#SILENTBUTDEADLY: GIFS SNAKES MUSTACHES AND MAKE UP!

#SILENTBUTDEADLY: Dr. Namaroff (Peter Cushing) attempts to destroy The Gorgon (Prudence Hyman), though makes the fatal mistake of looking directly at her, from Hammer's The Gorgon (1964). It's surprising how many times this scene has been requested. Despite the slightly disappointing SFX at the end, even by 1960's standards, everything else makes up for it in this Hammer classic. Everyone is on board, Cushing, Lee, Barbara Shelley and even Patrick Troughton get a look in! Haunting, score and top notch sets from the Bray team, 'The Gorgon' is one that grows on you. The script is imaginative, and the idea of The Medusa, 'monster' was original for the time. It's an idea that is bendy enough for Josh Kennedy, of Gooey Films to fit a contemporary setting. and Josh's 'Night of the Medusa' I would recommend. Keep an eye out here, for my review, sooon! This was requested by Tim The Smart (!) USA. Thanks Tim!

#SILENTBUTDEADLY: Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) about to add jail breaking to his list of crimes...this GIF from Hammer's 'The Evil Of Frankenstein' (1964). Requested by Albee Crawford.

 
#SILENTBUTDEADLY: Baron Meinster (David Peel) temporarily gets the better of Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) in Hammer's 'The Brides Of Dracula' (1960). Requested by Honest Sammy!

#SILENTBUTDEADLY: Before we go any further with this one..I have a confession. Christopher Lee as Prof. Karl Meister, in Hammer films, 'The Gorgon'? I get his performance, sort of, the voice I kind of believe, but it does distract me, every viewing. But, the  actual character, the age, the mustache? No. Why did they opt for trying to make him older? The whole grouchy Einstein thing?

When I interviewed make up artist, Roy Ashton, yeeears later, I asked him about it. You want to know what his opinion was? 'I don't know why. But, I do remember it came from the top. They wanted to try something different. Looking at it, it was a mustache which was made. Peter preferred to grow his own, he had a allergy to the gum we used. That's a wig, I would think. It usually was with Christopher Lee, some piece or another, and simple aging. ME: Did that happen often, the suits would suggest something, about the make up? ROY: Well, more often than not, they would leave you to it. Unless there was something they didn't like, they thought didn't work. Like the mustaches in Hammer's 'Curse of the Werewolf' They didn't like them. They said that it didn't look correct. But I had researched the era and location, for facial hair and whatnot, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. And presented my findings. And then they said, 'Oh alright'!  

ROY: Christopher's appearance was what they wanted, and I, as well as many others were too busy on the blessed snakes for the actual Gorgon, to worry. Oh it took sometime, and at the end of the day, you try your best. The same could be said, with the mask for Herbert Lom in their 'Phantom of the Opera'. They spent weeks and weeks leading up to the time, the actual day, that we were shooting a scene, where the mask had to be seen. They just didn't know what they wanted. I found some rags, some latex and a bit of paint, and put it together during my lunch break. 'That's it! That's it, they said, That's what we want!'..It was just as well, really'

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RICK BAKER CREATES A GREAT HALLOWEEN TRIBUTE TO PETER CUSHING!

#THROWBACKTHURSDAY: It's a great tribute to the work of make up artist Roy Ashton and Peter Cushing, that Cushing's portrayal of Arthur Grimsdyke STILL gets as much attention that it does! Make Up genius RICK BAKER too to twitter today to show us his #Halloween make up for this year! It's terrific! ' “Tested my Halloween party makeup today....He tweeted.... #Grimsdyke Fabricated out of cotton & latex. Hard to shoot a selfie with black fabric on your eyes!” GREAT job!

THIS TRIBUTE TO ASHTON/CUSHING also reminds us of the 'cameo' that the make up did in #thewalkingdead TV show last year. Greg Nicotero did a great job also of recreating Cushing's nightmare-Grimsdyke, back from the dead!

 

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#TOOCOOLTUESDAY: ROY ASHTON RARE SIGNED PIC, FRIENDS SOLVE A CUSHING PUZZLE AND SPENDING TIME WITH PC IN WHITSTABLE

#‎TOOCOOLTUESDAY‬: PHOTOGRAPHS OF PETER CUSHING in his award winning role of Arthur Grimsdyke from the Amicus films, 'Tales From The Crypt' are quite desirable. I got this one signed in 1980, during the filming of our PCAS interview with the great Roy Ashton who was responsible for this 'ground breaking;... for the time... make up, . . Roy still found the fact the gauze material in PC's eye-sockets, was a swatch of nylon hacked out of a pair of sockings!!

#‎TOOCOOLTUESDAY‬: DURING THE LAST FEW YEARS of his life, living in sleepy Whitstable, Peter Cushing befriended a young couple called Judith and Nic Gadd. They wrote a book and published it through Peter Cushing's own small publishing company entitled, 'Spending Time With Frankenstein' and it's certainly worth looking up...though it is a toughie to find.. Here is Judith with PC taking a walk through town . . . I LIKE that hat!

#TOOCOOTUESDAY : HERE'S A COOL LITTLE PIC, in the file with no credits. In THIS WEEK'S #TOOCOOLTUESDAY, we asked if any of you out there might have an idea as where this pic was taken. I was guessing it could be a Spanish television programe..and then we got some very cool feedback on the thread where this  was posted on ourPeter Cushing Appreciation Society Facebook Fan Page  

Rafael Martinez wrote to tell us, 'The program was in the spanish television, when Peter was in Spain filming "Horror Express". The program was named "Opened Studio" (Estudio Abierto) and hosted by José María Iñigo (on the left)It was at the time of "Horror Express", not "Monster Island" for sure. The TV program ended about 1975. "Monster Island" was filmed in 1981. I knew Peter briefly on original locations in Northern Spain, when he was filming "Monster Island" with Terence Stamp. Peter was a dear man. He often smoked on location, with a white glove to avoid nicotine stains.

'Peter was here only a few days, for a brief sequence in a beach (Terence Stamp was a few days filming too). The film had a very low budget. The rest of his brief participation was filmed in a studio in Madrid (The beach was Otur, Asturias, Spain)' 

 

ALSO EMPTY HEAD wrote to us with further info on the programme and a Christopher Lee connection, 'Incidentally, the late Sir Christopher Lee was also a guest on the programme "Estudio Abierto", though I don't know whether it was this particular episode or not. (see ABOVE) Those of us here who know our Spanish TV shows will probably be aware of José María Íñigo as a regular participant on "Que Tiempo Tan Feliz" (hosted by the legendary María Teresa Campos). I believe he also does the commentary for the Spanish transmission of The Eurovision Song Contest.

 

SO ALL IN A PRETTY PRODUCTIVE and cooL Tuesday! MORE NEXT WEEK HERE and at our FACEBOOK PAGE . CLICK HERE AND JOIN US NOW!

TOOCOOLTUESDAY : ROY ASHTON'S MONSTER MAKE UPS

#TOOCOOLTUESDAY Carry on from yesterday's post about make up artist's Roy Ashton's 'tailor's dummy'... here is a cool montague of Roy at work. Photograph A is me at Elstree watching Roy making some werewolf ears! Take a look at the other pics here and see if you can work out any of the films he is working on, or can you name any of those 'bits and pieces' of monsters??? ANSWERS LATER..

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HE IS NO DUMMY OTTO LIVES!! #MONSTER MONDAY

THIS WEEKS #MONSTERMONDAY features what is maybe not the fastest monster on two legs, but he's pretty effective at squeezing the living daylights out of Barry Morses, Bruno thread bare tailor! Without giving too much away, 'The Weird Tailor' story in Amicus films, 'Asylum' is a sort of spin on the old  chestnut of W.W.Jacob's ghost story, 'The Monkey's Paw', but with that extra 'Amicus' twist.

ONCE AGAIN, Peter Cushing gets to play a grief stricken and bereaved individual for Amicus, Mr Smith. This was the second 'a role too close to life?' for Cushing on the  big screen in as many years, with his Grimsdyke in 'Tales from the Crypt', being the first. His Dr Lawrence in Tyburn's 'THE GHOUL' would be the final performance, with cast and crew witnessing fragile Cushing's emotional melt down on set, it may have been a bridge too far.

AGAIN MAKE UP ARTIST Roy Ashton, provided the monster make up. In an interview with us in 1984, Ashton admitted that coming up with a convincing make up for Otto, was a challenge. As with the majority of assignments with amicis, ashton found himself with little to nothing for developing a make up, and even less in the way of time on the studio floor, after applying the make up to actually maintain it. Otto's appearance isn't the best of Ashton's work, but along with actor Daniel Johns efforts, it does the job.

There is only ONE Peter Cushing Appreciation

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#TOOCOOLTUESDAY : MEETING VINCENT PRICE ON THE SET AT ELSTREE

#‎toocooltuesday‬: WEDDING DAY, Birth of your children, Their graduations...aside, the day I had the opportunity to spend time with the one and only, Vincent Price, is up there! ..please don't let my wife read this... If you dislike tales of reminiscing, clumsy name dropping... you are excused now!

IT CAME AROUND by default. In 1980, make up artist Roy Ashton rang me...no I didn't have a hot line to him or any stars, we spoke once in a while, he was lovely... he was ringing to tell me he was making plans to start work on a film for Amicus films producer Milton Subotsky, starring Vincent Price at Elstree studios, in two weeks time...AND that it looked like Peter Cushing had signed up too! As it worked out, he hadn't. But that's another story. By the end of that day, through sheer luck, and by Milton Subotsky's and Roy's invitation, I had an invite to join them for the day on the set of 'The Monster Club' at Elstree studios!

BY THIS TIME, through sheer cheek and through what became known as 'the Cushing Connection' I had met and interviewed around 30 to 40 actors who had worked with Peter. Just the mention of his name, opened doors to the kindest of people and their generosity. Milton Subotsky was a fan at heart, a shy man who loved to talk books, comics and films. we certainly wasn't on buddy-back-slapping terms, but he was always friendly, loved to talk shop and the kind that, if he could help you, he would suggest he could... both he and Michael Ripper, validated my application for my Actors Union, Equity card!... and so, on this day he made the meeting happen.

MEETING VINCENT PRICE was a blast, Milton introduced me during a break in shooting. Vincent peered around Milton to see me and announced, 'Peter Cushing's WHAT? Ap-prec-iation Society?' I sheepishly nodded. 'How is the OL GOAT?' he said laughing. I took this as my cue, and stepped up. He pointed at an empty canvas chair, with name on it and...I sat next to him and John Carradine for the next FOUR hours, only wandering off during lunch.

AFTER THE FIRST HALF an hour, I indicated to Subotsky, that should I now...'come over there' and leave them in peace?.. Milton came over and asked if there was a problem. When I asked him again, he just smiled, 'No. It's fine. You can stay there'. Vincent over heard our stage whispers and bellowed, 'Just don't touch ANYTHING or fall over the CABLES!

I HAD A SMALL CASSETTE  tape recorder with me which I used for a short interview, which eventually strayed into relaxed conversation...his love of chocolate,Peter, Whitstable oysters...he was talking to me, but also playing to everyone else too. I changed tapes three times! It was all very funny and entertaining.

I HUNG ON EVERY WORD, joke, aside and anecdote. Both he and Caradine were called away several times, after the stand in's had helped set up their shot, the dressers brushed their clothes, someone fussed with Vincent's hair, he blew his nose and off they went filming the 'Family Tree' scene, sat at their coffin table, with Roy Ward Baker directing. Then they came and sat back down in their canvas chairs.

AFTER THE FIRST HOUR OR SO, it just seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting and chatting... he was very fond of Peter, loved Christopher Lee and as a joke, kept telling me 'We have birthday's on the same day you know. Now it's that strange? Peter is the day before us! Did you know that?'... after the third time he told me, he laughed out loud,'You KNEW that didn't you!' He was a kidder. He was extremely kind to me that day, and it's an experience I will never forget. I have never told this story before. I don't dine out on or make a habit of recalling ' and then Robert Quarry said to me' stories, I never had a little black book of contacts either! I was just a fan, a very lucky one, Now... isn't that just...TOO COOL? : Marcus Brooks

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THE WALKING DEAD : GRIMSDYKE NICOTERO TRIBUTE

Comicbook.com reports today: WALKING DEAD tribute to Cushing's Grimsdyke: On tonight's episode of AMC's Talking Dead, host Chris Hardwick and special effects guru Greg Nicotero revealed that the walker pictured above and at right was, in fact, an homage to the classic Tales From the Crypt ghoul known as Grimsdyke.

That undead unfortunate, played by Star Wars and Dr. Who and the Daleks veteran Peter Cushing, can be seen at left...and, yeah, it's easy to see why eagle-eyed fans who spotted things like George Romero's Bub and the in-jokes ranging from The Boondock Saints to An American Werewolf in London, didn't immediately pounce on this one. It's a solid likeness, but hardly identical...mostly because of how far effects have come since Cushing's day.

It isn't that the effects aren't great on Nicotero's end -- it's that the look they were mimicking came from a time when the effects weren't that great, and it would have been odd and out of character for The Walking Dead to have a walker look just like him -- so it was more "in the style of," rather than a more direct copy, and that made him a touch harder to spot."

More on this: HERE 

The Arthur Grimsdyke make up was created by Hammer / Amicus make up legend, Roy Ashton.

HEADS UP! ONE SEVERED AND ONE PLASTER!

HEADS UP! Peter Cushing with his 'axed nogging' from Amicus Film 'The House That Dripped Blood' (1971) and make up artist's Roy Ashton's plaster head of Peter, which he used to produce the latex prosthetic for Cushing's Arthur Grimsdyke in Amicus films 'Tales from the Crypt' in 1972.

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/