Saturday, July 21, 2012

THE ILLUSTRATED TWINS OF EVIL


Despite the pleasing to the eyes on-screen presence of Mary and Madeline Collinson -- better known by the collective name, "The Collinson Twins" -- the 1971 Hammer Production TWINS OF EVIL was somewhat anemic compared to some of their earlier vampire film fare.

Peter Cushing was luckily on hand to prop up the proceedings as usual, and billed as the next big Hammer thing, Egyptian-born Damien Thomas played the dark and handsome vampire bad guy. Alas, he must have found greener pastures as this was his only appearance in a Hammer horror film.

Brit monster movie magazine maker and all-around monster fan Dez Skin published the first issue of THE HOUSE OF HAMMER in October 1976. It was originally an homage to the great Hammer Productions with both photo features and illustrated comics stories (the first issue was an adaptation of HORROR OF DRACULA), but later widened its focus with material on other productions besides Hammer.

Issue #7 (Jan/Feb 1977) of THE HOUSE OF HAMMER featured a cover (by Brian Lewis) as well as a full-length, black and white illustrated story that adapted the TWINS OF EVIL film.

In 1982 appeared a magazine with the title of DRACULA'S SPINE CHILLERS ANNUAL, published in the UK by the oddly-redundant named World International Publishing Ltd. It contained a partially colorized, or more properly in Brit Lit, "colorised", version of the TWINS OF EVIL comic adaptation. It was the same story that had appeared five years earlier in THE HOUSE OF HAMMER, but had been shortened by the exclusion of the one-page prologue.


The TWINS OF EVIL comic adaptation was scripted by Chris Lowder and drawn by Blas Gallego. In the MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD version shown here, I have combined the two versions by preserving the excised prologue of the original and including the colorised pages from the DRACULA'S SPINE CHILLERS ANNUAL.


















1 comment:

Doug B. said...

Are you aware of any plans to release the Hammer House Television show on DVD in the US? I haven't seen any of the episodes, but the cast members listed on the Hammer web site are very well known actors. Great post on the Twins of Evil!