Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch (1985)

aka Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf

Coming to the funeral of his sister Karen, Dee Wallace Stone’s journalist character from the first movie, Texan sheriff Ben (Reb Brown) soon finds himself in curious company. Occult investigator Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) attempts to convince Ben that his sister had arranged her own on-camera murder to prevent turning into a werewolf for good. Karen’s former colleague Jenny (Annie McEnroe, doing an awkward Jamie Lee Curtis impression) is willing to buy into Stefan’s ideas quickly enough, but Ben needs a bit of convincing.

Fortunately, werewolf attacks are a good argument against scepticism, so soon, everybody’s on board with Stefan’s tales about the mighty werewolf queen Stirba (Sybil Danning) and her plan to turn more werewolves into wolfier werewolves, or something. Anyway, she needs to be stopped right quick. Stefan invites his new allies to accompany him to the small town in Transylvania that’s closest to Stirba’s secret lair in a big ass castle nobody appears to know how to find – not even Stefan’s local allies who must have lived in its neighbourhood for decades.

Needless to say, things turn weird in Transylvania.

Where Joe Dante’s first The Howling is still one of the best werewolf films ever made, Philippe Mora’s sequel is bad in so bizarre and wilful ways, it is also pretty damn fantastic without being good or best in any way, shape or form.

Aesthetically, this attempts to mix 1985 post-punk style, bits and pieces of gothic horror and a backlot Europe that manages to feel like an off-beat dream despite the backlot for once having been in actual Europe - Czechoslovakia to be precise. In practice, this means unholy yet weirdly compelling clashes between the kind of leather outfits favoured in movie BDSM and apocalypses and the cobwebby castles which are Christopher Lee’s natural habitat. A guy wearing an absurd medieval closed helmet and little else guarding said castle with an automatic weapon is the sort of thing you can expect here in every single scene. The film is nearly Italian in this regard.

Villagers that are having a folk horror village fete (probably to give Lee Wickerman flashbacks), a little person zombie attack that echoes Don’t Look Now, and a truly off-putting werewolf orgy to the jolly sounds of the film’s new wave theme song are only part of the film’s attractions. For the sleazebags among us, there’s also an incredibly ridiculous werewolf threesome between Danning, Marsha A Hunt’s character and whoever plays the guy trying to imitate wolf sex noises with them that’ll haunt your dreams (and not in a pleasant way), suggestions that Lee is the ten thousand year old brother of the equally ancient Stirba and the two once had a bit of an incestuous thing going on between them, and general horniness whenever nobody gets killed.

Our heroes are absolute idiots without any concept of strategy or any sense of self-preservation, jollily walking into traps like the giant idiots they are. Fortunately, Stirba’s not much better at her job either. I’m not sure what Stefan did with his life before becoming an occult investigator, or what his qualifications for the role are, apart from his knowledge about the movie’s curious werewolf subspecies that can only be killed by titanium instead of silver. But then, I’m not sure why our werewolf matriarch mostly spends her time having sex, shooting lasers and casting spells instead of doing anything werewolf-y, nor why there’s quite as much staking of werewolves going on here. Yes, titanium stakes, of course. Those are even more phallic, probably.

I am unsure if Mora is in on any of this being as funny, absurd and weird as it plays out, but then, that’s a not an uncommon reaction to Mora’s films for me. On the one hand, if he’s in on the joke, he keeps the straightest directorial face possible, on the other hand, how could anyone not be? The only point in the movie where I’m sure someone involved in the production is consciously taking the piss is in the ending credits, when Danning’s “iconic” moment of ripping her top off is repeated seventeen (of course people, including me, have counted it) times, intercut with outtakes from the movie one can only read as reaction shots to Danning’s breasts. Christopher Lee seems to approve of them.

The rest of the movie, I have no idea. What I do know is that Howling II is the perfect portrayal of the dream life of some male 80s teenager who also happens to be a fan of pulp writing.

In short: Mask of Murder (1988)

Original title: Invastigator

Warning: spoilers ahead, but can you really spoil something this tediously obvious?

A small town in Canada (Sweden). A serial killer with a pillow mask goes around murdering women. On a nightly raid, copper McLaine (Rod Taylor) and his partner Ray (Sam Cook) shoot down a very good suspect whom the audience can indeed identify as the killer, or really, in McLaine’s case, shoot the man when he’s already down. During the course of the firefight, their boss, Chief Superintendent Rich (Christopher Lee) is badly wounded, because Christopher Lee isn’t cheap.

Strangely enough, the murders resume shortly thereafter. Is it a copycat killer? Or has McLaine found out that Ray and his wife (Valerie Perrine) are having an affair and plans a long and boring revenge there’s no possible way for him to get away with?

I’ve liked quite a few films Swedish filmmaker Arne Mattsson made in the 50s and 60s, but this, my first excursion into the handful of entries that make up his filmography during the 80s, is a dire attempt at a return to filmmaking after half a decade’s absence. It aims at mixing elements of the giallo (which makes sense, seeing how Mattsson made films you can see as related to the Italian style decades earlier), the police procedural, and the thriller (non-thrilling division). Alas, the script is flaccid, limping from one badly written scene to the next, with no sense of drama or tension. The supposed surprises feel phoned in, and even a half-awake viewer will see them coming from miles away while the film seems to prefer twiddling its thumbs to causing any excitement in its audience.

The acting, even from the old pros in the cast, is terrible throughout. Most of the cast seem to be sleepwalking – Taylor is particularly bad – and the film is full of painfully dull line readings. Even worse, it is also full of flubbed lines that never should have made it into a finished movie but are left for the audience to gawk at.

But then, Mattsson’s direction feels amateurish more often than not, as well. It is full of bad framing and terrible visual choices, with nothing on screen that would suggest a director with decades of experience in serious popular filmmaking.

In short: The Hands of Orlac (1960)

Original title: Les mains d'Orlac

Self-important but brilliant pianist Stephen Orlac (Mel Ferrer) is on his way to his fiancée Louise Cochrane (Lucile Saint-Simon) when his plane crashes. His hands are destroyed in the crash. Louise convinces genius surgeon Professor Volchett (Donald Wolfit) to save Stephen’s hands. The experimental operation that may or may not be a complete transplant succeeds.

In the following weeks, Stephen turns from his old pomposity to a whiny kind of anguish that quickly turns into paranoia. He believes that something’s not right with his hands. He can’t play piano as well as before anymore, a week after his hands were completely destroyed, so clearly, his hands aren’t his own anymore! Just as clearly, his new hands are those of a strangler who was executed at about the same time of his operation! Why, he suddenly feels the need to strangle the gardener! When his hands get the wrong kind of naughty with Louise, Stephen storms off and rents a room somewhere in shadytown. There, he falls in with magician’s assistant/prostitute Li-Lang (Dany Carrel) and her always nattily dressed magician/pimp Nero (Christopher Lee).

Nero has plans for Orlac, obviously, and for reasons only known to itself, the film is rather more interested in this part of the narrative than the whole strangler’s hands business.

Well, actually, I’m not completely surprised about that, for Carrel and Lee are certainly the two actors in Edmond T. Gréville’s remake of two much superior films – Orlac’s Hände and Mad Love – who seem awake and willing to apply themselves to their roles. Particularly Lee, not an actor given to put much effort into things he deems beneath him but perfectly willing to take a pay check nonetheless, seems to be enjoying himself for a change, and so steals every scene he is in. Perhaps it’s the fantastic fashion sense of the character that kept him on board?

Of course, stealing scenes from Ferrer here is a lot like taking candy away from a baby, for his performance as Orlac is whiny, melodramatic and ineffectual as a portrait of a pianist losing his hands as well as that of a man slowly losing his grip on reality. He somehow manages to never elicit any sympathy for a character that should elicit hardly anything but.

To be fair, the script with its insistence on not making explicit important details and ignoring character motivations whenever possible, is not terribly helpful to him or anyone.

Add to this Gréville’s bland direction, the often sluggish pace and the film’s curious emphasis on its least interesting elements, and you’ll mostly wish to have watched the earlier versions of the material. I certainly did.

On the plus side, there are only few films whose happy end is based on the news that a man executed as a serial killer was innocent.

Crypt of the Vampire (1964)

Original title: La cripta e l’incubo

As tradition holds it, centuries ago, the witch Scirra (Ursula Davis) cursed the noble family of the Karnsteins. Today, as of 18xx, Laura (Adriana Ambesi), daughter of the contemporary Count Karnstein (Christopher Lee), suffers under terrible nightmares during which various family members are killed, perhaps by herself. Unable to watch his daughter suffer, and fearing the old curse might be real, Karnstein sends for the scholar Friedrich Klauss (José Campo) hoping Klauss might find the truth about the life and death of Scilla, thereby either debunking the whole curse business or discovering a way to lift it.

Klauss isn’t the kind of scholar who spends a lot of time in the stacks, though, and seems to spend most of his days trying to flirt with Laura and his nights having mildly spooky encounters.

Things turn rather more dramatic once Laura and Klauss encounter a mother and daughter who were involved in a coach accident. The mother (Carla Calo) needs to get wherever she’s going badly, but her daughter Ljuba (Ursula Davis, hmm) is clearly in no state to travel with her now. Laura does of course offer for Ljuba to stay in their creepy old castle with the Karnsteins until her mother comes back, and so they have a new houseguest.

Laura falls for Ljuba in the least sub subtextual bit of lesbian attraction imaginable, and soon the two young women have hardly an eye for anyone but each other, throwing the heaviest of heavy looks, and spend much time in each other’s bedrooms at night. Klauss certainly has lost all attraction for Laura. At the same time, the young woman’s nightmares turn ever stranger. Eventually, members of the Karnstein family do indeed start dying like they do in her dreams.

Her father and Klauss soon begin to suspect Laura of being the killer, though they dare not quite express it; they are not terribly bright.

Camillo Mastrocinque’s Crypt of the Vampire is one of the more curious adaptation of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”. It puts the core of the tale into a very different Gothic horror tale about the kind of witchy revenge the makers of Italian Gothics were more than a little obsessed with. The filmmakers do realize that the lesbian angle is somewhat important to the tale, but I’m not too sure they understand how and why, so Le Fanu’s thematically much richer lesbian vampire tale becomes rather diluted between this and the witch angle. However, the film’s portrayal of the intense, clearly sexual infatuation between Laura and Ljuba is highly effective, carrying erotic tension as well as an undercurrent of danger.

As a narrative, Crypt leaves rather a lot to be desired – the pacing is often curious and somewhat plodding, things never quite seem to come together logically, and characters never seem to have much character. However, as a bit of Italian Gothic horror, little things like a logical narrative and thematic depth really aren’t what the film is aiming for – this really is best seen as a pure evocation of mood through the play of light and shadow, the vigorous use of tropes and clichés as anchors to cling to in a narrative that doesn’t provide for the more typical expectations of logical narrative development. Like most good pieces of Gothic horror – and this is certainly good, perhaps even great – the film’s great strength is is ability to create a mood of the eerie and the macabre, its ability to feel like a very peculiar dream, where you won’t remember silly things like a plot the day after having watched it, but will find some scenes – Laura’s final dream, the moment when Laura draws Ljuba into her darkened chamber and both women disappear into darkness, Christopher Lee’s face during the climactic staking, the curious doppelganger/mirror business with Klauss – returning to your mind’s eye from time to time for years to come.

Three Films Make A Post: VHS Goes to Hell

V/H/S/99 (2022): I was pleasantly surprised to find that even this epitome series of bro horror has become a more diverse project behind and in front of the camera. This apparently doesn’t change my traditional reaction to all VHS films, where I find all but one segment of any given movie insufferably uninteresting. It’s all epileptically wobbling cameras, overdone fake VHS artefacts, and tales of asshats I don’t care one whit about being killed off in not terribly interesting ways by not terribly interesting monsters. Until, finally, the last segment, “To Hell and Back”, by Vanessa and Joseph Winter (also responsible for Deadstream), stabilizes the camera a bit and goes on to create a preposterous and absolutely awesome low budget hell dimension out of very little but sheer creative force and the imagination most of the other segments lack; that imagination is overflowing enough to design monsters for one single shot. The narrative drive as ridiculous as it is inspired. Reappearing from Deadstream is Melanie Stone in another awesome over the top performance that suggests somebody has found her niche.

The Arrival from the Darkness aka Príchozí z temnot (1921): This Czech silent movie by Jan S. Kolár ends on the worst explanation for the supernatural known to mankind, but before everything was a dream, there’s quite a bit to like: the visuals are often more naturalistic than expressionistic – though there is a pretty great alchemist’s lair in the Black Tower – but it’s the reality of old and half-ruined castles, so the film still has a certain uncanny gothic power. It is also an early example of the trope where some kind of reawakened evil from the past decides some poor woman to be the reincarnation of the love of his life, features the very Czech combo of Rudolf II and alchemy, and is generally an interesting entry into the sadly sparse number of silent films of the fantastic we can still see today.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959): This tale of an artist and mad scientist (Anton Diffring) who has become immortal thanks to gland transplantations is a usually ignored, and certainly very minor, bit of Hammer horror. It is still directed by Terence Fisher, shot by Jack Asher and written by Jimmy Sangster, so it’s certainly a technically well made film. There is even quite a bit of clever psychological business going on below the somewhat too melodramatic plot. Also of note are a couple of scenes of Diffring growing green in the face and a bit murderous as well as some pleasantly unpleasant business about his ideas about romance as exemplified by his relationship to a character played by Hazel Court, all situated between scenes of perfectly appropriate ethical deliberation between Diffring and an old friend played by Arnold Marlé. It is also interesting to see Christopher Lee in what amounts to a for him very uncommon role as the romantic lead – which is to say, he has very little to do in this one, in classic Hammer tradition.

Still, there’s just something missing that would turn this from “interesting” to “good” or “great”, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

In short: Cuadecuc, vampir (1970)

Supposedly, this started out as a behind the scenes documentary about the making of Jess Franco’s version of Dracula. But something must have happened with director Pere Portabella on the way, for what we actually get is a film that uses the behind the scenes material, B-roll from the Franco movie, and assorted footage to tell its own version of Dracula in the proper chronological order. Shot in beautifully grainy black and white this looks like the somewhat more concise ghost of the Franco movie.

To make matters more interesting, Portabella doesn’t use dialogue or location sound for most parts of the movies – until Christopher Lee gets the final word, as he so clearly loved to have. The soundscape instead consists predominantly of electronic and not so electronic drones, manipulated jazz orchestral music and indefinable noises composed by Carles Santos. This not only adds to the movie’s avantgarde score card (or is it a bingo card?) but also combines with the atmospheric quality of the footage and Portabella’s often striking editing rhythms to produce a curiously eerie mood.

More often than not, things feel downright spooky, and even perfectly normal and natural moments like the application of a bit of bloody makeup on Soledad Miranda’s face (which Portabella quite sensibly seems to love as much as Franco did) can take on a tense, perhaps even mildly disturbing, quality. Other viewers’ mileage may vary considerably, of course, for my mood of ineffable eeriness might very well be yours of goofy camp, imaginary reader. Which either demonstrates the magic of filmmaking, or the pointlessness of all movie writing, depending on one’s mood.

Challenge the Devil (1963)

Original title: Katarsis

Shot by gangster types of his acquaintance, a man of dubious morals escapes into the monastery of Padre Peo (Pier Vido), in wilder times a friend of his. Apparently, it’s all about a set of documents the gangster types believe their victim is holding out on them. He, on the other hand, believes these documents were stolen from him by his friend Alma (Alma De Río).

Padre Peo decides to visit Alma at the club where she’s doing “erotic” dancing and ask her for the documents, so that everybody can go home alive and well. When she’s reticent, Peo tells her the story of his religious/moral awakening, which takes up most of the film’s running time.

Once, Peo was part of a gang of bohemian thugs led by a poet who never seems to do any poeting. Instead, the gang roams the Italian countryside in their cars and beats up strangers, as bohemian types are apparently wont to do in Italy. Eventually, they end up in a seemingly deserted castle where they start on what the film decides to call an orgy, until they are interrupted by an old man (Christopher Lee in age make-up), who does a highly dramatic declamation about the hair of his lover, his pact with the devil to keep her forever young, and the devil’s usual betrayal. He asks the bohemian thugs to search the castle for the lover’s body to give her a proper burial; in return, he’ll give them all the riches of his castle.

Thus ensues many a scene of random wanderings through castle sets of varying quality full of shadows, mirrors and weird traps that never really hurt anyone. Apparently, wandering long enough through cobwebby corridors full of dubious metaphorical nonsense makes you want to become a monk. Who knew?

Challenge the Devil as directed by one-time filmmaker Giuseppe Veggezzi is a strange, awkward but also rather interesting little movie. It really doesn’t make much sense as the exploitation plus religious messaging movie this at least purports to be, but that really only strengthens the pleasantly weird impression the whole affair made on me.

The curious genre hopping helps there, as well, of course, seeing as how the film starts as a spy/gangster film, switches over to ten minutes of (bad) singing and dancing, and then shifts towards the metaphorically gothic, never connecting the different moods that come with these shifts in any sensible manner. It’s very Italian in that, expecting its audience to go with the flow of shifting atmospheres and genre rules.

The film’s moral ideas – perhaps coming from a position of honest Catholicism, perhaps from the more amusing one of exploitational hypocrisy – are vague at best, and its attempt at selling a bit of symbolic rambling through a castle as a big spiritual event that burns the evil out of one’s soul is as unconvincing as it is bizarre. Challenge is a bit too quaint for its own good – especially in an Italian movie from 1963 – and has rather adorable ideas about what an orgy is supposed to look like. Apparently, really awkward “wild” dancing and bongo drumming are as animalistic as orgies get. The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy clearly didn’t miss out on much.

What’s pretty great about Challenge is the aesthetic presentation of its very weak case against Satan. The black and white cinematography by Angelo Baistrocchi and Mario Parapetti is very beautiful indeed, and Veggezzi uses this beauty, the artificial yet also starkly impressive sets full of black backgrounds and curious shadows, to create an at times very evocative mood of the dreamlike, suggesting the emotional and subconscious impact of these surroundings and slightly weird experiences on the characters much more convincing and effectively than anything in the actual script does. This isn’t quite enough to turn this into a lost classic, but does certainly make it more than just worth the while for anybody who does love the shadowy black and white of the Italian gothic like I do.

The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967)

aka The Blood Demon

Original title: Die Schlangengrube und das Pendel (“The serpent pit and the pendulum”)

As luck will have it, neither Dr. Sadism (the surgeon you can trust) nor a pit full of snakes make an appearance. Go figure.

The 18th Century or thereabouts. Lawyer Roger Mont Elise (Lex Barker) is just an orphan boy, whose last name was given to him on account of a misinterpreted medallion that was part of the baby package. He seems puzzled but okay with his unclear birth identity, as far as Barker’s never changing facial expression can be interpreted, but when a one-legged Moritatensänger (German for a medieval “singer of ballads”, though the guy doesn’t actually sing his material) appears and gives him an invitation to the castle of one Count Regula (Christopher Lee, in a couple of scenes) in which the Count promises to disclose the truth about Roger’s heritage, he’s off to the far away “Middlelands” (I have no idea) at once.

As is usually the case in these situations, once our hero has reached the town supposedly closest to Regula’s Castle Andomai, the local populace is less than helpful and rather fearful when asked about how to get there. Eventually, our hero manages to acquire the information from an elderly gentleman walking around carrying a large cross over his shoulders, and goes on a long, long, long, oh so very long coach ride to the castle, meeting up with what will soon turn out to be a fake priest (Vladimir Medar). During that excruciatingly long coach ride, Roger saves one Baroness Lilian von Brabant (Karin Dor, never one of my favourite German actresses of her generation, and here actively bad instead of just her typical combination of very pretty and so bland being pretty is no help) from a group of masked riders. Well, Lilian and her servant Babette (Christiane Rücker), but Roger cares so little about her, he doesn’t even help her up when he finds both women knocked to the ground by the riders. What a hero!

Obviously, love is in the air. As it turns out, Lilian has also been invited to the Castle, though in her case, it’s something about an inheritance.

After further spooky coach riding, everybody eventually arrives at the castle, which turns out to lie in ruins. But don’t fret, there’s a creepy undead servant (Karl Lange, ironically giving the liveliest performance in a film full of people emoting like the walking dead) around. The dead man is out to revive ole Chris Lee with the blood of thirteen virgins, so Regula can take revenge on the parents of our young couple by murdering their descendants, who were responsible for quartering him for the murder of twelve virgins. The fact that Regula’s servant did indeed murder the parents of our protagonists, and Regula therefore has actually been avenged already notwithstanding. Christopher Lee’s gotta murder somebody, right?

Schlangengrube’s director Harald Reinl was one of the better directors of the Edgar Wallace cycle, mostly distinguishing himself there by providing his films with some actual pulp energy. Energy is not something you’ll find in this German attempt to jump on the Corman Poe adaptation train, for everything here happens in the slowest and most tedious manner imaginable while also lacking any and all of the deliciously clever subtext Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont were wont to bring into Corman’s films. Writer Manfred R. Köhler sure wasn’t Matheson, Beaumont, or even Del Tenney.

The film may deserve to be looked at as a record holder when it comes to the length of the coach ride that eventually will bring our protagonists to the castle, but I don’t think gothic horror is improved by drifting off into the realm of a very slow and boring version of Stagecoach. To be fair, said coach ride – which does take up about three hours of the film’s eighty-five minute runtime, I believe – does contain one of the handful of good gothic horror moments Schlangengrube delivers, when the superstitious driver is confronted with blue fog that reveals trees full of human limbs, in part growing out of them like branches. That’s obviously the sort of tone and content I wish Reinl would have emphasised, but director and script seem to go out of their way to underplay the truly fantastic elements of the film, and instead puts a lot of energy into scenes of various characters making circles through the castle cellars. Scenes that also happen to lack in in pace and energy, even though these elements of the filmmaking art should be right up the director’s alley.

The art department – lead by Gabriel Pellon and Werner Achmann - really seem to have been the only members of the production who actually got why the Corman productions this is trying to haplessly imitate were as good as they were, and do their best to create a bunch of interesting and expressionistically weird sets, only to have camera and direction put them into the worst possible, and most certainly least interesting, light. It’s a bit of a shame, really, but all too typical for German genre cinema after the silent era.

Three Films Make A Post: A hunter never leaves his prey wounded

Wounded (1997): A forest ranger played by Mädchen Amick gets into a pretty typical cat and mouse game with an insane poacher (Adrian Pasdar), after barely surviving a first encounter that left her partner and quite a few other people dead. The only person she trusts is an alcoholic cop (Graham Greene). Directed by Richard Martin in a somewhat slick and impersonal manner, this one really lives from a handful of fine performances. Amick, if you can suspend your disbelief far enough to imagine her as someone who spends most of her time outside, does a very credible job with a character wavering between grief, trauma and anger, Greene is his typical low-key inspired self, and Pasdar does pretty sociopathy and murderous scenery chewing very well indeed.

Structurally, this would probably have needed some extra hook, but still stays a pretty worthwhile hidden gem for the acting ensemble alone.

The Creeping Flesh (1973): This Tigon production is certainly not director Freddie Francis’s best, mostly because the script by Peter Spenceley and Jonathan Rumbold never quite seems to have decided what exactly it wants to do with some very Nigel Kneale-ish ideas, and so does quite a few things, none with much follow-through. But it still has the visual flow and flair typical of Francis even on his bad days, and fun work by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as half-brothers with their own respective brands of mad science. Particularly Lee is spectacularly nasty here once he gets going, contrasting nicely with Cushing’s more sympathetic (yet still horrible) kind of mad scientist.

The film features a complicated and not unproblematic view on mental illness and heredity, particularly when female sexuality comes into the mix, but also quietly suggests that certain male behaviours, even well-meant ones, might be among the root causes of the problem there.

If only the titular Creeping Flesh would make its appearance earlier (or, alternatively, only be a metaphor).

The Summit of the Gods aka Le sommet des dieux (2021): While I’m too much of a coward to ever do any climbing myself, I find mountain climbing and its philosophical and psychological underpinnings endlessly fascinating. Consequently, I find this animated French (though based on a Jiro Taniguchi manga and very Japanese in visual style) film directed by Patrick Imbert about mountain climbing, obsessive men, and the reasons for their obsessions very fascinating indeed.

It uses a flashback structure flawlessly, draws its characters clearly and with surprising complexity, and often looks very beautiful indeed, staging suspense, tragedy and the handful of moments when it wanders off into the slightly surreal all with the same calm capability.

In short: Scream and Scream Again (1970)

A serial killer stalks the clubs of London, listening to funky tunes and luring attractive young women into his sports car to drain their blood. Plodding Detective Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks) is on the case but police procedure is little help against the weirder aspects of the case. Perhaps young assistant medical examiner Dr Sorel (Christopher Matthews) will be of more use.

At the same time, we regularly pop in with a man trapped in some kind of medical facility who loses one of his extremities after the other. We also spend a little time in an unnamed Eastern European country where things are rather more fascist than communist. Here, we witness how one Konratz (Marshall Jones) kills his way to the top with his evil version of the Vulcan nerve pinch.

Eventually, these plot lines…well, actually, no, they don’t really converge, and only a very polite viewer will not call Konratz’s sudden appearance in London in the final act utter, pointless and awkward bullcrap.

I understand that this Amicus production directed by Gordon Hessler has found some admirers over time, but I have no idea what’s to admire here: the slow pacing of what should be a potboiler? The decision to slow things down even further by the film’s constant changing between totally disconnected plotlines? The inability of the script (by Christopher Wicking) to actually unite any of it? The total randomness of what will go for an explanation of what’s going on in the end?

Though one might call the film’s chutzpah even calling itself a film admirable. There’s really no connective tissue to any of what we see at all, things just happen for no reason, Peter Cushing pops in for a scene, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price for three, connections are insinuated but don’t make any kind of sense. It’s all very much like a dream – not an interesting one, alas, but just a crap assortment of random nonsense that’s not even interesting to look at.

Taste of Fear (1961)

aka Scream of Fear

Not having seen her father for nearly ten years after her parents’ divorce, wheelchair-bound Penny Appleby (Susan Strasberg) travels to his coastal villa in France, following a somewhat surprising invitation. Penny’s father is away on business, so Penny is greeted by her stepmother Jane (Ann Todd). Jane makes quite an effort to make her feel welcome, as awkward as the situation between a young woman and the second wife of her father she’s never met before is at its core.

However, something is very wrong at the villa. Starting on the very first night of her stay, Penny repeatedly encounters what looks a lot like the corpse of her father propped up in macabre manner. Of course, when Penny’s trying to show the corpse to Jane or hunky chauffeur Robert (Ronald Lewis), the thing disappears. Very quickly, Jane starts mumbling about the “neurotic tendencies” Penny has supposedly displayed in childhood. The doctor Jane calls in, supposedly a friend of Penny’s father, the very rude Dr Pierre Gerrard (Christopher “Frenchman” Lee), does love to go on in the same manner, making dinners with him rather a strain on everyone’s nerves. At least Robert – just call him “Bob” – is a lot of help, sharing some of the doubts Penny is developing.

Despite the great success (particularly for such a small company) of their horror films, beloved Hammer Studios weren’t exclusively making horror films in the sixties. Following the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho, Jimmy Sangster wrote about five or six (depending on which ones you count) twisty thrillers clearly influenced and encouraged by that film, yet never simply copying it. Rather, Sangster takes some of Psycho’s formal inventions, its play with the audience and its expectations, and thinks them further for his own purposes.

Case in point is the first film of this group, as directed by Seth Holt, using the viewer’s knowledge of the structure of a gaslighting-type film against them to pull off quite some clever things not just once but twice. The film doesn’t only use the audience’s assumptions about genre and characters, though – the characters themselves repeatedly fall into the same trap of taking what’s on the surface of others on very literal face value. Treating people as types and tropes is a dangerous thing, as it turns out. I’m not actually going to spoil the twists here despite the film’s age, because when a plot twist is as well constructed and wonderfully timed as those here are, its writer deserves the respect no to have it spoiled.

Despite not really being a horror film, Taste does feature some wonderfully macabre moments, too. The business with Penny’s father’s corpse is effectively creepy, Holt shooting these scenes as expressionistically influenced nightmares that stand in fine contrast to the many scenes of black and white sunlight surrounding them. And the final destiny of one of the film’s villains – in a move typical for the film probably the lesser one – has a sense of dreadful yet deserved irony many a horror twist ending strives for.

Holt does some grand work in other regards too, staging scenes in ways that make them feel so intimate, the film’s threats seem all the more personal. Generally, Holt as well as Sangster’s script like to keep events and emotions tightly controlled, in fact enhancing their impact by not overplaying them like many another film would. In lesser hands, the plot, where nobody involved, if still alive, will end up any happier than before, would be material for shrill melodrama, but Holt and Sangster let their audience figure out for themselves how much of a parade of broken people doing broken things we are actually witnessing.

Young Susan Strasberg is a great casting choice, too, projecting vulnerability and confusion yet also a hidden reservoir – clearly unexpected to the rest of the world – of strength and determination she desperately needs. The rest of the cast is up to the same fine standards – with the exception of Lee’s “French” accent – though this is really Strasberg’s show.


Really, said accent is the only thing I can find fault with in Taste of Fear, and if a bit of a ropey accent is the worst thing a film has to offer, nobody can fault me if I call it a little masterpiece.

Past Misdeeds: The Pirates of Blood River (1962)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


At the end of the 17th century, a group of Huguenots fled France and settled on the tropical, piranha-infested Isle of Devon somewhere in the tropics. Now, two generations later, what once was supposed to be a colony providing freedom from persecution has become the tyranny of a handful of older men with impressive facial hair under the leadership of Jason Standing (Andrew Keir, as intense as always, even though the script doesn't provide him with much to work with here). The bible-wielding elders sentence people to death or life in their own little penal colony for breaking that obscure set of religious laws known as "the ten commandments" (or something of that sort). The less bearded classes aren't too happy with the political state of affairs, yet they're still too respectful of their elders and their elders' leather-vested henchmen to openly rebel.

Standing's own son Jonathon (Kerwin Mathews, one of the better romantic leads for this sort of film) is especially dissatisfied with life on the island, thinking his father lets himself be manipulated into a cruelty that is quite against his nature by his colleagues. Rather lacking in holiness himself, Jonathon's also in love with a married woman who is mistreated by her husband, and plans on fleeing the place together with her. Alas, before the couple can realize their plans, the elders are catching them in the act of rubbing their cheeks together, provoking the poor woman into running into a river full of piranhas.

Graciously, the elders don't sentence Jonathon to death for his unbiblical behaviour, but rather to spend some time in the colony's penal colony, which, as it turns out, is just as much of a death sentence, just a slower one.

Things at the colony are rough, and Jonathon's background makes him not exactly well-liked by the warden, but eventually, the young man escapes. Only to run right into the arms of the pirate band of Captain LaRoche (Christopher "I'm French, no, really" Lee) which counts among its members some beloved Hammer mainstays like young Oliver Reed and Michael Ripper. For a pirate, the Captain seems civilized enough, and claims to be willing to help Jonathon out with peacefully getting rid of the rule of the elders if the younger man only agrees to let the pirates stay in the Huguenot village for rest and recuperation whenever they need it.

In a turn of events that only surprises Jonathon, the pirates are really in it for the raping and the pillaging. LaRoche is convinced that the founders of the colony have hidden away a treasure of gold somewhere (he might even be right), and he's willing to do absolutely anything to get it. Of course, hoping for gold and actually finding it are two things, especially when some of the Huguenots turn out to be quite competent guerrilla fighters.

John Gilling's The Pirates of Blood River is the least among Hammer Film's handful of seafaring averse pirate movies, slightly hampered by a script that sets up conflicts for its first thirty minutes it will then not bother to resolve later on by anything else but hand-waving.

The whole religious oppression angle is very much side-lined - except for two or three wavering dialogue scenes - once the pirates arrive at the colony, and is only ever resolved by the fact that LaRoche kills off the elders one by one, which sure is a solution, but not one that's thematically satisfying. On the positive side, pirates.

Said pirates are a bit sillier than in the other Hammer pirate movies, too, for some genius (Gilling? Anthony Keys? Jimmy Sangster?) decided it would be a bright idea not just to camp up their appearance, but also to let them all - except for Michael Ripper, whose dialogue instead tests out how often a man can use the pirate-appropriate word "matey" without giggling - speak with painfully fake accents. Reed - in an unfortunately minor role - and Lee - doing his evil glowering shtick with some enthusiasm and thanks to that to very good effect - seem to be trying to outdo each other in the badness of their "French" accents. Though this aspect of the movie clearly has camp value (too bad for me I abhor the concept), it's standing in stark opposition to the film's earnest dramatic tone and makes it quite a bit more difficult to take certain scenes seriously.

This isn't to suggest there's nothing enjoyable at all about the movie if you're not into pointing at especially silly pirates; this is, after all a Hammer production made in the early 60s, a time when the high professional standards of the studio and the people working for it made it quite impossible for them to produce a bad movie. Gilling - who directed two of my favourites among the studio's non-series horror movies with The Reptile and Revolt of the Zombies - may have his problems with the film's pacing in the early scenes, but once the final half hour arrives, he milks a lot of excitement out of the guerrilla warfare between the Huguenots and the pirates trying to get away with their ill gotten gains. At that point, there's little left of the silliness of the film's earlier scenes. High camp is replaced by a certain grimness that makes up for a lot of what came before.


My true disappointment isn't so much with the film's problems at the beginning anyway but rather with the idea how fantastic the film could have been if it had been quite as good as those last scenes right from the start. As it stands, the sympathetic viewer needs a bit of patience and the ability to ignore a problematic set-up to enjoy The Pirates of Blood River, but with that patience, the film is still very much worth seeing.

Past Misdeeds: The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


It's 1588, and the Spanish Armada has just taken its deadly thrashing. The Diablo, the small ship of Spanish privateer Captain Robeles (Christopher Lee) has taken flight as soon as the tides of battle – and the weather - turned against the Spanish. With his ship in a bad state, Robeles decides to pilot it into the English marshes in the hopes of finding a place to make repairs in peace before he and his crew can take up pirating again.

Their luck leads the pirates into the vicinity of a small English town whose younger male population has nearly completely gone to war, leaving the place in the hands of a cowardly country squire (Ernest Clark), some middle aged and elderly men of the lower classes, and Harry (John Cairney), a young man who lost the use of his left arm in Spanish captivity, and who romances Angela (Suzan Farmer), the daughter of the squire, quite against the man's wishes. Harry's father Tom (Andrew Keir) is something of a spokesman of the village’s working classes. There are, of course, also the women of the village, but the film isn't quite progressive enough to do much with them.

Robeles hopes to win the help of the village in the repair of his ship - and later get an opportunity to loot it - by applying a trick that plays on the place's relative remoteness. He'll march his men into town and pretend that Spain won over the British fleet and is now occupying the British Isles.

The squire and the local vicar only seem all too glad to oblige the new master in town, but the working classes - especially Harry and his father - are burning to make contact with any British resistance against their supposed occupiers. Ah, class war.

While Robeles has to use all his cunning and cruelty to play his ruse and keep the villagers under control, he is also threatened by philosophical differences with his first officer. That young man, Don Manuel Rodriguez de Savilla (Barry Warren), is a true Spanish patriot, and disagrees quite resolutely with Robeles plans for returning to the pirate business. Perhaps he will even disagree with them enough to partner with a bunch of English villagers?

While everybody (of taste) loves Hammer Film's horror output, people - me too often included - tend to ignore most of what the studio put out in other genres. In some cases, like the studio's small yet insipid comedy output, that's pure self-defence, but in other cases, like its land-locked pirate movies, ignoring these films means missing out on some very fine genre filmmaking.

Case in point is The Devil-Ship Pirates, as directed by the generally dependable Don Sharp (who must have had a very good year in 1964, creatively, for it's also the year that saw him direct the very fine little horror movie Witchcraft). It's a film as clearly done on a budget as anything Hammer did at the time, but it's also a film that knows how to use what it has (one ship, some fine looking sets and a highly dependable cast) in often inventive, always professional, and very entertaining ways.

Sharp's direction isn't as endowed with an eye for the pretty as it was in Witchcraft, but it provides the film with a sense of pace and tension that works well with its script. Sharp also manages to handle the film's more melodramatic parts in a rather off-handed way that provides them with a stronger feeling of veracity than you'd usually expect from scenes like them. There may be nothing flashy about Sharp, but he sure does all the right things to tell a clever story in an appropriately clever way.

Clever is also a good way to describe Jimmy Sangster's script for the film. The pirates' plan does at once provide a simple yet exciting set-up and keeps the film's action constrained to a comparatively small number of locations without letting the production feel impoverished in any way; and once that plan is set up, it's only a question of letting the various characters act appropriately, put in a few opportunities for mild swashbuckling (an English countryman is no Errol Flynn), and just let the plot roll out in a logical yet entertaining manner. Of course, Sangster also finds time to add in some of Hammer's usual political interests: the upper classes (especially the middle-aged men of the upper classes; there's often still hope for the younger men and women in the production house's films, at least if they're willing to fall for lower class guys and girls) are not to be trusted, the working middle class is awesome, priests mean well but often don't really know what they're doing. It could be quite annoying, if it were not a) obviously true and b) made more complicated by characters who are allowed to transcend their class characteristics to act like actual human beings, or at least the adventure movie version of such.

On the acting side, The Devil-Ship Pirates provides ample opportunity to watch various Hammer stalwarts do their usual thoroughly convincing stuff. Standouts are Andrew Keir - who brings surprising intensity to a rather small roll, and Michael Ripper who portrays a pirate as if his usual innkeeper character had gone nasty with a relish that can't help but delight.

Even the film's romantic leads in form of John Cairney and Barry Warren are perfectly okay. That may be caused by the script providing them opportunities to play somewhat more complex characters than usual for romantic leads, but I'm surely not going to complain about added complexity in my adventure movies.

For once, I'm also not going to complain about my least favourite iconic horror actor, Christopher Lee. Sure, he plays more than half of his scenes on auto-pilot, doing his usual menacing shtick with little obvious interest in his role, but he has two really great moments. The first one - in his first violent confrontation with Don Manuel - is one of these (getting rarer the longer the actor's career went) moments when the actor stops letting his Christopher Lee-ness stand in for acting and really puts some energy into projecting the smouldering menace he always was able to bring into its roles, but often seemed too disinterested to actually bring to use, turning his villain suddenly into someone not just bad in a perfunctory way as afforded by the script, but Evil in a much more total sense. Staying with the capital E Evil, his second great scene here sees Lee delighting in doing the most evil thing imaginable in a movie villain: outwitting a little boy.


So, clearly, The Devil-Ship Pirates has everything you could ask of an adventure movie.

Three Films Make A Post: Death means NOTHING to a beast with nine lives!

The Forest (2016): This is by far not the worst movie about people running through creepy woods I’ve seen, but Jason Zada’s film is pretty damn dull, going through the usual jumps scares and other mainstream horror business – of course there’s an embarrassing plot twist, too - with my worst enemy, boring competence. It’s too bad, too, for Natalie Dormer’s performance is as good as the underwritten script lets its be, and there are hints of the more individual and less generic film this could have been if it was made with a bit of artistry, thought and care instead of bland professionalism. While I’m complaining, I’d also have rather liked it if the film had actually made use of its Aokigahara setting; as it stands, this might as well have taken place in Oregon for all the use the film makes of the cultural background (or the potential differences between yurei and ghosts).

Slender (2015): On the other hand, the movie I watched the next day was this version of the slender man creepypasta turned internet folklore, making The Forest look much better. It’s not the difference in production values – Joel Petrie’s film not surprisingly being POV horror – so much as the fact that Zada’s film at least has a script acquainted with the idea that at least vaguely interesting things pertinent to a film’s plot should happen in regular intervals during said film’s running time. Whereas Slender mostly contains obnoxious characters being obnoxious assholes, background story that could have been developed in fifteen minutes bloated up so much it takes up most of the film, a surprisingly bland use of our slender titular character, and a pretty damn hard to believe way to get the characters to the place where they meet their dooms in form of ten minutes or so of badly realized POV horror standards, school division.

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970): One of these days, I’ll treat this Hammer Dracula movie to the deluxe write-up it deserves. Until then, I’ll misuse it as a stop-gap so as not to have to write about three movies I loathed in one post. While its director Peter Sasdy’s output is rather variable in quality, this is an atmospherically and pleasantly gruesome entry in the series that also features a script that makes good on the unfulfilled promises of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave of trying to use Lee’s misogynist prick vampire to tell a tale about innocent youth vilified by their hypocritical (and hilariously bourgeois in their secret “decadence”) elders and driven into the arms of actual evil. Which is still a rather conservative view of 60s youth revolt but does work perfectly in the context of the film and gives Lee the opportunity to play his hated career-defining role as evil and petty as he’s able – which is rather deserving of a very capital E and P. Why, even Ralph Bates isn’t absolutely terrible here.

In short: Night of the Big Heat (1967)

aka Island of the Burning Dead

aka Island of the Burning Doomed

Despite it being winter and the rest of Britain complaining about freezing temperatures the British island of Fara suffers under a terrible heat wave. Experts are baffled by the phenomenon.

The weather is only the start of the islanders’ problems, though, for there’s much worse, much stranger and much more fried egg shaped to come. At first, there’s only an inexplicable high-pitched noise in certain parts of the island upping the pressure but soon, sheep and people are cooked while electronics burst. And what does the mysterious guest of the island’s only inn, one Hanson (Christopher Lee), do with the science-y instruments he has in his room, and the tripwire and camera constructions he builds in the woods?

If your answer to that is: trying to find proof for an invasion by heat-producing giant, glowing fried eggs from outer space, then give yourself a gold star! Now the only question is: will you get through the film’s main concern, a love triangle between writer/innkeeper Jeff Callum (Patrick Allen as some sort of mid-60s John Agar-like manly man monstrosity who likes to blame the woman he fucked for their extramarital affair with charming declarations like “She was a slut! And I wanted her!”), his former lover Angela Roberts (Jane Merrow) who has smuggled herself onto the island as Jeff’s new secretary and is characterised in a way even a gracious interpretation can’t not call misogynist, and his wife, the wifely – yes, that’s her only character trait – Frankie (Sarah Lawson) to reach a finale where the aliens are beaten through a bit of rain, which never happens on the British isles?

Oh boy, this just might be director Terence Fisher’s worst film. It was produced by the same company responsible for the somewhat superior Island of Terror  with quite a few overlaps in cast and crew, with the addition of Christopher Lee and the relegation of Peter Cushing to a guest starring role. Which is rather unfortunate, seeing as Lee does the usual low effort thing he did when cashing his cheque for projects he was embarrassed by – looking grumpy, then looking grumpy, then looking grumpy some more – while Cushing doesn’t get anything to work with at all and still comes out looking the dedicated professional.

Though, to be fair, the script really doesn’t give Lee much to work with. It is much more interested in a love soap opera sub-plot that is badly dated, deeply unpleasant in his loathing of female sexuality and which can’t help but make every character involved in it look like a deeply horrible person. Sure, a better script could have used this approach to do something interesting about or with its characters’ general unpleasantness; unfortunately, this one’s not even average and therefore leaves us with a bunch of protagonists we have no reason to care about.

Night also suffers from sluggish pacing (that at least fits the whole heat wave concept, so there’s that), monsters that turn out to look like downgraded versions of the creatures in Island of Terror when we finally get a look at them in the last act, and the lamest deus ex machina ending imaginable. It’s really a rather dire film.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

Despite the dire warnings of the rather not superstitious and pretty worldly abbot Father Sandor (Andrew Keir) to keep away from the place, a quartet of British travellers – Helen (Barbara Shelley as the stick in the mud one who just might be right this time around), her husband Alan (Charles Tingwell), his brother Charles (Francis Matthews) and his wife Diana (Suzan Farmer) - on an educational jaunt through the Continent decide to make their way towards the village of Karlsbad.

Curiously enough, their hired local coach driver leaves them by the side of the road quite a bit away from the village as well as from the castle dominating the area. The good man seems to rather prefer not to stay in the area after dark. Things become even more peculiar from there on out: a driver-less horse carriage appears, but when the travellers attempt to drive it to the village, it races them straight to the castle. Let’s call it “Castle Dracula”, why don’t we? There, the strangeness still doesn’t end – having delivered our protagonists, the carriage races away again, with the traveller’s luggage still on board. At least the front door of the castle is open.

Despite Helen’s protests, the party enters, only to find a place that seems empty, yet also set for four visitors. Even more disturbing, the travellers’ luggage has somehow made its way into bedrooms in the castle.
After a bit, a decidedly creepy man named Klove (Philip Latham) appears and explains he’s keeping the place always ready for guests to continue the tradition of hospitality established by his late master, the always welcoming Count Dracula (Christopher Lee). That doesn’t explain even half of the weirdness going on, of course, but what’s a weary traveller to do?

Not surprisingly, Klove’s idea of hospitality is to murder the travellers to revive his late master with their blood, so, “running” would have been a good answer to that one, I believe. As it goes, only half of our protagonists will survive the night to flee to Father Sandor’s abbey, only to learn that the revived Dracula is not the kind of guy who keeps away from holy places once he’s set his fangs on a female neck.

The things I find most impressive about Hammer’s third Dracula film in ten years (marking the beginning of the films as a regular series, for better or worse, and given the quality of the films up to Scars, really for better), and only the second one to feature Christopher Lee’s count is how little happens in the first half of the movie, and how small the scale of its plot actually is. Or rather, how much trust Jimmy Sangster’s script has in director Terence Fisher’s ability to get by on sheer atmosphere alone, and how good the script itself is at making the small scale feel huge and eventful.

Both men are on top of their respective game here. Sangster manages to use strong brush strokes to create surprisingly multi-dimensional characters whose fates feel actually horrifying because they are so undeserved, fates they could have done little to avoid. For these characters act plausible enough to a weird situation. Even the romantic couple of the film doesn’t so much feel bland and a bit stupid but like people confronted with a situation they couldn’t have been prepared for without the knowledge they are in a horror movie; and that kind of meta lies far in the future. The script escalates wonderfully too, the slow first half making room for a second one that’s basically a thrill a minute, Lee’s this time around wildly animalistic Dracula (whose lack of dialogue may or may not have been caused by Lee hating Sangster’s dialogue, or by Sangster not writing any dialogue for Lee because he was sick of Lee’s complaining about is writing, or just by Sangster knowing his job quite well, depending on which story you prefer to believe) staying a believably horrific threat throughout.

Fisher for his part indeed does get by on an ability to build an atmosphere of fine, gothically inclined dread for the first half of the movie, turning out many a moment that still has a certain nightmarish quality all these decades later. I’m particularly fond of Dracula’s resurrection scene, a scene I couldn’t imagine being done any better by anyone, my beloved Italians included. And once it’s time for the more outwardly exciting second half of the film, the director rises to that occasion too. Judged by the number of memorable scenes alone, it’s difficult to call Prince of Darkness anything other than one of Hammer’s masterpieces.

Add to that Sangster’s script, a generally good cast (with Shelley and Keir the not surprising stand-outs to me), Christopher Lee doing his snarling best where he too often seemed to phone his performances in once he decided a film was under his dignity (but not enough under his dignity to not take the money), a Van Helsing replacement in Sandor who works particularly well because he isn’t like Van Helsing at all, and the film’s certainly not becoming worse.

Bear Island (1979)

A UN sponsored group of scientists of different nationalities – of course all played by English native speakers doing horrible fake accents – under the leadership of one Otto Gerran (Richard “Nein, hören Sie!!!!” Widmark) comes to arctic, Norwegian Bear Island for some vague studies concerning climate change. Apart from the small former Nazi base the scientists are making themselves at home in, there’s only an old Nazi submarine harbour and a NATO base that is so completely out of bounds for the scientists they are not even supposed to make radio contact with it. Even before most of the expedition arrived, there has been the first mysterious disappearance (well, it’s a mysterious disappearance for the characters, the audience knows full well the victim was murdered), and that’s just the beginning of a series of violent events.

American scientist Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland, not attempting a Californian accent as far as I can make out), who is actually on the island because his father was a German submarine captain who probably died right there and he feels in need of some closure, quickly discovers that there’s a huge cache of gold hidden on the island. It’s a lot of the stuff, and there are a lot of people in the expedition willing to kill for it.

Finding out who these people are will become rather difficult, though, because nobody on the island actually seems to have come to do any science at all, everybody has a secret, and nobody is truly who he or she seems to be.

By 1979, Don Sharp – despite a career that would in stops and starts continue for a further ten years – was still the always at least dependable, sometimes brilliant director he had been for decades, but he didn’t exactly move with the times anymore. From this perspective, he’s a very good fit for Bear Island, a thriller inevitably based on an Alistair Maclean novel that seems to come from a different world in a movie landscape after Star Wars and Jaws as well as after much of 70s action and adventure cinema.

There’s something old-fashioned and stiff about the film, a certain lack of sharpness and focus that results in a rather draggy middle act, with a script that can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a more visceral thriller, a variation of an Agatha Christie style manor mystery, or both, or nothing of the sort. From time to time, the film finds its step for ten minutes or so, thanks to Sharp creating a set-piece that’s actually exciting (if you like snow mobile duels, that is), or moody and actually telling us something about the characters (like Lansing’s first secret visit to the submarine base). Of course, a few minutes later, everything becomes a bit lifeless again, because obvious red herrings (seriously, no self-respecting old-fashioned mystery would be this obvious) have to be laid, and anything interesting has to wait for a while.

At least Bear Island has quite the cast. Apart from Sutherland (giving a performance fluctuating between bored and amused), and Widmark, there are also Lloyd “Bad Ass” Bridges, Christopher “I’m Polish, really” Lee, and Vanessa “Oops, forgot my accent for a scene again” Redgrave (wasted on playing The Girl, of course), and while the script does its damndest to not give them much to do or puts many a clunky line in everyone’s mouth, you can’t quite put this assembly of talent down, so from time to time, tiny sparks are indeed flying between them.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,canadian movies,reviews,thriller,don sharp,donald sutherland,vanessa redgrave,richard widmark,christopher lee,lloyd bridges

In short: The Accursed (1957)

aka The Traitor

A former German resistance group against the Nazis (among them Anton Diffring, Christopher Lee and Jane Griffiths) annually meet at the British country home of their second leader, Colonel Price (Donald Wolfit) to commemorate the murder of their first leader Gerhardt by fascist hands. This year, though, Price has gotten the disquieting information from someone in his employ that one member of the group had betrayed Gerhardt to the Nazis. Who exactly the traitor was is apparently the sort of thing one can’t mention on the phone, so Price’s man will make a personal appearance at the reunion.

Alas, once he arrives, someone knifes the spy in the back before he can tell Price much, so now everyone in the Colonel’s old dark house is under suspicion. Things become mildly more complicated when a British intelligence officer of no consequence and US Major Shane (Robert Bray, the usual third rate American actor this sort of British production hired to be able to sell overseas, for Americans always were constitutionally unable to stomach films not containing Americans, it seems) arrive under a thin pretext. Soon, everyone emotes melodramatically, Shane barks questions, and, if the audience is really lucky, somebody else is going to get murdered.

So yes, it’s another Old Dark House mystery, though one without a gorilla, instead making an attempt to give the usual tale of a bunch of character actors under suspicion of murder in a conveniently small number of sets a bit of a grounding in at the time still very near history. One would be tempted to say “to give it a twist”, but that would afford a more interesting script than the one director Michael McCarthy delivered - you know, one that is actually interested in exploring what the times they had to live throw did with its characters instead of one just using it for a bit of melodramatic shouting.

What we get instead is a competent yet deeply unexciting parade of character actors having the usual melodramatic outbursts, taking on silly accents if they’re not actually continental Europeans, and suffering from being terribly underwritten and just not very interesting. There’s some good lingering by Lee, and Diffring does his usual neurotic shtick, but there’s little of substance in the film for them to get their teeth into. The plot moves slow as molasses, and I found myself drifting away while the film went through 70 long minutes of motions I’ve seen made with more conviction in many earlier films.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,crime,michael mccarthy,donald wolfit,christopher lee,anton diffring,robert bray

In short: Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee (1962)

aka Secret of the Red Orchid

In a development that’s enough to make one’s bowler rotate, two rival American blackmail gangs, or in one case what’s left of one, make their way to the shores of London and start their brutal ways there. Scotland Yard is shocked, because clearly, before the Americans came, there was no violent crime, and certainly no machine gun murders, in peaceful straight-laced Great Rialto Britain.

Inspector Weston (Adrian “Boring” Hoven) is on the case, though, and seeks the occasional help of FBI man Captain (look, I didn’t write the script) Allerman (Christopher “The American” Lee), who helps out as much as the budget allows. Hilarity in form of murder ensues.

As much as I agree with the early Rialto Wallace adaptation cycle’s attempt to not deliver films completely to one formula, it’s difficult to ignore most of the films that were really mixing up things just ended up like Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee, which is to say, not very good.

Part of this particular film’s problems surely is Helmut Ashley’s technically competent but stylistically uninvolving direction that recommended the man for the career in indifferent German TV direction jobs he took up soon after. Where Rialto Wallace core directors Reinl and Vohrer (both later TV victims themselves) always demonstrated the kind of style and personality that effortlessly turns silliness and distractible scripts into assets, Ashley’s attempts at something comparable feel much more like a series of tonally disparate scenes, following a plot nobody involved actually cared about. Even the identity of the evil mastermind – as much as the film even has one – is obvious even to the dumb very early on, making a lot of the plot’s contortions look like pointless ways to prolong the inevitable.

Das Rätsel is not horrible, though. Apart from the film’s basic competence, there are some actually fun moments hidden behind the indifference. At least one third of Eddi Arent’s humorous shenanigans are actually funny, Kinski (playing a gangster called “Pretty Steve”, if you can believe it) seems in a particularly good mood, the Peter Thomas soundtrack is groovy before groovy was invented, a pre-Italian exploitation movie Marisa Mell demonstrates how much better her acting got a few years later, and Christopher Lee’s German is pretty fine. Of course, Lee also seems bored, and Adrian Hoven wins the no-prize of “dullest Wallace adaptation Inspector” but then you can’t win all the time, or so I’m told.

I have to admit, I would have hoped a film adding fake-Americans to the bizarre fake-England of the Rialto Wallace films would be rather more exciting but then I didn’t expect the fake-Americans to be this less interesting. So it really is true you can’t win them all.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,krimi,in short,helmut ashley,adrian hoven,christopher lee,marisa mell,klaus kinski,eddi arent

In short: The Three Musketeers (1973) & The Four Musketeers (1974)

(I treat both films as one because there's really no good reason not to, seeing as they were filmed back to back and absolutely belong together).

It is always a dangerous proposition to visit one's childhood favourites again, particularly when those favourites are comedies like Richard Lester's version of Dumas's Three Musketeers. Once, most of us found farts inherently funny, and now - hopefully - we no longer do.

So it is a particular delight when one can watch movies like the ones at hand and come out with the feeling that one was a particularly clever gal or guy when one liked it, already of impeccable taste and with an eye for strangeness.

For strange Lester's film surely is: turning the romantic splendour of the previous versions of the story into a mixture of the comedic, the veracious, and the absurd with the help of "Flashman" writer George MacDonald Fraser does not sound the most - or even fourth-most - obvious way to go about another adaptation of Dumas's novels, but Lester and Fraser really pull it of. A large part of the films' charm is based on the way the often very broad humour and the greater than usual in a swashbuckler authenticity collide, showing off much of what is splendour in other versions of the tale as just as silly as the fashions and mores of our times will look a few hundred years on. The past, the films make clear, was another, quite muddy and rainy (even in undramatic moments), country where people lived and loved and dressed and acted like fools, and where France was overrun with people with - or at least pretending to have - various British accents who were totally unable to agree on a pronounciation of D'Artagnan.

The Three Musketeers could easily have drifted into the realm of deeply cynical deconstruction with this approach, but the film looks at its strange people and times with a look that is as much one of wide-eyed wonder and compassion as it is one of mockery, as if Lester and Fraser had begun with cool distance to their material but soon enough fallen in love with all its inner ironies, its unconscious naiveties, and its sense of adventure that transcends morals.

Add to this a cast of actors like Oliver Reed, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Lee, Michael York, Frank Finlay, Raquel Welch and Richard Chamberlain in a very good mood (well, Welch is absolutely dreadful and has zero comical timing, but that was to be expected), and Lester's hand for heroically ridiculous (or is it ridiculously heroic?) swashbuckling action, and you have a film I'm inordinately proud to already have loved as a little boy.

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