This Hammer Horror Resurrected box set collects Hammer movies from the mid-1960s (plus a stray 1975 title), an era when Hammer was making sequels or even sequels to sequels and occasionally cobbling together films with a lack of care that would not have passed muster in the 1950s. Nevertheless, all of these films have elements that remain pleasing and a good half of the titles represented are in the front-rank of the Hammer canon. Rasputin the Mad Monk is a bloodied-up slice of Russian history, hindered somewhat by the need to limit the sets to those that could be recycled from Dracula Prince of Darkness and a legal injunction to refrain from naming names. Christopher Lee makes a fair fist of the lead role, employing his Dracula staring eyes and wringing hands to go with an impressive false beard and using sheer force of will to dominate the Tsar's court, especially the elegantly masochistic lady-in-waiting Barbara Shelley.
Frankenstein Created Woman sends Peter Cushing's Baron back to the drawing board and finds him diverted from his usual brain surgery and corpse-stitching into experimenting with cryogenic suspension and soul transference. Terence Fisher, on his third Hammer Frankenstein, directs the cynical script with cold flair. The side is let down only by Playboy Playmate Susan Denberg's insufficiently devastating lady monster.
The Vengeance of She is the mildest effort in this bunch, a quickie sequel to She in which blonde, bosomy Czech "discovery" Olinka Berova did not turn out to be an international sensation along the lines of previous Hammer babes Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch. The feeble storyline peters out as the heroine is plagued by dreams that suggest she is the reincarnation of the evil ice queen Ayesha but then turns out not to be.
The Plague of the Zombies is a grimmer Hammer, with cartoonish social comment ladled onto the voodoo goings-on. Cornish squire John Carson (even chillier than the usual Christopher Lee) enjoys rampaging around the countryside with his hunting pals abusing comely lasses while his fortune is kept going by the exploited living dead working his tin mine. Andre Morell has the Peter Cushing role as a concerned expert who recognises that there's voodoo in the air, and Jacqueline Pearce--unforgettable in director John Gilling's companion piece, The Reptile--is suitably affecting as the secondary heroine who turns into a seductive zombie and gets her head lopped off.
In Quatermass and the Pit boffin Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir) unearths an eerie history of insect aliens who have influenced human evolution when workmen extending the London underground discover a five million year old Martian spaceship. This is a rare intelligent science fiction movie with genuine ideas to go along with its creepy moments.
1975's To the Devil a Daughter was the last gasp of Hammer's horror cycle, an attempt to rejig Dennis Wheatley's once-popular Satanist-bashing novel into a post-Exorcist/Omen Devil movie. Fallen priest Christopher Lee tries to get teenage novice Nastassja Kinski pregnant with a monster, while pipe smoking occultist Richard Widmark does his best to foil the dastard. Sloppy, silly and awkwardly structured, with an especially limp climax (the villain is foiled by being bashed with a rock), it does manage some chills along the way, and has an interesting supporting cast of neurotics (especially Denholm Elliott, cowering inside a pentagram). This release presents a fuller version than some video or TV prints, including a strange sequence in which Kinski's womb is invaded by a repulsive demon child. The very young Kinski has a nude scene, but so does Christopher Lee's game stunt double.
On the DVD: Hammer Horror Resurrected box set has no extras at all. But the films are presented in nice, anamorphic transfers which bring out the pretty pastels of the landscape around Bray Studios and the rich red splashes of blood. --Kim Newman
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