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.

Indeed, making The Wicker Man doesn't seem like it was that much fun for the people who made The Wicker Man, but that also makes the story of its making juicy with drama. That's a boon for writer John Walsh and his new book, The Wicker Man: The Official Story of the Film. He gets into the film's literary genesis, the historical accuracy of its pagan depictions, its music, and its troubled making, so full of animosity (Britt Ekland vs. Ingrid Pitt; Christopher Lee vs. Michael Deeley; Robin Hardy vs. everyone). He makes attempts to solve myths associated with the film, such as the notion that Deeley deliberately botched the film's release and that Rod Stewart made an attempt to buy every print of the film because he didn't approve of girlfriend Ekland showing so much skin in the flick, although there's so much bad blood and opportunities to be self-serving among the Wicker Man gang that the reliability of the sources may sometimes be questionable. 

But who cares? What matters is that the telling is delicious and the book is full of fascinating tidbits (I hadn't known that Christopher Lee held some sway over the script's rewrites) and images that include shots of the construction of the title man, original sheet music for its wonderful songs, actors in the studio recording those songs, some fabulous fan art, stills of deleted scenes that have not been included in any cut of the film, and a handy chart for differentiating the film's various edits. Now if only the longest and best edit could somehow get properly restored...

Review: 'The Women of Hammer Horror: A Biographical Dictionary and Filmography'

Hammer Studios became synonymous with horror for a number of reasons: its stylish yet lurid reinterpretations of Universal’s monsters, its groundbreaking bloodiness, the charismatic presence of Peter Cushing, the chilly presence of Christopher Lee. Just as integral to the studios’ personality are the women who so fulfilled certain physical requirements that the term “Hammer glamour” was invented to define/label them. 

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 333

The Date: August 28

The Movie: The Vampire Lovers (1970)

What Is It?: Hammer’s first adaptation of le Fanu’s Carmilla. Ingrid Pitt transcends the exploitation with her energetic presence and committed acting. She plays a lusty vampiress who goes around biting and bedding everyone in sight. Well, everyone but Peter Cushing. The depiction of a predatory lesbian vampire is homophobic, but Pitt plays her with such humanity that she earns our empathy much more so than her vacant-eyed victim, whom she genuinely seems to love.

Why Today?: On this day in 1814, Carmilla author Sheridan le Fanu is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 52

The Date: November 21

The Movie: Countess Dracula (1971)

What Is It?: Ingrid Pitt radiates frenzied energy as Elisabeth Bathory, the infamous aristocrat who bathed in virgin blood to maintain her youthful complexion. One of the best later day Hammers.

Why Today?: On this day in 1937, Ingrid Pitt is born.

We Need Another Barbara Steele!

Perhaps no other genre generated more iconic actors than horror, and it wasted no time dumping them in cinemas. Even before the advent of sound, there was Lon Chaney and Conrad Viedt. As soon as we could hear our monsters groan and growl, we had Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Dwight Frye, Claude Rains, and Peter Lorre. Then came Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, etc.

The key word here, of course, is actors. Actresses were not absent from horror movies. Those monsters needed someone screaming and helpless to carry off, after all, so we had Mae Clark, Helen Chandler, Fay Wray, Valerie Hobson, Evelyn Ankers, and Hazel Court to perform such tasks. Their thankless roles as distressed damsels are summed up in the term “scream queen” coined decades after the first queen was heard to scream on screen. But what about the women who made us scream? They were few in the early days of horror cinema, and though the Bride of Frankenstein would become an iconic figure only rivaled by the big three guys—Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Frankenstein Monster—the character only had four minutes of screen time and Elsa Lanchester would not follow up on her horror stardom as Bela, Lon, and Boris did. Universal followed its first great sound scare-fest with Dracula’s Daughter, though the film is not one of the best-remembered horrors of its day, and the vampiric Gloria Holden would not capitalize on it any more than Lanchester did on Bride.

Review: 'Vampire Circus' (1972)

Unable to compete with the more sophisticated chills of films such as Rosemary’s Baby, Hammer Studios high-dived into high camp in the ‘70s. The new Hammer got off to a ripping start with the Ingrid Pitt vehicle The Vampire Lovers in 1970. Within a couple of years Britain’s greatest producer of lush monster movies had fallen into a comfy groove for better or worse with stuff like Countess Dracula, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Dracula AD 1972, and Vampire Circus. The latter film finally makes its DVD debut today, and it’s one of Hammer’s goofiest. Studio execs must have given screenwriter Judson Kinberg three specifications: lots of sex, lots of blood, vampire circus. Kinberg then dashed off the script in 45 minutes.



The plot is thinner than milk stew: a band of circus performers take revenge on a village where a vampire had been put to death fifteen years earlier. There are some pretty far-out sequences swimming around that spindly storyline: a woman screws a vampire while her daughter’s bloody corpse lies a few feet away, the circus presents the villagers with such acts as a totally naked woman simulating sex with a lion tamer and a guy removing a mask that looks like a painted face to reveal his actual painted face, and an absolutely ridiculous-looking fake panther gets shaken around a bit to create the illusion it’s chomping someone to death. The performances vary in their levels of hysteria, Thorley Walters emerging triumphant with his portrayal of the wackadoo Burgermeister with Anthony Corlan coming in second as the eye-rolling vampire/panther man, Emil. Adrienne Corri of A Clockwork Orange gets top billing, even though she brings little to the film aside from a perpetually shiny puss in dire need of a good powdering. The film does a fine job of delivering a pleasing quantity of silliness and phony baloney gore, but it never rises above camp because it lacks characters worth caring about. The Vampire Lovers had that, thanks to a memorable performance from the recently departed Ingrid Pitt, plus an all-you-can-eat banquet of campy gore and silly fun. It’s a better use of your 90 minutes than Vampire Circus, but Hammer completists still shouldn’t miss either of them.



The new Vampire Circus disc is a blu ray/standard DVD combo that includes lots and lots of bonus business: a new documentary, a retrospective on circus/carnival themed horror productions, a retrospective on the British horror/comic publication Gallery of Grotesqueries, a poster and stills gallery, and a Vampire Circus interactive comic book. All that sounds good, but I can’t say for sure because I only saw the movie using Netflix’s “watch instantly” option. 

Farewell, Ingrid Pitt

Ingrid Pitt only starred in a handful of horror films, but she made such an indelible impression in The Vampire Lovers, The House That Dripped Blood, The Wicker Man, and Countess Dracula that she is rightfully remembered as the definitive actress of British Horror. Pitt is primarily regarded as a vampiric sex symbol, but she was also a nuanced actress who brought liveliness, wry wit, and a disarming lack of self consciousness to her performances. Born in Poland, she survived the concentration camps to become the face of Hammer Pictures in the '70s as Elizabeth Bathory in Countess Dracula and Carmilla Karnstein in The Vampire Lovers. She was as adoring of her fans as they were of her, hosting an annual gathering of her fan club at a restaurant in London's Polish Centre. Pitt died of heart failure on November 23, two days after she turned 73.