BBC2 Horror Double Bill

Captain Kronos is a great movie - it would make a cool tv show actually!
And it starred my favourite actress, the beautiful Caroline Munro!
 
Kronos was made as the first in an intended series of movies but the film did not do well enough

The adventures of Kronos did continue in comic strip form in the 70's magazine The House of Hammer

I think Munro was dubbed yet again wasn't she?
 
Yes! I recall that! In 1977, they showed the old Universal horror films from the 30s and 40s, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and various sequels. I especially enjoyed, The Wolfman. Lon Chaney Junior was brilliant as tragic, haunted Larry Talbot, cursed to become a killer werewolf during the full moon. Next year, they started showing some of the Hammer films from the 50s and 60s. Their remake of Frankenstein, with Christopher Lee as the monster, was superb. The facial make-up was marvellously grotesque, with Lee looking like a car-crash victim, with all the stitches, scar tissue and his cloudy, blind eye-and the garish colour emphasised how spectacularly horrific it was!
 
I'm glad its just not me that remembers the Saturday night black and white double bill - that little plane flying around the world as the RKO logo!
I must have been 13 or so - my parents used to laugh as they heard me try and turn the light off and jump into bed as quickly as possible - I was so spooked :)
They just don't make them like that anymore :)
 
IIRC the first showing was in 1998 (I've still got a copy of it here on tape) and wasn't the extremely censored version but the recently-passed BBFC approved cut of the 'long version', which did have some trims to the gore scenes but nothing as drastic as previously. Unfortunately they were bound to do this due to the stupid rule that films shown on TV have to match a BBFC-approved version (that wasn't in place prior to the late 90s, and 'full uncut' versions of BBFC-censored films were often shown, especially Hammer films).

As you say they have since shown the fully uncut version, in line with it being released on DVD, along with Day Of The Dead (which they've never shown cut).
 
Deadly Strangers was an early 70s thriller that starred Hayley Mills and Simon Ward. A very suspenseful film-and a great twist at the end!
 
I liked that film from the moment I saw it on ITV in the 70's.
It took a while for the dvd release to come out but the quality is excellent.
I expect any screening today would omit the afterthought introduction the producers added just after the release as it uses un PC language:rolleyes:



I never saw Gargoyles but it was clearly a popular one as the Japanese dvd I have of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark is a double bill with Gargoyles.
Trilogy of Terror is another Dan Curtis classic that's just had it's second release on R1.

I don't think any Dan Curtis movies are out in the UK but R1 and R4 have plenty
 
Cool. I really love a lot of those early 70's British thrillers/horrors.

I will definately have to keep an eye out for this one.

I'd love a season of 70's British films actually, of all genres.
 
I was trying to remember which of the later colour movies I was first allowed to stay up and watch and I think it was Hammer's "Kiss of the Vampire"! I found it most scary at the time!
 
The season turned into a bit of a joke in 1980, when they showed Night of the Lepus, a US film about giant mutant carnivorous rabbits, played laughably straight. However, the year after, in 1981, they showed a film that although billed as a comedy, albeit a dark one, was a genuinely gripping horror thriller too, Theatre of Blood, with Vincent Price.
 
If your dvd player and other devices are setup correctly that problem does not happen.



I think TTWM gets forgotten because its not very good.

The Monster Club has some very good stories but the wraparound scenes with the music really hurt it.

The US dvd comes with the music soundtrack as a bonus feature
 
I can't recall when the first showing was but it definitely was cut to bits as I taped it out of curiosity.
I do have the Radio Times for the whole of the 90's so I shall have to dig it out although I can't see it being the Cannes version as that was a messy unfinished edit of little value.

There were so many cuts that to broadcast it as the Directors Cut would have been a bit stupid .
At that point the long version was still being erroneously sold as a DC
 
Remembering quite a few of these.

Theatre of Blood: superb black comedy with Vincent Price as the actor murdering a series of critics in ingeniously ghoulish ways derived from Shakespeare.

Race With The Devil: American film about caravanners in the country witnessing black magic rites and then being pursued by the devil worshippers. Works up a frisson of powerful paranoia in scenes in which we see the campers under observation by various creepy individuals in seemingly everyday situations, by people whom we realise must have been part of the rites and have seen them. One incident that sticks in the mind is an open-air country and western concert that the campers attend. The music is very jolly and upbeat, but fades into the background as we go into a close-up shot of a musician staring with hard, intently-gazing eyes into the crowd as his hanRAB go through the motions of playing a string instrument.

Zoltan-Hound of Dracula: twist on the vampire legend in which Zoltan appears to be a vampire in dog form, but with the intelligence of a human, and with an elderly keeper who seems, in fact, to be under his control. One particularly ghoulish scene stanRAB out in my mind in which a man is pinned down by the dog at night in a park, and his face slashed to bloody ribbons by the dog.

The Crazies: very powerful early-70s US tale of mass insanity due to chemical poisoning. The scene at the start, sticks in the mind, with the deranged father smashing up his home at night, in his pajamas, as a fire he has lit in the house takes hold-before the man, once in custody, appears to recover his mind, and, handcuffed in a police car, weeps for his children as he sees his house burn.

Bug: another American film from the 70s. A curious tale, set in a town in one of the desert areas of the southern US, and featuring giant insects that suddenly start to come to the surface from underground, and which grind their limbs together in ways that create sparks, and kindle fatal fires in the hot climate. A local scientist, who starts off as seeing the insects as objects of study, slowly cracks up and goes insane after his wife dies in a fire they create, conceiving a murderious vendetta against the creatures. One particularly disturbing scene has the scientist, soon after his bereavement, watching a group of the creatures in a glass case, at first with an air of detached scientific curiousity, but slowly detiorating into an insane alternation between tears and manic laughter, as he goes from just watching the insects to destroying them, as rage and despair at his wife's fate take hold.

Shuttered Room: Oliver Reed was on good form as a leader of a group of teenage thugs in a small town, in a story whose menace comes as much from the agression of Reed and his gang against the newly wed couple, as from the mysterious unseen being in the attic of a local house.
 
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