The “Karnstein Trilogy” could so easily have been derailed by the awful Lust for a Vampire (1971), but for the third and final film in the series, Hammer did the sensible thing and hired John Hough, a director who was much more engaged with the film than Jimmy Sangster had been with its predecessor and the result was one the company’s finest films.
Set 160 years before the first two films, it functions as a sort of “origin” story for the Karnstein clan. It starts with a great opening sequence with 17th century puritan witch hunters The Brotherhood, led by the zealous Gustav Weil (Peter Cushing) hauling a young woman (Judy Matheson) off to the pyre and setting her alight for alleged witchcraft. Shortly afterwards, twins Maria (Mary Collinson) and Frieda Gelhorn (Madeleine Collinson) arrive from Venice to stay with their uncle Gustav and he’s not at all happy with having two young women, from the sophisticated city of Venice, under his roof. Frieda in particular resents her uncle’s repressive ways and becomes fascinated with his arch-enemy, the decadent nobleman Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas). When Karnstein raises his vampiric ancestor Mircalla (Katya Wyeth), she turns him into one of the undead and he seduces and turns Frieda. When Frieda is captured by the Brotherhood and imprisoned, Karnstein has her replaced in jail by the innocent Maria planning to have her burned at the stake leaving Frieda unscathed. Young teacher Anton (David Warbeck) has to persuade the Brotherhood of their error before it’s too late.
Hough knew how to wring the most from a meagre budget better than either Roy Ward Baker (director of the first film in the trilogy, The Vampire Lovers (1970)) or Jimmy Sangster. Ray Stannard’s Castle Karnstein set is a thing of beauty, a huge, magnificent edifice that probably used up much of the film’s design budget (the scenes in the village were filmed on standing sets left over from Countess Dracula (1971)) and Dick Bush’s gorgeous photography looks like it belongs to a much more expensive film. Twins of Evil is easily one of the best looking of Hammer‘s 1970s films. Hough wrings maximum suspense from the extended finale, first setting Anton off on aw ill-he-make-it-in-time dash to save Maria from Weil and then a cracking climax where the angry villagers storm the castle. In scenes like this, Twins of Evil feels as much like an action film as it does a traditional Hammer Gothic.
The lesbianism has all but been eradicated from Twins of Evil and indeed the urge to have its leading ladies disrobe at every opportunity is kept to a minimum, Tudor Gates’ script proving to be a lot less leeringly juvenile that then other Karnstein films. Twins of Evil still trades in the sex (mainly involving the Collinsons) and violence that had become Hammer‘s stock-in-trade by this point but Hough deploys the former sparingly and the latter lavishly to much more interesting effect.
Cushing gives an extraordinary performance, one of his very best, and relishes the pick of the best lines (“What kind of plumage is this?” he storms when he first sees the twins in their Sunday best.) His Weil is as terrifying as Karnstein, giving the film an extra layer of nuance as both sides, the extremities of evil and pious “good” range against each other and everyone else becomes collateral damage. Weil’s long-suffering wife, beautifully played by Kathleen Byron, even suggests to him that Frieda went off the rails because of his authoritarian nonsense. It’s been suggested that Cushing was channelling some of his grief at the recent death of his wife Helen who passed away only weeks before filming began and certainly Cushing has the start of that gaunt and haunted look that would mark the rest of his career. His fire and brimstone sermon to his wife is a hate-filled rant of self-righteous but impotent rage, beautifully played by Cushing.
Elsewhere, David Warbeck is stuck with the underwriter younger male lead, Dennis Price appears all too briefly as Karnstein’s familiar but is marvellous in his every scene, eight years after playing a particularly sensual and ferocious vampire in The Kiss of the Vampire (1963) Isobel Black falls victim to one and Katya Wyeth gets the briefest of turns as Mircalla who disappears from the plot once she’s bitten Karnstein. Damien Thomas was told by Hough to give his performance a Shakespearian flourish and he plays Karnstein first as an arrogant and entitled monster but near the end as an abject coward, sending Frieda out of the crypt to see if the path is clear while he cowers in the doorway before using Maria as a human shield when he’s cornered before threatening to throw her to her death from a balcony.
The Collinson twins were spotted by co-producer Michael Style in the October 1970 issue of Playboy where they’d been the magazine’s first twin centrefolds and persuaded Hammer to abandon its planned Village of the Vampires and build a new film around them. And very good they are too though the plot device regarding Frieda and Maria being swapped at the stake doesn’t really work. “I swear I’ll never be able to tell the difference,” coos their aunt when she first meets them but there are some small but noticeable physical differences and for some reason Hammer decided to dub one of them with a refined English accent and the other wits some unplaceable European one. It helps the audience work out who’s who but should have tipped the characters off too.
It’s not a perfect film – there’s the never-answered question of who was committing the vampire murders before Mircalla is revived and the film slips over – just the once – into the prurience of Lust for a Vampire in the embarrassingly bad moment when Mircalla rubs suggestively at a candle while having sex with Karnstein. But these are minor missteps in a film that redeemed Hammer for the dreadful Lust for a Vampire and showed that when they took the care to cast the right actors, employ the right director and above all take the trouble to come up with an inventive and well-written script there was still very much life in the old dog. Sadly it was the last we would see of the Karnsteins as Hammer switched its attention back to the Dracula films and there would just one more Dracula-free vampire film, Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974) before the company went into its long hibernation later in the decade.
Crew
Directed by: John Hough; The Rank Organization presents a Hammer production; Produced by: Harry Fine and Michael Style; Screenplay by: Tudor Gates; Based on Characters Created by: J. Sheridan Le Fanu; Director of Photography: Dick Bush; Editor: Spencer Reeve; Music Composed by: Harry Robinson; Wardrobe: Rosemary Burrows; Make-up: George Blackler, John Webber; Hairdressing: Pearl Tipaldi; Special Effects: Bert Luxford [uncredited]; Art Director: Roy Stannard
Cast
Peter Cushing (Gustav Weil); Dennis Price (Dietrich); Mary Collinson (Maria Gellhorn); Madeleine Collinson (Frieda Gellhorn); Isobel Black (Ingrid Hoffer); Kathleen Byron (Katy Weil); Damien Thomas (Count Karnstein); David Warbeck (Anton Hoffer); Harvey Hall (Franz); Alex Scott (Hermann); Judy Matheson (woodman’s daughter); Luan Peters (Gerta); Sheelah Wilcox (lady in coach); Katya Wyeth (Countess Mircalla); Inigo Jackson (woodman); Roy Stewart (Joachim); Maggie Wright (Alexa); Kirsten Lindholm (young girl at stake); Peter Thompson (gaoler); Cathy Howard [Alexa in close-up – uncredited]; Roy Boyd [dying man – uncredited]; Maxine Casson, Vivienne Chandler, Doreen Chanter, Irene Chanter, Jackie Leapman, Annette Roberts [schoolgirls – uncredited]; George Claydon [midget – uncredited]; John Fahey, Kenneth Gilbert, Derek Glynne-Percy, Jason James, Sebastian Graham Jones, Bill Sawyer [puritans – uncredited]; Peter Stephens [uncredited]; Garth Watkins [chief priest – uncredited]
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