In Children of the Full Moon, a married couple on holiday has some car trouble. They find a large house that is looked over by Ms. Ardoy (Diana Dors) and inhabited by a multitude of children, who may or may not be werewolves. This episode starts out somewhat light but the tone eventually shifts and things end on a memorably dark note. Diane Dors gives a wonderful performance as the mysterious Ms. Ardoy. Be careful about where you take your vacation.
This episode originally aired on November 1st, 1980.
First released in 1957 and one of the films that put Britain’s Hammer Films on the map, The Curse of Frankenstein opens in Switzerland in the 19th century. It’s a time of superstitious villagers, judgmental priests, aristocrats who dabble in science, and lots of cleavage. It’s also a time when justice is harsh. That’s something that Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) has discovered as he sits in a cell in prison, awaiting his execution date.
Baron Frankenstein has been convicted of the murder of a maid named Justine and the public is eager to see this haughty and eccentric aristocrat put to death. Victor, however, claims that he is innocent of Justine’s murder. As Victor explains to a visiting priest (Alex Gallier), he is guilty of many things but he didn’t kill Justine.
The story that Frankenstein tells the priest is a familiar one. Victor inherited the Frankenstein estate when he was fifteen and, having always been interested in science, his hires a scientist named Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) to mentor him and ultimately collaborate with him on his experiments. Even as he falls in love with and become engaged to his cousin, Elizabeth (Hazel Court), Victor becomes obsessed with the idea of creating a human being from perfect parts collected from the dead.
Victor puts his creation together, piece by bloody piece. He has no trouble using a the body of a robber and the hands and eyes that purchases from the workers at the local morgue. But when it come time to pick a brain, he wants to use the mind of a distinguished scientist. Unfortunately, the scientist is still alive so Victor pushes him over a bannister. That kills the professor but the removal of the brain does not go quite as smoothly as Victor was hoping. The brain gets damaged when it’s removed. The Creature (an intimidating Christopher Lee) is eventually brought to life but, with that damaged brain, all it wants to do is destroy and kill. Victor isn’t happy about that but soon, he discovers that having a killer Creature has its uses.
As opposed to the well-meaning but obsessed version of the character that Colin Clive played in the original Frankenstein, The Curse of Frankenstein presents us with a Baron who is rather unstable from the start. It’s not just that the Baron is obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. It’s that he is fully willing to kill people for his experiment. Perhaps his only redeeming quality could have been his love for Elizabeth but he screws up even that by having an affair with the ill-fated Justine (Valerie Gaunt). From the start, the Baron’s main obsession is with his own power. Elizabeth is ultimately just another pawn for him to control.
Considering how evil this film’s version of Baron Frankenstein is, it’s a good thing that he’s played by Peter Cushing. Cushing gives an intense but charismatic performance as the Baron, capturing not only the character’s ruthlessness but also his fierce intelligence. The tragedy of the film’s version of the story is not that the Baron’s experiment goes wrong but that the Baron did actually have the potential to do a lot of good for the world. He’s smart and he’s determined but he’s lacking a conscience. If anything, the Creature he builds is a representation of his own dark thoughts and desires. The Baron is an aristocrat and the Creature is built out of common thieves and people who died in debt but they’re both different sides of the same coin.
Gory and fast-paced, The Curse of Frankenstein was a huge hit and it made stars out of both Cushing and Lee. I tend to prefer Hammer’s Dracula films to its Frankenstein film but The Curse of Frankenstein holds up well as a portrait of what happens when madness and science collide.
Jamie Shannon (Christopher Walken) is a professional mercenary who is hired, by a British businessman, to overthrow the government of Zangaro. Though Zangaro is currently ruled by a ruthless dictator, Shannon’s employers want to replace him with someone even worse, all so they can get their hands on the country’s platinum mines. After Shannon is captured and tortured by the government, he wants nothing else to do with Zangaro. Instead, he wants to return to New York and propose to his ex-wife (JoBeth Williams). But, when she turns down his proposal, Shannon and his mercenary army return to Zangaro.
Before winning an Oscar for The Deer Hunter and becoming one of our most popular character actors, Christopher Walken was a finalist for the role of Han Solo in Star Wars. If not for George Lucas’s decision to hire Harrison Ford to read lines for the actors at the auditions, Christopher Walken’s career could have developed far differently. The Dogs of War, which was Walken’s first big film after the high of The Deer Hunter and the low of Heaven’s Gate, features Walken playing a character who has much in common with George Lucas’s original conception of Han Solo, an amoral mercenary who will work for anyone who pays him. Walken is almost too good as Jamie, playing the part as being so aloof and ruthless that it is sometimes hard to feel any sympathy for him at all. If he had taken that approach to playing Han Solo, audiences would have really been shocked when Han returned to attack the Death Star. They would probably be worried that he had returned because the Empire offered him a thousand credits to kill Luke.
The Dogs of War has an intriguing premise but it’s a very slow movie that gets caught up in all the minutia that goes into staging a coup. It’s exciting when Walken and his mercenaries finally attack the dictator’s compound but it takes forever to get there. The book, by Frederick Forsyth, is a well-written page turner but the film adaptation largely falls flat.
Jamie Shannon (Christopher Walken) is a professional mercenary who is hired, by a British businessman, to overthrow the government of Zangaro. Though Zangaro is currently ruled by a ruthless dictator, Shannon’s employers want to replace him with someone even worse, all so they can get their hands on the country’s platinum mines. After Shannon is captured and tortured by the government, he wants nothing else to do with Zangaro. Instead, he wants to return to New York and propose to his ex-wife (JoBeth Williams). But, when she turns down his proposal, Shannon and his mercenary army return to Zangaro.
Through the Shattered Lens 