31 DAYS OF HORROR 2023 - Day 20: BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1971)

 

 Queen Tera sleeps...for now.

In ancient Egypt, evil queen Tera (Valerie Leon), who's a witch or a sorceress or something, is executed, perfectly preserved without the usual mummy's wrappings, and sealed in a tomb for eternity. That is, until a British expedition unearth her grave and the archaeologists abscond with sacred artifacts. Margaret (Valerie Leon in a dual role) is the daughter of the expedition's leader, and she is a dead ringer for the evil queen. When her father gifts her a ring taken from the severed right hand of Tera, the spirit of the queen begins to take over Margaret's mind with an aim to resurrect, and to fully manifest in the 20th century the queen must retrieve her pilfered artifacts and kill those who had held them. If the queen resurrects, apparently all manner of evil will be unleashed upon the world, but can anyone stop her?

By the dawn of the 1970's, Hammer, the once-groundbreaking British studio, saw its flame fade as its flavor of gothic horror spiced with bright red "Kensington gore" and voluptuous actresses began to be superseded by more explicit efforts from upstart studios that took advantage of the more permissive era. Hammer's charms now looked quaint, and though they still had a handful of solid works left in them before their looming demise, they issued more lumps of coal than gems. One such dud is this lifeless catalog of every mummy movie trope we've seen a million times since Universal's THE MUMMY back in 1932. The story is rote to the point of inducing torpor, the blood and gore is at a bare minimum, there's not rampaging gauze-wrapped mummy out murdering people, and there are no scares to be had. It's simply a product to fill time on a double-bill, and its sole saving grace is star Valerie Leon, who is ravishing and kindly allows us a brief glimpse of her ample backside. 

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB was a real slog for me to get through, as I found myself checking how much run time was left, and nearly falling asleep on it at four points during the narrative. Even if you consider yourself a Hammer loyalist/completist, I cannot in good faith recommend this one. Good mummy movies are as rare as tits on a trout, and this film can be left to the legion of sub-par mummy offerings that are best relegated to obscurity.

Poster for the U.S. theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 31: THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

                                                               Taking care of business.

 "The  Satanic Shite of Dracula," more like..

All good things must come to an end, and this film was one of the undeniable harbingers that Hammer's era of glory was well and truly over. As with  the previous entry, gone are the atmospheric Gothic sets and fog-shrouded forests and cobblestone streets, instead swapped out for the modern (translation: cheaper)  England, and with that loss the soul of Hammer bit the  dust.

 

Dracula (Christopher Lee) commands the audience to pull his finger.

For his last turn as Hammer's Dracula, Christopher Lee is given a dire script in which an apparently suicidal Dracula presides over a Satanic cult while seeking to take out humanity via a  super-powerful version of the bubonic plague whipped up by a biochemical  engineer in his  thrall. Peter Cushing's Van Helsing is along for the ride, but at  this point its all a case of too little too late.

A rarity in one of these films: an Asian vampire of the European variety (as opposed to the Chinese jiāngshī, of hopping vampire)

THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA is as lifeless as its titular character and could easily be ignored altogether if not for its historical position as  Lee's final outing in the role that made him an international star. An ignoble fate for the count, but it is what it is.

When you are bereft of ideas, it's time to break out the tiddies.

And wwith that we close out this year's 31 DAYS OF HORROR essays. See you next year and HAPPY HALLOW\WEEN, o my fellow Cine-Miscreants!

Poster for the U.K. release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022-Day 3: HANDS OF THE RIPPER (1971)

The Ripper stalks again (sort of).

Possession of the mind is a terrible thing/It's a transformation with an urge to kill 

-The Misfits

Some fifteen years after Jack the Ripper's reign of hideous terror, Anna (Angharad Rees), the Ripper's daughter, who as a child witnessed the Ripper murder her mother, has fallen into the unsavory care of an older woman who uses the now-teenage girl as part of her phony seance racket. The poor girl is also pimped out to sleazy upper-class "gentlemen," the old lady charging a high price for the leave to take what the clients are promised is the girl's virginity. (The scam is that once a gentleman has handed over the cash to have his way with the girl, the old woman interrupts the proceedings, claiming the girl is not right in the head, and the gentlemen callers have little choice but to leave or have their governmental positions jeopardized. That said, it is implied that Anna has seen many such callers, and was likely "deflowered" years previous.) The seance scheme is rumbled by the disbelieving Dr. Pritchard (Eric Porter, memorable as the ship captain in 1968's unintentionally ludicrous THE LOST CONTINENT), who's a devotee to the new methods of Sigmund Freud, and he takes Anna into his care after Anna suffers what is at first believed to be a psychotic break that prompts the girl to murder the old woman who exploited her. Installing Anna at his home, the doctor endeavors to find the root of the girl's problems and cure her, but what he did not count on was Anna not being psychotic. No, the poor girl is possessed by the spirit of her murderous sire, and she's a ticking time bomb that can be set off by certain triggers. By the time the story reaches its climax, three people are dead, one maimed and possibly dead, and one run through with a sabre, and the whole affair is rather bleak with only one way out...

So I finally saw HANDS OF THE RIPPER (1971), one of the remaining Hammer horror films that I had not had the opportunity to encounter over the course of a lifetime as a staunch supporter of the distinct Hammer flavor of horror. It's often overlooked, presumably due to it not featuring any of the classic-style monsters that the company revitalized via color and generous lashings of violence, blood, gore, and female nudity, but once it gets going it's a solid enough little shocker. 

This a more modern-looking Hammer, as it eschews the vivid colors and mist-shrouded and forested Gothic European landscape that so many of the company's classics are defined by, and no Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee is present to distinguish it, but the cast is game and it moves at a decent pace, though it does take almost a half hour before it really gets going. But when it does kick into high gear, hoo-boy, does it deliver. There were two moments of graphic carnage that made me exclaim "WHOA!!!" when each occurred, and it was nice to have such "HOLY SHIT!!!" moments in what could otherwise have passed for a particularly sordid installment of a British period drama. Not a classic, but definitely not deserving of the relative obscurity that it languishes in.

The entire uncut film can be had on YouTube. 

Poster for the American theatrical release.

SERIOUSLY???

 

Christoper Neame as... Oh, read it for yourself...

During today's dialysis session I watched DRACULA A.D. 1972 (1972). Considered by many to be the weakest of Hammer's Dracula flicks, I didn't hate it and it's far from my least favorite of the run. That said, it's really, REALLY stupid and moving the setting out of the Carpathian mountains in the 1800's to Chelsea as the "Cool Britannia" era was on its last legs just does not work. Also, it includes as a secondary bad guy who sets the plot in motion, a modern Dracula cultist named "Johnny Alucard?" SERIOUSLY??? Gee, I wonder if he could be evil? (massive eyeroll)

 

Johnny. Fucking. ALUCARD. And the fact that Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) didn't instantly go "'Alucard,' my ass..." was just insulting to the intelligence of everyone everywhere ever.

 

Oh, go fuck yourself, screenwriter!

JUST THE HAMMER HORROR STUFF

The toothsome Collinson sisters from TWINS OF EVIL (1971).

 To save you scrolling through everything else, go here for just the entries on Hammer films. Enjoy! 

(For Selena)

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2021 -Day 14: COUNTESS DRACULA (1971)

Ingrid Pitt as the title character, freshening up with the blood of one of her many innocent victims.

Britain's Hammer Films was renowned for infusing the somewhat moribund U.K. horror market with an instantly identifiable look, atmosphere and tone, as well as spicing things up with a then-controversial emphasis on graphic gruesomeness and sexual content, and as their movies progressed from the 1950's into the 1970's the stakes were raised when studio went all out in an attempt to win back an audience stolen by filmmakers who gave audiences lurid concoctions filled with content that reveled in explicitness at the cost of both story and good taste. Not being one to go down without a fight, Hammer sexed things up considerably in its waning years, famously coming up with their lesbian vampire "Karnstein trilogy," consisting of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970), LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971) and TWINS OF EVIL (1972), each drawing inspiration from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novella CARMILLA. That trio of films has a fond place in the hearts of many Hammer-philes and soft-core lezzie flick junkies, largely for coming off like better-produced installments of the old DARK SHADOWS soap opera, only with shitloads of tits, ass and Seventies bushola. Looked at now, especially in the wake of far more graphic material, it's a little hard to see what the big deal about the Karnstein trilogy was (with THE VAMPIRE LOVERS easily being the best of the lot), and that confusion is only further compounded when one takes time to consider 1970's COUNTESS DRACULA, a film that could easily have been shoehorned into the whole Karnstein thing, but wasn't.

Borrowing from the real-life atrocities committed by Hungarian Countess Erzsebet Bathory (1560-1614), COUNTESS DRACULA casts sultry Polish-born Ingrid Pitt (born Ingoushka Petrov, but a fox is still a fox by any other name) as Countess Elizabeth Nadasdy, an aged, hateful, cunty and generally evil bitch and a half who cares not one whit for the impoverished plight of her fearful subjects. When her husband dies and a number of friends and relatives are summoned for the reading of his will, among those who arrive is Lt. Imre Toth (Sandor Eles), the son of one of the Count's old war buddies, and the crone-like Countess feels her nethers twitch at the mere sight of him. Her attraction to the young officer does not go unnoticed by castle steward and all-around asshole Captain Dobi (Nigel Green, better known as Hercules in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS), who has been putting the meat to the Countess for years and for some reason loves the miserable old bitch, and now that the Countess is legally free he seeks to rightfully acquire more power and position through marrying her. The Countess' young daughter, who was sent away to safety some two decades earlier in the face of a Turkish invasion, is also on her way home for the reading of the will, but while she's in transit the Countess accidentally discovers that she can regain her youth by bathing in the blood of young women, so the Countess arranges to have her own daughter waylaid and imprisoned in a woodland shack so she can assume the poor girl's identity and woo the young Lieutenant (much to Captain Dobi's chagrin).

The Countess rejuvenated.

The Countess has a grand old time as her own daughter and since no one in the court has seen the girl in twenty years, no one is any the wiser (except for the Countess' handmaiden and willing accomplice, Julie), but things begin to fall apart when the restored youth proves temporary and brings even more severe aging when it wears off, prompting the Countess to have a growing body count of girls brought to her for slaughter. But when the Countess bathes in the blood of the village's cheapest whore (Andrea Lawrence), she ages to a point where she resembles a bowl of dry corn flakes, which leads to the discovery that the magical youth restoration only works properly with the blood of virgins.

The Countess' victims are discovered.

Once that bit's been sussed out, the murders continue right up to the point when the Countess is ready to publicly marry the Lieutenant (who now knows the truth and has been blackmailed with going along with the Countess' plans or else be framed for all the murders), but she doesn't count on her daughter having escaped from the shack in the woods, or her youth wearing off in front of dozens of witnesses...

Though technically not a vampire film, COUNTESS DRACULA certainly has the look and feel of one of Hammer's several vampire flicks, but it unfortunately lacks the verve and interest found in its brethren. The film is very slow-moving and surprisingly sparse on the sex and gore one had by this point come to expect from Hammer, with very little blood actually seen except for that found in the memorable sponge bath sequence (a shot from which opens this post), and the film's requisite nudity mostly supplied by the sponge bath and a bit where the Countess and the Lieutenant get their hump on in a haystack as the Lieutenant hungrily noshes on the Countess' "lefty." Despite years of having seen the blood-smeared Ingrid Pitt in various books and magazines on horror movies and being led to believe that COUNTESS DRACULA was much more than the meager sum of its parts, I have to confess to being majorly disappointed by it and recommend it only for Hammer/vampire completists and those desperate for even a glimpse of nude female flesh (there's no bushola in this since it was rated PG during its American release). Nonetheless, both Pitt and the movie in general are quite appealing to the eye.

                                                  Poster from the American theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020-Day 21: FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974)

More fun with Baron Frankenstein.

 

Having survived the conflagration at the climax of FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969), Baron Frankenstein blackmails his way into being the secret power within a mental institution, lording it over the alcoholic and lecherous head administrator and being allowed to treat the patients. Into this scenario is thrust young surgeon Dr. Simon Hedler (Shane Briant), a talented practitioner who seeks to follow in Frankenstein's footsteps by crafting a man from choice components and animating it. Hedler's pilfering of corpses and body parts is discovered and he is sentenced to a minimum of five years in a mental asylum, despite clearly not being insane. Fate lands him at Frankenstein's looney bin and in no time they develop a master/acolyte partnership, aided by the beautiful and mute Sarah (Madeleine Smith, late of1970's  THE VAMPIRE LOVERS), aka "the Angel," and Helder reveals an obsession with the secret of life that rivals his mentor's. 

 

The Baron, the Angel, and padawan.
 

From there it's pretty much what we have come to expect from a Hammer Frankenstein outing, as the Baron slowly lets Helder into his close circle of trust, revealing that he is once more attempting to create life from the dead, only this time garnering his choice parts from the remains of two inmates who expire under, er..."mysterious" circumstances, and using the hairy, hulking body of a homicidal "neolithic" throwback as the main chassis. Resembling a foul-tempered Sasquatch more than a human being, the creature (played by a pre-Darth Vader Dave Prowse) was once a man possessed of inhuman strength and a fascination with glass, which he enjoyed breaking and using to stab his victims in the face. The body, odd though it is, will do, but Frankenstein seeks the hands of an artist (that he lops off of the murdered body of an insane sculptor) and the brain of a genius (a professor of music and advanced mathematics, whose suicide by hanging via his own violin strings was prompted by the Baron making him aware that he would never be released, despite him only being locked up for something minor and curable), and once the Baron obtains them, the shenanigans begin...

 

Shopping for parts.
 

By the time FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL was released, it was pretty obvious that the writing was on the wall for Hammer, as their once-shocking brand was more or less rendered passe by the new permissiveness of onscreen sex and violence — which they had helped to usher in over the previous 17 years — and the flavors of horror shifting away from "adult fairytale Gothic" to outright festivals of carnage like BLOOD FEAST, 2000 MANIACS, and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. To be honest, and I say this as a Hammer devotee, their best years had been behind them for a while and they had begun to run out of ideas as the 1970's dawned. But at least this final outing for the wicked Baron was a case of the Frankenstein series going out with a bang. There's no sex or nudity in this one, but the story is solid and the lashings of gore are quite vivid and satisfying. 

 

Back in 1974, this sort of thing got you an "R" rating.

 

The Baron is as evil and coldly aristocratic as ever, and it's a delight to see him reduce the hospital's sadistic and corrupt staff to fearful lumps of jelly when he takes them to task for their abuse of the patients. (Including serial torture and rape.) The Baron may be a bastard, but even he will not abide wanton cruelty inflicted upon the clearly helpless and mentally-unwell.

"Pikachu...I choose you!"

The monster is one of the most unique designs for the classic shambling abomination, and Dave Prowse acquits himself nicely with a role dependent more upon his gym-earned physical presence than the sparse amount of lines the creature is given. He's definitely a version of the famous creature that no one would ever want to tangle with, what with his super-strength and a mind that is subsumed by the body's natural propensity for mutilating people with glass...

The creature.

When it's all over, the Baron and his accomplices live to cause mayhem and blasphemous crimes against nature another day, with them set in place in their asylum base of operations should the series have continued, but such was not to be. 

As a final entry in a series that had run on and off for 17 years, FRANKENSTEIN AND MONSTER FROM HELL is a lot of fun, though certainly not up to the standards of some of the installments that preceded it. Nonetheless, it's a good entry-level shocker for the older monster kids. (If released today, this would earn a PG-13.)

Poster from the American theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020-Day 19: THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964)

It had to happen sooner or later...

This third entry in Hammer's Frankenstein series is hands down the weakest of the lot, offering little or nothing new while being surprisingly turgid for on of this studio's efforts from its heyday. To be honest, I fell asleep during the first half-hour while watching it, and upon finishing it I lamented the 84 minutes of my life that I wasted on it and will never get back. It's wholly mediocre and dull, which are two unforgivable sins for any movie, but they especially rankle in a film released by a trusted studio and starring a favorite actor.

THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN is so rote, its details barely even merit recounting. The basics of this one amount to "after once more being discovered up to his ghoulish shenanigans and driven out of town, the Baron and his assistant return to his hometown of Karlstaad and once more mayhem and vengeance ensue." It takes the well-worn Frankenstein cliches and just leaves them on the screen in much the same way as one would imagine someone setting a Thanksgiving table with a cheap rubber turkey as the main attraction and expecting those in attendance to be satisfied with it. Peter Cushing returns as the Baron and appears largely bored throughout, nearly all of the surrounding characters are cookie cutter "types" common to Frankenstein movies in general, and the monster looks like it was rejected from a cheap local TV station's "spooky" afternoon kiddie show, or maybe a first pass at Peter Boyle's makeup from YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (only unintentionally humorous).

Kiwi Kingston as the monster.

I've certainly endured worse movies but, as I have said elsewhere, Hammer set a high standard for itself, so when it issued a dud, it stung. I expect better from them, a lot better, and this one is weak tea at best. Worth seeing only for hammer Frankenstein completists and definitely the sickly runt of the litter. If you opt to skip a Hammer Frankenstein, make it this installment.

Poster from the U.K. theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020-Day 18-THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)

Taking the concept of "homemade" a tad too far.

Here we are, at the Hammer imprint's Ground Zero. 

Though Britain's Hammer Studios had been around for a while, it was 1957's THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN that put them on the map (along with the following year's HORROR OF DRACULA). WWII was only 12 years in the past, so memories of real-life horror were still quite fresh, and it was also the era of the fugue state between the Profumo scandal and England losing its cherry to the sexual and psychedelic excesses of the swinging Sixties, so the U.K. simply was not ready for Hammer's flavor of shocks. The Universal cycle was swiftly becoming an antique during a market dominated by alien invaders and gigantic monstrosities spawned by the dawn of the atomic bomb, so something new was needed to sate audiences. What Hammer brought to the table was lush (some would say garish) color, a pervasive Gothic atmosphere that felt like dark fairytales for grownups, a more "adult" sensibility — remember, the British had just endured WWII, so hiding the nastiness of the world was no longer an option — stories geared more toward the audience's experience as adults, a reasonable amount of "sauce" in the form of generous, heaving bosoms, and the groundbreaking depiction of then-copious amounts of fire engine-red blood (that always looked to me like Sherwin-Williams house paint). Hammer kicked off their horror run proper by reinventing horror's two biggest stars, Frankenstein and Dracula, by putting spins on them that worked from the late-1950's/early-1960's, and in the case of Frankenstein, the focus was shifted from the creature to the creator.

If you have seen pretty much any Frankenstein movie, you know the basic building blocks (and the fact that only the germ of them were cribbed from the classic source novel):

• Obsessed scientist with a drive to create a living man from the dead bits and pieces of assorted corpses
• A hapless, misunderstood creature that did not ask to be created, possessed of superhuman strength
• The robbing of graves and pilfering of necessary organs from medical schools
• A female character to get in the way of the ghoulish medical shenanigans, often betrothed to the scientist
• Some sort of rampage by the monster
• A tragic climax

All of those elements are present in THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN,  so there's little need to bother recounting the details of film's plot. All you need to know is that it's the 1800's in Switzerland and we are introduced to the aristocratic Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing, in one of his career-defining roles), a wealthy scientific/medical genius who, with the aid of his tutor-turned-lab partner, Paul (Robert Urquhart), builds a man from random deceased components and seeks to grant it life. The pair discover the secret of life (which is conveniently not explained to the audience) and they have the hanged corpse of a highway man with which to get started. Now, all they need is a decent head and, preferably, the brain of a genius. As things escalate, Paul suffers bouts of conscience, while the baron forges ahead with a single-mindedness that can be read as madness.

 

 The Baron (Peter Cushing) goes shopping.

Matters are complicated when the Baron's cousin, Elizabeth (Hazel Court), arrives to take up residence at Victor's mansion. The Baron supported her and her mother since she was a child, but now her mother is dead and she has been promised to the Baron in an arranged marriage, which she's totally down with, but her presence throws a hitch into the Baron's ongoing affair with Justine (Valerie Gaunt), his lusty FRench maid. It all comes to head, and once it does, the Baron finds himself awaiting execution by guillotine, recounting his story to a priest in his dungeon cell. 

The film was a massive hit, despite the open revulsion expressed by critics and certain sectors of the general public over its then-shocking bloodiness, medical gore, and mention of the French maid being made out-of-wedlock pregnant by the Baron. Other than those daring elements, it's a well-made but pretty standard Gothic yarn, with its other big difference being that it was made in color, which it certainly took advantage of.

If I have one gripe about the film, it's that its creature, brought to (un) life by Christopher Lee (who, like Cushing, became an icon for his subsequent Hammer roles, most notable his especially evil take on Count Dracula), really doesn't resonate much, other than for his visual aspect.

 

Christopher Lee as one of the most pathetic variations on Frankenstein's monster.

The creature has no personality and does not speak, as the genius brain was severely damaged during an altercation between the Baron and Paul, and it moves with an impaired stiffness that does not allow it to do much. It does manage to escape briefly and shamble about the local woods, but over the course of the story the creature racks up exactly two kills, both offscreen. If you're into Frankenstein movies, then this is definitely not the film for you. Some of us, however, are in it for the monster's creator, and here is where things get interesting.

Peter Cushing, redefining Frankenstein from a mere mad scientist to an obsessed and cruel aristocratic sociopath.

Hammer's stroke of genius with its Frankenstein franchise was making the Baron the true monster of the cycle, and relegating the creature to mostly the role of being a goal to be striven for. The Baron rich and thinks himself beyond the laws of man and the Church, and he will stop at nothing to achieve his ends. Ghoulish grave-robbery and acquisition of fresh organs, abuse of those around him without a second thought, utter disregard for general human compassion and decency, the list goes on and would be further refined as the series progressed. He's a total hateful piece of shit here, but this is just the blossoming of the cold and vicious assholism that he would display further down the line. Cushing is always a delight, but his Baron goes so against his actual nice old man personality, it's astonishing. But, hey, such ifs the pint of acting.

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, though rather tepid by today's standards, is a landmark and as such it is worthy of your time. It's not my favorite of the Hammer Frankensteins, but it's certainly a good entry with which to get the ball rolling. A solid origin story and definitely recommended.

Poster for the British theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020-Day 12: VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972)

The Serbian village of Stetl is home to the vile Count Mitterhaus, a vampire who preys on young local girls for sustenance while sating his baser desires with Anna (Domini Blyth), the nubile wife of schoolmaster Albert Müller (Laurence Payne) and the vampire's very willing lover. 

                                         Evil for evil's sake: Count Mitterhaus (Robert Tayman).

Müller, fed up with the serial decimation of female youth (plus to say nothing of his being cuckolded by an undead suckface), rallies the village's men and leads a raid on the Count's castle, interrupting him in the midst of a lusty romp with Anna. The ensuing battle sees the deaths of a few of the men, but Albert drives home the needed stake through the heart. As his unnatural life force ebbs, the Count curses the village men, their children, and the viallge itself to death while Anna is scourged by the townsfolk. Even though she betrayed him for another man, er, vampire, Albert calls a halt to the beating, allowing Anna to flee back into the castle, which is promptly put to the torch by the rabble. But, unseen by the incensed villagers, Anna hauls the Count's body into then depths of the castle, where, with his dying breath, he instructs her to contact the Circus of Night, specifically his cousin Emil, who will "know what to do." As the castle burns, Anna flees the scene. Fifteen years later, Stetl has been closed off from the rest of the world as it is wracked by a deadly plague, a disease believed by men of science to be a pandemic, but what is in actuality part of the Count's curse in dread action. Into this bleak tableau arrives the caravan of the Circus of Night, featuring an eerie assortment of performers, all of whom are vampires, shape-shifters, of other creatures of indeterminate nature.

What we get with VAMPIRE CIRCUS is a well-mounted but middling effort that reveals the once-groundbreaking and relevant Hammer studios on its last legs, a brand done in by changing times and the permissiveness wrought by the 1960's and early-1970's. Where Hammer had once been a trendsetter with its then-shocking amounts of gore and saucy sexual content, international works had over the course of a decade eclipsed them with what filmmakers could get away with. The splashes of bright Sherwin-Williams red paint that stood in for blood now looked quaint and tepid when compared to the gore-fests of the like of Herschel Gordon Lewis and the nudity now found in European releases rendered Hammer's tight bodices and generous, heaving bosoms passe, so in order to compete Hammer upped the gore and grue, and the nudity moved well past the occasional mouthwatering decolletage into the realm of frequent toplessness, nekkid ass, and minor glimpses of bush, all at the expense of narrative quality. Hammer's stock in trade had been the Gothic made palatable to the masses, telling those stories with genuine suspense, lavish production design, a signature flavor and sound, and frequent reinvention of horror tropes that had been long established, most notably by the Universal monster cycle of the 1930's and 1940's, but the audience of the Civil Rights and Vietnam era were more sophisticated, having been exposed to the real-life horrors of the social unrest and military conflicts in clear representation in footage broadcast on the nightly news. Horror grew up in the 1960's, along with its audience, so the fare became harder-edged and more nihilistic, so Hammer's "Grimm's fairy tales for grownups" were a casualty of that evolution.

VAMPIRE CIRCUS, while not bad by any stretch, plays like what it is, specifically a catalog of Hammer vampire movie tropes, minus the creative spark that made their vampire efforts so memorable. It possesses a certain amount of atmosphere, but by the time of its release nearly every one of its aspects is as familiar as a beloved old cat that's getting on in years and clearly does not have long before the inevitable. The only new wrinkle in this is some of the bizarre performers in the circus (including a pre-Darth Vader David Prowse), but they are not all that well-realized. Yes, this was a last gasp and it showed. 

                      A pre-Darth Vader David Prowse takes a shotgun blast...and keeps on coming.

 If you ask me, the final Hammer piece that displayed real inspiration was 1974's CAPTAIN KRONOS, VAMPIRE HUNTER, after which the studio hobbled along until ceasing production in 1979. The company had enjoyed over two decades of trend-setting, beginning with THE QUATERMASS X-PERIMENT (1955), and kicking off proper with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957), and HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), with many worthy films following in their wake and adding up to an impressive legacy. If you love the Hammer brand (when it's firing on all cylinders), then by all means give VAMPIRE CIRCUS a look, but don't anything particularly engrossing or all that fresh. It's an okay way to kill 87 minutes, but that's about it.

 

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020-Day 11: THE REPTILE (1966)

When those dirty foreigners influence British womanhood.

In a Cornish village at the dawn of the 20th century, the locals are terrified of the mysterious "Black Death" that has struck down several among them. Harry Spaulding (Ray Barrett) inherits his brother's cottage when the brother is done in by the Black Death, so he moves in with his new bride, Valerie (Jennifer Daniel). Spaulding starts to look into the circumstance of his brother's death but is met with standoffish locals, eventually encountering the stuffy Dr. Franklin (Noel Willman) and his daughter Anna (Jacqueline Pearce), an eerie beauty dressed in foreign garb. In short order all of these elements (and more) converge and the Black Death is revealed to be hideous snake woman, actually Anna, who had been kidnapped and cursed by a Malay snake cult.

Anna (Jacqueline Pearce), her British whiteness besmirched.

I love horror films from Hammer Studios and when they are firing on all cylinders they are a thing of joy forever, which is why when they turned out the occasional middling effort, it came as little more than a passable time-filler. Such was the case with THE REPTILE, a story that retreads what was by now familiar ground for the studio, basically being yet another of its many vampire shockers but done up in serpentine drag. If you've seen one of those films, you've seen this, only done with more lively flavor and minus the old school xenophobia. The sole truly memorable aspect of this one is the look of the titular monster. In fact, if one really wants to go there, this is a case of Hammer ripping off itself, as this is pretty much a rehash of the far superior THE GORGON from two years earlier. While THE REPTILE is by no means bad, it's strictly for Hammer completists only, so check out THE GORGON to see the same basic story idea done right. It's suitable as an entry-level mildly-scary movie for kids, so take it as such.

 

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020: Day 10: THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

No-bullshit old school vampirism, from back when vampires were figures of raw terror.

After being ditched in a rustic Transylvanian (where else?) village by a shady coachman, Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur), a pretty French student schoolteacher, finds herself stranded among clearly terrified locals. Luckily (?) for her, the sinister Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt) rolls up and, hearing of her plight, offers the girl accommodation for the evening at her family's castle (a location whose immediate visual leaves no doubt that diabolical things will occur there.

 

Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur): Hijacked into a waking nightmare.

 

While settling into her guest room, Marianne goes to the balcony and surveys the outside of the castle, noticing a young man on the balcony across from her. Over supper, the Baroness explains that the man her guest witnessed was her son, whom she claims to be "ill" after he fell under the influence of a certain bad "wicked" associate — alluded to be have been Count Dracula — and whose presence she hides from the locals, having convinced them that he died some time earlier. Later that night, concerned for his well-being and catching a glimpse of the young man seemingly about to hurl himself to his death, Marianne calls out to him, admonishes him not to jump,  and swiftly sneaks out of her room in the middle of the night to confront him. Upon entering his rooms, Marianne meets the handsome young man, who reveals himself as the Baron Meinster (David Peel), a bitter prisoner in his own castle who is prevented from escaping by a shackle attached to his left ankle. 

 

Moved by his plight, Marianne agrees to steal the key  to the shackle from the Baroness's room and free the Baron, and when she obtains it she  throws the key to him on his balcony. He eagerly unlocks the cuff and tells Marianne to get dressed and meet him downstairs, but the Baroness realizes the key has been stolen and confronts Marianne. The Baroness, clearly beside herself with terror, tells Marianne that she has no idea what she has done, at which Marianne flees to meet the Baron. With the Baroness in hot pursuit, Marianne rushes into the arms of the Baron, who is now dressed in a cape and ready to leave, and he orders Marianne to get dressed, as his mother can no longer hurt her. As Marianne heads off to get dressed, the Baron commands his mother to follow him. As she readies to leave, Marianne hears the Baroness's housekeeper wailing in horror that "He's free! HE'S FREE!!!" and when she goes to investigate, the now utterly mad housekeeper shows the foolish, well-intentioned teacher the now-exsanguinated corpse of the Baroness, noting that the Baron has fled into the night (which is announced with the presence of bats being noted and the ominous howling of a wolf). Still unsure of why all of this is going on, Marianne runs off into the night while the housekeeper states to herself that the young Baron must return before the cock crows. Return to his coffin, that is...

The next morning, an unconscious Marianne is found in the woods by a passing coach. It's vampire-slaying expert Dr. Van Helsing (a returning Peter Cushing), who revives the girl and takes her with him back to the tavern where her misadventure began. the good doctor's timing could not have been better, as a local's daughter was killed during the night and now her wake is being performed, so the doctor examines her and discovers — you guessed it — she bears the signature neck wounds of a vampire attack. Van Helsing happened to be on his way to give a lecture on "the cult of the undead" and how it must be stamped out, so, immediately after she has filled him in on every aspect of her story, Van Helsing drops  the young idiot off at the girl's academy that she was on her way to in the first place, establishes himself with the school's director as an authority not to be trifled with, and, with undead suckface ass-kicking kit in hand, heads off to Chateu Meinster. As we all know, a vampire's victims can rise from the dead not long after they are interred, so in no time there are a number blood-imbibers running around for van Helsing to contend with, and let us not forget that there is a conveniently-located academy full of nubile young girls for the Baron to prey upon...

Risen from the grave to join the party...

 

The first of many sequels to the game-changing HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), THE BRIDES OF DRACULA could have been just another followup cranked out from the cinematic sausage factory to appease lovers of the newfound permissiveness of British horror in the wake of the studio's previous groundbreaking horror entries (the aforementioned Dracula effort and 1957's THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN), but this was made during the period when the soon-to-be-iconic Hammer brand was finding its footing and fired on all cylinders. Despite the absence of Christopher Lee's towering evil as Count Dracula, thanks to the character having been quite decisively killed (yeah, right) in the previous installment, director Terence Fisher crafts what is pretty much Hammer's finest vampire outing outside of the Dracula franchise, ranking alongside THE KISS OF THE VAMPIRE (1963) as the best and most fun of their undead suckface yarns that did not feature Christopher Lee. 

 

As always, Peter Cushing is a study in cool under pressure as Van Helsing takes the fight to the undead with a crusader's gusto and conviction, and he certainly has a lot to deal with in Baron Meinster and his minions. Meinster in an interesting against-type vampire, being blonde and somewhat fey in an era where such figures sported dark hair and a sense of superiority that one imagines an apex predator feels in comparison to its prey. He's almost baby-faced, and one can see how his initially pleasant looks and manner would sway an impressionable young lady. Such is definitely the case with Marianne, who has to be the most brain-dead heroine in a Hammer film up to this point. Her interference in family matters that do not concern her leads to the deaths of the Baroness, a local peasant girl, a stable hand, and one of the academy's students, and she remains about as sharp as a bag of wet mice, even after she is made fully aware of what's going on around her.

 

 "Une moment, Monsieur Baron... You are ze vampire or something, no?" (Poirrot she is not.)

 

To sum up, THE BRIDES OF DRACULA is a hoot and a half. It's a textbook vampire story across the board and is in every way a lesson in how to do a sequel right. It does not rehash the previous film to diminishing returns, and it offers the audience old school vampire thrills of the type that pretty much died out on the silver screen by the mid-1970's. Gothic to the core and replete with the signature look and feel of classic Hammer, this one is a must-see, both for Hammer enthusiasts and vampire junkies alike.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2019-Day 21: THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961)

Oliver Reed, on any given day at the pub. 

Spain, the 18th century: On the wedding day of a cruel nobleman, a pitiful beggar (Richard Wordsworth) arrives at the nobleman's castle and begs for food. Much to the amusement of his equally assholish guests, the marques (Anthony Dawson) humiliates the beggar for sport and commands him to behave like a dog to earn table scraps. As the marques and his blushing bride leave the feast for the nuptial bed, the beggar makes a risqué comment that offends the nobleman, thus earning him a one-way ticket to a dank dungeon, where he is promptly forgotten (though regularly fed) and allowed to languish for fifteen years. In the meantime, the marquis has aged into a physical state as repellent as his overall personality and his wife has apparently died, so he sets his lecherous eyes on the mute, busty daughter of the castle's jailer, and when the girl (Yvonne Romain) rejects the vile old bastard's advances he has her thrown into the cell with the forgotten prisoner. 

The start of a VERY bad day for an innocent, mute serving girl (Yvonne Romain).

The prisoner, having been there for so long, has lost all semblance of sanity and is now a disgusting, hairy, feral mockery of humanity, and once the luscious girl is within reach he savagely rapes her — thankfully off-camera, but there is no doubt as to what's taking place — and the poor girl cannot even scream for help. His last energy spent during the violation, the beggar expires, and on the following day the girl is sent to the marquis' bed chamber, presumably chastised by her night in the dungeon. She instead gives the marquis the murder that he so richly deserved, after which she escapes into the nearby woods and nearly perishes in the elements. Found by the wealthy and kindly Don Alfredo Corledo (Clifford Evans) and his motherly housekeeper, Teresa (Hira Talfrey), she is nursed back to health and it is soon apparent that she has become pregnant by the feral rapist. Tragically, the girl only lives long enough to give birth to a son on Christmas Day, whom Don Corledo raises as his own. Since a child sharing the birthday of Jesus is “an insult to heaven” and said child is likely to be cursed as a werewolf, the boy, named Leon, is doomed from the start, and as he grows up he exhibits behavioral and physical traits that mark him as a lycanthrope in the making, and when he reaches manhood, his animal passions become ever harder to control, and he falls in love with a girl betrothed to another…

Young Leon's curse begins to manifest.

My love of Britain's wave of genre-redefining horror from Hammer Studios is well-documented and second only to my adoration of the classic Universal cycle of the 1930's and 1940's, but I only recently realized that I had neglected to discuss Hammer's sole werewolf outing in any real detail. That said, while I find several elements in the film to be very strong, I'm going to commit Hammer fan heresy and go on record to state that I find THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF to be something of a well-crafted letdown. Allow me to explain.

The adult Leon (Oliver Reed), rocking the superb work of makeup artist Roy Ashton.

Oliver Reed is perfectly cast as the brooding, tormented Leon, and the film allows us to get to know and understand him and his plight, which is only made worse when one considers the circumstances of his conception and birth. Like the best of protagonists who suffers the lycanthropic affliction, the audience's sympathy is firmly with Leon, but, like most of the rest of his accursed kind, his tragic end is pretty much a foregone conclusion and the narrative is pretty much a question of how to keep things interesting until the inevitable at the climax. The story is rock-solid up through and including Leon's curse starting to manifest, but when it skips ahead a few years to show us adult Leon, it turns into a period melodrama with no actual werewolf action until the very last reel, and what we get of that amounts to a rather minimal rampage until he's put down with the requisite silver bullet. The werewolf's mayhem is good for its era and the savage-looking makeup work on the creature itself are terrific, but it comes as too little too late, if you ask me. And as this was Hammer's sole werewolf movie, perhaps they didn't deem the werewolf to be as easily continued as the long runs of the Dracula and Frankenstein franchises.

Worth seeing, as Hammer's one shot at remaking another classic monster for the then-current time, THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF may not live up to its potential but it's certainly not a total loss. Tragic all the way and riveting during Leon's origin story, what's most interesting to me about all of it is that Leon’s troubles come not from being bitten or from some Satanic pact, but from the fact that little baby Jesus apparently has birthday attention issues.

Poster from the U.K. theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2018-Day 30: THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1966)

Cornwall, 1860: a village suffers from mysterious lethargy and numerous odd deaths, so resident doctor Peter Tompson (Brook Williams) sends for the aid of his old friend and former teacher, Sir James Forbes (Andre Morell). Accompanied by his daughter, Sylvia (Diane Clare), Sir James arrives in the afflicted village and immediately runs afoul of a band of fox-hunting blue-blood assholes who, in their zeal to run down their prey, accidentally knock over a coffin being borne by two men. Upon crashing to the ground, the casket opens and exposes the body of the recently-deceased son of one of the bearers, and the bearer is none too pleased at the disruption and takes it out on the new arrivals. Since setting up practice in town twelve months previous, one local has died per each month of Dr. Tompson's presence, and he is at a loss to explain what the cause could be. As the locals' mistrust of Tompson percolates, Sir James find lodgings with Dr. Tompson and his wife, Alice (Jacqueline Pearce), and during an after-dinner conversation with the doctor, it is stated that Tompson has not been allowed to perform autopsies on any of the dead, both due to the villagers' reluctance at the perceived desecration of their loved ones' corpses, and also by the decree of Squire Clive Hamilton (John Carson), whose word amounts to local law in the eyes of the villagers. Since they cannot legally obtain a corpse for their investigation, Sir James and Dr. Tompson take it upon themselves to illegally exhume the body that was so rudely exposed by the fox-hunters, but upon opening the grave, the coffin is found to be empty...

Meanwhile, Alice has been looking haggard and behaving strangely, as she has been targeted by Hamilton for diabolical, voodoo-fueled purposes. Following Alice as she leaves in the middle of the night, a crying and terrified Sylvia is abducted by the returning fox-hunters and subjected to the preamble of what is clearly about to become a gang rape, which is thwarted just in time by an irate Squire Hamilton. Though allowed to depart unharmed and with a (seemingly) sincere apology from the Squire, Sylvia threatens to report the assault to legitimate authorities, but Hamilton persuades her not to do so, citing his appreciation and promising that the would-be rapists will be punished. On her way back to the doctor's house, Sylvia encounters Alice, now quite dead, in the arms of the undead brother who was missing from his coffin. 

The deceased Alice, carried by the undead.

Horrified and in shock, Sylvia makes it home and informs her father of what she has seen. Alice's body is retrieved and an autopsy finally takes place, which yields the discovery that a sample of blood taken from Alice is not human. The investigation leads Sir James and Dr. Tompson to a forgotten mine on the moors, and from there the true horror of what's been transpiring beings to become clear.

Oh, what the young lads bring back after studying abroad...

Unbeknownst to the general public, Hamilton is the head of a clandestine voodoo cabal comprised of himself and the fox-hunting rape gang, and the Squire has been utilizing his voodoo powers (which he learned during his studies abroad during previous years) to steal and revive the bodies of the dead to serve as slaves in the abandoned mine, which now yields tin that the Squire and his followers will maintain their wealth with. Thus, it's only a matter of time until the forces of goodness and medical science engage in final conflict with black arts cribbed from black people.

 Tompson encounters the living dead.

I'm a big fan of the Hammer cycle of shockers, a roster that cut a bloody and colorful swath across screens worldwide and which redefined the horror genre after the iconic run of Universal's monochrome celluloid nightmares, and despite being an avid seeker of their films, THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES was one that eluded me until just a few days ago. It never seemed to run on any of the local TV showcases for horror movies during my growing up years and I never saw it listed for cable airings. I finally had to shell out ten bucks for a DVD copy at the Chiller Theatre Convention over the weekend, and I am saddened to say that it was not worth the wait nor the ten bucks. I've certainly seen worse horror films, but I hold Hammer's works to a certain general standard and it's painful to encounter one of their films that's a solid dud, which is a kind way to describe THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES. First of all, the title is an outright lie. There is no "plague" of revenants. Prior to the film's ending, we get brief glimpses of exactly two zombies who do nothing but lurch around a bit, and a bit where Dr. Tompson is confronted by four newly-risen undead, only to wake up and have the encounter revealed to have been a nightmare. Then, during the climax, we see a bunch of zombies slaving away while being whipped in the tin mine. That's it. And bear in mind that these are pre-Romero, classical-style zombies, so they are simply undead slaves as opposed to being the ravenous flesh-eaters that now define the creatures in question. That lack of flesh-munching leaves little room for much in the way of gore, and the one bit of signature Hammer-style gruesomeness that we do get is a weak and unconvincing beheading of the zombie Alice via shovel. 

To be fair, the cast does their best with what the script gave them to work with, but one cannot make a gourmet meal from a can of Spam and a box of saltines. It is with a heavy heart that I rate THE PLAGUE OF ZOMBIES near the bottom of my estimation of Hammer's horror catalog. Perhaps not the worst they had to offer, but definitely a dull, tepid disappointment that does not warrant subsequent viewings. 

Poster from the U.K. release.

Poster from the American release.