What Are Your Favorite Films Made by Hammer?

Ray Pullar said:
Yes - watched it several times on British t.v. while growing up. It had Warren Mitchell and Bernard Bresslaw!
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From 1969. It had it's heart in the right place ,Roy Ward Baker directing, and 500,000 pounds was a big budget for Hammer (it was a Hammer film). It looked stage bound and awkward in the light of 2001 which had been out the year before. It would have made a better TV show.
 
MZT suffers from a tone problem in trying to be comical adventurous. It is very late sixties in style with a funky women's dance troupe, slapstick micro-gravity fights and British comic actors cast as monocle wearing villains.
 
M. Robert Gibson said:
Now I really want to see this film :LOL:

Edit
Found it
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The first five seasons of MST3K with Joel Hodgson were the best , first season probably the best of all. The ad libbing was really sharp and the in-between sketch stuff very funny. (This was one of those comedy shows where one needed to follow the story of Joel and the bots because it got more self referential.)
One thing surprised by MST3K did a number on This Island Earth and Rocket Ship XM …. I never realized how many goofy and corny things were in those movies. I mean it's easy to pick on Plan Nine From Outer Space.
 
My favorites


The Abominable Snowman
The Phantom of the Opera
Frankenstein Created Woman
The Lost Continent
Dracula Has Risen From the Grave
Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde
Hands of the Ripper
Taste the Blood of Dracula
The Reptile
Plague of the Zombies
Rasputin the Mad Monk
Kiss of the Vampire
Captain Clegg
The Devil Rides Out
The Gorgon
Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Twins of Evil

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Hammer films is that they treated fantasy seriously. Dramatic stories were never played for laughs (excluding The Old Dark House and elements of Frankenstein the the Monster From Hell). Even with the prehistoric cave man films the actors treated the gibberish as if it was King Lear.
 
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BAYLOR said:
Hammer films had class, style and a excellent writing which seems to be lacking in today horror films.
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Al Jackson said:
Tell ya, there seem to be an uncountable number of 'horror' films per year right now. Most , if not all, have no edge to them , are muddled, and not scary! These films actually make enough money to attract more limp and pedestrian films ???!!!
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Truth. I just watched Mother, which was basically an hour and 45 minutes of Jennifer Lawrence passive aggressively looking pensive about her husband's irritating house guests and a fifteen minute orgy of psychedelic violence.
 
The movie industry (that is, the big money ones) are no longer merit-oriented. They have enough money they can play around and write off any losses. What's particularly sinister about it is that they would prefer people not have access to older works in case they chose to watch them instead of new things. Disney's buy out of FOX should be worrisome since Disney is known to be disinterested in archival releases. 20th Century Fox has a big catalogue (their 1950s PRINCE VALIANT is worth a watch BTW--I think Star Wars was greatly influenced by it. Singing sword = light saber).

Hammer also did adventure films. The Scarlet Blade is a good example of how they infused the dramatic side of it with interesting characters to make up for a lack of spectacle. That was Hammer's particular strength. It didn't have the money for spectacle but it made good use of its limited resources.
 
I'm rather fond of VAMPIRE CIRCUS myself - with Lala Ward in a minor role. And of course THE DEVIL RIDES OUT and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT and Dr. JEKYL & SISTER HYDE and CAPTAIN KRONOS and … well, just about most of 'em. Never did quite get into ON THE BUSES, though.
 
Vince W said:
Quite right. It needs to be treated the same way it was originally. Otherwise don't waste the time.
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The secret ingredient there is Nigel Kneale who wrote the smart teleplays and screenplay for Quatermass… have to find some writer up to that.
 
Al Jackson said:
The secret ingredient there is Nigel Kneale who wrote the smart teleplays and screenplay for Quatermass… have to find some writer up to that.
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Guillermo Del Toro or perhaps someone like Alex Proyas or Chris Carter maybe ?
 
BAYLOR said:
Guillermo Del Toro or perhaps someone like Alex Proyas or Chris Carter maybe ?
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Good teleplay and screenplay writing is not easy.
I have sure seen a lot of bad stuff over the years.
On TV it seems to have a lot to do with show runners, I know most of Game of Thrones is written by the show runner there, but they shepherd all the teleplays, over at The Expanse the show runners there don't write as many of the episodes but also keep the story going well.
 
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