Thursday 11 June 2015

Deathblog:
Sir Christopher Lee
(1922 - 2015)

Well, what can you say….. whatever we may have said, thought or muttered over the years regarding Sir Chris’s personality, way of life or acting ability, he was Christopher fucking Lee, and you are not. He bestrides the past sixty years of fantasy / genre cinema like a colossus, he was the last man standing among the 20th century’s gentleman horror stars, and it seems likely we’ll be returning for further thoughts and rambling on his legacy before too long in these pages (whether we like it or not).

In the meantime, let’s have some fun imagining what his reaction may have been seeing big pictures of Dracula covering social media and news pages, and otherwise bask in memories of some of the following, until such a point as we can leave our places of employment or nearest equivalent and watch some of ‘em. In no particular order:

The Devil Rides Out, The Wicker Man, Scream and Scream Again, City of the Dead, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Pirates of Blood River, Eugenie and the Story of Her Journey into Perversion, The Bloody Judge, The Whip and The Body, Horror Express, Taste the Blood of Dracula, Dracula 1972 AD, The Curse of Frankenstein, The Mummy, (Horror of) Dracula, Count Dracula, Deathline, Brides of Fu Manchu, The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Skull, The Devil Ship Pirates, The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism, She, The Gorgon, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave, Castle of the Living Dead, Hercules in the Haunted World, The Terror of the Tongs, Beat Girl, The Creeping Flesh, Curse of the Crimson Altar, House of Long Shadows, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Penny and the Poundall Case, The Howling II: My Sister is a Werewolf, and many more besides.

If that’s not worth an R.I.P. and a raised glass, I don’t know what is.

2 comments:

Elliot James said...

Some of the social website comments when the news was announced were near hysterical in their mourning and grief. Some were hysterical. I've never seen anything like it.

An underrated film, Horror Express was a very good acting vehicle for him and Cushing (and they played a real team), unlike the Dracula movies in which he was a side character. If only he could have made a Dracula film that followed the the basics of the Stoker novel as Oldman did.

Elliot James said...

Some of the social website comments when the news was announced were near hysterical in their mourning and grief. Some were hysterical. I've never seen anything like it.

An underrated film, Horror Express was a very good acting vehicle for him and Cushing (and they played a real team), unlike the Dracula movies in which he was a side character. If only he could have made a Dracula film that followed the the basics of the Stoker novel as Oldman did.