Icons of Adventure Collection (The Pirates of Blood River / The Devil-Ship Pirates / The Stranglers of Bombay / The Terror of the Tongs)
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DVD details
Actor: Christopher Lee, Oliver ReedBrand: Sony
DVD: Region Code 99
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.37:1
Running Time: 332 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-06-10
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Sony Pictures
DVD Reviews of Icons of Adventure Collection (The Pirates of Blood River / The Devil-Ship Pirates / The Stranglers of Bombay / The Terror of the Tongs)
DVD Review: Icons of Adventure Collection
Summary: 4 Stars
Icons of Adventure Collection (The Pirates of Blood River / The Devil-Ship Pirates / The Stranglers of Bombay / The Terror of the Tongs)
Great action, good price!
DVD Review: Excellent transfer in proper ratios
Summary: 5 Stars
Behind the cheap cover artwork (and no front reference to Hammer), this Columbia/Sony collection of 4 movies is great ! Excellent anamorphic transfer, in proper ratios and interesting commentaries.DVD Review: Icons a Must for fans of Obscure Hammer!
Summary: 5 Stars
After all these years, we finally get a copy of Hammer's "Stranglers of Bombay" on DVD...and there's three more obscure Hammer adventure films included on two-discs and they all look and sound awesome. Buy this now! Let's send Sony a message that there are Hammer fans out there willing to part with their hard-earned cash for a great, great bargain. You know who you are!DVD Review: More Hammer titles emerge from the vaults
Summary: 4 Stars
Although this set contains 4 movies, I bought it for 2, specifically Terror of the Tongs and Stranglers of Bombay, as these fit as easily into the "Hammer Horror" collection as in the adventure collection, which I find less interesting. Both films are in fine condition, and in Tongs, it is great to see Christopher Lee in yet another villainous role. Some of the gruesomeness is surprising given the British Board of Film Censors' attitude toward these films, particularly shots of cut -off hands in Stranglers, making me wonder if this is a restoration or the original release. The censorship applied to Tongs results in its being fairly tame, as discussed in detail in the excellent book Hammer Films: The Bray Studios Years. For Hammer collectors, this set is a must-have. Others might find it less interesting. DVD Review: Are Christopher Lee and Michael Ripper really icons of adventure?
Summary: 5 Stars
That caveat aside, this is a rather splendid set of four of Hammer's adventure films of the Sixties with a nice array of extras - including audio commentaries on all four films - and trailers to compliment the fine widescreen transfers.
The Devil-Ship Pirates is an entertaining pirate romp from Hammer that's a part of studio legend. Hammer built a Spanish pirate ship for the film planning to reuse it on other pictures. Unfortunately, it was a death trap - the woodwork was so bad the decks would give way under people's feet and it was so unseaworthy that even in calm landlocked waters the thing would capsize, nearly drowning cast and crew. Things got so bad that even the parsimonious Hammer burnt it for real in the final scenes!
The film itself isn't as good as the story behind it, but it's a neat premise - the crew of Christopher Lee's Spanish privateer convince a small village that the Spanish Armada defeated the British to give them time to make repairs - well executed and an entertaining enough way to fill an hour-and-a-half on a Sunday afternoon.
It's all too easy to understand why Terror of the Tongs is such a rarity now - forget the political incorrectness, the most terrible thing about it is the sheer tedium. One brief scene of mild off-screen torture, a couple of badly choreographed fights and a LOT of sitting around talking to French or Irish actors pretending to be Chinese makes for a very, very long 80 minutes. Lee is mostly inert throughout the movie and has little to do, leading lady's Yvonne Monlaur's thick French accent and bad makeup make a mockery of her every scene and a plot which somehow manages to mix revenge, opium ("the pipe of dreams"), brothels, corruption, secret societies and murder and do nothing of even the remotest interest with them leaves you wondering how many irreplaceable body cells died while you were watching. The only pluses are Arthur Grant's photography and Bernard Robinson's typically beautiful production design and sets, both better than anything you'll see in even the best of Harry Allan Towers' superior Fu Manchu series, but other than that the most memorable thing in the film for me was the curious fact that, made up as a Chinaman, Marne Maitland looks just like my dog - and I don't think she'd be flattered by the comparison!
Only the existence of 'George and Mildred' stops this from being one of Hammer's very, very worst. Dull beyond belief, but don't let that put you off the set - it's more than worth it for the other films.
The Stranglers of Bombay is much more like it. Directed by Terence Fisher at the peak of his powers, it's slightly more accurate than expected - some research has been done into the Thugs, which is more than can be said for Gunga Din - but is still closer in tone to Victorian melodrama than history. Guy Rolfe is typically laid back as the officer trying to persuade the apathetic East India Company to investigate a series of disappearances only to be ignored and ultimately replaced by the a particularly idiotic candidate who went to the right school. Investigating on his own, he soon comes up against the followers of Kali, with results that should entertain anyone who likes Fu Manchu and his ilk. It's particularly interesting just how critical the film is of the British mismanagement of India - although more an Old Boys' network here than the otherwise unemployable dregs of the Empire that made up the Honorable Company's ranks overseas in reality, rather than agents of civilisation, their concern is purely with the bottom line. It's a fast-paced 80 minutes with many of the usual 'British' suspects - George Pastell, Roger Delgado, Tutte Lemkow and Marne Maitland - in black face in the supporting cast, and better production values than you might expect from the obviously low budget.
It's strange that the film is such a rarity since there are many more politically incorrect films still in circulation: maybe its down to the controversy that greeted it on its first release. Nonetheless, well worth a look if it crosses your path, especially in a good widescreen transfer in its original 'StrangloScope!'
Description of Icons of Adventure Collection (The Pirates of Blood River / The Devil-Ship Pirates / The Stranglers of Bombay / The Terror of the Tongs)
HAMMER WASN'T JUST HORROR...The legendary British studio is justly reverred for its classic horror movies but they actually made all kinds of pictures and this first Sony collection of their best films presents four pulse-pounding adventures - all new to DVD - three of them starring Hammer icon Christopher Lee. He's at his snarling best as blood-thirsty buccaneers in the rousing swashbuckers The Pirates of Blood River and The Devil-Ship Pirates. Then he warms up for his famed Fu Manchu series by playing an evil Chinese crime lord in The Terror of the Tongs. Rounding out the set is the rarely-seen The Stranglers of Bombay based on the chilling true story of how the British attempted to vanquish the Thuggees the notorious death cult that terrorized India for centuries. So strap yourself in for the most rip-roaring group of movies since Errol Flynn laid down his sword!System Requirements:Running Time: 332 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre:?HORROR/CLASSICS UPC:?043396243156 Manufacturer No:?24315Icons of Adventure is a terrific quartet of picaresque features from Britain's Hammer studios, best known for such unique horror films as The Curse of Frankenstein and the 1958 Dracula, both starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Lee was also the star of three of the films in the Icons set, two of those colorful pirate adventures. The 1962 The Pirates of Blood River finds Lee playing a deceptively docile buccaneer, one-eyed Captain LaRoche, who convinces a fugitive from a penal colony to help him locate a Huguenot colony on a large island. The runaway prisoner (Kerwin Matthews) is actually the son of a colony founder, sentenced to hard labor for challenging the establishment's tight grip on personal freedom. When the hero discovers that LaRoche simply intends to overwhelm the colony and use it as a new base of operation, he leads the fight to protect the authorities who previously threw him into hell. The more elegant and engaging The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) is a 16th century tale of a Spanish pirate, Captain Robeles (Lee), who convinces a small village on the British coast that Spain has won its Spanish Armada battle against England. Pretending to be an official, occupying force instead of a bunch of swashbucklers, Robeles rules the village with an iron fist while being hectored by a real Spanish naval officer who doesn't agree with his methods.
Lee turns up again as the imperious leader of a cutthroat tong--a secretive, organized criminal society--in the exotic 1961 Terror of the Tongs. Geoffrey Toone plays the captain of a British passenger ship whose daughter is murdered by the Red Dragon Tong during the latter's attempt to find incriminating papers smuggled (against her knowledge) within her possessions. As the captain seeks vengeance, he gets close to the dangerous heart of the tong, which exacts punishment over anyone who does not cooperate by hacking off his or her fingers. The fourth feature in Icons of Adventure is very different from the others and doesn't involve Lee. The Stranglers of Bombay (1960) stars Guy Rolfe as Captain Harry Lewis, a career soldier helping to protect the interests of exporters the British East India Company. Stationed in India for years, Lewis has conducted a thorough study of a rash of disappearances and anticipates a military assignment to solve the long-running mystery. When the job goes to an outsider who knows nothing about India, Lewis works independently and discovers a religious cult called the Stranglers, who waylay travelers and steal their possessions. A tense thriller involving crazed rituals of bloodletting, torture, wild-eyed sacraments and poisonous snakes, The Stranglers of Bombay looks like an influence on Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. --Tom Keogh
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