Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

This post is part of an ongoing series on Hammer horror director Terence Fisher.

There is a scene in each of Terence Fisher’s trilogy of vampire films—Horror of Dracula (1958),  Brides of Dracula (1960), and Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966)—in which a wise and devout man releases a vampire from the pains of immortal existence. In the Horror of Dracula, Van Helsing releases Lucy, much to the relief of her brother Arthur.  Arthur smiles as he sees the beauty of innocence restored to his sister.   In Prince, Fr. Sandor releases Helen from the curse, as her brother-in-law, Charles, smiles upon witnessing the peace that finally envelops the troubled Helen.   In Brides of Dracula, Van Helsing, introduced as a doctor of philosophy and theology, releases vampire Baroness Meinster (Martita Hunt), at her own request.  After being staked, the Baroness shows a touch of a smile.

Still from Brides of Dracula (1960)For the first (and best) sequel to Horror of Dracula, Fisher and the writing team (which included an uncredited Anthony Hinds, Jimmy Sangster, Peter Bryan, and Edward Pearcy) chose a disciple of Dracula, in the person of Baron Meinster (David Peel), as the antagonist rather than the Count himself.  The Baron is blond, pretty, manipulative, charming, and genuinely menacing.  Luckily, Peel fits the bill, although by general consensus he is no Christopher Lee.  Still, he is refreshingly different.  Such a choice allowed the production imaginative freedom and innovation.  The resulting film is inordinately elegant,  poetic and seething with atmosphere.

Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur) is on her way to start a job at a girl’s school when she is stranded at a local inn.  The Baroness Meinster arrives and offers to put Marianne up for the night at her castle.  The locals , well aware of the Baroness’ motives, attempt to to keep Marianne from accepting the invitation, to no avail.   Marianne is introduced to the Baroness’ imperious maid, Greta (Freda Jackson), and discovers that the Baroness’ son, the Baron Meinster, is a shackled prisoner in the castle.  The Baroness’ plan to feed Marianne to her son is upset when her guest releases the Baron from his chains of bondage.

Marianne flees the castle, confused and frightened, unaware that she has set a vampire free.  Peter Cushing‘s  Van Helsing, ever the father figure, discovers  her in the woods, takes her to the school, and, after hearing Mariann’s story, knows that his crusade to rid the world of vampires is far from finished.

Jackson, as Greta, is one of several acting delights here.  She cackles and theatrically waxes poetic.  She hams it up in several scenes, most notably one in which she assists a vampire’s attempt to resurrect himself directly through the soil.  Equally good is Martita Hunt (best known for her role as Miss Havisham in David Lean’s Great Expectations-1946) who becomes her son’s Oedipal victim.  Miles Malleson also does a charming turn in the role of the alcoholic Dr. Tobler.  Cushing, as usual, conveys self-assured, icy precision in a part that  he seems  born to play.  Peel’s Baron puts the bite on Helsing and, in a blood-red, thrilling scene, the Doctor plants a burning iron to his own throat to cauterize the wound.  Cushing masters the scene in his inimitable way.

However, Monlaur, as Marianne, is merely decorative and, consequently, bland, which is a serious defect in the film.  Another glaring flaw is in the some slipshod writing (the result of too many hands in the pot, no doubt).  A compelling, eerie henchman character appears and is ingloriously dropped.  Van Helsing’s appearance is far too convenient and contrived.  A cheesy flying bat is a major distraction.  Despite  the flaws, however, Fisher’s enthusiastic direction is contagious; aided , in no small part, by lavish art direction and camera work.  The finale, at a windmill, is sumptuous and visually exciting.

Unfortunately, there would only be one more good film in the series; Fisher’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness.  After that, the series was pretty much turned over to the hacks and it did not take long at all for the rot to set in.

Brides of Dracula - Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]

Brides of Dracula - Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]
  •  
Check Price
Canonically Weird (The List)

78. ZARDOZ (1974)

16 Comments

“When I see the film now, I’m astonished at my hubris in making this extraordinary farrago.”–John Boorman in his 2001 director’s commentary for Zardoz

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: John Boorman

FEATURING: Sean Connery, , John Alderton, Sara Kestleman, Niall Buggy

PLOT: Zed is an Enforcer, a warrior and slaver who pillages the countryside and takes commands from Zardoz, a floating stone head, in a distant barbaric future.  One day Zed sneaks into the head and is carried away with it to Vortex 4, a land filled with technologically advanced people who never seem to age.  Zed is a curiosity to them and becomes both a slave and an object of scientific study, but his presence disrupts their society in profound ways.

Still from Zardoz (1974)

BACKGROUND:

  • Zardoz was John Boorman’s first film after being nominated for an Oscar for Deliverance.  Boorman had been trying to get an adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” off the ground, but the project fell through.
  • This was Sean Connery’s second role after completing his run as James Bond with Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 (although he would return to the role for a one off in 1983’s Never Say Never Again).
  • Burt Reynolds was originally slated to play Zed but fell ill.
  • According to Boorman the film’s budget was one million dollars, $200,000 of which went to Connery’s salary.
  • Cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth also lensed 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many other films.
  • Boorman later co-wrote a novelization of the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Try as he might to fill his film with unforgettable visions of giant floating stone heads vomiting firearms and of humanity’s entire cultural heritage projected onto the half-nude bodies of immortal hippies, the one image that adorns almost every review of Boorman’s Zardoz is a simple one: Sean Connery standing in the desert, pistol in hand, ponytail insouciantly thrown over one shoulder, dressed in thigh high leather boots and a red diaper with matching suspenders.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This sci-fi spectacle starts with serious ideas and weighty themes, but gets weighed down under an avalanche of self-indulgent dialogue, a confused script, low-budget psychedelics, and consistently bizarre directorial choices. Fill a talented young director’s head full of anticipation of adapting Tolkien, then pull that opportunity out from under him but instead give him Sean Connery and carte blanche to make whatever film he wants, and the result, apparently, is Zardoz. (Oh, and LSD might have had something to do with it, too).


Original trailer for Zardoz

COMMENTS: Zardoz is introduced by a floating head weaving through a void, slowly Continue reading 78. ZARDOZ (1974) →

List Candidates, Shorts

LIST CANDIDATE: THE FILMS OF SUZAN PITT (1979/1995/2006)

Leave a comment

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Suzan Pitt

FEATURING: Jose Luis Rodriguez Avalos (“El Doctor”)

PLOT: A collection of three surreal animated shorts.  In “El Doctor”, a Mexican doctor visits odd patients while dreaming of a long dead love.  “Joy Street” contrasts a the life of a whimsical anthropomorphic ashtray with its suicidally depressed owner.  “Asparagus” is a totally abstract surrealist film featuring a faceless woman and obscene iterations of the titular vegetable.

Still from Asparagus (1979)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  It’s a question of classification, not of weirdness or quality.  Counting these three short films, made decades apart, as one “movie” for List purposes would clearly be cheating.  That means that we’re really only considering the compilation’s main event, “Asparagus,” for inclusion on the List, which raises the metaphysical question: how good/weird does a short have to be take away a spot from a deserving feature length presentation?  Some shorts will eventually make the List.  “The Heart of the World,” though a “must see” weird film, was eliminated from consideration for being too slim at just over three minutes long.  Pitt’s impressive work clocks in at 18 minutes—should that be enough to put it on equal footing with films that run four or five times as long?

COMMENTS:  Considering the shorts included in The Films of Suzan Pitt from most recent to oldest, and coincidentally from least favorite to most highly recommended:

“El Doctor” sports the crudest animation of the three shorts; deliberately, because the style means to evoke Mexican folk art.  We find the title character slumped at a bar, dreaming of riding into the sunset on horseback with a señorita, but soon the world-weary médico is called away to his strange and melancholy rounds.  These appointments—which take the form of miracles—don’t do too much for the main narrative; mainly, they supply Pitt with the opportunity to take mini-flights of fancy.  There’s not much to the story other than these surreal digressions.  One patient is pocked with holes from which flowers grow, giving Pitt the opportunity to film a field of flowers as if they were a rainforest (an image which pervades all Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE FILMS OF SUZAN PITT (1979/1995/2006) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: DEATH BED: THE BED THAT EATS (1977)

3 Comments

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats has been placed on the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies ever made. Please visit the official Certified Weird entry. Comments have been closed on this post.

DIRECTED BY: George Barry

FEATURING: Demene Hall, Rusty Russ, Julie Ritter, Linda Bond, Patrick Spence-Thomas

PLOT: Across four meal-themed segments, visitors to an abandoned house are eaten by the titular bed. Meanwhile, a former victim imprisoned behind a painting provides running commentary on the bed’s checkered past and strange habits.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: A horror movie about a killer bed? That’s kind of weird. But when it’s filled with nonstop voiceover relaying dense bed-related mythology, actors who are less energetic than a cast of mannequins, and incongruous Foley effects like the repeated sound of teeth crunching into an apple, then Death Bed has a definite shot at making the List.

COMMENTS: If it were anywhere near as risibly schlocky and straightforward as its title, Death Bed would probably be indistinguishable from the mass of movies about killer houses, animals, or furniture. But George Barry, the film’s writer, director, and producer (who, incidentally, never worked on another movie), had a unique vision, albeit an incomprehensible one. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether Death Bed is supposed to be low-budget horror, a pretentious art film, or some misbegotten hybrid of the two. It ranges in quality from bad to totally unwatchable, but it never goes the expected route.

The movie is about a killer bed, yes, but that bed has a very chatty British companion tucked away behind a nearby wall. Described only as “the artist,” he’s the ghost of a tuberculosis patient once consumed by the bed, and he narrates large chunks of the film, whether launching vicious tirades at the bed or jumping into jokey flashbacks about the bed’s exploits that stop the flimsy plot cold in its tracks. The artist also attempts to explain the bed’s convoluted origins—which involve a demon trapped in a tree and a young woman whose corpse has never decomposed—but these stories invariably raise more questions than they answer, especially when they’re invoked in order to bring about the film’s bloody, explosive resolution.

Death Bed‘s present-day narrative is split into four parts; the first, “Breakfast,” is unrelated to Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: DEATH BED: THE BED THAT EATS (1977) →

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

2 Comments

Folks, there’s still time to join the Weirdcademy and vote for the weirdest movie, actor, actress and scene of 2010!  Currently Enter the Void is leading Black Swan for Weirdest Movie; amateur underdog Zachary Oberzan is cruising comfortably ahead of sentimental favorite Heath Ledger for Weirdest Actor; Weirdest Actress is the closest race, with Natalie Portman and Splice‘s Delphine Chaneac neck and neck; and Enter the Void’s orgy scene is leading Natalie Portman’s transformation for your weirdest scene of the year.   Vote for your favorites here!

Next week we’ll feature reviews of the strangeness that is Death Bed: The Bed that Eats (1977); explore the experimental surrealistic animation offered by The Films of Suzan Pitt; take a gander at Zardoz (1974), featuring everyone’s favorite performance-in-a-diaper by Sean Connery; and we’ll continue our survey of Hammer director Terence Fisher’s oeuvre with a peek at Brides of Dracula.

Search terms used to locate the site seem to be getting more and more conventional over the past few weeks.  We’re scraping through the server logs looking for something strange enough to nominate as our “weirdest search term of the week.”  The long-tail fetishists continue to provide plenty of candidates: this week’s best offering was “touch molasses nylon sex movies.”  Although the following term—“brigitte nielsen pouts her wares at today’s make up trials for the loreal melbourne fashion festival”—isn’t really as weird as it might initially seem, the fact that people came here after searching for the phrase is certainly a bit odd.  But if we’re looking for the weirdest search term of the week, we have to give the award to the individual looking for “irving thalberg penis.”  We’re still trying to figure out whether the person was looking for a picture of the legendary producer’s wang, information about movies into which he inserted phallic references, or maybe searching for a prosthetic model of the late Mr. Thalberg.  The possibilities are endless, but none of them make sense.

Here’s the massive review queue (more titles after the break): The Films of Suzan Pitt (next week!); Zardoz (next week!); Possession; Wild Zero; Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Faust; Sublime;  Pink Floyd: The Wall; Toto the Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!