Vampire Circus (1972)

"They play no games. They are death."

I love old Hammer movies, especially vampire ones. The combination of camp humour and genuine creepiness is such fun, and there's such fun to be had with the subtext, too. Take the opening sequence here, for example. It's your typical Hammer setting: somewhere vaguely Mittel-Europa-ish in what looks like Napoleonic times, and everyone has vaguely German or Slavic names. Yet there's a nasty old Count, living in a suitably gothic castle, who's cuckolding the local gentry by stealing their wives, which has mediaeval droit de seigneur overtones, and drinking the blood of their daughters, which has paedophile overtones. Oh, and he's a vampire. Naturally. There are all sorts of sexual and class subtexts here already.

We also have lots more of the usual tropes- mobs with burning torches, sinister forests, even the music. (Incidentally, does anyone know whether the David Whitaker who composed the music here is the same chap who script edited Doctor Who? It's not a common spelling of the surname so I wonder…). Most obviously, of course, there's a very direct equivalence of vampirism with sex; every single scene of necks being bitten in the whole film is so wonderfully erotic. Anna's lust for the Count probably implies that Albert, her husband, is a bit rubbish in the sack. Of course, being a woman who is seen to enjoy sex, she has to be punished by all the men, by being whipped. Which, er, obviously has no sexual overtones whatsoever.

All of this is just the set-up, though, in a pre-titles sequence, something surprisingly rare in films. A lesser film would have this as its main plot, but here it's a mere preamble to establish a curse and get on with the films main purpose; scaring us, titillating us and reminding us that circuses, and not just clowns, are the creepiest things ever. Because they are, aren't they? The mysteriousness, the feeling of a closed world, the highly dodgy treatment of animals and, yes, the clowns. I'm a little worried to see the treatment of a dwarf as "other" and therefore scary, and also the overtones of Gypsies being sinister ("Hey, woman! Gypsy woman!"), but circuses are well creepy. A circus like this would, I suppose, have been recognisable in 1972 but now, thankfully, it isn't.

The plot is wonderful and satisfying, although it's not at all clear why the townsfolk keep going to the circus if they all suspect it of extreme dodginess! There are some nice touches and some nice set pieces. I like the way the strongman (Dave Prowse, no less!) is unaffected by a crucifix as he's not a vampire, and that the quick-thinking (if wet!) Anton is able to use a crossbow as a crucifix. It all looks gorgeous (particularly the large quotient of beautiful young ladies!) and the direction, by Robert Young, is excellent, with lots of particularly brilliant shots. The film is let down by a lack of charismatic actors, however. The cast is mainly competent, or better, but there are no real lead actors to be seen. The exception is John Moulder-Brown, who is eye-poppingly awful and, unfortunately, in a very major role. With a better cast, this would have been a much better film.

Still, there's not a lot wrong with the script or the look of the film. I'm surprised that Robert Young doesn't seem to have done much else. The later Hammers certainly tend to be a lot more erotic, but there's some very good stuff.

The Stone Tape

“A ghost is a mass of data waiting for a correct interpretation.”

I usually do films on Saturdays, but I suppose a one-off television play will just about do. It’s appropriate for the time of year, too; this was originally commissioned in 1972 as a Christmas ghost story. It’s the first drama by Nigel Kneale that I’ve reviewed on this blog, but it certainly won’t be the last. It’s also the first thing I’ve watched without subtitles for this blog (I’m a little hard of hearing) since those episodes of Doctor Who which had yet to get a DVD release. I don’t need them, exactly, but I’ve become used to being spoiled and not having to miss any lines of dialogue, so it’s become very annoying to have to suffer that here, at times. For a DVD release to neglect the subtitles is unforgiveable.

There’s something about the culture shock inherent in watching older dramas that makes them particularly interesting to write about. Here we have a bunch of characters who smoke all the time, drink whisky while they’re working, and wear… interesting clothes. The entire concept of a recording medium to replace magnetic tape is, of course, ancient. Peter’s attitude towards Jill is frequently quite eye-poppingly sexist. The vicar has an old-fashioned and incomprehensible Rowley Birkin-style way of speaking. We even get a full-on racist impression of a Japanese person which made my jaw hit the floor. The past is indeed a foreign country.

Aside from the fact that it’s dated, though, it hasn’t dated. The performances are great, with an extraordinarily intense Jane Asher putting in a superlative performance, and Michael Bryant convincingly playing a gradual descent into obsession. Peter is one of those men who seem to belong in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s; forthright, intelligent without being posh, meritocratic, a little bit bohemian, and dressed very much of the era- a bit of a cross between Alfie and Roger from The Great Escape. The direction is great, too; this doesn’t look at all like the static, multi-camera ‘70s stuff you’d expect.

But the main star here is Kneale’s script, which lets the characters breathe and gives us moments of humour while gradually building up the tension towards the incredible climax. The central concept is great; ghosts are in fact recordings, in stone, of emotionally intense moments. But there’s a twist, of course, and the revelation that there is in fact something ancient and malevolent behind this phenomenon is brilliantly shown just by the use of red lights. The final twist- that Jill takes the place of the erased ghost- is amazing.

As I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t any belief in the supernatural whatsoever, and some amount of such a belief is pretty much a precondition for being scared by this sort of thing. So it’s no criticism to say that I wasn’t scared, exactly. But I was riveted by the tension and the inexorable sense that things were heading towards an inevitable and horrible conclusion. Kneale may be a little dry as a writer (I found it very hard indeed to come up with an opening quote), but he’s an absolute master of storytelling.

The Omen (1976)

“When the Jews return to Zion
And a comet rips the sky
And the Holy Roman Empire rises,
Then you and I must die.
From the eternal sea he rises,
Creating armies on either shore,
Turning man against his brother
Till man exists no more.”

…And no, that poem isn’t real, it was made up for the film.

I’m not really what you’d call the most suitable person to review a horror film like this. Yes, I’ve done a few camp Hammers and Universals, but this is the first time I’ve done one which is supposed to scare you witless. But the thing is that I just don’t believe in anything supernatural- I’m the ultimate sceptic. Plus, I’m as atheist as they come- not the Richard Dawkins kind, mind. I just wasn’t brought up to be religious, I live in a fairly secular part of the world, and I’m one of those people who are simply unable to accept the existence of a higher being without actual physical evidence. The upshot of which is that films like this, which are reliant on at least some belief in the Devil and in predestination, just don’t scare me. Now, slasher movies, on the other hand…

None of this means I can’t appreciate when this sort of thing is done well, however, and it’s done brilliantly here. And, although Gregory Peck is always the most straightforwardly decent and heroic of leading men, there’s still a bit of camp horror here in the wonderfully over-the-top deaths of Father Brennan (the wonderful Patrick Troughton, whom we Doctor Who fans know to be a first-rate actor) and Keith (a shockingly young-looking David Warner).Plus, watching the film now, the atmosphere is a little diminished by the sheer retro pleasure that is the extreme 1970’s-ness of it all.

It’s a superbly taut script, with the first few scenes establishing the situation very quickly and economically, and unapologetically giving us a cast with fairly superficial; personalities so that we can focus on the plot. We’re given an image of a supremely successful man, Robert Thorn, United States ambassador to the Court of St James, and his seemingly idyllic family life. It’s only when Father Brennan intrudes into his life for the first time that we begin to get an inkling that his adopted son, Damien, may be something evil.

It’s interesting to ponder on the conceit of a child being evil in the light of the recent novel We Need to Talk about Kevin (recently filmed, of course) by Lionel Shriver. I should emphasise that I haven’t read or seen it yet, but it’s central theme- what if you, as a parent, raise a child who goes on to do something terrible?- seems to be the subtext of this film too, except that the fantasy / pseudo-religious elements help to make it more palatable for the movie-going public. It’s a deeply shocking idea (and redolent of original sin, of course) that a young child could be in some way “evil”. That’s what gives the film its power. That and the pacing.

There are a couple of plot holes, perhaps. Would a mother really not notice that her child had been switched just after birth? And how come the US ambassador to Great Britain has all this free time to go gallivanting all around Italy and Israel? But the whole thing fits together so well that I’m prepared to overlook these little things. The set pieces are superb: the sequence where Father Brennan is pursued by gales and tempests before his grotesque death is probably the highlight, but all the deaths are memorable, and the mutilated monk is a highlight too.

I’m glad I’ve finally seen this film- I’m 34, but today was the first time I’d seen it- as it looms rather too large in popular culture for it to be a film that can go unseen. I can’t say that I was scared, but that’s simply because such things don’t scare me. I enjoyed and appreciated it, at least. And so did Windsor Safari Park, I expect, who must have been delighted with the publicity.

Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920)

“…”

Well, that was interesting. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this, and not the only silent film I’ve ever seen. But I haven’t seen all that many, and it’s many years since I last saw this. I found it very, er, visual (duh!) and hard to follow the plot at times; all these young grey besuited men look the same!

Still, I love the overall look. The tint is very noticeable, and so is the over-the-top acting style, much as this seems effective and even necessary, given the lack of dialogue and the practical restrictions on how many captions you can have. And aren’t the captions on screen for just aaages? Some of us can read perfectly well, you know.

It’s fascinating to think this was made in 1919 and 1920, in the early days of the Weimar Republic and just after Germany (and indeed all of Europe and much of the world) had experienced a rather traumatic four years. It’s tempting, but possibly unwise, to read all sorts of things into the style and themes of the film because of this. I shall tread carefully, as I’ve deliberately not researched much about the film’s background so as to come to it fresh.

We start with a framing sequence as our narrator, Francis (why not Franz?) relates the bulk of the film to us. I know I’m always banging on about unrealistic narrators, but the expressionist style of the film is in hindsight a bit of a clue that all may not be as it seems. I like the spotlight technique that often opens and closes scenes, drawing our eye to things that the director wishes to highlight. And the expressionist style is fantastic. All of the buildings in the film are grotesquely distorted, and remind me very much of the sort of paintings Picasso was doing at the time. This is nicely alienating, and gives us what turns out to be a highly appropriate dreamlike quality. There are lots of nice stylistic touches; it’s noticeable that the town clerk, the police, and officialdom generally, are seated on massive tables that completely dwarf the mere mortals who are our protagonists.

More interestingly, though, this is a total rejection of realism. I know this is another thing I keep banging on about, but in the best possible way everything looks more like a theatre set than reality, and the effect of this is heightened by the fact that the camera never, ever pans; the effect really is that of looking at a dressed theatre stage. And, interestingly, to compensate for the lack of any movement by the camera, we get a great sense of depth on screen, with corridors, roads and crowds stretching in front of us.

The whole set-up with Caligari and Cesare is an historical curiosity these days- this sort of travelling freak show is very much a thing of the past, and it’s strange to imagine people queuing up for something as random as a somnambulist! Unfortunately, the plot is agonisingly slow, slower than I remember from other silent films I’ve seen- is this because it’s an early film? Does the storytelling get pacier throughout the ‘20s? It’ll be interesting to find out.

I was particularly struck by the scene where Cesare fails to stab Jane; he looks so Goth it’s unbelievable. It’s like a member of the Misfits nearly sixty years early. In fact, is it just me who’s reminded of a particular chap in the background to the video for Marilyn Manson’s version of Tainted Love? Jane is unbelievably sexy, by the way. Then again, all women in silent films are unbelievably desirable.

The bit where Caligari is “revealed” to be the director of the madhouse is agonisingly slow; exposition scenes are not pleasant to sit through when it means reading a series of captions which are on screen for what seems like minutes! I love the twist ending, though; it rather cleverly puts the dreamlike quality of the film in quite a different light.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)

“…And with every evil rooted in its stones…”

Yes, I know. Five film reviews, and all of them horror films. The next one will be different, I promise, and this time I mean it. Honest.

The opening scenes of the lands belonging to House of Usher, the eerie and claustrophobic setting within which the whole film is to be set, are great. There’s no attempt at realism, of course; this is a heightened reality of smoky mists, gnarled, dead trees and eternal dusk. It looks more like a theatre set than anything you’d see in real life, but so it should. These scenes not only set the tone but signal to us that we’ve entered a heightened version of reality.

It’s a heightened version of reality we see indoors, too. Not only is the house itself an increasingly sinister presence, but the claustrophobic mood is enhanced by the fact that the entire film has a cast of four. You don’t get more American Gothic than Poe, of course, but I think there’s something distinctly American about the eerie mood of this film, especially to this British viewer. For a start, there’s a real sense of isolation. The comforting normality and life represented by Boston, representing “our” world, are a long, long way. The wide, open spaces of America (yes, even New England, from a European perspective) are used here to emphasise the isolation, a trope often and successfully used in American horror films of all kinds. And the existence of aristocratic families such as the Ushers and the (real life) Winthrops, with their grand homes and butlers and inherited wealth, looks particularly decadent and decayed in the context of this young republic (Poe wrote the short story in 1839, and the costumes indicate a similar date for the film. The United States was sixty-three years old).

The isolation and alienation of the setting is carried much further than in the original; Poe has his short story narrated by an old friend of the narrator, which adds a certain touch of cosiness. The writer here (Richard Matheson, no less) gives us a protagonist, in Philip Winthrop, who is in a position to be as unsettled by his surroundings as we are, being a stranger to the house. He’s the fiancé of Madeleine Usher, with whom he fell in love in the happier surroundings of Boston, but a stranger to Roderick, and the house. We first meet him traversing the bleak lands of the house, approaching the large, intimidating doors, and using one of those big, iron ring-like knockers which always appear in films like this. He’s accosted by a sinister butler, Bristol- there’s another horror trope- and warned that his employer will not accept visitors. It isn’t long, though, before we meet Roderick Usher- Vincent Price is sublime in the part- and the beautiful yet doomed Madeleine.

We begin slowly as the mystery is gradually and unsettlingly established. We know that Roderick Usher, and the his sister, are unable to bear any strong sensation with any of their senses- which indicates that Madeleine would probably not make the best of sexual partners for Philip! This kind of medical condition is also, of course, the sort of thing which affects those with money and leisure suspiciously more that those who need to work for a living…

We learn that the sinister Roderick is unwilling to allow either himself or his sister to leave the house or, worse, beget children. For the moment, the sense of dread is dialled down. But it isn’t long before two incidents- a falling chandelier and an unsteady railing on the stairs- make it clear that there’s something very unnatural and eerie about this house.

We get hints early on- an Usher family history of madness, ensuing superhuman strength, a dark family history meaning the family line should not be perpetuated- but the opening scenes centre on a to- and fro between Philip and Roderick over the doomed Madeleine. But things ratchet up after Madeleine shows Philip the family tomb, with places for herself and her brother. This horrifies Philip, who is by this point explicitly having a parallel experience of the film to the viewer.

At last Philip confronts Roderick and gets an explanation. The speech is poetic and so wonderfully delivered by Vincent Price, whose performance is simply astonishing. Not only does the family have a history of moral dodginess (although not all of the ancestors described by Roderick, and painted in that strange Goya-cum-Graham Sutherland style, are all that irredeemable, surely?), but it seems the house, and its grounds, are a metaphor made literal; the grounds have become tainted and infertile, while the house is rocky, unstable and, Roderick believes, actively trying to kill Philip! This echoes the earlier references to the “settling of the house” by Bristol, a butler of sixty years who appears to essentially be an integral part of the house himself.

Of course, Philip is appalled by such superstitious nonsense, and immediately convinces Madeleine to come away with him. She starts packing immediately but, alas, seems to die while arguing with Roderick. A disconsolate Philip helps her brother to bury her in the crypt. He’s about to leave until Bristol’s casual mention of “catalepsies” brings him to a horrible realisation. It’s evident that the Americans of the early nineteenth century had a much wider medical vocabulary than the British of the early twenty-first!

Madeleine has been buried alive! Horrified, Philip rushes to her coffin and finds that it’s empty. He confronts Roderick, who glumly confesses that he deliberately buried his own sister alive, but refuses to tell where he left her coffin. Tiring himself after searching for hours, Philip settles to sleep. Roger Corman’s directorship has been superlative up to this point, but the ensuing dream sequence is inspired and extraordinary. It’s an abstract, tinted, sepia dreamworld, evoking the imagery of silent film and the surroundings of 1920s German Expressionist film in particular, with some extraordinary out-of-focus shots of various ghostly Ushers, who look like something Lon Chaney could have portrayed during the 1920s. This sequence raises the dramatic stakes; as Philip wakes, we know this is the climax.

An initially calm Roderick confesses to Philip that he has heard every scream and every scratch of Madeleine’s bloody fingernails as he listens to her slow and horrible death. Finally, Madeleine appears, mad, and strong enough to have ripped the coffin lid from its hinges. The house begins to fall apart as Madeleine strangles her brother. Both of them are crushed by burning masonry as Philip barely escapes the house which crumbles around him.

Extraordinary; the script, the direction, the set design and the central performance from Vincent Price are all of the very first class. This is one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen and certainly the best I’ve watched for this blog so far.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)

“I’m the Chosen One. And I choose to go shopping.”

OK, I know. This is four horror films in a row, sort of. It’ll be something very different next time, I promise.

I’m saying nothing about how soon I’ll be reviewing Buffy and Angel on TV for this blog(!), but suffice to say that I’ve seen every episode before, although a few years have passed. And that makes this film a very odd experience indeed. And I’m not just talking about the presence of an absurdly young Hilary Swank and David Arquette.

For a start, there’s the absence of that theme tune. This is film, not TV, so exposition needs to be over with quickly; hence the flashback at the start. We quickly move to the present day, though (well, the early ‘90s) and to Southern California, although not Sunnydale.

I’m sure that for most Americans reading this blog, the institution on the American High School was a formative experience in your life. But to me, a foreigner, it’s something defined entirely by popular culture, and a huge chunk of it Buffy-related. All the tropes of the American high school- cheerleaders, strange sports of which I know nothing, those strange jackets, jocks, nerds, stoners, senior proms, homecoming queens (whatever they are) are just that: tropes from film and TV.

And we start right in the middle of this sort of thing, with a bunch of cheerleaders and some teenage boys playing basketball. Even in the early lines in these scenes it’s apparent that we’re going to get a very witty script indeed, which should come as no surprise as the writer is Joss Whedon. In fact, I’d argue that the script is pretty much entirely brilliant, and the film’s many shortcomings are due to other factors, but more of that later.

Anyway, Buffy and her friends are, like, totally a bunch of Valley Girls, with dialogue which sounds like it could have come straight from that Frank Zappa song (which is, as if it needed saying, my soundtrack to writing this!). I could listen to them talking all day.

It all looks a bit cheap, though, and there’s little focus to the succession of scenes we get; vampires, Rutger Hauer as “The Master” (that gets re-used!), Pike and Ben. In fact, we’re introduced to so many different similarly-aged characters that it takes some time to get used to who’s who.

Eventually Buffy meets her Watcher, Merrick, played by Donald Sutherland, whose accent seems all over the place. Is he trying to sound British or something? Is he even attempting the same accent in every scene? It doesn’t feel like it. He’s certainly phoning in his performance, which is a shame; like everyone else in this film, he gets great dialogue. Kristy Swanson, on the other hand, is actually quite good, but her performance it pitched too far towards pure broad comedy. But that’s the main problem with this film; Joss Whedon’s scripts are invariably funny, but they’re more effective if played mostly straight.

Merrick exposits at Buffy until she’s convinced, and tells her of Lothos, the “Master” we met earlier. He shows her some real vampires and she stakes them. This being a low budget film, though, they don’t disintegrate. They just fall down rather unconvincingly.

Ben is vamped, and calls on his friend Pike. Fortunately for Pike, he doesn’t invite his former friend in, because he’s acting weird. By floating in mid-air, for one thing, although this apparent ability of vampires is never referred to again.

We get the usual sort of plot for this sort of movie, really; protagonist gets called from humdrum life to do Great Things; protagonist refuses but is persuaded to continue; protagonist meets Big Bad and gets arse whupped; mentor figure gets killed; protagonist gets big final showpiece battle. But here, the fact that we pretty much expect all this to happen means the emphasis can go on witty dialogue such as “All I want to do is graduate from high school, go to Europe, marry Christian Slater and die.” It’s a shame the characters feel so wooden, and I don’t think that reflects any fault in the script.

Merrick persuades Buffy to continue by showing her that she has superhuman strength and reflexes, something which she’s unaccountably failed to notice until now. We then get an unintentionally hilarious montage scene, complete with rubbish music, which goes on for aaaaages.

At last she gets a proper vampire fight, or at least the nearest we’re ever going to get in this terribly directed movie in which all the fight scenes are slow, ponderous, entirely lacking in oomph and full of characters standing around talking mid-fight. Here she discovers that “My secret weapon is PMS!”, and Merrick discovers that Buffy can’t even make a decent cup of tea.

Buffy then rescues Pike, who by this point is obviously going to be the love interest. After pausing to see Rutger Hauer about to eat a little kitten (awww!), we then get shown how alienated Buffy is becoming from her rather shallow friends. Still, that night, she chooses cheerleading over slaying. I think my favourite character in the film is the team coach (“Assert your personhood! Actualise! Actualise!”), the most stereotypical Southern Californian ever.

Soon a vamp comes on to the pitch, or court, or whatever it is that basketball gets played on, and Buffy gives chase, with motorbikes and everything. Here she meets loads of vampires and the Master himself, but for some bizarre reason they don’t actually want to kill her as she’s “not ready”. How very sporting of them.

Merrick, who has suddenly turned up, gets suddenly killed and, in a rather bathetic scene, dies in Buffy’s arms, telling her with his last words to keep doing it “wrong”. It’s such a shame this doesn’t really work. Yes, it’s badly directed, like the whole damn film, but there never was any chemistry between the two of them.

After this, Buffy has a crisis of confidence, and gets a bit of a pep talk from Pike. It’s a nice reversal of the usual gender roles from Whedon’s avowedly feminist script but, again. It would be nice if there was some semblance of chemistry between the two of them.

It’s obvious that the school dance is going to be the scene of the final confrontation, and it’s a scene that could have only taken place in 1992 and no other year. Even the DJ looks like he should be a member of Faith No More. Buffy’s not happy; her boyfriend has humiliated her by publicly dumping her in from of her smug and mocking friends, but Pike has gatecrashed the party. She’s glad to see him, they dance together, and they kiss. Inevitably, this is when the vampires attack- and I notice this is the exact point where the music suddenly changes to the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Halford. If this is the effect that vampires have on music being played on dancefloors, then frankly I think there should be more of them.

Fortunately, Pike has remembered to take all Buffy’s stuff, and we get a series of long, talky and uninvolving fight scenes. The Master suddenly turns up playing a violin, which makes me momentarily feel that we’re about to segue into the music video for Come on Eileen. This is a very silly scene for something that’s meant to be a climax; the annoying vamp’s slow and “ironically” badly-acted death is just embarrassing, and for someone who’s supposed to be the Big Bad the Master poses absolutely no sense of threat whatsoever. He even dies with an “oops”.

This film is entertaining enough, but this is entirely due to the excellent script. Not only is this badly shot, you get the sense, from the fact that many of the actors here are perfectly good elsewhere, that the big problem with this movie is a director who simply can’t give direction to actors. A sadly wasted opportunity. Fortunately, though, there was to be another chance…

The Mummy (1959)

“He’s a foreigner!”

“Well, he can’t help that, poor chap.”

This will be my last Hammer horror film for a bit (there’ll be plenty more, but this blog needs a bit of variety- perhaps a Western next?). It already feels different, though; the specific areas in both Egypt and England (an area where all the working class people seem to be Irish) may be fictional, but this is a far cry from the vague Mittel-Europa settings we’ve seen thus far.

This is the first time I’ve seen a proper mummy movie, but it amuses me how many of the tropes I recognise from popular culture, and not least certain episodes of Doctor Who. It isn’t the best Hammer horror but it’s entertaining enough once it gets going. This takes some time, though. This is a no-frills journey through the standard tropes, played dead straight, sort of. Like other early Hammers, there’s definitely an element of camp ironic humour, but it’s as deadpan as deadpan can be.

We begin in colonial Egypt, in 1895. Archaeologist Stephen Banning, his brother Joseph, and John, his son with a gammy leg (Peter Cushing) have spent ages looking for the hidden tomb of Ananka, an ancient high priestess. An Egyptian chap in a fez (cool!) played by the splendid George Pastell delivers the sort of warning of dire consequences which are de rigeur for these sorts of films, but this doesn’t deter John. He enters the revealed tomb, and it’s completely undisturbed. The inside of the tomb, incidentally, looks magnificent.

It all happens very fast; we hear a scream, and suddenly we’re in England three years later. Stephen is in a mental institution, John has an even gammier leg and none of them seem remotely capable of going more than ten seconds without lighting a cigar or pouring a glass of whisky.

After years of being completely out of it, Stephen wakes up and warns John of “the mummy”. Other things are afoot, too; that Egyptian chap is nearby, and we discover that drinking and driving was rife in the 1890s. Tsk. This leads to their cargo, a mysterious Egyptian casket, falling into a conveniently placed swamp. This seems not to upset the Egyptian bloke, though. Look at his face. Is he bovvered?

Later, Egyptian bloke reads the scroll and brings the mummy to life. It’s rather muddy and visually engaging. It seems such a waste of Christopher Lee to just put him in bandages like this. Still, the following scene, a nice bit of exposition from John, quickly segues into an extended flashback where Christopher Lee gets to play Kharis, during life as an Egyptian priest, and not only gets a good few lines but ends up looking really rather cool. Still, it’s always a shock to see how small a role Lee tends to play in these early Hammers.

These scenes of Ananka’s death rites feature some genuinely horrifying scenes, and this is where the film starts to wake up. The scenes of the handmaidens calmly bowing their heads, awaiting decapitation and death so they can serve the princess in the afterlife, make quite an impression as the camera cuts away and instead we hear the swords strike. The horror grows as Kharis returns at night, blasphemously, to attempt the resurrection of the woman he secretly and illicitly loved. He is caught, and doomed to an awful fate. The scene where his tongue cut out is the most horrible thing I have ever seen- the camera cuts away as the sword hits the tongue, but the process up to this point is quite graphic.

Kharis is sentenced to be buried alive, ready to be brought back to life to avenge any desecration of his beloved’s tomb. And, the backstory now revealed, the mummy is sent forth by Egyptian Bloke to kill Uncle Joseph. John fails to stop him, but manages to let off a load of gunshots which, naturally, entirely fail to kill the mummy.

Then we get the really shocking bit: John casually admits to a police inspector (with an uncanny resemblance to Nicolas Sarkozy and an inexplicably North American accent) that he shot the murderer several times, and there’s absolutely no suggestion of any legal trouble whatsoever. Even more incredibly, he tells the inspector everything and, while the inspector is at least sceptical, you’re left with the impression that the police are extraordinarily deferential to country gents on Planet Hammer.

John knows the mummy is after him, though, and we’re not surprised to see the Egyptian Bloke send it to kill him. At this point John’s wife, Isobel, the only woman in the film, finally gets the first of what must be less than a dozen lines. The character is a complete doormat. John “orders” her to lock herself away while he waits for the mummy. It’s feminism gone mad.

Oh, and John’s wife is the very image of Ananka, it seems, and the mummy promptly buggers off for a bit. It there anyone who’s seen this film and didn’t immediately guess the entire rest of the plot at this point?

Conveniently, the inspector has been making enquiries which lead him now to believe John’s story. He tells John that under no circumstances whatsoever should he make contact with Egyptian Bloke so, naturally, he does exactly that. It seems his actual name is Mehemet Atkill, which sounds Turkish rather than Arabic, but never mind. It’s amusing to see John’s staggering lack of tact in scoffing at those who worship the god Karnak- in real life not a god at all but a temple complex near Thebes. I don’t think John realises that the man facing him worships this god; he’s just not very bright, is he?

Inevitably, Mehemet and the mummy come after John, but he’s expected. The mummy is about to kill John, but again he sees Isobel. When Mehemet tells him to kill Isobel, he is casually killed, and things start to go all King Kong as the mummy takes Isobel into the swamp. This is a bit of a weird love triangle- I wonder which of them Isobel prefers? Probably the mummy. I can’t imagine John would be much good in bed. Alas, he puts her down, and gets riddled with bullets.

It’s a film of two halves, really, this. But it’s probably short enough to be worth seeing.

Dracula (1958)

“Sleep well, Mr Harker…”

We get a statement of intent very early on, with some blood spattering on to a coffin- these early Hammer horror films certainly like their bright Technicolor red blood!

We're in some vague part of Horror Film Mittel-Europa in 1885. As with Curse of Frankenstein, this is a stylised and intentionally vague setting.  Jonathan Harker is heading to Castle Dracula and, in a slight nod to the epistolatory nature of the novel, this part of the plot is narrated through his diary. The inside of the castle is at the same time luxurious and bleak, with the large rooms marked by harsh straight lines and a total absence of carpets or any hint of softness.

After a brief and disturbing encounter with a woman whom Dracula is apparently taken prisoner, Harker finally meets Christopher Lee’s Count who, although sinister, appears polite enough, to the point of complimenting a picture of Harker’s fiancée, Lucy Holmwood. It seems Harker, a scholar, is to work as his librarian, but it soon becomes apparent that Dracula is only available during the hours of darkness, and that Harker’s door is locked during the night.

But Harker, we learn, has ulterior motives, and is here to kill the notorious Count, who from this point on ceases to be a character and just becomes a monster, never speaking another line for the rest of the film. But poor Harker is doomed; he agrees to help the temptress he met earlier, and gets bitten in the course of a vamp-fight between her and the, er, vampire. Both she and Drac look great, and there’s lots and lots of blood.

Harker, himself doomed to become undead, manages to make it to the crypt before sundown, but chooses to stake the woman before the Count himself. WHY?

The inevitable happens, and we cut to Peter Cushing in one of those Hammer inns where all the locals stop talking as soon as a stranger enters. Still, armed with Harker’s diary, he’s soon delivering the news of Harker’s death to Arthur Holmwood (played by Michael Gough, later to play the Celestial Toymaker in Doctor Who and Alfred in Tim Burton’s Batman), brother of Harker’s fiancée, and his wife Mina, future star of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s splendid The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He receives a frosty reception, however, and Lucy can’t be told the news as she’s very ill with anaemia.

We soon see the reasons for this, however; Lucy is delivering her windows open at night and removing her crucifix, allowing Dracula to come in and bite her, night after Night. The erotic charge is so electric here that I’d be tempted to say “get a room, you two” except… they have. For the first time in the film we have the obvious use of vampirism as a metaphor for sex, and as we’ll see this tells us quite a lot about the sexual mores of late Victorian times as opposed to the late 1950s. On the surface this is an unhealthily puritanical message about sex but I don’t think the film is quite playing this straight. Like Curse of Frankenstein there’s something camply humorous about this film, even if it’s played very, very deadpan.

It’s a bit jolting to see Van Helsing listening to audio recordings of himself, even if it is from an ancient-looking gramophone and even though his butler seems to be amazed. There are plenty of audio recordings from the 1880s on Youtube (look for Gladstone and a very drunk Robert Browning!) but none of them have anything approaching this sound quality.

Van Helsing uses this rather obvious expository device to inform us that vampire bites are addictive and that this eventually results in death through loss of blood. Consulted by Mina, he soon discovers that this is what is happening to Lucy. He orders the windows to be closed and Lucy’s bed to be surrounded by garlic, but this is not adhered to and the girl dies.

Van Helsing now has no choice but to let Arthur into his confidence, especially as the undead Lucy is now walking the grounds of the house, threatening their daughter Tania. Arthur catches the undead Lucy the following night, and is only saved from being bitten by Van Helsing. These scenes are atmospheric, effective, and really bring home how this film is set in a dreamlike, stylised world of cemeteries, castles, inns, sleepy border guards and nothing else, which feels culturally German, Slavic and Romanian all at once, and vaguely evokes the cultural mix of Habsburg Austria, yet is full of characters with English names.

Lucy is stakes, and Van Helsing and Arthur have a bit of a chat in some comfy chairs with some brandy, as gents in Hammer films are wont to do. It seems that vampires cannot in fact turn into bats; evidently the budget won’t stretch that far. But, just as our heroes are beginning to get a grip, Mina is lured to Dracula’s base of operations, and from that point onwards is under his spell. Again, there’s a sexual subtext here, and in this case it’s a rather emasculating one for poor old Arthur; apparently he’s not satisfying her. Actually, given the blatant eroticism of what can only be described as the sex scene between Dracula and Mina, I’m not sure the word “subtext” is entirely appropriate…

Arthur’s implied emasculation is even more tragic as he’s clearly a decent and loving husband, as we see him selflessly donating an alarming amount of blood to save his wife, who presumably shares the same blood group. Understandably, he’s a little sapped after this, but Van Helsing has some sound medical advice: “Now, you need plenty of fluid. Tea, coffee or, better still, wine.” Yes, that’s right, Van H. Wine isn’t in any way dehydrating, is it?

We finish with a chase, incorporating a bit of comic relief at the border, and Dracula’s final gruesome death by sunlight. An excellent film, this- atmospheric, just erotic enough, just gory enough and very well-acted indeed.