This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
"And that's a wrap on Christopher Lee!"
This was Christopher Lee's last Hammer Dracula movie. It's far from the best. I'm not even sure it's the best vampire movie of 1973 (Vampire Circus and Scream Blacula Scream also came out that year). It's not awful ... Lee tried his best to be venomous and Peter Cushing (who still had one more Van Helsing outing after this one, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires) was fine. But the classic Hammer…
Old and square Uncle Bojo pursues various young women. That's the whole of the plot, but it doesn't begin to cover the screen time. There's significant travelogue footage of a town in New York state, a visit to the local zoo, an epic mini-documentary of a real but minor artist who was filling his house with plaster casts of people (the filmmakers also distributed this segment separately from Unstrap Me), and a wildly unexpected field-trip / change of course late…
Rachel Zegler is outstanding in this, which is a shame because if Hollywood is rational at all she will never be allowed to headline a movie this expensive again. (She spent the time she should have been promoting this film talking about how the original story is so awful and making fractious political statements.) Gal Gadot, who is notoriously for being bad in this movie, isn't bad or good ... she seems to consider the Evil Queen a one-dimensional character…
Lots of time is wasted in this film slowly revealing (long after we've already figured out) who is trying to give the Devil a daughter, how, why, and who else is in on it, but they really should have just gotten down to business and told an interesting story instead. Late Hammer is still Hammer, so maybe they were stalling to save on budget, but still, I felt like they were wasting my time. The acting is good, though, and…
Sometime around 2008 or 2009, my friends and I watched this movie. Near the beginning, I noticed a bumper sticker on a truck that said something like "HOW'S MY DIRECTING? CALL ###-###-####." After the movie, we called it and left a message. A few minutes later the actual director of this film called us back.
I don't remember anything else about this movie, which was not the greatest. But getting to talk to the director was pretty cool.
This movie is told in chapters. Is it praise to say that the first chapter is so good that I wanted more from that thread, or too diminishing to say that, implying that what follows instead in the later chapters is a little less interesting? The later chapters aren't boring in any way (well, maybe they are if you're not into academic discussions of economics, but I suppose I am). But the movie has an agenda well beyond horror. It…
