The session: "Vamps, Gorgons and Reptiles -- The Wicked Women of Hammer!" We watch Hammer films featuring female monsters.
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 1: The Brides of Dracula (1960) Directed by Terence Fisher
My Impressions Going In: I had never heard of this.
Plot: An idiot frees a vampire, exposing a whole town to terror. Idiot.
Reaction and Other Folderol: I have to acknowledge that Brides has elements that I like. It is, of course, a variation of your standard Dracula movie, but this time the vampire is imprisoned by his mother (until he gets set free), who somewhow got him vampirated. And there are hints of incest and other issues of sexuality. The plot is reasonably well-executed, even if it's not terribly original. As is par for the course with Hammer films, the visuals are great. Vivid color, great sets and really good camera angles.
So the movie delivers everything that's expected of it. And it is interesting. But the problem is that it's not particularly memorable. Sometimes I come out of these films thinking about them, and they stay on my mind. This one, nope.
Ratings Me: 7.5 Bob-O: 9.2 Christina: Somewhere in the 7s Dave: 9.6 Ethan: 8 Joe: 10
The session: "Blood for Blood's Sake" We watch Herschell Gordon Lewis' blood trilogy as well as a film by one of his associates.
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 4: Doctor Gore (1972) Directed by J.G. Patterson
My Impressions Going In: I had never heard of this.
Plot: A mad scientist, having lost his wife, proceeds to build the ultimate woman -- out of parts taken from other women.
Reaction and Other Folderol: Doctor Gore is, primarily a mad scientist story. There's a lot of plot taking place in a lab, where Dr. Brandon (played badly by J.G. Patterson, who also directed) cuts body parts off a variety of women and sews them all together. He has a vat of acid for cleaning off bones, and of course there's the requisite hunchbacked assistant. The gore is handled very well. Body parts sit on operating tables, their ends covered in blood, as they await their use. We see the doctor preparing to cut -- and cutting -- as he performs his surgery. Blood, in and of itself, isn't necessarily the pinnacle of cinematic achievement. But, let's face it, the blood was the selling point for this film. And it was achieved well.
But one problem with the film is that it tries (too hard, and with little subtlety) to be a comedy. Communication between the doctor and his drooling assistant is marked by attempts humor. The hunchback wheezes and grunts his lines, and the audience is supposed to laugh. And the humor does sort of work at times. But it seems out of place. Sometimes humor and horror can be meshed well. But that's not the case here.
To make matters worse, the script throws in a tender love story. Once the doctor has built his ideal woman, ha has to romance her. She is, after all, a blank slate (as is made painfully clear), so she could easily come under the influence of some other man. So the audience is treated to multiple montages with soft focus and lighting, and music that sounds like a third rate Glen Campbell imitator. In some movies, this might work. But juxtaposed with the crude laboratory footage, it's jarring.
The plot itself is not rendered particularly well. Admittedly, we're not talking about anything particularly complex. But there are details that aren't really explained well. That was particularly true of the ending. It wasn't really clear what was going on, and Keith had to explain it to us.
I was annoyed by the sound editing. There were many sections with no incidental music, and no attempt to clean the ambient sound. So it kind of hurts the ears. But the incidental music, a tinny plinky version of "My Favorite Things," was itself painful to listen to. The songs that were used weren't bad in and of themselves. They were kind of lounge-lizardish country. The song played in a nightclub was entertaining, but it went on too long. Instead of a fifteen second clip, we were treated to a couple full minutes and, I think, a full song. It was a good song, I admit, but it shouldn't have gone on so long. Similarly, the songs played during the romantic montages were good. But they went on too long and were out of place.
The romantic angle is actually kind of creepy. As part of the medical process, the Doctor hypnotized his ideal woman to forget everything she knows. So, post surgery, he has to explain the world to her. She has an adult woman's body (or is it women's bodies?), but the mind of a child. Furthermore, the body parts are, in a way, dead. So this combines elements of pedophilia and necrophilia. Lovely.
The session: "Blood for Blood's Sake" We watch Herschell Gordon Lewis' blood trilogy as well as a film by one of his associates.
As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.
Week 3: Color Me Blood Red (1965) Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis
My Impressions Going In: I had never heard of this.
Plot: A crazy artist needs blood as the key pigment for his red paint.
Reaction and Other Folderol: The thing about Color is that the fundamental premise of the movie is very strong. Arguably, it has the strongest premise of any of the blood trilogy*. The problem is that it was done so poorly. The script doesn't do enough to make the plot clear (beyond the basic outline I summarized above). To go with the weak plot, there's very little character development, which makes it very difficult to care about any of the people in the film. No one really mattered.
The blood was plentiful, so the viewer who just wants a lot of that comically bright red blood, this will satisfy that urge.
I also note that the film was bookended by a prologue and an epilogue that did nothing to make it better. They should have left those off.
Ratings
Me: 3.5
Bob-O: 5.5
Christina: 4.7
Dave: 7
Ethan: 4
Joe: 9
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*The other movies in the trilogy being Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs!
