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xsBusiness - 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)
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List Price: $24.96
Our Price: $16.99
Your Save: $ 7.97 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: SONY PICTURES
Starring: Paul Massie - The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyl, Terence Morgan - The Curse Of The Mummy', Peter Cushing - The Gorgon, Susan Strasberg - Scream Of Fear
Directed By: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll directed by
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Sony
EAN: 0043396271074
Format: Anamorphic
Label: SONY PICTURES
Manufacturer: SONY PICTURES
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: SONY PICTURES
Region Code: 99
Release Date: 2008-10-14
Running Time: 324
Studio: SONY PICTURES
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Columbia's 2nd Hammer Set...
Comment: Nice selection of horror films (not Hammer's best). Terrific quality prints. Best ever on each of these titles.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superb Hammer set from Sony.
Comment: This is a superb Hammer horror DVD set from Sony. The studio is really doing a great job with classic titles at the moment, and this set is a prime example! Four classic Hammer films and a great looking cover (yes, I was one of the fans who voted for it..). Recommended!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good transfers, o.k. movies.
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good nonscary monster movies
Comment: These old Hammer movies are good films, 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Four horrors from Hammer
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb
When European Egyptologists Dubois, Giles and Bray discover the tomb of the Egyptian prince Ra, American entrepreneur and investor Alexander King insists on shipping the treasures and sarcophagus back to England for tour and display. Once there, someone with murderous intent has discovered the means of waking the centuries dead prince...
Scream of Fear
After narrowly surviving an accident in which she nearly drowned, the wheelchair bound Penny Appleby returns home to live with her widowed step-mother Jane on the French Riviera. She begins to question her sanity after several times seeing her father's corpse around the house and its grounds, and enlists the help of the friendly chauffeur Bob while attending Doctor Gerrard acts in a suitably sinister manner. No one is who they seem in this tale of intrigue and suspense.
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll
Dr. Henry Jekyll experiments with scientific means of revealing the hidden, dark side of man and releases a murderer from within himself.
The Gorgon
In early-twentieth-century middle-Europe, villagers are literally becoming petrified. Although the authorities try to hush the matter up it is apparent that at the full moon, Medusa leaves her castle lair and anyone looking on her face is turned to stone. When this fate befalls a visitor, experts from the University of Leipzig arrive to try and get to the bottom of it all.
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