Word: hammered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Army's hammer was beaten into a plowshare, and its pole into a pruning hook at the bubble Saturday as Harvard's track team won an overwhelming 72-46 victory over the Cadets...
Reddest Gore. Only when it comes to promotion is Hammer truly lavish (the usual budget: $50,000 per picture). One of its first gimmicks after getting into the horror business in 1956 was to station ambulances outside theaters where its features were playing, supposedly to cart off fainting fans. For The Curse of Frankenstein, it claimed 3,000 victims in the U.S. alone. Often its advertising billboards seem more carefully prepared than its scripts. "There are more nudes in our posters than in our pictures," admits Founder and Chairman Sir James Carreras, who was knighted last year for his philanthropies...
...What is Hammer really promoting: Sado-sexuality? Occultism? "Pure entertainment," insists Sir James. "I see the rushes every Monday to make sure there are no sick-making scenes and no explicit sex or violence." Still, there is plenty of implicit sex and violence, and the simulated gore is the reddest to be seen anywhere (at $70 a gallon). Sir James views it all with the sanguine air of a man who started as the operator of a chain of movie theaters in London's Hammersmith area (the source of the name Hammer). His Spanish-born father established the chain...
...Camping. Unlike its prime competitor, American International Pictures, Hammer refuses to pander to the younger drive-in crowd (the bulk of the horror market in the U.S.) with more fad-conscious pictures like Was a Teenage Werewolf. Out of respect for the Karloff-Chaney-Lugosi classics of the 1930s, Sir James would never permit a Vincent Price to camp up the Gothic genre. While piling up its $100 million-plus grosses over the years, Hammer has been able to attract-if not get the best out of-such expert directors as Joseph Losey, Guy Green...
...after all those profits without honor in the serious film world, Hammer is attracting a cineaste cult following. This fall the prestigious British Film Institute showed a retrospective "Tribute to Hammer Films" at London's National Film Theater. The month-long festival came complete with solemn program notes (the portrayal of a Cornish voodoo cult in The Plague of the Zombies is seen as symbolic protest against oppressive modern mineowners). The changing critical climate seems to make Sir James uneasy. "I hope our public realizes that we're not going to change in the same way," he says...