Showing posts with label resurrection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resurrection. Show all posts

Tuesday 13 December 2016

#MONSTERMONDAY: THE OBSESSION FOR POE!


#MONSTERMONDAY: YESTERDAY at our FACEBOOK FAN PAGE we focused on  LANCELOT CANNING... the Man who collected Poe in the Amicus films 'Torture Garden' .... without giving away Canning's secret to anyone who hasn't yet seen the film...I mean, what kind of man would do that???? Certainly gives people who collects Cushing film photographs and posters ..or postage stamps a run for their money, for sure! SO... Canning? Monster or Victim? YOU decide! What says you?



WE HAD SEVERAL interesting comments and opinions from our friends and followers at the page, including: 

M.JAY: I don't really think of him as either - just an obsessive; but what a fantastic episode to end the film on! And what a pairing of Cushing and Palance! I always felt this episode could have made a whole film of its own; but maybe it would have been too similar in type to the The Skull?

M. IVESON: Neither! I would say obsessive. He took his harmless hobby a bit too far!

T. GAMMAGE thought it was all about MONSTER OBSESSIONS! : 'Both Jack Palance's character and Cushing's Canning were driven by the need to own everything about the writer POE. I think Cushing was the monster here. He resurrected Poe from the dead, so instead of a well deserved rest in the after life, Poe was walled up in a room scribbling new classics to satisfy the collecting ego of Cushing's character! He was a MONSTER!  

AND J. MORROW: I have always thought that this character was one of Peter's better roles. So well done.




JOIN US AT OUR FACEBOOK FAN PAGE : CLICK HERE
AND THEN CLICK LIKE THERE!

Monday 8 August 2016

#MONSTERMONDAY: CHRISTINA KLEVE : MONSTER OR VICTIM?


#‎MonsterMonday‬: WHO AM I??? The question asked by this week's monstermonday candidate, Christian Kleve...through out Cushing's FOURTH ‪#‎Frankenstein‬ feature for ‪#‎hammerfilms‬. So, was Christina, played by actress Susan Denberg, really a MONSTER? It's not a simple one this one. Beauty reborn from disfigurement, souls, murder, executions, wrongly accused victims, lust and finally revenge....that poor Christina, witnessed and was involved in… A victim of circumstance or MONSTER, you decide....

Saturday 30 August 2014

HOLD ON TIGHT! IT'S ALL CHANGE WITH HAMMER FILMS THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN


CAST:
Peter Cushing : Baron Frankenstein, Peter Woodthorpe : Zoltan, Sandor Eles : Hans, Kiwi Kingston : The Monster, Katy Wild : Rena.

PRODUCTION:
Director : Freddie Francis, Screenplay : John Elder [Anthony Hinds], Producer : Anthony Hinds, Photography : John Wilcox, Music :  Don Banks, Special Effects :  Les Bowie, Makeup : Roy Ashton, Art Direction : Don Mingaye. Production Company - Hammer films.


SYNOPSIS:
Forced to leave town because of their experiments, Frankenstein and Hans return to Frankenstein’s hometown Karlstad and set up laboratory in the abandoned Frankenstein chateau. Frankenstein then finds his original creation frozen inside a glacier and restores it to life. However, it will not respond to his commands. Frankenstein comes up with the idea of obtaining the services of Zoltan, a disreputable carnival hypnotist, to hypnotise the monster into obeying him. Zoltan is successful but has less than scientific interests at heart. With the monster responding only to his commands, Zoltan uses it to rob and take revenge upon the town authorities.



COMMENTARY:
General opinion holds The Evil of Frankenstein, the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films, to be one of the duds of the series. One is at a loss to understand why. To the contrary, I hold The Evil of Frankenstein to be one of the best of the series. With the preceding two entries, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Hammer had kept the same essential creative team – director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and star Peter Cushing – in place. For The Evil of Frankenstein, Hammer producer Anthony Hinds replaced Sangster on script, while Freddie Francis inherited the director’s chair. Freddie Francis was an up and coming director who had worked as an award-winning cinematographer in the previous decade, had made his genre debut with Vengeance/The Brain (1962), followed with a couple of Hammer’s psycho-thrillers, Paranoiac (1962) and Nightmare (1963), and then attained some success with the first of Hammer rival Amicus’s anthology films Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964) just prior to this. Francis, whose output to the Anglo-horror cycle has been underrated, would go on to become its next most prolific director to Fisher. (See below for Freddie Francis’s other films).


It is not clear why The Evil of Frankenstein is almost universally regarded as such a dog in the Hammer pantheon. Just look at the opening scenes that hit one with the fervid intensity of something out of a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare brought to life – a little girl sees a body being stolen from a hut in the forest in the middle of the night and calls a priest. The body is taken to Frankenstein who removes the heart before the paling body snatcher, dismissing his queasiness with a curt, “He won’t need it anymore,” before the priest bursts in, cursing Frankenstein’s abominable experiments as he smashes the lab equipment. It is a sequence lit with such a feverishly eerie intensity that it attains a nightmare atmosphere of dread chill. Nothing else in the film quite manages to match it.


Certainly, there are a number of images littered throughout that have a lingering memorability – the deaf-mute beggar girl and her strange relationship with the monster; the monster found buried in the side of the glacier; and one especially memorable scene where the monster gets up and begins to agonisingly shuffle around the lab while Frankenstein looks on, coldly clinically taking notes.



The Evil of Frankenstein presents some confusion to the continuity of the Hammer Frankenstein series. For some reason, Freddie Francis conducts a flashback that offers a potted retelling of the essentials of The Curse of Frankenstein anew. However, this makes changes to continuity – Frankenstein now appears to have merely been driven out of town, not executed. Where the events of The Revenge of Frankenstein fit in becomes somewhat confusing – the Hans character is carried over from Revenge, but Frankenstein’s new body and his escape from the gallows is forgotten about. It is a puzzle as to why the film creates the flashback – some of this is to set up plot points for later on – although without much rewriting this could all have been made to carry over from Revenge. What tended to lose many people was the addition of the Zoltan character, which takes the story considerably away from the Frankenstein mythos. Indeed, you could almost see this as Hammer’s attempt to craft their own variant on The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).



With The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer did not have the copyright to use the Jack Pierce designs for the Boris Karloff monster makeup from Frankenstein (1931) and so Phil Leakey came up with his own original designs. Apparently Universal has relaxed their copyright restrictions by the time of The Evil of Frankenstein and the makeup on Kiwi Kingston’s monster is closely modelled on the Pierce designs, the only time the Hammer Frankenstein’s came close to resembling the Universal originals. Production designer Don Mingaye and special effects man Les Bowie collaborate to come up with not one but two of the series very best creation sequences, with lightning bolts and generator coils crashing in the best Kenneth Strickfaden tradition. On the whole, The Evil of Frankenstein is a Hammer Frankenstein entry that is well worth re-evaluation.


The other Hammer Frankenstein films are:– The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973).


Freddie Francis’s other genre films are:- Vengeance/The Brain (1962), Paranoiac (1962), Nightmare (1963), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), Hysteria (1965), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Torture Garden (1967), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), Trog (1970), The Vampire Happening (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Tales That Witness Madness (1972), Craze (1973), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Legend of the Werewolf (1974), Son of Dracula (1974), The Ghoul (1975), The Doctor and the Devils (1985) and Dark Tower (1987).

Feature written by:Richard Scheib
Images edited by Marcus Brooks


No way to treat the curtains!
The Evil of Frankenstein

Sunday 20 April 2014

COMPETITION: FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL' BLU RAY / SHANE BRIANT Q AND A.


COMPETITION: To celebrate the release of the Hammer films classic ‘Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell’ UNCUT – coming to 2-disc DVD & single-disc Blu-ray for the first ever time in the UK on 28th April 2014.
ORDER HERE

Here in conjunction with Hammer films, Icon Film Distribution and Fetch Publicity is our FIRST competition..with a twist!


Next week we are launching an EXCLUSIVE 'Q and A with SHANE BRIANT' star of Hammer films 'Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell'. What we need from you are great QUESTIONS! And THAT'S how you can get your hands on some great prizes! Along with Shane Briant, we will pick the BEST THREE QUESTIONS as WINNERS! There are THREE prizes...




FIRST PRIZE: A copy of the 'Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell' Blu Ray / 2 DVD release PLUS an exclusive set of promotion 'Monster from Hell' LOBBY CARDS (Only 20 sets have been printed!) PLUS your LOBBY CARDS will be signed by SHANE BRIANT dedicated to you. PLUS your WINNING question will be featured on a 'Q and A with Shane Briant' presentation card.

SECOND PRIZE: A copy of the 'Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell' Blu Ray / 2 DVD release. PLUS your WINNING question will be featured on a 'Q and A with Shane Briant' presentation card.

THIRD PRIZE: A copy of the 'Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell' Blu Ray / 2 DVD release. PLUS your WINNING question will be featured on a 'Q and A with Shane Briant' presentation card.




The competition is now open UNTIL WEDNESDAY 23RD APRIL 2014 MID DAY GMT. So get YOUR questions in NOW!
 
PLEASE send your questions to us by to our EMAIL ACCOUNT: theblackboxclub@gmail.com, no later than WEDNESDAY 23RD APRIL 2014 MID DAY GMT. 


You Can Order Your Copy: HERE 

GOOD LUCK EVERYONE!



Our thanks to Hammer films, Icon Film Distribution and Fetch Publicity for making this PCASUK competition possible.
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