Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, made in 1968, doesn’t add very much to the Hammer Dracula cycle in terms of content. It’s really just another retread of the same old story. Monsignor Ernst Muller decides it’s time to exorcise Dracula’s castle and seal it up with a cross on the door, and sets off with the parish priest to do so. Unfortunately the priest unwittingly revives the vampiric count. Dracula, understandably miffed at having his lodgings dealt with in this way, is out for revenge on the monsignor. Despite its lack of originality it does have the usual virtues of Hammer films – the gothic atmosphere is well done, and it looks good. In fact it’s a fairly stylish production – director Freddie Francis shows plenty of flair, especially in the many scenes that take place on the rooftops of the village. Francis and cinematographer Arthur Grant make skilful and imaginative use of colour. The scenes in the bakery in the cellar, with lots of sickly greens and unhealthy reds, are extremely effective. Christopher Lee givers his usual performance as the Count – there’s not a lot of subtlety in it, but it works. And the Hammer films always came up with interesting ways of dispatching the Count at the end of each film. This movie is however definitely a disappointment after the previous Hammer Dracula movie, the excellent 1966 Dracula, Prince of Darkness.

While Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is moderately entertaining, it’s a pity that such a stylish and visually interesting entry in the cycle couldn’t have had a bit more effort put into the story.

6 out of 10

Revolt of the Zombies (1936)

Revolt of the Zombies was, for director Victor Halperin, a kind of follow-up to his very successful 1932 film White Zombie which had starred Bela Lugosi. Revolt of the Zombies, made in 1936, isn’t very highly thought of but it is an interesting and original little film. These aren’t the zombies so familiar to audiences today, and they aren’t voodoo zombies either. They’re Cambodian zombies. They’re people turned into automatons by a kind of telepathic mind control process. It’s a secret known only to certain priests in French Indo-China. During the First world War one of these priests turns a regiment of Cambodians into unstoppable killing machines. The Great Powers are horrified and the priest is imprisoned. After the war an archaeological expedition is sent to the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor to discover the secret. One of the archaeologists, Armand Louque (Dean Jagger), has been continually taunted by his best friend for his lack of ruthlessness, and the best friend drives home the message by stealing his girlfriend. This romantic sub-plot is in fact the heart of the film because Armand, determined to win back his lady love, decides to use the mysterious powers, powers to create zombies, that he has discovered at Angkor. It’s a fairly slow-moving movie but it’s quite atmospheric and it is at least an unusual zombie movie. It’s in the public domain and it’s worth a look if you can pick it up cheaply. I got it in one of those 20-movie packs. The picture quality is surprisingly good for a public domain movie. Not a great movie, but much better than its very low IMDb rating would indicate.

7 out of 10

Naked Lunch (1991)

It’s the 1950s, and Bill Lee is a pest exterminator. He’s in trouble with his employers because he’s been using suspiciously large quantities of bug powder. His wife has been injecting it. In fact they’re both addicted to it. Then he kills his wife accidentally, but it’s no accident. There are no accidents. He was programmed to do it. His wife is really a foreign agent, and possibly not human. Bill is a secret agent too, in the mysterious port of Interzone, in North Africa. He types his reports on a Clark Nova typewriter which talks to him through a sphincter-like opening beneath its wings. There are sinister plots afoot in Interzone. The paranoia is palpable. Of course none of this is real, and Bill Lee’s reports are in fact a novel, Naked Lunch.

David Cronenberg’s 1991 film Naked Lunch is based partly on the works of William S. Burroughs, including his novel Naked Lunch, and partly on Burroughs’ life. Burroughs really did accidentally kill his wife, in exactly the manner depicted in this movie. That event was crucial to his life and to his work as a writer and it’s crucial to the film. The extremes demanded of the creative artist, the intoxication of words and drugs, the writer as a spy or a subversive, Cronenberg captures beautifully. The sense of the flesh as something monstrous, something with a hideous life of its own, probably comes as much from Cronenberg as from Burroughs. Peter Weller captures much of the disturbing quality of Burroughs himself in his emotionally flat performance as Bill Lee. Judy Davis plays his wife and also one of the denizens of Interzone with whom Lee comes into contact. Her performance is the highlight of the film. The special effects are pre-CGI and all the better for that. They have a tangible quality that makes them truly horrifying and repulsive – something that CGI effects could not have achieved. The typewriters that are at the same time giant bugs are particularly memorable and the idea of the writing machine as something alive and monstrous is very effective. At one stage Bill Lee finds himself using a typewriter in the form of a monstrous head with appendages that ejaculate when he types something it likes. Whether Burroughs is really filmable or not, and how much of the film is Cronenberg rather than Burroughs isn’t really the point – if you accept it as David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch than it’s a brilliant movie. In fact it’s one of his best movies, along with the equally disturbing Spider and Crash.

8 out of 10

Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (1957)

Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon is based on a short story (Casting the Runes) by M. R. James, perhaps the most famous of all English writers of ghost stories. It concerns a witch cult and a deadly curse that is passed on in a scrap of parchment. The parchment has to be passed to the victim without his knowledge. Dana Andrews plays a sceptical scientist who is trying to expose a cult leader as a charlatan. Peggy Cummins plays the niece of another scientist who tried the same thing but met his death in mysterious circumstances. It’s a good film but Tourneur seems to have forgotten what he learnt working with Val Lewton in the 40s (for whom he directed two of the greatest horror movies ever made, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie) that horror works best when you don’t actually see the horror. In Night of the Demon we do see the demon, and although the special effects aren’t bad by the standards of the day the actual demon doesn’t quite come off. On the other hand it offers some solid acting, an intelligent script and classy direction by Tourneur and the result is an extremely good example of subtle cinematic horror.

8 out of 10

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970)

When a movie is released on DVD by Redemption you expect 1970s style erotic horror, but the 1970 Czech movie Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a very different kind of film. It’s essentially a fairy tale. A young girl receives a gift – a pair of magic earrings. She needs these because her wicked grandmother is intending to steal her youth from her. She also needs to protect her brother, and she has to deal with an evil land-owner who appears to have discovered a way to cheat both old age and death. It’s told very much in the style of a fairy tale, and the most obvious film to compare it to would be Neil Jordan’s movie of the Angela Carter short story The Company of Wolves. Like so many fairy tales it deals with transformations and rites of passage – life to death, youth to maturity, etc. And like so many fairy tales it deals with sex, although the sexual aspects are certainly dealt with in a less disguised form than in the average fairy tale. The erotic elements are done in a very restrained manner, though. It’s a gorgeous-looking film, with beautifully done period settings and some wonderful rather gothic images. It’s a lyrical, entrancing, dream-like movie, about as far removed from the typical horror movie as can be imagined. It’s one of the finest attempts I’ve ever seen to create a cinematic fairy tale. A magnificent movie that seems to have been completely overlooked by mainstream film critics, presumably because they’ve simply dismissed it a being a horror movie (which it isn’t) and therefore beneath contempt. The DVD looks great, and one can only hope that Valerie and Her Week of Wonders doesn’t once again get unfairly ignored because it’s been released by a company so firmly associated with horror.

10 out of 10

Delicatessen (1991)

If you’re a fan of the bizarre, the surreal, the just plain weird, and you haven’t seen Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1991 movie Delicatessen, then you should take steps to do so at once. All of the action takes place in an apartment building over a butcher’s shop in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Food is scarce, but the butcher has found a creative way to continue to supply his customers with meat. The inhabitants of the building are some of the oddest characters you’ll ever come across, and the movie gets progressively more surreal and more insane as it goes. There are plenty of bizarre images, and the occasional oddly beautiful one. Caro and Jeunet have a very distinctive visual style. And there’s also a rather touching love story in there as well.

I adored it, and thought it was every bit as good as their later City of Lost Children. Jeunet of course went on to direct the very successful, and absolutely superb, Amélie.

9 out of 10

Kill, Baby . . . Kill! (1966)

Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby . . . Kill! is a wonderful piece of Italian gothic horror from 1966. As always in Bava’s movies, the cinematography is astonishing and the use of colour is extraordinary. This movie has so much gothic atmosphere it’s almost overkill. It’s a tale of a village that is cursed, as a punishment for allowing a young girl to bleed to death. There’s witchcraft as well, but handled in a manner that is quite unusual for a 1966 movie. For a Bava movie it’s fairly restrained. Not much gore here, but plenty of genuine horror with some very creepy moments. A superbly crafted film by one of the grand masters of horror.

9 out of 10