Vampire Circus (1972)

          Among the last period pieces that England’s Hammer Film Productions made during their celebrated original run of Gothic-horror flicks, Vampire Circus offers a humorless onslaught of nudity, sex, and violence. However, the best Hammer pictures have a little something extra, whether it's the swashbuckling energy of the early Lee-Cushing adventures or the brazen sexiness of, say, the so-called “Karnstein Trilogy.” To be clear, Vampire Circus has energy to burn, thanks to a veritable explosion of frenetic onscreen activity—this lurid film has everything from acrobatics to erotic dancing to outrageous gore. What it doesn’t have is distinctive characters or a memorable storyline. By stuffing in so many different elements, up to and including people who shape-shift into various animals, Vampire Circus ends up being tiresome. Voracious horror fans may enjoy consuming this picture like the fare at an all-you-can-eat buffet, but mere mortals will get their fill quickly.
          Set in 19th-century Austria, the movie starts in an appropriately sensational fashion. Villagers storm the castle where an aristocratic bloodsucker has taken a sexy local girl for a lover. With his dying breath, the vampire curses the villagers. Fifteen years later, a circus comes to town, and mayhem ensues, because the gypsies operating the circus are supernatural monsters and their mortal thralls. It’s the count’s curse coming true. Some scenes in Vampire Circus are almost hypnotically weird, notably the vignette of a sexy dance involving a bald woman who is nude except for tiger-stripe body paint. Other scenes are almost comically grotesque, including one bit with dead children and another during which various animals are slaughtered. None of it adds up to much, although fans craving lizard-brain stimulation can savor lengthy views at nubile female flesh as well as lingering looks at blood and viscera. And while the cast lacks big names, the actor playing the circus strongman is David Prowse, best known for appearing onscreen in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and for inhabiting Darth Vader’s costume in the first three Star Wars movies.

Vampire Circus: FUNKY

The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)

          Even though Hammer Films’ long-running horror series were never big on continuity, it was a bummer whenever series entries were missing their regular stars. Thus, one of the many reasons The Horror of Frankenstein is so disposable is that Ralph Bates plays the titular mad scientist instead of Peter Cushing. It’s not that Bates is bad in the movie—quite to the contrary, he’s got a light touch for deranged perversity that suits Hammer’s campy style. However, the presence of Cushing in Hammer’s other Frankenstein pictures creates the illusion of a series that’s progressing forward, even though the movies are highly repetitive, simply because Cushing’s performance gets more intense in each successive film.

          Conversely, The Horror of Frankenstein represents pure narrative backsliding, because it’s a retread of the series’ first entry, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957); as in that picture, brilliant but reckless young doctor Victor Frankenstein tests his theories about the nature of human life by building a monster from pieces of corpses, only to see the monster escape the confines of Castle Frankenstein and murder unsuspecting villagers in the generic European countryside. Yes, it’s once more into the origin-story breach of Gothic production design, grubby henchmen, heaving bosoms, and over-the-top Technicolor gore.

          The specifics of the plot don’t merit recounting, since the storyline is just a mishmash of things you’ve seen a zillion times before, so only the movie’s few novel touches are worth mentioning. As directed and co-written by Hammer stalwart Jimmy Sangster, The Horror of Frankenstein tries to send up the series at the same time it delivers monster-movie thrills, so Bates gets to riff on the idea of doctor-as-deviant, and his grave robbers of choice are an amiable husband-and-wife team (he cuts up the bodies, she does all the digging). The movie’s monster is a big letdown, however, because he looks more silly than scary. As played by Darth Vader himself, British bodybuilder David Prowse, the monster looks like a Muscle Beach escapee in a Halloween costume, with a cheesy rubber skullcap and gauze-bandage bike shorts. So, while The Horror of Frankenstein has some meager redeeming values, the movie itself is like the monster—a patchwork of used parts artificially animated to something that fleetingly resembles life.

The Horror of Frankenstein: LAME

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)

Hammer Films’ long-running Frankenstein series reached its ignoble conclusion with this gruesome entry. Leading man Peter Cushing had last played Baron Victor Frankenstein in the terrific Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969), and by the time he returned to the role, he had aged considerably—he musters some of his old perverse glee, but his trademark intensity is diminished. The script boasts an interesting contrivance, because the Baron has become the in-house physician of the asylum where he’s incarcerated. He’s also up to his old tricks, pillaging body parts from inmates for the hodgepodge creature he’s building in his laboratory. That’s all well and good, but the inexplicably ape-like creature design is a buzz kill: Actor David Prowse (who later played Darth Vader) shuffles around in a clunky body suit and goofy makeup, preventing any suspension of disbelief and giving the movie an awkwardly campy quality. The picture also goes way overboard with blood and guts, even by Hammer’s lurid standards: A lengthy brain-transplant scene lingers on the Baron and his accomplice sawing open a skull, cutting tendons, and yanking out gray matter. Furthermore, because the movie is photographed with bright lighting and long takes, the focus throughout the story is less on atmosphere than on grotesquery, which makes it hard to appreciate the script’s fun character touches, like the scene in which organ fetishist Frankenstein opens a pot and smells his dinner: “Ah, kidneys—delicious!” While not the worst of the Cushing Frankenstein pictures (that would be 1964’s godawful Revenge of Frankenstein), Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell suggests the series was headed in such a grisly direction that pulling the plug was a form of cinematic euthanasia.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell: FUNKY

Star Wars (1977)

           First off, the title of the damn movie is Star Wars, not Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. No matter how much writer-director George Lucas enjoys rewriting history, there was no way he could have known when he was shooting this film that he would get to make one sequel, much less two sequels and three prequels. Thus, despite its eventual status as the first installment of a long-running franchise, the beauty of the original Star Wars is that it’s a complete, self-contained statement about the thrill of a young man discovering his destiny—and one of the film’s many charms is the parallel between Lucas and guileless protagonist Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). Just as Luke becomes an intergalactic hero by embracing previously unknown possibilities, Lucas changed the film industry by combining old-fashioned storytelling with groundbreaking FX.
          The basics of the story are familiar to most moviegoers: When agents of the evil Intergalactic Empire kidnap rebel leader Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), her trusty robots R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) and C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels) are sent to recruit aging Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness) to rescue her. Circumstances instead lead the robots to young Luke, a restless orphan living with his aunt and uncle on a remote farm but dreaming of life as a star pilot, and eventually Luke delivers the robots to Kenobi and discovers their true mission. When soldiers from the Empire wipe out Luke’s family, he joins Kenobi on the quest to rescue Leia, and sets out on the path to becoming a Jedi Knight, which is sort of an outer-space samurai with supernatural powers. Viewers also learn about the Force, an energy field binding everyone in the universe together; Jedis get their powers by channeling the Force.
          The heroic crew soon expands to include self-serving smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his hirsute first mate, a gigantic alien called Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew). Their journey leads them to the Death Star, a massive space station, where they must confront villains including the Jedi Knight-turned-bad Darth Vader (physically performed by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones). Along the way, Luke finds a surrogate father in Kenobi, a comrade-in-arms in Han, and a love interest in Leia. This is all fun stuff, of course, but the story is really just part of the appeal; with Lucas at the height of his visionary powers, the real magic of Star Wars is in the physical reality and the storytelling.
          At the risk of hyperbole, there’s simply no explaining what a thrill it was to discover this movie as a child of the ’70s. The production values were intoxicating, and the mixture of archetypes and classic themes made Star Wars feel like a tale that had existed for generations. Yet perhaps the sheer confidence of the filmmaking was the most overpowering aspect on first blush: Leaping from one colorful cliffhanger to the next, the movie was edited to travel as fast as any of the spaceships Lucas put onscreen. At the time, Star Wars hit youthful bloodstreams like a cinematic sugar rush, but with something deeper underneath.
          During my interview for the documentary The People vs. George Lucas, I was asked why I thought the first film had such an impact on kids my age. I noted that the mid-’70s was a murky time in American life, with Vietnam and Watergate topping the list of recent front-page downers, and Star Wars was a much-needed infusion of optimism. As a boy feeling the effects of social change (this movie was released around the time my parents’ marriage became a ’70s statistic by ending in divorce), I think I was primed for the hopeful idea that some Force for good existed in the universe. The movie’s staggering box-office returns, and the decades of devotion showered upon the Star Wars franchise by millions of Gen-Xers, indicate I wasn't alone in my reaction.
          You begin to see why it’s difficult to completely set aside larger examinations of this deceptively simple movie, since anything embraced by untold millions means something, whether good or bad—but beyond its pivotal place in ’70s sociology, Star Wars is simply one of the great rides in the history of popcorn cinema. The monstrous spaceship swallowing the tiny rebel vessel at the top of the movie. The otherworldly cantina. The outer-space dogfights. Han Solo’s last-minute heroism. Darth Freakin’ Vader. Escapist adventure doesn’t get any better, even if the actors (including the preceding plus Hammer veteran Peter Cushing) have to struggle through wooden characterizations and tongue-twisting dialogue. With John Williams’ indelible music giving coherence to all of Lucas’ mad-tinkerer ideas, Star Wars is pure cinematic pleasure from start to finish. And if it means something to you, as it does to me, then so much the better.

Star Wars: OUTTA SIGHT