Category: Media: Film & DVD Reviews

Hmmm!? We adore Vincent Price, but alas, the appallingly colorised (I use the American spelling deliberately here) version of The Bat we watched yesterday/this morning – we both dropped off to it last night! – is pretty dire.

I’ll prob’ check a few other versions (there are multiple versions on Amazon Prime alone, never mind other channels or sources!) to see if the original black and white fares any better.

One of the issues for me is how dated it all is. This can be a strength; we do love the era this was made and set in. But again, it does depend exactly how it’s done, and what aspects of the era it focusses on. In this instance the prissy ‘pointy-bra’ brigade, the core female leads, are rather off-putting.

Most of the men are no better, leaping like wooden marionettes straight from the pages of 1950s Reader’s Digest, all brill-creem, excessively good manners and overly earnest grins. Only the polite doc’ Malcolm Wells (Price), apparently offering any real diabolical relief from the saccharine crowd. Or is he alone in being evil?

The plot, such as it is, centres on Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorhead), a writer of horror fiction, who’s staying at The Oaks, a classic horror-movie haunted house, with an appropriately grisly legendary past. In a connected plot line, the head of the local bank (and owner/builder of The Oaks) has embezzled $1 million, which becomes the plot-driving ‘McGuffin’.

‘I’ve seen better performances’, says Lt. Andersen (Gavin Gordonson, whose every bone and sinew is, apparently, made of wood), at one point, with far more unintended irony than he knows. Amen!

This is based on a stage play, and boy does it ever have that very hokey ‘stagey’ feel. The acting is simultaneously theatrical and wooden. The only real point of interest is the issue of who, exactly, is The Bat? Even when, at one point, we think we’re finding out, we don’t. Meanwhile Agnes searches for the loot…

I reckon this movie will be way better in original black and white. I tried to find it in that format, but all other versions on Amazon were pay to view (naughty!)*. And it is, ultimately, a pretty poorly put together assemblage of clichés. But despite all of this, it has enough period charm to be an enjoyable watch.

In this terribly ‘auto-colorised’ form, two stars. Assuming black and white will be better – say three stars? – I’ll go with two and a half stars here, for now.

* I notice that of the four versions of this same movie I found just on Amazon’s streaming video services, only this terrible colorised (sic) version is free. That’s pretty shocking, given the film is out of copyright and therefore freely available for download/viewing. Anyone paying to watch this is being profiteered off, on the basis of their ignorance. But hey, that’s everyday capitalism for you.

What a bonkers movie!

Teresa said she wanted to watch a ‘50s sci-fi movie. I browsed Amazon Prime, and found this. And it’s Hammer! She’s keen on Hammer, esp’ the Cushing, Lee and Price stuff.

This oddity stars Brian Donlevy, a kind of pudgy moustachioed gone to seed Errol Flynn type guy, as the titular Quatermass. It’s a sequel to the Quatermass Xperiment (which we haven’t seen), in which Donlevy also starred. He’s the lone Yank in an otherwise British cast.

The plot is a kind of ‘invasion of the bodysnatchers’ type thing, also borrowing heavily from War of the Worlds. Boffins detect a kind of rain of meteorites, and… well, it’s too silly to bother synopsising, frankly.

It is worth remembering, however, that this is pre-moon landing, etc. So it’s more like Hergé’s Tintin on the Moon than things turned out; the rockets, for example, like Hergé’s, resemble souped-up German V2s more than the real rockets that would soon take man to the moon.

Donlevy is clumsily enjoyable (legend has it he was practically paralytic during filming*), in a ham-fisted B-movie way. And Sid ‘Carry On’ James has a part, as a boozy newshound. There are several other familiar faces, such as John Longden and Bryan Forbes.

But the acting isn’t the film’s strong suit. The best things about the film are the look of it; black and white, largely shot in a cool steel spaghetti pipe-filled oil refinery, with quite a few effective visual aspects, and the eerie post-WWII apocalyptic fear vibes.

As clumsy as it is, and as clunkily directed and acted as it may be, there is something paranoiac lurking within this film, just as the malevolently parasitic alien life form lurks in their asteroid pods. A certain post World War II Cold War era fear of pervasive ideological contamination.

I’d argue that most traditional myth is no more sophisticated than this, and that therefore what’s best about this film – aside from or in addition to the visual allure – is the idea of insidious colonisation of the mind and body as myth or metaphor.

Far from being great, or classic, there’s still a certain something about Quatermass II that makes it worth seeing.

*Not really 100% true, according to fellow cast members.

Teresa wanted to watch a Hammer horror film. But we could’nae find one we hadn’t seen before. So we went with this Amicus Productions number, as it stars the deadly duo, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

The Skull has a pretty silly plot, concerning the evil possessive influence of the titular skull, formerly the cranial property (accommodation?) of the infamous Marquis de Sade.

But despite the superstitious hokum it’s a rollicking good Hammer style fright-fest, in which Cushing, Lee, and a panoply of great actors – inc Peter ‘Gollum’ Woodthorpe, Nigel ‘Zulu’ Green and others (inc the lovely April Orlich!) – serve up lashings of prime ’60s/’70s style spookiness.

The visual design aspect is great, in ghoulish technicolour, and the music, by Elizabeth Lutyens (daughter of the famed architect), is powerful and effective. By the standards of modern horror this sort of thing is now quaint, or even inadvertently hilarious, occasionally. But if your inner child lives on, as ours most definitely do, it’s vintage horror fun of a very particular kind.

Silly in extremis, but we loved it.

Teresa wanted to watch a vintage movie, so we plumped for this. Starring a youthful James Mason, with some oddly comic support, and a very young Herbert Lom as the villain. Made in ‘44, but set in 38, it’s an oddball thing. It seems to want to be both a thriller and a comedy. And in the end it’s not that great at being either.

Mason is Peter Vadassy, half French and half Austrian, looking to move to France and become a doctor, and escape Hitler’s regime. A mix up of cameras with another guest at the titular Hotel Reserve lands Vadassy in the embrace of the French police, who ask him to do a bit of sleuthing or espionage type work on their behalf.

Essentially the movie is about how Mason’s Vadassy character struggles, in a rather paranoid yet also playful environment – folk holidaying in southern France, on the edge of war – teetering between appearing too nefarious himself, whilst trying to smoke out the real villain.

Mostly filmed on a pretty unconvincing set, and with a rather oddball cast, some darkly serious, others bizarrely comical, it’s not a classic. But it is a silly slice of period fun. And by the end it felt kind of lame but enjoyable. Weird!