Top Fifteen Hammers:Part # 3.

Posted as an extremely belated addition to what was the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon.

5. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973)

All of the Cushing/Fisher Frankenstein movies are great, but for some reason it’s this final entry that sticks most strongly in my memory. Although they ploughed on with a few more ill-starred ventures in subsequent years, for me ‘..Monster From Hell’ really marks the bitter end of Hammer horror, and, clearly doing its best to stretch out a shoe-string budget as unrelenting gloom descended over the whole British film industry, it is a conclusion to the Frankenstein saga as sickening, pitch black and claustrophobic as one could hope for.

Many of Hammer’s later films made a point of including gruesome asylum sequences, but nothing they offered up was quite as relentlessly grim as the institution that houses the goings-on here, with almost the entire movie confined to a cramped, brick-walled dungeon that is the polar opposite of the Matte-painted fantasias beloved of Fisher’s ‘50s and ’60s films. The twinkle-eyed humour and theatrical winks of earlier productions are also stone dead by this point, as a character like John Stratton’s incompetent asylum director, who might have been a chortlesome comic relief figure in earlier instalments, is rendered simply as a weak-minded, lecherous fool. No laughs here, just cowed, brutalised inmates, bully-boys with rubber hoses and nothing no escape to outside except the cemetery. The “monster from hell” itself is – deliberately, I think – a fucking travesty of a thing, a pathetic, drooling disaster that looks like a shaved gorilla drunkenly superglued with random off-cuts from the Pinewood make up department; it’s almost painful to look at.

We all know who the real monster from hell is though, and towering above everything, Cushing. Of all of his increasingly nuanced portrayals of the Baron, I think this final outing is arguably the best. By this stage of course, his character had just about reached rock bottom, the combined weight of his previous outrages having reduced him to a truly abysmal set of circumstances. But when he first appears, Frankenstein, ever steadfast, refuses to acknowledge this at all. On the contrary, he seems like a force of order and stability, a champion of progress within the otherwise stygian and entropic world of the asylum… making the gradual realisation of how insane he is a truly ghastly thing to behold.

We know it’s coming of course, we’ve seen it all before, but even here Cushing can still make it seem fresh. The key moment for me I think is when, after it becomes clear his piss-poor gorilla-monster is nothing to shout about, he immediately starts making preparations for ‘mating’ the misbegotten thing with mute servant girl Madeline Smith, casually discussing what a triumph the off-spring of their union might be as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, leaving us to join with juvenile lead Shane Briant in our slack-jawed disbelief at such a cracked, barbaric, just plain CRAZED leap of logic, emanating from a man who still just about maintains the exterior of an efficient, gifted scientist. It’s rare to watch a Frankenstein film in which we actually, personally, feel the urge to smash the Baron’s instruments and burn the place to the ground, but that’s the level of queasiness that’s induced here.

And yet, still some sympathy remains. More than just the end of Hammer Horror, ‘..Monster from Hell’ is a grisly full stop at the end of the whole golden age of international gothic horror cinema that ‘Curse of Frankenstein’ kicked off some fifteen years earlier, concluding the cycle on a note of anguished, gore-strewn bleakness, as Cushing’s drawn, cadaverous face stares straight to camera, calmly addressing the crowd of senseless, unwashed lunatics who have just bloodily torn apart the innards of his final, hopeless monster; “Go back to your rooms. There is nothing more for you to see. It’s all over now… all over.”

4. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

Although I have a soft spot for the general oddness of Conan Doyle’s characters and tales, I’m not really a big Sherlock Holmes fan to be honest. The central business of investigative logic and puzzle-solving has never interested me much… just give me mystery and monsters and inexplicable hullaballoo in my Victorian pulp. Thankfully, Terrence Fisher and his collaborators seem to have broadly agreed with my sentiment, and there is precious little investigative padding to be found in Hammer’s only proper Holmes movie – a film I would point to before any of the Frankensteins or Draculas as a perfect distillation of everything that made Hammer’s late ‘50s / early ‘60s output so special.

I wrote about it a little bit here, but to reheat a few key points; like ‘Captain Clegg’, Bernard Robinson’s gorgeous gothic production design and Jack Asher’s photography render this a horror movie in all but name – I honestly think it’s one of the most beautiful films Hammer ever made. Just about every element of the colour, lighting and mise en scene pleases me greatly on some deep, sub-conscious level. And even more so than ‘Captain Clegg’, the cast is a phenomenal assemblage of oddball British talent. Cushing and Morell are so definitive as Holmes and Watson, I get unbearably disappointed whenever I see the characters played by other actors, and in addition we’ve got the combined ham-age of Francis DeWolff, John LeMesurier and Miles Malleson to contend with, plus Christopher Lee in what I think is one of his most tolerable and sympathetic performances as the nervous and incompetent Sir Henry Baskerville, a great villainous turn from the somewhat-less-renowned Ewen Solon, and Marla Landi as a memorably deranged femme fatale. Despite being assembled from elements that could very easily have produced a film as static, dated and dreary as anything to come out of Britain in the ‘50s, Fisher as usual keeps things moving at a steady pace, with no shortage of exciting goings on thrown in at regular intervals (sacrificial knife murder! spider attack!), and, well… like many of the films on this list, it’s just BLOODY GOOD essentially, and on some days there’s no higher accolade than that.

3. The Devil Rides Out (1968)

Brief thoughts on this one can be found in my old 25 Favourite Horror Films run-down, and probably don’t need repeating in a similar format here. But if you’ll allow me to begin on a bit of a tangent: did any of you lot catch all the controversy surrounding the blu-ray re-release of ‘Devil Rides Out’ last year? I had it pre-ordered and was really looking forward to catching up with it again (I’ve currently still only got it on an old VHS), until I caught wind of the new edition’s compulsory ‘improvements’ (see here for details), at which point cancelation was the only option.

My refusal to accept these changes has less to do with a kneejerk hatred of digital tinkering with old films (although I’ll admit, there’s probably an element of that), and more to do with the fact that they’ve gone and 'fixed' some of the things that I actually liked best about the original film. I know that writers and fans often tend to gripe about the poor quality of the effects in ‘The Devil Rides Out’, and that apparently the filmmakers weren’t entirely satisfied with them either, but I would like to go on record as saying that, personally, I think those scenes are great. I like the fact that the supernatural apparitions in this film simply appear, plain as day, with no thunder or lightning or palaver. The way that bug-eyed genies and giant spiders just turn up like they popped round to borrow a cup of sugar makes things all the more frightening, and surprising, and just plain weird. So many of the more ‘sophisticated’ Satanic cult movies that followed tried to present their demons in a more allegorical or hallucinatory terms, but there’s no need to worry about the devil’s subtle machinations here – look, there he is, over there! The Goat of Mendes himself! Quick, run the bastard over!

In some ways, ‘The Devil Rides Out’ seems like a film that should have been made in 1938 rather than 1968; it seems absurd to think that a treatment of the material this pompous and straight-faced turned up in cinemas mere months before the far more modernist, self-aware approach taken by ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, but (and you probably saw this one coming) the sheer, bloody-minded imperial old-fashionedness is precisely what makes me love it so much. Throughout the history of cinema, black magic / Satanism movies have tended to be a rather peculiar business- even going back to ‘The Black Cat’ (1934 version) and ‘The Seventh Victim’, they’ve been couched as grotesque dreams or ambiguous psychological mysteries or as unearthly fantasias of some kind. But there’s no room for any of that bloody nonsense here. All you need to take on Hammer’s Devil is the love of God and an elephant gun. And a firm handshake, an aristocratic title and a state of the art motor car would probably help too. And look out for those foreigners – they’re sure to be up to no good, with their bad manners and shifty pagan ways. Who knows what really goes on in those dark, sultry nights in the depths of…. what? Well I don’t care if he is from Birmingham, where did he go to school for god’s sake? Keep an eye on him, that’s all I’m saying. Praise the lord, and pass the brandy.

Though it may have arrived a few decades late, it was ‘The Devil Rides Out’ that really set the standard for the kind of ‘normal’ Satanist movie that subsequent entries in this persistently strange sub-genre would proceed to mimic and spoof and deny and generally trample all over, and rightly so of course – the whole thing is antiquated and offensive and ridiculous. But for establishing the instantly dated rules and proceeding to stick to them with stiff upper-lipped determination as everyone else looks on and laughs, and for still managing to produce a powerful, entertaining and captivating film in the process, I will love Terrance Fisher & co. forever.

2. The Damned (1961)

Jospeh Losey’s ‘The Damned’ (‘These are The Damned’ to US readers) was one of the first films I ever wrote about for this site, and whilst I honestly wouldn’t recommend you go back and read that review (say what you like re: recent content here, but I’ve certainly got a lot better at writing about movies over the years), the film itself remains a mindblower.

Though it’s probably not a film many people would recognise as a Hammer production after the opening credits have rolled, said credits reveal that ‘The Damned’ was indeed part of the studio’s core output rather than one of their “farmed out” ventures, with such familiar figures as Anthony Hinds, Michael Carreras, Bernard Robinson and Arthur Grant all taking a bow on this decidedly uncharacteristic and controversial feature… and who can forget James Bernard’s singular (I hope) attempt to get down with the kids and play some rock n’ roll (“black leather, black leather, crash crash crash..”)?

Presumably ‘The Damned’ was initially cooked up to cash-in on the previous year’s successful ‘Village of the Damned’, but in Losey’s hands the material takes on a far more challenging, conflicted and multi-faceted aspect than the rather one-dimensional allegory of Wolf Rilla’s Wyndham adaptation, or indeed any of the era’s numerous other British sci-fi films. Never less than immoderately ambitious, and on fine straining-at-the-leash form here, the director mixes up a whole mess of decidedly unusual parallel story arcs – Oliver Reed’s pre-Clockwork Orange psychopathy and quasi-incestuous domination of his sister, Alexander Knox’s anguished humanism and self-destructive pursuit of cold war oblivion, Viveca Lindfors’ rootless beatnik sculptress – ploughing them all into a central aesthetic conflict between the quaint, parochial atmosphere of contemporary British cinema and the brutal reality of military-industrial Ballardian bleakness lurking just around the corner, beyond the barbed wire fence on the clifftops; Losey (as usual) offers no apologies to anyone as he instigates what must surely be the most unrelenting torrent of politicised, quasi-avant garde b-movie destruction ever wrought upon the quiet streets of Weymouth.

A ridiculous, unsettling and completely unique car crash of pulp sci-fi absurdity, misunderstood teenage nihilism, eerie seaside atmospherics and tormented mid-century paranoia, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who enjoys the kind of stuff I write about on this blog but hasn’t seen ‘The Damned’ should rectify that situation immediately. Since I wrote my original review, a cheap, dandy looking Region 2 DVD has become available, so now you have no excuse – see it, see it, see it, as critics who get quoted on the side of buses are apt to say.

1. The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

The tone of this list has focused heavily on the nostalgic reveries and general comfort factor of watching Hammer films, and as such it seems fitting that it took me about 0.3 seconds to decide that my favourite one is ‘Plague of the Zombies’.

Few would contend that it’s the studio’s BEST film (although it’s pretty damn solid), and it’s certainly not as weird or challenging or accomplished as my top tier of favourite non-Hammer British horrors, but nonetheless, it’s the one that provides the warmest memories for me – the one that I can watch again and again without ever getting sick of it. It’s like a member of the family. I wish I could marry it, or take it on long walks, or… well, probably best end this paragraph right there. You get what I mean.

I ranked it at a surprisingly low #13 in my Favourite Horror Films list a few years back, and, as per ‘The Devil Rides Out’, you can read some of my primary thoughts about it there.

I don’t think ‘Plague..’ was the first Hammer film I saw during my formative years of late night TV viewing (if memory served, I might have sleepily suffered my way through ‘Satanic Rites of Dracula’ and ‘Lust For a Vampire’ before getting to this one), but it was the first one that I REALLY LIKED; the first one that really struck a chord with me, that made me laugh and made me feel shivery and enchanted and made me want to watch a lot more films like it and find out about who made them, and where, and why. As such it played a pretty pivotal role in bringing me to where I am now, writing this blog and so forth. Most of the late night horror films I watched in those days, I enjoyed simply because they were funny and crazy, but (whilst it still had a lot of knowing humour about it) ‘Plague..’ was the first one I remember seeing (beyond some of the obvious classics) that I felt I could watch seriously, as a good story well told, and could enjoy for its rich atmosphere, and for the craftsmanship and obvious enthusiasm that went into its production design and performances. It’s the first one that really drew me into the British (and by extension, European) Horror World, so to speak, rather than just leaving me a smirking spectator.

I liked it so much in fact that I recall I sampled most of the dialogue and music from it, pushing a microphone against the mono TV speaker, ostensibly to use it in some sort of botched music project, but actually just so that I could walk around playing it in my headphones, reliving the experience of the film, meaning that to this day I can recite half of Andre Morell’s dialogue from memory, and do most of the voodoo chanting too. Quite what inspired such obsessive behaviour, who knows. I’m sure I could bore you senseless talking about how superb I think Morell’s performance is in this film, about how my respect for John Gilling as a writer and director grows each time I (re)watch one of his films, about how utterly jaw-dropping and endlessly evocative the graveyard dream sequence with Jacqueline Pierce’s decapitation is, and how it pretty much encapsulates everything that I love about horror movies in the space of about three minutes…. but I’ve done all that before, and probably will again, so let’s just leave it at that, and say that after viewing it approximately once a year for about a decade, I still can’t wait until the next time I get a chance to sit down and watch ‘Plague of the Zombies’ again. It really makes me happy.

Top Fifteen Hammers:Part # 2.

Posted as part of the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon.

10. Cash on Demand (1961)

At the risk of making them sound like a particularly successful biscuit factory, there is something about the level of craftsmanship and quality control Hammer maintained during their peak years that really sets their films apart. A combination of technical know-how and creative self-belief that allowed them to take to take an unambitious b-picture like this one and turn it into something special – an engrossing, affecting and quietly timeless little number, with all the requisite elements for a fine, low budget motion picture, all in their proper place.

In lesser hands, Jacques Gillies’ source play could easily have become fodder for a teeth-grinding exercise in quota quickie tedium, centring as it does on one of the more polite bank heists in cinema history, as bullish conman Andre Morell forcibly intrudes into the hermetic world of tyrannical suburban bank manager Peter Cushing. Whilst the film’s setting may be quaint however, its crime elements are excellently handled, exemplary in their edge-of-seat tension building, generating a sense of menace and suspense here that the makers of higher octane thrillers would do well to match.

That aside though, it’s the performances that really make it stand out. Seeing Cushing and Morell – two of my favourite actors – butt heads is very much the equivalent of a British character actor title fight, with both really punching on top form. Always a genial and domineering presence when he’s given a lead role to sink his teeth into, Morell brings the same sense of authority and determination that made him so memorable in ‘Plague of the Zombies’ and the BBC version of ‘Quatermass & The Pit’, but tempered here with a caddish, upper-crust kind of destructive criminality that makes his character a truly nasty piece of work. Cushing, for his part, always excelled at playing torn, schizophrenic characters – men either conflicted and uncertain, or else hiding their true nature behind a wall of repression – and here, in the character of Henry Fordyce, he finds an opportunity to fully express this theme within a real world context, leading to what is arguably one of his best ever performances.

Fordyce’s Dickens-inspired character arc, which sees him rediscovering his long-buried capacity for human feeling by means of a Scrooge-like last reel rebirth, could easily have been played as bit of cloying sentimentality, but Cushing instead adopts a deeper, more subtle approach to the part, making sure that hints of Fordyce’s humanity break through his shell even during his most intensely dislikeable moments. For all his evident faults and petty cruelties, Fordyce’s eccentric gestures and slight uncertainties of judgement serve all the times to suggest a parallel, internalised world in which he is indeed a man who feels and loves and does what he believes to be right, away from the eyes of his cowed employees, and probably even those of his unseen family. It’s the same essential key note that is repeated throughout Cushing’s numerous portrayals of tormented villainy, reminding us that though a man may be capable of monstrous acts, there is no such thing as a man who is a monster; that within the breast of even the most craven, despicable wretch, a human heart still beats. A fairly basic point, whether examined through the prism of a horror, a crime story or a straight drama, but it is rare to see it expressed with the level of lyricism and conviction Cushing brings to his modest part in this none-more-modest movie.

9. Brides of Dracula (1960)

Although it’s probably one of the best-loved Hammer horrors amongst fans, there’s something about ‘Brides of Dracula’ that has never quite sat well with me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really, really like it – hence its position on this list. But something about it bugs me. I guess I see it as film of two halves really; the first half, set in and around Castle Meinster is admittedly stunning, no question. One of the most awe-inspiring bits of high gothic artistry ever produced in popular cinema. The sheer depth and scale of the illusion Fisher, Robinson, Asher et al create here from a few sets, a few matte paintings and a few lighting effects is truly remarkable, probably the zenith of Bray-era Hammer’s always excellent production design, with a grand and tragic narrative to match, including a devastating turn from Martita Hunt as the mother of our errant vampire. Not that making ‘60s gothic horror movies was a competitive sport or anything, but if it ever came down to an instant KO, bare-knuckled tournament, I think the opening half hour of ‘Brides..’ takes down Corman, and maybe even beats Mario Bava on points; incredible stuff.

After that though, for me at least, it kinda gets a bit lost. All that faffing about at the boarding school kinda saps the film’s momentum and, whilst I’ve frequently heard it praised elsewhere, I can’t help but find the conclusion a bit of a let-down. Yeah, the stuff with Van Helsing cauterising his infected wound is pretty damn cool, but I get frustrated at the titular brides’ failure to do much beyond just stand around, and the method of Count Meinster’s final demise just strikes me as bloody silly – the genesis of Hammer’s unfortunate tradition of killing off their vampires in increasingly stupid and anti-climactic ways, swiftly leading to a situation where their arch-fiends seem so vulnerable it’s no wonder Dracula spent most of his later outings lurking about in a darkened crypt. Between running water, hawthorn bushes, inconveniently shaped shadows and randomly angled pieces of wood, just walking down the high street must have been an obstacle course of death for the poor sod. But anyway – ‘Brides of Dracula’. Um, to be honest, I haven’t seen this one for a while at the time of writing – probably long overdue for a re-watch, so don’t take me to task too harshly if you disagree with my assessment.

8. She (1965)

Ok, so you’d be hard-pressed to really defend this one as a legitimately good film – by any reasonable standard it’s rambling, shoddy, unconvincing and dated. But on the level of pure cinematic comfort food, it’s perfect.

Claiming it as “the closest thing Hammer ever did to an Indiana Jones movie” seems a bit wrong-headed given the film’s origin in the H. Rider Haggard novel that at least partially formed the basis for the exotic pulp adventure aesthetic that the creators of the Jones films drew upon so heavily all those years later, but nonetheless, it’s a good one-line summation of what’s going on here, and Peter Cushing, in his tougher-than-usual portrayal of Haggard’s Major Horace Holly, is every inch the precursor of Harrison Ford, rocking stubble, leathers and an ever-present hipflask (pity he wasn’t around for casting when Sean Connery got the dad part in ‘..Last Crusade’).

Post-dubbed Ursula Andress doesn’t do a lot for me here I’m sad to say, but I suppose there’s only do much you can do with the role of a stone-faced 1,000 year old goddess, and needless to say, the rest of the cast more than more up for her lack of charisma – Morell! Lee! And, uh… Cribbins?! Well, why the hell not. It’s even kinda nice to see John Richardson from ‘Black Sunday’ as the juvenile lead, even if he is characteristically annoying. Likewise, you may chuckle at the polystyrene boulders and wobbly columns, but I’d defy you to make a better film set in the uncharted wilds of North Africa without leaving Herefordshire – well done people! (Actually it seems they headed over the Isreal for some of the desert stuff, but, uh… my point still stands, more or less.)

A perfect exemplar of my firmly-held belief that nothing that begins with Peter Cushing and Bernard Cribbins instigating a brawl in a belly-dancing club can possibly be bad, ‘She’ is utterly undemanding, hugely enjoyable, and basically I want it on TV every rainy afternoon from now until the end of eternity.

7. The Reptile (1966)

Another one I’ve written about previously, but what else can I tell you friends - I love The Reptile. I mean, you’d perhaps be forgiven for thinking that a b-level production with a plot synopsis that barely extends beyond “there is a reptile” might not add up to much, but as was so often the case during Hammer’s classic years, John Gilling and his collaborators really rise above. Fetid Cornish moorland atmosphere, weird echoes of high imperial decadence, Michael Ripper finally getting to step up to the plate for a steadfast hero role, Jacqueline Pierce’s big dark, dreamy eyes, and of course, Noel Willman’s sitar-smashing frenzy – one of the most brilliant and beserk moments in any Hammer picture. Yeah, an evening with this Reptile is time well spent.

6. Captain Clegg (1962)

So, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this one: how do you fancy watching an early ‘60s Terrence Fisher film based on Russell Thorndike’s Edwardian pulp classic ‘Dr. Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh’, in which Peter Cushing plays a notorious pirate captain who narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose, reinventing himself as the mild-mannered vicar of the rural Kent parish in which his former self is ‘buried’, and from which he now orchestrates an intricate smuggling operation? With the help of cohorts including coffin-maker Michael Ripper and two-fisted libertine Oliver Reed, Clegg and his gang gallop across the night-haunted marshes in the guise of luminous, skeleton-suited ‘marsh phantoms’, running rings around His Majesties sour-faced revenue-men in a noble quest to raise the living standards of the local peasantry and provide the upstanding folk of South-East England with a steady supply of cheap booze, aaaand… well, basically, if your aesthetic sensibilities are anything like mine, you are probably straining at the leash by this point to watch what surely must be one of the GREATEST FILMS OF ALL-TIME, much as I was before I finally tracked down a decent copy of this harder-to-find-than-it-should-be Hammer epic and sat down with some nut-brown ale to experience what was sure to be a rare state of Bodhisattva-like oneness with the universe.

As it turns out, the reality of ‘Captain Clegg’ (better known in the US as ‘Night Creatures’) couldn’t possibly live up to my off-the-scale expectations, but that didn’t stop it from still being really, really good. With both feet firmly planted in the tradition of Hammer’s “pirate movies without pirate ships” half-term swashbucklers, there is perhaps a tad more theatrical faffing about and inconsequential toing and froing going on here than 21st century viewers may be comfortable with, but that aside, there is still so, so much to enjoy. Even though it’s not strictly a horror film, the fog-shrouded nocturnal atmosphere, the fixation with graves, executions and premature burials and the sight of the ‘marsh phantoms’ charging across the moors like precursors to the Blind Dead all add up to one of Hammer’s best ever gothic fantasias – an approach that is very much in keeping with the feel of Thorndike’s decidedly weird stories. Seeing Cushing transform from an absent-minded country parson to a merciless criminal gang leader in a split second is a sheer joy, and when the great man takes up his blade for a bit of chandelier-bothering swashbucklage towards the end, well… I’m certainly a happy camper. I probably don’t need to tell you that the supporting cast are superb, the production design is second to none, and aside from anything else, how great is it to see a Hammer film in which we’re invited to cheer on a bunch of booze-sozzled lags, decadent romantics and scurvy outlaws as they get one over on the forces of austere state bureaucracy? It’s like a version of ‘Whiskey Galore’ where shit just got real, and another kick in the pants to those over-reaching auteurists who’d seek to identify Fisher directly with the puritanical morality of his horror films.

To be concluded...

Gothic Horror Round-up:The Hound of The Baskervilles(Terrence Fisher, 1959)

Oh, what a treat. Perhaps unfairly neglected in the Hammer canon due to its nominal non-horror status, what could be better cinematic comfort food than this? Peter Cushing and Andre Morell portraying Holmes and Watson so definitively that I think they were occupying the characters in my mind long before I saw the film, and Christopher Lee essaying precisely the kind of role he's best at, the pompous and ineffectual Sir Henry Baskerville. John Le Mesurier is Barrymore the family retainer, world class ham Francis De Wolfe is Dr Mortimer, Ealing regular Miles Malleson is the doddering old bishop, and the cast is rounded out with a veritable coachload of other second string character actors, not a Bland Young Man amongst them. Even Italian actress Marla Landi gives it her best shot, adding a welcome dose of vengeful craziness to her role as the token pretty girl.

Everybody seems to be having a lovely time, and to be honest, when scheming gentleman farmer Ewen Solon invites the occupants of Baskerville Hall round to his place for dinner, I was sad that the damned plot got in the way, denying us a scene in which everybody sits around his rustic table, having a good laugh over a flagon or two of cider. Why can’t they all just get along?

But intervene the plot must, and whilst I’m unable to pass comment on the extent to which this is a faithful adaptation of the story (never bothered reading Conan Doyle to be honest), it’s certainly a good script from Peter Bryan – sharp, characterful and well-paced as you could hope for from a bit of 50s/60s b-movie hokum, exemplifying all the virtues of ‘quality’ held dear by partisans of Hammer’s pre-’66 output. As might well be expected, Fisher’s direction follows suit, and after the groundbreaking success of their recent Frankenstein and Dracula movies the studio clearly made no bones about playing this one about as close to a gothic horror as was humanly possible, incorporating strong scenes of villainy and bloodletting (not to mention a memorable set-piece that sees Lee menaced by a tarantula) that seem mild today but must have been fairly startling back in ’59.

Above all here, the production design is absolutely suburb, the eerie fog-strewn moors, the abandoned chapel and the underground caverns all contributing some of the most richly atmospheric backdrops ever seen in a Hammer picture, the autumnal cinematography looking better than ever, with subtle deployment of blue and green lighting amid the deep brown n’ black raising the film’s exterior sequences to a level approaching that of Bava’s early ‘60s masterpieces or the first half of Hammer’s own ‘Brides of Dracula’ - a definitive piece of technicolor gothic.

I’m not one of those who insists that Hammer’s Bray-era output was automatically superior to their subsequent releases, but still, it’s sad that the ubiquity of some of their later, sillier efforts tends to leave superb, low-key films like this one in the shadows. Should you ever need an example of all the more refined characteristics that stuffier Hammer-heads maintain the studio lost amid their embrace of flares, boobs, dinosaurs and shoddy methods of killing vampires, ‘..Baskervilles’ is the one to go for.

#13 Plague of the Zombies(John Gilling, 1966)

“Would you like to tell me about your dream, Peter? It sometimes helps..”

An unusual choice for ‘favourtie Hammer movie’ perhaps (back when the Watching Hammer weblog was asking people to pick their favourites, it didn’t even turn up in anyone’s top ten), but John Gilling’s “Plague of the Zombies” holds a special place in my heart. I’m not sure why really – partly just nostalgia for seeing it for the first time on late night TV many years ago I’m sure, but more than any other Hammer film, it just makes my nerves twitch and my senses warp in the best possible way.

And, looked at on a more objective basis, “Plague..” does thankfully prove pretty unfuckable with as a solid, mid-table British horror flick. Andre Morrel is absolutely superb as our hero, Sir James Forbes, holding the sanity of the afflicted village together with a mixture of aristocratic authority, courageous practicality and humane concern that he should have had bottled and sold to lesser horror movie protagonists. As in his role as Professor Quatermass in the definitive BBC version of “Quatermass & The Pit”, Morell is a joy to watch here, his stirring delivery of the script’s frequently absurd dialogue and his character’s vigorous, two-fisted approach to the action marking him out as the best leading man Hammer ever had, Peter Cushing notwithstanding. I really wish they could have cast him in more leading roles.

More than anything else, my love of British horror films probably crystalised during the scene in which Sir James and his younger doctor friend are busy doing the washing up after dinner (and oh what a sterling example of a Victorian peer he is - elbow deep in suds without complaint in the middle of a mysterious plague outbreak, rather than leaving the women/servants to get on with it while he sees to more ‘important’ matters - good chap), when the following exchange transpires;

“But we must have a body to examine, we can’t possibly work without one!”
“If you’re thinking of applying for an exhumation, I can tell you now --”
“Apply for nothing, we’ll dig one up.”
“We’ll WHAT?”
“Dig one up – that one they buried today will do, nice and fresh.”
“But we can’t just start --”
“Why not? There’s a full moon, couldn’t be better. We’ll start off about midnight.”

Amazing. And joy is heaped upon joy when said escapade sees Sir James being very politely arrested by Michael Ripper as the local copper – “and on what charge, Constable?”, “ooh let’s see.. graverobbing I should think, Sir”.

By its very nature, the script for “Plague..” is stranger, more imaginative and more action-packed than your average mid-sixties Hammer, its tale of the decadent squire of a small Cornish village importing Haitian voodoo to help resurrect a new workforce for his ailing tin mine so batty, it’s hard to do anything else but just sit back and accept it in stunned good humour, especially as relatively authentic-sounding voudoun drums start to pound ceaselessly on the soundtrack, and the iconic oatmeal-faced, cassock-clad zombies start to march abroad on the barren moors, menacing the classically nightgowned Diane Clare in an astounding bit of cracked cross-cultural exchange, at least two years before George Romero brought our modern conception of ‘zombies’ to the masses.

More than just a great, fun horror movie though, “Plague…” has a heavy, potent atmosphere too it that just slays me - the doomed, fog-drenched village with its dilapidated stone cottages, the sodden, swampy woodland surrounding it and the rusty machinery of the obsolete tin mines – one has the feeling Sir James and friends are fighting not just against an evil weirdo and the fears of a superstitious peasantry, but against a whole tide of cosmic lethargy and empathy, threatening to drag this benighted corner of England literally back into the ground, food for the tunnel-dwelling zombies who trudge away eternally to the hypnotic beat of out-of-place Caribbean drums - a perfect, mindless proletariat, kept alive to serve the needs of industry until their rotting flesh literally falls from their bones.

As much as I love the exquisite production designs of Bray-era Hammer, this film has somewhat altogether different going on. Something thick and sulphurous, something more in tune with the atavistic, rural, subversive horrors of “Blood On Satan’s Claw” and “The Wicker Man”; something, in other words, that is more in tune with morbid teenage layabouts like me about ten years ago, staying up past their bedtime, smoking pot, letting the poorly tuned in images flicker before their eyes…

The first time I saw that scene – yeah, THE scene, the one everyone remembers from this movie - where Jacqueline Pearce rises from her grave, I was absolutely stunned, I could barely move or speak. Her dead eyes, her evil, Mona Lisa-like smile, the way Morell makes a grab for that shovel…. here, essentially, is EVERYTHING that defines the modern horror film, compressed into one, primal, heart-stopping sequence.
I could wax lyrical on that scene for pages, but thankfully you’ll be spared that, as the sequence has been immortalised for all time (well, for a few months at the very least) on Youtube, for you to experience yourself and draw your own conclusions;