The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) 1h 30m

You were the chosen one!  Bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness!  Fucking Revenge of Frankenstein!  More like Rankenstein because this movie fucking stinks!

Nailed it!

We're important men.  Just look at
how tall our hats are!

The Revenge of Frankenstein is the last of our "Week of Hammer" and starts at the execution of Baron Frankenstein which is apparently at 9000 o'clock according to the church bells ringing.  Instead of losing his head he escapes and goes elsewhere in order to act as a real doctor all while continuing his experiments.  He has a new body all set up in order to do a live brain transplant and it's a success, but his patient doesn't want to be thrust into the public eye of science and the world.  He escapes and causes havoc only to begin to have his new body develop the same physical handicaps he faced with his prior vessel.  Stuff happens!

This started out okay but when there were a set of eyeballs on a stick that moved as an autonomous unit I was starting to question the quality of this film.  Don't get me wrong, there was some serious money thrown into the set designs and this was in color as opposed to most of the other Hammer films we covered this week, but in the end it was all for naught.  Not even Peter Cushing could keep me awake as this film descended from entertainment to a background lullaby as I began to doze on the couch.

We did get another actual Frankenstein Monster, but it came too late for me to care about anything.  Also, there's a fight in the lab early on which leads to tons of beakers full of shit breaking and I guess we have to assume they were all experiments on colored water as nothing bad happened.  No fires, no poison gas, just looks like someone pissed on the floor.

I give The Revenge of Frankenstein 1 Grand Moff Tarkin out of 5 only because of Peter Cushing:

The Snorkel (1958) 1h 14m

Could there be a dumber name for a movie?  The Snorkel.  Fuck you!  You can snorkel this dick!  I'm not even sure what that means but that's how frustrated I am with yet another film coming to us from the cheap as fuck Hammer Films set I got at a Wal-Mart.  You know, the land of bottomless $5 DVD bins and overpriced animated films.  DROP THE FUCKING PRICE ON HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 1 & 2 ALREADY YOU BASTARDS!

You have me confused with that guy
from Are You Being Served?

Unlike our other Hammer Films, The Snorkel doesn't start with a creeper in the bushes but the creeper is already in the house!  A man has drugged his wife to make her pass out and then tapes up the entire room (doors, windows, etc) in order to blow out the gas lamps and have her die as an apparent suicide.  Why he didn't just drug her and make it seem like that was the suicide is beyond me.  He has hooked up a mask and snorkel to outside pipes and hides in the floor to complete his elaborate faked suicide plot.  When she is found everyone assumes she did kill herself.  Everyone except for her teenage daughter who is apparently Nancy fucking Drew because she puts everything together pretty quick and then it's the step-daughter vs. the murderer for who will come out on top.

While a much dumber premise than anything I've watched recently, I was invested for no reason other than I wanted to see how the hell the girl put everything together.  She never figures out the hiding in the floor but it is given away to her at the end.  Speaking of which, always have a fucking back door, or at least an axe or something in case you get stuck.  You know, since you're hiding in floors all the time.

All in all, The Snorkel is a big bag of meh.  Once again, solid acting performance from all involved, and this film has my favorite opening credit now which is "John Holmes dog "Flush" as "Toto" because that dog deserves a fucking credit!

I give The Snorkel 1 hunky scuba diver out of 5:

The Fly (1958) 1h 34m

I remember, as a kid, seeing parts of The Fly remake.  Where Jeff Goldblum mutates and vomits on things and then puts a shotgun muzzle to his fly head while begging for death and looking gross.  It's a far cry from his open shirt sexy lounging pose in Jurassic Park, or his weird alien acting in Earth Girls Are Easy.  But we're not talking about him anymore.  We're talking about the original with Vincent Price and some other people I might never care about.

If you're unfamiliar with it, The Fly is science gone wrong.  We start with a woman running from a body with the head and arm crushed in some sort of machine press.  She then calls Vincent Price (because who the fuck else would you call in this situation) to say she just murdered his brother/her husband.  We're then told the story leading up to that moment.

Her husband creates some a form of matter transfer and while testing it on himself a fly is also in the chamber and they swap some DNA.  The man becomes more fly-like, and the fly becomes more man-like.  We don't see this happen, instead our experimenter keeps his head under cloth and his arm hidden in his coat.  We eventually see the fly arm and then a reveal of the head where his wife somehow elicits the same scream of indiscriminate emotion over and over.  As he loses his rational mind to the fly part of him, he begs her to help with his suicide.  After he writes "love you" on a chalk board she seems to think that it's okay to then do this.  It's just one of those weird moments where you see the character rationalize it in their head in that moment.  It's awkward.

This movie has one of the most annoying kid actors I've ever seen in a film.  He had to have been a stage-trained actor because everything he said was slow, loud, and over enunciated.  He is also given a line in which he says "...you know how women are."  You're fucking eight!  You don't know how women are!  How much tail has this kid been getting on the sly to be able to say that shit?  You know how women are?  They'll fuckin' send you to your room and ground you for talkin' shit like that.

Also the husband/brother tested the machine on the family cat and it didn't succeed.  We just get cat meows from the air.  The moment he even looked at that cat I instantly wrote this guy off and was waiting for his death.  Fuck you fly man!  You got what you deserved for fucking with that cat!

I give The Fly a solid 3 pictures of Vincent Price from the Simpsons out of 5:

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Cut 3 begins! Day 1: The Vampire's Coffin (El ataúd del Vampiro) (1958) 1h 20m

With our feet planted firmly on the soil of this Mexican vampire movie, we're back for our third cut!  Also, much like our previous reviews, we ended up getting what I'm assuming is a sequel to the 1957 Mexican vampire film "The Vampire," and if not the story telling is really fucked up.

The quick sum up is this:  A doctor and his girlfriend/wife apparently encountered a vampire while on a vacation that is only spoken about in this film.  She is under her boyfriend/husband's care at the laziest hospital I've ever seen.  Another doctor our hero works with is studying something to do with skin mutations (I can't remember) and hires a goon to go steal the body of the vampire from his tomb so it can be studied.  The goon sees the token vampire amulet on our vampire and sneaks back in to steal it, but in doing so he has to remove the stake.  This brings the vampire back to life (stick with me here...no pun intended) and the vampire hypnotizes the goon to become his man servant in what I assumed was going to become more homoerotic but I'm glad it didn't.  Our vampire finds the girlfriend/wife and keeps trying to put her under his power.  The whole thing leads up to a face off in the shittiest wax museum in the history of forever and the vampire gets speared to a wall.

That wasn't as quick as it could have been.

Overall, this film was a mess.  Being in black and white meant that a lot of the on screen acting was "stage acting" with over dramatic facial expressions by characters not speaking.  Also, they had the effect where the vampire faded away multiple times, but rather than use that each time they chose the turn the camera off, get into place, turn it back on method more often.  The bat was a rubber bat on wires, which I'm fine with, but they would play seagull noises the entire time the bat flew.  There's also a scene where the vampire changes directions in his coffin.

Worst of all though is the broken lore they try to pull with the vampire's reflection.  Every time they show the vampire in a mirror you just see his skeleton.  My fiancé tried to rationalize this point to me by saying that maybe it was showing his current form, since each time he was "dead" in the coffin.  It gets explained to us though as the UV light doesn't reflect off the skin so it doesn't have a reflection... but his bones do?  I feel like this person watched Dracula once, but then tried to remember how the vampire worked in that film and filled in the gaps with gibberish.  GIBBERISH I SAY!

I give The Vampire's Coffin 1 tacky vampire medal out of 5: