SHATTER aka CALL HIM MR. SHATTER (UK/Hong Kong - 1974; US release 1975) Directed by Michael Carreras. Written by Don Houghton. Cast: Stuart Whitman, Peter Cushing, Ti Lung, Anton Diffring, Lily Li, Yemi Ajibade, Huang Pei Chi, Lo Wei, Chiang Han, Liu Ka Yong, Liu Ya Ying, James Ma, Kao Hsiung. (R, 90 mins) Following the success of 1973's ENTER THE DRAGON and the subsequent explosion of kung-fu movies coming out of Hong Kong, Hammer, England's legendary house of horror, tried to get a piece of the action with a pair of co-productions with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers. Both turned out to be critical and commercial failures, starting with 1974's horror/martial-arts hybrid THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES, which bombed in the UK and wasn't even released in the US until 1979, drastically and disastrously re-edited as THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA. Since becoming widely available in its original, uncut form in the early days of DVD, the very entertaining LEGEND has found a strong cult following and is today held in higher regard by fans. The other was the international actioner SHATTER, which remains the ill-conceived dud that it was decades ago. Just out on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory (because physical media is dead), SHATTER was a troubled production from the start, with Hammer hiring the unlikely Monte Hellman to direct. A Roger Corman protege, Hellman enjoyed some critical success with a pair of low-key mid '60s westerns with Jack Nicholson and Millie Perkins (RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND, which Nicholson also wrote, and THE SHOOTING), and found a place in the post-EASY RIDER New Hollywood movement with 1971's existential road movie TWO-LANE BLACKTOP.
Despite his reputation as an American cult auteur, Hellman was never above a hired gun gig if he had bills to pay. He finished 1979's AVALANCHE EXPRESS without credit when director Mark Robson died during production, and he would later helm 1989's killer Santa sequel SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT. But it's hard to imagine why anyone thought he was the right guy for a Hammer/Shaw Brothers hit man/kung-fu movie, so it's little surprise that he immediately clashed with producer and studio exec Michael Carreras. Carreras stepped in to finish directing 1971's BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB when Seth Holt died of a heart attack on the set, and he would step in again here after firing Hellman three weeks into production. While Holt remained credited on BLOOD (it was about 90% done when he died), Carreras took Hellman's name off of SHATTER and is the sole credited director, even though all involved parties have said that most of the film was Hellman's work. In its finished form, it's a hodgepodge of ideas and trends that never quite gel, and experienced cinephiles with a sense for behind-the-scenes chaos will see a major red flag in the opening credits that list three cinematographers. It has hints of the themes of existential melancholy inherent in Hellman's films of that period, but it's also required to have some martial arts action, political intrigue (haphazardly represented by grainy, mismatched stock footage pilfered from TV news broadcasts), and some splatter and a little T&A for the exploitation crowd. It's a confused, compromised mess that feels more thrown-together and abandoned than finished.
Stuart Whitman had a pretty good run as a Hollywood leading man in the '60s, even earning a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance as a just-paroled child molester in 1961's THE MARK (he lost to Maximilian Schell in JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG). He would end up doing guest spots on TV and appearing in some truly dreadful movies by the 1980s, but here, in 1974, he's definitely finding a niche in drive-in exploitation as Shatter, a freelance international assassin hired to kill Ansabi M'Goya (Yemi Ajibade), a brutal East African dictator. When he goes to Hong Kong to collect his payment from bank executive Hans Leber (Anton Diffring), the representative of his unnamed client, he's told that he won't be paid and if he makes any trouble, he'll be arrested for M'Goya's murder. This understandably sets Shatter off, especially since he's got people taking shots at him, plus Rattwood (Peter Cushing, attempting what sounds at times like a Southern American accent), a cynical agent from the government's "security division" having him roughed up and telling him to get out of town. Shatter finds a love interest in masseuse Mai-Mee (Lily Li) and eventually teams up with her martial-arts expert brother Tai Pah (Ti Lung) to take on the assassins coming after him and help him get his money from Leber, who represents not the CIA or British intelligence, as Shatter assumed, but rather a cabal of international syndicate heads who wanted M'Goya rubbed out because he stood in the way of their lucrative global opium pipeline.
Stuart Whitman (1928-2020)
Released on the US grindhouse and drive-in circuit in 1975 and into 1976 by Avco Embassy as CALL HIM MR. SHATTER, SHATTER does boast an admittedly awesome score by David Lindup, filled with gratuitous waka jawaka, vibraslap, and shrieked "Shatter!"s. And it comes alive on a few occasions, usually during some kung-fu beatdowns by Lung, who had a long career starting in Shaolin movies from that period and is still active today, but is perhaps best known for starring with Chow Yun-Fat in a pre-fame John Woo's A BETTER TOMORROW (1986) and A BETTER TOMORROW II (1987). Whitman and Diffring look like they're just in it for the free Hong Kong and Macao vacation, but Cushing, in his last appearance in a Hammer production, manages to bring a spark to his small but unusual role as a tough-talking intelligence agent, usually capping off his smartass bon mots by popping a piece of candy in his mouth (Shatter: "Rattwood, you're a real bastard." Rattwood: "Yes I am, aren't I?"). Carreras initially had some half-baked notion of SHATTER being spun-off into a TV series with Whitman and Cushing, but it obviously never panned out. Hammer was suffering from multiple identity crises in their waning days of the 1970s as established horror trends were completely upended by the likes of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, ROSEMARY'S BABY, and THE EXORCIST, and their short-lived dalliance with the Shaw Brothers is just another example of them throwing anything at the wall to see what stuck. It was a nice idea, but SHATTER is a dull, dreary misfire plagued by a problematic shoot, and feeling a lot longer than 90 minutes. Whitman eventually retired from acting in 2000, and SHATTER's Blu-ray release was already announced when he died in March 2020 at the age of 92.
Michael Carreras, Peter Cushing, Sir Run Run Shaw,
and Stuart Whitman on the set of SHATTER
Directed by Jimmy Sangster. Written by Jimmy Sangster and Michael Syson. Cast: Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Ralph Bates, Peter Cushing, James Cossins, Gillian Lind, Brian Grellis, John Bown. (PG, 94 mins) A minor late-period Hammer thriller that's rarely referenced today, 1972's middling FEAR IN THE NIGHT gets by almost entirely on atmosphere alone, set in an eerily empty boarding school that allows director/co-writer Jimmy Sangster to maximize the sense of isolation felt by the film's terrorized heroine. But the story is so rote, predictable, and ultimately silly that the payoff isn't really worth the buildup. Recovering from what's been unfairly deemed a nervous breakdown (someone slipped her a mickey in a restaurant) followed closely by an attack by a one-armed man that no one around her believes really happened, Peggy (Judy Geeson) leaves her job as a caregiver for elderly Mrs. Beamish (Gillian Lind) when she marries teacher Robert (Ralph Bates) after a whirlwind romance. Robert moves them to an isolated rural area outside of London where he's accepted a position at a boarding school run by headmaster Carmichael (Peter Cushing). But right away, something is off and naive Peggy never does quite pick up on it: there doesn't seem to be any other teachers aside from Robert, and she keeps hearing voices in classrooms but there's no sign of any students. Carmichael--who has a prosthetic left arm--acts weird around her, she gets a strange vibe from his much-younger wife Molly (Joan Collins), and she's eventually attacked again by a one-armed man, but an incredulous, dismissive Robert tells her to "sleep on it" before talking her out of calling the police.
Hammer fans will recognize recycled elements from other Sangster-scripted women-in-peril thrillers like SCREAM OF FEAR (1961), PARANOIAC (1963), NIGHTMARE (1964), and CRESCENDO (1970), with some dashes of classics like GASLIGHT and DIABOLIQUE for good measure. But some of the big third-act reveals are so obvious that you'll figure out that someone is trying to drive Peggy insane and frame her for a murder long before Peggy does, especially with Robert's behavior and the presence of Collins, cast radically against type as a scheming, manipulative bitch. Robert's confession to Peggy about why he's actually at the school and what he's actually doing for Carmichael is utter nonsense, and the ultimate trick pulled off by Carmichael just comes off as one contrivance too many. Despite its myriad flaws, FEAR IN THE NIGHT is a reasonably enjoyable Hammer suspense thriller if approached with shrugged shoulders and an appropriately diminished level of expectation. Geeson (best known for co-starring with Sidney Poitier in 1967's TO SIR, WITH LOVE and more recently emerging from semi-retirement to appear in Rob Zombie's THE LORDS OF SALEM and 31) turns in an appealing performance even though you'll wish she wasn't so meek, passive, and slow on the uptake. It's obvious from the moment he's introduced sinisterly grimacing while adjusting his prosthetic arm like Dr. Strangelove that Cushing's Carmichael can't possibly be the villain, and with what's essentially a four-character story, it doesn't take much sleuthing on the part of the viewer to figure out what's going on and who's responsible.
Having written trailblazing Hammer titles like 1957's THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and 1958's HORROR OF DRACULA among many others, Sangster saw his short-lived and largely negatively-received directing career end with FEAR IN THE NIGHT, which followed 1970's THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN and 1971's LUST FOR A VAMPIRE. All three of Sangster's films starred Ralph Bates, FEAR being the last of several unsuccessful attempts at grooming the young actor to be Hammer horror's heir apparent, selected to help nab the youth market as Cushing was pushing 60 and Christopher Lee was nearing 50. Hammer and Bates parted ways by the time FEAR IN THE NIGHT was barely released in the US in 1974, and it marked the only film to team Bates with Cushing, the legend he was supposed to succeed. The film is old-fashioned enough and completely lacking in the lurid sex and skin in which Hammer was beginning to indulge that, aside from the hairstyles and the fashions and one shouted "Bastard!," it could've been made a decade earlier.
Ralph Bates and Jimmy Sangster
on the set of FEAR IN THE NIGHT
For all its stale twists and predictability issues, FEAR IN THE NIGHT (just out on Blu-ray from Scream Factory because physical media is dead), is probably Sangster's most accomplished directorial effort from a technical standpoint. The money shot that concludes the opening credits sequence is legitimately creepy, there's some unusual cutting techniques that are well-handled, and the use of all the open space in the hallways and abandoned rooms at the school indicates that he may have caught some of the early hits of the Italian giallo craze. But without the shocking violence and the innovative style of a Dario Argento, FEAR IN THE NIGHT can't really compete in that field, and the story is so old-hat that most of the "surprise" twists are really just hoary cliches. Sangster (1927-2011) would soon leave Hammer behind, relocating to Hollywood by late 1972, where he became a busy television writer, only periodically dabbling in big-screen horror (he wrote 1978's THE LEGACY and 1980's PHOBIA) while focusing on TV shows like BANACEK, IRONSIDE, CANNON, MCCLOUD, MOVIN' ON, THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, WONDER WOMAN, and B.J. AND THE BEAR.
THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (UK - 1970; US release 1971) Directed by Jimmy Sangster. Written by Jeremy Burnham and Jimmy Sangster. Cast: Ralph Bates, Kate O'Mara, Veronica Carlson, Dennis Price, Jon Finch, Dave Prowse, Joan Rice, Bernard Archard, Stephen Turner, Graham James, Neil Wilson, James Hayter, James Cossins, Glenys O'Brien, George Belbin. (R, 95 mins) One of the least-loved films in the Hammer horror cycle, 1970's THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN was intended as a reboot of their FRANKENSTEIN series as part of a calculated effort to skew toward a younger and more hip audience. By this time at the dawn of the '70s, audience interest was waning and Hammer decided to shake things up, with their general feeling being that 48-year-old Christopher Lee and 57-year-old Peter Cushing--the faces of "Hammer horror"--were starting to get on in years, relatively speaking. Cushing had just co-starred in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, the first of the so-called "Karnstein trilogy," a film that represented a sort-of turning point for Hammer in that it went all-in on excessive gore and gratuitous nudity from Ingrid Pitt and the female cast members. But when it came time for the follow-up to 1969's FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED, Hammer opted to head in a different direction, ditching Cushing to make a desperate grab for the youth market and placing most of their hopes on the shoulders of one Ralph Bates. A busy British TV actor (most notably appearing as Caligula in the 1968 six-episode ITV series THE CAESARS), Bates was already being groomed as Hammer horror's heir apparent when he was cast in 1970's TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, which, in its earliest stages, wasn't even supposed to feature Christopher Lee's Dracula, instead focusing on Bates as Lord Courtley, a Satanist disciple of the vampire. Lee was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of the DRACULA series and made no secret of his feelings to anyone who would listen. Nevertheless, it was at some point decided that he had to be in it, so the script was hastily rewritten to have Courtley supernaturally transform into Dracula, thus reducing Bates' role in the film to make way for Lee. The 30-year-old Bates took one for the team, and was rewarded by being made the new Victor Frankenstein in the same year's THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, replacing Cushing as part of Hammer's new youth-driven direction. This didn't seem to bother Cushing in the slightest, as he paid a visit to the set and even posed for some publicity shots with Bates. Perhaps he was as tired of playing Dr. Frankenstein as Lee was of playing Dracula, but just wasn't such a surly pain in the ass about it.
Ralph Bates (1940-1991)
THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN was the directing debut of veteran Hammer screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, a key figure who was instrumental in establishing the studio as the UK's premier House of Horror, having scripted their first three Cushing/Lee teamings: 1957's THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, 1958's HORROR OF DRACULA, and 1959's THE MUMMY, among many others. Sangster would ultimately prove to be a better writer than a director, quickly bailing on his short-lived directing career after just three films--all of which starred Ralph Bates--to return to his better-suited screenwriting occupation. A loose remake of THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN again tells the Frankenstein origin story, beginning with Bates' sociopathic Victor in school, where he's introduced showing up a harumphing professor and and manipulating him into believing he's having a heart attack. When his rich father Baron Frankenstein (George Belbin) refuses to pay for Victor to attend medical school, Victor rigs his father's shotgun to blow up in his face the next time he goes hunting. With the Baron out of the way, Victor inherits Castle Frankenstein, leaving it in the care of 16-year-old servant and the Baron's sexual plaything Alys (Kate O'Mara) while he goes off to university in Vienna. Six years later, Victor and his friend Wilhelm (Graham James) return to the castle, where Victor grows obsessed with reanimating the dead and assembling a man out of body parts collected by a team of husband-and-wife grave robbers (Dennis Price and Joan Rice). He picks up where his father left off with Alys ("She gave satisfaction to my father and she can do the same for me," Victor sneers to Wilhelm, adding "I hope she can cook"), and is so focused on his work that he barely picks up on the vibes he's getting from former classmate Elizabeth (Veronica Carlson), whose professor father (Bernard Archard) ends up being the source of the brain used in the Monster. Unfortunately, that brain is damaged when the grave robber drops the jar it's in and a glass shard gets stuck in it, turning the Monster (bodybuilder and future Darth Vader David Prowse) into a rampaging lunatic and convenient hit man when Victor needs his enemies eliminated.
Peter Cushing visiting Ralph Bates on the set.
As much if not more so than Cushing's interpretation of the character, Bates' Victor Frankenstein is an outrageously vainglorious prick who has absolutely no use for anyone. Starting with orchestrating his father's "accidental" death, Victor will let nothing stand in his way. He electrocutes Wilhelm when he expresses his outrage over his experiments, he kills the grave robber when he decides he knows too much, he has the Monster kill the grave robber's wife when she starts asking questions about her husband, and he tries to pin it all on his hapless, slow-witted cook Stefan (Stephen Turner) when former classmate and current chief of police Henry (Jon Finch, soon to star in Roman Polanski's MACBETH and Alfred Hitchcock's FRENZY) comes around to investigate. Bates' smug, arrogant Victor is like a Donald Trumpenstein, throwing everyone under the bus at the first sign of minor inconvenience or demonstrating even the slightest threat of disloyalty, treating Alys like shit, and stopping just short of shouting "FAKE NEWS!" when too many people have seen the Monster roaming around the woods and Henry demands to search the castle. All the pieces are in place for THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN to work, but it just never quite pulls itself together. Bates is fine in the role and much of the humor is intentional (Victor's killing of a pair of highwaymen is very funny), but the film just plods along, taking forever to get going (it's nearly 70 minutes in before the Monster even appears), and as a director, Sangster lacks the style and verve that guys like Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis, Roy Ward Baker, and even Peter Sasdy, for that matter, would always bring to the table. The film looks stagy and cheap, and Prowse's square head apparatus doesn't hold up under the scrutiny of HD on Scream Factory's new Blu-ray (because physical media is dead). Prowse, who would soon have a small but memorable role as the hulking nurse of Patrick Magee's wheelchair-bound Mr. Alexander in Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, is imposing enough, but he looks ridiculous, spending most his limited screen time shirtless, wearing only bandages from the waist down, which many have observed makes him look like he's wearing a diaper.
In short, nobody liked THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, neither in the UK nor in the US, where it appeared in the summer of 1971 on a drive-in double bill with the harder-edged SCARS OF DRACULA, easily the most violent of the Christopher Lee DRACULA outings. Hammer continued in their attempts to make Bates happen, first by reuniting him with Sangster on the second film in the Karnstein trilogy, 1971's LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, then by casting him as Dr. Jekyll opposite Martine Beswick in the same year's gender-bending DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE, and finally teaming him with Joan Collins, Judy Geeson, and--wait for it--Peter Cushing in Sangster's 1972 thriller FEAR IN THE NIGHT. By this time, it became apparent to Hammer that Ralph Bates wasn't the answer to the problems (nor, for that matter, was having Sangster behind the camera). Other than occasional non-Hammer supporting roles (he appeared with Lana Turner and Trevor Howard in 1974's PERSECUTION, and with Collins and Donald Pleasence in the 1976 demonic baby outing THE DEVIL WITHIN HER), he spent the rest of his career as a regular fixture on British TV, including the lead on BBC's DEAR JOHN, which ran for two seasons starting in 1986 and would be remade a couple of years later into the hit NBC sitcom with Judd Hirsch. Bates' last screen appearance came in a small role in 1990's little-seen period adventure KING OF THE WIND. He was just 51 when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1991.
What Hammer didn't realize at the time in their grooming of Bates was that the horror landscape was changing. In 1968, ROSEMARY'S BABY was a sign of things to come, but it didn't become apparent until THE EXORCIST in 1973 that the concern wasn't Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (or Ralph Bates)--it was simply a genre trend that saw a declining interest in "classic" horror. This became clear with 1972's DRACULA A.D. 1972, and 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, which found Hammer reaching a compromise in their shameless youth pandering by dropping their "aging" stars and their respective Dracula and Van Helsing characters into mod, swinging 1972 London in all its shagadelic glory. It wasn't any kind of happening and fans were decidedly not freaked out, and as a result, ambitious, inventive, and very entertaining period adventure/horror hybrids like CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER and THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES were forced to languish on the shelf for extended amounts of time because Hammer had grown skittish about their product. 1974 saw the release of FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (like CAPTAIN KRONOS, completed in 1972 and unreleased for two years), which brought back Prowse as a much-different and more ape-like monster than he played in THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN. Even with veteran Hammer director Terence Fisher returning (in what ended up being his final film before retiring from the business), along with Peter Cushing stepping back into his signature role, its focus was less on classic horror and more on graphic gore. And still, it was a critical and commercial flop and marked the end of the road for Hammer's FRANKENSTEIN series.
THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES aka THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA (UK/Hong Kong - 1974; US release 1979) Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Written by Don Houghton. Cast: Peter Cushing, David Chiang, Julie Ege, Robin Stewart, Shih Szu, John Forbes-Robertson, Robert Hanna, Chan Shen, James Ma, Liu Hui Ling, Liu Chia Yung, Wong Han Chan, Chen Tien Loong, Fong Kah Ann. (Unrated, 89 mins/R, 75 mins) With 1970's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, Hammer Films started spicing up their horror offerings with generous doses of skin and sex in an attempt to inject new life into their product. They made a play for the youth market by benching Peter Cushing in favor of Ralph Bates as a much-younger Dr. Frankenstein in 1970's little-loved HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, and while they didn't replace Christopher Lee as Dracula, they did transport him with Cushing's Van Helsing to mod, swinging London in all its Austin Powers glory for 1972's DRACULA A.D. 1972 and 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA. Neither film was a hit, and while Cushing soldiered through them, Lee made sure to voice his displeasure with Hammer and the DRACULA series to anyone who would listen. Warner Bros. shelved SATANIC RITES in the US, where it wouldn't be released for another five years, and when pandering to the counterculture demographic failed, Hammer took an even more unpredictable approach by partnering on two 1974 projects with Hong Kong's Run Run Shaw, whose Shaw Brothers outfit was for responsible much of the burgeoning martial-arts craze: the horror/kung-fu hybrid THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES and the Stuart Whitman-starring Hong Kong-set actioner SHATTER.
Hammer was in a strange place by 1974. THE EXORCIST was enough of a game-changer that "classic"-style horror was falling out of fashion. Cushing returned to his Dr. Frankenstein role for one last time with 1974's FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL, by far the goriest entry in the series and the same year saw the release of their most inspired film in years with Brian Clemens' horror/swashbuckler cult classic CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER, which was actually completed in 1972 but Hammer didn't have any confidence in it and shelved it for two years. Bad decisions, diminishing returns, and a changing genre landscape would eventually cause the company's classic incarnation to fold after 1976's TO THE DEVIL...A DAUGHTER, but THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES, like CAPTAIN KRONOS, was a film tragically unappreciated in its time and one that has aged remarkably well over the decades.
It would've been even better had Lee returned as Dracula, but he was so fed up with whole thing after SATANIC RITES that he walked away and refused to have anything more to do with the series, and it's doubtful that he would've been wooed back by the prospect of Dracula in a kung-fu setting. While Cushing returned as Van Helsing, Dracula was now played by jobbing British character actor and one-and-done trivia question response John Forbes-Robertson, the George Lazenby of the Hammer DRACULA series. Since Dracula's screen time is limited to the beginning and the end, the actor doesn't have much of a chance to make an impression beyond his excessive rouge and pasty makeup. And on top of that, he's dubbed over by veteran voice actor David de Keyser, whose familiar tones can be heard revoicing John Richardson in THE VENGEANCE OF SHE and Gabriele Ferzetti in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE. Forbes-Robertson has very little to do here, and it's likely Dracula would've received more face time had Lee agreed to be in it, but with the end result, it hardly matters. Directed by the venerable Roy Ward Baker (ASYLUM, THE VAULT OF HORROR, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS), with uncredited assistance from top Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh, who handled the action sequences, THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES is a dark horse underdog in the Hammer canon that's long overdue for respect and appreciation. As recently as 2018's comprehensive, 992-page chronicle Hammer Complete: The Films, The Personnel, The Company, author Howard Maxford calls the film "a letdown on almost every level." Quite the contrary...it's clever, wildly entertaining, paced like a freight train, and better than at least the last four of Lee's DRACULAs.
Disregarding the A.D. 1972 and SATANIC RITES continuity even though, like those two, it was written by Don Houghton, 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES opens in 1804 Transylvania, where Chinese priest Kah (Chan Shen) awakens Dracula (Forbes-Robertson) to beg for his help in resurrecting the legendary "seven golden vampires." A weakened Dracula decides to use Kah as a vessel to strengthen his own evil spirit and to use the seven golden vampires to wreak his vengeance on mankind (having Dracula possess Kah is also a convenient way around Forbes-Robertson being cast late in production). 100 years later, Van Helsing (Cushing) is in Chung King as a guest lecturer on the subject of vampirism, telling his students of the legend of the seven golden vampires who have terrorized the remote village of Ping Kwei for the last century. Most scoff and walk out, but one, Hsi Ching (David Chiang) knows he speaks the truth: his family comes from that village and his grandfather lost his life battling the seven golden vampires, but not before killing one of them. Van Helsing, with his son Leyland (Robin Stewart) and wealthy, widowed Scandinavian socialite Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who thinks "a vampire hunt sounds exciting," agrees to accompany and advise Hsi Ching, his six brothers, and their ass-kicking little sister Mei Kwei (Shih Szu) on a treacherous journey to Ping Kwei to find and destroy the six surviving golden vampires while frequently fighting off a growing army of their undead victims, now resurrected as kung-fu zombies.
I'm not sure how "Peter Cushing leading a band of sibling martial-arts warriors against vampires and kung-fu zombies" wasn't the most slam-dunk cinematic sales pitch of 1974. It's handsomely-produced and stylishly shot in garish greens, blues, and reds, with spirited performances (this is one of Cushing's best turns as Van Helsing, even taking part in some of the kung-fu fighting) and a sharp use of the region and its iconography (Van Helsing warns that crosses are useless against these vampires, who can only be warded off by Buddha imagery), but THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES was met with general apathy by UK audiences. Like THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, it was shelved in the US by Warner Bros, who ended up selling both films to the short-lived grindhouse outfit Dynamite Entertainment. They eventually released SATANIC RITES in 1978 as COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE, while 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES underwent a drastic restructuring into the cheesily-titled THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA, which hit theaters in the summer and into the fall of 1979. It's one of the worst botched re-edits of all time, gutting the film from 89 to 75 minutes, losing tons of exposition and shifting scenes around to the point where the story makes no sense at all. This had to be part of the reason the film was dismissed as gutter schlock and was maligned for so long by American audiences until Anchor Bay's original DVD release in 1999 finally made the original 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES cut widely available (the butchered 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA was included as an extra, and both cuts are present on Scream Factory's new Blu-ray, because physical media is dead). Considering how well-crafted the original version was, and that kung-fu films were all the rage in 1974--especially with Warner Bros., who had huge hits with 5 FINGERS OF DEATH and the landmark ENTER THE DRAGON--shelving the film in the first place was an astonishingly bone-headed decision, let alone Dynamite's later catastrophic mangling of it, basically reducing it to fight scenes and T&A, with one topless shot of a woman repeated three times. Forget the 7 BROTHERS cut unless you need to analyze just how badly a good movie can be fucked up beyond recognition. THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES is an absolute blast and a worthy conclusion to Hammer's DRACULA series, and it's time for it to be given its rightful place among the studio's crowning achievements.
The butchered 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA version
opening in Toledo, OH on 10/5/1979
DRACULA A.D. 1972 (UK - 1972) Directed by Alan Gibson. Written by Don Houghton. Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame, Michael Coles, Marsha Hunt, Caroline Munro, Janet Key, William Ellis, Philip Miller, Michael Kitchen, Stoneground. (PG, 96 mins) By 1972, Christopher Lee wasn't even trying to hide his seething contempt for Hammer's ongoing DRACULA series. He portrayed the Count in five Hammer productions going back to 1958's HORROR OF DRACULA, and in between two entries in 1970 (TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA and SCARS OF DRACULA), he went to Spain to star in Jess Franco's COUNT DRACULA with the promise that it would be the faithful-to-Bram Stoker adaptation that he'd spent years pleading with Hammer to make. Hammer still wasn't listening, and in 1972, following their attempts to capture the youth market with the increased T&A of HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, they decided to move Dracula to mod, swinging London in all its Austin Powers glory with DRACULA A.D. 1972. It's not a bad idea, and the film's an entertaining time capsule that's proven to have significant longevity as a genre cult favorite, but it just doesn't have enough of Lee, who's in it so sporadically that there's no way he was on the set for more than a few days. That was likely by design, as Lee made it clear he didn't want to do the movie, even though it marked the return of Peter Cushing, as Dracula's arch-nemesis Van Helsing, to the franchise after 12 years away following 1960's Dracula-less THE BRIDES OF DRACULA.
A.D. 1972 gets off to a roaring start with a prologue set in 1872, with Dracula (Lee) and Lawrence Van Helsing (Cushing) fighting on a runaway coach as daybreak approaches. The coach crashes, with a broken wheel impaling Dracula in the heart as the rising sun turns him to dust, with Van Helsing soon succumbing to his injuries. A Dracula disciple (Christopher Neame, really busting his ass to be the next Malcolm McDowell) arrives on the scene, gathers some of Dracula's ashes in a vial and buries them at the perimeter of a churchyard cemetery that's Van Helsing's final resting place. 100 years later, that seemingly undead disciple is revealed to be Johnny Alucard (clever!), a black-mass enthusiast who hangs out with a group of Chelsea hippies that includes Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), who lives with her grandfather Lorrimer Van Helsing (Cushing), a descendant of the legendary vampire killer. Alucard needs Jessica for his master plan: the resurrection of Dracula for his master's ultimate revenge on the Van Helsing family. She proves difficult to pin down and get alone, thanks in part to her boyfriend Bob (Philip Miller) but more to her skeptical, overprotective grandfather, who's convinced something isn't right, especially when her friends start turning up dead. As Dracula takes refuge in the ruins of the church located at the cemetery where Lawrence Van Helsing is buried, Alucard tries to placate him with offerings like Jessica's friends Laura (Caroline Munro) and Gaynor (Mick Jagger's then-girlfriend Marsha Hunt, considered by many to be the inspiration for "Brown Sugar"), but the Count remains adamant that he must have Jessica. Alucard attempts to stage the dead bodies of the victims as cult-like sacrifices, but Lorrimer, working with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murray (Michael Coles) has studied his ancestor enough to recognize the work of Dracula when he sees it.
Christopher Lee can barely contain his enthusiasm in this
DRACULA A.D. 1972 publicity shot, accompanied by Caroline Munro,
Stephanie Beacham, Marsha Hunt, and Janet Key.
Given Lee's surly attitude toward the franchise and the character at this point, it's little wonder that most of the heavy lifting is left to the presumably less mercurial Cushing. Lee may have hated doing these movies, but the film has a noticeable spark whenever he's onscreen, particularly when he's with his good friend Cushing. There's a lot of time devoted to Jessica and her friends, including a ridiculously drawn-out sequence involving American rock group Stoneground, and the detective subplot with Van Helsing teaming with Murray serves to advance the plot, but A.D. 1972's best scenes involve Dracula, with Lee channeling his frustration into a portrayal of the Count that's arguably his meanest and cruelest yet. He doesn't even seem grateful for his disciple's 100 years of service to his memory, instantly dismissing him upon his Alucard-instigated resurrection and taking credit for it himself ("It was my will," he scoffs, waving Alucard aside). The problem is that Dracula has so little screen time (after the prologue, he has one appearance in the next hour) that, like many of Lee's performances during this period, is really little more than an extended cameo spread out enough to make it look like he's in the whole thing. It's difficult to tell if this is the result of his frustration or the root cause of it, considering that he actually had a lot of screen time in SCARS OF DRACULA. DRACULA A.D. 1972 was a box-office disappointment in both the UK and in America, where it was released by Warner Bros. Nevertheless, Hammer wasn't deterred, as Lee, Cushing, Coles, writer Don Houghton (DOCTOR WHO), director Alan Gibson (CRESCENDO, GOODBYE GEMINI), and the contemporary setting would all return for 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA.
DRACULA A.D. 1972 opening in Toledo, OH on 4/6/1973
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA aka COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE (UK - 1973; US release 1978) Directed by Alan Gibson. Written by Don Houghton. Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Coles, William Franklyn, Freddie Jones, Joanna Lumley, Richard Vernon, Patrick Barr, Barbara Yu Ling, Lockwood West, Richard Mathews, Maurice O'Connell, Valerie Van Ost. (R, 88 mins) If it was a stretch to imagine Dracula going after "London's hotpants," as the DRACULA A.D. 1972 poster promised, then who knows how they came up with the insane plot of THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA? It's crazy enough to admire, but it never quite pulls its various threads together, and like A.D. 1972, it still doesn't have enough Christopher Lee, who doesn't even enter the story until 30 minutes in and then isn't seen again for another half hour. Indeed, anyone watching SATANIC RITES' first 25 minutes might think they've accidentally stumbled on a Michael Coles police procedural, as his returning Inspector Murray catches a case involving a dead SIS agent's undercover investigation of a Satanic cult that's populated by a quartet of prominent Londoners, among them Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and germ warfare expert Prof. Keeley (Freddie Jones), real estate mogul Lord Carradine (Patrick Barr), government security analyst Dr. Porter (Richard Mathews), and military honcho Gen. Freeborn (Lockwood West). A stumped Murray and SIS official Torrence (William Franklyn) decide to consult occult expert Lorrimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), who happens to be an old college chum of Keeley's. Van Helsing discovers that Keeley has been secretly developing a new and ultra-lethal strain of bubonic plague that could wipe out mankind on the 23rd of the month--known in the occult world as "The Sabbat of the Undead," all under the auspices of a secret foundation bankrolled by enigmatic, reclusive Howard Hughes-like tycoon D.D. Denham, whose skyscraper headquarters is located at the location of the demolished church from A.D. 1972.
Once Van Helsing gets wind of "The Sabbat of the Undead," he immediately concludes that Dracula is somehow involved, which is confirmed when he's granted a personal meeting with Denham, who's revealed to be--you guessed it--Dracula. His latest plan--apparently concocted after seeing too many 007 movies in his downtime--is to unleash a bubonic apocalypse that will wipe out humanity and yet, he still needs to abduct Van Helsing's granddaughter Jessica (future ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS star Joanna Lumley replaces Stephanie Beacham) and take her as his bride, which will render the two of them immune from the apocalypse, carried out by his own personal "Four Horsemen." The bonkers SATANIC RITES fared even worse at the box office than A.D. 1972. After a disastrous reception in Europe, Warner Bros. shelved it in the US, eventually selling it to exploitation outfit Dynamite Entertainment, who belatedly released it on the American drive-in and grindhouse circuit in the fall of 1978 as COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE. Once SATANIC RITES bombed, Lee, who's again terrifically snarling once he finally shows up (and his Bela Lugosi accent as D.D. Denham is...something), finally reached his breaking point and refused to appear in the next film, the 1974 Hammer/Shaw Brothers horror/kung-fu hybrid THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES. In it, Cushing's Van Helsing teams with a family of Bruce Lee-like karate experts to take on Dracula, now played in a bland and ineffective fashion by Lee's one-and-done replacement John Forbes-Robertson. The film was recut and retitled THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA for its 1979 US release, but by that time, the franchise and Hammer itself were over. With genre trendhops like SATANIC RITES' outlandish 007 plot and the ENTER THE DRAGON-inspired martial arts action of 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES, it would've been inevitable that Dracula and Van Helsing would've somehow ended up in space if the series was still going when STAR WARS came around in 1977.
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA's biggest problem is that it's never as fun as its crazy story makes it sound. It's also pretty stupid: why would Dracula and his surrogate Renfield in the form of Chin Yang (Barbara Yu Ling) keep his vampire brides stashed away in a basement with a fully-functioning and easily-accessible sprinkler system when water is lethal to the undead? And for someone with the means to create the ultimate weapon in germ warfare, Dracula seems to be off his game here, especially when Van Helsing tricks him into walking directly into a giant prickly bush like a cloddish oaf and getting caught in its vines and branches in what could very well be Dracula's dumbest-ever movie demise. Under both of its titles, SATANIC RITES ended up falling into the public domain and was available in various versions on any number of cheap, bargain-bin DVD sets over the last 20 years. It's just out now on Blu-ray from Warner Archive, who also released a spiffed-up A.D. 1972 last month (a double feature set would've been perfect). To see the constant posts on Hammer's fan page on Facebook over the last year, you'd think SATANIC RITES was some lost classic or something akin to THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND of Hammer horror. Calm down, guys...it's not that good, but it's a must-have for completists, especially with it looking better that it ever has in this new edition. I like the Dracula-as-Blofeld idea of THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA more than what it ultimately turns out to be. But for all its faults, it's always a joy to see the two horror legends together (they also starred in HORROR EXPRESS, NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT, and THE CREEPING FLESH during this same period), and ever the stalwart, Cushing again seems more accommodating to the filmmakers than the disgruntled Lee, playing it totally straight and never once letting on how ridiculous he likely found the entire project to be.
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, under its US title
COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE,
opening in Toledo, OH on 10/13/1978
THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH (US/UK/Canada - 2015) Directed by Tom Harper. Written by Jon Croker. Cast: Phoebe Fox, Jeremy Irvine, Helen McCrory, Adrian Rawlins, Oaklee Pendergast, Leanne Best, Ned Dennehy, Leilah de Meza, Jude Wright, Pip Pearce. (PG-13, 99 mins)
When it hit theaters three years ago, THE WOMAN IN BLACK was a nice throwback to gothic, old-school British horror and was one of the very few offerings from the newly-revived Hammer Films that was worthy of flaunting the beloved house of horror's treasured name. Other than THE WOMAN IN BLACK and the LET THE RIGHT ONE IN remake LET ME IN (2010), there hasn't been much for horror aficionados to get excited about with Hammer, which will henceforth be referred to as "Hammer" because, let's face it, it's not really the same Hammer and the current owners are just using it for name-branding to get a pass from horror scenesters. It seemed to work until last year's pedestrian THE QUIET ONES seemed to alienate everyone and finally expose "Hammer" as an in-name-only fraud. Now, "Hammer" is trying to win them back with the unnecessary THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH, a sequel with no returning cast members, filmmaking personnel, or characters, save for the titular ghost. This would seem to have "straight-to-DVD" written all over it, but it's a very atmospheric film with impeccable production design and some good performances, but after an intriguing set-up, it doesn't take long for the film to play all of its cards and exhaust the few original ideas it's got. Repetition sets in and the vivid period detail can only carry things so far.
Set roughly 30 years after the events of the first film, the sequel opens in 1941 during the Blitz in WWII. As London reels from the nightly destruction brought by German bombing raids, a small group of children, some orphaned, some with parents unable to leave, are sent off with their school headmistress Mrs. Hogg (HARRY POTTER vet Helen McCrory, also of PENNY DREADFUL and PEAKY BLINDERS) and young teacher Eve Parkins (Phoebe Fox) to the distant and presumably safe confines of Eel Marsh House, home of the ghostly Woman in Black. Eve is drawn to young Edward (Oaklee Pendergast), a shy, lonely boy who hasn't spoken a word since his parents were killed. On two different occasions, Eve catches a glimpse of the Woman in Black (Leanne Best) only to have her disappear, and Edward begins behaving strangely after an encounter with her in a locked room, after which one of Edward's bullying tormentors (Jude Wright) is found dead. Mrs. Hogg will hear nothing of Eve's claims that someone else is in the house with them even as the bodies of children start piling up, and the only person willing to listen to Eve is Harry (Jeremy Irvine of WAR HORSE), a shell-shocked pilot still haunted by a botched mission where everyone under his command was killed.
Working from a story by Susan Hill, the author of the 1983 novel The Woman in Black, screenwriter Jon Croker offers an unexpected depth to the characterization. Much like Daniel Radcliffe's widower lawyer in the 2012 film, everyone is silently nursing some devastating emotional trauma that makes it easy for the Woman in Black to prey on their weaknesses, whether it's Harry's war memories, Mrs. Hogg's concern over her grown sons fighting in battle, or a traumatic event in Eve's past that explains her motherly concern for the troubled Edward. Croker and director Tom Harper let the tension mount in an admirable fashion, but once everything is established, there's really nowhere to take it, and Harper soon reveals himself to be a one-trick pony when it comes to his overuse of piercingly-loud jump scares. There's a few occasions where it works, like Eve bending down to pick something up and the camera panning back up with her to show a writhing, shaking body hanging from a noose in the middle of the room. But long before the 17th or 18th time Harper pans across and has the camera stop and focus on a dark spot in the middle of a barren room--and this is a very darkly-shot film--for seconds on end only to have a horrific CGI ghost face suddenly appear, accompanied by a shrill scream, you've figured out his game. It gets almost farcical after a while, as Harper comes dangerously close to turning the third act into EXORCIST MAZE GAME: THE MOVIE. In its quieter moments, THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2 is more successful, with the depressing, dilapidated interior of Eel Marsh House and the perpetually gray skies and rain doing their part to convey an appropriate sense of melancholy and despair. The lone road to Eel Marsh House--that long causeway leading to the house that disappears when the tide comes in--remains an effectively chilling image and Harper pulls off a few striking shots both inside and outside the mansion. Despite these positives--and Fox is a very appealing heroine--THE WOMAN IN BLACK 2 suffers from a sense of indecisiveness and an uneven tone that stems from its wish to stay true to the Hammer of the past and its mandate to placate fans of the "Hammer" of the present. It wants to be a moody gothic chiller but it has to please the cheap jump-scare crowd. At least it doesn't pander to found-footage aesthetics, and in that respect, it's a major improvement over the quite disappointing THE QUIET ONES.
Conceived by writer-director Peter Hyams (CAPRICORN ONE) as an outer-space western, OUTLAND finally gets a worthwhile home video presentation on Blu-ray. The long out-of-print DVD was one of the first issued in the format and was utterly abysmal in quality. OUTLAND did generally well at the box office in 1981 and has always been held in high regard by genre fans, and despite a couple of dubious effects shots late in the film, it's aged very well. Sean Connery is O'Niel, a Federal Marshal assigned to a one-year tour heading the police force on Io, the third moon of Jupiter, where Con-Am runs a very profitable titanium ore mining facility. Sheppard (Peter Boyle), Con-Am's manager on Io, is very proud of his operation's increased productivity and profitability and politely tells O'Niel to just go with the flow. O'Niel senses something fishy when two miners have psychotic episodes resulting in their deaths. Sheppard orders the bodies sent back to the space station off Jupiter but O'Niel manages to get a blood sample from one and with the help of curmudgeonly, hard-drinking Dr. Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), finds traces of a powerful experimental drug that allows users to stay up for days on end, thus increasing their furious work output. The side effects, Lazarus says, are that continued use can cause complete psychotic breaks after 10 or 11 months. Sheppard and some associates are running the drug operation into Io, and as long as productivity, profits, and bonuses are high, everyone, including O'Niel's deputy Montone (Hyams regular James B. Sikking), is content to look the other way. When O'Niel doesn't back down, Sheppard and Con-Am execs decide to bring in three hit men from the space station to kill him, and it's here that OUTLAND turns into essentially a post-STAR WARS variation on HIGH NOON, complete with a large digital clock in a sleazy Io bar showing the countdown to the next shuttle arrival. Like Gary Cooper's Will Kane, Connery's O'Niel is forced to face the killers alone (with a little help from Lazarus), as an entire work force of minors and even his own deputies prove unwilling to help him.
OUTLAND is a top-notch sci-fi thriller and the miniatures and matte work still look superb and are more convincing today than most CGI. The cast is terrific--Connery and Sternhagen make an unlikely and very likable team, and Boyle is memorably smug, telling Connery to "go home and polish your badge...you're dealing with grown-ups here." It's a film that's fallen through the cracks over the years, but hopefully this proper HD presentation will allow it--and Hyams, a very underrated director and wonderfully snappy writer who was unstoppable in his 1974-1990 prime--to find a new audience. Hyams provides a newly-recorded commentary that covers all elements of the production (he wanted to call it IO, but everyone kept mistaking it for 10), with a lot of interesting Connery stories (they also worked together on 1988's THE PRESIDIO). Also with Clarke Peters (THE WIRE, TREME), Steven Berkoff, and John Ratzenberger as a freaked-out miner whose head explodes in the opening scene. (R, 109 mins)
ALTERED STATES (US - 1980)
It's a testament to just how much filmmaking, marketing, and audiences have changed over the last 30 or so years when one considers that Ken Russell's surreal, philosophical, challenging, jargon-heavy, sensory-deprivation, devolution sci-fi/horror mindfuck was not only bankrolled by a major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) with an unknown (William Hurt in his debut) in the lead role, but it was released in theaters on Christmas Day 1980. ALTERED STATES tells the story of psych professor Eddie Jessup's (Hurt) search for the Ultimate Truth via isolation tank and a hallucinogenic mushroom-based solution concocted by an indigenous Mexican tribe that's purported to take one back to "first soul" and be "propelled into the void." The more time he spends in the tank with himself as the experiment, monitored by a colleague (Bob Balaban), an endocrinologist (Charles Haid), and later, his estranged wife (Blair Brown), the more Jessup's genetic makeup devolves with horrifying results. Written by Paddy Chayefsky (NETWORK), who fought with Russell and took his professional name off the finished film (going by his real name, Sidney Aaron), ALTERED STATES is pretty deep and heady stuff, filled with stunning (though a bit dated today) imagery and visual effects and room-shaking sound (which got an Oscar nod). As ambitious and thought-provoking film as it is, it probably ranks as one of Russell's more strangely commercial films, and the one-sheet depicting Hurt upside-down in the flotation tank immediately became an iconic image. The film (also featuring Drew Barrymore, in her first film as well, playing one of Hurt's young daughters) instantly put Hurt on the map as an actor to watch and he'd have an Oscar within five years for 1985's KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN. Hurt is so familiar as a reliable character actor in supporting roles these days that it's easy to forget he was an A-list star in the 1980s. The new HD transfer for the Blu-ray release is crystal clear and absolutely beautiful. The only extra is a trailer, but at a relatively low price, this is the best ALTERED STATES has ever looked. (R, 103 mins)
TWINS OF EVIL (UK - 1971)
Hammer's box office appeal may have been in decline by the early 1970s, but some of the studio's best films were being made in this period, as evidenced by John Hough's TWINS OF EVIL, just out on Blu-ray from Synapse Films. The third in the studio's "Karnstein" trilogy (after 1970's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS and 1971's LUST FOR A VAMPIRE), based on the works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, TWINS OF EVIL has twin Playboy playmates Mary and Madeleine Collinson as orphans sent to live with their puritanical, cold-hearted uncle Gustav (Peter Cushing), a local witchfinder who leads a group of religious fanatics called The Brotherhood, finding presumed witches and burning them at the stake. One of the twins falls under the spell of Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas, who has a strange resemblance to Jimmy Fallon), a wealthy, well-connected Satanist whose activities have awakened undead vampire Mircalla (Katya Wyeth). Written by Tudor Gates and featuring David Warbeck and Dennis Price, TWINS OF EVIL is a highly enjoyable cult horror classic that showcases elements of the newly-explicit vampire genre (Hammer was taking advantage of the increasing demand for gore and nudity) and gave Cushing an opportunity to take part in the then-trendy "witchfinder" films popularized by 1968's THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL (with Vincent Price), 1970's THE BLOODY JUDGE (with Christopher Lee), and 1970's MARK OF THE DEVIL (with Herbert Lom). Cushing turns in one of his all-time great performances here, showing the complexities of noble intentions gone horrifically awry. Cushing's wife died unexpectedly shortly before filming began, and he's bringing a wide range of emotions to his role here as his Gustav is ultimately both terrifying and tragic. Synapse's Blu-ray transfer is absolutely impeccable, and it's loaded with bonus features, including the feature-length documentary THE FLESH AND THE FURY, which explores the works of Le Fanu, the "Karnstein" trilogy, and the making of TWINS OF EVIL, with appearances by genre luminaries and historians like Joe Dante, Kim Newman, Tim Lucas, Ted Newsom, David J. Skal, and Sir Christopher Frayling, in addition to TWINS co-star Thomas and director Hough. One of 2012's best Blu-ray releases. (Unrated, 87 mins)
