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: '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: 'Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Star Wars'

No film's history has been sifted through more often than Star Wars'. After phenomenally thorough tromps through force-lore by the likes of Michael Kiminski, John Phillip Peecher, Alan Arnold, and J.W. Rinzler, it’s unrealistic to expect that any chronicler would find anything new to say about George Lucas’s phenomenon. At least Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman take a novel approach by presenting their Star Wars study as an oral history. I really loved their book in this format about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, so I was looking forward to reading their Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Star Wars even though I wasn’t certain I would learn anything new from it.

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) **

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 3

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 12

Straight Jacket (1964- dir. William Castle) ***

This is a minor William Castle shocker, but Joan Crawford makes her presence felt as a woman trying to put her life back together after a long stint in an asylum for offing her husband with a wire hanger an axe. The twist is so-so, but getting the chance to see Crawford ham it up in a Castle picture is enough. The picture loses half a point because Castle never actually appears on screen to charm us with a schlocky gimmick while sucking on a giant cigar.

October 13

It Follows (2014- dir. David Robert Mitchell) ****½

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 27

Series: Hammer House of Horror

Episode: “The Silent Scream”, in which Hammer’s quintessential star, Peter Cushing, makes a small-screen appearance as a seemingly kindly concentration camp-survivor who hires ex-con Brian Cox to care for his menagerie of caged animals. Little does Cox know that Cushing intends him to be the latest addition to the menagerie and that a fellow does not need to be imprisoned in a concentration camp to survive one. Cox’s situation and escape attempts are nerve wracking and Cushing is even more evil than he ever was as Dr. Frankenstein. A last minute twist really solidifies the position of “The Silent Scream” as the greatest installment of Hammer House of Horror.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Vincent Price!

No Halloween season is a true Halloween season without a healthy dose of Vincent Price movies. But wait! Don’t sit down to shudder along with House of Wax or The Abominable Dr. Phibes just yet! To truly appreciate the man and his work, you’ll first want to bolster your Priceducation with these 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Vincent Price!

1. That Vincent Price was a gourmet chef and cookbook author is well known among fans, but they might not be aware that culinary interests ran deep in his bloodline. His grandfather, Vincent C. Price, invented baking powder and pioneered cornstarch as a baking ingredient, and his father, Vincent Leonard Price, was the president of the National Candy Company.

2. Vincent Price’s first wife, Edith Barrett, didn’t become as synonymous with horror as her husband did, but she did star in the creepy classic I Walked with a Zombie.

3. Price’s daughter Victoria is a serious writer who wrote scripts about Richard Widmark and her dad’s old friend Roddy McDowall for A&E’s Biography series and an extensive and refreshingly objective biography about her dad. She also had a brief role as a reporter in Price’s final film, Edward Scissorhands.

4. As a young man from an unquestioningly conservative St. Louis family, Price expressed sympathy with this burgeoning Nazi party. However, he underwent a major liberal awakening upon moving to Hollywood where he became active in such causes as the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Ironically, Joseph McCarthy targeted Price as a possible communist in the fifties, citing Price’s anti-Nazi inclinations as proof that he was some sort of dangerous radical. McCarthy was one loony piece of work.

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 335

The Date: August 30

The Movie: Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)

What Is It?: What could have just been an update of Bride of Frankenstein is a totally individual film. Robert Morris is the young assistant of Pete Cushing’s Dr. Frankenstein. Morris is beheaded for a crime he didn’t commit. The good doctor resurrects him by transferring his soul into the body of his girlfriend, Susan Denberg, who’d drowned herself after witnessing the execution. A badly scarred brunette in life, Denberg somehow springs back to life as a blonde with perfect skin and a yen for revenge against the trio of snotty rich kids who committed the crime for which Morris was killed. 

Why Today?: On this day in 1797, Mary Godwin is born.

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 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 239

The Date: May 26

The Movie: Brides of Dracula (1960)

What Is It?: So what if there are no brides and no Dracula? Hammer’s second picture to trade on the count’s name is one of the studio’s best. Peter Cushing turns Van Helsing into an action hero, owning the role for good. Somewhere Hugh Jackman weeps.

Why Today?: On this day in 1913, Peter Cushing is born.

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 80

The Date: December 19

The Movie: Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

What Is It?: Vampire and chopsocky flicks run at each other from across the room and make out for 83 minutes in Roy Ward Baker’s underrated Hammer horror. Contains what must be the cleverest use of bad dubbing in a seventies kung-fu flick. Also contains Peter Cushing. That is always a good thing.

Why Today?: On this day in 1916, Roy Ward Baker is born.

Psychobabble Recommends 'The Art of Horror'

Hal Leonard has been one of the highest-profile publishers of music instruction books for almost seventy years, but it only recently expanded into the pop culture side of entertainment when it acquired Backbeat Books in 2006 (the imprint put out my own The Who FAQ last year). Hal Leonard has also dipped into non-musical forms of entertainment with its Applause Theatre & Cinema Books imprint. This doesn’t just include the kinds of historical/analytical titles in the FAQ series (a couple of which I’m reading right now… more on those later this month), but also lush coffee table books.

Edited by Stephen Jones, The Art of Horror is one such recent volume.  Even if Hal Leonard had told me to go screw myself when I submitted my proposal for The Who FAQ, I’d still feel remiss for not trumpeting this book to the readers who prefer the creepier side of Psychobabble. This is a really fabulous collection of pieces that show just how far horror has stretched it tentacles through the art world. As you might expect, there are plenty of full-color movie posters, one sheets, and other motionless visuals associated with moving pictures, horror’s main medium. However, Jones also invites a diverse array of classical and modern artworks, comic and pulp novel covers, Halloween cards, engravings, and more to the mad monster party. There are full-page displays of works by creatures like Basil Gogos, Giger, John O.Winsch, and other artists who do not require introductions to hardcore horror fans, as well as a massive host of less familiar artists you’ll be glad you’ve discovered on these pages (well, at least until the nightmares start kicking in). The most delightful surprise was a couple of watercolors depicting Karloff in Bride and Son of Frankenstein by none other than Peter Cushing! Impressively, Jones also corralled such major horror writers as David Skal, Lisa Morton, Greg Mank, and Kim Newman to provide commentary. These writers tend to stick to the basic history of the particular monsters they’ve been assigned to profile, so you probably won’t learn anything new, but as the title tells, art is the point behind The Art of Horror, and there is a truly grotesque and gorgeous assortment here.