The Screengrab : peter cushing

Remembering Amicus, the Other British Horror Movie Factory

Phil Nugent — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Anyone with an interest in horror movies probably knows something about "Hammer horror", the strain of movies put out by the English production house for some twenty years beginning in the 1950s, which produced its own versions of the classic Universal monster films and made cult stars of such actors as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Hammer had its own wayward, dark cousin--the films made in the 1960s and 1970s by Amicus Studios, which might easily have been mistaken for Hammer product by twitchy-eyed buffs on a misspent matinee weekend, or later, by kids parked in front of the TV on a Saturday. As Will Hodgkinson recalls, Amicus was the result of a handshake deal between "a socially inept scriptwriter called Milton Subotsky and a fast-talking hustler called Max J Rosenberg". Subotsky was the hands-on, on-set presence during the company's salad days. Everyone who met him seems to remember him as a very sweet man and a bit of a social misfit and oddball--which kind of figures, very sweet men being in short supply in film production circles. Ironically, he is also remembered as a true horror buff, in contrast the the bosses at Hammer, who happened to find a commercial niche and beat it into an assembly line. "Had it dealt in garbage disposal," the director Freddie Francis once said, "it would have been just as successful." And Subotsky, Hodgkinson writes, was "driven by a deep-rooted hatred for Hammer. In 1956, Hammer had rejected a script he wrote called Frankenstein and the Monster, only to go on and have huge success with a similarly themed film called The Curse of Frankenstein. To Rosenberg, this proved there was money in British horror movies. To Subotsky, the gauntlet had been thrown down." It must have pleased him considerably to feel that he was eating into Hammer's market share, making films pitched to Hammer's audience that sometimes featured actors who were identified with Hammer, such as Cushing and Lee, while telling interviewers that his own stuff was better.

While Subotsky wrote scripts and hung out on sets overseeing the filming and driving the directors crazy, Rosenberg stayed in America, cutting distribution deals and shoveling money across the Atlantic. Not that he shoveled in great quantities; Amicus gave their movies a top-grade look while pinching pennies by hiring actors, ranging from horror stalwarts such as Cushing, Lee, and Vincent Price to the likes of Jack Palance, Burgess Meredith, Denholm Elliott, Terry-Thomas, and Joan Collins, by hiring them for only a few days at a time. Their first real production, the 1965 Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (directed by Francis and written by Subotsky), was an anthology film, with five short stories contained in a wraparound framework with Cushing telling the fortunes of a group of men in a train car. (Subotsky claimed the idea was an homage to the 1945 omnibus film Dead of Night, Ealing Studio's classic fling with the horror genre.) Amicus would later turn out a string of horror-anthology movies, including three with scripts that Robert Bloch adapted from his own stories--Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), and Asylum (1972)--as well as one, 1973's From Beyond the Grave (1973), that was derived from the ghost stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and two, Tales from the Crypt (1972), with Ralph Richardson as the Crypt Keeper, and The Vault of Horror (1973), based on classic EC horror comics. (Comics freaks might almost think of Amicus as the movie equivalent of Warren Publishing to Hammer's EC.) The company almost made one or two unsuccessful stabs at penetrating the art house market, hiring William Friedkin to film the Harold Pinter play The Birthday Party. But Subotsky also had his pragmatic, philistine-studio-boss side; he wrote an ambitious version of the Jekyll-and-Hyde story called I, Monster and demanded that the director, Stephen Weeks, make it in 3-D, despite the fact that "the sets had been built the wrong way round. The script called for the action to go from left to right, but the building lines went the other way." But when the money ran out with the picture unfinished, Subotsky "simply told Weeks to cut whatever scenes he had filmed into something resembling a finished movie. The film was released to terrible reviews - but, like most Amicus films, it made a profit."

According to Hodkinson, Subotsky ended up walking away from the company "for reasons that remain unclear", just when it was branching out into adventure fantasies based on the works of Tarzan's creator. "In 1975, the studio released an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' lost-world adventure The Land That Time Forgot. It had proved a difficult film to shoot: its star, Doug McClure, was drinking heavily after the collapse of his marriage, while Subotsky was rumoured to be spending more time at Hamleys buying toys than running the studio. His only real involvement with the production was to turn up at a screening with his four-year-old-son, announce that the boy could tell there were men inside the dinosaur suits, and leave." Amicus produced a sequel called The People That Time Forgot (1977) as well as At the Earth's Core (1976), which is best remembered by some of us eternal adolescents for the way that the leading lady, Caroline Munro, really filled out her me-Jane costume, but by then Subotsky was long gone. After working as a producer on one more horror omnibus, 1977's The Uncanny (a linked series of story with the common theme that cats secretly run the world--I didn't know it was supposed to be a secret), the 1980 TV miniseries The Martian Chronicles, and a number of Stephen King-based properties (including King's sole directing job, Maximum Overdrive), he died in 1991. Rosenberg died in 2004. Two years ago, the company name was revived by producer Robert Katz; the first movie from the new Amicus Entertainment was last year's Stuck from director Stuart Gordon.

No Shit, Sherlock: Guy Ritchie Reimagines Holmes

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we’re not philosophically opposed to a “re-imagining” of Sherlock Holmes. After all, the ace detective has been through a lot in his century-long career on the silver screen. He’s been played by Peter Cook, Peter Cushing, Peter Lawford and Peter O’Toole. He’s even been portrayed by actors not named Peter, including Christopher Lee, Christopher Plummer, John Cleese, Michael Caine and someone named Hugo Flink. But we’re pretty sure even the great Basil Rathbone would turn in his pipe and deerstalker hat at the news out of Hollywood this morning.

Guy Ritchie, the man behind such meticulously crafted mysteries as Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, will spearhead the Holmes revival. According to the Hollywood Reporter, “Ritchie has signed on to write and direct a reimagining of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes for Warner Bros. Lionel Wigram and Dan Lin are producing the movie, which takes its cues from a forthcoming comic that Wigram wrote as a selling tool for a new take on the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle character. The concept sees the character be more adventuresome and less stuffy than previous screen incarnations and mines on more obscure character traits.”

The phrases “selling tool” and “less stuffy” certainly have me salivating at the prospect of a hip new Sherlock for the 21st century, how about you? Can I get an “Elementary, my dear Watson”? No?

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Hazel Court, 1926--2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The British-born actress Hazel Court has died at the age of 82, at her home near Lake Tahoe. A leggy redhead with a figure made for period gowns, Ms. Court had a face of such unearthly perfection that, were she young and working today, she would probably be given the honor, along with a few other supernaturally beautiful women, of competing for the romantic attentions of some flabby loser in a movie that has Judd Apatow's name in the credits. Instead, she was a pin-up queen and became a familiar face on TV, but is best remembered for work in horror films by Hammer Studios--The Curse of Frankenstein, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee--and Roger Corman during his Edgar Allan Poe phase. She co-starred with Vincent Price in three of the latter, Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Raven, a very strange comic take on the material that must have taken its main inspiration from Corman's having managed to get Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff on the same set at a time when he also happened to have film in the camera. (The cast was rounded out by the young Jack Nicholson, who in this company got to pass for The Normal One.) In one of its few actual links to the poem that is its credited source material, the movie also cast Ms. Court as "Lenore", the lost love of the hero (Price), who turns out to not in fact be dead but to have run off with an older, more powerful wizard (Karloff). The best thing about The Raven may be that it gave Ms. Court, who spend an awful lot of her time in these movies standing around looking gorgeous waiting for the chance to need rescuing, a chance to be regal and bitchy--at one point, she laughs enchantingly while Karloff threatens her own daughter with a red-hot poker--in a way that left a lasting impression on many a young movie-watching poetry enthusiast.

Hazel Court was married to the Irish actor Dermot Walsh for fourteen years, from 1949 until their divorce in 1963. A year later, she married the American actor, Don Taylor, who set met on the set of one of the four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and who she was with until his death in 1998. After remarrying, Court retired from movies to focus on her family, as well as to develop a second career as a sculptor. She also wrote her autobiography, which is to published, under the title Hazel Court Horror Queen, later this year. Her very last film appearance was in a bit part in the third film in The Omen series, 1981's The Final Conflict, where her character is listed by IMDB as "Champagne Woman at Hunt." "Champagne Woman" wouldn't have been a bad superhero name for Hazel Court.

I'm A Sexy Vampire

Peter Smith — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

"Bela Lugosi!" Richard Pryor used to exclaim during his stand-up act. "I bet that guy got some weird fan mail." Indeed he did, but there's now a popular, if arguable, point of faith among some horror fans that nobody thought vampires were sexy until Christopher Lee first draped a cape around his six-foot-five-inch frame and started sinking his teeth into his demure co-stars' necks in the the 1958 Horror of Dracula. (It was his first time playing the Count but his second job for the British horror factory Hammer Studios; a year earlier, he played the monster opposite his frequent co-star Peter Cushing's mad scientist in The Curse of Frankenstein.) In the Guardian, Matthew Sweet discusses Lee, Hammer, and how their version of the classic bloodsucker fits into the vampire filmography. "Lee's performance convinced a generation of scholars that Dracula was a book about sex, and not about vampires." I'm not sure that it can't be a book about both, but Lee definitely put his stamp on the character; he went on the play him in six other Hammer films, as well as sending the character up in a cameo in the 1970 The Magic Christian. By the end, in the 1974 The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the studio, "looking for new ways to revive flagging public interest in fanged Transylvanians, had transplanted Dracula to the fag end of swinging London, where he hung out with a gang of hippie bikers — slaves of the dark side, of pot and of their taste in afghan casualwear." — Phil Nugent