THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. (1964) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. (1964) DIRECTED AND CO-PRODUCED BY ROGER CORMAN. DISTRIBUTED BY AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES. BASED ON TWO SHORT STORIES BY EDGAR ALLAN POE: THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, AND HOP-FROG. CINEMATOGRAPHY BY NICOLAS ROEG OF ‘DON’T LOOK NOW’ FAME.
STARRING VINCENT PRICE, HAZEL COURT, PATRICK MAGEE, JANE ASHER, DAVID WESTON, NIGEL GREEN AND JOHN WESTBROOK.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is an excellent addition to Roger Corman’s body of work based on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Some people back in the day considered it a bit too ‘arty,’ and Corman himself admits that it is quite arty, but it’s artistic in a gorgeously-coloured, lush way, the way all Corman’s Poe adaptations are equally fabulous to look at.

Vincent Price as the evil Prince Prospero is probably wickeder than he’s ever been before, except maybe as the Witchfinder General in the film of the same name. He’s a really mean customer, that Matthew Hopkins. Prince Prospero gives him a good old run for his money, though.

Prince Prospero is the ruler of a mediaeval village back in the time of the plague and the Black Death, terrible or non-existent sanitation and general all-round misery and privations for those who weren’t princes, basically. It’s the period of history I’d least like to go back to, if I had a time machine. All those boils and weeping open sores and poop flowing unchecked down the streets and what have you, eeuw…

Prospero, a jaded Satanist, lives in his fancy castle above the village and spends his time amusing himself with the debauched antics of his equally jaded courtiers. It’s not a very useful or productive existence, living just to sate oneself with gluttonous feasting, degrading and deviant sexual practises and other kinky perversions. Oooh-er. Crikey, where do I sign up…?

Prospero abducts a beautiful, innocent young girl called Francesca from the village and is thrilled with the thought of initiating her into the evil mysteries of his devil-worshipping ways. He also throws her boyfriend Gino and her father Ludovico (played by hunky character actor Nigel Greene) into his dungeons, where people are tortured and ill-treated for no other reason than Prospero’s pleasure.

Juliana, Prospero’s conniving and very jealous mistress, is tasked with having the ravishing and pure-minded Francesca cleaned up and instructed in the ways of the court. Prior to Francesca’s arrival on the scene, Juliana has been hesitating about taking the last few steps that will turn her into a true Bride of Satan and Prospero’s wife and partner in crime and evil for all eternity, but now that she has competition for the Prince’s heart in the form of this red-headed, naive beauty from the village, she decides she’s ready to take those steps. On her own pretty little head be it, I say…

In the meantime, the plague known as the Red Death- in the film, the Red Death is represented by an actual person- has come to the village. Prospero delights in battening down the castle hatches and leaving the villagers to their terrible fate, and amuses himself with planning a fabulous masked ball, at which no-one will be allowed to wear red.

At the ball, Prospero’s evil sidekick Alfredo experiences a fiery come-uppance at the hands of Hop-Toad, the court jester. Also, a mysterious cloaked figure in red turns up at the ball, despite Prospero’s strict instructions to the contrary. No-one is to wear red at this shindig, remember?

Intrigued and slightly uneasy, Prince Prospero follows the figure in red, with Francesca by his side, through the coloured rooms of his castle. He thinks the fellow might be an emissary of Satan’s, here to give him his reward for all the years of faithful wrong-doing. I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to catch up with the hooded guy in red if I were him…

The cloaked figures in different colours have always given me chills a little bit. Imagine if the world really was ruled by such supernatural beings with almighty powers, and the future of mankind could be read in the cards like it is in the film. To them, we mortals would be no more than chess pieces on a board. Fair give you the willies, it would.

The danse macabre at the close of the film is a magnificently grim ballet, and Vincent Price seems like he’s loving every second of it. He really throws himself into it, and pirouettes in deadly desperation with the best of them. Great film, great acting, great sets and costumes. Ten out of ten for THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. Poe would be proud.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s 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:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1781994234

BLESS THE CHILD. (2000) FILM REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

BLESS THE CHILD. 2000. BASED ON THE 1993 BOOK BY CATHY CASH SPELLMAN. DIRECTED BY CHUCK RUSSELL.

STARRING KIM BASINGER, RUFUS SEWELL, JIMMY SMITS, IAN HOLM, ANGELA BETTIS AND CHRISTINA RICCI.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a pretty poor film. I was personally disappointed when I realised that it wasn’t a film about an evil child, like in THE OMEN or THE EXORCIST, but a good child. A super-good child, in fact. A child so good that for centuries the forces of evil have been waiting to get their grubby mitts on her. I would have much preferred an evil child but, even aside from that, it was still a poor film.

Kim Basinger, whom I’ve always felt was just a trifle bland, or blank even, as an actress, plays Maggie O’Connor, a psychiatric nurse at a busy New York hospital. One day out of the blue, Maggie’s younger, not-so-together sister Jenna, whom she hasn’t seen for years, turns up on her doorstep clutching her newborn baby, the niece that Maggie never even knew she had. Jenna disappears again the same day, leaving a shocked Maggie literally holding the baby…

The child, a little girl called Cody, grows up autistic. Her Aunt Maggie dotes on her and gives her the best of everything. She’s not happy, therefore, when six or so years later Jenna turns up unannounced once more.

This time, she has a new husband in tow, the revoltingly smarmy Eric Stark. Eric belongs to a cult called New Dawn. He knows that Cody is a very special child. She has powers that Eric and his chums want to exploit, but not for good. For evil…

The second half of the film basically sees Kim Basinger running around like a headless chicken, trying to get Cody back from the mad culties who’ve kidnapped her so they can use her in their quest for world domination. She enlists the aid of Jimmy Smits’s FBI specialist in occult-related crimes to back her up when the final, inevitable showdown between good and evil occurs.

I don’t like to get personal, but I kind of feel the same way about Jimmy Smits as I do about Kim Basinger. Bland, bland, bland. Is there anything going on behind the bland good looks…? Who knows…?

The ending is disappointing, as are the practically non-existent special effects. A clash between Satan’s minions and God’s army has the potential to be utterly spectacular. Sadly, this is not the case with BLESS THE CHILD. There are contributions by Bilbo Baggins and Wednesday Addams, aka Ian Holm and Christina Ricci, but they’re only worth mentioning in passing.

I really hate being this negative about a horror film but I just felt so let-down by this one. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t watch it, though. You never know, you might see something in it that I don’t. Unlikely, haha, but it’s a free country after all and y’all can do what y’all wants to do…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. 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, women’s 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: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT. (1973) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT. (1973) DIRECTED BY PETER SASDY. PRODUCED BY ANTHONY NELSON KEYS. SCREENPLAY BY BRIAN HAYLES. STARRING CHRISTOPHER LEE, PETER CUSHING, DIANA DORS, GEORGIA BROWN, GWYNETH STRONG AND KEITH BARRON.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is an odd little curiosity of a film which I was thrilled to discover recently on DVD. It stars two of Britain’s most iconic horror stars, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, as well as the ravishing Diana Dors, one of that country’s most beautiful actresses ever.

I would have given the film a different title, as I’m not sure exactly what ‘Nothing But The Night’ refers to and it sounds a bit wishy-washy. Maybe it’s part of a quotation or something. Even something like ‘Island Of Terror’ or ‘Island Of Horror’ might have been a slight improvement. Weak as both suggested alternatives undoubtedly are, at least you’d know from the off what kind of film you were dealing with.

It starts off with a group of annoying schoolchildren on a bus. Was it their screechy rendition of ‘Ten Green Bottles Standing On A Wall’ that caused the bus driver to crash the bus and kill himself? Whatever it was, the bus driver is dead and the lead child, a girl called Mary, is hospitalised.

A doctor called Peter Haynes decides that she’s suffering from repressed trauma because she has repeated nightmares about fire. He enlists Peter Cushing, as his supervisor and the head pathologist of the hospital Dr. Mark Ashley, to help him get to the bottom of it. What can a pathologist do to help? Well, if Mary dies in a fire, I suppose he can perform the autopsy, lol.

Christopher Lee as a retired copper called Colonel Bingham then asks his friend Mark Ashley- yes, our pathologist- for help as well, because a good chum of his has died and Colonel Bingham suspects foul play. The chum who died was a Trustee of the Van Traylen Foundation, a foundation which runs an orphanage in Scotland, and three Trustees in all are dead by now in mysterious circumstances. That’s well suspicious, obviously.

By an incredible coincidence, Mary Valley, the fire girl (played by Gwyneth Strong, aka Rodney’s bird from ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES), is one of the Trustees’ orphans. Also, there were three more Trustees aboard the bus that crashed. Curiouser and curiouser, as they say.

Dr. Haynes is convinced that there’s more to Mary’s case than meets the eye. He gets involved with a sexy, supercilious reporter lady called Joan Foster, who thinks she knows it all and who is trying to re-unite Mary with her birth mother Anna Harb, and therein hangs an interesting tale. Could there be a story in it for Joan?

Played by Diana Dors in a messy red wig, Anna Harb is portrayed as a crude, common-as-muck ex-prostitute who spent ten years in Broadmoor and had Mary taken away from her for working as a prostitute while the child was in her care. That seems unfair, as clearly Anna Harb was only doing it so that she and Mary could eat, but whatever. The state (in most countries) has always been unfair to women.

Now Anna wants her child back but the Trustees are determined that this won’t happen. They whisk Mary from the hospital off to the island on which their orphanage is situated, leaving poor distraught Anna Harb with no choice but to follow her daughter to the island in secret.

Sir Mark and Colonel Bingham head to the island also, to investigate the deaths (suicides or murders?) of the three former Trustees. They are accompanied by Inspector Cameron, well played by Fulton Mackay (one of the stars of the sitcom PORRIDGE) with his brilliant Scottish accent.

What they discover on this isolated island would put you in mind of poor old Sergeant Neil Howie coming to Summerisle to investigate what he thinks is the case of a missing child in the 1973 mystery film THE WICKER MAN. What he discovers there is the stuff of nightmares, and Christopher Lee as the arrogant and aristocratic Lord Summerisle is the puppet-master expertly pulling the strings behind the nightmare.

Now the boot is on the other foot for Christopher Lee. Here, as the terribly English and upper-crust ex-copper Colonel Bingham, he experiences first-hand the terrors that the island holds for strangers and outsiders such as himself, while his chum Sir Mark unravels scientifically the exact truth behind what has been happening here on the mysterious island.

There’s at least one very gruesome death in the film, as well as a rather spectacular end scene involving Christopher Lee which, without giving anything away, made me want to yell at the screen: ‘Come on Chris, you’re Dracula, you’re Saruman, kick their asses! Knock ’em down! Flatten the little bastards! Are you gonna let them tread all over you like that?’ It felt rather demeaning to see him lying in the mud like that, but he was clearly overpowered, lol.

He looks so handsome too in his lovely hound’s-tooth jacket and beige overcoat (probably both his own), with that furry caterpillar of a moustache clamped to his upper lip for dear life. I prefer him without the moustache but it does make him look even more distinguished than usual. He’s more than manly enough to carry it off.

Peter Cushing looks and sounds immaculate here, as always, and the two leading men are so natural and easy with each other that it’s not at all hard to picture them being friends with each other in real life, two good mates who worked together and genuinely liked and respected each other. God bless ’em both. They were magnificent. Hope they’re resting in peace together now, the pair of ’em.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. 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:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

THE HEARSE. (1980) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE HEARSE. (1980) DIRECTED BY GEORGE BOWERS. STARRING TRISH VAN DEVERE, DAVID GAUTREAUX, MED FLORY, DONALD HOTTON, PERRY LANG AND JOSEPH COTTEN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Trish Van Devere, who this very same year co-starred alongside her real-life husband George C. Scott in the classic ghost story THE CHANGELING, has the lead role in this spooky shocker.

She plays Jane Hardie, an attractive young city school-teacher maybe pushing forty who, in the same year, has suffered through the death of her mother and the break-up of her marriage.

Well, those things are enough to shake anybody up and Jane herself admits that she went ‘a little crazy for a while’ when these events came along to rock her world to its foundations.

She’s slowly getting better now though, and she’s ready for a change of scenery. She intends to drive out to the countryside and spend the summer in an old house once owned by her late Auntie, but which now belongs to Jane. She’s inherited it, in other words, lol.

Jane’s shrink- ah yeah, ya gotta have a shrink if ya live in the city…!- thinks that ‘running away’ won’t solve Jane’s problems and that they’ll still be there when she gets back.

Well, that’s certainly true enough but Jane’s adamant that she needs the peace and quiet that getting away from it all will bring. The minute she utters these famous last words, you kind of know what’s coming…

The inhabitants of Jane’s Auntie’s little country town of Blackford are unusually hostile to Jane. They don’t welcome her into the flock at all, in fact they go out of their way to make her feel like she’s got the plague. The people in the local shop don’t even want to sell her her groceries, for Chrissakes, that’s how bad it is.

Jane tries to settle down in the house that she intends to maybe be her long-term home, if the summer works out okay. But a lot of strange things are happening out at the house that give her cause for unrest.

She keeps seeing flashes of a strange woman around the place. Now that shouldn’t be, surely? The lights flicker on and off randomly in the isolated old house on the outskirts of the town and that’s just the start of it.

Jane keeps having these horrible dreams, if they are just dreams, of a huge big black scary hearse driven by a scarred man following her on the dark country roads that surround the house. Once, this ‘dream’ hearse even drives her to the local church where she sees her own body laid out in a coffin, all ready to be buried.

It might help if she’d brought some books or her knitting or a couple of good big jigsaw puzzles with her to occupy her mind. Say, a jigsaw with a picture of nothing but sky and ocean so that it’s all just blue bits and it takes you, like, five years to complete it.

As it is, all she does in her spare time is read her Auntie’s old diary (it came with the house!), which tells the story of a young woman who falls in love with a man who lures her into the rather dubious practice of Satanism…

Well, that certainly explains why the townspeople give the house and its occupants past and present such a wide berth. Obviously they think that Jane’s Auntie was sacrificing goats and babies in the house and holding Black Masses there and summoning up the devil and God knows what else.

But the house is driving Jane batty. She spends more time in her nightie driving away from the house in the middle of the night, terrified and crying after yet another scare, than she does anything else.

What the hell does this cursed dwelling want from her, and are her tormentors really supernatural or is one of the many men in her life trying to send her out of her mind…?

The town’s big sexist Sheriff sexually harasses Jane verbally and treats all her complaints about the house as the kind of hysterical nonsense you might expect from ‘city women.’ He’s a dismissive jerk.

The town’s Reverend is creepy and weird. How can Jane trust him either, any more than she can trust the Sheriff, who makes it clear that he’d like to see her naked? What a jackass.

Paul, the big blonde burly son of the town’s grocers, is madly in love with Jane even though she’s, like, a million years older than him and, frankly, too classy for the likes of him. He wants to polish apples for her every day but she has to rebuff him on the grounds of his tender years.

Paul’s raging about this and blames the painful and humiliating rejection on this strange new fella Jane’s been seeing, a chap called Tom who dresses nicely and talks posh, who literally came out of nowhere and who appears overall as just too good to be true. Well, you know what they say about things that look too good to be true. Is Jane about to learn the truth of this old adage for herself…?

Joseph Cotten (CITIZEN KANE, SHADOW OF A DOUBT, THE THIRD MAN), a true star from the Golden Age of Hollywood, is excellent here as cranky old Mr. Walter Pritchard, the town solicitor who makes no attempt to rush through the courts the papers definitively proving Jane’s ownership of the haunted house out on County Road.

This is partly because he’s a curmudgeonly, boozy old bastard who’s in league with the Sheriff and a fully-paid-up, card-carrying member of the Good Ol’ Boys Network in the town. It’s the most sickeningly sexist town I’ve ever encountered. The #metoo and #timesup movements would be wasting their time there, I’ll tell you guys that for nothing.

The other reason Pritchard drags his legal heels is that, for reasons I’m not quite sure of, he thinks that the house ought to have been his. He thinks he missed out on inheriting it when Jane’s Auntie died. That makes him the prime suspect in the mystery of who’s trying to drive Jane away from her house and out of her mind, doesn’t it…?

This is a great little horror film with lots of terrific views of the house from an intruder’s point of view. Just to mention that the whole being-stalked-by-a-hearse thing was done extremely successfully previously in horror film BURNT OFFERINGS from 1975.

Oliver Reed was the victim of the frightening ‘hearse’ hallucinations in this excellent chiller which co-starred the legendary Bette Davis and scream queen Karen Black. And the manically smiling hearse driver looked as-freaky-as-f**k, so there, lol.

THE HEARSE is nowhere near as scary as BURNT OFFERINGS or even THE CHANGELING, but it’s still well worth a watch. Trish Van Devere, who looks a lot like the sweet-faced DALLAS actress Victoria Principal, does a top-notch job of running around the countryside in the dark in her nightie screaming her lungs out. Ask not for whom the hearse comes. This time, it comes for thee…

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:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor