Hammer horror - classic or dud?

I too boost "The Devil Rides Out". Also, "Dracula: Prince of Darkness", and "The Wicker Man"

The film with Tom Baker in it that you described is Vault Of Horror, made by Amicus. FYI.

I was watching "Tales from the Crypt" the other day (I think that was Amicus, too? They put out some great ones..."The Skull" comes to mind). The segment with the blind people taking their revenge on the cruel supervisor (who sics his dog on them!) is totally classic.

More importantly though, are there any plans to re-release (or are they even possible to find now?) the Hammer sci-fi stuff?

I especially want to see the Quatermass series of films.

I saw a re-release of the first Hammer Dracula last night in the cinema. Deadly stuff. I love how sexy the ladies become when they start turning into vampires. Rowr.

Not sure if that re-release hasn't hit town yet, or if I blinked and missed it over Halloween. Really want to see it on the big screen. I've only seen the Hammer movies late night on TV, which isn't really doing them justice.

oh i think these movies were MADE (unintentionally) for late nite TV viewing, that or a drive-in.

They are great on the big screen, though, with a half decent sound system blasting out the bombastic music.

Just got word the rereleased Dracula is showing here for three nights, just before Xmas!

Saw Dracula last night. Just great. The new print looks terrific. All kinds of detail you just miss on the small screen - you can see the actor's breath in Castle Dracula. Set design and costume are incredibly lavish. Lee is a huge, physically intimidating presence, and they aren't afraid to show him getting ragged and messed-up. Makes me want to see all the Hammer and Amicus classics this way.

Interesting, too, to revisit Hammer after seeing a lot of more or less contemporary Gothic Horrors from Italy and Mexico. It's all good, but each country has its own flavour, and it's great to compare and contrast.

Dracula AD 1972 has to seen to be believed.

otm

On Netflix streaming! I'm in

that was how I watched it earlier! made my day!

this is a gd blog

http://watchinghammer.blogspot.com/

and this is a great bargain

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ultimate-Hammer-Collection-Disc-Box/dp/B000HN31KQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1281217886&sr=1-1

love stoneground's version of 'Alligator Man' in Drac AD 72:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVWjbhTV7r4

it's weird to me that there isn't more hammer uberfanhood on ilx

I was totally nuts for these movies back in the pre-VCR days, nothing finer than watching Vincent Price chew the scenery in those Poe adaptations on late night TV.

gonna be a pedant and say that the Vincent Price/Poe movies were made by American International Pictures, not Hammer - Price never actually appeared in a Hammer movie, though he is in a few Amicus classics, including the amazing Scream and Scream Again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9IElNf9Jb8

went on a major hammer binge a few months back, mostly due to having realized I hadn't seen many and felt I was missing out--and I was right.

First post is largely correct calling "The Devil Rides Out" their best. The ones I loved the best were the Frankenstein flicks. Cushing's great in all of them, and their willingness to just set the reset button every single time became their most endearing feature.

RIP Ingrid Pitt. Loved her in the Vampire Lovers...va-voom!

Weirdly enough Harry Robinson, who did the string arrangement for "River Man" by Nick Drake, used to score Hammer films.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l87yrdCwXQ1qzm190o1_500.gif

To the Devil A Daughter! is fucking A+ late-period Hammer, holy fuck

Yeah, it's my favorite of them all. Has a genuinely unsettling quality most Hammer films never really tried for.

When I was a kid I loved the old horror flicks on television. These included the Karloff and Lugosi monster movies, and somewhat newer stuff like the Thing and Creature From the Black Lagoon. I did see some Hammer horror, mainly vampire movies, in theaters at the same time, but I was pre-pubescent and the sexual overtones never did a thing for me. I rated them poorly as a eleven and twelve year old.

As I got older, I never revisited them, so I don't know if I would ever have changed my assessment. No doubt now that I am a prudish old guy they'd just seem cheesy and stupid.

it's all in the attention span imo. Hammer horrors & all old horror assumes the full attention of the viewer - I think much watching and listening occurs through/over various levels of distraction now. Hammer always seemed more grown-up to me not because of the sexy stuff but because they're so moody - the atmosphere is a huge part of the whole deal

new remastered blu-ray, out in the UK on monday, restores censored footage to the first hammer dracula for the first time since 1958!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iujUuZxiFo&list=PLCqISFK17hESDX1O2z28nMuZI9PzpUcvk&index=1

:(

have never seen his Drac or Frankenstein creature, just reserved at liberry

you've seen the wicker man right?

oh yeah

was very funny in his SNL hosting gig in late '70s, esp as Death coming to claim Gilda Radner (ulp)

mea culpa... the SNL Mr Death sketch was with Laraine Newman.

"Did you kill Jesus?"
"No, the Romans did that."

The first Hammer Horror - The Curse of Frankenstein - opened sixty years ago today, at the Leicester Square Cinema on May 2, 1957. Here's a cool list courtesy of the BFI:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/great-hammer-horror-film-every-year

My list would have to find room for Dracula AD 1972 (so much better than the pisspoor Satanic Rites of Dracula), Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, The Reptile and One Million Years B.C. (Hammer's biggest hit - parts of it are like Malick's Tree of Life!)

One Million Years BC with one of the most stunningly original scores of the lot

Does that horror-only streaming service people have mentioned have much vintage Hammer on it?

This is a very niche item, but imho worth sharing all the same. On Sunday 14th October, the UK TV station Talking Pictures TV will be screening this Hammer film:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Duckling_(1959_film)

This has long been the 'holy grail' for Hammer film fans (even though it is most likely terrible) - as far as anyone knows it has never been broadcast on TV before, and has never been released on any home video format anywhere in the world. One of the possible points of interest is how similar (or otherwise) it is to Jerry Lewis' Nutty Professor, released about four years after the Hammer film.

I shall be watching.

Oh, and RIP to Fenella Fielding, who appears in Hammer's (also terrible) remake of The Old Dark House, produced for the company by William Castle, of all people, in 1963:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Dark_House_(1963_film)

I picked up one of those Indicator boxes - Criminal Intent. Two movies in so far and I'm very pleasantly surprised - neither of them are masterpieces but they're both a million miles away from the dull programmer blandness I was fearing. The Snorkel is a fascinating mix of tones - it opens like it's Riffifi before introducing a protagonist straight out of Enid Blyton. So you get this plucky girl detective, but she's investigating the murder of her own mother at the hands of her stepfather (not a spoiler), and the danger she's in feels very real, the tension works.

Never Take Sweets From A Stranger has a title that made me expect something exceedingly seedy, laughably didactic, or both. But turns out this is a pretty credible social problem film that is about child abuse but it's just as much about small town bigotry and corruption. The portrayal of the molester itself is saddled with the presuppositions of its time, which are pretty offensive now but they didn't know, and sadly the movie does devolve into a kind of gothic horror thing towards the end, but very worth seeing! Also has an unusual set-up: a British couple integrating into small town Canada.

Not sure I'll bother with the other boxes tho - first one seems like pretty conventional horror, third one's pitch seems to be "here's all our racist movies".

Also, this seems interesting: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hammer-Film-Scores-Musical-Avant-garde/dp/0786434562

No doubt they'll show up on Talking Pictures eventually.

Cash on Demand, in the Criminal Intent box, is also well worth watching - basically a cat-and-mouse two-hander between suave crook Andrew Morell and officious bank clerk Peter Cushing.

Yesterday's Enemy, in the Blood & Terror box, is a set-bound, atmospheric anti-war movie that still delivers quite a punch at the end. There's a stand-alone UK DVD of it that shouldn't be too hard to source.

André Morell!

I’ve been wanting to read that hammer film scores book for years but keep hoping it’ll turn up as an ebook.

I was an avid fan of horror/monster films as a boy, aged 10 to 12. I have a distinct recollection of being disappointed in the Hammer productions I watched, mostly in the vampire genre. To my young self they seemed very slow-paced and curiously unsuspenseful.

Ward, I watched Cash On Demand yesterday and it is indeed very good! If there was justice in the world there'd be a Die Hard level debate on its status as a christmas movie. André Morel's suave, charming, sadistic robber is delightful - I thought Cushing's bank manager scrooge was a bit too broad in comparison but he might grow on me.

I watched 'Devil Rides Out' a couple of days ago, it was.. fine?

Cash on Demand seems largely inspired by A Christmas Carol so yeah, definitely a Christmas movie!
And yeah, it's great. So it in a mystery Xmas marathon a few months ago.

I watched 'Devil Rides Out' a couple of days ago, it was.. fine?

This was my experience too, think I might've read the enthusiastic mentions upthread before watching. Not as much fun as the novel.

Having watched a bit more Hammer horror since then, I'd say The Curse Of Frankenstein is actually their best. Or Quatermass & The Pit, if that counts as horror.

Excellent, Daniel - another thing I like about Cash on Demand is the way that it especially foregrounds class conflict, which might be Hammer's most persistent, deep-lying theme across so many of their films.

Not read the Wheatley novel, but Devil Rides Out is definitely top tier Hammer horror - especially love the scene, so full of menace, where Charles Gray turns up at the house - daylight horror on a par with the sighting of the ghost at the lake in The Innocents. The special effects in the final spider sequence are pretty poor, tho am not sure I approve of them being retroactively upgraded for the recentish Region 2 blu ray release.

Wouldn't rank The Curse of Frankenstein quite as highly as that - I think it takes a little too long to get going - but it's definitely one of Hammer's most savage and cynical entries. It's easy to say that Hammer films are staid and slow, sixty years after the fact, but you only have to read the critical contemporary notices, or the reaction of the British censors to these movies, to realise how far they were transgressing standards of taste and decency at the time. The moment when Lee's monster gets shot in the eye - producing a welter of blood - is the first genuinely gory scene in horror cinema, and still feels like a violent break from the Gothic tradition of shadow and suggestion.

Devil Rides Out has such a bracingly hysterical James Bernard score

Watched the Curse of Frankenstein last night for the first time and, like most of the other Hammer things I've seen, I found it enjoyable enough but never quite as fun or scary as I was hoping.

But that being said I did find myself legitimately shocked and momentarily disturbed by the staircase-fall death scene. Maybe the slow pacing had dulled my senses a little bit, but it took me a couple seconds afterwards to realize that it wasn't an actual stuntman - the way the dummy is constructed is great, the angle from which its shot from and the way it falls & hits is so sickeningly real, at least moreso than the usual straw-filled dummy tosses that you get in other B pics of the time. I was surprised at how it really got to me. So good on ya I guess, Terence Fisher.

https://youtu.be/zz95zAuY5OU?t=36

I watched The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires the other night, not exactly the finest work of Hammer or the Shaw Brothers but pretty entertaining.

Drácula AD 1972, man.

Has anyone sampled “DIG THE MUSIC, KIDS!”?

Uh I don’t know why Dracula is autocorrecting with an á.

Pissed at Joan Collins rn because she got on Instagram and said The Devil Within Her was her scariest movie. So I watched it on Halloween and it's an awkwardly staged film about a stupid-looking evil baby. The Stud was scarier than this.

Although I did laugh at the Donald Pleasence character, a doctor who calmly explains that a baby who slashes his mother in the face, gives his dad a bloody nose, trashes its own nursery, and murders a nanny is really completely normal, nothing to worry about, and maybe the mother (Joan Collins) should consider checking herself into a sanitarium.

I have been reminded of one of my favorite bits of Peter Cushing trivia -- his dance track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdA6Wox7LXE

And he was even interviewed about it!

So a random mention of Peter Cushing elsewhere prompted me to remember that 1) he released a dance track a couple of years before he died and 2) _Melody Maker_ interviewed him about it and I had the issue somewhere. Turns out @iangittins did the honors! pic.twitter.com/T27Uh9jouc

— Ned Raggett (@NedRaggett) October 19, 2021

aw hell yeah

wonder if those Indicator boxes are over