Scars Of Dracula

 

Bloody Mess

Scars Of Dracula
UK 1970
Directed by Roy Ward Baker  
Hammer/Studio Canal
Blu Ray Zone B

Wow. I wish I could say this Dracula film was as bad as I remember but, truth be told, while I remember thinking how bad it was last time I watched it, I didn’t remember any of the plot details at all. I think it’s so bad I just blanked them out of my mind somehow. Many people believe this is where the decline of the Hammer Dracula films started, with each one being steadily worse as they were released onto an unsuspecting public. Frankly, I think those people are crazy, considering the next film in the series was easily the jewel in Hammer’s Dracula crown and was, itself, followed by two very interesting Dracula movies too.

Now, you could be forgiven for looking at various elements of Scars Of Dracula on paper and thinking, wow, this one looks really interesting and, yeah, it does look interesting and I will go on to call out those points of interest in a minute. Also, it has a very strong cast with Christopher Lee reprising his signature role and with Jenny Hanley as the ‘final girl’ he has to bite. Playing her boyfriend and main minder is a young Dennis Waterman, a role many have said was miscast but, honestly, I think he does just as good a job with his lines and actions as any of the other actors in the cast and he’s certainly not why the film fails to engage. We also have the great Patrick Troughton playing Dracula’s human slave in this one... a part which I still think is beneath him but he does a good turn here. And, of course, Hammer regular Michael Ripper turns up in his third consecutive Dracula movie, with a much more expanded role than he usually gets, I would say.

So it’s still a great surprise, considering all the things it’s got going for it, that it’s a dull as ditchwater, almost plotless affair which even the impeccable acting and James Bernard’s score cannot rescue. The storyline just involves Hanley and Waterman ending up in Castle Dracula looking for his lost brother and bringing on various vampire troubles for themselves. Everything leading up to their confrontations with Dracula and his helper seem to be just so much terrible story padding and, none of it really works. There are though, as I said, a few points of interest but lets get the elephant in the room out of the way first...

The film starts off with Dracula reviving, from powdered blood on his cloak, by a very fake looking (and much used throughout the course of the movie) vampire bat flying over it and dropping fresh blood onto the ‘Dracula residue’. Yes, Dracula is brought back to life by a complete lack of imagination leading into his demise in the previous film, Taste The Blood Of Dracula (reviewed by me here) being played in reverse and, well, the location of his death, which took place in a cathedral of sorts if memory serves, has somehow been relocated to Castle Dracula... don’t ask me how. Since this film was released the same year as the previous entry, they must have thought audiences have a really short memory.

There’s an interesting scene, probably not the first movie to deal with this and the goriness is mostly kept below shot, where Patrick Troughton is seen clearing up after his master’s latest blood feast by sawing up a young lady’s body for easy burial. This was a nice touch and certainly showed something the producers may not have gotten away with in an earlier entry in the franchise (although I'm sure their Frankenstein films must contain something similar).

Another point of interest is the scene where Dracula, who is mostly played more like an English gentleman in this by Lee (probably his most interesting stab at the role, in which he brings a certain parallel humanity to the character), scales the sheer wall of his castle in much the same way that Spider-Man might do it. Although the scene shows his progress up the wall at high speed, it’s a moment which is taken directly from Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel, albeit with Lee’s incarnation of the un-dead Count looking a lot different from the one that Stoker wrote about.

Finally, Dracula’s death in this is also quite novel... although somehow still quite dull looking in execution. Dennis Waterman pulls a bar of iron off of the top of the castle and throws it into Dracula’s torso like a spear, staking him. However, maybe in this version the stake has to be wooden to be effective because, Dracula just pulls it out again. He then raises the makeshift spear in order to do unto Waterman what has been done to him, when a stray lightning bolt from the raging storm is attracted to the stake in Dracula’s hand as it would be to a lightning rod and, before you know it, Dracula is up in flames and his burning corpse falls from the walls of the castle. So, yeah, an interesting death at least, if poorly realised when away from the page.

And that’s me really done with Scars Of Dracula now. It’s a real mess but, of course, the series would soon redeem itself, at least in my eyes, with the truly wonderful Dracula AD 1972, which I’ve already reviewed on this blog and which you can read just here.

The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Boneward Hound

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Torture Garden

Fair Warning

Torture Garden
UK 1967 Directed by Freddie Francis
Amicus/Columbia Indicator  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some story set up spoilers.

Torture Garden is not, as I’d once assumed as a teen, an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s late nineteenth century novel (from which I can only assume the famous fetish night club takes its name) but is, in fact, the first kind of ‘follow up’ portmanteau horror film from Amicus, riding on the success of their tremendous Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (which I reviewed here). Now, I have to say, I was very taken with that first one when I watched it fairly recently. Alas, the same can’t be said of Torture Garden which, asides from having the same director and one of the original stars, I’d have to say is a very mixed bag indeed.

The film’s opening credits are all superimposed over footage of various fast moving fairground rides and, once these finish, we are introduced to one of the fixtures of the fair, the horror museum of Dr. Diabolo. Yeah, if you’re right in thinking they replaced the train in Dr. Terror with the fairground attraction of Dr. Diabolo, you’d be right. It’s another device to open up the narrative into four separate, short(ish) horror (again ish) stories. We are presented with Dr. Diabolo showing off his exhibits and then, after the ‘official’ show, he invites members of the audience into his private rooms to see, if they so dare, the real horror they carry inside of them... for the price of a fiver each, which was a lot of money in those days (to some of us it still is). Five ‘victims’ agree and he leads them to a wax figure of Atropos, Goddess of Destiny (played by Clytie Jessop), whose countenance turns up in the odd place throughout the movie. Of course, she’s not really a waxworks figure in real life and, in the long shots, she is having a hard time keeping still. I suspect, in some of the close ups of her, a static image is inserted. Anyway, the five victims (well four of them anyway, I’ll get to that soon), have to gaze between her shears and see their ultimate fates, in the form of a short story.

Now, like Dr. Terror, there are some famous people turning up in this one but they’re not all in the bookend scenes. Dr. Diabolo himself is played by Burgess Meredith and this would have been around the time he was playing The Penguin in the Batman TV series. Which is interesting because he has a couple of costumes in this and the first one includes a top hat and cigarette holder just like the ones he used as Penguin. Also, you know he’s not quite what he seems because, when the five ‘customers’ aren’t looking, he burns the five pound notes they gave him. Of course, Meredith is one of those very interesting actors who are easy to watch, so it’s a shame he doesn’t actually appear in any of the four segments... just the binding story between them and bookending them. I’ll go through a few more of the actors as I get up to them but let me give you just a brief flavour of them as I go through the film.

Unlike Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors, the four segments here are all adapted by the same writer who actually wrote all of the short stories on which they are based... Robert Bloch, who’s name may be familiar to some of my readers as being the man who wrote Psycho. Although not titled on the screen, the four shorts are called, in order as they appear in the binding narrative... Enoch, Terror Over Hollywood, Mr. Steinway and The Man Who Collected Poe.

The first sequence, Enoch, shows a young man (played by Michael Bryant) who goes to visit his sick uncle (played by Maurice Denham) in the hopes of getting money out of him. He causes a heart attack which kills the uncle and then searches the house for the old gold coins which the uncle seems to be paying for everything with. It turns up, alright when he unearths a coffin in a dungeon beneath a trap door. There’s a cat trapped inside the coffin with the skeleton and the furry fiend houses the spirit of an old witch, which takes over the young man’s mind and makes him kill so she can feed off the victim's energy. Now, this may sound quite interesting but, honestly, this overly long segment (and the next one) is incredibly dull and not worth watching for anything other than for seeing director Freddie Francis’ various shot set ups. Indeed, there’s a remarkable shot taken from just next to the underside of the bed with the action going on in the far end of the shot, which alerts us to the presence of a trap door long before the central protagonist sees it. Also, when the cat is filmed in close up, it’s done so with the kind of bright red and green lighting scheme which instantly reminded me of the way Mario Bava used to light his movies.

Segment number two, Terror Over Hollywood, tells of a ruthless young lady played by Beverly Adams, who blags her way into being an actress in a substantial role in an American movie but, to her cost, finds out the terrible secret as to why the top ten movie stars of Hollywood look so young for so long. Out of the four segments here, I’d have to say that this one is more of a science fiction story with a possibly slight horror tinge but, even though it deals with an interesting subject matter, it didn’t exactly grab me and we were maybe an hour into the movie by this point (not leaving too much time for what I thought would be another three segments but... there’s a great little trick when you get up to the fifth person... I’ll get to that in a minute). And it was an extremely dull and hard to watch movie up until now, I thought. Not a patch on the previous Amicus portmanteau movie.

Things turn around for the last two, briefer segments, though. The first of which, Mr. Steinway, tells of a female reporter who falls in love with a successful pianist, only to find the Goddess who lives inside the piano, gifted to him by his long deceased mother, harbours a grudge and is jealous of her. So, yeah, it’s a short but sweet segment and, wonderfully, includes a killer grand piano. It’s nicely done and the combination of Francis’ shot compositions when coupled to a less dull story seems to work wonders.

The fourth segment, The Man Who Collected Poe, concerns the man who has remained wordless in the linking scenes until now, letting his presence add mystery to the proceedings until he explodes into speech for this final segment. This man is played by the wonderful Jack Palance and it’s essentially a two hander between him and the even more wonderful Peter Cushing. Oh yeah, by this point you know you’re in really good hands with a story about two collectors of paraphernalia associated with the writer Edgar Allan Poe. Palance is the jealous guy in awe of Peter Cushing’s collection and, when he gets him drunk, he gets Cushing to show him his 'even more private' collection in the basement. Here he finds brand new stories written by Poe and a surprise in store as it’s revealed that Cushing, once he has been ‘done away with’ so to speak, is from a family which has used powers of black magic, ensuring he is the owner of what I will only say here is... the ultimate Edgar Allan Poe collectible. This is a terrific piece and Palance’s nervy, 'threatening to explode in his fanaticism' performance is a joy to watch... as is Cushing’s. Anyone who thinks of Cushing as someone who is just a solid character actor should watch his performance as a slightly drunk collector in the last part of this sequence. It’s an amazing turn and really calls to attention to just what a great performer he could be, when the script gave him the chance.

And then we have the bookend scene, where the fifth victim, the great Michael Ripper (who you will probably know from damn near every other Hammer film which was made), completely flips out and... no I won’t spoil that for you other than to say... when you think you know how it’s ended, stick around for a few more minutes... not everything is as it appears and I was immensely pleased with this because, for once, I didn’t see the coming twist reveal until it was almost upon me.

The score for the film is a double hander between two composers who I only really know from Hammer film productions, Don Banks and James Bernard. I suppose they both got one or more segments to score and, I have to say, that whoever scored the first sequence, wrote a great score which I would gladly listen to as a stand alone experience (if it were possible and actually got a release) but in terms of being a back up to the ‘on screen’ images... well it just comes across as a little heavy handed, is all.

And, that’s more or less that. I couldn’t get into Torture Garden nearly as much as I could with Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors but, having said that, there were things which made it worth sticking around for. Asides from the quirky and sometimes brilliant third and fourth sections, there’s also the odd interesting idea here and there. Such as a night club scene which had a giant sized snow globe with a Christmas scene inside, with real people in it. So I’m glad I saw it but I’m very glad this wasn’t the first of these films I watched. Definitely worth persevering with if you are into 1960s British horror movies though and, once again, Indicator have done a truly marvellous job with this Blu Ray restoration. As is usual for them, it has a fistful of accompanying extras included. Not one to miss if you’re a fan of these kinds of productions.

Dracula (Horror Of Dracula)

Fangs Of Fury

Dracula (Horror Of Dracula)
1958 UK
Directed by Terence Fisher
20th Century Fox Blu Ray B

Warning: Spoilers may bite you in the neck...

Right. Before I get into this review, I want to state up front that this is not one of my all time favourite Dracula adaptations... although it would certainly be in my top ten (and possibly even make my top twenty vampire movies). My all time favourites would be the unauthorised 1922 version of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (aka Nosferatu), the 1931 Todd Browning version of Dracula and the simultaneously shot 1931 Spanish version of Dracula which utilised the same sets but different actors and with some more interesting artistic flourishes than the Browning version (although you can’t beat putting Dwight Fry in a movie, no matter how good your direction is).

I do, however, have a soft spot for some of the Hammer films. The first Hammer movie I saw was when I was about 6 years old in 1974. I remember going around to my uncle’s house to see a television screening of Taste The Blood Of Dracula. This was a very important moment in my infant life because a) it was another Dracula movie I hadn’t already seen and b) my uncle had a colour television set. Colour! This was still a novelty for many people in the UK in the early seventies.

I remember liking Taste The Blood Of Dracula so much that, one year later, I started collecting the Shock Theatre bubble gum cards, along with all the other infant school kids, with their depictions of, often quite nasty and blood curdling, photographs from various Hammer Frankenstein and Dracula movies. I remember I never got to finish putting more than just over half of the set together because all the kids parents got wind of them and they were soon banned at my school. Trying to complete my set now, with an exorbitant amount of money being asked for just single cards, would probably be out of my price range, to be honest.

In the ensuing years, I watched the various Hammer Dracula movies as they came on television but I can’t quite remember when I saw this first one. I certainly remember going to a 2007 screening of Dracula at the National Film Theatre with my friend @cultofthecinema and being somewhat disappointed and, frankly, infuriatingly alarmed at the liberties that were taken with the story in this version... although I seem to have calmed down a bit about that now. Most movie adaptations are versions of the stage story of Dracula and, even when they’re not, most movie companies make absolutely horrendous changes to the tale (see my review of Dario Argento’s new version here for another take).

I was expecting to be a little disappointed on this subsequent viewing again, to be honest, but I wanted to see it because the new 2012 restoration includes shots taken from the Japanese release print. Long story, but there were usually a few different release prints of the Hammer films for different global regions (so I’ve always been told and this film seems to prove that) and the Japanese version would usually be slightly longer with more gore, to cater for the tastes of that market. So I was interested in seeing those few seconds of footage and, to be honest, to also see the new documentaries on this edition (of which, at time of writing, I’ve only been able to see the first featurette).

The added unexpected outcome of this viewing, however, turns out to be that it seems to have grown on me and the Hammer version of Dracula is a much better movie than I’ve previously given it credit for. I even like one of the things which critics have faulted it for but i’ll get to that a little later.

So... okay, as a straight adaptation of Bram Stoker’s original novel, the Hammer version, if you’ll pardon the pun... sucks. But, as a tight script which distills the essence of Stokers novel, cutting away huge chunks but also making some bold and sometimes quite canny changes to the story line in deference to both budget and timescales, it really isn’t a bad piece of economic writing and Terence Fisher shoots the whole thing with a certain panache, it has to be said.

One of the main things it’s got going for it is that the rhythm changes often take you by surprise and are quite emotionally manipulative. Now if I was being less kind or seeing it for the first time in a long time (and this may have been my problem with when I saw the BFI print back in 2007) then I might be overly critical for the film having what could be described as an uneven tone. But on this viewing I realised that those tonal shifts from sedate, long, tranquil stretches to sudden, intense moments of fury... notably in the scenes where Dracula catches his “bride” with Johnathan Harker and, again, with his final fight with Van Helsing... were actually quite deftly handled. Of course, you’ve got a wealth of good actors selling you the moments through their performance and able to keep up with those sudden emotional switches without having to pause for breath, but the way the shots are edited together, the whole tempo of those sudden rises to match Christopher Lee’s sudden bouts of animal fury or Peter Cushing’s sudden bursts into action is all marvellously well done.

Naturally, the music really helps and James Bernard’s score, which possibly sounds a little like his scores to the first two Quatermass movies in certain places (although that might just be me responding to his personal style of composition) supports this movie quite assuredly, matching the sudden bursts of ferocity with great cries of what I can only describe as musical chaos whenever the film suddenly shifts gears. I’m amazed the first of Bernard’s Dracula scores has never, at time of writing, been released on CD.

There are, as I said, a lot of big changes to the story. The swapping of Mina and Lucy and their relationship to Jonathan Harker, for example, will probably catch many people off guard. The cutting of Dr. Seward to an extremely minor role and the absence of his sanitarium and, indeed, of the Renfield character, might equally throw some people (I know it did me, back in 2007). Not to mention the location shift (due to budgetary constraints).

One of the more interesting changes is the fact that, rather than appearing at Dracula’s castle as an estate agent, Jonathan Harker is, in fact, Van Helsing’s fellow vampire hunter, and he is there to end Dracula’s life right from the start of the movie... under the guise of a librarian to help catalogue Dracula’s books. This also, of course, means you can call the Van Helsing character into the storyline fairly easily and rationally without having to jump through narrative hoops... you can cut a few corners in the story is what I’m saying here.

All of this makes a pretty good Hammer film, marred perhaps by the fact that the same set seems to keep being re-used and dressed to double for multiple locations. Something I picked up on back in 2007 and which further added to my disappointment at that particular screening. Reworking the sets is a skill still practiced to this day, of course (just go ask Ridley Scott), but I wish it hadn’t had to have been so obvious in this movie.

Still, I did enjoy this rescreening for myself and I even found Michael Gough’s performance, which is often attacked, to be quite enjoyable too. He has a certain chemistry in the role with Cushing, I feel, and I would like to see if they ever worked together again. It certainly doesn’t mar the experience for me... certainly not as much as the poor, overworked sets... colourful and brilliant as they are, shot from curious angles and lovingly plastered across the screen in some, nevertheless, beautiful compositions.

Colour me surprised but I certainly appreciated this screening of one of Hammer Studios’ most important films a lot more than the last time I saw it. It’s not as good as their excellent Dracula AD 1972, of course, but as Dracula movies go it’s really not a bad one. Bit of a classic. Miss it at your peril.