Look What the Postman Brought In

Announcement of two major Hammer events

First of all: Welcome to all my new followers. The blog now has 150 followers. Nice number. Of course, 200 would sound even nicer. ;-)

The Black Box Club has just announced the new event by Don Fearney. Mark your calendars: On October 15 you can meet Shane Briant (as well as the usual large range of other Hammer celebs) in person at the Cine Lumiere in London to celebrate a FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL reunion.

Tickets will be £30, a bit higher than usual as Don needs to fly Shane in from Australia. They can be ordered at the usual address from Donald Fearney at 25 High Hill Ferry, Bakers Hill, London, E5 9 HG (tel: 0208 8066915).

Ever since my interview with Shane I've been dying to meet him in person. He seems to be one of the nicest guys around and is now also very active on Facebook and always ready to chat with his fans. So I'll do my darndest to make it.... even though I must admit that I have a number of other travel plans this year so am not 100% certain if I can get to London this year. Let's wait and see.

If you have never been any of Don't events you're in for a treat. If you have already, then you know what to expect and will no doubt start saving up already for the trip.

Just a few days ago though I noticed that it has been ages since I last visited Paris and lo and behold the Musee d'Orsay has a Hammer festival "In the Clutches of Hammer" from March 11 - 27. Seriously doubt that I'll be there for it but am hoping that I may have some French followers who could attend and provide photos and an update. My understanding is that this is primarily an retrospective with many of their movies on show in a big screen auditorium. Not sure if there is also a separate exhibition or publication about the company.

For more info check out Hammer's Official website or go directly to the Museum's program info.

A couple of things I learned while watching THE GIRL FROM RIO

OK, I am clutching at straws here with regards to the Hammer connection but, hey, wasn't Shirley Eaton also in A WEEKEND WITH LULU? So without further ado, here are a couple of things I learnt while watching Jess Franco's THE GIRL FROM RIO.

• Tough guys get manicures. Though they call it a MANicure.
• It's OK to swim with a telephone in your hand. It'll still work.
• 1960s clothes are utterly vavavavoom.
• 1960s wigs not so much.
• When you film a nude scene you really should focus on the nudes not the vase in the foreground.
• Oriental style funeral hearses are totally inconspicuous when they follow you right behind but stick out like a sore thumb when not in motion.
• You better think twice than to jump into a plane with practically topless stewardesses carrying machine guns regardless of how friendly they might appear.
• Note to self: There is no new mask for oxygen.
• George Sanders could have done worse for a paid vacation.
• 1960s people didn't just drink J&B but also VAT69.
• But they did drink J&B!
• I can't find the city of Femina on a map.
• Suave evil masterminds read Popeye comics.
• Randomly pause the movie and you always get an awesome image.
• Sumuru's motto: "I don't believe in banks" was far ahead of its time.
• As long as you keep an eyebrow arched up and an ironic look on your face there's no need to be afraid of women.
• Even if they do sometimes put you into awkward positions.
• Being irresistible to men can be taught in classes and apparently involves mathematical formulas not just scanty dresses.
• It's possible to talk freely even if your mouth is tied with duct tape.
• Chinese water torture is for wimps. Real torture is being kissed by three girls.
• Especially if two others then decide to stand on your belly.
• Bare midriffs are pretty sexy.
• George Sanders with a young girl on the lap on the other hand: Awkward. Very very awkward.
• Nothing like a local festival to film crowd scenes on the cheap and make the budget look much bigger.
• So there is at least one movie that features Maria Rohm but not Maria Perschy.
• Yep, that's an SS insignia on one of the girl's uniforms.
• When coming up against girls in fetish outfits wearing Hawaiian style clothing is pretty... well.... emasculating.
• If you tie a girl up on a rack common decency demands that you leave her ridiculously large summer hat on.
• It's a bit hard to feel threatened by invisible torture rays.
• Blonde or brunette... Shirley Eaton looks great regardless.
• But the only one wearing green should be Robin Hood.
• If you shoot at helicopters, girls, then aim at them not the blue sky.
• Mini skirted black mourning clothes work surprisingly well. I wonder why they never really caught on.
• I really need to start reading Sax Rohmer's SUMURU stories to check what - if any - connection this film has to them.
• Jess Franco is way better when under the reign of a watchful producer.
• Harry Alan Towers just can't do wrong.
• Like it? Love it!

I forgot to say it...

.... but The Black Box Club is live now. (I had previously mentioned some background info about the site here.)

Glen Davies: Last Bus to Bray – The Unfilmed Hammer

When I first heard of Glen Davies' 2-volume magazine publication of LAST BUS TO BRAY: THE UNFILMED HAMMER I was getting quite excited. Published as a special edition by Little Shoppe of Horrors these tomes were going to focus on all the movies Hammer had at one stage planned but then for various reasons abandoned. Yes, this was screaming niche niche market but I was ready to explore the murkey alleys of all the What Ifs that Hammer had once promised further. And LSoH always promises high quality research and excellent bang for your bucks. Some of the recent issues – such as the Amicus Special from a while back – were effectively standalone books in their own right for half the price of what it would have cost to have them properly published in either hardcover or paperback.

The moment LAST BUS was out I started getting emails from readers telling me that I may possibly need to lower my ridiculously high expectations and complaints were raised about anything from the general layout to the selection of photos as well as an abundance of typos and a general subpar experience.

So what is my stance now that I have read it?

LAST BUS is quite obviously a labour of love. Glen Davies has researched this subject extensively since the 1980s and it shows from the amount of info displayed here. The first volume deals with “The Glory Years” from 1950-1970, the second one with the “Decline, Fall and Rebirth” from 1970-2010. Some of the entries are short, others quite extensive. Whenever possible we get to read not just about the project itself but also what may have happened, whether it may have been filmed before or after it was dropped by Hammer. If it was based on a novel, then you can rely on additional info about the book, cover scans, short reviews etc. The author even highlights films that appear to have been announced by Hammer but were in actual fact spoofs concocted by fans such as DRACULA WALKS BY NIGHT, a “story which tied the legend of Vlad the Impaler and Sherlock Holmes into a vampire yarn set in London in 1895”. Or projects such as ROSEMARY'S BABY and DOCTORS WEAR BLACK (later to be filmed as INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED) that were suggested to Hammer by Terence Fisher but never adopted by the company.

So if you're in any way interested in that area of Hammer research, then on that level you won't be disappointed.

The trouble is that a publication such as this one cannot be judged on the general contents alone regardless of how fascinating they may be.

And one of the first things anyone is going to notice is indeed the abundance of typos and and other kinds of editing errors. Though richly illustrated there is a general feel of a slapdash approach to the layout. Now I have been raised on cheaply produced fanzines from the 1980s and overall this alone doesn't bother me too much if only the contents are worthwhile.

Those 80s fanzines, however, only cost a few pesetas. The retail price for LAST BUS, on the other hand is $32.95 for both editions combined plus postage. So when I ordered this I ended up paying a bit more than £30 (p&p included). That is a staggering amount for a small press publication and I could have easily have got an entire McFarland book for that deal.

So with that in mind I do feel that the publication would have been better off a) proofread and b) in the regular format (either as a regular LSoH or Special Issue) at the normal rate of around $8.95 (plus postage). Had it been published that way, I am sure I would have praised it to the hills. As it is I do, however, feel that it fails with its price-value ratio.

Now I absolutely adore the ground that Dick Klemensen is walking on. He has done more than ANYONE over the years to help carry Hammer's candle on and in his publication has always provided groundbreaking Hammer (and general Brit Horror) related research. And LAST BUS TO BRAY is indeed a typical example for the kind of publication that noone else but Dick would touch. It will be well thumped by me over the years (no doubt about that) but given all the numerous layout issues and the price it retails at readers may indeed think twice about forking out their hard earned cash for this LSoH Special.

Hammer what ifs and if onlys

by Matthew ConiamI first watched Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb on the 23rd of December, 1983. I was ten years old, and by the time 1984 rolled round I’d seen it at least twice more. Since then it’s become a regular Christmas ritual, and I’ve often written about my uncertainty as to the ratio of objectivity to nostalgia informing my conviction that it is by a comfortable margin the best film Hammer ever made in the nineteen-seventies.
But could it have been even better? It was very nearly considerably different. I’m not sure how much difference it would have made to the end product if director Seth Holt had lived long enough to supervise the final cut: it's to Michael Carreras’s credit that the film never overtly betrays the presence of a substitute director.
What is regrettable, however, is the loss of Peter Cushing in the central role of Professor Fuchs. Not because there’s much wrong with Andrew Keir, Cushing’s last minute replacement when he left the film to tend his ailing wife: there isn’t. But all Hammer fans know that a Cushing performance adds to any movie. It's partly that he spells Hammer like no other actor, and his presence is so reassuring a symbol of continuity in the studio’s output, a fixed point in the studio's fifties, sixties and seventies incarnations. It’s such a shame he wasn’t able to lend that presence to this one. Had he done so, I think we’d all be calling the film a masterpiece.
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I suspect all Hammer fans have their own list of what ifs - not just the might have beens and the nearly weres, but also the if onlys, where our imaginations run wilder even than that of James Carreras looking at a picture of Victoria Vetri and a rubber dinosaur.
As well as the Hammer films that really did nearly star Cary Grant, Brigitte Bardot and Vincent Price there are those which were never even considered but of which I dream all the same: Barbara Steele in The Vampire Lovers, for instance.
But no fantasy casting can seem as odd today as the genuine what if prospect of Bernard Bresslaw as the Creature in Curse of Frankenstein.
The irony has been noted that Christopher Lee owed his Hammer career to the very thing that had stood in his way as a leading man hitherto: his slightly otherworldly demeanour and his considerable height. But how much stranger that those same characteristics might have made a horror icon of Bernie! All the studio were looking for when casting the role, when Bresslaw was top of their list, was physical suitability, and Bresslaw would certainly have fit the bill in that department. Separate his features from their association with goonish comedy roles in the Carry On series and they start to seem surprisingly appropriate too. Bresslaw was soon to appear in Blood of the Vampire, written by Jimmy Sangster, and he was certainly no stranger to Hammer, for whom he appeared on a number of occasions, most notably as a comic Jekyll and Hyde in The Ugly Duckling.
But still, how strange to speculate on what might have happened - both to Bresslaw's career and to Lee's - if the original casting had prevailed! Might Bresslaw have become an international horror star? Probably not - he could never have played Dracula.
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Then there are all those unrealised projects, the famous posters for movies that were never made: Victim of His Imagination, Nessie, Vampirella or of course my personal favourite, Zeppelin Vs Pterodactyls. And imagine if The Hound of the Baskervilles had rung the box office bell a little more resoundingly, and Hammer had responded with a whole series of richly coloured, horror-tinged Sherlock Holmes movies. That, surely, is a prospect to savour: imagine Hammer’s take on The Speckled Band, The Devil’s Foot, The Sussex Vampire, The Creeping Man...
This what-if game can get mighty infectious!
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Returning to Blood From the Mummy's Tomb, though, I can't help thinking that we can justifiably curse the fact that Valerie Leon's was a one-shot performance for the company, and in particular that she was never cast as a vampiress.
Critical consensus has never been too effusive about her performance in Blood, but time has rightly made an icon of her all the same. None of the studio's other starlets was so genuinely spooky, so weirdly sensual and ethereal, an effect accentuated by her transfixing eyes and eerily melodious voice.
I don't know and will never understand why her performance is so consistently underrated, or how it didn't lead to other starring roles for the studio (or, indeed, any studio: it's her only ever movie lead). How did she never get to play a vampire? Think of her in Adrienne Corri's role in Vampire Circus, Anoushka Hempel's in Scars of Dracula, even, dare I say it, Martine Beswick's in Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde? Leon had a very special quality that was tailor-made for horror films, that went far deeper than mere gorgeousness and physical majesty, the only attributes that were tapped in her more frequent appearances in British comedies.
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But the Hammer what if my imagination grapples with most often is one that was all set to become reality, and yet remains almost completely unimaginable: Lust For a Vampire directed by Terence Fisher.
The first, Bray-era classics with which Fisher's name is synonymous seem a world away from the later, more brazenly exploitational films of the studio’s final decade, of which Lust For a Vampire is so emblematic. It's hard placing Terence Fisher and Yutte Stensgaard in the same universe - the idea of them collaborating on the same film is just ridiculous.
And yet, but for a twist of fate, not only would the film have starred Cushing in Ralph Bates’s pervy headmaster role, but it would indeed have been directed by Fisher, who was signed and ready before being forced to pull out after breaking his leg in a traffic accident.
I just can't begin to imagine how the film might differ with Fisher at the helm, what he would have chosen to play up or play down, how he would have handled the script's emphasis on softcore eroticism, if he would have attempted to reign in some of its more absurd or excessive contrivances or just rolled with them, and what his working relationship with Fine and Style would have been.
I don't have many bad words to say about Lust as it exists: it seems to me one of the most unfairly maligned of the later Hammers. But still, Fisher's version is one I'd give anything to see, and an unfortunate loss to the studio's filmography.
.Ready when you are, Mr Fisher...
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What unrealised Hammer projects most excite your imagination? If any readers would like to submit their own favourite what ifs and if onlys in the comments, please do so!

The Scarlet Blade (1963)

Following the success of Pirates of Blood River (1962), director John Gilling was asked to again helm Hammer’s next swashbuckling adventure The Scarlet Blade.

Jack Hedley as Robin Hood, sorry: The Scarlet Blade, has to go undercover and battle for his king against his opponents. Though set during the English Civil War there really is very little that differentiates The Scarlet Blade from the more traditional Robin Hood fare. It has all the typical elements of undercover war fare in the forest, friends being lost and rescued, scheming baddies, chivalric heroes and ladies who can’t help but fall for the outlaw. Nothing we haven’t seen done much better before.

The film is sorely lacking in big name actors. Oliver Reed is the one charismatic actor in the production and pretty much carries the movie with his moody looks and mellifluous voice. His character, Capt. Tom Sylvester, becomes traitor against Cromwell out of love for his Colonel’s (Lionel Jeffries) daughter (June Thorburn) who has turned against her father to support the king. When he discovers that his love interest has herself fallen for The Scarlet Blade the pendulum swings back and he again betrays the royal supporters. When his treachery gets discovered he outs the Colonel’s daughter as one of the main key figures in the fight against Cromwell and ends up being shot by her protective father.

It is hard not to root for his egotistic cause at times as he is clearly used and his emotions are being played with by the nominal heroes of the movie. It is these moral dilemmas that on the one hand distinguish The Scarlet Blade from similar productions, on the other hand make it such an utter disappointment: We see a daughter turn against her father and use a lovesick soldier for her cause; a father trying to protect her daughter from becoming a victim of the very same system he supports; a jilted lover twice turning traitor and finally ending up being pretty much the only one of the main cast who ends up dead, yet he’s the one who’s the least of all interested in any one side.

This moral ambivalence is carried through right to the end of the very short running time, though rather than making this an exercise in ethical dilemma, the overall ending just comes across as an anti-climactic let down. After barely 80 minutes – at a time when the viewer could usually expect some kind of show down between the opposing parties – we see The Scarlet Blade and the Colonel’s daughter escaping from Cromwell’s troops and finding refuge in a gypsy camp run by Michael Ripper in quite possibly his worst make up job ever. The Colonel searches through the camp. Now will he or will he not discover daughter and lover there? Will The Scarlet Blade be captured and battle him to the death? Will we see a fight scene that will be imitated by all the teenage boys on their way out of the cinema?

Err, no…..

He discovers both of the fugitives, then turns to Michael Ripper and advises him to make sure his gypsies remain in the forest. As he rides off the credits announce that we have just seen a “Hammer Production”.

This denouement is by far Hammer’s worst ending ever. Forget about Dracula removing his stake or seeing the devil in To the Devil… A Daughter being killed off by a simple stone. The Scarlet Blade will have you look at your neighbour in sheer disbelief with a quiet look of “What the….” on your face.

Jack Hedley is a very competent actor, but not the first person you’d have in mind for a swashbuckling debonair role. He is generally better suited for authoritative, grumpy old man parts as in Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper (1982).

For June Thorburn this would prove to be her second last movie. A promising career that had previously included Peter Cushing’s Fury at Smuggler’s Bay (also directed by John Gilling) was cut short when she died heavily pregnant in a plane accident.

The film is Suzan Farmer’s debut Hammer production. She has very little to do in her small part as Hedley’s sister Constance Beverley, a few lines and a terrified scream when she is led away by Cromwell’s troups.

John Gilling would soon direct his most famous movies, Hammer’s Cornish Horror duo The Reptile (1966) and Plague of the Zombies (1966).

Overall The Scarlet Blade is quite pedestrian and generally very unexciting. It is by far not Hammer’s worst swashbuckler - that dubious honour will have to go to A Challenge for Robin Hood (1967), an utterly charmless movie with moustachioed Merry Men that look as if they’re right out of an early porn production -, but it certainly was far from being one of the company’s best either.