The movie itself begins in Africa (after a credit sequence showcasing a lot of African wildlife, everything switches to a sound stage where you had left over sets from One Million Years B.C. laying around) with a British guide named David leading an old guy on a safari to hunt leopards.

After the old guy botches the hunt and merely wounds the leopard, David gets mad and sends the guy back to camp while he goes after the wounded animal because he doesn’t like to see the animals in his jungle abused. Shot full of lead until they’re dead? Acceptable. Simply winged by amateur? Morally reprehensible.

Despite being warned by some of his native pals that he’s entering forbidden territory where all the locals worship the white rhino and even though he sees a tree marked with the dreaded sign of the white rhino (it’s just a carving of a rhino, not a big white rhino dump or anything), he blunders on ahead, right into the white rhino obsessed tribe!

His torture is immediate and brutal as these guys start to dance around in their white rhino masks (characterized by enormous phallic-shaped noses) all the while singing one of their hit songs (probably about how they’ll meet some lady friend on the down low and let her ride their white rhino).

David is told by the tribal leader that there is no defense for defiling their land and that the penalty is death. The leader also babbles about how his tribe is enslaved to the white rhino god, but I imagine that David was pretty much concentrating on the whole death sentence aspect of things and wasn’t really in his right mind. How else to explain the fact that while everyone is about to stab him to death that he reaches out and touches the horn of the white rhino statue which instantly freezes everyone around him and simultaneously opens a portal to another time?

Actually, there isn’t any other way to explain it because it doesn’t make any sense. Along with an overabundance of dancing and laughably unconvincing cast, this is one of the movie’s big problems since none of the nonsense that occurs ever amounts to anything beyond a bunch of people milling around in caveman outfits in between dance numbers.

Just what sort of world did David find himself in after groping the white rhino horn? It’s a world unlike any other, except for the sound stage that he just left, only with a few different brightly colored plants. There’s also a prehistoric woman being chased by other prehistoric women and she bites David when he tries to help her.

Both David and the woman are captured by the evil prehistoric women and taken back to their village. There we are subjected to cruelties undreamt of since the last time we had to watch a bunch of people dancing around. This time though, it’s a bunch of blonde chicks instead of African natives. And their moves are even more annoyingly dull than what we had previously seen.

For those that lack even rudimentary powers of observation, it is pointed out that all the blonde girls are enslaved by the dark haired girls. The men are likewise enslaved and are all held in a prison where they are forced to do metal working.

Additionally, all the males are outfitted with these terrible looking fake beards and wigs, which lead me to believe that whomever was in charge of that sort of thing had a conversation with the director that included the phrase “you won’t believe how cheap all this was!”

The dark haired gal in charge is one of these ruthless barbarian queens who doesn’t mind if her slaves have to eat off the floor and who takes bubble baths. Personally, I don’t see why wanting to pamper yourself every now and again and maintain baby soft skin is such a crime, but I think it stretched credibility a bit that you would have a prehistoric woman so concerned with her personal hygiene.

Barbarian Queen has her eye on David and with his wussy demeanor, what Amazon-ish woman wouldn’t want to put him in a scissors hold?

But the blonde girl that bit him also likes him and David likes her. To really add to the drama, Blondie conceives a scheme to free her people. Her plan is for David to pretend that he likes Barbarian Queen and slip into her bubble bath and then do something that helps the blondies get free.

I don’t think David’s girlfriend thought it through beyond the whole “my boyfriend is going undercover as hooker” aspect and you can bet that even though Dave whined about doing it, he eventually sucked it up and agreed.

Things go slightly awry once the plan is put into action, mass stupidity ensues and David finally ends up back in the present day after an embarrassingly fake appearance by the white rhino himself!

One of Hammer Films’ worst efforts which was a bit of a surprise because even with some of Hammer’s lesser films, there’s some aspect that shows a little care went into things, whether it be set design, the acting, or a story that at least made sense.

There is nothing here to redeem this movie though and the fault has to lie with writer/director Michael Carreras. It’s a dumb story that feels like an unfinished jumble of ideas and clichés.

Carreras gets no help from his leading man either. Michael Latimer in the role of David is singularly underwhelming with his unenthusiastic and wimpy portrayal of a guy fighting to survive in a hostile world. He was completely miscast here. He wasn’t a brawny he-man, he wasn’t a rakish rogue, he just looked like an uptight nerd. It all left me feeling like I sat on a white rhino horn.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Just as scary though is that our hero is about a hundred years old! Don’t misunderstand me, André Morell is a comforting presence in any movie, but I’m not comforted when it’s up to my great grandpa to take on a bunch of zombies, even if they are just British ones.

The role requires him to dig up and rebury graves at regular intervals. I kept waiting for the old coot to stroke out or drop over from a heart attack. That isn’t the type of concern you’re supposed to have for your hero’s safety in these sorts of pictures.

Morell, who plays Sir James Forbes, eminent professor of medicine from London, also generates cheap suspense when he has to have a fight scene. How are we supposed to believe that this geezer is going to be able to control his bladder long enough to move out of the way of a dagger, let alone brawl with a guy, set him on fire, and stab him to death? I guess the filmmakers would have us chalk it up to all the special forces training he received in medical school.

Well, what the devil is a hoity-toity centenarian tough guy like Sir James doing in Cornwall hanging out in some hick village that’s gone and gotten themselves a bad case of the zombies?

It all begins with a mysterious letter from one of his former students. Sir James would later claim that the guy was his cleverest student, but I think he was just trying to pump the guy up a little since he let his entire village get taken over by a voodoo cult of all things.

His star student is Dr. Peter Johnson, a man characterized by his chronic whining and flop sweat reaction to any stressful situation. Sir James may have been classmates with Methuselah, but at least he had the guts to roll up his sleeves and do an autopsy on Dr. Peter’s wife right in front of him: “Well, don’t just stand there son! Lend me a hand and help me take out your old lady’s gizzard, for Pete’s sake!” (All quotes are made up for purposes of critical analysis.)

Dr. Peter writes complaining that a strange malady has overtaken many members of his village. It’s characterized by a loss of appetite, paleness of skin, and sudden death. Also, that old abandoned tin mine just outside of town is finally going to reopen again. It’s probably a foreign company using their own workers though because they’re all grey and lumber around and are a bit musty smelling.

Sir James isn’t too keen on having anything to do with any business up in Cornwall but he has his great granddaughter Sylvia living with him. Dr. Peter is married to Sylvia’s friend Alice and Sylvia thinks it would be a good chance to go and visit her.

At the village, Dr. Peter is facing a crisis of confidence with the villagers since they want to know what is causing all these deaths and why it just seemed to start when he came to town.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with all the strange goings on at the town squire’s residence. You know the chap. He traveled extensively abroad to places like Haiti, inherited everything once his dad croaked and came back home with a retinue of natives that pound their drums in an entrancing rhythm that was loud enough to wake the dead. Even more suspiciously, when we meet Clive Hamilton, his evil theme music plays and most damning of all, he has these odd sideburns that say “my barber is a zombie.”

Since this is one of those movies where the old guy investigating some supernatural problem is accompanied by his youngish female relative for no good reason (see also The Blood Beast Terror for example) she immediately gets herself mixed up in things, thus providing us with someone in jeopardy that our heroes can rush to save as the film draws to a close.

If you’re looking for zombies, you have definitely come to the wrong place. First of all, these are voodoo zombies, not George Romero zombies. This means that they’re easily kept in line by a gang of whip-wielding supervisors and though they can apparently kill you if they are told to, they aren’t about to go running amok and taking bites out of your arms or face. The fact of the matter is, they don’t do a whole lot, but that’s okay, because you don’t get to see them much.

Most of the action is centered around Sir James trying to figure all this business out. He has to do it all himself because the other two main nominal protagonists, Dr. Peter and Sylvia don’t do anything but stand around agog at everything transpiring or get themselves into danger.

Likewise, the villain is a uninteresting cipher. All we know about Clive Hamilton is that he knows how to do voodoo and uses zombies in the mine. Why? What’s he going to get by using zombies in the mine? If it was about power and money, couldn’t he raise the dead to do something, I don’t know, a little more ambitious perhaps?

Too much old guy, not enough zombies, and a villainous scheme that no one even considered explaining. Just like Sir James did to Alice when she turned into zombie, this one needs a good whacking across the head with a shovel.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Jekyll ponders this for about two seconds and comes up with his all-new, double-secret project. He will invent an elixir of life! This will allow him all the time in the world to beat back the embarrassment of athlete’s foot.

Now, just how is he going to go about inventing this elixir that sounds so far-fetched? Of course! Since women’s skin is always soft and silky smooth (not that Jekyll would know anything about the touch of a woman – at least not until he’s touching himself later on in the film) and since chicks don’t go bald while men do, there must be something in their hormones that prolong life or will at least help Jekyll get rid of that pasty complexion of his.

But where in the world is he going to get hormones from beautiful, young broads? Dead whores, silly!

Jekyll gets supplied by the local morgue attendant and things are going well at first until the young broads aren’t dying fast enough for the experiment. He then gets famous body snatchers Burke and Hare to do their thing and they rustle up bodies of wanton women by hook and by crook.

Jekyll tests out his potion on a fly and is surprised to see that it has turned a male fly into a female fly. Inexplicably, he thinks this is some type of success because it isn’t long before he’s drinking his jiggle juice and turning into Martine Beswick!

He reacts like any of us would and begins to fondle himself, but is interrupted by the brother (Howard) of a virgin (Susan) that was harassing Jekyll earlier. Howard has the hots for her and Susan is irritated for some reason. Jekyll tells everyone that this woman is actually his sister, a widow named Mrs. Hyde!

With Burke and Hare having been earlier disposed of and with Jekyll two-timing himself, Jekyll decides that if he’s ever going to wear the pants in the family again that he’ll need to start procuring chick hormones himself by slashing prostitutes.

This was, despite its gratuitous title, a pretty classy effort. There was none of the gore and/or sexy scenes that you would be hoping for, I mean, expecting. Instead, the focus is on Jekyll’s struggle with his own inner-babe.

Ralph Bates does a very good job portraying the slightly prissy scientist and he does comes off as a dude with a little woman inside of him. Because of the gender spin that is put on the Jekyll and Hyde story, the movie isn’t about the actual transformations as much as it is about the impact his interactions with other people has on himself.

The movie tries to show us right in the beginning that Jekyll may be more prone to alternative lifestyle choices and more than one character comments on Jekyll’s lack of woman action. (Howard actually almost comes out and says that Jekyll’s gay!)

When he does turn into Mrs. Hyde, you’re mentally trying to determine what it means for his sexuality when he starts making out with Howard. Is he gay? Is he bi? Is he a straight woman trapped inside a mad scientist’s skinny body?

I doubt that all transsexuals out there would embrace this as a movie celebrating their plight since it portrays Jekyll as being driven completely nuts by the whole mess, but we should probably chalk that up to the tight corsets and not to his she-male tendencies.

Things were a bit muddled as to the point of all the killings once he turned into Mrs. Hyde and the conclusion involving a blind organ-grinder wasn’t entirely believable, but it didn’t detract from the overall enjoyment of this film.

My really big complaint was that they only scratched the surface of the problems and wacky situations that a geeky scientist would run into when he changed into a sultry vixen at unexpected intervals. Simply put, this movie was not sleazy enough for its provocative subject matter. You kept expecting more outrageous things to happen, but Jekyll never did more than break dates with the virgin and neck with Howard.

Pretty good for what it was, but probably should have been more. The puritanical woman inside of me liked it, but the dirty old man in me was disappointed.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Their friend Simon hasn’t been around much lately and he’s been hanging with a new group of friends that keep him isolated and study astrology. Rex is disappointed that Simon isn’t there so the Duc decides they should just go up to Simon’s house and ask him why he thinks his doo doo doesn’t stink anymore.

They get there and there’s a big gathering going with thirteen people! The Duc and his pal breeze on in and Simon is none too happy to see them. The Duc has his suspicions about what’s going on and says he wants to see the brand new telescope that Simon has had installed upstairs.

The Duc goes on up with Rex and Simon in tow and starts to nose around. One goat-headed beast floor design and a couple of live roosters later, the Duc has figured out that Simon has joined a devil-worshipping cult run by the all powerful Mocata and they’re bent on corrupting as many innocent souls as the 95 minute running time of this feature will allow!

Duc and Rex drag Simon off to the Duc’s estate to keep him safe there. As added insurance, the Duc puts a crucifix around the neck of Simon to stop him from going back to his cult. Simon escapes after the well-meaning, but satanically challenged butler takes his crucifix off once it begins strangling poor old Simon!

At Duc’s behest, Rex goes to London to locate a woman (Tanith) who was in the cult and might be able to help somehow. Once she’s found and riding with Rex, she puts up a fuss and tries to jump out of the speeding car because Mocata is still controlling her.

Eventually Rex and Tanith arrive at their destination and as soon as Rex is out of the car giving his old chums hugs and salutations, Tanith, whom Rex left stupidly in the car, just drives off! I know there was something wrong with this plan!

In the ensuing car chase Mocata uses his powers to cause Rex’s windshield to turn an opaque white color, so Rex just puts his fist through it! Of course, I immediately wondered why if Mocata could do that, he didn’t just make the tires go flat or the radiator overheat. He does cause Rex to crash into a tree, so maybe he was just trying to do something appropriately showy.

The remainder of the film features tons more action packed devil battling heroics involving more mind control, kidnappings, attempted sacrifices, giant spiders, and the angel of freaking death, himself!

This was really a rousing Christopher Lee vs. Satan movie that is head and goat-shoulders above the rest of the demonic possession genre! Lee delivers a great performance, delicately balancing between being a strong, determined character and going over the top straight into Bela Lugosi ham territory.

The other actors are also up to the task and even the thickheaded Rex comes off well and is a nice compliment to the more cerebral Duc.

The villain seems a bit underdeveloped though. His past and motivations are never made entirely clear and we hardly see him, but I guess that left us with less of a chance of him running his yap about ridiculous plans to take over the world and the like. Maybe there just isn’t that much to know about a devil worshipping idiot who runs around in a purple robe that looks like he picked it up at the Heaven’s Gate Going Out of Business Sale.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

This isn’t your typical mummy movie though because it’s based on Jewel Of The Seven Stars, by Bram Stoker. Thankfully, the plot ditches all the hokum about guys wrapped up in ratty toilet paper shambling around after people in tents, swamps and universities and instead features a reincarnation plot line involving a babe named Tera, Queen of Darkness.

Margaret Fuchs, the very buxom daughter of Dr. Fuchs, has been having nightmares about ancient Egypt. She dreams that Tera (who looks a whole lot like Margaret) is laid out in a tomb surrounded by a gaggle of high priests.

We’ve all seen enough movies set in ancient Egypt to know that when you’re surrounded by a group of high priests, a situation like this will involve some sort of hideous mutilation like having your tongue ripped out, some part of your body chopped off or some good old fashioned mummification.

In this case the high priests have decided that they are going to use this small thing that looks a bit like a garden hoe and chop off Tera’s hand. There’s also a bunch of dire sounding talking as they do this. Once they exit the tomb though, the severed hand starts running around!

I’m not going to do any research for you to tell you about the history of the whole dismembered hand gag in horror films, but this isn’t exactly virgin territory and we all know what sort of trouble Thing from The Addams Family could get itself into on a weekly basis, so you can imagine that this hand is probably up to no good.

There’s some wind, some jackal howling, and some screaming and the next thing you know everyone has died from having their throat ripped out! Cut back to the present day and we see Margaret has a scar on her wrist!

We eventually learn that Fuchs and a group of colleagues entered a tomb which had some sort of an ancient Egyptian version of a “No Trespassing” sign posted, though they were more colorful with their warnings than we are today.

There they locate Tera’s resting place and open it, discovering that she has been preserved perfectly. Strange events also occur back in London that seemingly tie Tera and Margaret together.

Fuchs and friends cart off all the goodies, including the body and a pile of relics. Years later these relics are scattered amongst the people who were at the tomb.

You don’t have to be an Egyptologist to know what happens next. Tera possesses Margaret and has her go on a killing spree in an effort to recover the relics. This leads to a ceremony where Tera will be brought back to life once the stars are in their proper alignment. It’s all straight out of Ancient Egyptian Resurrection for Dummies.

This was a welcome change of pace from the usual mummy fare, chiefly because there was never really any mummy in it! Gone is the usual nudity and gore that characterized many Hammer movies of the early 1970s with the focus instead being on making the film atmospheric and dream-like. In style then, it owes more to Universal’s original film, The Mummy than to any of Hammer’s previously unrelated mummy movies.

It isn’t anywhere near as good as the Boris Karloff classic, but it is evocative of the same type of nightmarish chills found in that film. Both don’t feature any mummies per se, but instead focus on the reincarnation theme and use flashbacks and dreams to tell their tales. The Hammer film falls down though in comparison to the original because of its sometimes messy way of presenting all the details that explain who Tera is and what she’s up to.

It also doesn’t have the narrative power because this is really just a story about a guy trying to bring a monster back to life for no particular reason, whereas The Mummy was about Im-Ho-Tep’s forbidden love surviving through the ages and the afterlife.

Compared though to some of Hammer’s other mummy movies such as The Mummy’s Shroud, which was basically a slasher movie, Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb is very entertaining and a breath of fresh air amidst the generally musty smell of the genre.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The lama is one of those all-knowing type dudes.  You can tell because he’s always sitting cross legged and muttering incomprehensible blather that Dr. Rollason kind of squints at and doesn’t really understand until the end of the movie after the Yeti tried to eat him or something. Eventually, the lama babbles about some group that is coming to the monastery and Cushing seems to know who they are.  

The team of newcomers arrive and it is obvious from the get-go that they are the crass Americans the back of the DVD described.  They bluster in hooting and hollering, making fun of the natives, dissing the mountains,  calling out the Yeti and pretty much make royal asses of themselves.

The team is lead by a guy named Tom Friend.  He’s a big galoot full of vim and vigor and is kind of a big game hunter version of P.T. Barnum.  He’s also got a trapper with him named Ed Shelley and a guy named McNee that’s had some encounter with a Yeti and has become kind of obsessed ever since.

Dr. Rollason joins them and they all set off on their journey and discover that this is one of those movies where people climb for awhile, then stop, make camp and talk a lot.

We learn that Tom Friend is really in it for the money and not to expand people’s knowledge. Rollason had somehow convinced himself that Friend was in it for all the right reasons and was outraged to find out otherwise.  We also learn that Friend was responsible for promoting a bunch of Mexican wolf children or something earlier which turned out to be a hoax.

In any event there’s entirely too  much blah blah and not enough Yeti attacks. Since this is a mountain climbing movie, you get your standard radio report announcing that the worst snow storm since the Ice Age is going hit Mt. Yeti and that all crass, American-led teams in search of a missing link should use extreme caution and expect everyone in their party except the star to be wiped out.  So Tom Friend hears that and says: “Lets get going!”

As you might expect, the trip up to the top of the mountain is not without tragedy.  McNee gets his ankle all busted up somehow and then the howling of the Yeti begins!

McNee goes into a trance whenever the Yetis are around and Dr. Rollason wisely asserts that it must be because McNee is hypersensitive to their presence.

Somehow or other Ed Shelley shoots and kills one of these beasts that’s been lurking around the camp looking for hot dogs and candy bars, but we are only given a glimpse of its big hairy arm.  They think they’re building suspense by doing that and yes I did want to see what the dang thing looked like, but only because up until this point the whole movie was a regular hen party.

They wrap the thing up and haul it off to a cave. Tom Friend has seen all these giant monster movies so he knows that  the only way to appreciate a rampaging monster is to exhibit a live one in a major metropolitan area, so this Yeti roadkill just isn’t going to cut it.

McNee decides to jump off the side of the mountain at about this time.  We get to see him go thudding off a big rock and land in a busted up heap.

Dr. Rollason gets there and declares that he was in fact all busted up and immediately everybody blames the Yeti for exercising some kind of mind control on McNee.  If that’s the case, why didn’t the Yeti just use some hocus pocus mind stuff on them before they even got there?

Tom Friend realizes this and devises an ingenious plan to catch a live Yeti. He has Ed Shelley, the trapper wait in the cave with the corpse of the Yeti he shot, hangs a big steel net up and tells Ed that right before the Yeti comes to eat him, just drop the net on his furry butt. No fuss, no muss.  Just to be on the safe side though, Friend loads Shelley’s gun with blanks so that when Shelley gets nervous he won’t blow the Yeti away like he did the last time!

Nigel Kneale wrote the story and screenplay which was based on his television play and he plays with themes here that he better developed in Quatermass And The Pit – strange monsters that we usually think of as being savages (Martians, Yetis) that are actually much more evolved than humans and have developed their mental powers as opposed to their physical abilities.

It worked much better in Quatermass And The Pit because you could believe that maybe Martians had strange mental abilities since they were from an alien world.  It is less successful here because you basically have overgrown apes living on a really cold mountain with no sign of any type of civilization.

You also had a fair deal of action in Quatermass And The Pit to keep things moving so you didn’t dwell on how ridiculous the explanations were for what connections some humans had to Martians.  With this movie, nothing much happened.

Its origins as TV play were obvious with all the low-budget blathering that went on.  I also never really understood why Rollason was going up the mountain with Tom Friend.  Surely he knew who this guy was.  You don’t sign on to something like this without checking the background of the people you’re going with.  What did he think was going to happen?  And what does a botanist know about looking for abominable snowmen, anyway? You don’t need to be a psychic yeti to know this movie is one mountain you don’t want to climb.
 

© 2011 MonsterHunter