Hammer House of Horror S01E08 - Children of the Moon

Welcome back to Midnight Viewing. I'm your host, Father Malone. In this season, we are surveying the eighties UK horror anthology classic, The Hammer House of Horrors, and with me is Mike White from the projection booth. Mike White, how are you, sir? I am a man who is pure of heart.

Perfect for tonight's viewing. Tonight, we are looking at the eighth episode of the only series of Hammer House of Horrors. This one is called Children of the Moon, released on November the first, nineteen eighty written by Murray Smith, directed by Tom Clegg. Tom Cleig a director, Roy Skaggs as a director, we only accept yeggs. What's been to college?

Mike? It's Naris, Christopher Casanova, Celia Gregory, Diana Doores and Robert Urkhardt Diana Doors. Of course it was a fucking gorgeous bombshell. UK Beauty started their career in nineteen forty six when she was fifteen. She was just fucking incredible.

She turned into one of those old broads that doesn't give a shit and tells it like it is. And apparently, during the nineteen sixties hosted so many orgies that it was like the most open secret in Hollywood, and evidently when she died left millions of dollars stashed somewhere in her house and no one has found it to this day. And if you look just to the right of George Harrison on the cover of Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, you're going to see Diana Doores. This is about a couple who stumble upon a house in the woods or is it a den? In certain single wolf howl here?

What did you think of this one, Mike? This could have been the most right just we've seen this a million times before. A couple gets lost in the woods and they happen upon the wrong house and what strange things are going on. We talked a few episodes ago about some pretty creepy kids. We've seen what at least two creepy kids so far in this season, and here you got a whole host of them and they managed to pull this out.

Man, this surprised me in quite a few ways. I was really happy with this. And again we talked in the last episode about the whole husband wife dynamic. Good dynamic in this as well. The husband could have turned into a dickhead, the wife could have turned into an awful person, but instead I think they kept a really good balance between these two characters who are really the heart of the story.

Yeah, the writing here on Hammerhouse of Fars have always been characters enter first, and it's always been interesting characters. They don't They do not lean on the notion that this is a short piece of fiction and we need to just plug in a stereotype or an iconic kind of character. They give us real people every single time with who react in real ways in these most of insane situations. The other thing this show is doing fucking one spectacular is the cold opens. The cold open here, Oh fucking awesome.

Man, little girl, two German shepherds her backs to the camera. She's petting. You can see it's a lamb lying on the ground, so it's petting a sleeping lamb. The German shepherds are keeping watch over the scene. No, the fucking lamb is dead and the girl has blood all over her mouth.

What a fucking great opening. It's interesting. So I did not know that they put out these as a video series, and I probably saw them at the video store that I went to, like one of my original video stores, like before Blockbuster. It was even a thing like going to I think it was called Fox Video. It was at the corner of Sibling in Fort Street, and it was just like a long corridor type of one room video store and they had all of these Alvira thriller videos.

And I remember her hosting a lot of movies, but I didn't realize that she hosted Hammer House of Horrors as well. So I found this episode with her intro, but I noticed that it was pretty much the same length of an episode, So I'm like, how is she doing the intro and it's the same length they cut the cold open. So yeah, so you didn't get to see that it starts once she cues it up. It starts with the plane landing, the husband coming back from his business trip, Robert Urcart and him having a conversation as they're leaving the airport, the wife picking him up. So we missed that cold open.

And like you said, these cold opens are fantastic because they give you these little clues, or this one's a big clue as to what's going to happen. I love when we see them driving to this vacation house. It's their honeymoon. They're driving out there and lambs on the side of the road. I think that's even before the cargoes crazy.

And again it's the cargoing crazy. I guess that's the supernatural part of this, the way that they have us and that sequence of them driving this out of control car and having those cuts to the cargoing one hundred miles an hour, and it really feels like they're very much in danger, and yeah, what's it do? It takes them It's basically like that carriage from Nasaratu. It takes them right to Castle Dracula, or in this case, it takes them to this Hungarian house filled with werewolf children. I love that the key snapped off in the ignition.

Oh wow, that was fantastic, And I love that as it's happening, she leans over and says, I knew something like this was going to happen. Did you know that? Did you? Why did you get in the car? Did you have problems with this car before?

Oh? Yeah, so this is our second Apparently if this series were to continue, that would be a tip off that the supernatural was suddenly involved when you lose control of your vehicle. Also, could everyone never mind the out of control portion could everyone in England please stop driving so fucking fast down those tiny roads that are blind curves. That's insanity. Man.

You can barely get one car down it, and people are just like, fuck it. Life short. I kept thinking, somebody who's going to run out onto the road. I'm just like, okay. The way that they filmed that looked really dangerous.

And yeah, it didn't look like that footage was sped up. It looked like they just hired a stunt driver said drive as fast as you. Can, like they brought in an Australian. Oh yeah. And then yeah, you come to the little cottage in the woods, just tucked away.

They had this little old lady opening up the doors and Dana Doors doesn't there's something about her where like her face looks very young. They've got this gray hair on her and I'm pretty sure they must have it's either a wig or they put this gray in her hair. She doesn't look that old. I know she probably was a little old at this point, but she looks fantastic. I don't see a wrinkle on her face.

No, she's fifty I think here, and evidently was a problem for her in her career in that she was trying to play age appropriate, and they kept saying you do not look like Grandma Moses, like we can't, And she apparently was known as well as saying dirty me up, I don't care. Make put the wig on me, put the wart on the end of my nose. I'm happy to do all of that. So probably a wig here, yeah, and yes, impossibly young looking for fuck's sake. Oh yeah.

She reminded me a lot of Velita Valdi, who was in things like Suspiria. But before that she had such a long career, and after that she had such a long career. I just watched her in that film Killer Nun again, one of these very ageless women, because I'm like, I saw you in movies from twenty years before this, and you look pretty much the exact same. You know how it is around these parts she says that about her husband off gallivanting and siring other children with other women. Oh these parts a movement England, Mike.

Yeah, yeah, really. What's that fine wine that they're drinking. Pino noir brude on site? Yes, Oh yeah, it's a special Hungarian recipe. I like how they just pin everything bad on Hungarians.

That's where those raggle taggle gypsies come from. And I have an idea for new cafe, Mike. You get to eat in a very cozy environment, but then half a dozen freaky children just stare at you in a half circle and they're super umpy. There's a spark from a fire. Yeah yeah, oh god, yeah, these kids, they so remind me of like Village of the Damned.

Some of them are blonde, not all of them, but yeah, they just have these little secret smiles from one to the other. Oh that that's our brother who's up there playing flute, and it's oh yeah. They remind me of those creepy twins from the Simpsons. But these are a bunch of non twins, but they're creepy as hell. Yeah, speaking of front loading like information, at one point, one of the little girls says, oh, no, I'm getting clumsy again.

Yes, that was weird because I was like, oh, do they beat her if she gets clumsy? What is going on here? That little moment too, talking about the flute playing brother. When I think I want to say, they do a dolly in zoom out or zoom out dolly in shot when they introduce him, and I'm just like, well, this is weird, and like the kids who are outside playing, like is that rear projection. There's just some very unusual things going on even in that shot.

And then the way that she like looks down at the kids, and the kids are all gone, and then she looks back at the brother. The brother's gone too, The kids outside are gone, and it's just wow. Those are really easy things to do, but they are so effective. Super subtle, like no visual effect at all, just all camera work, all editing, all economy. My god.

Man. At one point, they okay, they're going to stay the night, so Diana Doors is saying to them, it'd be best if you just stayed in your room tonight, which is always something you want to hear after the day you've had. But after she leaves, he says offhandedly, jokingly, like maybe it's some kind of looney bin And if they occurred to me that was actually a perfectly acceptable reason. If when she says you should stay in your room tonight, she should say some of the children have emotional problems and right, they're up in a right and we wouldn't want any accidents. That would I'd be like, that sounds reasonable to me.

Let's go to bed. Honey. I'm not gonna shimmy down the drain pipe. And fall like an idiot. After announcing I'm a logical man, I'm a lawyer, he like swings out the window and starts shooting that.

I watched this with Andrey and we both laughed out loud at that line. I really like that it's the husband who is the one that runs into the beast the first time, because normally it would be oh, honey, you're just imagining things, because there's a little bit of that, oh, you're just overreacting. But no, that the husband is the one that saw it, You're like, oh, okay, good, he's not going to now question his wife. Yeah. Yeah, it's all on him as a matter of fact.

And I you know me, Mike, I hate the gaslighting in these things when people are like, no, you saw a stag and they're like, they keep hammering and she keep going, so that stag you so, And even the wife at that she's not in on anything yet, she's yeah, you were just you were hallucinating out there. Basically, I'm like, why do you keep telling him this? It's obvious so that later on they can you know, complete that cover up. But oh yeah, no, it's very nice. And then they calm down a little bit, so it's not just like fever pitch.

We have to get out of here. We have to get out of here, and they're trying to approach things logically where it's just sorry, I'm jumping all over the place. But like when he gets on the phone and starts calling around to get like a rental car or like somebody to repair his car, I'm just sitting there thinking, not in this era. And obviously you and I grew up in this era, but I'm just like, gosh, without like maps in Google Maps or GPS or anything, you pick up a phone book, and how do you know how far things are away from you? Like, how do you just like where are you at that moment?

Because your car was completely out of control for I don't know how long. You made a bunch of turns, probably not following the route that you had set out for you to try to find this guy's free cottage that he's giving you for your honeymoon. How do you know where the hell you are? How do you know what is the nearest town to call for a any kind of repair or anything? I'm like it just we talked last episode about irrational fears.

That was my irrational fear for this one where I'm just like, oh wow, to just not even be able to like these days, I'm so used to it, just pick up your phone, hit maps and see exactly where you're at. Yeah, to be in a situation where you're like, I need to use your phone, I don't know where I am and I don't know who to call, Like, yeah, it's back to the as you said, we grew up in this era, so you would have written down the directions to the place, so that probably would have been in your pocket, and you could have at least said, I'm somewhere close to this area, But what do you operator, I need a car rental place somewhere near blah blah blah. That's actually that's actually the answer. But can the operator know from the number you're calling from where you are, Like, I'm trying to remember how that works, obviously, Like with nine one one, they could tell.

Yeah, I don't think so. At the time, I think, wow, yeah, they wouldn't have your address. I think I remember accidentally dialing nine one one once as a kid, and they stay on the line like you cannot hang up on nine one one. But they couldn't have told me where I was unless I told them. Do you know the first nine one one call happened February sixty, nineteen sixty eight in Alabama?

I did not. What was it in reference to that was. A trivia question from the game I played last night, And they were like, what number? What phone number was first called on this day? And they even gave the city that it was called from, And I was just like, is it nine one one?

Like the it's not the time, it's not the weather. It probably wasn't for one one, So yeah, it's just it's such a ubiquitous thing now where it's just oh doll nine one one that wasn't a thing, Like luckily you and I grew up when nine one one was an actual thing and then only to be told by public Enemy that nine one one is a joke. They were right, and ultimately we've been in a panic ever since. It's the fear of a black planet. That's right.

Welcome to the Tterodome, everybody. So bring the noise. About the rest of this episode. I loved that that the car crash enabled them to give them a story where you're in the hospital now, not from a fall. That must have been your imagination, sir, we were in a car accident together.

Oh my yeah, yeah, that is nice. I do like that, and I like that the first revelation of a real werewolf that we get to see is very muted. It's through a window, so we're not seeing it full on, face forward and everything. It's through the window, so you get that glance at at pretty quick shot. And then when you find out that they're on the second story, maybe even the third story of this house, You're like, how the hell is this wolf outside the window?

And then he goes outside. I'm like, what are you doing? Man? You just saw a wolf outside your window. He's logical, just like everything else going on here.

He is a lawyer. He is a lawyer. Yeah. And then when the werewolf actually shows up, they it was like a Tom Savini special. They went to the they went to a shadow, they went to a silhouette of the thing, which was completely effective.

Thank you for doing that. Oh good. Yeah, I have to say that the I'm not too familiar with our main couple, but Celia Gregory, first off, hot, Tomali like the Deanna Door's of her day, I would say, but great performance and is able to I think both of them our main characters are terrific. But I like how she gets to play a couple different versions of this character. Like when we see her after the attack, you're like, oh, something is wrong with her, and she plays at nice and subtle, very Rosemary from Rosemary's Baby.

Yeah, it's we are unaware how conspiratorial she is at this point. We do know something is off, But I gotta say it's if we weren't so practiced at these Mike, I might have believed her. I might have gone along with it. It very well could have been. That was all just in my head.

But then you get the nookie problem. The nookie problem, the oh my god, she's pregnant. I couldn't believe that. The guy's boss, Have you solved the problem? The nookie problem?

He's like, nookie right. He did say nookie problem? Yeah. Yeah, And that's like a continuation of an earlier conversation like, no, she's great in bed, Oh really? What, like, why are you guys so casually talking about this stuff?

Is that the patriarchy in nineteen seventy whatever? This is or nineteen eighty whatever. This is. Come on, guys, you don't just talk about your wife like that. Yeah, this is, and it was so I guess it was casual ten because the other guy was at least a little bit shocked.

But I guess he opened the door so that you can just go house your nookie situation eventually. There is some b roll stuff here that they shout at Heathrow Airport, speaking of times when we grew up watching the exhaust pouring out of that airplane. Yeah, just a sheer black clouds, like it's no wonder everyone was so obsessed with cleaning up the fucking environment after that decade. Man, everything was gross. Oh yeah, and yeah, England was really bad back then.

They talked about the days of the London fog and all of the soot and everything, and it took a long damn time to clean up after the Industrial Revolution, and they weren't doing much of that in the seventies, that's for sure. Oh no, And like it's fully on display here, like you can see why Cleana SCONCEI got made almost immediately. Hey, look how everything is terrible. We should probably document this. Yeah, do you remember the eat I haven't heard about the EPA and forever they've probably have been disbanded and maybe even put to death.

I don't know. It's because of that Walter Peck, Oh yeah, wouldn't leave those Ghostbusters alone, defamation ruin the entire organization. Yeah, yeah, maybe Walter Peck would turn off the power and save Brian Cox from the last episode. That would be ideal because I want that. I want those two crazy kids to live.

You know what, now they did it to themselves. Actually, I want her to live. Can they just let the door open once she could run out? And could they be waiting for her with a puppy? Oh there you go.

Somehow, the same puppy from before. They repet it like day after tomorrow or not the day after the fifth day. It's a clone, the little clone puppy. Yeah, Barbara Stroysan had it made for her. I love when they had a husband and wife are back together and she's basically just eating ra eat in front of him.

And you can explain that away as cravings. In pregnancy, there's a what a particular craving It's called what a pika where you want you want to eat clay. And yeah, sometimes laundry detergent and stuff. Yeah, but he's like going, what are you doing? And all I can think about in that scene was the only part of that movie wax Work that I liked, which is in the Vampire Diorama they're all eating bloody pieces of humans and they explained it away as steak tartar.

Yes, steak tartar. It's a little bit salty, And so when she was doing that, I was like, just tell him it's steak guitar. How far right for it? What is she snacking on? When you get to see her driving later, it almost looks like strips of liver.

Yeah, strips of some animal that they slaughtered there on the farm and gave her to do just that because she's not gonna want to eat cheerios anymore. Do they have cheerios in England? Probably not. They say goodbye, that's cheerios. Oh not today?

Yeah, not as tight as the last episode we talked about, but definitely it keeps you going and they do have some things. I thought it was hilarious towards the end of the episode when she drives off and the husband gets a call and goes out after her, tries to find that same place. You got that the kids helping hide her car and all those things, and he's just wandering around trying to find her. And what do you find a woodsman? And I'm like, oh, okay, so now we're talking about Little Red Riding Hood.

Okay, he's going to go in and chop up Grandma and get Little Red Riding Hood out of there. No, No, not at all, not at all. The motherfuckers quit playing with my emotions. Hammer. I was just fully on board for this man to go reek havoc and reclaim this man's wife for him.

And then as soon as he talks about Hungaria, I'm like, oh, he's in on it. No, yeah, that one that Diana Dors was mentioning out there fucking all the other women to make all these other rare wolves all over the place area, is you idiot? Yeah, he's the guy, he's the alpha. They're just creating his whole brood of puppies. Oh.

And that's what I like about this is we understand what's happening. We don't have to be told in painful detail. I'm just glad nobody just stopped the narrative cold and said, years ago we emigrated from Hungaria after the war, and blah blah blah, and what are you gonna do have an animated sequence where you get to see this guy running and making a whole bunch of puppies. No, this just gives us enough that we can again fill in the blanks and just know everything that's going on with this. And then the big question is, Okay, what's gonna happen with her?

She's majorly pregnant, has this accelerated birth rate because we know our birth cycle, because we know that she's not hosting a human baby. I'm just like, what's going to come out of the womb? Isn't going to have fangs and teeth. It's almost scarier that it looks like a real baby. Yeah, and what does happen to her now?

Because none of the other mothers have survived, Apparently they're killing all of them, leaving only Diana Dorris as the overall den mother. But this woman was so into it that I don't know. Yeah, they have that circle of flowers, that kind of nice pagan thing above her head like a halo. And then when she apparently dies in childbirth, they take all right, they put it next to that picture of her, and I love that they have a photo of her like just there on her bedside table. Yeah, she was obviously she was still active when Hubby was completely comatose.

You told me this like the very first episode that we recorded, about how this house is just the same house every single time, just redressed. And I love that when she comes back, we get to see those same hallways and everything, and I think they put her back in that same room where the attack happened. And then yeah, I have that little picture of her and she looks at it, this is weird and looks at that garland of flowers and is this is weird? But I'm like, but you're so into it. Is are you finally starting to realize what's going on?

And but no, she doesn't. No, she was just surprised to see the photo overWe herself there. Oh he really does, Like, yes, speaking of the we talk about the economy over there on Tails from the Dark Side, and those episodes always feel like every single one of them, no matter the time span of the episode itself feels like it's not a clock like it just feels like they're on the run from moment one. This episode takes place over months and felt fine the previous episode, same thing that was a matter of weeks that we were witnessing all that. You feel the passage of time without it feeling like a drag here, and it doesn't feel like a cheat like we remember in Tales from the Dark Side of the movie ten years later.

What, Yeah, you're talking about ten years. A lot of shit could have happened in those ten years. This feels natural And I don't know, I just throughout the entire series they've managed to do that. It's very impressive. Yeah.

No, the cinema language is fantastic, and we're not getting a whole lot of like long dissolves where it's and then time passes. It's no, we the audience are being telegraphed enough information that we know, oh, how's the nookie problem. We know that she wanted to quit having sex as soon as she got pregnant, and he says, you're what, you're only two months pregnant or something, So he's they're giving us like little signposts, but it's not like a billboard right in front of our face. And yeah, no on screen titles present day or six months later, any of these things. It's nice.

It's nice that they trust us as an audience to figure these things out. And that, but they also put it out there. The other thing is just not mentioned at all, and like hope you hope you figured it out. But they find this nice little sort of middle ground every single time to let us know what's going on and how long it's taking us to get there. I do really appreciate when the husband calls the woodsman, you woodsman.

I'm like, did you want to ask his name? Maybe like just hi, I'm Tom, and you are like no, just calls him woodsman. And when he turns into a werewolf and has that axe above his art picks it up over his head, I'm just like, that's really terrifying. Like that axe looks like it weighs what fifty pounds and least oh, I can see him just cleaning this guy in two. And it's a werewolf using an instrument of death.

I don't think I've seen that. No other than like the Van Helsing movie, that classic with Hugh Jackman. I've not seen a werewolf this intelligent. Before maybe those Underworld movies, if any Yeah, that's true, if anything in that movie can be considered intelligent. Ah Burn you.

Never understood why you would use werewolves to be the vampire's bodyguards since they're only were wolves what like three four days a month. Yeah, exactly. The werewolves have the inherent problem of the of being tied to the moon, which they do away with here because they just make it when it's nighttime in night. So I guess that's what happens when you have natural birth wear wolves rather than being bitten bio worf. That's true.

So everyone makes up the room. Oh definitely, Yeah, David, it's a full moon tomorrow. You need to kill yourself. The best werewolf movie of all time down straight, ladies and gentlemen. On the next episode of Midnight Viewing, we are going to hold onto our hearts with their Carpathian eagle until then, Where can people see you breaking hearts?

Mike White, I'm. Almost breaking hearts over at Wirdingwaymedia dot com, where you can listen to all of the shows that I do, like The Chabby Detective, the once a month discussion of Colombo, or the Projection Booth where once a week I talk about different movies different people and been doing it for coming on fifteen years now. So having my big anniversary coming up. Maybe somebody will throw me a party. Wow, my god, congratulations, it's amazing.

As for me, you're listening to what I do midnight viewing. We're on twice a week for the Maloon's weekly round up is on Thursdays or Fridays, depending on how lazy I am that week. That covers everything new in streaming and theatrical and television. And on Mondays you're gonna hear either this where Mike and I are looking at a horror anthology series, or one of our fests where HP and I look at something like well currently Star Trek Fest. If you want to hear any of those early or exclusive shows that aren't in the regular feed, hit up my Patreon channel, Patreon dot com, slash fatherm alone and until next time, everybody, try to enjoy the.

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