Harefooted Halloween: Twins of Evil

What I Liked: The visual style is awesome, especially the scenes that take place in Karnstein castle.  There’s a large main room with a massive fireplace, balconies, a sacrificial alter in the middle with a pentagram on the floor, there’s creepy cobweb filled catacombs, dimly lit passages and there’s always some fog roving around.  Great atmosphere.

Peter Cushing (Tales from the Crypt (1972)) as a puritanical religious zealot is fantastic.  It’s weird to think he was in Star Wars only the year before because he’s so reserved in that and here he plays a very passionate man.  He’s a terrible person though who burns innocent women at the stake, forces his extreme views on everyone he comes across and excites others to do the same.  With so much fire in his eyes this is probably one of his best performances.

In fact I’ll say the acting is good all around including Mary and Madeleine Collinson who were Playboy playmates that oddly always appeared as twins in a handful of movies.  And Damien Thomas (Shogun) as Count Karnstein may be hammy but I like him in here anyway.

What I Didn’t Like: One of the twins is good and the other is evil but it’s not established why.  I guess they were just born that way?  I feel like there’s a scene missing setting up these dispositions.

There are a couple of confusing continuity issues.  When the wicked twin comes back from sneaking out of the house seemingly for the first time the decent twin confronts her about having to cover for her over several days.  So either these night excursions have been going on for a while or the bad twin was gone for days.  It’s not clear.  And then towards the end when Cushing’s mob storms the castle most of the shots are in the daytime but there are some that look like nighttime.  And this isn’t the day for night technique you sometimes see in older movies.

Karnstein’s hairdo is rough.  He’s got a wall of hair Elaine from Seinfeld sorta thing going on.

Overall Impressions: A really fascinating direction the film goes in is turning the gang of murderous Puritans from the bad guys into the good guys by the third act.  They’re completely wrong in their thoughts and actions but they become validated through the existence of real vampires committing despicable crimes.  On one hand this bothers me a lot.  On the other it makes for a thought provoking viewing.  Even one of the townies (David Warbeck (Duck, You Sucker)) who abhors these guys joins up with them because he recognizes there’s a greater evil that needs to be taken care of.

This is a cool Hammer picture with a bunch going on.  It’s a good deal better than Vampire Circus form a few days earlier (they apparently used the same sets although you never would’ve guessed).

It’s also the third in the Karnstein vampire trilogy.  The Vampire Lovers and Lust for a Vampire (which came out the same year as this) are the other two.  I’ll have to watch the second installment one of these days.

I find it amazing how effortless these Hammer movies come off.  It kinda feels like they’re always flying by the seat of their pants but they turn out alright in the end.  After you get through the A tier stuff like Horror of Dracula, The Curse of Frankenstein and The Mummy (1959) check out this B tier piece.