The Raven (1963)

 "But you'd be kiled!"

"I do hope not..."

I haven't checked how many of Roger Corman's Poe films I've seen. It's a lot. It's possible, with this film, I've seen them all. 

They are, of course, all B movies, bless them. They all acknowledge the fun side of that. Corman has always understood the power of kitsch... except in Frankenstein Unbound. This film makes me wonder if the tongue in cheek subtletiesof his other Poe films are wittier than they come across, Because this film is full of ironic, fourth wall- threatenning humour.

Understandably, many films are based on novels or plays. Few films are based on poems, yet this film begins with a recital of Poe's masterpiece- I love the poem, unfashionable thought it is; compare it to the adolescent nature-wanking drivel of John Keats- and just has fun.

Vincent Price is a great avtor, one who deserved more than B movies. Here he shows his prowess at deadpan humour. Peter Lorre not so much, but you can't take your eyes off him Hazel Court is more of the classy straight actress, but her performance works very well indeed. Boris Karloff cannot fail to be the consummate evil sorcerer. He was born to play such a role.

Yet Jack Nicholson- yes, he was once this young- turns out to be a bloody good comic actor, moving beyond the point of treating B movie characters like Shakespeare, as he was previously known to do, and showing a real comic timing. 

This film is a joy, despite the tenuous connection to Poe, and the cast is fascinating. So is the deliciosly garish direction, exalting in the possibility of Technicolor.

I know this film is very silly, but I love it.

Premature Burial (1962)

 "I don't enjoy life. I merely experience greater or lesser degrees of tedium."

I haven't seen any of Roger Corman's Poe films for quite a while. This is mainly because there aren't many left to blog and I don't want to end up with none left. This one, while its reputation is solid enough, is not much talked about. 

Well, it's brilliant. From a short story by Poe with very little incident it takes the concept of premature burial itself, the idea of catalpesy making one appear dead; and the horrible irony of the fear of premature burial causing said catalepsy. But little else is taken from Poe, mainly because there isn't much else; Poe's brilliance is in his prose.

So, instead, we have the character of Guy, loosely based on the short story's narrator (Ray Milland does a decent job but the role, alas, is one that Vincent Price was born to play. And, for once in a Corman Poe fim, he doesn't.) and a delightfully gothic, obviously studio-bound setting, which quite rightly prefers the gothic and macabre over the realistic. This is a world where the weather, the Technicolor lighting, the shapes of the trees, all are carefully arranged in order to maximise the gothic eeriness.

More than this, though, the plot is awfully clever. We spend the early scenes building u the tension and enjoying the facr that, as this is shot and scripted the way it is, Guy will be buried alive in the end. We expect the whole film to be predictable... and yet the plot is awfully clever, with multiple twists at the end that are all the more effective for the fact the film gave no indication that any twists would be forthcoming.

Oh, and Alfred from the Adam West Batman series (look at the pages on the right) has easily the best line.

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

"Each man creates his own God for himself, his own Heaven, his own Hell."

I'd seen and blogged a couple of Roger Corman’s Poe films before, and found they’ve always been impressive in how they were scripted, shot and acted. But this one absolutely stands out as the finest by far. It’s superb, taking an Edgar Allan Poe short story and making a dark philosophical treatise that almost echoes Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

The setting is simple; a gothic castle in Renaissance Italy and the dark, plague-ridden countryside. But the film eschews realism in order to make the countryside darkly stylised, while there’s a sense that this community is cut off from the rest of Italy, giving Prince Prosperous absolute power over all he surveys. An openly Satanist prince would not possibly have been able to survive in Renaissance Italy, of course, but the film exists in its own claustrophobic, deeply atmospheric little world.

And at the centre of it all is the magnificent, extraordinary Vincent Price, giving one of the performances of his career. His mellifluous voice, the arch of his eyebrow, the looks of sardonic sadism- all this makes him utterly compelling as a charming sadist with absolute power and a love of Satan. There are subplots- Hazel Court as a princess fated to a gory death after giving herself to the Devil, and the horrifying revenge of a dwarf for the insult to his lady- but the film entirely focuses around the compelling figure of Prospero, and his eventual comeuppance is glorious.

I’ve blogged a fair few Roger Corman films by now, many of them excellent. But this is his finest achievement by far.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)

"I always have a small one before I operate..."

This early Hammer is a bit odd: the opening is genuinely atmospheric, the style of the titles is very Hammer and it feels like an early Hammer. But it's not really a horror film in that there little suspense- and the lack of suspense makes for a short film that feels so much longer. It really drags.

Christopher Lee is good as Pierre, the dignified hero (yes, he plays a hero!), while Anton Diffring phones it in as evil surgeon Georges, who is 104 but looks about 35, having achieved immortality by means of murdering a woman every ten years, and has an inexplicably German accent. Hazel Court impresses as Janine, the female love interest who... well, that basically sums up the character.

The basic plot, from a play by Barre Lyndon, should in theory make a good film in the same way Jekyll and Hyde has several times and yes, there's atmosphere, but the problem is there's never any suspense- and Diffring just doesn't have the charisma to carry the film. The result is a distinct lack of excitement, a rarity with early Hammer when the quality was generally high.

The film's riff on immortality achieved by the murder of others is hardly original although, with its murders of women including a prostitute in the Paris of 1890, and given Robert Holmes' fondness for Hammer, it's a probable influence on the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. 

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

“Pass the marmalade, Elizabeth.”

Right then, here begin the movie reviews! And we start with, er, some text in a Gothic font. And then the credits, and the music, and the picture quality, and the vistas- definitely not TV! Interesting from the start that, although nominally set in Switzerland, this is a stylised and not necessarily realistic Mittel-European setting. The outdoor scenes seem to be sets at least some of the time, and any vistas of Alpine scenes are not really intended to look natural.

Peter Cushing is fantastic as Victor Frankenstein, and it’s interesting to see how straight he plays it, as he dominates the film such as to set the whole tone. Of course, the whole thing is, deep down, terribly camp, and feels as though it is intended as such, but it’s a very, very deadpan sort of camp.

The film is told in flashback, with the main narrative bookended by scenes of a desperate Frankenstein awaiting his execution. We then cut to scenes of him as an intelligent, enthusiastic but rather cold young man, who uses his vast inherited wealth to ensure that he gets the best scientific education money can buy, striking up a close friendship with his tutor, Paul.

But all this starts to fall apart as soon as the pair succeed in bring a dead dog back to life. The cracks immediately begin to appear in their relationship; Paul thinks only of the medical benefits this could bring, while Victor immediately shows signs of Evil Genius Syndrome, interested only in his own knowledge and personal glory. And the morally dodgy decisions start here; first he steals the body of a hanged man, then he buys a pair of eyes, and then he robs the grave of a celebrated sculptor for his hands! Interestingly, though, towards the end of the film Victor protests that all doctors rob graves, for the benefit of humanity, and Paul doesn’t demur. This is a rare moment of moral ambiguity.

The part played by Victor’s doormat of a cousin, Elizabeth, is disturbing. Firstly, because they plan an incestuous marriage (eurgh!). Secondly, this is the second quarter of the nineteenth century (going by the fashions), and yet no one raises an eyebrow at the two of them living together. But she is so naïve, not questioning Victor’s obsession with his experiments or his extreme neglect of her. The only one who genuinely seems to care about her is Paul.

Victor’s even worse than that, though; he’s having an affair with his maid, Justine, and has promised both women that he’ll marry them. From this point on, having established that he’s a cad and a bounder, the film shows him becoming more and more morally repulsive.

The visit from Professor Bernstein highlights an odd thing about this film; why is it that the main characters speak with Received Pronunciation while the minor characters all sound a bit German? Aren’t they all supposed to be speaking Swiss German? Also amusing is the scene where Elizabeth naively bemoans the time her fiancé spends in the laboratory,, and we pan to the two men with their brandy and cigars. The gender roles in this film are quite hilariously antediluvian at times.

Be that as it may, Victor’s casual and shocking murder of the Professor is a huge turning point. Of course, the Professor is then buried in Frankenstein’s family vault, from where he can cheerfully obtain the brain. This film’s version of Baron Frankenstein is much more villainous than is usually the case.

Paul, by now, has huge scruples and, in a scuffle between him and Victor, the brain is apparently damaged- although we only ever have Victor’s word for this. It isn’t long, though, until Paul is persuaded to help. But the monster has unexpectedly been brought to life, and it looks very effective indeed. Christopher Lee’s make-up looks nothing like the Universal version, for legal reasons, but this is a real strength.

The argument between Victor and Paul after the monster escapes is interesting. Paul wants it killed, but is it not a sentient being? This monster has nothing of the pathos of Karloff’s version, though. He simply terrifies the blind man and (implicitly) kills him, while the child by the lake (in this version a boy) apparently survives.

The scene where Paul shoots the monster is visibly shocking and horrible, with plenty of blood, but that’s it. The monster’s dead. Paul can now leave. Except--- has it not been foreshadowed that Frankenstein can bring the dead back to life.

Victor further demonstrates his utter caddishness in cruelly mocking the pregnant Justine, whom he had promised to marry with no intention of doing so. Now he simply dismisses her, very possibly to a very grim fate. The power imbalance between them, in terms of both class and gender, is huge. She looks for evidence in the lab with which to prove his crimes to the authorities, but he locks her in with the monster; his second murder.

Paul finally returns on the eve of the wedding to see the monster, resurrected and pathetic, reduced to spending its life on the end of a chain, obeying simple and pointless commands from its master. Paul, appalled, resolves to go to the authorities but, while they remonstrate, the monster escapes, heading to the roof for the climax. In the end it is Victor, threatened by his own creation, who shoots the monster.

We return to the cell, where Victor begs first the priest and then Paul to support his story that it was the monster, not he, who murdered Justine. But he is, of course, being disingenuous; it was he who locked her into the room with the monster, and in any case he was already a murderer by this point. A last scene between Pauil and Elizabeth strongly implies them to be a future couple, as our last shot lingers over the guillotine.

That was good, albeit with a lack of irony that would be impossible for such a film nowadays. The ethical dilemmas look a little different, too, in these days of stem cell research. A good start for Hammer horror, though. I’ll have to watch the Universal version soon…