1964 and with not a toga in sight Hammer plucked The Gorgon from Greek myth and handed her to veteran director Terence Fisher who had a penchant for the classic monsters - 'Dracula', 'The Curse of Frankenstein', 'The Mummy', 'The Curse of the Werewolf'. In Fisher's vision the creature, named 'Megaera' (actually the name of one of the Erinyes or Furies), has long haunted the woods and ruined castle of the German town of Vandorf and has been responsible - most recently - for seven deaths over the previous five years that are being hidden behind scapegoats and excuses from the world at large. It takes the father (Michael Goodliffe) and brother (Richard Pasco) of one of those scapegoats along with a handy Professor of Folklore (Christopher Lee) to finally bring the town's curse to an end.
With a stately pace and some great set design and music Fisher's movie - one of his personal favourites - is classic gothic Hammer and with a cast that alongside Lee includes Hammer legends Peter Cushing & Barbara Shelley along with Patrick Troughton (two years away from being cast as The Doctor) and Jack Watson you know you're in for a treat.
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We've featured several episodes from the mid 1980s ITV series 'World's Beyond' on Wyrd Britain before one of which, 'Home', featured the unlikely casting of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest's' Nurse Ratched, Louise Fletcher. This episode, the fifth in the series, features the equally unlikely casting of Eli Wallach of 'The Good, The Bad and the Ugly' as acting teacher Charles Burgess alongside his real world wife Anne Jackson as Marian, an actress struggling to come to terms with her declining career, holidaying in England where they discover a strange black tomb belonging to the former, unlamented, lord of the manor and Marian is stalked by a masked and cloaked figure.
With a flat and obvious script by Marc Alexander purportedly based on a story from the archives of the Society for Psychical Research from which he entirely fails to ring any sort of spookiness and some truly dire acting from the principal cast save perhaps John Vine as the Vicar and Derek Benfield (Frank Skinner in 'Timeslip') as the Doctor this is a dreadful piece of old tat. That said though it's an interesting curio of the time it was made within the slight revival of spooky anthology television in the middle of the 1980s alongside other series such as the supernatural classics plundering 'Shades of Darkness', the, apparently mostly lost and Robert Aickman focused, 'Night Voices' (of which only 'The Hospice' seems to remain) and 'Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense' but it is by far the weakest of them all and provides little more than an opportunity to idle away 24 minutes in the company of some unlikely stars.
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It was only a matter of time before we got to the film that launched - well, revived - a studio and created countless cinematic legends and so here we are in the company of the venerable Professor Bernard Quatermass.
When Hammer released 'The Quatermass Xperiment' in 1955 it was a familiar commodity to the British public with Nigel Kneale's creation having been made as a six part serial by and shown to great success on the BBC just two years earlier.
The story follows the return of the sole survivor of the rocket ship launched by Quatermass' 'The British Experimental Rocket Group' and of the alien parasite that takes over his body leading to one of the most iconic endings in movie history.
Director Val Guest tweaking a screenplay by Richard Landau from the original script by Kneale does a masterful job of building the suspense ably assisted by a sympathetic performance from Richard Wordsworth (great-great-grandson of William) as the doomed astronaut Victor Carroon, a gently comedic performance from Jack Warner as Inspector Lomax and a slightly lumpen but enjoyably brusque performance in the title role from Brian Donlevy, an American brought in to help sell the movie to the US.
The end result is a movie whose impact, beyond the rejuvenating of Hammer studios and the myriad films and careers that flowed from it, still resonates today.
If
you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us
continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the
blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain
Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.
