This isn’t a review of SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME, which is a fun superhero movie full of FX, action, teen romance and humour: this is a quick look at the ‘Elementals’ that feature in the movie.
These massive beings, supposedly from an alternate reality Earth (you find out their true nature later in the story) are pretty cool to look at.
There’s a brief teaser moment showing an Earth Elemental that appears in front of Nick Fury in Mexico…
Nick Fury and Maria Hill take aim…
…and then the first one we get a really good look at is a Water Elemental that attacks Venice. This flowing, fluid creature forms a roughly human shape and causes havoc in and around the Venetian canals.
Water Elemental makes a splash
The next Elemental we encounter is a burning, molten creature, which rampages around Prague, putting Peter Parker’s friends in jeopardy again.
Things get hot when the Fire Elemental attacks
The final one is a massive fusion of all Elementals (part lightning storm cloud, part water, part lava, etc) that rises from the River Thames and starts wrecking Tower Bridge.
The huge fusion of all Elementals takes chunks out of Tower Bridge
SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME is an enjoyable flick, with these Elemental set-pieces adding spectacle and excitement to the story. They also remind me a little of the kind of creatures drawn by Jack Kirby for Marvel’s pre-superhero monster comics.
In a cave-like tomb some mercenaries and an archaeologist have to deal with a red-eyed, naked, bearded humanoid who transforms into a large, demon-like monster after feeding on a young archaeology assistant.
Dracula is initially human-like……but he starts getting bigger after feeding……until he becomes a toothy-faced monster
The creature is actually Dracula, who halts momentarily in his attack when he sees a cat, allowing the survivors to flee, regroup, and leave an explosive device that blows Dracula up. The team runs down a tunnel that opens-up into a large chamber, where other monster-like vampires await…
There are more of them!
SUCKER OF SOULS, an episode from season 1 of the Netflix animated anthology show Love, Death + Robots, has a pleasing, sketchy animation style reminiscent of comic strip illustrations, zips along at a brisk pace, and portrays Dracula as a being capable of becoming a completely non-human beast.
He’s a beast!
Made by the Paris-based Studio La Cachette, SUCKER OF SOULS has a pretty simple plot, includes some obvious, not that funny pussy jokes, but is an entertaining 13 minute short.
I liked the hand drawn styleCue the pussy jokes…Run away!
SATANIC RITES was the eighth film in Hammer’s Dracula series and it was the seventh (and final) one to feature Christopher Lee as the undead Count. The film was the fourth one to star Peter Cushing as Van Helsing: he played the original Van Helsing twice and a descendent of Van Helsing twice in the Dracula series (and he played the original Van Helsing in 1974’s THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES too, which wasn’t part of the Lee series).
UK poster with artwork by Tom Chantrell
This film takes place two years after the events featured in DRACULA A.D. 1972 and deals with Van Helsing helping the Secret Service to discover why a group of elite members of the British establishment are performing satanic rituals at a large mansion. The trail leads to the mysterious property developer D. D. Denham, who turns out to be Dracula…
D.D.D… is Dracula!
As with DRACULA A.D 1972, I think this Dracula-in-contemporary-times flick is a fun viewing experience!
Let’s face it – THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA is an outlandish, pulpy yarn. It involves biker henchmen, the Secret Service, blood squib gunplay, a secret cabal of senior UK figures taking part in occult ceremonies, Scotland Yard, female vampires chained in a basement, death by fire sprinkler and Dracula planning to wipe out all of mankind with a weaponised strain of bubonic plague!
Black magic rites!
Sheepskin-waistcoated biker with shades and a silencer!
Blood squibs!Vamps in the cellar
A biker gets blasted!
Many Hammer fans dislike this eccentric mix of disparate elements, but I like this bizarre brew! Dracula’s demise is usually the butt of jokes because he ‘just falls into a thorn bush’, but I think the way the Count ends up with his own ‘crown’ of thorns (in this story the thorn bush is disliked by vampires due to its link with Christ’s crown of thorns) is effective visually and, anyway, it is actually Van Helsing who offs Dracula with a handy fence post.
Crown of thorns!
With Joanna Lumley replacing Stephanie Beacham as Van Helsing’s granddaughter Jessica, Michael Coles returns as Scotland Yard’s Inspector Murray, seen previously in DRACULA A.D. 1972. Freddie (FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED) Jones plays a mentally unstable scientist, Valerie Van Ost is a Secret Service secretary who falls victim to Dracula and William Franklyn, famous in the UK for his lighthearted commercial voice-over work, is quite effective as Secret Service agent Torrence.
Dracula comes calling…Secret Service secretary Jane becomes a vampire!Joanna (THE NEW AVENGERS) Lumley is Van Helsing’s granddaughter Jessica
Plague victim!
Cushing has a cross!
About this movie’s copyright issues: Warner Brothers released the film under its original title in the UK, but they didn’t distribute it in the U.S. The film was eventually released in America years later as COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE. In the 1980s the film was falsely believed to be in the public domain in America and released on video tape by several companies, using a transfer culled from a worn 35mm print. The rights reverted back to Hammer Films in the 1990s, however, and Anchor Bay acquired the video rights. THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA was then released officially on VHS and DVD.
Original US poster
One thing I can say is that I’m really pleased Hammer didn’t go with its original title for the movie: DRACULA IS DEAD AND WELL AND LIVING IN LONDON (!)
Dr. Mercer Boley teams up with local cops and some dirt bikers in the southwestern USA to take-on cave-dwelling gargoyles to save his kidnapped daughter (Jennifer Salt) and prevent all the gargoyle eggs from hatching, which could mean them spreading around the world.
They’re coming for you!
GARGOYLES was originally broadcast on Tuesday, November 21st, 1972 in The New CBS Tuesday Night Movies slot. For a made-for-television production that runs a brief 74 minutes, it boasts lots of on-screen time for the creatures, which were created by Ellis Burman (who designed and built the lead gargoyle), Stan Winston (who did all the background gargoyles) and makeup supervisor Del Armstrong (who oversaw everything).
A gargoyle lurking at the bottom of the bed!
Gargoyle vs biker!
The winged leader
The gargoyle creatures are a varied-looking bunch: the leader and his queen have wings, the others don’t, and they have different facial features (beaks, horns, fur, etc). I think they look best when shot in slow motion, which is what director Bill L. Norton does quite often in the movie.
Fight!
Cornel Wilde and Jennifer Salt, playing father and daughter, look meaningfully off-camera
A youthful-looking Scott Glenn plays James Reeger, one of the motorcycle dudes, and Cornel Wilde is anthropologist Dr. Boley, a man who wants to prove that the legends of creatures like gargoyles have a basis in truth. After Boley is shown a winged skeleton by the owner of an out of the way New Mexico gas station, and then physically encounters some of the beings, it is eventually discovered that gargoyles have a five hundred year incubation period: and now is the time for the large eggs to start hatching…
Big gargoyle eggs…
…beginning to hatch
This TV movie impressed me a lot when I first saw it way, way back as a kid. I thought I’d give it a rewatch recently, and I’m glad to say that I still enjoy it, thanks to the use of the desert locations, its 70s-era telefilm vibe and, of course, Burman and Winston’s nice-lookin’ titular creatures.
Here’s some more GARGOYLES background info and pics…
Concept art by Wes Cook
Gargoyle masks sculpted by Stan Winston for background characters
Close-up shot of one of the background gargoyles from the film setStan Winston applies dark camouflage makeup to a background actor on-setThe costumes for the background gargoyles were by Ross Wheat (the bodies were neoprene wetsuits covered in fishnet and small pieces of rubber). The heads were created by Stan WinstonJim Phillips (on the left) & Ellis Burman do an early makeup application of the lead gargoyle (played by Bernie Casey)
This was Stan Winston’s first real professional job (he had only just finished a three-year Walt Disney Studios makeup apprenticeship program), but he still had the guts to insist that he get a credit in the movie (which was seldom done at the time). After Stan threatened to leave the production, the producers relented and the gargoyle-creators received their credits. GARGOYLES was then nominated at the Emmys in the category of makeup… and Stan Winston, Ellis Burman and Del Armstrong WON the Emmy Award for outstanding achievement in makeup! Only those with screen credit could be nominated for an Emmy, so it’s thanks to Stan’s stubborn demands that they were eligible!
Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde), a college psychology professor who lectures about choosing reason over superstition, must finally accept that witchcraft does exist when his life goes off the rails after he forces his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) to destroy the good luck charms (a dead spider, animal skull, graveyard earth, etc) she has used to protect him from a college rival who is using conjure magic against him.
UK poster
NIGHT OF THE EAGLE (aka BURN, WITCH, BURN! in the US) was directed by Sidney Hayers, with a script by Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson and George Baxt, based on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife. The novel’s New England setting was moved to rural Britain.
Witchcraft in suburbia
I really like this film, which is subtly handled and well shot. It’s a kind of companion piece to NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957), in that both feature clear-headed protagonists who must concede that dark forces exist.
At first Norman does not believe…
…but Norman finally does believe!
A nice touch involves the use of a reel-to-reel tape to attack Norman: this is done by sneakily adding the recording of a black magic ceremony onto what was meant to be a speech on neurosis. As the tape plays, it summons some unseen thing that shrieks outside Norman and Tansy’s front door.
Nice witch
Nasty witch
We later see what this shrieking thing is when the same tape is played through the college loudspeaker system, causing a stone statue to become a huge live eagle that chases Norman around the grounds and halls of the college in the night. Once the tape is switched off the giant eagle disappears, and is seemingly just an illusion, but the film ends with the heavy eagle statue toppling from above the main door to crush the evildoer. The director’s decision to repeatedly include the stone eagle statue in various shots as the story progressed to this finale was a good call.
The stone eagle
The statue becomes a real eagle
The great eagle takes flightThe giant eagle swoops down!
With good use of close-ups and editing, this B&W tale of witchcraft in middle-class suburbia, with university wives using hexes and effigies, deserves to be as well known as NIGHT OF THE DEMON in my opinion.
Compelled to kill!
In the US theatre audiences were given a special pack of salt and words to an ancient incantation
The stone eagle looms in the foreground
Oh yes, Reginald Beckwith, who plays a college colleague in NIGHT OF THE EAGLE, was also featured in NIGHT OF THE DEMON, as Mr. Meek in the seance scene.
Reginald Beckwith, standing in the doorway, appears in both EAGLE and DEMON!
Danielle St. Claire (Cerina Vincent) is a forest ranger based in a remote ranger station, who is drinking herself into a stupor on a regular basis so that she can handle her memories of the car crash that killed her friend. She has to pull herself together, however, so that she can take on a murderous demon creature.
The heroine deals with a headless corpse
It’s a shame that far too much time (pretty much the first half hour of the film) is given over to the main character’s back story, because the winged, humanoid monster is quite effective when we do finally get to see it after all the forced histrionics.
The creature has wings!The monster gets up close and personal
The film would have benefitted from better plotting too: why didn’t the ranger heroine just trek away from the ranger station rather than stay there night after night, knowing the creature will attack? Why does the creature endlessly toy with the heroine but immediately kills every other character it encounters?
Monster alert!
Filmed on location in British Columbia, director Steven R. Monroe’s movie also features a very irritating parrot, various montage sequences, an origin for the monster that’s linked to a vague Native American legend and some gore moments.
Ouch!
The creature was the best thing about this film, that’s why I’m showing another pic of it!
A Sedonian alien trooper and his human adversary play a cat and mouse game of hunter and hunted on an arid desert planet they’ve crash-landed onto.
Sedonian aliens in stormtrooper-type gear!
This low budget sci-fi flick is nicely shot in Baja California, features some neat alien makeups and is kind of a small-scale ENEMY MINE, although the two characters in this story don’t become friends.
There are other characters featured in the movie too, including a green-faced bounty hunter and other Sedonian stormtrooper-like commandos.
This alien bounty hunter dude was played by the director
There’s a lot of trudging across sand dunes and sheltering beneath rocky overhangs in this movie, but it’s cool to look at, there’s a decent score, plus some plot twists and some small Sand Slug Creatures.
Sand Slug Creature chews on the human!
The human chews on a Sand Slug Creature!
HUNTER PREY was directed by Sandy Collora, who made the shorts BATMAN: DEAD END (2003) and SHALLOW WATER (2013). He is also a very talented creature designer, concept illustrator and sculptor.
A Sedonian walks past a big skeletonArguing Sedonians!
As the second season of Love, Death + Robots was recently released on Netflix, I thought I’d go back and give one of the episodes from the first season of the animated anthology show a rewatch…
THE SECRET WAR tells the story of a group of Red Army soldiers hunting and fighting demons in Russian forests during World War 2. The soldiers have several encounters with the hell-creatures and also find a notebook that describes how an old Soviet plan called ‘Operation Hades’ is the reason the creatures were summoned in the first place, but the demons weren’t controllable and became the menace they are now.
Skull in the snow
The Russian soldiers attempt to neutralise a large subterranean nest of demons with explosives, but this causes a huge cave-in, provoking masses of the creatures to crawl to the surface. The Russians make a last stand, whilst one of their number rides off, tasked with requesting a major bombing of the area.
No hiding from the creatures…
The next morning we see the malformed creatures munching on the corpses of the dead soldiers, then Soviet planes fly overhead and they begin bombing the site (the demon-things are depicted as a horde of deformed, hairless creatures that come across more like monstrous aliens rather than demons from hell.)
Demons chow down
THE SECRET WAR is amazing to look at, with a hyper-realistic style impressively depicting the cold Russian landscapes. Digic Pictures, a Hungarian 3D animation studio that specialises in the production of 3D animated game cinematics, made this episode. The 16 minute story, however, feels more like a fragment of a bigger plot, so THE SECRET WAR does rather come across like a cool cutscene for a high-end video game.
The landscapes look amazingDemons close-in…Surrounded
James Hoffman (James Le Gros) is posted at a remote Arctic oil drilling base to evaluate its environmental impact and he inevitably clashes with Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), who is the tough chief of the crew. Pollack just wants Hoffman to rubber-stamp the operation so that drilling for oil can begin, but the environmentalist doesn’t want to play ball.
Is this going to be ‘The Last Winter’?
With people behaving strangely, going missing and dying, Hoffman hypothesises that a type of natural gas is leaking from the permafrost due to the effects of climate change: this sour gas could be the reason people are having hallucinations and acting oddly.
As weird events continue, characters ponder whether nature has turned against all of mankind and maybe we’re approaching a ‘Last Winter’ – when the ‘spirits/ghosts’ of the creatures that comprise fossil fuels rise up to kill us.
A spectral caribou-creature approaches…
Shot in Iceland and Alaska, Larry Fessenden’s movie is an intriguing and pretty effective slow burn film, featuring decent acting and some briefly-seen spectral caribou creatures seemingly released from the earth to avenge man’s destruction of the environment.
People start turning up dead
The spirit-creatures are only hinted at through most of the film, presented occasionally as some kind of swirling spirit-storm, but we do get a good look at several of the large, ghostly caribou-things a couple of times later in the story and, for the most part, they look okay, though there’s some dodgy CGI featured in one particular overhead shot when the creatures close-in on a character.
What is this thing?
Ron Perlman’s performance is rather one-note – but, as a whole, THE LAST WINTER is a quite satisfying, modestly budgeted, eerie movie – though I feel the makers didn’t quite know how to deal with the creatures once they are properly revealed onscreen. The film, however, is certainly way, way better than Fessenden’s killer fish movie BENEATH (2013).
In a pre-title sequence two desperate men are shown eating part of a dead colleague on a snow-covered mountain. A third man refuses to take part in this. When the three men walk onwards, the two who had eaten the flesh start acting scared, as if they can see something up ahead. The man who’d not succumbed to cannibalism can’t see what is pursuing the others. This unseen force lifts up one of the flesh eaters, throws him to the snowy ground and bloodily rips into him.
Only those who’ve eaten human flesh can see the creature…
…and it hunts them down and kills them
The movie now switches location to the UK and we watch Ethan (Benjamin Sarpong-Broni) devising a way to get his girlfriend Nat (Megan Purvis) out of the mental health facility she is currently staying in. The couple have planned this escape so that Nat can celebrate her birthday with a bunch of friends on a weekend camping trip.
The land they are camping on is owned by Blackwood (David Patrick Stucky), who we recognise as the surviving flesh eater from the opening sequence. Blackwood generously offers the campers a container of raw hamburger patties. The friends enjoy this free meal, unaware that the burger patties contain human flesh…
Don’t eat the burgers!
Blackwood reappears and tells the group what they’ve eaten – and he explains that the local woodland is inhabited by a creature that hunts and kills anyone who has consumed human flesh. Blackwood’s plan is to use the friends as offerings, hoping that the monster (that has presumably stalked him from the mountains) will gorge on them and will leave him alone for a while.
The creature looms over a victimFang-face!
The friends must now try to keep out of the creature’s clutches, and this really should’ve provided the film with lots of opportunities to give us tension and action, but there’s a fair bit of running time where not much happens and we get characters having “you weren’t there to help”-type drama moments instead.
Brother and sister have a ‘you-weren’t-there-for-me’ moment
The movie inevitably ends with a final girl confronting Blackwood and dealing with the pursuing creature.
Nat covers herself in another victim’s blood
This low budget movie looks okay visually, has practical effects and features a decent synth score by Gabe Castro, so it’s a shame a lot of the film is basically a bunch of rather one-note characters walking and running about in the woods.
Nat ignites a signal flare
What I liked most about the movie was the central idea, which is pretty cool: if you eat human flesh you will be hunted down and killed by a creature that ONLY cannibals can see (non-cannibals can only see the victims being attacked, with the creature remaining invisible to them).
The suggestion that the creature can’t see you if you cover yourself with a dead person’s blood doesn’t seem well thought-through, however. Surely most cannibals get covered in a dead person’s blood (because they’re eating a corpse), so this must be a real problem for a creature that only hunts down cannibals!
The guy with the rifle can’t see the monster holding up Ethan because he hasn’t munched on human fleshThe creature gets up close and personal
This monster is a humanoid creature with a big, tooth-filled mouth, but it is never seen as clearly as depicted in the film’s poster: it is always shot cloaked in shadows, filmed from a distance, or shown in extreme close-up.
The poster showed the beastie far more clearly
In the end the movie just fails to be very memorable, which is a pity, as it had potential.
It’s looking out the window!
Devoted to every kind of movie and TV monster, from King Kong to Godzilla, from the Blob to Alien. Plus monsters from other media too, including books and comics.
Monster Zone 