By Roy Mathur, on 2024-04-15, at 00:36:52 to 01:35:46 BST, for Captain Roy's Rusty Rocket Radio Show
It's been a busy week. I'll tell you all about it in the next one, but tonight it is again Hammer time! Have I used that joke before?
Notable Cast: Tom: Christopher Cazenove; Three Men and a Little Lady, A Knight's Tale..., Sarah: Celia Gregory; The Professionals, The Ruth Rendell Mysteries..., Mrs. Ardoy: Diana Dors; the UK's Marilyn Monroe, prolific career 1947--85, inc. The Unholy Wife and The Amorous Milkman
Director: Tom Clegg; inc. McVicar and Rosemary and Thyme
Writer: Murray Smith; also inc. Die Screaming, Marianne and the Don Henderson vehicle, Strangers and Bulman
Producer: Roy Skeggs; ex-Hammer Films, formed spin-off Cinema Arts, returned to Hammer, moved production to Buckinghamshire and created Hammer House of Horror.
Locations: Various in and around Buckinghamshire (1980). They break down at Bryants Bottom Road, Great Hampden and the country house is Hampden House, Buckinghamshire. The couple's mews house is at Napier Place and Trans World Airlines is in Russell Road, Kensington.
Production: Hammer Films, Cinema Arts, and ITC Entertainment
Distribution: ITV
Music: The memorable theme music was composed by ex-Jazz pianist Roger Webb.
Broadcast: Episode 8 of 13, first broadcast 1 November 1980, c. 54 minute running time (c. 1 hr inc. ads), follows The Silent Scream 528.Media: DVD Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Collection (2002), Blu-ray Hammer House of Horror: The Complete Series (2017) (worth buying because the series was shot on 35 mm film), ITVX in the UK (2023), Apple TV
The Russians blow something up and, god help me, Barbra Streisand's suicidally depressing song, Woman In Love is still number one in the UK.
A little girl savages a lamb. We cut to jet set lawyer, Tom, picked up by his wife, Sarah, at a TWA building after a successful business trip. We cut to their journey into the Somerset countryside to stay at a friend's holiday cottage. The car goes out of control and they break down. They see a gate off the main road and decide to seek help.
They follow the overgrown path to a house in the woods, where they are warmly greeted by a woman and meet her eight children. She explains that she and Mr Ardoy have Hungarian roots and follow traditions different to the English. Having no luck with on the phone, Tom tries to seek help on foot, but is chased back to the house after a werewolf attack. The woman gaslights him into thinking was a stag. The woman puts them up in a bedroom, but warns them not to wander as it might frighten her children. They hear howling and later Sarah sees a werewolf at the window. Locked in, Tom climbs down the drainpipe, but falls as he hears Sarah attacked by the werewolf, as the woman and the children watch.
Tom later awakes in hospital. Sarah tells him that he was concussed. Tom assumes he dreamed the previous events.
Sarah has changed. She loves sex and meat, and shortly thereafter says she is pregnant. Later, she suddenly leaves home and returns to the house in the woods. The woman and children greet her and she is taken to a bed with a small wreath of flowers placed against the headboard. Scared, she prepares to give birth.
Tom follows Sarah, but is lost and later helped by a woodcutter. He guides Tom deeper into the woods, transforms into a werewolf, then kills him with an axe. He is the mysterious Mr Ardoy.
Sarah dies during childbirth. The woman says of the baby, "He's going to be a fine, fine fellow, just like his dad." One of the children covers Sarah, outside, Mr Ardoy howls, and the girl places the wreath against a framed photograph of Sarah.
In the opening scene, the blood smeared across the little girl's mouth looks an incredibly fake raspberry jam colour.
Car trouble... again! HHOH really loves to overuse that device---The Thirteenth Reunion, Growing Pains, Charlie Boy---cars in the 80s could be bad, but he was driving a Beemer.
There's a scene in which Tom returns from Harrods with baby things, including a large teddy bear. I remember well the iconic green bag with gold lettering he carries. Ours usually contained a bit of venison and garlic sausage from Harrod's food hall.
Trying to convince a person that a werewolf is a stag is the worse gaslighting attempt I've ever heard.
Considering that the woman in the woods fed them well and put them up for the night, I thought it mean that Sarah refers to her as an "old bag". Though maybe she had an instint that the woman was up to no good. Diana Dors certainly plays the character sly, with her seductively friendly, though darting eyes. On the other hand, we should also consider the tone, which, on the whole, seems to be a little scornful of the terribly middle-class couple.
There's a goof in the script where Mr Ardoy describes the behaviour of a wolf pack as vulpine, a word that relates to the behaviour of foxes. They rushed these episodes out in a year, so the scriptwriting and editing was occasionally sub-par.
The creature design for the werewolf is the typical bipedal lycanthrope, like that of Lon Chaney Jr.'s werewolf in The Wolf Man (1941). I thought the rapist/axe murderer had inappropriately cute, teddybear-like facial features.
It's a simple story with Little Red Riding Hood fairytale-like elements; straying from the path, a house in the woods, wolves, and a woodcutter, with a touch of Hansel and Gretel's sweet old woman who lives in the woods.
The TWA building that Tom exits had me foxed. I don't remember anything of the sort and I know my London airports.
According to the website RBK Local Studies, the building was part of the West London Air Terminal. Wikipedia says:
The West London Air Terminal was a check-in facility for British European Airways flights from Heathrow Airport. It was located on Cromwell Road in Kensington, London, and was in operation from 6 October 1957 to 1 January 1974. After passengers checked in their baggage and received their boarding passes, they would travel to Heathrow Airport by coach. One of the drawbacks of using the terminal for checking in was that road traffic could delay the coaches and ultimately delay the departure of the flight.
In 533, I told you about my planned podcasting schedule and I seem to be sticking to it so far. That's something, right? Right?