The Plague Of The Zombies

When Push 
Comes To Shovel

The Plague Of The Zombies
UK 1966
Directed by John Gilling  
Hammer/Studio Canal 
Blu Ray Zone B

Well it’s been a while since I last watched this one and, yeah, it’s still a real cracker of a film, for sure.

I first saw The Plague Of The Zombies in my very early teens, projected at my school film club for all the kiddies to see (somehow, the janitor never got into any kind of trouble for showing 10 year olds films like Death Race 2000... a screening I sadly missed out on at the time). My earliest memories of this are that it was in black and white but, it’s obviously been shot in colour so my memories must have been more muddied than the print Studio Canal had to work with (to varying degrees of success... yeah, I’ll get into that in a minute).

The film, set in the 1860s, tells the story of distinguished medical professor Sir James Forbes, played with relish by the great André Morrell (who was, perhaps, my favourite of the TV incarnations of Professor Quatermass in the original, serialised version of Quatermass And The Pit, reviewed here) and his daughter Sylvia (played by Diane Clare). They are summoned from London to a small community in Cornwall to help out Forbes’ former medical student, Dr. Peter Thompson (played by Brook Williams), who has set up a practice there with his wife, a friend of Sylvia’s, named Alice (played by the great Jacqueline Pearce, who would of course grow up to be the scourge of the galaxy as Servalan in Blake’s 7). 

There is a curious disease, of sorts, sweeping the village and killing off people unexpectedly... but the audience has already been clued in that it’s good old proper Haitian voodoo zombies and, once you meet the local squire, Hamilton, played wonderfully by John Carson with his sideburns sharpened up into razor-like points, you know he is the one responsible for bringing this practice back to Cornwall, by the tell tale symbol on the ring on his finger. He lives in his old country home which also served as the grounds and headquarters for SPECTRE at the opening of the movie version of From Russia With Love (reviewed by me here). And if you were in any doubt as to his status as lead villain, he surrounds himself with some local thugs who assert their collective British villainy by going fox hunting and, at one point, trying to gang rape Sylvia. 

But Forbes is on the case and, once he knows that the squire has allowed no autopsies on the bodies of any of the strange victims, he finds that the bodies are no longer in their coffins and so he also enlists the aid of the local Police Sergeant Swift, played by Hammer favourite Michael Ripper (is it really a Hammer film if Michael Ripper isn’t in it?). After a few walking corpses have been sighted in the vicinity and Alice is killed (and flung at Sylvia by a cackling zombie), Forbes consults the local priest who seems to have a library full of books about witchcraft and voodoo (because, of course). His theories  are confirmed when Alice rises from her exhumed coffin and tries to kill him, prompting him to decapitate her with a shovel in one stroke (trimmed by the English censors at the time in, presumably, lost footage... when he originally took about four shovel strikes). It turns out, of course, that Squire Hamilton has been killing and reanimating people as zombies to use as cheap labour for his old, abandoned tin mines. Justice arrives in the form of Forbes and Thompson and we are left with a typical Hammer film ending from this period, no epilogue... just a sudden ending with the heroes glumly watching the tin mines burn and wallowing in their sudden, Pyrrhic victory. 

And it’s a great movie. The zombies themselves predate the modern zombies kickstarted by George A Romero two years later in Night Of The Living Dead and are almost a cross breed of the brainwashed victims of Haitian zombies in earlier films and the ones to come... being that these specimens, with their white contact lenses and greyed skin, do bear more than a passing resemblance to some of those in Romero’s later ground breaking movie. And, of course, it also destroys the notion that Romero invented the kind of zombie that would tear itself from the under the soil and up into the open. For my money, the first movie to actually do that may have been one of the 1940s Universal Mummy sequels (I forget which one) but, in a strangely placed dream sequence, we see the pasty faced, dark rimmed with blank eyes undead rising out from the earth in the local graveyard... so, yeah, I suspect Romero might well have seen and been influenced by this movie in particular. 

Perhaps my one slight criticism of the film is that it seems like it’s been trimmed a little, possibly at the script stage, in that Morrell’s character seems to be jumping to just the right deductions before he has the necessary knowledge to make a judgement call. I suspect a few minor scenes of expository dialogue, such as more knowledge about the circumstances in which his daughter cut her hand (thus allowing the squire to make off with some of her blood to use on a voodoo doll), would have helped curtail those kinds of leaps. But it doesn’t really spoil my appreciation of the movie, which is that it’s pretty well made and a darn good yarn at that. 

What did spoil my appreciation of it a little, is the restoration on this relatively recent Studio Canal Blu Ray, which seems to be more than a trifle enthusiastic in its treatment of the many ‘day for night’ scenes, which appear to be presented way too bright than they ever have before... but I won’t get in to that argument here because, I believe there have been a fair few feuds about this and a few of their other releases in regards to this aspect online before... I just wish that someone like the Indicator label (aka Powerhouse Films) had been allowed to do a proper restoration instead. I’ve come to think of Studio Canal more and more like they’re the bad guys in recent years, blocking UK releases of some nice restorations and then leaving certain films either unreleased or in less prestigious versions over here in the UK. Which is a sad state of affairs for lovers of film but, there you have it. 

All in all, though, if you’ve never seen The Plague Of The Zombies before and you are a lover of Hammer horror, this is definitely one of their better movies and it certainly won’t be the last time I revisit this one. Much to be recommended here.

The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Boneward Hound

The Hound Of
The Baskervilles
UK 1959 Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

An overly comic book like ‘horror font’ is writ largely against James Bernard’s typical Hammer Horror sounding score, announcing the start of the famous studio’s production of what is probably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

The film stars three stalwarts of Hammer films for this version of the classic... Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes, André Morell as Dr. Watson and Christopher Lee as Henry Baskerville, the young heir to the Baskerville fortune who is now living under the shadow of the family curse of the hound, after the recent death of the previous owner of Baskerville Manor. Cushing would, of course, play Holmes a few more times after this production in unrelated films and a TV show (as would Christopher Lee at least once) and Lee and Cushing are a great Hammer double act after they’d faced off as adversaries (of a sort) in the studio's first Frankenstein and Dracula movies (they would do it again four months later in the Hammer production of The Mummy). Morrell, however (one of the great TV incarnations of Professor Quatermass) did not apparently get on well with Lee and tended to avoid him on set.

The film starts with a ludicrous and almost unwatchably bad retelling of the Baskerville legend before finally bringing us up to present day... well, present day Victorian period... for the rest of the story, which is much better and far more entertaining than the first ten minutes or so of the movie. Now, it’s been a very long time since I read The Hound Of The Baskervilles (at least two decades) and, even with all the many movie adaptations of this particular story in the Holmes canon (this is the first to be shot in colour), I really couldn’t remember that much about the original tale. Even so, although it tends to hint the main plot points pretty well, as far as I can dimly recall a smattering of the events of the original, it seems to add its own deviations and explorations, presumably to pad the running time to feature length.

For instance, there’s a wonderful moment early on in the film where Baskerville survives an assassination attempt, thanks to Holmes, after someone has put a tarantula in one of his boots. I honestly don’t recall this scene being in the original... but it’s an entertaining moment, nonetheless.

The film rambles along agreeably at its own pace with top notch performances by all and sundry including a very naturalistic and relaxed performance by Lee, which sees him more subdued to the plot rather than his presence dominating the scenes he’s in... which is interesting. There are also fine turns by Marla Landi as the, possible, love interest for Lee’s character and Miles Malleson... well, just doing what he usually does and having his doddery old, likeably confused, Miles Malleson moments.

Regrettably, although Cushing does a fine Holmes and plays him in a most energetic, almost manic manner, he doesn’t don a fiendishly clever disguise with which to fool both the other characters and the audience as, say, Basil Rathbone might have done in his Holmes adventures. I’m convinced Cushing could have pulled off one of those master disguises in this though, if given half a chance. Also, it’s nice to see André Morell not, like many of his predecessors in the role, portraying Watson as some kind of a buffoon but as someone who Holmes has chosen to have as his companion in crime solving because he actually brings something to the party. Much as I love old Nigel Bruce’s decidedly foolish, comic relief version of Watson opposite Rathbone (and I still champion Bruce as the best), it’s nice to see the character being treated with a little more respect here.

The direction is nice and there are some nice frame designs, with Fisher favouring some unusual angles from high above the action in several scenes. Also, he makes great use of emphasising the depth of the shots through the use of different planes enhanced by foreground objects. For example, the one riveting moment in the ‘legend prelude’ is where a lady is hiding behind an arch in some ruins. The actor looking for her is in the main parts of the left of shot with the arch and her up close in the foreground right of the frame. Similarly, when the director pushes the depth again in a forest scene, the branches and leaves of a tree in the foreground of a shot mingle in with all the trees in the background to make a foreground centre space which you didn’t realise was farther away than the leaves on the tree on the right until a character walks behind them.

One very odd choice in two parts of the movie on the same set, out on the moors by a ruin, is to have the light coming from behind some structures shining a bright, almost fluorescent green like suddenly Mario Bava had somehow turned up on the set that day to perform the same task. It looks fantastic, of course, but there seems to be no natural way that lightning scheme could have come into play in the natural setting and it looks a bit ‘at odds’ with the rest of the shots in the movie.

I don’t have much more to say by way of this review other than to add that some of Bernard’s score to Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula, reviewed here) is also apparently tracked into the movie too. If you’re a fan of any of the actors in this one, especially those in their capacity as Hammer veterans (although they weren’t quite that yet at this stage of their career), then this version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles is definitely one to add to your watch list. Three years later, Fisher would re-team with Lee for his own portrayal of Holmes in the West German/French/Italian krimi movie Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (aka Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes) which I will be reviewing soon for this blog very soon.