Horror of Frankenstein, The (1970)

Directed by:
Jimmy Sangster

After a decade-and-a-half run of successful costume horrors usually featuring more mature protagonists, Hammer decided to start specifically catering some of their output toward a younger audience with stories centered around more youthful protagonists. So no, Peter Cushing (who headlined all of Hammer's previous Frankenstein films) wasn't invited to this particular party. Instead we get Ralph Bates in the central mad doctor role. Bates had just made an impression playing the dashing, aristocratic black magic practitioner who helped to resurrect the Count in TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1969) and, while no spring chicken here at 30 years old, adequately fills the role of an evil, unfeeling medical school student. His Victor is a brilliant, smarmy sociopath with a truly pompous attitude who always seems to be pissing someone off. He kills indiscriminately: If you get in his way, you're toast and that's that. When Victor's rich father, who's carrying on an affair with the underage housemaid, Alys (Kate O'Mara), refuses to spring for him to go to a more prestigious university, Victor simply rigs his hunting rifle to explode and kill him.

Now with the title of Baron, a huge castle and a considerable amount of money all at his disposal, Victor decides to go to Vienna to further his studies. During his time there, he manages to knock up the dean's daughter, but tells him not to worry: Now that he has medical training, he'll just give her an abortion. The dean refuses and says he'll arrange for the two to be married. Victor decides to flee for the summer instead, with no real intentions of going back, and invites his classmate Wilhelm (Graham James) to come along with him to aid in his experiments. Away from town six years, Victor is promptly reunited with several former classmates. One of them, the sweet Elizabeth Heiss (Veronica Carlson, a real stunner), is still in love with Victor after all these years and has denied many potential suitors awaiting his return. Too bad for her, but he could care less and never has really liked her, anyway. He much prefers his no-strings-attached arrangement with Alys, who's still working as housekeeper in the castle and promptly becomes his lover.

After successfully reviving a dead turtle, Victor arranges for a sleazy grave robber (Dennis Price) and his wife to provide him with fresh body parts so that he can construct a human. The grave robber is able to acquire six whole bodies after an avalanche and when Wilhelm questions the ethics of all this and threatens to report Victor to the authorities, he's promptly electrocuted to provide even more parts. Now needing a brain, Victor poisons Elizabeth's professor father (Bernard Archard). Because of his debt, Elizabeth loses her home and is forced to come stay in Castle Frankenstein, where Victor plans to make her the new maid and decides to rid himself of Alys when she attempts to blackmail him. After stitching it all together, Victor's human creation (muscleman David Prowse) is revived by thunder. It immediately escapes and chops a villager up with an axe. Victor feeds it raw meat, attempts to teach it basic skills like sitting down and obeying his orders and is eventually able to make it kill for him. The obligatory police detective (Jon Finch), another of Victor's childhood friends, is on to him, though. Much use is made of an acid pit - convenient for eliminating evidence - in the meantime.

Director Sangster, who's better known as a script writer (and co-wrote this one as well), fails to inject much life into this entry, visually or otherwise. Perhaps strangest of all is his inability to really make good use of the lavish costumes, props and sets which were clearly at the studio's disposal. Some of the more talented of Hammer's production people seemed to be on hiatus when this was made, as the photography and music score - while competent - are also a bit lackluster. As scripted, the young mad scientist in this outing seems a bit one-dimensional, as well. The main problem however lies in the pacing. Because over an hour is spent leading up to the monster's creation, the concluding scenes seem rushed, leading up to a truly pathetic and anti-climactic final scene.

On the plus side, O'Mara manages to bring some real verve to her supporting role (which is very much appreciated, especially considering how bland most of the rest of the cast is) and veteran actor Price seems to be having a ball in his small role and has the film's most amusing scene sitting in a cemetery eating sausage and crackers while making his pregnant wife dig up a grave for him! The film provides some effective black comedy here and there (as well as some rather juvenile moments), and the monster design is pretty good. Mr. Prowse would also play the creature in FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974); Hammer's last Frankenstein film.

Like many of the studio's other titles, this has been well-serviced over the years, enjoying frequently television airings that continue to this day, as well as wide distribution on VHS and DVD (Warner in the UK; Anchor Bay in the U.S.).

★★

Devil Within Her, The (1975)

...aka: Baby, The
...aka: Evil Baby
...aka: I Don't Want to Be Born!
...aka: It Lives Within Her
...aka: It's Growing Inside Her
...aka: Monster, The
...aka: Sharon's Baby

Directed by:
Peter Sasdy

Former stripper Lucy Carlesi (Joan Collins) has just given birth to a 12-pound baby boy... who scratches her face and licks her blood just minutes after it exits the womb! Dr. Finch (Donald Pleasence) recommends she not breast feed because what just occured is clearly a sign of post partum depression. Lucy, her bland Italian husband Gino (Ralph Bates) and infant Nicholas all return home and things quickly go from bad to worse. Lucy relates a howlingly funny flashback to her former glory days as an exotic dancer to her completely useless best friend Mandy (Caroline Munro). You see, a year or so earlier, right after performing her patented Hunchback of Notre Dame-inspired strip act (!!) Lucy's dwarf co-star Hercules (George Claydon), Quasimodo to her Esmeralda, decided to try for some backstage action. After a failed attempt to grab her breast, Lucy shrieks, her sleazy boss Tommy (John Steiner) barges in and kicks the dwarf out so he can have sex with her instead. As Lucy is exiting the building later that night, the spurned dwarf emerges from behind the stage to curse her and tell her she's going to have a possessed baby.

So what does having a possessed infant entail? Well, it's messy. The baby manages to completely destroy its room and all its toys in a matter of seconds. It's super-strong. The baby easily draws blood by clawing and smacking people around. It hates crosses and has a fit during an attempted baptism. And it's deadly. The baby pushes its sitter (Janet Key) into a pond, where she hits her head on a rock and drowns. It also manages to tie a noose, climb into a tree, lower it around someone's neck and then lift them off the ground until they're dead. And it's even got enough oomph to pick up a shovel and swing it with enough force to decapitate someone during the film's only gory moment. Thankfully, Gino's full time nun / part time animal pathologist (!?) sister Albana (Eileen Atkins), who shows her affection for her brother by rubbing noses with him (!?) has flown in from Italy for a visit. After nearly everyone is already dead, Albana finally gets around to performing an exorcism on the baby during an exciting climax where the crib shakes, the baby rolls over onto its stomach twice and the dwarf keels over dead in the middle of a showgirl act. The end.

Sound like one of the most ridiculous and ill-conceived films ever created? Yep, it pretty much is. Obviously the filmmakers were wanting to cash in on both the big early 70s devil craze created by ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) and THE EXORCIST (1973) while also tapping IT'S ALIVE (1974), the surprise 'killer baby' hit made the previous year. Needless to say, they fail hard on both counts. The baby itself is never actually shown really doing anything. The film simply has one of the actors lean over the crib and suddenly jerk back, exclaiming "It bit me!" or "It hit me!" or "It spat on me!" followed by a shot of the baby lying in its crib wondering what the hell that big contraption is pointed in its face. I'll admit that I did laugh quite a few times watching this movie, but it also grows tiresome after awhile and has so many incredibly dull stretches that I'm not going to give it a "SBIG" rating.

There are many familiar faces in the cast... and most of them are terrible! While Collins does put some effort into her role, the woman just isn't a very sympathetic presence and her near-constant hysterics get highly irritating after awhile. And it pains me to say this, but Pleaseance and Bates (two actors I usually enjoy) are even worse. Pleasence is so subdued he might as well not even be there, while Bates' Italian accent is one of the worst ever commited to film. Atkins is also asked to do an Italian accent and while hers is pretty bad too (some of the unintented comic high points are her constant exclamations of "Day-Veeeel!") she's at least not utterly boring to watch like her male co-stars. Munro is around simply to look good but her character, who's screwing the same scrawny sleazebag who used to run around with her supposed best friend and may actually be the real father of the killer baby, has nothing to do and is distasteful. The most solid performance in the film is contributed by Hilary Mason (from DON'T LOOK NOW) as an elderly housekeeper who loathes the baby.

Even though I haven't seen everything from the usually-competent Sasdy, I can assume this is the low-point of his career. It's well-distributed in the UK and other countries, but there's no R1 release of this one.

★

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

Directed by:

Peter Sasdy

The fifth Hammer Dracula entry - picking up right where DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968) left off - is a step back for the series. The last time we saw the evil Count (Christopher Lee), he was impaled on a large bronze cross and disintegrating to a bloody mess at the base of his mountaintop castle home. Greedy Weller (Roy Kinnear) somehow stumbles onto the scene just in time to witness the entire thing and makes sure to take a few souvenirs back with him to his antique shop. Meanwhile, three middle-aged, upper-class married men; William Hargood (Geoffrey Keen), Samuel Paxton (Peter Sallis) and Jonathan Secker (John Carson), are looking to escape from their humdrum family lives by paying their weekly visit to a neighborhood brothel. There they meet a handsome young aristocratic man - Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates) - who promises to reward them with excitement if they'll accompany him to a few places about town. Their first stop is an antique store to buy Dracula's cloak, pendant and a vial of his powdered vampire blood. Next up is an abandoned church, where Courtley will perform a ceremony to resurrect the count. He slices his hand and drips blood into the powder, which swells into a full glass of bubbly vampire blood. The three older men chicken out on drinking it, but Courtley obliges, starts convulsing on the floor and is then beat to death by the three men, who vow to keep it a secret.

But the sins of the father are about to revisited upon each man's entire family as Count Dracula, resurrected from Courtley's ashes, comes back to destroy them all. William is shown to be the ultimate hypocrite and manages to be a more imposing and unlikable presence than Lee! A church-goer who claims he's off doing charity work while he's actually off with his buddies at the whorehouse, William is not only a liar and hypocrite, but an abusive alcoholic who bosses his weak wife Martha (Gwen Watford) around and accuses his cherubic daughter Alice (Linda Hayden) of being a "harlot" for simply talking to a boy. The boy - Paul (Anthony Corlan) - is actually Samuel's son, who's in love with Alice (and vice versa). Samuel also has a daughter -Lucy (Isla Blair) - who is being courted by Jonathan's son Jeremy (Martin Jarvis). Both daughters become entraced by the vampire and are used to help lure the men to their deaths.

Unfortunately, despite acceptible performances and production values, this chapter never really seems to take off. Both the characters and the scenarios said characters find themselves in seem dull and recycled. The exceptions here are Bates and Hayden. Bates vividly portrays a dashing, arrogant eccentric and his black magic scene is a nice departure from the norm. Hayden also makes an impression for her ability to switch from baby-faced innocent to evil, voracious seductress. It's easy to see why both actors - making their genre debuts here - would become familiar faces in the British horror industry of the 70s. Lee on the other hand has just a few lines and seems to have even less screentime than he did in the previous films. No wonder he was getting fed up playing the part at this stage in his career! Hammer regular Michael Ripper pops in briefly as a police inspector.

Followed by SCARS OF DRACULA (1970).

★★