David Vining's Blog

Not quite as madcap as the poster wants to sell us, The Lady Craved Excitement is a slightly odd comedic thriller, a plot of two threads that don’t seem like they should intersect at all. That kind of raises questions about why our main characters are involved in the larger plot at all, but if you kind of forget about the tenuous connection, what ends up happening is a mildly amusing exercise of the genre with some winning performances. It’s mild, not enough to really become good, but a nice...

Godfrey Grayson makes his least interesting film: a comedy. There’s no room for his steady hand at tension and mood. Instead, we have actors going through a silly situation, and it’s all managed decently well. I don’t want to make this sound miserable, but it’s a light comedy without much in the way of actual laughs. It moves quickly (it’s just a shade under an hour long) and is never boring. It’s just never quite that interesting either.

The Earl (Edward Rigby) has returned to England fr...

Modern day, bruh.

Cultural irrelevance, bruh.

Also, the Oscars, bruh.

I’m going to be honest. I was pleasantly surprised by this. I wasn’t expecting much from a “comedic thriller” directed by Francis Searle, who has yet to do much to entertain me, but the script by A.R. Rawlinson (based on the play of the same name by Major Campbell Christie and Dorothy Campbell Christie) has probably the best mixture of mystery and thrills that Hammer has come up with so far. The problem, though, is the comedy.

Ronnie Martin (Michael Medwin) is a nascent journalist looking...

This was easily the hardest movie for me to find in the Hammer Films run so far. And, the effort…wasn’t really worth it. Another stylish film from Godfrey Grayson, Room to Let ultimately just does not have the right script to do what it obviously wants to do. It takes on two separate mysteries and can’t fulfill either of them, so while Grayson tilts his camera, casts shadows, and gets surprisingly effective performances from his cast he can’t make the actual actions of the plot terribly inte...

Yet another adaptation of another BBC radio drama, The Man in Black has the good sense to not actually try and insert the titular character into the story he’s telling us. So, we don’t have that awkward opening where we get introduced to a character who’s ultimately incidental to the entire mystery we get exposed to later. However, the mystery itself is weirdly uninvolving. There’s a late twist that’s hard to see coming, which has some thin appeal, but the actual drama of everything is so mu...

What even is time, bruh?

Like…is now even now? What about then? What was now back then?

Bruh.

Godfrey Grayson reappears as the stalwart director for early, post-war Hammer Films, and he comes up with what is alternatively his most interesting and, perhaps, ambitious film for the small British studio yet, but also one of his least successful at the same time. Another adaptation of a BBC radio drama (how many did the BBC have?), this time about The Rev, an Anglican preacher who says that he should have been a police detective, Meet Simon Cherry is a primitive play on point of view that...

ANOTHER movie from Hammer based on ANOTHER BBC radio series, Celia is the story of a woman going on an investigation of a potential murder that hasn’t happened yet. It’s preventative rather than investigatory. Once again, the main character is something of a cipher, a pre-existing creation of some character traits to get us into a story, relying on the mystery to get us from beginning to end. And, it’s just not nearly as interesting as it probably should be. It’s inoffensive and quick, but k...

History gettin’ closer to today, bruh.

What is time, bruh?

Like, subscribe, cult, bruh.