A Hammer Miscellany

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1959)
THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1964)
THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

In THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, Marla Landi plays the tempestuous Cecile, descendant of Sir Hugo Baskerville. A Hammer vampire without the fangs, Cecile is the Fatal Woman of Gothic literature. Her introduction - waiting bare-legged to lead men to their marshy doom - is one of the great images of the Hammer oeuvre.

THESE Hammer releases typify their output by decade: the vibrant late 1950s, the rigor mortis that set in during the 1960s, and the experimental death throes of the 1970s. THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES is steeped in sexual unease and the oaken veneer of English nobility, making it the clearest demonstration of the studio's class-conscious approach to horror. The transportation of Arthur Conan Doyle to the bloody red Hammer universe is dubious as an adaptation but successful as a blend of murder mystery and terror. To move the 1902 source novel closer to the Hammer template, liberties are made with the dialogue; Sherlock Holmes (Peter Cushing) is given several lines which seem to have strayed from the Van Helsing phrasebook, and Doctor Watson (Andre Morrell) provides a brief nod to Jack the Ripper when he reflects that the escaped convict Selden (Michael Mulcaster) "murdered a number of street woman."

Though meeting with a mixed reception at the time, Cushing's master detective looks very much the ideal incarnation. Cushing's suitably gaunt Holmes - the actor fortuitously losing weight after a mild bout of dysentery while making JOHN PAUL JONES in Spain - mirrors many traits of Van Helsing and Baron Frankenstein: the furious concentration, the fervor of his convictions, an impatience for fools, and a physical dynamism. A life-long Conan Doyle fan, poor box office halted Cushing starring in a series of Hammer Holmes pictures, thus limiting the imperious actor's popularity with retreads of Dracula and Frankenstein.

Peter Cushing seemed a natural for the part of Sherlock Holmes. Cushing also played the detective in the BBC series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Channel 4's The Masks of Death, portraying Holmes in old age.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES bristles with life whenever Cushing is on screen, and it is to the film's detriment that the actor isn't visible enough. Absent from the 17th century prologue - which has Sir Hugo Baskerville (David Oxley) roasting a manservant in the fireplace as a prelude to gang rape of the victim's daughter - Holmes also vanishes for most of the second act. Cushing's commanding and flamboyant lead is the only portrayal whose goodness is more assertive than his eccentricities, and the only one who seems bright rather than odd or remote. Also, Morrell's Watson is closer to Conan Doyle's perception than any other: conservative but observant, aging but not yet incapable. Of the other cast members, Milles Malleson is a hoot as the sherry-guzzling Bishop, and Christopher Lee gives one of his most sympathetic and subtle performances as the beleaguered Sir Henry Baskerville.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES remains one of the most entertaining of all Sherlock Holmes films, as well as being the first ever in colour. Jack Asher's Technicolor camerawork gives the work a rousing and surprisingly sensual feel; in the interiors, vivid reds (Sir Hugo's hunting jacket) and blues (the gloom of Baskerville Hall) are striking, and exterior scenes of Dartmoor have an autumnal, shrivelled state odd for the Summer setting. With battle lines so clearly drawn between Holmes's rational milieu and the dark cruelty behind the Baskerville legend, director Terence Fisher is in his element. The detective is the perfect Fisher hero, the Renaissance scholar with mystical undertones who, like Van Helsing, marks a liaison between orthodox religion and the science of detection.

For THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, stuntman Dickie Owens makes the automaton pathetic rather than tragic, and without Christopher Lee under the bandages, Owen's eyes remain dead and expressionless.

A follow-up to THE MUMMY was long overdue, but THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB is a poor relation to Fisher's original. Produced, directed and written (as Henry Younger) by Michael Carreras, the film ties together the those-who-defile-the-tomb-shall-die scenario with the tale of Adam Beauchamp (Terence Morgan) - the cursed-to-immortality brother of Mummy Ra-Antef (Dickie Owens) - who needs to bring Ra back to life as he can only die at his hand. Beauchamp may produce a speech about how tired he is by witnessing three thousand years of man's inhumanity to man, but in 1900 he still takes time in seducing Annette (Jeanne Roland) away from her fiance John Bray (Ronald Howard).

THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB is a B-movie programmer which highlighted the extent to which Hammer were struggling to inject any inspiration into their early 60s horrors. This was not helped by Carreras' typically deadpan helming and the prodigal son's frustrated ambitions to move the studio away from its roots to more fantasy material. The original screenplay was suitably fantastic, which told of a group of archaeologists discovering an ancient tomb in the Sahara Desert and unleashing a giant Mummy which trashes Cairo. Unsurprisingly this draft was swiftly sidelined, though the pre-production image of a gargantuan Mummy clutching a girl was retained for the finished film's poster.

Julie Ege plays Vanessa Beren - a wealthy widowed suffragette who funds an expedition to exorcise evil - in the delirious THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES.

The comic relief is tedious, and the characters are cardboard throughout. Carreras has called Roland's performance "ornamental," but the twenty-one-year-old Anglo/Burmese model/non-actress doesn't even reach that level. When the film opens with her father's brutal slaying, Annette is hardly upset at all, preferring to spend the rest of the picture swooning after Beauchamp. Howard – who was close to fifty at the time – is far too old for the role of "intrepid young Egyptologist," and Fred Clark's crass, P. T. Barnum-like promoter Alexander King is irritating, but even so is the liveliest thing in the film. THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB leaves a bad taste in the mouth because, for all its mediocrity, the murder scenes are eerily memorable. The attacks are not staged with the vigor of Fisher, but instead are bludgeoning sadistic: archaeologist Sir Giles Dalrymple (Jack Gwillim) is hammered to death with a small statue of an Egyptian cat goddess, and George Pastell - playing a sympathetic Egyptian official after his high priest role in THE MUMMY - willingly sacrifices himself to Ra-Antef in a skull-crushing scene that ranks amongst Hammer's most vicious.

Billed as "The First Kung-Fu Horror Spectacular," THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES - directed by Roy Ward Baker - was Hammer's uneasy co-production with Run Run Shaw, a leading light in the Kowloon-based Shaw Brothers company. Not originally written as a Dracula film, the hasty prologue sees The Count (James Forbes-Robertson, thanklessly replacing Christopher Lee and looking like a drag queen) revived by Kah (Chan Sen). Dracula possesses Kah's body and returns to the village of Ping Kuei, where he commands the Seven Golden Vampires, who raid the town and harvest the blood of naked woman in a blood trough - eight gullied slabs arranged like petals around a central, bubbling cauldron. Lecturing at China's Chung King university, Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is approached by student Hai Ching (David Chiang), a native of Ping Kuei, for his help. The film benefits from a powerful James Bernard score and John Wilcox's Panavision framing, but is structured more like a Western than a Horror or Kung-Fu film. THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES possesses an entertaining air of derring-do, but ultimately acts as a substantial fall from grace for the often operatic Hammer vampire film. 

Houses of Horrible

BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH (1983)
DR TERRIBLE'S HOUSE OF HORRIBLE (2001)

"What in hell is going on at Headstone Manor?" One of the most baffling things about BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH is why Cleo Rocos doesn't take her clothes off.

BY 1983, Kenny Everett was one of the major stars of British television. Made to exploit this popularity, BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH is a brave failure that sees the zany comedian play Dr Lukas Mandeville - a former surgeon with an on-off German accent and a metal leg - the spearhead of a group of scientists sent to investigate the strange activity at Headstone Manor ("Businessman’s Weekend Retreat and Girls’ Summer Camp"). Unknown to them, their presence is about to incur the wrath of a local coven of bumbling but determined Satanists, led by a 700-year-old disciple known only as The Sinister Man (Vincent Price).

Written by Ray Cameron and Barry Cryer, the film flopped disastrously in Britain but was a box office hit down under; in an interview to promote the film on Australian television, Everett attributed its lack of home-ground success to the fact that the British "have no class." But the main reason was the suicidal decision of giving the film an 18 certificate, alienating Everett's young fans but simultaneously fully exploiting its tit humour and comedic gore; in a tour-de-force scene of excess, for example, Mandeville attempts to retrieve his monocle after it drops into his patient during a flashback surgery sequence.

The Countess (Ronni Ancona) bares her fangs in Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust, from DR TERRIBLE'S HOUSE OF HORRIBLE.

BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH is best viewed through a nostalgic haze; its all a juvenile mess, but an entertaining one, leading to a suitably perplexing climax. The cast is a checklist of familiar faces; the "distinguished international team of specialists" include Gareth Hunt and Don Warrington as the most bemused-looking gay couple in cinema history, Sheila Steafel as a butch lesbian, Pamela Stephenson, John Fortune, and Cleo Rocos, the latter redefining the meaning of non-actress. The film also revels in a lengthy list of movie parodies: Steafel in a school uniform (CARRIE), Stephenson being invisibly raped (THE ENTITY), a public house straight out of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, and Everett writhing on the table like John Hurt in ALIEN, before finding relief in a prolonged belch. 

When Steve Coogan's DR TERRIBLE'S HOUSE OF HORRIBLE first aired on the BBC in the winter of 2001, critical and public reaction was muted. Fans expecting a comedy akin to Alan Patridge were instead confronted with six quality homages to 1960s and 70s British horror, brimming with in-jokes and notable guest stars. And Now the Fearing apes the Amicus anthology, Frenzy of Tongs takes us back to yellow peril potboilers, and Curse of the Blood of the Lizard of Doom parodies the scientific-experiment-gone-wrong sub-genre. Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust is a sumptuous ode to the 70s Hammer vampire canon, Voodoo Feet of Death takes on the body-part-transplant movie, and Scream Satan Scream! is firmly ensconced in Tigon territory. Unlike the buffoonery of BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH, there is a genuine love for the material being spoofed, which makes the series an incredibly affectionate viewing experience.