Twins of Evil (1971)

 "They have crosses? And stakes? And axes?"

I've seen a fair few Hammer horrors in my time, and some of them are very good indeed, while others are less so. This one is easily the best I've seen thus far, and by some distance.

On the surface it's an obvious crowd pleaser. There are the two rather attractive twins themselves to offer a bit of soft porn with titties briefly on display. Both actresses are decent, but mainly there for their sexiness, which is considerable. Mmm. But it's also a bloody well made and splendidly scripted horror film, gripping throughout, and with possibly Peter Cushing's best and most nuanced performance.

And yet, while pushing all the buttons to appeal as a bit of top notch early '70s vaguely titillating horror fun, it's acrually a lot cleverer than that under the surface. The twins Maria and Frieda are good and evil  respectively, yet the society they live in is less clear cut. There are two equally evil villains. The first, Count Karnstein, is an obvious baddie, a bored and decadent aristocrat who becomes a vampire (from a fanous ancestor we recognise from the prequel!) for fun. Damien Thomas, an actor so often underused, makes a superb villain.

Yet no less evil is Gustav Veil, a man who leads a gang of witch hunters who persecute any woman who shows and degree of independence and burns her alive without due process and the maximum of cant. They perform at being religious, and no doubt believe themselves to be so, but their religiosity is shallow, authoritarian and  no less evil in its murderous fanaticism. This is made clear in the opening scene, and the fact that the opening titles run over the sight of a woman being burned alive. Yet Cushing plays him superbly, as a villain driven to evl by his fanatcism and reaising to his horror that he is not the good man he believes himself to be but an unwitting servant of Satan.

It is therefore appropriate that Veil should die fighting the Count and that the baddie should die instead at the hands of Anton, a decent, questioning sceptic who is not blinded by fanaticism- a moderate, a liberal, a centrist dad. Good man. 

Karnstein and Veil would probably vote Tory this coming Thursday if they happened to live in Leicestershire. I'm sure Anton would vote Lib Dem. Be like Anton.