TheFearmakers
Joined Nov 2016
Welcome to the new profile
We're still working on updating some profile features. To see the badges, ratings breakdowns, and polls for this profile, please go to the previous version.
Ratings1.7K
TheFearmakers's rating
Reviews1.6K
TheFearmakers's rating
A year after Hammer's progressively-sexual Karstein Trilogy, thrusting the classic vampire-horror into the counter-culture sensibilities while remaining in their signature Victorian Era, they finally skipped to the present, built right into the DRACULA A. D. 1972 title...
And while Peter Cushing's college professor Van Helsing heir has several long bouts of exposition and two third-act vampire battles, Christopher Lee basically hangs around at the same gothic church where he was reawakened by a young British swinger, who's basically the main character here, or at least, technically speaking, the most important...
In that, Christopher Meame becomes a kind of CLOCKWORK ORANGE-inspired sociopathic bad boy and, as shown in the Victorian-era prologue, he too is descended from the origin, gathering the same 1800-era rural ashes that brings Christopher Lee back to life in the hustle-bustle city-centered 1970's...
With slowburn bravado, Neame serves up his groovy/gorgeous lady-friends in what's a kind of proto body-count slasher starting with first-girl Caroline Munro, the most sensuously game during the initial reanimating seance... and whose one quick lustful post-bite expression sums up the bridge between Dracula's hypnotically-infatuated female-prey then (the 1800's) and now (the 20th century)...
Also featuring black model Marsha A. Hunt and the most subtle, soft-spoken, sophisticated beauty in Janet Key, nicely grown-up from the childlike maid in the original Karstein's VAMPIRE LOVERS that first turned Hammer from atmospheric antique-horror into risque horror-exposition...
Yet even in modern times, there's an old-fashion kind of Scotland Yard politely-interrogating investigation where dialogue between Cushing and detective Michael Coles are as interesting as the young swingers partying in a nightclub before and after Dracula's sporadically lethal (no female victims transformations here) bloodletting...
Meanwhile, Peter Cushing has more screen-time than Christopher Lee, as does the vamp-climbing Christopher Neame, fitfully named Alucard... Dracula spelled backwards...
Unfortunately Neame's character, so up-front and viciously primed for a new generation of lady-slaying, comes to his end in a rushed manner: deliberately paving the way for Lee and Cushing's inevitable showdown, protecting the latter's lovely granddaughter Stephanie Beacham... balancing both strong-willed and vulnerable... and filmed by director Alan Gibson in the church/cemetery's gothic darkness contrasting to the otherwise neon-lit London scene...
But what makes DRACULA A. D. 1972 work almost perfectly from beginning to end is that every scene underlines the tension-filled purpose of either remaining a vampire for longer (with every victim having their own importance no matter how much screen-time), or to stop the murderous aspect from continuing...
Overall making for an entirely underrated hunted/hunter masterpiece that brought Christopher Lee's legendary monster back to life - despite the fact he's more like a guest star in his very own comeback feature.
And while Peter Cushing's college professor Van Helsing heir has several long bouts of exposition and two third-act vampire battles, Christopher Lee basically hangs around at the same gothic church where he was reawakened by a young British swinger, who's basically the main character here, or at least, technically speaking, the most important...
In that, Christopher Meame becomes a kind of CLOCKWORK ORANGE-inspired sociopathic bad boy and, as shown in the Victorian-era prologue, he too is descended from the origin, gathering the same 1800-era rural ashes that brings Christopher Lee back to life in the hustle-bustle city-centered 1970's...
With slowburn bravado, Neame serves up his groovy/gorgeous lady-friends in what's a kind of proto body-count slasher starting with first-girl Caroline Munro, the most sensuously game during the initial reanimating seance... and whose one quick lustful post-bite expression sums up the bridge between Dracula's hypnotically-infatuated female-prey then (the 1800's) and now (the 20th century)...
Also featuring black model Marsha A. Hunt and the most subtle, soft-spoken, sophisticated beauty in Janet Key, nicely grown-up from the childlike maid in the original Karstein's VAMPIRE LOVERS that first turned Hammer from atmospheric antique-horror into risque horror-exposition...
Yet even in modern times, there's an old-fashion kind of Scotland Yard politely-interrogating investigation where dialogue between Cushing and detective Michael Coles are as interesting as the young swingers partying in a nightclub before and after Dracula's sporadically lethal (no female victims transformations here) bloodletting...
Meanwhile, Peter Cushing has more screen-time than Christopher Lee, as does the vamp-climbing Christopher Neame, fitfully named Alucard... Dracula spelled backwards...
Unfortunately Neame's character, so up-front and viciously primed for a new generation of lady-slaying, comes to his end in a rushed manner: deliberately paving the way for Lee and Cushing's inevitable showdown, protecting the latter's lovely granddaughter Stephanie Beacham... balancing both strong-willed and vulnerable... and filmed by director Alan Gibson in the church/cemetery's gothic darkness contrasting to the otherwise neon-lit London scene...
But what makes DRACULA A. D. 1972 work almost perfectly from beginning to end is that every scene underlines the tension-filled purpose of either remaining a vampire for longer (with every victim having their own importance no matter how much screen-time), or to stop the murderous aspect from continuing...
Overall making for an entirely underrated hunted/hunter masterpiece that brought Christopher Lee's legendary monster back to life - despite the fact he's more like a guest star in his very own comeback feature.
The iconic sitcom ALICE, about a trio of waitresses working in a greasy spoon Arizona diner owned by a grumpy endearing slob, was based on an Oscar winning Martin Scorsese film starring Alice Burstyn titled ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE...
Although the movie can get pretty serious, by the mid-way point, when Alice and her son Tommy, after surviving a really scary guy (Harvey Keitel) and bouts of highway boredom, find a home in Tucson, Arizona on the way to Monterey, California where Alice dreams of becoming a singer...
By the time Alice finds her waitressing gig she puts her dreams on hold... and here we begin the sitcom's pilot (written by the novel's author Robert Getchell), where Alice, played by Linda Lavin, waits tables in Phoenix, Arizona and meets a young smitten customer who pretends to be an agent...
Polly Holliday's now iconic Flo, a gum-chewing waitress with a wink for every trucker and a retort for any occasion, smiles when, for the first time, she utters the famous line, "Kiss my grits"... as if she were testing it out on the studio audience...
Vic Tayback's Mel (the only actor from the motion picture to star in the entire series) and Beth Howland's kooky Vera take the backseat - it's all about Alice thinking she, like Burstyn in the movie, has a shot at fame...
The biggest difference of the pilot is the character Tommy... Played by Alfred Lutter from the film, by the second episode he's replaced by the more TV-fitting blonde kid Philip McKeon...
Perhaps Lutter was a bit too glib for TV audiences... but fans of the movie know he was arguably the best character...
So while the pilot is far from the best episode of the series or season, it sets the stage decently enough - providing Alice a job she'd keep for a decade...
BONUS TRIVIA: After Alice and Tommy realize they're not going to Hollywood, Tommy says under his breath, "Now I'm never going to meet Tatum O'Neal..." Which is ironic because that same year he co-starred with Tatum in THE BAD NEWS BEARS.
AND TO THE OTHER REVIEWER who said that "that kid couldn't act beans," let's see how many movies Philip McKeon starred in under the direction of Martin Scorsese in his prime. Alfred Lutter is the best thing in that movie, he just didn't fit here. But he was a great actor. LOVE AND DEATH he was also great. Natural. But he was too glib and glum, which fit the movie but not a happy series.
Although the movie can get pretty serious, by the mid-way point, when Alice and her son Tommy, after surviving a really scary guy (Harvey Keitel) and bouts of highway boredom, find a home in Tucson, Arizona on the way to Monterey, California where Alice dreams of becoming a singer...
By the time Alice finds her waitressing gig she puts her dreams on hold... and here we begin the sitcom's pilot (written by the novel's author Robert Getchell), where Alice, played by Linda Lavin, waits tables in Phoenix, Arizona and meets a young smitten customer who pretends to be an agent...
Polly Holliday's now iconic Flo, a gum-chewing waitress with a wink for every trucker and a retort for any occasion, smiles when, for the first time, she utters the famous line, "Kiss my grits"... as if she were testing it out on the studio audience...
Vic Tayback's Mel (the only actor from the motion picture to star in the entire series) and Beth Howland's kooky Vera take the backseat - it's all about Alice thinking she, like Burstyn in the movie, has a shot at fame...
The biggest difference of the pilot is the character Tommy... Played by Alfred Lutter from the film, by the second episode he's replaced by the more TV-fitting blonde kid Philip McKeon...
Perhaps Lutter was a bit too glib for TV audiences... but fans of the movie know he was arguably the best character...
So while the pilot is far from the best episode of the series or season, it sets the stage decently enough - providing Alice a job she'd keep for a decade...
BONUS TRIVIA: After Alice and Tommy realize they're not going to Hollywood, Tommy says under his breath, "Now I'm never going to meet Tatum O'Neal..." Which is ironic because that same year he co-starred with Tatum in THE BAD NEWS BEARS.
AND TO THE OTHER REVIEWER who said that "that kid couldn't act beans," let's see how many movies Philip McKeon starred in under the direction of Martin Scorsese in his prime. Alfred Lutter is the best thing in that movie, he just didn't fit here. But he was a great actor. LOVE AND DEATH he was also great. Natural. But he was too glib and glum, which fit the movie but not a happy series.
At one point in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, Ingrid Pitt's central vampire Marcilla (then Carmilla) turns to the young, innocent and naive Madeline Smith's Emma and shouts, "You must die... Everyone must die!"
What sounded like a threat was really a kind of arthouse philosophy lesson... making THE VAMPIRE LOVERS more a Bergmaneque lesbian-centered melodrama than the next two vampire features, later deemed the Karstein Trilogy, that brought Hammer Films into the naked-sexy 1970's...
Although we begin with the kind of all-out Victorian (ballroom) splendor that made the studio famous... with Peter Cushing taking in former Hammer starlet Dawn Addams' virginal daughter, Pippa Steel (engaged to Jon Finch), who, during the first act, goes through exactly what young Emma would later, getting sick while being seduced: punctuating the trope of not letting a vampire into your home...
Much different here since Ingrid Pitt's scene-stealing lesbian seductress Marcilla/Carmilla makes herself a welcomed guest, twice, and what carries the suspense is how far she'll get with either young prey...
And for fans of lesbian flicks, they never go beyond quick kisses... but the kind of heated, simmering passion that Polish actress Pitt carries through... even onto a governess and then an actual man... is what makes VAMPIRE LOVERS worth anything at all -- while first-billed Peter Cushing really only bookends the beginning and end...
Peaking with his usual vampire-hunting self, it was probably both a reminder of what Hammer still needed, and what it was trying to shed for the lustfully risque drive-in era that Ingrid Pitt, while either surrounded by frightened or possessed victims, seems all too alone completely inhabiting.
What sounded like a threat was really a kind of arthouse philosophy lesson... making THE VAMPIRE LOVERS more a Bergmaneque lesbian-centered melodrama than the next two vampire features, later deemed the Karstein Trilogy, that brought Hammer Films into the naked-sexy 1970's...
Although we begin with the kind of all-out Victorian (ballroom) splendor that made the studio famous... with Peter Cushing taking in former Hammer starlet Dawn Addams' virginal daughter, Pippa Steel (engaged to Jon Finch), who, during the first act, goes through exactly what young Emma would later, getting sick while being seduced: punctuating the trope of not letting a vampire into your home...
Much different here since Ingrid Pitt's scene-stealing lesbian seductress Marcilla/Carmilla makes herself a welcomed guest, twice, and what carries the suspense is how far she'll get with either young prey...
And for fans of lesbian flicks, they never go beyond quick kisses... but the kind of heated, simmering passion that Polish actress Pitt carries through... even onto a governess and then an actual man... is what makes VAMPIRE LOVERS worth anything at all -- while first-billed Peter Cushing really only bookends the beginning and end...
Peaking with his usual vampire-hunting self, it was probably both a reminder of what Hammer still needed, and what it was trying to shed for the lustfully risque drive-in era that Ingrid Pitt, while either surrounded by frightened or possessed victims, seems all too alone completely inhabiting.