Chilling Hammer Horror Films.....................Hammer. A name synonymous with lush, Gothic horror with a very British tint. The Halloween season is ideal for bringing us back to those years from about 1958 until the early 70s, when Hammer—previously a somewhat down-on-its-luck film studio, hit upon the winning formula of revived horror classics with a fresh, Technicolor hue, liberally doused in blood and gore. Hammer produced dozens of films and a few TV series in its lifetime (it had a dry run in the 30s, before war-time exigencies slowed production and brought the studio to near-failure) –comedies, war movies, straight dramas, science fiction—but it became know for those fifteen or so years of full-color period piece horrors—often derivative and cheap and sometimes exploitative—but always flashy and classy and fun. Of course, to our tastes today these films are tame, the blood and gore silly and fake… but their wonderful period-creak has the cinematographic patina of a lost time—not only in the Victorian/Edwardian mise-en-scene of each film, but in the double dip of a bygone fifties and sixties, when times were simpler and even cheapish horror was slick and theatrical. The following are thirteen of the best Hammers, partly my opinion and partly the consensus of Gothic horror fans. Kids today may be jaded, but open your minds to suspended disbelief, and you may find yourself enjoying the look, colors, tonal moods and dark atmospheres of these small gems… not to mention the splendid acting talents of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, Michael Ripper, Andre Morrell and many others—the regular players who made Hammer their home. Bernard Quatermass was a character created by Nigel Kneale for the BBC in the 1950s, who was featured not only on television, but in a series of films produced by Hammer, beginning in 1955 with “The Quatermass Xperiment.” This begat a follow up a couple years later. Both films starred a poorly-cast American, Brian Donlevy, (a somewhat mundane actor with a well-fed face, who looked more businessman than scientist) as Quatermass. After these two black and white efforts failed to take off, Hammer delayed producing another Quatermass film until 1967, when it could apply both Technicolor and a better actor more suited to the role: bearded and tweeded Andrew Keir, who lent a professorial grumpiness to the part. But not only that—Quatermass and the Pit (titled “Five Million Years to Earth” for American distribution) was given a Hammer supernatural horror treatment as well. The story of a mysterious and apparently dangerous “haunted” projectile discovered during construction of the London Underground (it’s at first assumed to be an unexploded German bomb leftover from WWII) which turns out to be a spacecraft from Mars (replete with mummified Martian corpses and fossils of the ape-men the grasshopper-like Martians were experimenting on) is more pure ghost and horror story than science fiction, with the ancient Martian plot to transfer the survival of their civilization to genetically engineered apes (later to evolve into Humanity) mixed in with horrific legends of demons, devils, ghosts and goblins. Indeed, the horned visage of the Martians is discovered to be the root at our race memory of a classic devil, and the whole thing ends in a terrific bang of electricity and telekinetic energy. A favorite of many a Saturday Afternoon TV monster movie matinee for us kids of the 70s, this film still packs a delicious jolt.
Posted on: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 14:31:35 +0000