Ten Days of Terror!: The Vampire Lovers

Film: The Vampire Lovers
Format: DVD from LaSalle Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

Sometimes, when you request a movie from the library, you actually get two. That was the case when I ordered Countess Dracula through interlibrary loan; what I got was a two-fer that included The Vampire Lovers. This is a much more traditional horror movie in the sense that the title is going to lead us to think that there are vampires involved and, well, there are actual vampires involved. Even better, this is a straight-up lesbian vampire movie. I mean, I expect this from a film when it’s called Vampyros Lesbos. It’s more of a surprise when they’re just The Vampire Lovers.

Our film takes place in the middle of the 18th century in roughly southern Austria. We’re going to get a little opening sequence where a man named Baron Hartog (Douglas Wilmer) confronts a vampire who killed his sister. While he is almost killed, he manages to kill the vampire by decapitating her.

Ten Days of Terror!: Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde

Film: Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on various players

Sometimes people come up with a really fun and interesting take on a classic story. Take, for example, Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde. It’s clearly a prurient title meant to get people to sit up and pay attention to it. It looks like this is going to be an exploitation movie (and it kind of is), but this is actually a really fun and inventive take on the original Jekyll/Hyde story from Robert Louis Stevenson. In the original story, intelligent and sober Dr. Henry Jekyll invents a serum that releases his more animal nature, turning him into the criminal and vicious Edward Hyde. As the title suggests here, that’s not going to be the case with this film.

The conceit here is that Victorian-Era Dr. Jekyll (Ralph Bates) is initially researching a way to cure diseases. His womanizing friend Robertson (Gerald Sim) tells him that, figuring a couple of years to cure each disease in his sights (diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, and more), he’ll be dead before he manages to cure them all. This is an epiphany for Jekyll, who immediately decides that before he starts tackling diseases, he should first tackle life extension.

Kung Fu Dracula

Films: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires
Format: DVD from Reddick Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

Where has this movie been all my life? Think of the most ridiculous plot you can for a vampire movie, and you wouldn’t come up with what is presented in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. This is a Hammer horror movie—the last of the Hammer Dracula films. It is also equally a Hong Kong action cinema Kung Fu movie. I can’t believe that I’m saying this and that it’s taken me this long in life to watch this--The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is a Peter Cushing Dracula movie that features Kung Fu battles. If I had known this movie existed when I was 15, it would have been my favorite thing in the entire world.

We get a short intro, where a Chinese man named Kah (Chan Shen) arrives in Transylvania, asking for help from Count Dracula (John Forbes-Robertson). Kah is the emissary of the 7 Golden Vampires, who hold sway in a remote area of China. But their power is fading, and Kah has come to ask for help. Dracula does help, but does so by essentially absorbing Kah, stealing his appearance, and going to take charge of the vampires himself.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Vault of Horror

Films: The Vault of Horror
Format: Internet video on Fire!

Did you know there was a sequel to the early ‘70s film Tales from the Crypt? I didn’t. I thought The Vault of Horror was just another anthology film, but it was also released under the titles Further Tales from the Crypt and Tales from the Crypt II. Even without that knowledge, though, you shouldn’t be surprised at where this is going. We’re going to get a quintet of short stories with a framing story that will be what we think it’s going to be. The stories themselves are going to come directly from the pages of EC Comics.

In fact, that’s one of the oddities here. “Vault of Horror” was the name of an EC Comics horror anthology comic, but most of the stories here come from “Tales from the Crypt.” Ultimately, that doesn’t really matter, but makes more sense that this was originally pitched as a sequel to the original movie not just in content but in name.

Not Another Anthology Movie

Film: Asylum
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on the new internet machine.

When I tell you that I watched an anthology film, you almost certainly think immediately that it was a horror film. Horror anthologies do seem to be the most popular of the style, perhaps because horror movies often work very well without a lot of characterization or without a great deal of plot. I might argue that a film like Short Cuts is a kind of dramatic anthology, but it’s not one that is more or less pure—specific stories placed end-to-end in a linear fashion. A lot of anthologies don’t really measure up against longer films. Asylum is an exception to that.

Asylum comes with a pretty good pedigree. The stories were penned by Robert Bloch, who also wrote Psycho. The cast list includes Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom, Charlotte Rampling, Patrick McGee, and Britt Ekland. Admittedly, Cushing isn’t a shock since he made most of his career in this kind of film, but the others add some real heft for 1972.

Off Script: Quatermass and the Pit; Quatermass 2

Films: Quatermass and the Pit (Five Million Years to Earth); Quatermass 2 (Enemy from Space)
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I tend to like movies from Hammer Studios in its heyday. Sure, they’re not all great, but there’s an earnestness to them that I appreciate. Quatermass and the Pit is later in their run, but it’s a fine example of what Hammer could do on a very small budget. This is actually the third Quatermass film, based on a character created for the BBC. Despite it being the third film, the character name didn’t have the same recognition in the States, so it was released here under the awesome title Five Million Years to Earth.

In London in the mid-1960s, construction is going on at a tube station in Hobb’s End when a set of skeletal remains are unearthed. Dr. Matthew Roney (James Donald), a paleontologist, is called in to examine them. He determines that the remains are of a pre-human ancestor and he estimates them at five million years old—far older than any other previous finds of definably human ancestry. Around the same time that Roney reaches this conclusion, evidence of something metallic is located. It is decided that this metallic object is likely an unexploded bomb from World War II, and a bomb disposal squad is called in.