50% DISCOUNT ON ORDERS OF ISLAND OF TERROR BLU RAY AND DVD FROM SCREENBOUND

THIS YEAR 2016, marks the 50th anniversary of the making of ISLAND OF TERROR  starring Peter Cushing, Edward Judd, Eddie Byrne Niall MacGinnis and Sam Kidd. A great cast, but the true stars are the things that crawl, slurp and suck their merry way through the very entertaining 89 minutes. They are called SILICATES and are it must be said, they are one of the more original looking 'monsters' to ever come 'down the pike' in a 1960's UK Sci-Fi movie. Looking like a cross between a lump of porridge with a vacuum cleaner attachment, it's amusing at first, until you see WHAT these slip-sliding blobs can do!

The GIFS in this feature are not taken from the REMASTERED FOOTAGE SCREENBOUND dvd or

 blu ray release. 

ISLAND OF TERROR has quite a few releases over the years, but it has taken SCREENBOUND the people behind the excellent remastered releases of the Cushing classiscs, AMICUS FILMS DR TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965) in it's beautiful steel book presentation, NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT (1967) with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing final theatrically released film,  BIGGLES: ADVENTURES IN TIME (1986) ..remastered and restored in stunning HD by Deluxe Post Production and available in its original screen ratio of 1.85:1 for the first time!

In the past two years we've worked with SCREENBOUND to bring you some great competitions, and now we have a great offer for all PCAS followers and friends! For a LIMITED PERIOD ONLY with the help of a DISCOUNT CODE, you can ORDER YOUR DVD or BLU RAY copy of 'ISLAND OF TERROR' with a huge saving of 50% off!

This offer is only valid until SUNDAY MARCH 20th 2016

SO GET MOVING!! 

ITS EASY to place your order and receive your 50% DISCOUNT! Simply CLICK HERE  which will take you to CLASSICFILMSDIRECT.COM and the ORDER PAGE. Make your choice, for either the DVD or BLU RAY of 'ISLAND OF TERROR' then CLICK,  ADD TO BASKET, and TYPE IN THE DISCOUNT CODE 'terror50' and make your chosen method of payment. SIMPLE AS THAT!

NOW.. Just wait for the postman! But, if anything else turns up on your doorstep, like BELOW??? RUN FOR IT!!

 We'd like to thank the team at SCREENBOUND for making this great offer available to our followers and friends!

THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE: EDWARD JUDD JANET MUNRO REVIEW AND LOBBY CARDS

CAST:

Edward Judd (Peter Stenning), Janet Munro (Jeannie Craig), Leo McKern (Bill Maguire), Arthur Christiansen (Editor)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Val Guest, Screenplay – Val Guest & Wolf Mankowitz, Photography (b&w) – Harry Waxman, Music – Stanley Black, Special Effects – Les Bowie, Art Direction – Anthony Masters. Production Company – British Lion/Melina-Pax. UK. 1961. 

SYNOPSIS:

Coincidentally, both the Americans and the Russians detonate hydrogen bombs at the North and South Poles at the same time. Soon after, Britain begins to experience a freak heatwave. Peter Stenning, a journalist at The Daily Express, receives a tip-off from his girlfriend Jeannie Craig, a switchboard operator in government offices, and uncovers the fact that the explosions have caused an eleven-degree tilt of the Earth’s axis. He prints an article, which results in her arrest. Then comes the even more disturbing announcement that the explosions have knocked the Earth out of its orbit and sent it on a course towards the sun. As the heat rises, The Thames dries up and water rationing and communal showers are instituted. There is panic and rioting all over England. The only hope lies for scientists to detonate further nuclear weapons in the hope that this might jolt the Earth back into its correct position.

COMMENTARY:

The Day the Earth Caught Fire was one of a host of films that came out in the early 1960s confronting the possibilities of nuclear war full on. This grimly real genre had been started by On the Beach (1959) and still ahead would be the likes of Panic in Year Zero! (1962), Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964) and The War Game (1965). The Day the Earth Caught Fire was a personal project mounted by director Val Guest, best known within the genre for the first two Quatermass films. (See below for Val Guest’s other films). Guest found some difficulty mounting the project and eventually ended up financing it in part with his own money. 

The film is made on a slim budget, nevertheless Val Guest manages extraordinary things with it. He depicts the scale of the disaster with a remarkable economy. Special effects artist Les Bowie creates some striking matte shots of a dried-up Thames and the cracked, parched earth outside the Kremlin, the Taj Mahal and other world landmarks. Particularly good is Guest’s ability to incorporate stock footage of desiccated desert, of forest and building fires and of emergency services rushing into operation – in one scene, he even manages to insert Edward Judd into the middle of a CND demonstration. Even more striking is when he pans away from the disaster scenes to reveal the names of English landmarks to the extent where you are never sure what is real and what is not. 

Guest also scored the coup of being able to shoot the film in and around the offices of the real Daily Express newspaper – he even obtains an appearance from then-editor Arthur Christiansen as himself. It is something that, along with Guest’s soberly documentary-like depiction of such an environment, more than credibly grounds The Day the Earth Caught Fire. It is, for example, at least half-an-hour in, observing the life of the newspaper office and Edward Judd’s self-destructive habits, before we arrive at the heatwave. These scenes are crafted with some surprisingly good characterisations, particularly as we follow Edward Judd’s hero going from down-and-out alcoholic to gaining his feet again. The dialogue is sharp and well written – the scenes between Edward Judd and Janet Munro have a surprisingly adult level of banter for the time. The show is stolen in large part by a wryly cynical performance from Leo McKern. 

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is much more of a science-fiction film than any of the abovementioned nuclear war films are. Their concerns with the nuclear situation fell well within the possibilities of contemporary technology, whereas The Day the Earth Caught Fire concerns itself with the sweeping climactic changes of an entirely hypothetical (and scientifically ludicrous) scenario. Certainly, there are few films that manage to convey a basically scientifically nonsensical premise with such an absolute and thorough conviction – in truth, the detonation of the entire modern nuclear arsenal would barely even cause an earthquake that would be felt across the other side of the American continent, let alone move the Earth from orbit. Whatever The Day the Earth Caught Fire lacks as science, it more than makes up for with its entirely credible social portrait of the situation – images of water-riots, queues for communal showers in Hyde Park, people buying water on the black-market just to tend their garden. 

Perhaps the most interesting part of The Day the Earth Caught Fire is the way it ends on a deliberate note of ambiguity rather than resolution. People sit about waiting for the outcome of the attempts to correct the Earth’s orbit but instead of offering an ending, in the last shot Guest pans away to reveal two different copies of the next day’s newspaper headline – one saying ‘Earth Doomed’, the other saying ‘Earth Saved’. The film then fades out, leaving the world’s fate uncertain.

Val Guest’s other films are:– the comedy Mr Drake’s Duck (1951) about a duck that lays radioactive eggs; various of Hammer’s Nigel Kneale adaptations The Quatermass Xperiment/The Creeping Unknown (1955), Quatermass 2/The Enemy from Space (1957) and The Abominable Snowman (1957); as co-director of the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967); the prehistoric drama When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970); and the sf pop music film Toomorrow (1970). 

Copyright Richard Scheib 

Images : Marcus Brooks  

HAMMER FILMS PRODUCTIONS: THE VENGEANCE OF SHE: OLINKA BEROVA JOHN RICHARDSON

“Who is She ?” muses the singer of the title number in The Vengeance of She, an incredible Hammer Films misfire from 1967. Well, as all you lovers of  British fantasy will doubtless be aware, ‘She’ is Ayesha, or at least the reincarnation of Ayesha embodied the shapely person of Carol (Olga Schoberova, billed as Olinka Berova, for reasons which I can’t begin to fathom), a young tourist who is irrestistably drawn to the lost city of Kuma, ruled by King Killikrates (Richardson). Carol is picked up by a passing pleasure boat, where she meets the not especially amusingly alcoholic George (Blakely), his cynical wife Sheila (Melford), psychiatrist Philip (Judd) and a variety of anonymous crew members. However, her quest for Kuma is not all it seems and the influence of an evil priest must be conquered before she can return to her own life.

Now, the 1965 Hammer version of She isn’t at all bad. It’s not really in the H.Rider Haggard vein, although Peter Cushing makes a marvellous academic, but it’s entertainingly silly and features some good set-pieces. The weakest link was the casting of John Richardson as Killikrates. Richardson is a drag on the film and by the conclusion you’re not desperate to ever see him again. So it’s no surprise that, in this lower budget sequel, Richardson is the only cast member to reappear. The film basically plods through a similar plot to the original; journey to lost city, encounter exotic lost tribe, enjoy a ropey special effects and a destructive conclusion… you know the drill. It lacks a strong leading man to replace the implacable presence of Cushing. 

Edward Judd tries hard but is saddled with some appalling expository dialogue - “I don’t want to force my help on you, none of us do. But if you want help, just ask for it” - and some psychiatric jargon to make him seem like a reasonably likely headshrinker. Colin Blakely, always worth watching, does better with a more interesting part and his sparring with his wife has something resembling the spark of life even if it never quite seems believable. Derek Godfrey and George Sewell inject a certain amount of vitality to their scenes and if you stick with the film, you will be rewarded with a brief appearance from the great Andre Morell - although that fine actor was better served in the previous year’s Plague of the Zombies. 

Most disappointing is the casting of Ms.Berova. A well-scrubbed European blonde in the tradition of Brigitte Bardot, Yutte Stenssgaard, Elke Sommer and tha woman from the Shake 'n' Vac ad, Berova tries hard but simply can’t deliver dialogue in a manner which suggests anything is at stake. This wouldn’t matter if all she had to do was look pretty but her possession by Ayesha is the central plank of the plot and without a convincing actress, it simply doesn’t hold the attention. On the poster, she was described as “The ultimate female who used her beauty to bring kingdoms to their downfall... and men to their knees!" but her presence is so weak that it’s hard to think she wants to do anything to men except wash up for them and possibly do the ironing.

 A similar problem arose, you may recall, when the marvellous Ingrid Pitt was replaced by Yutte Stenssgaard in Lust For A Vampire. Hammer Horror or indeed fantasy, only works when it’s performed by good actors who are giving their all to the material. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are the most fondly remembered of the Hammer stars because they never suggested that the mediocre dialogue and flimsy sets were beneath their dignity. They took the films for what they were and gave committed, intelligent performances. The minute the Hammer films try to either undersell themselves, send themselves up or go for trashy camp value, they fall apart. This is occasionally fun - Dracula A.D.1972 is an unintentional joy – but is more often it’s simply tedious. The Vengeance of She is a case in point. It’s not exactly boring but it is far too long and lacking in anything to keep you engrossed. 

It doesn’t help that the production team is very much from the B-List of Hammer talent. The splendid American poster art suggests something a lot more interesting than we actually get and is an image – Berova wielding a huge wip while wearing something she picked up at an Ann Summers party – which is a damn sight more memorable than anything in the film. The cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky lights everything in much too even a fashion to create the requisite atmosphere in the underground city and he seems much happier with the Mediterranean exteriors towards the beginning of the film. Peter O’Donnell’s screenplay is much too convoluted, stretching a relatively straightforward plot out to an unconscionable length and showing little of the stylish wit of his ‘Modesty Blaise’ novels. Most of the criticism should, however, be placed on the shoulders of Cliff Owen. 

One of the most uninteresting British directors of the 20th Century, Owen never made a film which is anything more than mediocre. Like other directors of his ilk – Bob Kellet, John Robins – his shots have no imagination, he can’t build suspense and he doesn’t seem at all interested in either the visuals or the performances. He just points the camera and hopes that it all goes alright. The only films of his which have anything resembling worth are the ones where the characters or actors work miracles with their dubious material – principally Steptoe And Son and the Arthur Lowe / Beryl Reid scenes in No Sex Please We’re British. After all, this is the man who managed the difficult task, in two films, of making Morecambe and Wise seem unfunny. 

The Vengeance of She is a hard slog for any viewer who doesn’t have a thing about Scandanavian blondes – and even they are likely to lose their patience while the film tries to show off its unusually lavish North African locations. Even by the standards of Hammer fantasy – which, lets face it, are not all that high as a look at the bizarre The Lost Continent will confirm – it’s poor stuff. 

Review Source: Mike Sutton
Images: Marcus Brooks