TheFearmakers
Reviews
Little House on the Prairie: The King Is Dead (1979)
The Night And The City
Needs to be said here that this highly entertaining, break from the routine Little House on the Prairie episode The King is Dead is extremely similar to and obviously inspired by the classic film noir The Night and the City...
Not to be confused with the Robert DeNiro remake and starring Richard Widmark in the Ray Walston role who manages a younger, cocky, hot-shot wrestler and an old experienced one, both butting heads throughout and at the end, leading to the same tragic results from the big screen to the small...
Herein Leo Gordon as the old wrestler, who was a muscular tough guy actor in his prime and herein, but not just performing initially as he was a San Quentin inmate who got his break under Don Siegel in Riot in Cell Block 11... playing the most dangerous of the rioting felons... basically, he was playing himself...
This is also the best Jonathan Garvey episode, giving the former Rams player some action and physical interplay, as he's not that fantastic with dialogue...
Meanwhile Ray Walston gets to be shady and dishonest and he does it well, which is no surprise as he was one of those veteran actors who Hollywood adored but didn't cast him enough.
Dèmoni (1985)
Stylish-Direction Over Character-Development
It's a shame when, after about thirty-minutes, when an audience watching a grotesque, slasher-horror picture begin dying inside the theater... practically right alongside the movie playing on the screen... one of the bloody victims tells the frenzied and confused group, who were beginning to figure out this premise on their own, "It's not the movie, it's the theater..."
Because producer Dargio Argento's DEMONS directed by fellow Italian genre-auteur Lamberto Bava goes from this highly creative meta premise into a fight-or-die DAWN OF THE DEAD retread, inside a theater instead of a mall... including a resiliently cool black dude leader...
Who only leads for a little while, while his girlfriend makes for the most cunning of the titular zombie-creatures... leaving the mantle for heroic white guy Urbano Barberini, as normal and subtle as they come...
But it's who he hooks up with that the audience is most closely responding to, since the first ten minute setup has an obvious (perhaps) Final Girl in a subway, being stalked by a creepy masked-guy... and so Natasha Hovey (along with more temperamental Paola Cozzo) surely looks the part of sexy male-fantasy horror chick...
It's just that none of the would-be survivors, fighting like mad not to be slashed or bitten, to turn into the zombies they're trying to escape from, are all that involving (even when reanimated) for the audience to entirely care about or root for... what works best in DEMONS/DEMONI is what drives most Italian b-movies, and that's the creative camerawork and direction...
The practical effects are also great, obviously competing with the gross-out THE THING aspect... of creatures bulging from human flesh... and the tension guiding the practically non-stop action is also neatly timed: making DEMONS one of those flowing arthouse horrors you could watch with the sound off...
Although you'd miss out on what are randomly misplaced American heavy metal/hard rock tracks, from Motely Crue to Saxon to Billy Idol... although Accept's Fast As A Shark orchestrating Urbano riding a motorcycle (inside the theater) while massacring zombies could have been the greatest music video ever (an obvious inspiration for Peter Jackson's DEAD-ALIVE lawnmower sequence)...
It's just that, in what's ultimately another horror pitting humans against monsters, there needed more build-up into the individual personality traits (also including an outside group of thugs highlighted by wild yet vulnerable punk girl Bettina Ciampolini and last-minute sharp-shooting blonde Emanuela Zicosky) for their possible survival to mean more than their inevitable demise.
Outlaw of Gor (1988)
Donna Denton's Male Fantasy Fantasy
Cannon's fantasy exploitation GOR was more obviously leading towards a sequel than even the original STAR WARS... instead of just Darth Vader's tie-fighter flying off into space, there were several villains intentionally leading to a direct followup, played by last-minute cameo Jack Palance and the extremely beautiful Donna Denton...
Both taking the menacing mantle formerly handled by British actor Oliver Reed... but OUTLAW OF GOR has Denton in charge, here as a climbing princess turned evil queen making the once-freed barbarian-canyon village full of enslaved slave girls once again...
Sadly, former co-lead Rebecca Ferratti, whose role as the girlfriend and battle-instructor of Urbano Barberini... a clumsy college professor shuttled into this otherworld... is only sporadic... somewhat replaced by sexy slave supermodel Michelle Clarke...
This time, Barberini's Cabot gets thrust from Earth to GOR with a goofball sidekick, who'd been pathetically striking out at a neon-80's nightclub, and, seeming like potential comic-relief, is actually sidelined by little-person warrior Nigel Chipps, returning from the original but with a much larger (so to speak) role...
In a by-the-numbers sequel directed by 1960's/1970's exploitation veteran John 'Bud' Cardos, using basically the same broad premise of a menacing dictator encroaching both land and freedom, causing the preppy-turned-muscular Cabot to trudge through the barren landscape (while pontificating philosophy) to eventually save the day...
But it's THE NEW MIKE HAMMER ingenue Donna Danton's ride, almost entirely here, seeming more like a pilot to a cable-series she'd melodramatically headline... with gladiator style death-matches replacing what was previously a more basic sword-and-sandal traipsing adventure... that was miraculously intriguing enough (with its scantily-clad slave girls) to merit a sequel, again geared towards sexed-up b-movie male fans -- now able to lust upon both the protagonist and antagonist ingenues.
Gor (1987)
Don't REED Too Much Into GOR
Beginning with an uptight, otherwise average-looking, spectacle-wearing professor lecturing a university classroom before being thrust into an otherworld adventure, Cannon Films' infamous GOR seems equally inspired by RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK as the more obvious CONAN similarities including scantily-clad chicks and muscular men in a barbarian world... where the professor goes from wimp to warrior, taking enough time to provide Urbano Barberini a realistically transitional performance...
Although known for having British veteran actor Oliver Reed as the spider-mask-wearing overlord, stealing what's called a home-stone for his own greed before seeking revenge on our hero for accidentally killing his son... it's brunette model/actress Rebecca Ferratti who really steals the show...
Derived from John Norman's GOR fantasy novels detested by intellectuals for promoting sexism, this adaptation, while having its fair share of enslaved babes, has Ferratti's Talena not only the most tough and sword-resilient, but she alone teaches our stranger-in-a-strange-land male lead how to fight..
Shot in the vast deserts of South Africa, GOR shows its low-budget camp not in the settings since the university frame-story looks great (with its very own beginning, middle and end) while the sweeping camera makes ample LAWRENCE OF ARABIA-style vastness of the wastelands harboring mountainous villages cutting into torch-lit caverns...
But it's the first few times we see any wide-shot of a horde of tribal warriors fighting, looking noticeably slower and more unprofessionally contrived than the usual sword-and-sandal flick (a classic genre reignited in the 80's from CONAN to THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER and even THE ROAD WARRIOR), turning GOR into the kind of subpar fare that Cannon Films' was (and is still) detested for...
Which is the same crap the likes of Roger Corman would get away with, and that's mostly because the Cannon producers would attempt just-high-enough budgets to pretend to compete with the major studios... and they would sporadically hire some pretty great (sometimes legendary) actors...
Like Oliver Reed doing his usual whispering menace routine, killing anyone while taking anything he pleases (clashing with dependable giant Paul L. Smith and an enigmatic Jack Palance cameo)... formidably mixed within the younger, more picturesque talent who could only go so far and yet, for the abysmally low-rating and maligned reputation, GOR actually flows along decently enough when it needs to...
From scene after scene, there's not only another fight (faster and more intense when one-on-one) and a reason to either intrude or escape various perils just-in-time, the characters actually seem to mean business despite their (and their surrounding production's) obvious limitations.
The Brigand of Kandahar (1965)
Needs More Reed
With the seven Hammer Films featuring then-rising young star Oliver Reed, sometimes there's a feeling they didn't quite know how great a thing they had... even in his very own titular horror, CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, he doesn't appear until around forty-five-minutes (although the previous sequences are intensely entertaining)... and in THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER, he dies way too soon...
Same thing happens here, since, as the leader of a band of holed-up Indian (from India) rebels who kidnap Ronald Lewis... playing a half-Caucasian/Indian treated unfairly by fellow British soldiers led by Duncan Lamont... Reed's not supposed to be the main star, billed second to Hammer's square-jawed SCREAM OF FEAR and STOP ME BEFORE I KILL Lewis...
But Oliver simply doesn't have enough zesty screen-time overall, intensely channeling Anthony Quinn's zesty Arab rogue in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and again cast with his WEREWOLF co-star Yvonne Romain, looking voluptuous and alluring as usual while, as Reed's jealous sister, she doesn't have much to do but stand around and brood, without even really trying to seduce the handsome half-caste leading man...
Leaving most of the romantic ingenue role to equally gorgeous Katherine Woodville (who had also co-starred with Reed, in THE PARTY'S OVER) since her affair with hero Lewis... who supposedly deliberately abandoned her doomed husband... provides equal worth with the most conveniently dull character in Glyn Houston's wartime journalist (himself channeling Arthur Kennedy from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA), acting so breezy and bland that he never seems in very much danger: a microcosm of how this entire 1850's-era war-adventure lacks tension (and purpose) throughout.
Stolen Face (1952)
Early Terence Fisher Hammer Noir
Passive CASABLANCA French actor Paul Henreid's cheated on again, here in Hammer's noirish-drama STOLEN FACE, describing how Henreid, a plastic surgeon, made a badly scarred female career-criminal look exactly like the beautiful (and surreptitiously engaged) sophisticated pianist he fell for during the first half, resembling more of a Douglas Sirk melodrama than the intended crime-thriller by Hammer's future stock auteur Terence Fisher...
Enter American import Lizabeth Scott, who turned to England what she couldn't find in America, having portrayed both good and bad girls in stateside noir films, and here she plays both... despite only the original classic pianist character baring her own famously sultry low voice, which would have fit better than dubbing the original pre-surgery Mary Mackenzie for consistency (which wouldn't matter given the initial far-fetched premise)...
Although it takes over half the otherwise wispy run-time before Scott turns sneaky, corresponding with a former male crook while preferring taverns to operas, and shoplifting everywhere she goes before the original good girl returns for the previous dramatics to converge...
So it's a shame that Lizabeth couldn't play the femme fatale for much longer, and that initial surgery should have happened from the beginning since STOLEN makes a better second-half crime flick than first-half romance.
The Last Page (1952)
Second Hammer Blonde Noir
Following BAD BLONDE, here's another Hammer British Film Noir dealing with a blonde: in this case, beautiful Diana Dors, where any expression wields not only a full-lipped pout, but a seductively vicious pout as the story, centering on blackmail at a high-end English bookstore, slowly... through chatty exposition dialogue... unfolds...
Dors plays Ruby Bruce, whose stunning appearance alone turns men into jelly. Although her rich boss, with a lucrative insurance policy, is tougher than most pawns...
So Ruby teams with ex-convict con man Jeffrey Hart to collect the money as the slow, meticulous nature in which the plot pans out is intriguing...
As Jefferey coaches Ruby from the sidelines (at a posh bar), she becomes more and more guilt ridden and desperate, proving Dors, known as the "British Marilyn Monroe," had more ability to carry a storyline than the American bombshell...
But without her presence, MAN BAIT becomes your typical "wrong man" melodrama... Although the talented cast of Brits (including second tier ingénue Marguerite Chapman and Raymond Huntley as an uptight manager), and a few neat surprises, will keep your interest: Especially the last ten minutes when the antagonist gets really wicked.
Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971)
Slick, Classy & Deadly
Seeking a new face during the late 1960's and early 1970's, Ralph Bates was supposed to be Hammer's young resurgence of Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing... yet he never completely fit since he tried too hard to be the new antagonistic seducer... which made his role as the half-titular DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE his best, portraying Jekyll with a naturally grounded hybrid of blandly subtle and intensely neurotic...
With the novelty of turning into a girl instead of his own male alter-ego... and while their new studio exteriors looks more television-based than the plush-colored Victorian big-screen splendor of their prime, HYDE surpasses most of Hammer's 1970's vehicles competing with the R-Rated exploitation era...
And while it's their second attempt at the famous Robert Louis Stevenson story, a decade after THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL, it's really Hammer's way of cramming two other legendary crime stories from that antique 1800's...
While dodging flirtatious advances from beautiful good girl Susan Brodrick in the daytime, at night Jekyll uses death-collectors Burke and Hare... yet they're mostly used for dark-comedy-relief...
Yet it mostly pays homage to the fog-shrouded Jack the Ripper legend... the stabbing done by Jekyll himself to various street-walkers to gain serum which would lead to that female-transformation...
Where the suspense picks up with his scene-stealing second half... as Martine Beswick's SISTER HYDE is as mysteriously sensuous a literal lady-killer as she's an enigmatic temptress involving another of Hammer's signature traditions...
Hence the casting of more great British characters-actors, including Gerald Sim (lookalike to THE DAMNED semi-antagonist Alexander Knox) and sneaky future SWEENEY guest-star Lewis Fiander...
And while sometimes too complicated for its own good (and along with their superior Jack tribute THE HANDS OF A RIPPER), this intensely-involving JEKYLL/HYDE turns Victorian England into their very own atmospherically-shrouded, nightmare-laden landscape like the good old days, and nights, of classic Hammer Films.
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
Hammer's Counter-Occult
In two of Hammer legend Christopher Lee's favorite Hammer movies, he's a regular fella, not a monster or killer... although in the THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL he's a double-crossing scoundrel, having sex with his titular best friend's wife and suffering constant gambling debts that he talks the initially vulnerable cuckold into paying...
Yet in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, with the same director in Hammer staple Terence Fisher, he's actually the hero... and it was Lee's own persistence to bring author Dennis Wheatley's occult novel to the big screen...
Sadly, by 1968, Hammer hadn't caught up to the kind of demon-cult movies that worked best with a tinge of dark humor, like the same year's ROSEMARY'S BABY...
In fact DEVIL, looking as vibrantly handsome as other Hammer/Fisher productions... only taking place in the early motor-era instead of Victorian... is extremely dated, particularly one distracting rear-projected driving sequence with Lee's bland sidekick falling for ingenue Nike Arrighi who, despite being sporadically possessed, hardly seems in any real danger...
Meanwhile, during the Satanic Rituals, melodramatic music blasts so loud, it's one of the few Hammer films attempting to force audiences when to be afraid - but without any real reasons why...
Yet the biggest problem's not in Lee being miscast as the stalwart lead, but the otherwise sophisticated and gentlemanly veteran-actor Charles Gray as a demonic cult leader could have used some of that formidably hypnotic prowess that, unfortunately, Christopher Lee was tired of.
Vendetta for the Saint (1969)
Jim O'Connelly's A Great Noir/Action Director
When television shows becomes theatrical features, it's usually a cheat like in the case of THE SAINT two-part episode VENDETTA FOR THE SAINT, which, pieced together, becomes a 90-minute movie...
Although herein, there IS a kind of theatrical touch, for two reasons: villain Ian Hendry, as a mobster who was once someone else and now goes by a fake name while working as an aging/dying mob-boss's sophisticated, falsely-related henchman, is always great on both the big (GET CARTER) and small (THE AVENGERS to THE SWEENEY) screen...
But it's director Jim O'Connelly, mostly known for bringing Ray Harryhausen's dinosaurs to life in the novelty science-fiction western VALLEY OF GWANGI... before creating terrifically fast-paced theatrical noirish crime programmers THE TRAITORS, THE HI-JACKERS and SMOKESCREEN...
Moving Roger Moore along just the same in his career-making series that's otherwise mostly expository dialogue, here more action-oriented from beginning to end, getting in and out of trouble ranging from old antique dungeons to car chases and gun-play while protecting Hendry's gorgeously vulnerable pseudo-niece Rosemary Dexter and reluctant blonde mob moll Aimi MacDonald as, just as he would as 007, Moore's always perfect when traipsing around unexpected bulwarks at every turn.
Dracula (1958)
Atmosphere Over Terror
While Hammer's groundbreaking horror-remake THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN proved that Frankenstein was a man and not the monster, their follow-up HORROR OF DRACULA was to show the monstrous Dracula as a man...
Looking quite dashing and attractive, especially when Christopher Lee first shows himself, along with a barrage of sinister music, to solicitor Jonathan Harker, exactly what he's supposed to be... a gentleman wealthy enough to need someone to look over his books, getting his business in order...
Business both curtailed and ignited by Valerie Gaunt, billed simply as Vampire Woman, the first human baring fangs in a Hammer film: her first-act with John Van Eyssen's Harker seems like a short film all its own...
In Hammer's previous year's game-changing horror-remake THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, she was equally desperate and sexually-driven towards that film's titular character, played by Peter Cushing...
Who, as Van Helsing the vampire hunter, who was Jonathan Harker's mentor, is actually the true star here: getting not only more screen-time but whose expository-driven investigation (alongside Michael Gough) makes DRACULA (renamed HORROR OF DRACULA) a kind of dark crime-thriller involving bitten/transformed women connected to the film's introductory Harker...
His finance's the first victim who, played by girl-next-door-cute Carol Marsh, morphs into a zesty vampire-vixen... but should have had more screen-time or perhaps a backstory on her first two bites that we never experience, which would possibly make this DRACULA scarier...
Made by Hammer's master of atmosphere Terence Fisher, who directed most of their iconic monster classics, DRACULA relies on a brooding sense of impending doom over what his CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN used with more intensely sporadic bursts of monstrous action...
And while that feature is, despite the equally plush Victorian setting, more sparse and steely green-hued, this blood-red HORROR is where Hammer truly proved that Universal's B&W classics could/should be bathed in portrait-like colors: like a Gothic novel's cover brought to life...
In fact, many of Hammer's dialogue-driven creature-features feel like watching a book being read, or reading a book you can visually experience, particularly in this somewhat otherwise hit/miss venture that gets repetitive with the rotation of women under the same passive-to-sinister transformation... plus the fact we never see enough of Lee's initial seduction of either starlet...
Where middle-aged wife Melissa Stribling is a far more intriguing, sexually-driven conquest than the younger/prettier fiance while Peter Cushing and the underused Christopher Lee, beginning what would always seem like guest-starring roles in his own films, are part of a climax so enthralling you'll wish this DRACULA was a bit more hellbound than spellbound throughout.
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Frankenstein The Man
What Hammer did for FRANKENSTEIN is made people know that, unlike what it seems having grown up with James Whale's otherwise brilliant Universal double-feature, is that that's not the name of the monster, whose name is basically, The Monster, but here he's constantly established as the Victorian-era scientist himself...
As classy and sophisticated phenom turned idealistic heir, with a castle all to himself, Victor Frankenstein begins as a frustrated teenager, and there's never been such aesthetically perfect casting from child to man...
Initially played by Melvyn Hayes, his impatient prodigy's tired of scientific education even at the top schools... and the scenes hiring (and bonding with) second-lead Robert Urquhart as his personal at-home tutor like a short film all its own, with a beginning, middle and end, including the introduction of Victor's arranged child fiancé...
When grown, Hammer starlet Hazel Court looks perfect as the perfect wife, that Victor... now Peter Cushing with a fervent drive to recreate the dead, acting as his very own Igor in stealing necessary body parts... has no time for love when so much laboratory work's to be done...
Leaving the best Hammer starlet to dark-haired, full-lipped, Gothic-looking actress who would soon portray the initial vamp girl to Christopher Lee as DRACULA... and here Valerie Gaunt's a love-smitten, envious maid sharing secret kisses with Victor, who's more a charming scoundrel/cad than the icy brooder portrayed in further installments...
All he really cares about are those hit-miss surgeries, beginning with resurrecting a dead dog before finally creating the patchwork Monster in Christopher Lee, who couldn't be more different than the bolt-headed giant played by the iconic (because of his portrayal of FRANKENSTEIN) Boris Karloff...
While not intelligent like in Mary Shelley's source novel, Lee's performance is like Cushing's... in that both are tightly connected to the plot: his trudging gait and looming, formidable threat is built more around his creator's failure on creating a perfect specimen than adhering to the horror genre's need for a ruthless body-count killer...
But that kind of stuff happens too, first in the woods outside and then the castle inside with Valerie Gaunt's curiously-doomed maid, leading to the impending threat of Hazel Court in danger... which is where the progressively annoyed and reluctant Urquhart's arguments with Victor has more urgency than his guilt in helping to educate/assist the same mad scientist he now has to stop...
Making THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN more of a character-driven melodrama than terrifying horror... yet still wielding terrific bouts of suspense by Hammer auteur Terence Fisher: including an early scene where Cushing's Victor, progressing from body collector to cold-blooded killer, lures an intellectual old man to his demise...
And while Cushing continued a string of loosely-connected followups, none match the sheer simplicity of a scientist out to prove his creation alongside Hammer proving that their own recreated FRANKENSTEIN, the man not the monster, actually had somewhat of a soul... until his (own) brains got in the way.
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)
Fisher and Cushing's Lowpoint
Penultimate FRANKENSTEIN film for Hammer's most prolific director Terence Fisher, who made THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN that got the ball rolling a year before their more famous, HORROR OF DRACULA, which he also directed and where Peter Cushing plays intense good guy Van Helsing...
As Baron Frankenstein, he began a kind of misunderstood idealist more than the mad, mad scientist he'd turn into... but the title of FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED suits a film in which... for Peter Cushing and blonde DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE bombshell Veronica Carlson... was a catastrophe because of one quick scene...
Ironically, when Frankenstein enters Carlson's room for the infamous rape... which is hardly shown but not left entirely to the imagination... it's actually one of the more memorable scenes in what otherwise attempts director Fisher's dressed-up and classy Hammer origins he helped create that, to gain younger audiences while also saving money, had been getting less spectacular and more like violent body-count proto-slashers than the kind of scientific thriller attempted again here...
Sadly, the plot's too basic and complicated at the same time as Frankenstein uses a young couple... in which his inevitable rape victim is the girlfriend of Simon Ward, a blackmailed psych-ward worker that Frankenstein controls...
Nothing comes of it, really, since Frankenstein's intended creation/monster (using a brain transplant) is never made clear, or seems quite worth the trouble, while the ward patients are loud and annoying, and not very creepily effective...
Ironically, five-years later, Fisher and Cushing's last FRANKENSTEIN titled THE MONSTER FROM HELL would return to an asylum setting, only it's a far more creative and interesting call-back to the classic antique horror that's only worth resurrecting with a decent storyline since DESTROYED, while using several potentially-intriguing locations, feels all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action (2025)
Jerry's Postumous Propaganda
Not really about Jerry Springer and more about his executive producer and gopher and two female producers, being all glib and cocky about how great their obviously phony JERRY SPRINGER SHOW was until they finally say they had had enough...
The men eventually quitting while, somehow, god knows how, Jerry stayed on the air for another 18 years after peaking and after stopping the fighting right before a murder he was blamed for since the killers were former guests...
There are so many things missed here, like the crazy idea to make a fictional movie (Ringmaster I think it's called) about the show, that ended up bombing instead of getting viewers into the theater like the show got their audience onto the couch, basically the lowest denominator...
Meanwhile, Jerry, in archive interviews, seemed like an alright guy, and he made a few bucks, that's good since this is America...
But these kind of new-style documentaries on Netflix and Amazon are mostly just propaganda for the subject... and yet they act as if this kind of niche was somehow edgy since they admit upfront that the documentary is basically shilling for people that, because of that fact, will supposedly be more honest about themselves since the documentary is in their favor...
It's too difficult to figure out these new promotional videos masquerading as docs but, this one drops the ball by not having anywhere to throw it: and could have been one episode instead of two since the cliffhanger didn't really lead anywhere...
Showing both sides and opinions equally actually has the subjects being more honest instead of repeating the same thing over and over like they do here....
But it's still interesting to see some of the old shows in the 1990's when trash was king.
Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
Linda Hayden Steals The Movie
Foreshadowing GHOST STORY with three older, wealthy, distinguished, sophisticated Victorian Era gentlemen who, with a curious penchant for the macabre, become involved in a strange, semi-accidental murder before being stalked and picked off one by one...
And not by Christopher Lee, returning in Hammer's TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA in which he seeks vengeance against these fathers of one young man and most importantly, two token girls/women he bites and hypnotizes... this time for a particular reason other than eternal enslavement...
His goal's to entrance the daughters (and one son) to kill their dads... starting with one of the most effective Hammer ingenues, and, with girl-next-door blonde beauty Linda Hayden, there's a twist...
Initially punished for dating a young man by her overly religious father, who had ironically attempted the demonic seance involving hammy Hammer Christopher Lee-surrogate Ralph Bates as Dracula's flamboyant patsy, who winds up murdered...
It's never clear why he's important enough for Dracula to seek such complicated revenge... but what really works is how Linda Hayden's character, initially seeming like the more vulnerable and sheepish of his female conquests, winds up a goading/giggling lunatic that makes her part victim, part Renfield...
Meanwhile, slightly older, voluptuous Isla Blair's the most impatiently obsessed and desperate for Dracula's attention... but overall pales to Linda's natural ability to speak her mind without posing, oblivious to her striking beauty, like a platonic friend and girlfriend combined, making her possible future with token handsome lad Anthony Higgins really matter...
Higgins (who'd wind up a Nazi in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK) does a better job than the usual benign 11th hour hero, leading up to the inevitable race-against-time/saving-the-girl-before-she's-fully-transformed showdown within a spooky dark church that crams Hammer's Gothic aesthetic into what otherwise seems more like a proper period-piece melodrama...
So during Christopher Lee's sporadic, fitfully menacing appearances (once again a guest star in his own titular vehicle), TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA also provides doomed dads Geoffrey Keen, Peter Sallis and John Carson the kind of masterful character-actor roles that helped form the studio in the first place.
Norman's Rare Guitars Documentary (2024)
Great Doc... But Why The Actors?
This is a very cool documentary about Norman's Rare Guitars, going back in time showing how Norman Harris (who now looks like The Skipper from Gilligan's Island and used to look like a stoned Rowlf from The Muppets) went from being a starving musician into selling rare guitars, which at the point he was beginning, weren't rare at all...
He's obviously a great businessman... because small business are NOT easy to own... and has a lot of famous people that came by or that he met earlier, from Jimi Hendrix to George Harrison to Bo Diddley to Bob Dylan to Tom Petty to Richie Sambora...
The only problem is how much time's spent on actors like Jeff Daniels and especially Keifer Sutherland, who no one knows anything about, musically, and given so much time here talking about guitars, they should have had some time playing... being that they basically outshine the real musicians whose music help change the world...
So you get to see really rich people able to buy 50K guitars, but that's not the good stuff... what works here is meeting the guy who met the guys who found his niche in taking a risk and making a necessary profit off legendary antique instruments...
That, who knows, you just might have heard on someone's album... or two.
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Anachronistic Hipster Athiest Vs Dracula
Hammer's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE came out in 1968, and the studio must have really needed younger viewers to relate with the hero as Barry Andrews looks far from the Victorian Era setting...
With a frizzy perm, groovy clothes and being a proud and confident Atheist scholar (for what it's never clear), his girlfriend... niece of the monsignor who accidentally resurrected DRACULA while exorcising a cursed church... is what GRAVE is really all about...
But it's the First Girl, in this case Barry's barmaid workmate, Barbara Ewing, that brings back the genuine Hammer-ingenue vibe since she's seductive and frisky, experienced and downright voluptuous... for as long as she lasts, actually becoming Dracula's second hypnotized victim...
His first being one of the main characters in Ewan Hopper as a priest who had been the monsignor's frightened sidekick, and now he's Dracula's frantic sidekick, helping the caped foe find that gorgeous blonde...
Played by real life model Veronica Carlson (eerily resembling Sharon Tate), she's a little more befitting the antique era than her hipster fiance, but, despite the neat-looking 1800's rural-village aesthetic including dark gothic rooftop matte paintings, this DRACULA isn't altogether bad for what it's meant to be...
Basically a reworking of the original HORROR OF DRACULA where the prettiest girl, under a spell, lays sick in bed while it's up to the good guys, plural... in this case the tubby priest being more heroic than that anachronistic hipster... to save her in time...
From none other than Christopher Lee, who hardly speaks a word being that, in real life, he was once again dead-set against what he was most famous for: reluctantly returning as Hammer's most famous villain...
And since there aren't many scenes involving his titular character... mostly involving the lackluster romance between the miscast young couple... Dracula's not all that fun to love-to-hate this time around.
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
Enter The Vampire
Director Roy Ward Baker had nothing but complaints about the dank/uncomfortable sets in Hong Kong for what would bring the ENTER THE DRAGON martial arts craze into Hammer's horror, Count Dracula in particular, played by THE VAMPIRE LOVERS Christopher Lee surrogate John Forbes-Robinson who, during the ten-minute expository prologue, morphs into the body of roaming Satanic monk Shen Chan in order to bring together the titular LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES...
And Hammer regular Baker actually hardly used those supposedly troublesome interiors since most of GOLDEN occurs in daylight, as Cushing's college-lecturing Van Helsing ventures out with buried leads/karate-ringers David Chiang and his sister Szu Shih; Van Helsing's blandly handsome son Robin Stewart and the token Hammer blonde hottie Julie Ege...
One problem with these VAMPIRES is there isn't seven, nor any creative scenes gathering them up... in fact there's an entire zombie army, and so, in-place of more intimate one-on-one fights are two large groups rushing at each other with swinging weapons and not nearly enough of what's needed to make the genre's blend: strategic kung-fu...
Otherwise it's not a bad traipsing adventure... the fortress sets a neat-looking hybrid of the usual Hammer torch-mounted Victorian castles and the kind of epic Asian landscapes more similar to Kurosawa's 7 SAMURAI than any of the co-producing Shaw Brothers' kung-fu programmers... there just needed stronger heroes and far less of those battling hordes, which makes it difficult for the audience to keep score.
To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
Hammer Horror Out With A Whimper
Penultimate horror for one of the most famous horror studios, British's Hammer Films, has a young girl, schooled by nuns and dressed accordingly, being surreptitiously groomed into a Satanic coven care-of Hammer's biggest star Christopher Lee (who seems ready to bare fangs at any given moment) playing an ex-priest...
But the main problem with TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER... where the exploitation aspect's built right into the title, most likely to compete with THE EXORCIST... is that the novelty of a gorgeous young girl being used for Satanic/risque purposes means little since fourteen-year old Nastassja Kinski looks more like a nineteen-year-old old enough for whatever else she's being hidden from...
But her performance is good, and although first-billed hero Richard Widmark (initially partnered with Honor Blackman)... as a best-selling horror novelist protecting Kinskey's Catherine Beddows... should have been played by a younger actor, he does an affable job in what little's given...
In a witchcraft-centered Hammer (inspired by those rural occult b-movies involving vulnerable children) attempting the psychological thriller aspect over being effectively scary (DEMONS OF THE MIND comes to mind), DEVIL was a bonafide box-office success - but the studio was already too far in debt to recover.
Countess Dracula (1971)
THE LEECH WOMAN ala Victorian Hammer
Hammer had a new neck-sucker in Ingrid Pitt after her tour-de-force performance in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, and the title COUNTESS DRACULA refers not to her character or Dracula but a real life countess she's based on...
Yet the plot of a haggard rich woman needing blood from virgins to make her young and beautiful... but only for relatively small periods of time as she steals love with an otherwise oblivious handsome man, hiding away after turning even older and uglier each time... borrows straight from the decade-earlier b-movie THE LEECH WOMAN...
The usual Hammer low-budget is actually more apparent outdoors instead of within the gothic castle replete with neat wall torches and antique paintings within large dining or meeting rooms, where scenes of exposition dialogue and sneaky plotting have the feel of a TV-movie, which COUNTESS seems like an exploitation-cinema version...
The best sequences are each time a different young woman is chosen, ranging from the usual host of Hammer hotties: the Countess eventually learning that only virgins work after killing voluptuous whore Andria Lawrence (like when THE LEECH WOMAN realized only men work after killing Gloria Talbott)... although there's not enough of the stalking hunt and violent kill to make this horror movie more tense and scarier, while the aspect of turning old to young to old gets repetitive...
Featuring the token handsome suitor in Sandor Elès but the scene-stealer also stole ZULU in tragic character-actor Nigel Green, setting up each necessary murder for Pitt's Countess Elizabeth who, while in her youthful spell, pretends to be her visiting daughter...
Who's kidnapped/hidden for the ruse to work, and, played by British super-beauty Lesley-Anne Down, she's basically underused while the cunning relationship between Green and Pitt, the latter whose acting is better without the fake-looking hag makeup in her naturally seductive beauty that made HAMMER LOVERS shine, and what this novelty take on the legendary DRACULA is all about.
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
Modern 70's Dracula Crime Flick
Hammer's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA shouldn't be considered Christopher Lee's seventh Dracula but his 2nd... after DRACULA A. D. 1972, which brought the famous vampire from the signature Victorian-era into the 20th Century including hippies, nightclubs, night parties and one important seance...
But that was then... and now, two years later, there's a reclusive billionaire inside a spooky corporate building shot in murky wide angle lenses... actually looking more antique Gothic than Dracula's awakening church from 1972...
Herein returning director Alan Gibson made a body-count horror in which random investigators, including one unlucky male spy and a female secretary, get picked off or, in her case, are turned into a rabid vampire... combined with elements that feel somewhat science-fiction...
As Dracula, now the corporation's unseen leader... appearing thirty-minutes in and ultimately given only two speaking scenes with Cushing... is backed by contrasting henchman from chase-sequence motorcycle thugs to stealthily snipers to dire computer programmers to otherwise sophisticated middle-age devil-worshiping businessmen...
Meanwhile Peter Cushing and Scotland Yard inspector Michael Coles (aided by Hammer veteran William Franklyn) have some more terrific expository dialogue, leading to a backroom sacrifice/showdown vs Christopher Lee's title character in a basic seek-to-destroy premise that ultimately feels like two acts instead of three...
Framed by doomy aesthetics looking equally dark and foreboding whether inside that ominous building or outside in a grass/woody field (where Black Sabbath could have posed for an album insert-sleeve), it's like everything is cursed - fitting since, like any James Bond flick, this time Dracula's going to destroy the world (by reinventing The Black Plague)...
So SATANIC RITES, with one anticipated sequence involving sexy attacking vampire-girls (led by their cunning Asian queen) going after Cushing as Van Helsing's granddaughter played by Joanna Lumley instead of Stephanie Beacham from the original...
Actually making sense since, instead of the deliberately oblivious, free-style hippie chick, this Jessica Van Helsing's even more snoopy and investigative than granddad, seeming like an entirely different person anyway...
As this DRACULA feels like it could be a high-octane crimethriller with its funky cop-genre soundtrack including jazzy horns and those famous wah-wah peddle guitars...
And beside the far superior and more complete DRACULA (taking out swingers in Swinging London) A. D. 1972, director Alan Gibson did most of his work on British television - and if this were a TV-pilot that included big-screen exploitation violence and nudity, it might have had a chance: just imagine VAN HELSING: THE NIGHT STALKER following THE SWEENEY every Wednesday night.
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
Christopher Neame Steals 1972
A year after Hammer's progressively-sexual Karstein Trilogy, thrusting the classic vampire-horror into the counter-culture sensibilities while remaining in their signature Victorian Era, they finally skipped to the present, built right into the DRACULA A. D. 1972 title...
And while Peter Cushing's college professor Van Helsing heir has several long bouts of exposition and two third-act vampire battles, Christopher Lee basically hangs around at the same gothic church where he was reawakened by a young British swinger, who's basically the main character here, or at least, technically speaking, the most important...
In that, Christopher Meame becomes a kind of CLOCKWORK ORANGE-inspired sociopathic bad boy and, as shown in the Victorian-era prologue, he too is descended from the origin, gathering the same 1800-era rural ashes that brings Christopher Lee back to life in the hustle-bustle city-centered 1970's...
With slowburn bravado, Neame serves up his groovy/gorgeous lady-friends in what's a kind of proto body-count slasher starting with first-girl Caroline Munro, the most sensuously game during the initial reanimating seance... and whose one quick lustful post-bite expression sums up the bridge between Dracula's hypnotically-infatuated female-prey then (the 1800's) and now (the 20th century)...
Also featuring black model Marsha A. Hunt and the most subtle, soft-spoken, sophisticated beauty in Janet Key, nicely grown-up from the childlike maid in the original Karstein's VAMPIRE LOVERS that first turned Hammer from atmospheric antique-horror into risque horror-exposition...
Yet even in modern times, there's an old-fashion kind of Scotland Yard politely-interrogating investigation where dialogue between Cushing and detective Michael Coles are as interesting as the young swingers partying in a nightclub before and after Dracula's sporadically lethal (no female victims transformations here) bloodletting...
Meanwhile, Peter Cushing has more screen-time than Christopher Lee, as does the vamp-climbing Christopher Neame, fitfully named Alucard... Dracula spelled backwards...
Unfortunately Neame's character, so up-front and viciously primed for a new generation of lady-slaying, comes to his end in a rushed manner: deliberately paving the way for Lee and Cushing's inevitable showdown, protecting the latter's lovely granddaughter Stephanie Beacham... balancing both strong-willed and vulnerable... and filmed by director Alan Gibson in the church/cemetery's gothic darkness contrasting to the otherwise neon-lit London scene...
But what makes DRACULA A. D. 1972 work almost perfectly from beginning to end is that every scene underlines the tension-filled purpose of either remaining a vampire for longer (with every victim having their own importance no matter how much screen-time), or to stop the murderous aspect from continuing...
Overall making for an entirely underrated hunted/hunter masterpiece that brought Christopher Lee's legendary monster back to life - despite the fact he's more like a guest star in his very own comeback feature.
Alice: Pilot (1976)
RIP Linda Lavin
The iconic sitcom ALICE, about a trio of waitresses working in a greasy spoon Arizona diner owned by a grumpy endearing slob, was based on an Oscar winning Martin Scorsese film starring Alice Burstyn titled ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE...
Although the movie can get pretty serious, by the mid-way point, when Alice and her son Tommy, after surviving a really scary guy (Harvey Keitel) and bouts of highway boredom, find a home in Tucson, Arizona on the way to Monterey, California where Alice dreams of becoming a singer...
By the time Alice finds her waitressing gig she puts her dreams on hold... and here we begin the sitcom's pilot (written by the novel's author Robert Getchell), where Alice, played by Linda Lavin, waits tables in Phoenix, Arizona and meets a young smitten customer who pretends to be an agent...
Polly Holliday's now iconic Flo, a gum-chewing waitress with a wink for every trucker and a retort for any occasion, smiles when, for the first time, she utters the famous line, "Kiss my grits"... as if she were testing it out on the studio audience...
Vic Tayback's Mel (the only actor from the motion picture to star in the entire series) and Beth Howland's kooky Vera take the backseat - it's all about Alice thinking she, like Burstyn in the movie, has a shot at fame...
The biggest difference of the pilot is the character Tommy... Played by Alfred Lutter from the film, by the second episode he's replaced by the more TV-fitting blonde kid Philip McKeon...
Perhaps Lutter was a bit too glib for TV audiences... but fans of the movie know he was arguably the best character...
So while the pilot is far from the best episode of the series or season, it sets the stage decently enough - providing Alice a job she'd keep for a decade...
BONUS TRIVIA: After Alice and Tommy realize they're not going to Hollywood, Tommy says under his breath, "Now I'm never going to meet Tatum O'Neal..." Which is ironic because that same year he co-starred with Tatum in THE BAD NEWS BEARS.
AND TO THE OTHER REVIEWER who said that "that kid couldn't act beans," let's see how many movies Philip McKeon starred in under the direction of Martin Scorsese in his prime. Alfred Lutter is the best thing in that movie, he just didn't fit here. But he was a great actor. LOVE AND DEATH he was also great. Natural. But he was too glib and glum, which fit the movie but not a happy series.
The Vampire Lovers (1970)
Ingrid Pitt Steals The Show
At one point in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, Ingrid Pitt's central vampire Marcilla (then Carmilla) turns to the young, innocent and naive Madeline Smith's Emma and shouts, "You must die... Everyone must die!"
What sounded like a threat was really a kind of arthouse philosophy lesson... making THE VAMPIRE LOVERS more a Bergmaneque lesbian-centered melodrama than the next two vampire features, later deemed the Karstein Trilogy, that brought Hammer Films into the naked-sexy 1970's...
Although we begin with the kind of all-out Victorian (ballroom) splendor that made the studio famous... with Peter Cushing taking in former Hammer starlet Dawn Addams' virginal daughter, Pippa Steel (engaged to Jon Finch), who, during the first act, goes through exactly what young Emma would later, getting sick while being seduced: punctuating the trope of not letting a vampire into your home...
Much different here since Ingrid Pitt's scene-stealing lesbian seductress Marcilla/Carmilla makes herself a welcomed guest, twice, and what carries the suspense is how far she'll get with either young prey...
And for fans of lesbian flicks, they never go beyond quick kisses... but the kind of heated, simmering passion that Polish actress Pitt carries through... even onto a governess and then an actual man... is what makes VAMPIRE LOVERS worth anything at all -- while first-billed Peter Cushing really only bookends the beginning and end...
Peaking with his usual vampire-hunting self, it was probably both a reminder of what Hammer still needed, and what it was trying to shed for the lustfully risque drive-in era that Ingrid Pitt, while either surrounded by frightened or possessed victims, seems all too alone completely inhabiting.
Crucible of Terror (1971)
Mary Maude Is Insanely Beautiful
Fair and sophisticated, lithe and docile, straight-long-haired classic British beauty Mary Maude was as perfect a vulnerable ingenue in CRUCIBLE OF TERROR as she's the sublime target for who seems to be a serial killing sculptor in LUST OF THE VAMPIRE antagonist Mike Raven, looking fitfully wicked enough to provide Mary's character Millie an inevitably nightmarish 11th hour chase...
Which does occur, kind of... but with a twist... beforehand spending most of the screen-time in an artistically Gothic beachside house where various beauties are either posing or being murdered, ranging from scream queen Judy Matheson as the artist's more faithful yet seductive, devilish (and possibly bisexual) moll to Raven's daughter-in-law Beth Morris, as sexy a blonde as Matheson's a deeply gorgeous brunette...
Starting and concluding with dependable British male actors spouting plenty of exposition, from James Bolam as an art-show curator, whose sidekick Ronald Lacey's the formidable sculptor's nervously jealous son, to veteran actor John Arnatt, providing the kind of 11th hour "explaining everything" monologue (with flashbacks) that occurs at the end of all whodunnits...
Because despite the horror-sounding title, CRUCIBLE OF TERROR is more a slow-burn mystery/thriller that deliberately hides the true menace: somewhat predictable since Raven's pretty weak in the villain department and, overall, everything comes down to Mary Maude's uniquely unmatchable beauty that's downright hypnotizing from beginning to end.