VALERIE LEON NEW GALLERY: BLOOD FROM THE MUMMYS TOMB: HAMMER FILMS 1971

CAST: 

Valerie Leon (Margaret Fuchs/Queen Tera), Andrew Keir (Professor Julian Fuchs), James Villiers (Corbeck), Mark Edwards (Tod Browning), Hugh Burden (Jeffrey Dandridge), George Coulouris (Berigan), Aubrey Morris (Dr Putnam), Rosalie Crutchley (Helen Dickerson)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Seth Holt, Uncredited Additional Scenes Directed by Michael Carreras, Screenplay – Christopher Wicking, Based on the Novel Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker, Producer – Howard Brandy, Photography – Arthur Grant, Music – Tristram Cary, Music Supervisor – Philip Martell, Special Effects – Michael Collins, Makeup Supervisor – Eddie Knight, Production Design – Scott MacGregor. Production Company – Hammer.

SYNOPSIS:

Egyptologist Julian Fuchs gives his daughter Margaret a red ring for her birthday. Unknown to Margaret, the ring has been taken from the tomb of the Ancient Egyptian queen Tera who was executed for practicing black sorcery. Margaret and her boyfriend Tod Browning discover that Fuchs keeps Tera’s perfectly preserved body locked in the cellar. From her sarcophagus, Tera begins to exert influence over Margaret, who was born at exactly the same moment that Fuchs uncovered the tomb. Via her control of Margaret and by sending out her own severed hand, Tera begins to kill the members of Fuchs’s expedition in order to get back the artefacts she needs to complete her resurrection and then be able to possess Margaret’s body.

THEBLACKBOXCLUB.COM FULL REVIEW AND COLOUR GALLERY CLICK HERE

HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS: 'THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA' VINTAGE STILLS GALLERY

BETTE DAVIS: 'HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY' TO OUR FRIENDS AND FOLLOWERS IN THE USA!

A HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY! BETTE DAVIS CELEBRATES THE FOURTH OF JULY ON THE SET OF HAMMER FILMS 'THE ANNIVERSAY' (1968) JOINED BY THE CAST, DIRECTOR ROY WARD BAKER AND SCRIPTWRITER JIMMY SANGSTER

HAZEL COURT RAY MILLAND ' THE PREMATURE BURIAL' STILLS GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Ray Milland (Guy Carrell), Hazel Court (Emily Gault), Richard Ney (Miles Archer), Heather Angel (Kate Carrell), Alan Napier (Dr Gideon Gault)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Roger Corman, Screenplay – Charles Beaumont & Ray Russell, Suggested by the Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe, Photography – Floyd Crosby, Music – Ronald Stein, Makeup – Louis La Cava, Art Direction – Daniel Haller. Production Company – Santa Clara. USA 1962

SYNOPSIS:

Emily Gault goes to Guy Carrell, demanding to know why he has sent her a letter cancelling their engagement. Guy explains how he has become terrified after his father’s grave was dug up to discover that his father had been buried while still alive. He has become obsessed with the fear that he might also suffer from catalepsy and be buried alive. She persuades him to overcome his fears and marry her. Soon after the marriage though, Guy’s obsessions with premature burial start to affect his sanity. To counter this, he builds an elaborate tomb to cover every possibility that might occur should he be buried alive. He then suffers an extreme fright and collapses. Appearing to all intents and purposes to have died, he is buried – but, exactly as he has feared, he is still alive.

Premature Burial was the third of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. (See below for the other Corman Poe titles). There is much of a muchness that the Roger Corman Poe films fade into – the same sonorous atmosphere of doom, gloom and morbid obsession with death, the creepy old mansions and brooding production design, the thundering ominous scores, the craven tormented figures usually played by Vincent Price. The production design here, for instance, is overdone – there seems so much fog in the exterior sets that you think Ray Milland might be better off starting up a natural steam bore.

The film is reasonably accurate to the essence of Edgar Allan Poe’s original 1850 short story, which is mostly an essay about historical occurrences of the title subject before segueing into a study in obsession from the unnamed narrator who is deathly afraid of being buried alive and builds a tomb that he can escape from should such happen. The film adds to the story an improbably contrived psycho-thriller plot involving a scheme to drive somebody mad a la Les Diaboliques (1955). Not much is explained about this plot – like why the culprit is concocting this scheme or about Alan Napier’s traffic in stolen cadavers. Nor does any of the tortured psychology invoked in explaining Ray Milland’s obsession with premature burial rings authentic at all.

That said, Premature Burial is nicely written in places – I especially liked the scene where Hazel Court tells Ray Milland that he is already dead, that his attempts to avoid premature burial have already symbolically buried him. Roger Corman does a fine job directing – notably a sequence modeled on the burial alive in Vampyr (1932) with Ray Milland trapped immobile in a coffin, looking up and hoping the mourners will see his open eyes. Hazel Court plays with a nicely tight-lipped firmness of character. Although, Ray Milland, replacing Vincent Price who would normally be filling this role, gives an anxious, thoroughly overwrought performance.

With Premature Burial, Roger Corman changed his formula slightly in that it is the only of the Edgar Allan Poe films not to star Vincent Price. Corman’s usual screenwriter Richard Matheson is also replaced by horror writers Charles Beaumont, the author best known for 7 Faces of Dr Lao (1964) and Ray Russell, the writer of Mr. Sardonicus (1961) and Corman’s X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963).

Roger Corman’s other Edgar Allan Poe films are The House of Usher/The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), the Poe-titled but H.P. Lovecraft adapted The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964).

Roger Corman’s other genre films as director are:– Day the World Ended (1955), It Conquered the World (1956), Not Of This Earth (1956), War of the Satellites (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Journey to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957), The Undead (1957), Teenage Caveman (1958), A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Wasp Woman (1959), Last Woman on Earth (1960), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), Tower of London (1962), The Terror (1963), X – The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963), The Trip (1967), Gas; or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) and Frankenstein Unbound (1990). 

Review: Richard Scheib 
Images: Marcus Brooks

PETER CUSHING: BIG POINTY FINGER ASKS YOU A QUESTION!

Much more than a 'Fan Page': scanned full sized photographs, lobby stills, features and marketing memorabilia. The official Facebook site of The UK Peter Cushing Appreciation Society. Est: 1956. Click the link. Come join us! 

IF YOU HAVE A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT JUST CLICK HERE!

AMICUS FILMS: MENA SUVARI : STEPHEN REA : 'STUCK' REVIEW AND GALLERY

Stuck’s cheeky tagline—“Ever have one of those days?”—speaks to its simultaneously raucous and terrifying qualities. Director Stuart Gordon, a certifiable cult hero among horror aficionados, adapted the story from the true life tale of Chante Jawan Mallard, a Texas nurse’s aide who, while under the influence of ecstasy, struck a homeless man with her car and subsequently drove him to her garage where she let him bleed to death. The sensational case material was front page fodder for months, during which time Gordon and co-writer John Strysik crafted a fictionalized account of the shocking events.

American Beauty star Mena Suvari plays Brandi, a diminutive caregiver at a senior citizens’ home who spends her days traversing sterile hallways and changing shit-stained sheets, a depressive reality whose only bright spot is the potential promotion her stoic boss alludes to. By night, however, Brandi transforms into a reckless 20-something who drops E with her boyfriend as a means of anesthetizing the memory of her bleak quotidian existence. Brandi careens toward disaster after consuming a self-medicating mix of drugs and alcohol one evening, when, like, Mallard, she runs head-on into a homeless man (Stephen Rea) who has just been evicted from his hovel of an apartment.

He becomes firmly lodged in her windshield, his barely conscious face staring grimly into hers while she continues to drive down the block. Understandably terrified, Brandi attempts to anonymously deposit him in front of an emergency room before secretly storing his body while she figures out how to clean up the messy situation. And messy it is—gore king Gordon delights in drawing attention to how Brandi’s windshield wiper has impaled him, pushing the camera into his midsection as he painfully attempts to squirm his way free.

Brandi’s chain of poor choices are inarguably despicable, yet her character elicits a curious amount of sympathy, too. Gordon was brave in choosing this morally ambiguous imperative. Rather than bifurcating “good” Tom (Rea) and “bad” Brandi on opposite ends of an ethical spectrum, he blurs the lines of virtue to raise challenging questions. Brandi is flawed, but her moral gaffes arise from a very human psychic space. She is frightened and confused, just as Tom was frightened when he fled his rent-demanding landlord at the film’s start. Though the situations are not identical, they stem from similar emotional pools.

The role marks a drastic departure for Suvari, who sheds the wholesome character sheath she donned for the American Pie series to play an imperfect and oftentimes diabolical woman. As time passes and Brandi advances into progressively more troublesome territory, Suvari relishes the chance to emphasize the woman’s mental unraveling. The situation itself is mad, and Brandi descends into quasi-insanity as an attempt to justify her lack of principals.

Rea, meanwhile, has little dialogue to speak of but gives a valiant physical performance, one which incites viewers to root for him as he attempts to free himself from the windshield, whether ceaselessly honking the car horn or contorting his body to reach the cell phone Brandi carelessly left on the seat. The audience hopes for retribution, and Gordon delivers a grandiose conclusion that strays far from the facts of the original Mallard case. Though Gordon begs a number of philosophical questions with this picture—including why there is a fundamental lack of empathy in contemporary culture—he entertains with flamboyant cinematic gestures, too, embracing graphic imagery and campy violence to compose his stylized film. In a sea of homogenized summer fare, Stuck is the jarring jolt that moviegoers may need. 

Review: Heidi Atwel

Images: Marcus Brooks 

CHRISTOPHER LEE: YVONNE MONLAUR: THE TERROR OF THE TONGS' REVIEW AND GALLERY

The year is 1910 and the place is Hong Kong, which is labouring under the grip of the dreaded Red Dragon Tong, an organised crime syndicate that has a clawed finger in every pie in the area. A British ship's captain, Jackson Sale (Geoffrey Toone), doesn't believe this has anything to do with him even if the island is his destination, and as he entertains a Chinese scholar, Mr Ming (Burt Kwouk), he listens patiently to his stories but cannot see what he can do about the problem. However, he will soon be forced into action...

After The Stranglers of Bombay was a big hit for the Hammer studio, they began to churn out historical adventures with a violent tone in earnest, not as many as their horror pictures but enough to represent a minor place in their output. If the genuine chillers are the ones that they are best recalled for, then works like this one still have their fans, although mainly among those familiar with their other films rather than newcomers or casual viewers, but watched today they tended to lack the bite, if you will, of the vampire efforts, or indeed the other shockers they released.

One of the problems with Terror of the Tongs was that it is now inescapably dated due to its casting, with practically every major Chinese character played by a Western actor sporting eye makeup to render their appearance more Eastern. It was not a rare sight in movies ever since their inception, but was beginning to die out around the sixties, although Christopher Lee was a performer with more of these roles than many other stars thanks to his Fu Manchu series that he took the title part in. Here he was Fu in all but name, obviously indebted to Sax Rohmer's creation and very much coming off second best.

The fact that not every European actor playing Chinese actually wore the starched eyelids made it slightly more disconcerting, as when the female lead Yvonne Monlaur appeared you were unsure as to whether she was supposed to be a local or not thanks to her eschewing the type of arrangement Lee wore and opting for heavy mascara instead. Even in her black wig, nobody was going to be fooled, but if you can put the racial issues to one side, did this story stand up otherwise? The answer to that was those issues were hard to ignore when a paranoia about Chinese gangs was informing every aspect of the script, this time by Hammer's go-to man Jimmy Sangster.

So Mr Ming is bumped off by a Tong agent (killing off Burt Kwouk so early in your film is always a mistake) but not before he passes on a list of high up conspirators hidden in a book offered to Sale's daughter (Barbara Brown), which the bad guys are keen to track down for understandable reasons. When they do, this results in a surprisingly ruthless plot twist which showed that if nothing else, Sangster meant business in showing his villains to be as formidable as possible, and so Sale is left to tackle them practically single-handed until he manages to work up some assistance, with Monlaur's Lee (not Christopher) falling in love with him - more prejudice arises when the script decides they cannot be together for the final scene. For a man who drinks fifteen pints of brandy a day, Sale is a capable enough hero, but in spite of moments of vivid nastiness to distinguish it this was a little drab, even with that bright Technicolor.

Review: Graeme Clark
Link: HERE
Images: Marcus Brooks

YVONNE MONLAUR: 'THE TERROR OF THE TONGS' BLACKBOXCLUB PIN UP NUMBER TEN

UPDATE: BBC BFI: DOUBLE BILL: 'WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU' DVD RELEASE

DUE FOR RELEASE AUGUST 20TH 2012

BBC Ghost Stories Volume One: Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968 + 2010)

A film by Jonathan Miller (1968) Andy De Emmony (2010)

As a Christmas treat in the late 1960s and 70s, the BBC produced adaptations of ghost stories based on the works of MR James, the Cambridge academic and author of some of the most spine-tingling tales in the English language, which were broadcast to terrified viewers in the dead of winter. This was a tradition that was briefly revived by the BBC between 2007 and 2010.

These adaptations, which have a subtlety and style all of their own, have been a major influence on many contemporary British horror filmmakers and have come to be some of the most sought after British TV titles by their legions of eager fans.

Volume One in the BFI's BBC Ghost Stories collection pairs both versions of the terrifying Whistle and I'll Come to You : the 1968 adaptation directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Sir Michael Hordern, and the more recent reinterpretation, starring the legendary John Hurt, from 2010.