Just thought I'd let everyone know that Universal HD (the former Bravo HD) will be showing Hammer's EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN Saturday Dec. 18 at 3am est & 10 am est. It will be nice to see a clean HD Widescreen print of this hopefully this means Universal is getting ready to release their Hammer titles on DVD soon. I'm off to set my Tivo. :P

Anybody know which version this will be?

I believe there are substantial differences between the theatrical cut of the movie and the padded TV version shown on NBC in the sixties and circulating since.

A very interesting hybrid of the Universal and Hammer versions of the Frankenstein myth. Not as breathtaking as Terence Fisher's more radical interpretation, in my opinion, but a fun movie nonetheless.

SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT --

Great Cushing line:
"Even my bed!!!!"

This should be the original version as released to VHS. The old syndicated version with the extra padding vanished around the time the VHS came out and subsequent TV airings were uncut.
Video Watchdog detailed all the changes made for the NBC TV broadcasts in an older article.
As someone who grew up with the TV edition, it would be cool if Universal included these extra scenes for the inevitable DVD release ( even though they add nothing to the film ).
BTW, the most recent LIITLE SHOPPE OF HORORS mentions Universal has been working on it's Hammer material and has uncovered extra footage for BRIDES OF DRACULA and KISS OF EVIL. They also recently made restored theatrical prints of CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF which have played here and there around the country. Here's hoping all 4 titles make the jump to DVD soon, and that NIGHT CREATURES is unearthed and allowed to tag along.
Also in this issue is a still of a semi-nude Hazel Court from THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH, something I had long heard about but never seen.

Since KISS OF EVIL is just a retitled, edited version of KISS OF THE VAMPIRE, the edited material currently found in the original would qualify as extra footage for the KISS OF EVIL version. Extra footage for BRIDES is intriguing. Anyone know when Hammer stopped adding extra footage to the Japanese versions of their movies? I've wondered for a long time just how many there are of the "legendary Japanese versions"?

IMO, EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN is an unfortunate plunge in quality after the first two films in the series, mainly because the plot is a dreadful rehash of the '40s Universal entries. The ending is particularly ridiculous. The monster is possibly the worst incarnation ever, in makeup and performance, making Glenn Strange look positively brilliant by comparison. The film does, however, have some things to recommend it, namely excellent camerawork, an exciting music score, fabulous sets, and an enjoyable performance from Peter Cushing, even if it does seem at times to belong in a different film.

. . . of course, one of the problems with THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN is that it was among the Hammer Frankenstein's (the only other, I believe, being HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN - well, I suppose you could include the TALES OF FRANKENSTEIN T.V. pilot) not directed by Terence Fisher - I don't know if he would have done something more with the script (and his monster makeup for FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL was not among the best), but he always seemed to give his genre films a bit of flair with his directorial commitment, he often brought out the best in his actors, and his work often featured strong psychological underpinnings that made his stories more complex and interesting . . .

My mistake, meant to say KISS OF THE VAMPIRE. As you mention, KISS OF EVIL was the watered down NBC edit. The extra material found for BRIDES was scene specific, the material for KISS was not. Seeing as Universal already restored KISS OF THE VAMPIRE for laser and VHS, I'd like to believe they found additional footage previously unseen.

It would be fantastic if some extra footage had been found for Brides of Dracula and Kiss of the Vampire.

The extra TV stuff for Kiss and Evil of Frankenstein should be in an appendix if it's anywhere - the scenes aren't part of the original films (they were filmed by the TV company using American actors) and don't belong there. I also recall that most of the gorier stuff was snipped from Kiss and Evil in these bastardized TV versions.

What about Phantom of the Opera (Universal have the rights to this as well I believe)?

Additional scenes were shot for the TV version of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA as well. I've got the TV version on VHS from a broadcast years ago...as I recall all the added stuff was conversations between bumbling police inspectors.

I'd love to see a double feature of KISS OF THE VAMPIRE and KISS OF EVIL as well as both versions of EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN. It would be great to retire the old tapes of the versions I grew up with!

I've been hearing for years about legendary extra-gory Japanese versions of some Hammer titles (HORROR OF DRACULA in particular), but I've never known or heard about anyone who has actually seen the films or even stills of this extra footage. Do we know for a fact that they really exist(ed), or are they merely the stuff that dreams are made of?

Also, I seem to recall catching the TV version of EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN and/or KISS OF THE VAMPIRE fairly recently on the Sci Fi Channel. Does anyone else share this recollection?

Like probably everyone else here, I'm just going by what I've read over the years. In Wayne Kinsey's book "Hammer Films The Bray Studio Years" we read : The Daily Cinema on 13 August reported, "Jim Carreras was bursting to tell me that the Japanese version of DRACULA...has broken the all-time house record. The Japanese print of Hammer's horrifier has a much more emphatic shock content...than it's comparatively sedate British counterpart". Now, did the person who wrote that actually see this version or is he just hyping something he hasn't seen? Or something that doesn't exist? There was some additional footage shot of Dracula's disintergration but even Christopher Lee, who confirms this in the same book, doesn't know if it was ever used. A picture has appeared in various publications over the decades; I think it may have even been referred to as just a publicity still, but it certainly looks like it came from the unused footage as described. Kinsey's book also provides info on the scene in THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN involving a severed head that may have been used in the Japanese version: Assistant Director Derek Whitehurst recalls "There was meat slapped on the stump of the neck of this false head and I remember everyone saying, 'This is for the Japanese version'." But then there's Terence Fisher who says every country got the "complete integral version" and the local censors did the rest. So what are we supposed to believe? Based on what's been printed, it sounds likely that there's a little something extra in some of the early Hammer's but until they show up or an unimpeachable source can confirm having seen them, it's acceptable to be a skeptical.

KISS OF EVIL played on WGN constantly through the late 80s, and indeed Sci-Fi has run it often as well.

As for the TV version of EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, the last time I caught it was on TBS about 15 years ago. In recent years, it seems the TV broadcasts are always the original version; never caught it on Sci-Fi to check.

The longer PHANTOM broadcast I've got was from a PBS station.

As for TV broadcasts, I last caught KISS OF EVIL on Sci Fi around 1999. AMC has since run KISS OF THE VAMPIRE intact. I taped a late night EVIL off of Sci Fi a couple years ago and it was the original version with no padding. Did the same for PHANTOM and while Sci Fi had the uncut version, they censored the demise of the rat catcher, which was one of the things cut on the old NBC/syndicated version!

"Brides of Dracula", which was recently screened at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood with the restored "Curse of the Werewolf", had one cut that was extended. This was the insert of Martita Hunt's staking. Her blood starts to seep back through her dress.

In 1996 at the Barbican Hammer festival in London they ran an extended version of "Kiss of the Vampire". There is extra material during the final scene in the chateau when he bats destroy the vampires and an earlier brief shot of a female desciple that lifted her frock as she sat down -obviously too high for the British Censors!
I have been in touch with Universal to try to find this footage.

There's a long passage in Sammy Davis Jr.'s book Hollywood in a Suitcase detailing his love for Hammer films and his friendship with Christopher Lee where he describes getting to see different versions of an unnamed film being shot:

I kind of assumed that the story was at least partially exaggerated - would such a practice of re-shooting a scene really be that methodical? What I'd be curious to hear is an account of someone who actually got to enjoy a screening of one of these "gorier" variations in Japan. Has something like that ever surfaced?

I vividly remember the blood seepage from Martita Hunt's dress and gutteral groan from my childhood viewing of the movie on KTRK 13 in Houston circa 1969 or 1970. This would have been in the MCA feature package that also contained CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF.

Maybe VIDEO WATCHDOG could assign one of its ace correspondents to systematically investigate this historical conundrum. I know that Denis Meikle found some really cool stuff from Trevelyan and the BBFC on Hammer when he was writing his book, and of course the PCA files at the Academy in LA could detail some of the American reworkings of the movies (most notably TWO FACES OF DR. JEKYLL). And some of the Hammerites are still with us. . .

Our door is always open to anyone who can produce more facts about these Japanese versions. Steve Bissette once told me that he saw the complete disintegration scene in a French Canadian TV broadcast of HORROR OF DRACULA, and I've heard that a Japanese fanzine once presented frame enlargements of the sequence, which were photographed from a different angle than the famous posed color shot, which we've used as a back cover of one of our past issues. To me, the repeating of Cushing's reaction shot confirms the existence of missing footage of a peeling Lee, but I doubt it's more graphic than similar shots in DRACULA A.D. 1972; in fact, Steve told me the still photo is more impressive, makeup wise, than what appears in the uncut sequence. For the film to be missing more than a single cutaway shot of Lee would disrupt the score. The same goes for the severed head in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN; it seems to me that I saw the head being dunked into the acid once, either theatrically or on TV, but the entire sequence was in profile... and not as revealing as the "spare parts" shot that appeared in a back issue of FAMOUS MONSTERS. To have lingered on the severed head prop would have defeated the illusion.

An extra shot would disrupt the score as is but is there any reason they couldn't have edited that scene differently with a different sequence of shots using the same music bed? I don't know if they'd go to all that trouble but I don't see why they couldn't have done it if they had wanted to. It may not just be a case of just replacing one shot for another in some films but of a sequence being edited a bit differently.

Followup note: I just looked at the head sequence in THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Minor spoiler.
While Victor is cutting off the head of the corpse, there's a close-up of Paul. Then , when Victor takes the head into the other room, just before he lifts it up from it's burlap covering, there's another close-up of Paul that appears to be from the same take as the other shot. This could easily have been used to replace a couple seconds of our seeing Victor continuing and lifting the head up and dropping it into the acid. Perhaps the Japanese saw this continuous action while the rest of us didn't.