Sony once again opens its Columbia vaults for fans of the fantastic, this time highlighting four of its remaining
horrors from the revered firm of Hammer Films, Ltd. The mix is a good one -- two monster romps, a crackling
murder mystery and one genuine rarity uncut and uncensored.
Icons Of Horror Collection: Hammer Films has
titles with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and the screaming chores are ably handled by stars Dawn Addams,
Barbara Shelley and Susan Strasberg. It's a fine Halloween horror sampler.
First the good news. Until now
The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll has been difficult to see, and Sony's version
on disc appears to be the full-length uncensored 88-minute cut. The show was also known as
House of Fright
in an 80-minute abridged version distributed by American-International.
The movie itself is an interesting experiment and is certainly better than Hammer's other 'transformation' movie
released on DVD earlier this year,
The Man Who Could Cheat Death. The twisted screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz
(
Expresso Bongo,
The Day the Earth Caught Fire) plays fast and loose with Robert Louis Stevenson's
famous story. Mankowitz's bearded, dour Henry Jekyll (Paul Massie) is a lone researcher attempting to define and
control the duality of man. He wants to liberate the potential of man's personality, free of the restraints of
conscience and morality. Meanwhile, Jekyll's wife Kitty (Dawn Addams of
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse)
is proving rather two-faced as well. She's having an affair with the wastrel gambler Paul Allen (Christopher
Lee), on Henry's money.
Jekyll uses a potion to split his personality all right, but the Hyde that emerges is a handsome and amoral cad
eager for sensation. Hyde easily beds Maria (Norma Marla), a snake dancer at a bawdy night club-bordello. Hyde
then fails to seduce his own wife Kitty (who doesn't recognize him). When he finds out that Kitty actually loves
Paul, Henry/Hyde manages a strange series of machinations that impose tragedy on a structure more suitable for a
farce. Paul has a fateful date with Maria's snake, while Hyde maneuvers Kitty and Maria into each other's
bedrooms. As the song goes in
The Band Wagon, everyone ends in mincemeat.
The director is Terence Fisher, and with the impressive music of David Heneker and Monty Norman,
The Two Faces
Of Dr. Jekyll gets off to a rousing start. Fisher's pace sometimes slackens -- a fairly dull shot of Jekyll
injecting his potion sits in stasis seemingly forever, with the music working hard to keep our interest. The
almost uniformly bright lighting enforces a rather artificial, theatrical atmosphere. Eric Boyd-Perkins' editing
(
Gorgo) enlivens several decorative dance scenes in the London fleshpots -- and adds a couple of jarringly
inappropriate wipe transitions. Let's assume they were somebody else's idea.
Dawn Addams may well be dubbed but gives an effective performance as a woman leading a double life. In her own
way Kitty is trying to accomplish the same identity split as her husband. For once given a character role with
some meat on it, Christopher Lee proves that he can play a very convincing cad. Paul Massie is a gloomy Jekyll,
and his Hyde always seems a twitch away from breaking into a crazed grin. Jekyll insists that his dual-man
theories have nothing to do with good and evil, but Mr. Hyde's deeds are almost uniformly reprehensible. When
Hyde's chemical transformations begin to get out of control, we don't sympathize with him. There's nobody to root
for in this clutch of selfish people.
The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll is short of actual horror content. It's easy to see why the movie would need
cutting for American release -- Hammer seems to be reaching for salacious sex to replace censor-forbidden sadism
and violence. Some of the snake dancing by Norma Marla (or her double; she wears a mask) is pretty vulgar,
including a shot of her plunging the head of a large boa constrictor into her mouth. The club harlots talk a
bawdy streak, with the word "bitch" used prominently at least twice. And the film teases us with some near-nudity
in the Hyde-Maria seduction scene. When Columbia pawned the film off on A.I.P. it must have been fairly
inappropriate kiddie matinee material, even when cut.
The picture gives us a nice bit from Oliver Reed as an irate pimp (!) and a too-brief couple of moments with the
talented child actress Janina Faye (
Horror of Dracula). When the plot requires a London detective, we're
not surprised to see stalwart Francis De Wolff enter the scene. David Kossoff (
The Mouse that Roared)
is Henry's moralizing friend, who realizes that the situation cannot be explained by the Coroner's facile
conclusion that Henry Jekyll ventured too far into God's domain.
Scream of Fear is one of the best psychological thrillers immediately post-
Psycho, a consistently
entertaining mystery with a likeable lead character in Susan Strasberg. Wheelchair-bound Penny Appleby
(Strasberg) returns to her home after years at school. Her school companion has drowned herself, and Penny's
father has just died. The cliff-side Appleby estate is now being run by stepmother Jane (Ann Todd), who assures
Penny that she'll always have a home. But the schoolgirl's unstable nerves are getting the better of her -- she
keeps seeing her father's body turning up in odd places, like the storeroom behind the pool. Family chauffeur Bob
(Ronald Lewis) tries to console Penny, while Doctor Pierre Gerrard (Christopher Lee) comes almost every night for
dinner and to keep Jane company. Gerrard suggests repeatedly that Penny may have a stress-related nervous
disorder, which makes Penny even more unstable.
On the success of this project screenwriter Jimmy Sangster would continue to write blood-soaked murder mysteries
for Hammer, some with similar family settings and others relying on shaggy gimmicks.
Scream of Fear
(originally titled
Taste of Fear in the U.K.) is a contemporary story given fine direction by Seth Holt, a
former editor and producer who would make only four more movies before his death in 1971. In a completely
convincing interior / exterior set of the Appleby manor house, Holt and his cameraman Douglas Slocombe create an
excellent mystery atmosphere. Penny rolls her wheelchair cautiously to and fro, ever aware of her vulnerability.
Bob the chauffeur risks his job to give Penny some comfort, and we suspect that the stepmother Ann is jealous.
And what Dr. Gerrard has in mind is anybody's guess. Penny and Bob join forces to find some piece of evidence
proving that Ann killed Penny's father, but it looks like someone has discovered their plan.
Ann Todd and Ronald Lewis play excellent support to Ms. Strasberg, who has one of those faces that commands both
sympathy and attention. Penny shows inner strength as the pressure mounts. In a normal thriller we'd wait for the
handsome boyfriend or lover to arrive and save the day, but the fact that it's a Hammer film leaves Penny's fate
in serious doubt. What we remember most is Penny's relationship to water -- the Swiss lake, the murky,
Diabolique-like swimming pond, the crashing waves that seem so mysterious behind Slocombe's misty lens
diffusion.
It's best that viewers watch carefully from the beginning.
Scream of Fear packs a number of satisfying
surprises.
Prolific Hammer producer Michael Carreras directed
The Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb, an acceptable entry in
Hammer's Mummy series. For flashback scenes the Carlo Martelli music score is interrupted by Franz Reizenstein's
superior cues for the 1959 Terence Fisher version, reminding us that it was all done much better before.
Carreras' camera placement is weak, and he has a tendency to make ragged pans across décor and faces,
something that doesn't work out too well in the Techniscope format.
The script only half-develops its ideas. When a curse befalls the raiders of the tomb of Prince Ra-Antef, we know
that scurvy Egyptologist Hashmi is behind it; he's played by Hammer's all-purpose eastern fanatic George Pastell
(
The Mummy,
The Stranglers of Bombay). Fred Clark is fine as Alexander King, a Barnum-like
impresario hoping to make millions by exhibiting the Mummy back in England. His subplot is terminated before it
can really get up to speed. King is meant to provide cultural contrast as a vulgar American stirring up trouble,
but he's easily the most honest person in the show. Everyone else seems to be hiding their identities or their
feelings.
The really interesting material has to do with a love triangle. Egyptologist John Bray (Ronald Howard) watches
while his intended Annette Dubois (Jeanne Roland) falls in love with a more interesting new acquaintance. The
smooth fiancée poacher Adam Beauchamp (top billed Terence Morgan) is a man with a secret. It seems that
Adam knows altogether too much about Egyptian relics to be the amateur he claims he is.
The Curse Of The Mummy's Tomb starts with a graphic hand-chopping but pulls back on the gore thereafter;
what we get are about ten minutes of repetitious Mummy attacks modeled on Terence Fisher's original. Ra-Antef
smashes through doors and lurches into fancy houses, but he lacks the style that Christopher Lee gave the role.
He also seems physically unimpressive; Lee towered over his victims. The Mummy costume is rather baggy and
shapeless, with a head that looks like the comic character Zippy covered in ashes. Ra-Antef's mask allows for no
variation in expression.
But the show moves quickly and has great color and lighting by cinematographer Otto Heller. Ms. Roland is
stunning in her gowns, including the number she picks for a midnight stroll through the sewer, carried by the
Mummy. It's interesting that Hammer's male leads at this time all seemed to be in their 40s ... almost as if the
young Turks in the front office wanted to avoid the romantic competition that younger actors would pose.
The Gorgon is one of Terence Fisher's more interesting horrors, a film about a female monster pursued not
by a strong Van Helsing-type character but by men weakened by their interest in women. Paul Heitz (Richard Pasco)
wants to discover what killed his brother and father, but the authority figures in the tiny town of Vandorf seem
intent on hiding the source of seven unsolved murders in five years. Asylum doctor Namaroff (Peter Cushing)
submits false death certificates for the victims, to hide the fact that all of them have been literally turned to
stone, or "gorgonized." Paul sends for his professor friend Karl Meister (Christopher Lee) to help solve the
mystery.
In the script provided by John Gilling, all the men live in fear. Dr. Namaroff is particularly ineffective in
controlling women, even a madwoman in his asylum. Nursing assistant Carla Hoffman (favorite Hammer horror queen
Barbara Shelley) is repulsed by Namaroff's jealousy when she becomes attracted to Paul. Paul and the Doctor end
up fighting each other instead of watching out for the dreaded Gorgon Magaera, who claims her victims on the
second night of each full moon.
Fisher directs this outing with considerable skill, maintaining tension in a story with very little action. James
Bernard's eerie Gorgon theme puts new chills into the familiar Hammer castle sets. Barbara Shelley's Carla is a
sympathetic heroine to Richard Pasco's sincere hero, but Christopher Lee's professor is the only real take-charge
character in the story. Interestingly, this horror piece has no comedic coachmen or gravediggers, making it
distinctly more sober than most other Hammer Gothics.
What probably stunted
The Gorgon at the box office was its lack of a good monster. The tall Magaera is
shown too much and is little more than a scowling woman with greasepaint makeup and rubber snakes in her hair.
We're told that a complicated Roy Ashton makeup concept was thrown out in favor of a quick fix by the effects
department. The movie was obviously done on a tiny budget -- how Hammer continually made costume pictures so
cheaply is quite a mystery -- and the makeup and special effects available in 1964 just weren't up to the job.
But as a drama
The Gorgon works very well. Screenwriter John Gilling would move on to direct a pair of
similarly low-budget, impressive Hammers,
The Reptile and
Plague of the Zombies.
The four features in the
Icons Of Horror Collection: Hammer Films are fine transfers given expert
attention. All of the films, including the half-frame Techniscope titles, are from new elements made directly
from the original negatives.
The Gorgon has rich colors that associate it with the earlier Hammer output
originally printed in Technicolor. It and
Scream of Fear are also matted and pillar-boxed, masking away
acres of dead space above and below the desired 1:66 compositions.
Sony provides no added commentaries or featurette extras but each film is accompanied by an original trailer. The
trailer for
Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is so strident that it makes fun of the picture, while the tense,
graphic-based coming attraction teaser for
Scream of Fear generates maximum interest by showing almost
nothing but Susan Strasberg's screaming face. For 1961, it's a very progressive ad.
Research: Hammer and Beyond, The British Horror Film Peter Hutchings, Manchester
University Press, 1993
For more information about
Icons of Horror Collection: Hammer Films, visit
Sony Pictures.To order
Icons of Horror Collection: Hammer Films, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
