Spaceways

 

Three Stage Lovers

Spaceways
Directed by Terence Fisher
UK/USA 1953 
Hammer Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah, this’ll have spoilers rocketing your way.

I’ve been wanting to catch up with Spaceways for a few decades now so, this brand new UHD/Blu Ray set from Hammer films seemed like a good excuse to finally get to see this one. Since this was released much later in the same year as the utterly brilliant Four Sided Triangle (reviewed years ago by me here), I think this is technically the first science fiction film made by Hammer (although I believe there may have been sci-fi elements in others before this but, I’ve not seen certain films so I’m not going to question the established spiel at time of writing (maybe later). 

Now, I have to say I’m glad I finally saw this because it’s quite an interesting little movie. It’s a bit of a slow burn, for sure (a very slow burn even for audiences at the time, I would guess, judging from its critical reception) but I found it both charming and very well made. 

The film involves a community of military scientists living at the Deanfield Experimental Station. Our two heroes are the scientists Dr. Stephen Mitchell played by Howard Duff and Dr. Lisa Frank played by the always watchable Eva Bartok, who I best know from her roles in two fantastic movies, The Crimson Pirate (reviewed here) and Blood And Black Lace (reviewed here). However, Mitchell is married to a restless gold digger played by Cecile Chevreau (who was the voice of Buddha years later on the English dub of the Monkey TV show). She’s having an affair with one of the other scientists there, something which Mitchell finds out about but doesn’t challenge.

Anyway, after a small rocket carrying mice returns to Earth (with said mice deceased from the pressures of the journey), the team are ready to try out an orbiting capsule with a bigger rocket, in order to get it to navigate the Earth in orbit for all time. However, something goes wrong which means it orbits at a much lower place (which is an orbit which will eventually decay) and this is blamed on the third and final stage of the rocket somehow losing some of its fuel.  

Meanwhile, Mitchell’s wife and her lover have gone missing from this secure site and nobody can find them. So a military detective called Dr. Smith, played by Alan Wheatley, is called in and the film turns into... well... not exactly a whodunnit but a howdunnit. Smith accuses Mitchell of killing the two missing lovers, siphoning out some of the fuel before that test flight and then stuffing their bodies aboard to circle the Earth for the forseeable future. 

So, of course, there’s only one way for Mitchell to prove his innocence. Which is to speed up the time to develop a rocket capable of carrying a human being... and then going up and pulling the rocket back down to Earth with him. The game is afoot, so to speak, for Mitchell... with the aid of his new lover Lisa, to clear his name while Smith keeps up his pursuit for the truth. 

Okay, so it’s twisty, it’s turny and it’s ... incredibly slow. But I found that last trait kind of comforting actually and I loved the interesting shot designs and wonderful lighting in particular here. I’m used to seeing the extraordinary Hammer director Terence Fisher working with a nice colour palette but his black and white work in this is equally beautiful. I especially liked the way a party scene was shot, with a room full of people composed of a few set ups which made sure the chaos you might expect was absent and you could work out just where everybody was in the room. Not saying that’s the best approach for every film, of course, but it worked quite nicely here, I would say.

The acting is all very good and, although he’s pitched as almost a human villain, I found the Dr. Smith character quite an interesting fellow who, kind of, redeems himself by the end. Also, I found an early scene, where a bunch of scientists in a room are watching a camera playback of what was going on during the flight, to be almost a foreshadowing of a similar but more intense and complicated scene in the Hammer adaptation The Quatermass Xperiment (reviewed here). I’m guessing the scene was also in the 1953 original serial The Quatermass Experiment but, I’m guessing this was being shot around the same time as that was being broadcast so, I don’t think either story necessarily influenced the other in that respect. 

Another interesting thing I found was when the top scientist in charge of the project and his military counterpart were trying to justify funding for that fateful test rocket. The scientist pushes the wonders of space flight and discovery while the military guy pushes the ability to be able to keep close surveillance of the Earth from afar and the ability to weaponise that asset. Some things never change, I guess. 

But that’s me about done on Spaceways. As usual, the latest incarnation of Hammer gives us a nice transfer and a slew of supporting extras and printed materials (I especially liked the miniaturised press kit in the slipcase, for sure). As for the movie itself, well I really enjoyed it but I couldn’t, in all conscience, recommend it to everyone. However, I think people of a certain age who like slow moving drama should find something in this to keep them entertained. I had a good time with this one.

Night Of The Big Heat

All You Can Heat Buffet

Night Of The Big Heat
aka Night Of The Burning Damned (US)
aka Night Of The Burning Doomed (US TV)
Directed by Terence Fisher
UK 1967 
Planet Films Distribution/88 Films
Blu Ray Zone B

 Warning: Minor spoilers.

Okay then. I’d not seen Night Of The Big Heat before 88 Films issued this new Blu Ray transfer, although I’ve got it in the back of my mind that it probably played on British TV a fair amount during the 1970s and 80s. This one is set on a small island called Fara where, in the middle of winter... and at odds with the rest of the country... the inhabitants are suffering a huge heat wave. Patrick Allen plays novelist Jeff Callum, who is on the island writing his new book and who runs the local pub alongside his wife, Frankie (played by Allen’s real life wife Sarah Lawson). Then Jane Merrow turns up as his new secretary, Angela, who had a fling with him in her past and wants to reconnect... plus take no prisoners as far as his wife is concerned. 

This all goes on against a backdrop of strange goings on at the island, with the big tropical heat just a symptom of something else that’s happening. There are instances of strange, high pitched whirrings in the air sometimes and this is usually a prelude to somebody being confronted by something off screen and then being burned to death, as is the case when a character played by Kenneth Cope runs away after attempting to rape Angela... only to be confronted with ‘something unusual’. 

Trying to get to the bottom of it all is Godfrey Hanson and his amazing scientific instruments, played deliberately unemotionally by the great Christopher Lee. And, billed as a guest star  (he is only in a few scenes dotted about the movie at various points) is the equally great Peter Cushing, as the local Dr. Vernon Stone. Shenanigans ensue when Jeff and Godfrey form an uneasy alliance after the latter shares his theory that the heat is a by-product of beings from another planet coming to the island as the vanguard of an invading species, who need the heat in order to survive. 

And, it’s a film on which I’m now very torn. On the one hand, it has all the makings of a good ‘comfort horror film’ and I suspect it’s one I shall come back to every now and again. On the other hand, there are a lot of problems with it, tempered by the heat being a good excuse for Jane Merrow to run an ice cube over her half exposed torso and neck. I mean, some of the dialogue and story ideas are awful, which is strange considering it’s supposed to be an adaptation of a novel by John Lymington. Apparently it was rewritten from scratch a day or two before filming. It kinda shows.

And the film also suffers from some very low budget and not terribly effective monsters. Most of the time the monsters are unseen and thus create a certain amount of suspense and jeopardy until the big reveal. Unfortunately, the big reveal is just light pulsing rocks looking like they’ve been constructed from canvass. So, yeah, not good. 

The other problem is... the body count in the film wouldn’t be nearly as bad if some of the characters just acted on common sense rather than whatever the heck they do here. For example, people are practically going off to their deaths in ways that can be easily foreseen and, I suspect, easily escaped from...

In one scene,  for instance, Godfrey uses his walkie talkie to contact everyone in the inn to tell them to turn off the lights as it’s what is drawing the creatures to people. And so a token is made of showing some of the characters doing just that but... do they heck!?! When we return to the scene of the people in the inn, they have clearly left a few lights on... obviously to light the shot, I get it but, yeah, it makes no sense by this point in the film and it’s almost like the various main protagonists are trying to get themselves killed by doing the lamest things ever. So, yeah, I have no sympathy for their actions throughout the film, for sure. 

But, the pace is nicely fitting for the film and it has a kind of interesting score by Malcolm Lockyer. Now, I don’t know Lockyer at all apart from his music for the first Doctor Who movie (reviewed here) but, I have to say, I recognised the style immediately as sharing the same DNA of that score and was waiting for his name to come up in the opening credits. Which is another thing that pushes it into comfort movie territory for me, for sure. 

The denouement of Night Of The Big Heat is abrupt and totally unsatisfying, it has to be said. If you thought the ending of the movie version of The Day Of The Triffids was bad then, yeah, you ain’t seen nothing yet. So, all in all I would have to say that, in many ways the film is really terrible but, I found myself thoroughly entertained by it so, I was very happy to have 88 Films’ wonderful transfer hitting shops. It’s not one I’d recommend to everybody but fans of studios like Hammer and Amicus should maybe try and catch this one, for sure. 

The Devil Rides Out

Separating The Wheatley 
From The Chaff

The Devil Rides Out
UK 1967
Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Retire comfortably to a chalk circle if you don’t want to be attacked by spoilers.

It’s been a while since I last revisited the jewel in Terence Fisher’s directorial crown, The Devil Rides Out and, probably even longer since I read Dennis Wheatley’s best selling 1934 novel of the same name. And when I say best selling... I mean best selling. I remember as a kid, growing up in the 1970s, long before Stephen King became a name on bookshop shelves. If you were looking for fiction (of pretty much any kind, horror or not) you would find the shelves of book sellers and newsagents stacked high with large quantities of Wheatley’s tomes (and this one and The Haunting Of Toby Jugg were in pretty much every shop in the country that dealt with popular reading material, if memory serves). Bizarrely, they seem all but extinct these days but certainly, back in the 1930s through to, maybe the very early 1980s, these were wherever you looked. 

The Devil Rides Out was actually the second of 11 books that Wheatley wrote about the central character The Duke de Richleau (yes, fictional ancestor of that other famous Richleau). It was also the second film adaptation to feature him although, in the first one back in the 1930s, his character and name were changed somewhat. Only three of that series, this one included, had a basis in the occult as Wheatley was more known, at one time, for his pulpy adventure stories rather than his ‘few and far between’ occult adventures.

In this movie adaptation, which was pushed for by Christopher Lee (a friend of Wheatley’s) who plays The Duke de Richleau, he is joined by his three companions from those novels (making up the four modern musketeers in spirit, as I think they were originally pitched)... Rex (played by Leon Greene but dubbed by Patrick Allen), Simon (played by Patrick Mower) and Richard (played by Paul Eddington... best known, perhaps, for his stints on The Good Life and Yes, Minister). Other characters of interest are Nike Arrighi as Tanith, Sarah Lawson as Richard’s wife Marie and Charles Gray as devil worshipping satanist Mocata (obviously based on Aleister Crowley although, I very much suspect from an anecdote I read once by Wheatley about his meeting the man in question, that it’s based more on the sensationalist idea of Crowley than, perhaps, the personality of the man himself). 

And it’s a pretty good film. There are lots of elements missing such as the part of the plot dealing with the mummified penis talisman being sought to start a Second World War and using the Swastika, referring back to the days before it became a Nazi symbol, to deflect evil (it’s replaced by a common or garden variety Christian cross in the movie) but it’s actually a pretty good adaptation by another writing legend, Richard Matheson, who manages to extract and translate into film terms what was useful and yet still remain true to the spirit of the novel. 

Director Fisher does some nice things with vertical uprights and interior features, not to mention lighting to make very clean shot compositions to carry the action across. I especially like what he does with Patrick Mower’s shadow in one sequence, where it’s lit in such a way that it towers above him but, when his sense of power is taken from him by Mocata and he joins him once more as a complicit victim, he is suddenly lit from above and his shadow diminishes in size to something much smaller than him. 

Also, there’s a nice prominent colour palette of rich blues and pastel mauves in much of the picture, especially when something dark and devil worshippy comes up, later added to with some deep reds to warm everything up even more. 

Now, about those colours... I deliberately bought the US Shout Factory restoration of the film (the title of the film on the print is The Devil’s Bride, the original US title chosen for fear of people thinking this might be a Western) because I wanted one where the original special effects hadn’t been that tampered with (there was some revisionist style upgrading with CGI in various modern/recent versions of the film) and I was right to do so. However, the ‘other’ restoration by Studio Canal (a company name I’ve come to hate over the years for various reasons) is also included in the extras on this disc and, when I put it on to compare some scenes, I was horrified with the difference in the restoration. Some of the night scenes did not look very dark at all and, in terms of those beautiful rich colours I’d noticed... well... all I’m saying is the Studio Canal version (which I think is the only one available on Blu Ray over here in the UK, where the film was actually made) looks pretty washed out and mediocre in comparison to the main one featured here on the Shout Factory disc. I’m so glad I trusted my gut on this. 

Rounding out the extras on the Shout Factory edition are a ‘making of’ section, a talk about the movie by the always watchable Kim Newman and another one by the similarly worthwhile Jonathan Rigby (plus a couple of trailers where, on one of them, Leon Green’s voice isn’t completely dubbed out). 

And, yeah, The Devil Rides Out is, much like the novel on which it’s based, a fine romp of an entertainment and it even features a less than subtle but quite wonderful score by Hammer alumnus James Bernard... one of the few Hammer film scores which actually got a CD release for a short while (I put it on for a spin every now and again). If you are into films which take traditional (rather than strictly true life) devil rituals and weave them into fantastic tales of supernatural dread as a metaphor for good verus evil, with an absolutely top notch performance by Christopher Lee (playing the hero rather than the villain role he was often landed with) then this one should go right to the top of your list. It’s one of those films I come back to every 15 years or so and, yeah, I’m hoping this won’t be the last time I give it some play. 

Dracula Prince Of Darkness

Fresh Prince
Of Hell, Keir

Dracula Prince Of Darkness
UK 1966
Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

I’ve never known why there’s no comma in the title of this movie but I’ve left it as it is for this review. Perhaps, if you are some kind of royalty in the world of vampires, there’s no need to bother with trifling grammar... but it’s a bit of a bizarre ommission, it has to be said.

Anyway... Dracula Prince Of Darkness is the third of Hammer’s classic Dracula film series... although only the second to have Dracula in it as an actual character. As such, the film starts with a nicely framed flashback to the climactic showdown between Christopher Lee’s Dracula and Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing in the first movie... framed as a kind of diamond shape and with streaming mist behind the diamond... an interesting choice which looks like something that would have been done on the old flashback in a theatrical serial of the 1930s. So it’s a bit of a mistake to say that Peter Cushing is not in this movie... he certainly is as one of his key scenes from Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula, reviewed here) is played at the start.

In a scene made to set up the Van Helsing substitute of the movie... a wonderful, jolly priest called Father Shandor, played by future Professor Quatermass Andrew Keir... Shandor stops a superstitious bunch from committing the blasphemy of staking a local, recently deceased young lady, reminding them (and us) that there’s been no vampirism since the death of Dracula, ten years prior (more dates to totally sink the idea of timeline continuity within this series of films).

We then cut to two English couples, related by brothers, travelling around the area, consisting of the younger brother and his wife, played by Francis Matthews and Suzan Farmer... and the slightly older couple played by Charles 'Bud' Tingwell (from the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies) and Barbara Shelley (who would also star opposite Keir in Quatermass And The Pit... reviewed by me here). Pretty soon though, the English travellers find themselves in trouble and staying as guests of Dracula’s former butler Klove (played by Philip Latham... who looks a little in this like a sinister version of Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Show and its subsequent movie adaptation... I wonder if Richard O’ Brien had this character in mind in terms of the look?).

There’s a much less throwaway version of a Dracula resurrection scene in this, as Klove hangs Tingwell’s character upside down over a big coffin where he scatters Dracula’s ashes (he was melted by sunlight in the first film... although why Van Helsing never did something with the ashes is beyond me). He then slits the guys throat and, in this uncut restoration, there really is quite a lot of blood (bordering on Japanese arterial spray proportions) which mixes with the ashes and, in a long drawn out sequence of resulting mist and overlapping dissolves, revives Christopher Lee’s iconic take on the Count. Vampiric shenanigans ensue with the surviving younger couple fleeing to Father Shandor’s monastery where they are pursued by Dracula and his new vampire lady, Barbara Shelley.

And it’s a pretty good movie with some beautiful photography and direction from Terence Fisher, who uses some roaming camera for some sequences, such as an extended night time tour around the corridors of Castle Dracula which is almost like the ‘killer POV’ shots you would find happening later on, in a lot of US slasher films of the 1980s. Although the camerawork is in no way jerky, it’s very fluid and very controlled as it roves around the sets and actors. He does some nice things with colour too. A lot of the sets of the castle at night are lit up with blues but every now and again he will highlight something with a patch of bright red... such as a strip of curtains or a picture which is somehow bathed in red for no logical reason but looks great. Also, there’s a wonderful scene in Dracula’s coffin room where the light from a stained glass window is replicated and lit large as the lighting on a wall behind the actors in the reverse shot... with big blocks of different coloured shapes splashed against the background. It’s a bit like a slightly more pastel palette version of what Mario Bava might have done and it works really well.

The actors are all pretty good and we even have Thorley Walters turning up as this film’s equivalent of Stoker’s Renfield character, called Ludwig. Renfield was curiously absent from Hammer’s earlier Dracula movies but Ludwig pretty much does all the same things, including eating a pot of freshly caught flies at one point. Christopher Lee, famously, has no lines of dialogue in this movie... just goes about hissing at things and pointing. He allegedly announced he’d refused to speak the lines because the script was so bad but there have been several conflicting stories over the years as to why Lee has no lines in this... I suspect Lee’s version certainly has some elements of truth in it but how it played out exactly seems lost to time. I will say that, although Dracula is spread out into various sections of the movie, I would be surprised if Christopher Lee’s actual footage in the movie plays out for much more than five minutes. Probably his death scene under the ice of a moat in the castle, which somehow has running water under it and which looks truly awful in terms of the fake ice, has the most sustained footage of him (and this scene almost drowned Lee’s stuntman for real, from what I’ve read). He’s a definite presence in it though and the way he portrays him in this allows his facial expressions and physical skills to come more to the fore.

Dracula Prince Of Darkness ends, like many of the Hammer movies of this period of the 1960s, with a distinct lack of epilogue in terms of the wellbeing of the characters. Dracula is dead... again... and the credits run over his frozen features without fanfare or a real sense of resolution. It’s a mood which Hammer similarly employed for their third Quatermass adaptation, although the TV serial of Quatermass And The Pit (which I reviewed here) had a very long epilogue, from what I recall. Either way, this one is definitely an improvement over The Brides Of Dracula (reviewed here) and one of the better Hammer films of this, quite rich period in the company’s history, as far as I’m concerned. Definitely worth a look.

The Brides Of Dracula

Meinster Mash

The Brides Of Dracula
UK 1960 Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer Films Blu Ray Zone B

I remember that when I first saw The Brides Of Dracula many decades after I’d seen the other films in Hammer’s Dracula sequence, most of which I saw in my pre-teen years. I remember being hugely disappointed with this one and had a similar reaction in subsequent revisits.

My initial disappointment was that neither Dracula nor, it could be argued, the Brides of Dracula actually feature in the movie... unless you want to argue that various female vampires created by the film’s vampire villain Baron Meinster, could be given this title as a kind of extended metaphor for the brief narrative introduction to the movie, where the audience are told that, after Dracula’s death, his cult of vampirism lives on. Christopher Lee did not want to reprise his successful role two years after his initial appearance in Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula, reviewed here), for fear of being typecast in the role. Which he kind of was, of course... and he made a fair few Dracula movies after this one (at least one of them wasn’t even for Hammer).

Of course we have Peter Cushing returning here in the role of Van Helsing and, in one of a few factors which completely shoots the continuity of the series where he’s concerned, we are told that we are in the last years of the 19th Century. Cushing, of course, is always watchable and I’d maintain he’s one of the few reasons why The Brides Of Dracula is worth a watch. It has to be said, I’m not the biggest fan of this entry into the series but I do like the director and I can appreciate some of the things he, along with his set designer, brings to the production. I do find myself quite at odds with Fisher’s biographer Tony Dalton, it has to be said, in that he says in his recent book about the director, reviewed here, that he thinks The Brides Of Dracula is one of the best films in the series. Then again, he also doesn’t have much of a good word to say about my favourite movie in the sequence, Dracula Ad 1972 (reviewed by me here), so there you go.

After the opening narration we are treated to a bumpy coach ride (Michael Ripper is a rough coach driver, I can tell you) and we are introduced to the main female protagonist  Marianne (played by Yvonne Monlaur), who is on her way to teach at a private school in Transylvania. Unable to get to the school due to an incident (which half involves a man who lurks around in various scenes looking threatening and mysterious before dropping out of the narrative completely, still leaving me with no idea who or why the character was) she stays the night with Baroness Meinster in Meinster Castle, releasing her son from his imprisonment, not knowing that he’s a vampire...

Chaos ensues but she is found and helped the next morning by Cushing’s Van Helsing character, after a lengthy series of set pieces which means he doesn’t enter the film until the 30 minute mark. Which is similar to what was done in the previous Dracula movie, where a fair piece of narrative action leading into the story was dealt with before the entrance of the title character’s arch nemesis. Lots of shenanigans ensue as Van Helsing tries to help with the local vampire problem and save Marianne from being made... well... a Bride Of Meinster... yeah, that stupid title really makes no sense for this film.

The story is not great, it has to be said but it’s the magnetic presence of Cushing and the interesting direction of Fisher which just about keeps it vaguely watchable. He moves the camera a fair amount to good effect and quite often uses the height of the actors to create vivid triangular patterns in the compositions, something which I’ve noticed him doing a lot before. Another trick to make the staging interesting is to use areas of the set which are lit just slightly darker than others and to shoot the actors in these patches before having them move forward into the light, to increase the impact of their lines as their faces are suddenly lit up. Indeed, there’s one scene in this film where he does it in rapid succession with the only two actors in the scene, a real double whammy as one steps ito the light and then the other does the same in the reverse shot.

Indeed, he uses a lot of good little tricks to create interest in the dialogue heavy scenes. For instance, a shot where Peter Cushing is standing about two thirds of the way to the right of screen, talking to a local priest who is seated on the left. We can see the priest talking to him from both the left of the screen and also in reflection in a mirror behind Cushing on the direct right of the screen, as he's nicely sandwiched  between two of the same talking head, so to speak.

Another nice thing Fisher does is bring a lot of value to his sets, partially by using the old Roger Corman trick of ‘leaving the doors open’. One fantastic instance of this is in the first scene shot in a very narrow tavern. The set goes back a long way with various protuberances coming in from the sides and then with another room seen through the back alcove which is lit in a completely different colour to the first... bathed red in stark contrast to the rest of the set, highlighting the sense of depth. Very nice stuff.

There are some real problems with the ideas about vampires though. For instance, after being bitten by one, Cushing cauterises his neck with a red hot iron and this, combined with some Holy Water, stops what is presumably a viral, chemical reaction from taking place and turning him into a vampire... somehow. It’s a nice idea but makes no sense as far as I’m concerned. Furthermore, using the shadows of the blades of a windmill to project a cross and thus stop Meinster escaping is a wonderfully creative idea... except it only works if the body of the windmill would bizarrely project no shadow, which it doesn’t in this, somehow. There is no earthly set of circumstances in the world where the shadow of the crossing blades would be seen in isolation as they are here.

And another big problem is the continuity between this picture and the previous one in the sequence. In Dracula, Van Helsing clearly states that the idea that a vampire can change one’s shape into a bat is a fallacy. In this one, however, he clearly states that a vampire can change into a bat.... which the vampires in this movie do quite frequently... at least into a dodgy looking rubber bat at any rat.

I’m curious as to why Fisher wasn’t able to tap James Bernard for repeat scoring duties on this one. Instead, the score is provided by Malcolm Williamson. Good musical continuity, at least, is kept between the two films in that, although Williamson’ doesn’t use Bernard’s famous Dracula theme, the orchestration on this is very similar to the score from the first one and provides a modicum of auditory glue between the two films. So that’s okay at least but, despite some nicely creative shots, I wouldn’t recommend The Brides Of Dracula to many people, it has to be said. I’m not saying it’s the worst Dracula picture that the studio put out but, it’s very far from the best, it seems to me. Still, I look forward to revisiting the next film in the series fairly soon.

Sword Of Sherwood Forest

Baldry Tales

Sword Of Sherwood Forest
UK 1960 Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

Sword of Sherwood Forest is the first of two films presented in beautiful new transfers (and all the usual, hefty trimmings the Indicator label tends to provide for such handsome releases) making up their recent two film boxed edition Robin Hood At Hammer - Two Tales From Sherwood Forest, along with A Challenge For Robin Hood. Actually, Hammer Studios made three films based on the famous English outlaw but, for some reason, their first go round, The Men Of Sherwood Forest from 1954, isn’t included. I can only assume a particular other label (who shall remain nameless here because I’ve no idea if this is the case or not), are clinging onto the rights to the first film and sitting on them, not bothering to do anything with the property themselves. Well, I wish said label would get up and actually sort themselves out with these kinds of titles or, you know, let the rights go to much more deserving labels such as Indicator, Arrow or Eureka Master Of Cinema to do something much better with.

This one, though, surprised me as I absolutely loved it. It’s not particularly dynamic or that great but, it has nice pacing and has Hammer über director Terence Fisher helming the thing. And, of course, this has Richard Greene playing Robin Hood, fresh off of the 144 episodes of the popular British TV show The Adventures Of Robin Hood, in which he also played the title character (Fisher also directed a fair few episodes of this, between films). Since he was already popular in the role, it must have seemed a good bet to put him in a colour film continuing the character’s adventures and it also allows the audience the respite, mostly, of telling the origins of the guy through the classic tale, once again. With the exception of Maid Marian, played here by Sarah Branch, who is introduced to Robin for the first time again here.

The film starts off with some interesting music (more on that in a while) with some titles comprising sketches of various characters and scenarios with strips of colour appearing and overlaying them, in which the credits then appear. It’s a nice enough effect and the imagery, supported by an uncial style typeface, further pushes the sense of period.

This tale sees Robin trying to thwart the Sheriff of Nottingham (played wonderfully well by Peter Cushing, looking way different to usual to the point where I didn’t recognise him for about a minute) who is trying to lay legal claim to a village called Baldry, to turn it into a castle as it is in a good strategic position, in direct contrast to what the wishes of the absent King Richard would be. A squire is shot by the Sheriff’s men because he carries a specific seal to gain audience with the
rather dynamic personification of the Archbishop Of Canterbury (played solidly by Jack Gwillim), to warn him so he can stop this madness. So it’s up to Robin, aided by his merry men (not to mention Marion) to throw a spanner in the works, protect the archbishop and make sure the evil sheriff doesn’t get his way.

And it’s a nicely put together movie with, not too much action but it certainly cracks on at a pace and Greene is certainly confident in the role, carrying Robin likeably through the film. And it’s got an excellent cast too, including Niall MacGinnis as Friar Tuck and, no less than the great Nigel Green as Little John. I’ve never understood why the tragically short-lived actor was given big muscular characters like Little John and Hercules (in Jason And The Argonauts, review coming at some point this year, fingers crossed) but, he’s always so likeable and has such a larger than life presence that he manages to get away with roles like this. Incidentally, both Greene and Green went on to play versions of Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu series of movies made in the 1960s (check my main index to access the relevant reviews)... as did Douglas WIlmer, who was in the first Hammer Robin Hood movie, not presented on this set.

And the uncredited cast of the movie I discovered as I watched are just as good. We have Desmond Llewellyn, better known as Q in the majority of the Bond movies, as the squire who is shot at the start of the picture. He doesn’t have more than a couple of lines to speak before dying but it was nice to see him in something other than Bond. Also uncredited is Derren Nesbitt in another short lived role and, as one of the many villains dotted about the movie, regular Hammer actor Oliver Reed.

The film is pretty formulaic and, even though it’s not a faithful iteration of the more well known story, it still has a shooting contest where Robin has to prove how well he can shoot to gain dubious employment by another main villain in the film. This contest includes shooting arrows through the spokes of a fast spinning wheel to hit pumpkins, despite the wheel being stationary in one of the long shots before being shown spinning again in the next close up. It’s all good fun. Where the story certainly breaks tradition, though, is when Oliver Reed’s villain stabs Peter Cushing’s Sheriff Of Nottingham in the back several times, killing him before he gets any kind of chance to properly face off against Robin in the film’s finale battle, which takes place in a Nunnery. No sexy, lesbian nuns are in attendance, however... more’s the pity.

And that’s me just about done on the film but, if it’s a not particularly challenging but light weight and entertaining Robin Hood adventure you are after, then Sword Of Sherwood Forest certainly fits the bill. The boxed edition of this and the other film come with an 80 page booklet containing essays about the films, a double sided poster highlighting the original poster art for each and swathes of extras. One good one which I watched is David Huckvale’s appreciation and musical summary of the key parts of the score, written by a composer I’ve not encountered before called Alun Hoddinott. Apparently this guy was an extremely famous concert hall composer in Wales and Sword Of Sherwood Forest was one if his very rare dalliances with feature film scoring. So, yeah, it’s a great set to be sure and another valuable release from Indicator.

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.

Terence Fisher - Master Of Gothic Cinema

Raising The Dead

Terence Fisher -
Master Of Gothic Cinema
The Authorised Biography
by Tony Dalton
Fab Press
ISBN: 9781913051082

Just a very short review now to highlight to you a fairly recent book, Terence Fisher - Master Of Gothic Cinema, written by film historian Tony Dalton. I managed to acquire a signed copy recently from Fab Press and of the few studies of the man out there in the wilderness (if you can find any others still in print), this is the one I trust the most.

Mainly because Dalton was a good friend to Fisher and his wife Morag over the last 8 years of the director’s life and is still, from what I can make out, good friends with their daughter Mickey. So, if anybody is going to know what Terry thought of his own films and his colleagues, then this guy is the one who has heard it all direct from the horses mouth, so to speak. Not that I personally agree with everything he says about some of Fisher’s films, it has to be said. Here are three quick things we disagree on, for the record.

One is I love Four Sided Triangle (which I reviewed here). Two is that I really do find Brides Of Dracula a hard thing to sit through... I just don’t think it’s a great movie. And, yes, even though Terry and the rest of the cast hated it as much (if not more, probably, from the sound of the production history as detailed here) as Dalton himself does... I rather liked Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (review written and coming to this blog... at some point in the future).

The book has an unusual structure with regards to the more famous of Fisher’s works but it starts off as one would expect, with Dalton detailing Fisher’s early life. He was born on 23rd February 1904 in Maida Vale, went to study for a Naval career on the HMS Conway school ship, served his time and then did various things, ending up as a prominent window display artist for the Peter Jones department store in London (which perhaps explains why I’ve noticed that a lot of his film compositions tend to gravitate towards the centre of the screen?). He then decided to change career and seriously pursued his intention to work in the film industry, ending up as a clapperboy and editor for Gaumont, then editor for Warner Brothers and doing things for various studios on and off until 1947.

After this he went on a director training programme started up by Rank and, in 1951, directed his first film for Hammer Studios. The rest, of course, is history... starting in 1957 when he directed the hugely successful The Curse Of Frankenstein, followed soon after by Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula as it is known in the US - reviewed here) and really put Hammer on the map as the British quality name for horror film productions, directing many other movies for them including a lot of their revered terror films.

The writer takes us on a fairly linear route through Fisher’s CV until we get to this huge success and then, unlike what other biographers might do... and I’m not sure I totally appreciate this approach but, it is an interesting way of doing it... the writer starts talking about his remaining Hammer films in themed groups, disregarding the chronology and instead doing chapters on, say, his TV shows, his three Dracula films and the many Frankenstein sequels he did. As he goes along the text is peppered with quotes from Terry pulled from various interviews (including, of course, Dalton’s own) and each film is given a short precis and then a critical evaluation by the writer, including standout moments or scenes he thinks worth highlighting. Then the critics of the time are also given their voice in quotes from reviews, mostly contemporary to the release of each movie... these are often quite negative, it has to be said but, also oddly out of touch, I think, with the fact that many of these films were obviously well liked by the paying public and their popularity at the time meant there were many more made.

The book is certainly an entertaining and, dare I say it, insightful read into both the man behind some of the most famous Hammer Horrors and also, hand in hand, an insight into the general working process and how things were conducted at Hammer at the time. This includes little nuggets of information such as The Gorgon film he directed having the Gorgon named after one of the Furies and not one of the Gorgon sisters at all, for some unknown reason.

It concludes with a brief look at some unrealised projects which Fisher was either considered for or which he turned down at some point (Terence Fisher’s Dune anyone?) including two unrealised Dracula productions... and finishes off with a very touching epilogue dealing with the man’s final days and the various messages of sympathy sent to honour the man and say good bye to him (particularly touching are words by both Peter Cushing and Thorley Walters).

All in all, Terence Fisher - Master Of Gothic Cinema is a very entertaining and informative book which certainly captures a mood or sketch of the man and which I think admirers of both his work and the milieu in which he did it will find extremely interesting. I’m especially glad I read this one because, although I’ve been watching Fisher’s films all my life, he’s not a director I’ve really been aware of as an ‘auteur’ as such... and Dalton makes a very convincing case that he certainly was. Give this one a whirl if you are at all interested in this stuff, would be my advice.

The Earth Dies Screaming

Signal And I

The Earth Dies Screaming
UK 1964 Directed by Terence Fisher
Signal One/20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

The Earth Dies Screaming is a film I accidentally discovered not so long ago... maybe only 15 years ago at most... so I am, admittedly, a latecomer to the party but I remember how overjoyed I was when I first saw it. It’s absolutely brilliant but it’s also a very short film, clocking in at literally just a few minutes over an hour. Which is fine if it’s part of a double bill DVD like my first copy of this, on the old US Midnite Movies label but, honestly, I would be loathe to pay full whack for a Blu Ray of the thing and so, when a sparkly new restoration was released a couple of years ago... I didn’t. Then comes HMV to the rescue with one of their Covid 19 induced, almost daily ‘special offer’ sales and this one was in their two for £12 sale so, lucky I waited on it as I got to pay a price more suited to the running time. Also, watching this under corona virus lock down is just right for this film.

And it’s a real humdinger of a movie, right from the opening hook of a pre-credits sequence. The film is shot in a nice, crisp black and white 1.66:1 aspect ratio and it’s directed by Hammer alumni Terence Fisher. It starts off with, for my money, a most spectacular series of shots depicting an out of control steam train derailing. Now, the guy on the commentary track (which I also listened to but... well, I’ll get to that later) says that this opening shot is a miniature and I’ve no reason to doubt him but, honestly, it’s easily the best miniature I’ve seen, if it is. The grass blown in the wind and the steam rising from the funnel as the train goes down and everything is in exactly the right proportion to the model... all I can say is I could have sworn they did it for real. It’s that good.

This is followed by a shot of a car crashing into a brick wall, various people just dropping dead in the street and a plane falling out of the sky. I remember the first time I saw this I thought... wow, it’s just like the opening of Village Of The Damned. That film had, of course, been released into cinemas four years earlier and, as I’m sure you’ll remember if you’ve seen it, it starts off with a whole village full of people just passing out and staying unconscious for a day or so. Well, thanks to the guy on the commentary track here, I now know that the train shot is pilfered footage as, indeed, is the majority of the pre-credits sequence and it turns out that most of the footage used here consists of alternate takes at different angles from the exact same sequences in Village Of The Damned. So there you go... I learned something.

After the title and credits roll, we get my one big problem with the film... sure, we’ve just seen the majority of the planet fall dead but... not a one of them were screaming. They just passed out and died. So why the film is called The Earth Dies Screaming is anyone’s guess. No screaming here.

We then go to the little village square in which the majority of the film takes place (in an interior which is said to be a copy, which matches perfectly, the inside of the actual village inn used for the exteriors) and the American star, Willard Parker turns up. Yes, this is one of those curious 50s/60s British sci-fi/horror movies which used to import a somewhat lesser known or somewhat washed up US actor in the hopes that it will attract audiences overseas. So the first two Quatermass adaptations had Brian Donlevy, X-The Unknown had Dean Jagger, The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye) had Forrest Tucker and... The Earth Dies Screaming had Willard Parker.

Here he’s joined by an absolutely wonderful cast of six other actors, comprising Parker’s real life wife Virginia Field (who is, more or less, the implied romantic interest for Parker here), Dennis Price (playing the kind of ‘human villain’ role he was known for), Thorley Walters, Vanda Godsell, David Spenser and Anna Palk. These are all people who accidentally come together and surmise they have survived what they believe to be ‘an attack’ by not being in a place where they were able to breathe the same atmosphere as everyone else at the time... Parker as test pilot up in an altitude not affected, Field in an oxygen tent etc. They also have the standard dramatic plot roles to fulfil... for example Godsell playing the first post-earth dying victim, Walters the alcoholic, Spenser the sassy youth and Palk his heavily pregnant girlfriend etc. You just know that the birth is going to come on at just the wrong time, right?

Now the film is excellent and, after the introduction of roving space robots (who apparently elicit a lot of laughs from youngsters but, frankly, I’ve always been terrified of them) and also the resurrected zombie bodies of people (shades of The Trollenberg Terror), their white eyes staring as they attempt to visit death upon you... it's all just hugely suspenseful. At just over an hour it never outstays its welcome but, honestly, I could easily watch two or three hours of this stuff. I remember the first time I saw the scene where most everyone is asleep in the inn and the pregnant Palk is fixing herself some milk halfway through the night, blissfully unaware of the robot monster observing her from the other side of the kitchen windows. I was on the edge of my seat, as I was for most of the movie. This is a really nice yarn and, in some ways, foreshadows a little the kind of slow moving zombie films which were popularised by George A. Romero just a few years later.

Part of that is due to Fisher’s direction and shot design, part of that is due to the cast who make a nice ensemble and do a good, efficient job of allowing their character stereotypes to come to life with broad strokes... and it’s also helped by Elisabeth Lutyen’s (daughter of architect Sir Edwin Lutyens) rather wonderful score of ‘weird suspense’ which I would love to hear on CD some day. Alas, the majority of this avant-garde composer’s film work is unreleased and mostly it’s her more famous concert hall work which has been let out into the wild. It’s a nice score though, delicately spotted and certainly adds to the natural tension of the movie.

One of the things I love is the fact that, apart from being able to identify that the robots and zombie humans are being controlled by radio signals boosted by key radio towers on Earth (to allow for a bit of a deus ex machina end game which knocks the robots in the surrounding area out), we are given no explanation of the why or who this mysterious alien presence is. It’s very much like one of those many zombie films where the reason for the outbreak is unknown and never explained enough to get in the way of the drama of the situation. I can’t help but feel that this film has been a little influential on certain directors over the years.

This Blu Ray is nicely put together and has a lovely transfer. Extras include a short, not that great, documentary account about the experiences of three ‘behind the scenes’ staff working with the producer and a commentary track which, although it gave me a little information, I felt was a little vulgar and maybe just a little inaccurate in places too. It also felt a bit patronising at times but, maybe I’m a little sensitive... he did pick up, as I do believe myself, that these robot monsters may well have been the inspiration for the Cybermen in Doctor Who, who made their debut on the show just two years after the release of this film. It’s probably one of my least favourite commentary tracks for films of this sort but I’m glad it’s there because, how else would I have known about the alternative footage from Village Of The Damned making its way into the picture? So, yeah, for the princely sum of £6 I’m really not complaining because this is a film which has a lot of rewatch legs (this must be maybe the fourth time I’ve watched it) and I know this Blu Ray should get a lot of play in the upcoming years too.

And that’s me done with the somewhat contradictory titled The Earth Dies Screaming. If you’ve never seen this and you like nicely done, mid-60s sci-fi and horror then you really do owe it yourself to set that to rights immediately. It’s a fantastic movie.

Island Of Terror

Confounded? Try Silicate!

Island Of Terror (aka Night Of The Silicates)
UK 1966
Directed by Terence Fisher
Odeon Entertainment (for Planet Films) 
Blu Ray Region B

Warning: Slight spoilers but nothing which 
should really diminish your enjoyment of this movie.

One of the things I love about the current Blu Ray and DVD release landscape in the UK is the discovery of movies I really should have been tuned into as a kid but which, somehow, managed to escape me. Such a release is the new UK Blu Ray of the 1966 Terence Fisher movie Island Of Terror. Now Fisher is a director who is probably on the radar of pretty much anyone who’s interested in British movies made in the Science Fiction and Horror genres... most famously for the movies he shot for Hammer films such as Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula and reviewed by me here) and the excellent Four Sided Triangle (reviewed by me here). He also directed one of my all time favourite British sci-fi/horror tales, The Earth Dies Screaming, which I would recommend to all of my readers and which definitely falls into the realm of what I have often called on here, my much loved ‘comfort horror’ films.

Island Of Terror is, from now on, also one of these much loved comfort horror films I will occasionally reach for but, I should probably warn the faint of heart when it comes to certain people who like to take their horror straight up and as it comes, that it’s also badly written and falls quite comfortably into that realm of cinematic entertainment known as... the unintentionally hilarious movie.

The film starts off with some amazing script outbursts which show the inhabitants of an island village at their harbour, each passing second including samples of dialogue which absolutely highlights how cut off from the world they are, even to the point where ‘the company’ hasn’t even bothered to put phones on the island for the last two years. It’s a smallish community and even the local police force seems to be a force of one - Constable John Harris played by Sam Kydd. We then cut to a scene of some of the most incomprehensible sci-fi techno babble I've heard committed to celluloid, which I’m sure even the scriptwriters probably didn’t understand and made up without any kind of research, as a team of scientists in a secluded manor house on the island start their next experiment involving Strontium 90 and a load of lab equipment. All in a quest to discover the cure for cancer. The pseudo-science dialogue is quite outrageously bad, even for a movie like this, and would have took some rehearsing to get it to roll off the tongue like that, I’ll bet.

We then get a credit sequence where my ears stood up and took note. I’d not consciously heard any other movies scored by this composer except one and, as they music played out, I just had time enough to say to somebody in the room that... this sounds a little like the music to the first Dr. Who And The Daleks movie... before the music credits came up. Music by Malcolm Lockyear with sound effects by Barry Gray, who people will know as the musical team behind that first Dalek movie and, in Barry Gray’s case, the composer of many of the Gerry Anderson TV shows such as Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Space 1999 (Season 1) and the like. So I was quite pleased to be able to identify Lockyear’s trademark style when I’d only ever heard his stuff on that first Dalek film, to my knowledge. That being said, when the music was playing on the menu screen, the other person in the room with me suggested the film must be a comedy, from the sound of the score. Nope, it’s not a comedy... well, not intentionally, anyway, but I’ll come back to this point with the music a little later, I think.

Pretty soon, a man goes into a cave and we hear his screams. When he’s discovered by Sam Kydd and taken to one of the three male main protagonists of the film, Dr. Landers (played by Eddie Byrne), it becomes apparent that the rubbery husk of the remains has somehow had the bones stripped from the body. Oh no! Is it a virus? Landers takes advantage of the only boat a week that leaves (or some such, they really do keep emphasising how cut off the population of the island is at any opportunity) to go to London to enlist the aide of his friend Dr. Stanley, played by the legendary Peter Cushing. Stanly takes Landers to meet the lothario Dr. West (played by Edward Judd) who agrees, along with Dr. Stanley to accompany Dr. Landers back to the island to investigate the body.

But how to get there?

Well, West’s girlfriend Toni (played by the lovely Carole Gray) has a rich father and she secures a helicopter ride back to the island... on condition that she can accompany them. Unfortunately, she only accompanies them to be a paper thin character frequently put in peril, assist exposition and help out with the villagers while the men do all the interesting stuff but... hey ho... that’s what you expect from this kind of movie, I guess. Of course, it then transpires that her father will need the helicopter again the very next morning... so the four of them are dropped off on the island and the helicopter agrees to return in a few days... because it’s really important to the plot that everyone in the audience knows they are cut of from the rest of the world on this island for a number of days, right?

And then, amost immediately, the whole film gets really great and when our intrepid heroes go to investigate the Manor House containing the island’s experimental scientific community... they find them all in an equally dead and rubbery state, their bones sucked from their bodies. It doesn’t take long for our heroes to discover that the scientific experiments to cure cancer inadvertently brought forth a rock based, amoeba like creature with a long tentacle that can sting you and suck the very skeleton from you in a very small amount of time. Oh... so it wasn’t a virus after all then? Okay that’s good.

From here on the film turns into a standard monster combat situation, as our heroes learn in no uncertain terms that the silicates (as they call them) split after they’ve eaten some bones (belonging to the odd horse or human, for instance) and multiply with great rapidity. Our three scientists, aided only by West’s girlfriend, the short lived constable and a bunch of “Oh, arrr” local villagers, have only a day at most to stop the total annihilation of the population of the island by the increasing numbers of silicates. As one of the villagers said to another, in a piece of dialogue that says everything about this movie in terms of its scripting... “There’s some peculiar goings on, going on, on this island.” Not sure if that’s the right punctuation  for that sentence or not but... no, I’m not making this stuff up.

Oh wait. Did I say ‘standard’ monster combat situation. Well, this movie is anything but standard and although the script is quite bad and giggle inducing at regular intervals, it’s... well, it’s pretty well made for starters. There’s some really nice things happening with the composition of the shots and the director uses the varied heights of people to make diagonal patterns and pyramid shapes within the set ups... which works really well and might well be a signature trait of the director since I’m sure I’ve picked up on that element of his films before.

The other thing this movie has got going for it, apart from some brilliant actors and actresses in it who you wouldn’t believe would ever want to attempt to bring these almost unsayable lines to life, is a certain unpredictable quality to it. It’s not a film which sticks completely to a formula and, though the elements of peril and much laboured sense of jeopardy are hitting pretty standard riffs, things suddenly happen in this film that you just don’t expect to see... like the unexpected death of one of the three doctor heroes about half way through the movie (and no, I’m not going to tell you which one that is).

There’s another quite amazing moment which completely contradicts what we know about the physiology of the silicate monsters but is a nice scene, nevertheless... where Peter Cushing’s character gets a tentacle around his wrist and is being pulled towards a silicate. Edward Judd’s character reacts as quickly as he feels the audience can keep up with and grabs an axe, moving towards the silicate... and, just when you expect him to cut the tentacle off the creature, he chops off Cushing’s hand instead. Apparently this particular scene was trimmed in a few countries, including here in the UK, to delete the spurting of blood from Cushing’s stump. However, I’m happy to confirm that this Blu Ray reinstates the second or two shot... which was previously only available in a German DVD release of the movie, from what I can make out.

Even the possible cure to the silicate problem, which I won’t go into here, involves the heroes sacrificing all the cattle on the island to the creatures in order for their mad scheme to work... which is kinda brutal and ruthless even for a modern horror film, when you stop and think about it, let alone something which hit the cinemas in 1966. So all in all, the less than predictable way in which a lot of the plot unfolds is quite stand out and it certainly had me scratching my head, in a good way, at times.

Less good is the amount of padding in this movie. It’s not  long affair but a lot of the film seems like it’s lingering unnecessarily in scenes to fill out the running time. For instance, when the helicopter leaves our heroes on the island we are treated to a long, held shot as it flies off into the distance for a while. The music tries hard to make this long, drawn out static shot sound a bit more exciting but, sad to say, and going back to the comment made about the film looking like it was a comedy, the soundtrack does seem like inappropriate scoring for the majority of the movie. it would be great as a stand alone listen, I’m sure (although I’m also sure we’ll never get the chance) but as support to the movie, it’s heavy rather than robust a lot of the time.

Similar scene padding comes when Cushing and Judd go to collect a load of Strontium 90 from the Manor House. We are treated to a long scene of them putting on their protective radiation suits which takes far longer than it should and, sad to say, looks like each actor is wearing a giant condom over their head. I know the characters want to stay safe but that’s not the kind of safe I was expecting from them, to be honest.

While I’m at it though, I noticed a probable cut scene too, that doesn’t seem to have made the final version of the film. In one scene, where Judd is addressing the village community, he talks about running one of the creatures over... well I can probably hazard a guess as to where this scene would have been but it’s certainly not referring to anything that happens in the movie as it was released... so that’s a bit of a worry. Also, a quick note to anybody fighting monsters... if you’re going to throw Molotov cocktails at rock creatures, don’t stand directly under a tree which happens to have one in it. Just a little word of advice there.

And that’s all I got on this one. The ending is... well it’s a bit more predictable than some films I’ve seen Fisher work on but there's a little punchline of an ending, where one of the characters says the truly groan inducing line... “We’re lucky this was an island. If it had happened anywhere else I don't think we could have destroyed them.”... takes us to a scientific research team in Japan,  obviously working on a similar problem and getting killed offscreen by a similar ‘accidental creature.’ It’s all happening in this movie but it makes for an incredibly corny ending, I must say.

All that being said, though, I absolutely loved Island Of Terror and have no hesitation in recommending it to pretty much anyone who loves these old British B movies and it’s one I’ll no doubt watch a fair few times in my life, now I know it exists. Not a hard release to love and I certainly hope there are a lot more of those kinds of movie coming from wherever they dug this one up from. I’ll be happy to stand in line for them.

The Mummy (Hammer Studios)

A Kharis Born

The Mummy
1959 UK
Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer Dual Edition BluRay/DVD Regions B & 2

So here we have the Hammer studios third attempt at utilising one of the old Universal horror icons from the 1930s... well, actually from the 1940s mostly, but I’ll get to that in a minute. It was Hammer’s third big monster movie after their versions of Frankenstein and Dracula and, unlike those first two, this was part of a deal they now had in place with Universal to “reboot” certain of their monsters. Hence it is Kharis the Mummy, played first in the 1940s by Tom Tyler before Lon Chaney Jr took over for another three films, who gets reworked by Hammer here, although certain elements of the 1931 movie The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff as Imhotep, are also present.

For example, the opening of the Karloff picture, where a man is driven mad by the presence of The Mummy, is used in this movie (twice in fact... just to pad the film out and reveal more of what happened when it gets to be flashback time) and the back story of this incarnation of Kharis is almost identical to the Imhotep back story, referenced again in an overly long “padding” scene here and later re-used again much more dynamically and successfully in Stephen Summer’s reboot of The Mummy, forty years after this Hammer version. Another important element, which is again a hangover from the original 1931 picture, is the character of the main lead’s wife, played here by Yvonne Furneaux opposite Peter Cushing’s John Banning. Her resemblance to the love of Kharis’ life, Ananka, is used not once, but twice, as a way of preventing Banning’s death in two, almost adjacent, sequences which betray a certain sloppiness in the writing, to be honest.

There the Imhotep similarities end and we are definitely into the Kharis version of The Mummy, with Christopher Lee donning the bandages and reanimated by a fez wearing Egyptian tool of vengeance, although it should be noted that nobody mentions the magical tana leaves which brought Kharis to his lethargic reanimation every night, when required, in the original film series.

This is, apart from the dragging sequences of background exposition and unnecessary flashback mentioned earlier, really not a bad little movie. It’s nowhere near Hammer’s finest but there are certain nice things about it which make the film worthy of your attention on occasion. The colours, for example, are splendid and very reminiscent of the late, great Mario Bava in a certain scene where the father of Peter Cushing’s character first enters the Mummy’s tomb and finds a lot of the interior flooded with bright green, fluorescent lighting... which makes absolutely no sense in the scheme of things at all. But, whether there’s a rationale behind the lighting used or not, you can’t deny that the colours are dreamy.

Another thing is the design of the sets and the way things are shot. I noticed that the director has gone for a lot of triangular and angled compositions, especially in the first half of the movie, to re-emphasise the shape of the pyramids by echoing it in shots around tents or the slope of the roof or the outwardly jutting lines of a rock. At first I thought I was imagining this but then I noticed when there were no natural diagonals to bring out in a shot, the director had then resorted to tilting the camera in some scenes to enhance the diagonal motif. This design philosophy doesn’t seem to engulf the entire movie but it is pretty strongly pitched in the first half hour or more. Interesting stuff.

The performances by Christopher Lee (as Kharis), Peter Cushing and the rest of the gang, including Hammer stalwart Michael Ripper (yay!) are all very fine and on the money but a lot of the time they’re let down by a script that does tend to drag in places. They are though, as I said, supported by some nice set design and, for this film from this studio in particular, a quite extraordinarily good score by Franz Reizenstein, one of only four film scores he composed in his career as a composer, all of which date from either 1959 or 1960. This is much more melodic stuff than we are used to listening out for in a Hammer production, not that this gives it any more weight over a more atonal score, but it’s also one of the best I think (although I’m always a sucker for a good bit of Tristram Carey myself).

All in all, the movie is a bit pedestrian and repetitive (even the excellent score is overtly repetitive when, perhaps, it shouldn’t be, at times) but the film still has a certain atmosphere to it. The leading lady could have had a bit more to do rather than save Cushing’s character in two scenes and get carried off at the end though. This film certainly fails the Bechdel test on all levels, I’m afraid. But, even so, it’s got a bandaged Christopher Lee smashing his way enthusiastically through doors and windows (much to his personal cost as an actor, actually, from what I understand of the number of times he injured himself doing silly stuff like this on the film) and Peter Cushing verbally battling with Mehemet Bay, the latest of a long line of fez wearing villains who were a regular fixture in the Universal Kharis movies.

Like I said, not the best Hammer movie, but certainly one that lovers of the studio and their product can savour and enjoy. I’ll certainly be unwrapping this one for another look sometime in the not too distant future.

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.