The only pairing of Lee and Fisher that was a disaster?

Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) 

Starring: Christopher Lee, Thorley Walters and Hans Söhnker 

Director: Terence Fisher 

Rating: Two of Ten Stars 

 Sherlock Holmes (Lee) and his arch-nemisis Professor Moriarity (Söhnker) matching wits over an Egyptian necklace owned by Cleopatra, as it is stolen, recovered, and re-stolen.

  This 1962 German film, with its two British stars and a British director, has surprisingly little to recommend it. The script is like a reject from the Universal Pictures series starring Basil Rathbone (with everything I don't like about the weaker efforts among those amplified ten-fold here, most notably Watson being portrayed as a bumbling, retarded simpleton), with an unbearably bad score. 

 It's amazing that a film with so much potential--Christopher Lee as Holmes and Terence Fisher directing... should be a sure winner!--could go so wrong. While Christopher Lee is absolutely right in his opinion that he and Thorley Walters more closely resemble the literary Holmes and Watson than any other on-screen pair, and there's no question that Lee gives a good performance as Holmes and that Walters does as good a Watson as he can given what has to work with, there is very little else that works in this movie. 

 There are a couple of interesting moments between Holmes and Moriarity (who is played by the appropriately sinister German actor Hans Söhnker), but the downside is that they feel like they belong more in a hard-boiled, pulp fiction detective novel than a Holmes adventure.

 

Excellent thriller from the Britain's Premiere House of Horror

Scream of Fear (aka "Taste of Fear") (1961)
Starring: Susan Strasberg, Ronald Lewis, Ann Todd and Christopher Lee
Director: Seth Holt
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

Wheelchair-bound Penny (Strasberg) returns to her wealthy father's house for the first time in ten years, only to be told by his new wife Jane (Todd) that he has gone away suddenly on a business trip. When her father's corpse starts to appear and disappear around the property, Penny enlists the help of hunky chauffeur Robert (Lewis) to help her prove her sanity.


"Scream of Fear" is a plot any fan of suspense and horror movies has encountered at least twice--a vulnerable woman seems to be losing her mind but in truth someone is trying to drive her insane--but it's rarely been done as well as it is here. This is truly one Hammer Films' great films and it's a crime that it took so long to get it on DVD.

Extremely well-acted and brilliantly cast, every performer and every line they deliver in the film plays into the fact that no one in the household is quite who they seem and everyone is keeping at least one secret. Take Christopher Lee for example. He plays a French doctor who is a very insensitive cold fish, but is he cohoots with the bad guys or is he just a jerk? Or is there something going on under the surface that has yet to be revealed? With Lee, who split his screen time evenly between playing heroes and villains, it's impossible to guess until the Big Reveal at the end.

The film is also very well constructed and finely paced from a story perspective. From the opening scene to the twist-laden climactic final few minutes, "Scream of Fear" builds the tension and terror not with the "gotcha!" scares that are so popular with filmmakers these days, but through storytelling methods that are almost entirely relegated to the written medium these days; it builds its tension through character development and by continuially deeping the film's mysteries and by reversing, double-reversing and triple reversing the audience's expectations about exactly what is going on in the film. (I've seen a dozen or so movies built around the same formula as this one, so I thought I had the story figured out fairly early on, but then a twist made me doubt my conclusion... the a little seemingly throwaway detail made me think I'd been right... and another twist showed I was completely wrong... but then a third twist got me thinking I had been right from the outset... and so on, right up to the point where various plots, schemes and deceptions of the film's characters are revealed. (Although even after that, the film has one more twist to deliver....)


Too many writers these days are turning out suspense and horror scripts with "twist endings" that they think show how clever they are. Instead, all they end up showing is how little talent or how lazy they are, because their twist endings are hardly ever based in the story and their stories are weak and badly structured. Perhaps, if these hacks would use "Scream of Fear" instead of simply "Scream" as the film to emulate, they might be able to turn out decent work.

"Scream of Fear" is only available on DVD as part of the "Icons of Horror: Hammer Films" four movie pack, a collection of excellent movies that is well-worth the asking price.

'Horror Hotel' has lots of amosphere but few sparks

Horror Hotel (aka "City of the Dead") (1960)
Starring: Venetia Stevenson, Christopher Lee, and Patricia Jessel
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

When Nan (Stevenson) decides to spend her Winter Break working on a research project involving witches, her professor (Lee) urges her to travel to a small New England village that has a rich history of witchcraft. Once there, she discovers that the fog-bound hamlet is crawling with evil witches and Satanists (both alive and undead).

"Horror Hotel" has a few nice scares, a couple of genuinely chilling moments, and nice performances by its stars (with Jessel being particularly excellent in a dual role as innkeeper and evil undead witch), but the most constant feature of the film is tedium. The fog-shrouded village and its decaying cemetary are rich with atmosphere, but the pay-offs of that atmosphere are too few, and I often felt myself wishing that the film would get on with it.

In final analysis, "Horror Hotel" is a fabulously atmospheric movie, but the filmmakers are then unable to fully capitalize on that atmosphere.