A trained mime, yet! Now, why didn’t we see any of that on screen? What we did get, however, was a veritable pot pourri. From early not-quite-theres fighting sillicon gone mad with Vincent Price in The Aries Computer and copping off with chicken-drummers-era Brando in The Nightcomers, through ill-advised career-haunting Italian sauce Blue Movie Blackmail (alongside Patricia Hayes as Mamma the Turk!) and into a rich seam of horror, including Schizo, And Now the Screaming Starts and, er, Inseminoid.
FINEST HOUR: Dicing with death in the name of ‘a quiet bit of mind-blowing’ as the groovy dropout granddaughter to Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing in Dracula AD1972.
damien
October 4, 2010 at 4:58 am
i sold her some cable tv back in the day!
George White
October 23, 2023 at 2:37 pm
The Aries Computer was never actually made.
Sidney Balmoral James
October 23, 2023 at 7:58 pm
Extraordinarily varied career without ever becoming an institution – crappy sexploitation films, working opposite Brando (admittedly for Michael Winner, which doesn’t really count), high-gloss TV (the Colbys), low-grade TV (Bad Girls), a clutch of Hammers, Seaquest DSV, Coronation Street, and a lot of theatre. The Aries Computer does sound like something someone came up with, Alan-Partridge like, on the spur of the moment and then had to desperately come up with a concept. ‘Its got Vincent Price, and a giant computer and er……’ Actually, I’m always a bit surprised by how Price continued to be employed into the 1970s in horror etc. as let’s be frank, in an era of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hammer films and their like are pretty ribby, and Price, who had been a leading man for thirty years, was really showing his age, and his lack of interest (the Phibes films apart). But then horror as a genre is pretty puzzling.
George White
October 24, 2023 at 7:54 am
The thing is, he made four great films in the 70s – the two Phibes pictures, Theatre of Blood, and I’ll vouch for Madhouse, which is a really interesting picture iMO, not perfect but full of memorable bits, particularly that ending.
The Aries Computer was part of a series of TVMs made by Gold Key Television, a US syndication company. Others planned were Curse of the Moonchild, a thriller set in Victorian London starring Adam West,
These films haunted filmographies for years, people wondering ‘did they exist?’ To confuse matters, they were even listed in syndication catalogues as programmes to buy. Some interesting casts listed. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ka_LLKxHtzw/TWxm_Oj7GdI/AAAAAAAALwo/OsFWR_eC3es/s1600/zodiaclist.jpg I do wonder if it was related to Graham Williams’ planned BBC/US series of TVMs, ‘the Zodiac Factor’.
Sidney Balmoral James
October 24, 2023 at 7:32 pm
I am less fond of Theatre of Death than some people, which is a bit grim (several of the deaths are pretty horrible for a jokey film) and Price is a bit too conscientious to make Lionheart a real ham but it has a high reputation amongst horror fans. Madhouse of course has the horror debut of Michael Parkinson, in an otherwise dreadfully overlong sequence consisting of clips of old Price films – David Shipman describes the effect as ‘masturbatory’!
Richardpd
October 23, 2023 at 11:09 pm
Tenko was another series Stephanie Beacham was in.
Hammer started to make sitcom spin off films as their old school horrors went out of fashion, though some later ones upped the kink factor.
As well as continuing to act Vincent Price seemed to do lots of other odd endorsements in his later years, like putting his name to paint by numbers kits, making that documentary about roller coasters with the Grandstand theme, writing cookbooks among other things.