1971 - ISLAND OF THE BURNING DAMNED aka Night of the Big Heat

 Hammer films director Terence Fisher directed a few low budget films away from Hammer, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, The Earth Dies Screaming and this film Island of the Burning Damned.  None of these films can really compare with Fisher's best Hammer films although The Earth Dies Screaming isn't bad.  

The film is about an extraterrestrial invasion of earth with the vanguard of space aliens landing on an island.  The space aliens are unique in that they are to put it mildly warm blooded.  They begin to heat   the island up to temperatures of 100 degrees plus.  Into this situation comes Christopher Lee as a scientist trying to stop them and Peter Cushing as a doctor on the Island.

 

For a science fiction film a lot of time is spent on some love triangle between an author, his secretary  who parades around in a bikini and his wife who is the manger of the local pub.  After a while one hopes they will get back to the actual problem at hand instead of having to watch them work out their personal problems during an alien invasion.  

 

Terence Fisher was a good director of horror films but this low budget effort did not seem to bring out the best in his story telling despite the presence of old acting colleagues like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Towards the end of the film they finally show the alien invaders but the cheapo production apparently didn't have the money to make them convincing alien monsters.

Anyway, the running time is 94 minutes, the writers were Pip and Jane Baker and Ronald Liles.

1950 - SO LONG AT THE FAIR, attempt at a Hitchcock like thriller

A brother and sister travel to Paris to attend the Paris Exposition of 1889.  The brother mysteriously vanishes or does he?  Everyone the sister meets tells her that she traveled alone and no brother ever existed.  Let the mystery begin as the sister and some guy she meets attempt to figure our what is going on.

The stars are the very pretty Jean Simmons and British matinee idol Dirk Bogarde before he became a real actor.  The brother is played by David Tomlinson who everyone will recognize as Mr Banks from Mary Poppins.

This film kind of plods along as the mystery of the brother's disappearance unravels.  Frankly the film is so stolid and kind of lifeless that the resolution is disappointing.  The film really needed an Alfred Hitchcock to whip it into shape and juice up the suspense situations.

86 minutes, written by Hugh Mills.

1961 - CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, wrapping up the Hammer film weekend.

Hammer does what Hammer does best, make a lurid horror movie with sex and lots of violence.  Oliver Reed is the werewolf and he looks like Oliver Reed even in his werewolf makeup (ha ha good joke).

Anyway, the director Terence Fisher is good with this horror stuff and holds off showing the werewolf until the end of the film.  The story is completely original and not a remake of the unimpressive Wolf Man film that Universal filmed back in the 1940's.  There is lots of mumbo jumbo about good vs. evil and evil spirits inhabiting the bodies of innocent people to turn them into werewolves.  It's all presented very soberly even though it's a bunch of nonsense.

When it comes to acting, Oliver Reed is in a class by himself.  This guy just never heard of the word "restraint" when it came to giving a performance.  Even in the love scenes he's still kind of a scary guy. 

The film ends with the usual angry crowd scenes of people running around with torches and the silver bullet through the heart.  Hammer wrote a new werewolf story but couldn't entirely let go of the old cliches.

91 minutes.

1962 - THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, disappointing Hammer prouducion.

Well at least it's short because this is a slow moving version of the old melodrama that's been kicking around for years.  You think that The Phantom of the Opera would be perfect for the Hammer treatment but the director Terence Fisher seemed to get bogged down with the opera segments and the mystery of the Phantom.

The film has a decent cast, Heather Sears, Herbert Lom and Michael Gough.  They are certainly up to the Grand Guignol aspects of the story.

Universal took a shot at remaking The Phantom of the Opera in 1943 and it had a lot of the same issue as this version.  It had to many opera sequences and the mystery of the Phantom took forever to solve.  A boring film.

84 minutes.

1960 - BRIDES OF DRACULA, where's Dracula?

A very dumb French school teacher releases Baron Meinster, a vampire and all hell breaks loose.  It's up to Dr. Van Helsing to stop Meinster and his vampire brides.  

Apparently Brides of Dracula had a lot of censorship and script problems.  The film was rewritten by the producer, Jimmy Sangster,  Hammer's top screenwriter and Peter Cushing.  Major parts of the story at times just don't make any sense.  You can see there must have been some issues since Dracula isn't even in the film but has his name is featured in the title. 

Still for all the script problems, nobody knows how to do battle with vampires like Peter Cushing. His confrontations with Baron Meinster are definitely the high points of the film and the final battle in an abandoned windmill is very entertaining. 

Coming in under 90 minutes, this is a film that does not push it's luck.  An entertaining B-movie from Hammer studios.

85 minutes.

1964 - THE GORGON, weak Hammer horror film

The ancient Greek creature the Gorgon is lose in eastern Europe turning people to stone.  It's up to a couple of British actors playing some kind of European professors to track it down. 

The Gorgon is a mighty disappointing Hammer film in spite of the involvement of "the big three" from Hammer,  Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and the director Terence Fisher.  The production looks cheap even by Hammer's standards with the whole thing filmed on about 4 sets.  The woman with the snake head hair is what it is for a 1960's special effect. 

What should have been a horror film is really more of a murder mystery story with Christopher Lee attempting to figure out exactly who the Gorgon is.  Even this part of the story is so poorly done that it's pretty obvious almost immediately

James Bernard who could usually be counted on to ramp things up with an over the top score tried for a little more subtlety this time for a film that probably needed things to be ramped up a whole lot.

83 minutes

1960 - SWORD OF SHERWOOD FOREST, Hammer Studios does Robin Hood

Hammer Studios and actor Richard Greene produced this stand alone Robin Hood story in color and shot on location in Ireland.  Hammer's top director Terence Fisher kept the story moving along with lots of guys getting shot with arrows and stabbed with broad swords.  Since this was a Hammer production there was the expected touches of sadism and violence.

Richard Greene had started in a television version of the Robin Hood story called The Adventures of Robin Hood.  Greene cranked out 143 of these TV shows (which I can remember seeing in reruns) so he had a ready made audience for this film.

This film is nothing special but it is a decent time killer.  The film is unpretentious and doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is an entertaining Hammer film.

80 minutes, written by Alan Hackney.

1966 - ISLAND OF TERROR, British Science Fiction at its cheezy best

Another dumb scientist messing with things they don't understand film.  In this case they are trying to find a cure for cancer on a remote island.  Instead they create "Silicates"  creatures that can't be killed and like to suck the bones out of people and animals. 

Coming to sort this mess out are scientists Peter Cushing and Edward (whatever happened to my career) Judd and Judd's tag along girlfriend Carole Gray, who is hot but also very whiny and hysterical and really has no business going to the Island of Terror in the first place.

Island of Terror is a B movie in the best sense of the term.  The acting is pretty good, the story and situations are interesting.  Peter Cushing actually shows a sense of humor for a change and the monsters are pretty dumb looking.  This film was directed by Terence Fisher who gets a lot of mileage out of all the old science fiction cliches, confirming the old adage, "it's not the story but how you tell the story that counts."

Island of Terror, is kind of a rehash of Day of the Triffids which had walking plants that ate people.  The Silicates also appear to be distance relations to the  "Graboids"  from Tremors.

89 minutes.

1959 - THE STRANGLERS OF BOMBAY, Hammer's lurid exercise in sadism and racism

A British officer for the East Indian Trading Company, investigates the infamous thuggee cult in India.

Hammer's go to director Terrance Fisher filmed this little piece of incoherent sadism, violence and racism.  If this film were to be believed, just about every brown skinned person on the continent of India was a member of a scarf strangling cult primarily directed at the white British merchants running the country.  The film seems to have been made as an exercise in how much Hammer studios could get away with.  The film features eye gouging, hand removal, a hanging, disembowelment, and lots of strangling. 

There is some attempt to present the British as pretty clueless about the country and culture of India they are occupying, but the main thrust of the film is on the viciousness of the Indians and their complete disregard for human life.  Even for a film made in 1959, it still says lot about the white Anglo Saxon culture's dehumanizing disregard for anyone who isn't from their culture or has their skin color.

Typical scene from The Stranglers of Bombay, a British officer is being tortured while a large bosomed woman watches.

As a film, The Stranglers of Bombay, is not really one of the better Hammer films.  The screenplay is loaded with coincidences and underdeveloped characters.  Terence Fisher doesn't do the best job staging the action scenes.  The production also looks cheap even for a Hammer film, with lots of phony looking studio sets and outdoor scenes which look like they were filmed at a municipal park.

The thuggee cult shows up again as the antagonists in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a film just about as unenlightened as this. " From the Icons of Adventure" DVD collection.

80 minutes.

1959 - THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, Hammer does right by Conan Doyle's famous character

Cheapskate horror studios Hammer, brought out their version of The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes and did a pretty decent job with this famous story.

Hammer reworked the story and got the film down to a solid 90 minutes.  The screenwriter Peter Bryan and the director Terrance Fisher also solved a major problem of the book.  The lack of involvement of Sherlock Holmes in the actual case.  Doyle's book is essentially a series of letters to Sherlock Holmes from Dr. Watson about what is going on in the Grim Mire home to Baskerville Hall.  Sherlock Holmes doesn't even show up until around the end of the novel.  The filmmakers changed this and have invented some new scenes to get Holmes into the plot early and have him more involved.

Their other bit of cleverness was having Peter Cushing play Sherlock as he was written by Conan Doyle.  Cushing's interpretation of Sherlock Holmes has him  as the insufferable "know it all" that he comes across in the book. 

This is still a Hammer film so it's a little lurid at times and the color is pretty garish the way Hammer always like it.  Still this in one of the better Sherlock Holmes films that actually gets it right for a change and this Sherlock Holmes is closer to the spirit of Conan Doyle's legendary character.

1958 - HORROR OF DRACULA, Hammer's epic retelling of the Dracula myth with a cast of 10 maybe 13 people tops.

Hammer studios continued to remake the classic horror films that Universal studios had such good luck with during the late 1950's and early 60's.  After Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer  brought out their version of Dracula.  This was a seriously scaled down  Dracula  with the screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and the director Terence Fisher making some big changes to the original Bram Stroker story.

This downsizing may have been for the better, even by the late 50's, the Dracula legend had been really beaten to death in film.  There does seem to be a continued fascination with Count Dracula, the undead creature running around sucking the blood out of women and being defeated by the ultimate symbol in Christian culture, the Cross, etc.

Zipping along at top speed, the focus is on Peter Cushing's Dr. Van Helsing.   Cushing is no ancient academic but almost an occult James Bond character racing around the countryside chasing Dracula.  Cushing always contributed a lot to any film he was in, he was a major supporting character in the first Star Wars film.

Christopher Lee played Dracula so much he finally got sick of the role and refused to even discuss it in interviews but there is no denying that he is very good in the part.  Besides, it takes a lot of screen presence to not look stupid running around in a cape.

Hammer Studios was always the low budget British production company.  The weren't about to sink a ton of money into yet another version of the Dracula story.  Probably by necessity Sangster and Fisher had to streamline the story to fit with the film's modest budget.  Coming in around 80 fast paced minutes this is a very modest but enjoyable film.

Another good example of a small studio employing talented people to freshen up an over exposed property.

82 entertaining minutes.

1967 - THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, black magic vs. Christopher Lee

The screenwriter Richard Matheson adapted a book about a battle between white magic and black magic, someone at Hammer films had the great idea to get Christopher Lee, who usually played their bad guys and make him the hero in this one. 

Christopher Lee is a pretty dapper fellow in this film playing the Duc de Richleau who along with his associate Rex van Ryn (talk about cool names) are a version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson if Holmes and Watson battled the occult instead of Dr. Moriarity.  They certainly have a tough adversary in the actor Charles Gray who plays the wizard Mocata (another cool name). Overall, the film has a very good cast.

Along with Richard Matheson, The Devil Rides Out has Hammer's best horror director, Terence Fisher. Terence Fisher was a smart enough director to know that having people recite magic spells at each other could get kind of boring.  He made sure to add plenty of action to keep the film interesting.  For a 1960's film on a low budget, the special effects are pretty decent.

The beginning of the film feels a little rushed and expects the audience to accept almost immediately the presence of black magic in the modern world but the acting, dialog and the staging of the scenes are so good you can embrace the story almost immediately. 

The final black magic assault on Christopher Lee and his friends in their protective circle actually works up quite a bit of tension. 

Another good example of a very good film made by very talented people on a modest budget.

 Probably only the subject of witchcraft would tend to put an audience off.

96 minutes.