The New Avengers

Purdey Hair

The New Avengers
ITV 1976-77
Two series
26 episodes
Studio Canal Blu Ray Box 

When I was around four or five years old, in the very early 1970s, I used to watch repeats of The Avengers on TV and I remember liking it a lot. I saw the Honor Blackman episodes (indeed, I must have seen many of the episodes I suspect are now no longer with us from the first season), the Diana Rigg episodes and the Linda Thorson episodes... and I believe some of my earliest name fictional character recognitions were Kathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King*… along with other usual suspects like Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, Doctor Who and Scott Tracy.

And of course there was the solid rock of a character in every episode, the male lead in pretty much every incarnation of The Avengers... John Steed, with his bowler hat and umbrella. Played, as always, by the great Patrick Macnee.

So it was with no small amount of excitement when the 8 year old version of myself received the news that a brand new series of The Avengers, entitled rather practically as The New Avengers, would be on my TV screen soon.

It was on fairly late on a Saturday or Sunday evening, if I’m recalling correctly… and we sat down to watch the first episode, The Eagles Nest, about a group of modern nazis who has been keeping Hitler’s body on ice all these years, until medical science was able to resuscitate him. And I have to say, it was pretty good stuff. We all loved it as a family and it even had Peter Cushing in the episode, as the scientist the new nazis kidnapped to get the job done right.

Now, not long after the show had started, my mother and I were run over by two cars which hit each other before mounting the pavement, out of control, and clobbering us. Since my jaw bone from my ‘against all odds’ still attached head couldn’t be wired back in the normal way, I had to take a few years off school to allow it to heal itself. Every cloud has a silver lining I guess but the problem was, I was stuck in hospital for the first week or two and the nurses on the children’s ward wouldn’t let me stay up with the television on to watch The New Avengers. Which I was very concerned about at the time. Although I did have the special souvenir magazine put out by TV Times to comfort me at some point, which was pretty thick and covered a lot of the show (and predecessors)… an issue which I’m pleased to say I still have to this day.

So, alas, I didn’t see a fair few of the episodes on its original run, which makes me happy to be finally catching up with them again after all these years, in a new Blu Ray set put out by Studio Canal, which looks good but is way too expensive for what is, after all, just 26 episodes.

And I watched these all recently with my mum and it’s still great. Patrick Macnee was still charming as Steed and his two new, supporting Avengers, Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit and Joanna Lumley as the amazing Purdey (shortly before she would amaze us all again by taking on one of the title roles in Sapphire And Steel), are brilliant.

Some of the episodes… and this is no surprise since the show was using the same writers and producers of the bulk of the original incarnation… are able to capture the surreal and fun spirit of the originals and, others are a bit more humdrum but, even so, the chemistry between the three leads and the dialogue writing for them, was absolutely brilliant and I was a little surprised that these whimsical ‘to and fros’ between the characters still hold up today.

For instance, when Purdey pulls her bra off to give to Mike to use as a slingshot to get them out of a jam, he says “Why didn’t you burn it with all the other ladies?” To which she replies, “I didn’t need to. I already knew I was liberated.”

There were guest directors as well, such as Robert Feust, who you may remember directed The Final Programme (reviewed by me here). And, of course, many actors and actresses who would suddenly turn up for an episode (because who wouldn’t want to be in The Avengers) such as Jenny Runacre, Jon Finch, Ronald Lacey, Deep Roy and even the great Caroline Munro.

They even have a bit of a reunion, with Ian Hendry returning for an episode, although not as the co-starring lead character he played alongside Macnee in the early years of the show. Not to mention an episode where the two bad guys are played by Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins, who would bring exactly the same chemistry they had here to the producer’s next TV show, The Professionals.

Not only that, the set includes the last four episodes, shot and produced in Canada, proudly proclaiming before the pre-credits sequence that it’s The New Avengers in Canada, before going onto the usual action sequence which would then freeze at the crucial part... followed by the wonderful animated credits sequence that came in from about halfway through the first season… and then going back to the freeze frame and concluding the opening scene. As was the format of all the episodes.

And of course, all the music, including the wonderful new opening title music which cunningly utilises his old baseline from the original show in a new way, is by the original show composer Laurie Johnson, who came on in the early days of the show after original composer Johnny Dankworth left. The show is filled with good music including a few sly nods to Johnson’s mentor, composer Bernard Herrmann.

And with episodes dedicated to such antagonists as killer birds, a giant rat in the sewers and a homicidal building… it’s just a fun packed snapshot of what late 1970s TV could be. The New Avengers makes for a nice, if prohibitively expensive slice of TV heaven that audiences of a certain age should surely enjoy and a worthy successor to the original show. Go on, give it a go.

*I’m not forgetting Avenger girls Ingrid Hafner as Carol Wilson and Julie Stevens as Venus Smith... but that’s for another review (coming to a blog near you, sometime late 2026 or early 2027).

DarkFest 7

Dark Climes and
Tripped Up Climbs

DarkFest 7
Organised by Allan and Yanni Bryce

It was February 2021. I was just under a year into what would be two and a half years of working from home due to the Covid 19 pandemic. It was a surreal (but strangely much missed) time and I had two things which reignited my appreciation of the art of film and reminded me that, sometimes, life could be worth living, for a bit, during those unusual times. One of those things was Severin’s Al Adamson box set (written up with links to all the reviews here) and the other started with a friend telling me that the great Caroline Munro was on a nice cover painting in a magazine in my local W H Smith. Now, after washing my hands for the recommended 20 seconds, I rushed to my local news vendor - masked up and keeping my distance from everybody - and purchased said magazine, The Dark Side.

And I rekindled my declining relationship with magazines again. Not because I’d ever not liked them but, I just didn’t realise people were still doing these things in print (thankfully... I hate digital editions of anything and just don't bother reading them). And the magazine was great and I haven’t stopped buying both that and its sister magazine Infinity since. The editorials by Allan Bryce are so fun to read and I really appreciate these gems of printed materials as I grab them each month. But then I discovered that, as an annual event, the Bryce’s organised a thing called DarkFest at the Genesis cinema (around the Whitechapel area of London). I’d not been tempted before now but the quality of the guests this year such as Caroline Munro, Linzi Drew, Valerie Leon and Eileen Daly plus loads of good stalls and six mostly cool horror movies taking place over 12 hours (from 11am to 11pm), all for the ‘great value for money’ sum of £40, seemed too good to resist this year. So me and a friend braved the rain and went to check it out.

Now, I’ve often said in my years of going to FrightFest that the horror film fan community are among the friendliest in the world and this was exactly the case here. Which is very fortunate actually as the crowding of all those stalls and wonderful people somewhat resembled the ‘stateroom scene’ from the Marx Brothers movie A Night At The Opera (if you know, you know) and moving around the event was sluggish at best. I got the wonderful Ms. Munro to sign my Japanese At The Earth’s Core souvenir programme, had a word with Linzi Drew and also got a beautiful lingerie calendar signed by the charming Mrs. Moon, the organiser of the Misty Moon events. Alas, Eileen Daly left before I could get near to her which was a shame... this is the third time I’ve tried to see her and fate always conspires to keep me away.

Now I was worried about how my friend would take the first movie shown, Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas (reviewed by me here) since it’s... well it’s badly acted, badly written and badly directed. It’s also very fun but, luckily, my friend said it was her favourite film of the day. I then left her to the next movie so I could get a chance to visit some of the stalls and empty out my wallet (and also grab a hot dog) but when I rejoined her 20 minutes before the end of Scars Of Dracula (reviewed by me here only last week) I managed to trip over the stairs in the cinema in the dark and hugely exacerbated the pain in my knees after a perilous falling accident in 2019. As I type these words I am in total agony and can barely walk... which is not the best state to be in.

We then watched what is probably my favourite vampire movie of all time... the low budget, highly creative Razor Blade Smile starring Eileen Daly as Lilith Silver and directed by Jake West. It’s been restored and will be getting a proper Blu Ray release soon so I won’t do a full review yet but, if you’ve never seen this film, with Daly playing a Jerry Cornelius-like vampire turned assassin caught up in a deadly conspiracy... you’re missing out. It’s a wonderful film and deserves to be properly re-evaluated by modern audiences. I could never figure out why there wasn’t a string of Lilith Silver movies made after this one.

At this point I had a brief but nice chat with Rick Melton, the erotic artist whose magazine cover had caught my interest in the first place. He was a really nice chap and I am looking forward to a new book coming out, according to him, in about ten months time. Then, after this year’s ‘Slaughter Awards’, we saw one of Lucio Fulci’s best horror films, The Beyond (reviewed by me here). This was good fun but, surprisingly, had loads of walkouts. I’m guessing the audience was already very familiar with this movie and were somewhat jaded and needed refreshments by this point.

After that we were faced with two more films... Friday The 13th, which held no interest and, the mystery film which I’d correctly guessed was a screening of a new transfer of Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. Alas, the screenings were already running around 20 minutes late and we knew that if we stayed past the advertised time we would both have trouble catching our last trains home from Liverpool Street station so, at this point, we decided to call it a day. Alas, this was when I’d found that Eileen Daly had just flown the coop and all the stalls were beginning to get packed away already.

So, apart from the overcrowding at DarkFest 7 (but hey, at least everybody was friendly) and the late running schedule, I had a blast at this year’s event and something tells me that my friend (who preferred it even to FrightFest) and I will be back again around this time next year for DarkFest 8, which I assume will happen. I’ll report back on that one as the opportunity arises.

Running Scared - Insider Tales From The House Of Hammer

Running ‘til
They’re Hammered

Running Scared -
Insider Tales From
The House Of Hammer
by Phil Campbell with Brian Reynolds
Peveril Publishing
No visible ISBN

Subtitled Insider Tales From The House Of Hammer, Philip Campbell and Brian Reynolds’ tome Running Scared is a lovely, short but refreshing read about a time period roughly between 1969 and 1972, where these two both worked as runners for the illustrious British film company Hammer.... both in their Wardour Street office in London (I always look for the preserved Hammer House fronting when I am up there to this day) and in the various studios and on location, where they were sometimes assisting in production to one degree or another. Before I dig in though, an apology is in order, on the odd chance either of the writers ever stumble on this review...

I bought this 2015 book from the two writers in that same year, from a stall run by them at the Camden Film Fair. I remember chatting with them for a bit and telling them about this blog, dropping them a card and telling them to wait a few months and then, after that, they should find a review of this book on here. Well, what can I say? There’s always a shinier, newer book around the corner and, although this book didn’t stray too far from the top of the pile, a seven year wait for me to read and review was not my intention (nor a two year blog publication date after that, for that matter). So my apologies to Phil and Brian for not getting my act together quicker. It’s only me working this blog and I’m doing my best, honest.

Okay, that out of the way... I bought this book knowing nothing about it other than when I discovered the writers on a stall at the fair. But I had a hunch that, if anyone was going to turn up the stories you don’t officially get on various accounts of the Hammer films in various authorised editions, then it’s going to be the non-star ‘little people’ who were hovering in the background. It’s always the same in any company... it always seems to be the average man in the office who is fully aware of what’s really going on and what to do about things, while management go about creating their own problems for themselves and it seems it’s true of film companies too. In fact, I’ve noticed over the past couple of years that this is also true of the people running the country... the people in power demonstrate a lack of common sense and an unbelievable lack of awareness of things going on and, yeah, the people in the street are the ones having to deal with their folly. So it is, in some ways, although certainly only very politely touched upon here, in various film studios too.

The book is breezily written by Phil, who is the main focus although several of Brian’s accounts of his experiences with various personnel and iconic stars also find thier way into the tome. Phil writes with a lot of humour and, as I’d suspected, it’s packed with information that you won’t necessarily find in other, more high profile accounts of the days of Hammer. Basically, as runners, the guys would do a variety of jobs which could be considered a bit ‘run of the mill’ (while also being quite essential to the smooth running of a production, actually) including things like buying biscuits, transporting film cans, photocopying various documents and call sheets and distributing them, running errands for cast and crew... stuff like that. So, as you can probably guess, people like these two can certainly have some stories to tell.

And what stories! If you want to find out about many things such as giving Ingrid Pitt a piggy back ride to keep her costume out of the mud and being asked to deposit her weekly pay down her ample cleavage because her hands were full, then you’ve got the right book. Or that time Jenny Hanley got a fly in her eye and nearly killed herself and Phil because she was giving him a lift in her car and they nearly ran a red light. Or some interesting times with my favourite Lady Of Hammer, the lovely Caroline Munro, who Phil saw in action on both her Hammer movies, Dracula AD 1972 (reviewed here) and Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter.

There are also his observations about the times when tragedy struck... for example, during the making of one of my favourite Hammer Horrors, Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb (reviewed by me here), he tells of how Peter Cushing had to leave on his first and last day of filming one of the main roles when his wife died, how his replacement Andrew Keir managed to damage his leg and had to go to hospital on his first day and how the director died half way through filming.

And, yeah, it’s all in here. Encounters with the likes of Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro, Ingrid Pitt, Kate O’ Mara and a whole host of others too numerous to mention here, not to mention actors from neighbouring sets such as Vincent Price when he was filming his second Dr. Phibes movie.

I won’t go on as this is only a quickie but I would like to conclude by heartily recommending Running Scared - Insider Tales From The House Of Hammer, not because it by any means replaces any of the more exhaustive or academic works on the studio but, more because it’s got stories and photos (many of them) which are quite unique to this book and the memories of Phil Campbell and Brian Reynolds... you won’t see too many of these anywhere else folks. Also, of course, because it’s entertainingly written and I had an absolute blast with it. A quirky, fun and very informative book, for sure.

The Life And Deaths Of Christopher Lee

Final Curtains

The Life And Deaths
Of Christopher Lee
Directed by Jon Spira
UK 2024
Canal Cat Films
UK Premiere FrightFest 2024 screening

I’ve been following Jon Spira on Twitter for well over a decade... I even made a small contribution to some of his crowd funded books (which I promise I will get around to reading) but I never watched any of his films until now. I figured, if I didn’t like them and posted a review, he’d probably hate me.

That being said, it’s almost a time honoured tradition for me and my friend to attend a FrightFest screening which is a documentary about something which may be considered to be connected to Hammer horror films and so, The Life And Deaths Of Christopher Lee seemed to fit the bill. I somewhat reluctantly bought tickets and... well... I have to say I was quite pleasantly surprised in that this is easily one of the best documentary films I’ve seen in many a year (possibly the best and certainly the best I’ve seen at FrightFest).

Why? Well because it’s so well written and moves along at a fair lick. And my one small criticism, which I’ll get to in a while, is absolutely no fault of the film makers at all. That’s my personal baggage. Let me set the scene for why this documentary is so well put together by describing the opening minutes...

The animated opening credits show a wonderful cartoon, as they roll, of Sir Christopher Lee walking on from each side of the screen and being killed in some manner... arrow shot, cannon, bomb etc. All the while, just off to the left of shot, nicely lit and silhouetted so you can’t yet see it properly, is a figurine which I at first thought was one of those horrible bobble heads, of Christopher Lee. And then, on the right we see actor Peter Serafinowicz practicing his impression of the voice of Lee. And then the light comes up and we see it’s a pretty great looking marionette puppet of Christopher Lee, who then proceeds to narrate the whole story of his life. It’s ingenious and works really well.

One of the talking head interviewees of the film is, of course, the great horror scholar and sometimes actor Jonathan Rigby (who I’ve mentioned on this blog numerous times) and he knew Lee quite well. So he was, according to the director in his Q & A session at the end of the movie, on hand to help vet Spira's script and ensure that things Lee wouldn’t say or which were tonally off for the actor were not included in the running narrative and, yeah, there’s nobody I could think of who would be better suited to know about such things.

The film takes us quickly through Lee’s long family lineage and speeds us to his school days, his life in the airforce... with brief mention of his stint as a nazi hunter, I’ll get to that... and onto his choice and easyish access into the world of acting. It, of course, tells of his later distaste of being associated with such things as Dracula and talks also about many of his films, including obvious ones like The Wicker Man (Lee’s favourite performance, I believe) and The Man With The Golden Gun, playing one of his cousin Ian Fleming’s characters on the big screen. It even mentions the colossal flop that was Spielberg’s 1941.

The film also takes you through his triumph of singing heavy metal concept albums and, in some very nice clips, his friendship with Peter Cushing. And it’s all assisted with some wonderful interviewees, such as the aforementioned Rigby and people such as Caroline Munro, Joe Dante, Peter Jackson and, in a very funny turn, John Landis. Not to mention a few revealing clips of the man himself and various animated segments in different styles by different artists (including Dave McKean).

And I can’t say enough good things about this. I can only hope this gets a Blu Ray release at some point soon... this is a must have purchase for me but I’m not doing that horrible streaming stuff. And my one, very small, problem with it (other than the fact that I could easily have watched another hour) is that it doesn’t reveal any details about Lee’s days as a nazi hunter during (and I think also after) the Second World War. But, it turns out that this is because, since it was confidential information, Lee would never talk about what went on to anybody. In fact, John Landis tells a very funny story (among many) about his attempts to get the information out of Lee whenever he saw him.

So, yeah, a shame it’s not there but the information is not up for grabs and the way Spira and crew handle the lack of data here is, at least, brilliantly done and shot through with humour (like the rest of the documentary). So, yeah, I had an absolutely marvellous time with his new film The Life And Deaths Of Christopher Lee and would urge all fans of the great man to see this one as soon as possible. A fitting tribute and one, I hope, he would have approved of.

Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas

Sleighed N’ Slayed

Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas
aka Dont Open Till Christmas (sic)
Directed by Edmund Purdom
UK 1984

Warning: Santa spoilers aplenty.

I love Italian gialli but I don't think much of US slashers... for the most part. I was initially drawn to Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas because Caroline Munro is in it (yeah, I’ll get to that later). As I watched though, it became clear that this was actually a British slasher trying to look like a successful American counterpart... which turned out to be an interesting aspect of the picture. A movie I’m quite undecided about but... okay... let me start at the beginning, where the real horror lies.

After a brief scene setting up a Santa killer... being a killer of people dressed like Santa, not a killer dressed as Santa himself... which sees a Santa sexing up his girlfriend in a car before both are stabbed up good by the killer, possessing the full cliché presentation of POV roving camera with deep breathing on the soundtrack... the two elements of horror and sheer terror come to light.

Firstly, it turns out one of the producers of the film is Dick Randall. My first thought was... did anyone get paid? I bet this was a troubled shoot. I have a good amount of respect and admiration for the cheapy producer but I knew then and there not to take this movie in any way seriously. As the credits role while a Santa ornament slowly burns, we find out that the film stars distinguished actor Edmund Purdom. Not only that, the film is directed by him, which was apparently the deal if he was going to star in it... although I hear trouble with the shoot meant he quit directing half way through and at least three directors had their turn at finishing it. Oh yeah, did I mention Dick Randall produced this? Anyway, to be fair, for a film which kept having scenes rewritten and lots of reshoots, it does hold together really well, it has to be said.

Then the second, true horror of the movie is revealed... the release print title is... and I really don’t like even having to type this crime against punctuation but it can’t be helped... Dont Open Till Christmas. So, yeah, not only did the people titling this not realise that the proper shortening of the word Until should be written ‘til (no, language doesn’t change... it just gets mangled by troglodytes and then followed blindly by idiots who don’t know any better) but they’ve also left the apostrophe out of Don’t. So, yeah, don’t show this film to the easily impressionable or they will never be correct about grammar and spelling again.

Anyway, getting over that shock, the film is a police procedural starring Purdom as Police Inspector Harris who, with his assistant Sergeant Powell (played really quite well for an actor struggling with a troublesome script, by Mark Jones), are investigating a series of Santa-themed killings in London, as anyone wearing a Santa suit is fair game for the twisted killer. And, despite some really good acting by a number of the cast, they can’t seem to outrun the fact that the film actually looks quite amateurish in some ways. Can’t quite put my finger on why but there’s something less than professional about the whole production, it seems to me. And Des Dolan’s score is going full on ‘slasher electronica’ to try and distract from things but, yeah, it never quite succeeds in successfully adding a glossy veneer. But, like I said, although some scenes don’t quite make sense in terms of dialogue, following on from others which cover the same verbal territory, it does still hold together in a coherent manner (if that’s all you need).

There are three things that make up for the lack of production values, however...

One is the early 1980s London locations. It was great seeing places like Covent Garden, Hamleys toy shop and the Portobello Road Market just as I remember them from when I was a teenager. There’s even an extended chase and kill scene which takes place in The London Dungeon in Tooley Street (which I think is where it was located at the time, if memory serves). This film was a real nostalgia trip for me and I loved that aspect of it. I’d also forgotten that the old ‘Nee Naw Nee Naw’ style police car sirens were still in effect at that time in England.

Two, some of the kills are inventive and, sometimes well done (at least in the depicted aftermath). For instance, there’s a peeing Santa who has his penis cut off, a spear through face killing, a guy who gets roasted on his own roast chestnut stove and a bizarre kill featuring a Rosa Klebb style knife boot coupled with a spiky glove reminiscent of the ones worn in Rollerball (reviewed here). So, there was a kind of inventiveness at play in some of the gorier scenes for sure. Added to a generous amount of ‘glamour sleaze’ brought to the production from actresses like Pat Astley, who had been in films like Rosie Dixon Night Nurse, Come Play With Me (reviewed here) and The Playbirds (reviewed here)... and the film is certainly far from boring, at the very least.

And then, good thing number three is Caroline Munro. She doesn’t have much to do, playing Miss Munro, a pop star, who dances and sings her way on stage for one number before showing what a good screamer she can be when a severed head pops up in front of her. She was the main draw for me here but the scene only lasts about two minutes and was filmed in one day, by all accounts.

All in all, it’s a terrible film and, it has to be said, terribly predictable. The title and a Christmas gift given to Purdom at the start will end exactly as you think it will and you will be in no doubt of the identity of the killer, despite some red herrings pushed very hard, by the last act. The killer himself, played by Alan Lake, shortly before his early death, is actually quite watchable and, again, adds something to proceedings. But the film really is obvious so that’s a point against it. Overall, I’d have to say my take-away response to Don’t Open ‘Till Christmas is actually quite confused. On the one hand, it’s a terrible, amateurish looking movie which I really couldn’t recommend to anybody but, on the other hand, I actually quite liked it. Indeed, the London location scenes and, of course, the wonderful Caroline Munro, means I might actually have a look at grabbing a Blu Ray copy of this to watch again at some point. I’d definitely hesitate before committing to buying this as a first time watch though, for sure.

The Monster

Dwarf Spirit

The Monster
aka I Don’t Want To Be Born
aka The Devil Within Her
aka Sharon’s Baby
UK 1975 Directed by Peter Sasdy
Network Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has all the spoilers.
If you don’t want to know, don’t read.

I’ve been wanting to see I Don’t Want To Be Born aka The Monster aka The Devil Within Her aka Sharon’s Baby for some time now and regular readers of my blog can probably guess why... yeah, that’s right. One of my favourite people in the world, Caroline Munro, is in this one. So when Network brought out a Blu Ray edition of the film last year, I was very keen to get my hands of a copy (thanks @cultofthecinema and a Merry Christmas 2021 to you too). Now, although it’s been released under the title The Monster by the company, I’d only ever heard of this as I Don’t Want To Be Born. Trying to find it under any of these titles on the IMDB though (at time of writing) proves a bit of a slog. You’ll find it listed there under the completely ludicrous title, Sharon’s Baby. Why is that a ludicrous title? Well for starters, there’s no character called Sharon in the movie so... yeah.

Okay, the film starts strongly with a pregnant Lucy, played by Joan Collins, screaming her head off as the credits roll and Dr. Finch, played by Donald Pleasence, tries to extract her baby from her. The kid puts up quite a tussle and it’s at this point that Dr. Finch exclaims to his assisting nurse (played by none other than a very young Floella Benjamin), that it’s like the baby doesn’t want to be born. Something which, later on in the movie, he’s reminded of when someone says that, um, it’s like the child never wanted to be born. All I can say that, even at the first utterance of this, I was pretty sold on I Don’t Want To Be Born as being the one, truly genuine title for this film. I mean, I’ve talked about the non-existent Sharon but, did I also mention the baby Lucy gives birth to is a boy? So, you know, calling it The Devil Within Her is a little over the top if alluding to the child and, if it’s not, then it’s certainly only in Joan Collins character for about two minutes before it’s born into the world. Born into the world and, apparently, half scratching Lucy’s face off and looking like it wants to drink more of her blood. So, yeah, this is not the best delivery the good doctor’s seen in recent years.

Okay, so Lucy’s husband Gino, played by Ralph Bates attempting to do an Italian accent, collects gal and sprog but it’s not long before the little tyke is causing a ruckus and, eventually killing people. Lucy’s friend Mandy, played absolutely brilliantly and naturalistically by my heroine Caroline Munro (it’s got to be one of her best performances... she doesn’t just hold her own with Joan here, she acts her off the screen), can’t really suggest much in the way of help but maybe her boyfriend Tommy (played by John Steiner, with a brilliant cockney accent here) whom she works for as a stripper, may know what the answer is. Well, Lucy remembers it might be something to do with when she used to work and sleep with Tommy at a strip show too, where she rejected the advances of Hercules the dwarf (played by George Claydon) and so said little person put a curse on her.

Meanwhile, Gino’s sister Albana (played by Eileen Atkins), who really is a sister with her nun’s habit and holy ways, recognises something amiss with the little darling child. Maybe it’s the fact that it manages to somehow go on a killing spree and do things like chop Donald Pleasence’s head off with a couple of well placed blows with a garden spade... or that time it killed its dad, Gino, who has apparently ‘gone missing’. At the end of the film, after the toddler who shouldn’t be able to even crawl yet has chased mummy with a knife and stabbed her to death, Sister Albana exorcises the demonic spirit from the baby... which also somehow affects Hercules (who somehow was manifesting as the child... not sure how that works), causing him to die of a heart attack on stage at the strip show, due to having his dual spirit exorcised from the kiddies body. It makes about as much sense as anything else in this movie but, well, here’s the thing...

Call it a guilty pleasure, if you like, but I really had a good time with this one. It’s not the fact that Sasdy’s use of camera movement to wander away from a honed in set up to pan somewhere else (which I’m sure I’ve seen him do in some of his Hammer films) or his interesting compositions are all that special. It’s not even the acting which, was quite good from some people and not great from some others... honestly, Caroline was the best thing about this movie for me... and it’s not even super cool Ron Grainer’s wildly catchy but, let’s be honest here, mostly inappropriate score for the movie (which I would love on CD please record companies?). It’s the fact that it’s such a wildly ambitious idea to have a killer baby going on the rampage before CGI was even a thing. I mean, this is literally, you see a knife coming at the camera or a spade coming down towards camera or a window or cot bashed apart and then... cut to cute picture of a completely immobile toddler to somehow show that it was the baby committing all these crimes. It’s just so wildly funny... I hate to say it but, it’s hugely entertaining because of how silly the execution of the premise is (and there have been much better killer baby movies done in the intervening years, of course).

But there you are... a film with some strange influences at work in its genetic make up... intentionally or not. So obviously trying to ride the wave of The Exorcist but, also, that Grainer music is played through in a way almost against the visuals and running as an accompaniment rather than an illustrative score... much like Italian groups like Goblin or Libra might provide for a giallo or horror movie. I thoroughly enjoyed... hmm... I’ll refer to it as I Don’t Want To Be Born... and Caroline Munro looks absolutely stunning in this, as well as being at the top of her game. So, there are good reasons to have this title but, for me, it’s just a fun experience.

The Black Cat (1989)

Cat Me
If You Can

The Black Cat
aka Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Black Cat
aka Demons 6
Italy 1989
Directed by Luigi Cozzi (as Lewis Coates)
21st Century Film Corporation
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A

Well this is a complicated mix. I’ve been wanting to see this particular version of The Black Cat for some time because, well, the great Caroline Munro is in it (her second film for Cozzi after Star Crash, which I reviewed here). However, even though she looks great in this film especially, gives a good performance and has gone on record that she has a good deal of affection for this writer/director, it’s certainly not one of her best films. I love these kinds of movies and even love Cozzi movies like Contamination but, this one is a bit of a mess, I reckon (although it’s a miracle it looks as good as it does, considering the budget Cozzi had to work with).

Okay, so I’ll start off by stating that this film has nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat (as it proudly proclaims to the contrary on the titles on this print)... absolutely nothing and, to be honest, I don’t know why producers would want their film called that when there are so many movies out there with that title already. Apparently, the notorious Menahem Golan (formerly of Canon Films) asked Cozzi to drop some shots of black cats into the film after he’d delivered the finished product because he’d apparently already sold this film as an adaptation of the Poe story. So, I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling but there are a few added shots of a black cat here and there and the film within a film, which is being finished by the characters at the start of the movie, is said to be a version of The Black Cat... which it also clearly isn’t, it has to be said.

What it actually is, or at least started life as, is the first crack at a third part of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers trilogy, written once again by his ex-wife and long standing writing and acting partner Daria Nicolodi (she had made large contributions to the first two and can even be seen in an early sequence of Suspiria, reviewed here). But Luigi Cozzi is good friends with Argento (I believe he even runs Argento’s shop in Italy) and, after Argento rejected the screenplay to go and do something else, Cozzi didn’t want to do something which might seem like a betrayal... so he rewrote the script so it’s an ‘homage’ to Argento’s Three Mothers movies instead although, it has to be said, homage or not, it still kinda plays out like a direct sequel, it seems to me. At this point, Nicolodi left the production and also dropped out as the lead actress/protagonist, movie star Anne Revanna... to be replaced by Florence Guérin who, actually, does a pretty good job here anyway. Although it’s hard for the actors in this to shine completely because the script is not good... at least that’s what I think.

So, anyway, Anne’s husband Marc (Urbano Barberini) and his writing partner plus his wife (Nora, played by Caroline Munro) have written a script based on the Third Mother in homage to Argento’s Suspiria (all happily referenced in the film). Once a sinister producer, Leonard Levin (played by Brett Halsey) agrees to back the film, things start going wrong and the lead actress cast in the movie, Anne, starts getting dream visitations from the real third mother... and there is loads of jumbled up murder and mayhem ensuing for the rest of the movie. There’s also a kind of cosmic element to the film and Cozzi goes on record on an extra feature on the beautiful new Severin Films Blu Ray restoration of the film, saying that it’s a sci-fi movie dressed up in horror clothing because horror was a lot easier to get green lit back in those days. To me, actually, it almost feels like a close cousin to Lucio Fulci’s Manhattan Baby and, between the two of the movies, there’s not much in it.

Nice things for me were, Caroline Munro’s sexy performance (she’s playing a bad girl here and is not what she at first seems) and the over the top goriness of some of the effects which might make you raise an amused eyebrow. For instance, a professor who is really a good witch, is gotten by the Third Mother by a psychic signal which makes her start bleeding everywhere on her head until her heart explodes and ejects itself from her shattered rib cage. It’s an obviously similar death to some of the ones in Cozzi’s Contamination and also, it's fairly evident that it’s an attempt to both recall and out-do the famous chest burster scene in Ridley Scott’s A  L  I  E  N, except, they never really look all that convincing, it has to be said. Although I do appreciate the effort and feel they have a somewhat satisfying, almost comical feel to them.

The photography and whole atmosphere of the film is nicest, though, when it’s spoofing or paying homage to Suspiria. For instance, when Ann is reading the script for the film, the lighting style is primary greens pitched against reds and, instead of Vince Tempera’s hit and miss score on the soundtrack (but not as miss as those awful needle dropped rock songs which were fashionable at the time), they actually track in Goblin’s main Suspiria theme into these shots too. Which I’m surprised they got permission for but, that’s fine.

The only other thing I’ve really got to say about this... somewhat dull and messy affair... is that there are some beautiful and arresting visual moments in the film but, they never really add up to anything more consistently substantial and so, yeah, nice to look at but it’s not a film I think I would be revisiting often. It’s a shame actually that the producers didn’t think to get Ania Pieroni back to reprise her short cameo as the Third Mother from Dario Argento’s Inferno (reviewed by me here) but, yeah, another missed opportunity, I feel. One last thing though... when Argento did finally make Mother Of Tears (aka The Third Mother) in 2007, it was much more of a successful movie (at least I think so) but it felt less like he was making a film close to the sensibilities of Suspiria and Inferno and more like he was doing a riff, in terms of style, to The Black Cat. Just a thought and I’m sure people would disagree but, that’s what it felt like to me. Mother Of Tears is still a great film though and I wish somebody would put the thing on a definitive Blu Ray edition soon. I definitely need an upgrade.

Space 1999

Orbit-uaries

Space 1999
UK/Italy Aired 1975-1977 (differing from region to region)
Two Series Network Blu Ray Zone B

I used to like Space 1999 as a kid but I’d not seen anything near to even half the episodes. Partially this was because the scheduling was absolutely bonkers (the second series was split between two years with a big hiatus in the middle) and partially because it often clashed with the latest episode of Doctor Who. I wasn’t what you would call a ‘follower’ of the show but, although I never had any of the Mego action figures, I did have the smaller, cheaper of the two toy versions of the unique ray guns they used in the series and I also had one of the die cast Dinky Eagle spacecraft. For those who are interested and remember these, I had the green one with the passenger pod as opposed to the blue one with the cargo pod. I could never figure out why they were those colours however, when all the ones in the show were so clearly just white. I also had some of the British branded bubble gum cards but, like other British produced confectionary cards of the time, these were far inferior to the American made Topps cards being much smaller, not very well designed and having an absolutely terrible tasting piece of bubble gum with them. I remember, on occasion, biting into a Space 1999 ice lolly with great delight though.

However, with Network doing a nice Blu Ray combination set of both series on Blu Ray, I thought it was finally time to sit down and look at these things properly. It was certainly an interesting watch...

The show was definitely a show of two halves with famed TV producer and Supermarionation guru Gerry Anderson firing and then divorcing his wife and co-show runner Sylvia at the end of the first season. When Fred Frieberger was brought in to replace her... well, I don’t want to say he totally managed to ruin the show but there was certainly a lot of change in the look and feel of the series and, for the most part, not change for the better. That being said, I can totally understand why some of those changes were made... after all, they were trying to be more popular and capture the American market too... but I certainly don’t agree with most of them.

So the plot is very simple. It was set in the 'far future' of 1999 and the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha are mortified when an accident with a nuclear explosion blasts the moon out of orbit and sends it hurtling through space like an out of control starship, so the characters could encounter new threats every week, the deeper they got into space... and explore nearby planets when they came into range to see if they could evacuate and colonise a nice looking one. So, yeah, it was a bit like Star Trek but with a moon base and the accompanying Eagle rocket ships housed within, instead.

The main leads, Commander John Koenig and Dr. Helena Russell were played by (then) husband and wife team Martin Landau and Barbara Bain. They were supplemented by a crew of around 300, mostly nameless and unseen, characters populating the base which included such Series One regulars as Barry Morse (playing Professor Victor Bergman), Prentis Hancock (playing Paul), Nick Tate (playing Eagle commander Alan Carter) and Zienia Merton (playing Sandra). Now I always liked Barry Morse as the old professor in this but this shows up one of the possible problems of the series... not for the audience but for the producers... in that the top three characters were all in their 40s or 50s... which was unusual for the time. This wasn’t a young show although you did have Nick Tate’s Carter... who seemed to get knocked unconscious more or less every week... and the gorgeous Zienia Merton, who I fancied quite a bit.

But I certainly never noticed the age thing or saw it as a minus. The show was quite off beat though, particularly the first season... it never really got dull in that first fling. There wasn’t a heck of a lot of action in the first series as the shows writers dealt with more philosophical problems and dilemmas which, of course, is what science fiction is all about. There are often unasked questions at the end of the stories and a real cue for the audience to think things over for themselves. It’s also quite bleak and dramatic for the first season and this is not to its detriment at all.

I also like that, for the first season at least, the main hero figure of Commander Koenig can often be seen to falter, change his mind or make wrong decisions. It sometimes leaves a lot to be desired in a lead character but, at the same time, it lends a touch of realism and depth to the performance which is worth the trade off, I reckon. Although, like a lot of TV shows made before the 1980s, it seems to take delight in sending out the most important and irreplaceable characters, such as the base commander, on the most lethal missions. Seriously guys, when a dangerous and probably hostile alien is in the neighbourhood, why would you send the guy in charge, the most irreplaceable person on the base, in to deal with it? I can never understand this.

Depending on who is working on the show there’s also some nice cinematography and shot designs to be found. Some of the special effects are quite good and... some of it quite ropy. I love all the ‘miniatures work’ but 90% of the time you see any of the crew journeying across the lunar surface in a moon buggy, for example, it is obvious they are just tiny, static models. It’s almost as telling as some of the faces on the so-called ‘stunt doubles’ at times.

Actually, some of the worst but highly entertaining moments are when various characters are having a fist fight on the moon and they don’t notice that the visor on their space helmet has just popped up. But, what the heck, they just keep on breathing and hurling fists anyway so, what the heck? I guess they must also notice some of the space backgrounds have creases in the canvass too.

It’s generally nice to look at though and it has a lot going for it. Unfortunately, most of that changed with Series Two.

The first thing you notice here is that half the regular cast are missing. Either fired or walked away while the walking was good. And there’s never any reference made as to why either. Victor Bergman, my favourite character, is nowhere to be seen. Ditto for the back up guy who was always left in charge when Koenig went exploring... Paul is just gone, even though he was Sandra’s potential love interest. Sandra is kinda in it, then not, then back in it again and then... hmm... you never know if Sandra’s going to be around or not but in most of the episodes that she isn’t in for the second season, she is replaced by an actress called Yasuko Nagazumi... who I also fancied.

There were also some new kids on the block. As rival to Nick Tate for ‘young action guy to get beaten up, become an alien host or run about a lot’ you had Tony Anholt as Tony Verdeschi. He was okay although his off and on flirtations with another new character get a bit tiring and hollow after a while.

And you also get the one really good thing about the second season... screen actress Catherine Schell turns up as a new regular called Maya, an alien they pick up in the first episode of Series Two who can morph in to any animal, alien species or person at will, thus becoming the key person to get everyone out of trouble, more or less every week. Schell actually turned up as a different character for one episode in the prior series so she obviously got on well with the cast and crew, I’m guessing. The character was so popular with audiences, in fact, that the producers were going to do a spin off show just about her before the main show was unexpectedly cancelled at the end of the second season.

This second series is much more action oriented than the first and it’s like Commander Koenig has had a personality transplant, suddenly becoming the confident, unflappable hero you would expect him to have been in the first series but, losing some of the edge of the character in the process. Out goes the philosophical and more thoughtful questions posed by the stories in the first series and in comes the fist fights, air battles and dodgy aliens to emphasise a show more about action than anything else. Some of this second series is quite dull because of this attitude and rather than leaving viewers with questions about the story mechanics and moral dilemmas of what they had just seen, the second season was more likely to leave them contemplating the loose ends in the plot and wondering what the heck just happened.

If anything, the second ‘year’ is even more like watching an episode of Star Trek... one of the not very well made ones. As well as the deluge of boring action sequences, we have Doctor Helena Russell updating us at the start of each week in a kind of ‘voice over’ log entry... although the dating of this is completely inconsistent and nonsensical, it has to be said. And as far as the episode called The Rules Of Luton goes, it’s literally another remake of the Star Trek episode Arena, based on the much used short story by Fredric Brown.

The music pays a huge part in the reception of both series too, I believe. The first season was scored by Gerry Anderson’s regular musical collaborator Barry Gray and... it’s nice stuff. The opening music is cool and, though a lot of it is retracked in for later episodes quite often, much of the score quotes the main theme in different guises. Derek Wadsworth scored the ‘dynamic’ second season and, though it makes for a really great stand alone listen, in the context of the show it mostly sounds like a mid-1970s porn film and really does nothing to enhance the action... quite the opposite in fact. Which is a shame because the CDs of both these series are pretty great on their own. As is the Ennio Morricone score CD for the Italian dub of the show... would like to hear that in context with the actual visuals sometime.

Still, this Blu Ray set is actually pretty good, despite the inadequacies of the second season and, although possibly a little light on good extras, the show itself more than makes up for it in terms of the amount of guest stars throughout the run of the show. From established ones like Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Joan Collins, Shane Rimmer, Brian Blessed, Patrick Troughton, Patrick Mower, Peter Bowles and Julian Glover to some of those who are much more a name now than they were then... such as Ian McShane, for example. There’s even an episode in the second series where a photographic still of young model and actress Caroline Munro is pictured on the view screen in two shots in the last minute of the story. I wonder if she even knows her photo was once used in Space 1999? If there’s an opportunity in a post-Covid 19 world, I shall have to ask her at a signing.

So there you go... Space 1999 was definitely ‘of its time’ but, if you are of a certain age and were growing up with this kind of show in the 1970s, then you’re onto a winner with the Network Blu Ray set. Especially in terms of the first year.

Dracula AD 1972

Rising Vamp

Dracula AD 1972
UK 1972 Directed by Alan Gibson
Screening at the Regent Street Cinema
with Q&A from Caroline Munro 5th March 2020

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Okay, so when I found out that my favourite of the Hammer Dracula movies was playing in London, I couldn’t resist seeing this thing on the big screen, finally. Especially since I found out that one of my all time favourite screen personalities, the lovely Caroline Munro, would be doing a Q&A session after the main feature.

Dracula AD 1972 was Caroline’s first feature for Hammer and although she’s not in it all that much... she comes to a definitively sticky end quite early in the movie... she was the first and, as far as I know, the last actress actually put under contract by the Hammer Studios, following this film up with the equally excellent Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter. Alas, she’s not in this much but she surely makes a memorable impression as one of a young group of hippie friends crashing parties and generally having a wild time in ‘swinging London’... an incarnation of the counterculture which had moved on somewhat by the time this movie was shot but, it sure seems like a nice place to be.

Another actress in this group of ‘wild young friends’ is Stephanie Beacham as Jessica, the granddaughter of the contemporary ancestor of Van Helsing... in this film he’s the ‘all new’ Lorimer Van Helsing but he’s still portrayed by Peter Cushing (in a dual role... I’ll get to that in a minute). The group also includes Marsha Hunt, Michael Kitchen and, as Dracula’s main assistant, Christopher Neame as the wonderfully monikered Johnny Alucard (I’ll leave you to ponder the permutations of that last name... I don’t think you’ll need to draw out a hilarious chart like Peter Cushing does in this movie). Neame also plays a dual role here as his own ancestor in the film’s opening sequence.

Of course, we also have the inimitable Christopher Lee back as the charismatic Count and, as far as I can see, this film also stars the only other actor besides Cushing and Lee to play a running character in more than one Hammer Dracula movie... Michael Coles as Inspector Murray, who would also turn up in the next movie in the sequence, The Satanic Rites Of Dracula. Jessica Van Helsing would also be back in the next movie but played by Joanna Lumley the second time around.

And it’s still my favourite of the Hammer Dracula movies, that’s for sure.

The film starts off a little differently than their usual fayre, with an opening reminiscent of the James Bond movies in that it shows an ‘end of mission’ action sequence as an opener. The pre-credits are all set in 1872 as we are witness to the final confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing, starting with a galloping stage coach, Dracula clinging to the sides as he attacks the latter. The coach crashes into splinters and Dracula finds himself ‘staked’ to one of the broken coach wheels but, not before he has put paid to Van Helsing. However, Christopher Neame’s pre-20th Century character gathers Dracula’s ring, some of his ashes and buries them in a grave next to his nemesis as the burial goes on. We then witness director Alan Gibson’s first flash of creative genius (in a film full of really nice stuff) where he pans up from the graveyard in the Victorian era, into the sky as we see a jumbo jet soaring above London, effectively segueing from one millennium to the next in the space of a few seconds in one shot... which is really cool. Then, more of Mike Vickers excellent and funky 'wah wah' score kicks in as the opening credits play out.

From then on, the film is one big romp of a fun movie set in early 1970s London... the kind of period and city I love to watch on film anyway because it reminds me of my early days as a child model in the city. It’s a bit of a chamber piece in that it’s not epic in scale but it works really well and there’s a lot of nice stuff. The director designs some wonderful frames and he’s one of those people who is not afraid to use just a quarter of the screen and leave the rest in darkness so he can focus you in... there’s a pretty cool shot of a car pulling into a garage/drive from within, for example, where the only area of the screen that isn’t black is the bottom right hand corner where we can see the car’s arrival.

Also, considering the phenomenally low budgets of these Hammer films, they used to look way better than their actual financial means should have allowed for... the production values are something else. One of the audience asked Caroline Munro after the film if the church was shot in a real church or if it was a set. Her initial reply of... “What do you think?” was followed up with the revelation that the interiors of the church were shot in a studio and... well, honestly, they had me fooled. It looks a lot like a real location to me.

Peter Cushing had recently lost his wife when he made this and there’s even a photo of her on Van Helsing’s desk in the film but, he turns out one of his usual, interesting performances for this and he comes across particularly well in his action scenes, which he doesn’t look like he is able to handle but does so admirably. Lee is his normal, solid self in a role which he had, by all accounts, had enough of.. he didn’t like the idea of Dracula being modernised, from what I understand... and Miss Munro indicated after the movie that his personal feelings about the role and the script were not even felt or realised on set by the other actors... which shows you what a professional he was.

Stephanie Beacham is pretty good as Van Helsing’s grand daughter but I don’t think she has the best or, at least, most credible lines in the movie, for sure. And, of course, Caroline Munroe, in the few scenes she has, is absolutely brilliant. I love her opening dance scenes where she looks like a floppy, bouncy miracle bundle of energy who could go all night. I wish her role could have been a little more expanded but I’m just grateful she got the part, which she explained came about because the producer used to ride the trains a lot and saw her in her famous Lamb’s Navy Rum girl campaign posters at the time (I used to love those when I was a toddler, the colours and poses on those posters were quite striking).

The film is a little problematic in terms of continuity in future films, especially with the death of the original Van Helsing set as 1872... but thats something I’m going to need to look into a little more when I get around to re-watching Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires at some point. But there’s honestly not much I could find at fault here, to be honest, except for maybe the silliness of the dapper Johnny Alucard (he has the best shirts) falling in the bath and accidentally turning the shower on when he grabs it to save himself... effectively killing himself because, in this version of the Dracula mythos, vampires can be killed by running water (never really understood that one myself).

Dracula AD 1972 is a fine, visually inventive entry in the series and is the main one I’ll always come back to. Especially interesting to historians as a time capsule of what the establishment who were making the picture perceived the ‘youth of today’ to be, rather than actually nailing that side of things.  I’m so glad I finally got to see this one on a big screen too... that’s another one crossed off my cinematic bucket list.

Vampirella - Lost Hammer Performance

Fang About The House

Vampirella -
The Lost Hammer Script Performance
UK 2019 Directed by Jonathan Rigby
Performed at the Regent Street Cinema
Thursday 17th October 2019

Vampirella is a pretty iconic character these days. I think my father refused to get me a comic when I pointed to one when I was about 4, wanting to read it, because he said I was too young. She was created, along with artist Trina Robbins, by the driving force behind the much loved Famous Monsters Of Filmland magazine, Forrest J Ackerman... and she was originally, for a few issues at least, just another one in a long line of comic book horror hostesses there to introduce the stories. However, she was also given her own short strip as part of the comic and things soon began to look up for the young, vampiric alien from the planet Drakulon. After the Warren Publications Magazine finished in the 1980s, she found herself on hold for a bit but never absent for too long, finding a new lease of life in full colour comic adventures from the likes of, first Harris Publications and then Dynamite, who are still putting out a lot of stories with the character to this day. And I’ve never gotten around to reading any, alas... although earlier in the year I acquired a complete run of the Warren Magazines and I’m hoping to get through them sometime in the next year or two, so I can put a review up here.

Now, back in the early to mid 1970s, Hammer Films needed to rejuvenate their flagging company in an age where films like The Exorcist and other sophisticated horror movies were making their once very successful films seem very old fashioned and not that sustainable at the box office. So one of the directions they were going to go down was an movie based on the Vampirella comic strip which would hopefully take their stock-in-trade of Hammer vampire films and blend it with the science fiction genre (which was only a couple of years away before it exploded like never before at the box office) to see if this would get them out of a hole, so to speak. I’ve heard various names come up who were considered for the title role over the years, who either refused or didn’t get the job, including the wonderful Caroline Munro, the fantastic Valerie Leon and Barbara Leigh. Alas, the movie was never made and Hammer failed as a company soon after... there were several  ‘lost’ intriguing projects in their portfolio ready to roll and people still lament the fact that these didn’t get made.

However, like any good vampire and much like her comic book incarnation, who tended to hop from company to company, Vampirella refused to stay down for long... although as far as the Hammer version goes, it’s been a bit of a wait to even see what they had in store for her on-screen equivalent (there was a movie made by another company from another script in the 1990s which I still haven’t got around to watching... need to dig that old DVD out from under the pile.. but my understanding was that it was far from successful). Luckily, the original Christopher Wicking script surfaced back in 2017, according to Kieran Foster who, along with Hammer expert, actor and writer Jonathan Rigby, is one of the driving forces behind this particular project in its most recent form. So Jonathan Rigby adapted the script and got people like Caroline Munro involved to give what they modestly describe as ‘a live script reading’ of the unfilmed screenplay... although in the hands of this wonderful cast and crew, it seemed like so much more than just ‘a reading’ when I saw it performed.

The production opened with an animation set to music where a brief intro was given about the Vampirella character. The artwork on this ‘cartoon’ was extremely stylised and perhaps a little jarringly angular for a character who is, frankly, as much about curves as anything else on a visual level but it was really nicely done and somehow fitted the subject like a glove. Next, Kieran Foster came out to introduce the production before handing over to a cast of ten, very talented actors. Then came a lovely opening credits sequence involving a ‘montage in motion’ of panels from the old Warren Comics version of the character (which would have been the only version of the character when Hammer were trying to produce the movie) where various cast and crew’s names were placed into the descriptor boxes of some of the panels (this was very nicely done). This was followed by approximately two hours of the ‘dramatised’ reading. Jonathan Rigby started off with the narrative of the script but also played Pendragon, a down on his luck magician until he met Vampirella. The great lady herself, Caroline Munro, also had a couple of roles and many of the actors here had several. The nice thing about it was that Rigby had divided up the narrative sections between various performers to keep things varied and interesting and this worked a treat.

It was a great performance of the thing with the occasional visual flourish by way of an accompanying graphic and a nice musical score by Luke Jackson. Alas, Georgina Dugdale, who I believe is one of Caroline Munro’s daughters, didn’t wear the iconic red outfit sported by Vampirella in the comics and on the beautifully rendered poster by Graham Humphries (designed and illustrated for the event) but she was wearing a lovely red dress to keep in spirit with the character. Either way though, she was absolutely brilliant in the title role and it was a really strong and friendly performance. And pretty much the same can be said of all the people up on stage. Special mentions to Claire Louise Amias and Francesca Anderson for their wonderfully hilarious turns in this and a big shout out to lady whose face I couldn’t quite place... Peyvand Sadeghian... but then discovered she was the person I had singled out in my review of The Numbers (you can read that here) which I’d watched a couple of weeks before. Also, Jason Morell, son of the famous Hammer stalwart Andre Morell (who was once a Quatermass), did some marvellous voice work but nothing... nothing... could compare to his scream as one of his characters was ‘rolled’ to his death.

I had a really good time with this production and I really got a picture in my minds eye about how this could have played out as a film, thanks to the wonderful vocal characterisations on display. I tend to gravitate sometimes to films which were... let’s say were not always hugely loved in their time... as well as some of the more camp or interesting films of the 1960s and early 1970s. I can imagine, from the way the script came across, that this would have stood head and shoulders with such fun classics as Modesty Blaise, Barbarella, The Final Programme and even, perhaps, Casino Royale (yeah... you know the version I mean). In other words... something which might not have caught the imagination of its time but something we would all be happily devouring on Blu Ray releases to this day.

And, because of this, it just makes me really sad that this didn’t happen as a movie, although I’m pretty sure that some of the quirks of the script were, possibly, just a little bit too quirky to have stayed in the final filmed version. And by that I mean there’s a fair degree of post-modernistic reference to other works outside of the Vampirella canon itself... such as a boat named Dirty Harry. Or, at one point, I’m pretty sure I caught a reference specifically name checking Commander Straker from Gerry Anderson’s UFO. So, in a way, as I put the picture together in my head, I couldn’t help but think we were maybe ‘seeing’ how an uncut version of the movie might have played out.

The script did some nice stuff, too, with unpacking the information at an energetic and interesting pace. For example, it kind of reminded me of a 1960s Marvel comic as Vampirella’s back story was told through ‘hypnotic flashbacks’ at dramatic points rather than going at it in a more linear format and it really did bring home how well crafted these scripts were and whether that kind of structure would have been employed if it were filmed today (possibly making for a duller movie). The minimalistic stage direction, so to speak, that Mr. Rigby so empowered the production with, where little special vocal effects like the ‘hubbub of the crowd’ or Morell’s fatalistic scream, punctuating the text with little moments, seemed to really go down well with the audience too and I did find myself totally immersed in the thing... which is rarely the case these days.

And that’s me done with the unfilmed Vampirella. I would love to see this again so it’s a shame it’s only a one off performance but I was very pleased to take home a limited edition poster marking the event, along with a small programme, so I’m very pleased I came. An absolutely brilliant production and Mr. Rigby and his cast and crew did a really exceptional job. This will be one of my more treasured memories, for sure.

The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad

Super Kali, Fragile Mystic

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
UK/USA 1973 Directed by Gordon Hessler
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

I would have been five years old when I first saw The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad at a cinema in London. It was 1973 and I can’t remember exactly which cinema it was for certain that I saw this at but, a quick scan through of the supplementary marketing material included in the excellent new dual Blu Ray/DVD Sinbad boxed set from Indicator allows me to say that I’m pretty sure it was at the ODEON in Marble Arch, as it was then. It was the first Sinbad film I’d ever seen at the time... possibly even my first Ray Harryhausen although, I might have possibly already seen Jason And The Argonauts on the little black and white television set we had back then in the 1970s. It was also the same year that my parents took me to see my first James Bond film at the cinema, Live And Let Die, so... yeah, that was a pretty good year for introducing me to these wonderful characters.

I still remember getting on the tube train at Marble Arch after the film, clutching a copy of Issue 8 of the Marvel Comic Worlds Unknown in my hand as I waited for the train to come and take me home after seeing a film filled with wonder. This particular comic book contained the second of Marvel’s two issue adaptation of the movie and it had a beautiful cover depicting the battle with the big statue of Kali from near the end of the film. Alas, I never got around to tracing the first part in Issue 7 but one of these days I'll find the thing so I can read the whole adaptation.

As I stood there in the tube with my parents, gazing up in wonder at the giant wall length poster for Lamb’s Navy Rum on the other side of the tunnel, I didn’t make the connection that the alluring Lamb’s Navy Rum girl (alluring to me even at the age of 5) was the same girl who I had just seen as the leading lady of The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, the very likeness of whom I was holding between the covers of the comic I was clutching so tightly in my hand.

It took me literally decades to figure that out but you can pinpoint the beginning of my admiration/adoration of that particular model turned actress, Caroline Munro, right there. Even when I saw her in other much loved movies from my childhood, it took me a while to put a name to the face or even, truth be told, match up that face to different roles, to be fair. So when I saw her in other much loved films as I was growing up, such as At The Earth’s Core and another Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me, I took notice of her even though I was unfamiliar with her name or the fact that she was the sexy girl in the half undone red jump suit, balancing a checquered helmet in her hand for Lambs.

This was my first Sinbad film though and, while I’ve watched it a fair few times over the years, the new Blu Ray transfer from Indicator is a great way to see this thing.

Now this film stars John Philip Law as Sinbad and absolutely no reference is made throughout the film to the previous Sinbad adventure, The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (which I reviewed here), with Kerwin Mathews in the title role... nor to any of the other characters in that film, which seems to contradict the happy ending found in that last movie. So, like that film before it and the next Harryhausen Sinbad adventure, Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger, this one pretty much functions as a stand alone film. And quite a nice one still, at that.

The film starts off with a flying homunculus, shot at by one of the crew of Sinbad’s ship which causes it to drop a metal symbol on deck. Sinbad picks it up and wears it as an amulet. He does this after first seeing a vision of the film’s evil mystic played by Tom Baker and, also, a vision of a girl belly dancing with an eyeball tattooed onto her hand. This is our first sight of Caroline in this film but her face is in shade so the character can be revealed later via the eye symbol. After the ship goes through a very effectively shot storm, which looks and feels particularly hellish and after some shenanigans where Sinbad deprives Tom Baker’s villanous Koura of his metal symbol, he finds himself in league with a masked Visier who has another part of the symbol, played by Douglas Wilmer. They set off in a race to find the third part of the symbol which, when placed in a fountain, grants the person with these pieces special powers and riches. Aided with some new crew members such as Caroline Munro as former slave girl Margiana and his own trusty crew, headed up with right hand man Rachid, played by Martin Shaw who would find fame as one of The Professionals on TV a number of years later... the quest then takes the form, as most Sinbad movies seem to, of a road movie but with ships and sandals rather than using any actual roads.

Of course, various incidents and perils are thrown at Sinbad and his crew, mostly inflicted upon them by Tom Baker’s dark mystic, who gets a little more fragile and aged each time he uses his black magic to try and defeat Sinbad. He is aided throughout some of the film by Spanish actor Aldo Sambrell, who I believe also worked again with Caroline Munro again many decades later. For some reason, though, he kinda just drops out of the film about three quarters of the way through and I often wonder if this was the result of action that wasn’t included in the final cut of the movie.

John Philip Law is... perhaps a little wooden and naive in the role of Sinbad but he does look the part more so than the other actors who have played the character and it’s interesting because his stylised form of performance seems to play in direct contrast to Martin Shaw. Shaw, somehow, has a more naturalistic way of acting through the film and, although you’d think this would be at complete odds with Law’s approach to the movie, it actually makes for an interesting on screen chemistry between the two. It shouldn’t work but... yeah, it kinda really does, actually. Also keep an eye on Tom Baker because he makes this role his own and this is apparently the part which helped secure him the role with which he’s most identified with, the fourth incarnation of The Doctor in BBCs long running series Doctor Who.

And then there’s Caroline Munro, of course. She’s really great here but doesn’t have a lot of lines and so, similar to her role in Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter, if memory serves, she performs a lot of it a little like a silent movie star might. And she’s brilliant at it. If you want to watch a film where Caroline really has an unbelievable amount of screen presence, even when she’s not the main focus of a scene, then look no further than The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. I mean, yes, she obviously looks beautiful here... as she always does... but there’s a certain way she has about her that means it’s very hard to take your eyes off her when she’s on screen. More so here than in many of her similarly outstanding roles, I think it would be true to say.

Now the film is beautifully shot with some nice compositions scattered throughout and some truly amazing, Mario Bava-like lighting in some of the cavern sequences, where bright reds, greens and purples play against one another in the shot to truly give a visual feast for the audience. And as well as being a wonderful, artistic environment for the actors to perform against, we also have a load of the typically outstanding creatures animated and dropped into the sets and brought to life with the photo trickery of Dynarama (or whatever they were labelling the stop-motion process this time around... I believe it was called SuperDynamation in the previous Sinbad movie). So we have a wonderful sequence where Sinbad’s ship’s figurehead come to life to attack the crew... don’t know how many other ships kept their figureheads just inside the ship rather than outside but, I guess they needed to make this work somehow rather than just have it come to life and immediately fall in the water. There’s also a sequence where a cyclopean centaur has a fight with a gryphon... for no conceivable reason that I could see but, it seems to be integral to the finale of the movie somehow and it certainly looks okay.

And, of course, we also have the wonderful part of the film which made the five year old me really sit up to pay attention and... it probably has a similar effect on me to this day, to be honest. The wonderful sequence where the giant, six limbed statue of Kali is conjured to life and fights Sinbad and his crew with her six swords. It must have been an absolute nightmare for Harryhausen to choreograph this on set and then somehow animate it, frame by frame later but... well, the results are more than worth it as far as I’m concerned. Decades later, when I was playing Tomb Raider 3 on my Playstation, I came across a scene which was obviously more than just a little influenced by this movie, where Lara Croft has to fight more or less the same statue in a very similarly lit setting, by pumping it full of as many bullets as she can before taking enough damage to kill her. It certainly brought those childhood memories flooding back.

And added to all this, of course, the film has a standout score by Dr. Miklos Rosza. Now Rosza had a thing for epic pictures set in ancient times and he’s a good choice here... although the score is not nearly as good as Bernard Herrmann’s contribution to The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, for sure. Now, I always find late Rosza scoring beautiful but very dated. It’s like, however modern the film was, he would always be writing something like an old fashioned, 1940s Hollywood score and that can often overpower the visual images for films he scored which were made after the 1950s or mid-1960s, I reckon. And it’s very much the case here too, it has to be said but, I would also say that the years have been very kind to this film and now that we look back at it from a fair distance in time, the score seems to work better in context with the images, it seems to me, than they once seemed to. So I don’t know how that works but, either way, it’s still a lovely score and also a very good listen away from the film itself.

So there you have it... the story is not great but The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad does have some good one liners in it, such as “My heart is full of bravery but I have very cowardly legs.” and, combined with some good performances by the actors, good lighting and some stand out Harryhausen effects work, we have a truly fun picture which really holds up well now and will certainly keep the family entertained whenever it goes on. And it has Caroline Munro giving a truly remarkable, almost silent era performance which really draws you in. Indicator’s new set is filled with some pretty cool extras including a new interview with Caroline herself and it even has the old Super 8 cut down versions of the film as an option (which is a nice inclusion from a historical perspective). If you have the opportunity to grab one then the Indicator Sinbad box set is definitely the way to go with this one... you don’t want to miss out on this if you are a fan of cinema, for sure.

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

We’re Warner Git You Sucka!

Hammer Horror -
The Warner Brothers Years
2018 USA Directed by Marcus Hearn
Screened 26th August at FrightFest 2018

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years is the latest in a series of documentary films written by the director, Marcus Hearn, about certain sections of British cinema and TV heritage from times gone by. He has written a number of books, too, on his specialist areas of interest such as, amongst others... Amicus Studios, The Avengers, Doctor Who and, of course, Hammer Studios. So he’s definitely one of the main people you could want researching, writing and directing a documentary like this which, it has to be said, certainly has a very specific, honed down subject matter. That being the films Hammer made with money flowing to them from Warner Brothers/Seven Arts. This was during the last ten or so years of the original studio’s last hurrah although, there were also other films being made with other distributors before, during and after this which obviously don’t get much of a mention here.

So this one doesnt quite cover the last few years of Hammer’s descent into non-existence (in that particular incarnation) but it does show them as they are attempting to change the way their movies are produced and in turn perceived by a target audience that was clearly changing. So this covers mostly films such as Taste The Blood of Dracula, Dracula AD 1972, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires but doesn’t talk about some of their films with other distributors in which they were also trying to have a hand in changing their image, so to speak.

The film is, as you would expect, as series of talking head shots of various surviving creators and actors/actresses such as Veronica Carlson, John Carson, Madeline Smith, Peter Sasdy and the incomparable Caroline Munro, all interspersed with clips from the movies (and even rare behind the scenes footage) and interviews with such modern experts on the phenomena including author Jonathan Rigby, director Joe Dante and Sir Christopher Frayling.

There is a lot on offer here with, perhaps, not a lot of time to cover the ground the documentary so obviously wanted to try and get to. Consequently, I’m sure most people will find that not enough of their favourite movie from this, admittedly, somewhat short selection of films is being covered... which is not particularly a fair criticism, to be sure, because you’re always going to get that kind of thing happening. For instance, for me personally, there were some issues with the documentary which really only rang true for me and I’m sure everyone will have a very personal response to what has been covered.

Caroline Munro states here that a lot of people are warming up to Dracula AD 1972 after it coming under fire a lot over the decades and even in Kim Newman’s introductory interview with Marcus Hearn before the film screened, he put in a good word for it. I dunno, I somehow found it hard to believe that, despite the treatment of the gothic, church bound Dracula in this movie, which various interviewees rightly pointed out, none of the people in the documentary realised that Dracula AD 1972 is, indeed, the greatest Hammer Dracula film (followed closely by The Satanic Rites of Dracula and Taste The Blood Of Dracula). It might also have been nice to get Michael Kitchen’s view on his role in Dracula AD 1972 too, I think but... maybe it’s not a film he looks back on as fondly as some others.

And while I’m on the subject of that particular film, nobody in the documentary addressed the glaring continuity problems with the Van Helsing character created by the opening, pre-credits sequence in Dracula AD 1972 and the later movie The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires. Neither did anyone address the astonishing differences between the two actresses playing the character of Jessica Van Helsing in the two movies... Stephanie Beacham and Joanna Lumley. Nor indeed why that transformation occurred in the first place.

Another problem for me was the relatively short amount of time spent on Moon Zero Two (reviewed by me here) and When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth. The latter because it’s one I’ve never got around to seeing and I’m kinda interested in it and the former because, frankly, asides from the various Quatermass adaptations that Hammer did, I personally think Moon Zero Two is their next best movie. I would have loved to have had more insight into the making of that one, to be honest and, also, the way that I suspect it must have influenced Gerry Anderson when he came to make his live action TV show, Space 1999.

All this being said, Hearn clearly knows which noggins to tap for this particular story and it was truly a pleasure to watch the likes of Frayling and Rigby talk about some of this stuff at a variety of locations including the Cinema Museum and the Natural History Museum. It was also great that Hearn managed to talk to Peter Sasdy, who I don’t quite recall seeing before in one of these kinds of productions. In fact, one of the things Hearn pointed out in his introductory interview with Kim Newman before the movie played was that with the Hammer films of this period, now, it really is almost a race against time because at some point all the people who have first hand knowledge of working on these things will depart this earthly plane.

The one thing which did surprise me a little is that, given some of the books I’ve read about Hammer over the years (including some by Hearn, no doubt), there was only a hint of the problems behind the scenes with the various producers and studio heads at Hammer at that time. The death of the company was looming but it was perhaps not quite as chaotic or damning at the time these particular films were made to really taint the story of this period with the negativity which would later engulf the studio and rip it from this world. I did, however, notice a certain resistance on the part of some of the interviewees who starred in these films in that they weren’t all that enamoured of the direction that Hammer was taking but, as others pointed out both in the film and in the pre-screening talk, it was definitely something Hammer had to do. Hammer was being perceived as a somehow cosy and toothless brand of horror compared to some of the other, American, bigger budget horror movies which were coming out at the time and they really did need to change the way they wrote and produced these kinds of 'dark fantasies'. After all, as this film points out, 1973 was also the year when The Exorcist hit cinemas and so Hammer really were beginning to be perceived as the quaint, cutesy alternate to what I’m sure many people of the time were thinking was ‘real horror’. Alas, it becomes obvious at some point that they clearly weren’t doing enough to change their approach and it’s also made abundantly clear in the documentary that, when Warner Brothers withdrew their money and support from Hammer, it was the beginning of the end for the company that had fairly recently won the Queen’s award for best British exports.

As the director himself pointed out in his introduction to the film at FrightFest, this documentary is really an attempt to put together an ‘extra feature’ which is sadly absent from various Hammer DVDs and Blu Rays and it certainly has the look and feel of other extras he’s been involved with (and yes, it does often reference Mike Vicker’s main title score to Dracula AD 1972 throughout... a bit of a go to track for a lot of ‘Swinging Hammer’ documentary spots, it seems to me). That’s certainly fine with this audience member, though, as it’s solidly entertaining and certainly informative in a few places to boot. If you’re an admirer of the Hammer Horror brand with a fondness for this period in their celluloid history then Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years is probably something that you need to see. I, for one, hope the director might consider doing another such documentary on some of the other films that Hammer was producing at that time, sometime in the near future before the well of the legacy of talent dries up.


FrightFest 2018 @ NUTS4R2

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Luciferina

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

Videoman (aka Videomannen)

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