A Beginner’s Guide to Bizarre Christopher Lee Movies
The legendary actor Sir Christopher Lee starred in far too many roles for the average well-balanced person to keep track of, some worthy of his iconic presence, and some decidedly not. This is where I come in, and there’s only so much I can blame on quarantine. Gathered here are six of the most head-in-hands-while-cackling-with-glee-and-or-confusion movies from this truly hardworking man’s body of work. These are not necessarily all movies I have watched in full or ever intend to watch in full; rather, they are movies that made me think, what is HAPPENING, but in a delightfully baffled way. Please enjoy, always noting Lee’s full commitment to whatever role he’s playing. We could all learn a thing or two from that sort of grace and dedication. [note: spoilers ahead!]
1. The Return of Captain Invincible (1983)
If you want to see Christopher Lee as a leather-clad Nazi-caricature supervillain perform a number written by the Rocky Horror songwriters that he felt was one of the “best or favourite things he had ever put on film,” this is the movie for you. Terry Pratchett described The Return of Captain Invincible as “a series of bad moments pasted together with great songs and a budget of fourpence,” adding that it was “a regularly-viewed video in the Pratchett household.” I’d have to agree with that sentiment.
The movie follows Captain Invincible’s comeback after his reputation was destroyed by the rampant McCarthyism of the 1950s, which is an INCREDIBLE premise for a superhero movie. There’s a courtroom sequence near the beginning of the movie that’s genuinely hilarious to me: Captain Invincible (Alan Arkin) is on trial, absurdly accused of communism — the completely unfounded evidence includes his red cape — while Lee lurks in the back seats. He’s just there, watching, almost easy to miss. The whole thing is surreal.
Lee was absolutely thrilled to play this character, and it shows. He loved to sing, and he seemed to seize every available opportunity to showcase his sonorous baritone voice. When he heard that the director, his friend and fellow WWII buff Philippe Mora, was going to make a musical, he wanted in. Even better that his character would be a Nazi he could make a silly caricature of; having served as an intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force during WWII, Lee passionately hated them.
Lee performs two numbers: “Name Your Poison,” an alcohol-pun-laden song in which Lee’s character tries to tempt Captain Invincible into drinking (this song was Lee’s favorite, and was later released in Germany as a single!), and “Evil Midnight,” which establishes his villainous backstory. There are also some charming (?) moments in his lair in which he blackmails politicians and feeds his pets to his increasingly larger other pets. (“Open wider, you silly boy!” he says as he attempts to feed his snake to his vulture; a phrase that’s entered my mental lexicon and that I cannot use in my day-to-day life lest I be forced to explain it.)
2. The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967)
No other movie title has ever brought me such delight in its sheer self-indulgent absurdity. I have no choice but to love this title for the laughter it brought me upon discovering it one night at 3 am, which was soon buoyed by my Google search that revealed that Edgar Allan Poe was listed as a lead writer by IMDb. I can never remember the exact wording of this title, and to further confuse matters, it’s also known as “The Blood Demon,” “The Snake Pit and the Pendulum,” and “Castle of the Walking Dead.” Why? Why?? Somewhat surprisingly (or not, given the title’s clear abandonment of good taste), Lee’s character, known as Dr. Sadism, is not actually a sadist. He’s just an undead count trying to achieve immortality (which sounds… familiar) and that just happens to involve a whole lot of torture, as determined by his quasi-scientific research. There’s a pit and the pendulum sequence, which is how the unfortunate Mr. Poe unwittingly came into all this, and a lot of stumbling through a booby-trapped sound stage castle dungeon. Lee’s face is painted grey for most of the movie and his hair looks like That; again, I have no good answers.
3. Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf (1985)
Christopher Lee apologized to the director of the original The Howling movie for appearing in this objectively terrible sequel. It wasn’t his fault; he just wanted to add a werewolf movie to his resume, and the one he signed on for turned out to be… a mess. He plays an occult specialist, Stefan Crosscoe, who’s hellbent on hunting down the ancient Stirba, a werewolf queen sorceress (?) with whom his relationship is unclear. Is she his sister? His former lover? How old is he, then? None of these questions are answered (not quite true; she says she’s his sister, but that line feels like such an afterthought that I’m calling it into question with all the authority I can muster, because yes, she is the one pictured above). But this isn’t about him, though the movie would have been enormously better if it had been. The story centers around a young man whose sister — you guessed it — had been turned into a werewolf, as well as a young woman who’d worked as a journalist with the werewolf sister. After initially disbelieving Crosscoe about the werewolf situation (and who can blame them! He went right up to the grieving brother after the funeral and told him his sister was still alive and her immortal soul was in danger. Directly after the funeral!), they join forces with him on his quest to destroy Stirba and follow him to Transylvania, because the writers apparently forgot that werewolves are not vampires. Seriously — there’s garlic, staking, holy water, Transylvania, Christopher Lee… the list goes on.
This movie feels like it was filmed not only before the script was finished, but before it was started. Like someone had had an 80s werewolf fever dream and tried to make it make sense for about half an hour before getting hungry and abandoning it for lunch. It’s a horror film in that I’d be horrified to sit through the entire thing. That said, it is kind of a treat to watch Lee act so seriously in what must have been clear to him at the time to be a train wreck of a movie.
And there are some fun moments. The gang is ambushed by werewolves as they’re sneaking up to Stirba’s castle, and Christopher Lee raises a vial of sacramental oil above his head, shouts something in Latin, throws the vial, and shouts, “RUN.” Run, I wondered? Away from the werewolves, I guess? And that guess was wrong, because his Latin prayer had turned the holy oil into a grenade. Reader, I cackled. There’s also a somewhat surreal chase scene that seems to belong to an entirely different film. Crosscoe notices someone in a mask wearing the identifying necklace worn by one of his associates, and he demands to know where she got it; she runs, laughing at him, leading him down a dark alleyway and into a seemingly abandoned building. We seem poised to slip into actual horror here; we’ve got a mystery on our hands now, arguably the first interesting thing to happen in this movie. I’d be genuinely interested in any story that was based around the still from that scene below, which has an aura, as it were, that I can’t quite describe.
Oh, and also — this movie features Lee in a eye-searing orange button-up and white plastic sunglasses combo as he attempts to fit into a concert crowd. That’s the image I always see associated with this movie, so I thought I’d do you a favor in not including it here, classic though it may be.
4. Safari 3000 (1980)
Lee plays Count Borgia, an caricatured aristocratic race car driver who wears a helmet that looks like an homage to the Spaceballs helmet, except for that somehow, Safari 3000 came out first.
I can only imagine Lee had some influence in the making of this movie, as several of his scenes feature him singing opera as he drives (and also, his wife makes a cameo). After a certain point in his career, Lee began to embody the Kristen Wiig character at the dinner party who yearns to sing; this movie came out well after that point.
There isn’t too much substance to his character beyond being a source of comic relief — in one scene, he clumsily tries to seduce the leading actress only to have his servant drop the diamond necklace he was offering her into his wine — but this movie has Lee deliver a truly tremendous line that I love very much: “Feodor, you know that I am fluent in twelve languages. Amongst all those noble and ancient tongues, there is but one solitary word that describes you with complete and total accuracy: putz.”
5. Serial (1980)
Lee’s role in this movie is its only redeeming feature. BUT LISTEN. In it, he plays a closeted gay biker gang leader, and that was more than enough to balance out having to skip through the rest of the movie to find his scenes. It’s about the alleged social dynamics of a new age San Francisco suburb (at the time, I guess), which according to Roger Ebert “shows us an alien life form with a superficial resemblance to the human being.”
His character is a high-rolling San Francisco businessman blackmailed into helping the lead character (whose name I cannot remember and perhaps never knew) rescue his daughter from a religious cult. The lead character and his Regan-era views didn’t age well, but Lee played his part genuinely and not, in my opinion, as the butt of a joke. He has a few delightfully funny quips and actually gets to ride a motorcycle around the city. I wouldn’t be surprised if he agreed to be in this one just so he could put a biker character feather in his cap, and if so, I fully respect that.
6. A Feast At Midnight (1994)
I did not know, when I first started this movie, that Lee’s stern-boarding-school-teacher character was a velociraptor analogue. So it was a surprise to me when he started creeping around the school kitchen, looking for wandering students, that dormant memories of Jurassic Park began to reemerge. I looked it up to verify, and yes, his scene is a note-perfect recreation of the scene in the kitchen where the velociraptor hunts for the two kids. He even blows pipe smoke at the door’s circular window, a nod to the dinosaur’s steamy breath. I suppose I should have seen this coming — his character’s nickname is Raptor. But you know what would have really helped make it obvious? Seeing THIS POSTER:
The movie is about a young boy who takes respite from the bullying and terrible food at his English boarding school by sneaking into the kitchen at night with his friends and making increasingly elaborate dishes. A charming premise, really.
Anyway, Raptor, apart from frightening his students and being an emotionally distant father and widower, also has a crush on the matronly school nurse. I don’t often ship characters — I mostly just like to see how stories play out — but I was rooting for them, like I root for so many older couples on Midsomer Murders, and I was surprisingly happy to see that it paid off.
Thanks for making it to the end, dear reader! When you search how many movies Christopher Lee made, the answer you get is, “at least 136.” So, here were six of them. I hope you enjoyed, and if you’re like-minded, I hope you get to watch (or, in some cases, skip through) them, and indeed others, yourself!
