David Vining's Blog

The third of the three disconnected Robin Hood movies that Hammer made, The Challenge of Robin Hood is the least of the three. Not so much bad as less interested in providing an adventure without replacing that with much else. It’s essentially an origin story for Robin and his Merry Men, but the back and forth to create that is this harried and unfocused boys adventure that veers from one event to the next doesn’t really have anything like a strong story on which to hang the events. It’s fun...

At the very least, you have to give props to Don Chaffey and Michael Carreras for committing to the bit. I’ve never seen this before, so I was expecting a dialogue heavy experience like most Hammer films. No better way to fill a screenplay to 80 pages that reams of inane, largely pointless dialogue. And yet, the dialogue here is never more than grunts or made up words for nouns. However, the writing still suffers a bit. This is a film that honestly should rise and fall with character, and th...

Quality, bruh.

Just, quality.

Except for Barbra Streisand, bruh.

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English folk horror is one of my favorite little slices of horror, at least in concept. Few examples I’ve seen really capture the inherent horror of the old things in the English countryside hiding in the shadows ready to lash out at the modern world. For a while, I really thought The Witches was going to be an example of folk horror done right. The setup was humming along with implication and slow burn potential, and then it all got weirdly talky and convoluted in the final act. Instead of ...

Another attempt to create a new monster like The Gorgon or The Plague of the Zombies, The Reptile is yet again Hammer relying on atmosphere and shadows over a rubber mask to provide some thrills. There’s never an attempt to make this anything like a character-based tale, so all we’re left with are atmosphere, tone, and the thrills of politely exploitative sights and sounds. In that regard, the film is a mild success, but what do you do in between those moments?

Harry Spalding (Ray Barrett...

Cahiers du Cinema are dicks, bruh.

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This is entirely a performance piece. This is a showcase for Christopher Lee as the eponymous character because he was not a fan of the script and decided that the only thing he could do was play the role as big as possible. And it’s big, and it’s easily the most interesting thing in the film, present in almost every scene from beginning to end. However, the script by Anthony Hinds (long-term producer and co-owner of the studio) falls into the trap that many biopics fall into: becoming a sta...

Hammer’s efforts to create new horror movies untied to the most famous monsters all end up blending together. They are generally just retelling pretty much the same story over and over again, with the only real variation being what the new monster will look like. This is really hardly any different from The Gorgon. So, the joys can’t be found in plot or general story beats, but they have to be in how the monsters work and the individual performances. I’m not going to get much out of another ...

Oh, so we’re just going to outright ignore Brides of Dracula, huh? Probably a good decision. Terence Fisher’s sequel to his previous film Dracula just outright starts with an extended look at the finale of what came before. This is a direct follow up that takes the idea that our titular character did get completely destroyed into ash before. And, surprisingly, Fisher and his screenwriter John Sansom find ways to keep up the atmosphere and deliver some thrills. It may be a bit uneven in tone ...

Whiplash, bruh.

Technical acumen but no solid voice, bruh.

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