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.

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.

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

The Most Assassinated Woman In The World

Luciferina

Hammer Horror - The Warner Brothers Years

Videoman (aka Videomannen)

Crystal Eyes (aka Mirada De Cristal)

Studies in Terror: Landmarks of Horror Cinema

Terror Firma

Studies in Terror: Landmarks of Horror Cinema 
by Jonathan Rigby
Signum Books ISBN: 0956653448

I don’t often review the books I read. Mostly because there’s always “the next film” to write about and sometimes I just don’t have time to do absolutely everything. However, I just wanted to give a little shout out to this book, Studies In Terror: Landmarks Of Horror Cinema by Jonathan Rigby because, although I have my usual reservations about this kind of tome, I did find it very helpful and had a few good times off of the back of it.

To explain...

I did a seven day countdown to Halloween back in October with a different horror movie reviewed every night. Quite unusually, for me, I actually liked pretty much every movie I reviewed for that week and I’d seen none of them before (also a bit unusual). Three of those titles were watched and included from among a fistful of movies that I’d not heard of before reading this book... so if it hadn’t been for this invaluable volume, I wouldn’t have been able to include Pontypool (reviewed here), Outcast (reviewed here) and Splinter (reviewed here) in my Halloween week reviews.

Now this book does have some large gaps in that the author is more into “favourite moments” from his favourite horror films... as opposed to what many would regard as essential. The original Universal incarnations of Dracula and The Bride Of Frankenstein, for instance, aren’t even included. Horror purists are really going to be driven crazy by many such omissions like these. To be fair to the author, though, he does at least try to tackle these omissions in his opening salvo and his insistence that the book is a collection of “moments of terror” is, at least, a token response to the obvious one that you also have gialli or common or garden thrillers highlighted over some of the more ‘classic’, actual horror films he could have included.

I confess, I wasn’t happy, but...

He kinda won me over. This is an excellent book and whatever you may think of Mr. Rigby’s skills in the ‘list compiling’ department, he does have a very good eye for digging out some really great movie experiences which, so far, have all turned out to be well worth my time. I was also secretly pleased he was happy to include a couple of movies which I personally would consider classics of the genre, but which writers of such compendiums seem to be largely ignoring so far... namely Werewolf Of London and The Descent.

The design of the book is very pleasing to somebody like myself who likes a simple, functional structure to the reading material on offer. Each decade from the early 20th Century up until present is represented, with a little introduction on the decade in question. This is followed by a load of movies, each of which take up exactly two pages of description of his favourite moments of that movie, along with a small overview on what else was going on simultaneous to this movie (including any influences it may have had), an incomplete set of statistics of the film (director, some of the main actors, composer etc.) and then a tiny sampling of extracts from reviews of the film, almost all of which are cotemporary to the time in which the film was released. This last little section from each movie is something to particularly relish as it does include a lot of very bad, ill tempered reviews of movies which have outraged various reviewers... many of which have gone on to become the classics of today. Wonderful stuff.

Once I’d accepted the inclusion of such ‘totally non-horror” movies as Les Diaboliques and Psycho 3, I was able to allow myself to enjoy reading the work of someone who has especially good taste in movies and the way in which they get under your skin. Using the option of ‘buying stuff really cheap for a couple of quid each’ at Amazon, in combination with some of the films in this book, I ordered not only the three I mentioned above, but also The Skull, Anatomie, The Tenant and Left Bank, and am greatly looking forward to watching and reviewing those ones for you also.

All in all, a very different kind of book than I was expecting, and not just your run of the mill ‘book of lists’ that have passed for expensive paperweights in recent years. Once you can get past the worrisome and always problematic issue of the author’s twisted view of what defines a horror movie, you will find this book well worth your time and a much more helpful book than some others you may have resting eruditely on your shelves of late. One word of warning though... because of the nature of the main thrust of this book in finding the best, unsettling moments, this one does kind of weigh in as a massive book of spoilers. While I was grateful for the discovery of Pontypool, for example, I knew what was going to happen to one of the characters long before it actually does. This is a shame but it is a kind of double edged sword so, I guess its “caveat emptor” time as to whether you want to risk the trade off. I’m glad I did... and can only recommend this book heartily to any fans of horror movies out there.