The Hammer Collection

oddbodd · The Hammer Collection

I've spent the past few months getting through this 21-disc collection, which gives a very thorough sample of Hammer's output from their heyday. Although they'll always be linked to the horror genre, Hammer also diversified into the areas of thrillers and fantasy, and this collection has elements of all of these.

However, it must be said that the better examples within this collection are the horrors. Often, this is down to the excellence of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, but the efforts of other Hammer stalwarts such as Barbara Shelley, Ralph Bates, Andrew Keir and Michael Ripper are just as crucial to the impact of the films.

On the negative side, Hammer produced so many films that it would be naïve to imagine they didn't make anything rubbish. For the most part, these film are where Hammer strayed from their Horror specialty. This is not to say that their thrillers and fantasies don't have roses between their thorns - The Nanny and She being examples of good ones.

As a box set, it has a fine representative sample, covering many of their subgenres and with a number of excellent guest stars, such as Jeames Donald, Honor Blackman, Bette Davis, Ursula Andress and Charles Gray. I'd reccommend it to anybody who is really interested in Hammer and what they produced, but not to anyone who'd simply like to see their better stuff. That being said, I've recently seen it on sale in HMV for £45 - not bad at about £2 per movie.

The full list of films is below, with my humble ratings.

Very Happy