Christopher Lee

Christopher Lee’s feature debut. Also Terence Young’s directorial debut. A Rebecca knock-off featuring Eric Portman as a wealthy eccentric who believes Edana Romney to be the reincarnation of an Italian countess he loved in a past life. Lee’s bit part comes early and his lone line lacks his resonant baritone.

Caribbean pirate Burt Lancaster captures a British ship, schemes to sell its arms twice over, then falls for a rebel leader’s daughter and switches sides.

A fictionalized biography of stunted artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (José Ferrer).

An insurance investigator (Jack Hawkins) finds himself caught up with an old flame and the target of blackmail after uncovering an art forgery scam.

Awaiting execution, Baron Frankenstein recounts how he created life from corpse parts—and how his partner’s sabotage turned genius into monster.

Howard Hawks’s recipe for a good movie comprised “three great scenes and no bad ones.” Hammer’s first entry in its Dracula franchise gives us exactly that.

Peter Cushing plays Sherlock Holmes who, alongside André Morell’s Doctor Watson, seeks to save nobleman Christopher Lee from a family curse involving a supernatural beast.

Anton Diffring kidnaps beautiful Hazel Court to blackmail surgeon Christopher Lee into performing an operation to keep him young.

Archaeologist defile the tomb of an Egyptian princess and face the wrath of her protector, an undead mummy.

Homely Dr. Jekyll’s serum transforms him into the dashing, sociopathic Edward Hyde—who promptly torments Jekyll’s unfaithful wife and her lover, Jekyll’s backstabbing best friend, played by Christopher Lee.

The City of the Dead opens in a small, fog-shrouded village. The locals have gathered to burn Elizabeth Selwyn for the crime of witchcraft. As the flames consume her, Elizabeth pledges her soul to Lucifer in exchange for eternal life. The bloodthirsty villagers drown her out, chanting “Burn witch, burn!”

A British sea captain (Geoffrey Toone) tries to bring down a Hong-Kong crime syndicate.

A wheelchair-bound woman (Susan Strasberg) doubts her sanity after repeatedly seeing her absent father’s corpse around his French Riviera home.

A pirate (Christopher Lee) forces an escaped prisoner (Kerwin Mathews) to reveal the location of a remote settlement where he hopes to find treasure.

A group of wayward young adults wander into a castle where an elderly man promises them riches if they can find his dead wife.

A masked torturer and a scarred servant (Christopher Lee) terrify a woman recently arrived at her husband’s ancestral castle in Germany.

Any film starring Christopher Lee as a ghost, whipping a half-nude woman as she moans in ecstasy can’t be all bad.

A theater troupe travels to perform for a mysterious nobleman at his remote castle, unaware he’s perfected a formula that kills and embalms instantly—and wants them as specimens.

A professor (Christopher Lee) investigates a woman (Barbara Shelley) and a doctor (Peter Cushing) who may be linked to the Medusa-like creature terrorizing a small village.

A mysterious woman lures a trio of British adventurers to her lost kingdom in Africa, believing one of them to be the reincarnation of her long-dead lover.

Two couples ignore multiple warnings and visit Castle Dracula.

Rasputin: The Mad Monk opens with Rasputin, played by Christopher Lee, arriving at an inn and demanding wine. When he’s told the innkeeper is unavailable due to his ill wife, an annoyed Rasputin marches upstairs. He storms into the bedroom, and proceeds to will the disease out of the frail woman, drawing it into his now red-hot hands.

Psycho-Circus plays like two films stitched together. One great, one mediocre.

Some films have no business working as well as they do. The Devil Rides Out is one such film.

Searching for his brother, a young man travels to Christopher Lee’s remote lodge where he meets witchcraft expert Boris Karloff and dreams of green-skinned witch Barbara Steele.

The Oblong Box suffers from an identity crisis.

A detective investigating a string of vampire-like murders uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy involving mysterious surgeon Vincent Price and shadowy government official Christopher Lee.

The extras on The Bloody Judge DVD are more interesting than the feature film.

Christopher Lee plays Count Dracula, a vampire who relocates to London where he preys on young women until Herbert Lom’s Professor Van Helsing leads an effort to destroy him.

Director Billy Wilder’s humanized portrait of Holmes and Watson as they help a mysterious woman find her missing husband.

Reviewing anthology movies is hard. I picture you, dear reader, trudging through endless paragraphs of plot synopsis and I feel guilty. I have let you down.

“He would be the most dangerous human being on earth. A monster.”

Raquel Welch plays the titular Hannie, a woman who recruits a bounty hunter to train her to exact revenge on the outlaws that murdered her husband then raped her.

Horror Express may be flawed, but the production, performances, and novelty of genre icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee working as allies make it hard to resist.

In London, after a prominent civil servant goes missing, a police inspector (Donald Pleasence) investigates a series of disappearances caused by the cannibalistic descendents of a group of cave-in survivors.

A scientist (Peter Cushing) believes the monstrous skeleton he unearthed may lead to a biological cure for evil, but his ambitious brother (Christopher Lee) has other ideas.

A Scottish police officer arrives at an island village to investigate a young girl’s disappearance.

British secret agent James Bond (Roger Moore) finds himself the target of an elusive and deadly assassin (Christopher Lee).

To the Devil a Daughter was the final film of Hammer Film Productions. The studio rose to prominence with films such as The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula. Unlike those staged, period pieces, this film is set in contemporary times and shot on location. It represented a big departure for Hammer, but it was too little too late.

Alien youngsters Tia and Tony (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann) return to Earth for a vacation, only to fall victim to the machinations of a power-hungry scientist (Christopher Lee) and his spinster financier (Bette Davis).

In a story co-written by Bruce Lee, a young warrior (Jeff Cooper) meets a blind man (David Carradine) and battles both a monkey man (David Carradine) and a martial artist (David Carradine) in his quest for a book guarded by a wizard (Christopher Lee).

Christopher Lee plays an “occult investigator” hunting a ten-thousand-year-old werewolf queen to prevent a werewolf apocalypse.

Twenty years after their last adventure, D’Artagnan reunites the Musketeers to battle France’s enemies.

The conclusion of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, featuring the battle for the white city of Gondor, and the conclusion of Frodo and Sam’s quest to reach Mount Doom.

After a nearly 200 year imprisonment, vampire Depp confronts 1970s pop-culture, dysfunctional descendants, a family business in ruin, and the witch who cursed him. Burton frames the film in his usual quirky visual style and Depp’s charismatic performance apes original Barnabas Collins’ portrayer Jonathan Frid’s rigid delivery almost to the point of caricature, but Grahame-Smith’s script seems paralyzed by the multitude of ways to approach the material, veering between comedy, horror and drama without committing to any of them, resulting in a film that feels hollow beneath all its polish.