First were Zombies, next it’s Vampires! This is the first of my “Looking Back at 2010” posts, in which I plan to have a look at what I watched this year and see what was great (and not so great…). This is based on the list of films I watched in 2010, not necessarily (or at all!) on those released in 2010.
My 2010 count of Vampire flicks clocked in at some 27 different films, although the vast majority were Hammer films. Last year was the first time I really got to grips with Hammer Horror films and I certainly watched a lot of their Vampire outings! I’m a massive fan of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, so any of the films with them in leading roles were certainly winners. Dracula (1958), Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Taste The Blood of Dracula were particular favourites from the Dracula cycle, with an honorable mention due to Dracula AD 1972 for being so completely mad. Scars of Dracula was a pretty thin addition to the series and The Satanic Rights of Dracula was nice enough but decidedly underwhelming.
This is the first of my “Looking Back at 2010” posts, in which I plan to have a look at what I watched this year and see what was great (and not so great…). First up: Zombies! This is based on the list of films I watched in 2010, not necessarily those released in 2010.
Last year I sat through a fair number of Zombie films and, much like the genre, I have to say they were a pretty mixed bag. My film list contains 29 that I would describe as either being Zombie films or at least significantly featuring zombies. Of these, there were a handful of true genre classics - several of which I’d seen before - including Umberto Lenzi’s zombies-with-weapons masterpiece Nightmare City (which I reviewed here), Hammer’s brilliant Plague of the Zombies, the creepy Spanish Tombs of the Blind Dead and cult-classic no-budget cheese-fest The Video Dead.
Well, I don’t think there’s any point denying that the 2nd half of 2010 was pretty disastrous in terms of keeping this blog updated… Five posts in as many months? And one of those was a post saying that I hadn’t been posting enough, a post where I promised all sorts of exciting film reviews that I then never wrote.
Part of the problem, it would appear, is that I watched too many films. Early in the year I set myself the goal of watching 365 different films in the year and, though I did manage that, the goal did rather take over a lot of my free time - time that I would and could (and should?) have spent writing about films here.