Jay's Movie of the Week #13: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are as comforting a team as Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, or Steve and Edie. Hammer films, be they horror or a mystery-thriller like this, are as comforting as house slippers. Mannered, stage-bound, and always hinting at much darker thrills than they show, this studio produced gem after gem. All together, it's a match-up equal to chocolate and peanut butter.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is perhaps the most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and this is one of many versions of the film. Cushing as Holmes and Andre Morell as Watson, however, have a take on the characters that seems somewhat... breezy. Cushing's Holmes is more a sharp and insightful showoff than someone truly driven by their genius intellect and preternatural powers of observation. Just the smartest man in a roomful of dim bulbs.

He's also a fairly emotional Holmes who makes some rash mistakes and assumptions, which is a dimension you don't see enough in this character. Invited to investigate the death of the lord of Baskerville Hall, where the prologue showed us a murder committed by the debauchery-minded Sir Hugo, who was then himself killed by "something."

Sherlock Holmes, never one to suffer fools gladly in any incarnation, agrees to investigate the death and descends upon Sir Henry (Christopher Lee). The son of the deceased Sir Charles, he's the new lord of Baskerville Hall, and a bit of a jerk. (Okay, he's a big jerk.) Sir Charles dropped dead, perhaps running from the mythical hell hound that curses the family. It's equally possible, though, an escaped murderer named Selden might have had a hand in the proceedings. So is the threat something supernatural, or just a prosaic murderer? Worse, will the family heart condition knock off Sir Henry before anything else gets a chance?

31 Flavors of Horror #15: Vampire Circus (Also, One A Week Reviews #41)

 I liked Vampire Circus so much that, even though I wrote this review for DVD Snapshot back in April, I saved presenting it on my own site until October so it could be part of the 31 Flavors of Horror. I also thought it should be one of the titles doing double duty as a One A Week Review.


This Hammer Horror came in a Blu-Ray and DVD combo pack chock-full of goodies and it's definitely worth getting your hands on. A seriously fun, old-school movie watching experience.

31 Flavors of Horror #15:

Vampire Circus

Official Synopsis:

A little girl is brutally slain by a vampire in a tiny 10^th century Austrian village. Seeking revenge, the townspeople invade the foreboding castle of Count Mitterhaus and kill him for the crime. As the Count died, he curses the villagers and vows their children will all die so that he may someday return to life. Fifteen years later, as the village is ravaged by the plague, a traveling circus comes to town and distracts the villagers from their current hardships. Little do they know that their troubles are only beginning! The circus is actually a troupe of shape-shifting vampires and, as the local children start disappearing, they realize the prophecy of the long dead Count is coming true. Synapse Films is proud to present Vampire Circus, now available for the first time on home video in glorious 1080p high-definition and loaded with amazing extras you can really sink your teeth into!

Our Take:

The above synopsis accurately captures the prologue of Vampire Circus, but neglects to mention the dark sexuality implied in it. A mother feeding her own child to her vampire lover is just as deliciously wrong now as in 1971. When the aggressively lascivious circus folk roll in to the already plague-ridden Austrian berg where our tale is set, the line between staid old-guard values and Seventies permissiveness is clearly drawn. Will our staid Burgermeister be able to uphold the society's conventions against a circus featuring a writhing body-painted snake woman and dark-eyed panther boy? How can he when they can seduce every local lady in sight?

31 Flavors of Horror BONUS: Hammer Horror

While putting together these posts for my 31 Flavors movie review project, I stumbled up on the news that Kate Bush has a new album coming out around the end of the year.  (She once took over a decade off in between albums and now two in eight months? That's just showing off...)

These two acts in tandem got "Hammer Horror" stuck in my head for an hour, so I thought I'd (pass the earworm along) share her tribute to the studio and the spooky movies they made as a bit of a 31 Flavors of Horror bonus...

 Wow... what a ham. I'm a fan, mind you, but some people play to the back row. Can mugging for the camera be scary?

Another thought - I used to do a Song o' the Day feature on Big Lug Land when I first got her started - think I should try again? (My taste in music is, I assure you, wide and varied. Little of it comes with weirdly dance major performance art videos...)

One A Week Reviews #18: The Resident

No wonder I don't live in New York. In The Resident, Hilary Swank is renting a gorgeous apartment at $3800 a month and that price is represented as a steal. I live in Ohio. I can't wrap my brain around that.

The landlord is dreamy, the rent is (supposedly) great, and there's even a kindly-but-dotty old Christoper Lee downstairs. This apartment is so fine, so much like home, it even brings out the exhibitionist in Swank, who lets the camera zoom a little too close into her sheer panties. (I guess that's part of play the subject of a voyeur's gaze is great and all, but, honey, you got Oscars. Plural. I don't need to see your landing strip.)

The Resident is getting press for being the new film from Hammer studios, and it got lavished with production dollars. Sadly, it went straight to DVD because, even with a guaranteed "opener" like Swank, we live in a world where Christopher Lee isn't recognized as one of the biggest box office stars of the 2000s (by virtue of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars movies. He's a bigger action villain than anyone else over the last decade). This, however, is a decent weeknight-in thriller that I think both male and female audiences would enjoy.

Swank is a young, single doctor who winds up in a mostly empty apartment building with a few creepy neighbors and a few creepier events. "Dreamy Landlord" (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) starts out "meeting cute" and being charming, and winds up being creepy-dreamy. Her ex, Jack (Lee Pace) straddles "creepy-dreamy" as well. Meanwhile, she engages in all the "quirky movie girl" habits like drinking wine from balloon glasses that make you look more waifish. She also has the unusually quirky trait of sleeping deeply, allowing for the cheesiest "man lurking over sleeping woman" scenes in history. One with sucked fingers.

Much like Audition, what starts as almost a cute, Meg Ryan-worthy dating story resets into something more. At the half-hour mark, the film rolls back to the beginning and fills in the gaps that make the men in Juliet's life so creepy-dreamy... and we find out why her apartment has been so cheap: It's an aquarium.

This hearkens back more to the crime shockers and slasher thrillers Hammer put out than their more famous supernatural monsters. Hidden dangers of the male kind surround our damsel in distress as she falls into the grasp of a family with a dangerous dynamic. For starters, they might use your toothbrush... eww.

There's a lot technically perfect about it, though that sheen is also a shell to keep us from getting too invested in The Resident. It's a little bit of The Collector, and a little Single White Female; a cat and mouse game with a dark walnut lacquer.You admire The Resident more than you enjoy it, because it's a cool, distant. The slow but creepy middle leads to an exciting third act, especially because Swank can act. The scenes of her "putting it together" and last moment "hammering" are worth investing your time here. Not too shabby by far.

One A Week Reviews #32: Pay Phone

PAY PHONE is Brandon Ford's third novel and an impressive achievement. Set in New York City in January 1998, it's somewhat "timeless," as the imagery and events may easily conjure up for you the grimy, dangerous concrete streets of Times Square at it's 1970s and early 80s sleaziest.

The novel features two isolated characters at it's core. Jake, a monster hiding in plain sight who uses a pay phone to entice his victims, and Chelsea, a vulnerable and optimistic young woman who gets ensnared by him without even realizing the door she's opened by answering a random ringing phone. Tight and tidy, this is spare storytelling. A 2 day timeline is pared to the essentials and the pacing is compulsive. Like evesdropping on an interesting stranger who's "in extremis" in real life, you simply HAVE to follow and find out what happens, even when you dread to look.

Ford draws each character in the small assortment of players as humanely recognizable. Their idiosyncrasies and oddly unifying loneliness make the surprises of backstory and the explosions of cleanly, smoothly-detailed violence as shocking as the nasty surprises of real life. His descriptions of violent acts define "chilling." They're images that stay vivid in the mind's eye. I can't remember the last novel that actually made me gasp out loud -- and more than once, at that -- much less one that actually had me feeling powerless to intercede on a fictitious someone's behalf.

Ford's previous novels CRYSTAL BAY and SPLATTERED BEAUTY demonstrated his eye for detail, which continues to engage here. Those novels and this one also brim with his vivid and memorable supporting characters who add layers of dimension and terrific red herrings. Ford generously engages us with all his characters, good and evil. His skill grows with every outing and you want to start following him now, as PAY PHONE is a surprisingly moving novel staking out his way forward. It's horrors lie in our mundane reality and that's more than good writing. The inevitability of events in PAY PHONE make it almost downright dangerous.

There's nothing fantastical here, but this novel harbors a monster, the one who may be next door. You won't be able to stop reading. I can't recommend it highly enough.
In the end, using a phone connection between villain and victim is even more timely and ominous now in our cell-phone and internet age of virtual interactions... I look forward to the next novel.

One A Week Reviews #26: These Are The Damned

An "odd duck" that's part of the Hammer Icons of Suspense collection, These Are The Damned kicks off fast. With a jangly theme song called "Black Leather" that WILL unfortunately lodge itself into your brain, there's rapid-fire introductions to boring American tourist/Man of Mystery Macdonald Carey;dapper biker-thug Oliver Reed and his sassy, hip-swinging sister-moll, Shirley Ann Field with her inexplicable attraction to Carey; and exotic beatnik sculptress Viveca Lindfors.

With gorgeous black and white cinematography and an intriguing English Seaside town setting, Damned is engaging from the get-go, where you're expecting a character story. Something about the wild youth of "today" rebelling against staid society, even if here it's represented by the stately, stuffy Carey. Oliver Reed, in an early role, is already expressing the magnetic lunacy that will make him a compelling and repelling screen presence for his whole career. You have the "dapper biker gang" trying to roll the American, but this little "social drama" soon turns when a military conspiracy is revealed. One involving a classroom of very sheltered, black-clad children (These "damned" are the aesthetic flip-side of the Village of the Damned kids).

It's all very intriguing and by 25 minutes in you're hooked, committed to find out just where the hell this is all going. The story goes from "social drama" (I keep turning to that phrase but I don't know how else to describe it's dynamic. Maybe "kitchen-sink drama"?) to chase thriller to Sci-Fi-W-T-F? while keeping a fair pace. It does drag in a few places, but that's acceptable in a nearly 50 year old film. You're not sure why Carey and Field get together beyond the perfunctory needs of the script, yet they have an oddly calm chemistry. Lindfors and Reed share a very interesting scene, something out of a social drama. They seem to be two very damaged kids who could just somehow make it work.

Joseph Losey was an accomplished director and here created a real below-the-radar gem. I can't recall encountering this film before, but I'm definitely glad to find it now. I'm not going to spoil too many of it's secrets because it's worth a watch. An artifact of the "Atomic Age" and a curious glimpse at early sixties youth counterculture, this is a unique film. Seek it out!

One A Week Reviews #22: Never Take Candy From A Stranger

The DVD release of any Hammer film is cause for celebration for those of us who love them. This "Icons of Suspense Collection" includes four non-horror titles. I plan to see 'em all and review a few for you.

1960's Never Take Candy From A Stranger may be viewed as a departure for Hammer Studios. Known primarily in America for their horror pictures, they were in fact a full-fledged movie studio, not just a boutique outfit. As such, they branched out into all kinds of fare.

Racy and shocking for the day, Stranger is a Canada-set potboiler that's something like The Crucible for child molestation and adopted from a play named The Pony Cart that I've never heard of before this.

Little new-in-town Jean Carter loses her candy money and her friend Lucille says she knows what to do. This leads to Jean (rather blithely) telling her mother and school principal father (Sally and Peter) that the ominous Mr. Oldeberry made them dance nude in exchange for candy. Being that he's mentioned ominously in the very first scene, there's very little doubt that Clarence Oldeberry will turn out to be a monster par excellence.

The shock for a modern audience starts when realizing that Jean has no idea something inappropriate happened. Growing up in the age of "Stranger Danger," we always had the awareness that there were monsters outside, even if we grew up in suburban cocoons that blessedly left us more worried about the ones under our beds. Jean has no sense at all that there was an agenda going on that wasn't innocent. (That this is all old hat for Lucille is pretty disturbing, as well.) Also, Grandmother's dismissal of a flasher from her childhood strikes one because that's honestly how many dismiss some of the shocking peeks at the adult world they get as children. She would rather be stoic than rock the boat in their new city.

The police match Grandmother's attitude. The Carters are new and foreign and shouldn't be throwing accusations and drawing attention to citizens of long term social standing. Evidently the whole town knows Old Mister Oldeberry is a giant pervy letch-king but nobody bothered to tell them in time. The town doesn't understand why they didn't have the good sense to keep her away from there and people even start ostracizing Jean for what happened. Oldeberry's son is ready to turn the whole city against the Carters for doing nothing more than having the temerity to expose his father's actions. Was there always a code of silence in small towns to protect the crimes of their more eccentric and prominent citizenry? Probably...

In the end it's the Carters versus Society in a scandalous trial. Oldeberry just sits in the dock, not speaking, while the trial goes on around him. Lucille's parents seem so afraid to jeopardize the status quo they actually ship Lucille out of town so she doesn't have to attend.

For a stiff, mannered and reserved 60s film, the overall pace and especially the trial scenes are surprisingly gripping. I think my response is to the simple, clean, broadly-drawn depiction of a town closing up against exposure. Us versus them. Just as frustrating as all the stories of lawyers maneuvering and criminals released on technicalities are nowadays. Nothing like watching a lawyer try and take apart a child on the stand through goading and confusion. For a crisp, mannered British film, the sleaze oozes out of the oddest places.

I'm not going to spoil the outcome of the trial, or the surprisingly discomforting conclusion of the film, because I do recommend this one. Never Take Candy From A Stranger is engaging and unsettling. One reveal of Mr. Oldeberry shocks as much as if Freddy Krueger had shown up in his place. Also, it's a very contemporary story that plays at points like a leisurely, layman's edition of Law & Order. Sure, again, it is painted in broad strokes of black and white, both literally and figuratively, but the clear moral choices make the various character's shades of gray all the more involving.

Jay's One A Week Reviews #17: I Sell The Dead

This movie was a pleasure to review for dvdsnapshot.com - You really should seek out this very enjoyable and rather black comedy.

I SELL THE DEAD

OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS:
It was a time of ghouls, ghosts and most ghastly of all, the fine art of grave-robbing. Dominic Monaghan of Lord of the Rings and Lost stars as 19th century corpse-snatcher Arthur Blake, who pilfered the cemeteries and coffins of England until his capture by police. But just before Blake is to meet the hangman's noose, he will confess to a peculiar priest (Ron Perlman of Hellboy and Sons of Anarchy) his gruesome tale of vampires, zombies and cadaver-dealing that takes him from the savagery of the criminal underworld to the terrors of the undead. Producer Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, The Last Winter) and Angus Scrimm (Phantasm) co-star in this deliriously grisly and hilarious homage to foggy graveyards, bloody mayhem and the golden age of gothic horror.

OUR TAKE:
Arthur Blake and Willie Grimes are a pair of grave-robbers in the best "Burke & Hare" tradition. As the film opens, with some colorful credits and a delightfully playful musical score, Willie's losing his head and Blake is giving his final statement to a priest. What's in his story, however, proves 19th century crime to be a rather... supernatural past-time.

Aesthetically, I Sell the Dead is a mash-up of the best features of Hammer Horrors and old EC comics with the same black-humored heart. They say "life is nasty, brutish, and short" but in this world, it doesn't end peacefully or finally. As they steal bodies for Dr. Quint (Scrimm, who looks to have one heck of a "Scrooge" in him judging by this performance), their misadventures move from corpse-robbing to "the resurrection trade." Something of the zany spirit of The Evil Dead is here in the slapstick humor and daring camera work. Monaghan and Fessenden stay droll in the face of various and sundry creatures of the night. The framing sequence of storytelling knits the various anecdotal encounters together in the best Hammer and Amicus anthology tradition.

The film has a terrific look, with areas of New York standing in for the misty, stage-bound England so familiar from those Hammer films. However, it's more modern in it's very black comedy. There are occasional comic-book panel images, layered montages, and other digital effects. They all stand out, but mostly are there to enhance the thrills. What could be wrong with that? Director Glenn McQuaid is a visual effects and titles designer directing his first feature, an expansion on his short film "The Resurrection Apprentice," which sadly is not included on this disc. That design experience shows in this film, that looks darn rich and stylish for it's lower-budget roots. Funny and a visual pleasure, I have no idea why this hasn't had a bigger profile. I Sell the Dead is not to be missed.


SPECIAL FEATURES:
I Sell the Dead comes on DVD widescreen in English 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio and with English and Spanish subtitles. Special features include two separate commentary tracks (one with Monahan and Fessenden, one with McQuaid), an hour-long making of featurette that's quite exhaustive and a nice and in-depth 13 minute featurette on the special effects. The trailer for the film is included, along with those for Dead Snow, Pontypool, The Escapist, Five Minutes of Heaven, and In The Loop.
The DVD packaging also comes with a comic book adaptation of the film.

CONCLUSION:
In the vein of Hammer's sixties-era gothic films, old EC horror comics, and the humor of Edward Gorey, I Sell the Dead is a small, humorous horror gem. With rich style and black humor, this horror-comedy makes for a good night's viewing. Not rated, and not for the little ones, but if you enjoy droll humor and a little monster make-up, you can't go wrong.

OVERALL PICTURE:
MOVIE: A
EXTRAS: A