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Showing posts with label baron frankenstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baron frankenstein. Show all posts
Sunday 13 September 2015
Monday 30 June 2014
MONSTER MONDAY : QUOTABLE CUSHING AND PETER CUSHING SCRAPBOOK COMPETITION
#MonsterMonday : Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein, with Christopher Lee as the Creation ...#thecurseoffrankenstein #hammerfilms 1957 Directed by Terence Fisher. A film with a great story, sets, music, cast and some pretty good dialogue too!
#MonsterMonday : Not all of Peter Cushing's Frankenstein's 'monster's' looked like the last thing you would want to meet down a dark alleyway. This one, was quite the opposite. A relatively unknown actresses when she came to the role of Christina Kleeve's in Hammer films 'Frankenstein Created Woman' in 1967, Denberg's eventual beauty is the perfect mask that hides a heart bent on revenge and murder, giving us a the monster, that given the chance based on appearances, we would be quite happily take out to dinner...and a trip to the cinema!
Look Out for our 'So You Think You Know : Peter Cushing?' Competition THIS WEEKEND 5th / 6th July 2014! There are THREE COPIES of Peveril Publishing's THE PETER CUSHING SCRAPBOOK up for grabs!
The Peter Cushing Scrapbook:
Leading fantasy film historians Wayne Kinsey (Hammer Films – the Bray Studios Years, The Elstree Studios Years, A Life in Pictures, the Unsung Heroes and On Location) and Tom Johnson (Hammer Films – an Exhaustive Filmography, Peter Cushing – the Gentle Man of Horror and his 91 Films and The Films of Oliver Reed)
come together with Joyce Broughton (Cushing’s secretary and aide for
over 35 years) to present the definitive pictorial history to Peter
Cushing. A perfectionist in his work and a talented artist in every
sense of the word with a great sense of humour and always a boy at heart. The Peter Cushing Scrapbook is a unique pictorial book packed with Cushing memorabilia that showcases his private and professional life:
Watercolor paintings,sketches, bird drawings, Tudor Tea Room Profiles, costume designs, humorous cartoons drwn for his wife, Helen. Painted scarf and jewelry designs, model theatre sets, letters, annotated pages. Notations for photographs written by Peter Cushing, candid photographs. Material from the estate of director, Roy Ward Baker. Film props. An alternative script for Hammer films 'Captain Clegg' and rare material from two unfilmed Hammer film projects to have starred Peter Cushing: Kali - Devil Bride of Dracula and The Savage Jackboot and rare cinema posters...
Friday 16 May 2014
# FRANKENSTEINFRIDAY: 'THE SAD TALE OF BARON FRANKENSTEIN'S PUPPY' THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
#FRANKENSTEINFRIDAY: 'The Sad Tale of Baron Frankenstein's Puppy' as told by Derek Whitehurst, first assistant director on #hammerfilms 'The Curse of Frankenstein' (1957)
Thursday 28 November 2013
A HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL OUR FRIENDS AND FOLLWERS WORLDWIDE
A Very Happy Thanksgiving To All Our Friends And Followers Worldwide
Friday 23 August 2013
COMING UP THIS WEEKEND: BLU RAYS, MONOGRAPHS AND CANDIDS
Busy weekend coming up! Still time to enter
the 'Evil of Frankenstein' blu ray competition, but we'll be announcing
the winners this weekend. There's blu ray copies of ' Hammer Films 'The
Brides of Dracula' from Final Cut Entertainment to be
won. Four copies of Reel Solutions monograph 'Putting The Grand In
Guignol' Limited Edition AND some terrific and rare candid photographs
of 'someone' relaxing during the production of a Peter Cushing classic.
Please join us.
Monday 19 August 2013
THE BARON REBOOTED: THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN : HAMMER FILMS 1964
CAST:
Peter Cushing (Baron Frankenstein), Peter Woodthorpe (Zoltan), Sandor Eles (Hans), Kiwi Kingston (The Monster), Katy Wild (Rena)
PRODUCTION:
Director – Freddie Francis, Screenplay – John Elder [Anthony Hinds],
Producer – Anthony Hinds, Photography – John Wilcox, Music – Don Banks,
Special Effects – Les Bowie, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Art Direction – Don
Mingaye. Production Company – Hammer.
SYNOPSIS:
Forced to leave town because of their
experiments, Frankenstein and Hans return to Frankenstein’s hometown
Karlstad and set up laboratory in the abandoned Frankenstein chateau.
Frankenstein then finds his original creation frozen inside a glacier
and restores it to life. Only it will not respond to his commands. And
so Frankenstein comes up with the idea of obtaining the services of
Zoltan, a disreputable carnival hypnotist, to hypnotize the monster into
obeying him. Zoltan is successful but has less than scientific
interests at heart. With the monster responding only to his commands,
Zoltan uses it to rob and take revenge upon the town authorities.
COMMENTARY:
General opinion holds The Evil of Frankenstein,
the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films, to be one of the duds of the
series. One is at a loss to understand why. I, to the contrary, hold The Evil of Frankenstein to be one of the best of the series. With the preceding two entries, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Revenge of Frankenstein
(1958), Hammer had kept the same essential creative team – director
Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and star Peter Cushing – in
place. For The Evil of Frankenstein,
Hammer producer Anthony Hinds replaced Sangster on script, while
Freddie Francis inherited the director’s chair. Freddie Francis was an
up and coming director who had worked as an award-winning
cinematographer in the previous decade, had made his genre debut with Vengeance/The Brain (1962), followed with a couple of Hammer’s psycho-thrillers, Paranoiac (1962) and Nightmare (1963), and then attained some success with the first of Hammer rival Amicus’s anthology films Dr Terror’s House of Horrors
(1964) just prior to this. Francis, whose output to the Anglo-horror
cycle has been underrated, would go on to become its next most prolific
director to Fisher. (See below for Freddie Francis’s other films).
It is not clear why The Evil of Frankenstein
is almost universally regarded as such a dog in the Hammer pantheon.
Just look at the opening scenes that hit one with the fervid intensity
of something out of a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare brought to life – a
little girl sees a body being stolen from a hut in the forest in the
middle of the night and calls a priest. The body is taken to
Frankenstein who removes the heart before the paling body snatcher,
dismissing his queasiness with a curt, “He won’t need it anymore,”
before the priest bursts in, cursing Frankenstein’s abominable
experiments and smashing the lab equipment. It’s a sequence lit with
such a feverishly eerie intensity that it attains a genuinely nightmare
atmosphere of dread chill. Nothing else in the film quite manages to
match it. Certainly, there are a number of images littered throughout
that have a lingering memorability – the deaf-mute beggar girl and her
strange relationship with the monster; the monster found buried in the
side of the glacier; and one especially memorable scene where the
monster gets up and begins to agonizingly shuffle around the lab while
Frankenstein looks on, coldly clinically taking notes.
The Evil of Frankenstein
presents some confusion to the continuity of the Hammer Frankenstein
series. For some reason, Freddie Francis conducts a flashback that
offers a potted retelling all the essentials of The Curse of Frankenstein
anew. However, this makes changes to continuity – Frankenstein now
appears to have merely been driven out of town, not executed. Where the
events of The Revenge of Frankenstein fit in becomes somewhat confusing – the Hans character is carried over from Revenge,
but Frankenstein’s new body and his escape from the gallows is
forgotten about. It’s a puzzle as to why the film creates the flashback –
some of this is to set up plot points for later on – although without
much rewriting this could all have been made to carry over from Revenge.
What tended to lose many people was the addition of the Zoltan
character, which takes the story considerably away from the Frankenstein
mythos. Indeed, you could almost see this as Hammer’s attempt to craft
their own variant on The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).
With The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer did not have the copyright to use the Jack Pierce designs for the Boris Karloff monster makeup from Frankenstein
(1931) and so Phil Leakey came up with his own original designs.
Apparently Universal has relaxed their copyright restrictions by the
time of The Evil of Frankenstein and
the makeup on Kiwi Kingston’s monster is closely modelled on the Pierce
designs, the only time the Hammer Frankenstein’s came close to
resembling the Universal originals. Production designer Don Mingaye and
special effects man Les Bowie collaborate to come up with not one but
two of the series very best creation sequences, with lightning bolts and
generator coils crashing in the best Kenneth Strickfaden tradition. And
on the whole, The Evil of Frankenstein is a Hammer Frankenstein entry that is well worth re-evaluation.
The other Hammer Frankenstein films are:– The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973).
Freddie Francis’s other genre films are:- Vengeance/The Brain (1962), Paranoiac (1962), Nightmare (1963), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), Hysteria (1965), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Torture Garden (1967), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), Trog (1970), The Vampire Happening (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Tales That Witness Madness (1972), Craze (1973), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Legend of the Werewolf (1974), Son of Dracula (1974), The Ghoul (1975), The Doctor and the Devils (1985) and Dark Tower (1987).
Review: Richard Scheib
Sunday 4 August 2013
Wednesday 5 June 2013
Monday 31 December 2012
THE BARON'S SWAN SONG: PETER CUSHING IN FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL : HAMMER FILMS 1973
PETER CUSHING for the last time as Baron Frankenstein in Hammer Films 'FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL' It's due for release on Blu Ray in 2013.
Friday 2 November 2012
HAMMER AND SICKLE: PETER CUSHING BTS 'FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED' (1969)
BEHIND THE SCENES: MGM EMI Elstree. Cameraman Neil Binney shooting
Peter Cushing as he wields his gruesome sickle in the doorway of Dr.
Heidecke's surgery, during the opening scene of FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE
DESTROYED. Hammer Films (1969)
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