BEAL AND STING IN THE BRIDE: FRANKENSTEIN FOR DREAMERS: LOBBY CARD GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Sting (Baron Charles Frankenstein), Jennifer Beals (Eva), Clancy Brown (Viktor), David Rappaport (Rinaldo), Alexei Sayle (Magar), Phil Daniels (Bela), Geraldine Page (Mrs Baumann), Carey Elwes (Joseph), Veruschka (Countess), Quentin Crisp (Dr Zahlus) 

PRODUCTION:

Director – Franc Roddam, Screenplay – Lloyd Fonvielle, Based on the Novel Frankenstein by Mary W. Shelley, Producer – Victor Drai, Photography – Stephen H. Burum, Music – Maurice Jarre, Special Effects Supervisor – James Whiting, Makeup – Sarah Monzani & Aaron Sherman, Production Design – Michael Seymour. Production Company – Columbia. USA. 1985.  

SYNOPSIS:

Using harnessed lightning, Baron Charles Frankenstein brings to life his second creation, a beautiful female. He names her Eva. His first creation, a male, Viktor, is angry when Frankenstein betrays his promise to give her to him as a mate. Viktor is then consumed in a laboratory explosion but survives. Presumed dead by Frankenstein, he meets Rinaldo, a friendly dwarf who invites Viktor to join him on a trip across Europe to join a circus in Bulgaria. Meanwhile, as Frankenstein introduces her to society, Eva becomes the attention of many male paramours. A battle of wills ensues as she comes to desire her independence from Frankenstein.

COMMENTARY:

Director Franc Roddam promoted The Bride as being a feminist reworking of Bride of Frankenstein (1935). It was a lavish big-budget version that was clearly a revisionist attempt. This meant goodbye to Dr Pretorious, Queen Nefertiti hairdos and Boris Karloff with his tombstone intonation: “We belong dead” and all resemblances to the 1935 version. There is no longer any of the dark, arch humour that James Whale invested the original with. Instead, this is a film drenched in period atmosphere – at times, The Bride looks for all the world closer in tone to a straight version of My Fair Lady (1964) than anything resembling James Whale’s droll classic.

Certainly, The Bride is a film that is beautiful to look at. The photography is stunning – the Countess’s reception is like a perfectly poised Classical canvas. The production design is superb – the multi-tiered laboratory in the opening scene with ornate inscriptions in German and giant buckets of water waiting to douse the lightning rods evinces a great shiver of excitement. However, the film is no more than a series of posed tableaux. Franc Roddam has no idea how to dramatically enervate it. 

The laboratory opening is indeed spectacular, but thereafter the film splits off into its two separate storylines – one following Viktor’s trek across Europe (and the bonding scenes with he and the dwarf do get terribly twee) and the other about Frankenstein and Eva’s battle for supremacy – but it merely becomes one tableaux following another without dramatic cohesion. There is no Dr Pretorious character in this film – the film could have done with something that to get it worked up. 

As Frankenstein, Sting does what he does best – acting ruthless and evil (he is the perfect person to play The Vampire Lestat (1985) if they ever get around to filming it) – but the character has no depth beyond that. Jennifer Beals came to attention after her sizzling debut in Flashdance (1983) and this was her second film. Subsequent to Flashdance, she almost entirely vanished without a trace. With her dark saucer-eyes, she is all provocative innocence but the moment she opens her mouth, her American accent crashingly destroys all pretence. Much better is the pairing of David Rappaport and Clancy Brown – Rappaport’s crafty swagger has charm and Clancy Brown’s slow genteel brings a touch of pathos to the monster altogether missing since the days that Boris Karloff stopped playing the part. 

In the end, The Bride will probably only be remembered for Franc Roddam’s ability to bring together a most unusual cast list – one of the world’s biggest rock stars Sting; England’s ‘stately homo’ Quentin Crisp of The Naked Civil Servant (1975) fame as the lab assistant, no less); absurdist comedian Alexei Sayle; Polish model Veruschka; the eccentric grand dame and previous year’s Best Actress Oscar winner Geraldine Page; diminutive 3’11” David Rappaport; and, apparently, Mariel Hemingway, who was cast as Elizabeth but had her scenes cut out. 

British director Franc Roddam had come to fame with Quadrophenia (1979), based on The Who album and featuring Sting in his first acting role, and The Lords of Discipline (1983) about brutality in a military academy. Roddam’s subsequent films have been the little-seen War Party (1988) about an historical war reenactment gone wrong and the mountaineering drama K2 (1992), as well as the tv mini-series Moby Dick (1998) and Cleopatra (1999). He is also the creator of the classic 1980s British tv series Auf Weidersehen, Pet (1983-6) and creator of the reality tv series Masterchef (1990-2001) and its various spinoffs. Screenwriter Lloyd Fonvielle also wrote the stories for Cherry 2000 (1987) and The Mummy (1999), as well as wrote and directed the unusual film noir ghost story Gotham/The Dead Can’t Lie (1988).      

 Richard Scheib

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JANE SEYMOUR : TARYN POWER : PATRICK WAYNE : SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER : GALLERY AND REVIEW.

CAST:

Patrick Wayne (Sinbad), Jane Seymour (Princess Farah), Taryn Power (Dione), Patrick Troughton (Melanthius), Margaret Whiting (Zenobia), Kurt Christian (Rafi), Nadim Sawalha (Hassan), Damien Thomas (Kassim)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Sam Wanamaker, Screenplay – Beverly Cross, Story – Beverly Cross  Ray Harryhausen, Producers – Ray Harryhausen Charles H. Schneer, Photography – Ted Moore, Music – Roy Budd, Stop Motion Animation – Ray Harryhausen, Models – Les Bowie, Special Effects – Wally Veevers Colin Chilvers, Production Design – Geoffrey Drake. Production Company – Andor/Columbia.

SYNOPSIS:

Sinbad is implored by his beloved, the Princess Farah, to help her brother Kassim, who has been transformed into a baboon by the black arts just as he was about to be crowned Caliph. Behind this is Farah’s stepmother, the witch Zenobia, who desires the crown for her son. Sinbad and Farah seek the help of the wise man Melanthius. Under Melanthius’s guidance, they set sail for the lost land of Hyperborea, a fertile valley amid the icy wastes at the North Pole, in the hope of uncovering the matter transformation secrets of a vanished people. All the while, Zenobia pursues, determined to stop them.

COMMENTARY:

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was the third of cult stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films – following The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973). Both The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad are superb fantasy films and show Ray Harryhausen’s effects at the very peak of their form. However, Harryhausen seemed to lose the plot by the time it came to Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

Ray Harryhausen’s films always seem to belong to the 1950s and the era of the Cinemascope historical spectacle – the era that produced the likes of The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959). All Harryhausen’s films have the same wooden leads, pedestrian melodramatics and the emphasis placed on spectacle and effects, just as the Biblical spectaculars did. By contrast, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger came out the same year as Star Wars (1977) – and up against Star Wars, Ray Harryhausen’s more traditional type of fantasy film looked decidedly shabby. While Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was a reasonable success in theatres, the effects revolution created by Star Wars showed that Ray Harryhausen’s type of films were increasingly relics of a bygone era.

Harryhausen would only make one other film after this, Clash of the Titans (1981), before announcing his retirement. Both Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Clash of the Titans, made in the 1950s style of filmmaking with glaringly grainy process photography and wooden 50s-styled action, look flat against the modern fantasy and effects revolution, and moreover are weaker Harryhausen films.

In a Ray Harryhausen film, the screen dramatics are wooden but this is unimportant as the film is usually carried by the spectacular stop-motion animated set-pieces. In Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, there is not even that – it feels like a film composed of leftover ideas that were not good enough for the other Sinbad films. The film even rehashes set-pieces from other Harryhausen films – the skeleton duels from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the giant insects from Mysterious Island (1961). Crucially, what it lacks is any big spectacular stop motion set-piece. The ones we do have are lacklustre. The sabre-tooth tiger, which presumably provides the eye of the title that is cryptically unconnected to anything else in the film (or even mentioned anywhere throughout), looks like a stuffed hamster, and only the Trog and baboon have any character. There is never a standout scene that dazzles with the pure wondrousness of Harryhausen’s art like the encounter with the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the skeleton fight in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) or the Kali duel in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Moreover, the story is often contrived, having to sidetrack out of its way to throw in the various encounters with Harryhausen’s creatures – the visit to a tent where they are attacked by skeletons, the walrus encounter at the North Pole, the giant wasp, the reanimated sabre-tooth. If the plot kept to strictly linear telling of the story and eliminated all side-episodes, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger would lose much in the way of fantasy content.

Actor Sam Wanamaker took the director’s chair and was reportedly not happy making the film, having little interest in the fantasy content and finding the laborious and painstaking necessity of Harryhausen’s special effects frustrating. It certainly shows on screen. John Wayne’s son Patrick makes a wooden Sinbad, while Margaret Leighton camps it up badly as Zenobia. Patrick Troughton, the second incarnation of Doctor Who (1963-89), playing a tetchy guru is the only fun the film offers. Jane Seymour offers a touch of class as the love interest, although remains underused.

Ray Harryhausen’s other films are: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the granddaddy of all atomic monster films; the giant atomic octopus film It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955); the alien invader film Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers (1956); the alien monster film 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957); The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960); the Jules Verne adaptation Mysterious Island (1961); the Greek myth adventure Jason and the Argonauts (1963); the H.G. Wells adaptation The First Men in the Moon (1964); the caveman vs dinosaurs epic One Million Years B.C. (1966); the dinosaur film The Valley of Gwangi (1969); The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973); and the Greek myth adventure Clash of the Titans (1981).

REVIEW: Richard Scheib
IMAGES: Marcus Brooks

HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS: VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972) THE BLOODIEST SHOW ON EARTH! REVIEW AND GALLERY

LABEL: Synapse Films

REGION CODE: Region A (This Blu Ray will not play on Standard/European Blu ray Players)

RATING: Unrated

DURATION: 87 Min.

DIRECTOR: Robert Young

CAST: Adrienne Corri, Thorley Walters, Anthony Higgins, Robert Tayman

TAGLINE: Human fangs ripping throats - no sawdust can soak up the torrent of blood!

 

PLOT: A little girl is brutally slain by a vampire in a tiny 19th century Austrian village. Seeking revenge, the townspeople invade the foreboding castle of Count Mitterhaus and kill him for the crime. As the Count dies, he curses the villagers and vows that their children will all die so that he may someday return to life. Fifteen years later, as the village is ravaged by the plague, a traveling circus comes to town and distracts the villagers from their current hardships. Little do they know that their troubles are only beginning! The circus is actually a troupe of shape-shifting vampires and, as the local children start disappearing, they realize the prophecy of the long dead Count is coming true.

FILM: The tale is set in the 17th century Austrian village of Stettle. In an extended prologue to the film Professor Albert Muller (Laurence Payne) is in the forest with his daughter Dora  when she is led astray by an attractive young woman named Anna (Domini Blythe) and taken to the castle of the feared vampire Count Mitterhaus. Anna turns out to be the estranged wife of the professor who has come under the spell of the vampiric Count. Muller proves unable to enter the castle to save the young girl and returns to the village where he gathers a mob who return to the castle with the preferred armaments of 17th century mobs;  pitchforks and torches. Meanwhile Anna offers the young girl to the count who drains her blood as Anna looks on, clearly sexually aroused by the pseudo act of pedophilia. Pretty lurid stuff for a Hammer film of the time I would imagine.

After draining the young girl the Count and Anna make love but are interrupted when the angry mob burst into the castle and drive a stake through the Count's heart. With his dying breath the he curses the villagers swearing death to their children so that he may be resurrected. The villagers duly set fire to the castle but not before Anna drags the Count's body to a secret crypt. Mitterhaus is briefly resurrected by a drop of blood and tells Anna to seek his cousin Emil whom will aid her in his resurrection. The way he is briefly resurrected reminded me of an humorous extended death scene that one might see in Simpson's Treehouse of Horror episode, fun stuff. With that in mind it should be said that this is a slightly campy and quirk filled vampire film that's not above a bit of dark humor here and again. I think the odd tone and dreamy atmosphere of the film lends it a unique quality that helps it stand alone amongst so many other bloodsucker films of the period.

Fifteen years later the village is plagued by what some believe to be the black plague while others whisper that the Count's prophecy has come to fruition. The village is shunned by the neighboring villages who fear it and have set up an armed, trigger-happy quarantine around the village perimeter. That's some slow acting curse, fifteen years? Fairy tales and fables rarely seem logical and Vampire Circus definitely has fable-esque quality to it. One day a travelling circus called 'Circus of Nights' arrives in town and despite the oddity of such an arrival during a time of plague the villagers welcome them and appreciate the distraction. The circus is led by gypsy woman (Adrienne Corri) and a menacing white-faced dwarf named Michael (Skip Martin). Also among the performers are Emil (Anthony Higgins), David Prowse (yep, the dude underneath the Darth Vader costume) as the Strongman and high flying twin acrobats.  The troupe put on a series of performances for the village that includes Emil transforming into a panther mid-leap and a fantastically erotic performance from a tiger-lady completely painted head-to-toe, it's mesmerizing stuff.

Having just recently taken in a viewing of VAMP (1987) I couldn't help but think of Grace Jones performance here, but this is way better, sexually super-charged stuff.  Now, this shouldn't be too much of a surprise as the film is is called Vampire Circus but the circus performers are indeed shape-shifting vampires who are there to resurrect the Count by murdering the villagers children.  After the first performance Emil the shape-shifter manages to seduce the mayor's daughter Rosa (Christina Paul) and during the second performance the mayor himself (Thorley to a  thoroughly enjoyable film.

DVD: This is Synapse's initial Blu-ray offering and the presentation is truly wonderful. The original Brian Bolland artwork is fantastic and the newly restored 16:9 enhanced 1.66:1 aspect ratio brings the nearly 40 year-old  film back to life. Obviously not as eye-popping as a more recent films, the image looks a bit soft at times but the colors are suitably vibrant and the black levels look consistently deep. The image is accompanied by  DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 audio and while it's not what I would call dynamic it is adequate to the film. A great bonus audio option is an isolated music score showcasing composer David Whitaker's dark filmscore. This is a fairly obscure Hammer horror film and to have such great bonus content to compliment the film is much appreciated. The Bloodiest Show on Earth: The Making of Vampire Circus (32:37) is an all new documentary featuring interviews with Tim Lucas, Joe Dante, actor David Prowse and others discussing the film, it's a great watch.

Next up is Gallery of Grotequeries (15:07) a brief look back at circus and carnival themed films through the ages. Visiting the House of Hammer (9:47) is a short retrospective of the "House of Hammer" which was a British horror magazine not unlike "Famous Monsters of Filmland" only Hammer oriented. Rounding out the special features are an interactive black and white comic book, a theatrical trailer and a poster and stills gallery. What's missing? An audio commentary, subtitles and a newly created 5.1 surround mix would've been grand but that's just nitpicking. Note, the special features are presented in anamorphic widescreen HD and duplicated on the DVD in SD. This mark's the first Region 1 Hammer film on Blu-ray, here's to  to more to come. A pretty fantastic and loving assemblage of film and bonus content. Very impressed with Synapse's initial Blu-ray offering,  we should be so lucky that all the obscure genre gems receive this respectful treatment Blu-ray and DVD.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

- THE BLOODIEST SHOW ON EARTH (32:37)

- GALLERY OF GROTESQUERIES (15:07)

- VISITING THE HOUSE OF HAMMER (9:47)

- ISOLATED EFFECTS AND MUSIC SCORE
- VAMPIRE CIRCUS: Interactive Comic Book (3:15)
- POSTER AND STILLS GALLERY (1:58)
- ORIGINAL THEATRICAL TRAILER (2:31)

VERDICT:  It's a real shame that VAMPIRE CIRCUS is not better known, at least here in the States, and we should all be appreciative of Synapse Films for bringing it to the masses. This may just be my favorite Hammer film, definitely my favorite Hammer vampire flick. It's a bit surreal and lurid even by Hammer standards of the time and with hints of pedophilia, the murder of small children, and a bizarre carnival atmosphere this is a striking and unique take on the vampire lore. This is a first class, dark fantasy mixed in with some surreal sexed-up vampirism. A high recommend from me, this is a must-buy.
****1/2 (4.5 out of 5 stars)

Review: Ken Kastenhuber

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Images: Marcus Brooks