Three Standalone Hammers

No clever intro this time: I’m clearing my backlog of Hammer movie reviews, here’s a review of three which don’t fit into any neat category.

The Nanny

After What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a surprise hit, Bette Davis was more than happy to spend a chunk of her late career cashing in on her newfound acclaim as a horror villain. After all, the performance she and Joan Crawford had pulled off in Baby Jane had kicked off a brief micro-genre of psychological horror movies with older women as malevolent figures – why not exploit that, when the industry was otherwise all too willing to leave aging actresses on the shelf? That’s how she ended up starring in this 1966 Seth Holt film, which ended up being Hammer’s last black and white feature.

We open with Bette’s character – referred to simply as “Nanny”, for that is the capacity in which she’s hired by her employers – enjoying a happy little walk through her local park before she enters the home of her employers, the Fane family. As soon as she steps inside, the contrast between the miserable atmosphere inside the house and the happy outdoor scene is brutally obvious.

Blondes Have More Cave Fun?

Ever since enterprising movie producers realised that setting a movie in the prehistoric past was a good excuse to get nubile young actresses (and perhaps a buff actor or two) in skimpy fur costumes, absurdly unrealistic fantasies of cave people doing all sorts of archaeologically unlikely stuff like fighting dinosaurs have been an occasional fad in cinema. A swathe came out in the 1960s, and one of the contributors to this outburst was Hammer Studios, who produced a few movies along this line – some of which have been used to round out the numbers in Hammer DVD boxed sets or the like.

For this article I’m going to review a couple of them. Spoiler: they’re both kind of goofy. One of them, at least, is notable for being a major landmark in the career of Raquel Welch. The other one… has a model rhino.

One Million Years BC

This Hammer co-production with Seven Arts, directed by Don Chaffey, is the one everyone remembers for Raquel Welch in a doeskin bikini and the awesome stop-motion dinosaur action courtesy of Ray Harryhausen, and between their various talents they probably made this the most famous Hammer production which wasn’t a horror piece. Goodness knows that there isn’t much else of note about this.