Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Neil McCallum, Alan Freeman, Bernard Lee, Roy Castle, Michael Gough, Donald Sutherland, Max Adrian, Ursula Howells
Six people from different walks of life (and by that we mean 6 middle class white men) meet in a train carriage. One of them, the aptly named Dr Schreck, is a tarot card practitioner and volunteers to read all their fortunes. This goes about as well as you’d expect in a horror film, and all five passengers learn of the terrible fates about to befall them. Should they live long enough to experience it, that is…
I know! Let a future Watcher take you on a vampire hunt. Nothing says classic horror like bloodthirsty fiends lurking in the night sucking the life force from the young and vital.
This horror anthology is clearly inspired by Dead of Night, and while it doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor, it is very fun and entertaining. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are wonderful as always, and Donald Sutherland looks very much like his son (who Sister the Oldest may or may not have had a huge crush on in the early nineties… Think Lost Boys/Young Guns era).
Sure, the look might be somewhat dated now, but it certainly worked in 1987! (And in 1992 which was probably around the time the movie [and the style] reached Norway.)
The story of Dracula hardly needs another recap, but if you still have no idea what this is all about, check out our previous entries on the same story, Dracula(1931) or Nosferatu(1922). We’re pretty sure we summarized the story in at least one of those.
Blood, fangs, crazy eyes and just a hint of sexy. Really all the info you need.
That being said, Terence Fisher and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster took some liberties with their 1958 version, mainly concerning some characters and their relationships. Lucy, Mina and Jonathan Harker in particular have gone through some changes.
Well-known story and some artistic liberties aside, Hammer’s Dracula (a.k.a. Horror of Dracula) is one of our favourite versions of Bram Stoker’s novel. Christopher Lee is sexy, suave and animalistic as the count, and Peter Cushing is magnetic and dynamic as his arch nemesis.
We’re honestly not entirely sure how we would react if this guy showed up in our bedroom… Sure, he’s deadly, but what a way to go!
We absolutely love this movie. There’s nothing like a good vampire story (emphasis on the “good”), and we appreciate that Jonathan Harker is as useless and boring as we’ve always thought he was even as they’ve tried to make his character a bit more interesting.
Going from accountant to vampire-fighting librarian might sound cool on paper, but he can’t even resist one scantily clad woman. Giles he’s not!
Now, our eternal love for Gary Oldman is well documented, but even we have to admit that Christopher Lee’s vampire count may be on par with Oldman’s. And despite the many changes to characters etc. made in this version, it stays true to the original story. There’s nothing not to love, and if you’re only going to watch one version of the ultimate vampire romance, you could do a lot worse than this.
Pro tip: if you have no reflection in the mirror, take a full bath before bedtime. It’s so easy to miss a spot of blood.
What we learned: If you’re trying to kill a powerful nemesis and his much weaker sidekick, perhaps it is a good idea to take out the main threat first..?
Victor Frankenstein (Cushing) is smart, ambitious, handsome, charming and rich. He is also an arrogant jerk. And imprisoned. He confesses to a priest and tells his unusual, and somewhat unbelievable, story.
“It all started, as these things tend to do, with a dead dog…”
Orphaned at a fairly young age, Baron Frankenstein hires his own tutor, Paul Krempe (Urquhart), to be his teacher and later partner. Together the two explore the world of science!
That’s just normal glass – his eyes are really like that. If you don’t believe us, watch Top Secret (1984)
Their greatest achievement, the reanimation of dead tissue, brings about different reactions in the two scientists. While Kempe’s initial reactions is “yay! This’ll make surgery so much easier and safer!”, Frankenstein’s first impulse is to go out and harvest body parts to make himself a new man-puzzle. Kempe finally starts to see the sociopath in his student, and they have a falling out.
“It’s MY turn to reanimate the corpse!” “No, it’s MINE!” “Who’s the one paying for all this?” “Screw this, I’m out.”
Things escalate when Victor straight up murders another intellectual to use his brain for his creation, and then uses his successfully assembled and animated creature (Lee) to kill his knocked up maid Justine (Gaunt) who threatens to expose his shady dealings if he does not marry her.
“Sorry, sweetheart – you’re certainly not good enough for the likes of me. Think of what the children will be like??? No, I’m engaged to marry my cousin. Yay gene pool!”
Meanwhile, Victor’s cousin Elizabeth (Court) has arrived to marry him, which adds another complication. With the death toll rising, a creature on the loose, a falling out between the friends, and a Fair Maiden™ innocently roaming the large house at night, how on earth will this end?
Let’s face it: fancy, defenseless ladies roaming around castles in the night with only a small lamp for company are usually not indicative of happy endings…
The Curse of Frankenstein is quite different from its early predecessor Frankensteindespite their many similarities. For one, the monster (or, in this case, creature) isn’t really all that important. As creepy and scary as Christopher Lee is in this, the focus is all on the Mad Scientist™ Victor Frankenstein.
For such an unfortunate looking creature, he’s a surprisingly snappy dresser!
Frankenstein himself is also very different. Personally, we feel that this take on the Baron is closer to the source material than many other incarnations – he really is an arrogant, egotistical, spoiled brat with a God complex in the book, no matter how bad he feels once everything falls apart. Cushing’s Frankenstein is particularly ruthless, and we love him for it. Well, not him as much as this version of events, we suppose. But we definitely love this film!
What we learned: If you’re going to stand up to a rich, insane, megalomaniac nobleman who doesn’t like being told what to do, you’d better have a contingency plan…
