For the third (and final) film in the Ginger Snaps series, they went back to the beginning. Or rather the beginning of the beginning. Or something. What I’m saying is they made a prequel.
Set in 1815, this film follows two sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabel), as they battle werewolves and try to keep Ginger from turning into one after she’s been bitten.
If you’ll remember, that is exactly the plot of the original film, even down to the same actresses playing characters with the same names and (more or less) the same personalities.
Instead of being two modern girls living through the hell of high school and being obsessed with death, these sisters have survived a terrible accident that killed their parents and everyone else in their party while exploring the great wilderness.
They come upon a nearly abandoned fort filled with suspicious characters. The people inside have been waiting for a party to return with food and supplies, but they are two months late. Wolf-like creatures have been attacking the fort regularly.
One night Ginger discovers a strange, deformed boy hidden in a room. The boy bites her. It will come as no surprise to learn the boy was bitten by a werewolf and is starting to turn. Soon enough Ginger will start to turn as well.
To keep that from happening, she needs to kill the boy. But her father is none too keen on that happening, and killing a child proves a bit difficult for her as well.
The original Ginger Snaps was a terrific little horror film that blended the smart high school satire of Heathers with a good dash of bloody horror. This third entry feels like they just took the same concept and threw it into a different time period. The sisters act just like they do in the original film, down to the way they talk (which is rather off-putting since it takes place in the 1800s). There also isn’t much satire to it. It really doesn’t feel like they took the time to think through the earlier time period but needed it to be a sequel since (spoilers for the previous films) Ginger is dead and Brigitte is a full-fledged werewolf.
The end result isn’t terrible. It is a perfectly serviceable horror film. It just pales in comparison with the first one.
I’ve written about Scream (1996) several times before. I grew up watching slashers in the late 1980s, and Scream did this amazing job of both satirizing the genre conventions and actually being one of the best films in the genre. The characters are all self-aware. They seem to know they are living inside a horror movie. Well, not that exactly; they are real characters, but they all know the horror conventions. They constantly talk about horror movies, and at one point one of the characters breaks down the “rules.”
I loved that. I’d never seen a movie where characters talked about pop culture in the same way I did. I’d often thought about the rules of horror, even if I’d never exactly put it that way. To see characters on the screen that were like me was revolutionary.
There were two immediate sequels, followed by what are now four legacy sequels that started just over a decade after the third one ended. They have mostly been a series of diminishing returns. This latest one is the worst in the franchise.
Scream satirized the entire horror genre, specifically slasher films. Scream 2 turned its eyes on sequels, and Scream 3 attempted to go after trilogies. Then there were shots at remakes, YouTube Videos, and Legacy Sequels. Scream 7 seems to just be satirizing itself, as if there are not other aspects of the genre it can poke fun at.
The legacy films in this series have been a mixed bag. Sometimes they’ve felt like they are trying to set up a new group of characters to carry the torch, and yet they can never seem to let go of the old familiar faces. I’ve seen them all, but I would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about the last three films.
Due to a salary dispute, Neve Campbell did not appear in Scream 6, but she is back front and center for this one. As is Courteney Cox. Melissa Barrera, who was set up as the main lead in Scream 5 and Scream 6, was not asked to be back for this film due to some social media-related kerfuffle. Jenna Oretega then decided not to return.
I’ve said an awful lot here without actually talking about the film at hand. There just isn’t that much to talk about.
The cold open features a couple of Stab fans (Stab being the in-movie films that basically fictionalize the events of the Scream films, if that makes sense). They come to the house that most of the characters died in the original Scream,as a sort of dark tourism satire and promptly get killed.
Sidney (Campbell) has now moved to a rural town, gotten married to a cop (Joel McHale), and has a kid who she named Tatum (Isabel May) (the name of one of her friends in the first film who was horribly killed – which is kind of weird when you think about it – and the characters in this film do think about it).
Ghostface Killer finds them and starts murdering people in very gore-filled but not so imaginative ways. He video calls Sidney and has the voice and face of the original killer in Scream. But it can’t be him because he was killed in that first film. Or can it? By this point in the franchise, anything can happen (but mostly doesn’t).
There are a lot of secondary characters who are also suspects. There is the weird kid obsessed with Sidney and her (many) run-ins with killers. There’s the boyfriend and movie nerd girl. Plus a couple of kids from the last film. There is some decent meta-humor where characters literally call these people by the names I’m using (weird kid, boyfriend, etc.).
They have the now perfunctory meta-discussion on who the killer could be, but they put no real effort into it. Gayle (Cox) eventually shows up. Her entrance is pretty good, but then they don’t seem to know what to do with her.
Scream is one of my all-time favorite horror films. I’ve enjoyed many of the sequels even while recognizing they are never as good as the original. But this one just doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist. Yet, I’m not mad I watched it. I even spent good money on it to see it in the theater (something I haven’t done since Scream 3).
But if they make another one, I hope they get rid of the entire original cast and find a way to make it feel original again. At this point this series is starting to feel like the films the original was so good at making fun of.
This was one of the first Dario Argento films I ever watched. I had definitely watched The Bird With the Crystal Plumage before, and probably Suspiria, but I was not well versed in Argento or Giallo at that point. I watched it on an old DVD that I bought on the cheap. It was one of those packs of multiple films all put onto a couple of discs where the quality is god-awful. This was a pack of like ten slasher films on two discs.
I didn’t know anything about the film; I’m not even sure I knew it was an Argento, but it sounded interesting, and I gave it a go. I mostly liked it, but I didn’t love it.
I’ve seen it a couple of times since and have come to enjoy it more. Having now seen almost all of Argento’s filmography and a whole lot of Giallo, I can better see how it fits inside those things and appreciate it more. It still isn’t anywhere close to my favorite, but it’s a long way from the worst. I do find it interesting that I watched it so early.
The Cat O’ Nine Tails was the second film Argento ever directed and is the middle part of what has become known as his “Animal Trilogy” (the first is Bird With the Crystal Plumage, the last is Four Flies on Gray Velvet.)
This film suffers from it leaning more towards the murder mystery aspects of the Giallo and away from the more lurid and stylistic parts of the genre.
Someone breaks into the Terzi Medical Institute but steals nothing. The institute studies genetics and has just made a breakthrough. It seems that individuals with an extra Y chromosome—making it XYY – have a much greater tendency toward violence. That extra chromosome is quite rare, but a study inside a prison found that those convicted of violent crimes had it at a much higher rate.
Since nothing was stolen, the police basically shrug. But a newspaper man named Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) takes an interest in the story, as does Franco “Cookie” Arno (Karl Malden), a blind man who loves working puzzles.
Before they can figure it out, the bodies start piling up. Someone is strangling people that at first seem random, but they ultimately are found to have some connection to the institute.
There are lots of groovy scenes featured from the killer’s point of view, usually as he’s killing someone. In the midst of this, Argento often gives us extreme close-ups on the killer’s eyes, but until the end we do not see who the killer is. With that and Cookie being blind, Argento’s themes about what we see and what we don’t are none too subtle. But still effective.
The editing is rather fascinating. Between scenes, the film will often give us flashes of what is to come. As one scene is ending, we’ll see the beginning of the next scene flash cut into the previous scene for a few seconds. There are a few nicely staged scenes and some typical Dario style, but mostly he plays it straight. Which is too bad because the actual story doesn’t quite have enough in it to keep me completely interested.
It is well worth seeing if you are a fan of Argento or Giallo. It isn’t the first film I’d turn to if you are interested, but it is definitely a nice way of seeing how things developed.
As an aside note I’m counting this as part of Foreign Film February even though the copy I watched was an English dub. Like a lot of Italian films from this time I believe Cat O’ Nine Tails was filmed with everyone speaking in their native tongue and then in post production it was dubbed into English and Italian (with the main actors using their own voice when possible – so Karl Malden speaks in English, and was presumably dubbed by an Italian for that version.) So this was a foreign made film directed by an Italian so I’m counting it.
Last night the family and I went to see the King Cabbage Brass Band in concert. I’ll probably have more to say about that later, but for now I’ll say we had a blast. It was a great show. To get there we had to leave about 6:30, and we didn’t get home until almost midnight, at which point I was utterly exhausted, and was not capable of sitting down to watch a horror movie.
I had actually planned for this and watched a movie earlier in the afternoon. I got about half of this post written before it was time to go. So, I’m finishing it now, and we’re calling it the Saturday Morning Horror Movie. I guess I could call it the Friday Afternoon Horror Movie since that’s when I watched it, but let’s not make things complicated.
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There is just too darn much stuff to watch. My daughter wanted to watch Hamilton a couple of weeks ago, and the only way to stream it is to get Disney+. Apparently, the only way to get Disney+ is to bundle it with Hulu. Being the good father that I am, I ordered both, and we all enjoyed Hamilton.
Then I started to enjoy Hulu. They’ve got some good movies, and some great shows, and I decided to keep it for another month. Tonight I figured I’d see how their horror selection was and came across this film. The trailer looked intriguing, and I gave it a go.
Turns out it is part of a horror anthology series from horror stalwarts Blumhouse Pictures. Into the Dark, as the series was called, ran for two seasons with roughly one movie coming out per month. Each movie was holiday themed, grabbing whatever big holiday happened during the month it aired.
Somehow, I’d never heard of this. Like at all. Which is weird because this sort of thing is right up my alley. Like I say, there is just too darn much stuff to watch.
But now that I’ve watched this, I’m kind of glad I’d not heard of it before. There are some intriguing ideas in All That We Destroy, but none of them are explored with any real gusto.
Dr. Harris (Samantha Mathis) is a geneticist who has found a way to make perfect human clones. In her house. It is perfect timing because, as it turns out, her son Spencer (Israel Broussard) is probably a serial killer. He’d shown all sorts of signs of that growing up, but when he actually kills a human – a drifter named Ashley (Aurora Perrineu)—she’s sure of it. Instead of turning him in or getting him some kind of therapy, she clones Ashley and lets him keep killing her.
The idea is that if she observes his killings, then maybe she can figure out what makes him tick and change him. Or at the very least, killing a clone will get those instincts out of his system (for a time), enabling him to live a normal life. And whenever those instincts pop back up, he can come home and kill another clone.
That’s an interesting idea, but again the film doesn’t do much with it. It doesn’t really explore what makes him tick. The mom could turn into a great villain. It makes a certain sense that any mom would protect their son, but she just keeps churning out clones for him to kill. Even when the clones start to have memories of themselves and increasingly seem human, she just keeps making them.
The trouble is Spencer knows he’s killing a clone. That makes her not human, and he can tell the difference. It just isn’t the same killing a clone. Enter Marissa (Dora Madison), the cute, effervescent neighbor who takes a liking to Spencer even though he speaks in monotone and acts very strangely. She becomes the love interest but also a real human he might have to kill.
Spencer’s Dad (Frank Whaley) shows up at some point, but only through these very strange virtual reality phone calls with his mom. When he calls, the mom picks up these little dots she attaches to her head and gets transported to a virtual world where they both walk and talk together. There are some other odd technological moments in this film that seem to exist to show that we are living in the near future or something.
The script does nobody any favors. Madison and Perrineau give it their best, and both are quite good with what they’re given. There really is something to this story, but it’s like the filmmakers didn’t quite believe in it enough and wound up falling back on some stupid tropes.
As it is Foreign Film February, I wanted to do a non-English language film for my Friday Night Horror flick. It has also been a long day, so I grabbed the thing closest to me, which was my Paul Naschy boxed set. There are five films in that set, and I hope to watch and review them all over the next couple of months. I love the idea of reviewing all the DVDs I own, but that is a monumental task.
Vengeance of the Zombies is an absolutely bonkers film. In the booklet that came with this set, Naschy (who wrote the film) is quoted as having probably been on hashish when he sat down at his typewriter. That definitely checks out.
It also checks out that this was a chepie exploitation flick. Technically there is a plot, but it is so haphazardly put together it is impossible to make sense of.
Someone is killing a bunch of women in London. Then someone else, a voodoo priest named Kantanka (Paul Naschy), is bringing them back to life as part of his zombie horde. Naschy also plays Krisna an East Indian mystic.
Elvire Irving (Romy) thinks Krisna is one cool cat and follows him to his big mansion out in the country. The big mansion was once the home of an evil family who were eventually murdered and hung upon the trees in the yard.
There are a lot of dream sequences where Kantanka and some other foul faced fiends attack Elvire. In one particularly groovy dream sequence, Paul Naschy plays Satan, to whom various others make sacrifices. Another sequence (which may or may not be a dream; it is difficult to tell), a lady wearing a big box painted like a man’s face dances around while Kantanka pours blood onto corpses to turn them alive. Or something.
Scotland Yard gets involved but is mostly useless.
Seriously, I just watched this film, and I’m having a hard time remembering anything about the actual plot.
There is lots of murdering. Plenty of ladies wearing sheer nightgowns. And loads of gratuitous sex.
I do love the sex scenes in these types of films. During one scene, the housekeeper is upset over something. Krisna tells her everything is going to be ok. Then he looks at her, the music starts up, and he then pulls down the covers, pulls down her top, and gropes her breasts three times. She then sits up and passionately kisses him.
In another scene, Elvire goes into a barn only to find a woman with her head nearly chopped off. Then she is attacked by a dude with a scythe. Krisna jumps in and saves the day. They then go to the house, where she tells him that he should call the cops. He brusquely says “no” to which she responds by making out with him.
I’ve been doing my seduction techniques all wrong, I guess.
The music is a wild mix of popular rock and funk. It is so crazily inappropriate for most of what’s happening on screen.
This is a ridiculously bad film in every imaginable way. But it’s also a lot of fun to watch. It is the kind of film you want to watch late at night with a group of friends while getting loaded. Check your brain at the door and get ready for ridiculousness.
When I first began writing these Friday Night Horror columns, back in 2022, I didn’t really write full reviews of the films. They really were Friday night movies. After supper, me and the family would go upstairs to my bedroom and watch a Doctor Who episode, and then I’d write my Five Cool Things column (which was published on Fridays back then), and then I’d start watching a horror movie. But by then it was usually pretty late. Many times I’d actually fall asleep on the couch before I’d finished the movie. Even if I did make it to the end, it would be way too late for me to be able to write a full review. So usually, somewhere in the middle of the film, I’d dash off my column with promises to write my full thoughts the next morning (usually this didn’t happen.)
At some point my daughter got older and started having friends over on Friday nights (or she’d go to their house), and the Doctor Who watching kind of stopped. Then I stopped writing Five Cool Things on Fridays, and suddenly I had a lot more free time to start my weekend. Truth be told, I often watch my horror movies on Friday afternoons.
Short thoughts on movies I hadn’t even finished became full-on reviews, and here we are. I say all this to admit one thing: I can barely remember watching Black Phone (2021). When trailers started dropping for Black Phone 2, I remembered I had seen the first one, but I couldn’t remember anything about it. I was pretty sure I had written about it, so I searched my site hoping to find a review to refresh my memory. I found my Friday Night Horror column on it, but then had to face the fact that it was written at that time when I wasn’t writing full reviews. And in the case of this movie, I was so spoiler-avoidant I hardly said anything about the plot.
I started to watch it again because I wasn’t interested in the sequel, but I’ve got a stack of Blu-rays on my desk that need watching (and reviewing), so I didn’t feel like I had time. So I watched a couple of trailers and refreshed myself with the basic premise of the films and sat down with the sequel.
Black Phone 2 takes place four years after the original film. The hero of that film, Finney Black (Mason Thames), the only survivor of the Grabber’s (Ethan Hawke) reign as a serial killer, is haunted by his experience. His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who helped find Finn when he was trapped in the Grabber’s basement, is now haunted by nightmares featuring young boys being murdered at the Alpine Lake Christian Camp. When she receives a phone call from her dead mother and discovers that she once worked at Alpine Lake, she convinces Finn and her friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) – whose brother was killed by the Grabber – to visit Alpine Lake and investigate.
They tell the camp they are interested in becoming counselors in training. The camp agrees, but by the time they arrive, a great blizzard has rolled in. Most of the staff went home to stay out of the storm, and none of the other counselors (or campers) have arrived. This leaves our heroes alone with Armondo (Demián Bichir) the camp supervisor; Mustang (Arianna Rivas), Armondo’s niece and assistant; and Barbara (Maev Beaty) and Kenneth (Graham Abbey) two employees of the camp and staunch Christians.
As someone who grew up in a conservative Christian environment and who attended a Christian summer camp for several years, I have a little complaint to make. Our heroes – two boys and a girl – arrive at this camp in the midst of a terrible storm in the middle of the night. They are greeted rather coldly and then immediately separated – boys in one cabin, Gwen in another. When Gwen asks about this arrangement, not wanting to be left alone in this strange place in the middle of a storm, she’s told by Mustang that there is a law against underage boys and girls sleeping in the same cabin. Furthermore, while Mustang would like to stay with Gwen, she also is not allowed by law because she is not a licensed counselor.
What the what? I’ve been to numerous Christian camps and retreats, and while it is true they don’t allow boys and girls to bunk in the same house as each other, it isn’t because of some law but rather because they fear the sexy. Boys and girls can’t be trusted with their lust and therefore must be separated. Even if it is in the middle of the night, in a strange place, and there is a scary snowstorm. Even if one of the boys is the girl’s brother. And almost every adult I’ve ever known in this situation would absolutely let Gwen either stay with her brother or with them. No way are they making her sleep by herself.
But I digress.
Gwen continues to have dreams. A payphone (for some reason located outside by itself, very near a frozen lake) starts ringing even though it is disconnected. Finn answers it and discovers the Grabber isn’t dead, and he’s ready for his revenge.
Armondo is suspicious these kids aren’t really the Christian camp counselor type (Gwen’s hilariously foul mouth tips him off), and soon enough they confess to him why they are really there. He remembers the mother and agrees to help.
Gwen’s nightmares were shot using Super 8 and Super 16 cameras, which give it a wonderfully gritty and old look. Unfortunately, they are mostly gore-filled jump scares that didn’t do anything for me. The rest of the film didn’t fare much better.
My (admittedly vague) memory of the first film is that it was very tense and thrilling. The sequel has none of that. They don’t attempt to add anything to the lore. They don’t try and explain how the Grabber is still alive. He’s come from hell, I guess. They do some variations on his creepy mask, which is kind of cool, but he isn’t terrifying here.
I didn’t hate the film. There are moments that are interesting. I do appreciate that they tried to go in a different direction instead of imitating the original, but they missed the goal line.
The idea of a horror movie told from the perspective of a dog is a good one. It’s a great one, actually. It seems so simple you wonder why it hasn’t ever been done before. The execution of Good Boy is mostly good too. Except for a few shots, it isn’t from the dog’s POV or anything, but the camera is often set down low, from the height a dog would normally see. The dog’s owner, Todd (Shane Jensen), barely has his face on screen. If you’ve ever had a dog suddenly look out a window into darkness or bark at a door when no one was outside, then you know the feeling this movie gives you.
There isn’t a whole lot of plot to describe. Todd has some kind of disease. The kind that makes him cough up blood regularly. The film opens on him unconscious, lying on his couch with the dog Indy (a very good dog, indeed) sitting by his feet. Todd’s sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) discovers him there and calls for an ambulance.
Upon release, he moves to his dead grandfather’s old home in the woods. Vera constantly calls Todd with concerns over his health, to his increased annoyance. The house is old and creepy and possibly haunted. Indy regularly feels a dark presence there. Sometimes he sees something lurking in the shadows. Sometimes it does more than lurk. This is the type of film that will linger in a wide shot inside the house. After a long beat, something will move, or a shadow will become a creature. I found myself always looking in the backgrounds to find some new horror.
It is a mood film with jump scares.
I dug all of that. But the script has problems. Nothing is very well defined. My expectations were that Todd would be attacked in some way by the monster and Indy would triumphantly save him. I would have even accepted Todd dying early in the film and the rest of it being Indy trying to survive the monster like a Final Girl.
But Todd hardly even notices the evil presence. It might be attacking him. It might be making him sicker. Or it might be possessing him somehow. But none of that is clear. At one point I thought the monster might just be a metaphor for his illness.
Indy is more of a passive observer than a hero. It would have been incredibly obnoxious to have him barking at everything the entire movie, but he just sits there watching weird shadows appear and nightmare monsters attack without hardly even growling.
All of this makes the film fairly inert. There isn’t much forward motion to it. The plot never seems to go anywhere, but the themes—what the film is trying to say—are more muddled than clear.
I’m glad I watched it. I really do think the concept is a good one, and the execution is well done. I just wish there was more to it.
Paul Naschy was a Spanish writer/actor/director who is most known for a series of horror films he made where he starred as a werewolf named Count Waldemar Daninsky. The films are mostly unconnected to one another except that he plays a werewolf with the same name, but there is no continuity to be found within them. I’ve seen a couple of them and quite enjoyed the watch. So much so that I found a collection of Naschy films boxed up in a Blu-ray set and put them on my wishlist for Christmas. My lovely wife bought them for me, and I opened them up tonight to start watching.
What I failed to recognize when I put this set on my wish list was that these films are just random Paul Naschy films, not a collection of his werewolf movies. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, so I put on the first one and hoped for the best.
According to the liner notes (and Wikipedia), Naschy was told by the producers they wanted to make a film with him, but in order to do so, they needed a script ASAP. So he popped some pills and sat down to write, pounding out the script to Horror Rises from the Grave in 36 hours.
It definitely feels like a movie whose script was written in 36 hours. There is very little story to it, and it plays like Naschy just took every horror movie he loved and blended them together. Then added copious amounts of gore effects and enough naked breasts to make Cinemax on a Saturday night blush.
Still, it is pretty fun to watch.
It begins in medieval times, where a warlock called Alaric de Marnac (Paul Naschy) and his witch companion Mabille de Lancre (Helga Line) are executed (he has his head chopped off, she is burned alive) for Satanism.
Flash forward to the present, and a group of young people, including Hugo de Marnac (also Paul Naschy) head out to Hugo’s ancestral grounds, where a psychic medium told them the bones of Alaric de Marnac are buried. They figure it will be fun to dig up an old warlock (also there might be treasure).
Naturally, they find the bones. Naturally, when they do, all hell breaks loose. But it is a strange sort of hell. This is where the rushed script becomes apparent. Eventually old Alaric de Marnac will rise from the grave, but first his severed head seems to mesmerize some local townsfolk, and then some of Hugo’s friends, where they go about killing everyone in sight. Later, some of those dead folks will rise, zombie-like, and wreak havoc. Alaric de Marnac takes a couple of our heroes as slaves, and one pretty (and scantily clothed) lady has her blood drained onto the bones of Mabille de Lancre, which brings her back to life.
The movie pretty much exists so that our villains can kill our heroes with full gruesomeness and pretty ladies can run around in sheer nightgowns taking their tops off (with echoes of the vampire films of Jean Rollin). It does do both of those things very well, so who am I to complain? There are some interesting transitions, and the gore effects are good. It is goofy and dumb, but if you like that sort of thing, this film is pretty fun.
One of the bonus features on my Blu-ray is a selection of alternate “clothed” scenes. Some theaters in Spain at the time didn’t allow nudity, so they shot those scenes twice, once without clothes once with them on. I thought that was pretty funny.
I find I have mixed feelings about Guillermo del Toro. He’s clearly a great visual stylist, and his apparent love of cinema imbues all of his films with a certain reverent love, but I find his stories to be hit or miss. Because of that, I’ve been putting off watching his first film, Cronos, afraid that I’d be disappointed.
I was not.
With caveats.
Cronos is basically a vampire story, though one that is different from any vampire story I’ve ever seen. It begins with a prologue where we’re informed that in the 1500s some alchemist invented a scarab-looking device that will prolong one’s life forever.
Flash to the present, and Jesús Gri (Federico Luppi) finds the scarab hidden in the bottom of a statue a strange man left in his shop. He fiddles with it, and it opens; the scarab’s legs extend, grabbing his arm, while a stinger pricks his skin. Inside the scarab, we see a living creature sucking the blood.
The next morning, Jesús feels good. And he looks younger. Also, he’s got a hankering for some blood. At a party a man has a nosebleed, and Jesús laps it up like a dog. Then he’s bumped on the head and killed. Or not killed, as he can no longer die.
The killer is Angel de la Guardia (a young Ron Pearlman). He’s the son of Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook), a rich, dying man who’s been trying to find the scarab for many years. He’s got a book that tells you how to use the scarab. He wants to make a deal with Jesús so they can both live together. Or he’ll just kill Jesús and take the scarab. Either way is fine.
There is also a little girl named Aurora (Tamara Shanath) who is Jesús’ granddaughter, and Mercedes (Margarita Isabel), his wife. Del Toro tries to do a lot with them emotionally, but they feel underwritten. Especially Mercedes.
There are some of the tropes of vampire movies – Jesús feels pain at sunlight, Aurora builds him a coffin to sleep in. And some utterly wild additions – Jesús’ skin peels off revealing a blindingly white skin underneath.
It definitely feels like a first movie, but the practical effects are mostly terrific. Del Toro has always been a master of those. It is a lot of fun watching Perlman at this stage of his career, acting a bit more goofy than menacing. The whole thing is well worth your time.
As I put on this film, my wife asked me if I would watch as many Hammer Horror films if she wasn’t around. She doesn’t like horror films, you see; she can’t stand the violence, the gore, and the scares. But she enjoys the Hammer films, as they are a little bit cheesy but well produced and not all that scary. I answered in the negative, as I probably would not watch as many films from the famed studio without her. Oh, I’d still watch their films, but I do have a habit of putting them on when I want to watch a horror film with her. It is either Hammer or Universal, and I’ve seen all the Universal films.
As you have probably surmised, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is based on the novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. This was the third time Hammer Studios had adapted that novella. The previous two were The Ugly Duckling (1959) and The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960).
As the change of title suggests, this film takes quite a few liberties with the text and throws in some strong references to Jack the Ripper and Burke & Hare (the historical grave robbers/murderers).
Dr. Henry Jekyll (Ralph Bates) has dedicated his life to creating an elixir that will cure all known illnesses. But when his friend and libertine Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim) points out that it will take him more years than he has left to create such an elixir, Jekyll becomes obsessed with finding a life-extending potion. He believes that since women live longer than men on average, the solution to his problem lies in female hormones.
He at first enlists Burke and Hare to provide him with fresh corpses from which to extract those hormones, but soon enough he’ll turn to murdering sex workers. His elixir transforms him into a woman whom he pretends is his sister named Mrs. Hyde (Martine Beswick). While Jekyll is a bit reserved, and shy (especially around women, specifically his upstairs neighbor Susan (Susan Broderick)), and dedicated to his work, Hyde is wild, sexy, passionate, and a bit mad.
There is no actual indication the elixir will prolong life, but Jekyll is obsessed with it anyway. The more hormones he extracts, the more often he changes into Hyde. The more often he changes into Hyde, the more she wants to be the dominant person. Eventually, she’ll stop needing the hormones and be able to change him at will. This then becomes a battle of wills, with each personality fighting for dominance.
There are some fascinating queer/trans readings of the films that I don’t feel qualified to comment on, but they are out there if you look for them. I’m not sure the film is all that interested in diving into gender and sexual politics, but it is quite fascinating to ponder them nonetheless. There is a rather funny scene when Jekyll first transforms into Hyde where she fondles her naked breasts with curiosity. I found the gender twist to be a fascinating change to the usual Jekyll/Hyde story. Martine Beswick is quite good as Hyde, giving the character a heightened sexuality and freedom. She’s not evil exactly (well, I mean she does quite a bit of murdering), but rather she longs to be freed from the body of Jekyll and his rather oppressed nature.
Production-wise, the film enjoys Hammer’s usual excellent set designs and costumes. Director Roy Ward Baker and cinematographer Norman Warwick make great use of fog machines, making the nighttime London streets look quite eerie and beautiful. There are some wonderful transition scenes as well, making Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde quite believable.
The romantic scenes between Jekyll and Susan feel a bit superfluous and dull (Hyde’s seduction of Susan’s brother is much more fun to watch), and its attempts to either turn Jekyll into Jack the Ripper or at least make him some sort of copycat feel a bit tacked on, but mostly I quite enjoyed this film. If you are a fan of Hammer’s Horror output or Dr. Jekyll adaptations, I highly recommend it.
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