At the Earth’s Core (1976)

          Difficult as it may be to imagine today, when seemingly every major movie includes sci-fi elements, there was a time when fantasy-themed feature films were so rare that nearly every one of them developed a cult following. This phenomenon goes a long way toward explaining why At the Earth’s Core isn’t universally derided as an embarrassment for everyone involved. Based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, this exceptionally silly co-production of U.K.-based Amicus Productions and U.S.-based American International Pictures features monster costumes that look like they were made for a high school play, background paintings and set dressings that one might expect to find in an old Star Trek rerun, and dramatic situations so infantile that it’s amazing actors were able to play their scenes without constantly bursting into laughter.

          Highlights of At the Earth’s Core include scenes of giant winged lizards leaping from their resting places atop a lava pit so they can grab female humans with their talons—that is, after the lizards have finished hypnotizing the unfortunate ladies with their telepathy powers. And in perhaps the film’s finest moment, a ridiculously fake-looking dinosaur lifts a human with its jaws—at which point the film cuts to a miniature shot of the dinosaur chomping on an inert figure that looks like a Barbie doll in caveman clothes. Oh, and the primitive humans living in a primordial realm nestled deep inside the earth all speak English. On the plus side, British horror-movie stalwart Peter Cushing gives a quasi-amusing supporting performance as a dotty old scientist who treks through the earth’s core with his trusty umbrella always close at hand. Pip-pip, old man!

          The larky plot begins in Victorian England, where British scientist Dr. Perry (Cushing) and his American backer, David (Doug McClure), pilot the maiden voyage of a manned drilling machine. The machine malfunctions, taking Dr. Perry and David into a cave near the earth’s molten core. Our heroes are soon taken captive by the Mahars (the aforementioned lizards), but then David decides to liberate the subterranean humans whom the Mahars use as slaves. Helping motivate David’s decision is the presence of a sexy cave woman, Dia (Caroline Munro), since it appears he’s also eager to liberate her from her clothes. All of this stuff trudges along in the familiar way—battles, setbacks, heroism, betrayal, et cetera—and each special-effects scene is goofier than the preceding. About the only genuinely effective element of the film is the largely electronic score by Mike Vickers, which complements the filmmakers’ trope of using tricked-up mechanical noises as the “voices” of underground monsters. FYI, At the Earth’s Core is the second of three fantasy pictures that onetime TV star McClure made for Amicus. Although the other two movies, The Land That Time Forgot (1975) and The People That Time Forgot (1977), form a continuous story, At the Earth’s Core is a stand-alone.

At the Earth’s Core: FUNKY

Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (1974)

On paper, this sounds like tons of fun, at least for genre-movie fans. Seriously, an action-packed horror movie about a dashing soldier who travels around pre-19th-century Europe killing vampires with a samurai sword, accompanied by a hunchbacked scientist and a voluptuous female companion? And it’s from UK-based Hammer Films, the kingpins of Gothic shockers? What’s not to like? Well, for one thing, Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter is woefully devoid of the one thing it should have in abundance, which is entertainment value. Yes, the picture is handsomely produced (within the parameters of a humble budget), and the filmmakers don’t skimp on stylish violence. But where’s the joie de vivre? The picture isn’t as grim as some Hammer pictures, which is a relief, but it’s still unnecessarily sober. Did the world really need something called Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter played straight? Anyway, at least viewers who dig Hammer’s formula of dastardly deeds conducted in crypt-like castles and murky forests will find much to savor here. The picture begins when a village physician, Dr. Marcus (John Carson), encounters a series of strange deaths—young women drained of blood fall dead, their bodies inexplicably aged. Marcus summons his old Army pal, Captain Kronos (Horst Janson), who happens to be a professional vampire hunter. Convenient! Kronos travels with a deformed scientist, Professor Grost (John Cater), and a sexy peasant girl named Carla (Caroline Munro). As the movie unfolds, Kronos and his allies set traps for the bloodsucker—or bloodsuckers—preying upon Marcus’ village, but not all goes according to plan. Written, directed, and co-produced by Brian Clemens, Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter moves at a sluggish pace. Once in a while, Clemens lands a nice line of dialogue, as when Kronos describes Grost’s expertise: “What he doesn’t know about vampirism couldn’t fill a fly’s codpiece.” And periodically, Clemens nails a groovy visual: At one point, Kronos holds the blade of his sword before his eyes in order to reflect back the gaze of a ghoul who is trying to hypnotize him. Unfortunately, the actors all deliver highly generic work. Janson is an attractive physical specimen—as is Munro, who later became a Bond girl—but neither radiates much in the way of charisma. And the less said about the various anticlimactic scenes in which Kronos effortlessly vanquishes hordes of attackers with ridiculously skillful swordplay, the better.

Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter: FUNKY

Starcrash (1978)

How bad is Starcrash? To paraphrase the Bard, let us count the ways. First, there’s the discombobulated, idiotic storyline—an interstellar smuggler gets sent to the monster-filled home world of an evil wizard in order to rescue the son of an outer-space emperor, aided only by a band of outlaws and robots. Yep, it’s all the main signifiers from the previous year’s blockbuster Star Wars, thrown into a blender and transmogrified into nonsense. (Proving the makers of Starcrash have no shame, the flick even features low-rent light sabers.) Then there’s the garish production design, which blends Buck Rogers-style camp (the heroine spends most of the movie in an outer-space bikini) with sub-Star Wars mechanization, resulting in an aesthetic jumble. Next come the godawful special effects, ranging from chintzy stop-motion monsters to weak spaceship shots. And finally, there’s the abysmal acting, which is exacerbated by sloppy dubbing: B-movie stalwarts including Marjoe Gortner, David Hasselhoff, Caroline Munro, and Joe Spinell hiss and preen through ridiculous performances. Throw all of these elements together, and you’ve got junk so dreadful that even producer Roger Corman, whose company released the picture in the U.S., should have been embarrassed. Made in Italy, and variously titled in different international territories as Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione and The Adventures of Stella Star, the picture is nominally a showcase for leading lady Munro, a raven-haired beauty who first caught notice in Hammer horror flicks and a kitschy Sinbad picture. She fills out her barely-there costume nicely, but her bug-eyed acting diminishes her appeal considerably. Even more painful than enduring Munro’s work, however, is watching Christopher Plummer’s stupid cameo as the emperor—could he possibly have been paid enough for this humiliation? And for that matter, how the hell did the producers get A-list music composer John Barry, already a three-time Academy Award winner at this point, to do the score? Mysteries, to be sure, but not worth investigating.

Starcrash: SQUARE

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) & Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)

          Special-effects legend Ray Harryhausen, adored by generations of fantasy-cinema fans for the lovingly crafted creatures he brought to herky-jerky life through stop-motion animation, first dramatized the adventures of Arabic adventurer Sinbad the Sailor with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), a lively adventure featuring a memorable duel between Sinbad and a sword-wielding skeleton. More than a decade later, Harryhausen returned to the character with less beguiling results for a pair of mid-’70s romps featuring juvenile stories, outdated FX, and wooden acting. Even though many ’70s kids feel nostalgic toward these pictures, they haven’t aged particularly well, for a host of reasons—not only was Harryhausen’s take on Sinbad technically antiquated by the mid-’70s, but it was culturally antiquated, as well. Watching American and English actors prancing around with scimitars and turbans now feels borderline cringe-worthy.

          The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the better of the two ’70s Sinbad flicks, stars the attractive but vapid duo of Barbarella stud John Phillip Law, as the title character, and British starlet Caroline Munro, as Sinbad’s slave/love interest. (Her cleavage gives a better performance than either actor does.) The forgettable plot has something to do with an evil sorcerer conspiring to collect magical artifacts, but of course the narrative is merely a line from which Harryhausen strings encounters with fantastical creatures. Some of those creatures are quite silly-looking, such as a gigantic centaur, while others have more cinematic flair, notably a six-armed living statue that makes short work of Sinbad’s crewmen by wielding several swords at once. The movie also benefits from the presence of British thesp Tom Baker, who trades his familiar Doctor Who hat and scarf for a turban and a cape; playing the main villain, he provides an effective degree of gravitas and intensity, even though the script fails to give him much in the way of characterization. Harryhausen and his collaborators deserve credit for delivering a good-looking movie on a budget of less than $1 million, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad zips along at a brisk pace. Still, it’s hard to get past Law’s bland performance and the cliché-ridden script, no matter how mesmerizing Munro looks in her barely-there costume.

          Things got a hell of a lot weirder with the next installment, Sinbad and The Eye of the Tiger. Whereas the casting of American actors as Sinbad was always problematic, the casting of Patrick Wayne—son of the Duke—seems absolutely perverse. Moreover, Wayne gives such a lifeless performance that he makes Law seem dimensional by comparison. And yet that’s not what makes Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger so bizarre. The trippy plot involves an evil sorceress who transforms a prince into a baboon, then transforms herself into a seagull for spying purposes, only to botch her return to normalcy, thus ending up with a giant webbed foot. Creatures populating Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger include a bronze minotaur, a club-wielding troglodyte, a giant saber-tooth tiger, a massive mosquito, and even an enormous walrus that blasts through arctic ice before spearing victims with its tusks. (Yes, this Sinbad movie ends up at the North Pole—go figure.) There’s also a faint wisp of bestiality because the prince/baboon bonds with the telepathic daughter of a mystic who joins Sinbad’s team during their travels. Some of the film’s special effects are genuinely terrible, particularly green-screen tricks used to match studio footage with location shots, and the pacing is way too slow.

          Yet Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger has one attribute that compensates for nearly all of the film’s flaws, and that’s Jane Seymour, who plays the sister of the prince/baboon. (Her character is also Sinbad’s love interest, naturally.) Whether squeezed into a revealing costume or appearing semi-nude during one scene (quite something for a G-rated movie), Seymour is brain-meltingly beautiful here; even the sight of her twinkling eyes over the rim of a veil is enough to quicken pulses. Taryn Power, who plays the aforementioned telepathic daughter, is also quite lovely, and even more of her figure gets revealed than Seymour’s, so remarking on the film’s sex appeal is appropriate—clearly, someone on Harryhausen’s team advocated for injecting skin into the formula.

          In any event, since both of Harryhausen’s ’70s Sinbad pictures were solid hits relative to their costs, it’s interesting that he didn’t make further episodes, instead shifting focus to the more ambitious Clash of the Titans (1981), his final feature. Although much slicker in terms of production values, Clash of the Titans has some of the same problems as the Sinbad films, from hokey dialogue to wooden leading performances, but the grandiose picture embedded itself in the minds of fantasy-loving Gen-X kids. All of Harryhausen’s latter-day films trigger the same reaction when viewed today. No matter their shortcomings, the movies inspire awe that way back when, Harryhausen rendered cinematic spectacle by creating intricate puppets and moving them one frame at a time. In today’s CGI-dominated environment, there’s something comforting about revisiting crudely handcrafted escapism.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad: FUNKY

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger: FUNKY

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) & Scars of Dracula (1970) & Dracula AD 1972 (1972) & The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) & The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

          By the mid-’60s, a dreary formula was in place for Hammer Films’ long-running Dracula series: Each movie contrived a laborious new mechanism for resurrecting the titular bloodsucker (Christopher Lee), and each movie ended with Drac suffering an elaborate demise. As the series progressed, Lee’s characterization became more robotic, and the filler scenes depicting various supporting characters became more tedious. By the time the ’70s arrived, even Hammer’s lush Victorian-era costumes and locations felt stale. As a result, Taste the Blood of Dracula is a routine but well-photographed entry notable only for introducing Satan worship into the series, although comic actor Roy Kinnear enlivens a few early scenes. The movie takes forever to get started (an hour passes before Drac bites his first neck), and the formula of blood, cleavage, and Gothic atmosphere is overly familiar; furthermore, Dracula’s overreliance on henchmen makes him seem more like a Bond villain than a legendary monster.
          Scars of Dracula features more of the same, but instead of Satan worship, the story pays rudimentary homage to Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel with scenes of an unfortunate European fellow imprisoned in Drac’s castle. Reflecting how dry the creative well was at this point, the opening scene depicts a bat reviving Dracula by drooling blood onto the count’s bones. Really? Although Lee spends more time onscreen than usual in this entry, Scars of Dracula is one of Hammer’s shoddiest productions, complete with fake bats that wouldn’t pass muster in a student film.
          After a two-year hiatus, Hammer shook up the formula with Dracula AD 1972, which resurrects Dracula in present-day England, and the always-entertaining Peter Cushing returned to the series for the first time in 12 years, playing Lorimer Van Helsing, a descendant of the count’s old nemesis. The movie retains a bit of Gothic flavor by giving Dracula an abandoned old church as a lair, but most of the story takes place in the London youth scene, so lots of with-it kids party in tacky early-’70s fashions (leading lady Stephanie Beacham rocks a fierce mullet hairstyle). Campy dialogue, kitschy musical interludes, and slick camerawork make Dracula AD 1972 a guilty pleasure, and watch for raven-haired cult-favorite starlet Caroline Munro in an early role. It should also be noted that Beacham’s mesmerizing cleavage is such a focal point in Dracula AD 1972 that her breasts should’ve gotten special billing; this movie may represent the apex of Hammer leering, which is saying a lot.
          Hammer continued its new modern-day continuity with The Satanic Rites of Dracula, a Cushing-Lee romp enlivened by the presence of costar Freddie Jones, who plays a twitchy Satanist/scientist, and future Absolutely Fabulous star Joanna Lumley, taking over Beacham’s role as a Van Helsing descendant. The movie boasts an energetic score (proto-disco funk passages, lots of stabbing horns), plus slickly atmospheric wide-lens photography. There are even a couple of genuine jolts (rare in any Hammer flick), like a slo-mo attack on Lumley by several distaff vampires. The fact that the first hour of the movie plays out like an occult-themed conspiracy thriller sets the stage nicely for Lee’s dominance in the last twenty minutes; for once, Lee gets to do more than lunge at people and recoil from crosses, and he seems energized. Satanic Rites is easily the best thriller of this batch, even though it’s barely a Dracula movie in the classic sense.
          In 1974, Hammer’s Dracula series reached a bizarre conclusion with the kung fu epic The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, a joint effort from Hammer and chop-socky specialists the Shaw Brothers. In two brief scenes, John Forbes-Robertson unimpressively stands in for the absent Lee as Dracula, while a tired-looking Cushing reprises his Van Helsing shtick for the whole dreary flick. Boring nonsense about noble Chinese martial artists engaged in brawls and swordplay against decaying vampire ghouls in ornate gold masks, 7 Vampires is the series’ absolute nadir. Plus, who knew Dracula spoke fluent Chinese?

Taste the Blood of Dracula: LAME

Scars of Dracula: LAME

Dracula AD 1972: FUNKY

The Satanic Rites of Dracula: FUNKY

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires: SQUARE