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HAMMER’S ‘DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE.’ (1968) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE. (1968) BASED ON CHARACTERS CREATED BY BRAM STOKER. DIRECTED BY FREDDIE FRANCIS. PRODUCED BY AIDA YOUNG. SCREENPLAY BY JOHN ELDER.

STARRING CHRISTOPHER LEE, RUPERT DAVIES, MARION MATHIE, GEORGE A. COOPER, MICHAEL RIPPER, BARRY ANDREWS, EWAN HOOPER, NORMAN BACON, BARBARA EWING AND VERONICA CARLSON.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a stunning addition to the Hammer Dracula canon. It’s the third in the series to feature Christopher Lee as the Count, coming after DRACULA (1958) and DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965). Christopher Lee is in excellent form as the titular Dracula, or ‘the fanged undead,’ as he’s rather pithily described in the promotional material.

Very fine form indeed, especially considering he’s supposed to have spent the last several years frozen under the icy-cold waters that flow near his castle in the mountains. Still looking very good too, just waiting for a clumsy man of the cloth to lose his footing, crack the ice, under which Dracula slumbers uneasily, with his bonce and bleed his blood on to the sleeping vampire’s lips.

The first half hour is truly magnificent and super-exciting. A little village in the Hammer-created ‘Mitt-Europe’ that Hammer do so well has had its church horribly desecrated by Dracula. The Prince of Darkness has chosen to ravish and murder a beautiful and busty young woman in its little bell-tower, leading to one of the most spectacular ‘reveals’ of a victim’s blood-drained cadaver in the studio’s history.

A visiting Monsignor, name of Ernest Mueller, responsible for all the churches in the area, is distressed to see that a shadow cast by the vampire’s castle, even though the vampire himself is supposed to be dead, is preventing the superstitious locals from attending church services. Any excuse not to go to Mass, eh?

The Monsignor decides to climb up to the castle himself, reluctantly accompanied by the parish priest who will soon be enslaved by Dracula and forced to work as his lackey, and exorcise the damned place once and for all.

Dracula, however, accidentally revived by the terrified parish priest, is more than pissed off to discover that his home has been befouled by the Monsignor and his shimmering golden cross.

He determines to seek revenge against the poor old Monsignor, for which purpose the action moves to the Monsignor’s sweet little home village of Keinenberg, a picturesque wee place surrounded by the mountains.

The Monsignor lives very comfortably indeed there with his brother’s widow, a fine figure of a woman called Anna who does everything for him except warm his bed, and her beautiful daughter Maria, the Monsignor’s niece.

A less worthy man than the Monsignor might be tempted to take advantage and enjoy a little mother-daughter action, but the Monsignor’s motives are as pure as the driven snow. Even while his buxom sister-in-law is kneeling at his feet putting on his slippers when he arrives home after a hard day’s exorcising, not once, seemingly, does he feel the urge to say: ‘Um, while you’re down there, Anna…!’

Played by Hammer’s latest discovery of the time, the ravishing blonde-haired Veronica Carlson, Maria first bounces charmingly on to the screen dressed in a gorgeous dusky pink dress complete with Little Red Riding Hood cloak.

She’s looking for her boyfriend Paul, a college student, so she can bring him to dinner to meet her mother and uncle, the Monsignor. And where else would she look for him but in Max’s public-house, where he pulls pints and is training to be a pastry chef under the not-so-watchful eye of the endlessly good-humoured Max?

Max is played by Hammer stalwart Michael Ripper, who surely, more than anyone else living or dead, was born to pull pints in a Hammer-created ‘Mitt-European’ alehouse, Gawd bless ‘is little ‘eart.

The getting-to-know-you dinner at the Monsignor’s house goes tits-up, and Paul is ordered out of the house on the grounds that he has the audacity to admit to his girlfriend’s uncle that he’s an atheist, goddammit, but never mind all that for now.

The Monsignor and his family have bigger problems than the curly-headed, happy-go-lucky Paul, who actively encourages his goody-two-shoes girlfriend to visit him at night via the surprisingly dizzy rooftops of Keinenberg, if you can believe that. No true gentleman would ever permit his girlfriend to do such a dangerous thing, especially when she’s lacking in, shall we say, a little blood…? What an ungallant cad he is.

Anyway, Dracula has found the perfect way to get back at the Monsignor, and that’s through his lovely niece Maria. Maria’s seduction by the Count is not as knee-tremblingly sexy as Melissa Stribling’s in the 1958 DRACULA, but it’s a nice little scene nonetheless.

It involves open bedroom windows, pleasant terraces overlooking the mountains and another mesmerised woman walking hesitantly backwards towards her bed, while gazing up the whole time into red bloodshot eyes, like a rabbit fascinated by the snake that’s poised to pounce on it.

Dracula’s other girlfriend here, Max’s busty brunette barmaid Zena, has a bit more chutzpah and oomph, if you get me, than the rather prissy Maria, but Dracula treats poor Zena appallingly. Which only makes women like me fancy him all the more, heh-heh-heh. Women in these Dracula films are here for two reasons only, to be used and abused, and to damn well be the eye candy while they’re doing it, lol. Ah well, it’s nice, at least, to know where you stand.

Poor Maria gets dragged from pillar to post as well by the Count, in her bare feet and white nightie to boot, but at least Dracula doesn’t try to bury her alive like he does Melissa Stribling in the 1958 film.

It’s up to Paul, the not-very-swotty college student and would-be pastry chef, to save not only Maria from the evil clutches of Dracula, but the village of Keinenberg as well. Is the curly-headed one up to the task…?

In this film, a neat little addition to the folklore surrounding the fanged undead is included, in the form of a caveat that decrees that you can’t just stake Dracula through the heart and he’ll obligingly die. You’ve got to mumble Latin words from the Bible over him as well, or he won’t croak. Now I wonder where on God’s green earth we can find a padre to do the necessary at this hour of the night…?

I love the scene where Zena is being chased through the forest at night, by the mysterious black coach with the four black horses with the black plumes on their heads. Such a fearsome carriage could only belong to one man. The poor horses seem to get whipped a lot by the Count in this film, but I’m fairly certain that it’s only pretend-whipping, lol. I love George A. Cooper as the landlord of the tavern in the village with the cursed church, by the way. He’s a terrific actor.

This is a gorgeous-looking film. The forty-six-year-old Christopher Lee is still very much engaged in the series, and it really shows. (He was at his sexiest in his forties and fifties, and even his sixties, if you ask me.) Some people say that he zoned out a bit towards the end but I don’t know. Down in the murky, leaky basement of Max’s tavern (it’s a good job that Max never seems to go down there!), the centre of operations where his black coffin rests imposingly on blocks of wood, he’s very much the master of all he surveys.

He’s magnificent here as the Count, and his two chosen concubines, Zena and Maria, are très easy on the eye as well. Michael Ripper is behind the bar in the tavern, dispensing homespun wisdom along with the ale and sausage rolls and meat pies. God’s in his heaven, and all’s well with the world of Hammer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

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CAPTAIN CLEGG. (1962) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

CAPTAIN CLEGG. (1962) A HAMMER FILM PRODUCTION. DIRECTED BY PETER GRAHAM SCOTT. PRODUCED BY JOHN TEMPLE SMITH. SCREENPLAY BY JOHN ELDER (AKA ANTHONY HINDS).

STARRING PETER CUSHING, MICHAEL RIPPER, PATRICK ALLEN, MARTIN BENSON, DAPHNE ANDERSON, MILTON REID, SYDNEY BROMLEY, JACK MACGOWRAN, DEREK FRANCIS, OLIVER REED AND YVONNE ROMAIN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Their oath was… Terror! Their cry… Blood!’

This isn’t one of my favourite Hammer movies, as I tend to prefer the ones with Christopher Lee as Dracula in them, heh-heh-heh, or beautiful lesbian lady vampires bursting at the seams with bounteous bosoms, but it’s still a most enjoyable swashbuckling romp.

Patrick Allen stars as Captain Collier, the leader of his little band of rowdy sailors or ‘King’s men.’ They come to the picturesque little English coastal village of Dymchurch in the late 1700s to investigate various rumours that have been circulating about the place.

Firstly, that a marauding band of ‘Marsh Phantoms’ have been seen riding out and terrorising the countryside by night and secondly, the slightly more Earth-bound rumour that illegal smuggling activities have been taking place there. What Captain Collier finds at Dymchurch, situated on the edge of the Romney Marshes, looks like this.

He finds Peter Cushing in splendiferous form as the aptly-named Dr. Blyss, a happy chappie who occupies the role of village Parson and who delights in delivering lengthy sermons to his long-suffering parishioners. Dr. Blyss thinks nothing of making these lazy parishioners sing the various hymns again if he feels that they were lacking in gusto first time round, lol. The sadist…!

The Parson passive-aggressively makes it known to the King’s men, in the sweetest way possible, that there is no room at the Inn for the sailors. And of course the villagers have every reason not to want the King’s investigators sniffing around the darling little village of Dymchurch, because they’re up to their very tonsils in the aforementioned illegal smuggling activities.

They’re running quite a nice profitable little bootlegging operation out of Dymchurch, keeping their illicit booze from France in coffins supplied by Michael Ripper as Mr. Mipps, the local undertaker.

Dear me, most ingenious, most ingenious indeed. The Parson is in on it, the surly local inkeeper Mr. Rash is in on it, the local Squire Cobtree’s son Harry (Oliver Reed) is in on it, the whole damn village is in on it.

Captain Collier will have the devil’s own time proving it, however, especially as a local scarecrow has been conscripted into keeping watch for the smugglers and sightings of the ‘Marsh Phantoms’ are keeping Collier and his drunken sailors busy running round the countryside in the middle of the night on wild goose chases.

There’s a romance underway in Dymchurch as well, between Squire Cobtree’s handsome, dark-haired womanising son Harry and the local barmaid Imogene. I don’t believe for one second that Harry has the remotest intention of making an honest woman out of Imogene like he’s promised her.

He’s coming up with the lamest-sounding excuses for putting off their nuptials and intended running-away-from-the-village-to-start-a-new-life-together-where-nobody-knows-them. Does his constant delaying of their plans have anything to do with Imogene’s mystery-shrouded origins?

Imogene, the ward of the disagreeable Mr. Rash, who’s simply ‘itching’ to get his hands on her splendidly ample goodies (geddit? Itching? Rash?), does not seem to be correctly informed as to her parentage. And who is the almost mythical figure whose mouldering bones have supposedly been taking up space in the quiet little village churchyard for some time now? Since around 1792, to be precise?

Could these bones be a clue to the busty Imogene’s identity…? And why does the man known as ‘the mulatto’ react so violently when he sees a certain man of the cloth? The village of Dymchurch is certainly awash with mysteries.

The increasingly exasperated Captain Collier will have his work cut out for him attempting to solve them, especially as the cunning villagers are determined to put obstacles in his path whichever way he turns.

I personally would have put a few more bosomy beauties and a few more sexy rolls-in- the-hay into this production, but that’s just me. As usual, the scenery and settings and costumes are spot-on and Peter Cushing is magnificent as the pleasantly-spoken bootlegging Parson, with a hidden agenda he doesn’t wish to come to light.

It reminds me of the Prohibition episode of THE SIMPSONS, where booze has been banned in the town of Springfield because ten-year-old Bart Simpson gets drunk on Saint Patrick’s Day and shames his family on national television.

Homer Simpson duly becomes the ‘Beer Baron’ or the person responsible for ‘jerking suds on the side.’ He manufactures the hooch down in his basement and smuggles it into Moe’s Bar via the use of bowling balls. Dear me, most ingenious, most ingenious indeed…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

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HAMMER’S FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974) AND MEETING CHRISTOPHER FRAYLING AT THE HORRORTHON: BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL. (1974) BASED ON CHARACTERS CREATED BY MARY SHELLEY. WRITTEN BY JOHN ELDER. MUSIC BY JAMES BERNARD. DIRECTED BY TERENCE FISHER. PRODUCED BY ROY SKEGGS.

STARRING PETER CUSHING, SHANE BRIANT, MADELINE SMITH, DAVID PROWSE, JOHN STRATTON AND PATRICK TROUGHTON.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘His brain came from a genius. His body came from a killer. His soul came from Hell…!’

Yesterday was my favourite day of the year so far. I turned my back for one day only on my hermit-like writerly existence and mosied on down to the Irish Film Institute on Eustace Street, which was holding its annual Horrorthon, or five days of non-stop horror movies.

Esteemed film historian Sir Christopher Frayling gave a superb ninety-minute talk on FRANKENSTEIN: THE FIRST 200 YEARS, all the material for which can be found in his latest book, a gorgeous and sumptuous hardback of the same name. He signed my copy for me after the talk, and guess what he wrote in it under his signature? He wrote… ‘IT’S ALIVE…!’ Methinks it wasn’t his first book-signing, lol.

Anyway, he talked to us about the life of Mary Shelley, concentrating on that fateful summer in the Villa Diodati in which her famous gothic horror novel was written. He talked about how it wasn’t an overnight success but rather, a slow burner that only went viral, so to speak, when plays of it began to be produced a few years later. He had the most stunning-looking slides prepared for us as well, all of which can be found in his book.

He went on to talk about all the film versions of FRANKENSTEIN that have appeared over the years, and he confided in us that THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN is his personal favourite of all the Frankie films. Snap! My favourite movie scene of all time is when the deliciously evil Dr. Pretorius is dining off a tomb in the crypt. Frankie’s Monster comes up behind him and he literally doesn’t turn a hair. ‘Oh…!’ he smirks in his cut-glass English. ‘I thought I was quite alone…!’

A screening of Hammer’s FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL followed Sir Chris’s talk. This is a really dark addition to Hammer’s FRANKENSTEIN canon, the sort of film where you’re constantly asking yourself how the hell did they manage to slip this or that past the ever-vigilant censors, who were always on poor Hammer’s case, lol. That nightdress better not be see-through or you’ll never eat lunch in this town again type of thing.

Shane Briant (Hammer’s FEAR IN THE NIGHT, DEMONS OF THE MIND) is a blonde Adonis who surely was born to wear a frilly white shirt and black frock-coat. He plays Simon Helder, a posh, sardonic, arrogant, privileged young doctor with the deeply inbred sense of entitlement that can surely only come from being an upper-class twat with an Oxbridge education, lol.

He’s arrested for ‘sorcery,’ as in he’s been avidly studying the life’s work of one Baron Frankenstein and trying to create life out of the body parts of cadavers. ‘You’re gonna get caught one day!’ Patrick Troughton’s grave-digger-upper ominously warns him. And he does. Get caught, I mean.

The judge is not at all impressed with Helder’s uppity demeanour. He sentences him to a good long stint in the local insane asylum for his trouble, a fate which even the constable who delivers Helder to the loony bin pities him for. ‘Rather you than me, son,’ he says, and ‘Good luck, son…!’ Cor blimey. If even the delivering copper is pitying you, you know you’re in for a bumpy ride…

And he most assuredly would be in for a rough ride (if the ‘bath’ with which he’s initiated into the horrors of the Asylum is anything to go by) if it were not for one salient fact. Peter Cushing’s fellow Asylum inmate Baron Frankenstein is the real power behind the nasty, blustering Asylum Director…

Calling himself merely Dr. Carl Victor now and firmly maintaining that Baron Frankenstein is dead and buried in the Asylum graveyard, he’s overseeing the care of all the Asylum patients while keeping a few ‘special’ patients back for himself only. And, of course, he’s been continuing on the sly with his experiments to create new life out of old, stitched-together body parts…

Simon Helder is thrilled skinny to meet the Baron, his idol, and be given the job of his assistant. Dr. Victor, as he’s now known, is delighted to have for his helper such a qualified and knowledgeable groupie, a doctor in his own right.

Helder feels like he’s been given the keys to the kingdom when he’s even introduced to Dr. Victor’s ‘special’ patients. What must he feel like, then, when one night he accidentally stumbles upon the good Doctor’s real secret, the truly monstrous-looking ‘creation’ he’s cobbled together from the parts of cadavers from the Asylum’s various tombs…? He’s both thrilled and, I think, appalled…

Still, he quickly offers to help the Baron to continue with his researches and the eternal search to give the Monster real, thinking life. The Monster is a true abomination, unlike, say, Boris Karloff’s Creature which we still recognise clearly as a man.

This Monster is not a man, or even remotely human-looking. It’s hairy, lumbering and utterly hideous. It’s the saddest, most pathetic thing you could possibly imagine. The kindest thing you could do for it would be to put it out of its misery. Put an end to its terrible suffering.

And yet Peter Cushing’s Baron is as proud of it as any parent on School Prize-giving Night. Can any good really come from the two doctors continuing to try to improve on this dreadful ‘thing’ by adding sundry bits and pieces from yet more cadavers to its monstrous frame? The bit where they’re opening up a corpse’s skull and taking out a brain to transplant into the Monster’s head is one of those bits I’m shocked got past the censors.

Madeline Smith (THE VAMPIRE LOVERS with Ingrid Pitt) is a true thing of beauty here as Sarah, the deaf-mute Asylum inmate who, until the arrival of Goldilocks Helder, has been performing the Baron’s secret surgeries for him because the Baron’s hands are all burned and useless now. This bit’s a bit far-fetched but whatever. The Asylum inmates call Sarah ‘the Angel’ and certainly she’s visually an improvement on the hideous Monster, lol.

This was legendary horror director Terence Fisher’s last film and the last outing, I believe, for Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein. He’s looking tired here, a far cry from the fresh-faced young fella who first played the immaculately-turned-out Baron for Hammer in 1957 with his role in the iconic THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. He’s still magnificent here though, and he still gives it his absolute all.

Apparently, he didn’t much care for the somewhat curly-wurly wig he was made to sport in FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL. Hee-hee-hee. I think it looks nice on him. And he goes out on a nice little question mark too, as in, is the Baron actually planning to put himself and his minions through all this horror again…? Well, you know the Baron’s motto, guys. If at first you don’t succeed…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

You can contact Sandra at:

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NIGHTMARE. (1964) A VINTAGE HAMMER HORROR REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

NIGHTMARE. (1964) DIRECTED BY FREDDIE FRANCIS. WRITTEN AND PRODUCED BY JIMMY SANGSTER. STARRING JENNIE LINDEN, MOIRA REDMOND, CLYTIE JESSOP, BRENDA BRUCE, GEORGE A. COOPER, IRENE RICHMOND AND DAVID KNIGHT.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a terrific old vintage Hammer Horror that’s similar in theme to another of their films, TASTE OF FEAR (1961), in that it deals with a woman who is a victim of the phenomenon known as ‘gaslighting.’

The term derives from the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play GASLIGHT and the two subsequent film adaptations of the play in 1940 and 1944. The 1944 film starred Ingrid Bergman and was a huge hit.

The term ‘gaslighting’ means to make another person doubt their own sanity or perceptions of reality by, basically, playing tricks on them and causing them to think that they’re losing their mind. It’s a nasty, despicable thing to do and is nearly always carried out for nefarious reasons and not for good ones.

Women are usually the victims and men the perpetrators, certainly in films anyway. I suppose you could ‘gaslight’ a man but it would just be harder, naturally, in view of their being made of sterner stuff than we hysterical, weak-minded females, who are so vulnerable and impressionable compared to our male overlords. Hahaha…

Anyway, NIGHTMARE is a gorgeously gothic and atmospheric black-and-white horror film in which a young woman at boarding/finishing school, Janet, is haunted by the shadowy memories of something that happened to her in her past.

Janet saw her mother stab her father to death when she was only eleven years old. The mother was declared insane and locked up in an asylum for life. Janet not only has the nightmares about the stabbing to contend with, but she’s also plagued with the most terrible fears that she’s going to end up like her mother, that she’ll inherit her mother’s insanity and end up going out of her mind and being incarcerated for life just like her Mum. They do say that these things run in the family, don’t they?

A nervous, impressionable young girl like Janet, with all her doubts and fears and issues regarding her traumatic past, would be a prime candidate for a spot of gaslighting. After a particularly severe bout of nightmares, Janet is sent home from school and back to High Towers, her old home, where she is now under the care of a man called Henry Baxter. Quite how he became her guardian after the death of her father and the incarceration of her mother I’m not exactly sure, but her guardian he indisputably is and he decides what’s good for her.

Accompanied by her teacher, Miss Lewis, Janet returns to High Towers to be greeted by the housekeeper, Mrs. Gibbs, and the chauffeur-cum-gardener-cum-handyman John, played by the wonderful character actor George A. Cooper. These two are old family retainers and are faithful friends to Janet and staunch defenders of hers as well. They give her all their loyalty, which is lovely to see.

There’s a new member of staff at High Towers now too though, an attractive nurse called Grace Maddox whom Henry Baxter has hired to be Janet’s ‘companion.’ Once she’s installed back home, however, Janet’s nightmares only seem to worsen.

Now she’s seeing a white-shrouded woman with a hideously scarred face roaming around the house wherever she looks. Janet feels like she’s going crazy with fear and doubt. These visions culminate in a horrible, unforeseen murder at High Towers. Who is the murder victim?

And who is the real victim here, the victim of a cruelly sadistic gaslighting campaign that causes a young woman to be locked up in an insane asylum and two vicious murderers to crawl out from under their stones for a brief period of basking in their mutual cleverness?

Of course, the evildoers in films nearly always get their richly-deserved come-uppances, as you know, and NIGHTMARE is no exception to this rule. I won’t tell you what happens but the ending is brilliantly worked out.

Those ingenious Hammer lads, Freddie Francis and Jimmy Sangster, have done it again. NIGHTMARE is well worth your time, and it’s vintage Hammer gold as well. Make sure you watch it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

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FEAR IN THE NIGHT. (1972) DIRECTED, PRODUCED AND CO-WRITTEN BY JIMMY SANGSTER. STARRING RALPH BATES, JUDY GEESON, JOAN COLLINS, JAMES COSSINS AND PETER CUSHING.

STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING. (1972) DIRECTED BY PETER COLLINSON. PRODUCED BY MICHAEL CARRERAS. STARRING RITA TUSHINGHAM, SHANE BRIANT, JAMES BOLAM AND KATYA WYETH.

‘Second star to the right, straight on till morning…’

I love, love, LOVE these two films, which I recently watched back-to-back courtesy of my lovely new twenty-one film Hammer Horror boxset. Yes, I know that I’m late to this party but I’ve always liked to make a spectacular entrance, lol.

It’s both ironic and apt that I should have chosen these two horror movies to go together. I hadn’t a clue when so doing that they’d been released together as a double bill back in the day, a double bill I would have adored to see on the big screen. The theme of both films revolves around female hysteria and mental fragility so they do actually sit really well together.

As it is, I was nearly incoherent with excitement at having brilliant new Hammer films to watch. New to me, that is. And at first I thought that FEAR IN THE NIGHT couldn’t be topped, so fantastic was it. Until I saw STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING, that is…

FEAR IN THE NIGHT sees the darkly attractive Ralph Bates (THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA) playing a school-teacher called Robert Heller, who has just married a woman he’s known for only a few weeks. Nothing like a whirlwind courtship, eh?

Peggy, who works as a carer to an elderly woman before her marriage to Robert, is blonde, pretty but possibly a bit dim. She also has some unresolved mental issues. Robert must really love her to have taken her on as his wife, with all her mental and emotional baggage, eh…?

The night before Peggy is to leave her job and go to live with Robert, she is attacked in her flat by a seemingly one-armed man dressed in black. This isn’t a good omen, surely.

The police aren’t called because the doctor and Peggy’s elderly charge both agree that poor Peggy’s been under a lot of strain lately. That’s tantamount to saying that she’s imagining things, isn’t it…? Not terribly complimentary, anyway.

The newly-weds are going to live in a nice chalet or lodge-house on the grounds of the posh boys’ boarding-school where Robert works. Term hasn’t started yet and the school is empty of snobby little schoolboys when Peggy takes a tentative look around it by herself.

Well, she’s not quite by herself. She bumps into Michael Carmichael, the school’s headmaster, played by Hammer royalty Peter Cushing. He unnerves her by asking her to let down her pretty blonde hair, an intimate request that it would be more appropriate for a husband to make than a complete stranger, surely. Peggy is glad to get away from him.

If Michael Carmichael has unnerved her, then his wife Molly, played by a young-looking and glamorous Joan Collins, sets her teeth on edge with her patronising, bitchy and rather bossy treatment of Peggy.

Well, she is a headmaster’s wife after all and probably used to bossing people around, but this headmaster’s wife is a glossy, brittle super-bitch whose artificial veneer of hospitality doesn’t fool Peggy. Which is funny, because Peggy, as we see later, is exceptionally easy to fool. She’s malleable, pliable, vulnerable, impressionable and a prime target for ‘gaslighting…’

To her absolute horror, Peggy soon discovers that her one-armed attacker has followed her here to her safe little country abode. Robert has serious fears for her mental state.

Is Peggy crazy, or is there something nasty and sinister going on in this supposedly empty boarding- school? Is the school really as empty as we’re meant to believe? These are questions to which we’ll need answers before the curtain comes down on the final act…

All the four leads are excellent but I also loved the inclusion of James Cossins here as the doctor who looks Peggy over after the first attack by the, um, one-armed bandit, lol. He co-starred in THE ANNIVERSARY as one of Bette Davis’s messed-up sons, the cross-dressing one, and he’s given memorable performances also in SOME MOTHERS DO ‘AVE ‘EM and FAWLTY TOWERS.

In SOME MOTHERS DO ‘AVE ‘EM, he plays a man giving a course on Public Relations. All good so far, except that one of his pupils is the socially inept and accident-prone Frank Spencer. Suffice it to say that he’ll need time off after he’s given his course to have his Frank-induced nervous breakdown.

In FAWLTY TOWERS, Mister Cossins plays the man who sells outboard motors for a living but whom Basil has mistaken for the dreaded Hotel Inspector. ‘The wine has reacted with the cork and gone bad.’ The relief felt by Basil when he realises that he’s got the wrong man- yet again- is positively palpable. James Cossins is excellent at playing that type of well-spoken posh bloke.

STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING, its title taken from childrens’ fairytale PETER PAN by J.M Barrie, blew me away completely. Rita Tushingham plays Brenda, a young woman who writes fairy stories for fun and whose head is permanently in the clouds. She could even have mental problems or be delusional. She’s not quite the full shilling by a long stretch.

Her behaviour at the start of the film is bizarre. Though she’s not pregnant, she tells her Mum that she is and that she’s off to London to find a father for her baby. Cuckoo…! She gets a job in a boutique and moves into a flat-share with one of her co-workers, the beautiful party-girl Caroline, and even goes to her first party, dressed of course like Ma Ingalls, lol.

A small dog is the means by which she meets and moves in with Peter, a stunningly good-looking, languid blonde hippy-ish type who lives in a fancy apartment and swans about doing nothing all day, or so it seems.

He’s seemingly independently wealthy and doesn’t need to work. At least, he’s got a drawer full of cash and he won’t say where it comes from, which is odd and even a little suspicious. It’s hard to imagine him working at anything, anyway. He’s just too damned languid…!

They’re an unlikely pairing, but Peter sees something in the Plain-Jane Brenda that strikes a chord within him. She’s not beautiful like he is but for some reason he’s okay with this. This is what he wants from a woman right now. He re-christens her ‘Wendy’ to his Peter (as in Peter Pan) and they sit around telling each other fairy stories. Ever so languidly, of course.

One of Peter’s stories, in particular, should make the dozey Brenda want to run for the hills but Brenda believes she’s finally found a man she can have her longed-for baby with. Astonishingly, Peter says he’s agreeable to fathering this kiddie but Peter is as mad as a box of frogs.

There’s no two ways about it. He’s damaged goods and his grip on reality is tenuous to say the least. It’s even more fragile than Brenda’s, and she’s a fruit-loop. What has happened to the divinely attractive Peter to send him off his rocker like that? The key is in the story he tells, the one that Brenda fails to interpret correctly.

How can one broken, mentally unsound person cure another? They can’t, of course. The pair can only enable each other to fulfil the worst of their potential until irreparable damage has been done. Peter and Brenda are on a collision course to disaster. Will anyone be left standing after the crash…?

Both these films kept me gripped right till the end, especially STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING. The friend with whom I watched both films said that she didn’t know that Hammer made horror movies that weren’t about Dracula, the Mummy or Frankenstein’s Monster and she kept expecting Christopher Lee to pop in, fangs and cape and all. Well, anyone who knows me knows that I’d be all in favour of that, lol.

Anyway, we both absolutely loved these tense, taut and infinitely atmospheric psychological horrors. Perfect specimens from the Hammer vault of terror and suspense. Marvellous viewing for whenever you feel the need for the icy-cold, clammy fingers of Death on your shoulder…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

You can contact Sandra at:

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com