Post by In_Stereo on Jun 29, 2005 12:37:37 GMT -5
I would just like to say: As God is my witness, I will never watch another Hammer film as long as I live. You know, Hammer, the British production company. So far, I have seen (and used for home MSTings) Plague of the Zombies, The Witches (The Devil's Own), and Rasputin: The Mad Monk. And, of course, we've all seen Moon Zero Two, a Hammer sci-fi entry.
I mean, the British have given us some pretty good things, like golf, tennis, Monty Python, Blackadder, and the like, but Hammer is not one of them. There are some people who simply should not try to make movies, and Anthony Nelson Keys and his Hammer friends definitely fall into this group.
I've noticed four defining characteristics of a Hammer film: (I think I wrote about this somewhere on the IMDb)
1. A flimsy, vaguely defined plot
2. All the tension removed and replaced with long, drawn out, pointless scenes and convoluted subplots
3. A baffling, confusing denouement, usually supposed to convey irony, but leaving the audience's heads spinning
4. Then, before the closing action is completed and before the plot has had a chance to resolve itself, the end credits elbow their way in.
Let us consider, for example, The Witches.
1. The "plot" wanders around from schoolteacher Gwen Mayfield's (Joan Fontaine, in her last screen role) haunting experience with African witch doctors to the troubled love life of two of her students to an abusive granny to mysterious deaths to witchcraft in a weird underground temple (none of this appears to be connected, either).
2. Tension? There's not a clearly defined plot, what's there to be tense about? Instead, we are treated to looooooong scenes of Joan looking concerned and the two kids having to be broken up by adults. Then, get this, in a totally random subplot that doesn't advance the film's main action at all, Joan loses her memory, goes to a nursing home, gets her memory back, returns to the school, and the movie soldiers on. Not even joking.
It is then revealed, completely out of the blue, that the schoolmaster's wife is a voodoo priestess who has kidnapped a local girl for the purpose of sacrifice. There now follow about thirty-seven hours of ritual scenes; a roomful of zombies (all townspeople somehow; characters that we've met) dance and play instruments and go through motions and eat poop as the priestess lady chants incantations in some made-up language.
3. The priestess is killed just before sacrificing the girl when Joan cuts her own arm and wipes blood on the priestess's robe. This is supposed to be an ironic reference to a Satanic recording about "at the moment of sacrifice, let no blood be spilled," but how it kills her is never explained.
4. After an irrelevant one-minute scene back at the school, up come the credits, leaving any number of plot points hanging.
I could go on and on about this, but my point is made: Hammer films are slow, confusing, and plotless and are not classics by any means.
Then again, there are people who like them. Huh.
I mean, the British have given us some pretty good things, like golf, tennis, Monty Python, Blackadder, and the like, but Hammer is not one of them. There are some people who simply should not try to make movies, and Anthony Nelson Keys and his Hammer friends definitely fall into this group.
I've noticed four defining characteristics of a Hammer film: (I think I wrote about this somewhere on the IMDb)
1. A flimsy, vaguely defined plot
2. All the tension removed and replaced with long, drawn out, pointless scenes and convoluted subplots
3. A baffling, confusing denouement, usually supposed to convey irony, but leaving the audience's heads spinning
4. Then, before the closing action is completed and before the plot has had a chance to resolve itself, the end credits elbow their way in.
Let us consider, for example, The Witches.
1. The "plot" wanders around from schoolteacher Gwen Mayfield's (Joan Fontaine, in her last screen role) haunting experience with African witch doctors to the troubled love life of two of her students to an abusive granny to mysterious deaths to witchcraft in a weird underground temple (none of this appears to be connected, either).
2. Tension? There's not a clearly defined plot, what's there to be tense about? Instead, we are treated to looooooong scenes of Joan looking concerned and the two kids having to be broken up by adults. Then, get this, in a totally random subplot that doesn't advance the film's main action at all, Joan loses her memory, goes to a nursing home, gets her memory back, returns to the school, and the movie soldiers on. Not even joking.
It is then revealed, completely out of the blue, that the schoolmaster's wife is a voodoo priestess who has kidnapped a local girl for the purpose of sacrifice. There now follow about thirty-seven hours of ritual scenes; a roomful of zombies (all townspeople somehow; characters that we've met) dance and play instruments and go through motions and eat poop as the priestess lady chants incantations in some made-up language.
3. The priestess is killed just before sacrificing the girl when Joan cuts her own arm and wipes blood on the priestess's robe. This is supposed to be an ironic reference to a Satanic recording about "at the moment of sacrifice, let no blood be spilled," but how it kills her is never explained.
4. After an irrelevant one-minute scene back at the school, up come the credits, leaving any number of plot points hanging.
I could go on and on about this, but my point is made: Hammer films are slow, confusing, and plotless and are not classics by any means.
Then again, there are people who like them. Huh.