Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974)

The conventional wisdom is that the 70s was a period of decline for Hammer Films. This was certainly true in a financial sense, as a series of poor business decisions eventually doomed the studio. It was certainly not true in a qualitative sense though, and Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (made in 1972 but not released until 1974) provides further evidence of just how good some of their movies of this era are. Brian Clemens, one of the best British television writers of the 60s and 70s (in fact arguably one of the best British television writers ever) was brought in as writer and director. It’s the only film he ever directed, which is surprising because he did an excellent and extremely professional job– it’s visually interesting, well-paced and consistently entertaining. It’s also very unconventional for a Hammer film. At this time Hammer were trying to breathe new life into the gothic horror genre with interesting and slightly off-beat entries like Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (also written by Brian Clemens), and Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter overturns all the established clichés of the studio’s previous vampire flicks – it has vampires that drain their victims of their youth rather than their blood, vampires that need to be killed in different ways, and vampires that are unworried by sunlight. It also adds some of the flavour of other movie genres, and was clearly influenced by both Japanese samurai movies and Italian spaghetti westerns. Interestingly enough, it also seems to have itself been a major influence on the much later (and absolutely superb) Japanese anime horror movie Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.

Captain Kronos is an Austrian officer turned professional vampire hunter. When a number of young women are found horribly and inexplicably aged he and his partner, the hunch-backed Professor Hieronymos Grost, are called in. They immediately suspect vampiric activity, and along with a beautiful young gypsy woman they picked up along the way (Captain Kronos seem to have a bit of an eye for the ladies) they set out to uncover the mystery and find a way to slay the undead fiends. Horst Janson is moody but charismatic as Kronos, Caroline Munro is more than competent in the role of the gypsy girl Carla, and John Cater is delightful as Grost – although he’s a hunchback he is not a figure of fun, and is both highly knowledgeable in vampire lore and an active and very useful partner to Kronos. Lois Daine is suitably enigmatic and slightly disturbing as the daughter of the noble but slightly disturbing Durward family and Ian Hendry is fun in a small role. With Clemems showing plenty of flair in both the writing and directing departments this is really a great little film that deserved more commercial success. It’s possible that the one weakness of the movie, undoubtedly because of Clemens’ television background, is that it probably needed a bit more sex - by the standards of other contemporary Hammer movies it’s rather tame in this area which may have hurt it a little at the box office. Overall though it’s a movie I recommend very highly.

The Hellfire Club (1961)

The notorious 18th century Hellfire Club would, you would think, make a great subject for a movie. Unfortunately the 1961 British film The Hellfire Club is not that movie. The Hellfire Club itself plays a marginal role in the film, which is really just a swashbuckling adventure romp. The good news is, if you happen to like swashbuckling adventure romps then this one is a pretty good example of the breed. Keith Michell makes a dashing, brave and noble hero as the son of a wicked lord (and leading figure in the infamous Hellfire Club). He and his mother flee the said wicked lord but his mother is killed and he realises he cannot go back to the family estate now. So, naturally, he runs off to join the circus. As you do. When word comes that his father is dead he returns to claim his title and his inheritance only to find that his wicked cousin has got there first. He enlists the help of a slightly shady lawyer (Peter Cushing), and with his pals from the circus sets out to right the wrongs that have been done to him. The movie has the look of a Hammer film, and includes a number of regular Hammer players, although in fact it has no connection with that studio. There’s plenty of action, lots of narrow escapes, and an abundance of swordplay. Not a great movie, but entertaining escapist entertainment.

Mill of the Stone Women (1960)

Mill of the Stone Women is a somewhat neglected classic from the early days of the Italian gothic horror boom. Made in 1960, it’s a film that relies on atmosphere and creepiness rather than thrills or action. Fortunately it has both atmosphere and creepiness in abundance. It’s set in the Netherlands, presumably sometime in the 19th century, and most of the action takes place inside a windmill owned by Professor Wahl. It is in fact a kind of wax museum, with the windmill providing the motive power for a series of moving tableaux of macabre subjects – hanged women, and assorted female murderers and murder victims. There is of course a ghastly secret hidden here, involving the professor, his enigmatic daughter Elfy and his partner, a disgraced doctor. The daughter apparently suffers from the sort of unspecified and mysterious ailment that tends to afflict beautiful daughters in gothic horror movies. The professor and his medical colleague have taken drastic and unnatural steps to prolong her life. All goes well until young Hans arrives at the mill and the aforementioned mysterious daughter seduces him. Hans is already in love with another woman, Liselotte, who is one of Professor Wahl’s art students. Hans and Elfy argue, and Elfy collapses, apparently dead. Naturally things are more complicated than that, but you’ll have to watch the movie for yourself to find out how. And this movie is very much worth watching for yourself. You effectively get not one but two mad scientists, some great sets with gigantic windmill-type wheels and gears, the very very macabre waxwork tableaux, and some reasonably effective acting. Robert Boehme as the professor and Wolfgang Preiss as his doctor accomplice are suitably sinister. The voluptuous Scilla Gabel has just the right air of strangeness and exotic beauty as Elfy, while Dany Carrel is equally beautiful and very likeable as the rather effervescent Liselotte. Pierre Brice is adequate as the hero of the piece, Hans. Mill of the Stone Women is worthy to be counted among the cream of the Italian gothic horror movies, perhaps not quite as good as the greatest of Mario Bava’s films but a very very fine film. It’s impossible to find anything to seriously complain of in the Mondo Macabro DVD release – the movie (shot in Technicolor) looks terrific. If you enjoy subtle horror this movie is an absolute must-see.

The Violent Years (1956)

The Violent Years isn’t just a juvenile delinquent movie, it’s a JD movie scripted by Ed Wood jnr! And it has the classic Ed Wood touches – lots of incredibly but amusingly clunky speechifying, dialogue that you have to hear to believe, and some very interesting hints of gender-bending. A gang of bad girls dress up like men and carry out a series of daring and violent armed robberies. They become involved in a communist conspiracy to vandalise schools and desecrate the flag. The most interesting of their escapades, however, comes when they terrorise a couple of innocent young kids making out in Lovers’ Lane. They force the girl to get partially undressed and tie her up. They then march her boyfriend off into the woods, start forcibly undressing him, and the last shot we see is the leader of the girl gang starting to remove her clothes. The poor boy is clearly about to suffer a fate worse than death. These girls are beyond bad! The pyjama party scene is also pretty memorable. We eventually find out that it’s not really Paula’s fault (Paula being the chief of this gang of female delinquents) – she’s been the victim of terrible child abuse. Instead of giving her love and lots of mother-daughter heart-to-heart talks her uncaring mom just keeps buying her expensive new dresses and a new convertible every year for her birthday. The poor kid! Luckily the kindly judge is on hand at the end to instruct parents on the proper way to bring up their children – lots of attention, frequent church-going and regular beatings in the woodshed. The most entertaining thing about the movie is the way Wood’s own preoccupations keep subverting the ostensibly conservative social message. Not only do these girl hoodlums engage in cross-dressing, they also call each other by masculine names – Paula becomes Paul, Georgia is known as George, Phyllis becomes Phil, etc. One can only assume that censors at the time didn’t even realise what Wood was up to here.

The acting is bad of course, but it’s good bad, it’s the sort of bad acting that is required by the sort of dialogue that Ed Wood wrote. The DVD release from Something Weird also includes a second girl JD movie, Girl Gang, which I haven’t had a chance to look at yet. The Violent Years looks pretty good for a 50-year-old low-budget movie. It may not be the best JD movie I’ve seen, but it is the most bizarre and the most interesting, and it really is a must-see.

Eugénie de Sade (1970)

Jess Franco’s Eugénie de Sade is his attempt at an adaptation of a work by the notorious Marquis de Sade. A young woman is initiated by her father, a writer who regards himself as misunderstood genius, into the pleasures of murder. Franco certainly has a knack for creating disturbing female killers, women who seem to be driven to kill by overwhelming forces or emotions – in Female Vampire it’s her insatiable vampiric hunger, in She Killed in Ecstasy it’s a woman taking revenge for the death of her beloved husband, and in Eugénie de Sade it’s Eugénie’s obsessive, and incestuous, devotion to a dominating father. The relationship with her father is handled with considerable subtlety, and Soledad Miranda is mesmerising as Eugénie. She makes us believe that Eugénie is as much a victim as a monster. She is an innocent drawn into evil. Paul Muller is very good, and very creepy, as her father, Albert Radeck. Franco himself plays the role of another writer, a man who has followed Radeck’s literary career with great interest, and is now equally fascinated by his criminal career. Radeck regards murder not merely as an intellectual recreation for superior minds, but seems to see it also as a form of art, and the movie very effectively pursues this link between literature and cruelty, and between art and death. If murder can be a subject for art, can murder itself become art? The film raises such questions in a rather uncomfortable way, and Franco’s ability to make murder both entertaining and beautiful serves to make the viewer even more uneasy. The link between sex and death, always an unsettling element in horror, is even more disturbing than usual in this film. Most of all the film makes is disquieting because it takes de Sade’s ideas seriously, and it compels us to take them seriously as well. We can disagree violently with those ideas, and in fact we probably should disagree violently with them, but it may well be both useful and healthy to at least face up to the existence of such questions, and to admit their relevance to an understanding of our own civilisation. Jess Franco remains one of the few directors able to crate genuine erotic horror; not horror with added sex, but horror in which the erotic and the horror are inextricably linked. While there are still many who dismiss Franco as a film-maker, Eugénie de Sade is a movie that is compelling, fascinating and brilliant.

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

The daughter of the great surgeon Dr Génessier is horribly disfigured in a car accident. She is left virtually without a face. Her father is determined to restore her to her original beauty, whatever the cost. His assistant Louise is devoted to him, with good reason – her own face had been horrifically damaged but he had repaired the damage so well that no trace of her accident remained. She kidnaps beautiful young women for him, young women whose faces will be removed to provide his daughter’s new face. Georges Franju’s 1960 Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) is one of the classics of the horror genre; it has influenced a host of subsequent movies, some of which are little more than copies of this film. Few of these later movies have captured the essential feel of Eyes Without a Face however. Although the surgical scenes are remarkably graphic for a movie of its era the overall impression is one of restraint. Franju’s treatment of his subject matter is resolutely non-sensationalistic, and visually the movie is lyrical and haunting, and even poetic, rather than horrific. In an interview included on the DVD Franju points out that Dr Génessier is not a mad scientist – he is a sane man who does insane things. His motivations are rational; he simply takes them to insane extremes. Pierre Brasseur is frightening as Dr Génessier because his manner is so calm and reasonable. Edith Scob’s performance as the daughter is mesmerising and eerie. Her face is covered with a mask for most of the movie, and she movies in a strange and wraith-like manner, as if she is not really a living person at all. Since her accident she is so disconnected from the world of ordinary people that she is really more of a living ghost. It’s not a movie that is likely to terrify a modern audience, but it remains disturbing. It’s a strange and strangely beautiful film, and it’s a film that every horror fan must see. And if you’re not a horror fan, see it anyway.

Die, Monster, Die! (1965)

There have been few totally successful movie adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft. Die, Monster, Die!, directed by Roger Corman protégé Daniel Haller in 1965, is certainly a brave attempt. It makes no attempt to be a faithful adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, but it does achieve a reasonably Lovecraftian feel (as does Haller’s later, and very underrated, The Dunwich Horror). Haller lays the gothic atmosphere on with a trowel, but it looks great. There’s no point in underdoing a gothic atmosphere! The social effects are cheap but surprisingly effective. An elderly and ailing Boris Karloff turns in a wonderful performance as Nahum Witley, whose family have long dabbled in forbidden things. Karloff plays the entire movie in a wheelchair, but still dominates proceedings and is as charismatic as ever. The rest of the cast manage adequate performances. Haller’s direction and pacing really can’t be faulted, and at just under 80 minutes it’s a taut and rather gripping chiller with some moments of real weirdness. Special mention must also be made of Terence de Marney, whose brief appearances as the family retainer Merwyn are delightfully creepy. Die, Monster, Die! should please most fans of gothic horror, and I think Lovecraftian enthusiasts will find it reasonably satisfying. A classic piece of 60s horror, and highly recommended.