TheRetroCritic

You know those old B movies where you don't see the monster until the last 10 minutes and until then you're made to sit through a slow-moving narrative and endless shots of people walking around in dark rooms looking perplexed? Well, The Reptile is one of those movies. But is the payoff worth it? Almost. There is fun to be had throughout this Hammer horror thriller: Noel Willman is great as the troubled and decidedly odd Dr Franklyn, the Reptile looks the business and there are enough anomalies in the film itself to keep fans of bad movies nitpicking and entertained. The lighting is all over the place: with a single candle lighting a whole house and day turning to night back and forth without rhyme or reason. The continuity is often questionable, the locations cheap-looking and some scenes are clearly either missing entirely or awkwardly there to fill in a gap. Overall, The Reptile is one for the more patient viewers: it's not particularly exciting and t

Using pretty much exactly the same sets as The Reptile , Plague of the Zombies is Hammer's only zombie venture and is well worth a look. Infinitely more threatening than The Reptile, the film starts pretty much exactly in the same way with mysterious deaths, funerals, grave robbing and generally sinister goings on but it soon introduces some nifty antagonists. The genuinely unpleasant group of fox-hunters, led by Alexander Davion, terrorise Diane Clare's innocent daughter, John Carson's shady Squire is a constantly untrustworthy presence, and then of course there are: the zombies. Unfortunately they are a little disappointing in that they are reduced to lumbering mine-workers with bad skin and only truly shine during one terrific dream sequence. Jacqueline Pearce's beheading, however, is an unexpected (but welcome) gory moment. Unlike The Reptile, this feels more focused and less clumsy in its approach. The lighting and editing feel more polished and