One Million Years B.C., whatever its merits when one looks at it today, demonstrated Hammer was adept at turning its hand to genres other than Gothic horror and were equally as willing to embrace science fiction, psychological drama, crime noir, comedy, swashbucklers, and epic period adventure with its customary zeal.
A full review of the 50th Anniversary Blu Ray release is here: www.framerated.co.uk/one-million-years-bc-1966/
The Man Who Fell To Earth shows Roeg taking his non-linear narrative approach of Don’t Look Now (1973) and fragmenting it even further. His rapid intercutting of material epitomises his obsessions with time shifting through the story. Allusions and associations challenge the perception of what is past, present and future and acknowledge Roeg’s own view of cinema as a ‘time machine’. At the heart of his masterful use of montage and mise-en-scène, the spectacular manipulation of landscape and light, there…
The celebrated play, first staged on the West End stage in 1979 with Ian McKellen and Tom Bell in the lead roles of Max and Horst and then on Broadway in 1980 with Richard Gere, makes a somewhat uneasy transition to cinema in Sean Mathias' 1997 film version.
Mathias, primarily a theatre director and who revived the play in 1989, oversees, with the play's original writer Martin Sherman on screenplay duties, the play's transformation from a sparse, Beckett-like dualogue of…
By the early 1970s, British horror was struggling to maintain its hold on the genre. The romantic Gothic horrors of Hammer's heyday were no longer the box office of choice. Their Eastman colour fairy tales of vampires, gorgons and werewolves were giving way to new exponents of the field, such as Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General (1968) and Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973). Harder edged folk horror was supplanting the traditional material of the previous decade.
A self awareness was…
