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 Maniac (1963) 1h 26m

I am turning this into the "Week of Hammer," fuck it!  Sticking with our Hammer Films set chock full of rapidly declining quality movies comes The Maniac!  A film with more heel turns than the WWE Network... and I don't mean just because they'll reinstate Hogan to the hall of fame but still act as if Benoit never existed!

Mustache rides: 5 cents

The Maniac, like most Hammer films on this set, starts with a creeper in the bushes.  When the local high school kids arrive home he pulls up to one of the girls and offers her a ride.  He sexually assaults her but is caught by a local man and school boy.  The creeper is knocked out with a wrench and brought back to the man's garage where he is tortured to death with an acetylene torch.  Flash forward to present day where a smooth America leaves his rich girlfriend and ends up in a small French village.  At first he has his eyes set on the young waitress but later moves from her to her mother in a "I'll fuck anything that moves" power play.  The woman's husband is in prison for the torture and murder of the creeper.  She claims that her husband will let the two of them be together if the American and her help the husband escape prison.  They do, bodies turn up, then the American finds himself on the wrong end of the torch.

This movie is just treachery everywhere.  The American betrays the daughter for the mother but then betrays the mother because she was trying to betray him by not actually helping her husband escape but another man that murdered the husband upon escaping and the two of them were going to betray the daughter as well in hopes of... I don't know.  I guess elope?  Have crazy mustache babies?

I'm really beginning to regret not shelling out the extra $10 for the better Hammer Films set.  The Maniac was just as poorly paced and boring as the last two films.  The acting was decent, aside from the couple's dance where the two couldn't look more bored with each other despite one of the characters saying "look how happy she is!"  Whatever, fucking next.  I'm over this.

I give The Maniac 0 butane torches out of 5:

Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) 1h 37m

This is turning into the "Week of the Hammer" because we've got another one here from my cheap Hammer Films Collection.  This film was what sold me on buying the set because with the Misfits song being so good, obviously the movie has to be.  Right?  Danzig wouldn't lie to me, would he?  Sure, he'd have me kicked out of a concert if I tried to take a picture of his gut but... young baby Danzy?

I made this face while watching this.

Die! Die! My Darling! opens on Patricia with her current fiancé.  She tells him that the mother of her prior, now deceased, fiancé has sent Patricia a letter and she would like to visit the mother.  The fiancé continues to London and Patricia travels to Mrs. Trefoile's home.  Upon her initial arrive Mrs. Trefoile just seems to be a still mourning mother and overly pious woman.  It's when Mrs. Trefoile's zealous nature bubbles to the surface that Patricia attempts to leave but finds herself held captive by a mad woman.  Can she escape befor she is murdered in the name of her dead ex-fiancé?

Okay, I described that much better than this film is.  Don't misunderstand me, Tallulah Bankhead fucking kills it as Mrs. Trefoile, but all of the other characters I don't really care about.  The husband and wife duo that had been Mrs. Trefoile's helpers and accomplices are just grifters and Donald Sutherland's simple Joseph serves no purpose aside from being muscle.

The film itself is a bit of a crawl.  A majority of it consists of Patricia being locked in a room and attempting to escape or Mrs. Trefoile descending further into madness.  I do like that the breaking point for her is having a stash of all her sinful items and then doing the crazy wide lipstick ring around her mouth.  Other than that, Danzig has bad taste in movies.  Actually, Danzig has taste in very slow moving films because I've watched Where Eagles Dare and it was a crawl too.  I have a copy of THX 1138 which I haven't watched yet, but if it's slow then Danzig is getting an angry tweet!

I give Die! Die! My Darling! 2 Misfits singles out of 5:

Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960) 1h 31m

My very first note for this film was "I made a mistake."  Never Take Sweets from a Stranger is part of a $10 Hammer Films collection I picked up from Wal-Mart not long ago.  They have a better one with better films for double the price but I wanted to have  the bottom shelf stuff.  This is certainly the bottom as I assumed I was going to get the usual Hammer lesbian vampires or whatever.  Instead I saw into the eyes of the devil and he winked at me.

Look at this fucking stranger danger!

Never Take Sweets from a Stranger opens with an old creeper using binoculars to watch two younger girls play.  When one of the girls looses her "sweets money" the other says that she knows where they can get some candy and run towards the old man's house.  Upon returning home for the evening one of the girls relays her day to her parents, not even flinching at the part where she and her friend danced naked while the old man watched.  The family is taken aback and the mother gets the whole story.  When she comes back both her husband and her mother (or mother-in-law, I couldn't tell) downplay the incident and I was losing my mind.  Eventually we get a court case where the defending lawyer rips into the small girl like an absolute scum bag.  The man is found innocent and goes free, only to later find the girls playing in the woods, stalks them, and ends up killing one of them.

I hated this movie.  I hated every fucking second of it.  Not because it was a bad film.  As far as random films from 1960 go this was more than competent.  I hated this because it showed just how horrible human beings can be.  A lot of the town had stories of that old man doing inappropriate things, the grandmother had a story of a man exposing himself to her every day as a child and she just wrote it off like that was normal.  The police, holy fuck the police in this film, pull the "You know he and his family built this town so you should change your mind..." thing and were just evil.  Then the old man's son that was just throwing around his power and influence to protect his nasty ass father.  Acting as if letting the girl's dad keep his job as principal to show that there were "no hard feelings" is anywhere near acceptable.  I've never wanted someone punched in the face as much as I wanted that guy.  I screamed it at the end of the movie but apparently no one heard me through the TV and like 58 years in the past.

A lot of the time horror films will pull the "we were the real evil all along!!!" trope but this is just "humanity is evil" from start to finish.  Don't watch this.  It's uncomfortable and somewhat depressing.   The very end of my notes say "I hate the world now," which is how you leave Never Take Sweets from a Stranger.

I give Never Take Sweets from a Stranger 0 Stranger Danger images out of 5: