Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Photo of the Day

The pirate ship from THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER

This is the only shot which indicates that there are pirates from a ship. They added palm trees in the obvious matte painting even though the rest of the film was shot somewhere in the UK, not the Caribbean.

This shot makes me laugh. Talk about penny-pinching filmmaking. This is a Hammer film and one rarely hears how cheap and bad their films are even though they were really low-budget productions but you constantly hear how trashy and stupid Italian PEPLUM films are even though those films had  actual *real* ships and had actual action on said *real* ships. Trashing Italian-made films is just xenophobia and this is just a good example of the double-standard.

2 comments:

orsh549 said...

I agree with you 100%. Hammer made some good movies, but the majority were really cheap sound stage productions. I think that because it was made by Hammer and the company's reputation made it all right. Italian Peplums had some big budget films along with low budget ones, but they always had a lot of extras and did film many movies in exotic locations. Rodger Corman's movies with V. Price seemed to have had bigger budgets and in my opinion better than Hammer. Hammer's VIKING QUEEN was a real joke despite some real good actors. The storyline wandered far from the actual events that happened, and was very low-budgeted. I actually laughed at the battle scenes and thought that Hammer should stick with their so-so sound stage Horror movies.

PEPLUM TV said...

I agree with THE VIKING QUEEN...what a painful film.