The Gorgon - Hammer time. Again. I thought I had seen this one and I kinda sorta had. But it had been so long that I conflated it with another Hammer offering,
The Reptile. This particular Hammer however costarred Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and those three names are as close to a gold standard in the suspense/horror genre as there is. People are dying in the village of Vandorf in 1910 Germany. The authorities and local doctor are engaged in a coverup of sorts. the victims have all been turned to stone which you would think merits a second look. A young artist is found hanged and his death ruled a suicide. He's also blamed for the latest bizarre murder. His grieving father comes into town and starts digging around. When he meets the same fate his other son also travels to Vandorf looking for answers.
Cushing plays Dr. Namaroff, the resident alienist at the local mental asylum. Barbara Shelley plays his assistant Carla and Lee is Professor Karl Meister of Leipzig University. They gift Lee with the role of heroic curmudgeon and he turns in his usual peerless performance. Cushing does the grunt work and Shelley is there as the object of desire/wild card. It's Hammer so it's definitely worth watching.
75/100
From the Earth to the Moon - Got all confused from the get-go with this one. I thought I had seen it before but turns out I had only watched the first 20 or so minutes. Then I had also mistaken it for
First Men in the Moon, an all around superior film. In this one Joseph Cotten and George Sanders play Victor Barbicane and Stuyvesant Nicholl, competing inventors and manufacturers. The Civil War has just ended with Sanders side on the losing end and Cotten has just invented Power X, the most powerful explosive know to man. Sanders is the more religious one and considers the rapacious Barbicane a danger to humanity. They make a bet and when Barbicane's explosive projectile not only disintegrates Nicholl's armor but the entire hill behind it it also inadvertently fuses the armor into a ceramic.
Barbicane, knowing he could never test it on earth, had been toying with the idea of launching an explosive projectile at the moon to show people the true enormity of it's power. But with the danger of re-entering Earth's atmosphere now solved he decides to make it a manned flight and, appealing to the other man's scientific curiosity, talks Nicholl into helping him. Nicholl however, consumed by equal parts jealousy and religious fervor, has his own agenda. The two men, along with Barbicane's assistant and Nicholl's stowaway daughter, succeed in launching themselves at the moon.
This is when the movie veers away from what I thought it would be. The rest of the plot more closely resembled something like
Apollo 13 with the four passengers having to deal with Nicholl's attempt at sabotage. RKO studios, which was producing the film, was in the process of going belly up with the once healthy budget for the project having dried up. The script had originally included them landing on the moon but it was scrapped, resulting in a largely static and talky third act. Viewers are left scratching their heads and trying to find some kind of reason to keep caring.
50/100