October Hammershow: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, or, Underboob: The Movie

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb movie posterHammer, in a wise decision, jettisoned much of the tropes they had used in their previous Mummy films. For three consecutive productions, they had made basically the same film. British archaeologists discover ancient Egyptian tomb, said tomb has a curse on it, ancient Egyptian mummy resurrects and kills those who dared desecrate the tomb. It really was the same thing again and again. That was all well and good when they did it the first time, but by the last film, The Mummy’s Shroud, the plot was too familiar, and everyone involved seemed to be just going through the paces.

The fourth film, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, stays true to only some of the core elements, going so far as to ditch the traditional bandages and rags of films past. In this film, written by Christopher Wicking, loosely adapting Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, the mummy is the perfectly preserved corpse of Queen Tera, who died young and buxom, and thus couldn’t be wrapped in bandages, oh no.

Her tomb is discovered by the requisite British Egyptologists, but they bring the dead queen and her artifacts back to England in secret, rather than placing them in a museum or putting on a tour. That’s because, for reasons that are never adequately explained, some of the party wish to resurrect the queen, so she can rule again. Anyway, the resurrection part is kind of on the periphery, because in the meantime, Queen Tera has a doppelganger in Margaret Fuchs (Valerie Leon, who plays both Margaret and Tera), the daughter of the archaeological expedition’s leader, Julian Fuchs (Andrew Keir). She was born in England at the very moment Queen Tera’s sarcophagus was opened, revealing the scantily clad beauty within. Continue readingOctober Hammershow: Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, or, Underboob: The Movie”

October Horrorshow: Alien: Covenant, or, An Endless String of Stupid Decisions: The Movie

Every artist reaches, and then passes, their creative peak. It happens to everyone involved in creative endeavors should they survive long enough. Bands grow stale, the words of authors lose their ferocity, and auteurs show their viewers passable films where once there were epics. Declaring an artist as being past their prime is a bit like writing an obituary while a person is still alive, but those are the feelings that are evoked by watching a film like Alien: Covenant. It’s gorgeous to look at, and is still obviously the construction of a master filmmaker, but the deft touch and tight focus that made Alien a classic is all gone. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Alien: Covenant, or, An Endless String of Stupid Decisions: The Movie”

October Hammershow: Frankenstein Created Woman

Baron Victor Frankenstein is back. At the end of the previous film, The Evil of Frankenstein, the series’ antihero was dispatched along with his box-headed creation. It was a scene of ultimate finality, even if there wasn’t a shot of a dead Frankenstein putting an exclamation point on his story. But death is never permanent in film should the producers wish it. I don’t just mean the death of a character, either, but the actor who plays the part. This film’s star, Peter Cushing, finds his character resurrected for further use in this film, but Cushing himself was resurrected digitally, more than twenty years after his death, to make an appearance in the latest Star Wars flick. It won’t be much longer before actors find themselves under the same threat of obsolescence as the rest of us in the workforce. But I digress… Continue readingOctober Hammershow: Frankenstein Created Woman”

October Horrorshow: Cold Prey

Cold Prey, the 2006 debut feature film from Norwegian filmmaker Roar Uthaug (whose excellent film, The Wave, led to his being hired to direct the Tomb Raider reboot), is a paint-by-numbers slasher flick. From beginning to end, there isn’t a moment that won’t be familiar to fans of horror films. And that’s okay. Cold Prey is a case study of the maxim that as long as a film does old ideas well, it’s still a good film. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Cold Prey”

October Hammershow: Dracula Has Risen from the Grave

It is now the halfway point of this year’s Horrorshow, and I’m enjoying watching all these classic Hammer horror flicks. But, watching them all close together like this means I’m more aware of when they are repeating themselves compared to watching them on a normal release schedule. For example, the three Mummy flicks I’ve reviewed so far this month have basically been the same film. There is still a good film to be made from the idea, but by The Mummy’s Shroud, I’m not sure the filmmakers were trying. Today’s film, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, suffers from some of the same sort of creative malaise that doomed The Mummy’s Shroud. Continue readingOctober Hammershow: Dracula Has Risen from the Grave”

October Hammershow: The Abominable Snowman

The Abominable Snowman, director Val Guest’s film from 1957, has sort of fallen through the cracks. Well, most Hammer films have fallen through the cracks in one way or another, but this flick is the most obscure of those I have seen so far this month. Hammer has a legendary reputation when it comes to their horror. Much of the films aren’t great, but Hammer was persistent and fertile, never going more than a few months before bringing audiences something new. But their catalogue has been mistreated, much of it only available on out of print, and thus hard to find, DVDs and VHS tapes. The big flicks are available in places like Prime and iTunes, but if one wishes to watch something like The Abominable Snowman without searching for physical media, the options, and quality, are very limited. Continue readingOctober Hammershow: The Abominable Snowman”

October Horrorshow: Them (2006)

I sometimes wonder if Eastern Europe is as mysterious a place for people in Western Europe as it is for people here in the United States. For us, it’s an obscure place — a somewhat monolithic land still struggling after throwing off the yoke of communist oppression. It’s a place of strange languages and cultures. For those with some familiarity with history, it’s a land of continual strife. For those of us interested in tales of the supernatural, Eastern Europe looms as the birthplace of vampire tales and werewolf stories. Whether we are conscious of it or not, Eastern Europe, as seen through western or American eyes, is a threatening locale. It’s the perfect place to set a horror flick. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Them (2006)”

October Hammershow: Quatermass and the Pit, aka Five Million Years to Earth

It’s a new era for Quatermass. Because of Hammer’s success with its horror films, the third Quatermass film had an increased budget compared to the previous entries. Whereas The Quatermass Xperiment had to get by on a mere £42,000, Quatermass and the Pit had an astronomical £275,000 with which to work its magic. Gone is the inexpensive black and white film stock, replaced with color. It’s still an inexpensive stock, but COLOR. Continue readingOctober Hammershow: Quatermass and the Pit, aka Five Million Years to Earth”

October Horrorshow: Jason X

Jason XIt’s Friday the 13th! In October! Missile Test couldn’t possibly let the day go by without watching a Friday the 13th flick, and this one is a doozy. By 2001, the original Friday the 13th franchise was on its last legs. The producers, recognizing that the old formula had been ground into dust by overuse, decided to shake things up. And by shake things up, I mean they all contracted serious cases of the awfuckits and sent their franchise property into space. That’s right, no more summer camp and no more Crystal Lake. This film takes place in outer space…in the future. Hell yeah.

Jason X, from writer Todd Farmer and director James Isaac, is the tenth film in the Friday the 13th franchise. It’s the second to ditch the Friday the 13th moniker, after 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. When a film franchise forgoes using its title — the most significant brand that it has — a viewer can tell that things haven’t been going so well lately. The Friday the 13th flicks were always moneymakers, but the return on investment had been going down with every film, and the franchise had earned an unsavory reputation for being cheap, exploitative schlock. Clearly the only thing to do was to double down. Continue readingOctober Horrorshow: Jason X”