'FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL' BANNER FOR SCREEN SAVER!

HAMMER FRANKENSTEIN FRIDAYS

PETER CUSHING: INVITE FOR STAR WARS TEST SCREENING 1977

QUESTIONNAIRE FOR AUDIENCES OF

THE TEST SCREENING OF 'STAR WARS' MAY 1ST 1977.

QUESTION 19: DO YOU THINK THAT THIS MOVIE WILL CHANGE THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA???

'THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN' GERMAN PROGRAMME HAMMER FRANKENSTEIN FRIDAY

ONE SIDE OF THE GERMAN PRESS BOOK FOR HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS 'THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN' HAMMER FRANKENSTEIN FRIDAYS

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED. PETER CUSHING CLASSIC HAMMER FRANKENSTEIN FRIDAYS

Cast:

Peter Cushing : Baron Frankentein. Freddie Jones: Professor Richter/Dr Brandt. Simon Ward: Karl Holst. Veronica Carlson: Anna Spengler. Maxine Audley: Ella Brandt. George Pravda: Dr Frederick Brandt. Thorley Walters: Inspector Fritsch.

Crew:Director: Terence Fisher. Screenplay: Ben Batt. Story: Ben Batt & Anthony Nelson-Keys, Producer: Anthony Nelson-Keys. Photography: Arthur Grant. Music: James Bernard. Makeup: Eddie Knight. Art Direction: Bernard Robinson. Production Company: Hammer Films

Synopsis: Frankenstein is forced to flee town again after his experiments are discovered. He signs into the boarding house of Anna Spengler in a new town. When he discovers that Anna’s fiancee Karl Holst has been stealing cocaine from the asylum where he works to help his ailing mother, Frankenstein blackmails them both with threat of calling the authorities. He takes over the boarding house and has Karl steal supplies so that he can set up a laboratory in the basement. He then discovers that his old colleague Dr Brandt is incarcerated in the asylum, having been deemed mad. Frankenstein wants the secrets of how Brandt successfully conducted brain transplants and devises a scheme to break him out with Karl’s help. However, the attempt places Brandt in a coma. Frankenstein makes the decision to transplant Brandt’s brain into the body of the incompetent asylum head Professor Richter. During the process, he cures the problem that was causing Brandt’s madness. However, when Brandt comes around, Frankenstein realizes that he was mad after all. Brandt then escapes, setting a trap to kill Frankenstein.

Commentary:

Terence Fisher is a director around whom a cult has grown, championed in particular by the likes of Anglo-horror critic David Pirie. Fisher had a distinctively florid style that used the full richness of Hammer’s cinematographic and production values and there are times, particularly the climaxes of his Dracula films, where he could bring everything together with dazzling effect. Upon other occasions, Fisher could be a pedestrian director. Fisher’s two finest moments are generally regarded as being Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Devil Rides Out (1968). (See below for Terence Fisher’s other films). Contrarily one might go out on a limb and suggest that Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is the best of Terence Fisher’s films and certainly the finest of Hammer’s Frankenstein films. It is Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Fisher’s penultimate film, rather than Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1973), that Anglo-horror-philes should consider Terence Fisher’s swan song. It is the one moment where everything he did knitted together superbly.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is a brilliantly directed film, one that propels Terence Fisher from being an efficient manipulator of the Gothic into a master of mise en scene. The scene where the water main bursts, expelling Brandt’s buried body out of the garden just as the neighbour is visiting, is a sequence that would not go amiss in a Hitchcock film. The opening is a superbly edited piece – one that opens up like a Chinese box of shocks one after the other from the point-of-view of a burglar who breaks into Frankenstein’s laboratory. At first, we see just the feet of the figure coming down the cellar steps, the figure then joltingly revealed to have a bald, hideously scarred face, before this is revealed to be a mask worn by Peter Cushing, and with the burglar then accidentally tripping and knocking over a container that holds a recently severed human head. Of course, the climax with Freddie Jones taunting Peter Cushing and smashing oil lamps to set fire and block every exit from the house is superlative stuff too.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is also a point where the new gore trends were making in-roads into Anglo-horror. Terence Fisher handles that too with an ease that leaves the film in a class way above the random splatter of today’s gore films. There is something that turns the stomach to the shot where Peter Cushing puts the brace-and-bit up against Freddie Jones’s head and starts drilling. Or the scene where he uses a fretsaw to cut open the skull. There is no blood shown in either scene – the effect is all conveyed from off-screen actions and some unnervingly convincing snapping and crunching effects.

 

 

Bert Batt’s screenplay is more complex than usual for the Hammer Frankenstein series. For Hammer’s Frankenstein series, unlike Universal’s Frankenstein series, the monster is a relatively anonymous creation that is far less interesting than Peter Cushing’s ruthless Baron. However, Freddie Jones’s creature is the most interestingly complex and well played of all the Hammer’s Frankenstein monsters – it is the only one to come anywhere near Mary Shelley’s novel and her conception of an intelligent and literate creation come to taunt its creator for the condition inflicted on it.

Surprisingly, Terence Fisher also indulges a sense of droll humour throughout the film – like the cut from Veronica Carlson telling Peter Cushing how he will enjoy the peace and quiet at the boarding house to a madwoman screaming at the asylum, or the boarders who sit around discussing Frankenstein’s infamous exploits unaware he is sitting in their midst. There are odd anachronisms, like having cocaine a regularly prescribed drug and the establishment of an international narcotics bureau in the midst of the 19th Century, although these hardly stand in the way of such an exceptional effort.

The other Hammer Frankenstein films are:– The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973).

Terence Fisher’s other genre films are:– the sf films The Four-Sided Triangle (1953) and Spaceways (1953), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960), The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), The Gorgon (1964), Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), The Devil Rides Out/The Devil’s Bride (1968) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973), all for Hammer. Outside of Hammer, Fisher has made the Old Dark House comedy The Horror of It All (1964) and the alien invasion films The Earth Dies Screaming (1964), Island of Terror (1966) and Night of the Big Heat (1967).

REVIEW: Richard Scheib

Richard's Page Here

IMAGE: Marcus Brooks

'BAY WATCH!' PETER CUSHING'S 1961 'FURY AT SMUGGLERS BAY' DVD REVIEW

Though not a Hammer film per se, Fury at Smugglers Bay (1961) has all the earmarks of that studio's swashbucklers. Among other things, Peter Cushing is top-billed, and the picture was directed by John Gilling who, in addition to directing Cushing in the Hammer-esque The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), went on to make seven films for Hammer, including the somewhat similar Pirates of Blood River (1962). Fury at Smugglers Bay is an enjoyable quasi-pirate movie, perhaps Gilling's best work, an old-fashioned melodrama loaded with swordfights and shipwrecks and, for that matter, fury and smugglers.

 

 

 

 

Though Cushing is top-billed, his is really a supporting part. Indeed, one of the picture's more unusual aspects is that, probably unintentionally, there is no central character. The story is set in 1789, at a remote fishing village off the English coast. Merchant ships frequently crash and are sunk off its rocky coast, and this has led to a fight over the booty brought ashore. On one side are the "Wreckers,Ecutthroat mercenaries led by Black John (Bernard Lee); on the other is the comparatively honest fisher folk, lead by merchant François LeJeune (George Coulouris). Caught in the middle are Christopher Trevenyan (John Fraser), son of the local squire (Peter Cushing), and a Dick Turpin-like highwayman known only as The Captain (William Franklyn).

 
 

 

The film's story is thin and predictable, but its rich atmosphere and continuous action keep things moving. Most of the drama hinges on the nightly shoreline battles between the Wreckers (who light fires on the beach to draw ships into the rocks) and the fisher folk, and Squire Trevenyan's hard line condemnation of the latter when LeJeune and several others are caught red-handed. Complicating matters is LeJeune's daughter, Louise (Michèle Mercier), who is in love with Christopher, though the squire disapproves of his son socializing with the lower classes. The older Trevenyan's behavior is a mystery: Is he in collusion with Black John (who had been a servant to the squire years before) or is he simply an ineffectual snob?

 

 

Fury at Smugglers Bay was independently produced, a co-production between Regal Films International and John Gilling Enterprises. This may account for its relative obscurity and the confusion over its cast and their roles (the IMDB is a mess in this regard). Additionally, many sources incorrectly list this as a black and white film; presumably it was exhibited in America that way at some point, either theatrically or on television.

 

 

 

In any case, both the movie and the DVD are definitely in color Evivid color, in fact. Fury at Smugglers Bay was shot in an anamorphic process called Panascope, which apparently had the somewhat unusual aspect ratio of 2:1. Given the limitations of anamorphic lenses of the period, director of photography Harry Waxman (who also shot Swiss Family Robinson and The Day the Earth Caught Fire around this time) does a marvelous job sucking what life he can out of the process. Waxman consistently makes dramatic use of the rocky English coastline, of riders on horseback against the deep blue sky. The picture has a lot of day-for-night photography, and Waxman shoots this more effectively than most. The film's color is especially good -- soldiersEuniforms are vividly red, and in a scene with the Duke of Avon (Miles Malleson), Cushing is seen wearing a royal purple and violet colored jacket that nearly pops off the screen.

 

 

Cushing himself is fine, alternately snooty and charming, but he doesn't have much to do. The picture suggests a major dramatic scene where the squire learns (incorrectly, as it turns out) that his son has been killed. One would bet that this scene was scripted but either not shot or deleted prior to release. Whatever the case, its absence denies Cushing an obvious and dramatically-needed scene.
 

The real surprise, though, is Bernard Lee's Black John. Best remembered as "MEin the first 11 James Bond movies, Lee seems to relish his atypical role in Fury at Smugglers Bay. Sporting a long scar over and around his right eye, wearing a pirate's earring, and sporting a five-day beard, Lee quietly sneers through the role in an effectively ominous manner.

 

 

 

 

The picture's technical aspects are very good for what was presumably a low-budget film. There are a number of shots of a ship at sea, caught in a violent storm, which eventually crashes into the rocks. This footage is clearly lifted from another film, a black and white picture tinted blue for use here. The film seems rather old and converted to scope from standard 35mm. The filmmakers do such a good job doctoring the footage that their deception almost works, but not quite. John Victor-Smith edited the film, and his cutting of the big action scenes reminds one of the style of Peter Hunt. Victor-Smith and director Gilling over-crank many of the fight scenes, but this is overdone giving some shots the feel of a Keystone Kops short.

 

 
Video & Audio
Cinema Club's DVD is letterboxed and, happily, has been 16:9 enhanced for widescreen TVs. In addition to the great color, the transfer itself is good, putting the format in the best possible light. The mono sound is fine if unexceptional. No subtitles or closed captioning are offered. And there are no extras at all, not even a trailer.

Though hardly a masterpiece, Fury at Smugglers Bay, like its evocative title, is an atmospheric, old-fashioned swashbuckler, the kind of throwaway escapist film they just don't make anymore.

Buy DVD: HERE

Original Review: HERE

IMAGES: Marcus Brooks

'STAR WARS' OFFICIAL COLLECTORS EDITION 1977 PROGRAMME: FEATURING PETER CUSHING

 WHEN THIS PROGRAMME WAS PRINTED IN IRELAND IN 1977 'STAR WARS' WAS ALREADY BREAKING BOX OFFICE RECORDS. PETER SAID OF THE FILM 'IT SEEMED LIKE A FUN IDEA. SOMETHING CHILDREN WOULD LIKE...AND GEORGE LUCAS SEEMED LIE SUCH A NICE YOUNG MAN'...THE REST AS THEY SAY, IS HISTORY.

PETER AND HELEN CUSHING: VINTAGE TELEVISION CHILDREN'S HOUR BOOK.

ONE OF PETER CUSHING'S MANY PASSIONS...THIS IS A FEATURE FROM THE BOOK 'TELEVISION CHILDREN'S HOUR, YOUR TV FRIENDS, INTRODUCED BY MICHAEL WESTMORE' A GREAT BOOK AND ONE OF MANY BOOKS AND MAGAZINES TO CARRY THE STORY OF PETER'S LOVE OF MAKING MODEL THEATERS AND WAR GAMES.