(1961)
Dir - Sidney J. Furie
Overall: MEH
Shot in six days for roughly £17,000 with the sole intention of throwing it on as a double feature with something more sustainably produced, The Snake Woman, (The Terror of the Snake Woman), turned out as cheap as would be expected. The script by Orville H. Hampton was reworked by director Sidney J. Furie and it is a pathetic attempt at capturing some of Hammer Films' magic, setting it at the turn of the century with a reptilian female serving as its would-be monster. Unfortunately, nothing interesting or even remotely exciting is done with such an ideal, B-movie premise. As the title lady, Susan Travers only speaks a couple of sentences and gets maybe four and a half minutes of screen time, plus at no point is it ever explained how no one in her village ever sought to seek her out before when she has apparently been biting people in snake form throughout her roughly twenty living years. She can also switch from snake to human while keeping her dress on, but to be fair, this makes as much sense as cinematic vampire's ability to shapeshift in a similar fashion. There is virtually no action during the sixty-eight minute running time, but there are endless scenes of the same characters trying to get to the bottom of a mystery that the viewer already had all of the answers to when the opening credits hit.
(1964)
Dir - Terence Fisher
Overall: MEH
In between some of his latter Hammer works, director Terence Fisher returned to comedy for the first time in nearly a decade with The Horror of It All, an unassuming old dark house romp written by Ray Russell. Scoring Pat Boone in the lead, (who even gets to bust out a completely random song forty minutes in), he is joined by familiar genre faces such as Valentine Dyall, Andrée Melly, and Erik Chitty who round out the wacky Marley family, the members of which keep dropping like flies while exhibiting their oddball quirks. One of them is an inventor who "invents" things that already exist, another has all of the mannerisms of a vampire, another is a mindless brute, and yet another is a invalid grandpa who likes to look at nuddie magazines. Most of the gags are predictably stupid and the double twist ending is convoluted enough to garnish groans from the audience, which was likely intentional in some respects. Unfortunately the movie is too lighthearted to deliver much macabre charm and most of its ghoulish set pieces seem tame even for the time period. Still, it is harmless stuff that is worth eventually checking out for Fisher completests or anyone who wants to see Boone sing about ghosts and goblins.
(1968)
Dir - Frederic Goode
Overall: MEH
Forgettable genre fodder, The Hand of Night, (Beast of Morocco), has one or two effectively eerie sequences early on, yet it also has an imprecise plot line that stagnates and never recovers. William Silvester, Diane Clare, (in her final film role), and Terence De Marney should be familiar faces to horror buffs, with the latter spouting cryptic nonsense as a seemingly all knowing guy in a hood and Clare having fun with a French accent. Opening with a patented nightmare scene, there is another somewhat macabre instance in the first act where Silvester wanders the barren streets of Morocco to creepy stillness, but the story runs in circles once our characters venture out in to the desert which takes up the majority of the running time. Silvester's recent widower deals with the loss of his family while trying to make merry at the beach with Clare, only to get persistently bothered by a woman, (Miss Israel herself Aliza Gur), who is apparently a vampire even though she does absolutely nothing vampiric besides show up in a coffin at the very end. There is also some other stuff about a missing archeologist and a magic ring, but the pacing is sluggish and the characterizations weak, all of which just makes for a messy ordeal.
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