Hammer Rises From the Grave
That old British chestnut Hammer Film has been dug up and given a new lease of life:
For three decades, Hammer Film Productions has lain dormant, with fans having to rely on special late night showings at cinemas or the occasional reissue of one of the more popular classics from its prodigious 295-item back catalogue on DVD. But now the brand that defined the great British film alongside Ealing comedies and James Bond is back in business and plans to make more movies to terrify a new generation of fans.
There’s my problem with this right there – Hammer is a (horribly out of date) brand right now and not much else. I’ll hold off on getting too excited until they reveal something in the works just half as great as ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ (Force more powerful than 1,000 H-Bombs unleashed to devastate earth! World in panic! Cities in flames!) or ‘Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter’ (The only man alive feared by the walking dead!). That Hammer 2.0 is going to “repackage some of these old favourites” is a lot more scary than any script they could come up with.
I do have hope though as there HAS to be more on offer Horror-wise than the teens-as-meat crap that American studios are shoving out at the moment. Let’s hope the new powers-that-be concentrate on the right period of Hammer history for their inspiration, otherwise we may end up with a big budget version of ‘On The Buses’ with Jason Statham.
All we need now is someone to revive Amicus.
I never got into Hammer stuff I always read a lot about it in books, and occasionally caught half a film on tv but the whole era was kind of before my time. My dad always harks on about Quatermass and how the tv show scared the crap out of him when he was a kid and how one of the first films he took my mum to see when they were first together was a double bill of ‘Mummy’ Hammer films. My dad is a nerd.
Who knows they could come up with something great… but I’m not holding my breath.
maybe if they are directed by Neil Marshall they could be good. Stratham on the buses sounds great with Gary Oldman as Blakey