Seb Palmer

We watched this movie – in part or whole? I forget now – once before. Here we are watching it again. As we approach Hallowe’en it seems there’s a bit of a Hammer-fest going on round here!

I’m not naturally a massive fan of these hammy technicolour schlock-horror sorts of movies. But Teresa is gradually indoctrinating me in the ways of Hammer and similar stuff.

None of the cast are familiar to me, except perhaps Jennifer Daniel. And even then I’m not sure I’ve really seen her before (other than the last time we watched this).

To enjoy these things one has to either have some degree of susceptibility to the superstitious, or else suspend all pretence at any idea of rational integrity. The world these supernatural or paranormal stories inhabit is, well, frankly really rather silly.

But if you can settle into the silliness – I can’t be bothered to synopsise the typical haunted castle pretty dame horny ol’ vampire schtick – then there is here an alternate ‘reality’ in which one can revel in a whole bouillabaisse or witches brew of nuttiness.

If one knows and loves Cushing, Lee et al, as we do, their charisma can help make even the most excessively camp nonsense more palatable. Surprisingly, perhaps, the B-list cast of Kiss of the Vampire are actually okay, on the whole. Within the formulaic corridors of this rather tawdry hallucinatory world this isn’t so bad.

Still, that’s hardly a glowing recommendation!

Teresa loves her Hammer horror movies. We tried one called The Black Glove, about a ‘jazz trumpeter’, wrongfully accused of murder. But she didn’t like the look of it. So she picked this Bavarian adaptation of an Edgar Allen Poe story instead.

The soundtrack has the feel of being dubbed very poorly into English, with very questionable choices of music. Only some of the Germanic locations (oh, and the fulsome boobies, I guess!) save the film from being utterly dire. It’s a pretty bizarre but lame film. Very stilted, but very Hammer-esque.

Christopher Lee is hardly in it, just at the beginning and end. Pity! Perhaps his fee was so big they could only afford him briefly? The Poe pit ‘n’ pendulum stuff also appears, but to no real effect. Pretty poor, overall, frankly.

But it has a vibe closer to what Teresa wanted, so she’s happy. I was less enamoured of it.

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.