THE POSSESSED (1977)

Father Kevin (James Farentino, at right) is an alcoholic priest who is beginning to show signs of his struggles even when holding mass. While impaired, he crashes his car and dies, but is brought back to life by a supernatural force that tells him he can redeem himself by seeking out and fighting evil. Meanwhile, at the Helen Page School for Girls in Salem, Oregon, strange incidents of what seem to be spontaneous combustion are occurring regularly: a dorm room is burnt up, a piece of paper in a typewriter catches on fire. The headmistress Louise (Joan Hackett) is dealing with stress from financial problems. Her stepsister Ellen (Claudette Nevins) is a teacher whose daughter Weezie is enrolled at the school and is often on the brink of getting into trouble, even having a secret fling with Paul, an instructor (Harrison Ford), who also flirts with Louise. When one student's legs are burnt badly while she's giving a speech, the cops get involved as does Father Kevin—it's never explained whether he's flesh and blood, or a supernatural being, or even what he does for a living anymore, though he suspects that a possession is happening and an exorcism may be in order. 

This was made a few years after The Exorcist when possession movies were the rage, but it was made for television so the gore and horror had to be toned down. The various occurrences of fire are mostly as explicit as things get, but the fire effects are well done, especially one near the end involving a swimming pool in flames. Though the ending leaves things with the priest's character vague—he basically just vanishes—this has the feel of a TV pilot in which Father Kevin would have solved a possession case each week. Farentino, darkly but quirkily handsome, underplays his role (some call him wooden, but I prefer taciturn) and still manages to seem fairly charismatic. Hackett and Nevins look enough alike that I was getting them mixed up for the first half-hour of the movie. It’s fun to see Harrison Ford, weeks before the release of Star Wars would change his life, playing a role not dissimilar from Indiana Jones. I suspect his character is supposed to be a bit slimy and unsympathetic, but his youthful charm comes through to add a bit of complexity to the part. Diana Scarwid (the older Christina in Mommie Dearest) and Ann Dusenberry are quite good as two of the students. Eugene Roche is the cop. Not necessarily one to hunt down but a solid example of the 70s made-for-TV horror film. [YouTube]

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)

In London, a subway redevelopment project runs into a snag: the discovery of a five million year old skull of what the newspapers call an underground ape man. Dr. Roney (James Donald), a paleontologist, is called in to investigate. Soon they find a large metallic object which they fear could be an unexploded German bomb from the Blitz so the military is called in. Prof. Quatermass (Andrew Keir), who works on a national missile planning committee, goes to the site with his assistant Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley) and immediately stirs up friction with Colonel Breen (Julian Glover) from the Army, who is trying to muscle his way into Quatermass' missile work. The metallic object, with a surface harder than diamond, turns out to be a hollow cylinder and another skull is found in it. Could this be an ancient spacecraft which once held living beings? Quatermass and Judd hear that an abandoned house across the street from the subway station is haunted, and they discover that, over the years, whenever the ground in the area has been disturbed, strange sightings occur. Soon, workers are having similar sightings of creepy life forms darting about. While a workman tries unsuccessfully to drill through the metal, a "freak vibration" is set off causing all in the area to have mini-seizures. Next, they find dead bodies of insectoid creatures, like giant locusts. Quatermass and Roney theorize that these are Martians who (if I've got this right) were trying to colonize the Earth in the altered form of an ape-like creature who eventually evolved into man. The locusts, who have horns, may be in our "race memory," having become the image of what we call the devil. Breen thinks the whole thing is some kind of weird Nazi propaganda and the government opens the excavation to the public. This is about where the plot went a bit wonky for me. Through some electronic device, race memory visions of the Martians can be viewed on a video monitor. Some people become possessed by the alien forces which seem to be emanating from the spaceship and they start behaving threateningly toward others who are not possessed and are therefore "different." Then a huge demonic vision of a locust Martian towers over London, leaving Quatermass, Judd and Roney to try and fight the madness.

This is an unusual movie, a mix of sci-fi, horror, mythology and maybe mysticism. There's a lot of backstory you can read on the Internet about the Quatermass series, three films which were adapted from three BBC TV serials. Suffice it to say that Prof. Quatermass is a somewhat gruff scientist involved in a British space program and each film was about some kind of contact with extraterrestrial life. This is often considered the best of the batch: it's the only one in color, it seems to have had a pretty decent budget, and Andrew Keir is usually judged to be a better Quatermass than American actor Brian Donlevy who played him in the first two—Keir certainly gives the character more dimension than Donlevy. Though I don't think anyone would call this a character-driven drama, the four main actors do very nice jobs giving their characters some roundness and fleshing out their relationships with each other. If there is a bad guy figure, it's Breen, standing in for the government, but as embodied by Julian Glover, even he doesn't come off as exactly villainous. Roney is a bit stiff and formal, but that’s how he should be and James Donald makes him likable enough. Barbara Shelley makes Judd compelling and full-blooded without going into caricature, and Keir seems perfect as the in-control but very human Quatermass. 

Other actors who have their moments include Duncan Lamont as a workman who is the first one affected by the Martian vibrations, Maurice Good as a military man, and Robert Morris as an assistant scientist ("cute guy with glasses" is how I described him in my notes; pictured at right). The plot details are quite fuzzy; even on a second viewing, I wasn't always sure what was happening in terms of machines and thought waves and race memory and telekinesis. But the idea that life on earth might have been seeded by aliens is interesting, and was echoed the next year in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a bit talky but the last twenty minutes or so are full of action. The Blu-ray print is clear and gorgeous, and there is a very good audio commentary by film historian Bruce G. Hallenbeck. Another commentary by Constantine Nasr and film historian Steve Haberman is OK but gets repetitious and focuses a bit too much on comparing this film to the original TV serial. Recommended. Original American title: Five Million Years to Earth. Pictured at top are Keir and Glover. [Blu-ray]

FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1967)

The time: the 1800s. The place: rural England. A boy named Hans witnesses the execution by guillotine of his father for murder. Some twenty years later, Hans is a young man working with Baron Frankenstein and the disgraced alcoholic Dr. Hertz on experiments to revive the dead. We see Hans and Hertz pulling Frankenstein out of a freezing cold trunk where his dead body had been for an hour. Frankenstein returns to life none the worse for the wear. He is most excited by what this says about metaphysical death and the persistence of the soul, and wants to carry out more experiments. Now (hang on) he wants to perfect his invention that can create an impenetrable force field so he can capture the soul of a recently dead person and transfer it into another body, and that person's soul would remain alive in that body. Got it? Meanwhile, at a local inn, Hans has a thing for Christina, the disfigured and crippled daughter of Kleve, the innkeeper. One night, a trio of obnoxious dandies come to the inn for drinks and spend their time insulting Christina. Hans, upset that Kleve doesn't do more to get rid of them, fights them for Christina's honor, leaving one, Johann, with a knife wound across his head. That night, while Hans and Christina sleep together, the three dandies return to the inn to vandalize the place. Kleve catches them and they end up killing him. The next day, the police, knowing that Hans was upset with Kleve, arrest him for murder, saying, "Like father, like son." He won't disgrace Christina by using her as his alibi so, in short order, he is guillotined, she kills herself, and both bodies wind up at the Frankenstein place. His soul is captured, her body is brought back to life, and after extensive surgery to make her look beautiful, Hans's soul is put in Christina's body. Since she has Hans' memories, she soon goes on a rampage to kill the dandy hooligans who started all this trouble.

As Hammer horror films of the era go, this one is maybe a notch above average, mostly due to the weird body/soul storyline. For most of the movie, Peter Cushing plays the baron as more metaphysically curious than deranged, though how the capture and transfer of souls is accomplished is left unclear. He's not so much evil as an egotistical ass. There is no staggering monster, but a young and voluptuous woman who is the creation (I guess) of Frankenstein. The title would seem to promise a Bride of Frankenstein plotline, but the resurrected Christina is not stitched together from parts, but one whole body. It should be called Frankenstein Resurrected Woman, I suppose. Maybe because Cushing doesn't get to go into blood and thunder mode until the end, he seems a little restrained. Better are Robert Morris as Hans, Susan Denberg as Christina, who does a nice job of switching personalities from mousy to sexy after she is "created," and Thorley Walters as Hertz. Derek Fowlds is successful at making Johann, the main dandy, thoroughly hateful. I found this more interesting than truly compelling, but worth watching for Hammer fans. Pictured are Denberg and Morris. [Blu-ray]

THE SHADOW OF THE CAT (1961)

Ella Venable is sitting alone at night in a room in her mansion, reciting "The Raven" to her beloved cat Tabitha. The old rich woman is set upon by her brother Walter, her butler Andrew, and her maid Clara. They kill her and bury her body in a swampy woods near her estate. Walter, also old and infirm, eventually calls the police to report that Ella is missing; the plan is that, when Ella is declared dead, the three killers will present a counterfeit will that leaves her estate to them instead of to her niece Beth. But we see that the cat witnesses the murder (shots from the cat's point of view are distorted and stretched) and begins slipping in and out of view of the killers, as though taunting them. Their varied attempts to get rid of or kill the cat all end in failure. Meanwhile, a police inspector arrives with his friend, reporter Michael Latimer. They are on the premises looking for Ella, but when Beth, the niece, arrives, Michael becomes very protective of her (yes, they soon fall in love). Walter, trapped in a cellar with the cat seemingly stalking him, has a heart attack and is laid up in bed, so he calls on his brother Edgar, Edgar's son Jacob, and his wife Louise to come help look for the genuine will so it can be destroyed, and also to get rid of the cat. From here, the film takes a predictable turn as attempts to kill the cat tend to go astray and result in the death of the would-be cat killer. But what about that pesky will?

This Hammer horror film is less well known than most of their 1960s output because for some reason, it was officially released by a one-shot company, BHP, and issued in the U.S. by Universal. Nevertheless, it has most of the Hammer hallmarks—an imposing mansion, gloomy rooms, a string of deaths (not graphic), and several people known for their Hammer work, such as Andre Morell (top billed as Walter), Barbara Shelley (Beth), Freda Jackson (Clara), and director John Gilling. I watched this because the Criterion Channel aired it as part of a Cat Film collection, and in that context, this is decent viewing, although the use of the cat leaves something to be desired. Bunkie, the real name of the cat who plays Tabitha, is cute but almost too cute to seem really menacing. In shots of her watching and stalking the villains, she looks like she's placidly waiting for someone to pet her. Occasionally you see her being chased, but she never really looks vengeful, or even irritated. The actors are all pretty much low-energy B-level performers, except for the old pro Barbara Shelley who works up some chemistry with Conrad Phillips (the reporter) and Alan Wheatley who is low-key but effective as the inspector. The gloomy gothic black & white cinematography is also a plus. A big minus is the absolutely awful discordant score by Mikis Theodorakis (Zorba the Greek, Z). The opening 10 minutes or so are made very irritating by the noisy and shrill background music, though it gets more tolerable as it goes on. [Criterion Channel]

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)

In a prison cell, Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is awaiting execution for murder and we see his story in flashback as he relates it to a priest. After the death of his father, young Victor inherits a fortune (as well as an expectation that he will eventually marry his cousin Elizabeth) and hires Paul Krempe as a tutor. Over the years, Paul becomes a scientific mentor to Victor, and aids him in his attempts to revive life in dead animals, eventually bringing a dead puppy back to life. But when Victor decides he wants to create life from scratch, Paul begins distancing himself from Victor's work. The middle part of the story will be familiar to horror fans: Victor robs graves, pieces together a being (Christopher Lee), kills a scientific genius and steals his brain, damages the brain, and finally animates his monster during an electrical storm. In the midst of all this, Elizabeth returns after years away, expecting to marry Victor, though for his part, Victor is not only fully consumed with his work, but also enjoying a fling on the side with his buxom maid Justine. Soon he loses control of the monster and Paul kills it, but Victor resurrects it and when Justine reports she is pregnant, threatening his plan to marry Elizabeth, he has the monster kill her. Things go downhill quickly.

Though not Hammer Studio's first foray into horror, the genre that would make the studio famous, this film is known for other firsts: the first reboot of the Universal horror films of the classic era; the first star teaming of Hammer stalwarts Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing; the first horror film directed by Terence Fisher who would go on to helm over a dozen other horror films, mostly for Hammer. It was also a hit that kickstarted both the reboots of Dracula, mummies and werewolves and the future direction of the studio. The future template for Hammer films is present: settings in villages of the past, gloomy houses, sexy strumpets, and some blood and gore, not nearly as much as would eventually become the norm in the 1970s, but much more than is found in the classic era films. Lee as the monster is more brutish and faster moving than Karloff was in the 1930s, and in order to avoid any legal problems with Universal, Hammer made the make-up very different, and it's quite effective (pictured at left). Cushing as Frankenstein is not sympathetic or even particularly interesting. Honestly, for as good as those two eventually got, there isn't much sign here that they would become horror superstars. Hazel Court as Elizabeth is fine, though her character is a bit of a cold fish. Paul Urquhart (Paul Krempe) is the only truly sympathetic character. I've always found it interesting that in the realm of pop culture, it's the Universal movies that have become the ur-texts for horror movies rather than the original works by Shelley (Frankenstein) and Stoker (Dracula). This movie follows the 1931 film rather than the novel. And it's this movie that provides the inspiration for the visuals of the scene of creation in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Certainly still watchable. [DVD]

NIGHT OF THE BIG HEAT (1967)

In England it's wintertime, but offshore on the island of Fara, the villagers are struggling with a record heat wave that doesn't even cool off at night. Cars are overheating and telephone lines are filled with static. At an inn called the Swan, a gruff and secretive man named Hanson (Christopher Lee) goes out in the woods and sets up cameras that will snap pictures when triggered. The owners of the inn are author Jeff Callum and his wife Frankie. Jeff is struggling to come up with another bestseller and has hired a secretary. When she arrives from the mainland, she turns out to be Angela, a former mistress of Jeff's. Things went badly between them, but she's determined to reignite their affair. Jeff feels the pull but resists until Angela threatens to tell Frankie about their past (though Frankie already has her suspicions). Angela's arrival during this heat wave piques the lustful drives of young bar regular Tinker. The local doctor (Peter Cushing) is at as much of a loss as anyone else to explain the heat. Then people start hearing a high-pitched whining noise, often preceding phone blackouts or exploding televisions. A tramp, poking around one of Hanson's cameras, hears the whine and is burned to death in the woods. Sheep start dying, also from burns. One man burns to death while driving at night. Eventually, the enigmatic Hanson shares his theory: aliens looking for a new planet to colonize have traveled here in the form of radio waves, then take on substance as they try to heat up the atmosphere to a temperature of their liking. They are attracted to light and they drain energy sources, but Hanson, Callum, and the doctor are determined to find an alien weakness and drive off the invasion.

This was originally released in the United States under the much more interesting title ISLAND OF THE BURNING DAMNED. Unfortunately, that title conjures up expectations that this film is not equipped to meet. Despite some potential in the story, budget limitations severely hurt this film. It’s a very talky movie which spends too much time on the soap-opera melodramatics of the love triangle, though all three actors (Patrick Allen as the author, Sarah Lawson as his wife, and Jane Merrow as his mistress) are fine. Kenneth Cope brings some life to the character of Tinker who, maddened by the heat, assaults Angela and is eventually offed by the aliens. William Lucas and Thomas Heathcote are good as secondary characters. But the two biggest names in the cast, Lee and Cushing, are rather bland, and are actually supporting characters in terms of plot (especially Cushing who only gets a handful of scenes before joining much of the rest of the cast as a victim of the aliens). For most of the film, we don't see the aliens, just the whining noise, a really bright light, and the victims clutching their faces and screaming as they die. When the aliens are revealed, they are huge disappointments. Hollywood B-sci-fi movies of the 60s had better aliens than these, glowing blobs that just lie on the floor and pulse. Despite attempts to make the heated atmosphere feel real (it was filmed in the winter), it never really does. Characters are given huge sweat stains on their clothes, but they look like huge stains of glycerin and, except when being attacked by the aliens, no cast member ever really looks uncomfortably warm, let alone hot. The first time I watched this, I kept napping on and off the whole time, so I rewatched it a week later, and only fell into a nap once. If you decide to watch this one, have plenty of black coffee or Coca-Cola on hand. Pictured are Patrick Allen and Christopher Lee. [YouTube]

EEGAH (1962)

As the credits roll, we hear beatnik jazz music as the camera pans past several mummified bodies in a cave. Cut to nighttime in what looks to be a California suburb on the edge of a desert. Roxy (Marilyn Manning) leaves a dress shop and stops at a gas station where her boyfriend Tom (Arch Hall Jr.) works. They make plans to meet at a country club party and she heads off for the club. On a desert road, Roxy suddenly sees a giant bearded man dressed in a caveman outfit (Richard Kiel), standing in the middle of the road holding a dead deer. He tries to beat her with the deer carcass but when Tom comes pulling up behind her, the giant is scared away. At the party, people don't believe her story but the next day, she and Tom and her father Robert (William Watters) head out to the desert and find huge human footprints. Robert hires a helicopter to take him up to Shadow Mountain to investigate. There he comes face to face with the giant, who drags him back to his cave (the one from the credits with the mummies). The next day, Tom and Roxy take a dune buggy out to the desert to look for Robert who doesn't show up at his appointed meeting place. The two spend the night in the desert and the next morning, the giant (who winds up being called Eegah for the guttural common utterance he frequently makes) spirits Roxy off to his cave. Eegah doesn't seem to be dangerous, and he frequently talks to the mummies, who Robert figures out are his long-dead family. Eegah seems to be the last surviving caveman. He feeds his new friends, lets Roxy shave him, and brings her flowers, but eventually Tom finds and frees them. Using a cloth with Roxy's scent on it, Eegah follows the three back to town where he eventually disrupts a country club pool party. Roxy is sympathetic to the caveman, but the climax is a variation on the King Kong ending in which "beauty killed the beast."

This drive-in B-film has a reputation as one of the worst movies of all time, but I have a fondness for it based on my history with it. It came out when I was 6 or 7 when I was just getting interested in monster movies and I loved the scary ads that ran on TV for it with a voice intoning "Eegah!" One night when I had drifted off to sleep on the couch, my mom woke me by whispering "Eegah" in my face. I woke up screaming. My poor mom didn't think I would be affected like that, but it's a memory that is vivid to this day, some sixty years later. I didn't get to see the movie until my college days, and by that time I was more interested in the male lead, Arch Hall Jr., who I thought was a cute blond surfer-type. Nowadays, I tend to agree with the online reviewer who says Hall looks like "Michael J. Pollard hit by a shovel," but he still has his cute moments, and though his acting would never win any awards, he fits the teeny-bopper B-lead role just right. Hall apparently had ambitions to be a pop singer so he sings some songs here, not terribly well, but really no worse than the average non-celeb singing you would hear in a 60s beach movie. Oddly, though he sings them to Roxy, one song is called "Vickie" and one is called "Valerie." Go figure. Manning (pictured at right with Hall) is a serviceable damsel in distress; she's not exactly good but not the worst I've seen. (I'm doing lots of damning with faint praise.) Watters, who plays her father, is actually Arch Hall Sr., who also produced, wrote and directed under a pseudonym. Like his son, he hits his marks and says his lines with varying degrees of conviction, and we'll say no more. Eegah himself, 7 foot tall Richard Kiel (pictured at top), went on to pop culture fame as the villain Jaws in a couple of James Bond movies. His only dialogue consists of saying "eegah" and other grunted nonsense syllables, but he does look menacing enough most of the time to be believable as a scary caveman. (More faint praise.) This is not a very good movie, and it deserves the MST3K treatment it got, but there are certainly worse ones out there, and bad movie fans will like it. I might even try to dig up a couple of other Arch Hall Jr. movies. [YouTube]

DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965)

In England, five men in business suits board a train compartment and get settled in for their trip to the town of Bradley. At the last minute, a sixth traveler joins them, Dr. Schreck, a little disheveled, with bushy eyebrows and wearing a long black coat. As the trip begins, the men converse and discover that Schreck (whose name, it is noted, means fear or terror) has a tarot deck which he says can predict the future. He then proceeds to do a reading for each man as five vignettes play out. In the first, an architect named Dawson (Neil McCallum) is asked by a rich woman to plan out some structural changes in an old house he formerly owned. Breaking down a wall, he discovers the coffin of Cosmo Valdemar, a previous owner who claimed that the Dawsons stole the house from him and said he would return from the dead to reclaim the house. Dawson is not a believer, until a servant girl is killed, perhaps by a wolf, and the blood trail leads to the coffin. Soon enough, Dawson will believe. In the second reading, Bill (Alan Freeman) and his family are cleaning up their vacation home when they come across a large vine that resists being cut; it actually seems to propel the shears out of Bill's hands when he tries to cut it. An expert is called in, the family dog is strangled by the vine, and ultimately, the vine tries to encircle the house to trap the family inside. The third reading features trumpet player Biff Bailey (Roy Castle) who gets a booking with a jazz band in the West Indies and, against advice, sneaks out to witness an authentic voodoo ritual. He likes the melody of the voodoo chant and copies it down, and, despite being warned not to by a voodoo priest, plays a jazzy arrangement of the chant at a nightclub in London. He will soon regret this.

The fourth man, art critic Franklyn Marsh (Christopher Lee), is a bit aloof and disdainful of the tarot process, but Schreck goes ahead and tells him that his destiny is wrapped up with an artist named Landor (Michael Gough) whose work Marsh mocks. Landor exposes Marsh to public ridicule, so one night, Marsh hits Landor with his car, resulting in the severing of the artist's hand so he can no longer paint. Soon, Marsh finds himself stalked by a disembodied hand and suffers an ironic fate brought on by the hand. The last tale features Bob Carroll (Donald Sutherland), who is soon to be a newlywed. The reading reveals that his bride is a vampire, which of course leads to nothing good for Carroll. All five of the readings end with the Death card revealed. The men are all a bit rattled by Schreck's fortunes, and when they disembark at Bradley, they have one more surprise in store.  

This is the first (and one of the best) in a series of horror anthology films from the British studio Amicus, with short horror vignettes presented in a narrative frame, like the classic 1945 film DEAD OF NIGHT. Each story is relatively short, getting wrapped up before it wears out its welcome. They are tonally quite similar, spooky and set at night, except for "Creeping Vine" which feels like a version of Hitchcock's The Birds. They're all consistently good, with "Creeping Vine" being the least, "Voodoo" being the best and most atmospheric, and "Vampire" having the best twist. Despite what you might think, the disembodied hand is a pretty good effect. Lee and Cushing, though OK, seem to be working at half-power here. The best performances are from Alan Freeman (better known in England as a DJ) as the man dealing with the vine, and Roy Castle as the jazz musician. In that sequence, which has more light moments than the others, there is a fun inside joke as Castle goes on the run in nighttime streets and sees a poster for a movie called Dr. Terror's House of Horrors with the five lead character names listed as actors. (Pictured at right; it's a quick moment so keep an eagle eye out.) The music in that segment, played by the Tubby Hayes Combo, is quite good. Even if the ends of the stories (and the movie itself) are fairly predictable, this is worth watching. Pictured at top are Cushing, Freeman and McCallum. [DVD]

KINDAR THE INVULNERABLE (1965)

The walled city of Utor in the middle of the Egyptian desert is ruled by a king who is constantly on guard against invasion from a band of nomads anxious to get access to a natural spring in the city that gives abundant water, something that is hard to come by in the desert. During a storm, the queen goes into painful labor and just as she gives birth, a lightning bolt strikes her through the window, killing her but leaving her infant son not only alive but, as foretold by legend, invulnerable to any injury except from the "Red Flower," a term that none of the seers understands. The king hopes he will grow up to be Utor's invincible protector, but just after his birth, he is kidnapped by a treacherous handmaiden and taken to Seymuth, leader of the nomads, who raises him over the years as his son and names him Kindar. Twenty years later, Seymuth decides the time is right for an invasion of Utor, led by the grown Kindar, who is revealed to be invulnerable when Seymuth has a squad of men shoot arrows at him which bounce off his muscular chest. During their first attack, they manage to capture Nefer, lover of the king's other son, Ciro. When Ciro comes to rescue her, the nomads force him into a duel to the death with Kindar. It's a pretty good battle, with whips and rocks, and when Kindar prevails, he spares Ciro's life and allows her to take Nefer with him back to Utor. Eventually, Kindar discovers the secret behind his parentage, learning that he is Ciro's brother. The king of Utor tests him by putting him in a device called The Bride of Horus, basically an iron maiden torture device, and when he emerges unscathed, he joins up with Ciro and the king to battle the nomads. Seymouth decides that the "red flower" of myth is fire, and in the final battle, he plans to use fire to fight Kindar.

This is an engaging sword-and-sandal flick, and a bit of an outlier in that, though made by an Italian company with mostly Italian actors, it is set and partly shot in Egypt. There is no wicked queen with designs on our hero, no volcanos, and no gods (we discover that these people worship Horus though we don't get a backstory for the legends surrounding Kindar). There are, however, shirtless muscled men, bosomy women, a big city, and a shift in who we see as good and bad. Italian-American Mark Forest, star of several peplum films, is a solid handsome hero, though he is supposed to be 20 but looks much closer to his actual age of 30—and on a gay note, we see some of his assets delightfully displayed in his tight red leggings. After this film, he retired from movies and became an opera singer. Howard Ross (pictured, credited as Red Ross) as Ciro is also decked out nicely. Mimmo Palmara (Seymuth) is almost as hunky as the hero. Rosalba Neri (Kira) and Dea Flowers (Nefer) look their parts even if they have little to do except get in trouble or get others out of trouble. The suspense element of the Red Flower is not handled well—basically, Kindar just darts in and out of the flames in the final battle. But overall, a solid entry in the peplum genre. It's lovely to see a handful of shots with a real pyramid in the background, though the bulk of the movie was shot in Spain. [YouTube]

SEVEN SEAS TO CALAIS (1963)

Plymouth, England, 1577. A man is attempting to smuggle a map of New World port cities where the Spanish have hidden gold reserves. He is killed in the streets but manages to give the map to passerby Malcolm Marsh (Keith Michell) and tells him with his dying breath to get the map to notorious explorer and privateer Francis Drake (Rod Taylor, pictured)—privateer here seems to mean a pirate who mostly attacks ships from the enemy of his country. Marsh manages to get to Drake who decides to take his men and sail around South America to grab the gold. Marsh becomes his chief assistant and falls in love with Arabella, a member of the Queen's court. Queen Elizabeth (Irene Worth) tells the Spanish ambassador that she opposes any of Drake's activities, but in secret is bankrolling his trip in exchange for some of the booty. While becalmed near the tip of South America, there are stirrings of a mutiny which Drake and Marsh put down. Eventually, they get hold of some gold and fraternize with the Incas while back in England, pining Arabella gets mixed up with Babington (Terence Hill, billed early in his career by his birth name, Mario Girotti) who is plotting with King Philip of Spain to assassinate the Queen and replace her with her imprisoned rival Mary of Scotland. When Drake returns, he tries to foil Babington's plot and is then tasked with fighting off the Spanish Armada—and as anyone who knows the phrase "Spanish Armada" will realize, the British are victorious.

This is probably total historical hogwash, but as an under-budgeted costume adventure film, sort of on a par with the Italian sword-and-sandal films of the era, it's satisfying enough. Rod Taylor carries the whole thing on his capable shoulders, making Drake a cocky, fun, and laid-back sort of fellow, with a goatee that makes him look quite saucy, in the tradition of swashbuckler actors like Errol Flynn; he would appear the same year in Hitchcock's The Birds. Keith Michell is similarly personable, and quite handsome, as his young buddy. Irene Worth plays the Queen like a slyboots character who wouldn't be out of place at Downton Abbey. Edy Vessel as Arabella and Terence Hill as Babington are fine. The sword fights are quite well done, feeling more real and less staged than similar scenes in older movies. The passage of time is not dealt with clearly, partly due to some oddly abrupt scene transitions. The first time this happened, early on, I attributed it to a choppy print, but it happened a few more times so I think it must have been deliberate. The director, Rudolph Maté (When Worlds Collide) was at the end of his career, and though his best work was as a cinematographer (Stella Dallas, Foreign Correspondent, Gilda), this does not display much visual flair. Some viewers dock this movie points for its obvious use of miniatures, but for me, that's part of the suspension of disbelief that we always engage in. No classic, but it sure is Saturday matinee fun. [TCM]