Straight on Till Morning : Boring Hammer Flick

Just watched this - it's seriously dull. The camerawork is distracting and the characters are so poorly defined that you don't really care what happens to them. AVOID!

I didn't find it to be very dull or boring, but I think there are many Hammer films that are more satisfying. As far as Hammer thrillers go, this would be placed more toward the bottom of my list with "Demons Of The Mind," and "When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth."

I'd have thought that Peter's "cruel actions" were pretty much the driving force of the film's plot!

It's a HORROR film, Mark! What do they expect? 90 minutes of immersion in the milk of human kindness?

I can only read what is in your comments on the thread, Mark, not what is in your mind. As it happens, I agree with what you have written above.

Probably not. That said, I haven't found your prose-style the easiest to disentangle.

Given that you freelance for several magazines you've proven beyond a shadow of doubt that you're the greatest prose stylist since Doctor Johnson and that in failing to extract one choice declarative sentence from the thickets of your earlier verbiage I'm a *beep* idiot. Point well made! Good day yourself, O Master of the English Language.

You know you love me really!

I liked it, definitely not boring

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When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth

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I wouldn't call it boring, but it is one of the worst Hammer films I've seen.

"I wished Her back but the dead adored Her, Even wild winds sang in chora for Her"

This is one Hammer movie I never thought was boring. I found out years ago, this movie was double billed in the UK with Fear in the Night. Now that movie was boring. A by the numbers pot-boiler that was so predictable. Worst Hammer? Evil of Frankenstein, Maniac (Oh please)Hysteria (Come on)and of course, Fear in the Night. Now that I think of it, Crescendo could possibly be the worst Hammer movie ever made.

Boring? This film is, among other things, a textbook of psychology, normal (Tom Bell, Katya Wyeth), abnormal (Shane Briant) and troubled-but-functioning (Rita Tushingham, James Bolam). I'll concede that the central conceit - Shane Briant's Peter-Pan complex - is weakly established (and quite unlinked to his consequently arbitrary hatred of beauty), but this is surely preferable to the tediously over-elaborated backstory that would be provided for his character in a modern film on the same theme. If nothing else, this is a magnificent time-capsule of very-early 1970s London, especially Earl's Court (before it became a semi-official outpost of the Levant).

Actually, all the major characters had one form of mental disorder or another. This applies even to the several older women that were attracted to Peter's "beauty" and got murdered as a result.

Brenda was actually almost as crazy and obsessed as Peter, though in a nonviolent way. She was so desperate to get a child that she didnt mind getting it from a complete stranger. She lied about pregnancy and left her mother to go to London by herself to find a father. Like the other women, she was so obsessed with Peters beauty that she abducted his dog in order to get close to him. Such an obsession in a different film of course could have driven a person to violence too.

I also wouldnt say that Caroline (the Katya Wyeth character) was normal. She was definitely promiscuous. She probably at first had good intentions when she searched for Brenda, but she then immediately ended up having sex with Peter - even after he lied and said that Brenda had moved in with him.

I suppose this points up the difficulty of determining what is or isn't normal. I'd still maintain that Tom Bell and Katya Wyeth's characters functioned normally within the social milieu that they inhabited. Promiscuity might be a deviant behaviour for a 34-year-old spinster who lives with her aged mother and works as a librarian in the provinces, but it wouldn't be for a freewheeling, London-based late-60s/early 70s dolly-bird working on the fringes of the fashion industry. (Also, personality is complex; a person who does "bad" things can still retain decent impulses.) For that matter, Tom Bell's character is ruthless, shallow and opportunistic, but he functions quite rationally (if unlikeably) in the world he inhabits and with the personality traits he possesses.