Next Week on TCM…

All times are Central Standard; adjust accordingly

Friday Oct 15th All month long Friday is Hammer night.
7:00 PM The Mummy Hammer’s first Mummy film is the best of the breed, save Karloff’s original
9:45 Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
11:15 The Mummy’s Shroud
1:00 AM Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb
2:45 Repo Man

Sunday the 17th
12:30 PM Earth vs. the Flying Saucer
2:00 The Time Machine
4:00 The Crowded Sky Proto-disaster movie starring Dana “Zero Hour” Andrews
12:00 AM The Hunchback of Notre Dame The Chaney version
2:00 AM Infernal Affairs The Hong Kong flick that inspired Scorsese’s The Departed

Monday the 18th
6:00 AM Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde The Fredric March version
10:45 PM The Black Stallion Pretty great horse movie
3:15 AM The Lady from Shanghai Man, I’ve got to get around to seeing this one of these days.

Wednesday the 20th
11:45 Arsenic and Old Lace Hilarious black comedy starring Cary Grant, Raymond Massey as Boris Karloff (sort of) and my personal favorite, Peter Lorre. Great stuff, and highly recommended.

The week after this will be the big Halloween blow-out, of course.

  • The Rev.

    You know, I saw Infernal Affairs on the listing and was shocked. I don’t know if they’ve ever played a movie from the 2000s; hell, I can’t recall a movie from the 1990s playing, for that matter.

    Still, I’m definitely setting the DVR for that. As well as many other things this month…

  • Rock Baker

    I’ve heard of The Crowded Sky. As a fan of both airborn disaster movies and Dana Andrews, I’d love to see it. If anyone can record it for me, I’ll try to work out some sort of trade. (How about having a character named after you appearing in the next adventure of Dinosaur Girl?)

    And what October would be complete without a screening of Arsenic and Old Lace? If you haven’t seen it already, make plans for it!

  • zombiewhacker

    Speaking of Hammer, what’s the general opinion here of all the Hammer “wannabes”: Tigon, Amicus, Anglo-Amalgamated, Planet Film?

    They produced a lot of good horror films in the 50s-70s, many featuring Cushing and/or Lee. But I’ll be darned if I can ever remember which studio did what.

  • Rock Baker

    I know Tigon did The Blood Beast Terror (and I think they also did The Crimson Cult), and Amicus did all those Doug McClure movies and anthology pictures like Asylum and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, while Tyburn did the best imitation Hammer movies like Legend of the Werewolf. Sadly, Tyburn came along just a little too late in the cycle to do much. The Hammer films tend to be more oppulent, with the Amicus stuff being a little lighter, slightly more crude and exploitation-minded (it would seem Assignment: Terror! was trying to be an Amicus movie more than anything else). The few Tigon films I’ve seen have been solid efforts, meshing well with the Hammer asthetic. As for directly answering your question, I can only speak for myself. Others tend to be purists when it comes to their British horror and side firmly with Hammer. I for one almost always enjoy the Hammer copies from the smaller guys (but I will allow that Hammer’s films tend to be rather more lush and colorful).

  • alex

    Amicus was founded by Milton Subotsky. He worked at Hammer in the 50s and apparently it was his idea to do an adaptation of Frankenstein in color. He received no credit or compensation for that and that’s why he left to begin a rival company (at least that’s what the legend says). His fist Amicus production City Of The Dead (Horror Hotel in the US) is quite good. I’m not crazy about the rest of the Mamicus stuff however. Tigon had some good stuff but the budgets were very low and like Rock Baker said they came in too late in the game when classic horror was on it’s way out.

    The best Hammer imitation I’ve ever seen is Blood Of the Vampire (1958) produced by Baker and Berman. They hired Jimmy Sangster to write the script. The movie is really lurid and creepy (I mean that in a good way) and a lot of fun if you catch it in the right frame of mind.

  • alex

    Let me correct what I wrote in my previous post. Subotsky was not an employee of Hammer. He brought in a project of a Frankenstein adaptation wich was re-written by Jimmy Sangster and became Curse Of Frankenstein. The question of who decided it would be in color will always remain a controversy between Subotsky and Michael Carreras but whatever it was, Subotsky felt he got cheated by Hammer. Hence the creation of Amicus.

  • zombiewhacker

    A quick trip to Wikipedia reminded me that Amicus also produced the Peter Cushing Dr. Who films. In addition to anthology horror films, which was their staple, they also released single story narratives like “The Skull” and “The Mind of Mr. Soames.”

    Tigon’s total output, turns out, was less Hammer-esque than I’d originally thought. Cushing and Lee only made one film together for Tigon (“The Creeping Flesh”) and one other film apiece (Lee’s being a cameo in “Hannie Caulder.”) Tigon even released the theatrical version of “Oh Calcutta.”

    Planet Films (and this part I remembered without having to look it up) produced the scariest Peter Cushing film ever made, “Island of Terror.” They also reunited Cushing and Lee for the strikingly similar “Island of the Burning Doomed.”