For those of you who haven't heard the latest, Hammer Studios has taken a new lease on life...proving once again you can't keep a good vampire down...
BY THOMAS K. GROSE
Starting in the late 1950s, Hammer Film Productions churned out scores of campy horror and science fiction hits, ranging from The Curse of Frankenstein and The Mummy to When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, a creaky forerunner of Jurassic Park. They made Hammer Britain's most successful and popular film company of the time.
By the early '70s, however, Hollywood and the movie-going public's tastes moved on to more realistic (read grosser) depictions of gore. Films like The Exorcist and The Omen eventually drove a stake through Hammer's heart; in 1976, the studio went into receivership.
But in a plot line right out
of one of its movies, Hammer Films has cheated death and lives
again. A group of British investors that includes wealthy ad
impresario Charles Saatchi recently purchased 50 percent of the
company for $9 million. The group envisions extending the Hammer
brand to a series of projects, including restaurants, a theme
park, and video and virtual-reality games.
Hollywood also is showing renewed interest in the company, and several remakes of Hammer favorites are in the offing. Jan De Bont, the Danish director of Speed as well as of the upcoming sequel Speed 2, is developing and may direct a remake of Hammer's The Day the Earth Caught Fire for 20th Century Fox. And Alex Proyas, who directed The Crow, is well along with plans to remake Quatermass and the Pit, another sci-fi classic, for New Line Cinema. Other directors also have expressed interest in remakes.
A resurrected Hammer should enjoy a built-in audience. It's a fondly remembered filmmaker in the United States and on the Continent and is wildly popular in Japan. Generations of younger Americans, who missed out seeing first-run Hammer films, have become fans via late-night TV, cable outlets like the Sci-Fi Channel, and video. Anchor Bay Entertainment, a Michigan company, plans to rerelease 16 Hammer videos over the next year or so in digitally mastered, wide-screen versions.
To youngsters growing up in the 1960s, the appeal of Hammer Films was obvious: It was the first filmmaker to combine Technicolor gore and scantily-clad actresses (think Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.). Later, more sophisticated audiences were amused by the hammy acting and often-cheesy special effects. Alan Barnes, coauthor of The Hammer Story, attributes the films' enduring popularity to craftsmanship. "They were romantic horror films, sexy not sexual, with serious themes. They were done with class, style, and élan."
Specter of doom. Hammer's history is as foggy as some of its films' sets. Started by vaudevillian actor Will Hammer, it was originally a film distributor. By 1936, however, it was making its own movies. Celluloid success eluded Hammer until 1955, when it remade the BBC-TV film The Quatermass Experiment for theatrical release. Hammer's breakthrough came the following year with The Curse of Frankenstein, Britain's first color horror film. Its stock company of stars, including Christopher (Dracula) Lee and Peter (Baron Frankenstein) Cushing, became household names. But in the '70s, drive-ins and Saturday matinees, the traditional American venues for Hammer films, were becoming scarce. That, combined with competition from Hollywood fare driven more by special effects, led U.S. distributors to pull out, sealing Hammer's fate.
In 1982, however, Roy Skeggs, a former Hammer accountant and board member, rescued the company from bankruptcy. The company squeaked by on revenues from residuals and other licensing agreements. Two years ago, Skeggs enlisted ICM, a top talent agency, to represent Hammer in Los Angeles. Then, last month, the group involving Saatchi bought into Hammer. The deal maker was Neil Mendoza, a London trade-magazine publisher and Saatchi business associate. Mendoza's lawyers are vetting contracts going back 60-plus years (including the will of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, which gives Hammer the rights to film The Hound of the Baskervilles) to determine which film rights belong or have reverted back to Hammer. Mendoza estimates his lawyers may unearth rights worth as much as $33 million. In 1968, Hammer Films won a Queen's Award for Industry for being one of Britain's top exporters--the first and only filmmaker to win one. But the British film industry has long since become moribund. "People looking for signs of life in the British film industry recently have been disappointed," says London-based media analyst Mark Bielby. Ironically, a back-from-the-crypt Hammer could once again become the U.K. film industry's biggest name.
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