Hammer To Fall.
When you look back at British films it is impossible to do so without seeing Hammer. They churned out an amazing amount of movies and when the studio finally closed its doors in the mid 1980s it was a very sad day indeed.
They gave us some wonderfully scary films and some truly great characters. Who can think about Count Dracula without seeing an image of Christopher Lee, or Van Helsing, without remembering the brilliant Peter Cushing?
Today’s horror movies make the old Hammer flicks look tame but it wasn’t all about the scariness. Those old movies had a great deal of style and class about them which cannot be found today. And we may have modern actresses with perfect bodies, tans and teeth, but they do not have the appeal of Hammer’s beauties. Ingrid Pitt, Yvonne Furneaux, Joanna Lumley and Yvonne Monlaur were all incredibly sexy and could even manage to speed up the heart rates of the living dead.
There was a certain class about the movies from the house of Hammer. It didn’t matter if some of the lesser known actors were not so hot or that the blood used for gore was the wrong sort of red because the films themselves were great. Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, Donald Pleasance and Christopher Lee all became household names largely because of their involvement with Hammer Studios. And many other famous faces cropped up in their films over the years; Joan Collins, Ian Hendry, Roy Castle, Ralph Bates, Michael Gough, Andre Morrell and Nastassja Kinski, the list goes on.
But the good news is that we may be seeing the return of Hammer films. The studio has been taken over by new owners and there is talk of investing around £25 million into the production of a new batch of horror movies. Just how it will all turn out is anyone’s guess, but if it is anything like their films of long ago then we could be in for a treat!
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