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Will Dracula rise again? With a title well ahead of you is 1968's Dracula has Risen from the Grave. A Hammer horror film directed by Freddie Francis, it features Christopher Lee as Dracula but no Peter Cushing this time around. His adversary is a steadfastly honest young baker played by Barry Andrews, a dead ringer for Roger Daltrey.



I kind of hoped it was Daltrey when I saw him, despite not seeing Daltrey's name in the credits. The Who versus Dracula? I'd be down for that. But Andrews is charismatic in his own right.

The story feels suspiciously like a screenplay originally written without Dracula or even supernatural horror in mind into which Dracula was inserted. Screenwriter Anthony Hinds seemed preoccupied with the worth of honesty. Paul, Andrews' character, wants to marry the daughter of the Catholic Monsignor (Rupert Davies) who's just gotten home from putting a big crucifix on Dracula's castle, to make sure the Count never, ever rises from the grave. Along the way, he inadvertently attracts the eye of Dracula, who has already risen from the grave.



Paul's father is played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper, once again playing a tavern keeper. He advises his son that honesty isn't always the best policy, that he should know when to play things close to his chest. Unfortunately, Paul wants nothing to do with tact, and when the clergyman he hopes will be his father-in-law asks his religion, Paul happily owns himself an atheist.

You'd think the rest of the film, in which Paul's fiancee (Veronica Carlson) and the buxom tavern wench (Barbara Ewing) are both bitten and enthralled by the famous vampire, would cause him to reexamine his beliefs. But the plot proves to be more about the monsignor accepting Paul as his daughter's chosen.



Freddie Francis delivers the goods again as one of the better Hammer directors. I particularly like a rooftop set/matte painting combination he uses repeatedly throughout the film, making it the choice location for battles or even just the routine route for clandestine young lovers.

Dracula has Risen from the Grave is available on HBOMax, one of four Hammer films, the others including Hammer's first Dracula film, their first Frankenstein film, and the Hammer version of The Mummy. I'd say The Mummy is the best of the group with Frankenstein in second but, despite loving Hammer movies, I've never been fond of their first Dracula entry. It's a shame Warners doesn't have some of the better Hammer films on HBOMax, like Frankenstein Created Woman, Rasputin the Mad Monk, The Brides of Dracula, She, or The Vampire Lovers.

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe. My favourite anthology horror film from Amicus has a great deal to do with him--1967's Torture Garden. Directed by Freddie Francis with a screenplay by Robert Bloch, based on four of Bloch's short stories, each segment has keen fantasy logic with some lovely cinematography and wonderfully weird production design.



I love this room for the killer piano in the third story. It's like a Man Ray painting. And yes, I said killer piano, and it is a bit silly, but it's also kind of a fun exploration of the subtext in the muse versus the lover type of story. The piano is named after the muse Euterpe and she seems to be murderously jealous of her player's (John Standing) lover, Dorothy (Barbara Ewing).



I like the build up with him seeming increasingly distracted and Dorothy finding it increasingly unreasonable that he has such an emotional investment in the thing. The pianist's manager (Ursula Denham) thinks it's Dorothy who's being unreasonable though, if you ask me, just wanting her lover to have dinner with her now and then is pretty low maintenance. I doubt Dorothy thought she'd have her fears confirmed by being chased around the room by a piano with a lid chomping like great mouth.



The framing story has the four protagonists at a side show run by an effectively satanic Burgess Meredith--he's so sinister in this movie I forgot all about his Penguin. He invites each person to stare into the shears of a mechanical Atropos figure (very obviously an actress sitting very still) to see into a future where their own wrongdoing leads to their downfall. Unlike in Dr. Terror's House of Horror, a big part of Meredith's spiel is that the individual can use the foreknowledge to prevent tragedy. It's a warning to each person to mend their ways.



And yes, it doesn't quite make sense because nothing Dorothy did seems all that bad. The other female protagonist, Dorothy's American cousin Carla (Beverly Adams), is at least a little mischievous and ruthless. She pretends to accidentally burn a roommate's dress so she can steal her date with a movie star (David Bauer).



Carla also makes it clear she's willing sleep with anyone to get ahead in show business and easily moves from Charles onto another movie star (Robert Hutton) when it seems the latter might be easier to manipulate. The story has an amusing Sci-Fi twist that nonetheless is a sharp, disquieting revelation on the illusion of the Hollywood dream.



All of the stories have something to do with art or entertainment industry except first story about a young man (Michael Bryant) who allows his rich uncle (Maurice Denham) to die in the hopes of inheriting his wealth. Matters are complicated when said wealth turns out to be buried chests of antique coins guarded by a mind controlling murder cat.



I suppose it fits into the other stories in that achieving the aims of avarice can introduce weird, unexpected problems. The story bears some resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat, which ties it to the final story of the film.



Jack Palance, with a very unconvincing English accent, plays an obsessive collector of Poe artefacts named Ronald Wyatt. Peter Cushing plays another obsessive, and far more successful, Poe collector named Lancelot Canning. The two meet at an exhibition of Canning's collection where Ronald covets a rare edition of one of Poe's works. Canning won't part with it for any price but invites his fellow collector to his home in the U.S. so he can rub his face in the rest of his collection.



As in Dr. Terror, the transition from England to the U.S. is a little abrupt. With no exterior shots, we basically go from one interior that could be anywhere to another interior that could be anywhere, but with this décor I'll forgive anything.



Palance plays his character slightly over the top, almost feverish, like he's ready to bludgeon Canning at any moment and I wonder why the more reserved Canning would dare even invite the other man into his home around such delicate artefacts. Cushing seems to be having fun, though, playing his character as very drunk most of the time, subtly bobbing his head and smiling placidly while Palance gets worked up over a manuscript.



Watching these two actors talk about Poe in this environment is much more satisfying than the resolution of the story but Torture Garden never really lets you down.

I'd think it difficult to be led astray by the title of 1964's Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. Though as a matter of fact we never see Dr. Terror's house--but it is a satisfyingly lurid horror anthology film, the first of a series for which British studio Amicus would become famous for in the 1960s and 1970s. Like most of those films, it features Peter Cushing, joined in this case by his friend and frequent Hammer co-star Christopher Lee. Both effectively play against type and the film's greatest flaw, its thoroughly illogical screenplay, even kind of contributes to how good it is. It's almost nightmare logic.



The framing story takes place on a train, not a house, where Dr. Schreck, played by Peter Cushing, tells the fortunes of five men in the car with him, one after another. Each story ends in doom for its subject, one of the movie's logical problems being that no-one asks if they can't avert fate now that they've been given foreknowledge. Though an unsurprising and effectively strange conclusion to the film arguably solves this problem.



Schreck's name means terror in German and Cushing plays the character with a thick accent and a lot more hair than is usual for him. A bigger departure, though, is Christopher Lee as one of the compartment occupants.



His story, the penultimate, is about revenge in the art world. "Disembodied Hand" bears a lot of resemblance to a story from the Tales from the Crypt comics, "The Maestro's Hand". Lee plays a vicious and conceited art critic named Franklyn Marsh who's embarrassed when an artist named Eric Landor (Michael Gough) tricks him into praising a painting by a chimpanzee.



It seems meant to prove a point he'd been making when Marsh had been publicly bashing an exhibition of Landor's paintings--Landor makes the argument that art is totally subjective and that its power resides in the viewer. Marsh's view of art as a measurable skill is rocked by the revelation of the chimpanzee artist so thoroughly that he goes quiet and literally runs away whenever Landor enters a room. As such, a disembodied hand that tries to strangle Marsh later in the story might be interpreted as a manifestation of repressed psychological issues.



And that's supported by Lee's nervous, fussy performance and it's really a highlight of his virtuosity to watch this alongside his natural and exuberant performance as Rasputin in Rasputin: The Mad Monk. Though I wonder if it really would've been so hard to say maybe a chimpanzee has talent. The fact that the ape's art is better than Landor's might have been a nice way to turn the insult around, Marsh really had to put his foot in it to make Landor's prank work, a slightly unlikely scenario, another thing that seems dreamlike.



Maybe the most dreamlike story in the film is the second one starring Benard Lee as a scientist trying to save a man and his family from a carnivorous vine inexplicably attacking his house.



There's no explanation for it, the plant just seems to've gone crazy one day. It's also difficult to understand why it's so hard to defeat.

The final story features Donald Sutherland as a doctor who brings his French wife (Jennifer Jayne) home to New York with him. The story is about vampirism and makes absolutely no sense, filled with motivations that turn on a dime. Sutherland is weird to watch, contemplating the murder of his wife with a wooden stake with only vague, mild distress.



There's absolutely nothing in this story to make you think it was shot anywhere near New York--apart from Sutherland, all the American accents are unconvincing and every scene was clearly shot on a sound stage.



But I like the look of it, the Technicolour in this movie is sort of gorgeously brash, particularly in the first story which is a sort of combination werewolf and haunted house story set in Scotland (again, mostly sound stages).



The film also features a story about a musician punished by supernatural forces for stealing a melody from a Haitian Voodoo ceremony, the weakest story in the film but weird enough to be enjoyable. The whole film is slightly unhinged fun.

Twitter Sonnet #1053

Two rivers make an absent third alive.
A sibling text appeared in pairs of notes.
A quiz delayed'll fade the brain's archive.
A grey and quiet crew deploy their boats.
Descending sizes stretch the cauldrons out.
In boiling clocks the hands are useless oars.
The gentlest tree contorts for leafy gout.
And ev'ry eve a cat conducts the tours.
The shadow horns replaced the scales in mind.
Ouroboros in human hearts decayed.
Expanding lungs of darkened walls rewind.
And slowly lids of metal eye cascade.
As straw inside investors try to birth.
A metal ice revisits corp'rate Earth.

There's not really any paranoia in 1963's Paranoiac. One of many low budget thrillers, this one produced by Hammer, designed to capitalise on the success of Psycho, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster seems to have decided the way to outdo Hitchcock's film is to add more complications. The plot holds together and due to this, along with gorgeous cinematography by Arthur Grant, capable direction by Freddie Francis, and several nice performances, it's a pretty entertaining film in spite of some absurdities and weak characterisations.

Over the course of its brief run time, the premise of the film seems to change every fifteen minutes or so. Just as you start to think you're seeing the shape of the ultimate plot twist, that plot twist is immediately revealed and a new plot begins on top of it. The first part of the film is a kind of Shirley Jackson-ish setup.



A young woman named Eleanor (Janette Scott) lives with her aunt, Harriet (Sheila Burrell), her brother, Simon (Oliver Reed), and a nurse, Francoise (Liliane Brousse), in an enormous mansion. Eleanor's beloved older brother, Tony, had died some time earlier and now the reckless, alcoholic young Simon seeks to get Eleanor out of the way so he can inherit the whole fortune. But Eleanor has started having visions of Tony (Alexander Davion) wandering about all over the place.



Just as I was starting to think the end of the movie might be about how Simon is trying to drive his sister crazy with someone impersonating her brother, or it might be a haunting, Tony casually starts talking to the whole family, much to the shock of Simon and Harriet, very early on.



So a movie that seemed to be about the point of view of a young woman doubting her senses due to impossible visions and duplicitous, scheming family, suddenly becomes about a long lost brother returning home and questions about his authenticity. It might have been a been too derivative of Shirley Jackson to have the movie from Eleanor's point of view but I would have preferred it to what happens. After this, the whole movie is told from Tony's point of view, a man whose motives are never clearly establish played by an actor giving a surpassingly bland performance. Meanwhile, Eleanor turns into a background character.



I won't reveal the subsequent twists except to say those problems only get worse. But Oliver Reed is very good, of course, his eyes wide and his gestures sudden and quick while he fiendishly plays a pipe organ or abuses the butler for not bringing him more brandy. There are a couple effective jump scares in the movie, too.

Twitter Sonnet #1039

A cane in noble blessings cinched the bag.
Alerted soon, a single gourd awoke.
Because the painted eye was warm it sagged.
Of tiny child grains the stars bespoke.
A narrow stair ascends inside the gloom.
A gleam bespeaks an aging split ahead.
In clicking bursts the message came to doom.
A powder plus a paste awoke the dead.
A smoke replaced the sky beyond the hall.
A sinking sun conducts along the line.
In channels forced the water sure will fall.
Though seeming close the voice is down the mine.
The sounds emerges with electric step.
In static cords a drifting noise is kept.

The world may seem like it's controlled by powerful, invisible, malevolent forces. Much of this impression may be mere paranoia, so the best answer is investigation and illumination. This is what Peter Cushing believes in 1965's The Skull, a simple but pleasantly garish horror film directed by Freddie Francis based on a story by Robert Bloch.

It may come as no surprise that eventually Christopher Maitland (Cushing) bites off more than he can chew in the form of a skull, supposedly the skull of the Marquis de Sade. The filmmakers don't seem particularly interested in the particulars of De Sade's life beyond the fact that his name is the origin of the word sadism. So the skull is cursed, possessed by a demon that makes its owners commit murder.



Cushing is a collector of bizarre, demoniac paraphernalia from all over the world, surrounding himself with these items and books about them in his study where he spends most of his time alone with the things. Naturally, he neglects his wife (Jill Bennett) in the process.



When a dealer (Patrick Wymark) from whom Christopher purchases many objects stops by, she pleads with Christopher to give up his obsession. She's worried he's tampering with dangerous forces. He smiles indulgently and patiently explains, "It's because people, all through the ages, have been influenced and terrorised by these things that I carry out research to try and find the reasons why."



We frequently see Christopher at ease in his study, relaxing amidst his nightmare sculptures, completely assured of his control. With the introduction of the skull, this sense of control is undermined in different ways. In a possible hallucination, he's dragged out of his study by two men who claim to be police and taken to a place where he's forced to undergo some simple, sadistic trials.



This movie mostly works on atmosphere and performances. In addition to Cushing, Wymark is great as his shady dealer and Patrick Magee is memorable in two brief appearances as a police surgeon. But next to Cushing, of course, Christopher Lee makes the biggest impression, despite being only credited as "guest star"--he's actually pretty prominent in the film as the former owner of the skull who cautions his friend to stay away from it. It's just great watching these two talk about this while playing billiards. I could listen to them discuss occult artefacts while playing and drink cognac all night.