Showing posts with label monster.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monster.. Show all posts

Thursday 11 July 2019

ACTOR FREDDIE JONES DIES AGED 91


THE VERY SAD NEWS of the passing of actor FREDDIE JONES reached us last night, has been marked with many comments and shared messages of condolences at the PCASUK Facebook Fan Page, yesterday and today. Freddie was 91 and had an impressive film, television and theatre career that stretched over a very busy sixty years.  Most #Hammerfilm and #PeterCushing fans will know him for  two Hammer classics, first Hammers Frankenstein Must be Destroyed and 'The Satanic Rites Of Dracula'. 






MORE ON FREDDIE JONES and 'Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed' HERE!

IN 'DESTROYED' Freddie gave us a Baron's creation that was full of pathos and sadness. Who can forget his duel with Cushing in the final moments, where Professor Richer cranks up the tension by trapping Cushing's Baron in a blazing house!? Jones's portrayal of Frankenstein's indulgence, is probably is most complex of all Hammer films 'Frankenstein Monsters', who manages to spin the title of 'Monster' neatly into the lap of Cushing's Baron. There are few actors who could so convincingly share the interplay between Cushing Hammer characters and themselves. The tension and  dread was pushed even a little further in the scenes which Freddie Jones and Cushing shared in #hammerfilms 'The Satanic Rites of Dracula'. Freddie's Professor Julian Keeley wobbles and sways from fear, to dread, lust and disgust in a shared A two-hander scene with Cushing, that is probably the highlight of the film. 



MORE ON FREDDIE JONES and 'The Satanic Rites of Dracula' in our PCASUK GALLERY and REVIEWHERE!

FREDDIE JONES also frequently worked with David Lynch with roles in 'The Elephant Man' (1980), 'Dune' (1984) and 'Wild at Heart' (1990 ) His role as Inspector Baynes in Granada television's 'The Return of Sherlock Holmes' in 1988, with Jeremy Brett as Holmes is a gem. Freddie Jones always brought much to every role. You never knew quite what was going to be on the table, but it was always entertaining, convincing and very real.



Friday 20 October 2017

ALL CHANGE : LAST CALL FOR FRANKENSTEIN AND MONSTER MONDAYS


#FRANKENSTEINFRIDAY! A lovely and rare transparency of Peter Cushing with 'that head' from the 'Curse of Frankenstein' (1957) served up on a background platter of the ultra rare press-book from the same film... This is our last #frankensteinfriday post today, and in fact for a little while. I am putting the day away to bye byes. I think you are all a little Frankenstein Friday'd OUT! SO a new themed day next FRIDAY and also NEXT MONDAY #MonsterMonday has a long well earned sleep too, so TWO new Cushing Themed DAYS next week. - Marcus



IF YOU LIKE what you see here at our website, you'll  love our daily themed posts at our PCAS FACEBOOK FAN PAGE.  Just click that blue LINK and click LIKE when you get there, and help us . . Keep The Memory Alive!. The Peter Cushing Appreciation Society website, facebook fan page and youtube channel are managed, edited and written by Marcus Brooks, PCAS coordinator since 1979. PCAS is based in the UK and USA . 

Saturday 18 March 2017

#FRANKENSTEINFRIDAY: CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN PRESS BOOK


#FRANKENSTEINFRIDAY: IT WAS THE FIRST, and some say the best. Peter Cushing first Frankenstein for Hammer films in 1957. Here is the cover of the press-book, for that miles stone film... note that the 'creature is a non-descript figure in the bottom left, Hammer would say, we didn't want to give away the appearance of OUR creation. But we know, that the make and facial appearance (make up job) of Christopher Lee's 'monster' was still being finalized just days away from him stepping before the camera.....






#FRANKENSTEINFRIDAY: TODAY WE WISH a happy birthday to the lovely Eunice Gayson. Best known for playing Sylvia Trench, James Bond's girlfriend in the first two Bond films (Dr. No 1963 and From Russia with Love 1963). Originally, Gayson was to be cast as Miss Moneypenny, but that part went to Lois Maxwell instead.
  

Tuesday 14 February 2017

VALENTINE MONSTER MONDAY : HE'S ALL HEART!


#MONSTERMONDAY.... Peter Cushing's Arthur Grimsdyke, THE Valentine Monster...HAD to be really, didn't it? It's that time of year...Valentine, when we, to paraphrase Monty Python, 'Bring Out OUR Dead; and present you with Peter Cushing's portrayal of his touching performance of his little ol man, who is all heart...YOURS! Tales from Crypt (Amicus 1972) still ranks very high, in your list of Cushing favorites, and always gets the tears a-runnin and the heart a-pumpin! So, where does he weigh on our scales of #MonsterMonday Madness?? Grimsdyke was he a monster OR victim??

Monday 19 August 2013

THE BARON REBOOTED: THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN : HAMMER FILMS 1964


CAST:
Peter Cushing (Baron Frankenstein), Peter Woodthorpe (Zoltan), Sandor Eles (Hans), Kiwi Kingston (The Monster), Katy Wild (Rena)

PRODUCTION:
Director – Freddie Francis, Screenplay – John Elder [Anthony Hinds], Producer – Anthony Hinds, Photography – John Wilcox, Music – Don Banks, Special Effects – Les Bowie, Makeup – Roy Ashton, Art Direction – Don Mingaye. Production Company – Hammer.


SYNOPSIS:
Forced to leave town because of their experiments, Frankenstein and Hans return to Frankenstein’s hometown Karlstad and set up laboratory in the abandoned Frankenstein chateau. Frankenstein then finds his original creation frozen inside a glacier and restores it to life. Only it will not respond to his commands. And so Frankenstein comes up with the idea of obtaining the services of Zoltan, a disreputable carnival hypnotist, to hypnotize the monster into obeying him. Zoltan is successful but has less than scientific interests at heart. With the monster responding only to his commands, Zoltan uses it to rob and take revenge upon the town authorities.


COMMENTARY:
General opinion holds The Evil of Frankenstein, the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films, to be one of the duds of the series. One is at a loss to understand why. I, to the contrary, hold The Evil of Frankenstein to be one of the best of the series. With the preceding two entries, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Hammer had kept the same essential creative team – director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and star Peter Cushing – in place. For The Evil of Frankenstein, Hammer producer Anthony Hinds replaced Sangster on script, while Freddie Francis inherited the director’s chair. Freddie Francis was an up and coming director who had worked as an award-winning cinematographer in the previous decade, had made his genre debut with Vengeance/The Brain (1962), followed with a couple of Hammer’s psycho-thrillers, Paranoiac (1962) and Nightmare (1963), and then attained some success with the first of Hammer rival Amicus’s anthology films Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964) just prior to this. Francis, whose output to the Anglo-horror cycle has been underrated, would go on to become its next most prolific director to Fisher. (See below for Freddie Francis’s other films).


It is not clear why The Evil of Frankenstein is almost universally regarded as such a dog in the Hammer pantheon. Just look at the opening scenes that hit one with the fervid intensity of something out of a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare brought to life – a little girl sees a body being stolen from a hut in the forest in the middle of the night and calls a priest. The body is taken to Frankenstein who removes the heart before the paling body snatcher, dismissing his queasiness with a curt, “He won’t need it anymore,” before the priest bursts in, cursing Frankenstein’s abominable experiments and smashing the lab equipment. It’s a sequence lit with such a feverishly eerie intensity that it attains a genuinely nightmare atmosphere of dread chill. Nothing else in the film quite manages to match it. Certainly, there are a number of images littered throughout that have a lingering memorability – the deaf-mute beggar girl and her strange relationship with the monster; the monster found buried in the side of the glacier; and one especially memorable scene where the monster gets up and begins to agonizingly shuffle around the lab while Frankenstein looks on, coldly clinically taking notes.


The Evil of Frankenstein presents some confusion to the continuity of the Hammer Frankenstein series. For some reason, Freddie Francis conducts a flashback that offers a potted retelling all the essentials of The Curse of Frankenstein anew. However, this makes changes to continuity – Frankenstein now appears to have merely been driven out of town, not executed. Where the events of The Revenge of Frankenstein fit in becomes somewhat confusing – the Hans character is carried over from Revenge, but Frankenstein’s new body and his escape from the gallows is forgotten about. It’s a puzzle as to why the film creates the flashback – some of this is to set up plot points for later on – although without much rewriting this could all have been made to carry over from Revenge. What tended to lose many people was the addition of the Zoltan character, which takes the story considerably away from the Frankenstein mythos. Indeed, you could almost see this as Hammer’s attempt to craft their own variant on The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).


With The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer did not have the copyright to use the Jack Pierce designs for the Boris Karloff monster makeup from Frankenstein (1931) and so Phil Leakey came up with his own original designs. Apparently Universal has relaxed their copyright restrictions by the time of The Evil of Frankenstein and the makeup on Kiwi Kingston’s monster is closely modelled on the Pierce designs, the only time the Hammer Frankenstein’s came close to resembling the Universal originals. Production designer Don Mingaye and special effects man Les Bowie collaborate to come up with not one but two of the series very best creation sequences, with lightning bolts and generator coils crashing in the best Kenneth Strickfaden tradition. And on the whole, The Evil of Frankenstein is a Hammer Frankenstein entry that is well worth re-evaluation. 


The other Hammer Frankenstein films are:– The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973).


Freddie Francis’s other genre films are:- Vengeance/The Brain (1962), Paranoiac (1962), Nightmare (1963), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), Hysteria (1965), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Torture Garden (1967), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), Trog (1970), The Vampire Happening (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Tales That Witness Madness (1972), Craze (1973), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Legend of the Werewolf (1974), Son of Dracula (1974), The Ghoul (1975), The Doctor and the Devils (1985) and Dark Tower (1987).


Review: Richard Scheib
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...