Horror and Sci-Fi films old and new, weirdo trash, arthouse, forgotten gems, well loved classics, and I'm watching the original Dr Who from the beginning.
Standard issue 1950s Sci-fi, with little to recommend beyond the hilariously goofy godawful puppet used for the titular character.
The plot is about a giant bird attacking cities around the world. There's no point trying to describe it, so I'll just show you a picture:
As usual with this genre, there is far too much talking and padding out the running time with stock footage. There's some gobbledygook about antimatter to explain the creature, but trying to understand it is a waste of time.
There is a doom laden apocalyptic tone at the end as the bird smashes up New York, but by then it's too little too late.
The Curse of Frankenstein is the film that launched Hammer Horror on to the world, and there is a deliberate attempt to distance this film from both the Mary Shelley book and James Whale's iconic Universal version and create something unique. There are no pursuits to the North Pole, no fairy-tale castles, and no hunchback assistants, but the basic premise of the precociously talented scientist obsessed with creating a fully formed human being, and then being forced to deal with the consequences of achieving this remains intact.
Jimmy Sangster's script makes Victor Frankenstein the focus of the story but makes no attempt to portray him in a sympathetic light. This is a man who does not think in terms of good and evil, only in terms of getting his work done, and as a scientist who has no concept of the consequences of his actions. Peter Cushing brings a mix of charm, coldness, and nervous energy, to the role, creating a character who is determined, dangerous and unpredictable. While courting his cousin Elizabeth he carries on an affair with his maid, and when the latter finds she is pregnant, it is fascinating to watch the difference in his attitude to creating life in the laboratory and creating life with a human being.
Christopher Lee gives a similarly distinctive performance as the Monster. When he is discovered chained to a wall by his creator, his first instinct is to cover his face, still showing traces of vanity and humanity. The end result is a complex creature who is both a mindless killer, and a slightly pathetic pawn of somebody else's ambitions.
With two such dominating characters (and actors), it is difficult for the supporting cast to get a look in. Hazel Court does her best with the underwritten part of Elizabeth, but Frankenstein's increasingly moral and self-righteous mentor Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) is just irritating.
When placed in the context of the Hammer Horror story, what amazes in retrospect is how fully formed the style seems already, with so many of the tropes, such as the colour, the gore, the actors, the urgent, dramatic music, and the Gothic European settings already in place.
Night of the Demon is a wonderfully wry supernatural story, with the chills coming from the ambiguity and atmosphere, and the tension and drama coming from the battle of wits between the human lead characters.
Psychologist Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews) comes to England from the US for a science convention at which he plans to expose renowned occultist Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) as a charlatan and a cult leader. On arrival he finds that not only has his research partner, Professor Harrington, has died in a mysterious accident, but Harrington was growing increasingly afraid of the powers he thought Karswell possessed. Holden is having none of this however, even when Karswell tells him he is going to die in three days time. But as increasingly strange incidents keep occurring, Holden is forced to question whether the supernatural does exist - and whether or not his days are numbered.
Andrews does not totally convince as a scientist, but one thing he does bring to the role is a forcefulness and an unshakeable faith in rationalism that makes him a believable opponent to Karswell, an equally strong character supposedly based on the so-called “wickedest man in the world”, real life occult guru Aleister Crowley.
The tension between the two is palpable as the cat-and-mouse games escalate, but it also found an off screen parallel in tensions between this film's producer and director. Hal E Chester originally wanted to make a straightforward monster movie rather than ambiguity and atmosphere, and shot the scenes involving the demon without the director's knowledge. With little money in the budget, the end result is a little bit silly. The appearance at the beginning of the film sets completely the wrong tone for what is to follow, and the appearance at the end almost undoes the hard work that the director and actors have done up to then - almost,but not quite.
Director Jacques Tourneur had built a career on spooky and atmospheric horror classics such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. He takes a similar approach here, with the end results feeling wonderfully spooky, rather than actually terrifying, with a ghoulish sense of humour thrown in, and much as the incidents affecting become ever more baffling they never truly spill over into the supernatural.
In addition, in all three of the demon's appearances, there are no external witnesses so it could still be argued that there is some ambiguity as to whether it makes it into the real world or whether it is simply a demon of the mind.
An entertaining whodunnit, Town on Trial is also a peek behind the curtains of middle class village life in 1950's England. While the crime aspect of the film is not entirely successful, the subject matter is surprisingly frank for the time that it was made, and the script takes some surprising turns with characterisation. When a young woman is found strangled by a stocking in the English village of Oakley Park, there is no shortage of suspects, from Mark Roper, the married Lothario secretary of her tennis club, to the local doctor with a secret from his past, to a troubled young man with a history of blackouts. Superintendent Mike Halloran (John Mills) is brought in to solve the case, something he pursues with relentless zeal, but with the locals resenting the outsider and refusing to help, can Halloran succeed before the killer strikes again? The detective aspects of the story do not always work, with the clues and police procedural work rarely rising above the sophistication of an episode of Midsomer Murders, while the killer's motives seem vague. Much more convincing is the claustrophobic and sometimes mean-spirited world of village life, where many residents seem more interested in sweeping the murder under the carpet rather than finding out who did it. Conformity and fitting in is the name of the game, a theme that drives or shapes many of the main characters. The murder victims both stray from the accepted social norms for women, giving their deaths an air of puritanical retribution akin to some horror films, accentuated by the by the Bible quotes left at the murder scenes. The detective is also an outsider, something underlined in the scene where, after a conversation about ties worn by former pupils of Harrow Public School, Halloran pointedly replies that he went to London Polytechnic. He is certainly a man who feels more at home with inner city life "a place you can see the dirt – here you have to dig for it". The suspects, on the other hand, are doing their best to keep their heads down and out of trouble. Roper has spun an extraordinary web of deceit in order to keep his coveted position as secretary of the tennis club, a web that soon comes unraveled once the police start poking into his affairs, and his past. The plot mixes sex, violence, and stockings in a way reminiscent of Hitchcock, with the story generally pacy, and the revelations and twists coming thick and fast. The Hitchcock influence is also felt in the climax, which sees Halloran clinging for dear life to the side of the church steeple.
Adapted for the
screen by the producer director team of (respectively) Roy and John Boulting,
and starring Ian Carmichael, Lucky Jim is a minor forgettable piece of 1950s
British comedy, and a disappointment considering the talent involved.
The story, based on the Kingsley Amis novel of the same name, follows
the misadventures of Jim Dixon, a young history lecturer at a “redbrick”
English university. Along the way he manages to unintentionally offend his
colleagues and sabotage his career – but always comes out okay in the end,
because, after all, he is “Lucky” Jim.
The film is
hampered by an indecisiveness of what tone to take with the material, something
that spills over into both the script and the casting. At times Dixon is shown
as an “angry young man”, shaking up the stuffy world of academia with his
unpretentious teaching style, and love of women and booze; at others he simply
looks like a hapless boob, blundering around from mishap to mishap.
Ian Carmichael
was an excellent comic actor, especially playing affable but clueless upper
class types, such as in the far superior I’m Alright Jack (also made with John and Roy Boulting)
or as Bertie Wooster in the 1960s BBC TV series World of Wooster. Here though,
he seems uncertain what to do with Dixon, his vague generic northern accent
hinting at lower middle-class provincial roots without ever convincing us.
In addition,
wasting the talents of Terry Thomas is simply unforgivable. Thomas, like
Carmichael, worked best within a limited range, but also had charisma and comic
timing in abundance. Here he looks and acts like a sleazy middle-aged weirdo
rather than the hip young sophisticated bohemian type his character is supposed to be.
The subject
matter is also a problem. There is nothing wrong with satire aimed at a very
specific set of people, but the satirists have to accept that it may not
stretch to a wider audience. To do that you have to find a way to make the
subject relevant to the wider world, and this, ultimately, is what Lucky Jim
fails to do. The world of 1950s English academia, at least as presented here,
is just too rarefied and obscure to make sense to anyone not familiar with its
people and customs.
Although they
have their place as influential science fiction, ground breaking television,
and a vital part of the Hammer Film Studio story, to me the Quatermass stories
are also a kind of 20th century English mythology, an attempt to examine and
explore the post-World War Two English identity, politically and socially. The
first, the Quatermass Experiment showed a country trying to maintain its status
as a world superpower through space exploration. The third, Quatermass and the Pit, looked at issues of race and identity. Sandwiched between those is
Quatermass 2, a paranoid tale of Government cover-ups, colonisation, attitudes
to authority, and mob mentality. The end result is tense, fast paced, and even
more thought provoking than the original.
Professor Quatermass and his team of scientists have been tracing mysterious
objects that have been falling to earth from outer space. Tracking them to
their landing place, Quatermass finds a town that has been almost completely
destroyed, some rocks filled with a mysterious, ammonia-based gas that infects
his assistant, and a shadowy refinery that bears a striking resemblance to his
rejected plans for a Moon colony. Officially, it is producing a new synthetic
food, but it actually harbours a terrifying secret with deadly implications for
the future of humanity.
Like the other two Quatermass films made by the Hammer Studios, this started
life as a six part BBC TV serial, which was condensed into a 85 minute film,
and as with the other two, the original story stays largely the same, but moves
along at a much quicker pace. The only significant change is in the climax,
where instead of Quatermass piloting his experimental rocket to destroy the
invaders, an unmanned craft is sent up instead.
Director Val Guest had a long and varied career, and although he never settled
on a particular style or genre, when faced with subject matter of a fantastic
nature, such as here or The Day the Earth Caught Fire, he would often mix this
with a low key, more realistic filming style. Events are presented in a matter
of fact style, and many of the scenes set in everyday locations, such as pubs,
or out in the countryside. In addition, Guest employed cinema verite
techniques, such as hand-held cameras, to give something of a documentary feel
and by having the dialogue delivered at a rapid pace, sometimes overlapping, he
stops it feeling too staged and stilted
A standard practise in British films at the time was to cast an American actor
(usually one whose services could be obtained cheaply) in order to maximise box
office potential in the US. Hence, Brian Donlevy reprises his role as Professor
Quatermass from the first film, and, as before, he is both a liability and an
asset.The character was originally
conceived as a thoughtful, somewhat reserved scientist, a world away from Buck
Rogers-style action heroes, and Donlevy rarely seems convincing when having to
play that role. However, plenty of fictional characters, from Hamlet to Dr Who,
have been played in plenty of different ways, so why not Quatermass? His real
strength comes when events call for, if not aggressive, then at least assertive
action, as this Quatermass is no shrinking violet.
As a film, although not overly gory, Quatermass 2 manages to be gruesome and
quite shockingly violent at times. The brainwashed refinery guards
cold-bloodedly gun down their fellow citizens, who respond in kind when they
get chance, while at one point the aliens use pulped human corpses to block
pipes pumping out deadly (to them) oxygen. There are also more subtle nods to
the horror genre, particularly the sight of the townsfolk forming themselves
into that classic horror archetype, the lynch mob, to attack the
refinery.
It is fascinating to consider some of the historical context in which
Quatermass 2 would have been seen originally, and the picture of 1950s Britain
that it presents. Identity is one of the key themes of the film, both national
and personal, and the big influence on both would undoubtedly have been World
War 2. With Britain under threat of invasion, whether fighting overseas or
keeping the home fires burning, it was something that everyone was involved
with and affected by, and something that they would still be reminded of some
years after, in the landscape of bombed out buildings and craters, in the
continued rationing of food, and in the dead and injured soldiers and
civilians.
The Britain shown on screen is not a "green and pleasant land" but a
grey, frightened, paranoid country, coming back down to earth from the giddy
euphoria of victory over Hitler, to face the harsh and potentially apocalyptic
realities of the Cold War. Writer Nigel Kneale cleverly combines this with
drawing on contemporary fears and events such as the Chemical Warfare plant at
Porton Down, and the (nowadays, largely forgotten) state of emergency that the
British Government declared in 1955, and these are reflected in some of the
images and situations in the film.
Yet there is
still possible to see something relevant to modern life in Quatermass 2. The
idea of aliens infiltrating the government predates the X-Files by several
decades, along with the general air of paranoia, and cover-ups. That
infiltration could also be read as commentary on creeping corporate influence
on government, while fears over loss of identity, both national and personal,
are perennial.
Ultimately, what
I love about the Quatermass stories, and Quatermass 2 in particular is how it
almost sums up my love/hate relationship with both England and being English.
It has elements and themes that are everything I dislike about this country:
New towns, deference to authority (at one point, we see a sign behind a bar saying,
"Secrets mean sealed lips"), small-minded pettiness, Government
secrecy, and the lynch mob mentality.
However, Quatermass 2 also represent plenty of things I like about England: It
is a Hammer film; the script is full of a thoroughly English dry satirical wit
and a streak of paranoia, and understatement; and, in a sign of the obvious
influence on that other English sci-fi icon Dr Who, the calm logic of science
and the decency and heroism of the individual cools the raging heat of the mob
and saves the day.
