Icons of Horror: Hammer Films (2-disc) (The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb / The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll / Scream of Fear / The Gorgon)

The transfers are very good of these movies.
The trailers are the only extras.
The movies themselves are o.k. nothing that you will want to watch over and over again.

These old Hammer movies are good films (I would give 3 1/2 stars), not very scary to today's movie watcher. They all offer interesting takes, especially the Jekyll/Hyde tale. I found them all enjoyable and so did my wife. It is hard to find horror movies we can watch together since she is not a fan.

The "Scream of Fear" is a very different Hammer film. It is a suspense mystery with some good twists. It is the only B&W film in the package.

While Universal succeeded in making horror a successful film genre in the 1930s with their series of flicks featuring Dracula, the Wolf Man and other monsters, by World War Two, its output had declined both in quantity and quality. In fact, in the 1940s, outside of Val Lewton's films (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, et al), horror was pretty much a spent genre. In the 1950s, however, Hammer Films in England resurrected horror in a big way, bringing back the Universal monsters in new versions of familiar tales. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee took the place of Lugosi, Karloff and Chaney; perhaps more significantly, color replaced black-and-white, allowing a more vivid depiction of violence that may seem tame nowadays, but was shocking at the time.

The biggest of these Hammer horror films include Curse of Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Horror of Dracula. The Hammer Films - Icon of Horror Collection, however, contains some lesser known efforts, with four movies on two discs.

Disc One has The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll and The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb. The former movie is another re-telling of the familiar Jekyll-and-Hyde story; while it pales in comparison to the Frederic March version, this movie does offer a couple twists. In particular, in this case Hyde is actually the better-looking of the pair, a suave though completely amoral playboy. Jekyll is married to a faithless wife who loves Christopher Lee, another suave and amoral playboy who is also Jekyll's best friend, setting up an interesting triangle (or is it a square?).

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is another version of the familiar mummy tale with the mummy wreaking vengeance on those who violated its tomb. The twist regards the human villain who guides the mummy; though most viewers will have this character pegged quite early, his motives take a while to be revealed. This movie is also the only one in the set not to have Lee in the cast.

Disc Two has The Gorgon and Scream of Fear. The Gorgon has not only Lee in a rare heroic role, but also Peter Cushing. The title monster is a sister of the more famous Medusa but with a similar look and powers. Similar to a werewolf, the Gorgon only appears at the full moon. Cushing is the local doctor who knows more about the Gorgon than he is willing to say, and Lee is a professor who helps solve the mystery.

While these three films fit into the standard Hammer monster stories, Scream of Fear is distinctly different, a non-supernatural horror mystery. Hammer did several of these movies that were all in black-and-white and were reminiscent of Hammer's pre-horror days when it made B-film noirs. Other examples include Nightmare and Paranoiac. In Scream of Fear, Susan Strasberg plays a young wheelchair-bound woman moving back to her father's home after a decade abroad. When she gets back, her father is gone on a trip, leaving her only with his new wife. After some strange goings-on, including seeing what she believes is her dad's corpse, she suspects something sinister afoot; can she, with the help of the chauffeur, figure out what's going on? Lee is in this movie as a local doctor who seems to get along a little too well with the step-mother. Though it is the atypical member of this set, Scream of Fear is also the best in the set.

As seems typical with most Hammer DVD releases, these films come with little in the way of extras, merely the theatrical trailers. None of these movies are bad, though the Disc One films are slower-moving; the Disc Two films, however, are pretty good. In fact, though these are clearly lesser Hammer movies, this is still a fun set that should be enjoyed by most Hammer fans.

Icons of Horror: Hammer Films (2-disc) (The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb / The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll / Scream of Fear / The Gorgon)
Hammer added another 'classic' monster with Terence Fisher's THE GORGON (1964). Filled with chilling menace, the film is set in the Transylvanian village of Vandorf, terrorized by a series of killings in which the victims have turned to STONE. The Gorgon, Magaera, is found in the nearby ruins of the Castle Borski, but the discoverer is himself turned to stone, having just time to summon help in the form of his son and his son's tutor, Professor Meinster ( Christopher Lee, in a fine set of whiskers and playing for once, the avenger )! Eventually the Gorgon, is found to be in possession of the beautiful Carla Hoffman (Barbara Shelly) assistant and ex-patient of the sinister Professor Namaroff ( Peter Cushing ). Roy Ashton's make-up for the Gorgon, haloed with a hissing, striking frieze of serpents, makes Megaera, a true and unique female monster

Horror fans are well aware of the iconic position that Britain's Hammer Film Productions holds in the history of horror cinema, but most would agree that it's a bit of a stretch for Sony/Columbia to have included these four films in their Icons of Horror series. While these flicks are not without their merits, critics and fans alike agree that all four films are essentially second-string examples from the overall Hammer catalog and are not, therefore, icons of horror in and of themselves. Nonetheless, it's cool that Sony/Columbia has made these less-than-stellar films available in such a reasonably priced two-disc DVD set, and ardent fans of Hammer horror will definitely want to add the set to their collections.

THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL (1960), the first film in this set, was initially panned by critics for being slow paced and poorly directed, yet it actually offers an interesting twist on the familiar Robert Louis Stevenson story and contains some superb acting. In this interpretation, instead of being a handsome and successful doctor whose self-inflicted experimentation turns him into an ugly brute, the good doctor is a dull, ordinary-looking milquetoast who turns into a suave, handsome libertine after ingesting a chemistry-set concoction. (It wouldn't be unreasonable to argue that this treatment served as the inspiration for the 1963 Jerry Lewis parody THE NUTTY PROFESSOR and its later remake, both of which also used the ugly-duckling-to-beautiful-swan idea.) Canadian actor Paul Massie delivers very convincing and affecting performances as both Jekyll and his evil alter ego Hyde, and Hammer regular Christopher Lee is delightful in a supporting role. And as with all Hammer films, there are also plenty of pretty women with heaving bosoms. In fact, the only truly egregious flaw in THE TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL is the special FX makeup--the visual difference between Jekyll and Hyde is achieved solely via the presence of facial hair (Jekyll) or the lack thereof (Hyde), and it therefore becomes difficult for viewers to suspend disbelief and accept the idea that the denizens of Jekyll's world can't tell that he and Hyde are one in the same.

The second film in the set, 1964's THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, comes closer to being a remake of Universal's classic Karloff vehicle THE MUMMY (1932) than did Hammer's 1959 film of the same name. Yet, as with most mummy-centric horror films, this flick is little more than a collection of cliches based on the myths and misconceptions that originated with the discovery and opening of King Tut's tomb in the early 1920s. Maybe it's because I hold a degree in Art History and have extensively studied the art of ancient Egypt, but the props and production design for this Hammer flick are historically and aesthetically inaccurate and therefore seem unconvincing to me. And if that's not enough, even the FX makeup on the titular monster looks technically more primitive than that with which Jack Pierce covered Boris Karloff nearly 32 years prior! Admittedly, THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB is mildly entertaining despite its flaws, but there is really nothing outstanding or groundbreaking about the film.

The third offering in this set, 1964's THE GORGON, is probably the least entertaining of the four. Inspired by the Greco-Roman myth about the feminine creatures whose gazes could turn men to stone, the film is almost unbearably slow paced and, with the exception of the anticipated decapitation at the denouement, wholly uneventful. As always, regular Hammer thespians Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing give it their best, and director Terence Fisher and his crew do a pretty good job of creating the moody, depressing Gothic atmosphere for which Hammer films are famous, but the material they are forced to work with is a creative albatross that they just can't ultimately overcome. The only really notable thing about THE GORGON is that it marks the first high-profile role in a Hammer film for actor Patrick Troughton, who here plays the chief of police in the town where the Gorgon resides. Troughton would go on to play supporting roles in a few other Hammer films, after which he would achieve international stardom playing the second incarnation of the titular character in TV's DOCTOR WHO. Horror fans might also recognize Troughton from his later role as the priest who gets impaled by a lightning rod in THE OMEN (1976).

SCREAM OF FEAR (1961), the fourth and final entry in this DVD set, was actually released in the UK (where it was made) under the moniker TASTE OF FEAR. It tells the story of a wheelchair-bound heiress who, at the invitation of her estranged father, arrives at the family estate only to discover that her father is conspicuously absent and that her stepmother is behaving rather suspiciously. Just when she becomes convinced that her father has been murdered and that her stepmother and family friends are conspiring to cheat her out of her inheritance, everything takes an interesting twist. Unlike the other three flicks in this "icons of horror" set from Sony/Columbia, SCREAM OF FEAR noticeably lacks the usual accoutrements of a horror film, and it would therefore be more acurate to describe it as a thriller or a mystery. Nonetheless, the tightly plotted story, excellent acting (including an early performance by American actress Susan Strasberg, who portrays the heiress), and skilled directing make it the best film of the lot, and it alone is worth amazon.com's price of admission.

The digital transfers of the films in this set are clean and crisp, all films are presented in their original aspect ratios (enhanced for widescreen TVs), and the sound quality is pretty good. The discs also include the original theatrical trailers for each film, but those are the only extras. While these films might not actually qualify as icons of horror in and of themselves, the studio that produced them, Hammer Film Productions, will always stand as an icon in the history of horror cinema. So all in all, this DVD set will make a fine addition to the collections of true fans of Hammer horror, and even fans of good mystery movies might want to pick up a set just to get a copy of the excellent SCREAM OF FEAR.