PETYR PRINCIPLE

Happy November to all! Check out the latest issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands, for my "Four Corners" column on Valley "fusion" eateries.

With Thor: Ragnarok, directed by the New Zealander Taika Waititi, opening this weekend...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod to Petyr (Ben Fransham), the most forbidding of the vampire roomies in What We Do in the Shadows...

...the horror comedy co-written (with Jemaine Clement), directed by and starring Waititi. This broad, silly mock-documentary was recently recommended to me, and made me laugh a lot.

"Vampires don't chat," said screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, explaining why he didn't write any dialogue for Christopher Lee in 1966's Dracula, Prince of Darkness (Lee claimed that the character had dialogue, but it was so bad he refused to speak it). In What We Do in the Shadows, however, we further learn that "Vampires don't do dishes."

MOUTH TO HAND

Check out the June issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column on Back-East-style dining this summer for grounded snowbirds. It's on the stands now, or you can read it here.

Universal's new version of The Mummy opens this weekend. The movie shares elements with the 1971 Hammer schocker Blood From the Mummy's Tomb, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod to the severed, but still busy, hand from that movie...

...adapted from Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars and featuring the not-unfetching Valerie Leon as the resurrected Egyptian princess.

ALFRED THE GREAT

Halloween reading: Check out my list, on The Robot’s Voice, of the top horror and sci-fi roles of the great Michael Gough.

For the current generation Gough is probably best known as Alfred the Butler in the Batman movies of the ‘90s, but I’ve long thought that he deserves to be ranked up there with Lugosi, Karloff, Lee, Cushing and so forth as one of the all-time horror greats—he may have been the most unmitigated, purely evil S.O.B. of the lot.

FOND-LEE REMEMBERED

Christopher Lee was the last of them.

Fans of classic horror movies will know who I mean by “them.” First there was Lugosi, then Karloff, then Lon Chaney Jr. and John Carradine, and around midcentury came the rise of Vincent Price, and then, more or less starting with the same 1957 movie, came Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Some might exclude Carradine from the list, and some might include, say, Peter Lorre or Lionel Atwill. But essentially I think that these seven guys—Lugosi, Karloff, Chaney Jr., Carradine, Cushing and Lee—represent the true superstars of old-school, classic horror in English-language talkies.

And now they’ve all passed on.

Of course when Lee and Cushing became horror stars, with Hammer’s ’57 Curse of Frankenstein and the following year with Dracula (called Horror of Dracula in the U.S.), they didn’t seem old-school, but rather new-wave, with Hammer’s amped-up gore and cleavage, usually in lurid color. But within a decade or so, Hammer and its stars and style and imitators had been fully admitted to the canon of horror as Boomer-era, Famous Monsters of Filmland-reading fans would recognize it.

Lee, who started as a movie actor shortly after his WWII service (he was an uncredited spear-carrier in Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet) and who even made a couple of movies with Karloff—he played the grave-robber Resurrection Joe in the Karloff chiller Corridors of Blood—never really faded away. Though still probably most remembered for playing Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Mummy and many other scary parts in the Hammer and other British films of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Lee remained relevant as a character actor until his death, at 93, earlier this month, appearing in The Wicker Man and The Man With the Golden Gun and Airport ‘77 and in the title role of the Pakistani biopic Jinnah, and in the Star Wars movies and Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations and Tim Burton’s flicks and TV miniseries and video game voices and so on.

For my birthday this year I got The Christopher Lee Collection, a pretentiously-titled DVD box set featuring four fairly low-rent films Lee made for producer Harry Allen Towers, three of them directed by Spanish sleazemaster Jesus “Jess” Franco. So I recently caught up with Lee in two ‘70s quickies I’d never seen before—The Castle of Fu Manchu and a tawdry historical melodrama called The Bloody Judge. They’re terrible movies, but the star is effortlessly authoritative in both of them.

In 1970’s The Bloody Judge (hilariously retitled Night of the Blood Monster for the U.S. market) Lee plays an actual historical figure, the original “Hanging Judge” George Jeffreys, who notoriously presided over the treason trials after England’s Monmouth Rebellion in 1685. Franco’s version of this story is full of quite unsavory violence and sexual exploitation, but there in the middle of it is Lee, trying his best to give a textured performance as the haughty but conscience-haunted Jeffreys. This was his fate throughout much of his long career, and he seemed good-humoredly resigned to it.

Anyway…

Monster-of-the-Week: Obviously Lee should get the nod this week, but which of his roles to choose? For a lot of fans, there would be no contest; many regard him as the greatest screen Dracula of all time. I’m a Lugosi loyalist myself, but there’s no doubt of the sexual charisma and imposing physical threat Lee brought the role, even when, as was most of the time in the Hammer Dracula films, he was ridiculously underused—in 1966’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness he doesn’t even say a word in his beautiful deep rumble, and in several of the others he speaks only a handful of lines.

So let’s acknowledge him, this time, for the title role in Count Dracula…

…a low-budget 1970 non-Hammer production, again produced and written by Towers and directed by Franco. It’s not an entirely successful film by a long shot, but it allowed Lee to play the Count as he had long wanted to, in a manner highly faithful to Stoker’s novel.

RIP, sir. You’ll be missed.

TWIN-WIN SITUATION

RIP to the conjoined twin gray whales found on the Baja who, alas, survived only a short time after their birth.

In their honor (and not remotely meant, of course, as a reflection on their character)…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas)...

...the lecherous playboy vampire in Hammer’s 1971 Twins of Evil, at long last available on Blu-Ray.

The Count is a dissolute aristocrat who can’t find any decadent diversions to amuse him, until he is turned into a bloodsucker by his undead ancestors and takes to seducing the more adventurous of the two luscious twin nieces of a local puritan (Peter Cushing) who leads an eager order of witch-hunting religious fanatics.

Said nieces are played by Mary and Madeleine Collinson—famously the first identical twins ever to pose together for Playboy; they were the joint “Playmates of the Month” in October of 1971—and they of course were the movie’s major selling points. But it’s a ripping, fast-moving melodrama, and it has its heart in the right place—vile though the Count is, he’s only a hair more odious than Cushing and his sadistic witch-burning pals. The handsome young schoolmaster (David Warbeck) caught between the two factions is a goodhearted religious liberal. He’s in love, at least at first, with the naughtier of the twins, poor chap.

HANDS ACROSS THE WATER

We Yanks have been in a breathless tizzy over British new arrivals lately, and I’m no exception: Out on Blu-Ray this month is a Hammer horror picture I had never seen before!

It’s Hands of the Ripper, from 1971, and it concerns the daughter of Saucy Jacky himself. In the grim prologue, the poor kid witnesses Jack murder his wife from her crib, after which he comes over and gives her a kiss on the cheek. Years later, as a guileless young thing (Angharad Rees), now working as an aide to a fake medium (Dora Bryan), she’s given to murderous outbursts herself whenever she is similarly smooched.

She’s taken in by a rationalist Doctor (Eric Porter) who wants to try out the techniques that this Viennese fellow Freud has been talking about on her. But the Doc’s something of a head-case himself; he obviously has a Freudian thing for his young charity case, and he starts covering up, Norman Bates style, for her monkeyshines.

Directed by Peter Sasdy (Taste the Blood of Dracula), Hands is like most of the Hammers—silly, and unsavory, but somehow also irresistible, especially if you grew up on the studio’s product. As the story progresses, the circumstances leading to the right psychological trigger for another murder become more and more laughably contrived, but the movie culminates in a strangely subdued and tragic climax at the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul’s.

Porter tries hard to give a serious performance, and he’s impressive right up until he catches a sword in the side, toward the end. After that, the best actor in the Empire—Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud, or whoever you pick—couldn’t have kept his dignity.

BAD HAIR DAY

Continuing our reptilian theme from last week...

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s notice a lady with a stylin' serpentine coiffure from the wonderful world of Hammer Films: The Gorgon Megara, played impressively by Prudence Hyman…

…in 1964’s The Gorgon.

MY SCARE LADY

Since Turner Classic Movies is featuring a Hammer horror line-up this Saturday…  

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to a creature from one of the evening’s features: The woman (Susan Denberg) revived by Frankenstein, but infused with a vengeful male soul, in 1967’s Frankenstein Created Woman…

Martin Scorcese admires this movie (try to hear the following in his rat-a-tat voice): “I like all Hammer films. If I singled this one out, it’s not because I like it the best—it’s a sadistic film, very difficult to watch—but because, here, they actually isolate the soul: a bright blue shining translucent ball. The implied metaphysic is close to something sublime.”

JUMPIN' DRAC FLASH

If for no other reason than that it’s celebrating its 40th anniversary…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the title character in Dracula A.D. 1972, released by the UK’s Hammer Films in the title year.

This was Hammer’s attempt to give a “mod” spin to their Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Dracula series. It opens in 1872 (long before the 1897 date of the Stoker novel) with Van Helsing (Cushing) & Dracula (Lee) fighting it out again on an out-of-control carriage. It ends badly for both of them—the Count meets the business end of a broken wheel spoke.

But a century later, after the opening credits, a Drac disciple with the rock-star-like name of Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame, looking insufferably pouty & Byronic) leads a group of thrill-seeking Chelsea hippies in an unholy ceremony in the ruin of a church, & succeeds in re-integrating the vampire prince, who is particularly ungrateful & entitled about it: When his young benefactor says “I summoned you,” he snaps “It was my will.” Typical freakin’ aristocrat.

I watched this for the first time in decades this past weekend, & was struck by how very little Lee was given to do in the film—with the title, one might hope for psychedelic party scenes of the Count mingling with the Mods, but except for the fight in the prologue, Lee, who’s top-billed, spends all of his brief footage in the wrecked church—to which Johnny A. dutifully delivers him such delectable snacks as Caroline Munro, Marsha Hunt & Stephanie Beacham, in return for an equal lack of gratitude—& speaks only a handful of lines. Cushing, as a modern Van Helsing, does the expository heavy lifting.

All that being said, the film is fun early-‘70s artifact, & it features an appearance by the American rock ensemble Stoneground. They perform, in an hilarious scene early on, at an upper-crust party that’s been crashed by decadent hippies, to the elaborate scandalized horror of the guests.