THE REPTILE: HAMMER FILMS : LOBBY CARD SET

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)

PRODUCTION:

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/Seven-Arts.

SYNOPSIS:

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.

HAMMER FILMS: THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF: YVONNE ROMAIN AND RICHARD WORDSWORTH

TASTE THE BLOOD: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA: RALPH BATES LINDA HAYDEN GALLERY REVIEW

CAST:

Geoffrey Keen (William Hargood), Linda Hayden (Alice Hargood), Anthony Corlan (Paul Paxton), Christopher Lee (Count Dracula), John Carson (Jonathan Secker), Peter Sallis (Samuel Paxton), Ralph Bates (Lord Courtley), Isla Blair (Lucy Paxton), Martin Jarvis (Jeremy Secker), Gwen Watford (Martha Hargood), Roy Kinnear (Weller), Michael Ripper (Cobb) 

PRODUCTION:

Director – Peter Sasdy, Screenplay – John Elder [Anthony Hinds], Producer – Aida Young, Photography – Arthur Grant, Music – James Bernard, Music Supervisor – Philip Martell, Special Effects – Brian Johncock, Makeup – Gerry Fletcher, Art Direction – Scott MacGregor. Production Company – Hammer.  

SYNOPSYS:

Three Victorian men who lead upstanding and moralistic lives, sneak out to a brothel on the pretext of conducting charity work. Their pleasure is interrupted by the libertine Lord Courtley who offers to show them far greater pleasures. He takes them to an antique shop where he gets them to purchase Dracula’s cape, signet ring and a vial of his powdered blood. Courtley conducts a ceremony in an abandoned church. But when he asks the men to drink the blood, they are disgusted. Drinking it himself, he collapses. The men kick and beat Courtley to death and then flee the scene. But Courtley’s spilt blood revives Dracula who swears vengeance on the other men for killing his disciple. Dracula then seduces each of the men’s children, making them vampires and turning them against their fathers.

COMMENTARY:

Taste the Blood of Dracula was the fifth of the Hammer Dracula films and by unanimous consensus the last Hammer Dracula worth seeing. It saw the entry of a promising new director Peter Sasdy. A Hungarian immigrant, Peter Sasdy had come from noted tv work during the 1960s, including episodes of the sf anthology series Out of the Unknown (1956-71) and the acclaimed BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1970). After Taste the Blood of Dracula, Sasdy was seen as the new directorial lifeblood of the latter day era of the Anglo-horror film but this promise petered out after a handful of horror films of no particular distinction (see below). Come the 1980s and Sasdy was back directing tv work like episodes of Minder, the mediocre Hammer’s House of Mystery and Suspense series of tv movies and the brief light of Adrian Mole mini-series’.

Sasdy immediately turns Taste the Blood of Dracula into a different type of Hammer film. He eschews the rich and florid colours that Terence Fisher gave the Hammer film and what has been typified as ‘the Hammer look’ in favour of a grittier more realistic period Victoriana. The sets are darker instead of being brightly lit to show all there is on display. Virtually all Hammer films tap it into a a sense of repression emerging from beneath the veneer of British society, where Dracula acts as a metaphorical force to tear polite convention apart before being dispatched. And in the opening minutes of Taste the Blood of Dracula, Sasdy makes memorable contrast between Geoffrey Keen beating daughter Linda Hayden for smiling at a boy in church and then heading off to a West End brothel under the guise of ‘doing charity work’. 

Although the great difference between Peter Sasdy and Terence Fisher and the sense of Victorian repression that exists in the likes of his Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) and Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966) is that Fisher invariably takes the side of society and sees the vampire hunters quashing the emergence of repressed sensuality as just and honourable, whereas for Sasdy Dracula is not so much a force that catalyses repression as one that exposes hypocrisy behind the veneer of virtue that Fisher’s vampire hunters defend. For Terence Fisher the society is just and there is a sigh of relief as the transgressive is finally banished, for Peter Sasdy the status quo is rent asunder and revealed as false

Sasdy creates some memorable images – the image of innocent Linda Hayden suddenly turning and taking lascivious relish in bashing her father in the head with a shovel. Although the most striking of all images is that of her curled up asleep on the lid of a crypt beneath which Dracula lies in rest. There’s a vivid resurrection sequence with dust blowing in to cover Ralph Bates’ dead body and then a mask cracking open to reveal Dracula’s face alive beneath. 

But Taste the Blood of Dracula doesn’t always work – as usual with the Hammer Dracula sequels, the script has difficulty coming up with worthwhile motivation for Dracula. The vengeance is not well connected – it does seem overly generous of Dracula to swear vengeance for Courtley’s murder, having not even met Courtley. And considering that Courtley’s death was necessary for him to be resurrected it does seem slightly irrational of Dracula to then swear vengeance on Courtley’s murderers. Further it makes Taste the Blood of Dracula into something different. It now becomes a film about vengeance rather than one about vampirism. Throughout the focus is on Dracula corrupting the children and turning them against their parents and the usual business of blood-letting hardly even figures at all. 

Hammer’s other Dracula films are:– Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Brides of Dracula (1960), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Scars of Dracula (1971), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rites of Dracula/Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973) and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires/The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (1974).

Peter Sasdy’s other genre outings were:– Countess Dracula (1970), Hands of the Ripper (1971) about Jack the Ripper’s daughter, the ecological horror film Doomwatch (1972), the immortality syndicate film Nothing But the Night (1972), the Nigel Kneale ghost story tv play The Stone Tape (1972), the Satanic impregnation film The Devil Within Her/I Don’t Want to Be Born (1975) and the proto-Virtual Reality film Welcome to Blood City (1977).   

       

Review: Richard Schieb

Images: Marcus Brooks

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE: BEHIND THE SCENES AND ON THE SCREEN

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. UK. 1968.

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. 

COMMENTARY:

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave was the fourth Hammer Dracula films. The first in the series Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) had made the Hammer name and birthed an entire English horror industry. Subsequently, Hammer had spun out the excellent The Brides of Dracula (1960), although this was without Christopher Lee who was trying to avoid typecasting. Hammer subsequently brought Lee back for Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966). By the time of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Christopher Lee was firmly established in the role, although original director Terence Fisher, who had helmed the preceding three entries, had bowed out of the series and the reins were here inherited by Freddie Francis, who had similarly stepped into Fisher’s shoes on Hammer’s Frankenstein series with The Evil of Frankenstein (1964). (See below for Freddie Francis’s other genre films).  

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is one of the entries made before creative drought had started to enter Hammer’s Dracula series and is an occasion where all parties involved turn out on good form. Certainly, there is a silliness to the plot. Screenwriter John Elder introduces some spurious business about Dracula being able to pull a stake out of his heart unless it is hammered in by somebody with faith. And one wonders why Dracula can’t simply get the priest that he puts under his control to remove the cross barring the door of his castle in the first place. And there is the whole petty revenge plot – in all their Dracula sequels, Hammer could never find much for Dracula to do so had to keep inventing petty revenge plots to keep him busy – somehow revenge seems something that would be beneath Dracula. Christopher Lee, as usual, is not given much to do other than stand around, look evil and let his eyes turn red. Nevertheless, the script provides for some effective characterization, creating an interesting debate between atheism and belief.

In his only entry in the Hammer Dracula series, Freddie Francis, one of the more underrated directors in the Anglo-Horror cycle, directs effectively. There is some silly business framing the edges of the lens in sepia tone. But there’s a surprising sexual element to this film – watch how perennial Hammer heroine Veronica Carlson opens her dress and passively awaits Christopher Lee’s arrival, or how Barbara Ewing (giving a spirited performance as a barmaid) pleads him to drink her blood instead of chasing after Veronica Carlson. 

The sets are particularly good – the exception being the frontispiece of the castle that looks like it is made of cardboard. Especially good are the rooftop sets, which are designed with a feel almost right out of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) with jagged, angular chimneys, boiling fogs and all lit virtually in monochrome. In fact, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is almost the antithesis of Terence Fisher’s approach – Fisher’s sets are florid and sumptuously colourful, while Freddie Francis likes them washed out and stripped of all vividity to stark, neutral colours. It’s quite an interesting contrast. 

Hammer’s other Dracula films are:– Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Brides of Dracula (1960), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Scars of Dracula (1971), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972), The Satanic Rites of Dracula/Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (1973), The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires/The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula (1974). 

Freddie Francis’s other genre films are:- Vengeance/The Brain (1962), Hammer’s Paranoiac (1962) and Nightmare (1963), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Hysteria (1965), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Torture Garden (1967), Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), Trog (1970), The Vampire Happening (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Tales That Witness Madness (1972), Craze (1973), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Legend of the Werewolf (1974), Son of Dracula (1974), The Ghoul (1975), The Doctor and the Devils (1985) and Dark Tower (1987).
 
Review: Richard Scheib
Images : Marcus Brooks 

MICHAEL RIPPER AND GEOFFREY KEEN: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)

Michael Ripper and Geoffrey Keen. Another one bites the dust as Dracula has his revenge in TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (Hammer Film Productions, 1970)

THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF: PHOTOGRAPH: OLIVER REED AND CATHERINE FELLER (1961)

Oliver Reed as Leon the werewolf and Catherine Feller in THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF Hammer Films 1961. Directed by Terence Fisher.

THE REPTILE: HAMMER FILMS BEHIND THE SCENES: JENNIFER DANIEL : RAY BARRETT AND MICHAEL RIPPER.

 

EMPTY

BEHIND THE SCENES: HAMMER FILMS : THE REPTILE (1966)

JENNIFER DANIEL, RAY BARRETT, MICHAEL RIPPER AND MICROPHONE. HAMMER FILMS 'THE REPTILE' 1966 DIRECTED BY JOHN GILLING

HAMMER FILMS: PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES: ZOMBIE MAKE UP TEST PHOTGRAPH

 

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PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES 

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

HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS: PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES: THE DEAD ARE AWAKE AND WALKING! REVIEW AND GALLERY!

CREW:
Director: John Gilling. Screenplay: Peter Bryan. Producer: Anthony Nelson Keys. Photography: Arthur Grant. Music:  James Bernard. Music Supervisor:  Philip Martell. Special Effects: Bowie Films Ltd. Makeup: Roy Ashton. Production Design:  Bernard Robinson. Production Company: Hammer Film Productions /Seven Arts.

CAST:

Andre Morell: Sir James Forbes, Diane Clare: Sylvia Forbes, John Carson: Squire Clive Hamilton, Brook Williams: Dr Peter Tompson, Jacqueline Pearce: Alice Tompson, Michael Ripper: Sergeant Jack Swift, Marcus Hammond: Martinus, Alex Davion: Denver, Roy Royston: Vicar.

PLOT: Professor of medicine Sir James Forbes receives a letter from his former pupil Peter Tompson, now a GP in a small town in Cornwall. Tompson mentions how he is baffled by a strange plague that is killing the locals. Sir James and his daughter Sylvia travel to Cornwall to investigate. Not long after they arrive, Tompson’s wife Alice succumbs to the plague and dies. The local squire Clive Hamilton forbids them to conduct autopsies on the bodies so Sir James decides to conduct an illegal exhumation, only to find that the coffins in the graves of the plague victims are all empty. Sir James realizes that Hamilton is using voodoo to raise the dead as zombies and is then employing them as slave labour in his tin mines. As he makes this discovery, Hamilton conducts a voodoo spell to bring Sylvia under his control.

The Plague of the Zombies is a Hammer film that has gained a modest cult reputation in Anglo-horror circles. This is something that was boosted by its relative obscurity on video/dvd up until recent years. It was directed by John Gilling who had made a number of other Anglo-horror films. (See below for listing of John Gilling’s other films).

The Plague of the Zombies is frequently discussed in tandem with John Gilling’s The Reptile (1966), both of which were shot back-to-back. Both films use many of the same sets – the village streets and the inn – and have similar plots with outsiders arriving in a small village in Cornwall where they discover that something is killing off the locals. In both cases, the menace is seen to be foreign in nature (voodoo here, a woman transformed into a snake creature after being abducted by a snake cult in Borneo in The Reptile). Both films also star Jacqueline Pearce as one of the central characters who is transformed by the menace, as well as contain a minor appearance from Michael Ripper as one of the locals.

John Gilling directs with florid effect. There is a striking opening sequence involving rituals being conducted by figures in white hoods smeared with bloody symbols. The film gains some impact in the long scene where Andre Morell and Brook Williams dig up Jacqueline Pearce’s grave and we wait in closeup on her face before her eyes suddenly open and then she crawls out of the grave with a lascivious smile, before being decapitated by Morell. This is followed by the much remembered (and copied) scene where Brook Williams has a dream of the zombies clawing their way up out of the grave and coming after him. There are many other notable pieces – the eerieness of the scene where John Carson draws Diane Clare to him, and a reasonably intense climax as the house and mine go up in flames. Regular Hammer makeup man Roy Ashton creates some excellent zombie makeups – with their pallid faces and glowing eyes, these look startlingly gruesome, even after two decades of exposure to George Romero copies.

The Plague of the Zombies also has a striking political subtext – that of an uncaring aristocracy and their exploitation of the working classes. John Gilling sets up a series of potent images that illustrate this – the fox hunt with the hunters riding through the village at full tilt, heedlessly charging through a funeral procession, knocking the coffin over the side of a bridge; or where Diane Clare is abducted by the local Hellfire Club who circle and taunt her and then gamble over her fate. (Gilling loves the image of the aristocrats resplendent in their spiffing scarlet red jackets). The idea of the peasantry being turned into zombies to work in the mines is rich in symbolism and the images that we see of the zombies being whipped and made to work are striking.

On the minus side, some of the plotting is vague – it is not made clear why John Carson is also zombiefying and placing the women of the show under his spell – it is a little far-fetched to believe that he is doing this because he wants to turn them into slaves in the mines as well. Rather though, his motives seem to be the all-embracing Hammer standby of the courtly nobleman placing women under his hypnotic spell with sinister intent.

Andre Morell fulfils the role of the savant that in any other Hammer film would mandatorily be played by Peter Cushing. Morell plays the part with an aristocratic grace – it is almost like a Peter Cushing role that has been cast with a country gentleman. John Carson is in what normally be the Christopher Lee role – that of the sinister lord of the manor up to no good. However, John Carson eschews any sense of the sinister threat that Christopher Lee would have given the role and plays the part with a mannered politeness that contrarily serves to only give the character even more sinister effect.

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 Reptile (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: Richar Scheib
Here
Images: Marcus Brooks

HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS: 'THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES'
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