Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)

Herschell Gordon Lewis’s main claim to fame is that he introduced gore into the horror movie. European directors were starting to show more graphic violence in their movies at around the same time, especially in the giallo films, but the horror movie that relies purely on gore seems to have been the invention of Lewis. Two Thousand Maniacs!, made in 1964, certainly has nothing else going for it. There’s no atmosphere, and there’s nothing remotely interesting about the visuals. There’s no suspense and no tension. There’s also no wit, and no sense of fun. There were plenty of bad horror movies made around this time that are enormous fun to watch. This isn’t one of them. The acting is execrable, and the pacing is ponderous. The film has some moment of sadistic violence, and it has gore. By 1964 standards, it’s very gory (and very crudely done).

It doesn’t even have any real horror – there’s no sense of weirdness or strangeness or cosmic wrongness, no sense of things happening that challenge our comfortable beliefs about the way the world works. The only real horror is the banjo music! The basic idea had some potential in that area – it’s the story of a town in Georgia that was destroyed by Union soldiers during the Civil War, a town that comes to life again every hundred years to exact revenge on northerners. The plot is in fact lifted from the musical Brigadoon! Unfortunately the execution is so leaden and so inept that the potential is never fulfilled. It’s a movie that is both tedious and nasty, but mostly it’s tedious. Amazingly tedious. Of mild historical interest only, as marking the beginning of the trend towards gore that would eventually ruin the horror genre.

1 out of 10

Kwaidan (1964)

Lafcadio Hearn was an American who became a Japanese citizen. Among other things he collected Japanese ghost stories and weird tales. Masaki Kobayashi’s 1964 movie Kwaidan is based on four of these stories. The stories themselves are excellent – they’re subtle horror that doesn’t rely on gore, but the horror is still very real. Kobayashi’s translation of these into film is masterful – this is a gloriously visual movie with some of the most arresting, most beautiful, and most disquieting images you’ll see in a movie. The music is also exceptionally well done and adds to the atmosphere of eeriness. The film is deliberately non-realistic with much of it shot on sound stages – Kobayashi is deliberately drawing attention to the film as story-telling. I can’t recommend this movie too highly.

Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)

The success of Hammer’s horror movies in the late 50s and early 60s encouraged a number of other British companies to try their luck in the horror genre. Among Hammer’s competitors were Amicus and Tigon British Films. While their output varied widely in quality, the best of their movies were worthy competition for Hammer. Tigon’s best-known horror film was probably their 1971 production Blood on Satan’s Claw, and it’s a very good film indeed. In feel it’s much closer to Michael Reeves’ excellent 1968 Witchfinder General than to Hammer’s movies. It’s an attempt to explore in a serious way the subject of witchcraft, and the persecution of witchcraft, in late 17th century England. A young farmer unearths a strange skull. Subsequently, the young people of the village are drawn into the worship of the devil and a cult develops, a cult that soon becomes murderous. A judge with links to the village is eventually convinced that the reports he has heard of witchcraft have some substance to them and he determines the crush these dark practices regardless of the cost.

Patrick Wymark gives a powerful and finely nuanced performance as the judge. It’s a very restrained performance, and it suits the mood of the film. He’s chilling, and he’s chilling because he’s really a reasonable and essentially decent (and by nature somewhat sceptical) man who believes he has no choice but to act. Linda Hayden is quite good as Angel, the young girl who has assumed leadership of the followers of Satan. Michele Dotrice is excellent as a young witch who finds herself adopted by a family of farmers who believe they can save her from her evil ways. The movie benefits from some rather lyrical cinematography by Dick Bush. The movie portrays both the witches and the witch-hunters as people who are misguided and driven by forces they only dimly comprehend, driven to acts of violence and horror without any clear understanding of their own actions. It’s a clash between opposing belief systems, neither of which are very attractive. It makes its point without sensationalism, and it builds to an effective and satisfying conclusion. A very fine movie, made at a time when the British film industry was producing some extraordinarily good serious horror films.

9 out of 10

Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)

Watching the Revenge of Frankenstein (directed by Terence Fisher in 1958) a couple of days after Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (directed by Freddie Francis in 1968) offers the opportunity to compare an early and a mid-period Hammer gothic horror movie. There’s also a definite contrast in directing styles. You notice immediately that Freddie Francis’s film is moodier and more striking visually (not surprising since he was also a distinguished cinematographer), but Fisher’s movie is a lot more energetic. Terence Fisher’s movies rarely suffer from pacing problems – he gets the story moving straight away and he keeps it moving. In fact as far as plot is concerned Revenge of Frankenstein is not much more than a remake of the original Frankenstein film – Baron Frankenstein has escape execution for his earlier crimes and has resumed his experiments under an assumed name. He has built up a flourishing new practice, and he also works in a hospital for the poor, performing a surprisingly high number of amputations – he does need an abundance of spare part for his experiments! This time he is determined that he’s going to get it right, and his new creation is going to be perfect.

Despite its lack of originality the movie has plenty of vitality and Peter Cushing makes Baron Frankenstein a subtly disturbing and morally ambiguous character, and the result is a very entertaining and very effective movie.

7 out of 10

Edgar G. Ulmer's Bluebeard (1944)

Despite his undoubted gifts Edgar G. Ulmer spent most of his career making B-movies for Poverty Row studios. He had a knack for making B-movies on minuscule budgets that turned out to be better than most people’s A-pictures, and some, such as Detour, are among the all-time great Hollywood movies. Bluebeard, made for the Producers Releasing Corporation in 1944, isn’t quite in the Detour class but it’s still a fine movie worth seeking out. The plot involves a murderous painter in Paris. As in Ulmer’s earlier horror masterpiece The Black Cat it’s more concerned with the evil within than with external monsters. Like Detour it deals with a protagonist who feels that he has no control over his life and that he cannot avoid the evil the befalls him. For a movie shot in six days it looks marvellous, and the puppet opera is worth the price of admission. John Carradine gives his finest performance in the title role.

6 out of 10

The Princess Blade (2001)

The Princess Blade is an interesting hybrid swordplay action/science fiction/alternative history movie. Yuki is a young woman who belongs to a clan of warrior ninja assassins. The plot involves the power struggle within the clan as well as Yuki’s involvement with a member of an anti-government rebel group. The action sequences are stunning, but it’s not just an action movie - there’s a focus on the heroine’s motivations and her relationships as well. Yuki has a destiny, and it involves more than just killing. She has great skill as a swordswoman but her real strengths lie elsewhere, in her growing understanding of the nature of power and responsibility and the uses and abuses of violence. It’s an intelligent, very stylish and very entertaining movie with a fine performance by Yumiko Shaku as Yuki.

7 out of 10

Waxworks (1924)

Paul Leni’s 1924 film Waxworksis one of the less known masterpieces of German Expressionist film. It’s not really a horror movie in a conventional sense. The framing story as a writer employed to come up with some stories about the figures in a wax museum. The first story involves the Caliph Harun al Raschid and is an Arabian Nights style fantasy, with some truly and wonderfully bizarre settings. It’s a lot of fun. The second story, concerning Ivan the Terrible, is much darker and looks just as fantastic as the first one. The third story, about Jack the Ripper, is really just an odd little epilogue and is has even less in common with conventional cinematic story-telling than the rest of the film. The movie is tinted, and the tinting look magnificent – it’s the most effective use of this technique I’ve seen. The movie present a series of visual images that are not merely stunning, they’re truly stupendous. It’s a movie that’s very much worth seeing, especially if you have a taste for movies that are out of the ordinary.

8 out of 10