Review: The Hand of Night


William Sylvester is still grieving for the deaths of his wife and child in a car accident. On an airplane voyage he makes friends with archaeologist Edward Underdown and is talked into catching up with him in Morocco. When an ancient tomb is discovered on one of Underdown’s excavations, it appears to release vampiress Aliza Gur. Sylvester becomes haunted by her, and Underdown’s pretty stepdaughter Diane Clare tries to rescue him from Gur’s otherworldly influence. Or something like that.

Cheap, uneventful supernatural horror flick from 1968 just goes to show that the Italians and Spaniards are much better at this kind of ghostly thing than the Brits tend to be. Directed by Frederic Goode (“Death is a Woman”, “The Syndicate”, “Avalanche”) and scripted by Bruce Stewart (a veteran TV writer), there’s no goddamn plot after about an hour. Nothing was going on, nothing worth a damn at least, unless you find rubber bats, muddy photography shot at 4PM (Or more likely, a badly failed attempt at ‘day for night’ photography), and stupid dream sequences to be ‘something’. Slightly ahead of an Al Adamson crap-fest or one of those shitty Spanish-lensed horror flicks an ailing Boris Karloff ended his career with, this is just so unbearably tedious.

Stiff lead actor William Sylvester looks to be in an horrendous state of mind, and it’s not an acting thing. Diane Clare is comparatively not awful, though she completely fails to maintain whatever vaguely European accent she’s attempting (By the way, the largely non-UK bit players appear to speak English as a seventh language at best. You’ve been warned). The best performance, and frankly the only source of interest whatsoever here, comes from Edward Underdown. He can’t save it, though, as he’s not Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, or Robert Morley (his co-star in “Beat the Devil”).


It’s all a lot of dreamy mind-fuck nonsense, people talking in riddles, all of which Sylvester responds to with a constipated look on his face. The film tries to get us to think of vampires in a different way, but the alternative we get here is boring as fuck. The icing on the turd cake is the irritatingly insistent music score by Joan and John Shakespeare (“Connecting Rooms”). It’s horribly off-key right from the word go.

A cheap, unbelievably boring horror item that cries out for some sex or violence, or a director with a sense of style or the surreal. Crushingly dull, this forgotten item is best left alone.


Rating: D-

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Hellraiser (2022)

Recovering junkie Odessa A’zion accompanies scuzzy boyfriend Drew Starkey on a break-in where all they find is a weird puzzle box. A’zion later opens the box and after some weird shit happens, A’zion and Starkey figure it might be a good idea to learn more about this messed up trinket. Goran Visnjic plays a millionaire who possessed the box before our protagonist nicked it.   Is there any point in remaking/rebooting “Hellraiser” when the 1987 adaptation of Clive Barker’s original text was written and directed by Barker himself? And is considered a horror classic? On evidence here, absolutely not. Directed by David Bruckner ( “The Signal” ) and scripted by Ben Collins ( “The Night House” ) and Luke Piotrowski (ditto) this is an entirely tedious affair. I took a long time to get on board with the 1987 “Hellraiser” , I have to admit. It was wildly imaginative and original, like a nightmare transplanted on to film. However, the characters were stone cold and left me similarly chilly t
Read more

Review: Boyka: Undisputed

Yuri Boyka (Scott Adkins) is out of prison and fighting for a living, with ambitions for the ‘Most Complete Fighter’ to make a real name for himself. However, after an opponent dies during a fight, the deeply religious Boyka starts to have a crisis of conscience. He tries to make amends with the man’s widow, which eventually pits him against a local gangster (Alon Moni Aboutboul, quite good). Anything with Scott Adkins will generally get me interested, and although this series peaked with the superlative “Undisputed II: Last Man Standing” , this 2017 film from director Todor Chapkanov (director of the SyFy movies “Copperhead” and “Ghost Town” ) is no slouch in a series yet to deliver anything less than solid entertainment. Producer Isaac Florentine is missed in the director’s chair, but Chapkanov gives us at the very least the series’ most dramatically ambitious entry, as Adkins’ ‘most complete fighter’ Yuri Boyka continues on his journey to redemption here. In this one, the
Read more

Review: Ninja 2: Shadow of a Tear

Scott Adkins is once again Casey, an American proponent of the martial art of Ninjutsu. When Casey’s pregnant Japanese wife (Mika Hijii) is rubbed out, he’s on a vengeance mission to find her killers. A friendly face, Nakabara (Kane Kosugi) turns up at the funeral, and suggests Casey come to Thailand to deal with his grief in another country. Casey initially declines, but eventually takes Nakabara up on his offer. However, his wife’s murder still haunts Casey, and with intel supplied by Nakabara, the trail eventually leads Casey to a brutal drug baron named Goro (Shun Sugata).   I was extremely disappointed with the first “Ninja” , but had heard that this 2013 sequel from director Isaac Florentine ( “Undisputed II: Last Man Standing” , “Undisputed III: Redemption” , “Ninja” ) was a damn near masterpiece of the martial-arts action movie genre. Having now finally gotten my hot little hands on it, I’d say the hype is a bit much, but this is unquestionably a much better film than the f
Read more