HAMMER TIME! BQ SWASHBUCKLES WITH PETER CUSHING'S HOLIER THAN THOU PIRATE....IN 'NIGHT CREATURES'

Night Creatures (1962)   What a fun, rip roarin' blast-from-the-past this was......82 minutes of non stop breathless melodrama pumped out by the Hammer horror factory at the height of their reign......

                Very little horror here (unless you count incognito pirate-smuggler-outlaw Dr. Bliss (Peter Cushing) and his posse gallping around at night in day-glo Halloween Skeleton outfits).......

                 But loads of violent action, all centered around a 1792 village surrounded with ghostly marshes for people to wade through......and drown in......

                Cushing's Dr. Bliss, formerly the infamous pirate Captain Clegg,  masquerades as the town's sanctimonious Parson while he and his merry band (including the ever smoldering Oliver Reed) go about sneaking in contraband French wine.......

               Naturally, importing the illegal hooch doesn't sit well with with Capt. Collier (Patrick Allen) and his force of Royal Marines............and as a bonus minion, they've carted along one of  Capt.Clegg's old pirate crew (the inevitable, huge Eurasian, Milton Reid), who's nursing a Milton-sized grudge over Clegg leaving him stranded on an island with his tongue cut out)....

                As Danny Kaye sang in "The Court Jester"........plenty of derring-do....and some folks end up at the angle that herring do.....

                And one year later after this film's release, came a slightly kinder, gentler, Disney-fied version of this material......from who else, Walt Disney's TV show The Wonderful World Of Color, with the relentlessly taciturn Patrick McGoohan..........(as opposed to Cushing's neon-bright skeleton outfit, McGoohan suits up as a scarecrow, complete with guttural, gargling voice delivery.....)

              But in Disney's version, of course, you won't  see such fun stuff as a wide-eyed corpse in his coffin and a tongue-less Milton Reid and Cushing going at each other like steel-cage wrestlers.....yipeeeeee!    For "Night Creatures", we Hammer out 4 stars (****)

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