Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel from which this film was adapted was once hugely popular (it was a major influence on the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft), but like this movie, it belongs to a more innocent age. If you're told that a movie involves a family cursed to die spitting blood because their ancestors caused the death of an innocent man by framing him for witchcraft, rivalry to the death between two estranged brothers over long-lost treasure connected with the curse, and Vincent Price is in it, you'll know what to expect. Except that in this case, you'd be dead wrong. Price was only 29 when he made this film, and not yet typecast as a horror actor, so he plays the kind of fellow who used to be described as "gay" before it came to mean something altogether different. And if you've seen a lot of Roger Corman movies, the sight of a carefree young Vincent playing the piano while singing a merry love-song is downright Surreal!

The rôle of his wicked brother who becomes insanely obsessed with the legendary treasure goes to George Sanders, an actor who in 1940 was much more familiar to the public as a suavely sinister villain than Price would be until over a decade later. Which is a pity, because Sanders is oddly subdued, as if he was only doing the movie because he was contractually obliged to and hated it, and he doesn't provide any truly memorable villainy. Price, on the other hand, gives a bravura performance, and is totally convincing, both as a happily extraverted young songwriter in love with the world in general and his fiancée in particular, and the sadder, wiser man events turn him into. Playing somebody who ages two decades over the course of the story is a real challenge, especially for an actor still in his twenties, but Price impersonates the middle-aged man he would later become for real to a degree that's downright uncanny.

Unfortunately, for unavoidable plot-related reasons, he's absent from a very large part of the film, meaning that Sanders doesn't really have anyone to exercise his villainy on properly, so he becomes largely superfluous and fades into the background until Price eventually reappears. The story mainly revolves around Margaret Lindsay's character, who is apparently doomed to a lonely life as an embittered old maid because of the evil brother's greed and treachery, so basically it's a tragedy about interrupted love in which Lindsay and Price tug on our heartstrings very effectively, but there's not much in the way of mystery or suspense, let alone horror, since the gothic elements of the source novel have been greatly watered down or omitted altogether, to the point where the elaborately cunning plan which eventually resolves everything happens almost entirely offscreen because the camera is far more interested in a couple of largely irrelevant young lovers. What we're left with is an old-fashioned and extremely melodramatic romance featuring a couple of excellent performances, but as gothic romances go, it's tame even compared with the novel it's based on, which was published in 1851.

The story was filmed again in 1963 as part of the anthology film "Twice-Told Tales", this time omitting everything in the book that isn't horrific and adding a great deal of extra nastiness, resulting in a tacky romp involving madness, murder, and homicidal skeletons, and making Vincent Price one of the few actors to have been in two completely different versions of the same movie.

This was the movie that introduced unsuspecting audiences to the Hammer style which would have such a huge impact on horror cinema for the next two decades. And it was a bold move to reinvent one of the old Universal monsters, because the poor things had long since become feeble parodies of themselves, even co-starring in Abbott & Costello films. So it came as a genuine shock when Baron Frankenstein and his creation got up to genuinely horrid things involving lashings of bright red blood and real guts from the butcher's shop.

It's a historically important movie, and in its way a classic. But does it still stand up as great horror sixty years on? The answer has to be yes and no. People were far more easily horrified in those days, and by today's standards the gore is very tame and there's not a lot of it. The miserly budget is also painfully obvious. Hammer were taking a gamble, and they didn't want to spend too much on a film which might very well bomb, so apart from a few scenes in a wood by a lake which might be almost anywhere (but is in fact round the back of Bray Studios, and would become a familiar sight to cinema audiences over the years), the action is confined to studio sets, many of them rather small. Remember the magnificent laboratory Victor Frankenstein had in 1931? It appears that since then, his mad science budget has been drastically reduced.

The creature's appearance is also a poor substitute for the look made famous by Boris Karloff. That wasn't entirely Hammer's fault, since Universal still held the copyright to Jack Pierce's iconic makeup, but it could still have been done a lot better. Lee himself hated the film and his rôle in it, feeling it was beneath his dignity as an actor to play a character with no lines and his face completely obscured by lumpy latex, and he was only cast because he was 6'5". However, he does bring what he can to the performance, and the way the creature moves like a poorly manipulated marionette as if its mismatched parts are having trouble cooperating with each other is genuinely creepy, and by far the most memorable thing about this decidedly bargain-basement monster.

What still works splendidly about the film is Peter Cushing's superb performance as Victor Frankenstein. Hammer decided from the outset that, since they were going for horror rather than pathos, the real monster was the Baron himself, not the miserable creatures he gave a warped semblance of life they never wanted. Cushing plays him as a charming psychopath who cares about absolutely nothing except his obsession with proving the truth of his theories, and if a few people end up dead, they deserved it for becoming inconvenient. His passionate commitment to what he whitewashes as scientific progress but is really his own ego, a far more monstrous beast than anything he could ever stitch together from morgue leftovers, makes him one of the great screen villains. Of course, he acts his conspicuously small supporting cast off the screen, though to be fair, Christopher Lee is reduced to miming with a bag on his head so he can't really compete.

It's far and away Peter Cushing's film, and he's the reason to watch it. It's just as well Hammer kept their options open by ending the movie with Victor Frankenstein apparently doomed but didn't actually show him die. This modestly-priced feature was a big enough hit to justify Cushing reprising the rôle in five sequels, the last made in 1974.

This almost-brilliant but flawed semi-masterpiece is very good indeed some of the time, but at other times it flags badly. Part of the problem is that its source material, "Casting The Runes" by M. R. James, is a short story (easily available online if you want to compare it with this adaptation), therefore in order to spin it out to an hour and a half, a lot of subplots have to be inserted wherever they'll fit, and some fit better than others. For instance, would a man who is going to be torn apart by an actual demon from hell in a few days really take time out from trying to escaping his ghastly fate while he awkwardly romances some girl he's just met?

The best scenes are those lifted more or less directly from the source material. The demon, though almost inescapable, cannot strike before a set time has passed, but as the deadline approaches, the hints that something is closing in on the victim become more and more blatant, and nightmarishly surreal happenings that uneasily skirt the borders between hallucination, coincidence, and downright devilry literally dog his footsteps. Jacques Tourneur, always better at portraying implied psychological horror than in-your-face nastiness, handles this material superbly, especially the scene in which the hero is chased through the woods by an entity which, its appointed time not having arrived yet, hasn't quite broken through into our reality and exists semi-abstractly as a sort of satanic UFO. And the diabolical Karswell is very well played indeed by Niall MacGinnis, effortlessly switching between harmless affability and casually matter-of-fact menace, even while wearing full clown makeup - remember that this film was made decades before scary clowns became a cliché.

Where it goes a bit off-track is in making its hero so unlikeable. He's a rational and thoroughly skeptical scientist who constantly and extremely rudely denies the reality of the paranormal, so of course he turns out to be 100% wrong and it nearly costs him his life. But does he really need to take so long to catch on that supernatural beings are out to get him when the truth is staring him in the face? Part of this is probably the result of re-editing by the studio, which resulted in Jacques Tourneur taking his name off the picture. Apparently he wanted the existence of the demon to much more ambiguous, making it plausible for the hero to refuse to believe in it. In particular, he wanted the creature itself to be shown only for one-fifth of a second, leaving the audience wondering whether they'd seen it or not. But the studio bosses reckoned that, as with some of Tourneur's other films, footage needed to be inserted explicitly giving the customers the monster they were promised by the title. And, as you can see from the picture above, Tourneur lost the debate.

However, it's still a very good film despite its faults. Its portrayal of weirdly puritanical devil-worshippers is so off-the-wall that I wanted to see far more of them and whatever it was they got up to. And it's always a joy to witness actors who later became fixtures in long-running sitcoms doing something completely different early in their careers, in this case the amiable Foggy Dewhurst from "Last Of The Summer Wine" as a clinically insane murderer who worships Satan.

By the way, "Night Of The Eagle" (1962), although based on an unrelated short story by Fritz Leiber, has such a similar title because it's almost a remake, dealing with much the same themes in an even more bizarre way, and might make an interesting double bill with this film.

"Beware The Beat Of The Cloth-Wrapped Feet!" was the advertising slogan for this film, so you can tell Hammer weren't taking it all that seriously. Which is probably why it's almost a spoof, right down to a crystal ball which works just like CCTV, and is suspiciously similar to the one Charles Hawtrey had in "Carry On Cleo".

Basing its plot fairly closely on the alleged curse of Tutankhamen, the shrivelled remains of the tragic boy-king Katu-Bey are not the mummy whose clothy footbeats we're supposed to beware of, which is a pity, because if that desiccated cadaver had bestirred its twiggy limbs and gone a-hunting, the results would have been infinitely creepier than the desultory rampage of the hulking Prem, who is often shown in the same shot as the other mummy, which is definitely not a man in a suit, and thus makes Prem appear even less convincing than his crude, immobile mask and peculiar romper-suit already do. Ironically, that last detail was based on how Egyptian royal mummies actually look, not the way they're supposed to look in mummy movies, so it's right but seems wrong.

The story is a hopeless muddle. After a lengthy prologue set 4,000 years ago, much of which shows us the action in the form of paintings to save money, and which tells us a great deal concerning an Ancient Egyptian dynastic struggle with no relevance whatsoever to the plot, we're treated to the usual clichés. A bunch of archaeologists bring the past to life more literally than they intended, which comes to pass thanks to an even madder mad Arab than usual (Roger Delgado, the best "Doctor Who" baddie ever), his absolutely screaming bonkers mother, whose performance makes his look restrained by comparison, and the sacred tea-towel of Osiris. The usual lumbering and slaying occurs. The only thing missing is a coincidental resemblance between the hero's girlfriend and the mummy's long-lost love.

Lacking the budget to hire a big name like Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, the nominal star is André Morell, but they could obviously only afford him for a few days because his participation isn't much more than a cameo. Which leaves us with somebody or other as a hero who does almost nothing significant, a leading lady whose acting is so bad that her character is given completely irrelevant psychic powers in a failed attempt to make her interesting, and an anti-hero who ends up as the leading man by default, and is such an irredeemable bastard that even his on-screen wife knows she'll soon be a widow and isn't the slightest bit upset about it.

Yet it's one of those movies which you know is terrible but at the same time is hard to dislike. Several of the actors involved, especially the mother and son bad-guy team of Catherine Lacey and Roger Delgado, aren't taking it seriously for a second and revel in the glorious mess they've landed in, to the point when you wish the scenes with the murderous mummy were even more infrequent than they are so that we could see more of these people hamming it up as if they were in an overacting contest (perhaps unofficially they were).

And, thanks to the hero-shaped vacuum at the film's heart, the picture is stolen by, of all people, that incredibly prolific Hammer veteran Michael Ripper, who gets far more to do than usual as the splendidly-named Longbarrow, and seizes the opportunity with both hands. Longbarrow doesn't really have any relevance to the story, and ought by rights to be an irritating little twerp. But Ripper's excellent performance means he ends up being the only character you care about.

Although this extraordinary film is over 60 years old and inevitably shows its age in places, its best scenes still pack a punch that modern thrillers can seldom match. Its basic premise works superbly because the heroes aren't up against a foe they can potentially kill or outwit. Their nemesis consists of two truckloads of a chemical that could explode with apocalyptic force at any moment for the most trivial of reasons, such as a small pothole in a road hundreds of miles long that only qualifies as a road because it isn't part of the surrounding jungle. They can't even run away from the danger because their entire job consists of deliberately staying close to it.

However, it only just barely qualifies as an action film. Henri Clouzot, the French Alfred Hitchcock, has the intelligence not to make the entire two-hour movie all about some men attempting to prevent a truckload of tins from going critical. The opening section, which may seem overlong and irrelevant at first, establishes the peculiar relationships between a group of European ne'er-do-wells who, for one reason or another, none of which are really explained, find themselves stuck in a dismal, disease-ridden fly-speck of a South American town which, if you can't afford the air-fare out, is so inescapable that it might as well be Hell.

Finding themselves at the bottom of the pecking-order and barely surviving at all, their attempts to salvage a few shreds of pride by jockeying for position amongst themselves like a pack of stray dogs allow the four main characters to relate to one another in complex ways that don't necessarily have anything to do with whether they like each other, and means that their decision to go on a near-as-dammit suicide mission has just as much, if not more to do with their desperate macho posturing than their stated motive of being paid the promised small fortune. It also means that, for the entire main part of the film during which their terrible journey takes place, they have to balance an equation much more complex than weighing their desire for money against their fear of death, and be more and more honest with themselves and each other as the tension wears them down.

Of course, the extent to which they're individually able to cope turns out to be inversely proportional to how much of their image as hard men depends on bluff and bluster, since no amount of Alpha Male posturing will impress a can of nitroglycerine. In a nice touch, out of all these extremely manly men, the one who shows by far the greatest courage is, as far as you can tell in a movie from an era when they were very coy indeed about openly referring to such things, probably gay.

This complexity of motive allows Clouzot to turn what could have been a simple tale of flawed heroes coping with a series of unfortunate events along the lines of "Armageddon" into a compelling character study of men so flawed they aren't heroes at all doing something insanely dangerous for reasons that are no better than they are. This means that, although the hazards they encounter along the way really are nail-bityingly tense, there aren't so many of these that the story degenerates into a painfully contrived obstacle course and becomes absurd. Most of their journey is uneventful and relatively safe. But of course the unrelenting, inescapable fear that if anything at all goes wrong they'll instantly be very dead indeed is gnawing away at their sanity.

This is terror pared down to its barest essentials, and Clouzot masterfully shows us what it does to the men in its grip. 24 years later, with a vast budget and special effects Clouzot couldn't have even dreamt of, William Friedkin remade it as the misleadingly-named "Sorceror", and it bombed. Mind you, it did have the misfortune to hit cinemas at exactly the same time as a funny little film called "Star Wars".

Although Humphrey Bogart is by far the best-known actor to have played archetypal private eye Philip Marlow on the big screen, Robert Mitchum is the only one to have played him twice. Watching him here, you can see why he got a second crack at the rôle, because he's just about perfect. The only slightly jarring note is that he's almost twice as old as the character is in the book, but that's dealt with in the very first scene by a voiceover monologue explaining that this version of Marlowe is getting old, so we aren't expected to believe Robert Mitchum is in his early thirties. Since Marlowe is a world-weary character whose hard-boiled cynicism conceals the softest of hearts, making him older than usual works very well.

You can easily see how he got that way. The mean streets Marlowe inhabits are very mean indeed. The almost all-pervasive colour scheme of the movie is the dirty yellow of old newspapers and bad teeth, and nearly everybody lives in claustrophobic squalor which doesn't end when they go out onto the cramped, grubby streets. Almost every room opulent and spacious enough to be a potentially pleasant environment is filled with crooked people doing things which are at best sleazy. And the one family rich enough to live in a luxurious home that isn't a casino or a brothel have plenty of grubby, sordid secrets lurking just below their veneer of respectability.

Yet there's a surprising element of warmth and humanity which isn't present in the book. This older, wiser Marlowe, when forced to spend time with a hopeless alcoholic in her fifties who hasn't done any housework in years, is obviously sorry for her rather than simply disgusted because she's old and drunk and dirty.

This isn't the only way in which the book has been revised. Several major characters who got involved in the action in extremely contrived ways but turned out to be utterly irrelevant have been either omitted altogether, or rewritten to make them a meaningful part of the story, which in one case results in a change of both profession and sex. But these rewrites improve what was originally (and to some extent still is) a chaotic muddle of a plot which reads as though Raymond Chandler randomly thought up events and characters that appealed to him and then tried to make them all fit together somehow.

However, the basic storyline, in which Moose Malloy, an ex-con as strong as he is stupid, memorably played here by wrestler Jack O'Halloran, who succeeds in making Robert Mitchum, who is not a small man, look puny compared to him, won't quit looking for the girl he loves despite overwhelming evidence that she isn't the slightest bit interested in being found, especially by Moose, is very faithful to the book. And although she isn't really in the film all that much, Charlotte Rampling is as fatale a femme fatale as you'll ever see!

This is not a thriller in the modern sense, with massive slo-mo gunfights and immensely long chases in elaborate environments that will form the basis of the spin-off computer game, it's just a screen version of a Raymond Chandler novel published in 1940. But as Chandler adaptations go, they don't come much better than this.

In many ways this is an excellent movie. The supporting cast are excellent, notably Sterling Hayden as a totally out of control alcoholic writer obviously based on Ernest Hemingway. The screenplay, which was, amazingly, written by the lady who co-wrote "The Big Sleep" starring Humphrey Bogart in 1946, removes some unlikely and unnecessary subplots and provides a far better ending than the one in the book. Robert Altman shows his usual mastery of cinema. Even the running gag about all the music in the film being different arrangements of the title song works splendidly. This should be the ultimate Raymond Chandler film.

The problem is Elliot Gould. It's not that he gives a bad performance. It's just that if you're familiar with Philip Marlowe, the character he's supposed to be playing, which most viewers will be, the hero of this movies comes across as a grotesque parody. I strongly suspect the Coen brothers were inspired by this film to make "The Big Lebowski", in which Chandler homages and tropes pop up constantly, but the central character isn't supposed to be Philip Marlowe; he's just a dim-witted easy-going slob who somehow gets dragged into a Chandleresque situation.

Gould's Marlowe is Jeff Lebowski's slightly smarter older brother. At times his apparent stupidity is revealed to be an act when he does something unexpectedly clever, but these moments occur far too seldom. Mostly he seems genuinely thick and a little unbalanced, constantly mumbling repetitive nonsense even when he's alone, especially his mantra "it's all right with me", which seems to apply to every situation in which nothing bad is happening to him right now. And although he does display occasional flashes of intelligence, much of what happens doesn't require him to do anything at all, especially the convoluted subplot involving a completely psychotic gangster, in which the actions of third parties cause Marlowe to passively drift into and then out of extreme danger while he stands there looking and sounding stupid.

This film would work far better if, like "The Big Lebowski", Gould's character wasn't supposed to be Philip Marlowe, but a completely unconnected person trying to do Marlowe's job without having the slightest aptitude for it. If you've never read any of Raymond Chandler's books or seen any of the other screen versions of them, you'll have no problems with the peculiar characterisation of the hero. But if you know what this extremely famous fictional private eye is supposed to be like, it'll be the equivalent of a movie in which Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as a borderline moron with autism and played by Billy Bob Thornton. Which is a pity, because it's an excellent movie thrown out of kilter by its inexplicably bizarre treatment of a character almost all of its target audience would have expected to be portrayed completely differently. Oh, and in case you're interested, Arnold Schwarzenegger has a walk-on part and takes his shirt off.

This film, with its theme of disaffected Americans suddenly killing complete strangers for no apparent reason, is even more topical now than it was half a century ago, as well as being the only thing inspired by a mass shooting that isn't another mass shooting or "I Don't Like Mondays". It makes a very strong case for America's obsession with guns being a bad thing because weak, troubled people who have been told all their lives that guns make you strong and have easy access to them may try to solve their problems with guns, and there's only one thing you can do with a gun. And although it's not quite Boris Karloff's last film, it should have been because it's the last movie he was in that was any good. So why isn't it better than it is?

One problem is its self-indulgence. It's fair enough for somebody like Karloff, at the tail-end of an extraordinary career, to indulge himself a bit, because he's earned it. But for Peter Bogdanovich, a first-time director, to cast himself as a character who is basically himself, whose big scene involves getting drunk with Boris Karloff, also basically playing himself, while trying to talk him into putting off his retirement long enough to star in a movie which is heavily implied to be the one we're watching, is just plain odd. It feels as though the real purpose of the scene is to allow Bogdanovich to say: "Hey guys, Boris Karloff is my buddy and we get drunk together and everything, and I can prove it because I've got it on film!" And he really is in love with Boris (they even end up in the same bed!), meaning that Karloff is allowed to spend a little too much time just being himself, in a way which is delightful if you're a big fan of his, but which doesn't exactly ratchet up the dramatic tension.

The other plot thread goes a little too far in the opposite direction. The killer is such a stereotype of the All-American Boy of 50 years ago that himself and his family are almost parodies. He says very little, expresses few emotions, and seems rather stupid, a bovine oaf whose response to some vague discontent he never bothers to explain is to vacantly munch comfort food, and if that doesn't work, shoot people. Why? That's not the point of the film, so we're never told. The trouble is, I'm not quite sure what the actual point of the film is supposed to be. Scarier things happen in reality than in horror films, especially quaint old gothic chillers starring people like Boris Karloff? I think we knew that already. Americans have too many guns? Not news either. The American Dream looked increasingly hollow in the era of the Vietnam War? Not very profound, and I'm not even sure the film's trying to say that.

There's a lot to enjoy here, especially for Karloff fans, but there really should be more. And Bogdanovich seems to have problems directing action, because everything seems just a little bit flat and far too slow. In particular, the climactic scenes really ought to involve much more chaos and panic. Obviously the budget was a factor, but some directors could have pulled it off anyway. Overall, it's good in a lot of places, but it's a bit too satisfied with itself. Karloff's great, but in a way he probably would have been without any direction at all.

By the way, "The Terror", the apparently fictitious film-within-the-film at whose premiere the climax takes place, actually exists. It's a very obscure and completely barking mad Roger Corman movie which is available on DVD, so maybe it would make an interesting double bill with this film.

As with all Hammer's gore-soaked reboots of Universal's tired old monsters, the first film in their mummy franchise is the best, making the most of its simple plot by piling on the exotic creepiness and not waiting too long before showing us what their new turbocharged mummy can do. Beginning in exactly the same way as the very first mummy movie starring Boris Karloff from 1932, in which the title character is awakened by mistake, is entirely free-willed, and has his own agenda, it then gives logic a body-swerve by devoting the rest of its running-time to rehashing all the sequels, in which the mummy is awakened on purpose by a sinister chap in a fez to avenge the desecration of the tomb of somebody or other, and is little more than a dehydrated zombie. This of course results in a storyline you're probably not supposed to think about too hard, in which the baddie does everything in the wrong order. (By the way, watch out for a bleeding chunk of the plot of "Dracula" which Hammer left out of their movie adaptation but used here instead.)

And yet, despite such basic lapses in narrative coherence, it works, mainly thanks to Christopher Lee's superb performance as Kharis, the 4,000-year-old desiccated revenant who defied even the gods for love and paid a horrendous price. Acting with nothing but his eyes, Lee manages to convey the depths of passion that drive this tormented creature, making Kharis a truly sympathetic mummy. Probably because Lee absolutely hated playing the Frankenstein Monster, feeling that a rôle in which he never spoke and his face was completely hidden wasted his talents and any tall man could have done it, there's an extended flashback showing us how Kharis came to suffer such a terrible fate, but ironically he's as bound by religious laws in life as he would be by bandages in death, and he's still doing all the real acting with his eyes while the rest of him performs elaborate, sometimes cruel, and mostly meaningless rituals.

Apart from some Irishmen we're meant to find amusing and an "English" police detective whose accent isn't even native to this planet, the supporting cast are very good too, especially a young and vigorous Peter Cushing, who is cleverly given a minor disability, so that although he isn't paralysed by fear of the stiff-legged, slightly arthritic mummy, he can't run any faster than it can, so he has to fight. Which he does, as effectively as anyone could against something that doesn't care if you blast holes in it with a shotgun. Even the Egyptian villain is weirdly sympathetic. His fanatical devotion to a barbaric religion so obsolete that it appears to consist of himself and a dead guy is downright Pre-Islamic State, but he truly means it in a completely unselfish way. And a special mention must go to the sets. Although the outdoor scenes were obviously shot in studios, enough money and design skill was lavished on them for their intense colours and general air of unreality to enhance the dreamlike horror of the wildly implausible situation.

This very minor B-movie is billed as co-starring those mighty horror heavyweights Karloff and Lugosi, but the best acting comes from the utterly obscure Stanley Ridges as the gentle, absent-minded professor of English literature who has to share a skull with what's left of a psychopathic gangster. Ridges is very good as the mild-mannered academic who begins to transform more and more frequently into a ruthless killer, and it's his performance that carries most of the movie. Unlike Dr. Jekyll, it's not his own fault that he winds up with an evil alter ego, and he doesn't even know he literally has part of somebody else in his head, so he truly is an innocent victim, which makes Karloff's treatment of him all the more horrendous.

Karloff is, as he so often was, the mad scientist who supposedly means well and is only doing Very Bad Things for the good of humanity. The trouble is, unlike Ridges, he doesn't convincingly put across the two sides of his character. The first chance he gets, he murders a bad man to save a good man who also happens to be his best friend and needs spare part brain surgery right away - not exactly ideal behaviour for a doctor, but we can understand his motives. But the moment he finds out there's a fortune in stolen money out there somewhere, he's trying his hardest to revive whatever remains of a dead killer's personality in his bewildered friend's head because think of all the good he can do for humanity with his shiny new mad brain science laboratory! And so what if his helpless, trusting best buddy turns into a schizoid murder for a while? Hopefully not too many people will die before he finds the money, and then Boris can turn his pal back into a harmless poetry professor again. Probably.

Karloff has considerable screen presence because he's Karloff, but he neither tries very hard to convince us that he's a good man who got tragically carried away by his zeal to cure cancer or something, or goes over the top as an unashamed baddie who seizes every opportunity to do illegal weird operations, and if they happen to involve turning his best friend into a psycho killer that's just the way the cookie crumbles. By not going far enough in either direction, he ends up looking like a selfish hypocrite who simply wants the money, and that's not terribly interesting.

As for poor old Bela, despite being second-billed, he's barely in the movie! Anyone who thinks Ed Wood exploited him should watch this film. He gets as wet, cold and bedraggled as he ever did in "Bride Of The Monster", and he's treated with about one-hundredth of the respect Wood gave him. No wonder he tried so much harder in those desperately threadbare final films than he does here. He must have known how bad they were; but he also knew when he was appreciated and when he wasn't.

This film really deserves two and a half stars at best, because Karloff isn't trying very hard, and Lugosi isn't trying at all. Not that it matters, since he's wasted in a nothing part just so they could put his name on the poster. But Stanley Ridges gives it everything he's got, and considering the director expected him to be the scariest thing in a movie where he was third-billed after Karloff and Lugosi, he deserves full credit for a performance which would have made this a classic B-movie if his more famous co-stars had been as committed to doing their job as he was.

As somebody who lives in Edinburgh, I'm always amused to see it portrayed by Hollywood, and this movie actually does it pretty well, capturing the peculiar almost subterranean quality of the Old Town - the set designers must have been given lots of photos of the Cowgate to draw inspiration from. The real Edinburgh can even be glimpsed in a few seconds of the oldest archive footage they could find. The problem is, as always, the accents. And Russell Wade as the strangely passive "hero", who accomplishes extraordinarily little in the course of the film, is so painfully un-Scottish that he can't even pronounce "Edinburgh" correctly! He's also a terrible actor, and, as previously noted, a waste of space who gets in the way of the more interesting bits of the story with a lot of insipid padding involving a little girl's operation and a lukewarm semi-romance which is so irrelevant it never quite bothers to actually happen.

I'd give it a higher rating if Russell Wade wasn't in it, or his character was very minor, because the real story is all about the twisted relationship between Henry Daniell's hypocritical Dr. McFarlane, who pretends his selfishness is necessary for the greater good but is far too intelligent to fool himself, and Boris Karloff's incredibly sinister cabman John Gray, who supplements his income by supplying the good doctor with fresh bodies, no questions asked where from, and treats him with insolent over-familiarity despite the huge difference in their social status. What exactly is the backstory between these two? That's what we want to know, not whether some kid who can't act will recover from her operation! Which obviously she will because they always do.

At its heart, this is the tale of a man who becomes bad because he's too morally weak to be good, and what happens when he meets a man who is truly evil. As the real baddie, Karloff is simply magnificent. Gray isn't normally listed as a classic Karloff monster because he's not a proper monster, just a very bad man indeed. But he should be. If Gray had turned out late in the film to be an actual devil from hell, it wouldn't have seemed odd, because he really is evil incarnate. Even his occasional moments of "goodness" seem like a man whimsically trying on a coat that doesn't suit him just to see how funny he looks in the mirror. It's Karloff's movie, and he gleefully seizes it with both hands and never lets go unless he's off-screen. It might even have been a masterpiece if all the sentimental padding hadn't been there to get in his way. Watch it for Karloff's performance, which is one of his best, and, as portrayals of unashamedly despicable people so often are, far more entertaining than the good guys.

Oh, by the way, poor old Bela Lugosi is in it for about five minutes as a moron wearing a wig borrowed from the Three Stooges. He doesn't look happy, and you can't blame him. Even Hollywood couldn't pretend that Bela's accent was Scottish, so his character is "recently arrived from Lisbon". I bet that line gets a big laugh in Portugal.

This companion piece to "The Plague of the Zombies", shot on the same sets by the same director with some of the same cast, unfortunately suffers a bit from the fact that they'd spent too much on the previous film, so it's a more modest affair. The picturesque Cornish village of Clagmoor is beset by a frightful curse which has caused the locals, plus one slightly more upper-class fellow who moved there for some reason, despite the suicidal stupidity of living in a place with a name like Clagmoor in a horror movie, to drop dead on a regular basis for the past year or so. But that last victim has a brother who wants answers...

If anyone in this film could put two and two together and make more than one and a half, it would be a very short film. It takes forever for the hero, who is of course much smarter than any of the villagers, to notice a subtle clue they've missed all along: everyone who dies of the "Black Death" has two incredibly obvious bite-marks on their neck, suggesting an attack by a large fanged creature not unlike that beastie on the DVD cover. And then there's the weird unfriendly aristocrat who lives in the big house from which strange oriental music can be heard playing every time somebody dies, and for company has only an incredibly creepy Malay manservant and a beautiful daughter whom he's oddly reluctant to let out of his sight for one single moment. Hey, do you suppose they might be in some way implicated in the killings...? Actually, they must be, because there's literally no-one else in the small cast who could possibly be responsible. And anyway, when is it ever not the fault of the haughty bloke in the big house and the thing he keeps in the cellar?

On the plus side, Jacqueline Pierce is wonderful as the tormented Anna; her sitar-playing scene is worth the price of admission by itself, and really made me wish we'd seen far more of her character's seductive side - Ken Russell's "The Lair of the White Worm" owes a huge debt to this film, in a ham-fisted barking mad kind of way. Noel Willman is over the top but great fun as her even more tormented dad. And good old Michael Ripper, the unsung hero of Hammer films (that's him at the top of the page, wearing his best "this beard is not false and the spirit gum doesn't itch" expression), gets to play a well-developed sympathetic character with lots of screen-time instead of being killed almost immediately as he so often was.

Unfortunately we also get a typical manly-but-dull Hammer hero, an equally typical damsel-in-distress who can't act (to be fair, she's better than some, but only by Hammer standards), and too much padding while they try to figure out the bleeding obvious because the plot's too thin and the budget's running out. Though anyone who really hates Private Fraser from "Dad's Army" has a treat in store! It's not a great film, but it's got some great bits in it. I suppose that's why Hammer near-as-dammit remade it two years later as the dreadful yet bizarrely entertaining "The Blood Beast Terror".

This is not far off being a superb film noir. Unfortunately it has two major defects. The first is Richard Conte. He's not much of an actor, a deficiency he tries to make up for by being incredibly manly; the trailer actually spells out to us in letters which on a cinema screen would have been enormous how VIRILE he is! I suppose he is, but he's so busy being dead butch that he just comes across as smug. He also appears to be extremely stupid. See how dense he looks in most of those stills? I'm not surprised he ended up playing the kind of supporting characters who weren't required to make the audience like them, because he's lousy at it.

The other problem is a weirdly schizoid plot. Although it starts off being about long-distance truck-drivers, the hero soon reaches his destination and the rest of the film concerns his feud with an evil greengrocer. (Yes, really!) Except that there's another character who literally gets left behind by the main plot, and almost seems to be in another unrelated movie we occasionally catch glimpses of which is much more light-hearted than the one our hero is in, until the two plot-threads come together at the end, and characters who are at least borderline comical very abruptly find themselves in the kind of film where people die in nasty ways.

Valentina Cortese as the tart with a heart is so much better than Conte that I wished the movie had been about her struggle to free herself from a lifestyle she hates with the help of a tough but gullible trucker she at first cynically manipulates but soon comes to genuinely care for. Unfortunately it's about him and his quest for revenge, which, although he has a very compelling motive, doesn't make the slightest sense because his cunning plan seems to consist of tempting the baddie to blatantly rob him, thus making it OK to beat him up. Actually I'm not sure he has a plan at all, since he wanders around being repeatedly swindled and duped until something which the villain wasn't in fact responsible for finally makes him angry enough to take decisive action.

The supporting cast are extremely one-dimensional. Lee J. Cobb's cheerfully insincere and utterly despicable fruit and veg wholesaler gets away with it because Cobb's trademark style is to play everyone much larger than life. But most of them are wacky stereotypes whose involvement in genuinely horrible situations feels very wrong indeed (it doesn't help that one of them looks incredibly like 50% of Ant and Dec). And some of them are more than slightly annoying. It's about halfway to being a truly great movie, but it doesn't seem to quite know what it's about, and ends up getting into a bit of a muddle.

One of two excellent Hammer films shot back-to-back by John Gilling on the same set, no doubt because it's visibly much more expensive than many Hammer sets and you can believe you're in a Cornish village rather than a cramped studio, both of which feature Jacqueline Pearce, who would later play galactic dominatrix Servalan on "Blake's 7", this is basically a remake of the extraordinary "White Zombie" from 1932, minus Bela Lugosi and most of the subtlety, with elements of "Dracula" thrown into the mix.

But of course you don't expect subtlety from Hammer. Though actually, as their films go, it is fairly subtle, with no gratuitous nudity or irrelevant lesbian scenes, either because they knew it was a good enough movie to succeed on its own merits, or because they couldn't persuade the leading ladies to get their kit off. It's possibly the best of Hammer's lesser-known movies, and although the zombies are underused prior to the extremely predictable climax, there's plenty of other stuff going on all the time as André Morell, very effective as the Van Helsing figure you might have expected Peter Cushing to play (some of Morell's dialogue right at the beginning sounds very much as though it was written with Cushing in mind), gets to the bottom of it all.

What really sets it apart is that it marks the transition between old-style zombies, grotesque yet pitiful slaves reanimated by magic who mean no harm to anyone except the fiend who made them what they are and only want to rest in peace, and George Romero's feral rotting cannibals. These zombies, though animated by Haitian voodoo to solve a purely economic problem in a very bizarre way, are bestial savages their master can only just control, and it's obvious that although their decaying brains no longer function too well, they can still feel primitive emotions, exulting in violence and perhaps a few other things too - it's made as clear as it could be in 1966 that the handsome, charming, and very rich baddie would have no trouble at all finding attractive female sexual partners who were still alive, but he prefers sleeping with dead girls. It's also the first zombie film in which the the spell that makes them walk doesn't stop them going all green and smelly (though, despite what this site's synopsis claims, they don't eat people).

Leading lady Diane Clare (the great-granddaughter of Buffalo Bill Cody, by the way) is a major problem because she can't act - most of her performance would have been more appropriate in a sitcom - but Jacqueline Pearce makes excellent use of what screen time she has, and André Morell and John Carson are a fine hero/villain combo. Plus it's nice to see my uncle's old drinking buddy Michael Ripper, the ultimate obscure Hammer actor who was in just about all of them somewhere, getting more to do than usual, and being cast as someone he can play convincingly rather than in whatever random part happened to be available. And some of the zombie scenes - one in particular - must have packed a real punch half a century ago. I can imagine George Romero sitting in the cinema thinking: "Yeah, I'm definitely stealing that bit..."

Just like Universal, Hammer had an unfortunate tendency to run their monster franchises into the ground, and here we see the poor old mummy in its second Hammer outing already in trouble, because how many possible plots are there in which a dead Egyptian lumbers around killing archaeologists? Doubtless that's why Hammer's fourth and last mummy picture, "Blood From The Mummy's Tomb", took a completely different approach to the subject. This retread of the tired old tale has exactly one original element (which it would be a plot-spoiler to reveal), and that's nowhere near enough.

There's a can't-be-bothered feeling about the whole affair. The first film starred Christopher Lee as a very impressive mummy and Peter Cushing as its main antagonist, but there are no horror heavyweights in this cast of second- and third-stringers. Jeanne Roland gets the dreaded "and introducing..." credit, and sure enough, she's awful as the love-interest, though it's not entirely her fault, since although her character's nationality has no bearing whatsoever on the plot, she's given a dubbed French accent that would make Inspector Clouseau blush (she went on to have bit-parts in a couple of Bond films and hasn't acted since 1969).

Somebody plays the boring, wooden hero. Somebody else plays the mummy, squinting through a crude mask and bringing none of the pathos to the part that Christopher Lee managed to in 1959. And almost everyone else is somewhere between adequate and terrible. To be fair, Terence Morgan is quite good as the charming sophisticate who sometimes gets oddly intense when the conversation turns to mummies, but I couldn't help thinking how much better Christopher Lee would have been. I'm sure he wouldn't have objected to being in another mummy movie if this time somebody else wore the bandages, but he was probably too expensive.

Everything about this film is cheap. Apart from a few seconds of grainy stock-footage, every "outdoor" scene takes place in a rather small studio. Flashbacks to Ancient Egypt avoid showing us any buildings other than one medium-sized tent. In the first film, the mummy's indestructibility was demonstrated by bullets and even a harpoon going right through it leaving gaping holes, which it casually ignored. This time, point-blank gunfire has no effect at all, though you'll notice that in the scenes where it's shot at, the mummy has a patch of cloth on its chest which doesn't match and keeps changing shape, so I'm guessing there was supposed to be a special effect there, but it looked so crummy they had to cut it. And since every genuinely gory moment in the movie (all three of them) involves a hand being cut off, it's pretty obvious they had to use whatever was in the prop cupboard at the time, and it happened to be a rubber hand. There's even a shot where two extras pretend to be statues because they couldn't afford real ones!

Worst of all, it's tedious. Two-thirds of the movie elapse before the mummy comes to life, and nearly all of that time is devoted to people who are mostly uninteresting or downright annoying falling in love, arguing, or talking at length about the stuff we're waiting to see actually happen. And as for motivation, some of these characters behave in such a muddled and illogical manner it looks as though the writers didn't care whether the script made sense because they knew no-one else would. For real high-class Hammer mummy action, watch the 1959 film with Christopher Lee (to which this is not a sequel - it's a different mummy).