Review: 'Horror of Dracula' Blu-ray

In 1957, the world gasped before the film that defined Hammer Horror. With Terence Fisher behind the camera, and Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, classic monster source material, and an unprecedented degree of violence and sex in front of it, The Curse of Frankenstein laid out the Hammer essentials. 

The following year the same elements perfected it. Fisher's Dracula was even better than his excellent Frankenstein adaptation, this time matching a great villain with an equally formidable hero. Lugosi's Dracula may have still been a bit too iconic for Lee to beat, but Cushing's charming, action-packed Van Helsing was definitive. With Jack Asher's colorful, autumnal photography and Jimmy Sangster's tight script—as well as strong support from Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling and Carol Marsh—Dracula proved to be the finest film from one of horror's defining studios.

Review: 'The Hammer Story: Revised and Expanded Edition"

The first book on Hammer Horror I ever read was A Thing of Unspeakable Horror. Sinclair McKay's study is a thorough, witty, and critically astute trek through the history of Britain's most important and adored purveyor of blood and beastliness. It's a great read, but the little paperback barely tries to convey the ghastly, often sexy, always vibrant imagery that usually outweighed mere matters of storytelling in Hammer pictures. For that you'd have to dig in to The Hammer Story (or, you now, watch the movies). 

Review: 'The Hammer Horror Omnibus'

Hammer horror was always more about aesthetics and the enthralling presence of the studio's big stars than story. What is Hammer without all of that crimson house-paint blood, those lush Victorian sets, the decayed Gothic castles and cemeteries, and the enthralling presence of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee? 

Review: 'Dracula Has Risen from the Grave' Blu-ray

A quaint little village is still reeling from Dracula's last rampage, and though the count is dead, the local priest can still feel his evil presence. That's probably because "dead" is a relative term when it comes to vampires, especially one in a long series of Hammer Dracula movies.

So what happens next? The title says it all. Freddie Francis's Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is Hammer's fourth vampire picture, and it's the third with Christopher Lee and the second without Peter Cushing as valiant Van Helsing. Cushing is sorely missed, but a couple of youngsters take up the slack: Barbara Ewing as sexy barmaid Zena and Barry Andrews as refreshing atheist Paul. Because this is a Hammer picture, which always balanced its buckets of red-paint blood and leering close-ups of cleavage with a pretty conservative outlook, you know Paul will see the light by the time the closing credits roll, but it does this with enough subtlety to not be totally off-putting. 

Review: 'The Godfathers of Horror Films'

I've read biographies of Boris Karloff and Peter Cushing. I've read a book about the professional and personal relationship between Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. But I've never read a book like Jennifer Selway's The Godfathers of Horror Films. 

Selway attempts to do a lot in just two-hundred pages. At its most basic, The Godfathers of Horror Films is a triple-duty biography of Karloff, Cushing, and Lee. While the three stars have several significant things in common—they're all British, they all became stars by making Frankenstein movies after many years of toiling away as bit players, they all had major and prolific careers as horror stars thereafter, they were all the faces of studios intrinsically associated with horror, they all fought in world wars—their careers overlapped infrequently enough to make weaving their stories together a challenge. 

Review: 'Frankenstein Lives: The Legacy of the World's Most Famous Monster'

Dracula may be sexier, but Frankenstein is the king of the monsters. His power, pathos, versatility, metaphorical possibilities, and iconic looks are all larger than manmade life. The story of his literary creation is much more legendary than that of Dracula's, and the subsequent tales he has inspired more profound. So it's only natural that this unnatural character has been the topic of many books.

Review: 'The Wicker Man: The Official Story of the Film'

Like most true cult films, The Wicker Man has certain trappings of a particular genre (horror), but it's actually pretty hard to categorize. For most of its run time, it would be better classified as a police procedural or mystery. Midway through production, director Robin Hardy declared it was a musical. Indeed, The Wicker Man is all these things, which is just one reason it is such a unique viewing experience. However, it can also be frustrating since it exists in so many forms due to a less than respectful release that saw it get chopped to pieces to play second-fiddle to Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, with which it joined forces for an admittedly excellent double feature in 1973. Complicating the story further, there are questions as to how much it was influenced by David Pinner's novel Ritual, how much it was auteured by Hardy (whom many of the folks involved in the film describe as barely competent), and how miserable the cold, combative, and stressfully compressed shoot was.

Review: 'King's Road' Expanded Edition

Carnaby Street may have been synonymous with Swinging London, but the King's Road was swinging centuries before dedicated followers of fashion swarmed Carnaby and a good decade after that street warped into a Disnified version of itself. Henry VIII spent time in the King's Road area. So did Thomas More, Henry James, Noel Coward, Germaine Greer, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors, Aleister Crowley, Bram Stoker, Francis Bacon, and Karl Marx. But it was scene makers like Mary Quant, the Stones, Pete Townshend, and later, the Sex Pistols and The Damned, who really gave the road its character. The Rocky Horror Show debuted there. A Clockwork Orange was filmed at its Chelsea Drug Store, which Jagger immortalized in "You Can't Always Get What You Want". Judy Garland died there. It was where a box for keeping plants alive on long sea voyages was invented, where you could see a monkey ride a pony around a mansion's grounds (if you were around in 1843, that is), where a "mad idiot" was known to visit the night spots with a dyed-green rabbit he loaded up with LSD until the poor pet committed suicide, where a wombat suffocated in a box of cigars, and where the British Spaghetti Queen slipped into a dress comprised of thirty helpings of macaroni. Thirty!

Review: 'I, Monster' DVD

In 1971, Hammer was having another go at Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a decade after its failed first attempt, Terence Fisher's generally misguided The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. Perhaps to avoid confusion with Roy Ward Baker's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Milton Subotsky opted to call his own adaptation of the same year I, Monster and changed the names of the title character(s) to Dr. Marlowe and Mr. Blake. 

Review: 'Horror Hotel' DVD

In 1960, director John Moxey arguably outdid Hammer with his own atmosphere-rich Gothic horror. In contrast to Hammer's vibrant colors, Moxey opted for high-contrast black and white and deep focus photography to tell his tale of a burned witch who reappears in the present to lure a young woman to her sacrificial death. Much has been made of the structural similarities between Moxey's City of the Dead and Hitchcock's Psycho, but Moxey's story is purely supernatural and his film much more stylized. It's also a lot more fun than the grim and realistic Psycho. 

Review: 'The Wicker Man: The Original Soundtrack Album' on Transparent Yellow Vinyl

What The Rocky Horror Picture Show is to glam, The Wicker Man is to Wyrd folk, that quaint and creepy strain of Olde English acoustic music that conjures images of Maypole reveries and pagans in animal masks. Robin Hardy's enchantingly eerie 1973 film is the paragon of folk horror pictures, and Paul Giovanni's outrageously bawdy and outrageously beautiful songs such as "Gently Johnny" and "Willow's Song" are as integral to the spell it casts as "Time Warp" is to Rocky Horror's. Any fan of Hardy's film would not be caught in a flaming wicker man without a copy of its soundtrack album. 

A Wicker Man soundtrack album first arrived via Trunk Records 25 years after the film's theatrical debut. The tracks on that version were pulled directly from the film's soundtrack, and though the disc was very complete (right down to the inclusion of lots of sound effects and dialogue bits), the sound quality was hardly optimal. It was not until 2002, when Silva Screen Records paraded out the original master tapes for eleven tracks, that The Wicker Man really sounded up to snuff on CD and vinyl. A clutch of the most essential pieces of music not found on the original master tapes were included as pulled-from-the-film bonus tracks on both editions.

Unfortunately, those bonuses are absent from Silva Screen's latest reissue of The Wicker Man: The Original Soundtrack. Like each reissue since 2013, only the pristine-sounding eleven from the original masters are present. That means you don't get the mesmerizing version of Robert Burns's "The Highland Widow's Lament" that opens the long edit of the film, but you do get such outrageously bawdy and outrageously beautiful things as Giovanni's "Gently Johnny", "Fire Leap", "Corn Rigs", "Maypole", and the utterly spellbinding "Willow's Song", which contains some of the rudest lyrics that do not resort to expletives. You get the voices of Giovanni, stars Christopher Lee and Diane Cilento, and Lesley Mackie subbing for Britt Ekland on "Willow's Song".

Britt, however, does appear in all her own bawdy glory on a newly designed inner sleeve complete with libretto. The gatefold still features conductor Gary Carpenter's notes from Silva Screen's 2002 edition of the soundtrack, but the design of it and the front cover are new. So is the use of transparent, yellow vinyl, which has a well-centered spindle hole and is pretty quiet. The music sounds as warm and unsettlingly inviting as ever. 

Review: 'Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Horror Cinema'

Like Karloff and Lugosi, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee partnered in several beloved horror movies that are all the more loved because these two particular actors appeared in them together. Unlike Karloff and Lugosi, Cushing and Lee’s partnership extended beyond the screen. They were close friends who spoke of each other in only the most rapturous tones. That friendship also affected their work, as when Lee prevented Cushing from deserting the Horror Express production by gently reminding him of the good times they had together.

Review: 'The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films'

Hammer Film Productions made more than 160 movies, about a third of which were the horror flicks that earned the company its looming reputation. With so many films and so many producers, directors, and writers who helped Frankenstein them to life, Hammer is well deserving of a monstrous encyclopedia like the one Chris Fellner is about to publish.

The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films is exactly what the title describes. Fellner’s tome supplies more than 525 pages of entries on the expected movies and crew members, as well as entries on Hammer’s forays into television, such as The Hammer House of Horror, and even some items with a somewhat tangential relationship to the production company, such as Blood of the Vampire (a non-Hammer production made by a crew with deep ties to Hammer) and Ida Lupino, whose husbands and father worked for Hammer and who played house-host to Hammer’s number-one star, Peter Cushing.

Entries on films each follow a similar format with subheadings listing cast and crew and UK and U.S. release dates, summarizing plots in great detail, offering quotes from critics and cast/crew members (Christopher Lee’s quotes are almost invariably about how he wasn’t being paid enough), and tersely running down production notes and trivia, some of which are quite interesting (I had no idea that Cary Grant was a major Hammer-head who almost starred in Phantom of the Opera in 1962). That terseness prevents this book about fun films from being truly fun. It would have been nice if Fellner took a more playful and less drily encyclopediac approach to composing his encyclopedia. He only drops his dry professionalism when discussing the so-called “Hammer Glamour” actresses for which the studio is famous. While the way Fellner leers over these actresses is technically appropriate in a book about a studio infamous for the way it exploited its female stars, it can make for uncomfortable reading in 2019, especially when the author does such unnecessary things as relaying certain actresses’ measurements. A book about the sixties does not have to read like a book written in the sixties. 

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 19

Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (1974- dir. Brian Clemens) ****

At a time when Hammer was doubling down on its exploitative rep, the studio produced this comparatively light-hearted romp in which a swashbuckler trots across the countryside looking for vampires to stab. Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter may be Hammer’s freshest film of the seventies. James Needs’s editing is very stylish (a pub swordfight is pricelessly executed), and Horst Janson is reasonably appealing as the vamp slayer (though his penchant for violent sex is a gratuitous capitulation to the era’s nastier ethos). Caroline Munro and John Cater as Kronos’s more personable sidekicks are better. It’s too bad this did not lead to the series it was intended to because it would have been great fun to watch this dynamic trio swashbuckle their way through other adventures.

Blair Witch (2016- dir. Adam Wingard) **

Review: Mill Creek's Hammer Horror Double Feature Blu-rays

For a long period of the blu-ray age, being a Region A Hammer Horror fan was very frustrating. The most vivid hunks of monstrous comfort food were sparse in the U.S. despite being abundant in a number of other regions. That began to change last year with Warner Brothers’ release of The Mummy, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Taste the Blood of Dracula, and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. Since then, other companies have started serving famished fans such titles as Twilight Time’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Universal’s Hammer Horror 8-Film Collection, and Mill Creek’s double features of The Revenge of Frankenstein/The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll/Gorgon (blu-ray upgrades of DVD sets originally released in 2008).

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 310

The Date: August 5

The Movie: Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

What Is It?: The Curse of Frankenstein fully established the Hammer conventions: excessive blood, sleazy sex, and source material with roots in Universal horror. Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster jettisons much of what made James Whale’s movie great. Frankenstein was a poetic, deeply humane portrait of a monstrous innocent driven to horrendous acts after being abandoned by his equally sympathetic creator. The Curse of Frankenstein is a portrait of cruelty. Focus shifts away from the Monster and onto the doctor, who is more villainous than any horror character since Mamoulian’s Hyde, and like Hyde, he is not without his charms because he is played with electrifying gusto. Peter Cushing is great in the title role, magnetic even as he murders a kindly house guest, launches into megalomaniacal rants, or torments the maid with whom he’s having an affair.

Why Today?: This is the date in Mary Shelley’s book that Robert Walton finds Frankenstein’s sledge.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 297

The Date: July 23

The Movie: The Mummy (1959)

What Is It?: This is not one of Jimmy Sangster’s cleverest scripts, but Christopher Lee gets to upstage costar Peter Cushing for the first time. Spending much of the movie wrapped in dirty bandages, his face caked in Egyptian mud, Lee is still more sympathetic as lovelorn Kharis than he was in his earlier monster roles. He also gets some quality face time and dialogue during a lavish, 13-minute sequence reimagining the mummification scene from the original Mummy, though without reaching similar heights of claustrophobia-inducing terror and all of the brown-face makeup the white actors play while impersonating Egyptians is pretty off-putting. The greatest triumph of The Mummy is that of director Terence Fisher, cinematographer Jack Asher, and their brilliant art department. The team’s use of colored lights, painted backdrops, spectacular costumes and props, and sets cluttered with detail make the whole picture look like a canvass thick with rich oils.

Why Today?: On this day in 1952, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 begins.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 248

The Date: June 4

The Movie: Horror Express (1972)

What Is It?: Christopher Lee is a scientist transporting a monkey man that makes people bleed out of their eyeballs aboard the Trans-Siberian Express. The third act introduction of some totally unexpected gonzo humor by way of Telly Savalas’s Cossack captain elevates Horror Express from schlock masquerading as art to the other way around.

Why Today?: On this day in 1876, the Transcontinental Express sets a record by arriving in San Fran from NYC in just 83 hours and 39 minutes.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 218

The Date: May 5

The Movie: Dracula (1958)

What Is It?: It’s probably a cliché to say that Dracula is Hammer’s best horror, but some clichés are true. It’s the best, from Christopher Lee’s imposing turn as the count, to Peter Cushing’s endearing and high-action one as Van Helsing, to Jack Asher’s sumptuous cinematography and Terence Fisher and Jimmy Sangster’s economical storytelling.

Why Today?: In Bram Stoker’s novel, Jonathan Harker arrives at Castle Dracula on May 5.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 214

The Date: May 1

The Movie: The Wicker Man (1973)

What Is It?: The king of folk horror flicks, The Wicker Man is a heady swirl of fun-loving paganism and spellbinding folk music. Its unmatched atmosphere makes it worth watching over and over even though its mystery is such a huge part of the story.

Why Today?: I won’t spoil that mystery. I’ll just say that it is solved on May Day.