By Roy Mathur, on 2023-08-31, at 23:57:53--00:33:05 GMT, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
Happy Hallowween from Castle Royenstein.
Today's non-podcasty events: I bade a sad goodbye to the car as it left for the scrapper this morning, I randomly started talking about my long dead grandfather (Halloween and Pitru Paksha liminal weirdness means that the dead are floating about in my subconscious), we made and ate our famous delicious savoury pumpkin pie, and I am very tired, but still somehow must tape one last Halloween revisit tomorrow.
I'm going to need a rest after that, so don't expect the daily podcast to continue. This is a one-off Halloween special event, so enjoy it while it lasts and then I will return to a more reasonable upload schedule.
Noteable Cast: Reporter Ruth Cairns: Julia Foster; prolific, unusually, not in anything I recognise, Weight Loss Client Ben Faraday: Warren Clarke; inc. Dim in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Scar in Hawk the Slayer (1980), P.E. Instructor Mr Willis: James Cosmo; The Stone Tape, Doomwatch, tough guy in various roles
Director: Peter Sasdy; also directed for Hammer Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), Countess Dracula (1971) and Hands of the Ripper (1971), and Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape (1972), etc.
Writer: Jeremy Burnham; actor in The Avengers, co-authored Children of the Stones (1977), etc.
Producer: Roy Skeggs; formerly of Hammer Films, formed spin-off Cinema Arts, returned to Hammer, moved production to Buckinghamshire and created Hammer House of Horror
Locations: Various locations in Buckinghamshire in 1980.
Theme Music: The memorable earwormy theme music was composed by Roger Webb an ex-Jazz pianist.
Broadcast: Episode 2 of 13, first broadcast 20 September 1980, 54 minute running time, follows Witching Time covered in pod 507.
Media: DVD Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Collection (2002), Blu-ray Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Series (2017), ITVX in the UK (2023).
Same as in the last episode, the number one song in the UK was still Scottish singer, Kelly Marie's excellent poppy disco version of Feels Like I'm in Love.
Reporter Ruth goes undercover to investigate an unusual dieting course at a clinic. During a degrading session in which Willis humiliates the clients, she meets Ben who has been prescribed drugs and told to binge. Driving home after a dinner date with Ruth, Ben hallucinates and fatally crashes.
Ruth later meets Andrew, a young undertaker, who tells her Ben's corpse, and others who died in similar suspicious circumstances were brought to his workplace. Breaking in, they discover the bodies replaced by dummies and that his bosses are taking them tto the clinic. Ruth goes undercover again, finds more bodies, and tails the director back to his country house.
There Ruth is discovered and is invited to stay for dinner. She is told that the dinner party consists of survivors of a plane crash who and this is their thirteenth reunion. The big reveal is that they survived until they were rescued by resorting to cannibalism and now crave the taste of human flesh supplied by the clinic. Willis arrives and says that he was a survivor too and then murders Ruth with a meat cleaver.
As a Whovian, this reminded me of New Who's first the first Adipose episode. Doctor Who: Partners in Crime (2008), which also featured an investigation into a sinister dieting firm.
I was interested seeing such well-known faces from British TV, particularly Clarke and Cosmo. It's amusing to see that Cosmo was typecasted as an unrelenting bastard early in his career. I was so taken with Foster that I wish I was more familiar with her work, but alas, her participation in geeky media content is limited.
I loved the protagonist. She was charming, but not too young or ludicrously attractive, and an intrepid reporter.
I was hooked to this, as I always am to anything in which the protagonist is a journalist because I was one myself. Julia Foster is engaging and charismatic as an investigative reporter when she teams up with Gerard Kelly and the pair go Scooby Dooing. I found the burgeoning relationship between her and Warren Clarke sweet. Her likeability made the brutal shock ending all the more disturbing. This is my favourite of the three of I have watched to far.
The 2017 Blu-ray (Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Series) is overpriced as it is out of production. With all the other options for owning ir watching it, don't pay scalper prices.
The pedigree of some of the acting talent producer Roy Skeggs snagged to star in this series is staggering. I haven't researched this, but I suspect he must have taken a leaf out of Amicus's Milton Subotsky's genius for scheduling the shooting to fit into the time celebrities had to spare.
Please follow along with my revisit, which will continue after Halloween until I cover all thirteen episodes. The DVD is widely and cheaply available and the series can also be streamed free on ITVX in the UK.
Let me know what you think about Hammer House of Horror and I'll speak to you tomorrow.