My take: Horror meets science fiction in this Hammer horror classic.

Rating: 3 out of 4 stars

When science fiction and horror combine, terrifying things can happen. You never know what might happen next when the rules are being broken and boundaries pushed.

For this reason, science fiction horror has always been one of my favorite subgenres. Aliens, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Fly are just a few of the frightening tales that come from this combination. The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass and the Pit also stand out as an excellent examples of this.

Quatermass and the Pit takes place in London’s present day, present day being 1967. While digging to expand an Underground station, workers discover skulls and bones. The archeologists step in and find something even more interesting, an artifact that the first assume is a bomb. But it turns out to be so much more.

Poster for Quatermass and the Pit.

It’s got aliens, it’s got ancient skulls, and it’s got a theory for the creation of man that is downright scary.

If you like science fiction horror, watch this movie. I would also recommend it to fans of classic science fiction and fans of Hammer horror films.

I watched it online on YouTube. Here’s the trailer:

My take: If you keep in mind that this was one of the the first movies with a creepy child ghost, it makes it a whole lot better.

Rating: 2.5 out of 4 stars

Kill, Baby…Kill!, originally called Operazione paura, is an Italian horror film directed by the same man who created Blood and Black Lace. That man is Mario Bava. After having seen Blood and Black Lace, I expected a whole slew of gory deaths and hot Italian women. But this film was more in line with a Hammer film than his previous work.

It’s a period piece that follows Dr. Paul Eswai, a doctor in town to investigate a series of strange deaths. The individuals all appear to have committed suicide, but each of them seemed young, healthy and completely sane prior to death.

Along with the inspector and a hot young woman named Monica, the doctor discovers that the town is living under a curse. Ever since the death of a young seven-year-old girl named Melissa, townsfolk have been tormented by her ghost. If you see the face of Melissa, you are doomed to die.

The ghost of Melissa amongst her creepy dolls.

The film itself has a pretty straightforward story, but what keeps you interested is how innovative this film was at the time. As Jonathan Rigby points out in Studies in Terror that David Lynch wholesale lifted a scene from this movie for his film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.  Additionally, “The image of Melissa herself would be recycles by Frederico Fellini in the “Toby Dammit” episode of Histoires extraordinaires (1967) and by Martin Scorsese in The Last Temptation of Christ (1987). And the whole paraphernalia surrounding her — the bouncing ball, the girlish giggling on the soundtrack — would sink deep into the fabric of the ghost-child subgenre.”

For these reasons, Kill, Baby…Kill! is worth watching. I would recommend this to people who enjoy a good ghost story or classic Italian horror.

I watched it on Netflix’s instant watch. Here’s the trailer on YouTube:

My take: Classic zombie tale from the time when zombies were the result of evil voodoo sorcerers (and before zombies ate brains).

Rating: 3 out of 4 stars

This is yet another example of how Hammer Films stands out from their contemporaries. The sets are lush, the colors bright and the characters fully formed. It’s period horror at its finest, and you can see how Hammer became famous for this type of horror.

The Plague of the Zombies is set in Cornwall, where a small village has been beset be a series of mysterious deaths. The local doctor requests the help of his former professor, whose daughter comes along for the trip. They discover that a dozen people have died with strange symptoms: sluggishness, pasty appearance, slow reflexes. There is no known cause as the superstitious townsfolk have been keeping the doctor from performing autopsies.

The professor suggests that they simply go dig a body up. They discover, however, that the graves are empty. Where are the bodies? And what is going on a the old, abandoned tin mine? Spoiler: it’s zombies.

It’s a zombie!

This is a solid zombie film, that is likely overlooked in its timing. Just a few years from when this film was released, Night of the Living Dead came out. That film would change the face of zombie films, and films like The Plague of the Zombies have been forgotten in the aftermath.

This is a film rich with voodoo myth and legends. It also has the trademark atmosphere of lust and violence that make Hammer films so compelling.

I would recommend this to fans of Hammer horror, classic zombie films, and classic horror in general.

I found the movie on Daily Motion. Here’s the trailer:

My take: I was riveted because it was a completely unique story in a unique setting.

Rating: 4 out of 4 stars

Atmosphere can make or break a horror movie, and some of the best horror movies can turn inanimate objects into fearful things.

In The Shining, Kubrick managed to embody the Overlook Hotel with horrors. In The Wind, the director made the howling winds carry all the fears and torment of poor Letty.

Likewise, in Onibaba the endless grass field is a character unto itself. The grass makes warriors in feudal Japan lose their way trying to get home. It helps the old woman and young woman, who are the main characters, stalk and kill the warriors who mistakenly wander into the grass field. It hides the deep, old well the women use to dispose of the bodies. It also helps the old woman strike fear into the heart of the young one as she hides amongst the grass dressed as a demon.

The demon in the grass in Onibaba.

The story plays out like a fairy tale or parable. The two women kill to survive. When a neighbor returns from war telling them that their son and husband are gone, he sets his eyes on the young girl. The young girl, now newly widowed, reciprocates to the old woman’s dismay. The old woman would not survive without the help of the young woman. So, she hatches a plot to frighten the young woman into believing that her acts of love will land her in hell.

It was a story unlike any I had heard before, and it was utterly refreshing after having watched so many western tales of horror. Additionally, the setting of feudal Japan with samurai and war, kept me guessing at what could possibly happen next.

I would recommend this to anyone who like a bit of history mixed with their horror as well as fans of Japanese horror films.

I got the movie on disc from Netflix. Here is the trailer from the Criterion Collection:

My take: A lot of elements were utterly cheesy, but it came together somehow to make a movie worth watching.

Rating: 3 out of 4 stars

At times while watching The Castle of the Living Dead, I imagined the writers drawing horror tropes and characters out of a hat to see how they could fit them into the story. The movie seemed to have a lot of things all mixed together:

• The story is about a group of performers who look like a cross between a band of gypsies and a freak show
• The evil villain is a count played by Christopher Lee
• He also happens to be a bit of a mad scientist
• The count has an eerie castle that the band of performers are paid to visit
• There a creepy, hunch-backed henchman
• The castle is filled with taxidermied animals
• There’s a witch who lives in a hut in the woods

I’ve seen all of these elements before. There were gypsies in the Wolf Man. Christopher Lee has played the most evil count of all time in Dracula. Taxidermied animals abound in the Most Dangerous Game.

On paper, I would have called this entire plot derivative and a hodgepodge. However, it somehow all ties together. Maybe it is because there is so much packed into the film. Maybe it is Christopher Lee’s superb ability to play the villain.

There was also a surprising bonus: Donald Sutherland plays a range of strange parts in the film. He’s a police Sargent who investigates when people start dying at the castle.

On the left is Donald Sutherland as the Sargent. On the right is Christopher Lee as Count Drago.

He also plays the old witch who lives in the woods as well as an old man.

Donald Sutherland as the witch in Castle of the Living Dead.

Seeing him pop up occasionally added a lot of fun to the movie.

This is the type of movie I would put in a horror marathon with friends, simply for the hodgepodge of horror themes. I would also recommend it to fans of classic horror and fans of Christopher Lee.

I found the movie on Daily Motion, though it was quite blurry. Here’s the trailer in YouTube: