Battleship
2012
A Victorian scientist returns to London with his paleontological bag-of-bones discovery from Papua New Guinea. Unfortunately, when exposed to water, flesh returns to the bones, unleashing a malevolent entity on the scientist's family and friends.
Freddie Francis
James Hildern
Waterlow
Emmanuel Hildern
Penelope Hildern
Emily
Doctor Perry
5/27/2023
6/10
Right until the end, I was convinced that this was just a bit of nonsense. At the end, though, a great deal of it falls into place and through it still isn't really very good, this film made a lot more sense. In a nutshell, "Hildern" (Peter Cushing) returns from Papua New Guinea with some artefacts (human ones). When they get wet, they reanimate into a rather nasty skeleton that wreaks havoc. Determined to stop this evil from spreading, the professor tries to use it's blood to immunise his young daughter from it's effects - bad move! Meantime, his half-brother Christopher Lee - who has been supervising the care of his sibling's mentally ill wife for some years, has his own agenda not just for the treatment of the wifely insanity, but also for our marauding bundle of bones. The script offers us just a little too much half-baked, amateur psychology but there is still enough gravitas delivered by Messrs. Cushing and Lee to make the conclusion worth the wait. This genre was losing it's appeal by 1973, the colour photography robbing the storyline of much of its eeriness and jeopardy and at times this looks more akin to a "Sherlock Holmes" style of investigative costume drama, but it is still worth a watch.
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