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| A Vampire's Castle, yesterday. |
Vampire Circus is astonishing - easily Hammer's best film of the 70s. The pre-titles sequence is Hammer to a tee, with a lustful acolyte brazenly and shockingly stealing a child to be drained of blood by her vampire lover - a sequence that recalls Bram Stoker's Lucy Westenra's 'Bloofer Lady'. The Circus of the Night is a sinister and surreal travelling show, with men who turn into panthers and clowns who rip off their facepaint to reveal a clownface underneath. The acrobats tumbling and jumping into the air and turning into vampire bats is not only witty, it's beautiful. Vampirism is likened to (and linked to) a plague and the village is placed under armed quarantine - but as always the evil cannot be contained until science and superstition merge into a spiritual force.
Kiss of the Vampire is almost as good, though the fanboy in me wishes that Andrew Keir's Father Sandor (from Dracula: Prince of Darkness) occupied the Professor Zimmer role (a gruff, drunk, outcast vampire hunter certainly describes both characters). Here, vampirism is a decadent cult - something entered into willingly for aesthetic reasons as much as anything else. Science is no good, but learning about your enemy is the way to fight back, using supernatural rituals against the forces of darkness. It works on an instinctive level - dark against dark.
The Vampire Lovers, adapting Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, uses sexual metaphors effectively, as the vampire Carmilla Karnstein seduces a series of young girls. There's a very European feel to the film - it's a story about strange unworldly people intruding into a fairytale version of adolescence. Lust for a Vampire is the same movie played again as crude sex comedy, and it's badly made too.
Twins of Evil seems to be two films in one - a striking Hammer take on Witchfinder General/The Crucible, with the great Peter Cushing as a zealous puritan "instrument of God"; and a tacky yet entertaining Karnstein vampire film with glamour models who clearly can't act and yet another cruel and sexy aristocrat bastard vampire (after Baron Meinster, Dr Ravna, Count Mitterhaus, etc.) who gets his kicks from rejecting any form of morality or restraint. It's a shame the captivating Ingrid Pitt didn't play Carmilla in all three films, as she's far the best.
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter is a frothy romp, packed with good ideas and nice performances, but it somehow feels like a failed pilot for a TV series. There's a great sense of the aristocracy being a class above and beyond the Church, of a ruling dynasty of evil that disguises itself effectively behind a cloak (literally) of respectability and piousness.
These films seem to be situated in a Hammer Vampire Land in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Europe. The ruling gentry are all cruel, sexy vampires, and earnest school teachers and drunk physicians have to take the fight to them in crumbling castles and deep forests.
* In Dracula, having been turned into an un-dead vampire by the thirsty Count, Lucy haunts Hampstead Heath and preys on children.
Whilst i acknowledge Ingrid's wondrousness, Katya Wyeth is still 'my' Carmilla / Mircalla / Carmina Burana, because Twins of Evil is great.
ReplyDeleteShame they never got round to doing any of the proposed sequels to Captain Kronos, too - it would have made a fun series / franchise / thing.