EUREKA AMICUS CUSHING LEE HORROR CLASSIC THE SKULL BLU RAY AND DVD RELEASE COMPETITION

THIS COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED! SEE WINNERS AT

 BOTTOM OF FEATURE!

EUREKA AND THE PETERAPPRECIATIONSOCIETY.COM BRINGS YOU THE CHANCE TO WIN A PETER CUSHING AMICUS HORROR CLASSIC 

ON DUAL BLU RAY AND DVD RELEASE!

EVENT

OCTOBER 26th sees the BLU RAY and DVD release from EUREKA of Amicus films classic THE SKULL starring the two grand masters of terror, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. This is the first time that THE SKULL has been available on BLU RAY in the UK and to celebrate this, EUREKA have sponsored our competition by providing THREE copies of the DUAL FORMAT release for you to WIN! This edition contains both the BLU RAY and DVD.

ALL YOU HAVE TO DO

To enter the competition and be in with a chance of winning EUREKA's EXCLUSIVELY RESTORED release of THE SKULL is correctly ANSWER the question below. Once you have your answer, just simply send it in an email to us at: theblackboxclub@gmail.com 

QUESTION:

Amicus script writer and producer, Milton Subotsky had a favorite SURNAME he used for his characters in over half a dozen of his films. WHAT WAS THAT SURNAME?

This competition CLOSES on FRIDAY 23rd OCTOBER 2015 at MIDNIGHT GMT. GOOD LUCK EVERYONE!

You can place a PREORDER for EUREKA's 'THE SKULL' Dual Blu Ray and DVD release at Amazon.co.uk : QUICK LINK: HERE 

EUREKA THE SKULL BLU RAY AND DVD DUAL PACKAGE SPEC:

Exclusively restored 1080p presentation of the film on Blu-ray

Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.

New video interview with film scholar Jonathan Rigby.

New video interview with critic & author Kim Newman

Reversible sleeve featuring original and new artwork
Limited Edition Collector’s Booklet.

You can place a PREORDER for EUREKA's 'THE SKULL' Dual Blu Ray and DVD release at Amazon.co.uk : QUICK LINK: HERE 

Join Us At The Official Facebook Page of the Peter Cushing Appreciation
Society Website : HERE

JENNIE LINDEN : A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

A Happy Birthday to JENNIE LINDEN who celebrates her birthday today December 8th.... and who fought the good fight against the Daleks with Peter Cushing as Dr Who in 'Dr Who and the Daleks' in 1965

HOLD ON TIGHT! IT'S ALL CHANGE WITH HAMMER FILMS THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN

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 films.

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. However, it will not respond to his commands. Frankenstein comes up with the idea of obtaining the services of Zoltan, a disreputable carnival hypnotist, to hypnotise 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. To the contrary, I 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 as he smashes the lab equipment. It is a sequence lit with such a feverishly eerie intensity that it attains a 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 agonisingly 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 of 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 is 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. 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).

Feature written by:Richard Scheib

Images edited by Marcus Brooks

No way to treat the curtains!

The Evil of Frankenstein

A VISUAL NIGHTMARE : TROY HOWARTH TAKES IN A KEY SCENE FROM AMICUS FILMS 'THE SKULL'

One of the best sequences of THE SKULL (1965) is the extended dream sequence.  Director Freddie Francis handles the transition from reality to fantasy so skillfully that the audience is not even aware of the fact that they are watching a dream. Sooner than rely on distortion filters, a la Roger Corman, Francis lulls the viewer into a state of blissful ignorance as the protagonist, Professor Christopher Maitland (Peter Cushing), drifts into unconsciousness and undergoes a strange and terrifying nightmare.

Francis’ background as a cinematographer is very evident in the film, which is handsomely photographed by John Wilcox in the widescreen Techniscope process. Using sound effects and Elisabeth Lutyens’ score to help build the mood, Francis conveys much through camera movements and artful compositions within the frame. Much like the rest of the film, there’s relatively little dialogue—and this is why the film remains the director’s best film: it is a work of pure cinema, allowing his strengths as a visual stylist to take center stage. For fans of Cushing and Christopher Lee, THE SKULL is a genuine treat: it’s creepy, stylish and quite unlike anything else from the golden age of British horror.

Troy Howarth's 'The Haunted World of Mario Bava' Explanded and Revised: NOW Available $45.00, FULL COLOR 8 1/2 X 11 SPECIAL INTRODUCTORY SALE PRICE! $35.00!   Order Here! Look out for Troy Howarth's 'Tome of Terror' and 'So Deadly, So Perverse' coming soon...all from Midnight Marquee.

A Visual Nightmare : The Skull