Hammer Wednesday

 

I'm going through some of the October mainstays for this blog Wednesday night. I chose a few Hammer classics to kick off a run of familiar friends in the month, starting with a popular blog favorite, The Mummy (1959), which I can actually watch at any part of the year. I love when Turner Classics shows this during the oddest months of the year, but October almost always has enough real estate available for "The Mummy". I admit that it has become such an easy watch, I had it on in the background while doing this and that relaxing in bed. It's definitely always welcome. I never seem to tire of it. Since I watched "The Mummy" in the early 2000's, it is almost on every year. Probably out of the last 20 years, I imagine I've watched it 13 or so times, if not more. Lee is barely recognizable under the swampy, damp bandages while Cushing remains the lone survivor of an English archaeological dig that unearths Ananka and relics from her tomb in Egypt. I guess it's a fun watch because of how it takes the best from Universal Mummy films and applies them in a story. Lee breaking through an asylum room window and suffocating Cushing's father is a memorable scene as is Cushing failing to fend him off. Furneaux is the wife of Cushing who reminds Kharis of his lost love, a weakness Cushing will exploit while Pastell as the vengeful Egyptian Bey could very well be sympathized with considering his argument about the tombs of his people raided by the British for museums has merit. I have said this so many times about Lee on the blog, but his menacing presence is so crucial in how to sell the Mummy as a serious threat. There is one great scene where Cushing's John Banning provokes Pastell's Mehemet Bey about his god and religion, and despite maintaining his posture and composure, you can see Bey seethe. I liked my double feature choice of "The Mummy" and The Reptile (1966) because you see the career progression of Michael Ripper, going from just a raving drunk in the former and a heroic pub owner/bartender in the latter. While I often always couple "The Reptile" and "Plague of the Zombies" together in most of my October double feature Hammer night viewings, because of their interesting historical ties, this time I right enjoyed the changing up of my usual watch formula.

Ripper is really the only one in a small village that greets Barrett and Daniel, newlyweds, as they arrive after Barrett inherits his recently deceased brother's cottage. The reason the village is so standoffish--you see a trend in Hammer films, especially in the Dracula series, where villagers overwhelmed with fear and paranoia fail to welcome outsiders--is there seems to be a type of "black death" that strikes certain victims. We later learn the cause of this peculiar "condition/cause of death" is the cursed daughter (the striking Jacqueline Pearce, who I think has one of the best horror sequences in Hammer history in "Plague of the Zombies", rising from her coffin a zombie in a nightmare sequence) of a theology doctor (Willman, a rather offputting snob who barges into Barrett and Daniel's cottage with their permission to look for his daughter). It seems Willman pissed off a snake tribe, and a "servant" on his grounds (Marne Maitland) holds that over him, with Pearce seemingly unable to escape her "reptile curse", left an anxious, terrified, agonizing young woman, stuck with her fate because of her father. Willman is very hard to like in the film, which is the intent while Pearce is absolutely sympathetic because of this curse through no fault of her own. I thought the scene where Barrett is lured to Willman's castle and bitten by Pearce in snakewoman form, and the subsequent struggle to survive the poison was really suspenseful and the life-threatening wound that is left (and how Barrett sells the effects) looks so ominous because of the makeup effects. I LOVE the snake face "mask" on Pearce, although I hate she suffered so under it all. What a great monster. I think the casting for this is just excellent top to bottom, including Laurie's off-the-wall Mad Peter, sucking chicken legs and belching at the dinner table, when not trying to manipulate Barrett for some liquor...he's the village eccentric that, whenever he speaks, isn't taken seriously.