David Vining's Blog

I was not entertained by the first cinematic adaptation of the television show On the Buses, and I’m equally unentertained by its first sequel (yes, there is a second sequel). Another attempt to string together a series of losely connected episodes that combine into something like a feature film. But, much like the first, the bigger problem is that the material strung together in the script by Ronald Chesney and Ronald Wolfe and director Harry Booth is simply not, you know, funny. I watched ...

This feels like a film I would love. The sparse narrative, the weird tone, the emphasis on atmosphere, it all should combine well in my mind. But it doesn’t. It clashes rather badly, all stemming from a script with not nearly enough writing to justify its jumble of ideas especially in terms of its characters. Every single character is just a vessel for symbols and ideas without actually ever feeling like people. This can be fine for some characters, but when it’s literally everyone you’ve se...

Well, there goes that happy feeling I had about late Hammer. The effort to swing for the fences with the company on the financial ropes was having shocking success, but Straight on Till Morning is just an effort to bring some stylistic excesses to a story that cannot support it, a Peter Pan reference filled exercise that has no real clue what to do with the ideas in their places. This feels like an effort for the director, Peter Collins on, to push himself to the forefront with no conception...

A return to psychological thrillers that Hammer trended towards in decades past, Fear in the Night is a film that Jimmy Sangster had been trying to get made for almost a decade, the script getting close to greenlights from certain production agreements and a few rewrites until Sangster cowrote the final draft with Michael Syson. Finally getting the final Greenwich, Sangster directed and managed a solidly enjoyable thriller with one of Hammer’s biggest stars in a small role, really only four ...

Chuckles and laughs, bruh.

Even some tears, bruh.

Like, subscribe, cult, bruh.

For about the first two-thirds of this film, I kind of loved it. Aside from an errant opening scene, it was a proper mixture of updating setting, some basic character work, and some absolutely marvelous cinematic stylings that made the most of its eponymous character’s minimal screentime. Then its final third pushes things a little too unintentionally silly. Still, Alan Gibson finds a better application of his skills with this script by Don Houghton, an effort by Warner Bros. to get Hammer t...

Gosh darn, there really was something about Hammer dying as a company that seemed to bring out the best of what the company would allow. Instead of just another tale of Dracula coming back from the dead to halfway start a new covenant before getting defeated again, Hudson Kinberg, screenwriter, and Robert Young, director take the basic idea of a vampire coming back after defeat and makes a whole film out of it, allowing a lot more dreaminess, terror, and danger to the point that it almost fe...

Back, bruh.

With some laughs, though.

Like, subscribe, cult, bruh.

Hammer was struggling financially. Its cash cow of gothic horror monster movies was faltering, so it did what it had done before the rise of its niche. It made adaptations of television (as opposed to radio) shows. On the Buses was the first attempt to return to that well, and it was a huge success for the company, becoming one of the biggest money makers in England at the box office that year. Unfortunately, I don’t think the appeal extends to 55 years later.

Stan (Reg Varney) and Jack (...

Sometimes a movie comes along that I want to love. That has the right ideas and is so well made that it actually pains me that it doesn’t work as well as it should. Hands of the Ripper is just such a movie. The script ends up just repeating itself for far too long, but there’s something under the hood and Peter Sasdy’s brings a dreamy and composed quality that I found rather engaging. That it doesn’t actually come together by the end was ultimately disappointing, but I was rooting for it all...