This movie feels like it belongs to no set time and space. I can freely admit that it’s not good, but also that I’m fascinated by it. If asked to describe it in ten words or less, I’d say, “Imagine if Cafe Flesh was about comedy and not good.”

It’s set in a fascist police set of the future, but shot on the sets of Freddie Francis’ The Doctor and the Devils. Nobody bothered to clean those sets, so they are covered with straw. This movie is to straw as Conquest is to fog.

Sam Coex (Steve Munroe) is a stand-up comedian who can’t get booked, so he kills — not like you kill on stage — his rival Joey Myers, buries him in his garden and takes over his career, becoming a big success. He starts sleeping with stripper named Ann all while the zombified Joey starts to haunt him An American Werewolf in London-style.

You have to wonder what the Welsh miners and doctors whose hard-earned money went to funding this thought when they saw the final result. As for its writer and director, Richard Driscoll, he was found guilty of a $2.3 million tax fraud over the invoices for his movie Eldorado, which starred Daryl Hannah, Caroline Munro, Brigitte Nielsen, Peter O’Toole, Rik Mayall, David Carradine, Jeff Fahey, Steve Guttenberg and Michael Madsen. He served three years in jail for the crime. Some would say his worst offenses would be the films that he makes, which are Bruno Mattei-esque jabs at recreating other films like Kannibal (Silence of the Lambs) and at least two movies with a title close to Grindhouse.

Man, now I have a whole new thing to be obsessed about and yet, I know in my heart that the films of Driscoll are not in any way good. Such is how it goes. Also, the lovemaking scenes in this movie disturbed me and I grew up watching the Dark Brothers films, so just imagine the things that I have seen.

Based on the play The Man in Half Moon Street, which was already made into a movie in 1945 and a TV movie 18 months before this was released, this Terrence Fisher-directed film was originally going to star Peter Cushing. However, the actor was exhausted following The Hound of the Baskervilles and stepped out six days before filming was to begin.

Hammer threatened him with legal action, but since there was no contract, there wasn’t much they could do. The lead role went to Anton Diffring, who had previously played the part of Dr. Georges Bonnet in the aforementioned TV version of the story that had appeared on the British show Hour of Mystery.

Released in the U.S. by Paramount, it played drive-ins until well into the 1960s, supporting Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors as late as 1965.

This is the story of playboy scientist and sculptor Dr. Georges Bonnet, who may look like a vibrant thirtysomething but is truly 104-years-old, staying alive through parathyroid gland transplants every decade. His personal surgeon, Professor Ludwig Weiss, can no longer operate after his stroke, so Bonnet must drink a steaming green drink to get a month of youth at a time. Now, the hunt is on to find a new surgeon to complete his vitality regimen.

The police start catching on to Bonnet, as models go missing every time he needs a transplant. Or maybe they just want to arrest him for obscenity — the European release of the film featured a scene in which Court appeared topless, which is cut from the UK and U.S. prints and has been lost — as he loves sculpting nude ladies like Janine Dubois (Hazel Court, who was my favorite character in The Masque of the Red Death, Julianna).

Of course, our antagonist soon finds himself running out of options and death starts creeping up on him, at which point he starts killing a number of models and surgeons. He also rekindles his romance with Janine, but it’s to no avail. Time comes for all men, even The Man Who Could Cheat Death.

And hey! Christopher Lee is a surgeon in this!

It’s a bit talky, but hey, Hammer is Hammer. It’s definitely a high class operation all the way and you could see how a lesser studio would make this much scummier. There’s always a veneer of class even when topless art models are having their glands harvested when this studio makes the picture.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Italian producer Pier A. Caminnecci, who was the money behind Succubus, Castle of the Creeping Flesh, Two Undercover Angels, Death on a Rainy Day and Kiss Me Monster, wanted to make a movie for his wife Pia Degermark, whose movie Elvira Madigan had been a major success. We’ve seen it before, but have we seen it as a ripoff of The Fearless Vampire Killers* with British horror director Freddie Francis, an international cast based in West Germany and the producer’s wife playing two roles, much less the producer himself in a cameo?

Decades later, as part of Italy’s Fantafestical 86, Francis would explain, “I was aware from the start of the difficulties in shooting a horror parody. I really believed that I was working with normal people in the movie industry, and thought I could have made a decent film. With time, I became aware that the producer was an imbecile who treated the project like a home movie. He wanted to do the casting, make cameos in the film, and wanted his wife as an actress. It was a disaster which I can’t say anything serious about.”

Degermark plays American actress Betty Williams and her great great grandmother Clarimonde, one of the many vampires here. She’s also nude for most of the movie, which I’m certain that came from her getting to show off for her husband. As soon as the vampiric relative rises from the dead, she sets about devouring and turning all of the young priests and nuns at the nearby monastery and girl’s school.

This is still not the strangest vampire movie Francis would direct, as just three years later, he’d make Son of Dracula. But that’s another story.

It’s not a great movie, but hey — at least it’s interesting. And quite frankly, Degermark is gorgeous. Sadly, this would be her last film and she’d divorce Caminnecci two years later. She suffered from anorexia, got into drugs and fell into a bad crowd, but then went further by being charged with stealing money from charities run by her stepmother. She lost her son to the child welfare system and went to jail for a period. Here’s hoping her life improved, as it seems like it was getting better in the last interview that I could find from her, which was conducted in 2004.

*It’s so influenced by that movie that Ferdy Mayne shows up as Fürst Christopher Dracula. Mayne also played a vampire in My Lovely Monster, Freckled Max and the Spooks and, of coure, Polanski’s comedy vampire effort. He’s literally Dracula here, showing up in his own helicopter.

Based on the novel The Disorientated Man by Peter Saxon*, this Amicus film boasts the best line-up potentially ever in a horror film. It features the iconic Christopher Lee, the legendary Peter Cushing, and the master of macabre Vincent Price, all delivering stellar performances.

The film opens with a man jogging, collapsing, and waking up in a hospital, missing his leg. He screams, and then the same scream repeats as he loses every appendage. Meanwhile, an Eastern European spy named Konratz (played by Marshall Jones, Cry of the Banshee) is on a killing spree, targeting his superiors, including Cushing. In another subplot, someone is killing young women in London, and it appears that Keith (Michael Gothard) is the murderer, a blood-drinking super-strong weirdo.

Price shows up as the sinister Dr. Browning, and it all ends up being a conspiracy movie that owes a fair deal to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. However, that movie didn’t end with much of its cast falling into acid.

According to Lee, the villains of this movie were going to be revealed as aliens, but that was cut out for some reason, leaving a lot of the movie unexplained.

This was directed by Gordon Hessler (Pray for Death; Scream, Pretty Peggy; Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad).

Team Price, Lee, and Cushing appear in only one other movie: House of the Long Shadows. They barely appear in any scenes together, though.

*A house pen name for multiple authors at Amalgamated Press; the Saxon that wrote this story is Stephen Frances, edited by W. Howard Baker.

Source

Film Still Scream and Scream Again Peter Cushing Christopher Lee 1970 – Richard Thornton Books. https://richardthorntonbooks.com/product/film-still-scream-and-scream-again-peter-cushing-christopher-lee-1970/

Author Dennis Wheatley was expelled from Dulwich College for allegedly forming a “secret society,” which is pretty awesome and hilarious. He was also gassed while serving in World War One and then went on to coordinate strategic military deception and cover plans during World War Two, during which he earned a direct commission in the JP Service as a Wing Commander and took part in the plans for the Normandy invasions. After the war, he was awarded the U.S. Bronze Star.

After his second book, The Forbidden Territory, he decided to write a book about black magic. A friend introduced him to Aleister Crowley, the Reverend Montague Summers and Rollo Ahmed, which led to The Devil Rides Out. In the years after this novel, Wheatley became known as an expert on came to be considered an expert on  the paranormal.

He was so popular for this that in the 70s, there was even The Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult, a series of books that he selected and wrote the introductions for, including books by Crowley, Bram Stoker, H. P. Blavatsky, Maurice Magre,  Isaac Bonewits and Cheiro.

This was one of Christopher Lee’s favorite movies — he’s a heroic character, which is rare for him — and would say in interviews that Wheatley was so pleased with the movie that he gave the actor a first edition of the book.

The Devil Rides Out doesn’t dance around the issue as to whether or not. the devil exists. Lee’s Duc de Richleau character — who appeared in eleven of Wheatley’s novels — doesn’t just fight occultists. He comes up against the literal Goat of Mendes called Baphomet and the Angel of Death for real.

This movie also presents Christianity as the ultimate destroyer of evil, so if you get upset by the Conjuring films and how they simplistically make the battle of heaven and hell white and black, well…this movie goes even further. Wheatley believed all of these things and even saw Communism as a force from Hell.

If you only know Charles Gray from Rocky Horror, let me tell you, he’s great in this movie. I love every single minute of this film. His character of Mocata was based on Crowley in the book, in which he was seeking to start an occult magic world war with a mummified penis called the Talisman of Set. Obviously, that is not in the film.

While Simon and Tanith were played by Patrick Mower and Nike Arrighi in the film, the roles were originally going to be given to Roddy McDowall and Linda Evans. Sadly, McDowall had to pull out at the last minute to take care of his ailing friend Louise Brooks, who was suffering from emphysema and arthritis.

Directed by Terence Fisher from a script by Ricard Matheson, I’d say this is in the top ten of Hammer’s output.