Hammer House of Horror: Children of the Full Moon (Tom Clegg, 1980)

Up to this point in the series, the otherwise disparate episodes of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ have been united by their complete avoidance of the kind of gothic horror tropes with which the titular studio had become synonymous over the preceding decades.

True, we’ve had a witch episode, and a haunted house episode, but both have taken a rigorously quotidian approach to their subject matter, emphasising their present day settings and prioritising attention-grabbing narrative twists and the disruption of everyday life over the pulpy, escapist grandeur which defined Hammer’s glory days.

Like those episodes (and most others in the series, to be honest), ‘Children of the Full Moon’ centres around the travails of a recently married, contemporary British couple - in this case, smarmy young corporate solicitor Tom (Christopher Cazenove) and his wife Sarah (Celia Gregory), a possessor of no other immediately obvious character traits.

Whilst roaring around the West Country in their BMW in search of a holiday home belonging to Tom’s even-smarmier boss (the great Robert Urquhart, a veteran of ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’ (1956), no less), the young lovers fall victims to a supernatural joy-riding incident which leaves their swanky motor wrapped around a tree in what is, evidently, the middle of bloody nowhere.

This time around however, the fateful misadventures which befall our characters as they stomp off into the forest in search of help bring us such easy pleasures as creaking wrought iron gates surrounded by banks of spot-lit ground fog, dim lights burning in the windows of an imposing gothic revival manor house (Hampden House in Buckinghamshire, location fans may wish to note), shadowy cinematography, ominous howls in the night, axe-wielding folkloric woodcutters, creepy pale-skinned children in Victorian garb, and - as the episode’s title so subtly implies - some honest to goodness werewolves.

All of which proves a hell of a lot of fun, needless to say, even as Murray Smith’s knocked-off-in-a-weekend script remains sloppily predictable throughout.

In particular, it’s an absolute delight to see Diana Dors popping up here as the homely matriarch of the lycanthrope brood, giving it her all as usual, gradually dialling up the glassy-eyed malevolence behind her ingratiating smile and ‘Archers’-worthy Somerset drawl as things become increasingly hairy (pun intended) for our not-especially-likeable yuppie protagonists, perhaps adding a touch of ‘city vs country’ social tension to the thin subject matter in the process.

Sadly, we don’t get to see Diana experiencing a full-on werewolf transformation, but her opposite number (played by Jacob Witkin) eventually does the honours instead, and, in view of the TV drama level production budget and notorious difficulty of achieving decent werewolf effects, I think it must be acknowledged that the make up team here did a fair job.

Nonetheless, regular series director Tom Clegg was probably wise to minimise screen time for the werewolf, keeping the stalking beast safely confined to the darkened woods until the finale, whilst meanwhile allowing the bulk of the episode’s creepitude to instead fall upon the shoulders of wolf-family’s brood of creepy, carnivorous children.

Given that one of them plays the flute, that they have ‘suspicious’ foreign names like Tibor and Eloise, and that they wear incongruous Victorian costumes, M.R. James’ ‘Lost Hearts’ (or more likely, Lawrence Gordon Clark’s 1973 ‘Ghost Stories For Christmas’ adaptation thereof) would seem to be a prime influence here, which is certainly no bad thing.

As noted above, even casual horror fans will find very little to surprise them in the way this story pans out, but in a sense, the very predictability of Smith’s script serves to move the series away from the twist-heavy ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ type yarns which have tended to predominate in earlier episodes, and more towards something approaching good ol’, no nonsense gothic horror (albeit, a contemporary-set variation with a touch of ‘70s b-movie nastiness thrown in for good measure) - a change which I, for one, welcome with open arms.

In fact, if ‘Children of the Full Moon’ had been a segment of an Amicus anthology film from the preceding decade, it would have ranked as a pretty damn good one, which is high praise in this context. Definitely one of my favourite episodes so far in terms of pure entertainment value, even if its artistic merits may be questionable at best.

Hammer House of Horror: The House That Bled To Death (Tom Clegg, 1980)

Episode # 5. Pretty cool title, eh? Could have made a good sequel to ‘The House That Dripped Blood’ in an alternate world. But anyway, yes - this is ‘the haunted house one’, much as you’d expect.

Director Tom Clegg’s sparse feature credits however include such hard-boiled items as ‘Sweeney 2’ (1978) and ‘McVicar’ (1980), so it’s perhaps not surprising that, in keeping with all preceding episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’, he and writer David Lloyd entirely forgo gothic/period atmos here, instead telling the quotidian tale of a young family who have the misfortune to move into a pebble-dashed suburban semi previously occupied by an old codger who cut up his missus with a pair of Gurkha knives, which, after being eerily rediscovered by the new occupants, remain ominously nailed up on the kitchen wall.

When it came to this episode, I confess I mainly found myself enthralled by the ambient details and textures of lower middle class British life circa 1980 which fill almost every second of screen time. This is more-or-less where I came from, but my memories are sketchy, so I couldn’t help just drinking it all in, thinking about the life lived by my parents, and their neighbours and friends, around the time of my birth.

Of course, unlike husband/father Nicholas Ball here, my old man didn’t look and act like an attempt to genetically cross-breed Mel Gibson and David Hemmings; there’s something fishy about that guy right from the start I thought, although the double denim outfit he wears to the first day of his gig as a hospital porter is admittedly pretty spectacular.

(And just imagine, incidentally, a world in which it was a reasonable expectation for a bloke who works as a porter to have not only managed to buy his own family home, but to support his wife, who can comfortably stay home caring for the kid and doing the shopping. Outdated patriarchal assumptions aside, and bearing in mind that we probably shouldn’t regard an episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ as a barometer of social realism, it gives you an insight into how sorely the lot of the common (wo)man has declined over the years, doesn't it?)

BUT ANYWAY. Horror-wise, most of this episode is pretty excruciating and/or boring to be honest, as the family’s daughter is traumatised by the highly suspicious death of her beloved cat (who seems to have eviscerated himself on a broken window), and as her parents meanwhile develop a creepily intimate passive/aggressive relationship with their across-the-road neighbours (TV stalwarts Pat Maynard and Brian Croucher - the latter so shifty and pervy he makes Ball seem like a paragon of trust in comparison).

But, it’s difficult to resist the show-stopping chaos of the central children's party drenched in blood set-piece, and the story’s final act brings forth a splendidly cynical, self-reflexive twist which I really enjoyed (but won’t spoil), closing on a note of vengeful nastiness worthy of a Pete Walker movie.