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8 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Late, but top quality Hammer suspense thriller!, 22 January 2007
8/10
Author: The_Void from Beverley Hills, England

This Hammer film has remained in the wilderness for years, but thanks to Optimum Releasing, it now has its long awaited DVD release. The back of the box proclaims this film to be the last of Hammer Horror's suspense films, and one of the best - and both of those statements are true! Many of the suspense films that Hammer produced are among the best that the studio had to offer - Taste of Fear and Paranoiac being among the finest of them. This film isn't your usual Hammer film or your usual Hammer suspense film and plays out a lot like a Hammer version of Italy's popular Giallo sub-genre. Hammer Horror would go on to make a lot of films that took influence from the more lurid Eurohorror imports in the seventies, and while this shift in focus didn't always serve them well - it certainly does here! The plot focuses on a boy's school. Peggy Heller is recovering from a nervous breakdown, and she goes to stay at the school with her teacher husband Robert. Upon arrival, she discovers that the school is run by headmaster Michael Carmichael, and she soon becomes the victim of murderous attacks by a one-armed man. However, nobody believes her...

It has to be said that the plot runs rather slowly for the first hour, with the hapless victim being attacked a couple of times and facing disbelief from both her husband and the wife of the headmaster. It's always interesting, however, and this slow burning first half soon gives way to a more furious final third, where revelations about the school and its headmaster become the forefront of the story and give way to a delicious double twist. The film features performances from three big stars of British horror - the sinister Ralph Bates is perfect as the husband, while the beautiful and deadly Joan Collins provides an extra dimension and things are topped off in style courtesy of a great performance from Hammer's main man Peter Cushing. Judy Geeson holds her own in the lead role also, and the film certainly doesn't come a cropper on the acting front. It has to be said that the final twist is somewhat predictable considering the film's genre, but it's carried off well and the way that the tale concludes is both clever and exciting. Overall, Fear in the Night might not have gained the same amount of praise as Hammer's more popular offerings - but it's a damn good film and I'm glad I saw it!

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7 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Somewhat Disappointing, 21 December 2000
Author: BaronBl00d (baronbl00d@aol.com) from NC

Don't get me wrong. This is not a bad film, but it really is not a good film either. It really is a rather predictable treatment of material that had so much more potential. The story about a crazed headmaster at a school that no longer is open, the recent arrival of a young woman that had recently gone through some emotional problems, and the two plot strains coming together through various attacks on the young woman by a crazed tormentor has promise. However, in director Jimmy Sangster's hands, his third directorial feature, the plot is very predictable and slow-moving. The cast is first-rate, and all the actors do fine jobs in their roles. Peter Cushing is in top form as the bizarre headmaster of a country boy's school. Judy Geeson is lovely and vulnerable in her role as a young woman who cannot tell whether or not she is imagining being attacked. Ralph Bates does an equally good job in his role, but his motivation becomes very clear well before it should have. Lastly is the presence of Joan Collins. She is beautiful and bitchy(always her trademarks as an actress)yet has very little screen time and none with Peter Cushing who is playing her husband! With all this acting talent, the Hammer staff, Sangster, I was just very disappointed that the film was so blase. There are a few good moments like the opening panning of the camera across the school grounds and the final shot as well, but I had the "complex" plot figured halfway through the film partly because its been done a dozen or so times(most of them far more effectively) and partly because it was the only possible solution at hand. Not enough red herrings! A must see if you are a Hammer or Peter Cushing fan, but otherwise I think you will be, like me, disappointed and not feared in the night but rather....bored.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
A decent thriller with plenty of twists., 14 February 2008
6/10
Author: Paul Andrews (poolandrews@hotmail.com) from UK

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Fear in the Night starts as Peggy Heller (Judy Geeson) is set to leave London & join her new husband Robert (Ralph Bates) in the country at a boarding school where he works, however the night before she is due to leave Peggy is attacked in her bathroom by someone with a false arm. No-one believes her though & she decides to just forget about it, once at the boarding school which is empty due to the end of term Peggy meets the strange headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) who has a false arm & his overbearing wife Molly (Joan Collins). Soon after arriving Peggy is attacked again by the mysterious person with a false arm, Peggy puts two & two together & suspects Michael. Is she right? If so what does Michael intend to do? Why attack her & what does he want...

This English production was co-written, produced & directed by Hammer studios regular Jimmy Sangster after he made the disastrous The Horror of Frankenstein (1970) & Lust for a Vampire (1971), realising that their popular classic monsters like Dracula & Frankenstein weren't doing the business at the box office anymore Hammer studios made film just like Fear in the Night to try & branch out & expand with mixed results. I mean if you hear the name Hammer studios you instantly think Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Frankenstein & Dracula not Judy Geeson & Fear in the Night. The script by Sangster & Michael Syson is a psycho thriller with plenty of twists rather than a straight horror, I would say it's worth a watch & the story is good but it's not perfect & has zero replay value as once you know the twists (if you buy the DVD don't watch the trailer before you watch the feature proper as it gives the whole plot away) it loses any surprise or impact that it had. The character's are alright although I have to say some of them are rather gullible & do things which are hard to believe, I mean how could two people marry & one of them not ever see where the other lived? For the plan to work Peggy needed to be fooled but what if those not involved with the plan told her the truth, be it by accident or not? The last thirty minutes has plenty of twists & turns that come thick & fast some of which are highly improbable & a little difficult to swallow, I think maybe that there's one contrived twist too many. Still a good mystery thriller to watch as a one off though & I did like it overall.

Director Sangster does alright but instead of the trademark Hammer horror Victorian period setting Fear in the Night takes place during contemporary Britain, there's a nice early 70's dated but fun look to it & the big school is a period building so in that regard maybe it's not quite as far from the Victorian set classics as I first thought. There's absolutely no gore or violence (although a rabbit is shot by Joan Collins) or nudity so don't expect any, any & all shock value in Fear in the Night comes from the twists & turns in the story. The opening sequence is very good, probably the best in the whole film actually where angelic children are singing on the soundtrack as the camera pans across a picturesque English field & stops on a pair of swinging feet belonging to someone who is hanging from a tree!

Technically the film is good with nice locations, good cinematography & decent production values. The acting is pretty good as well, despite near top billing Peter Cushing only gets about five minutes of screen time with Joan Collins faring little better & she doesn't even appear in the film until past the forty minute mark. Collins made this when her career was at an all time low & after she found success again in Dynasty (1981 - 1989) Fear in the Night was re-released on video to capitalize under the title Dynasty of Fear! Strange but apparently true. Geeson is sort of cute while Bates has a horrible 70's haircut.

Fear in the Night is an entertaining thriller with a fair amount of twists which aren't overly new or original (even back in 1972) but work well enough. A little silly & not really scary or anything it's just about clever enough & the last third has plenty of twists to keep you interested.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Obscure but interesting Hammer movie, 13 June 2006
Author: lazarillo

Although this is certainly not one of their more famous titles, I was actually quite impressed with this Hammer movie which is an interesting variation on the famous French thriller "Diabolique" but with four main characters instead of three. Judy Geeson is a naive schoolmarm who marries a man (Ralph Bates) who she thinks is also a schoolteacher but actually turns out to be the caretaker of an abandoned boys' school and its mentally unstable former headmaster (Peter Cushing). The headmaster in turn has a shrewish, grasping wife (Joan Collins)who spends her time cruelly blasting cute bunnies with a double-barreled shotgun. Without giving too much of the plot away, two of the characters are having an affair and scheme to drive another of the characters insane so he/she will kill the fourth character. But as usually happens, the plan goes horribly awry for almost everyone involved.

This is one of the more interesting 70's Hammer films because it actually tries to do something new rather than just mining the old Gothic formulas and monsters that served them so well in the 60's. Hammer had of course done psychological thrillers like this as early as "Scream of Fear" in 1961, but this is one kind of film that they actually refined and perfected in the 1970's (rather than beat like dead horse)with entries like this, "Straight on Until Morning", and the Gothic/psycho-thriller "Demons of the Mind". It was definitely better than Jimmy Sangster's first directorial effort "Lust for a Vampire", even though the latter was much more famous (probably owing to Yutte Stensgaard pulling her two Danishes out every five minutes). It will probably never be regarded as a Hammer classic, but is interesting film at least, which is more than can be said of a lot of their 70's product

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
FEAR IN THE NIGHT (Jimmy Sangster, 1972) **1/2, 19 May 2007
6/10
Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

Sangster's third and final film as director forsakes the Gothic trappings of the first two for the psycho-thrillers which Hammer occasionally dabbled in (inspired by LES DIABOLIQUES [1954] and kick-started by the Sangster-penned TASTE OF FEAR [1961]).

As such, it's a pretty solid entry in the genre: well-made (the last half-hour being especially tense), stylish (making subtle use of elliptical editing, careful not to go overboard as was the case with STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING [1972]) and sporting a compact but most able cast - Judy Geeson (her inherent vulnerability is suited to this type of frightened lady role), Joan Collins (going through a horror/thriller phase at the time and who's, of course, alluringly bitchy), Ralph Bates (it took me some time to accept him in a modern setting since he's so comfortably placed in the Gothic world of his other stuff for Hammer, but there's no denying that he does quite well by his role here!) and Peter Cushing (superlative as always, he has a field day with an ambiguous characterization); incidentally, Cushing and Collins must be one of the most incongruous husband-and-wife pairings in film history!

As one can gather from the above, I liked the film quite a bit and, in fact, pondered for a while the notion of awarding it a *** rating but was, ultimately, deterred from doing so by a couple of flaws: the 'ingenious' plot is, actually, fairly predictable (but, if anything, it's even more fun to be able to anticipate the many twists involved!); however, this also means that one has to labor through a first half that is both slow and repetitive!! I do feel that it's underrated in the Hammer canon: Leonard Maltin dismisses it, for instance, but Leslie Halliwell - not usually one to bother much with the company's latter-day output - is surprisingly complimentary in his review.

While FEAR IN THE NIGHT more or less adheres to Hammer's formula for this type of film - an innocent girl having a brush with murder and madness in remote surroundings - it also draws parallels to the contemporary giallos, especially with its device of a black-gloved stalker. Incidentally, of Hammer's 10 modern suspensers, I've only got two more to catch up with - MANIAC (1963) and CRESCENDO (1970).

The Audio Commentary here proves disappointing - not because it isn't informative but, rather, due to the fact that we get an awful lot of repetition of Sangster's anecdotes from his tracks for THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1970) and LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1971); to be fair to him, the fault lies more with moderator Marcus Hearn - who should have come up with a fresher set of questions, as it were. Then again, I'd have expected more insight into the actual construction of the script (a psycho thriller being, fundamentally, more intricate than a Gothic horror) - but it's safe to assume that, after all these years, Sangster recalls precious little about this aspect...although he does mention that he had pitched the script to the company as early as 1963, and that it was originally intended to be set on a boat! The discussion also touches upon Hammer's other suspensers: apart from citing TASTE OF FEAR and THE NANNY (1965) as his favorite films, Sangster mentions that Orson Welles turned up unannounced one day on the set of MANIAC; in connection with the film under review - which, incidentally, brought Sangster's fortuitous association with Hammer to a close - he acknowledges the fact that Peter Cushing was basically serving the same function (i.e. a red herring) that Christopher Lee did in TASTE OF FEAR.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
A Pedestrian Thriller Elevated By Some First-Rate Acting, 6 March 2007
6/10
Author: ferbs54 from United States

"Fear in the Night" is a somewhat contrived and lesser Hammer picture from 1972 that somehow still manages to work up a fair amount of suspense and one or two chilling moments. The film concerns young Peggy Heller (excellently portrayed by Judy Geeson), who, after suffering a nervous breakdown, moves with her new teacher husband to a large, private boys' school on 1,200 acres of English countryside. Poor Peggy is soon made the victim of a string of attacks by a stalker with a prosthetic hand, and her lot is hardly made more comfortable by the presence of the very strange headmaster (Peter Cushing) or his haughty young wife (Joan Collins). The film builds to a surprise ending of sorts that probably won't surprise many, especially those viewers who have already seen a certain classic Vincent Price horror movie from 1958. Still, the film does offer some compensations, including very fine performances by the actors just mentioned, as well as by Ralph Bates, playing Peggy's husband. Viewers will appreciate just how fine the acting is, perhaps, after a second viewing, with a greater knowledge of all the characters' secret motivations. The film also offers some beautiful scenery, both in terms of the autumnal Hertfordshire countryside AND Ms. Collins herself. Thirty-nine years old here, and nine years prior to incarnating TV's ultimate bitch on wheels, Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter, etc. on "Dynasty," she really is quite gorgeous to look at. (Sadly, she and Cushing, though playing man and wife, share no screen time whatsoever in this picture.) But the film belongs to Geeson, who appears in every single scene (with one major exception). Just five years after her "To Sir, With Love" debut, she turns in a very credible and ingratiating performance. Indeed, it is the sterling acting by all four principals that elevates this rather pedestrian thriller into something quite admirable indeed.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
After recovering from a nervous breakdown, a young woman goes to stay with her teacher-husband at a seedy British boys' school where further terrors await her., 14 September 2000
Author: verna55 from cincinnati, ohio

Often effective British thriller features a tip-top cast(Joan Collins, Peter Cushing, Ralph Bates, Judy Geeson), but suffers from a lack of originality as this is, for the most part, a rehash of similar motifs explored in earlier British horror films like PARANOIAC and NIGHTMARE, which themselves derived from the brilliant French thriller DIABOLIQUE. Still, the good outweighs the bad and there are plenty of nice, genuine jolts.

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Middle of the road, 27 September 2003
Author: movieman_kev from United States

A Hammer film from the latter part of the studio's days. A woman with a history of mental illness is beset by visitations of a person in trench-coat & gloves who repeatedly acosts her, but is she just suffering from delusions again? very VERY slow moving.

My Grade: C-

Extras: just a commentary & the theatrical trailer

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Fear in the Night, 29 March 2000
Author: Janos Smal (jsmal@osi.hu) from Budapest, Hungary

A young and fragile woman marries to a handsome teacher, with whom she moves to a country school, but then she is continuously attacked by a mysterious one-armed man.

Slick Diabolique-stuff; closer to the original narrative than most, but very professionally made and eminently watchable, with some inventive new twists, though finally quite impenetrable.

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Old-school terror., 14 March 2009
7/10
Author: BA_Harrison from Hampshire, England

Pretty, neurotic newlywed Peggy (Judy Geeson) survives an attack by a leather-gloved, one-armed assailant the day before she is due to leave London to live with her husband Robert (Ralph Bates) who teaches at a posh boys school in the country owned by sinister headmaster Michael Carmichael (Peter Cushing) and his bitchy young wife (the lovely Joan Collins).

Once there, though, poor Peggy soon realises that, even though she is now miles from the city, she still isn't safe: the one-armed maniac appears to have followed her to her new home...

It shouldn't take seasoned fans of psychological thrillers very long to suss that the mysterious goings on in Hammer's Fear In the Night are intended to turn the protagonist completely insane, drive her to murder, or both. But although the film's plot doesn't earn many points for originality, being heavily reminiscent of the French thriller Les Diaboliques, director Jimmy Sangster delivers enough startling imagery (Cushing's shattered glasses; a gloved prosthetic arm) and well-handled scenes of suspense to ensure that the film is certainly never dull: from its wonderful opening credits sequence, in which the camera pans across the school to eventually reveal the legs of a man hanging from a tree, to its tense denouement, Fear in the Night is a solid slice of macabre entertainment.

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