One of Hammer's Worst!

Nope, don't agree with the OP. Sorry, but despite its faults this is still one of the greats from Hammer.


"Remember, you have to make it home to get paid" (The Dogs of War)

I thought it was pretty good. But then again I'm almost impossible to displease when it comes to horror films, especially ones from the 1960s and 1970s that deal with the supernatural.

Burn, witch! Burn, witch! Burn! Burn! Burn!

When I was a kid, we all loved Hammer films. We thought they were the bee's knees. I've seen some recently, and apart from Lee and Cushing, I think they stink. They are indeed closer to Ed Wood than Spielberg. All right, maybe on the same level as Roger Corman, but no better. Very often, there is sunlight shining through the trees when the action is supposed to be at night. They are cringingly cheesy, with salacity thrown into the mix at every opportunity. And there are strange and inappropriate accents, and tacky costumes. I was particularly disappointed by their depiction of the 'Goat of Mendes' in TDRO. The description in the book was far more interesting. The scripts are fair to middling, with some horrid cliches. I haven't seen TDRO in decades, but I expect I'd not like it much, indeed, at the time I rather suspected it was made back to back with Fu Manchu over one weekend. I always thought the Val Luton films like, "Night of the Demon", "Cat People" and "The Seventh Victim were far superior. Somehow, being filmed in colour made "Hammer Horrors" look particularly tacky with the lurid tomato ketchup blood dripping from the mouths of actors and -- on occasion -- rubbery bats. One thing that struck me about TDRO is that someone connected to Hammer seemed to know the president of a vintage car club as every vehicle in that film was a classic Rolls-Royce or Bentley or something equally grand. Well, just about everyone in the film was filthy rich, so why not? Except that I more got the impression that it was the other way around and the producer said something like; "Hey! We've got this big, Gothic house and these vintage cars, what film can we make next?" And Lee and Cushing joyfully said: "How about, 'A Handful of Dust"?" But they were shouted down and had to do another hokey horror.

All this might sound harsh, but please bear in mind the Hammer was a low budget company that was indeed lucky enough to be based (for a time) in a magnificent Gothic monstrosity of a house, which they used whenever they could. Originally, Hammer just made 'quota quickies', B pictures. But in a stroke of luck, they found that the public enjoyed the 'sexed up' Gothic horror film, "The Curse of Frankenstein", even though the monster makeup looked more like a traffic accident and the story was a bit of a car crash too. After TCOF Hammer realised they had found their metier and turned out a string of successful horror films on a production line. It's a shame that they ran out of steam -- or money -- as they could have matured and produced some good quality work with their in house rep company and mature scripts, had they just had more time.