Best served cold

Revenge of Frankenstein from 1958, directed by Terence Fisher and written by the other half of that familiar team from early Hammer, Jimmy Sangster.

Hammer knew when they were on to a good thing and this sequel was knocked out just one year after the Curse of Frankenstein, and yes I am doing the Frankenstein movies out of order but I'm watching them as I get hold of them. In the same way as the Hammer Draculas had to find a new way to revive the Count for each successive film here they have to spirit Peter Cushing's Baron Frankenstein away from the guillotine so that he can set up shop in a new town and start practising medicine as the not at all suspicious sounding Dr Stein. While he is popular with both society ladies and the patients of the workhouse hospital, he also has his secret laboratory and has soon recruited Francis Matthews to assist him in bringing life to his new creation. 

Frankenstein skills have advanced and this time he has fashioned a perfect male body into which he transplants the brain of his deformed servant, Karl. At first all goes well but once the creature (Richard Wordsworth) has escaped and encountered a sympathetic society lady his body betrays him and starts to revert back to his deformed shape. The usual mayhem ensues and once again the mob is soon turning on the villainous Baron. Fortunately Francis Matthews is on hand to save the day and rescue Cushing who escapes to London to start again as Dr Victor Franck. Apparently Baron Frankenstein shares Count Dracula's belief that if you spell your last name slightly differently no one will notice. Works every time.

Peter Cushing makes Frankenstein a nastier person in each film and Richard Wordsworth gives us a very sympathetic creature. His slow degeneration recalls his iconic performance as the doomed astronaut Victor Carroon in the movie version of the Quatermass Experiment. Elsewhere Michael Ripper has again beaten everyone else to the punch in the Hammer Michael Ripper drinking game. Here he makes up one half of a comic pair of drunken gravediggers with Lionel Jeffries filling the other role. The gore of the first film is mostly missing and all the bosoms are well hidden with little or no heaving to be seen. Not a bad outing for the Hammer monster but maybe only three out of five twitching disembodied hands.

Through a Fog Darkly

Interrupting my Hammer-fest for some classic John Carpenter. The Fog from 1980, a film I haven't seen since the early days of VHS rentals, and there was the DVD in a cheap bin at the London Forbidden Planet on free comic book day. How could I resist?

Carpenter's first three movies were Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13 and then Halloween which are all classics in their own rights. Following up the huge success of the night Michael Myers came home he turned to a creepy revenge ghost story with this tale of a strange fog enveloping a Californian coastal town and the return of the crew of a ship the townsfolk lured to its doom 100 years ago. Cult favourite actors Tom Atkins, Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh all find themselves trapped in tight spots with rotting, zombie sailors breaking through doors and windows.

There's plenty of slow build up as Carpenter develops the tension in what seems like a typical Stephen King version of small town America. Various bits and pieces go bump in the night before Adrienne Barbeau's disc jockey realises what is going on and starts to broadcast a warning about the fog. Meanwhile the rest of the cast retreat from the fog and the watery walkers and seek refuge in priest Hal Holbrook's church for the final reveal about what the sailors want and the battle to keep them out at all cost. Strangely the events of the final night all happen rather quickly and there aren't as many deliberate jumps and frights as in Halloween. This is a more atmospheric piece that recalls a classic ghost story in a tone that is set by veteran actor John Houseman's opening camp-site retelling of the legend of the lost ship.

It's all quite creepy and although it never hits the heights of his first three films it's not too bad and the special effects have stood up quite well over the last 35 years. Of course it has a nice piece of John Carpenter electronic music for the theme and the cast are all pretty good. It's nice to see Napoleon Wilson himself, Darwin Joston, showing up briefly as Dr Phibes (the name is another nice reference). Like all films from the 1980s it has been remade recently, I haven't seen it but the reports are not good. If the original shows up somewhere then check it out and if you treat it like a ghost story rather than a slasher horror then it will be pretty entertaining. Three dripping zombie stars.

A Matter of Taste

No sooner has Dracula been impaled on a cross at the end of the the previous film than Roy Kinnear pops up to collect his fallen cloak and clasp, signet ring, and collect his dried blood in a test tube. This can't possible end well for the Antiques Roadshow. Taste the Blood of Dracula is the fourth of the Christopher Lee Hammer vampires. Released in 1970 and directed by Peter Sasdy.

Before long we're back in old London town where three jaded business men are looking for something a little different in the way of extreme experiences. Up pops a batty Ralph Bates to lure them to Kinnear's shop and then the scene is set for a bizarre regeneration in an old church, which is an odd place to choose for the Prince of Darkness to be reborn in. Having said that the dust covering Bates' body and then cracking open to reveal the reconstituted Count is well done. And the foaming blood in the goblets during the corrupted version of the communion service is also effective, although the presence of Peter Sallis as one of the three men did lead me to make various comments along the lines of "Nice brew, Gromit. Any biscuits? A bit of cheese perhaps?"

Once Dracula is on the loose it is fairly easy for him to hunt down the three business men and corrupt their children to carry out a bit of Patricide in a variety of gruesome ways. Michael Ripper arrives, this time as a police detective, and almost does his own version of the Hammer Ripper drinking game by heading straight for the decanter himself.

The problem is that once the three men are dispatched Dracula seems at a bit of a loss. The Hammer vampire films are obsessed with finding new ways to destroy and then resurrect the Count, but overall he doesn't seem to have a grand plan and is too easily distracted by a pretty neck. I always felt that the Stoker and Lugosi versions had some horrible intentions to spread their curse across the channel but Lee just looks menacing and does little more before he is dispatched once again.

Hammer moves into the 1970s so the sex quotient is increased with a bawdy bordello sequence but all in all the power of the Hammer Count seems to be waning as the films progress. Two and a half out of five foaming goblets for Taste the Blood. Now let's find out how Baron Frankenstein is getting on.

Frankenstein created Playboy

I've skipped a couple of the Hammer Frankensteins to get to Frankenstein Created Woman from 1967 with Terence Fisher back on board as director.

Baron Frankenstein is in a new town and quietly carrying on with his experiments. Meanwhile a trio of nasty toffs frame a young man for murder, and his execution leads his disfigured girlfriend to commit suicide. With two bodies on his hands Frankenstein creates the perfect woman and transplants her boyfriend's soul into her beautiful form. As soon as the bandages are off she becomes the ideal vehicle of revenge, luring each of the villains in turn to a bloody death.

The Playboy model Susan Denberg is surprisingly good as both incarnations of the tragic Christina, and Peter Cushing is as charismatic as ever. Out of the rest of the cast a young Derek Fowlds stands out as one of the bad guys, years before he would go on to Yes,Minister or Heartbeat, or even his stint as Basil Brush's straight guy.

It's a surprisingly bloodless Hammer film. There's no grisly surgical detail and the killings are mostly off camera. At least Denberg provides the heaving bosom to distract the bad guys from the sharp implements in her hands. Cushing does some athletic leaping about rooftops but for the rest of the movie he's fairly quiet and restrained and Hammer seemed to be hoping that Denberg's charms would win the audience over. A fairly enjoyable romp but not a classic, three out of five guillotine blades and onwards.

Predators - why bother?

Finishing off my Predator box set with Predators from 2010, directed by Nimrod Antal.

A mismatched bunch of killers find themselves parachuted on to an alien planet where they become the hunted prey of a trio of super Predators. Adrien Brody sets aside his art-house credentials to beef up and do that hoarse tough guy voice that Christian Bale's Batman is so fond of. There's loads of guns, the usual tricks and traps, and Brody even gets smeared in that all important mud. The Predators themselves are bigger, nastier and somehow less frightening than their predecessors and it is all rather dull.

The magic spark from the first film is still missing and while all the special effects are extremely competent and none of the performances are bad it all just falls flat. Plus there is the huge mystery at the centre of the film about what Laurence Fishburne has been surviving on.

It's not as terrible a film as the second in the franchise but it just washed over me without any real excitement. Two stars and time to put these extraterrestrial monsters away and concentrate on the home grown horrors of Hammer.

Making a grave error

Dracula has risen from the grave from 1968 is the third of the Hammer vampires that count. Freddie Francis took over as director and does some interesting things with colour filters whenever Christopher Lee is on screen.

A clumsy priest falls and cuts his head and soon the blood has dripped through the ice to the frozen Count who having completed his own version of the ice bucket challenge is up and about terrorising the roof tops of another non-specific European town. There are the statutory heaving bosoms, two of which are provided by the gorgeous Veronica Carlson, and of course Michael Ripper is on hand as a friendly baker and innkeeper.

Lee is given some lines to speak and more to do but I sense that Hammer are struggling to know what to do with him. Invading attractive women's bedrooms to ravage their necks is all very well but he doesn't seem to have any grander plan, and it's only a matter of time before the vampire hunters are on his trail for another desperate race against the sunrise as those familiar black horses carry him back to his castle. Which, incidentally, has had a bit of a facelift and been moved up into the mountains since we last saw it. Hammer had moved production from Bray to Pinewood studios so there are all new sets to play with.

As well as the weird colour filters Freddie Francis also gives us lots of close ups on Lee's bloodshot eyes which look very uncomfortable indeed and presumable involved some more hard contact lenses. Lee is as imposing as ever but the whole film seems to add little to the canon apart from a spectacular new way to kill the Count. It's  middling three out five fresh baked strudels for the third film and time to see with the Baron has been up to since his first outing.

Make mine zombie

Hammer cracked out The Plague of the Zombies using the same crew, the same sets, and some of the same cast as The Reptile as the two films were filmed side by side by John Gilling.

Once again there are two outsiders brought to a Cornish village because of a string of mysterious deaths and disappearing bodies. The locals are unfriendly to the new people even when one of them is a distinguished Professor of medicine whose former colleague, now the local GP, has summoned him. But the GP's wife, played by the equally doomed Jacqueline Pearce is not at all well and seems in thrall to the sinister local squire who lives in a rather familiar big house.

Possibly the greatest Professor Quatermass Andre Morell is brilliant as Professor Forbes who represents a mix of Quatermass, Doctor Who and Van Helsing all wrapped up into one. Michael Ripper trousers another pay cheque, this time as a sensible police sergeant who is soon acting as backup for Forbes. And yet again there's lot of grave robbing to bring up a succession of empty coffins and all filmed on exactly the same set as the Reptile. I'm sure they coordinated the diggings to fit both films,

But of course we want Zombies and before long they appear with their flaky grey face make-up, painful looking complete white contact lenses, and strange monk like sacking robes. Their appearance provokes many a scare and one notable dream sequence that pre-dates the Romero horrors to come one year later. However when we learn that evil Squire is killing off the locals, turning them into zombies, and then setting them to work in the tin mine beneath his house it does seem rather a waste of the potential horror of a new Hammer monster. Well it is a creative use of a wage-less workforce to create capital. Left unchecked the Squire would probably have gone on to a seat in the House of Commons or a job at a city bank. But despite his voodoo powers and his always on tap trio of tribal drummers he is doomed for a sticky end as his workforce turns on him in a zombie occupy movement against the 1%.

And the big house goes up in smoke again, or probably at the same time as in The Reptile. The presence of Andre Morell makes this a success along with the genuinely creepy zombies who would be much more effectively used by Romero, although interestingly Hammer had spotted their potential as a signifier of social injustice. Plenty of good bits in this film, four out of five uncomfortable zombie contact lenses. And next we'll find that fangs ain't what they used to be.