Word: hammerism
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...with bunny scent. A girl put her pet on springs that jiggled its feet. A device that pulled dogs along was propelled by an ingenious power plant: the energy was created by the dog's barking into a speaking tube. Only one machine threatened punishment, using a hammer to whack a dog on the back if it refused to exercise...
...high-rolling film business, seven of every ten releases are box office flops. Financing is drying up, and most studios have cut back to a handful of new productions a year. What would Hollywood make, then, of a brash little outfit called Hammer Films on a second floor in London's Soho district? Hammer is riding a streak of nearly 100 straight moneymaking movies. Last month it began shooting its tenth new production of 1971. So successful has it become at exporting its wares that it is a winner of the Queen's Award for Industry-a grateful...
...films that have made Hammer, in its words, "accepted as a branded product all over the world" are largely girl-and-ghoul flicks and caveman epics, with titles like Countess Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, One Million Years B.C. and Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. Each is turned out on a near-strangulation budget and schedule ($500,000 and 25 shooting days). The plots, usually lifted from some Victorian romancer like Bram Stoker or Sheridan Le Fanu, are as creaky as the doors of Castle Dracula. The starlets who flit through prehistoric landscapes or quaint Transylvanian villages...
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...