Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971)

Eighteen years ago, archaeologist Fuchs (Andrew Keir) and his associates apparently found the grave of the Egyptian queen Tera (Valerie Leon), killed and mutilated by priests for their fear of the huge magical powers she had developed, and perhaps her evil. Let’s not get into what “evil” might have meant to an ancient Egyptian priest. Since her hacked-off hands murdered a bunch of jackals who were trying to eat them, they can’t have been too wrong about her having powers, at least.

In any case, when Fuchs and company found Tera’s tomb, they made the startling discovery that her body was untouched by any kind of decay. Something the film never makes quite clear happened in the tomb, and eventually, Keir and associates scattered to the winds, each one taking one artefact belonging to Tera with them to protect it for – or perhaps against – her, while Fuchs secretly built a replica of the tomb in the cellar of his mansion, also taking Tera’s body there.

Now, nearly eighteen years later, the powers connected with Tera seem to awaken. This shouldn’t be too surprising to Fuchs, either, for his daughter Margaret looks exactly like Tera (and is obviously also played by Valerie Leon). In fact, Margaret was born dead and suddenly came back to live the very same moment the expedition found Tera’s body, so there’s a connection that’s pretty difficult to deny, try as Fuchs might. Though, really, Fuchs doesn’t seem to know his on mind on the situation, if he believes in any mystical connection between Tera and Margaret at all, or if he wants Tera to use Margaret for her own goals, whatever those may be exactly or if he wants to protect his daughter from Tera’s influence. He does not become more decisive now that Margaret begins to display strange powers and curious personality shifts.

Corbeck (James Villiers), one of Fuchs’s former colleagues, on the other hand, has very much made up his mind about things: he wants to shove Tera’s spirits into Margaret’s body by force, so he can then control her and use her for his own lust for power. He’s trying to manipulate Margaret into that direction, but really, he is much further out of his depth than his mock-decadent left-hand magus demeanour suggests, looking rather a lot like an ant pretending it is controlling where the woman on whose shoulder it sits goes.

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, a film not containing a single mummy, is one of the lesser loved films from Hammer’s risk-taking phase in the early 70s when they tried to shake off the image of stuffiness they had developed over the course of the last decade and reach the increasingly elusive younger audiences again. I get why people don’t love the film as much as others from this stage. Director Seth Holt (a man with a small but excellent filmography, and apparently a rather intense personality) died four fifths through the production, which was finished by Michael Carreras without a clear idea where the whole of the film was supposed to go. So there’s a sense of something, maybe some explanations or some connective tissue, perhaps even important scenes, missing from what is nominally an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Jewel of the Seven Stars” (but is really inspired by motives from it more than anything). It can be a bit like watching a second draft of something that probably needed a third or a fourth, and this feeling of the film not being quite finished or quite whole tends to stand between a movie and the status of a classic for most people.

For me, Blood works as a fascinating artefact more because of this great flaw than despite of it. There’s clearly meant to be a lot of ambiguity surrounding Tera’s nature anyway, and this mystery and ambiguity is only strengthened by the film’s state. As it stands, it’s difficult to understand what Tera actually wants, the audience only ever seeing her through Fuchs’s or Corbeck’s interpretation, and the psychic pressure she puts on Margaret. But how much of Margaret’s actions under Tera’s influence are Tera’s decisions, Margaret’s own psychological torment caused by the various men in her life trying to dominate her in one way or the other is unclear. As it stands – certainly also helped by Tera never speaking – the Egyptian queen feels more like a force of nature, something much bigger than any of the human characters can comprehend, everyone, well, every man deciding what she is or wants on the basis of very little actual evidence.

Which of course also does the curious trick of putting this as close to Lovecraftian cosmsicism as well as to feminism as Hammer movies get. The latter aspect of the movie is additionally strengthened by Valerie Leon’s wonderful performance that should have recommended her to Hammer for a whole load of other substantial roles. Of course, they never did try very hard to develop any of their actresses with obvious staying power and charisma, while wasting a surprising amount of energy on some obvious male failures.

Anyway, all of Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb’s flaws, its ambiguities purposeful and not, some fine horror scenes, as well as the cosmsicism and feminist readings it suggests combine for my taste into a very enticing whole, the sort of film I come to Hammer in this phase of their existence to.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,horror,seth holt,michael carreras,andrew keir,valerie leon,james villiers

Taste of Fear (1961)

aka Scream of Fear

Not having seen her father for nearly ten years after her parents’ divorce, wheelchair-bound Penny Appleby (Susan Strasberg) travels to his coastal villa in France, following a somewhat surprising invitation. Penny’s father is away on business, so Penny is greeted by her stepmother Jane (Ann Todd). Jane makes quite an effort to make her feel welcome, as awkward as the situation between a young woman and the second wife of her father she’s never met before is at its core.

However, something is very wrong at the villa. Starting on the very first night of her stay, Penny repeatedly encounters what looks a lot like the corpse of her father propped up in macabre manner. Of course, when Penny’s trying to show the corpse to Jane or hunky chauffeur Robert (Ronald Lewis), the thing disappears. Very quickly, Jane starts mumbling about the “neurotic tendencies” Penny has supposedly displayed in childhood. The doctor Jane calls in, supposedly a friend of Penny’s father, the very rude Dr Pierre Gerrard (Christopher “Frenchman” Lee), does love to go on in the same manner, making dinners with him rather a strain on everyone’s nerves. At least Robert – just call him “Bob” – is a lot of help, sharing some of the doubts Penny is developing.

Despite the great success (particularly for such a small company) of their horror films, beloved Hammer Studios weren’t exclusively making horror films in the sixties. Following the success of Hitchcock’s Psycho, Jimmy Sangster wrote about five or six (depending on which ones you count) twisty thrillers clearly influenced and encouraged by that film, yet never simply copying it. Rather, Sangster takes some of Psycho’s formal inventions, its play with the audience and its expectations, and thinks them further for his own purposes.

Case in point is the first film of this group, as directed by Seth Holt, using the viewer’s knowledge of the structure of a gaslighting-type film against them to pull off quite some clever things not just once but twice. The film doesn’t only use the audience’s assumptions about genre and characters, though – the characters themselves repeatedly fall into the same trap of taking what’s on the surface of others on very literal face value. Treating people as types and tropes is a dangerous thing, as it turns out. I’m not actually going to spoil the twists here despite the film’s age, because when a plot twist is as well constructed and wonderfully timed as those here are, its writer deserves the respect no to have it spoiled.

Despite not really being a horror film, Taste does feature some wonderfully macabre moments, too. The business with Penny’s father’s corpse is effectively creepy, Holt shooting these scenes as expressionistically influenced nightmares that stand in fine contrast to the many scenes of black and white sunlight surrounding them. And the final destiny of one of the film’s villains – in a move typical for the film probably the lesser one – has a sense of dreadful yet deserved irony many a horror twist ending strives for.

Holt does some grand work in other regards too, staging scenes in ways that make them feel so intimate, the film’s threats seem all the more personal. Generally, Holt as well as Sangster’s script like to keep events and emotions tightly controlled, in fact enhancing their impact by not overplaying them like many another film would. In lesser hands, the plot, where nobody involved, if still alive, will end up any happier than before, would be material for shrill melodrama, but Holt and Sangster let their audience figure out for themselves how much of a parade of broken people doing broken things we are actually witnessing.

Young Susan Strasberg is a great casting choice, too, projecting vulnerability and confusion yet also a hidden reservoir – clearly unexpected to the rest of the world – of strength and determination she desperately needs. The rest of the cast is up to the same fine standards – with the exception of Lee’s “French” accent – though this is really Strasberg’s show.


Really, said accent is the only thing I can find fault with in Taste of Fear, and if a bit of a ropey accent is the worst thing a film has to offer, nobody can fault me if I call it a little masterpiece.

In short: Danger Route (1967)

Jonas Wilde (Richard Johnson) is working as a killer for one of the British secret services; as it goes with jobs like this, he’s gotten sick and tired of it, particularly since he’s acquired Jocelyn (Carol Lynley) as the kind of girlfriend that makes a man think of retiring. Also, not killing people for money anymore.

However, shortly after his latest job and before he can do anything about his retirement plans, Wilde is called in for an emergency assassination on British soil. The Americans have gotten hold of an Eastern defector, but Wilde’s superiors are convinced the man is in fact a double agent who will do incalculable damage if he’s not “gotten rid of”. The job doesn’t sit quite right with Wilde, particularly when curious things start to happen around the new job. His contact Ravenspur (Maurice Denham) suddenly grows a niece (Barbara Bouchet) who just happens to be in the game too, and Wilde can’t shake the idea the defector isn’t the only one who is to be gotten rid of.

He’s quite right, too, and that’s not even the worst thing Wilde will learn in the next few days. Well, at least he’s tough and unpleasant enough to have a chance for survival.

Most of us know Amicus as purveyors of horror anthology pictures, but of course the company did work in other genres too, like the mid-level realist spy movie Danger Route. The film is neither as kooky as your typical Eurospy movie or James Bond film nor as complex and dark as Le Carré style espionage films but moves on that middle ground where the spy work is relatively down to Earth yet not quite enough so to be believable as naturalistic.

On a philosophical level, the film prefers a somewhat tired bitterness and a very general feeling of disgust, a disgust that is in large part shared by its hero, who is disgusted by the things he does for a living (and once for Queen and Country), disgusted by how good he is at them, clearly disgusted too at the way he uses people like Diana Dors’s (fittingly sadly played) lonely alcoholic housekeeper, and certainly disgusted by the duplicity of everyone around him. Johnson expresses this disgust with deeply tired look and the facial expression of a man who really can’t smile at himself in the mirror anymore. The way Johnson plays him, it’s quite clear that Wilde expects the betrayals he is going to suffer during the course of the movie as the logical consequence of all the betrayals he has committed – and continues to commit - himself. In what feels like a twist of bitter irony, the only times Wilde really seems to be without doubts is when he commits the violent acts he has begun to abhor.

Seth Holt (a director with a bit of spy experience via the TV show Danger Man) films this bitter little piece without any grand gestures, concentrating on the performances of his lead and a bunch of fine supporting actors, giving everything the appropriate leanness as well as providing moments of effectively unpleasant violence that turn Danger Route into something of a lost gem of the espionage genre.

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