Tag Old School British

Phantom of the Opera, The (1962)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , February 6th, 2013 @ 7:24 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Terence Fisher

  • Writer: Gaston Leroux (novel), Anthony Hinds (screenplay)

  • Starring: Herbert Lom, Heather Sears, Edward de Souza, Thorley Walters

  • Run Time: 90 mins

The Phantom of the Opera (1962)

Out of the hell-fire of horror unimaginable rises the figure of terror incarnate!

A poor composer, Professor Petrie, is angered when he finds out that the slimy Lord D’Arcy is stealing his work by printing his own name on the top of an opera he had composed. Petrie sets out to try and put an end to the printing but an accident in the press horribly burns his face with acid and he escapes into the sewers, forced into hiding. Years later, D’Arcy is about to start production on one of Petrie’s plays. But Petrie has not died and decides to terrorise the opera house to make sure that the play doesn’t go ahead.

 

Hammer struck gold with their reinventions of classic horror icons Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy so it was inevitable that the studio would turn to other famous literary characters to keep the bandwagon rolling. In their second wave of remakes, Hammer gave the Gothic treatment to the Wolf Man in The Curse of the Werewolf, Dr Jekyll in The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll and here with The Phantom of the Opera. Unfortunately this second wave was not as commercially successful as the first and these films tend to be overlooked within the Hammer canon. Most people will associate the Phantom with Lon Chaney in the 1925 silent film but the story and character has since gone on to become one of the most adapted works of all time. Would Hammer’s trademark Gothic spin make any difference?

Well Hammer didn’t exactly produce a dud with The Phantom of the Opera but the film falls way below the high expectations that it set itself with previous successes. I think it’s just because, as a character, the Phantom himself is never mentioned in the same top-billed breath as Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy (and even the Wolf Man too) and that instantly makes him become something of a second class movie monster. Perhaps this is made more so with the fact that neither Christopher Lee nor Peter Cushing star, the two names most synonymous with the glorious Hammer Technicolour horror revolution of the late 50s, were signed up to star and lend the film some much needed star power. Hammer rustled up some decent names for the film but none with the same marquis value as the two legends. Hammer’s most famous director, Terence Fisher, was once again tasked to breath new life into a Universal classic but even he can do little with the film. It looks good and flows perfectly fine but never really kicks into life like the earlier horrors did.

The film itself is one of Hammer’s more sedate films – its low on violence and gore (we don’t get a clear shot of the Phantom’s disfigured face which I had been hoping for) and it drags quite a bit in places as the plot unravels slowly. The focus is on melodramatic elements, not the horror aspects, and getting the audience to sympathise with the character of the Phantom, even though he isn’t given too much time on the screen. And as the film is based around opera, you’re going to have to sit through quite a bit of singing as well (though obviously not as much as any of the musical stage adaptations!). I just get the impression that Fisher and the production team were playing it safe here. Far from ground-breaking gore and Gothic flavour in The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula, where Hammer took some risks which paid off, The Phantom of the Opera is too plodding to ever really set the world alight.

Herbert Lom is great as the Phantom and the script focuses a lot more on his psychological state. It doesn’t quite know whether to treat him as mad or misunderstood as he’s built up to be a villain throughout the film, only to show his true colours towards the end. As the actual ‘Phantom’ he doesn’t have an awful lot to do but in person there’s a lengthy flashback scene which shows us how he came to be in the state he is. His lair looks superb for a low budget set and is one of the best that Hammer ever designed. There is a sewer running through it as well as a massive organ as its centre piece and everything is sculpted around the rocks. Bond villains didn’t even get real estate as beautiful as this!

Michael Gough steals the show as the slimy Lord D’Arcy. I don’t know whether it’s just me but I’ve always thought that Gough looked a little sinister and creepy and this film really plays on it. He chews his scenes with glee, firing employees, lusting after female opera singers and, of course, stealing music. There are a whole host of other character actors on show including Thorley Walters, Patrick Troughton and Hammer cameo regular Michael Ripper makes an appearance too. It’s a solid cast and I wouldn’t expect anything else from Hammer. It’s just a pity that what they have to work with is so, well, lacklustre.

 

Hammer’s version of The Phantom of the Opera does contain a lot which is worth viewing. If you like your films a little more sedate (and with plenty of opera singing no less!), then check this out. It’s not a Hammer classic in the same vein as The Curse of Frankenstein but it’s still worth at least one viewing.

 

 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Devil Rides Out, The (1968)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , January 28th, 2013 @ 5:09 pm
  • AKA: The Devil's Bride

  • Director: Terence Fisher

  • Writer: Richard Matheson (screenplay), Dennis Wheatley (novel)

  • Starring: Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi, Leon Greene

  • Run Time: 95 mins

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

The beauty of woman . . . the demon of darkness . . . the unholy union of “The Devil’s Bride”

The Duc Du Richleau and Rex Van Ryn arrive at the house of their friend Simon Aron for a long-awaited reunion. However Simon has forgotten about them and is instead holding a mysterious party for an astronomical society. Richleau then discovers that the society is a really a coven of Satanists led by the charismatic Mocata and the two men bundle Simon away to safety. That is the least of their troubles though as Mocata won’t let Simon go that easily and uses all of his black magic powers to claim Simon’s soul. Mocata had summoned the Angel of Death and it will not return to Hell empty-handed.

 

Having firmly established themselves as Gothic horror specialists in the 50s and 60s with their array of Frankenstein and Dracula films, Hammer‘s fortunes began to wane a little in the late 60s. There were only so many times that audiences could watch Frankenstein fail again or see Dracula staked before it got repetitive. So the studio decided to dabble in the black arts and looked for other literature that they could bring to the screen. Dennis Wheatley’s 1934 novel, The Devil Rides Out, seemed like a perfect fit with its tales of black magic, ritual sacrifices and shady good versus evil dynamics which Hammer loved. In fact an adaptation of the novel had first been proposed by Hammer in 1963 but with the subject matter proving controversial (even on its eventual release) it was put on the back burner until 1967 when censorship had become a little more relaxed and this finally went into production. The studio pulled out all of the big guns – their top director Terence Fisher, composer James Bernard and the legendary Christopher Lee – to make sure that this was a hit. It has since become one of Hammer’s most celebrated films and whilst its slow pace is a product of its time, it is a film which lingers long in the mind after viewing.

The Devil Rides Out pulls out the dark, sinister undertones almost right from the beginning as both the scholarly Du Richleau and sceptical Rex go to visit Simon at his party and realise something is not right. There is a constant sense that something terrifying is lurking around waiting to be unleashed. Nowadays this would be replicated with a bombardment of special effects but this is old school horror and the power of the film lies in suggestion rather than visuals. Wheatley knew his occult down to very fine detail and every shred of knowledge is crammed into the screen in some form either by visuals in the form of the lavish ceremonial sets or through dialogue (much of which is spoken by Christopher Lee which instantly makes it sound credible – more on him later though) in which we get to know things like the exact amount of people that need to be present at one of these ceremonies and so forth. If you don’t know anything about the occult, chances are you’ll have picked a few things up afterwards.

The piece-de-resistance of the film is the scene in which Du Richleau, Marie, Reggie and Simon stay inside a protective circle chalk-drawn out on the floor and must survive the night as Mocata sends all manner of black magic forces against them including the Angel of Death and a giant tarantula. It sounds a lot more epic than it turns out and the quality of the special effects varies between enemies (they do age the film considerably) but the scene is more about atmosphere and tension and that it manages to nail.

Rather more alarmingly is the scene in the woods for the first attempt to baptise Simon into the cult. As the cultists chant and sacrifice, a goat-headed figure appears representing the Devil himself. Even though it is blatantly a guy in a mask, the entire scene is rather unsettling for its intent than any outright shock. The less said about an early scene in which Du Richleau and Rex are greeted by the sight of a demon arising from a hidden pentagram (simply a cross-eyed black guy – someone call the politically correct brigade!) the better. I guess what I like about the film is that it believes in itself. Rex is asked to buy into the existence of black magic at the start of the film by Du Richleau and in effect he’s asking the audience to buy into it as well. The scene with the Devil in the woods is presented almost as matter-of-fact with hardly any focus on the goat-headed apparition perched on a rock watching the ritual. This makes it all the more terrifying.

Whilst the film plods along when it isn’t conducting black magic rituals and the less-than-subtle Christian messages get a little too sickening towards the end, it is the performances which make this a true Hammer classic. Christopher Lee has often stated that out of all of the films that he’s starred in, this was his favourite and it’s easy to see why from his viewpoint: he gets to star as the good guy for a change! If see you ‘starring Christopher Lee’ in a title, you assume that he’s the bad guy such as his typecasting over the years has dictated. But whilst his sinister moustache and beard lends itself to images of Satanic priests, Lee’s usual pomp, grandeur, intensity and directness make for an interesting choice of hero. It’s one of Lee’s best performances, certainly more energetic and committed to the script than I can recall from other films (and I’ve seen a lot of Lee’s films).

Charles Gray, more famous for his appearance as Blofeld in James Bond flick Diamonds Are Forever, stars opposite him as Mocata and though Gray’s more feminine persona and foppish voice does detract slightly from the character, his smarm and arrogance slices through the screen and more than adequately gives him a creepy edge. His quote “I will not be back. But something will, tonight” is delivered with devilish relish as he warns Marie of the night they’re about to face and smirks at the thought of their suffering. Mocata and Du Richleau are set up as binary opposites to each other, much like Dracula and Van Helsing were in the Dracula films or even Professor X and Magneto in the X-Men films (to use a more recent example). With equal powers and equal knowledge of the other, the tense stand-offs between the two smacks of intellectuals playing chess with human pawns. Its sterling work and credit must also go to writer Richard Matheson for crafting such enthralling characters. The rest of the cast don’t make nearly as much of an impression but when you’re in the shadows of Lee and Gray on this form, there’s no shame in that.

 

The Devil Rides Out is a stand-out film in Hammer’s massive film library. Without Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster in the film, the studio showed that they could deliver classic horror films and this is certainly one of their best efforts despite it not doing all that well when it was released. It has since found much respect and with a towering, near career-best performance from Christopher Lee at its core, The Devil Rides Out is classic horror at its most daring.

 

 ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 

 

 

And Now the Screaming Starts (1973)

0 comments By MovieBuff101 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , November 11th, 2012 @ 11:30 am
  • AKA:

  • Director: Roy Ward Baker

  • Writer: David Case (novel) Roger Marshall

  • Starring: Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom, Patrick Magee, Stephanie Beacham

  • Run Time: 91 mins

And Now the Screaming Starts (1973)

The dead hand that crawls KILLS and LIVES!!!

Newly weds Charles and Catherine Fengriffin move into the family estate to start their new life together. But shortly after arriving, Catherine is disturbed by ghastly visions of man whose eyes have been gouged out and is also tormented by a disembodied hand. However no one else in the house has seen these things and Charles begins to suspect that Catherine is going insane. When she becomes pregnant, Charles enlists the help of psychiatrist Dr Pope to get to the bottom of these apparent hallucinations. What becomes evident is Catherine is now the victim of a horrible curse which had been bestowed upon the Fengriffins thanks to the actions of Charles’ grandfather.

 

Known more for their anthologies back in the 60s and 70s, British company Amicus finally tried their hand at period horror in an attempt to muscle in on their rivals, Hammer, with And Now the Screaming Starts. Ironically enough, Hammer had begun to move away from that tried-and-tested formula by bringing the likes of Dracula into the present day with Dracula A.D. 1972. So Amicus’ decision to do something that had been done to death over the years was a bit bewildering. So much so when you see how average And Now the Screaming Starts actually is. Far from being a classic period Gothic horror, it just went to prove Hammer’s decision to move on to different material was a good one.

Director Roy Ward Baker directed a few British horrors around this time and he approaches And Now the Screaming Starts as if he’s making some sort of low budget ghost train ride for a theme park. Portraits rattle against the walls. Windows blow open. Candles extinguish. There’s thunder and lightning. And that’s just the start of it – its hardly subtle horror, rather in your face scares. Baker relies on repeating the same scares over and over again for the first half of the film, with the eerie eye-less man leering through windows, a fake severed hand appearing and disappearing whenever someone mentions the curse and constant zoom-ins on one of the oil paintings which results in loud, sinister music being played. The effects aren’t convincing the first time around but they’re overworked like mad here as if Baker didn’t know how else to scare people. Despite his efforts, the film rarely conveys any sense of dread and as a result, the pace of the film slows to a crawl. You’re waiting for something to jump-start the film into life.

Thankfully the arrival of Peter Cushing half-way through the film is this required jump-start – not because he’s on the screen (though it makes a big difference to have him around) but because the story finally starts to advance and the characters begin to unravel the curse that is hanging over the Fengriffins. This leads to a nasty flashback and then the film moves swiftly on to its finale, peppered with a few twists and turns along the way. There are still a couple of the tacky scare sequences like there were in the opening half but at least the film is moving with purpose by this point and they don’t feel like they’re simply there to pad out the running time. Now they appear with meaning and relevance to the story. In fact the last forty minutes or so is pretty good. Though the direction of the story is predictable and the twists themselves are hardly nerve-shattering, And Now the Screaming Starts provides decent entertainment.

Stephanie Beacham stars as Catherine and she’s got a massive set of lungs on her (in both the euphemism sense and the proper sense!). Obviously with a title like And Now the Screaming Starts, there were going to be moments in the film where she was required to scream and boy, does she ever scream. Possibly one of the most ear-piecing and genuinely frightening screams I’ve heard, her character’s shock and fright is easily transmitted to the viewer. It helps matters greatly that she’s beautiful – like seriously stunning, one of English’s finest roses. The role requires her to scream a lot and wear low-cut dresses and she does both with equal aplomb.

Ian Ogilvy doesn’t do have much to do as Charles Fengriffin so it’s left to the old timers Peter Cushing and Herbert Lom to deliver. Cushing only enters the film past the half way point and even though he’s his usual brilliant self, the role is virtually useless to the story and the actions that his character makes could easily have been written for Charles himself. Lom’s part is meatier, starring in a flashback scene as Charle’s debaucherous grandfather and showing us the reason that the curse was put onto the Fengriffins. Lom hams it up in his brief role and is arguably the best bit of the film. This sequence alone features rape and a nasty hand chopping to boot!

 

And Now the Screaming Starts is totally worthless. It could easily match up against some of Hammer’s lesser efforts with ease. It’s just that the terrible first half of the film torpedoes any sort of momentum the film needed to give the rousing second half any hope of winning the viewer over. I got the impression that it would have worked better as a shorter film in one of their specialist anthologies.

 

 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

0 comments By MovieBuff101 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , November 3rd, 2012 @ 12:10 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Arthur Crabtree

  • Writer: Herman Cohen, Aben Kandel

  • Starring: Michael Gough, June Cunningham and Graham Curnow

  • Run Time: 95 mins

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

SEE! The Fantastic Binocular Murder! SEE! The Vat of Death!

Crime writer Edward Bancroft secretly owns a private ‘black museum’ full of deadly implements and torture devices. When London is gripped by a series of sensationalist murders, Scotland Yard have no clues as to the identity of the killer. Bancroft has hypnotised his assistant into committing these acts of murder so that he has something lurid to write about for his fanatic audience.

 

From the opening scene in which a woman uses a pair of binoculars with brutal and bloody consequences, you know that Horrors of the Black Museum is going to hold little back in the way of garish shocks. Much like the story featuring a spate of sensationalist which grips London with fear, Horrors of the Black Museum serves up a macabre meal of as much visual horror as the late 50s would allow.

Horrors of the Black Museum would no doubt work well in today’s horror environment, albeit with more gore and nudity. It’s virtually a collection of horrific set pieces strung together by the flimsiest of the plots – on the DVD cover and in its TV listing write-ups, the fact that Bancroft is the one behind the murders is blatantly stated. And if you hadn’t read any of that, the film promptly reveals this to you before the twenty minute mark is up. This isn’t meant to be a murder mystery or ‘whodunnit.’ This is quite literally a slasher for the 1950s or a Saw-esque film in which story matters little, how bloody and outrageous the film can be matters a lot. As well as the gruesome opening with the booby-trapped binoculars, there is a bedroom beheading which was definitely well ahead of its time in the gore stakes. In my favourite moment of the film, a recently-murdered body is lowered into a vat of acid and reduced to a skeleton. Tame today, yes. For 1959, I bet people were throwing up in sick bags. Throughout the film, the blood is a vivid scarlet colour and it certainly looks the part. You can imagine audiences never seeing sights so ghastly back in the day!

As the film progresses, its early grounding in reality gives way and it gets ever more preposterous – the idea that Bancroft is controlling his young assistant through hypnosis; the physical transformations that he suffers as a result; the super computer that Bancroft keeps in his basement; and much more. At this point, we, like Bancroft, are one step ahead of the police and it’s only a matter of time for them to play catch-up. Though the film provides a number of solid set pieces, you get the sense that there’s no real overlying story to keep it all hooked together. We never find out Bancroft’s real motives and there are too many unanswered questions. The finale at an amusement park provides a limp pay-off given the brutality that the previous hour had shown.

I’ve always thought that the late Michael Gough looked decidedly dodgy. I’m sure he was a nice enough fellow in real life but in his films, most particular his early work when he still had a full head of jet black hair, he’s got this snivelling, odious look to him. Perfectly cast as the villain, Gough chews the scenery up like mad, going from calm and collected gentlemen to a ranting and raving murderous lunatic. Gough lets rip with some excellent monologues and cutting barbs about journalism and human nature and his portrayal is of a man who believes that he is a cut above everyone else. The notion of his character having a massive Bond villain-style super computer in his basement is just taking everything too far though. Apparently the role was meant for Vincent Price but he wanted too much to do it. I could see Price hamming it up perfectly as Bancroft but Gough makes an excellent alternate. The rest of the cast are insignificant – this is a show for Gough and the gore only.

 

Horrors at the Black Museum is a solid, if overly dated, British chiller worth watching for a malicious tour-de-force performance from the great Michael Gough.

 

 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Theatre of Blood (1973)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , October 24th, 2012 @ 8:19 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Douglas Hickox

  • Writer: Anthony Greville-Bell (screenplay), Stanley Mann (idea), John Kohn (idea)

  • Starring: Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Harry Andrews

  • Run Time: 104 mins

Theatre of Blood (1973)

It’s curtains for his critics!

A hammy Shakesperian actor takes horrific revenge on the critics who savaged his plays and denied him the chance to win Best Actor of the Year award by killing them in parodies of deaths from Shakespeare’s plays.

 

Essentially an elaborate sequence of death scenes linked by a loose plot, Theatre of Blood is an attempt by AIP to recapture the success that was The Abominable Dr Phibes. With Vincent Price playing a classically educated madman keen on getting revenge on some wrong-doers through a variety of convoluted set pieces, the film was a remarkably camp but graceful affair which is a bit of an oddity. Dr Phibes Rises Again soon followed which followed the same template. Then a couple of years later, this one appeared and for all intents and purposes, Theatre of Blood could almost be Dr Phibes 3.

Theatre of Blood works for one reason and for one reason only – Vincent Price. This is his film right from the start. He knows it. The director knows it. The script writer has known it. The rest of the cast know it. And after we’ve finished, we know it too. Price is at his scenery-chewing best in this one. The role of the hammy but egotistical Shakesperian actor needed a certain character to play the part and Price is perfect for it, mixing his energetic delivery with his velvet vocals and his trademark sinister, dark persona to create the perfectly grandiose villain. Edward Lionheart is weird and sometimes camp, totally mad, devoted to the works of the Bard and always posing an element of utmost danger. Shakespeare himself would have been proud to create such a multi-levelled character! Had Price not become so typecast within the horror genre, he would have made for a fantastic Shakespearian actor as he rattles off a recital of a passage of Shakespeare right before or after each death with immense passion.

Diana Rigg plays his on-screen daughter and seems to be having as much fun as Price himself, though she spends most of the film hiding beneath layers of fancy dress and make-up as she re-enacts the scenes with the ‘help’ of the intended victims. The supporting cast of critics include Jack Hawkins and Arthur Lowe of all people, most famous for his brilliant portrayal of Captain Mainwaring in the hit BBC show Dad’s Army.

Though Lionheart himself flits between the camp and the tongue-in-cheek, the film itself is played straight which makes for a disjointed combination at times. Theatre of Blood sadly lacks a decent narrative to keep it going. As I’ve already mentioned, the film is virtually a collection of Shakespearian death scenes. The flimsy story moves from death A to death B to death C without any hint of deviating. Ultimately, this just means the film gets too predictable because we know that nothing else is going to happen. Basically Price hams it up for a bit, kills someone and then moves on to the next victim. You could argue that the film follows the classic slasher formula to the latter, stripping away as much of the story as possible and keeping things simple.

The death scenes are highly elaborate and gruesome: each one ‘influenced’ by a famous death scene from a Shakespeare play and there are some crackers. One pompous character is fed his own dogs baked in a pie (from Titus Andronicus) and there’s a recreation of the famous swordfight from Romero and Juliet. Knowing your Shakespeare would definitely help! For 1973, the film can quite graphic and gallons of blood are spilled, more done with amusing fashion than truly nasty intent.

 

Theatre of Blood works on one level and one level alone: Vincent Price. If you like him, you’ll love this. If not, you still might like this. Gory fun with an interesting idea and you might even learn a bit of classic Shakespeare in the process. Price considered this his best film and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree.

 

 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 

 

 

Earth Dies Screaming, The (1964)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews, ScI-Fi Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:37 pm
  • AKA:

  • Director: Terence Fisher

  • Writer: Harry Spalding

  • Starring: Willard Parker, Virginia Field, Dennis Price, Thorley Walters

  • Run Time: 62 mins

The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

Who… Or What Were They… Who Tried To Wipe All Living Creatures Off The Face Of This Earth?

An astronaut returns to Earth to find that it has been ravaged by some unknown force, killing virtually everyone. No one knows what has happened and a small group of survivors in an English village band together to find out more. When they see a couple of men in space suits walking through their village, they assume that it is the Air Force and they are here to help. What they find is more terrifying than they could have ever imagine – these ‘men’ are actually killer robots.

 

The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula sent the name of Hammer sky-rocketing to the top of the horror genre and the man sitting in the director’s chair for both, Terence Fisher, was hot property. But after making a few more Hammer horrors, Fisher and the studio fell out over creative differences and he briefly left for a rival studio that persuaded him to helm a trio of science fiction films for them. At Planet Film, Fisher clearly found himself a little out of his comfort zone. Horror he was able to handle with ease – science fiction seemed a bit of a task. And without the other creative geniuses behind the original Hammer films (the talented writers, composers, producers and actors), it wasn’t a case of Fisher being found out (since he was a good director) but more a case of him being isolated without help. The Earth Dies Screaming was the first of the three films he made – the others being the fantastic Island of Terror and the underrated Night of the Big Heat – and whilst I have extremely fond memories of it as a kid (and scary memories too), upon further viewing as a mature adult, it’s nowhere near as good as you’d like it to be.

It’s was always going to take something special to live up to a title such as The Earth Dies Screaming so it’s no surprise that this doesn’t even come close. I’m not quite sure whether the idea to shoot in black and white was for budgetary reasons or whether it was designed to be more of a throwback to early 50s sci-fi films but whatever the reason, it is for the best as it looks and feels a lot older than its 1964 release. The biggest issue facing The Earth Dies Screaming is that it doesn’t go anywhere. From the apocalyptic opening scenes of trains crashing and planes falling out of the sky, everything gets rather low-key and very quickly. The group of survivors do what the English do best and hole up inside a pub to figure out what is going on and pretty much stay there for the next forty minutes. The robots turn up. Some of the dead humans begin to rise as zombies. And that’s about it.

With only a short running time of just over an hour, the story ends no further forward than it was when it started. We have no idea what caused nearly everyone to die, no idea what the robots were, what they wanted, why they reanimate the dead and so on. There’s no resolution to proceedings. There’s no closure. I’m not sure whether there is any film missing, whether they ran out of money and had to end when they did or whether they planned to do a sequel. It’s a highly unsatisfying ending which renders the rest of the film almost worthless.

Terence Fisher tries to keep the suspense up to compensate but after the promising opening and first appearance of the robots, the film loses steam quickly. There are too many inconsistencies with the way the robots and the zombies work for them to come off as serious threats – for convenience sake it seems the robots only occasionally attack people. The robots knew where the survivors were all holed up from the start so for them to just ignore the pub completely is a bit silly.

The robots remind me of the Cybermen from Doctor Who – back when the Cybermen were in their prime and bad ass, not those mindless drones in the new version. These robots apparently pre-date the Cybermen but I’m not one to argue that case. They’re too slow to be menacing and seem to have a lot of trouble walking (I’m not surprised with those gigantic moon boots they wear) and the script must take liberties in some scenes in order for them to appear more deadly than they are by having the characters react extremely slowly or just have them stand there in fear. The zombies are just as bad. Their purpose in the film is not explained and flimsy at best – for all intents and purposes, I think they were just put in as replacements for the robots in some scenes because it would have been too expensive or too fiddly to film those cumbersome robots walking up the stairs in the pub. Take them out of the film and the script would have run almost the same.

Willard Parker is the token American hero, no doubt cast to appeal to the US market. But he’s devoid of any charisma or charm and is a pretty unlikable lead it has to be said. Thankfully there are a few decent character actors propping up the supporting cast with Dennis Price as the shifty Taggart and Thorley Walters in his trademark role of a bumbling fool.

 

The famous line “they don’t make them like this anymore” completely sums up The Earth Dies Screaming. It had everything you wanted from a 60s B-movie: robot alien invaders, zombies, a remote village, group of survivors banding together, etc. This rating is probably an extra mark higher than it should be given that it scared me to death when I was a kid. Its effect has worn off considerably over the ages and now looks like the tepid 50s/60s sci-fi horror effort that it really is.

 

 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 

 

 

Trollenberg Terror, The (1958)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews, ScI-Fi Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , October 3rd, 2012 @ 2:33 pm
  • AKA: The Crawling Eye

  • Director: Quentin Lawrence

  • Writer: Jimmy Sangster (screenplay), Peter Key (story)

  • Starring: Forrest Tucker, Janet Munro, Jennifer Jayne, Warren Mitchell

  • Run Time: 82 mins

The Trollenberg Terror (1958)

A man dissolves…and out of the oozing mist comes the hungry eye, slave to the demon brain!

A series of unexplained deaths in the Swiss Alps leads investigator Alan Brooks to the Trollenberg mountain where the nearby observatory has been tracking a strange radioactive cloud that doesn’t seem to move. Joining him in his travels to Trollenberg, a couple of English psychics claim to be mysteriously drawn to an alien presence on the mountain. It is revealed that aliens from a dying planet have made the icy cold peaks their new home but are now moving down the mountain towards the village.

 

Another of Britain’s entries in the 50s science fiction genre, The Trollenberg Terror isn’t one of it’s greatest but still manages to deliver some eerie goods. Jimmy Sangster, the man who penned some of Hammer’s finest films, was given the task of writing and, fresh off completing a similar sci-fi tale with X the Unknown, comes armed with a wealth of ideas that would make Quatermass happy. Back in these days, the stories had to be top notch because everyone knew that the special effects were never that convincing. A good story and solid build-up would alleviate many of the weaknesses of the special effects – if the film did such a good job of making you believe in the existence of aliens and the science around them, it hardly mattered what they looked like because you were already sold on the idea. Such is the case with The Trollenberg Terror. A good story, some eerie moments and a gradual sense of impending doom keep the film ticking over until the disappointing aliens are revealed.

The plot, adapted from a BBC serial a couple of years earlier, is your routine story about mysterious goings on in a small town. You know the sort of film I’m referring to and the set-up is formulaic. There’s the pre-credits victim. The opening scene is really good and because you don’t actually see what is happening with the person off-screen, it’s a lot more effective. Local people then try and deal with the situation themselves. More disappearances. The townspeople call in some external help since their local experts don’t know what the problem is. Eventually this leads to a pivotal ‘reveal’ moment mid-way through the film in which the threat is uncovered. It’s the same routine with the scientific ground that it tries to cover – aliens coming from another dying planet and choosing Earth to be their new home, etc. The Trollberg Terror adheres to this template to perfection, casually going about its business with the minimum of fuss. It’s never overly boring but there are many occasions where you wish the pace would pick up just a little bit.

One good point is the use of the radioactive cloud. Every time the monsters go to attack, the cloud moves position on the mountain. Earlier in the film, this is a useful tool to create a bit of mystery and suspense. You know something is inside the cloud but you’re not sure what is lurking there. I guess it’s the imagination kicking into overdrive thinking about all of the weird and wonderful (and deadly) things that could be lurking in there. Regrettably, the monsters massively disappoint when they get their big reveal about half-way through and it is at this point the film loses its mystery and suspense. With everyone trapped inside the observatory, you’d think there would be some Night of the Living Dead-style barricade where the survivors fight off the monsters. But that doesn’t happen and the finale is a bit of a damp squib, with the blame solely lying at the feet of the special effects.

The monster designs are very good so it is a pity that they’re unable to do much on-camera and make themselves look like a threat. The fact that the monsters are giant brains with a big eyeball is no secret due to the fact that they’re plastered all over the front cover. They get a great debut late on the film when a character opens up the door of the hotel to see one peering in. Sadly, whenever they’re required to move or attack, they look like the models being pulled across miniature sets that they are. The humans either have unconvincing fights with rubber tentacles that don’t move or the monsters simply attack clay figures on the model sets. There’s a rather infamous attack during the observatory finale where one of the monsters grabs an unlucky chap by the throat and lifts him up off the floor – the following scene of a model man being pathetically hoisted up by the cheap monster makes me chuckle every time. At least they tried.

 

Typical of standard 50s sci-fi, The Trollenberg Terror isn’t anything special when you consider what else was out around the same period (I’m thinking of the Quatermass films here). It would have been better had the finale been more exciting and the special effects been more convincing. Even the Japanese were managing to do decent miniature work at this time with Godzilla and his giant monster friends.

 

 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Death Line (1973)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 21st, 2012 @ 1:50 pm
  • AKA: Raw Meat

  • Director: Gary Sherman

  • Writer: Ceri Jones (screenplay), Gary Sherman (original story)

  • Starring: Donald Pleasance, Norman Rossington, David Ladd, Sharon Gurney

  • Run Time: 87 mins

Death Line (1973)

Beneath Modern London Lives a Tribe of Once Humans. Neither Men Nor Women…They Are the Raw Meat Of The Human Race!

Over the years, numerous people have gone missing in the tube between Holborn and Russell Square. When a top civil servant is the latest to disappear, Scotland Yard take the matter seriously and begin to investigate. They find out that at the turn of the century, a group of tunnel-diggers in the London Underground were lost when it caved-in. Presumed dead, they managed to survive in an air pocket but without food, they resorted to cannibalism. Now it seems they have found a way out.

 

After watching the dismal Creep, I read a few reports stating that it was very similar in story to an earlier British horror called Death Line, which has garnered quite a cult reputation over the years. It took me ages to track it down and having finally seen it, I can report that it’s a very acquired taste. In other words, if you like slow, talky flicks with a few cheap gore scenes thrown in, then this is right down your alley. In fact I’m being a little harsh with that comment. For 1972 and for a British-made horror flick, this is pretty gruesome and boundary-pushing material.

It’s a largely American-made film which clearly tries to tap into the Hammer/Amicus horror market of the 60s and early 70s and does a reasonable job of creating a modern horror flick, back at a time when Hammer was still engrossed in setting their films in the past. The London Underground is such an ominous setting in real life and it’s a perfect place to set a horror flick (just ask John Landis when he filmed An American Werewolf in London) but unfortunately we don’t see a great deal of it. Instead we see lots of dark, empty, unfinished tunnels which lead to the cannibal’s lair. The long, unbroken pan around the cannibal’s home is superb though, seeing the rotting corpses of former friends and family and getting a general sense that this place has been untouched for years. There’s dust, slime and the air seems stagnant – you can almost smell how bad it is. Lighting and shadow is used to create a time capsule but unfortunately this is the only time we see the lair.

Most of the film is set away from any sort of railway line, including shops, police stations and pubs. It’s here where the film really, really drags. I’m not expecting the film to just show us continuous montages of the cannibal attacking people and moping around his lair. But contrast that to scenes featuring the hero and heroine in their apartment, and I know which I’d rather be watching.

At least there’s a seasoned veteran beefing things up. Donald Pleasance is a hoot in this film as the police inspector assigned to the case. His efforts to get to the bottom of this mystery take up the bulk of the screen time and whilst Pleasance is a joy to watch here, it’s just way too much exposure for one film. Christopher Lee also gets a large billing but appears in a shocking cameo for about five minutes before vanishing entirely. Also worth mentioning is Hugh Armstrong as ‘The Man’ or the cannibal in the film. He turns the monster into such a sad, lonely figure almost like Frankenstein’s monster. He’s not really scary because the film contrasts him too much. One moment we see him caring for his dying wife before we see him dispatching a few workers in grisly manner a couple of minutes later. Later in the film when he kidnaps Patricia, I guess we’re supposed to hate him for it but in reality, we want to see a happy ending for him. Unfortunately for Alex, the hero of the film, because the ‘villain’ is so sympathetic, it’s hard to root for him. Despite the cannibal committing some brutal acts of murder and being incapable of speech, he’s still way more appealing than this sponge of a man.

 

Death Line is seemingly caught between a rock and a hard place. It wants to be an intelligent horror film dealing with one man’s struggle to retain the way of life he has grown used to and the realisation that he’s the only one left. But the inclusion of some highly gory moments suggests that they opted for a quicker profit margin with shock tactics. It’s highly talky but definitely one film all horror fans should scope at some point simply because it’s so hard to find in the UK (at time of writing).

 

Ghoul, The (1975)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 21st, 2012 @ 1:34 pm
  • AKA: Night of the Ghoul

  • Director: Freddie Francis

  • Writer: Anthony Hinds

  • Starring: Peter Cushing, John Hurt, Alexandra Bastedo, Gwen Watford

  • Run Time: 80 mins

The Ghoul (1975)

…

A former missionary to India keeps his crazed, cannibalistic son locked away in the attic of his country house in order to keep him from killing to eat. When a group of people in a cross-country race stop off at the house, it is only a matter of time before the son escapes to feed.

 

British horror in the 70s was at its lowest point. Hammer and Amicus had been churning out the same horrors for years with dwindling results and a new breed of horror was emerging from America with the likes of Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Audiences didn’t want to keep watching Dracula, Frankenstein or other monsters stalking victims through Gothic settings. Some people foolishly stuck to the formula that had brought about the greatest success in the hope that people would eventually come full circle again but all it did was expose how poor and one-dimensional the films had become.

Tyburn Films was a new studio established by Kevin Francis, son of horror director Freddie Francis, that attempted to replicate the Hammer formula at a time when everyone else was trying not to replicate it. What we got was a handful of competently-made but ultimately weak and feeble horror outings that may have scared people back in the early 60s but looked woefully short of imagination and scares in the mid-70s. The Ghoul is one such outing.

The Ghoul might as well have begun with characters saying “been there, done that and got the t-shirt” because it’s so routine, unimaginative and uneventful. The story itself is very thin and it plods along way too slowly to do anything effective. There’s lots of padding early on with the antics of the racers taking up the bulk of the early running time. Even when they do get to the country house, they spend too much time doing very little of note. Freddie Francis’ direction is competent but so devoid of energy and life. He lets the film play out like an elongated sketch that should have been short and snappy but was dragged out to full feature-length levels.

Whilst the film is well shot, with plenty of fog-drenched moors and remote locations, it just doesn’t do anything with it. There’s no atmosphere, no sense of dread or foreboding or worthwhile build-up to the eventual reveal of the cannibal. Typically of old school horror films, the monster isn’t revealed until the very end of the film and its no surprise to find out that it’s a big let down. The ‘ghoul’ of the title is simply a man with a bit of green paint on his face. It’s hardly going to make you wet your pants, especially as he looks to be wearing a huge nappy and waddles across the floor like he has just done something naughty in it.

It’s a shame because it’s got good pedigree with the cast and crew: director Freddie Francis is a British horror legend, helming some of Amicus’ most popular anthology films as well as a few Hammer films; writer Anthony Hinds produced some of Hammer’s best early outings; both Peter Cushing (no introduction needed!) and Veronica Carlson starred in their fair share of Hammer horrors; John Hurt would shoot to fame when an alien burst out of his chest a few years later in Alien; and Ian McCullough starred in his fair share of late 70s/early 80s Italian exploitation horrors. Cushing does what he does best and that is improve the watchability of any rubbish film simply by his performance. This was three years on from the death of his wife, from which he never really recovered, and apparently he broke down a few times during filming. It’s not one of his best performances, if you can call it that, as he seems to be portraying himself – a heartbroken man full of grief and mourning. He chose the right character to play but probably at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. John Hurt pops up as the crazy gardener.

 

The Ghoul isn’t going to win any horror awards with its pedestrian, lifeless formula being about ten years out of date. It’s harmless enough but just a chore to sit through the same old, same old time and time again.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

Blood Beast Terror, The (1968)

0 comments By andrewSMITH951 Filed in Horror Movie Reviews, Movie Reviews Tagged with , , August 21st, 2012 @ 1:32 pm
  • AKA: The Vampire-Beast Craves Blood

  • Director: Vernon Sewell

  • Writer: Peter Bryan

  • Starring: Peter Cushing, Robert Flemyng, Wanda Ventham, Vanessa Howard

  • Run Time: 86 mins

The Blood Beast Terror (1968)

…

Detective Quennell investigates a series of murders in which the victims are found drained of blood with huge claws marks over their bodies. His investigation takes him to good friend and entomologist Karl Mallinger. Here he finds out that Mallinger has been conducting experiments that have caused his daughter to morph into a giant Death’s Head moth and she has been killing the men who are attracted to her.

 

Peter Cushing once remarked that The Blood Beast Terror was the worst film he ever took part in and he’s probably not too far from the truth. The Anglo-horror era in Britain in the 50s and 60s saw plenty of international smash hits churned out from the likes of Hammer. But there were also a few lesser known studios which wanted a piece of the pie and tried to muscle in on the market to little avail. This one is from a studio called Tigon who made the excellent The Witchfinder General but then struggled to keep the hits coming. It’s easy to see why they’re forgotten about when people continually talk about Hammer and Amicus.

The Blood Beast Terror is a complete mess. Even the worst of Hammer films usually had some form of coherent plot which made sense no matter how stupid some of them became. Here, there is nothing done to explain anything that happens. No doubt you’re wondering what the hell the plot is all about and it’s never explained throughout the course of the film. We don’t know how Mallinger managed to create a moth that big, let alone one that can change appearance between human and moth in the blink of an eye. Nor does it explain why the moth becomes a vampire, desperately needing blood to survive as opposed to nectar or whatever moths eat to stay alive. I guess any reasons would have been silly but at least we’d have a reason! It’s better than clutching at straws.

The film itself is terribly flat. Not a great deal happens. There’s a pointless subplot with Mallinger’s servant who continually harasses Mallinger’s eagle pet with a big stick before it pecks him to death and that plot thread ends. There’s a few deaths scattered around with a splash of blood on some of the bodies but nothing to get worked up over. The music adds nothing to the film whatsoever, with lots of misplaced and badly-timed cues of music which detract from some of the film’s most serious moments.

At least the acting is pretty reasonable with Peter Cushing being flawless as always (despite the absurdity of the material on hand) and Robert Flemyng being a bit of a turncoat as Mallinger. It’s the sort of role that Cushing can do in his sleep but one which he approaches with his traditional professionalism and ability to turn even the worst dialogue into intelligent science and fact. Wanda Ventham stars as the ill-fated ‘moth woman’ and it’s a thankless task. The moth costume looks ridiculous – fancy dress hire quality with its black bodysuit, big red eyes and some tacked-on wings.

The finale where Cushing builds a huge fire to attract the moth to it is so badly timed and rushed that it’s over before it begins. There’s one shot of something flying towards the fire but the lens seems to have been out of focus so it’s hard to explain what it is. Then the film ends. I had to read up on it in order to understand just what happened because it was all so quick and sudden. If there is one positive, it’s the great in-joke as some students put on a play of Frankenstein in Mallinger’s house. Cushing’s character peers through the window and smiles at the play, a self-referential wink to one of his greatest performances in The Curse of Frankenstein.

 

Cushing was right. The Blood Beast Terror was the worst film he ever starred in, through no fault of his own – but almost everyone else’s. It’s awful and not the way I want to remember British horror.

 

 ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ 

 

 

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