Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Five years can be a long time. When Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed came out in 1969, Hammer Film Productions was at its absolute peak of influence and popularity. The next and final entry in the main line of Hammer Frankenstein films, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, was released in 1974, but the cinematic landscape […]

The three years from 1968-1970 were a period of tremendous possibility and crisis for Hammer Film Productions: still at the peak of its popularity, the company had to deal with a sudden explosion in the degree to which sex and violence could be depicted in English-language cinema, which was far less prominent in the United […]

The years 1964-1969 were probably the peak of the Hammer Film Productions wave, popularly if not aesthetically. By the middle of the ’60s, the company had firmly entrenched itself as the world’s best source of tony Gothic horror, and was beginning to explore other genres, finding great success with pirate movies (e.g. The Devil-Ship Pirates […]

The first sequel to the groundbreaking The Curse of Frankenstein – the film that absolutely secured Hammer Studios as the home for top-notch Gothic horror with cutting-edge gore effects in the late 1950s and early 1960s – took scarcely more than a year to reach theaters. A sign of greed, you might think; a sign […]

There was a time when the national cinema of Great Britain was an unfriendly place for horror films; when the moral guardians of that quintessentially backwards-looking country gnashed their teeth and looked with the deepest scorn at any movie which tried to titillate and thrill the average moviegoer with blood and guts and a healthy […]

From among the Video Nasties I hold it a truth that bad movies are good for the soul; but a whole lot of bad movies can kind of get to you after a little while. And while I never expected this all-Video Nasties edition of the summer of blood to reveal much in the way […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: we’re pretty much used to blockbuster movies such as the current perpetual money machine The Twilight Saga: Eclipse aiming […]

Basically, Splice is one of the most confounding horror movies I’ve seen in quite a long time. Parts of it work magnificently well, parts of it work magnificently well while being incredibly hateful, and parts of it are just plain stupid. There are going to be a lot of people who see it, and hate […]

After the miserable artistic failure of House of Frankenstein, there wasn’t much that the next Universal horror movie had to do besides show up to be an improvement. But House of Dracula does more than just show up. Perhaps because the filmmakers realised on some level that this was to be the final hurrah for […]

I have not been able to determine much information about the box office fortunes of the Universal monster films in the 1940s, so I cannot say if Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Son of Dracula, the studio’s two franchise entries from 1943, made any particular sum of money worth mentioning. I suspect they must […]

Along comes World War II, and all of a sudden you can’t sink too much time and effort and especially money into making a movie anymore; certainly not an epic-scale monster movie. And thus it was was that 1941’s The Wolf Man, though itself a film riddled with small signs of cheapness, would be the […]