The Flesh And The Fiends/Burke And Hare Double

Snatch Of The Day

The Flesh And The Fiends
1960 UK
Directed by John Gilling

Burke And Hare
1972 UK
Directed by Vernon Sewell

Both movies shown as part of the Classic Horror Campaign 
to bring horror double bills back to BBC2 television.

Warning: Very slight spoilers snatched from their last resting 
place and scattered throughout the following paragraphs.

Now this was an interesting proposition. I’d already seen an “inspired by” version of the real life tale of body snatchers Burke and Hare in Val Lewton’s classic production The Body Snatcher, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, which changed the names and played even harder and looser with the established facts than either The Flesh And The Fiends or Burke And Hare did, to be honest. Here, however, the current Classic Horror Campaign team of @cyberschizoid and @DrKarenOughton gave us all the chance to see two movies inspired by these events in one sitting and the contrast between the two productions couldn’t have been more telling about the times in which they were made.

To be honest, though, it wasn’t this that got me to brave the very depths of darkest London on a Saturday afternoon. The main pull for me was the fact that one of the stars of Burke And Hare, the lovely Francoise Pascale (@Fpascal) would be in attendance to talk a bit about the movie and to sign copies of her new autobiography, which can be found at her website here.  Now I’d accidentally met Francoise at a signing session at the Westminster Film Fair earlier in the year and had been bowled over by the lady’s charm and enthusiasm, so to be honest it was more in mind with the thought of buying a copy of her book and seeing one of her more prominent film roles that I attended the said event than for anything else.

That being said, the Classic Horror Campaign’s screening was another corker of a double bill and I shall certainly be going back for more of those when I can claw back some time to attend. The two films I saw this time are both items I actually hadn’t seen before, and I have to say the presentation was both fascinating and entertaining... especially in light of the second of the two, Burke And Hare.

The Flesh And The Fiends was shot in black and white by director John Gilling, a man who would go on to direct some classic Hammer Horror movies but, it has to be said, I was not particularly impressed with the majority of the look and feel of the movie, if truth be told. The design of the shots and the way in which they were edited left me pretty uninspired on this one, to be honest but the one thing you really couldn’t fault it for were the performances.

Peter Cushing plays Doctor Knox crisply, without emotion for the most part... and with an eyelid that hangs down over one of his eyes... giving him a slightly creepy look, to be sure. Burke and Hare themselves are played in this one by George Rose and Donald Pleasance and they do it so well that you really wouldn’t want to fall afoul of either of these gentlemen on a dark night. Between them they emit a potent blend of brutish force and calculated ruthlessness, which certainly gives the characters the kind of gravitas they needed to live up to the real life villains the actors were trying to portray.

The second movie of this double feature, Burke And Hare, is a big, multicoloured confection of a film which could only have come out of that late 1960s/early 1970s period, I reckon. Derren Nesbitt, who I knew primarily for his portrayal of Number Two in The Prisoner episode It’s Your Funeral, plays Burke and Minder regular Glynn Edwards does the honours for Hare. The way that they are played is dictated very much by the tone of the film which seems to me to have been a direct attempt to turn the story into a light and fluffy comedy and sex it up for a cinema-going audience who were more interested in laughs and thrills than any serious attempt at portraying the facts of the case... which is okay by me, I love this kind of stuff.

British character actor Harry Andrews plays Dr. Knox in this one and plays him with a similar sense of authority as Peter Cushing did in The Flesh And The Fiends, but with a little more emotion. Unlike Cushing, though, he elects to play his role (or someone elected it for him) with a black lens on one of his eye glasses, as opposed to the downturned eyelid of Cushing’s incarnation of the role. It was also good to see James Hayter again for a brief scene. He always gives a good performance. And Yootha Joyce as Hare’s wife was also brilliant and helped give the movie another comical support.

And then, of course, there was the stunningly lovely (and still absolutely gorgeous as she is now, as it happens) Francoise Pascal, playing the romantic interest in the form of a prostitute in this version of the tale... in a role which was very much the equivalent of the one Billie Whitelaw played in The Flesh And The Fiends. Both were good in their respective roles but Pascal really knocks it out of the park in this one. And it wasn’t just because she runs around a lot of the film in various states of undress either... although that was also more than worth the price of admission, to be sure. During her interview session between the two films which made up this double bill, she said that she didn’t think she was all that good in this. Well I have to beg to differ on that verdict I’m afraid. She is definitely the only person you are watching whenever she lights up the screen on this one and really does give the film an enormous lift. Her acting is more than fine! She signed her book at the end of the film for me and I have to say, I look forward to reading this as part of my “holiday reading” in July. A review, I’m sure, will be forthcoming.

An in yer face comedy song called Burke And Hare by the popular band Scaffold (remember their big hits Lilly The Pink and Thank You Very Much... I remember Pinky And Perky singing that one at the end of their show every week) sets the tone to not take this movie too seriously right from the outset. The producers must have really liked this song, actually, because it’s included in the film three times... once at the start, once at the end and also for a “body snatching is fun” kind of montage sequence somewhere in the middle. Strange stuff.

In fact, the musical score by Roger Webb is quite odd all the way through. It’s like they are trying to inject even more fun into it by giving it something which almost sounded like a Carry On film soundtrack but with the added odd moment of B-movie terror stinger at certain points. In fact, one of my bestest friends who I was with at the time, @cultofthecinema, leant over during the film and whispered that the music was making him expect Sid James to pop out from behind a door at any moment. I’d have to agree with him that the scoring was maybe a little too strong at times... perhaps in an attempt to lift parts of the movie that the producers possibly didn’t have confidence in. Still, it’s of its time and I certainly enjoyed it as much as almost any other element in the movie.

In real life, after Hare was released due to turning King’s evidence, there were a lot of stories about what happened to him. Some say “the mob” got him, some say he was thrown into a lime pit and the no less credible accounts say he went to live with an in-law for the rest of his days. Each of the films here take a different ending... with the ending of Burke And Hare being a little rushed and more abrupt than I was expecting, to be honest. Burke And Hare has one of those “this is what happened to the characters next” kind of voice over narratives at the end of the film... before crashing into that Scaffold song again. This second movie goes with the lime pit story while The Flesh And The Fiends shows Donald Pleasance being horribly blinded with a lighted torch. More interesting than the fates of the two victims is the fate of Doctor Knox. He fares pretty well by the end of the first one than the second but in each of the adaptations he’s certainly portrayed as a misguided good guy, paying for questionably supplied corpses in the hopes of pioneering the cause for good, future doctors. In real life, of course, his reputation by association with Burke and Hare was a little less palatable and more than a little tarnished... but, of course, was not the career destroyer one would expect from a similar chain of events if something like this ever went down today.

Of the two films, I found Burke And Hare to be absolute brilliant (and something I ordered the next day on BluRay as it happens) and The Flesh And The Fiends to be more interesting in terms of studying the performances, especially that of Cushing, who was already being associated with and exploited for, certainly with some of the posters, his recurring role of Baron Frankenstein for Hammer.

All in all, this was another sure fire winner from the Classic Horror Campaign team. I’ll definitely be going back for more! Check out their web page here http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com/ and sign their petition!

And for more details about the charming Francoise Pascal, and to grab a copy of her autobiography, go to her website here... http://francoisepascal.co.uk/

Frighten Brighton August 2012

Brighton, Crisp and Even

Hello all.

When I first started up this blog, just over a couple of years ago, I used to semi-regularly feature a diary column which pointed out various up and coming events that film fans, cinephiles and selective rabid mad beasties might find interesting to attend. I kind of lost my way, or at least lost interest, in doing that Fresh From The Diary kinda column after a while, mostly I think because I stopped having the financial resources to regularly attend such things. However, I have been quite regretful of late that I let that regular column slide, to be honest.

Luckily, the organisers of the Classic Horror Campaign sent me an email about their forthcoming Frighten Brighton Horror Festival and it was like a virtual, bloody poke in the eye to get these kinds of things up for people again. Now I’ve not been to any of their Frighten Brighton editions before but I do know it will be a good day out for fans of classic horror movies.

How do I know that?

Well, I have been to some of their double bill screenings at The Roxy in London and, even if the movies aren’t always some of my favourites (although they often are), I can safely say that the atmosphere created by the two co-hosts Cybershizoid and Scare Sarah is always conducive to a more than convivial atmosphere.

So there’s that plus... what’s this?

Wow. They’ve got the sultry, knowledgable, Goddess-like and sexifying Emily Booth there as a guest at the show. Someone I’ve always wanted to meet in person... although I know I would probably go “all shy” and drool on myself by accident if I were ever in the same room with her. She’s done a lot of stuff in her time and she’ll always inhabit a fond spot in my heart. She’s worth the extremely “value for money” price of admission all on her own, I suspect.

But, in addition to the gorgeous Emily, they also have a stall of horrifying merchandise from Hemlock Books (horror film books, magazines and dvds etc), some “too ghoul for school” horror prizes up for grabs and, not to forget the main event, five incredibly cool horror films which are all must sees... at least in my book. And at £5 per film or the uber-cheap all day £15 pass to all the ghoulish goings on and shivering shenanigans at the Komedia in Brighton that day... you’d be a braindead zombie not to get yourselves down to the show.

Here’s my few words about the five films they’re showing... and don’t worry, no big spoilers in here.


Mad Love 1935
This is Peter Lorre’s first US production, if memory serves me correctly, and it’s yet another adaptation of The Hands Of Orlac. Yep, that’s right, the old template story about what happens when you graft the “criminal” hands (eyes, wig, various bodily appendages, depending on which version of the story you happen to be viewing) onto the body of an innocent and they take on a sinister life of their own, so to speak.

This is a pretty special movie because, in addition to the incomparable Peter Lorre, you have the original Universal Doctor Frankenstein Colin Clive (a direct relation of the original Clive of India, who he played once in a movie) in the film and the whole, stylistic delight is directed by former Dracula cinematographer Karl Freund, who imports his direct experience of shooting early silent German Expressionism into the mix. A real visual treat with a characteristically delirious performance by Lorre. Truly not to be missed.


Cat People 1942
Next up is the equally unforgettable Cat People, directed by Jacques Tourneur under the legendary influence of his producer, Val Lewton. This film had two sequels and one official remake (not to mention a fair few, um, homages?) and it certainly deserves its reputation as a classic scare movie. It’s the movie from which the term “a bus”, meaning a scary shock or sting, was named after and the scene with the bus in this film will certainly give you a start if you’ve not seen it before... as would a similar scene in the same director and producer’s later film, The Leopard Man.

Unusual in a way in that it’s a post-Hay’s Code movie that actually involves the act of sexual intercourse as the driving factor which fuels the fear of the main protagonist Irena (played wonderfully by Simone Simon in both this and Curse Of The Cat People), with a lot of 1940s “beating around the bush” in terms of not mentioning or showing the actual act of... erm... beating around the bush. It’s visually brilliant and subtly moody, as all the RKO horror films had to be in able to compete with the larger budgeted Universal productions at the time.


THEM! 1954
After Cat People we have my personal pick for best, or at least most fun without laughing, of this batch with THEM! Although I expect the audience will be doing a lot of laughing at this one too. Especially when the authorities are puzzled over why something large and ferocious has been after big stockpiles of sugar!

It’s no secret that this movie involves early atomic bomb scare, mutated, giant ants and, frankly, it’s a absolute classic example, and one of the better made, of that interesting little sub-genre. Starring James Whitmore, who I always see as a kind of poor man’s Spencer Tracey, and Edmund Gwenn, who I always think of as a poor man’s Leo G. Carroll (Carrol appeared in the giant Tarantula movie a year later), it’s probably the best “giant anything” movie ever made, I reckon.

Fans of ALIENS should see some similarities as the movie starts off with the authorities finding an orphaned, unspeaking little girl who has survived an attack by... something. And further similarities like seeking out the giant insect’s nest and battling them with flame throwers. I’m not, of course, suggesting Jimmy Cameron actively stole anything from this film... but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this movie was already in his blood when he made the sequel to A L I E N. I’m sure it’s just an “homage” guys and gals!

Also, look out for the casting in a “blink and you’ll miss him” scene featuring a young Leonard Nimoy as a radio operator. You see? It would be totally illogical for you to miss out on this movie!


The Plague Of The Zombies 1966
The giant ants are followed by a Cornish army of the undead in the Hammer classic, The Plague Of The Zombies. It’s been popularly believed and repeated over the years that George A. Romero’s classic Night Of the Living Dead was the first movie to feature an undead creature rising up from out of the earth. Well prepare to put paid to that modern myth when you see the very same thing happen in a movie which pre-dates Romero’s by two years (actually I believe the first time this was seen in a film was in one of the 1940s Universal Mummy sequels.. but can’t remember which one off hand).

This is a pretty good, atmospheric Hammer Horror and, even if it wasn’t, it’s got Jacqueline (My names Servalan, I’ll be your dominatrix for this series of Blakes 7) Pearce and the wonderful, “whoop every time you spot him in a Hammer movie”, Michael Ripper in it. What’s not to like?


Phantasm 1979
And then, to finish up the day, they have the first of director Don Coscarelli’s four (and counting, five is in the works now, apparently) Phantasm films. If you’ve not seen this before, you’ll think you’ve been smoking something funny all day by the time you get halfway in. Phantasm is actually a really interesting and, definitely, warped film. I still remember the 1979 TV spots of this from when I was a kid. It’s got a really great and unique atmosphere going for it and, apart from all the on screen weirdness, it’s got two great pieces of horror iconography on show too.

Yeah, that’s right. Two. It’s not that often you associate classic horror icons with 1970s cinema but Phantasm is the one which will change your mind.

For starters, you’ve got those wicked, flying killer balls which fly onto your forehead, sticking into you by the two strikingly ornamental blades, before a little drill pops out the front and drills into your skull, jettisoning the associated blood from the back of the ball in a quite ostentatious manner. One of the great horror moments of the 70s.

Added to which you have the irreplaceable Angus Scrimm as... da, da, daaaaa... The Tall Man. Seriously, another horror icon! Partially modelled by the actor on Boris Karloff’s turn in the first Universal Frankenstein movie, the character is a huge visual presence in the history of the modern horror film and has appeared, always played by Scrimm, in all the sequels to date. It just wouldn’t be Phantasm without The Tall Man in attendance.


So there you have it. Five great movies, merchandise and the stimulating presence of the legendary Emily Booth. Get yourselves there people!

Frighten Brighton takes place at noon on the 11th  August at Komedia in Brighton with more details on how to book a ticket at these three links...

http://komediabrighton.ticketsolve.com/shows/126525115/events

http://frightenbrighton.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/horror-by-the-sea/

https://www.facebook.com/events/290663814344396/

Frighten Brighton. The ball is back!

Vampyres

Rising Vamp


Vampyres (aka Daughters Of Dracula) UK 1975
Directed by José Ramón Larraz
Showing as part of the 6th May 2012 
Classic Horror Campaign double bill

Okay. Round two.

So after the interesting but, to my mind, mostly dull charms of Blood Of The Vampire (reviewed here), the second part of this particular Classic Horror Campaign  double bill was Vampyres (aka Daughters Of Dracula), which was much more to my taste but which also asks more questions than it answers in terms of the storyline.

Now I’d seen this movie years ago when a friend leant me the old VHS copy and I remember thinking... yeah, okay. Not terrible but not really a great film. But I couldn’t really remember it and my tastes have mellowed over the years. Also, if that tape was not in its original aspect ratio I would have probably “felt” the way it had been tampered with in terms of shot flow and design in a negative manner. I’m usually pretty sensitive to that kind of stuff.

This time around I really loved it but, while it is technically a British vampire movie, in that it was made with British money and is set and shot over here, I really wouldn’t go as far to count this as a British movie.

True, the acting in it is very "British", that is to say, the dialogue is very colloquial to our country while, at the same time, also being quite bad (in this case) and somewhat stilted in the acting style. Everything is delivered in a very proper but also very stiff manner which seems almost at an odds with the nature of the characters being portrayed. Why I say it’s not really a British movie is because of two reasons...

One is that the director, José Ramón Larraz, is Spanish... and one can see just by looking at the content of this movie that no British director would have turned this story in, in quite this manner (ironically, if the actors had been speaking Spanish and I’d been relying on subtitles, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the incredibly bad acting that goes on by the majority of the cast in this movie). The film deals with two female vampires who get picked up hitchhiking every night and lure their “good samaritans” back to their little stately home so they can have sex with them and kill them so they can drink their fill of life preserving blood (although that in itself is an impractical thing in that a fresh corpse a night would certainly have provoked more ballyhoo with the local police).

And that’s where my second point comes in. The film deals with two bisexual vampires who spend a lot of time naked and “getting it on” with both their victims and each other in fairly, for the time, graphic detail which most British directors then would have certainly shied away from. These are nothing less than “stylishly seventies” blood orgies... which are a bit of a rarity even now in this country (the film was somewhat cut on it’s initial cinema release and some of it’s subsequent home viewing editions over here) but the most interesting influence on this one must surely be that... well... I reckon the director may have been a bit of a Jean Rollin fan.

Jean Rollin, a French director, made badly acted, barely coherent but always sexy and surrealistically beautiful lesbian vampire movies. A lot of these are quite stunning, despite their obvious shortcomings in some areas, but one recurring piece of imagery which finds its way into a lot of Rollin’s movies (and literature) is that of always having two (sometimes twin) vampire girls/women who often drive the plot in some way. Now, to be fair, the two vampire girls are usually quite sweet an innocent in their outlook.... yeah, they can feast on peoples flesh, have loads of lesbian sex or practice sadistic tortures on each other, but for some reason they are always imbued with a certain sense of girlish naivete. Now Larraz doesn’t go that far in this movie... these vamps are definitely not, in any way, innocent... but he does take the theme of two vampire girls and puts them in a small scale setting where the action is always played out in a... well, let’s say cosy, space. This is no globe-trotting location movie like the large, visual orchestral symphony of a James Bond movie, for example. Like Jean Rollin’s own movies, this is a chamber concerto when it comes to the confines of its setting and, consequently, there’s not really a lot of variance over what goes on in the movie once the idea has been set up.

Once the visual ingredients are all laid out, the movie revels in its own “funky seventies” decadence for a while before coming to an abrupt end. Along the way there are some questions which hint at darker things but which never get answered. For instance, the movie starts with the two girls who become the vampires being shot to death mid-sexy romp by an unseen killer... but this in no way explains their vampire origins... or does it? The man who becomes their main and constant human snack bar throughout the course of the film (and surprisingly, he’s the only main human character who actually survives to the end of the movie) checks into a hotel in the area in which this film is set and one of the hotel clerks seems to recognise him from many years before... although the ages don’t match up. Hmmmm... are they setting this guy up to be the main vampire?

Well, the answer is... no. Not a bit of it. He seems just as confused as everybody else who ends up becoming bloody food for these female sexpots... which makes me wonder if there wasn’t a story change somewhere along the line and little moments which had already been shot to signify something else were just jettisoned later in the production as the story reshaped itself in to something else... due to either inventiveness, dried up funding or an inability to capture what was initially wanted. I guess I’ll never know if that’s what happened... but one of those things seems likely to me.

Not that this makes much difference. Vampyres is a really neat little “horror” film and, although the visual design and atmosphere are not a patch on what French lesbian vampire auteur Jean Rollin could create, this little movie certainly holds it’s own in the entertainment stakes and has a certain hypnotic spell all it’s own. I can imagine giving this one a spin when I’m next in need of a little mindless but sexy “vamping up”. Highly recommended for any fans of 70s euro-horror... and for fans of bare, heaving bosoms dripping with blood, of course.

Homicidal/Madhouse Double Bill

Far From The Madhouse Crowd

Homicidal US 1961

Directed by William Castle

Madhouse UK 1974

Directed by Jim Clark

Spoiler Break! This is your one minute spoiler break... if you don’t want to know the terrible secrets lurking in this double review, leave this article and click on one of my other reviews to read... I won’t laugh at you and point my finger at you... honest!

Okay! So once again I had to “wear shoes on a Sunday” to make it out of the house in time for @cyberschizoid and @scaresarah‘s latest London double bill to support their Classic Horror Campaign, launched to persuade the BBC to bring back their classic horror double bills of yesteryear. This month it was a double bill of two movies I’d never seen before... and I have to say, two movies I wouldn’t see again in all honesty. In fact, the reason I am reviewing them both as a double bill this time around is because I was none too taken with either of them (well, it would have been hard to follow last months killer double bill of Black Sunday and Horror Hospital) and don’t think I could find enough of interest to say about either of them separately to fill up a full on entry for each.

That being said, however, one of the best reasons for getting yourself along to these double bills is to soak in the atmosphere of like-minded people watching along with some of their favourite old friends (films can be friends) and often laughing at the twisted but camp thrills as they appear on screen. So, honestly, please don’t let my review of this one put you off getting yourself down to one of these brilliantly organised little events and make sure you sign their petition too!

Homicidal is a William Castle movie (he of the ballyhoo and gimmick publicity stunt) and it’s not a film I knew anything about. I think my only exposure to William Castle in my life has been his movie House On Haunted Hill and John Goodman's character based on him in Joe Dante's Matinee. So I'm perhaps not the best qualified person to comment on all things Castle. However, I did take note that it had been “influenced” by the success of Psycho, though it doesn’t have too much in common with that film from the previous year asides from some “through the windscreen” driving shots with the only other similarity being one of sexual identity.

Now, I might have been roundly surprised by the end of this movie had I not known of the tenuous links to Hitchcock’s movie. Unfortunately, after about 20 minutes into the film where everyone is talking about a character called Warren who has yet to show up in adult form, I suddenly twigged that the leading “homicidal” lady was almost certainly going to come back on the screen at some point as “Warren”. Sure enough, although the transformation is pretty good, the actress was soon back in a dual male/female role which gives you the entire end of the movie once you’ve realised this. If my mind hadn’t been working overtime in the background on this I probably wouldn’t have seen it coming... nor noticed the bad dubbing whenever Warren spoke. As it is, the rest of the movie was spent with me wondering when at least one of the other characters in the movie was going to catch up on this.

The general direction, acting and cinematography on this one was more than competent but nothing special and the score by Hugo Friedhofer is in the full-on romantic mode which he was used to writing and orchestrating for Erich Wolfgang Korngold... not the cooled down atmospheres favoured by Bernard Herrmann.

William Castle’s 60 second “fear break”, where you had 60 seconds to leave the theatre and go to coward’s corner to get a refund before the end sequence, was fun but... well... if you’d already figured out there was a twist coming then it kinda killed it.

So yeah... I didn’t have the best reaction in the world to this one but... it was okay and I’m glad I saw it. Ditto for the second movie which followed the usual intermission and “classic horror quiz with prizes” which is a regular feature of these shows.

Now I really like some of Vincent Price’s horror work from the early sixties to the mid seventies (that’s my favourite period for his work in this manner anyway), especially his famous collaborations with Roger Corman on the Poe movies (as a kid in the seventies I didn’t think much of these but when I finally saw them in my thirties in the proper aspect ratios as opposed to the truncated versions shown on 70s TV, I realised what little masterpieces these particular movies actually are). However, I found myself a little disappointed by Madhouse after a very short time.

For starters... Vincent Price, who plays a Hollywood actor synonymous with his role in a series of horror movies as a character called Dr. Death, is so built up as the fall guy that, when the “real life” Dr. Death murders Price’s wife to be after some heated words between them... it’s so obvious that the killer is not actually Price himself and this kinda put a slight dampner on things again for me because this all happens before the credits roll.

The credits sequence was actually quite well done, however, utilising still photography of Dr. Death and his victims and got a big laugh when Michael Parkinson came up in the cast (yes, he’s playing himself in this) and was impressed by the mention of Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff... although their only actual input in the movie turned out to be old AIP movies used to mimic the films of Dr. Death... such as Twice Told Tales and The Raven.

I was a little more impressed by the movie’s actual cast in that Peter Cushing was sharing screen time with Vincent Price in this movie as is Robert Quarry... and a horror themed party sequence during the film shows Cushing dressed as his regular on-screen nemesis Dracula while Robert Quarry gets to wear the same costume he wore when he was playing Count Yorga, Vampire.

However... while the plot of the film and the throwaway nature of some of the more novelty murders were all quite entertaining, there was nothing to really grab me in this one and when the second murder happens in the movie, some twenty or so minutes in, I pointed to the “real” Dr. Death on screen and whispered to my friend... “Is that Peter Cushing?” Alas, it turns out at the end of the movie that this is, indeed, Peter Cushing framing his friend for a new set of murders... many years after he had done the same with the murder of Vincent Price’s wife as seen in the pre-credits sequence (ushered in with the most ludicrous and highly comical scream you could imagine from Price as he goes to see his loved one and her head falls off).

The score on this one didn’t really do it for me either but I have to say at this point that, although I didnt get a great deal from either film here... at least I’ve been able to see them now without paying out vast sums of money for DVD versions and whether the films are any good or not is really secondary to the real reason for going to these Horror Double Bills which is, as I said before, the wonderful atmosphere created by the audience at the Roxy.

Please help keep these events going and support the Classic Horror Campaign by going to their homepage here... http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com/ or tweeting the organisers here... Cybershizoid http://twitter.com/#!/cyberschizoid and ScareSarah http://twitter.com/#!/ScareSarah

Vampire Circus

Blood and Circuses

Vampire Circus UK 1972

Directed by Robert Young

Screening as part of a double bill in a pub

as part of the Classic Horror Campaign.

http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com

OK, short entry here because I was less than enamoured of this particular film.

This is the second of the two films I saw projected on a big screen at the Roxy Bar in London as a presentation of the Classic Horror Campaign (a campaign to bring back the classic, late night BBC2 horror double bills from the 70s and 80s... check out their website right here). I reviewed the first part, the always excellent Night of the Demon yesterday (reviewed here) and now it’s the turn of an interesting little Hammer movie, Vampire Circus.

Now I’ve slowly been getting back into Hammer gradually over the last couple of years but this is one I’ve not seen recently, if at all. If I ever did see it then it would have been back in the 70s when I was about 9 years old... and probably in an edited version on TV. Little parts of it did ring vague bells as I was watching but that also might be to the familiar locations and plot devices which it shares with a load of other Hammer movies of the time.

It’s weird I didn’t take to this one because there were some "less than common for the genre" elements to the film and, also, the hosts for the show cybershizoid (his blog here) and scaresarah (her blog here) had promised “blood and boobies”... and I do confess to having a penchant (weakness) for bosoms besmirched with a touch of Kensington gore... so this film should have been a shoe-in for me.

The film started off well enough with a bosomy vampire sex scene and a torch and pitchfork wielding angry mob exacting their furious vengeance on said vampire and his young lady... and of course, at the denouement of this set-up we had the time-honoured “curse” placed upon the “mobbed-up” villagers in question which then sets the pace (somewhat slow and lethargic in places) for the rest of the movie which occurs some twenty years after the “death” of the vampire in the prologue.

While the quarantined villagers are busy dying from a plague which, we find out later, is carried by the bite of vampire bats, a circus (indeed, a vampire circus) rolls into the village to kill the folk from the start of the film... and their young offspring. Now, I know this was a Hammer production but when I say circus I use the term loosely. I saw exactly "two small coaches only" roll into the community but from this they manage to construct a modest show including three animal cages and a hall of mirrors. That’s pretty good for two coaches... where did they keep all the people (the ones that weren’t slumbering in their tiger or panther guise that is). That’s pretty good going... I guess since they do have a mirror which is a portal to a place under a spooky vampire castle so they can do their vampiric murdering in relative peace, then a decent case could be made that their coaches are in fact dimensionally transcendental. Although, if this is the case, I don’t know why the villagers don’t rumble them any sooner.

Actually, looking at said villagers... I think I do know why they don’t rumble them sooner. The community in the film, it has to be said, is not one where intelligence and common sense prevail in an atmosphere of reason and logic. I wouldn’t like to live there or possibly even spend a few weeks there... but what can you expect, I guess, from a place which makes Thorley Walters their burgomaster!

Vampire Circus is a bit of a strange one in the Hammer cycle of films, at least to me since I’ve probably only seen about 50 or 60 of them. There are exploding, squib blood effects from impact wounds which I don’t remember seeing in a Hammer film before and the predominance of naked flesh on show place this film squarely after the far superior (in terms of atmosphere and watchability) The Vampire Lovers. This would normally be enough to engage me with the movie, at least on some level :D but on this occasion, even the presence of a future Doctor Who babe (Lalla Ward before here double stint as the Princess Astra and then second incarnation of Romana) was not enough to keep me entertained for this one. This is one DVD which I won’t be buying when it gets released later in the year but I’d still urge all Hammer fans to pick this one up if you’ve not seen it. Worth a look at least once.

Again, thanks and appreciation to the Classic Horror Campaign for putting on an enjoyable double bill of this and Night Of The Demon... if they do any more of these events you should get yourself there. The atmosphere of watching these kinds of movies with like-minded individuals is worth the price of admission alone.

Night of the Demon

Name That Rune

Night of the Demon

(aka Curse of the Demon US) UK 1957

Directed by Jacques Tourneur

Screening as a double bill in a pub

as part of the Classic Horror Campaign. http://www.classichorrorcampaign.com

I’m not much for big celebrations of Easter. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, for me personally, there’s only two really great things about Easter. Number One is I can stay away from work and be with family or friends and Number Two would be that it’s an excuse for my yearly ritualistic screening of It’s The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown.

This year, however, my Good Friday wasn’t just that... it was actually a really great Friday. This is because the Classic Horror Campaign (a campaign to bring back the classic, late night BBC2 horror double bills from the 70s and 80s... check out their website right here) had organised a pub screening of one of my favourite British made horror movies Night of the Demon and also a classic Hammer Horror which I don’t think I’d seen before, Vampire Circus.

The venue and organisation of said event were great and the relaxed atmosphere, comfy sofas and knowledge that you were watching these classic movies with like-minded individuals did a lot to make this run-in to Easter truly one to remember.

Warning! Okay... so this review is only about Night of the Demon and, because I want to reiterate some points about it I probably already made in a review of another movie, this one will have some pretty big spoilerage in it... so desist from reading this right now if you’ve never seen this or the slightly truncated and alternate US version Curse of the Demon.

Night of the Demon is a 1957 movie made in Britain and based on the M. R. James short ghost story Casting the Runes. It was directed by the legendary Jacques Tourneur who was certainly no stranger to the horror genre as he had directed three of the best of producer Val Lewton’s famous and critically acclaimed RKO low-budget alternatives to the Universal Horror cycle in the 1940s... notably the original version of Cat People plus The Leopard Man and I Walked With A Zombie.

Now this isn’t actually, when you get right down to it, exactly a faithful adaptation of the short to be honest... but like other less than faithful movie adaptations (I might mention Jaws or Blade Runner) it plays around with concepts and ideas which are thrown up by the original source material and manages to be a movie that conjures up a chilling atmosphere which is reminiscent of the spirit of the original and, quite apart from this, is certainly one of the most watchable and entertaining British horror movies of all time.

Like the original short story, the movie takes up the idea of a demon coming to destroy the possessor of a piece of paper with a runic curse on it. Once the initially unknowing owner of said piece of runic scribble is aware of this, the movie becomes an exercise in a) the characters progression from “do I really believe this” to “bugger this I’m in trouble here” and b) how do I pass the curse back to the originator without him being aware that I’ve done it before the demon comes to take me.

The original story was a small character sketch on fear with the presence of an actual demon implied but not actually verified by the writer... a kind of “make your own mind up” conclusion as to whether the death of a character in the short story was down to a demonic force or whether it was a freakish and coincidental accident caused by the act of fleeing a suspected reality, in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way.

The movie plays things a little less vaguely with a pre-credits sequence that includes a scene which shows the demon coming to kill the last victim of the runic symbols in a quite charming "Ray Harryhausen-style" stop motion animation. I understand that the director did not want to make the demon implicit himself and hated the scenes where the demon is actually shown and I guess this would in fact fit in with his modus operandi from when he was working for Lewton over at RKO in the decade before. Still, whether the director wanted it there or not, it’s there and it’s curiously effective for something which is so obviously a stop motion element to the movie. The demonic murder itself is called into question because the car of the victim is electrocuted trying to flee the monster in question.

The very real villain of the piece, however, is a black magician called Dr. Julian Karswell who may or may not have been based on the real-life Alesteir Crowley, played by Niall MacGinnis who really gives a brilliant performance in the role. An absolutely charming character who will be quite happy to provide you with some charming chit-chat over tea and cake before slipping you a runic scroll and setting a demon on you.

The main protagonist is Dr. John Holden, played by Dana Andrews who was presumably cast to ensure the film’s distribution in the US. He plays a doctor who has journeyed from America to disprove Karswell’s claim of being a witch and thus finds himself, cynically, on the receiving end of one of Mr. Karswell’s nasty runes. His romantic interest is the daughter of the previous victim of one of Karswell’s demons played by Peggy Cummins... but she doesn’t really seem to do that much but provide a female Mulder to Dana Winter’s skeptical Scully.

By the way, if any of the plotline to this movie is starting to sound just a little too familiar to fans of modern horror cinema, that’s because this is basically the same storyline (with a few modern adjustments) of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell a few years ago... I haven’t actually come across anything where the makers of Drag Me To Hell have admitted that their movie is a direct remake of Night of the Demon... or even “inspired by” M. R. James Casting The Runes... but it does seem pretty obvious to me that this movie was just a thinly and inadequately disguised remake of Night of the Demon. Still, Drag Me To Hell was a pretty good horror movie too... my review of it is here.

Asides from the opening confrontation with Karswell and the aforementioned and subsequent death of victim number one at the hands of the demon, the movie keeps a brisk but discrete pace and keeps everything else under wraps while exploring the psychological effects of the events of a man’s death foretold on th characters. It’s only towards the last half an hour or so, after Last of the Summer Wine actor Brian Wilde throws himself to his death out of a window while reliving a demonic encounter in a hypnotically induced trance that things begin to kick back into high gear with a cat wrestling scene, a pursuit by a shiny bright demonic light through a forest (including brilliant Michael Bentine’s Potty Time invisible creature footsteps) and a race along some train tracks involving the runic paper and the death by one of the characters at the hands of the stop-motion demon. The railway track setting, of course, means the injuries sustained by this character can be explained by a train having rolled over him... something that Raimi used a couple of years ago as the scene of the final denouement of Drag Me To Hell. Hmmm... wonder where he got that idea from.

Shot in a stark black and white which perfectly evokes an eerie mood, Night of the Demon is the perfect film for fans and students of the Great British Horror Movie and I would heartily recommend this movie to people who fit that description. A shorter cut-down version of the film was released in the US as Curse Of The Demon and at one time I understood that this version was made from different takes of the same scenes... although I can’t seem to verify that claim at the present and I’ve never bothered to watch that version (as yet) so I can’t honestly say it is or it isn't.

The second half of this double bill, Vampire Circus, will be reviewed soonest!