavish color remake in 1943 with Claude Rains as the phantom, but the musical production numbers were pushed to the front, making for incredibly anemic horror.

Almost twenty years later, the time was right for a new version, and Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera was perfect material for Hammer’s luxurious Gothic style, its seasoned horror director Terence Fisher, and an ideally cast Herbert Lom as the Phantom. But even with this talent involved, The Phantom of the Opera was poorly received in 1962 when it was released on a double bill with Captain Clegg, a period adventure picture about smugglers. The film still maintains a lower profile than other cinematic Phantom adaptations, both literal and loose, of the story of a tortured and murderous composer beneath the Paris opera house. Or, in this case, a London opera house.

…

Read More Read More

My 300th Black Gate Post: Why I Write About What I Write About

My 300th Black Gate Post: Why I Write About What I Write About

Comments 8 comments
cushing02 godzilla-2014-1108x0-c-default steve-reeves-and-sylva-koscina-in-hercules-pietro-francisci-1958 john-carpenter-bw j allen st john tarzan

This is my three hundredth post at Black Gate. This year also marks the tenth anniversary of my first post as a regular blogger. I remember when John O’Neill first invited me to be a part of this project, back when none of us had any idea where it would go — I certainly didn’t think it would last for a decade and that I’d still be around. Or that John would win a World Fantasy Award for it. Yet here the site is, ten years later and a World Fantasy Award richer, and I still can’t believe people show up to read what I have to say about Hercules movies, Godzilla, and Tarzan. It’s humbling to be part of a site with such a wealth of amazing material, great contributors, and so many dedicated and intelligent readers.

I’ve changed enormously as a nonfiction writer over these ten years, and most of the changes happened because of Black Gate. When I started my regular posts, I had only a blurry vision of the sort of blogger I wanted to be. The reality has turned out different because I made interesting discoveries about my own tastes along the way: specifically, what it is that I most enjoy writing about. I once imagined I’d write primarily about fantasy literature, Conan pastiches, and writing techniques. Now I write about monster movies, John Carpenter, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

To mark my personal anniversary, I’m going to offer an apologia of sorts — an explanation of why I write about the topics I write about most frequently on Black Gate. None of these were in the plan on Day 1, and I’m probably the person who’s most curious about how these subjects turned into my main nonfiction focus.

…

Read More Read More

October Is Hammer Country: The Gorgon (1964)

October Is Hammer Country: The Gorgon (1964)

Comments 1 comment

gorgon-1964-posterI love October, but it brings with it a major annoyance from popular movie websites: a deluge of click-bait lists with titles such as “10 Best Horror Films for Halloween,” “10 Best Underrated Horror Films,” and “10 Best Horror Films We Market Researched from Other 10 Best Horror Films Lists.” They’re tedious, show no deep thought about the genre or the season, and feature the same set of obvious picks. Plus, I have never seen one of these Top Halloween Movie lists include The Gorgon. Therefore, they all bear false witness.

The Gorgon is Halloween movie perfection, and ranks with the 1958 Dracula as the Hammer film most fit for the ghoul season. It’s Gothic, has a classic — albeit unusual — monster, features a small European village beneath a beetling haunted castle, and stars both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Plenty of Hammer films contain these elements. But what makes The Gorgon stand out for October is how much the dry, crisp, windy sensation of autumn blows through it. You can feel the arid wind each time it slams open a window or door. Dead leaves are strewn everywhere. The moon hides behind ever-scudding clouds. And there’s a sough on the breeze that sounds like a woman in the distance singing eerily (with electric organ accompaniment). It’s one of the studio’s most sumptuously beautiful productions and fulfills director Terence Fisher’s aim to craft his horror films in the model of dark fairy tales.

It’s also simply a fantastic movie with complex characters and psychology to make its designs mean something. Director Terence Fisher, the production team, and the insanely talented cast all outdid themselves on this one. The Gorgon doesn’t have the name recognition of a Dracula or a Frankenstein film, but it deserves to be better known — because I for one can’t imagine October going by without watching it.

Hammer moved rapidly through the classic movie monster catalog once they settled into Gothic horror, and by 1964 they were interested in finding new monsters. J. Llewellyn Devine came up with the idea of using a Greek mythological creature, the snake-headed Gorgon. He invented a new one called Megaera, the only survivor of the original three Gorgon sisters. (In the Perseus myth, the Gorgons are named Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale.) John Gilling, one of Hammer’s prolific directors, turned Devine’s treatment into a script, with uncredited rewrites from Anthony Hinds. Gilling wanted to direct the script himself, and was contemptuous of Hinds’s change and the final results. I understand his anger — but I disagree with his assessment of the movie.

…

Read More Read More

October Is Hammer Country: Twins of Evil (1971)

October Is Hammer Country: Twins of Evil (1971)

Comments 1 comment

twins_of_evil_posterI loitered in the early ‘60s for my first two Hammer movies of October. Now it’s time to shift to a different era in the fortunes of the British studio that redefined Gothic cinema: the sexy, violent, and financially troubled early 1970s. Hammer Film Productions didn’t make it out of the decade, releasing their last film in 1978, but this period of independent producers and escalating R-rated material left behind some enjoyable decadence. Twins of Evil is late-period Hammer sexploitation with a basic high concept: sexy twin vampire girls! But the film ends up far better than the exploitation lure would lead you to expect. A good portion of this success has to do with Peter Cushing delivering a top-tier career performance as basically an aging, less tolerant Solomon Kane.

By 1970, the close-knit Hammer family was scattering. The in-house producers had left, so chairman James Carreras turned to outside producers. A small company called Fantale Films, consisting of producers Michael Fine and Harry Styles and writer Tudor Gates, brought Hammer a proposal to film Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire novella “Carmilla.” This led to a loose trilogy of films about the Karnstein clan: The Vampire Lovers and Lust for a Vampire (both 1970) and Twins of Evil. Filled with nudity and overt lesbianism — at least in the first movie — the Karnstein series was a hit for Hammer at a time when the studio struggled to keep up with changing tastes in horror.

Twins of Evil is nebulously a prequel to the first two Karnstein films, showing how Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas) became one of the undead when he raised the vampire of sixteenth-century Countess Mircalla (Katya Wyeth) from her tomb. The heart of the story, however, is the Brotherhood: a band of puritan crusaders under the leadership of the fanatic Gustav Weil (Peter Cushing). The Brotherhood executes suspected witches and devil worshippers across Karnstein’s domains, although they cannot touch the count himself.

…

Read More Read More

October Is Hammer Country: The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

October Is Hammer Country: The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

Comments 3 comments

curse-of-werewolf-movie-posterOn the second week of October, Hammer Films gave to me … one Oliver Reed werewolf, and I guess that’s all I need.

By 1961, the Gothic horror machine at Hammer Film Productions had unleashed Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy. Now partnered with Universal International and free to use the studio’s classic monsters, it was inevitable that Hammer tackled The Wolf Man next. Universal, however, purchased the rights to Guy Endore’s 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris and asked Hammer to adapt that. Instead of a Hammerized version of the tragedy of Lawrence Talbot, we got a much different type of lycanthrope movie, The Curse of the Werewolf. Which is fine, because The Curse of the Werewolf is pretty darn great. Director Terence Fisher and the production team working out of Bray Studios were in peak form, and Oliver Reed, in his first starring role, ripped ferociously into a part so suited to his talents that it feels like the start of a comedy bit.

There was no feasible way for Hammer to make a straight adaptation of The Werewolf of Paris on a $100,000 budget. Producer Anthony Hinds was stunned when he first read the novel to discover epic scenes of warfare and street fighting in the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. With no money to hire a screenwriter, Hinds took on the job himself, using the writing pseudonym “John Elder” for the first time, and looked for a way to squeeze a werewolf script into the budget. One cost-saving maneuver was relocating the story from nineteenth-century France to eighteenth-century Spain so the movie could be shot back-to-back on the sets for The Rape of Sabena, a Spanish Inquisition movie co-financed with Columbia. Hammer chairman James Carreras canceled The Rape of Sabena because of concerns raised by the British Board of Film Censorship, but the sets were already built, so The Curse of the Werewolf continued ahead with the Spanish setting. It would also run into grief with the BBFC; considering some of the sexually violent content, it’s amazing The Curse of the Werewolf made it through production while the Inquisition movie never got off the blocks.

…

Read More Read More

October Is Hammer Country: The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

October Is Hammer Country: The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

Comments 1 comment

kiss_of_vampire_posterOctober is here and that means I need no excuse simply to line up a quartet of horror movies from Britain’s Hammer Film Productions for the next four Saturdays in a row and throw words at them. For me, Hammer films are the perfect horrors for the Halloween season: atmospheric, Gothic, supernatural featuring famous monsters, violent without making you feel abysmal afterward, and packed with plenty of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Hammer movies feel like great Halloween party guests who wear the most elegant costumes and whom you want to hang out with after the other guests have gone home.

My criteria for picking the four movies for a Hammer October was to choose films from outside of the studio’s two major franchises — Dracula and Frankenstein — and which are currently available on Blu-ray in North America. Which means Plague of the Zombies and The Devil Rides Out are disqualified, unfortunately. (Kino Lorber, please get on this.) But it was easy to find movies that fit my ghoulish bill, and I’m starting off with the first vampire film Hammer produced that didn’t involve Dracula.

The Kiss of the Vampire was originally intended as a follow-up to The Brides of Dracula (1960), the first sequel to Hammer’s smash 1958 hit Dracula/Horror of Dracula. Hammer was trying to create a Dracula series without the count and Christopher Lee, focusing instead on Dracula’s legacy of aristocratic blood-sucking descendants and Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing pursuing them. The Kiss of the Vampire was going to continue this, introducing a full coven of vampires holding black magic ceremonies in a Gothic castle. This expanded on hints from The Brides of Dracula: the opening narration speaking of how Dracula’s “disciples live on to spread the cult and corrupt the world,” and the story of the wealthy visitors to Castle Meinster who seduced the young baron into their undead circle.

…

Read More Read More

You Deserve a Great Mummy, So Here’s My Favorite: The Mummy ‘59

You Deserve a Great Mummy, So Here’s My Favorite: The Mummy ‘59

Comments 12 comments

Mummy-1959-US-posterMy short take on The Mummy unleashed to theaters last week as the start of Universal’s “Dark Universe” franchise gamble: It’s an embarrassment for everyone involved. Except maybe Sophia Boutella as Princess Ahmanet. She deserves a real mummy film, not a schlock Tom Cruise action picture only interested in selling later movies. The Mummy ‘17 is ugly, confused, stupid, and boring. North American moviegoers decided to watch Wonder Woman again rather than see Universal trash its own legacy: The Mummy opened to a glum $32 million domestically, putting it almost $25 million behind Wonder Woman’s second weekend. However, The Mummy is targeting international revenue (one of the reasons Universal allowed the criminally miscast Tom Cruise into the room), and so far it’s grossed $141 million in foreign markets. The “Dark Universe” will proceed, but under a bleak curse.

Okay, I’m finished with that movie. Healing time. I shall now read from the Scroll of Life, brew tana leaves, and bring back the sleeping Gods of Egypt with what I consider the high point of eighty-five years of movies about the undead of the Nile River Valley: 1959’s The Mummy from Hammer Films Productions.

The Alchemical Feat of The Mummy ‘59

“The Mummy made by Hammer Films is, in my opinion, one of the best films of its kind that British cinema has made.” — Christopher Lee

Because it stands in the shadow of Hammer’s first two Gothic hits, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula/Horror of Dracula (1958), it’s easy to gloss over The Mummy as merely a good Hammer horror film rather than one of the greats. But since it debuted on Blu-ray in the U.S., I’ve come to the realization I prefer The Mummy ‘59 to the famous 1932 Boris Karloff-Karl Freund film. I didn’t believe this was possible: The Mummy ‘32 is on my shortlist of Universal’s best classic monster movies. But watching the Hammer version in a pristine Hi-Def restoration, the vibrancy of its colors and designs rescued from dull DVD transfers, I had to face my emotions honestly and embrace it as My Favorite Mummy.

…

Read More Read More