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Will Dracula rise again? With a title well ahead of you is 1968's Dracula has Risen from the Grave. A Hammer horror film directed by Freddie Francis, it features Christopher Lee as Dracula but no Peter Cushing this time around. His adversary is a steadfastly honest young baker played by Barry Andrews, a dead ringer for Roger Daltrey.



I kind of hoped it was Daltrey when I saw him, despite not seeing Daltrey's name in the credits. The Who versus Dracula? I'd be down for that. But Andrews is charismatic in his own right.

The story feels suspiciously like a screenplay originally written without Dracula or even supernatural horror in mind into which Dracula was inserted. Screenwriter Anthony Hinds seemed preoccupied with the worth of honesty. Paul, Andrews' character, wants to marry the daughter of the Catholic Monsignor (Rupert Davies) who's just gotten home from putting a big crucifix on Dracula's castle, to make sure the Count never, ever rises from the grave. Along the way, he inadvertently attracts the eye of Dracula, who has already risen from the grave.



Paul's father is played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper, once again playing a tavern keeper. He advises his son that honesty isn't always the best policy, that he should know when to play things close to his chest. Unfortunately, Paul wants nothing to do with tact, and when the clergyman he hopes will be his father-in-law asks his religion, Paul happily owns himself an atheist.

You'd think the rest of the film, in which Paul's fiancee (Veronica Carlson) and the buxom tavern wench (Barbara Ewing) are both bitten and enthralled by the famous vampire, would cause him to reexamine his beliefs. But the plot proves to be more about the monsignor accepting Paul as his daughter's chosen.



Freddie Francis delivers the goods again as one of the better Hammer directors. I particularly like a rooftop set/matte painting combination he uses repeatedly throughout the film, making it the choice location for battles or even just the routine route for clandestine young lovers.

Dracula has Risen from the Grave is available on HBOMax, one of four Hammer films, the others including Hammer's first Dracula film, their first Frankenstein film, and the Hammer version of The Mummy. I'd say The Mummy is the best of the group with Frankenstein in second but, despite loving Hammer movies, I've never been fond of their first Dracula entry. It's a shame Warners doesn't have some of the better Hammer films on HBOMax, like Frankenstein Created Woman, Rasputin the Mad Monk, The Brides of Dracula, She, or The Vampire Lovers.

Christmas doesn't technically end until the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6 and Eastern Orthodox Christians won't even have Christmas Day until the seventh so I think I'm in my rights to review a Christmas movie now. 1961's Cash on Demand is a surprisingly subtle variation on A Christmas Carol from Hammer centred on an incredible performance from Peter Cushing.



As the film's resident Scrooge, the fastidious Harry Fordyce (Cushing), lords it over a small group of employees at a bank, his insistence on precise observation of protocol putting him on the verge of firing a kind man named Pearson (Richard Vernon) two days before Christmas. But then Fordyce finds himself at the mercy of a bank robber identifying himself as Colonel Gore-Hepburn (Andre Morell).



Gaining entry to Fordyce's office by pretending to be a security agent for one of the bank's insurance companies, the Colonel makes it clear that Fordyce must comply with his every whim. A phone call reveals the Colonel's accomplices are holding Fordyce's wife and child as hostages. If the Colonel doesn't signal his accomplice every fifteen minutes, the woman and child will be subjected to torture and death.



Unlike the Christmas spirits who visit Scrooge, the Colonel seems to have no particular interest in reforming Fordyce but he does take sadistic pleasure in how especially painful it is for Fordyce to participate in committing a crime of any kind, even worse in the workplace where he prides himself on professionalism. Cushing conveys the excruciating pinion in which Fordyce finds himself with brilliant instinct, letting just the right amount of his anxiety slip through among the employees and hitting bigger notes of anguish when appropriate.



The focus remains on his situation rather than on any self-reflection which leads to a surprisingly poignant moment when Fordyce says desperately that his wife and child are all he has in the world. It's clear to others that this is because of how Fordyce has walled himself off from everyone else but Cushing shows just how tragically unaware Fordyce is of it himself. The beginning of the film obviously sets him up as an unsympathetic character so the surprise in how sorry you feel for him once the Colonel gets his hooks in is very nice. Cushing's peculiar mixture of sensitivity and coldness makes him singularly suited for the role.



The film's set almost entirely in one room, which is all it needs. Andre Morell gives a very good performance, too, and just watching him and Cushing work this material is a real pleasure.

Now this is Quatermass at his best. Andre Morell as the spectacularly sidetracked rocket physicist in the 1958 serial Quatermass and the Pit, creator Nigel Kneale this time coming up with a beautifully eerie Sci-Fi account on the origins of human racism. The 1967 Hammer film version surpasses the serial really only in having Barbara Shelley and Julian Glover. It's a good film and a lot of dialogue is directly ported over but the serial benefits so much from being able to take its time and explore ideas and, while Andrew Keir is fine as Quatermass, he doesn't match Morell's fascinatingly weird, perfect choices.



Like putting his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets while addressing an assemblage of military and government brass. It somehow looks both awkward and magnificent--believably awkward, not like the actor made an odd choice but like this is what an eccentric but very sharp professor might do when lecturing on the serious reality of our ancient Martian overlords.



Of all the Quatermass stories up to this point it has the best supporting characters, too. The first episode of the serial almost makes it seem as though the anthropologist, Dr. Roney, and his assistant, Barbara Judd, are going to be the stars. Roney is played by Canadian actor Cec Linder with wonderful energy and he has brilliant chemistry with Christine Finn as Barbara. Kneale makes points about the state of human civilisation with the anthropologists' discovery of ape-man fossils, human forebears, accidentally unearthed in a work site.



This leads later on to the inevitable but nicely portrayed revulsion from conservative government men which only gets worse when Martians get involved in our ancestry. The reluctance to accept the weirdness of our common ancestry is put in context to references to the racial tensions in England at the time due to an increase in immigration. Both the serial and the film version have one unnamed black worker at the construction site and later on Roney specifically mentions race riots. He also has a darkly funny, prescient line when Quatermass asks him what he thinks human civilisations would do if they knew the world was ending and Roney says we'd probably just go on with the same squabbles as before.



There's nothing wrong with James Donald's performance as Roney in the film version but Linder is just so much more lively. And I liked the way he seemed to respect Judd's opinion more in the serial--he looks to her to come up with a theory as to what the strange hard object is they've unearthed among the fossils. Though Barbara Shelley comes off as much more intelligent than Christine Finn.



I liked in the film this even prompted the filmmakers to give some of Roney's lines to her and having her be the one to accompany Quatermass on the excursion to the library instead of Roney. Otherwise, the special effects in the film aren't even much better than the serial and the black and white in the serial contributes to the atmosphere much better.

Twitter Sonnet #1060

Confetti grown grotesque is clatt'ring out.
A sagging party horn emits a blat.
The stuffing clouds'll cushion suns about.
The whist'ling air escorts the cooking vat.
Unhandled reins permit a heavy steed.
In clashing lamps the light oppressed the field.
Exposing rocks to split the hoof at speed.
Percussive leaves produced unseasoned yield.
A changing tie but briefly choked the beard.
In climbing mud the mantis sinks to worms.
The suction fell from steel to iron weird.
The pegs'll hold the tent on careful terms.
The ruling carapace arrived from Mars.
They put an instrument inside the bars.

The intricacy of plots people hatch to make you feel like you're going crazy can make you feel like you're going crazy. Hammer dials gaslighting up to a gas inferno with 1964's Nightmare. Obviously influenced by Hitchcock, the plot is too absurd to have satisfied Hitchcock's obsession with detail but it's a delightful entry to the genre of gothic films about women in nightgowns creeping around opulent mansions.



Janet (Jennie Linden) is having nightmares about her mother who was committed to an asylum after murdering Janet's father on Janet's birthday. She's afraid she's likely to go mad too, madness being in the family and all, something which puts her in a constant state of anxiety. So her teacher at the finishing school, Miss Lewis (Brenda Bruce), takes Janet back to her family home, a sprawling manor house where her guardian, a young man named Henry (David Knight), lives now. Though he's mysteriously absent. The film never explains how and why he became Janet's legal guardian.



Janet's not home for long before she starts seeing a woman with a scar on her cheek roaming the place in a white gown. Turns of plot involving murder and duplicity show things aren't at all what they seem, of course, and then a whole new plot involving Janet's nurse, Grace, takes off. Grace is played by Moira Redmond who gives a better performance than Jennie Linden so the second half of the film is a bit more absorbing. Shot from her point of view, we join her on the maddening journey arranged for her by another set of conspirators plotting her downfall.



But the whole movie's pretty good. Directed by Freddie Francis with cinematography by John Wilcox, the film's a banquet of shadows and expensive knick-knacks crowding in on fearful victims, wandering this nightmare in nightgowns.

Twitter Sonnet #1049

As ankles grow in graves the forests part.
Inside a room that wasn't there it runs.
The orchestras in apprehension start.
At night the cards foresee the pumpkin suns.
Presiding points of yellow eyes ignite.
A gleeful grin's aglow through sugar smoke.
In wav'ring voice the spirits now recite.
The rusted fence by toothsome vine is broke.
A mist reveals a castle made of webs.
The parting clouds display a bloody sphere.
The spirits can't delay the tide that ebbs.
A swinging hinge is laughing cross the mere.
A spirit shakes the bones below the sky.
Behind its stone a socket wants an eye.

As much as I love Christopher Lee, one of the reasons Dracula is my least favourite of his famous roles is that he generally doesn't do or say very much in the part. He's given a bit more than usual in 1970's Scars of Dracula, a film that also has some of the best examples of the Hammer aesthetic and one of the goriest openings in any film from the studio in the 1960s. The film's themes simplify Bram Stoker's commentary on sexuality to a condemnation of lust, particularly male lust. Directed by Roy Ward Baker, the film's a lot of fun with a lot of very effective tension, among other things.



Several shots like this are clearly intended for the sole purpose of showing how effective the crucifix is in warding off Dracula. Clearly. Yet the film's opening sequence, which is a lot like the ending sequence of many Dracula films, features all the women in the little village slaughtered in the chapel where they've taken shelter while the men storm Dracula's castle.



It's a nicely horrible moment of disorientation. If Dracula can do this on hallowed ground while the townsmen, led by the innkeeper (Michael Ripper as usual) and the priest (Michael Gwynn) are burning his home, how can Dracula be defeated? It's no wonder the townspeople seem sullenly resigned to life under the shadow of Dracula after this.



How did he manage it, anyway? Well, vampire bats play an especially crucial role in this film as Dracula's ally--one even revives him at the beginning of the film to explain why he's not still obliterated from the previous entry in the series. So it's vaguely implied that a swarm of bats managed to slaughter all these people, something improbably enough that's probably for the best it was left off screen. It's a shame vampire bat effects never really became convincing until cgi advancements in the 90s. Even in Dario Argento's classic Suspiria made a few years later the vampire bat is the same rubber toy flopping on wires.



The action shifts to a nearby city and we're introduced to the first of the film's protagonists, Paul Carlson (Christopher Matthews), who happens to be an absolute cad. He wakes up in bed with a young woman (Delia Lindsay), quickly leaving her with flippant language, obliging her to chase him naked down the stairs. Released the same year as The Vampire Lovers, also directed by Roy Ward Baker, Scars of Dracula isn't aiming for the almost softcore porn quality of the other film and contents itself with showing only Lindsay's bare buttocks. In addition to titillation, this brings a comedic tone to a scene that winds up having very serious consequences, a lesson to any young fellow who would take such things lightly. She turns out to be the burgomaster's daughter and when he blunders in to spot her, covered by only a sheet clutched to her bosom while chasing Paul, she's obliged to accuse Paul of rape. Thus the chase begins that eventually sees Paul lost in distant woods to become a guest of Dracula.



But before that we meet his brother, Simon (Dennis Waterman) and Simon's fiancée, Sarah (Jenny Hanley), who, like all the other women in the film, is in love with Paul, much to Simon's barely restrained vexation. But it is restrained and one senses this is why Simon is less vulnerable to the vampire. Though even Dracula seems jealous when one of his brides (Anouska Hempel) wants to take a bite out of Paul.



The film also features Patrick Troughton as Klove, a Renfield-like thrall of Dracula's. This was the year after Troughton left Doctor Who and I was kind of hoping he would play a Van Helsing-ish role in this film but I should have expected something much different. Troughton's main reason for leaving Who was his hope not to be type cast. He is effectively disgusting with false teeth and a massive unibrow. His character is given a little complexity when his loyalty is divided after he falls in love with a portrait of Sarah in Paul's possession--close-ups on Troughton give him a nice opportunity to convey internal conflict. Once again, of course, lust is the thorn in a character's side.



Twitter Sonnet #1046

To represent the real the hair is small.
In climbing up adult the verb is pale.
In swaddling shades conceptions birth the wall.
Computing forth, the voyage shaped the whale.
In rambles winding out the digit seeks.
As fortune's wind allows umbrellas through.
The dust of rain illumes the greying peaks.
The fields between were where the branches grew.
On placid jade the glasses found an eye.
In hands unasked beneath a thorny bridge.
To cross a starving pit the dust'll try.
In solemn rows the feathered keep the ridge.
In chapels red the bat has found ingress.
The castle draws who wear translucent dress.

They say there are few things that lighten the heart so much as the laughter of Christopher Lee. Well, I'm sure someone says that. I say that, at least as far as 1966's Rasputin the Mad Monk is concerned. After seeing him in other Hammer horror films as a dour edifice playing Dracula or the Mummy it's refreshing seeing him in this hairy, gregarious role, booming with mirth and dancing with a barmaid. The movie someone resembles the real story of the historical Rasputin but in an effort to avoid political awkwardness, and to make a villain of a man best known for having been murdered, Hammer made Rasputin into an evil wizard, something that never quite ties in sensibly with the rest of his personality. But Lee sells the character and the usual Hammer atmosphere works well.



We learn that Rasputin (Lee) makes regular appearances in a rural village where no-one knows his name or where he comes from. He just shows up at a tavern, drinks an impossible amount of alcohol, makes merry, and vanishes--there are several scenes where the man effortlessly drinks other men under the table.



This is how he gains his key ally, Boris (Richard Pasco), when he comes to St. Petersburg. He's forced to flee the monastery after he heals the wife of an innkeeper but then kills a man for attacking him while he makes out with the innkeeper's daughter. The makeout session was consensual but it's implied it might not have been after the attacker was killed. Still, it's a little unclear why the rural innkeeper is suddenly angry at the man who brought his wife back from certain death.



In St. Petersburg, Rasputin seduces a noblewoman, Sonia (Barbara Shelley), a lady in waiting to the Tsarina (Renee Asheroson), then uses hypnosis so that she'll "accidentally" injure the prince. He can then step in and use his miraculous healing powers to win the favour of the Tsarina who gives him a mansion in thanks.



Apart from the hypnosis and magic healing powers, the story's vaguely close to the real Rasputin who gained popularity as a mystic in the Zsar's court, particularly among women. Instead of the political intrigue that was the real cause of Rasputin's protracted demise, here he's once again beset by the jealous lover of the woman he seduced.



It's never really clear why a man before contented with drinking and love making suddenly became so ambitious. Lee makes it seem like Rasputin is totally amoral and considers the world and its people but trivial playthings. In this, he's effectively frightening, but it would've been kind of nice just to have a big hairy Christopher Lee who liked having a boisterous but perfectly innocent good time.

Twitter Sonnet #1045

In bulky webs the garment fell to rocks.
In craggy cuts, horizons pale the sky.
The healthy play with iron keys and locks.
A careful plan remakes a frozen pie.
In raisin clothes the chic's beneath the sun.
To stitch appointed tonsils tin's supplied.
Connected towels abridge what tans've done.
The autumn beach with fire now implied.
Triangle eyes assess potential burns.
In dancing lights a vision took the hills.
Conveyed in stone and twig the lizard learns.
The corn is ground beneath the scratching wheels.
A minty gasp precedes the ice and rain.
A portrait stared along the watching main.

Sometimes a movie is great in spite of its lead actor and that's the case with 1955's The Quatermass Xperiment. A classic in weird science fiction dread, this is a film that shows an understanding of how the unimaginably strange might interact with the perfectly mundane to horrifying effect.



The director, the effects people, the producers, and most of the actors seem to have understood. Certainly the source material, the 1953 television serial, understood and in the two surviving episodes one can still appreciate the terrible mixture of anxiety, sorrow, and desperation in Reginald Tate's performance as Quatermass. But sadly, Tate's death and Hammer's desire to appeal to American audiences led to the casting of American actor Brian Donlevy in the first film adaptation.



To compare the two works is to see how much it matters when an actor understands the fundamental issues at play in the work as a whole. Donlevy doesn't get it and probably didn't care--he flatly barks orders to police and scientists, delivering lines about the importance of detaining the infected space man and the strange alien plantlife like he's ordering his secretary to get coffee. He keeps the film from being a masterpiece but there is still plenty to appreciate about it.



The television serial putting the site of the rocket's crash landing in a flat probably helped the show's budget and allowed the strangeness of the ship's presence alongside the ordinary residents and cops to have an effect. But the film version putting the rocket in a country field makes a wonderful impression and nearby residents are established well enough to give an idea of the existential disruption of the thing.



Richard Wordsworth as Victor Carroon is very good as the monster to Quatermass' Dr. Frankenstein, the man infected with some kind of space virus slowly turning him into a man eating plant. It's a nice transposition of the kind of experience with disease resulting from European contact with the Americas and considering how much of Carroon's story involves his inability to connect with others because of his body one could say it works as a metaphor for syphilis. The impending catastrophe promised by the full effect of his disease might be taken as the effect of European disease on Native American peoples.



And as in that case, it's clear the framework of civilisation has no means of coping with it or even recognising it. A television broadcast on a restoration Westminster Abbey can't even contemplate stopping production until the menace is actually visible on camera.



It's a lovely, mostly effective film filled with great atmosphere.

There's not really any paranoia in 1963's Paranoiac. One of many low budget thrillers, this one produced by Hammer, designed to capitalise on the success of Psycho, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster seems to have decided the way to outdo Hitchcock's film is to add more complications. The plot holds together and due to this, along with gorgeous cinematography by Arthur Grant, capable direction by Freddie Francis, and several nice performances, it's a pretty entertaining film in spite of some absurdities and weak characterisations.

Over the course of its brief run time, the premise of the film seems to change every fifteen minutes or so. Just as you start to think you're seeing the shape of the ultimate plot twist, that plot twist is immediately revealed and a new plot begins on top of it. The first part of the film is a kind of Shirley Jackson-ish setup.



A young woman named Eleanor (Janette Scott) lives with her aunt, Harriet (Sheila Burrell), her brother, Simon (Oliver Reed), and a nurse, Francoise (Liliane Brousse), in an enormous mansion. Eleanor's beloved older brother, Tony, had died some time earlier and now the reckless, alcoholic young Simon seeks to get Eleanor out of the way so he can inherit the whole fortune. But Eleanor has started having visions of Tony (Alexander Davion) wandering about all over the place.



Just as I was starting to think the end of the movie might be about how Simon is trying to drive his sister crazy with someone impersonating her brother, or it might be a haunting, Tony casually starts talking to the whole family, much to the shock of Simon and Harriet, very early on.



So a movie that seemed to be about the point of view of a young woman doubting her senses due to impossible visions and duplicitous, scheming family, suddenly becomes about a long lost brother returning home and questions about his authenticity. It might have been a been too derivative of Shirley Jackson to have the movie from Eleanor's point of view but I would have preferred it to what happens. After this, the whole movie is told from Tony's point of view, a man whose motives are never clearly establish played by an actor giving a surpassingly bland performance. Meanwhile, Eleanor turns into a background character.



I won't reveal the subsequent twists except to say those problems only get worse. But Oliver Reed is very good, of course, his eyes wide and his gestures sudden and quick while he fiendishly plays a pipe organ or abuses the butler for not bringing him more brandy. There are a couple effective jump scares in the movie, too.

Twitter Sonnet #1039

A cane in noble blessings cinched the bag.
Alerted soon, a single gourd awoke.
Because the painted eye was warm it sagged.
Of tiny child grains the stars bespoke.
A narrow stair ascends inside the gloom.
A gleam bespeaks an aging split ahead.
In clicking bursts the message came to doom.
A powder plus a paste awoke the dead.
A smoke replaced the sky beyond the hall.
A sinking sun conducts along the line.
In channels forced the water sure will fall.
Though seeming close the voice is down the mine.
The sounds emerges with electric step.
In static cords a drifting noise is kept.