HORRORS! ANOTHER BUMPER COMPETITION THIS WEEKEND!

PLEASE DO JOIN US FOR ANOTHER BUMPER PCAS COMPETITION 

THIS WEEKEND! 

HERE AT OUR WEBSITE AND OUR OFFICIAL

PCAS FACEBOOK FAN PAGE HERE

ANOTHER CUSHING HAMMER BLU RAY ON THE WAY FROM FINAL CUT ENTERTAINMENT

Final Cut Entertainment are preparing a BLU RAY release for #hammerfilms 1970 Ingrid Pitt and Peter Cushing outing, THE VAMPIRE LOVERS. No news of release date or of any extras at this point. This release is expected to be a region B release only, which is good news for anyone who missed out on the region A Shout release from the US last year. We'll keep you posted.

 

 

Don't forget to join us for our 'So You Think You Know Peter Cushing?' Competition THIS WEEKEND and win yourself a copy one of THREE copies of The Peter Cushing Scrapbook!

You can purchase a copy: HERE 

AHOY ME HEARTIES! SET YE TIME PIECE FOR THE WINNING OF 'CAPTAIN CLEGG' BLU RAY

AHOY ME HEARTIES! AVAST BEHIND, And all that...Get your sea legs ready, there's no time for hanging a jib, 'cause shiver me timbers, this weekend ye can grab yourselves, some real #PeterCushing #hammerfilms TREASURE, me beauties! And NO Crimping either! We've got some beautiful booty and plunder, A PAIR of fine blu ray's of the ol Captain himself..'CAPTAIN CLEGG'! Yours for WINNING! Still in their wraps they be and hot from the scallywags at Final Cut Entertainment. 

Join us for some grog, a tankard of Nelson's Folly, on the good lord's day, THIS SUNDAY 15th JUNE....and try thee luck at nabbing a copy for yourself in our competition. We'll be pulling out the bung hole and making much merriment, in celebration of  the ol' Captain. So, all hands on deck and get ye coxswain to steer ye a path, to our landing party here. All rapscallions and 'Brethren Of The Coast', most welcome. Be seeing ye, me handsomes..... AYE!

PRE ORDER YOUR COPY HERE

FINAL CUT ENTERTAINMENT: CAPTAIN CLEGG NIGHT CREATURES BLU REVIEW

#hammerfilms 'CAPTAIN CLEGG' ' 'NIGHT CREATURES' blu ray starring Peter Cushing is due for street release on Monday 23rd Jun 2014. NEXT WEEK we'll be posting a full review of the blu ray and it's extras... PLUS you can WIN yourself some copies too

'THE BRIDES OF DRACULA' BLU RAY COMPETITION

In our second competition today, we have a PAIR of 'The Brides Of Dracula' (1960) Blu Ray / DVD's up for grabs, courtesy of Final Cut Entertainment. To be in with a chance of winning your very own copy, all you have to do is correctly answer the question below and send your answer to theblackboxclub@gmail.com

QUESTION:
The Brides of Dracula Starred Peter Cushing and Yvonne Monlaur. On the final day of shooting Peter Cushing presented Monlaur with a gift. What did he give her?

Choose ONE of the following:
a) A Pair Earrings
b) A Water Colour Painting
c) A Scarf
d) A Necklace

The competition closes SUNDAY 1st SEPTEMBER, 2013 at 12 MID DAY GMT. Winners names will be drawn and announced here two hours later at 2PM GMT.

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.

FIRST TIME ON BLU RAY: HAMMER FILMS 'THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN' UP PRIZES UP FOR GRABS

Have You Entered Yet? We have a pair of Peter Cushing's THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN Blu Rays + DVDS up for grabs, fresh from the nice guys at Final Cut Entertainment. Available for the first time on blu ray, The Evil of Frankenstein goes on sale Monday 26th August. 

To be in with a chance of winning your very own copy, all you have to do is correctly answer the question below.

COMPETITION QUESTION:
When The Evil of Frankenstein was sold to NBC television in the USA, for screening in a prime time slot, new footage had to be shot to pad out the length of the film from 84 mins to two hours. Who was the director who filmed these extra scenes? Choose from the options below:

a) Ernest G. Moore
b) Irving J. Moore
c) Irwin J. Morgan
d) Edward G. Maughan

Send your answer in an email to our email address: theblackboxlub@gmail.com

The competition closes SUNDAY 25th August, 2013 at 12 MID DAY GMT. Winner names will be drawn and announced two hours later at 2PM GMT at the UK Peter Cushing Appreciation Society Facebook Fan Page and here at this website.

GOOD LUCK! 

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

Images: Marcus Brooks
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Evil-of-Frankenstein-Blu-ray/69370/ 

WEEKEND AT PCASUK FACEBOOK FAN PAGE : GRAB THOSE GOODIES!

COMING UP THIS WEEKEND ON THE PCASUK FACEBOOK FAN PAGE: Over the weekend we'll be celebrating the blu ray release Hammer Films THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN from Final Cut Entertainment, posting a selection of large hi res scans of RARE photographs from the film and launching a competition where you can a bag a free copy of the blu ray. We'll be giving details of our Grindhouse 'CORRUPTION' blu ray competition, there's also a chance for you to win copies of Reel Solutions 'Peter Cushing Centenary Monograph' AND we'll be announcing the WINNERS NAMES to our HAMMER SOCKS(!!) competition from last weekend. We look forward to your company