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'HE WHO ROBS THE GRAVES OF EGYPT DIES!' THE MUMMY HAMMER FILMS (1959)

Hammer Films 'The Mummy' Starring Peter Cushing as John Banning, Christopher Lee as Kharis and Yvonne Furneaux as Isobel. Directed by Terence Fisher and produced at Bray Studios. Shooting Production: February 25th until April 16th 1959.

Hammer Films 'The Mummy' Starring Peter Cushing as John Banning, Christopher Lee as Kharis and Yvonne Furneaux as Isobel. Directed by Terence Fisher and produced at Bray Studios. Shooting Production: February 25th until April 16th 1959.

Hammer Films 'The Mummy' Starring Peter Cushing as John Banning, Christopher Lee as Kharis and Yvonne Furneaux as Isobel. Directed by Terence Fisher and produced at Bray Studios. Shooting Production: February 25th until April 16th 1959.

QUICK REVIEW: BEHIND THE SCENES: HAMMER FILMS 'DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE'

CAST:

Christopher Lee (Count Dracula), Barry Andrews (Paul), Rupert Davies (Monsignor Ernst Muller), Veronica Carlson (Maria), Barbara Ewing (Zena), Ewan Hooper (Priest), Michael Ripper (Max) 

PRODUCTION:

Director – Freddie Francis, Screenplay – John Elder [Anthony Hinds], Producer – Aida Young, Photography – Arthur Grant, Music – James Bernard, Special Effects – Frank George, Makeup – Heather Nurse & Rosemary McDonald Peattie, Art Direction – Bernard Robinson. Production Company – Hammer.  

SYNOPSIS:

A visiting Monsignor comes to visit the town beneath Castle Dracula. The Monsignor is disgusted to find that even after Dracula has been killed, the town still lives in such fear that the church is empty on Sunday morning. He drags the cowardly priest up the mountainside to Castle Dracula where they perform a rite of exorcism and he places a cross over the entrance to the castle. But the priest falls, hitting his head. The blood drips down and revives Dracula where he is imprisoned inside a frozen mountain stream. Enraged at what the Monsignor has done, Dracula follows him to his home town and plans revenge by turning his niece Maria into a vampire.

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BLACKBOXCLUB PIN UP : NUMBER 23 MARY COLLINSON : TWINS OF EVIL

HAMMER FILMS: 'THE TWO FACES OF DR JEKYLL' TERENCE FISHER'S MEDITATION ON THE EVIL MEDICATION : REVIEW AND GALLERY

CAST:

Paul Massie, Dawn Addams, Christopher Lee, David Kossoff, Francis De Wolff, Norma Marla, Magda Miller, Oliver Reed, William Kendall, Helen Goss, Pauline Shepherd, Percy Cartwright, Joe Robinson.
TECH:
Director: Terence Fisher. Script: Wolf Mankowitz. Producers: Michael Carreras / Anthony Nelson Keys. Production: 1960 UK

COMMENTARY:

Dr Henry Jekyll (Paul Massie) lives an almost reclusive lifestyle, only seeing other people when he needs to as he tends to his experiments. One person he does see is Dr Ernst Littauer (David Kossoff), the one man he feels he can confide in, even if they are not seeing eye to eye on his field of endeavour. Jekyll allows the mute children from the nearby school to play in his garden, partly out of generosity, but partly so he can examine human nature, as he believes he can tell a lot from the way they interact free from the niceties of adulthood. But what if there were some way of doing the same for him?

Crack open the bottle of serum, it was split personality time again for this umpteenth version of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which let's not forget the big twist at the climax turned out to be that the title characters were one and the same. Naturally, every movie and television adaptation that followed were not able to use this as a major surprise for their versions, mainly because the ending became so famous that everyone who had ever heard of it knew very well what its central conceit was: that Jekyll managed to separate the two sides of his personality into the virtuous and the wicked.

And how he suffered for it, except in this variation he's suffering even before he starts injecting himself with the fruits of his labour. By 1960, Hammer were enthusiastically remaking every classic horror tale they could get their hands on, and this was no exception, only they decided to go for a novel approach, the main selling point being that Jekyll was old and ugly, while his alter ego was young and handsome. Massie was the man filling both roles, and though he starts the film rather stiff and bland no matter which character he was portraying, he did grow into the role, appropriately enough for a film that becomes more interesting and lively as it progresses.

Terence Fisher was the man at the helm here, Hammer's star director, and continuing his meditations on the nature of evil as exhibited in the duality of mankind, something that the Jekyll and Hyde story sounds perfect for. And he does divine some worth from a tale that had already grown pretty old hat, although in those early stages it's up to Christopher Lee, playing the raffish gambler who is having an affair with Jekyll's wife Kitty (Dawn Addams) and helping himself to her bank account, to provide the interest as he is the most entertaining performer in this, with Addams lumbered with a role that is wholly in service of the plot. Once the Hyde incarnation is unleashed, Lee's Paul Allen finds himself with a new best friend.

In other hands this would be the ideal material for farce - you can imagine Ray Cooney crafting this into a trouserless comedy romp as Jekyll and Hyde try to conceal their subterfuge from the woman only one of them is supposed to be married to. Indeed, the other main female role is taken by Norma Marla as exotic dancer Maria, who curiously only appeared in one other film and that too was a refashioned Jekyll and Hyde plot, The Ugly Duckling, starring Bernard Bresslaw doing much what Massie gets to do in this. 

But here the laughs are more likely to be thinner on the ground, unless you begin to ponder that the serum would make a terrific exfoliant considering how the doctor's facial furniture vanishes (plucks his eyebrows, too) when he turns Hyde. If it doesn't have much new to say about the two sides of people, it does it with stronger stuff than audiences of the day would be used to, with drug taking, suicide and rape among its shock scenes, though it was yet another film of the era that suggested decadence by having a dance troupe leap onto the stage for a can-can. Music by David Heneker and Monty Norman.

Review: Graeham Clark
Review: Here
Images: Marcus Brooks

HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS: THE REPTILE: COME SLITHER!

THE CREW:
Director: John Gilling. Screenplay: John Elder. [Anthony Hinds]. Producer: Anthony Nelson Keys. Photography: Arthur Grant. Music: Don Banks. Music Supervisor: Philip Martell. Special Effects: Bowie Films. Makeup: Roy Ashton. Production Design:  Bernard Robinson. Production Company:  Hammer Film Productions/Seven-Arts.

CAST:

Ray Barrett: Harry Spalding. Noel Willman: Dr Franklyn. Jennifer Daniel: Valerie Spalding. Jacqueline Pearce: Anna Franklyn. Michael Ripper: Tom Bailey. John Laurie: Mad Peter Crockett. Marne Maitland: Malay

THE PLOT:
Harry Spalding, a captain in the Royal Grenadiers, inherits a cottage in a small Cornish village after his brother Charles dies in mysterious circumstances. He moves into the cottage with his wife Valerie. Harry discovers that several locals have been killed by mysterious snake bites. This is also found to have been the cause of Charles’s death. The origin of the snake killings appears to rest with Dr Franklyn who lives in the village mansion. As Harry investigates, he discovers that these are being caused by Franklyn’s daughter Anna who was abducted by a snake cult that Franklyn was researching in Borneo and that she now periodically transforms into a snake creature.

COMMENTARY: 

This Hammer film has obtained a reputation as a minor classic. It is almost invariably discussed in tandem with director John Gilling’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966), which he shot back-to-back with this on the same sets and using several members of the same cast. Both films are strong examples of the colonial revenge theme that rings through a number of Anglo-Horror films – others include The Stranglers of Bombay (1959) and The Ghoul (1975). In these films colonial evils – thuggee cults, dark foreign rituals – represent the same symbolic threat to British society as vampirism does in Hammer’s Dracula films – that is, it festers beneath the repressions of polite society and unleashes dangerous sensual energies.

The Reptile was made at a time when Hammer had conducted most of their variations on classic monsters and were trying to come up with new ideas. In reality, all that they did was coin new variations on the vampire – such as The Gorgon (1964) and the Reptile here. The Reptile is only Dracula with snakes. The reptile attack pattern is even identical to the vampire’s – two teeth marks at the neck – and the reptile’s end dispatch is not dissimilar to the one in Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958). However, this tends to reveal the film’s conceptual limitations. The reptile’s behaviour is not logically thought out – in actuality, a snake kills its victims either when it is threatened or to have food, whereas the reptile here appears to be doing neither. In effect, it is a series of random killings that have been designed to be modeled on vampirism but that come without much in the way of supporting rationale.

Director John Gilling’s effectiveness is in building atmosphere. He gets good mileage out of the hoary old tropes – the villagers who refuse to talk to strangers, the town drunk who may or may not be crazy and is the only one able to give an insight into the menace. Even better is the subtlety with which Gilling uses the genre’s expectations where Jacqueline Pearce, later to attain cult status as the intergalactic dictator on tv’s Blake’s 7 (1978-81), is painted as a threatened innocence where in fact everything that is happening to her is completely the opposite – father Noel Willman is made to seem autocratic and controlling when in fact he is trying to restrain her from attacking others; when a cat is brought to her by Marne Maitland, it is made to seem that he is threatening the cat when in fact he is offering it to her; a skin briefly-seen in her bed gives the impression that she is another victim of the reptile where in fact it is the skin she has shed.

John Gilling’s other genre films include Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire/My Son, The Vampire (1952), The Gamma People (1956), The Flesh and the Fiends/Mania (1960), The Shadow of the Cat (1961), Panic (1963), The Night Caller (1965), The Plague of the Zombies (1966), The Mummy’s Shroud (1967) and The Devil’s Cross (1975). Gilling also wrote the scripts for House of Darkness (1947), The Gorgon (1964) and Trog (1970).

Review: Richard Scheib
Images: Marcus Brooks