The late Sir Christopher Lee narrates a series of four half-hour ghost stories by M.R. James. Originally shown on BBC2 during the last week of December, 2000.
Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in "The Wicker Man" (1973).
Born May 27th, 1922. Can you believe it?
Once almost irreconcilably typecast as the vampire Count Dracula, Sir Christopher Lee's career has crossed multiple genres and spanned seven decades. With over 280 acting credits to his name, he is more than established as one of the world's greatest and most well known fantasy actors.
Thank you, Sir Christopher, for givng us a lifetime of entertainment. Many happy returns!
And let us never forget his fellow horror icons, Vincent Price (May 27th, 1911 – October 25th, 1993) and Peter Cushing (May 26th, 1913 – August 11th, 1994). Happy birthday and may they rest in peace.
Christopher Lee with Vincent Price and Peter Cushing
in "House of the Long Shadows" (1983).
It's also Hart Fisher's birthday, the owner of American Horrors. Happy birthday, Hart!
AMERICAN HORRORS is the new uncut horror TV channel owned and hosted by legendary horror creator, Hart D. Fisher. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you can watch for free on your ipod, ipad, iphone, or Android by downloading the FilmOn App!!!
After the semi-dramatic M.R. James adaptations read by Robert Powell, the BBC also produced a short series of further readings in 2000 featuring Christopher Lee as James: "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral", "The Ash Tree", "Number 13" and "A Warning to the Curious".
All of these "M.R. James' Ghost Stories for Christmas" have been included in the new BFI boxset, but there are two available as a taster on YouTube. Enjoy!
Number 13
A Warning to the Curious
I'm sure you're sick to death of M.R. James now. Don't worry, I have something different for you tomorrow.
"Johnny Alucard raises Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) from the dead in 1972 London. The Count goes after the descendants of Van Helsing."
It's hardly a secret that I prefer Hammer horror movies over absolutely anything American or European from the same time period. I grew up watching Hammer movies on TV and probably saw them all at least a dozen times each before I left school.
As much as I've wanted to like the classic Universal monster movies from the '30s and '40s, black and white has never done it for me. I like my films in colour otherwise I wouldn't have a colour TV. If there's one thing you can be sure of with a Hammer production, that's lots of colour. There are always lots of boobs and blood too which is a bonus especially in something now rated PG.
I'm sure you are so familiar with "Dracula A.D. 1972" that I don't need to go through all the rigmarole of telling you who does what to who and why. It's yet another tale of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in their famous roles as Count Dracula and Professor Van Helsing respectively but with a new angle (for the time) of being set (after a 19th century prologue) in the 1970s.
This was Hammer's attempt at modernising Dracula which worked in spite of itself and the fact that Christopher Lee really didn't want to have anything to do with it. The vampire Count isn't actually in "Dracula A.D. 1972" very much at all and only delivers about ten lines. Forget Bram Stoker's novel as much as you can because this "Dracula" is far more Hammer's invention.
Most of the action involves a gang of "young people" getting up to all sorts of mischief such as crashing parties, smoking pot, and hanging out in a coffee bar all day. I hate to use the term "hipsters" for them because that would imply that they are cool. If any of them had a brain, they'd be typical students.
Their leader, Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame) is, of course, a disciple of Dracula who comes across as half Alex from "A Clockwork Orange" and half Austin Powers (before Austin Powers ever existed). I haven't posted a picture of Johnny Alucard because, to be honest, his character is so overacted that the ludicrous expressions he pulls throughout would make you think that "Dracula A.D. 1972" is a comedy when it really isn't.
Here's a nice picture of Caroline Munro about to be baptised in blood instead:
Caroline Munro only has a small but important role in the movie. Unfortunately, she doesn't get nude or turn into a vampiress which is a bit of a shame. I would have loved to have seen her sprout fangs and bite a couple of the other hot girls in the movie. Alas, it was not meant to be.
The story moves along at such a brisk pace that there's plenty of other entertainment apart from the vampirism anyway. Just looking at the sets or the clothes (or watching the background to see some of London in 1972) is quite educational. The number of "day for night" shots which nobody ever seems to pick up are rather clumsy and cause a few inconsistencies, but whatever, it's still Hammer.
The various action scenes are quite energetic and are more than adequate to tell the story. "Dracula A.D. 1972" doesn't suffer from too much talk although several scenes are unnecessary. The one where Van Helsing reverses the name of "Alucard" on a piece of paper as if it's some hugely difficult anagram springs to mind.
Although there isn't anything which you could really call character development in "Dracula A.D. 1972", the closest to it is done by the lovely Stephanie Beacham who is also, for lack of a better word, quite "pneumatic". Her boobies are the stars of the show and a lot of her screen time is devoted to semi-gratuitously showing her cleavage off in close-up. The artifice of putting crucifixes round her neck and ripping them off again twice fools no-one.
Anyway, with only 6 days left until Hallowe'en, "Dracula A.D. 1972" is the last vampire movie in my "Hallowe'en Countdown". Last year, I recommended the original Hammer "Dracula" (1958), but I now think "Dracula A.D. 1972" with Johnny Alucard's occult ritual suits the season better.
"An English anthropologist has discovered a frozen monster in the frozen wastes of Manchuria which he believes may be the Missing Link. He brings the creature back to Europe aboard a trans-Siberian express, but during the trip the monster thaws out and starts to butcher the passengers one by one."
It's the 21st of October! Only ten days left until Hallowe'en! Are you getting excited? Have you bought your mask and enough candy from the dollar store to give you diabetes? What about movies? Did you check the shelves in Dollar Tree for some of the public domain gems which only turn up at this time of year?
Last year, I was lucky enough to find "Horror Express" at one of my local branches of Dollar Tree and included it in my "I bought that for a dollar" series of posts. The Digiview Productions version is far from being the best transfer in the world - it looks like a VHS rip complete with tracking errors and tape damage - but it was only $1 for one of the greatest horror/sci-fi movies from the 1970s.
You just can't go wrong with anything starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as a couple of pompous Edwardian Brits especially when the same movie also has Telly Savalas in far more than just a cameo appearance as a Cossack captain. It takes an hour for him to turn up, but Telly Savalas absolutely steals the show. That's no mean feat either since the entire cast are at the top of their game throughout.
When I first saw "Horror Express" on the BBC far too many years ago to even remember the date, I was amazed that it was so underrated. "Horror Express" contains everything you could ever want from a horror movie including a kind of vampiric, body-hopping, alien monster, brutal kills, gore, beautiful women, and a resurrection of what can only be described as zombies near the end. There's even a mad monk who is Rasputin in all but name.
With Father Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza) and Inspector Mirov (Julio Peña) dominating most the screen time, it's pretty obvious that the Spanish cast could more than hold their own alongside more internationally famous actors. Sadly, this was the last movie for Julio Peña who died in 1972. After quite a successful career, Alberto de Mendoza also passed away in December last year at the age of 88.
Since Peter Cushing, Telly Savalas, Alice Reinheart, José Jaspe, George Rigaud, Víctor Israel, and Barta Barri have also shuffled off their mortal coils, "Horror Express" is yet another one of those movies full of dead actors who were so important to many of us in our youth. Of course, if you are aren't in your late 30s or older then you won't know who any of them were.
Eyecandy is provided by Silvia Tortosa, who plays Countess Irina Petrovski, and Helga Liné as an industrial spy who may well have inspired Famke Janssen's character, Trillian St. James, in "Deep Rising" (1998). Neither of them really do a lot, but Helga Liné provides a more lustful than usual Peter Cushing with some amusing moments.
For a low-budget movie, "Horror Express" has a great atmosphere and manages to successfully deliver several old-fashioned scares. Notwithstanding the plot-holes and minor historical inaccuracies, "Horror Express" is one of the must see '70s classics which rivals "The Thing From Another World" (1951), "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) and their remakes.
"A young coed (Nan Barlow) uses her winter vacation to research a paper on witchcraft in New England. Her professor recommends that she spend her time in a small village called Whitewood."
Rather than write yet another review of "The City of the Dead" which nobody reads, I've just embedded the full movie from YouTube at the top of this post so you can watch it for yourself. It's ideal viewing for a gloomy Sunday afternoon.
As "City of the Dead" (AKA "Horror Hotel") is in the public domain, I used to keep a copy of it on my own YouTube channel (which I hope you've all subscribed to) until the amount of bogus copyright claims started to get annoying. When they tried to put adverts next to something which even I couldn't monetise, I took it down to stop the thieves from making any money.
I will just say that "The City of the Dead" has a great atmosphere, it's low-budget but looks good in black and white, and it's full of clichés. Maybe those clichés weren't quite so clichéd at the time though. Watch out for a reworking of the "phantom hitchhiker" story around 17 minutes in (and again around the 50 minute mark).
Standouts include Venetia Stevenson as Nan Barlow, Patricia Jessel in a dual role as Elizabeth Selwyn/Mrs. Newless, and, of course, Christopher Lee doing an American accent.
You can hear about the other details from the director, John Llewellyn Moxey, in the video below.
Here are the obligatory screencaps which most people only come to my blog to steal anyway. I don't care. I only took them from the Google image search myself.
I also found this interview with Christopher Lee about "The City of the Dead" (and a lot of his other films) which you might find interesting. Before you ask, no, I don't know what's wrong with the interviewer's mouth either.
Tonight, I'm going to see "Sinister" which I will write a review of tomorrow.
"A scheming couple plot to conceal a hidden cache of stolen money from its rightful owner. The only problem is that the house they plan to hide it in is haunted."
(Please note that this IMDb synopsis is completely wrong.)
Directed by the late Don Sharp who, apart from having a host of TV credits under his belt, also made some very enjoyable non-horror movies such as "Callan" (1974) and "Rasputin: The Mad Monk" (1966), "Dark Places" was a very overlooked British horror from the '70s.
In fact, it was so overlooked that I hadn't ever seen it myself until I found it on YouTube earlier. Although seeing Christopher Lee's name attached to it was an instant attraction, he made some absolutely horrendous movies in his career and turned out to be horribly miscast in this too.
"I smell poopie!"
The first time Christopher Lee appeared fully on screen, the look on his face was as if he could smell a tray full of rotting cat excrement. Maybe he knew something I didn't about this film and was warning me, but I brushed it off as just being his standard, surly look.
I was even more intrigued with the idea of Robert Hardy playing a possibly romantic leading man in a horror movie. With the other big names being Joan Collins and Herbert Lom, there were only two ways this could go. Either "Dark Places" was going to be extremely good or extremely bad with no middle ground possible. I still tried hard to give it a chance to impress me though and was prepared to overlook the scenery-munching as far as possible.
Bombastic Robert Hardy was a bit shouty, but I could see that he was trying to rein himself in most of the time. I'm not a big fan of his work outside of "All Creatures Great and Small" although I watched nearly everything that he made when I was much younger (due to my mum once being an extra in an early film he made with John Schlesinger). He wasn't too bad really given that he was really playing two roles and his descent into madness was almost up there with anything Jack Nicholson could do.
"Here's Johnny!"
One scene where Robert Hardy was tapping the panelled walls with a coin and listening for something hollow amused me not only due to it going on for far too long, but also because, in reality, all wooden panelling has a gap behind it.
Hilarity ensued when he smashed through a wall and a load of rubber bats on wires came flying out. I wasn't expecting something that amateur to be in this movie at all, and I really did laugh out loud.
Christopher Lee turned in his usual routine performance with even less time on screen than Herbert Lom. Even Jean Marsh and the lovely Jean Birkin had little more than cameos. All four did really well and stayed serious, but I would have liked to have seen more from them.
Joan Collins stood out the most in a highly slutty and slightly bitchy role which, of course, she was typecast in throughout her later career. I thought she looked beautiful though and even made Jean Birkin look plain in comparison.
"After the pleasure, the pain, lover!"
Something which came across as quite original was the use of quasi-possessions instead of the more usual flashbacks to recount the story of the mostly bloodless murders in the house and tie them into the present. I can't say that every time it happened wasn't confusing, but it was inventive.
With no actual scares, absolutely no atmosphere, and a plot which wasn't much different to a least a dozen previous ghostie movies including its twist and the downbeat ending, I would say that "Dark Places" was entertaining but not particularly memorable. It pulled its punches on at least four occasions where it should have been great, but, given the time it was made, I will mark it up for even daring to suggest the things it did.
"An American writer goes to a remote Welsh manor on a $20,000 bet: can he write a classic novel like Wuthering Heights in twenty-four hours? Upon his arrival, however, the writer discovers that the manor, thought empty, actually has several, rather odd, inhabitants."
For some reason when I was a lot younger, I always confused "House of the Long Shadows" with the abomination known as "Bloodbath at the House of Death". It probably had something to do with Vincent Price being in both of them, although I'd also guess that the stupid titles were somewhat interchangeable in my own mind. Either way, I'd only seen a third of the the latter before switching it off and had never watched the former. No matter how many times it cropped up on late night television, I'd vowed to never watch that crap again and changed the channel immediately.
Having recently discovered "House of the Long Shadows" on YouTube, I clicked on it to see if it was as horrible as I remembered. It was only then that I realised that it wasn't actually the film I hated at all.
Starring the four most famous veteran horror actors of my youth, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and John Carradine (okay, that's really only three because I never much cared for John Carradine in anything), "House of the Long Shadows" was exploitation movie director Pete Walker's finale. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but he never made anything else afterwards.
I'm going to keep this as brief as I can because I'm still somewhat undecided about whether or not I really liked "House of the Long Shadows". I did find it entertaining and enjoyed the series of twists at the end. More than that, I cannot say, but hopefully, I'll come to some conclusion by the end of this review.
Being pretty sure that I had only ever seen Desi Arnaz Jr. in the "Automan" TV series before watching this, I really have no idea if he was ever a serious actor or just a comedian. Therein lies a problem since the film spent a lot more time focused on his character than the horror actors. Everything about his persona was rubbing me up the wrong way in a kind of "poor man's David Naughton" manner at the beginning, but he grew on me by the end.
As soon as I saw Julie Peasgood, my heart really started to sink because I've never liked her or her incongruously fake posh accent which, to this very day, she still forces over the top of her real Northern one. She used to be Fran on "Brookside" (a Liverpool based soap opera on Channel Four), and I couldn't stand the sight of her on that either. I know it's an irrational thing, but some actors and actresses just do that to me. Mercifully, her appearances were brief and to the point in this film.
The "old guys" were either as serious or as camp as they ever were and had enough screen time to be more than just cameos. The only thing I didn't really like was Peter Cushing's rhotacism. It was embarrassing and a shame to ruin his perfect speaking voice.
Vincent Price was mostly his usual self but somehow slightly more serious due to his age. He was a pleasure to watch but certainly wasn't as commanding as Christopher Lee. Let's face it, nobody could be as commanding as Christopher Lee, and he stole every scene he was in.
As for John Carradine. Who? He didn't do much and I can't remember ever seeing him in a good movie, or at least, in a role where he played anything other than himself, a grizzled old man, or a cowboy.
There were a few other actors who all did well with what they were given. Although Sheila Keith was largely wasted, she looked horrible enough. Richard Todd did a great job at the beginning and the end. Norman Rossington was a suitably surly railway station master, and the married English couple of Richard Hunter and Louise English surprised me with their reappearance later in the film. I wanted to see a lot more of Louise English really but not quite in the way things turned out for her character.
The horror elements were quite good, but to be frank, this was all very dated and slightly comical stuff. Having read some things about the film since watching it, it seems that it was intended to be a comedy originally, but then it was decided to edit it back into a straighter horror. I see nothing wrong with that, and I wish it would happen to a few more "horror-comedies", but it's painfully obvious where one thing was intended and another delivered.
I was most amused by an obligatory "cat scare" which happened twice but only showed the black cat once. There was a "meta" moment of explanation concerning this, but following the big reveal at the end, the whole story turned out to be a giant old school prank anyway and three years before "April Fool's Day" did it all again.
"House of the Long Shadows" had no big scares, but one of the "gore scenes" disturbed me slightly because I know of at least one person on the planet whose real life story made that a lot more horrible to me than it really was. I'm not going to say anymore about that though because I'd hate for the Google search robots to pick up on it. I don't mind getting some second-hand internet fame from crappy old horror movies, but I don't want my blog to ever be associated with real crimes.
I suppose, if I liked films such as "Clue" (1985), I might have appreciated "House of the Long Shadows" more. I'm not a fan of very much outside of the horror genre though, so I was probably expecting too much from it. It was still a horror movie but with a much lighter feel than the ones I really like, so I'll just rate it as average.
I haven't done one of these for ages so here are two more "Double Feature" DVDs which I got for $1. In this case, these DVDs by "PC Treasures" were reduced from $1 each to 50c each so I got twice as much for my money.
From left to right, first we have "Circus of Fear" (1966) which is more of an English giallo than a horror (which isn't that surprising as it was written by Edgar Wallace) but I had to have it for Christopher Lee even though it's not exactly his greatest performance and you don't really see a lot of him in it.
Next, "The Hitch-hiker" (1953) is a very underrated film noir which, of course, is a precursor in many ways to "The Hitcher" (which we all know and love). If anything, it's a lot more tense than the Rutger Hauer vehicle and is supposedly based on a true story.
More film noir which borders on horror in "D.O.A." (1950) as a salesman gets poisoned and only has 24 hours to find out who did it and why. It's actually really good for the time although the plot has been done to death since.
Finally, "Detour" (1945) is kind of like "Very Bad Things" but without any comedy as a small time criminal falls foul of one of the most evil femme fatales ever and can't get away from her. Ann Savage is absolutely fantastic in it.
All of these public domain movies are quite highly rated on the IMDb and I almost bought a couple of Mill Creek's "mystery" packs to get them once. I'm glad that I saved my money though as these are the only titles on those packs which are any good anyway.
- Note: Does not include Christopher Lee reading "The Ash Tree".
, but there are two available as a taster on YouTube. Enjoy!
