Public Servant Lifestyle

Two classic British horror films are about to receive their first releases on DVD this January - just the thing for those long winter nights!

British horror specialist DD Home Entertainment is releasing Blood of The Vampire and Daughter of Darkness on DVD.

Malpractice

Scripted by Jimmy Sangster, the author of Hammer Films' The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula, Blood of The Vampire is a lurid classic from the golden age of British Gothic horror films.

Set in the late nineteenth Century, the film finds the anaemic Dr Callistratus (played by Donald Wolfit) working as the governor of a brutal penal institution housed in a remote castle. There we meet Dr John Pierre (played by Vincent Ball), a medical man wrongly convicted of malpractice and given a life sentence - but soon employed by Callistratus to help him with his research. In a laboratory beneath the castle, Callistratus and his hunchbacked assistant Carl (played by Victor Maddern) submit the inmates and assorted young women to cruel experiments in blood transfusion.

Outside the castle Pierre's fiancée Madeleine (played by Barbara Shelley) determines to rescue him, but they both end up at Callistratus' mercy. The bloodthirsty doctor will stop at nothing to cure his debilitating condition, even if it means others must die so that he may live.

Directed by veteran filmmaker Lance Comfort in full-blooded Gothic mode, Daughter of Darkness is a fascinating post-war thriller featuring British cinema's first female serial killer!

Disturbed

In Ballyconnen, Emmy Baudine (played by Siobhan McKenna) is a beautiful but disturbed young woman who works for the local priest. When the carnival comes to town, she encounters a handsome young boxer called Dan (Maxwell Reed) and lays his face open with her fingernails when he expects sexual favours from her.

Hurriedly packed off by Father Corcoran to Yorkshire, Emmy is taken in by a farming family and manages to suppress the strange feelings of fascination and repulsion that she experiences in the presence of the opposite sex. Until, that is, the carnival comes to town and brings with it the vengeful Dan.

Both titles feature 24 page collectors booklets by film historian Marcus Hearn - as has become customary with the DD cult releases.

Blood of The Vampire and Daughter of Darkness will be available in all good DVD retailers now, priced £14.99 and £12.99 respectively, or direct from DD Home Entertainment, Unit 1, Pool Bank Business Park, High Street, Tarvin, Chester, CH3 8JH; please add £1.80 towards postage and packing for one title or £2.75 for both. Credit card customers can also order copies by ringing the 24 hour DD hotline on 01829 741490 or by visiting www.ddhe.co.uk.

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