Wanted for dissertation: Hammer Fans of a certain age

I just got contacted by Joshua Searle who is a student at Portsmouth University and currently writing a dissertation concerning the Hammer Horror films of the 1950s and 1960s. He is very much interested in learning more about the initial audience reception when the movies were first released and is interested in interviewing anyone who may have watched those in the cinema during that time.

Please find below some more infos by Joshua about his requirements. Needless to say this is a very worthwhile cause and I hope that he can find some possible interview partners through this blog post:

"At the moment I am working on a research project concerning the Hammer Horror films that were released between 1950-1970. Movies like Dracula (1958) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) were very popular in their day and my project's main aim is to find out why this was. Nowadays it is very important that this type of research contains audience reception and so I need to interview people who went to see these films at the cinema. The study is also, broadly speaking, looking at the experience of going to cinema and how it changed after The Second World War.


In 100 years time people will look back on memories that are orally recorded with the same fascination that we would if we had the chance to examine the testimony of people from 1912. So if you went to see these films, or know someone who might have, and would be interested in sharing your memories about both them and your cinema-going experience please contact me by on 07518401791, or by email at shl90734@myport.ac.uk.


Thank you for reading, Josh."

The Great Plague

A guilty confession: not counting Woman In Black, the only Hammer film I've seen on the big screen until yesterday was Dracula, and that was back in the late nineties at the Barbican.

So I confess to having been immoderately excited when my local cinema announced it was showing Plague of the Zombies as part of a Tuesday night season of British classics (and Quatermass and the Pit still to come!)

I expected to thoroughly enjoy myself; what I did not expect, however, was to have my opinion of the film substantially altered in any way, simply by virtue of seeing it as nature (or at least James Carreras) intended. 

I'm too young to know any real connection between my love of cinemas, where I went to see James Bond films and the like, and classic horror movies, which I saw only on television. 

TV still feels like Hammer and Universal horror's natural home for me. I've never been overly convinced by the standard assurances that seeing a film well-known from TV screenings in a cinema is invariably a transformative event; certainly I've rarely felt that way myself. (And experience has additionally forced me to be wary of attending rep screenings of classic horror films, because of the forced oafish laughter that is for some reason felt to be the correct response by large sections of the audience.)

Nonetheless, Plague of the Zombies really did come alive in a whole new way for me, to the extent that I'm now inclined to label it a late-flowered primary masterpiece (alongside Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and - sue me - Phantom of the Opera) rather than, as I'd always had it pegged until now, an example of solid, mid-period competence.

It's not merely the intended experience of being engulfed by an imaginative world I am more accustomed to seeing self-contained and safely boxed in an otherwise rational living room. And neither is it the resultant luxury of seeing deeper into the frame than ever before, though I confess it was fun to be able to actually read the letter Andre Morell receives at the beginning, and to notice for the first time that when John Carson banishes his associates from the room after he scuppers their attempted gang rape of Diane Clare, one of them simply goes to the landing at the top of the stairs and waits there.

It really did seem a better, more compelling and, yes, scarier film yesterday than ever before, and that's no small achievement given that I knew what was around every corner. Even the ironic contingent were largely silent, unleashing their guffaws only for the admittedly amusing way in which the two drops of blood Carson manages to squeeze from Clare's finger seemed to increase in quantity each time it was transferred from one vessel to another. 

But everything else - the jumps and jolts, the suspense, the effects, and the performances (especially Morell's and Jacqueline Pearce's) worked exactly as intended in 1966.

The best scare remains the first sighting of the zombie, that inexplicably but so effectively screams as it flings Pearce's body to the ground, a moment doubly striking to me because I realised for the first time that this was Ben Aris, an actor I knew well for his appearances as suave, well-bred types in TV sitcoms. 

Of course the most famous scene remains the nightmare, in which the dead rise en masse from their graves and threaten Brook Williams, though rather less muddily and messily than I remembered, and notably bereft of the planned shots of a shuffling, decapitated Pearce holding her smiling head. (The BBFC put paid to that idea, though it may have been a case of Hammer out-imagining their special effects resources anyway.)
I've often been struck by just how untypical of the Bray boys this sequence is: I can't off-hand think of any other pre-seventies Hammer film containing anything comparable. (And it's shot in such a stylised, European kind of a way, all saturated colour and Expressionist angles. Hammer traditionally deal in prose, not poetry; the strictly empiricist approach was a large part of their distinctiveness.)
It was only watching the scene this time that I realised the reason for it's being there at all - it's to get a few zombies into the movie, thus justifying the title. Apart from Ben Aris's shock cameo there's nary a zombie in sight until the finale: only The Mummy's Shroud is less keen to fulfil the promise of its title and show us the damned monster. But it is a measure of the excellence of Plague that we don't feel the lack in anything like the same way: the suspense never flags, and the detail is consistently diverting.

Simon Helder returns!

This was waiting for me in my in-box this morning:

Dear Matthew,
We thought you might be interested in the feature film we are about to shoot, called 'Sherlock Holmes vs Frankenstein'. The cast includes Hammer veteran Shane Briant, as well as real-life baron Clement von Franckenstein.
Synopsis:
1898. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson travel to Germany to investigate a strange case in the village of Darmstadt.
Who is the mysterious scientist who digs up corpses and steals their limbs? Could these events be related to the nearby presence of Castle Frankenstein, whose name is closely associated to Mary Shelley's horror novel? Everyone is a suspect...
Best wishes,
Gautier CAZENAVE
Marteau Films Production

And yes, it would seem that Briant really is reprising his old Monster From Hell role!
Follow the link here to find out more.

Stop Me Before I Kill!/The Full Treatment (1960)

So what's to like about Hammer's 1960 thriller Stop Me Before I Kill! aka The Full Treatment? 

This was Ronald Lewis' first starring role in a Hammer movie. He would later also feature in Taste of Fear and The Brigand of Kandahar. None of those parts would ultimately set the world on fire but in Stop Me Before I Kill! he has the notable honour of arguably playing the rudest and most obnoxious leading man ever filmed in a Hammer production.

Following a car accident during his honeymoon his race car driving character is left not only physically but also mentally scarred and living in fear of wanting to murder his wife. He is compulsive, insulting, constantly flies off the handle and looks a lot like Errol Flynn.

During a party scene we have a black female character playing a French Baronesse and society lady. Absolutely nothing is made of her skin colour and she fits neatly into the dinner table round. While this may no longer raise an eyebrow it is remarkable for a film of its time.

Of course, it would have been even more remarkable had this character actually been played by a black actress but researching this blog post it appears that Barbara Chilcott, the actress playing that role, was Canadian and white.

Unless I am very much mistaken Stop Me Before I Kill! features Hammer's first nude scene. Diane Cilento, today better known as the woman who once was Mrs Connery, graces us with a nude swim and a blink and you'll miss it so press the darn pause button quickly topless scene, the first of many more to come for Hammer.

Eight years prior Cilento had one of her first roles in Hammer's Wings of Danger though genre fans will always remember her as schoolteacher Miss Rose in The Wicker Man. She was Oscar nominated for her supporting role in Tom Jones.

Here she plays the long suffering wife – and potential victim - of race car driver Alan Colby. Given her character's name (Denise) and the location this movie is partially set in I guess she is meant to be French, however, in some early scenes she speaks fluent Italian and for the most part sports a very convincing Italian accent. In actual fact she is so good in it that it is hard to imagine that she is not one of Hammer's Continental discoveries but indeed Australian born.

Wow indeed. No wonder someone spies on her.

And that someone playing Peeping Tom is Claude Dauphin as a psychiatrist who suspects that smoking may cause cancer (so much for this being a new discovery) but still smokes and spends more time brusquely interrupting his patients and being argumentative rather than listening to their concerns. He is obsessed with murderous instincts (even when seeing a spider) and goes as far as treating his patients with CO2.... even if it nearly kills them.

And, hey, and did you know that you don't need an iPod or even a Walkman to listen to music on the go? All it requires is to hang a portable radio smoothly around your neck while admiring your collection of surgical instruments.

All in all Stop Me Before I Kill! is an enjoyable enough early piece of non-horrror entertainment from Hammer Films. Director Val Guest generally keeps this from getting too dull but the production does dabble far too much into then-fashionable psycho babble. One of the bigger issues is that for the most part until the end there is no real threat yet this production still has enough in its favour to make it worth a watch.

The UK version of the film (and the one currently available on DVD) clocks in at a little under two hours which for a classic Hammer movie is practically monumental but for the material available is far too long. The cinematic version in the US was apparently a good bit shorter and quite likely better paced.

All the actors play remarkably well even when their characters are often meant to be quite non-chalant about dealing with a guy with murderous urges. It is also surprising to hear quite open discussions about sexuality in a film of its vintage.

Don't be surprised if you don't see any reference to Hammer in the credits. Falcon, the production company, was one of Hammer's subsidiaries and for financial reasons the powers that be decided to erase any reference to its far more famous parent company.

Stop Me Before I Kill! is available as part of the ICONS OF SUSPENSE COLLECTION that was released in 2010.

Caroline Munro's musical career

This article was first previously published on my now defunct Hammer Glamour website. For this blog post I have only made slight modifications. At the time it was the only overview online about her musical career but since it got posted Karl Sherlock's Numa Records - The Formative Years has added a great section on Caroline Munro with info and record scans that far FAR surpasses mine though I was able to also help him out with the scans and tracks for Caroline's Convention Demo Tape. Definitely do check them out for a more complete overview of this part of Caroline's career. In actual fact just by reviewing their pages for today's updates was I even made aware of Munro's husband/wife collaborations with Judd Hamilton in the 1970s!


At the time of writing the first version of this article YouTube wasn't even around. Nowadays, however, exploring her musical career has never been easier and I dropped most of the scans I had posted (and long lost again in Cyberspace) for YouTube clips.


This article is probably a bit past its sell-by date but blogging about Caroline Munro's music videos made me recall it and bring it out of the cupboard.


Throughout her career, Caroline Munro repeatedly tried to break into the music business. In actual fact, prior to ever getting into modelling or acting and while still at school at the age of 16, she recorded a cover version of Tar and Cement together with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce of Cream and Steve Howes of Yes as backing musicians. For a good while that single has been something of a Holy Grail for Munro Collectors as it was quite difficult to trace and also proved expensive enough due to her now famous fellow musicians involved in it at the start of their own careers but nothing stays obscure for too long these days and it has since found its way to YouTube and elsewhere. It’s a cheerful ditty tune that will keep you humming throughout the day and quite possibly the best song she has ever recorded.



In the subsequent years she became quite successful as a model and poster girl for Lamb’s Navy Rum and also started a promising acting career. She also appeared as the cover girl on some albums. In 1972 e.g. she appeared as an archer in Robin Hood gear on the front and back cover of Hot Hits 11. She also appeared on the cover of a Top of the Pops sleeve. Some more cover appearances have since been posted on Karl Sherlock's tribute (even though I don't think the Europa Hitparade is Munro).

In 1971 Caroline Munro did not just appear as a cover girl but in actual fact was also the subject of a song herself! For his first solo album "One Year" Colin Blunstone, lead singer of The Zombies, wrote a song called Caroline Goodbye about the breakup of their relationship.



Caroline’s most famous recording was Gary Numan’s production Pump Me Up. The single was released in 1984 and also featured Numan on keyboards and backing vocals. It’s recorded in typical Numan style, i.e. her voice is completely drowned in some monotonous synthesiser sounds and it's hard to understand what she's singing.

The B-Side, The Picture, is actually much better. In that song she sounds very much Blondie’ish.





Caroline was so serious about trying to get a break as a pop star that she even accepted a singing cameo in Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas in 1984 and co-wrote the song Warrior of Love. Little did she know that her one-day shot was turned into a "starring" role for her on the film’s posters thanks to the producers’ savvy marketing tactics.



Over the next couple of years, Caroline made only a handful of films and concentrated more on her family and raising her young kids. In the second half of the 1990s she rekindled her career by starting to run her own fan club. Again very keen on making it as a singer, she produced a private tape with excerpts of Warrior of Love, the very Country & Westernish Everything I Need and Numan’s Pump Me Up. On that tape she also spoke and introduced the songs and excerpts. The tape was distributed around "The Monster Model Fest ‘96" in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Shortly later she teamed up with fellow musician Gary Wilson and – under the name of Wilson Munro – recorded a CD with cover versions of Let It Be Me, Everlasting Love and Cruisin’, a tune written by Wilson's cousin Clive Wilson and Brian Hodgson, two long standing session musicians. Clive played the guitars on that CD as well and was also involved in Christopher Lee's recordings of It's Now Or Never and Wanderin' Star. The tunes on the Wilson Munro CD are easy enough to listen to, but unfortunately Wilson’s voice is stronger than Caroline’s and she often comes across as little more than a prominent backing musician. The CD was sold via her Official Fan Club.

Her most successful recording was actually not a musical tune, but rather an audio CD for Big Finish’s Dr Who Adventure Omega, released in 2003! Though at times hard to follow for someone not too familiar with the good Doctor, this CD is nonetheless a Must for Caroline Munro Fans as this is by far the best acting she ever did. It’s hard to believe that this is the lady who was dubbed in most of her important roles. Caroline really takes very well to the audio medium and I would sure love to hear more from her in that kind of production. Her voice is amazing: soothing, sexy, ironic, stern, whatever it needs to be. And to think that she was worried about the production because of her dyslexia is unbelievable. Her performance is nothing short but a revelation. The CD is still available from Amazon UK.

Caroline Munro in new music video

An article in the Clacton Gazette informed me that Clacton's very own country singer Gary Curtis has just recorded a new charity single, Life is for the Living, featuring Caroline Munro in its accompanying video.

Gary Curtis is also known as Gary Wilson and a while back as "Wilson Munro" the two of them together had already recorded a 3-song CD. In actual fact the photo of them at about the 01:30 mark shows a promotional picture of them in younger years from that very CD release.

Can't say that this will ever be in the Top 100 of my favourite songs ever but it's good to see Caroline again in a music video.



Of course this is not the first time that we see her in a music video. The 1982 video for Adam Ant's debut single as a solo musician, Goody Two Shoes, featured Caroline Munro as a stern and stuck up member of the press corps who literally lets her hair down for the musician.

Also look out for veteran comedian Graham Stark as the butler.



Less famous than Goody Two Shoes is Meat Loaf's If You Really Want To, probably the only one of his classic songs that didn't become hugely succesful. But what a video and what a chance for Caroline to shine for the first and only time ever as a....

Ah well, don't want to ruin the surprise for those of you who may never have watched that video before.



Though she has over the years recorded a number of songs - Mental reminder that I need to transfer my old Discography article over from my now-defunct Hammer Glamour site – Caroline has never really recorded a proper music video for any of her songs. The closest she came to it is this clip of her cameo appearance from Don't Open Till Christmas singing Warrior of Love.

Dave Worrall/Lee Pfeiffer: Cinema Sex Sirens

Dave Worrall and Lee Pfeiffer, the authors of Cinema Sex Sirens, are the brains behind CINEMA RETRO. Dedicated to the films of the 1960s and 70s this is the only professional magazine these days I still subscribe to. And so should you if you haven't: The magazine consistently publishes very well researched, in-depth and beautifully illustrated articles often with the involvement of the men and women behind those flicks. Their look into The Men from U.N.C.L.E. movies e.g. lasted so many issues that a compilation of these articles would easily make up a proper book in its own rights.

In actual fact that publication is so good you may not just want to purchase their magazines once but even twice just so you have a spare copy to auction off once the mags are all sold out. Their Where Eagles Dare Special Edition from just about three or so years ago now easily commands prices in the $100 range.

Just goes to prove that Worrall and Pfeiffer clearly know their stuff.

So when they promise a coffee table book dedicated to the 1960s/70s sex sirens you bet that I'm all over it.

Those two decades with their more free spirited approach to sexuality and nudity rolled out new kinds of athletic female sex symbols that were all stunning, luscious and wonderfully uninhibited with not a Size 0 anywhere in sight. These beauties were often the focal point in horror, spy and (s)exploitation films (and their accompanying posters). Not a lot of modern female stars are still oozing this kind of glamorous jet setting mystique. As the promotional campaign for this book emphasised: They sure don't make'em like they used to.

The concept is very similar to Marcus Hearn's Hammer Glamour from a while back. All actresses get anything between 2-6 pages. A short biographical overview of generally one, sometimes two pages will not, ahem, reveal anything majorly new if you are already familiar with the ladies in question though serves as a good spring board to the primary raison d'etre behind the tome: the photos.

The book is richly illustrated with good quality reproductions of promotional photos and cult film posters. This being the Internet age it's hard to really describe a lot of those pics as “rare” but as usual it's nice to have them all available in one single publication.

The book is divided into three main sections dealing with Hollywood Sex Symbols from Raquel Welch to Natalie Wood (and also including Russ Meyer gals and Blaxploitation favourites), the Continentals (e.g. Ursula Andress, Senta Berger, Sylva Koscina and a number of giallo references) and Brit Glamour. The last section contains chapters on some of the more prominent Hammer Glamour ladies (such as Ingrid Pitt, Caroline Munro, Madeline Smith).

One potent reminder about the quality of the images in this publication is when I discovered to my initial dismay that one of the pages had been ripped out prior to shipment by either a Sharon Tate or Mamie Van Doren Fan working for The Book Depository. The issue was quickly resolved and I was promised a pristine new copy so my inital annoyance quickly made way to an ironic acknowledgement that even in the year 2012 these ladies still literally have pin-up appeal.

All those list-style books by their nature have omissions and for me it is unfathomable that Jacqueline Bisset doesn't even appear to warrant a single name check in one of the overview chapters. Still even with that omission this book is just as glamorous and gorgeous as the ladies it portrays though maybe not quite as in-depth and essential as the magazine it spawned from.

A Foreword is provided by Roger Moore.