GREGORY’S DOUBLE FEATURES Presents HALLOWEEN HORRORS, Vol. 1, Entry 4: HAMMER TIME!
GREGORY’S DOUBLE FEATURES
Presents
HALLOWEEN HORRORS, Vol. 1, Entry 4:
HAMMER TIME: DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966), FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967), THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)
Surprise! Triple Feature here! Thus this volume goes to ‘11’!
Not sure why these three particular films are bundled into one set, but it’s hard to displease me with Hammer, so let’s go:
Dracula: Prince of Darkness represents, after a couple of very good “sidequel” Hammer vampire movies to fill the void, Christopher Lee’s then-long-awaited 1966 return to the role he had made his own in 1958. “Retired” rock bands get back to touring, sequel books arrive long after completed trilogies, and all manner of celebrities leap back into the limelight when their multiple mortgages exhaust them or their kid blows up a rehab clinic or whatever, so to say that Mr. Lee returned to Dracula with dignity is understatement. It’s a plum role, he’s perfect for it, and yet I was advised not to discuss it with him when I interviewed him about everything else — *ahem* legend! — almost exactly 20 years ago. Still, way cool. (And thanks for the hookup, J.S. And for the other two legends Lee, Spike and Stan, thank you, T.D. Top tier, right here.)
In this story, it’s ten years since Count Dracula was “destroyed” by Van Helsing’s nimble curtain leap, but not to worry — or in this case do worry: there’s a new group of hapless Brits touring the Carpathians, and of course horrors await them. Following a mildly psychedelic, smoke-framed revisiting of the climax of the previous Christopher Lee Dracula movie, we meet the prophetically named couple Charles and Diana (Frances Matthews, Suzan Farmer), and Charles’ not-so-prophetically named brother Alan and his wife Helen (Charles Tingwell, Barbara Shelley) — the last of which is the only one who’s got a bad feeling about this. Behaving like capricious Boomers and repeatedly ignoring the stern warnings of a monk called Sandor (Andrew Keir as this movie’s brusque, burly answer to Van Helsing; Mr. Cushing was busy making the next movie in this review), the four of them accept a possessed carriage that rockets them to a huge, well-appointed, apparently uninhabited castle, which they rather mistakenly consider a bargain holiday package. Soon appears Dracula’s extremely trustworthy-looking servant Klove (Philip Latham), who serves them some apparently tasty soup and explains that his master is spending a few years dead for tax purposes. (Thank you, D.N.A.) You can guess, broadly, what happens next. Notes: Klove wouldn’t return until the excellent Scars of Dracula in 1970, played by Dr. Who’s own Patrick Troughton. And Ms. Shelley died only this year, following complications after contracting COVID-19. Horrors continue, though ours could have been more easily defeated, had grownups behaved like grownups.
Accounts vary as to why Dracula has no dialogue in this movie, from Mr. Lee claiming he refused to say the lines, to regular Hammer screenwriter Jimmy Sangster (“John Sansom”) claiming he never wrote any dialogue for the character. Either way, his portrayal proves frightening here, with Dracula coming across as a sort of sad, speechless stalker. (Some of his leaps and bounds are sillier, plus the ol’ softie attempts to breastfeed Diana, but these acts also fit the arch performance.) For some reason Renfield is renamed “Ludwig” (Thorley Walters), and the back-and-forth between the monastery and the castle feels strangely proto-Fury Road, but in the capable hands of director Terence Fisher, and his MVP, composer James Bernard, this is a typically handsome and resonant Hammer production.
*
With its initial concept almost a joke (a play on 1956’s And God Created Woman), it’s a pleasant surprise indeed that, a few years later, this 1967 Hammer Frankenstein film emerged as an elegant and elegiac production. In the presumably-not-burnt hands of Terence Fisher (director of the above Dracula film, and many other fine offerings), Frankenstein Created Woman doesn’t skimp on murder and mayhem in its closing minutes, but mostly it eschews pieces ’n’ parts, leaning instead toward the spiritual. Featuring delightfully quaint sets and another enchanting score from James Bernard (as above, but less bombastic, more lilting; and the guy did his own orchestrating!), this particular Frankenstein is less horror movie and more melodrama, but, like, in a good way.
In a town beside a popular guillotine where apparently the locals frequently decapitate each other (Germans), first we see a loutish oaf (or, if you prefer, an oafish lout) loudly disturbing the peace en route to his own beheading, yet turning serious when he glimpses his young son watching from the foliage. Cut to a creepy lab, and that son has grown up into, natch, Hans (Robert Morris): assistant to methodical Dr. Hertz Donut — j/k, it’s just Dr. Hertz (Thorley Walters again!) — who in turn assists Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing). The first two bring the last out of a dry-ice-fog deep freeze, successfully reviving him from a full hour of being dead, and sending him into a new mania for capturing the human soul from the recently deceased. Conveniently, Hans is in love with the landlord’s daughter (I know, The Wicker Man, but stay focused, eh?), scarred and misshapen Christina (a.k.a. Susan Denberg), and the 19th-century equivalent of fratboys kill her father, then Hans takes the fall, he’s unfairly tried and beheaded, grieving Christina languidly leaps a few feet into a very pleasant little stream to her somehow death — and then Dr. Frankenstein gets down to business: not so much creating woman (false advertising), but rebuilding one, you know, like in Beverly Hills.
Although we spend a few moments with rudimentary sci-fi set dressing, this fifth Hammer Frankenstein film sidesteps the mad-doctor rigmarole in favour of jerk-dandies and jerk-cops making life miserable for all concerned, a mess into which Victor, having blended the abruptly vengeful soul of Hans with the beautified chassis of Christina, finds himself inextricably pulled. I could nitpick Tony Hinds’ (as “John Elder”) script — Doesn’t Hans value his own life over Christina’s honour? Why does the hifalutin Baron stupidly tell the witchcraft-obsessed authorities the truth about his incredible experiment? Who even drinks white? — but the truth is that this movie, like many Hammers and Cormans before and after it, represents yet another ideal rainy Saturday, or Sunday, afternoon at the movies. And five decades before his own extremely creepy revivification as a digital Disney drone, Peter Cushing, even in casual mode, proves captivating. Self-indulgently I grin that for a while he lived nearby, yet no foul stench did I recognise.
P.S. I’m well aware that this is actually the fourth Hammer Frankenstein film. Just wanted to summon an outraged and/or smug look to your nerd face. Nerd.
*
Had I been aware of and been able to see The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires when I was 11, I would have learned about vampires, kung fu, and boobs, all in one helpful film. Well, better late than never.
As its title suggests, this pleasingly awkward Hammer/Shaw Brothers co-production concerns seven (7) golden vampires . . . sort of. In fact they look more like they’re wearing gold masquerade masks atop papier-mâché “scary” heads some fourth graders made in art class for Halloween, plus one of them has already been torched (the vampires, not the fourth graders), thus our primary conflict lies between some persecuted villagers and especially long-removed former villagers (why would they even care?), and not seven (7) but six (6)! Six golden vampires, ah-hah-hahhh!!! Oh, and “leading” them is “Count Dracula,” except it’s not Christopher Lee, who hung up his fangs and cape (for Hammer, anyway) after the previous year’s Satanic Rites of Dracula, thus we get some other guy, John Forbes-Robertson, only in brief bookending scenes, and his climactic “battle” with Van Helsing (always-game Peter Cushing) literally lasts 15 seconds. You or your first boyfriend lasted longer.
The good news is that the balance of this movie (about 80 minutes in the available edit) is, “Guilty-pleasure ambrosia!” (Shout/Scream Factory: There’s your quote. What? 2019? Just missed it. Dang.) Lensed entirely in Hong Kong, at the famed Shaw Brothers Studio, the story concerns Dracula claiming the physical form of one of those Taoist monks who just adores vampires (Chan Shen, who plays Dracula in the middle, and proves significantly more menacing than Forbes-Robertson), and, off camera of course, zipping away to the obscure Chinese village of Pang Kwei, to revive the 7, or 6, eponymous baddies — plus a whole lotta ghouls who crawl out of the ground in gnarly ways and accompany them. Fortunately (unless you’re a vampire, or ghoul), after about a century of slaughter, Professor Van Helsing (Cushing) happens to be at Chungking (now Chongqing) University during a terribly unpopular tour lecturing on vampires, but student Hsi Ching (David Chiang) enlists him to battle his hometown bloodsuckers. Accompanying them for protection are Hsi Ching’s six brothers and one sister, Mai Kwei (Shih Szu), and pardon me while I croon some R.E.M.: “She will return, she will return…”
To be sure, this production is a mishmash, but that’s precisely its charm. It’s even got parallel budding romance: between Van Helsing’s son, Leyland (Robin Stewart), and Mai Kwei; and Hsi Ching and their adventure’s underwriter, the voluptuous Scandinavian widow Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege). The movie leans lurid with the capture and torture of topless village ladies, questionable, but beats watching the 700 Club. (And why exactly do demonic “Golden” undead need to strap down their victims anyway? Are they turned on by writhing?) Veteran Hammer composer James Bernard returns yet again, and his “Eastern” leanings prove fascinating. But the main thing is, with English director Roy Ward Baker (Quatermass and the Pit, Scars of Dracula, The Monster Club) out of his depth, Chinese director Chang Cheh (One-Armed Swordsman, Shaolin Temple, Five Venoms) was called in to make sure that everybody was kung fu fighting — and in fact, it is a little bit frightening.
