The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)

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As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been slowly working my way through the classic monster series from Hammer Studios. This is the second film in the Frankenstein series. The first film, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) very loosely adapted the novel from Mary Shelley. Apparently Universal Studios was all too ready to sue them if they adapted it too closely, or if they copied any of their designs for the castles or the monster so it is a very loose adaptation, but a good one.

At the end of that film, Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is set to face the guillotine for his crimes. At the beginning of this film, we learn that with the help of a hunchback named Karl (Oscar Quitak) a priest was executed in his place and he escaped. Three years later we find him living in Carlsbrück, Germany as a successful doctor named Victor Stein.

He’s become very popular amongst the rich (much to the chagrin of the medical council (as he refuses to join their club), but he also runs a clinic for the poor. Naturally, he’s also continuing his experiments into creating life (and probably hacking off a few body parts from the poor for that purpose.)

He teams up with Doctor Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews) a man who recognises him from his past and is excited about the work he did with reanimation. They will successfully remove Karl’s brain and implant it into a much healthier body. Things go pretty well, until of course they don’t. It wouldn’t be a Frankenstein film if he didn’t wind up going at least a little bit crazy.

The thing I’ve learned about Hammer Horror, especially their early entries, is that they are all about setting a mood. They have these wonderful sets and costumes that look both real and artificial. They create scenes that feel like they take place hundreds of years ago, yet there is an artificiality to it as well. Like you know you are watching a movie, but are still transported anyway.

The plots are often convoluted, and if I’m being honest, a little dull. And it often takes a while for the action and horror to take place, if it even comes at all. This film is like that. There is very little action or violence. It takes an incredibly long time for the monster to do anything. Instead, we spend time with Dr. Stein and Kleve talking about what they are going to do. Stein shows off his lab, which had a rudimentary experiment in it (there is a severed hand in one box of water, and a floating pair of eyes in the other, and they respond to one another).

There is a potential love interest, and some complaining by the board. Etc. It is more like a drama that just happens to have a reanimated corpse in it rather than a straight up horror film, but I still completely dig it.

I find I have to be in a certain mood for these films. You have to let them wash over you and enjoy what they are doing instead of what you might expect. But when you can’t, they are a lot of fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

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This is going to be a slight cheat. Obviously, I write a lot of movie reviews for Cinema Sentries. I do it for fun; I don’t get paid for it (I do get free Blu-rays, which is nice.) I’m not sure if I’d want to be in the cultural critic business right now; those folks are having a tough time of it. I’m also happy I don’t have anyone demanding I watch certain things. I review the things I request. I try to keep my requests down to a steady pace, but sometimes I go a little overboard, and I wind up with a stack of Blu-rays sitting on my desk, and that can be overwhelming.

That’s happening to me right now. I have a Blu-ray in front of me that I just watched but need to review. I’ve got another one I’ll hopefully watch later tonight. I have a six-film boxed set of Errol Flynn movies and another boxed set of all seven Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

That’s a lot of movies to watch and review. The Nightmare set is actually on the bottom of the pile, but since tonight is Friday and I always do a horror movie on Fridays, I thought I’d bump the first Nightmare on Elm Street up and kill two birds with one stone.

That also means I won’t be digging too deep into it because I’ll want to save all my best thoughts for the official review.

What I will say is that I love this movie. I grew up in the 1980s, and so slashers are my horror movie sweet spot, and this is one of my all-time favorites. Freddy Kreuger is a horror icon, and this is where he started. In later films he’d become a wise-cracking goof (admittedly a goof that will kill you in the end, but still a goof), but here he’s absolutely terrifying.

It was a stroke of genius having him kill inside of dreams, as that allows the film to eschew the laws of physics and reality. Anything goes, and the film makes good use of that. The imagery here is absolutely iconic. From the wall that turns elastic to the claws reaching up from the bathtub or the stairway steps turning to goo, to Freddy’s outstretched arms, the film is simply loaded with memorable shots. There is a wonderful tactile quality to the film and its use of practical effects. Sometimes that means you can see the filmmaking behind it – you can tell that the goo inside those steps is oatmeal, and when Freddy falls down the stairs, you can see the mattress he lands on—but I much prefer that to the CGI garbage so many modern films rely on.

So, yeah, I love this movie. I will have more to say about it and all of its sequels in a week or so. Look right here in these pages for that link when it comes out.

Funny story, just now as I’m about to post this I have a premonition to do a search of my site for this film, just in case I’d written about it before. I couldn’t remember writing about it, but I write a lot of stuff so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick search.

Friends I wrote a full review of the film (and its release in UHD) just over a year ago!

The Friday Night Horror Movie: What Lies Beneath (2020)

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Robert Zemeckis had an incredible run in the 1980s through the 1990s. It started with Romancing the Stone in 1984 and ran through the Back to the Future Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Death Becomes Her, and Contact. I was a big fan. When I learned he was making a thriller with Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford, I was completely on board. I believe I saw it opening weekend in the theater. I was highly disappointed. I’ve not seen it since.

The Criterion Channel is currently running a bunch of horror films from the 2000s. This is one of them. Lately, I’ve been revisiting films from my youth that I didn’t much care for at the time to see if the decades since might have made me more attuned to their wavelength. This is especially true for films that my critic friends seem to like.

So, I figured it was time to revisit this one and see if I’ve changed my mind. Friends, it still stinks. Well, okay, it isn’t that bad, but it is a bit of a mess.

This is basically Zemeckis doing Hitchcock, but that’s not really a thing in his wheelhouse.

It begins like a Rear Window homage. Claire Spencer (Pfeiffer) and her husband, Norman (Ford) live in a big, beautiful, lakeside house in Vermont. He’s a fancy researcher at a fancy college. She gave up her musical career to be a mom. As the film begins, they are saying goodbye to their daughter, who is headed off to college. Claire is having a hard time with this. She’s lonely and bored.

She notices the new neighbors are often fighting. Loudly. One rainy night she spies him loading something (a big covered something) into the trunk of his car. Did he just murder his wife? Suspicions run even higher when she stops by with a welcoming package and realizes that the wife’s car is in the garage, but she seems to be gone. And the husband is being cagey.

But just as that idea gets going, the film shifts gears. Now Claire is seeing ghosts. She hears whispers, the front door keeps finding itself open, and the bath is filled with hot water when nobody’s home.

All of this works well enough. Ford and Pfeiffer are too good of actors, and Zemekis too talented a director for it not to, but it never rises above. It never quite thrilled me. I never really believed the ghost angle, and without that there isn’t much more to the story. I kept half expecting the neighbor to show back up and to be an actual killer. I think I would have preferred that to what we actually get.

The trailer for the film famously spoils half the movie and the big twist towards the end. I won’t do that in case you haven’t seen it. The first time I watched the film, I felt the ending really killed the film’s momentum, but this time I found the final act to be the most interesting. That’s when Zemeckis goes into full Hitchcock mode, allowing himself to move away from the problematic script (by Clark Gregg!) and into pure direction. Although, I’ll still admit there are some really silly bits to its conclusion.

It isn’t a terrible film, just not a great one. And with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how this marks the beginning of a downside to the director and his two stars.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Get Away (2024)

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Horror often relies on putting characters in unfamiliar places. They might be somewhere remote and isolated, where help cannot be found. Or maybe they are in a different culture where they do not understand the language or customs. Putting our protagonists somewhere they do not feel safe gives us an immediate sense of dread.

Get Away falls in the tradition of films like The Wicker Man (1973) or Midsommar (2019) where are protagonists are both isolated from the outside world and surrounded by a strange and unfamiliar culture. It then plays with those conventions, subverting them in interesting and fun ways.

Richard (Nick Frost, who also wrote the script) and Susan (Aisling Bea), along with their two children, Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres), are taking a holiday on a tiny island off the coast of Sweden. They are looking forward to the island’s annual celebration of Karantan (where islanders nearly starved to death, resorting to cannibalism due to some forced quarantining).

Before they even arrive at the island, they are given the side-eye by the locals who warn them they won’t be welcomed there. They barely make the last ferry (which naturally won’t return for several days) and arrive on the island where they are greeted by scorn.

The one friendly face, Mats (Eero Milonoff), is the one who rented them the Airbnb, and he turns out to be a pervert, spying on Jessie and stealing her undergarments.

For the first hour, the film relies on the tropes of these sorts of films – miscommunications over cultural differences, an increasing sense of unease – and then it takes a big twist. I won’t spoil it, but unless you really aren’t paying attention, you’ll probably figure it out long before the film wants you to. It is a bit strange that it takes the film so long to get to that twist, because what comes after is where everybody seems to be having the most fun.

At that point, the unease turns into a straight-up gore fest with loads of well-done practical effects and very fun kills.

It is a film that isn’t nearly as clever as it needs to be, or funny, but it isn’t a bad cinematic experience. I like Nick Frost quite a lot, and it’s fun to see him just being weird and having a good time. I just wish I enjoyed myself as much as he seems to have.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Sci-Fi In July Edition: Resident Evil (2002)

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I stopped playing video games after things advanced past the Super Nintendo System. Partially, this was because I’d gone to college and found more interesting things to take up my time. Partially, this was because I was now college-aged and expected to purchase things like gaming systems myself, and I had other things to spend my money on. But also, my friend had a Nintendo 64, and when I’d play games on it like GoldenEye, I found I got nauseated.

My brother had a PlayStation, and I believe he owned the first Resident Evil game. I remember playing it a time or two, but it never hooked me in. So when the movie came out, I was none too interested.

I thought I had watched it sometime previously to tonight, but I’ve not logged it in Letterboxd nor rated it on IMDB. Watching it, I found that I had no real memory of it. The opening scene did seem a little familiar, and I definitely knew about a scene where a laser beam cuts some soldiers into pieces. But maybe I saw that in a trailer, or some other clip. Or maybe I started the movie, got halfway through, and decided it was too stupid to finish. I dunno. As I get older, my memory of what I’ve seen and haven’t seen diminishes, and I’m left scratching my head over certain films.

Obviously, none of this matters to anyone, but this is my blog, and I can ramble if I want to.

But on to the actual film. Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up naked and alone in a shower. She seems to have fallen, pulling the shower curtain down with her (to strategically cover up her naked parts, yet reveal enough to get the horny boys most likely to see this movie all excited). She seems to have lost all memory of who she is and what she’s doing there. She sees a picture of herself with a man. They are dressed as if it is their wedding day. She notices a wedding ring on her finger.

Suddenly, a strange man tackles her just as a group of commandos busts into the mansion. The commandos have no time to explain, but take Alice and the man with them to an underground train. There, they find Spence (James Purefoy), the man in that wedding photo, who also says he has amnesia.

Riding the train deeper underground, the commando boss, James Shade (Colin Salmon), explains that they are entering The Hive, a top-secret genetic research facility owned by The Umbrella Corporation. Earlier that day, The Hive’s supercomputer, also known as The Red Queen, mysteriously killed all the people inside The Hive. The Commandos are there to find out why. Alice and Spence are employees of The Umbrella Corporation, tasked to guard the entrance of The Hive, and were only pretending to be married as some sort of cover.

For the first half of the film, our heroes do battle with The Red Queen. It is still on guard and has set deadly traps for anyone trying to get in. That’s where those laser beams come in, plus various other murderous traps.

Once they turn the computer off, they realize the reason it went haywire is that the T-Virus was unleashed, and The Hive had to be shut down lest it contaminate the outside world. The T-Virus turns humans into zombies.

Also, the crazy scientists in The Hive were experimenting with the T-Virus on various creatures, creating super monsters. The rest of our film finds our heroes battling them.

Paul W.S. Anderson directs (I seem to be having an Anderson weekend). Like all of his films that I’ve seen, he does a good enough job directing that I don’t hate what I’m watching, but a poor enough job to make me wonder why I kept with it. He’s competent enough to keep things interesting, but not enough of an artist to ever make me seek him out. Someone should tell him to lay off the CGI, though. It looks bad in all his films, but here especially, since most of the monsters are CGI and they are laughably bad.

He’s helped here by a script that kept the action coming at a steady pace. Jovovich is quite good as the lead; she’s starred in all of the Resident Evil films, and I imagine this is what she will be remembered for. She’s got quite a presence. As does Michelle Rodriguez as one of the commandos. This was just her fourth film, but she completely owns it. The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, ranging from pretty good to fairly terrible.

This is a film where, if I have actually seen it before, I can totally understand how I’d forgotten it. It isn’t all that bad, but neither is it particularly memorable. It is, however, just good enough to make me want to watch the sequel. Or maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

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28 Days Later was one of the first movie reviews I ever wrote for this blog. With the new legacy sequel, 28 Years later, coming out this weekend, I thought it would be fun to revisit the first film and its original sequel 28 Weeks Later.

I find I mostly still agree with my original review of the first film. I like the first half better than the second, but my opinion of the second half improved a little, and my thoughts on the first half declined. I think I appreciate what it was trying to do with the military stuff more, and the zombie stuff no longer feels all that fresh or original.

My memory says I hated the sequel, but I rated it 3.5 stars out of 5, so I guess my feelings were mixed. I didn’t write a review of it, so I don’t have the details of those feelings written down for posterity.

This time around, I mostly liked it.

It begins with completely different characters from those who were in the first film. We find a group of people huddled inside a small but rather fortified cabin, hiding from the zombies. This includes Don Harris (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). The zombies attack, and at first, Don plays the hero, fighting back the zombies while everyone else runs.

But then he runs and ultimately finds himself separated from his wife and a small child. The zombies attack them, and instead of fighting, he runs. We see him fleeing the house while his wife pounds on the window, presumably about to get eaten.

The film spends a lot of time painting that action as completely cowardly and Don as a horrible person. He is completely grief-stricken. The thing is, I kind of found myself on his side. It was a horrible situation, and there wasn’t a whole lot he could have done to save her.

Movies teach us that everybody should always risk their lives to save others, and while that is a noble sentiment, it is also perfectly human to be scared out of your mind in these types of situations, and not always be the hero.

I’m going to avoid spoilers, but something happens to rub that guilt in, and then it totally doesn’t matter because the film takes a different turn.

Anyway, flash forward to 28 weeks later, and the zombies have all died out. They apparently never escaped England, and all the humans either were bitten or escaped. The zombies eventually died of starvation.

Now they are trying to repopulate the country. NATO forces (led by Americans) have set up a fortified camp on the Isle of Dogs, an isolated peninsula near London. Don’s children, Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) have just arrived, where they are reunited with Don.

There is some interesting subtext about Americans and militarization. They act like they have complete control of the situation, full of bluster and ego, and then everything goes haywire, and they are mostly completely useless to stop it.

The film takes its time before the zombies come back, but once they do, things kick into high gear. There are several terrific set pieces that I enjoyed a lot more than the original film. 28 Days Later used a lot of handheld camera work, and I often got lost in what was happening to whom, but here the action is much better balanced.

There is a lot of nonsense in where the plot goes, and so many characters make so many dumb decisions, it is hard to take it seriously, but if you can set that sort of thing aside, this makes for a good little zombie sequel. It helps that the cast is completely stacked. Besides those already mentioned, we’ve got Idris Elba, Jeremy Renner, and Harold Perrineau as soldiers and Rose Byrne as a military doctor.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Baron Blood (1972)

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Apologies for getting this out late. My daughter had a sleepover last night, and I decided to stay up late watching a French adaptation of an Agatha Christie story with my wife rather than write this. I think you will understand.

Baron Blood was directed by the great Italian genre director Mario Bava. It was made late in his career (he’d only direct three more films before his death) when he was having trouble getting financing for any film. Beloved as he is now, Bava’s films rarely made much money when they were released.

As such, the film has plenty of style and looks amazing, but falls fairly flat in the storytelling department.

Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora), an American university student, comes to Austria to visit his ancestral castle. While there, he learns that his Great-Grandfather was a notorious sadist who tortured and killed hundreds of villagers, earning him the nickname Baron Blood. Legend says that the Baron burned a witch at the stake, but before she died, she cursed him with a spell that would allow him to rise again from the grave only to be eternally tortured by her.

Naturally, our hero, along with his friend Eva Arnold (Elke Sommer) enacts the curse and raises the baron from the grave.

But first, Joseph Cotton.

Although he is top billed, the legendary actor doesn’t appear until at least half an hour into this 90-minute film. He plays Alfred Becker, an eccentric millionaire who buys the castle at auction.

Actually, no, my timeline is off. Peter and Eve do use an incantation to raise the Baron from the grave before Becker shows up. They do it at midnight, but the clock strikes 2 ( the exact time when the Baron was murdered), and blood runs under the door, but they don’t actually see the Baron. Before they can read the recantation, a wind knocks the scroll into a fire, and it is lost.

Although they do not know it, the Baron has risen, and he kills the previous owner of the castle, hence the auction, hence the showing up of Alfred Becker.

He kills a few more people, and our heroes try to find a way to lift the curse. Etc. The plot follows a pretty standard path from there.

Cotton feels out of place here, like he’s not quite sure what he’s doing in this film. He was in his late 60s at the time, making a string of low-budget horror movies, which I can only assume was a low point in his career. Sommer seems to be the only one having any real fun, and she’s a delight.

What makes it worth watching is the setting and Bava’s usual fantastic use of color, light, and shadow. Shot on the grounds of a real castle, he makes great use of the gothic setting, complete with a tower, torture chamber, and lots of enormous chambers that give the director plenty of interesting angles to shoot from.

It is far from Bava’s best work, but even average films from him are well worth watching.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Dracula (1979)

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Though I’ve seen probably a dozen Dracula movies, I’ve never actually read the book by Bram Stoker. Everything I know about the story, the characters, and the most famous vampire of all comes from the movies. I have no idea how accurate any of them are. They all change the narrative to suit their cinematic needs. But I figure between them all, I’ve probably gotten all of the details in there somewhere.

This version of the story was based on a stage play (the same one the Bela Lugosi film was based on). It doesn’t do anything particularly new with the story, though it does lean more into the seductive side of Dracula than the violent, destructive side. But it is a very good adaptation, if not exactly a necessary one.

It skips the beginning of the story with solicitor Jonathan Harker (Trevor Eve) visiting Count Dracula (Frank Langella) at his home. Instead, it begins with the arrival of Dracula on the Demeter. The ship crashes near the home of Dr. Jack Seward (Donald Pleasence), and Dracula is rescued by his daughter, Lucy Seward (Kate Nelligan).

At first, Dracula is friendly with everybody and dines that evening with the Seward’s and their friend Minda Van Helsing (Jan Francis). But that evening he’s sucking Minda’s blood and seducing Lucy.

Minda’s death brings Professor Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier) back from his journeys and…well, if you’ve seen other adaptations of the story, you more or less know what comes next.

Like I said, it doesn’t do anything particularly new with the story, but I quite liked it anyway. The sets look amazing, and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, along with director John Badham, create some stunning imagery.

Olivier is great as Van Helsing, and Pleasence is enjoyable as Dr. Seward, whose home also happens to be situated on the grounds of an insane asylum, providing the film with some of its most memorable set pieces. Tony Haygarth gives a fine, if all too brief, performance as the deranged Renfield.

The entire cast is quite good, save for Frank Langella as Dracula. His performance lacks the menace or sensuality the role requires. He plays it like he’s an old gentleman, beset by loneliness who periodically has to suck people blood to survive. There are flashes of something special hidden in there, but mostly I found it a very odd performance.

But overall this is a very good version of the old story.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Freaky (2020)

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“What if Freaky Friday, but a slasher?” – some guy in a pitch meeting, probably.

Christopher Landon directed the two Happy Death Day movies, which were basically Groundhog Day, but a slasher, and they are both quite good. So is Freaky, which handles the mashup of comedy and horror with aplomb.

Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) is an unpopular and constantly bullied teenager (despite being very pretty, relatively stylish, funny, smart, and plays the school mascot at football games) who is still mourning the death of her father one year ago.

After a game, her (alcoholic) mother “forgets” to pick her up (she’s passed out in a drunken stupor), leaving Millie alone after dark. She’s attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), who stabs her with an ancient Aztec knife. This causes a body swap, and now Millie must stab the butcher with that same knife by midnight or the body swap will be permanent.

The specific plot elements of this film are pretty dumb. But the film doesn’t take them seriously. The joy of it is watching Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton play each other. Vaughn is especially a lot of fun. He gets a lot of mileage as a middle-aged man sporting a tall, bulky frame playing a small teenage girl.

Millie has a couple of sidekicks (played by Celeste O’Connor and Misha Osherovich) who provide a lot of banter and comic relief (some of which works, some of it doesn’t). The kills are clever and surprisingly brutal.

But really, the reason to watch this is Vaughn having a ton of fun and Newton getting to act like a brutish psycho killer in the body of a teenager.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Crooked House (2008)

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We have now moved from our beloved Awesome ’80s in April to Mysteries in May. When I started this theme last year, I entitled it Murder Mysteries in May. I think I liked the aliteration more than anything, but I also seem to have known I would probably move from Murder Mysteries to just Mysteries, as when I created the category for it, I did not include “Murder.”

The thing, of course, is that you can have a mystery without there being a murder. I imagine that the majority of mysteries involve solving some sort of crime, often a murder, and Lord knows I love a good Murder Mystery, but I think I like broadening it up to other types of mysteries as well. So here we are. I’ll likely write more about that tomorrow in my normal opening salvo for the month’s theme, so I’ll move on.

It is easy to find a mystery that is also a horror film. Lots of murder mysteries have horror elements mixed in, and a good haunted house story is also mysterious. Tonight I wanted to watch something with my wife, and as she doesn’t like the hard horror stuff, I went looking for a nice mystery with just a touch of horror. It took forever, and when I finally found something, our internet went bad, so I had to find something else.

I landed on a movie called Crooked House from 2017. It is based on an Agatha Christie story, it was scripted by Julian Fellowes, and stars Glenn Close, Terrence Stamp, Julian Sands, Gillian Anderson, and Christina Hendricks. The trailer looked fun, and my Fire Stick indicated it was available on Prime.

I pressed play, and an opening scene had Marc Gatiss in it. That was a nice surprise, and I was pleased to have yet another actor I enjoy in this thing. Then the opening credits rolled, and none of the other names were familiar to me. None of those stars I just rattled off appeared either.

This was the wrong film. I backed out and looked at it again. The title card indicated the movie I wanted, and the trailer too. But pressing “play” again yielded the same results. I then searched for “Crooked House” on my Fire Stick, and now Amazon indicated that the film I wanted was not available to me.

Figuring the Mark Gatiss film was just an older adaptation of the same story, I decided to go ahead and watch.

It is not the same story. It isn’t even a movie. This Crooked House was a television series created by Mark Gatiss, who also wrote it. It ran for three episodes in 2008. Presumably, someone put the episodes together and made them into a movie. It works like an anthology series, which fits the premise well.

Gatiss conceived it as a homage to both the stories of M.R. James and the films of Amicus Productions. I’ve not read anything by James, but I am quite familiar with Amicus, which made a bunch of low-budget horror films in the 1970s that feel like low-rent Hammer Horror knock-offs.

A high school history teacher, Ben Morris (Lee Ingleby), brings an ancient door knocker he’s recently discovered to the local museum, where he presents it to the curator (Mark Gatiss). He says it must be from the old Geap Manor and proceeds to tell him two ghost stories about the place.

The first story finds an old miser restoring the Manor after he got rich on an investment that ruined the other speculators. Soon enough, he’s hearing loud knocks coming from the walls, which seem to turn to blood in the wee hours of the night.

The second story takes place in the Roaring Twenties, with a wild party going on in the manor. The new owner announces his engagement to the daughter of a tradesman, much to the chagrin of his ex-girlfriend and grandmother. The ex is jealous, but the grandmother tells a story of a terrible suicide that happened to her sister on her wedding day. And the curse the woman put upon all new brides in that house.

Our final story involves Ben Morris as he takes the knocker home and puts it on his own door, only to begin hearing creepy knocking at 3 every morning and finding his house transformed into the old manor.

None of the stories is particularly good, but they do have a certain creepy charm to them, and there are a couple of good scares to be found. The fact that it was initially a television series somehow makes it better. I can totally see myself enjoying it that way. And I do dig that Amicus vibe.