Hammer Horror as a Parable for Multimedia Universes

[MKSheppard]

Gentlemen...

I've been on a great Hammer (British 1950s-60s Horror Films) kick, watching the late, great Peter Cushing in almost all of them.

CushingFrankenstein.jpg

Cushing films are always entertaining to watch, no matter how horrible the overall plot is; because Peter always put 500% effort into his acting. He knew he was chewing the scenery; but he did it with such seriousness that you could believe in it; following the well known maxim of:

"This may be a completely ridiculous concept, but we're gonna take it seriously to make you believe it's real."

However, there's a good rule of thumb for almost all Hammer Franchises like Mummy + Dracula + Frankenstein:

The first movie and it's immediate sequel are decent; while every successive film afterwards becomes worse and worse, to the point that even a great Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee performance can't salvage the film.

In the case of Hammer's Frankenstein; the first two films are great and form a self-contained cycle; but the third completely loses the plot.

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_Film_Productions) helped me understand what happened with Hammer Frankenstein:

The first two films were produced under previous agreements with Universal Studios (so as to avoid messy and expensive copyright fights) which limited what Hammer could do with the story of Frankenstein.

Thus, in the first two Hammer films, Baron Frankenstein is the true monster, not whatever he's created and 'expensive' sequences considered 'core' to the Frankenstein story such as:

* Using a lightning storm to bring the monster to life.

* Villagers forming a mob and destroying Castle Frankenstein.

were deleted for budgetary reasons and copyright reasons, forming a unique "Hammer Frankenstein" that worked because it was fresh and different.

For the third film, they negotiated a new agreement with Universal, allowing Hammer to more closely follow Universal's films; and as a result, the third film (and all subsequent Hammer Frankensteins), per Wikipedia:

"Each subsequent movie in the series contains elements that do not relate to (or flatly contradict) the events of the movie(s) that went before, whilst the characteristics of Cushing's Baron [Frankenstein] vary wildly from film to film, resulting in a series that does not progress as a self-contained narrative cycle."

Does the above passage remind you of anything?

FANBASE_Expendable.jpg

[warshipadmin]

Yet 007 seems to have maintained a rather inconsistent trajectory of quality. If we ignore CR(1) then you have Dr No - which had some insanely Dr Who- ish sets but also a lot of glamour and fun, From Russia with Love, a surprisingly conventional spy story, then somebody hits the go button and we get Goldfinger. Sadly the dreary Thunderball reveals it is hard to make scuba skirmishing very entertaining

YOLT gets us back on track, followed by the almost definitive OHMSS. It's a pity Connery wasn't the Bond in that, Lazenby lacked a hard edge. DAF wasn't particularly anything and then I didn't bother with the Roger Moore ones.

[Nathan45]

I liked the Dalton bond films, but he had bad timing, regarding the cold War, and it was just before secondary DVD and rentals could justify bigger budgets.

Alien Romulus I actually enjoyed, but inconsistently. I liked some clever features it had, loved the actor playing Andy. The insistence on referencing all the noteworthy points of the alien franchise sometimes worked (loved the Alien isolation elements) and sometimes didnt, but it does give me some hope the franchise can continue.

[Simon Darkshade]

I'm not sure about the secondary part about Multimedia Universes, not having seen any of the Alien pictures or really any comic book pictures, but I do know and like Hammer.

I can recommend Cushing's role in Dracula A.D. 1972, which was his first joust with Lee as Dracula since 1960. He definitely has some difficult dialogue to carry across, but does it with class, as it is Cushing.

[warshipadmin]

My favorite Hammer film was Theatre of Blood. Featuring the lovely Diana as a rather vengeful young lady.

[MikeKozlowski]

Yet 007 seems to have maintained a rather inconsistent trajectory of quality. If we ignore CR(1) then you have Dr No - which had some insanely Dr Who- ish sets but also a lot of glamour and fun, From Russia with Love, a surprisingly conventional spy story, then somebody hits the go button and we get Goldfinger. Sadly the dreary Thunderball reveals it is hard to make scuba skirmishing very entertaining

YOLT gets us back on track, followed by the almost definitive OHMSS. It's a pity Connery wasn't the Bond in that, Lazenby lacked a hard edge. DAF wasn't particularly anything and then I didn't bother with the Roger Moore ones.

FWIW -

Never considered TB dreary, but after the near perfection of GF it was a bit of a letdown. But as much sheer fun as YOLT was (along with DAF and MR, it's one of my go-to Bond movies) it's also where the series started to go off the rails.

I definitely agree with you about OMHSS; Connery would have knocked it out of the park. The real loss though was Lazenby calling it quits. The original plan for DAF's pre-credits sequence was to be the last few minutes of OMHSS, then the plot was to have been Bond literally going on a rampage hunting down Blofeld. It was going to be very stripped down and straightforward. (The first drafts of the Connery DAF - which would have brought back Gert Frobe as Auric Goldfinger's smarter twin brother - were epic, though)

Mike

[warshipadmin]

I haven't watched TB in decades, I'll give it another go.