Red Weed

Satan's Playthings

2012-02-12T04:01:00.000-08:00

AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970)

ASSAULT (1971)

AND SOON THE DARKNESS sees English nurse Pamela Franklin contend with a serial killer and the language barrier in rural France. The film was needlessly remade in 2010, where American girls go on a bike trip in a remote part of Argentina.

THESE thrillers both exploit rural settings as key plot devices, and play like a rebuttal to the sexual freedom of the Love Generation. Directed by Robert Fuest from a script by Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, AND SOON THE DARKNESS tells the story of Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice), two young student nurses from England on a cycling holiday through rural France. Jane intends to keep to a schedule, but Cathy wants to enjoy the surroundings at a slower pace, especially the local males. This conflict of interests leads to an argument where Jane leaves Cathy to lounge at an off-road spot. However, when Jane returns she can find no trace of her friend and, asking around, learns that a few years ago another blond woman was sexually assaulted and killed in the area. Joined by scooter-riding Paul (Sandor Eles), who claims to be a detective for the Sûreté, the evidence leaves Jane unsure as to whether he might be the killer.

The movie is set completely in broad daylight and unfolds almost real-time over a single afternoon. The bare openness of the fields and countryside brood with sinister effect, as the provincial landscape is a foreboding character in itself. The French language notably is not subtitled so the viewer feels the same alienation as Jane ("Meutre? That's French for "murder" isn't it?"), who is faced with a catalogue of unnerving locals all strangely lukewarm about the need to find Cathy; even the English schoolmistress Jane encounters is matter-of-fact ("loathsome business, sex.") AND SOON THE DARKNESS may be too slow-burning for some - especially as it shows restraint at a time when nudity and gore were beginning to characterise most output - but this British film prefigures the Backwoods Brutality cycle that would be defined by the classic slices of Americana THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE HILLS HAVE EYES.

An uninspired tale of killer-baiting, ASSAULT is also known under a dizzying amount of alternative titles, including THE CREEPERS, IN THE DEVIL'S GARDEN, TOWER OF TERROR and even SATAN'S PLAYTHINGS. This is a 1987 video cassette cover from New York's Video Treasures label.

Based on Kendal Young’s novel The Ravine, Sidney Hayer's ASSAULT begins in Devil’s End wood, where Heatherdene Arts School student Tessa Hurst (Lesley-Anne Down) is raped. When a second girl is attacked and murdered in the same location, detective Velyan (Frank Finlay) is struggling for clues, as Hurst is psychologically traumatised and unable to speak. Velyan seeks the help of Dr Greg Lomax (James Laurenson) in profiling the offender, and eyewitness art mistress Julie West (Suzy Kendall) offers herself as bait by using tabloid journalist Denny (Freddie Jones) to run a story announcing she is about to complete a photo fit painting of the killer. The investigation takes on a different angle when Lomax decides to use Pentothal on Tessa to bring her out of her comatose state, but when he arrives at the hospital dispensary to collect the drug, it transpires that a fellow doctor has taken the supply.

Although any number of Italian gialli were set in Britain and/or were UK co-productions, ASSAULT is unique in that it a completely British giallo, illustrating plot devices made famous by the genre. Sadly, unlike the Italian entries, the cinematography here is staid and unimaginative, and the execution linear and logical. The production uses that infamous British trait of casting twenty year old vixens as fifteen year schoolgirls, and dressing them in mini-skirts short enough to get any real schoolgirl expelled. The most lurid scene involves the headmistress's lecherous husband Leslie (Tony Beckley) and a student librarian on a ladder; the "student" is played by Janet Lynn, a British sex star of the period who had featured the year before in Pete Walker's COOL IT, CAROL. Finlay and Laurenson make turgid investigators, and it rests with honey-blond Kendall - who starred in Dario Argento's notable giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE - to bring some interest to the screen.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Maids of Evil

2012-02-01T23:29:00.000-08:00

HALFWAY INN (1970)
SOME LIKE IT SEXY (1971)

Before a brief career in features, the Collinson twins appeared in the bawdy 8mm short HALFWAY INN.

TWINS have long been a source of fascination in cinema, and they usually get a raw deal. Representing duality and split personality, they often symbolise the battle between good and evil, and signify that sinister events are about to happen. Female examples include Brian DePalma's SISTERS - where Margot Kidder stars as twin siblings, one of whom is most probably a psychopathic killer - and Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING, where the pre-teen Grady Twins are one of many mirroring devices used to add to the horror of Jack Torrance’s descent into madness. More recently, Wolfgang Büld's lively TWISTED SISTERS stars Fiona Horsey is an unrelenting power struggle between good twin/bad twin, and even an early episode of THE X-FILES featured nine-year-old twin sisters separated at birth killing their parents.

Born to an English Royal Navy father, Maltese identical twin sisters Madeleine and Mary Collinson caused quite a stir upon their arrival in Britain during April, 1969. After various modelling assignments they became the first twin Playmates in the October 1970 Playboy, after attending a party where they met Victor Lownes, the head of Playboy's European operation. The twins sealed their pop culture immortality by taking the title roles in Hammer's TWINS OF EVIL a year later and, after five flirtations with the British sex scene - the two under consideration here, plus squalid entries GROUPIE GIRL and PERMISSIVE, and the Keith Barron/Kenneth Cope vehicle SHE'LL FOLLOW YOU ANYWHERE - Hollywood beckoned, but their only American credit was LOVE MACHINE, where they shared a shower with John Philip Law.

The Collinson twins quickly bore of Christopher Matthews - as does the viewer - in SOME LIKE IT SEXY.

HALFWAY INN is a thirteen minute short from George Harrison Marks, the glamour photographer, publisher and filmmaker whose early work included THE WINDOW DRESSER, where his partner Pamela Green starred as a cat burglar who hides from the law by posing as a lingerie shop dummy. Marks' background as a music hall performer is evident in the “little stories” devised for his 8mm films, some of which were appealingly macabre: in PERCHANCE TO SCREAM, an evil inquisitor sentences women to be whipped and beheaded by a masked executioner. It should be remembered that the twins were only seventeen (at most) at the time, and their scenes in HALFWAY INN are relatively strong for 1970. The film is a period piece where a man is soon consumed by a comely maid; after flirting over dinner there follows several sexual encounters, and the man is reduced to exhaustion by the apparently relentlessly lusty maid, and flees. It is only at the end that we are shown that there are in fact two maids, who have been sharing the intimate duties.

Unlike Continental erotica, British sex films were mainly comedies, a thinly veiled critique on our own private lives. However, the problem with this throwaway sub genre was that the productions were not titillating or funny. Donovan Winter's SOME LIKE IT SEXY was originally released as COME BACK PETER in 1969, but after several countries complained the film wasn't sexy enough extra sequences were shot, including the Collinson twins in a sisterly menage a trois with professional ladies man and E-type Jag-driving Peter (Christopher Matthews). This "improved version" is also noteworthy for having a body double for Mattews whose standard posterior is replaced by an actor who possesses the hairiest arse in motion pictures. Both versions follow Peter's sexual adventures with the likes of a middle-aged socialite, a blues singer, a hippy and even a Salvation Army officer, surreally inter cut with flashes of a butcher hacking at a side of beef. This inexplicable image is explained in the twist "sex fantasy" ending, where Peter is revealed not as a super stud but as a butcher's delivery boy on the Fulham Road, where the colour image drains to monochrome as he climbs into his tatty white van.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Aliens, Mutants and Terence Fisher

2012-01-01T02:06:00.000-08:00

THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING (1964)
ISLAND OF TERROR (1966)

Invading alien robots - impervious to bullets, but not to Land Rovers - shamble around in THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING. Resembling a visage put together from whatever the film maker's could find lying around Shepperton studios, the creation reminds of Cybermen to come.

ONLY a few weeks after completing his directing assignment on Hammer's THE GORGON, Terence Fisher was at the helm of THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING, a hardly feature-length offering from Lippert Films. An alien gas attack has wiped out the entire population of England - possibly the world - and caused some to be reanimated as white-eyed zombie slaves. Amongst this carnage, American test pilot Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker) is soon joined by Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price), Peggy (Virginia Field), Vi (Vanda Godsell) and husband Eddie (Thorley Walters). All share the same unifying factor, that during the previous evening they were all in purified air conditions, thus avoiding the threat. When two space-suited humanoids are seen walking in the street, Vi runs out to greet them in the mistaken belief they are military assistance; in fact, they are alien robots who kill her by lethal touch. After another pair of survivors arrive - Mel (David Spenser) and his pregnant wife Lorna (Anna Palk) - the group venture to a local Royal Engineers TA drill hall in the hunt for weapons.

THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING is somnolent sci-fi on a shoestring budget - the opening montage even utilises stock footage from VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED - which attempts to host an apocalyptic invasion with two robots and a conservative scattering of dead bodies filmed in the Surrey village of Shere. No-one dies screaming; even the zombies - when shot - regress to the dramatics of a school playground, and the invasion is finally foiled by the destruction of a rickety old radio mast. Fisher was no fan of science fiction, but he does inject some atmosphere into the village-under-siege dynamic, especially the reanimated Vi staircase walk, and the eerie framing of an alien watching Lorna through a netted window. The performances are purely functionary, with the exception of Price and Walters; Walters is entertaining as ever in his trademark role of frightened alcoholic, but Price is the standout as Taggart. There is a wonderful scene where he attempts to rescue wads of useless money from a fire - hinting at a seedy past which is never fleshed out - and the slippery character fittingly leads the robots to his colleagues when in zombie-state.

Carole Gray is menaced by a bone-sucking tendril in this publicity shot for ISLAND OF TERROR.

Two years later Fisher directed the guilty pleasure ISLAND OF TERROR for Planet Films. On Petrie's Island off the coast of Ireland, researchers are working on a cure for cancer, but accidentally create a race of bone-sucking creatures dubbed silicates. After the discovery of a body which has been reduced to jelly, local Dr Landers (Eddie Byrne) seeks help from scientists Dr Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) and Dr David West (Edward Judd), who travel to the island with West’s socialite girlfriend Toni (Carole Gray). The two scientists discover that bullets, fire and dynamite won’t stop the silicates from advancing on the island’s humans and cattle.

Co-produced by science-horror specialist Richard Gordon, ISLAND OF TERROR can be seen as a inferior re-imagining of his earlier FIEND WITHOUT A FACE. Everything is in place for an effective monster movie: a laboratory destroyed by a new life form, creatures who emit an eerie slurping sound, unexplainable corpses ("like mush with the two eyes a-sittin' in it"), no telephones or form of escape, and Peter Cushing. Although the veteran actor's screen time is shared by Judd's younger, more bullish scientist, it is testament to all of the players who attempt to create tension away from the appearance of the silicates, who are arguably the weak link. They may have a fast-moving tentacle, but their plastic-looking bases move so slowly that you wonder how they have effectively snared so many victims (they can even climb trees). Despite all the impending doom, as Kim Newman states in his Video Watchdog review, "as often in British SF, we learn that crises should be left to the experts, even if boffins have started the trouble."
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Die Screaming, Susan George

2011-12-01T13:27:00.000-08:00

DIE SCREAMING, MARIANNE (1971)
FRIGHT (1971)
STRAW DOGS (1971)

Susan George was astutely described by Leslie Halliwell as "British leading lady, former child actress; usually typed as sexpot."

1971 was a tough year to be Susan George. The blond, olive-skinned actress made the most of her nymphet/spoiled girl demeanour in a trio of cult films, two of which were cheap exploitation, the other a masterpiece which defined her career. DIE SCREAMING, MARIANNE begins with Marianne 'Hips' McDonald (George) - working as a go-go dancer in Portugal - almost run over by sports car driving tourist Sebastian (Christopher Sandford). Returning to England, Sebastian impulsively proposes marriage, and in a Monty Pythonesque turn of events, Marianne becomes married to best man Eli (Barry Evans) instead. Back in Portugal, Sebastian tells Marianne's disgraced magistrate father (Leo Genn) of her whereabouts; The Judge and Marianne's unhinged half-sister Hildegarde (Judy Huxtable) are willing to kill the dancer unless she reveals a Swiss bank account number containing an inheritance of £700,000 and damning evidence on her father, which Marianne's mother secreted away before dying in mysterious circumstances.

DIE SCREAMING, MARIANNE is an antiseptic mystery thriller which never lives up to its title. The film was a troubled production which was suspended because of frictions between its young cast, according to director Pete Walker, yet screenwriter Murray Smith suggests the problems were more financial. Whatever the reason, the meandering script surprisingly lacks nudity, sex and violence after an appealingly garish opening credits sequence, which sees George gyrating to the theme music in a black bikini against a glowing red backdrop. With its extensive location shooting its all too glossy and respectable to ever create the erotic charge Walker yearned for, though the incestial relationship between The Judge and Hildegarde provides some memorable tensions ("I ought to spank you - only you'd like it.")

"The scream you can hear is your own." The scariest thing about FRIGHT is that the dream sequence from THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES plays on television. This is the cover to Optimum's R2 DVD, released in January 2010.

One of the first films to explore a babysitter tormented by an escaped psychopath, Peter Collinson's FRIGHT is another dull affair. Amanda (George) is hired as a babysitter for Tara (Tara Collinson, the director's son), the infant of Jim and Helen Lloyd (George Cole and Honor Blackman). But unknown to Amanda, Helen and Jim are not a married couple heading out to celebrate their anniversary, but are going to meet a psychologist to discuss Helen’s husband Brian (Ian Bannen), who has been placed in an asylum. Back at the house, Amanda is harassed by would-be boyfriend Chris (Dennis Waterman), and spooked by various noises. When she finds Chris battered unconscious, in her panic she lets in an apparently friendly neighbour. But that person is in fact Brian, who has escaped from custody.

Amanda is a plucky heroine, paving the way for the multitude of final girls to come, and Tudor Gates' script deals with a good many plot elements that would become staples of the bludgeoning slasher genre: the beleaguered babysitter, the boyfriend playing pranks and/or pestering the heroine for sex, the friendly neighbour/visitor who may not be what they seem, phone cords cut et al. Yet it all feels too dated; 'Nanette' sings a tepid song (Ladybird) over the opening titles, Waterman is embarrassing in pink flares and cardigan ("Oi reckon you've got a lovely pair of Bristols"), and Bannen overacts to a point of parody (in his Video Watchdog review, Charlie Largent is more lenient, likening his growls to Karloff while referencing SON OF FRANKENSTEIN). The film also has the most ineffective police force you're ever likely to see, and it is amusing to note that the Constable is played by Roger Lloyd ('Trigger') Pack.

George in STRAW DOGS. Sam Peckinpah's Westcountry Western was accused of glamouring rape and glorifying misogynistic sadism.

Cast on the strength of these minor outings, George gives an extraordinary performance as Amy in Sam Peckinpah's STRAW DOGS. The film exists at the heart of Amy's world, a rural West of England of which her and American mathematician husband David (Dustin Hoffman) have relocated. The couple soon realise that his intellect and her girl next door image cause resentment, factors festering with the couple's own marital problems. In the final act, David runs over suspected paedophile Henry (an uncredited David Warner) and takes him home, unaware that he has broken the neck of a flirtatious teenager. When the girl's drunken father (Peter Vaughan) discovers that the couple are hiding Henry, a whiskey-fuelled posses besiege David and Amy's abode of Trencher's Farm.

Shot by John Coquillon - who similarly gave us a tableaux of rural English violence for WITCHFINDER GENERAL - STRAW DOGS is a draining experience. The notorious double rape sequence is still troublesome, particularly because of its ambiguity: after initially resisting her first assailant - former boyfriend Charlie Venner (Del Henney) - Amy appears sympathetic toward him, seemingly on the grounds of their past relationship during her formative years. During the climactic pitched battle - which includes a shotgun blast to the father's foot and Venner dispatched in the giant jaws of an antique poachers trap - David becomes as bestial as the raiders, and loves it. David's regression - or progression? - to feral state defending his home feeds Peckinpah's career-long blood lust. The director had read books by Robert Ardrey, who hypothesised that man's voracious appetite for violence is not the product of environment or childhood trauma as Marx or Freud believed, but pure instinctual drives, creating a murderous ape who fashions ever more sophisticated weaponry to satisfy a desire for control of territory. It is this need for territory, not women, that subscribes most to Peckinpah's oeuvre, and the climactic chaos leaves Amy suitably abandoned at film's end.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Terrors Below and Above

2011-11-01T00:09:00.000-07:00

X THE UNKNOWN (1956)
QUATERMASS 2 (1957)

Fuelled on the then-current fears of radioactivity,
X THE UNKNOWN is Quatermass without the nuances.

IN the wake of THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT's success, Hammer approached the mentor of their breakthrough picture - Nigel Kneale - for permission to use the Quatermass character in a sequel. When Kneale refused ("I said 'No, you can't - it's mine' - they were funny people"), the company progressed with the Leslie Norman-directed X THE UNKNOWN, from an original screenplay by Jimmy Sangster. The film begins with a sudden appearance of what seems to be a volcanic fissure in military manoeuvre grounds. When a soldier, then a young boy, die of first-degree radiation burns, Dr Adam Royston (Dean Jagger) - a scientist working on a radio signal capable of neutralising bombs - investigates. Collaborating with McGill (Leo McKern), a representative for Atomic Security, Royston surmises that the opening has unleashed a mass of energy from the centre of the Earth, a sentient being that has fed off natural radiation for millions of years.

X THE UNKNOWN is a sombre slice of 50's Hammer, which uses its premise of internal horrors primarily for budgetary reasons - at least the studio wouldn't have to build expensive sets and spaceships. Royston is no Quatermass, and the sloppish movement of the titular creature (which, when finally glimpsed, looks like chocolate mousse) mimics the film's lack of thrills. Impervious to "Machine gun bullets! Dynamite! Flame Throwers!," this combination of radiation and molten crust is often mentioned in the same breath as the more famous BLOB which followed a year later, yet the latter was an extraterrestrial mineral, and X, in fact, shares more in common with particle masses CALTIKI THE IMMORTAL MONSTER and THE H-MAN, which both surfaced in 1959. Where X THE UNKNOWN does deliver is with its special effects; the disintegrating radiographer - where Phil Leakey placed a heating element in a plastic skull housing a wax mask of actor Neil Hallett - is still a show-stopper.

A stylish French poster for QUATERMASS 2 makes the paramilitary zombie guards centre stage.

When Hammer did return with Quatermass at the helm a year later, the result - in contrast - was one of the finest science fiction films produced by a British studio. Val Guest's QUATERMASS 2 sees metallic meteorites rain down on Winnerden Flats, a town near a highly guarded chemical plant. Professor Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) is startled to discover that contact with the shells causes deadly infection, and that the facilities - supposedly producing synthetic food - appear to be modelled on his own aborted moonbase design. Quatermass uncovers a sinister conspiracy that extends to Government level, and has to battle zombie-like guards who will stop at nothing to protect the top secret complex. With the aid of old friend Inspector Lomax (John Longden), the Professor discovers that the plant is in fact housing an alien invasion, and that gestalt creatures have been arriving inside the meteorites.

Britain's answer to INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, QUATERMASS 2 drips with postwar paranoia. Scripted by Kneale (from his 1955 BBC teleplay) and Guest, the film is as urgently paced as the alien takeover (the actors even indulge in "cue biting"). Kneale was always critical of Donlevy's brutish approach to the beloved scientist, but the actor's forcefulness here actually works with the rapidly unfolding horrors and realisations, especially when the Professor commandeers a guard uniform to infiltrate the plant. This insurrection culminates in a memorable pressure control room scene, where oxygen is being pumped to kill the alien manifestation in the plant domes. When workers venture out to talk to their "superiors," they are murdered and their body parts stuffed into the pipes to impede the oxygen flow, an action, as Jonathan Rigby states in his book English Gothic, is "as grotesque an image of capitalist exploitation as can be imagined."
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Escape from the Asylum

2011-10-01T00:20:00.000-07:00

GHOST STORY (1974)
KILLER'S MOON (1978)

Even though GHOST STORY won Best Picture at the Sitges and Paris Film Festivals, it was never released theatrically, languishing on late-night TV before resurfacing on home video a decade later under the title MADHOUSE MANSION (to avoid confusion with Peter Straub's best-selling novel Ghost Story, which was filmed in 1981).

STEPHEN Weeks' GHOST STORY and Alan Birkinshaw's KILLER'S MOON are two films that feature Droog-like asylum escapees, but in very different styles. M.R. James meets P.G. Woodhouse in GHOST STORY, where three mismatched ex-university chaps are haunted in a stately house. Weeks' slow-burning chiller is set in 1930s England, where McFayden (Murray Melvin) invites former college associates Duller (Vivian Mackerell) and Talbot (Larry Dann) to spend a few days at his recently inherited isolated mansion. McFayden eventually reveals rumours that the house is haunted and it is the sensible Talbot - rather than spiritualist Duller - who becomes susceptible to a demonic antique doll and a supernatural gateway which shows Robert (Leigh Lawson) incarcerate his sister Sophy (Marianne Faithfull) in a nearby asylum for incestuous desires. The institution is run by Dr Borden (Anthony Bate) and Matron (Barbara Shelley), and when Sophy's former servant Miss Rennie (Penelope Keith) attempts to free her, the inmates (all played with relish by members of a hippy commune) accidentally escape and run riot.

Tired of behind-the-scenes complications on I, MONSTER (1971) and GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (1972), Weeks co-wrote, produced and directed the picture under his own "Stephen Weeks Company," so he would have full artistic control. Shooting most of the film in South India gives GHOST STORY a fittingly otherworldly detachment, where the colonial architecture and sun-baked locations act as a backdrop to an exaggerated, dream-state Englishness which is further enhanced by its time-lapping narrative and an atmospheric, experimental score by Pink Floyd collaborator Ron Geesin. The performances are all first rate, especially a post-Rolling Stones Faithfull - who arrived five weeks late on the shoot with her heroin-dealing boyfriend in tow - perfectly cast as the doomed innocent, and GHOST STORY can also boast the only major role of the late Mackerell, Bruce Robinson's inspiration for WITHNAIL AND I. Unsurprisingly, the actor talks like Richard E. Grant, and you can hear traces of Withnail in his indignation at being served a jam sandwich.

Imagine a film fused with the backwoods sleaze of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, CARRY ON CAMPING and a shot of the old ultra-violence, and you would arrive at KILLER'S MOON.

In comparison, KILLER'S MOON is a notorious, badly misconceived slice of Britsploitation. A coach populated by the kind of people who only would appear in 1970s British films - a driver from ON THE BUSES, prim and proper school teachers, and a group of school girls all played by actresses in their twenties - are on their way to a singing contest in Edinburgh when their vehicle brakes down on a backwoods country road. A local groundskeeper leads them to a hotel where they can spend the night, run by Mrs May (Hilda Braid). The bus driver (comedian Chubby Oates) isn’t so lucky, as he meets four men as he goes back to sleep on his stranded vehicle: Mr Smith (Nigel Gregory), Mr Muldoon (Paul Rattee), Mr Jones (Peter Spraggon), and Mr Trubshaw (David Jackson), escaped mental patients in an induced LSD-addled state who are convinced they are living a shared dream in which they are free to rape and murder.

Exactly why this LSD state is good therapy for the escapees is one of the film's many mysteries. In fact, it is difficult to conclude what is the most unbelievable element: is it the fact that the film actually enjoyed a theatrical release after being granted an uncut X certificate by the BBFC, or is it the debacle was co-scripted by Birkinshaw's sister Fay Weldon, who goes uncredited. Or is it the crass dialogue, which includes "All men want to kill their mothers - isn't that what they say?" and "Look, you were only raped. As long as you don't tell anyone about it, you'll be alright." Fittingly for such a demented release, Hannah - a three-legged Doberman Pinscher - gives the best performance. Supposedly attacked by the escapees at the beginning, in reality the dog was awarded the canine V.C. in 1974 for defending her master in an armed robbery - during which she was shot and had to have a leg amputated. Hannah's bravery hit the headlines when her owner - the landlord of the Cheeky Chappie public house in Brixton - was held at gun-point after closing time.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Weird Science

2011-09-01T00:25:00.000-07:00

I, MONSTER (1971)
THE ASPHYX (1973)

The performance of Christopher Lee is the highlight of Milton Subotsky's take on the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story, I, MONSTER.

AMICUS'S I, MONSTER and Glendale's THE ASPHYX are two stylistically-shot early-70s releases which not only centre around warped experiments, but also attempt to adhere to the ever-distinguishing genre of the horror period drama. Set in 1906, I, MONSTER tells of Dr Charles Marlowe (Christopher Lee), a psychologist who rejects the findings of Freud and develops a more immediate treatment which uses character-modifying drugs. Marlowe confides in his solicitor Utterson (Peter Cushing) and friend Dr Lanyon (Richard Hurndall) that his experiments are causing changes in his patients, and rather than continue to subject them to unpredictability, decides to use himself as the test. In the early stages, Marlowe/Blake commits theft and vandalism, but as his addiction increases, his actions escalate to a street knife fight and to the brutal murder of a prostitute.

I, MONSTER was directed by Stephen Weeks on the recommendation of Lee, after the actor had seen the filmmaker's WWI trench warfare featurette for Tigon, 1917 (1970). Weeks only directed four films between 1971 and 1984, yet he demonstrated a visual flair in projects with a fantastic and historical backbone that made him comparable to the much-lamented Michael Reeves (the Utterton's dream sequence is memorable here). In his feature-length article on Amicus in Little Shoppe of Horrors #20 (published in 2008), Philip Nutman is extremely dismissive of Week's filmography, calling GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT (1973) "disappointing and muddled," the dream-like cult favourite GHOST STORY (1974) "painful and dull," and SWORD OF THE VALIANT (1984) "truly wretched." Closer to the truth is that the filmmaker suffered numerous distribution problems and behind-the-scenes tinkering on his films. Week's trails with I, MONSTER included a particularly cumbersome Milton Subotsky script ("I was coming home from - oh, some place at the end of the world") and the folly of abandoning an experimental 3D process during shooting (which Subotsky championed after reading an article in New Scientist).

In THE ASPHYX, Robert Stephens and Robert Powell are enthralled then repelled by imp-like banshees and cursed immortality.

THE ASPHYX is set in 1875, where Sir Hugo Cunningham (Robert Stephens) returns from a trip with his fiancee Anna (Fiona Webster), and informs his children Christina (Jane Lapotaire), Clive (Ralph Arliss) and adopted son Giles (Robert Powell) that he will soon remarry. A photographic specialist, Sir Hugo shows a series of slides to a psychic investigation committee, which show smudges that he believes illustrates the spirit leaving the body at the point of death. One afternoon, Sir Hugo captures on film the deaths of Clive and Anna in a boating accident, which footage shows a black presence which he terms The Asphyx - a Greek mythological term for the spirit of the dead. Stricken with grief, Sir Hugo becomes obsessed in capturing his own Asphyx so he can become immortal, and when Giles asks for his blessing to wed Christina, Sir Hugo withholds his approval until they too agree to become immortal. Things spiral out of control when Christina is accidentally decapitated, and Giles commits suicide in a gas chamber during their Asphyx-inducing stagings.

THE ASPHYX is a truly sumptuous-looking production, a rich canvas brought to live by LAWRENCE OF ARABIA veterans Freddie Young (photography), John Stoll (art direction) and director Peter Newbrook (who acted as second unit cameraman on David Lean's film). The production design envelops a wonderful premise, yet this ashen-faced tale - very loosely based on the exploits of Parisian gynecologist-cum-neurologist Hippolyte Baraduc - falls short by presenting a series of absurdities. Mainly, we have the implausibility of Sir Hugo not only being a photography and psychic phenomena expert, he also invented the motion picture camera (with zoom lens no less) and seems to master electricity for his Asphyx-turn on a home-made electric chair. After uttering the wonderful line "Bring me a guinea pig," the critter remains Sir Hugo's only friend in the aftermath, despite inadvertently setting in motion Christina's demise by chewing through a crucial rubber pipe. The Asphyx itself is portrayed as a rather risible, shrieking, rod-puppet, and Sir Hugo's rubber mask makeup in the film's contemporary climax - which tidies an opening car crash sequence - is horrendous for the wrong reasons.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Two from Tigon

2011-08-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

ZETA ONE (1970)
THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR (1970)

ZETA ONE even manages to make strip poker with Yutte Stensgaard boring. The Danish au pair/model had a versatile association with British pop culture: she auditioned for the part of DOCTOR WHO companion Jo Grant, appeared as the hostess on THE GOLDEN SHOT, and is most famous for her role as Mircalla / Carmilla Karnstein in Hammer's LUST FOR A VAMPIRE.

FOUNDED by Tony Tenser in 1966, Tigon released a wide range of films - from sexploitation to an acclaimed adaptation of August Strindberg's MISS JULIE (1971) starring Helen Mirren - but were most famous for making WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) and BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (1971). These two films, however, represent Tigon at its worst. ZETA ONE sees secretary Ann Olsen (Yutte Stensgaard) learning that Special Agent James Word (Robin Hawdon) is investigating Public Enemy Number 1, Major Bourdon (James Robertson Justice). Attractive young women are being abducted from Earth and brainwashed into serving space queen Zeta (Dawn Addams) from Angvia (typically, an anagram of vagina). Word is given the task of protecting Edwina (Wendy Lingham), a stripper who is to be the next kidnap victim, though she is actually working for Bourdon. With the assistance of the inept Swyne (Charles Hawtrey, in a role intended for Frankie Howerd), Bourdon is planning to be the new ruler of this race of scantily clad super women. However, Olsen is another Angvian trying to stop Word from thwarting their unexplained plans.

Described by Films & Filming as "A piece of science fiction pornography," ZETA ONE is a kitsch, one-dimensional romp through the fifth dimension. Based on the swinging sixties London-published Zeta - a magazine which contained captioned photo-stories of naked girls in the name of sci-fi - ZETA ONE opens with a numbingly long strip poker sequence, where after Word and Olson jump into bed and the not so Special Agent narrates the story of his investigation. By the time director Michael Cort had run out of his meagre £60,000 budget, he barely had sixty minutes of footage, and this scene was one of many tweaks to a film that Tenser tried to salvage. The production was an unhappy one, filming in an uncompleted Camden complex where dressing rooms and offices would remain only partially operational. Robertson Justice and Hawtrey seem tired and embarrassed as they await their pay cheques, and the climax - where the aliens annihilate a group of hunters by a zap sound effect from their fingertips - brings new meaning to artistic license.

A delightfully misrepresentative German DVD cover for the drab THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR. The appearance of the military at the top of the design - who are key to the plot - seems like an afterthought.

Written and directed by James Kelly, THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR at once reveals its punchline rather than use its more intriguing, original title ARE YOU DYING, YOUNG MAN?. Joyce (Flora Robson) and Ellie (Beryl Reid) are two elderly sisters living in an isolated, rural family house. Murders of soldiers at a nearby base are initially blamed on an animal ("a leopard in Lancashire?"), but the culprit turns out to be the spinsters' brother Stephen (Dafydd Havard), who was walled-up in the cellar before WWII to prevent his enlisting and ending up shell-shocked and disfigured like their WWI father. After continually escaping from his confinement, Stephen appears in his taloned-Neanderthal form to haunt his siblings in a thunderstorm-set climax.

THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR was the first Tigon picture to be shot at Pinewood, yet there is no scope in this static, talkative production; even a 'sex in the barn' scene delivers nothing of interest. The anti-war allegory undoubtedly still resonates, but is ultimately lost amidst the endless regurgitation of dialogue - celery is a particular talking point - which are infrequently interrupted by jarring, quickly edited murder scenes with minor flashes of blood. Publicity was unsurprisingly milked to try to gather some interest (UK trade ads even tried to associate the film to the Edgar Allan Poe quote "and much of madness, and more of sin, and of horror the soul of the plot"), but to no avail. Robson and Reid give stoic performances more associated to the stage, and Robson apparently only took the part after a chance train meeting with Laurence Olivier, who persuaded her to take the offer of work.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Don't Go In The House

2011-07-01T00:41:00.000-07:00

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973)

THE INNOCENTS child star Pamela Franklin plays spiritualist Florence Tanner. The Yokohama-born actress was busy with the supernatural in the early 1970s - appearing in NECROMANCY and the made-for-TV SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS - before retiring from acting in 1981.

PHYSICIST Dr Barrett (Clive Revill) is offered £100,000 by elderly Mr Deutsch (Roland Culver) to establish "the facts" about survival after death. The only suitable location for such an undertaking is the foreboding Belasco House, dubbed the "Mount Everest of haunted houses." Barrett is given a week to deliver his conclusions, organising the delivery of his newly perfected (and extremely bulky) electro-magnetic radiation machine, and works alongside mental medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) and Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), a physical medium and the only survivor of a previous investigation. The owner of the property was "Roaring Giant" Emeric Belasco, a six-foot-five perverted millionaire who disappeared soon after a massacre at the house. Florence claims to receive visits from Belasco's abused son Daniel, and when Barrett expresses scepticism he is attacked by - in quick succession - a glass, a flying meat rack and a falling chandelier, then a fire starts suddenly. Meanwhile, Barrett's wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) - accompanying her husband during his stay - is turning into a nymphomaniac, and Florence is being molested by the disturbed spirit of Daniel and later, mauled by a black cat.

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE beat THE EXORCIST into theatres by six months, and both deal with demonic possession in tandem with sexual language. However, the British entry plays like a children's horror movie, with one of the most laughable endings in genre history: basically, Emeric Belasco was no giant. Scripted by Richard Matheson from his novel Hell House (1971), the writer was apparently "sick with disappointment" after seeing the film, a notion shared by the majority of its audience over the years. At least half of its performers bring something to the table: Franklin takes the acting honours despite the ludicrous situations her character is thrust into, and McDowall entertainingly sleep-walks through his role as the distant Fischer. In comparison, Revill makes for a staid and stuffy scientist - one can only dream of Peter Cushing in the role - and Hunnicutt is miscast as the faithful yet sexually-frustrated wife, who at least can experience some kind of carnal pleasures while in the grip of the Belasco environment.

The cover to Saint Martin's reprinting of Hell House. More graphic and sexually violent than the screen adaptation, the novel also depicts the Belasco property as a luxurious art deco-style palace - complete with swimming-pool and ballroom - rather than the cobwebbed Gothic mansion of the film.

Crowleyesque Emeric apparently shut himself and his acolytes within the mansion ("Look at the windows...he had them bricked up so no one could see in...or out"), the house a haven for murder and debauchery ("Drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, bestiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism... not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies.") In one unintentionally hilarious scene, sexually-souped Ann approaches Fischer with a sweaty verbal onslaught after rubbing the breasts of a statue ("Together, naked, drunk, clutching, sweating, biting...") Perhaps it was Matheson's intention to subscribe to Crowley's beliefs, and portray a set of individuals with differing viewpoints to illustrate that the only unifying human condition is sensual and sado-erotic pleasure, and to test what is physically and spiritually possible. Barrett is a rationalist who refuses to believe that Tanner and Fischer are anything more than conduits for electrical forces, the two mediums differ over the exact nature of the haunting, and Ann yearns for awakening.

The film has a misplaced feeling through its not always convincing time-frame captions, and the week of the investigations takes place in the lead up to Christmas, without any mention of the holiday season. This otherworldly quality is enhanced by BBC Radiophonic Workshop veterans Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson’s electronic soundtrack, which exists more as a series of drum-driven oscillations than a formed score, and its distinctive visual style was recently plundered by Edgar Wright for his fake trailer DON'T! in GRINDHOUSE (2007). The special effects though are hardly special, resulting in a ectoplasm scene that has to hide behind some scientific hyperbole (“Premature retraction of ectoplasm causes systemic shock”) and one gets the impression that Matheson and director John Hough think they are making some important statements, though this is hard to see behind its shock tactics and silly sex scenes. This serious stance is underpinned by the opening written assurance from Tom Corbett - a "clairvoyant and psychic consultant to European Royalty" who also acted as technical advisor - to the effect that the story, though fictitious, is "not only very much within the bounds of possibility, but could well be true."
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Beneath the Skin

2011-06-12T14:35:00.000-07:00

THE CREEPING FLESH (1973)

Peter Cushing plays man of science Emmanuel Hildern, whose good intentions lead him to disaster, professionally and personally. Once again Cushing delivers a performance that not only saves the film, but offers a poignant parallel to the recent real-life loss of his wife.

A joint Tigon/World Film Services feature, THE CREEPING FLESH - directed by Freddie Francis - is clearly Hammer-Victorian, though largely shot on redressed sets from Amicus's THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970). The film has gathered momentum over the years as one of the few period piece British horror classics of the 1970s, yet the storyline - which has to thread together waring half-brothers, a family mental disorder, curing evil through science, an escaped lunatic, and a skeleton which grows back its flesh when in contact with water - is too disparate to create a cohesive whole. Despite fittingly juggling Victorian obsessions of palaeontology and psychology, this overly ambitious mix makes the film needlessly sluggish and the ending - despite its playful twist - leaves a monster roaming for a sequel that never came.

Revealed in flashback, Anthropologist Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing) returns from New Guinea with a giant skeleton. His daughter, Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), has been waiting anxiously for his return, unaware that the mother she believed long-dead has in fact only just died in a mental institution run by her father’s cold and calculating half-brother James (Christopher Lee). Working on the relic - believed to be the legendary Shish Kang, the Evil One - Hildern and assistant Waterlow (George Benson) conclude that evil is a disease of the blood, and that the skeleton may hold the key to a vaccine. Hildern is startled to find that the skeleton’s tissue can regenerate when touched by water, and is certain that its reconstituted blood can create an immunity from evil. He injects his daughter with a serum to stop her being afflicted with the madness that drove his wife Marguerite (Jenny Runacre) insane, but instead it turns Penelope into a psychopathic killer. James grows jealous of Emmanuel's work, stealing his research papers and the bones; but when his coach crashes during a storm, the skeleton develops into humanoid form.

By 1973, the world had moved on from Hammer Gothic. Yet THE CREEPING FLESH embraces it, with mixed results.

Cushing and Lee (top-billed for a second-string role) are unsurprisingly the highlight. Emmanuel's eroding mental stability is expertly portrayed by Cushing, expressing tender protectiveness of his innocent daughter and the grief of a widower, to the stern focus of a scientist on the brink of a major discovery. Lee is in his element as the scheming head of the asylum, showing no compassion for the inmates and using them as guinea pigs in his quest for the Richter Prize (“Unfortunately, in the state of society as it exists today, we are not permitted to experiment on human beings. Normal human beings.”) Dauntingly cast alongside Cushing and Lee, Heilbron consistently holds her screen presence, transforming from a repressed young woman to a leering, murdering seductress. Also, Kenneth J.Warren gives a sympathetic performances as the escaped mental patient, Lenny. The scene where a crazed Penelope gleefully sends him to his death - after the escapee acknowledges her as a potential companion - is shocking and saddening.

The unevenness of THE CREEPING FLESH mirrors the haphazard directorial career of Francis, in stark contrast to his illustrious credits as a cinematographer. In the director's chair, Francis worked almost exclusively in horror, struggling to stretch low budgets to accommodate overambitious screenplays (on his apparent typecasting as a genre director, Francis said, "horror films have liked me more than I have liked horror films.") At least Francis enjoyed some familiar faces behind the scenes here, including photographer Norman Warwick, editor Oswald Hafenrichter - who worked on arguably Francis's finest hour, THE SKULL (1965) - and make-up artist Roy Ashton. In fact, a further nod to THE SKULL is the use of the same camera trick of shooting through the eye-sockets of the creature, but the Evil One is more bloody that the earlier example. He made numerous workmanlike pictures for Hammer and Amicus, but usually managed to infuse his assignments with stylish bursts of visual energy. Particularly memorable in this feature is the monster's huge shadow, slowly creeping up and covering the house.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Ripping Yarns

2011-06-01T00:21:00.000-07:00

A STUDY IN TERROR (1966)
HANDS OF THE RIPPER (1971)

Jack the Ripper suspect Walter Sickert's 1907 oil on canvas Mornington Crescent Nude, which hangs in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Since the Whitechapel murders of 1888, the few facts of the case have been put aside for the sake of sensationalism and stupidity; in 2001, novelist Patricia Cornwell destroyed some of Sickert's art in her quest to unveil the Ripper's identity.

JACK the Ripper will forever cast his (or her) shadow. Countless films and television programmes have exploited a mythology rooted in one of the first examples of tabloid journalism. Plot devices are often conjured out of thin air for dramatic gain, though the firm facts are so slim that any form of adaptation will shroud it in thick, London fog. A common misconception is that the killer was a Royal surgeon who wore a top hat and cape, and carried a large black bag of shiny surgical instruments. The Sir William Gull/Coachman Netley/Royal conspiracy has its origins in a 1970 article in The Criminologist, before this notion gained momentum in a 1973 BBC documentary which directly inspired Stephen Knight's best-selling The Final Solution (1976). Despite chief protagonist Gull being a physician and never practised as a surgeon - or indeed being a Freemason - the threads of this ripping yarn were nevertheless woven into a 1988 television serial starring Michael Caine, and the Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell graphic novel From Hell (1988 - 98). In reality, the only detailed description of the murderer said the Ripper had "the appearance of a sailor," and actual evidence is limited to the murder of five prostitutes within one square mile of Whitechapel between 31st August and the 9th November 1888.

Some of the more amusing suspects have included Charles Lutwidge Dodgson - the real name of author Lewis Carroll - and Lord Randolph Churchill - the father of Sir Winston. Carroll was thought to have had an unhealthy fixation with virginal purity, though it is unclear why this would have made him a viable suspect, and Churchill seems to be mentioned only because his political career was cut short by a fatal bout of neurosyphilis. American crime writer Patricia Cornwell handily "staked her reputation" by naming British artist and long-standing Ripper suspect Walter Sickert as Jack. The novelist bought 31 of Sickert's works, and claimed that some of his canvases' contain visual references to the crimes; according to Cornwall, Sickert was turned into a killer by a defective penis. Cornwell also claimed a letter written by the killer had the same watermark as some of Sickert's writing paper. There were hundreds of letters from different people falsely claiming to be the murderer, and the watermark in question was on a brand of stationery that was widely available at the time. So much for Cornwell using the title Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed for her 2002 book.

Starlets on display in A STUDY OF TERROR include Edina Ronay as Mary Kelly and Barbara Windsor as a comedic Annie Chapman.

When exploitation producers Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser - together Henry E. Lester, executor of the Arthur Conan Doyle estate and head of Sir Nigel Films - touched on the idea of divorcing Sherlock Holmes from his usual canon of literature to forge a fresh new career in features, James Hill's A STUDY IN TERROR sees a youthful and athletic Holmes (John Neville) investigate the Whitechapel murders. However, the desire to downplay the Ripper aspects and re-establish Holmes and Watson as series characters never took off in a decade of James Bond's and Derek Flint's. Drawn into the investigation when he receives a case of surgical instruments through the post - minus a scalpel - Holmes is lead to the estate of the Osbourne family and the medical mission of Dr Murray (Anthony Quayle). Unravelling the mystery, Holmes and Watson (Donald Houston) are drawn into a tangled web which involves a family feud, blackmail and revenge set against the ongoing slaughter of the East End.

Despite authentic production design and costume, the Whitechapel of A STUDY IN TERROR is that of filmic melodrama and full of prostitutes straight from the 1960s (using the actual names of the victims for the first time on screen). The promise of the film pitting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's master detective against Saucy Jack is never realised by a script which sees its prime duty as providing a (albeit fictional) solution to the crimes. In a screen career which stretched back to the turn of the century, the casting of the detective was less important here, with Holmes merely a gimmick. The action sequences - where Holmes is equipped with pistol and sword stick - led to Columbia's American ads selling the film under the wing of the then topical BATMAN TV show. Complete with "Pow!," "Biff!" and "Crunch!," Sherlock Holmes was apparently "...the original Caped Crusader."

Eric Porter plays John Pritchard in HANDS OF THE RIPPER. Porter had previously survived Hammer's THE LOST CONTINENT, but was primarily known for his portrayal of tortured solicitor Soames in the BBC's THE FORSYTE SAGA, which won him a BAFTA Best Actor award.

Hammer's HANDS OF THE RIPPER was arguably the studio's finest release of the 1970s, and their first flirtation with Jack since the Exclusive-bannered ROOM TO LET in 1950 (though a third entry, DR JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE, was released two weeks later). Directed by Peter Sasdy, HANDS OF THE RIPPER has a quality of production which contradicts the truth of a company in decline: a lush score, impressive stock sets, and use of real locations and extras provide a fitting stage for a uniformly excellent cast, and even the blood looks real. In a memorable pre-credits sequence set in Berner Street, Whitechapel, a young girl watches as her father is revealed to be a syphilis-scarred man leading a double life as Jack. Anna (Angharad Rees) grows to young womanhood as an orphan, working for a charlatan psychic, Mrs Golding (Dora Bryan). After committing the impaling murder of Golding of which she is not suspected, brusque Dr Pritchard (Eric Porter) - an early practitioner of Freudian psychology - takes Anna home as his ward.

Rees is the antithesis of the usual cleavage-heavy Hammer female lead, her doll-like visage effectively illustrating the innocence behind her curse as the "possessed" spirit of a serial killer. Its an interesting twist on Ripper lore which can be traced back to the "Mad Midwife/Jill the Ripper" theory, which surmised that there was a female covering up a series of botched abortions, a notion quashed by the fact that none of the victims were pregnant. Anna is so fragile the viewer is rendered helplessly sympathetic towards her, despite her acts of grandiose murder (none of which are committed by knife) whenever she becomes entranced by sparkling light: housemaid Dolly (Marjie Lawrence) has her throat slashed by a vanity mirror and left in a bath of blood; Prichard's torso is perforated by a sabre; and in the films standout gore moment, prostitute Long Liz Stride (Lynda Baron) has her face pierced by hatpins. Despite this carnage, HANDS OF THE RIPPER is almost a love story, longer on character relationships and period atmosphere than these exploitative scenes suggest.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Hammer Has Risen From The Grave

2011-05-11T12:07:00.000-07:00

WAKE WOOD (2011)

A reworking of W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw (1902) and Stephen King's Pet Sematary (1983), WAKE WOOD also owes debts to the 1973 releases DON'T LOOK NOW and THE WICKER MAN. But despite all these reference points, the film successfully attempts a genuine Hammer rebirth around rebirth motifs.

HAMMER has been in a state of frustration since the 1980s. New beginnings always fizzled into oblivion, including a Warner Bros deal in 1993 which proposed a $100m programme of remakes, a deal with Firstsight Ltd announced at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and 2003 had a schedule issued by Queensland-based Pictures in Paradise. Then in 2007 it was announced that Dutch media tycoon John De Mol - whose production house invented the BIG BROTHER reality show - had purchased the Hammer rights to over 300 films in the studio's back catalogue, and the company was restarted under the guidance of Simon Oakes. The first output under the new regime was BEYOND THE RAVE - made in conjunction with Channel 4 - which premiered free on myspace in twenty, four-minute segments during 2008. This contemporary vampire serial with blasting techno (selected by dance-music maestro, Pete Tong, innit) and hip street lingo couldn't have been further from expectations.

David Keating's WAKE WOOD was the first of the new Hammer films to be shot, but the last to be released, after Matt Reeves' needless English language version of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008), LET ME IN (2010), and Antti Jokinen's voyeuristic mis-fire THE RESIDENT (2011). WAKE WOOD tells the story of Patrick (Aidan Gillen) and Louise (Eva Birthistle), who move to the Irish village of Wake Wood after their daughter Alice (Ella Connolly) is killed in a savage dog attack. One night, they stumble upon a ritual led by Arthur (Timothy Spall), and soon learn that the community has the power to bring the recently deceased back to life for three days. The couple desperately want to see Alice again, and so begins the latest ceremony where their daughter is "reborn" via the utilisation of another corpse - a farmer who died in an accident involving a bull - which is systematically pressed, cut, covered in mud and burnt to recreate a suitable husk.

Arriving in Wake Wood for a fresh start, a young couple become trapped in a tortured existence with their undead daughter.

Gillen and Birthistle are fine as the grieving parents - Birthistle should be used to menacing minors after THE CHILDREN (2008) - and Spall evidently enjoys his turn as the village elder with nocturnal habits, but it is the wide-eyed Connolly was is the most effective as the dead soul, switching from wholesome child to murderous spawn with relative ease. Made in conjunction with the Irish Film Board and the Swedish Film Institute, WAKE WOOD is a slow-burning and emotionally draining film which draws heavily from past cult favourites. Refreshingly old school with its English eccentricities and grue, this may, however, restrict its modern appeal, and acceptance may be limited to those enveloped in Hammer nostalgia.

During their years of inactivity, many intriguing Hammer projects were mentioned, ranging from Jamaican voodoo film THE WHITE WITCH OF ROSE HALL, epic television anthology THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HAMMER, and a mini-series based on Peter Norden's Salon Kitty (1970). Yet WAKE WOOD feels like the kind of film "new" Hammer should be making. With any reinvention of such a historic brand, production natures need to be tweaked, but a respect to their heritage is also important. Case in point is the new DOCTOR WHO, which is currently losing its prime time viewers in a whirlwind of riddles and bombastic CGI; it will be interesting to see over the coming years if Oakes will keep the ship away from revenue friendly crowd-pleasers, or commit to earthy releases with one eye on the past.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Pit of History

2011-05-01T01:09:00.000-07:00

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)

One of the best Hammer productions, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is science fiction just as audacious as 2001, with considerable less pretension. Here the film is being shown in an uneasy double-bill with CIRCUS OF FEAR.

SCIENCE fiction is a genre of ideas, apprehensive about the universe and our role within it; H.G.Wells was obsessed with human insignificance, and George Orwell our capacity for authoritarian evil. Away from the USA-style bug-eyed monsters and space cadets, British SF is sullied by a dark ocean of history and class struggle, yet today we live in a world of perpetual surveillance, apocalyptic pathogens and computer hyperconnectivity which has not only blurred fact and fiction, but eroded boundaries of national identity and personal space (in Fredric Brown’s one-page story Answer (1954), when a new super-computer is asked if there is a God, it replies "Yes, now there is a God.") London, in particular, has suffered at the hands of SF, with differing intellectual richness; DOCTOR WHO featured numerous "creature of the week" alien invasions, and on a more dystopian level totalitarian regimes have been evident in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) and BRAZIL (1986). More bombastically, American productions LIFEFORCE (1985) found the capital overrun by space vampires, and in REIGN OF FIRE (2002) a hibernating dragon is awakened by construction work on the London underground.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT is arguably the greatest "London under supernatural siege" picture, and a seminal ideas film. Based on the celebrated Nigel Kneale BBC series, Hammer's version - directed by Roy Ward Baker from Kneale's screenplay - begins with the discovery of ape men skeletons - rather than dragons - during work at Hobbs End underground station. When a strange metal container is found, it is thought to be a German V2, but this is quashed when Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir) finds insect creatures inside. He believes that these beings came from Mars five million years ago, and helped humanity to gain racial consciousness. The Martian psychokinetic energy still lies dormant in mankind and the horned insect figures are remembered in human memory as the Devil. Hobbs End has been notorious for centuries of paranormal disturbances and now - with the full uncovering of the spaceship - the dormant powers become active.

A QUATERMASS AND THE PIT novel was published by Penguin in April 1960, with a cover illustration by the author's brother, Bryan Kneale.

Kneale has always been abrasive of the stealing of his ideas, particularly by DOCTOR WHO. But here the writer borrows from Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) - a novel about a race of aliens who resemble the classic image of The Devil - and also Clarke's The Sentinel (1948), a short story which was expanded and modified into 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). Although the releases are poles apart in budget, both films share a great deal thematically: the impact of alien intelligence upon human evolution and the consequences of that intervention being discovered. But while 2001's alien intelligence is arguably one of teacher and observer, Kneale suggests that Martian genetics are actively malevolent, transferring the Martians own instinct to kill the other into the ape men who they experimented upon. Consequently, the human urge to hate, despise and destroy is explained through the fact that, as is explicitly stated, “We ARE the Martians!”

Kneale's concept of induced human violence is linked with the equally sensational notion that rationalises our conception of haunting and the devil, explaining apparitions ("ghosts... [are] phenomena that were badly observed and wrongly explained") and demonology in one handy revelation. Consequently, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT portrays our layered heritage of old, weird Britain with historical and supernatural clout unlike any other. The film is lensed by Arthur Grant in his trademark muted style, providing a perfect feel for a film so obsessed with bones and ancient mythology. The scenario of unearthing a long-buried evil is addressed with equal zeal in BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (1970), where a skull is uncovered by a farmer's plough; this artifact turns the young people of a 17th-century village into a cult with a penchant for erotic blood sacrifices. Shooting with an abundance of low camera angles, this amplifies the feeling of being watched by some ancient other.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Planets of Doom

2011-04-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

DOCTOR WHO - PLANET OF EVIL (1975)
DOCTOR WHO - THE BRAIN OF MORBIUS (1976)
DOCTOR WHO - THE SEEDS OF DOOM (1976)

The Doctor and Sarah are engulfed by the PLANET OF EVIL.

PRODUCER Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes used many classic horror/science fiction motifs as a springboard for their stories on DOCTOR WHO, creating a greater appreciation of alien concepts and otherworldly environments. PLANET OF EVIL sees The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah (Elisabeth Sladen) arrive on Zeta Minor - a planet "at the very edge of the known universe" - where they discover that a Morestran geological expedition has fallen prey to an unseen killer and only the leader, Professor Sorenson (Frederick Jaeger), remains alive. A military mission from Morestra has also arrived to investigate - at first suspecting the Doctor and Sarah of responsibility - but the culprit is revealed to be a creature from a universe of antimatter, retaliating for the removal by Sorenson of some samples from around a pit that acts as an interface between the two universes.

PLANET OF EVIL is an effective fusing of FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), brought to life by a robust performance from Jaeger and Roger Murray-Leach's extraordinary jungle set, a vividly successful illustration of Hinchcliffe's desires to create more believable elseworlds. Not only do we have Sorenson as a transforming character, Zeta Minor itself is a living contradiction, as is the unscientific (but suitably dramatic) plot mechanism of matter versus anti-matter. Television sci-fi writers have had a long love affair with anti-matter, which they have used to illustrate that well-known dictum do not tamper. Thankfully, there are usually safety valves between the two states (as in STAR TREK - THE ALTERNATIVE FACTOR (1967)), or a lonely sentinel warning against matter-mixing (SPACE: 1999 - MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1975)).

THE BRAIN OF MORBIUS features a monster so absurdly weird it challenges Japanese kaiju. Morbius’ brain is eventually encased inside a fish-tank with eye-stalks, on a patchwork body with one arm being a giant lobster claw.

Originally written by Terrance Dicks, THE BRAIN OF MORBIUS was extensively re-written in his absence by Holmes to up the horror quotient and remove the technically challenging notion of a scavenger robot. By Dicks’ chagrined request, the show is given the pseudonymous writing credit "Robin Bland". The final version is a messy mix of Frankenstein (1818) and She (1886) set on Karn, a home world for both The Sisterhood – whose sacred flame produces the elixir of life – and Solon (Philip Madoc) – a mad scientist who is putting together a body for the still-living brain of an executed Time Lord. When the Doctor (Baker) and Sarah (Sladen) arrive, The Sisterhood think they have been sent to steal the last drops of elixir produced by a dying flame, and Solon is after the Doctor’s head to complete his work (though it is left unclear why the scientist doesn’t just use the Doctor’s body rather than the unwieldy mutant he has created).

The ritualistic Sisterhood are laughable with their endless arm-waving, yet the serial’s most ridiculous moment comes when the Doctor solves their extinguishing life-force (“the impossible dream of a thousand alchemists, dripping like tea from an urn”) by removing some soot. Thankfully the scenes with Solon and his Igoresque assistant Condo (Colin Fay) are wonderful galactic Hammer Horror, and the moment where Condo is repeatedly shot predictably caused Mary Whitehouse to stir, claiming the story “contained some of the sickest and most horrific material seen on children’s television.” The graphic nature is indeed memorable, but the lasting talking point is the climactic mind-bending contest between Morbius and the Doctor, mainly because it seemed to contradict WHO lore by indicating that there had been eight previous incarnations before William Hartnell (although an equally viable explanation would have been the faces that appear – which include Hinchcliffe and Holmes in stock costume – where actually Morbius’ former selves).

In THE SEEDS OF DOOM, the humanoid Krynoid suit was recycled from a surviving costume from THE CLAWS OF AXOS, and sprayed green.

Robert Banks Stewart's script for THE SEEDS OF DOOM liberally draws on THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955), THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951), and The Day of the Triffids (1951) for its source material. Two alien seed pods are found buried in the Antarctic permafrost and the Doctor (Baker) realises that they are Krynoids; "I suppose you could call it a galactic weed," begins the Time Lord, "though its deadlier than any weed you know. On most planets the animals eat the vegetation. On planets where the Krynoid gets established, the vegetation eats the animals." After an act of sabotage, one of the pods is delivered to eccentric plant collector Harrison Chase (Tony Beckley) at his English mansion, where assistant Keeler (Mark Jones) is infected. Keeler - whose transformation is accelerated by Chase feeding him raw meat - goes on a rampage, rapidly growing to gigantic proportions before being destroyed by the RAF.

THE SEEDS OF DOOM is a strange Doctor Who because it could be played out without the characters of the Doctor and Sarah (Sladen). Though behind Douglas Camfield's action-orientated direction, the show is easily one of the consistently entertaining Who six-parters. Baker and Sladen often lapse into self-parody, but Beckley is chilling as Chase, portraying a level of Masteresque authority and habit even down to wearing black leather gloves, and it is fun to see John Challis playing a "heavy" like Scorby, far from his future in Peckham for ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES (1981 - 2003). The model work holds up very well, and the various stages of Krynoid transformation are handled with aplomb, but the serial suffers from an antiseptic handling of UNIT and a perplexing final scene; after the TARDIS materialises at the South Pole, Sarah states that the Doctor "...forgot to reprogram the co-ordinates," yet our dynamic duo initially landed at the Antarctic base by helicopter.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

This post is dedicated to the memory of Elisabeth Sladen (1/2/1946 - 19/4/2011).

Virgin of Evil

2011-04-12T04:24:00.000-07:00

VIRGIN WITCH (1970)
TOWER OF EVIL (1972)

VIRGIN WITCH's Vicki Michelle would later be best remembered as waitress Yvette in the BBC's WWII catchphrasefest 'ALLO 'ALLO. Unsurprisingly shying away from her schlock past, Vicki can also be glimpsed in QUEEN KONG and THE SENTINEL; she was young, she needed the work.

RAY Austin's VIRGIN WITCH sees two sisters - Christine and Betty (played by real life siblings Ann and Vicki Michelle) run away from home with dreams of fame and fortune in London. This being a 1970s British sexploitation flick, they are promptly picked up by a smooth-talker in a sports car (in this case, Johnny (Keith Buckley)), and swept off to a comfortable flat where opportunity waits around every corner. Christine is hired for a photo shoot by Sybil Waite (Patricia Haines), a predatory lesbian who uses her modeling agency as bait to lure attractive, naïve young women to the pagan coven she acts as high priestess; what Sybil doesn't know is that Christine is gifted with supernatural powers of her own. With Christine arriving at the Wychwold manor house for her assignment - and the innocent Betty in tow - it is soon discovered that the voyeuristic owner of the house, Dr Gerald Amberley (Neil Hallett), is a high priest who is (conveniently) holding a Sabbat that very evening.

VIRGIN WITCH was shot in 1970, but it took two further years to get it into theatres due to problems with the BBFC. The blend of horror and sex was always a problem for the censor, but viewed today it is difficult to understand why such a timid release should be withheld for such a period, particularly as these ingredients were inseparable for British filmmakers at the dawn of the decade. Whereas Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy was old-fashioned horror spiced up with liberal sprinklings of flesh, VIRGIN WITCH is first and foremost a skinflick, with supernatural and horror elements so ineffectual they scarcely warrant a mention. In fact, the most unnerving thing about the film is that producer “Ralph Solomans” was actually a joint pseudonym for wrestling commentator Kent Walton and Hazel Adair, creator of that zenith of daytime soaps, CROSSROADS.

TOWER OF EVIL was released in the USA as HORROR ON SNAPE ISLAND, then reissued as BEYOND THE FOG. This uproarious film mixes old world Gothic (dark setting, mythical superstitions, gloomy atmosphere) with the modern slasher (elusive killer, bloody murders, sexually active characters as victims).

Jim O' Connolly's TOWER OF EVIL can boast one of the most delirious plots in British film history. John Gurney (George Colouris) and his son Hamp (Jack Watson) make their way by small boat to Snape, a fog-bound island off the South-West coast of England. On their arrival they discover the mutilated remains of three American teenagers (played with bogus accents by British sex film actors Robin Askwith, John Hammill and Serretta Wilson) before shrieking, naked survivor Penny (Candace Glendenning) knifes John to death and is knocked out by his son. One teen had been killed by a gold Phoenician ceremonial spear, which leads a bickering group of archaeologists to travel to the island, together with Brent (Bryant Halliday), a private eye intent on clearing Penny's name. As the archaeologists delve deeper into the island, they are attacked by Hamp's demented Neanderthal brother Saul (Frederic Abbot) and his even madder son Michael (Mark McBride); it is claimed that the duo have become unhinged after the death of Saul's "calming influence" wife Martha, whose seaweed-covered, crab-chewed corpse is kept in a rocking chair.

Together with Mario Bava's equally convoluted A BAY OF BLOOD released the previous year, TOWER OF EVIL contains a potent blend of sex, nudity and violence that helped set the template for the American slasher craze yet to happen. It is also a riot of 1970s paraphernalia in its hippie dialogue ("Bravery isn't my bag, man"), psychedelia (Penny's very unorthodox interrogation involves regressive hypnosis induced by disco-lights) and fashion (the use of skin-tight flared jeans leave little to the imagination – and that’s just the men). Ultimately there is something very British in having a dank, foggy island as a hotbed of sexual activity and intrigue, where scrambling crabs act as a delicious metaphor.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Faking It

2011-04-01T02:12:00.000-07:00

SCIENCE REPORT: ALTERNATIVE 3 (1977)
SCREEN ONE: GHOSTWATCH (1992)

Presented and narrated by well-known broadcaster Tim Brinton, ALTERNATIVE 3 purports to be an investigation into the UK's brain drain, uncovering a plan to make the Moon and Mars habitable in the event of an environmental catastrophe on Earth.

IN the 1970s, Anglia Television ran a weekly series called SCIENCE REPORT. The final episode was due to have been broadcast on April 1st, and as the slot was not to be recommissioned, the production team decided to produce a spoof. Written by David Ambrose and directed by Christopher Miles, ALTERNATIVE 3 began by detailing a number of disappearances and deaths of physicists, engineers and astronomers. It was claimed that these people were involved in a secret American/Soviet plan in outer space, and that scientists had determined that the Earth's surface would be unable to support life for much longer due to climate change. In 1957, Dr Carl Gerstein (Richard Marner) proposed that there were three alternatives to this problem; the first was the drastic reduction of humans, the second the construction of vast shelters to house government officials and a cross section of the population, and the third was to populate Mars via the Moon. The programme ends by showing a 1962 landing on the Martian surface; as American and Russian voices celebrate their achievement, something stirs beneath the Martian soil.

Following the grand tradition of CRIMEWATCH and BADGERWATCH, GHOSTWATCH involved BBC personnel (hosted by Michael Parkinson, with Mike Smith manning the phones and Sarah Greene and Craig Charles roving reports) performing a live, fake investigation of poltergeist activity. Like the most effective examples, the story centers around family relationships and prepubescent girls, areas which it is felt that the viewer will show attention and compassion. The culprit in this case is a malevolent ghost nicknamed Pipes, from his habit of knocking on the house's plumbing. We also learn that Pipes is the spirit of a psychologically disturbed man, himself believed to have been troubled by the spirit of child killer. In the end, the reporters realise that the transmission itself is acting as a national seance, with the spirits' taking control of the studio and possessing Parkinson. As part of its climatic melee, Greene is sucked into a cupboard and presumed dead, which, at this point, one hopes the programme had been real.

Michael Parkinson adorns the cover of the Radio Times promoting GHOSTWATCH's Halloween night screening. His typically forlorn performance was one of the key elements duping people to be believe the drama was actually showing true, live events.

ALTERNATIVE 3 and GHOSTWATCH illustrate how easily the viewer can be fooled if they are presented in acknowledged formats. Both were fronted by well-known television personalities which instantly lend gravitas, but it is difficult to understand how such a high volume of viewers can be fooled by interviews which are too polished to have been spontaneous, and ignore closing credits which clearly name actors and writers. GHOSTWATCH, in particular, resulted in an outcry of which only the Great British Public could manifest. The BBC were besieged with calls criticising the corporation for the misleading and disturbing nature of the programme, and the ensuing hysteria included the case of Martin Denham - a mental retard so "hypnotised and obsessed" by the show he committed suicide - and a woman who demanded recompense for a pair of jeans because her husband was so terrified he soiled himself. Additionally, a report in the British Medical Journal described two cases of GHOSTWATCH-induced post-traumatic stress disorder in children, the first PTSD caused by television.

The legacies of both programmes are far-reaching. Conspiracy theorists are still feeding and elaborating on the prophetic propositions of Dr Carl Gerstein, and GHOSTWATCH was ahead of its time in the sub-genre of horror vérité, which would break out in everything from THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999), MOST HAUNTED (2002 -10), and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2007). MOST HAUNTED is an interesting faux pas, as after many viewer complaints - usually about "spiritualist medium" Derek Acorah - Ofcom cleared the show of any deception, ruling that the programme was entertainment and not to be taken seriously. Ofcom ruled that it contained "a high degree of showmanship that puts it beyond what we believe to be a generally accepted understanding of what comprises a legitimate investigation".
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Hampden House of Horror

2011-03-21T06:59:00.000-07:00

HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR (1980)

The House That Bled To Death is a double-twist shocker featuring a priceless scene where a pipe spurts blood over children at a party. A family move into the dilapidated abode where a man had carved up his wife with an ornamental machete, though the new owners have an Amityville-like agenda of their own.

TELEVISION always served Hammer films well. After all, if it wasn't for the success of their adaptation THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955), it is likely that their vivid re-imaginings of Frankenstein and Dracula would have never been made. By the 1970s, Hammer's usual output of costumed gothique was in its death throes, slices of entertainment that seemed frozen in time. However, the studio's big screen spin-off of ON THE BUSES (1971) was a box-office phenomenon, leading the studio on a comedic vein which included LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR (1973) and MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE (1974). Hammer's attempts to make TV projects of their own resulted in four separate ventures; the series under consideration here was followed by HAMMER HOUSE OF MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE (1984), but earlier projects were TALES OF FRANKENSTEIN (1958) - an abortive pilot starring Anton Diffring - and seventeen episodes of JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN (1968).

British horror had largely become past tense from the mid-70s; Tigon's last official release was the Mary Millington sex film COME PLAY WITH ME (1977), and Amicus ceased production after THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT in 1979, the same year in which Hammer called in the receivers. But two former board members, Brian Lawrence and Roy Skeggs, assumed control and immediately began looking at ways to revitalise the company. Lawrence and Skeggs needed a new base of operations and leased Hampden House in Buckinghamshire - close to Hammer's spiritual home of Bray - to develop a new series for television. A former private house and exclusive Girl's School, the majestic property and surrounding areas are used ad infinitum, and most of the production, including the editing, was overseen there. Assembling their crew, the two men unsurprisingly drafted in a number of former Hammer employees, including directors Peter Sasdy, Alan Gibson and Don Sharp, visual effects man Ian Scoones, and James Bernard scored two stories.

Diana Dors and her brood in Children of the Full Moon, a long way from Oliver Reed and THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF.

Funded by ITC and screened between 13th September and 6th December 1980, the 13 episodes of the HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR were refreshingly bleak affairs, mixing contemporary horror and titillation in the manner of Norman J. Warren (with Frankenstein and Dracula nowhere in sight). Hampered by meagre budgets, pedestrian scripts and flat direction, the fifty-minute stories are still surprisingly watchable, thanks to their variety of topics - devil worship, time-travelling witches, cannibalism and Nazi pet shop owners - and stars such as Hammer favourites Peter Cushing, John Carson and Robert Urquhart, together with Brian Cox, Jon Finch and Warren Clarke et al (even a young Pierce Brosnan appears as a randy jogger victim, a character so incidental that he's even denied an onscreen death).

HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR falls into that particular notion lovingly referred to as guilty pleasures. Even the worst entry, Carpathian Eagle, stars Suzanne Danielle as a psychotic seductress/writer who rips out the heart of her victims with a dagger. The best two episodes hold up as memorable slabs of TV horror: The Two Faces of Evil is a dazzling doppelganger yarn with a genuinely jolting prologue, and the delirious The Mask of Satan sees a morgue worker believing he has a disease engineered to bring Satan to Earth. The rest of the output fall somewhere in between; at least Rude Awakening attempts something different in its total abandonment of logic, with adulterous estate agent Denholm Elliott persistently accused of murdering his wife; and VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1971) helmer Robert Young brings some much-needed stylish flourishes to the voodoo-themed Charlie Boy.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Hammer Monster Mash

2011-03-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)
THE GORGON (1964)

"All Earth Stands Helpless!" Aware that the Quatermass name held no weight in the United States, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT was retitled SHOCK! then THE CREEPING UNKNOWN, and cut by United Artists. The movie was released with THE BLACK SLEEP, which featured Basil Rathbone as a mad scientist opening the brains of his victims to discover a means to cure his wife's tumour. It was alleged that this double-bill literally scared a nine-year-old boy to death, who died of a ruptured artery during a showing in Illinois.

HAMMER were always happy to capitalise on established hits; having previously drawn on radio (Dick Barton (1946 - 51), PC49 (1947 - 53)), the studio looked towards television with a truncated version of Nigel Kneale's celebrated six-part THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT (1953). While most British production houses regarded the X certificate as a kiss of death for the box office, Hammer hoped that the subtle title change to Xperiment would be a marketing ploy to help the financially stricken company. Thankfully the film was a hit; without THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, it would be doubtful that Hammer would have survived to create the Gothic horror renaissance that is so entrenched in our cinematic heritage.

The film begins with experimental rocket ship Quatermass 1 crash landing at Oakley Green. This opening - where the phallus-like rocket ship plunges into the ground breaking the monotony of two coy lovers - is a fitting allegory for the arrival of Hammer horror. In this instant, the domesticity of the British feature film makes way for a new order of directness. Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) - the British rocket group scientist responsible for launching the craft without official sanction - discovers that two of the three crew members have disappeared. The sole survivor - Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth) - is suffering from alarmingly low blood pressure, pulse and heart rate. As Carroon's condition worsens, the astronaut plunges his fist into a cactus, starting a consumption by an alien organism which mimics the plant form. Quatermass tracks the mutated creature to Westminster Abbey, and before its spores can spread, is electrocuted.

Richard Wordsworth's alien-infected Carroon in THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT is an unwilling martyr to Professor Quatermass' abrasive scientific crusade. The actor would later bring similar sympathetic tendencies to the role of the feral beggar in THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF.

In keeping with a long-established pattern, a Hollywood star was contracted for the benefit of stateside distribution. Fading heavy (and alcoholic) Donlevy was selected much to Kneale's horror (Donlevy's alcoholism reducing the actor to read off cue cards) and in 1995 the writer was still vociferous of the actor's portrayal of the scientist: "I may have picked Quatermass' surname out of a phone book but his first name was carefully chosen: Bernard, after Bernard Lovell, the creator of Jodrell Bank. Pioneer, ultimate questing man. Donlevy played him as a mechanic, a creature with a completely closed mind. He could make nothing of any imaginative lines, and simply barked and bawled his way through the plot. A bully whose emotional range ran from annoyance to fury." Donlevy's Quatermass is indeed pointed and bullish, refusing to waste time even when considering Carroon's increasingly catatonic suffering ("There's no room for personal feelings in science ... some of us have a mission").

As well as the wayward Donlevy, American Margia Dean plays Carroon's wife Judith. Suffering from a case of indifferent post-synching, Dean was imposed upon director Val Guest because she was reportedly the girlfriend of American co-producer Robert Lippert. Thankfully the British cast feature more strongly: David King-Wood as Dr Briscoe, Harold Lang as private eye Christie and Thora Hird as Rose the baglady are uniformly excellent, with Jack Warner's Police Inspector Lomax shadowing his trademark role in DIXON OF DOCK GREEN (1955 - 76). Wordsworth's heart-rending performance, however, is the highlight; communicating an unbearable loneliness through mime, the success of the actor's illustration of a once intelligent man consumed by forces beyond his control was key to Hammer when contemplating their re-imagining in THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957). Discovering body horror years before David Cronenberg, Wordworth's poignancy matches Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, particularly in the scene with a little girl (Jane Asher), which mirrors Karloff's lakeside encounter with Maria (Marilyn Harris). Interestingly, it is in this sequence that we glimpse Carroon in human form for the last time, as if the innocence of the child evokes the astronaut's last note of sympathy.

The girl who befriends Carroon in THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT is played by Jane Asher, who seventeen years later would star in Nigel Kneale's THE STONE TAPE.

Many characters and sub-plots are inevitably missing when compressing the television serial to feature length - for example, the intriguing notion that the alien ether had made Carroon absorb the other two astronaut's minds - but such trimming makes THE QUATERMAS XPERIMENT a fast-paced thriller which is made even more immediate by Guest's gritty, semi-documentary style. Perhaps one constriction too many was the change made to the Westminster Abbey conclusion; instead of the explosive climax in the film, on television Quatermass appeals to the human consciousness within the alien, which wills itself to death. Totally lost upon the feature is the teleplay's framing of this climax within a fictionalised live BBC broadcast - which must have raised a few eyebrows of those tuning in late - but although THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT loses this particular faux realite, Guest's feature does incorporate one of the earliest examples of found footage in cinema history: a silent video feed shows the bombardment of Q1 by the cosmic rays which cause Carroon's transformation.

While the changes to the teleplay are in the interests of producing a box office success, the cuts made by United Artists for the Americanised THE CREEPING UNKNOWN release are, in fact, insulting. Nearly three minutes of footage is removed - mostly cheapening the London Zoo sequence - but the devil is in the detail: Donlevy and Dean receive above the title billing opposed to Donlevy and Warner in the British version, and the titles also downplay the importance of Kneale's play. Furthermore, American prints eliminate acknowledgments to the BBC, The Air Ministry, the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co, The British Interplanetary Society, The Post London Authority and General Radiological Ltd, as well as replacing the closing "A Hammer Production, produced at Bray Studios" with a simple "The End."

Having exhausted the gallery of classic movie monsters, Hammer turned to mythology for inspiration, resulting in THE GORGON being one of the studio's most poetic and haunted achievements.

When THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN was unleashed, it set in motion an initial burst of robust Hammer Horrors that focused on dominating male characters and situations. THE GORGON, however, made seven years later, started a trend towards predatory yet well-spoken female parts that fundamentally weakened narrative. Hammer's later move from Bray to Elstree was detrimental enough, but this gender shift resulted in a hit-and-miss series of films which portrayed murderous but sexualised lead woman: for every measured entry like FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1966) and HANDS OF THE RIPPER (1971), there was a debacle such as THE WITCHES (1966) and LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1970).

The last Hammer film to combine the talents of stars Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and director Terence Fisher, THE GORGON is overwhelmingly fatalistic. Set in 1910, the film focuses on the village of Vandoft, which has been suffering a series of mysterious deaths for five years. However, the local doctor Namaroff (Cushing) has been concealing that the victims were all turned to stone, and suspects that the derelict Castle Borski is housing Megaera, the last of the legendary Gorgons. When an artist's model and her unborn child are turned to stone, her boyfriend Bruno (Jeremy Longhurst) hangs himself, which results in the boy's grieving father Professor Heitz (Michael Goodliffe), his second son Paul (Richard Pasco) and Paul's mentor Professor Meister (Lee) investigating.

Barbara Shelley in THE GORGON. Ballet dancer Prudence Hyman played Shelley's monstrous alter ego with the infamous stiff snake-hair.

Ambiguities add to this dream-like storyline. Hammer may have looked to mythology for new monsters, but the Greek Megaera was not even a Gorgon, rather a deity who causes jealousy. It is unclear why The Gorgon only appears during the full moon, as is the question of why - after thousands of years - the spirit has possessed a human, Namaroff's assistant Carla (Barbara Shelley). Although her back story is never elaborated on, Carla was an amnesia victim who came to Vandorf for treatment, the doctor exhibiting both concern and deeper feelings for his patient. Shelley brings her usual grace and strength to the role, but the inversion of Cushing and Lee's usual screen persona's creates mixed results. Cushing plays the stern, humourless authority role that Lee would normally be presented with, Namaroff a tormented variation of Cushing's Frankenstein as he struggles with guilt and unrequited love. Lee, however, seems uneasily cast - in an unflattering greying facade - as this particular Van Helsing substitute.

The doctor's observation "the most noble work of God, the human brain, is the most revolting to the human eye," underlines Fisher's unrelentingly grim approach. With only some humorous asides from Meister to relieve the gloom ("Don't use long words, Inspector; they don't suit you"), the director's emphasis on the pain of romance has great depth, with the central love triangle being the most poignant to be found in Fisher's oeuvre. Despite THE GORGON being considered a second-tier release by Hammer historians, It is an intimate picture which uses its careful pace as a necessity of its mood. Indeed, there are scenes here that rank with the best of Fisher: Heitz's call to the Castle Borski, for example, and the sequence where the doomed father attempts to pen a letter to Paul during his gradual petrification.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Gimme Moore

2011-03-01T00:27:00.000-08:00

Unearthing (2010)

Alan Moore has long maintained that art and magic are one and the same, and since the mid 1990s his works have included complex occult and baroque yearnings. Moore has said of Steve Moore (no relation) that "It was his model I was following when I became a comics writer, and it was his model I was following when I decided to get into magic, so in many ways, he is singularly responsible for having ruined my life."

WRITTEN and narrated by Alan Moore, Unearthing is an audiobiographical tale of longtime friend and mentor, Steve Moore, an influential figure in the emerging British comics scene of the 1970s. Despite Steve guiding his more illustrious namesake through the joys of comic book scriptwriting, he has been consumed by the Northampton Magus' ever-increasing shadow. Yet Steve Moore has had a fascinating rise to obscuredom: he was a co-editor of the Fortean Times in its days as The News, and latterly was responsible for that magazine's more academic sister publication Fortean Studies (as well as acting as FT's indexer). He was also a key instigator of SF fandom in this country before writing for 2000 A.D., Warrior and Marvel UK, which included co-creating cult anti-hero 'Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer' for Doctor Who Weekly. Transforming an interest in Chinese mysticism that led to a fellowship of the Royal Asiatic Society, Steve Moore has also enjoyed many - shall we say - metaphysical adventures.

Layered by musicians Crook and Flail and assorted members of Faith No More, Mogwai and Godflesh, this hypnotic two hour reading - originally an essay from the Iain Sinclair-edited anthology London: City of Disappearances (2006) - is crammed with phantasmagorical diversions. The most arresting is when Steve summons an incarnation of Selene, the Greek Moon Goddess, for Alan to witness ("...he asks if I'm ready to begin and like a twat I say yes.") Steve has been secretly living with this entity as his invisible companion for some time, and after suitable chanting the Moore's see her, straddling Steve's lap. "I suppose technically, we were both hallucinating," Alan told The Guardian's Steve Rose, "but the fact that we were both seeing the same hallucination behaving in the same way makes it perhaps a different category of hallucination. This is not making any outrageous claims. This is how it seemed to us. We may be deluded but we are honest."

Selene by Mitch Jenkins, which illustrates a portion of Unearthing's box set. The Greek Goddess of the Full Moon, Selene is the daughter of Hyperion and Theia, and one of the deities of light during the dynasty of the Titans. By Zeus, she is the mother of Pandia and Ersa; by Endymion, she is the mother of fifty daughters, who represent the fifty lunar months that elapse between each Olympiad.

As Mark Pilkington states in Fortean Times #272 (March 2011), "This is not Steve Moore the rock opera," but rather in Alan's words "...after all those years of working within the comics industry and quietly going mad, this is what erupts." Packaged in a box set of sumptuous 1970s-tinged photography by Mitch Jenkins from Lex Records, Unearthing oscillates between Steve's story and the history of his lifelong home of Shooter's Hill (“where Kent begins and London... disappears.”) Millions of years ago, a chalk fault on the north side of the hill collapsed, and formed the Thames Valley; without which there would be no river Thames and no London. Alan Moore has always been keen to link people and landscapes because, he argues, we all need a sense of mythology. Having a bedrock of story gives our lives coherency; the most important factors about any place or person is what they have been.

The work also acts as a rich document of an almost life-long friendship. Alan praises Steve's radical and progressive mindset - as well as telling of unrequited and lost love - with his infectious, flowing drone, describing his subject with delightful detail ("fine wrinkles spreading from the corners of his eyes, curved up around the brow, curved down around the cheekbones, face like a magnetic field.”) When the reader is engaged with any text, they are creating a rhythm in their minds, something Alan Moore has always tried to achieve in his comic books and magic. When Unearthing was performed live in railway tunnels beneath Waterloo Station, you can understand the writer describing this catacombic event as "coming home," literally, the sound of the underground as he journeys toward the “final panel.”
~ Stephen C. Jilks

"You Can't Mesmerise Me, I'm British!"

2011-02-14T07:03:00.000-08:00

AT THE EARTH’S CORE (1976)

Having cowered from superior special effects in THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD, Caroline Munro is at her most beautiful in AT THE EARTH'S CORE; every male wanted the actress to be a nubile slave girl above anything else.

AMICUS produced a trio of Lost World features: THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975), AT THE EARTH’S CORE and THE PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT (1977), all of which were based on the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and shared the same producer (John Dark), director (Kevin Conner) and leading man (Doug McClure). Subscribing to the mentality of matinee cinema, these escapist adventures were released to coincide with school holidays; the ‘Saturday morning’ ethic has a heritage that stretches back to the serials of the 1930s and 40s, but also applied to the cinematic spin-offs DR WHO AND THE DALEKS (1965) and DALEKS’ INVASION EARTH 2150 AD (1966), which were co-financed by Amicus under the Aaru banner. Peter Cushing’s portrayal of the eponymous Time Lord in both of these films has much in common with his character Dr Abner Perry in AT THE EARTH’S CORE: a stereotypically British eccentric professor – who stubbornly carries his trusty umbrella at all times - created for a stereotypically juvenile target audience.

Perry – together with David Innes (McClure) – set out to test their earth-boring Iron Mole machine. However, they unexpectedly arrive at the centre of the Earth, where in the cavernous underworld of Pellucidar primitive humans – such as Dia (Caroline Munro, "SEE: The seductive Dia, Princess of the land of Pellucidar") – are enslaved by a prehistoric race of birds with mind-altering powers, the Mahars. With the help of Innes’ two-fisted exploits and Perry’s scientific know-how (plus a skill with bow and arrow), the humanoid tribe overcome their beastly oppressors. Unsurprisingly, AT THE EARTH'S CORE’s ending is very different from the book; in Burroughs’s version, Innes escapes from the underground world to discover that his companion in the Iron Mole is not Dia but the corpse of a Mahar, placed there by Hooja, the Sly One. The film eschews this ghoulish ending in favour of a suitably light-hearted climax, where the Mole emerges through the lawn of the White House.

Peter Cushing plays the dotty professor role similar to his big screen Doctor Who; a mix of British eccentricity and stoic, colonial spirit.

Lost World features are synonymous with rubber monsters, and AT THE EARTH’S CORE ("An Adventure Beyond Any Ever Before Filmed!") is no exception. Here we have a lizard/parrot crossbreed pursuing Perry and Innes upon their arrival in Pellucidar; the lumbering hippopotamus which Innes is forced into combat; and a fire-belching toad-beast ("SEE: The MOSOPS, whose fiery breath withers trees & plants"). Making amends for these misfires are the distinctly more malicious Mahars, the female mutated pterodactyls ("SEE: The vicious MAHARS, bird-women who feed on human flesh"). Using telepathy to communicate with their foot soldiers - the diminutive spear-toting Sagoths ("SEE: The cruel SAGOTHS, animal-faced soldiers of Pellucidar") - the nastiest moments come at meal times, where the juiciest slave girls are lined up in their chamber.

It is easy to forget Cushing’s more light-hearted roles (Perry’s comment to his avian captors “You cannot mesmerize me, I’m British” echoes his quip from HORROR EXPRESS (1971), “Monster? We’re British you know!"). In isolated moments of his filmography, the imperious actor gave a jovial twist which was otherwise consumed by his magisterial horrors. Early in his career he played one of the students in the Laurel and Hardy vehicle A CHUMP AT OXFORD (1940), before developing his comedic craft in BBC productions such TOVARICH (1954) and COMEDY PLAYHOUSE: THE PLAN (1963). Television would also call at the height of his Hammer Horror excesses - Cushing was featured repeatedly as a guest on THE MORCAMBE AND WISE SHOW wondering when he was going to be paid - but the actor was largely wasted in latter box office “comedies” such as TENDRE DRACULA (1974) and SON OF HITLER (1978). As a bookstore owner in TOP SECRET (1984), Cushing sported a grotesquely large eyeball (the punch line to which he is first seen gazing through a magnifying glass), an arresting image for this most unassumingly playful of men.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Love Will Tear Us Apart

2011-02-01T03:51:00.000-08:00

THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961)

Oliver Reed and Yvonne Romain in an impossibly-staged publicity still. Reed and Romain had a closely tied association with Hammer; the actress plays Reed's mother - who dies in childbirth - for THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, then became his fiancee in CAPTAIN CLEGG before sharing their third appearance in THE BRIGAND OF KANDAHAR.

UNLIKE the literary origins of Dracula and Frankenstein, zombies and werewolves are rooted in superstition and folklore. Consequently, the living dead and shape-shifting sub-genres have treated film as their developing texts; George A. Romero basically re-invented the rules for the zombie with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), while THE WOLF MAN (1941) similarly set the precedence of romantic dread. Subsequent werewolf appearances were negligible until advances in make-up special effects unleashed a slew of transformation pictures in the early 1980s, where THE HOWLING and WOLFEN (both 1981) developed the notion of lycantropic societies coexisting with humans, and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984) a link with menstruation. This exploration also seemed in tandem with developing body horror concerns, not only with cinema spectacles such as THE THING (1982) and VIDEODROME (1983), but with the onset of AIDS.

Werewolves were limited to a triptych of releases during the British horror period of the 1960s and 70s. Amicus’ lupine whodunit THE BEAST MUST DIE (1974) was joined by two features inspired by Guy Endore’s 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris: Hammer's THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF and Tyburn's LEGEND OF THE WEREWOLF (1975). Directed by Terence Fisher and written by producer Anthony Hinds under the pseudonym John Elder, THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF is by far the best remembered. It is a flawed, visceral melodrama of lycantrophy from birth to death, ponderous in its pacing, but the film effectively focuses on the inner turmoil of man into wolf, benefiting from make-up artist Roy Aston's most accomplished work and arguably propelling young Oliver Reed onto the road to stardom. Pulverised by the Monthly Film Bulletin which claimed the film was "a singularly repellent job of slaughter-house horror," the production ranks as one of the most brutal of all Hammer Horrors.

Oliver Reed's werewolf was the cover star of Warren publishing's low-brow Famous Monsters of Filmland #12 (June 1961).

The film opens with a beggar (Richard Wordsworth) visiting Castillo Siniestro, where the Marquis (Anthony Dawson) is celebrating his wedding. The beggar irritates the nobleman, who has him thrown into the dungeons where he remains forgotten by all but the jailer and his mute daughter (Yvonne Romain). After many years - with the Marquis decrepit and his wife long dead from his brutish behaviour - the Marquis sexually assaults the servant girl. When she rejects his advances, he has her thrown into the dungeon where the beggar - now reduced to a slavering animal - rapes her then dies in the act of violation. When the girl is freed, she stabs the Marques to death and flees into the woods, where kindly scholar Don Alfredo (Clifford Evans) rescues her. The girl dies in labour after giving birth to a son from her ordeal, and as the young Leon (Justin Walters) grows, he is increasingly troubled by dreams of drinking blood. Diagnosed with lycantrophy, the only cure is for Leon to be within a loving environment. Reaching manhood, Leon (Oliver Reed) - denied access to his love Cristina (Catherine Feller) - goes on a murderous rampage.

Endore’s source material emphasises a number of aspects that cinema - at the time - could not dare to adhere to. Endore's rapist was a priest, not a beggar, for example, and the afflicted Bertrand and his love Sophie in the book avoid the violent effects of his transformation by cutting into parts of her body and allowing him to suck her blood ("Her body was a fountain of blood to him, and it was if her body responded to his needs, like a nursing mother with milk.") In contrast, the film superficially represents the bond between Leon and Cristina in typical Hollywood fashion - the closest to a love story Fisher achieved - that never touches on such sado-masochistic tendencies. Furthermore, the movement of the novel's locales to Santa Vera, Spain centre around the abandoned Spanish Inquisition drama THE INQUISITOR/THE RAPE OF SABENA. After distributors Columbia feared condemnation by the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency, the project was pulled from Hammer's schedule, leaving a number of sets taking shape on the Bray lot which were then integrated into Fisher's film.

The House of Hammer #10 (January 1978) included a comic adaptation of THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF. Scripted by Steve Moore and drawn by John Bolton, the strip acted as the flagship for this special werewolf issue.

With Reed not appearing until roughly the halfway mark, the extended prologue detailing Leon’s lurid conception is suitably heady but prolonged. It is detrimental to the mechanics of the film that Reed and Evans’ central performances could not be afforded more screen time, but the film suffers from a number of time anomalies, surprising considering Fisher's trademark linear style: Leon’s feelings for his eternal love develop too quickly and off-screen, and Alfredo somehow narrates the preceding events which he could not have been akin to. Hammer also adheres to several cliches of the werewolf picture but also establishes new ones of its own. Lycanthropy is presented not as a disease but as an accursed birthright, and Leon’s bestial instincts can be suppressed by the feelings of inner peace and comfort bought about by love, while the emotions of rage and frustration have precisely the opposite effect. Therefore Leon is subconsciously in control of his own fate, his werewolf dependent not just on the occurrence of a full moon but also upon Leon’s state of mind. But like most cinematic werewolves, the character is not painted as a villain but as a personable young man ultimately condemned to a second existence of blood lust by circumstance.

Ashton’s make-up effects for the wolf man, the Marquis and the beggar are uniformly excellent. Aston himself had suggested to Hinds that Reed's bone structure would be ideal for the role, and the success of the monster is that it is part-man and part-wolf, encapsulating Reed's ferocious contortions and snarls, especially starling when blood drips from his mouth. With this avenue for human expression, the tragedy of the werewolf is not lost, unlike later films which are reliant on mechanical effects and CGI, which overshadow any levels of performance. The Marquis' design explored how make-up could define a character's prolonged debauchery - especially memorable in the scene where Dawson picks his skin in an attempt to improve his appearance for the servant girl - and the beggar's own mutation into beast would not feel out of place on H.G.Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).

Universal - who owned the source material - contracted Hammer to make THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF. A film very much playing like THE WOLF MAN's bastardised relative, its horde of "Angry Mob" villagers who hound Leon at the climax - seen here underpinning this one-sheet - was Universalesque in its own right.

Dawson is suitably lecherous as the Marquis, and Wordsworth - having been similarly effective as the man/monster of THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955) - is both touching and frightening in a role ranging from abused beggar to feral man. Evans brings a subtle facade to the role of adoptive father, emotionally distraught yet resolved to end his sons misery. Without question, however, it is Reed's film. While the "Hammer Heavy" was evidently not quite the finished article at this point in his career, his portrayal conveys pathos and menace and amusingly, when he does appear, he's soon working in a winery, surrounded by bottles. Romain is enchanting as the exotic, raven-haired servant, but the rest of the cast are a mixed bag. Michael Ripper is wide-eyed as Old Soak and Desmond Llewellyn makes an appearance as a footman, but John Gabriel - as a sanctimonious priest - and Martin Matthews - as Leon's best friend - bring nothing to their roles. And in a refreshing quirk of fate, Peter Sallis appears as mayor Don Enrique, 45 years away from tackling similar circumstances voicing Wallace in the clay-mation favourite THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT (2005).
~ Stephen C. Jilks

A Warning from History

2011-01-01T01:21:00.000-08:00

VIDEO NASTIES: MORAL PANIC, CENSORSHIP AND VIDEOTAPE (2010)

Italian Lucio Fulci could boast three titles on the DPP Video Nasties list: ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS (released in 1979 and on the list from October 1983 to December 1985), THE BEYOND (1981, November 1983 to April 1985) and THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981, November 1983 to December 1985).

IN early 1980s Britain, Margaret Thatcher found an escape clause for broken public spirit in the twisted world of VHS horror. These often poorly made features - mostly from America and Italy - could hardly raise to the expectations of their own garish box art, but there was no censorship, classification or regulation for the home video market, and items could be bought or rented from almost anywhere: newsagents, garages, even butchers and barbers. The Daily Mail published comment headers with such lurid headlines as "Rape of our children's minds", and the Daily Mirror published a report of sexual attacks on ponies where the Police stated that the acts "could have been caused by video nasties or a new moon." Not surprisingly, the country's social problems didn't disappear with the removal of these films, and the BBFC eventually allowed them to be presented either uncut or in more complete forms.

The hysteria over the Video Nasty scare was a melting pot of patronising lobbyists, tabloid sensationalism, clueless politicians and an out-of-their-depths Scotland Yard (who seized by mistake titles like APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), THE BIG RED ONE (1980), and THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS (1982)). The mere act of selling or owning a suspected video on the infamous Director of Public Prosecutions banned list(s) became an extremely dangerous business, and this convoluted debacle is expertly portrayed in Jake West's documentary, which was first shown at FrightFest 2010. In no way is this piece merely for horror fans; it is required viewing for every politician, policeman, lawyer, sociologist and media studies student in the land, and should act as both a lesson and a warning on the very nature of censorship and civil liberty. Especially revelatory here is that the Video Recordings Act 1984 was never officially presented to the European Commission, therefore it was not enforceable in law: a particular hard pill to swallow for the people who suffered jail sentences, fines, or had their collections or stock incinerated in an event that was the 1980s equivalent of a Nazi book burning.

The self-appointed Guardian of National Morals - Mary Whitehouse - was particularly thankful for the Video Nasties panic, as it gave her a topic which people knew even less about than she did. Whitehouse never felt the need to actually investigate the material she deplored: "I have never seen a Video Nasty. I wouldn't ... I actually don't need to see visually what I know is in that film."

West may be better known as a director, but he also has a prolific concurrent career in promotional and featurette material, having been responsible for many of the extras on Region 2 DVDs. As such, he’s on familiar ground getting people talking about horror movies; contemporary directors like Neil Marshall and Christopher Smith alternate comments with genre critics such as Alan Jones, Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower. The most remarkable and powerful contribution, however, comes from lecturer and author Martin Barker, who recalls in moving detail the widespread condemnation he received for standing up to the charade, and even more notably, illustrates the magnitude of exaggerations and lies on which the campaign was built.

The documentary is not a loaded argument in favour of the nasties - it doesn't need to be. Peter Kruger - head of the Obscene Publications Squad at Scotland Yard between 1981-84 - and MP for Luton South Graham Bright - whose Private Members Bill directly lead to the VRA - are afforded equal screen time to illustrate their ignorance. Bright is an absolute goldmine; not only does him condemn the films as "evil" (at which point the documentary mutes into a wonderful faux Public Information Film where Emily Booth is bound, gagged and consumed by videotape), he acknowledges the whole snuff movie concept as fact, having "no doubt...that was exactly what was happening." And in the jaw-dropping highlight, Bright is seen in archival footage championing unfinished research that "will show that these films not only effect young people but I believe they effect dogs as well."

One of the most notorious titles on the DPP's list, Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, was pre-cut by Go prior to its February 1982 video debut. The film still contained enough on-screen carnage (and marketing to match) to make sure this cover adorned most of the press outrage against the nasties. Go were not shy of promoting their release, even issuing free beer mats featuring this artwork to public houses.

As the documentary clearly shows, the early 1980s were not engulfed in the corporate mentality of today. The distribution of the nasties was viewed with suspicion by major studios, who rather than seeing the home market as an avenue for their product, instead treated the medium as a threat to their box office and TV revenue. Consequently, the majority of titles being released in the video explosion were low-budget exploitation, simply because they were the only titles most of the companies could afford to acquire. The intense competition was increased by the number of black market bootlegs, and the fight for shelf space equated to a blood-red marketing war: release your films under the most lurid packaging possible, regardless of accuracy to the film itself. Whatever happened with the whole video nasty phenomenon, it can be said that with such demented designs, the distributors should have seen it coming.

In a by-product to the VRA, the Video Packaging Review Committee was introduced in 1987. Formed as the result of another overblown reaction - this time to Michael Ryan's gun spree in Hungerford - the VPRC's brief was to ensure that such gaudy video covers would never be seen in Britain again. Problems with such marketing had been alerted by a May 1982 report by The Advertising Standards Authority - who specifically cited Go Video's full-page ads for SS EXPERIMENT CAMP (1976) and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1979) in Television and Video Retailer and Music & Video Week - and it is ironic that the eye-popping artwork that had been so detrimental in the success of the videos would prove to be the initiator of their downfall.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Santa Slayer

2010-12-01T01:50:00.000-08:00

DON'T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS (1984)

“Do you think we might have a psychopath on our hands?” Wearing a distorting plastic mask, a hooded killer is terrorising London Santa's in Britain's answer to the American slasher craze of the 1980s.

WITH a scene of 198 naked, elderly men corralled in an electrified reindeer pen, the release of Finnish horror RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE (2010) is set to rekindle interest in the sleazy sub-genre of mean-spirited Christmas cinema. Origins of this particular type of film can be traced back to the Mexican-made SANTA CLAUS (1959), a film which displays both a nauseatingly wholesome attitude to its hero and near surreal art direction. It features Santa battling Satan, who sends bad dreams to innocent children and inspires them to break windows and steal toys. The original killer Santa appeared in the celebrated And All Through the House segment of TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972), before the festive season was the setting for two influential slashers released in 1974: the sorority-house based BLACK CHRISTMAS - the sub-genre's finest hour - and the atmospheric, giallo-like SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT. The most notorious, SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984), is actually nothing special, but came along at the wrong time and felt the brunt of a slasher-weary protest movement during its 1980s explosion. Rather than following the mold of these previous entries, DON'T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS makes Santa the victim, focusing on the search for a London serial killer who slays Shopping Centre Father Christmas's.

The film is associated with a long list of cult personalities. Producers Stephen Minasian and Dick Randall had previously been involved with FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) and PIECES (1983); Derek Ford, a director and writer of sex films throughout the 1960s and 70s, wrote the screenplay; Alan Birkinshaw, who helmed the notorious KILLER'S MOON (1978) - here credited as Al McGoohan - is "assistant director," and Des Dolan (the guiding light behind the Go Video label) provides the score. Fallen star Edmund Purdom heads the cast as Scotland Yard detective Ian Harris, and set dressing is provided by Caroline Munro cameoing as herself, and sex starlets Pat Astley (as a nude model) and Paula Meadows (as the London Dungeon secretary). In his final film Alan Lake plays journalist Giles, a fittingly seedy role to end a seedy life; a notorious heavy drinker who had punched an extra on the set of THE PLAYBIRDS (1978), he was most famous for being the third husband - and attempted murderer - of Diana Dors, before shooting himself in October 1984.

Why has a killer such an apparent and vile disgust for Santa and the festive holiday? The answer is supplied in this obligatory childhood flash-back scene.

This role call of suspect talent could not prevent DON'T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS suffering one of the most troubled shoots in British cinema history. The film took two years to complete and scenes were re-shot and rearranged endlessly, with Birkinshaw, Ford, Purdom and editor Ray Selfe all taking turns in the director's chair. What eventually surfaces looks suitably filthy and is technically inept, but at least the body count is kept consistent and the deaths bloody and inventive; one Father Christmas has his penis cut off with a razor, while another has his face thrust into roasting chestnuts. There are also scenes that exude a sleazy charm: the photographer snapping nudes in his grubby bedsit could have come straight from any British smut-fest of the previous decade, and Munro's glittery performance of an instantly forgettable song (Warrior of Love) concludes with a scream when a Santa with a machete in his face comes up through the stage trapdoor.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Planet of Gold

2010-11-09T07:39:00.000-08:00

DOCTOR WHO - REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN (1975)

The highlight of this serial is its location shooting at Wookey Hole, home of the Witch of Wookey. A chagrined woman, she used her arts to blight girls' lives and keep them from the joys denied to herself. Turned to stone by the Holy Clerk of Glastonbury, the Witch still haunts the caverns.

THE Time Ring takes the Doctor (Tom Baker), Sarah (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry (Ian Marter) back to the space station Nerva, but to a period many thousands of years earlier than their previous visit in THE ARK IN SPACE (1975). The station is currently acting as a beacon warning space traffic of the existence of a new asteroid orbiting Jupiter, Voga, also known as the planet of gold. A plague has killed all but a handful of Nerva's crew and visiting civilian scientist Kellman (Jeremy Wilkin) is in fact a traitor working with a group of Cybermen, who want to destroy Voga as gold dust can coat their breathing apparatus (and the plague is the result of poison injected by Cybermats). Kellman however is really a double agent, working with one faction of the Vogan, whose plan has been to lure the Cybermen onto the beacon and destroy them with their Skystriker rocket.

A weak link in Doctor Who's otherwise excellent twelfth season, REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN is nevertheless fondly remembered as the initial Cybermen serial in colour, as well as being the first commercially available story released on VHS in 1983. Scripted by Gerry Davis - who had jointly devised the monsters with Kit Pedler in 1966 - the tale has long been a guilty pleasure for Whovians. The four-part adventure features an alarming array of double entendre, knowingly enjoyed by cast and crew alike. "Take the Cybermen from behind," "We're still heading for the biggest bang in history," and "Pull it harder, it's coming" are typical examples, and the antics of the black-helmeted Cyberleader (Christopher Robbie) are unintentionally hilarious; often arms on hips, his strangulation of the Doctor near the end of the story looks more like a Swedish massage. Sladen's experience of her attack by a limp Cybermat - which had to be hugged by the actors to make them seem even remotely threatening - led her to decide to quit the series, only for the actress to thankfully reconsider once the show moved onto much better-realised productions.

Chris Achilleos' cover for the Target novelisation of REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN (#51, May 1976), written by Terrrance Dicks.

The Vogans are an interesting addition to the series' mythology and their society can be seen as an allegory of 1970s Britain - a power that was once great but is now bitterly divided over how to exploit its remaining resources. But the story is spoiled by the titular menace; it may have been a return for the Cybermen after a long hiatus (they were last seen in THE INVASION (1968)), but they appear uncharacteristically emotional and have terrible dialogue. The idea of them being susceptible to attack with gold dust is also less than inspired; previous entries have shown them to be vulnerable to radiation, solvents, gravity, low temperatures, electric currents, force fields, emotional impulses and grenades, and the revelation of this latest weakness only serves to further reduce their potency. Their ineffectiveness is underpinned by the Doctor's famous outburst "You're nothing but a pathetic bunch of tin soldiers skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship," a viewpoint certainly reinforced by their subsequent appearances.

The network of natural caverns known as Wookey Hole, near Wells in Somerset, was an inspired choice of location for Voga. The show caves had gained a reputation for being haunted by a Dark Ages witch, now petrified as one of the cave's rock formations, and stories of the serial's curse are more interesting than the programme itself. While scouting, director Michael E.Briant's wife discovered several Iron Age arrowheads, which she kept as mementos. This precipitated a chain of strange occurrences which beset the production, which began when Briant encountered a potholing ghost while scouting. Potentially the most serious incident occured after certain crew membes disobeyed instructions and interfered with the “Witch” formation. During the afternoon's shoot a boat driven by Sladen on the “Witch's Parlour” cave went haywire, forcing the actress to jump overboard to avoid smashing into a cavern wall.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

The Beast Within

2010-11-01T03:41:00.000-07:00

THE BEAST MUST DIE (1974)

Time is running out for Peter Cushing's Norwegian accent during
the infamous "Werewolf Break" of Amicus' cult curio.

AMICUS' THE BEAST MUST DIE mixes Blacksploitation, THE AVENGERS and Agatha Christie in an uproariously silly production made at the height of British horror desperation. Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) is a black millionaire big game hunter whose elaborate mansion security system - run by Pavel (Anton Diffring) - has been constructed to keep tracks on a potential prized conquest, a werewolf. Newcliffe explains that his guests have been invited for one reason only – one of them is a lycanthrope. Everyone has a suspect past: outrageously accented Dr Lundgren (Peter Cushing), concert pianist Jan Jarmokowski (Michael Gambon) and socialite girlfriend Davinia (Ciaran Madden), artist Paul Foote (Tom Chadbon), and diplomat Arthur Bennington (Charles Gray) all have places at the table. Also, could the werewolf be Caroline (Marlene Clark), Tom’s wife?

Adapted from science fiction author James Blish's novelette There Shall Be No Darkness (1950), THE BEAST MUST DIE was Amicus' last horror film. Directed by Paul Annett - who devoted most of his career to television - the film plays more like a made-for-TV movie with obvious budgetary constraints: the werewolf is actually an Alsatian. At the beginning a Valentine Dyall voice-over tells us to “watch for the werewolf break," so the viewer can contemplate their own decisions who is the shape-shifter. When it actually arrives it is a 30 second William Castle-style gimmick, but the whole premise is self-defeating, as the film does not portray any legitimate structure for sleuthing; everyone has been portrayed as being as guilty as everyone else, which rather debunks that the film is “A detective story – in which YOU are the detective."

To illustrate the ramshackle nature of the production, even the werewolf in this one-sheet isn't actually from the picture, rather an image from Universal's THE BOY WHO CRIED WEREWOLF.

THE BEAST MUST DIE's stance on werewolf lore is confusing, mixing wolfs bane, lympth glands and everyone's favourite party game Pass the Silver Candlestick. The performances range from the sublimely ridiculous to the ridiculous and amazingly Lockhart was the first black actor to play leads with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Lockhart's statement “Money buys…. things….” is as profound as the character gets, with the actor delivering his lines as effective as Thornton Reed in GARTH MARENGHI'S DARKPLACE (2004). Of the other cast members Gray is suitably slimy, Cushing uses the term “transmogrification” to prove he is a scientist, and Gambon's slightly troubled expression doesn’t change throughout, even when playing out one of the most tedious car chase scenes in 1970s cinema.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

A Hammer Miscellany

2010-10-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1959)
THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1964)
THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

In THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, Marla Landi plays the tempestuous Cecile, descendant of Sir Hugo Baskerville. A Hammer vampire without the fangs, Cecile is the Fatal Woman of Gothic literature. Her introduction - waiting bare-legged to lead men to their marshy doom - is one of the great images of the Hammer oeuvre.

THESE releases from Hammer typify their output by decade: the vibrant late 1950s, the premature rigor mortis that set in during the 60s, and the experimental death throes of the 70s. THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES is steeped in sexual unease and the oaken veneer of English nobility, making the film the clearest demonstration of the studio's class-conscious approach to horror. The transportation of Arthur Conan Doyle to the bloody red Hammer universe is dubious as an adaptation but undeniably successful as a blend of murder mystery and terror. To move the 1902 source novel closer to the Hammer template, liberties are made with the dialogue; Sherlock Holmes (Peter Cushing) is given several lines which seem to have strayed from the Van Helsing phrasebook, and Doctor Watson (Andre Morrell) provides a brief nod to Jack the Ripper when he reflects that the escaped convict Selden (Michael Mulcaster) "murdered a number of street woman."

Though meeting with a mixed reception at the time, Cushing's master detective looks - at distance - very much the ideal incarnation of the character. Cushing's suitably gaunt Holmes - the actor fortuitously losing weight after a mild bout of dysentery while making JOHN PAUL JONES (1959) in Spain - mirrors many traits of Van Helsing and Baron Frankenstein: the furious concentration, the fervor of his convictions, an impatience for fools, and a physical dynamism. A life-long Conan Doyle fan, poor box office halted the possibility of Cushing starring in a series of Hammer Holmes pictures, thus limiting the imperious actor's popularity with retreads of Dracula and Frankenstein.

Peter Cushing seemed a natural for the part of Sherlock Holmes. Cushing also played the detective in the BBC series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Channel 4's The Masks of Death, portraying Holmes in old age.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES bristles with life whenever Cushing is on screen, and it is to the film's detriment that the actor isn't visible enough. Absent from the harrowing 17th century prologue - which has Sir Hugo Baskerville (David Oxley) roasting a manservant in the fireplace as a prelude to gang rape of the victim's daughter - Holmes also vanishes for most of the narrative's second act. Cushing's commanding and flamboyant lead is the only portrayal whose essential goodness is more assertive than his eccentricities, and the only one who seems genuinely bright rather than odd or remote. Also, Morrell's Watson is closer to Conan Doyle's perception than any other: conservative but observant, aging but not yet incapable. Of the other cast members, Milles Malleson is a hoot as the sherry-guzzling Bishop, and Christopher Lee gives one of his most sympathetic and subtle performances as the beleaguered Sir Henry Baskerville.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES remains one of the most entertaining of all Sherlock Holmes films, as well as being the first ever in colour. Jack Asher's Technicolor camerawork gives the work a rousing and surprisingly sensual feel; in the interiors, vivid reds (Sir Hugo's hunting jacket) and blues (the gloom of Baskerville Hall) are striking, and exterior scenes of Dartmoor have an autumnal, shrivelled state odd for the Summer setting. With battle lines so clearly drawn between Holmes's rational milieu and the dark cruelty behind the Baskerville legend, director Terence Fisher is in his element. The detective is the perfect Fisher hero, the Renaissance scholar with mystical undertones who, like Van Helsing, marks a liaison between orthodox religion and the science of detection.

For THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, stuntman Dickie Owens makes the automaton pathetic rather than tragic, and without Christopher Lee under the bandages, Owen's eyes remain dead and expressionless.

A follow-up to Hammer's THE MUMMY (1959) was long overdue, but THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB is a poor relation to Terence Fisher's magisterial original. Produced, directed and written (as Henry Younger) by Michael Carreras, the film ties together the usual those-who-defile-the-tomb-shall-die scenario with the tale of Adam Beauchamp (Terence Morgan) - the cursed-to-immortality brother of Mummy Ra-Antef (Dickie Owens) - who needs to bring Ra back to life as he can only die at his bandaged hand. Beauchamp may produce a speech about how tired he is by witnessing three thousand years of man's inhumanity to man, but in 1900 he still takes time in seducing Annette (Jeanne Roland) away from her fiance John Bray (Ronald Howard).

THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB is a B-movie programmer which highlighted the extent to which Hammer were struggling to inject any form of inspiration into their early 60s horror films. This was not helped by Carreras' typically deadpan helming and the prodigal son's frustrated ambitions to move Hammer away from its roots to more fantasy-related material. The original screenplay was suitably fantastic, which told of a group of archaeologists discovering an ancient tomb in the Sahara Desert and unleashing a giant Mummy which rampages through Cairo. Unsurprisingly, this draft was swiftly sidelined, though the pre-production image of a gargantuan Mummy clutching a helpless girl was retained for the finished film's poster.

Julie Ege plays Vanessa Beren - a wealthy widowed suffragette who funds an expedition to exorcise evil - in the delirious THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES.

The comic relief is tedious, and the characters are cardboard throughout. Carreras has called Roland's performance "ornamental," but the twenty-one-year-old Anglo/Burmese model/non-actress doesn't even reach that level. When the film opens with her father's brutal slaying, Annette is hardly upset at all, preferring to spend the rest of the picture swooning after Beauchamp. Howard – who was close to fifty at the time – is far too old for the role of "intrepid young Egyptologist," and Fred Clark's crass, P.T.Barnum-like promoter Alexander King is irritating, but even so is the liveliest thing in the film. THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB leaves a bad taste in the mouth because, for all its mediocrity, the murder scenes are eerily memorable. The attacks are not staged with the vigor of Fisher, but instead are bludgeoning sadistic: archaeologist Sir Giles Dalrymple (Jack Gwillim) is hammered to death with a small statue of an Egyptian cat goddess, and George Pastell - playing a sympathetic Egyptian official after his high priest role in THE MUMMY - willingly sacrifices himself to Ra-Antef in a skull-crushing scene that ranks amongst Hammer's most vicious.

Billed as "The First Kung-Fu Horror Spectacular," THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES - directed by Roy Ward Baker - was Hammer's uneasy co-production with Run Run Shaw, a leading light in the Kowloon-based Shaw Brothers company. Not originally written as a Dracula film, the hasty prologue sees The Count (James Forbes-Robertson, thanklessly replacing Christopher Lee and looking like a drag queen) revived by Kah (Chan Sen). Dracula possesses Kah's body and returns to the village of Ping Kuei, where he commands the Seven Golden Vampires, who raid the town and harvest the blood of naked woman in a blood trough - eight gullied slabs arranged like petals around a central, bubbling cauldron. Lecturing at China's Chung King university, Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) is approached by student Hai Ching (David Chiang), a native of Ping Kuei, for his help. The film benefits from a powerful James Bernard score and John Wilcox's Panavision framing, and is structured more like a Western than a Horror or Kung-Fu film. THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES possesses an entertaining air of derring-do, but ultimately acts as a substantial fall from grace for the Hammer vampire film.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Houses of Horrible

2010-10-01T00:16:00.000-07:00

BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH (1983)
DR TERRIBLE'S HOUSE OF HORRIBLE (2001)

"What in hell is going on at Headstone Manor?" One of the most baffling things about BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH is why Cleo Rocos doesn't take her clothes off.

BY 1983, Kenny Everett was one of the major stars of British television. Made to exploit this popularity, BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH is a brave failure that sees the zany comedian play Dr Lukas Mandeville - a former surgeon with an on-off German accent and a metal leg - the spearhead of a group of scientists sent to investigate the strange activity at Headstone Manor ("Businessman’s Weekend Retreat and Girls’ Summer Camp"). Unknown to them, their presence is about to incur the wrath of a local coven of bumbling but determined Satanists, led by a 700-year-old disciple known only as The Sinister Man (Vincent Price).

Written by Ray Cameron and Barry Cryer, the film flopped disastrously in Britain but was a box office hit down under; in an interview to promote the film on Australian television, Everett attributed its lack of home-ground success to the fact that the British "have no class." But the main reason was the suicidal decision of giving the film an 18 certificate, alienating Everett's young fans but simultaneously fully exploiting its tit humour and comedic gore; in a tour-de-force scene of excess, for example, Mandeville attempts to retrieve his monocle after it drops into his patient during a flashback surgery sequence.

The Countess (Ronni Ancona) bares her fangs in Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust, from DR TERRIBLE'S HOUSE OF HORRIBLE.

BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH is best viewed through a nostalgic haze; its all a juvenile mess, but an entertaining one, leading to a suitably perplexing climax. The cast is a checklist of familiar faces; the “distinguished international team of specialists” include Gareth Hunt and Don Warrington as the most bemused-looking gay couple in cinema history, Sheila Steafel as a butch lesbian, Pamela Stephenson, John Fortune, and Cleo Rocos, the latter redefining the meaning of non-actress. The film also revels in a lengthy list of movie parodies: Steafel in a school uniform (CARRIE (1976)), Stephenson being invisibly raped (THE ENTITY (1982)), a public house straight out of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981), and Everett writhing on the table like John Hurt in ALIEN (1979), before finding relief in a prolonged belch.

When Steve Coogan's DR TERRIBLE'S HOUSE OF HORRIBLE first aired on the BBC in the winter of 2001, critical and public reaction was muted. Fans expecting a comedy akin to Alan Patridge were instead confronted with six quality homages to 1960s and 70s British horror, brimming with in-jokes and notable guest stars. And Now the Fearing apes the Amicus anthology, Frenzy of Tongs takes us back to yellow peril potboilers, and Curse of the Blood of the Lizard of Doom parodies the scientific-experiment-gone-wrong sub-genre. Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust is a sumptuous ode to the 70s Hammer vampire canon, Voodoo Feet of Death takes on the body-part-transplant movie, and Scream Satan Scream! is firmly ensconced in Tigon territory. Unlike the buffoonery of BLOODBATH AT THE HOUSE OF DEATH, there is a genuine love for the material being spoofed, which makes the series an incredibly affectionate viewing experience.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Nine Eternities in Doom

2010-09-10T11:24:00.000-07:00

THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971)
DR PHIBES RISES AGAIN (1972)

Vulnavia (model and artist Valli Kemp) is summoned from the netherworld to aid Dr Phibes' Egyptian expedition in DR PHIBES RISES AGAIN.

SINCE making WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968), Vincent Price had increasingly become an indigenous part of British productions at a time of declining audiences and stale output. American International Pictures had disengaged itself from further co-productions with Hammer after THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970), but AIP was in danger of becoming just as out of touch with its core audience as everyone else. Music had replaced movies as the premier entertainment for the young, and in July 1970 the BBFC had raised the age-limit on X certificates from 16 to 18 years, enabling filmmakers to exploit a more liberal censorship regime and produce more lurid output to lure audiences back into theates. Although THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES was a return to horror epitomised by HOUSE OF WAX (1953) in its Grand Guignol, the film chimed with a prevailing mood among disenchanted youth, as Dr Phibes was seen to champion a lost ideal, making a last stand against impersonal capitalism.

This short lived series is often applauded for giving Price the classic monster role his career had previously lacked, but the two titles can also lay claim to evoking the black humour of James Whale and even Monty Python (in THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES, Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey) is addressed as Pike or Bream, and when a victim is impaled on a screw he is physically rotated). The first film sees Dr Phibes (Price) - a hideously disfigured musical genius and doctor of theology - enacting an elaborate vendetta against the surgical team whom he holds responsible for the death of his wife Victoria (Caroline Munro), contriving their deaths to accord with the curses inflicted on the Pharaohs by Moses in the book of Exodus. Exactly why Phibes should choose to inflict Hebrew curses is never explained, though their nature would fit his raison d'etre of elaborate murder. This lack of detail is synonymous with the film, further illustrated by Phibes' sketchy survival from a car crash, and the origins of his mute female assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North).

THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES' concept of eight or nine murders in a single storyline - one per reel - would later become integral to the slasher boom.

As Phibes, Price contrives to tip a wink, not only at his horror icon status, but also at his celebrity as an art authority; having drained every drop of blood from Dr Longstreet (Terry-Thomas), Phibes glides out of shot, only to glide back in to tut over his victim's taste in art. Yet for its colourful touches and opulent production design - giving Price his most elegant tableau since Daniel Haller's Poe landscapes - THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES is a shallow experience, undermined by its dramatis personae. The victims are only present as a prelude to their inventive deaths, and there are at least twice as many comedy police inspectors that are strictly necessary. Only Joseph Cotton - as Dr Vesalius - lends any gravitas to his role, particularly when facing up to Price in the climax.

For DR PHIBES RISES AGAIN, the mad doctor is pitted against an adversary of similar cunning and intent, Biederbeck (Robert Quarry), who has been artificially sustaining his youth (which, again, is never fully explained). The film contrives to engineer Phibes' return but not that of Vulnavia (Kemp), who is now represented as an ethereal spirit to be invoked at will. The delicate sensibility and elegant interiors of the first film are replaced by pastiche - Victoria's coffin sporting radiator grilles of a Rolls-Royce - and the sequel's obsessing over a sacred relic is the derivative stiff of Universal Mummy movies, not for the sophistication of Phibes. However, the film is buoyed by some notable guest appearances, such as Peter Cushing and Beryl Reid.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Derbyshire Dead

2010-09-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE (1974)

Guthrie (Fernando Hilbeck) enjoys a liver in a film which has been released as BREAKFAST AT MANCHESTER MORGUE, LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE and DON'T OPEN THE WINDOW.

IF you are looking for a connection between the undead films of George A. Romero and Lucio Fulci, Catalonian director Jorge Grau's THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE acts as that bridge. This cult Spanish/Italian oddity can also be viewed as one of those releases - similar to Alfonso Cuaron's CHILDREN OF MEN (2006) and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 WEEKS LATER (2007) - that sees our green and unpleasant land with a quirky yet lovingly distant eye. The film isn't set in Manchester - though there are glimpses of Deansgate and John Dalton Street - most of the film is shot in various locations around Derbyshire. Like many foreign filmmakers, what Grau finds is a stuffy environ on the verge of chaos and, in this sense, THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE is a worthy successor to those other extraordinary views of a decaying country, the 1971 releases STRAW DOGS and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.

The film begins as George (Ray Lovelock), an antiques dealer, has his motorbike damaged at a gas station by Edna (Christine Galbo), a nervous woman en route to her sister Katie (Jeannine Mestra)'s farmhouse in Southgate. While giving George a lift, Edna is attacked by a recently drowned homeless man Guthrie (Fernando Hilbeck), when the antiques dealer is asking directions from Ministry of Agriculture scientists who are field-testing experimental ultrasound equipment to rid crops of insects. These sonic tremors, however, have begun to revive the recently buried dead. The couple arrive at the farm to see Edna's brother-in-law Martin (Jose Ruiz Lifante) killed by Guthrie, where bigoted Irish Police Inspector McCormick (Arthur Kennedy, sporting a typically colourful accent) takes one look at George's long hair and beard - and the obvious signs of Katie's heroin addiction - and comes to a much more straightforward conclusion.

Vito Salier as the autopsy zombie haunting the halls of Southgate Hospital.

Grau's film is arguably the first colour treatment of the generic possibilities from Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), while also anticipating the Pittsburgh-based director's developing social criticisms. McCormick despises any form of non-conformity - hippies, drugs, et al - placing the blame for the spiralling events squarely on our young leads. The idea that the police might pose as much of a threat as the zombies is rather apt considering that the film was released at a time when the UK constabulary were something of a law unto themselves. This uncompromising view of the Manchester police force will strike a chord with anyone who remembers that city's notorious Chief Constable James Anderton, who conducted a personal fatwa against pornography and one accused AIDS victims as "swirling in a cesspit of their own making." There is also a staunch pro-environment message; as well as the radioactive bug zapper, we see shots of nuclear power plants, crumbling buildings, gloomy riversides and rundown hospitals - suggesting a world dying under the influence of crass corporate and industrial practices.

THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE is more sedate and low-key than Romero, channelling a steady accumulation of incidents and detours enveloped by a genuinely weird soundtrack of unnerving hums and distorted breathing. There are oddball elements - a busty female streaker, with two fingers held aloft in the traditional peace sign, jogs through traffic attracting little attention from the jaded motorists; the notion that the zombies can “create” members of their brood by the application of blood to the eyelids - but since Grau keeps everything else grounded, we buy their overall non-believability. In the satisfying twist ending, when the undead George takes revenge on McCormick, Grau asks the viewer to align with the zombies as a retributive force that needs to be unleashed.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Alien Encounters

2010-08-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

PREY (1977)
LIFEFORCE (1985)

A dog-nosed alien terrorises rural England in PREY, the strangest British horror movie of all time.

EXISTING in tandem with Hammer's decline was a vibrant sub-culture of independent filmmakers working with minuscule budgets but inspirational levels of enthusiasm and raw talent. One such director was Norman J. Warren, who followed his cult pot-boiler SATAN'S SLAVE (1976) with PREY, shot in ten days at Shepperton for around £50,000. A triumph of minimalism, with a principal cast of three, the film is the story of hesitant shape-shifting alien Kator (Barry Stokes), who adopts a human guise (and the name Anderson) from his first victim and finds himself stranded on Earth in the care of an unstable lesbian couple in their isolated home: possessive Josephine (Sally Faulkner) and childish Jessica (Glory Annen). Unnervingly bleak, PREY plays out its bizarre triangle with several moments of inspired weirdness. Anderson is forced to dress as a girl for a highly uncomfortable dinner party, and when the alien discovers he cannot walk on water, there is a seemingly endless slow-motion struggle in an improbably filthy stream. And when Anderson finally gets to go to bed with Jessica, Warren unleashes a truly shocking entrail-wreathed climax.

Josephine is more sinister than the alien, and has already killed one of her lover’s potential male suitors; Faulkner doesn’t overplay this, and keeps the character at least two steps from insanity. PREY was Annan’s first movie and despite a very halting style of delivery it is appropriate that she doesn’t have the strength of Faulkner. Stokes is also memorable, his limited resources as an actor paying dividends in this role where he's meant to seem awkward and an outsider. When he changes into his true form, however, Stokes looks less like a dangerous alien than a badly made-up dog on children’s television. But considering the budget and the schedule, PREY is astonishingly effective and certainly deserves more attention. It’s also got one of the great final lines of any British horror movie.

Mathilda May's background in ballet lends her a certain onscreen elegance in the SF fiasco LIFEFORCE.

LIFEFORCE (commonly known as Lifefarce) is a film light years away from the intimate inventiveness of PREY, so conceptually ambitious that it bites off far more than it is ever capable of coherently presenting. Loosely based on Colin Wilson's 1976 novel Space Vampires, its tale of three sleeping humanoids brought back to Earth and draining London of its lifeforce plays more like a Quatermass scenario. Directed by American maverick Tobe Hooper, the film is remembered mostly for French actress Mathilda May - billed as Space Girl - who spends the entire film undressed. May is possessed of such a spectacularly statuesque physique that she could probably have conquered all of mankind even without her special talents, which include a form of electroshock vampirism and the ability to inhabit other bodies.

Hooper pays homage to his hosts, drawing on the British tradition of sci-fi drollness (tea is served as the country burns to a crisp), and much of its wryness is in the laughably sincere performances; wispy Peter Firth representing military authority and Frank Finlay playing the relativist scientist ("Well... in a sense, we are all vampires"). Producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus sank a then substantial $25 million into the production, clearly seeing LIFEFORCE as the next great SF blockbuster. Hiring ALIEN (1979) co-scripter Dan O’Bannon and John Dykstra - the man behind the visual effects on STAR WARS (1977) - the film, however, was a box office disaster. In fact, LIFEFORCE and Hooper’s other two productions for Cannon - the equally disastrous remake of INVADERS FROM MARS (1986) and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE 2 (1986), ended up almost single-handedly sinking Cannon’s finances and forced Golan and Globus to declare bankruptcy by the 1990s.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

"It's in the trees ... it's coming!"

2010-08-01T00:21:00.002-07:00

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957)

Despite being book-ended by appearances of a crudely animated monster, NIGHT OF THE DEMON is an effective exercise in atmosphere.

IN 1957, British horror cinema exploded into life with the garish, Eastmancolour THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Terence Fisher's box office sensation was the starting point of Hammer's domination, but Jacques Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON - which started filming on the same day as Fisher's classic - was shot in black and white, and unlike Hammer's emphasis on physical violence, owes more to the power of suggestion. Tourneur's stylish production - an adaptation of M.R. James' Casting the Runes (1911) - predicted an anti-Hammer stance in the early 1960s that produced a triumvirate of monochrome horrors based on works of supernatural fiction: THE INNOCENTS (1961, from Henry James' Turn of the Screw (1898)), NIGHT OF THE EAGLE (1962, from Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife (1943)) and THE HAUNTING (1963, from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959)).

Scenes such as the storm invoked by black magician Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), dressed in clown's makeup for a children's Halloween gathering, are genuinely unsettling, and this garden party suddenly interrupted by demonic intervention anticipates THE OMEN (1976). As in that film, the leading protagonist is an American - here, Dr John Holden (Dana Andrews) - coming to terms with what he initially sees as bunkum. This theme of the modern, rationalist American adrift in a world of superstition can be traced through several films, including AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981), and even back to Universal's cycle of the 1930s and 40s, were settings were often in generic old Europe.

Columbia's 2002 R1 DVD of NIGHT OF THE DEMON was sold as a "double feature" with CURSE OF THE DEMON, the film's Americanised, truncated version which cut fourteen minutes from the original running time.

Screenwriter Charles Bennett crafts a meditation on the conflict between science and superstition, embodied by the personality clashes between the two worldviews of Andrews’ psychiatrist and MacGinnis’s occultist. One of James's most important achievements was to redefine the ghost story by dispensing with many of the Gothic trappings of his predecessors, and replacing them with more realistic, contemporary settings. By using this trait cinematically, NIGHT OF THE DEMON sometimes seems somewhat dry, but this is a small price to pay for a movie that takes its subject matter with an utter conviction rarely seen in the genre.

Tourneur was a master of suggestion, his visual style the perfect film equivalent of James’ prose; Holden's eerie encounters alone in forests, empty hallways, and desolate farmhouses evoke a wonderfully paranoid atmosphere. Ken Adam's production design is an effective blend of British antiquity and striking modernism, rendering library corridors and railway carriages as endless passages which need to be conquered. It has become a cliche to point out that Tourneur cut his directorial teeth working on three of producer Val Lewton’s brooding 1940s horrors (THE CAT PEOPLE (1942), I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and THE LEOPARD MAN (both 1943)), but NIGHT OF THE DEMON seems to be Tourneur’s attempt to recreate the Lewton formula: the emphasis on solid scripting, the use of shadows, and the depiction of belief versus skepticism. But none of the Lewton-produced films ever endorsed the supernatural; in fact, such beliefs were often equated with mental illness. Holden is not portrayed as a man sinking into madness; in fact, acting on his new-found knowledge saves him from death, and it is interesting to note that Andrews' wooden performance loses up as he gets closer to supernatural enlightenment.

Video Watchdog #93 (March 2003) featured a "duelling critics" piece where Kim Newman and Bill Cooke assess Columbia's DVD release, as well as detailed analysis by Cooke of the cuts made to produce CURSE OF THE DEMON.

A 1960s Mad magazine article pointed out that movie heroes and villains often act against type: villains are courteous, charming and open-minded, while heroes are bad-tempered, bigoted and thuggish. NIGHT OF THE DEMON illustrates this sound theory expertly. James' Karswell is a melodramatic character akin to George Zucco, but MacGinnis plays the Devil-bearded disciple with a touch of Celtic whimsy; he may be a diabolist, but he always treats his enemies with exaggerated courtesy. The odd relationship between Karswell and his mother (Athene Seyler) is one of the many off-beat aspects of the film, suggesting that the magician is an insecure mother's boy who shows none of the insidious interest in the opposite sex so commonly demonstrated by screen devil worshippers. This hint of homosexuality doesn't progress further, leaving Karswell as a paunchy and balding character, whose resemblance to that of Aleister Crowley is closer than any other actor.

Tourneur crafted NIGHT OF THE DEMON to exist in a shadow world which would evoke feelings of dread through expressive lighting and sound rather than any sensationalised effects such as a man in a monster suit. Bowing to pressure from executive producer Hal E. Chester, the director agreed to reveal the demon for a few frames in the film's finale. Much to Tourneur and Bennett's horror, Chester re cut the film so that Karswell's fire demon (a combination of a puppet, suit and a mechanical bust influenced from Medieval woodcuts) was shown extensively at the beginning and end of the feature, and was on all the film's publicity materials. For decades, the debate has raged whether Chester's use of the demon cheapened or enhanced the film. Dubbed as a "monumental blunder" and "atrocious," the monster is over-used at the climax, but overall beneficial to the narrative but perhaps not to the overall facade.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

The Circus of Nights

2010-07-11T11:11:00.000-07:00

VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1971)

Bald, naked and coated in body paint, Serena is the Tiger Woman.

AS Hammer entered its wilderness years, Robert Young's VAMPIRE CIRCUS rediscovers the studio's vigour for the genre. Picking up the gauntlet thrown down by TWINS OF EVIL (1971), this offering pushes Hammer further into the softcore sex and copious bloodletting required to maintain interest amongst pictures made outside of Elstree or Pinewood. Despite the film being Young's first picture, and the inevitable delays resulting from the extensive use of animals, Michael Carreras ceremoniously pulled the plug on the unfinished production when it had reached the end of its six-week shoot. The footage was subsequently spliced together, creating a Euro-horroresque/incoherent charm of its own.

Opening with a twelve minute prologue which plays like a featurette, in 1810, vampire Count Mitterhaus (Robert Tayman) and his mistress Anna Mueller (Domini Blythe) are apparently destroyed by the villagers of Schtettel. Fifteen years later the village is riven with plague and quarantined, and The Circus of Nights, led by an enigmatic gypsy woman (Adrienne Corri), arrive to entertain the villagers nightly with a Tiger Woman (Serena), a Panther Man (Anthony Corlan), twin acrobats and a clown dwarf (Skip Martin). In fact, the troupe are undead, shape-shifting relatives of Mitterhaus, who seduce and procure the blood of the local young to resurrect him.

Written by Steve Parkhouse and illustrated by Brian Bolland, VAMPIRE CIRCUS was adapted into comics for The House of Hammer #17 (Feb 1978).

The Circus of Nights ("A hundred delights!") is one of the most subversive takes on the essential innocence of the carnival ethos. The villagers gasp in amazement at the antics of the troupe, and even though the performers change into bats and black panthers before their eyes, they take a remarkably long time to react to their visitors true nature. The villagers are portrayed as generally deserving of the various fates that the vengeful vampires see fit to bestow upon them. The undead are predominantly young, talented and sexy, whereas the town folk are sexually repressed, middle-aged, unattractive and riddled with fears and prejudices. When Anna watches her lover feed from the throat of a young girl in the prologue, watching in voyeuristic ecstasy in a prelude to making love with Mitterhaus, there is no question that she is truly liberated.

VAMPIRE CIRCUS is one of the few British horror films to understand the difference between nudity and eroticism, and would be impossible to make in today's conservative climate. Not only does it break the taboo of unleashing violence to young children - a scene where two boys are lured to The Mirror of Life is particularly uncomfortable - it dares to be homoerotic, suggestively bestial and incestuous. Because of such lurid material the film has gone unappreciated, but this may be underscored by the lack of a name horror star. Laurence Payne's world-weary schoolmaster, the central heroic figure, only receives sixth billing in a large cast which includes David Prowse unsurprisingly as the circus strongman, Thorley Walters as the bumbling Burgomeister, and John Moulder-Brown as the most unconvincing romantic lead in the whole Hammer canon.

~ Stephen C. Jilks

Queen of Darkness

2010-07-01T00:22:00.000-07:00

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1971)

Valerie Leon enjoys British cult status ten times over: one Hammer horror, seven CARRY ON's, and two James Bond's. From 69 to 75, she was best known for Hai Karate commercials, and later spoofed her man eater image by playing a whip-cracking dominatrix in REVENGE OF THE PINK PANTHER.

IN early 1970s London, Margaret (Valerie Leon) suffers a recurring nightmare about an ancient Egyptian Queen, to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance. The priests who entomb the Queen first chop off her hand but, after throwing the member to the jackals, are killed by a mysterious force that lacerates their throats (as are the animals). A day before her birthday, Margaret's father, archaeologist Professor Fuchs (Andrew Keir), gives her a ruby ring. This artifact was discovered when, twenty years before, Fuchs and four others broke into the tomb of Queen Tera and found the item on her disembodied hand. At that moment, thousands of miles away, Margaret's mother died giving birth to her, signaling the start of Tera's sorcery.

Similar to TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970), there is a sense here that a complex society exists beyond the surface, with a number of mixed motive individuals caught up in the supernatural, rather than the black and white tableau of Terence Fisher. Also, with the marginal exception of THE WITCHES (1966), the film is Hammer's first Gothic to have a contemporary setting, and the production moves towards the ambiguous endings that would become standard for horror cinema in the 70s: is it Margaret or Tera, swathed in bandages, that survives in the hospital bed at the climax of the film?

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB is a lurid adaptation of Bram Stoker's mystical novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). It is a film as much about images as it is about characters: snake and cat statues, the skull of a jackal, the ruby ring and a fixation with throat-cutting and Valerie Leon's breasts.

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB was one of Hammer's most cursed productions. Peter Cushing was initially cast as Fuchs, but Keir was hurriedly drafted in because of Helen Cushing's ill health. Screenwriter Christopher Wicking was banned from the set after an altercation with producer Howard Brandy, a young art department employee died in a motorcycle accident, and director Seth Holt succumbed to a sudden, fatal heart attack with a week's filming still to complete. Michael Carreras, who had just became the studio's Managing Director, prepared for a total re-shoot, but ultimately finished the production and supervised the assembly himself.

Despite all this behind the scenes chaos, the film is a welcome re-imagining of the Mummy sub-genre, moving away from a rampaging monster. It also possesses an atmosphere unlike any other Hammer, which is refreshing particularly in context with the studio's cheapening output; the drab modern suburbia seems almost permanently overcast, the nocturnal gloom an appropriate atmosphere for the return of Tera. It is as if Holt's spirit hangs over the production, creating an eeriness and melancholy that crosses the barrier between life and death. The problems that plagued the film inadvertently contributed to its non-linear style, but BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB has a Lovecraftian feel. The film also benefits from an effective severed hand, and disturbing shots of Tera's lactating stump oozing blood after each killing.

Bruce Timm's rendering of Leon for the back cover of Richard Klemensen's indispensable Hammer fanzine Little Shoppe of Horrors #24 (May 2010).

Dubbed throughout, Leon gives a suitably dream-like performance in her dual role. Shakespearean actress Amy Grant was initially cast as Margaret/Tera, but Sir James Carreras soon over-ruled in favour of Leon, despite her inexperience in leading roles. Consequently, the actress felt insecure on set, and one can only yearn for the part to have been offered to Martine Beswick, who would have devoured the role. Keir makes for a fine Cushing replacement, but his role of Fuchs is irritatingly underwritten, even hinting at incest. James Villiers is suave as the scheming Corbeck, and Aubrey Morris gives a bizarre showing as the sunglass-wearing Dr Putnam. And in an early attempt at an in-joke character name, Australian Mark Edwards plays Margaret's boyfriend Tod Browning, who is written out well before the climax even though he receives an "and introducing" credit.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Retread of the Cybermen

2010-06-01T10:14:00.001-07:00

DOCTOR WHO - ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN (1985)

Briefly working alongside Peter Davidson's Fifth Doctor, before developing a more spiky relationship with Colin Baker's incarnation, Nicola Bryant successfully auditioned for the role of companion Peri soon after finishing drama school. Appearing in a number of revealing outfits to bring more sex appeal to the series, there is no doubting Bryant was one of the most naturally attractive actresses to grace Classic DOCTOR WHO.

WHEN Colin Baker was announced as the Sixth Doctor in August 1983, it was the beginning of the end for Classic DOCTOR WHO. Allegedly invited to play the coveted role by producer John Nathan-Turner on the grounds of his entertainment value at a mutual wedding, Baker began his travels in the alienating THE TWIN DILEMMA (1984), which showed the regenerated Time Lord as dangerously unstable and with outrageous mood swings. A major problem with the reign of the Sixth Doctor was his costume; continuing Nathan-Turner's policy of giving his Doctor's stylised facades, Baker's monstrosity encouraged - indeed, almost requires - equally gaudy production design and outlandish story lines to compete.

Nathan-Turner had decided to break with precedent by making the new Doctor's debut story the last of the current season (twenty-one) rather than the first of the next. This decision was made in the hope of engaging viewers early to the incoming actor, but together with the shift to a forty-five minute episode format, and the return to Saturday schedules, the road ahead seemed as uncertain as Baker's portrayal. Season twenty-two began with ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN, which also rekindled criticism of violence in the show. It seemed, by this point, that DOCTOR WHO had become unnecessarily preoccupied with its back-catalogue (fans were acting as unpaid continuity advisers), rather than deliver what the majority wanted: original tales in the tested style. This serial references other Cyber stories with London sewers (THE INVASION (1968)), a Cyber Controller and cryogenic chamber on their adopted planet Telos (THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN (1967)), and Mondas' imminent destruction in 1986 (THE TENTH PLANET (1966)). Out of this jumble comes a confused tale of the Cybermen trying to prevent the destruction of their home world in the past, while their domination of Telos seems assured in the future.

Michael Kilgarriff reprises his role as the Cyber Controller from THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN with unintentionally hilarious results. After a gap of some eighteen years the actor had "filled out" considerably, and his "Cyber-tent" suit met with delusion from fans questioning such a trivial casting ploy.

But ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN is not without interest. The London sewers and the de-saturated feel of Telos are effective, and the female, ethereal Cryons - the native race on Telos - bring a much-needed contrast to the masculinity of the Cybermen and brutish ex-Dalek agent Lytton (Maurice Colbourne). The TARDIS' fabled Chameleon Circuit is also repaired - briefly - which changes its exterior shape to blend into its surroundings; here, a cupboard, then a pipe-organ and ornamental gateway before reverting back to a police box. In fact, Baker's line "the TARDIS, when working properly, is capable of many amazing things, not unlike myself" seems a statement of what the production had become.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Full of Secrets

2010-05-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

THE SKULL (1965)
TORTURE GARDEN (1967)
THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970)

“Welcome to the Club!”; Ingrid Pitt plays leading lady Carla in The Cloak segment of THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD.

TORTURE GARDEN and THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD are two of seven horror anthologies produced by Amicus, and both have tales adapted from his own stories by Robert Block. A low-budget operation which was the most serious rival to Hammer during the 1960s and early 1970s, Amicus were officially a British company founded in 1961 by two Americans, creative force Milton Subotsky and financier Max J. Rosenberg. Amicus may mean friend in Latin, but by the time the company was dissolved in 1975, the relationship between the two producers was far from amicable. The biggest irony is that Subotsky and Rosenberg were indirectly responsible for Hammer making THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957), ushering in a generation of Technicolor horrors; Subotsky had written a script for a colour Frankenstein, which was bought by James Carreras and allegedly re-written by Jimmy Sangster.

A prime reason for Amicus to be lodged as a British company can be traced to the advantages of the Eady Levy, a government incentive passed in the 1950s to stimulate film production by which producers were paid a subsidy on percentage of box office. Not only is there conjecture of how British the company actually was, there is the notion that Amicus didn’t really make horror films per se; their softer outlook seems to tie in more with Subotsky’s love of fantasy. The distinct Amicus character lays in Subotsky himself, who possessed an innocence at odds with the cynicism of the film industry. Although the company milked the British connection in terms of actors, directors and technicians, their reliance on American material (such as EC Comics for TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1971) and THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973)) and use of contemporary settings distanced the product from homegrown Gothique.

Directed by Peter Duffell, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD benefits from strong performances by Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Denholm Elliott.

Yet TORTURE GARDEN and particularly THE SKULL provide such a footing. TORTURE GARDEN is the name of a sideshow where Dr Diablo (Burgess Meredith) invites patrons backstage for further excitement. As each customer stares into the shears of fate held by Atropos (Clytie Jessop) - a fortune-telling mannequin - they become hypnotised and glimpse their ultimate fate. Four stories are revealed: the first, Enoch, sees a nephew demanding to know where his uncle’s stash of gold coins are hidden; the second, Terror Over Hollywood, has a struggling actress stymieing her roommate’s date to meet a prominent Hollywood producer; the third, Mr Steinway, is about a killer piano; and in The Man Who Collected Poe, Jack Palance and Peter Cushing play competing Edgar Allen Poe fanatics.

Directed by Freddie Francis, TORTURE GARDEN is a turgid affair. Bloch had proposed that the film be called HORRORSCOPE, an effective moniker more apt than the redundant one chosen: Torture Garden comes from the decadent novel by French anarchist Octave Mirabeau published in 1898, a fact that irritated Bloch up until his death. The middle two stories are simply embarrassing: not only are we subjected to the most laughable Hollywood nightclub set, it is difficult to see how any filmmaker could successfully bring to screen a story where a woman is murdered by a piano. However, Enoch is atmospheric, and The Man Who Collected Poe is a mini-masterpiece; the final revelation that Poe himself (Hedger Wallace) is lovingly preserved in a cobwebbed vault underneath Cushing’s private museum presents Amicus with its most lasting Gothic image.

“Look deeply into the Shears of Fate!” A promotional gimmick for the film was to give away sachets of “fright seeds” so audiences could go home and plant their own TORTURE GARDEN.

Despite its lurid title, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD is relatively anaemic. Following the disappearance of its current occupant - horror film star Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee) - Inspector Holloway (John Bennett) discovers that the three previous owners of a house in the Home Counties have all come to unpleasant ends. The first story - Method For Murder - sees horror writer Charles Hillyer (Denholm Elliott) move into the house with his young wife to finish his latest novel. He is very proud of his creation - a psychotic strangler named Dominick - but becomes increasingly unnerved as he begins to see the killer making appearances in his everyday life. The second - Waxworks - has Philip Grayson (Peter Cushing) haunted by memories of the woman whom he loved and lost many years before. Sweets To The Sweet tells of stiff-backed disciplinarian John Reid (Christopher Lee), a father who is terrified that his small daughter Jane (Chloë Franks) may have inherited her dead mother’s unsavoury hobbies, and in the final tale - the light-hearted The Cloak - Henderson arrives at the house as he prepares to appear in his latest film opus. Irritated at the low production values, the self-important actor declines the moth-eaten garment he is offered for his costume and insists on obtaining one of his own. Visiting an obscure costumier, he acquires a much more convincing item.

The four tales have differing tones that make the film entertaining but ultimately hackneyed. Elliott gives a bravura performance in the opening segment, and the unpredictable introductions of the grinning Dominick are genuinely unsettling. Waxworks is an overtly thin entry raised by Cushing’s controlled evocation of loss and jealousy, Sweets to the Sweet is an effective family drama, and The Cloak is more amusing in outline than on screen.

For THE SKULL, director Freddie Francis and cameraman John Wilcox filmed the POV shots with a large prop cranium mounted in front of the lens, a trick Francis would repeat for THE CREEPING FLESH.

Based on Bloch’s pulp story The Skull of the Marquis de Sade (published in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales), THE SKULL is the crowning achievement of Amicus and the most accomplished of the many horror films directed by cinematographer Francis, as well as being the finest of the Cushing/Lee team-ups since their Hammer breakthroughs. The lengthy pre-credits sequence is set in the early 19th century, where a French phrenologist (Maurice Good) steals the head of the Marquis de Sade from his grave, intending to study its formation in an effort to prove that de Sade was not insane but rather possessed by an evil spirit. Jumping forward to modern day, against the advice of fellow collector Sir Matthew Phillips (Lee), occult writer Christopher Maitland (Cushing) adds the skull of de Sade to his collection, acquiring the item from seedy supplier Marco (Patrick Wymark). It is also ironic that with this film it was Amicus - rather than the risible Hammer attempts DRACULA, A.D. 1972 (1972) and THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973) - that succeeded in transposing Gothic horror to a present setting.

An exceptionally downbeat movie, THE SKULL portrays Maitland, Marco and Phillips living suffocating lives; neither Maitland or Phillips are practising students of the black arts, more armchair occultists cocooned in their own dark academia. The film also represents an important chapter in the evolution of recursive horror cinema; whereas PEEPING TOM (1959) was an investigation of the relationship between the viewer and the images that attract him, THE SKULL questions whether dark subjects are truly corrupting or are a necessary means to mastering basic inclinations to the human animal. Unusually - especially for the straight-laced Amicus - THE SKULL experiments with form: the third act is virtually silent, there is a surreal nightmare sequence, and shots are shown from the Skull’s subjective point of view (actions viewed through hollowed sockets, with inner bone aglow with an unnatural green hue). This fluid nature was imposed on Francis by trying to provide a feature-length film from a meagre Subotsky script only 53 pages in length, but the result is a marvel of production design and ingenuity.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

The Figurehead

2010-04-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

Dodgem Logic (2009 - )

National treasure and Glycon snake cultist Alan Moore is unsurprisingly the mastermind behind a return to the 1960s style underground press.

WHEN Alan Moore wrote an article for OVR2U - a youth and community publication in his native Northampton - about a particularly deprived area of the Borough, the piece was rejected by the funding body on grounds that it was critical of the council. Consequently, Moore felt he couldn’t talk about the real problems people were facing without breaking free, and the seeds for Dodgem Logic were sown. Part entertainment and part grassroots activism, the first issue - released in November 2009 - contained the tagline “colliding ideas to see what happens,” which fittingly describes this free-wheeling enterprise. Dodgem Logic #1 contained a free CD celebrating 50 years of Northampton music, while #2 (February 2010) has an inserted mini-comic Astounding Weird Penises.

It has the luddite appeal, for those who tearfully yearn for the tangible fanzine. Whether it’s recipe pages or political agenda, Dodgem Logic resurrects the spirit of 60s alternative papers International Times and Oz, whose fanatical anti-war stance was flanked by gay liberation and extreme political views which now seem mundane but were frighteningly prophetic. There is also a real sense that this is a personal project for Moore; there are rumours that he delivered a batch of Dodgems to his local comic shop in person asking “Does Frank Miller do that?” But Dodgem Logic is by no means a one-man show: think of Moore as the curator of an varied display of talent, sincerity and open-mindedness.

Dodgem Logic #2 contains Melinda Gebbie’s article on Burlesque, past, present and future.

But no matter now earnest Dodgem Logic strives to be, it cannot begin to compare with the tempestuous and influential period International Times or Oz were published. In 1970, reacting to criticism that they had lost touch with the young generation, Oz’s editors invited school children to edit an issue. The opportunity was taken up by mostly Public School students, and one of the resulting articles was a sexualised Rupert Bear parody created by pasting the head of Rupert onto the lead character of an X-rated cartoon by Robert Crumb. Oz’s offices had already been raided on several occasions, but the conjunction of school children and what some viewed as obscene material set the scene for the infamous obscenity trial of 1971.

Forty years on, however, the status of the printed magazine has changed radically. Since the World Wide Web, publications have been rendered redundant by their online counterparts, with websites offering free content (often reproducing the exact same articles that you’d find in the magazines themselves) and delivering news in a far timelier manner than their printed counterparts. Similarly, the bonifide fanzine has been reborn as the WeBlog, with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter mirroring the society’s fixation with texting, as the morons wallow in their world of self-gratification and zero substance. In this context, the launch of Dodgem Logic seems even more brave, and it is gratifying it has been so well received. At just £2.50, it represents superb value for money.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Beswick Rules

2010-03-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966)
PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1966)

Martine Beswick as Kari in the bewildering PREHISTORIC WOMEN. Beswick was a B-Movie queen before the term was created.

HAMMER’S biggest commercial hit and greatest folly, Don Chaffey’s ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. was a success jointly because of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion dinosaurs and Raquel Welch’s doeskin and fur bikini. The feature is a hopelessly anachronistic melange of prehistoric man, volcanoes and reptiles; not only is the film a scientific abnormality, it is also an aberration in the context of the maturing cinematic landscape of the 1960s. Away from Harryhausen’s creations, ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.’s wafer-thin plot tells of a mixed-tribe love affair between Tumak (John Richardson) of the Rock People and Loana (Welch) of the Shell People. It is all marvellously silly stuff - Michael Carreras’ screenplay is devoid of dialogue, relying instead on grunting and pointing - and all the better for being done with a straight face.

The sequel to ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. was actually completed while the dino-epic was still in post-production. PREHISTORIC WOMEN was hastily devised by Carreras to optimise the costumes and Elstree sets made for the earlier film and to include the talents of its supporting actress, Jamaican-born model/actress Martine Beswick. This fatuous, non-dinosaur production opens with African big game hunter David Marchant (Michael Latimer) mysteriously transported back in time (or is he dreaming?) to the kingdom of a fabled white rhinoceros cult. He encounters Saria (Edina Ronay), one of a number of fair-haired tribeswomen oppressed by a group of dark-haired vixens led by the evil Queen Kari (played with infectious relish by Beswick).

Ray Harryhausen’s Allosaurus during the village raid sequence of ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. All of his stop motion creatures are filled with enough charisma to act the entire human cast off the screen.

With her angular facial features and stunning physique, Beswick commands attention every moment she’s on screen, not so much stealing the film from the others as to rip it from them and devour it whole. Beswick first came to the attention in a pair of James Bond movies, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963, as a wrestling gypsy) and THUNDERBALL (1965, as a Jamaican spy), and in her first starring role here Beswick treats Queen Kari seriously, alternately seductive, childish and sluttish. When the warriors first push Marchant before the Queen, she parades in front of him naked, oblivious to anything remotely resembling modesty.

Produced, directed and written (under the pseudonym of Henry Younger) by Carreras, PREHISTORIC WOMEN is fittingly dismissed by critics and Hammer historians alike. However, the movie is a treasure trove for connoisseurs of camp; not only do the phallic implications of the rhino horn make for uneasy viewing, the climactic rhino-on-tracks is unintentionally hilarious. Additionally, the script is a litter of hyperbole, trumped by “The women are sad, and when the heart is heavy, the feet are not light - let there be no more dancing,” a statement which the viewer can only wish for during the seemingly endless tribal dance numbers.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Fresh Blood

2010-02-27T10:52:00.000-08:00

DR JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE (1971)
CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER (1974)

CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER was adapted into comic form for Hammer’s Halls of Horror #20 (May 1978), and an original strip featuring the character also appeared in the first three issues of the magazine.

AS Hammer entered the 1970s, new ideas were sought to revitalise their outdated mythologies. A potential saviour came in the form of THE AVENGERS alumni Brian Clemens, who created free and fresh adaptations of two renowned horror themes. The first, DR JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE - directed by Roy Ward Baker - sees Jekyll (Ralph Bates)’s obsessive quest for the elixir of life make him change sex into Hyde (Martine Beswick). A decidedly kinky reversal of the familiar tale, Bates’ creepy austereness is countered perfectly by Beswick’s blatant full-bodied sexuality. It has the look of Oliver! (1960), with its cheeky street urchins and gin-swilling tarts, but Clemens’ off the wall approach encompasses too much: the jovial threads of Jack the Ripper, Dorian Gray, Burke and Hare and Sweeney Todd jar somewhat with the disturbingly frenzied stabbings of Betsy (Virginia Wetherell) and Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim).

Clemens’ second Hammer screenplay proved to be every bit as iconoclastic as his first. The sleeper CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER - directed by Clemens himself - has the swash-buckling, eponymous hero (Horst Janson) seeking to destroy a vampire clan who drain youth rather than blood. Although dubbed by Julian Holloway, Janson gives a brooding performance for what is an outstanding creation; the character of Kronos is fleshed out by an intriguing back-story (his mother and sister were vampires) and memorable sidekicks (hunch-backed Professor Grost (John Cater), gypsy Carla (Caroline Munro)). The film also created a whole new vampire lore; not only are victims emaciated, different methods kill specific breeds, dead toads buried in boxes will spring to life if a vampire walks across it, and flowers will wilt in the undead’s wake.

Martine Beswick and Ralph Bates were perfectly cast for DR JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE.

CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER effectively portrays the English countryside in perpetual autumnal decay. Clemens seems set on desexualising his vampires (their quest for youth is not so much driven by their unchecked libido as it is by a self-admiration), and his direction is also of note, which makes the film move with an agility that many latter-day Hammer’s lacked. Yet both these brave attempts didn’t appeal to the cinemagoers of the day. While Hammer’s own feature version of ON THE BUSES (1971) was breaking house records during its first days of release, the double bill of DR JEKYLL & SISTER HYDE and BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB (1971) managed only a meagre showing in its opening week at London’s New Victoria. Similarly, with no assured distribution, CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER - whose principal photography actually wrapped nearly two years previously - was barely released.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Rising from the Moat

2010-02-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)

Christopher Lee's Prince of Darkness is again reduced to petty revenge, this time lusting after Veronica Carlson's Maria.

DIRECTED by Freddie Francis, DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE is set a year after the vampire’s death by drowning at the end of Terence Fisher’s DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965). A priest (Ewan Hooper) finds a woman with bite marks hanging dead inside his church bell, a discovery that further convinces the parishioners that this place of worship – which is touched at dusk by the shadow of Dracula’s castle – is tainted by the unholy. A visiting Monsignor (Rupert Davies) - disgusted by the townsfolk’s fear of an already vanquished monster - takes the priest to the Count’s castle and places a giant golden cross across the door, though not before a storm causes the priest to fall down the mountain and bleed, conveniently, on the shattered ice that has imprisoned Dracula (Christopher Lee). Free to resume his demonic business, the Count seeks revenge on the Monsignor and his blond niece Maria (Veronica Carlson), who’s in love – much to the Monsignor’s disapproval – with God-denying baker Paul (Barry Andrews).

Like most Hammer Dracula’s, The Count is given little to do, here lurking in the basement of the bakery-cum-public house, staring imperiously and baring his fangs on cue. Being a Francis film, its weak script and continuity errors are offset by a series of exquisite set pieces - none more effective than Paul’s attempted staking of Dracula - and a miscellany of visual splendour. Francis and cinematographer Arthur Grant utilise a dour, restrained tableaux, which gives the films’ one big colour (red, inevitably) maximum impact. At the climax, after falling - in a slightly unlikely manner - onto the golden cross, Dracula cries tears of blood and, for once, has the tragic nobility of the character in Bram Stoker’s source novel. Francis also makes the most of the lenient censorship which was extant by 1968: there is ample blood, and the liberal approach to sex is illustrated by lower necklines and more orgasmic shrieks.

Carlson’s mix of good looks and pale complexion made her one of Hammer’s most striking leading ladies.

Although DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE dabbles with intolerance and Christian discovery, the film lacks the tension and dynamism that Fisher habitually brought to equally poor scripts. But perhaps Fisher’s overall reputation was enhanced by his lesser involvement as the Hammer empire was running out of steam; his earlier masterpieces were certainly made when the studio was more clear-cut and less commercially confused. This change from Fisher-like efficiency to the stylish dashes of Francis seems to mirror Hammer’s shift from their confined, spiritual home of Bray Studios to the more sprawling Elstree and Pinewood. The intimate feel and tone of such Bray-filmed classics as THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) and THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1965) is ultimately lost on the bigger sound stages, and such releases as LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (1970) and THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1972) typify a certain loss of soul.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Disciples of Dracula

2010-01-16T12:46:00.000-08:00

THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)
DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966)

"Say you forgive me for letting him love me";
Andree Melly is one of THE BRIDES OF DRACULA.

DIRECTOR Terence Fisher’s reputation rests almost entirely on the horror films he directed for Hammer in the 50s and 60s, but he was a more versatile filmmaker than this output suggests. Fisher had previously helmed films with a variety of themes - such as tragic romance and light comedy - but he was accused of representing a conservative and pedantic force within British horror. Yet within his construction a primal yet supremely visual ethos was created, mixing precise framing and acting with negligee-wearing vampire brides and claustrophobic burial vaults. In fact, Fisher epitomised Andrew Sarris’ definition of the auteur in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (1968) “…to evoke a self-contained world with its own laws and landscapes.” Above all, Fisher was a storyteller, preserving the coherence of his films by containing few flashbacks and virtually no dream sequences.

Fisher’s THE BRIDES OF DRACULA begins with Marianne (Yvonne Monlaur) - en route to a teaching engagement - taking shelter at the invitation of Baroness Meinster (Marita Hunt). From her room’s balcony, Marianne sees a young man chained by his ankle, Baron Meinster (David Peel), her hostess’ vampire son whom his mother has been acquiring peasant girls for feeding. After freeing the Baron without knowing of his past, the woman escapes into the woods where she is rescued by Dr Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), who must face the Seal of Dracula once more.

Despite a relatively late introduction, Peter Cushing effortlessly commands the screen in THE BRIDES OF DRACULA. The scene where Van Helsing proceeds to burn out his bite from Meinster with holy water and a red-hot branding iron is one of Hammer’s most heart-rending.

Despite a contradiction from DRACULA (1958) that vampires cannot change their form (though curiously unavailable to the Baron when held in leg irons), and the arrival of Hammer’s customary unconvincing bat, THE BRIDES OF DRACULA is a sumptuous production. With the absence of Christopher Lee, the androgynous Peel makes for an engaging, Byronic, manipulative charmer in his role “to spread the cult and corrupt the world.” Subsequent Lee/Dracula Hammers all de-vitalised rather than embodied The Count, and the followers of the vampire in THE BRIDES OF DRACULA are painted with a complex stroke that the series would not feature so successfully again; when the cackling Greta (Freda Jackson) - Meinster’s childhood nurse - lies full length on a freshly dug grave beckoning its occupant “I know it’s dark, but you’ve got to push, push…”, no wonder Van Helsing is startled. Van Helsing demonstrated a cool but obsessive intensity in DRACULA, but his character changes substantially here; now a vampire slaying hero, much of his scientifically detached persona and harsher edges have been smoothed over. With Lee not taking centre stage, it is Cushing that must carry the film.

What is often overlooked with Lee’s return in Fisher’s DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS is that THE BRIDES OF DRACULA was the last film to feature Cushing’s Van Helsing until his modern day return in DRACULA A.D. 1972 (1972), although DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS does have a Van Helsing replacement, courtesy of Andrew Keir’s warrior-monk Father Sandor. However, Lee’s much-anticipated reprisal is reduced to a series of mute, melodramatic and repetitive attacks, and the two stand-out sequences don’t feature The Count at all: the sacrifice of Alan (Charles Tingwell) and the controversial ecclesiastical gang rape of his wife Helen (Barbara Shelley). Such sequences, however, do subscribe to the poetry of flesh and blood akin to Bram Stoker’s source material. The Count slipping through broken ice to be swallowed by the running waters of the moat around his castle makes for a powerful ending, with the scene seeming reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno (1861), which shows Satan trapped in the ice in the lower pit of hell, his wings flapping in a vain effort to pull him free.

Repressed Barbara Shelley succumbs to DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS.

Whereas the economic retelling of Stoker’s novel in DRACULA left no room for the characters of Dr Seward and Renfield, a Renfield substitute appears in the guise of Ludwig (Thorley Walters). Here an obsessive but chivalrous bookbinder in the hospitality of a monastery, Ludwig is the one Renfield in cinema who actually encapsulates the character as Stoker describes him. Although partial to eating flies, Walters never radiates total madness, instead performing such transgression as mischief in an existence vague to everyone and thing except the needs of his Master (another avenue from the book omitted from the first film - where Dracula cuts his chest for a victims benefit - is over too quickly).
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Hitchcock Comes Home

2010-01-01T00:42:00.001-08:00

FRENZY (1972)

Strangulation as art in Hitchcock’s penultimate picture.

IN England for his first feature since STAGE FRIGHT (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s FRENZY seized the opportunity for what most critics term a return to form. Adapted by playwright Anthony Shaffer from Arthur La Bern’s novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square (1966), FRENZY is the story of a series of rape-murders committed by suave Covent Garden fruit-merchant Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), who throttles women with a necktie. Being Hitchcock - himself the son of a greengrocer - suspicion falls on the wrong person, ill-tempered former-RAF officer turned bartender Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). The screenplay is crafted a little too deliberately, as the detective plot seems mechanical underneath its oh-so-English tone. But the film has long been greatly undervalued, and resurrects many conventions of the director’s first hit, THE LODGER (1926).

Hitchcock had laboured under censorship restrictions throughout his illustrious career, yet FRENZY was made when such controls had eased. Consequently, the rape and murder of Blaney's ex-wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) is as explicitly nasty as the director ever got, and after this scene the film doesn't need to portray subsequent killings. This enables Hitchcock to execute one of his finest shots, as Blaney’s girlfriend Babs (Anna Massey) is killed off-screen (“You’re my type of woman”) while the camera retreats backwards down the stairs, through the front door, and then across the street to join the people outside. And the sequence where Rusk has a tussle in a potato truck with Babs’ uncooperative corpse - clutching the discriminating evidence of a tie pin - is arguably the most blackly comedic scene Hitchcock ever filmed. It’s rewarding to see the filmmaker - after fifty years in the business - still experimenting and executing with such aplomb.

“Lovely, lovely”; Barry Foster is The Necktie Killer.

Claims that Hitchcock was a misogynist - or at least had a neurotic compulsion to mistreat women in his films - had increasingly haunted the auteur; true, Tippi Hedren’s ordeal in the attic with THE BIRDS (1963) is gratuitous, but arises inevitably from dramatic situation. Even Hedren, despite her quarrels over the director’s possessiveness, had no complaints about the support he normally gave her. In his private and professional live Hitchcock was always surrounded by women; he and his wife had one child, a daughter, and she produced three grandchildren, all females. There was a succession of women personal assistants, as well as the usual complement of secretaries, but his wife Alma was the most professional aid of all, and always the ultimate authority in the cutting room.

Similarly, Hitchcock’s hatred of actors has been exaggerated. The director believed that performers should only concentrate on their artistic presentation and leave work on the script to the director and screenwriter. Before filming began, tensions grew between Hitchcock and Finch, with the actor earnestly telling reporters that the director seemed past his prime, and that the cast might have to improvise to improve the quaint script. Hitchcock never forgot this violation, and gave Finch no warmth on set, so the actor remained as off balance as Blaney throughout the story. Over the years, there was a persistent rumour that the director had said that actors were cattle; Hitchcock denied this - typically tongue-in-cheek - clarifying that he had only said that actors should be treated like cattle. For him, like the props, the performers were part of the film’s setting.

The Governor purveys his domain.

In contrast, Foster relishes his role as the psychotic market trader, a character who is deliberately made more agreeable than the unappetising man he is framing for his crimes. Massey is genuinely touching as the naive girlfriend, and there are plenty of recognisable faces in the supporting cast, such as Clive Swift, Billie Whitelaw and Bernard Cribbins as a sleazy pub landlord. Best of all, however, is Alec McCowan as Inspector Oxford, an old-fashioned copper right down to the ironic final line (“Mr Rusk, you‘re not wearing your necktie”). The scenes between him and his gourmet wife (Vivien Merchant) extend the films obsession with food, as well as portraying a cinematic equivalent of Mr and Mrs Hitchcock.

There is little hope in FRENZY, reflecting a world which is irrevocably fallen; women are harridans or naive lambs for the slaughter, while the men are either brutes (the hero Blaney is an implied wife-beater) or simpletons telling rape jokes over the bar, and the nicest people end up dead. Somehow the world seems to be at the end of its tether, where human beings are reduced to the same level as food and waste, and abandoned - as the rape scene suggests - by any rationale. In fact, FRENZY can be viewed as the culmination of a hostility against the world that Hitchcock begun back in the 1920s.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Dead Reckoning

2009-12-01T10:21:00.000-08:00

COLIN (2008)
DOGHOUSE (2008)
OUTPOST (2008)

Z-movie starlet and TV presenter Emily Booth plays The Snipper in DOGHOUSE.

BILLED as “The £45 Zombie Movie” and the “First Zombie Movie told from the zombie’s perspective” (though RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 and I, ZOMBIE: THE CHRONICLES OF PAIN portrayed a descent into putrefaction fifteen and ten years previously), Marc Price’s COLIN conveys its apocalyptic world through an accompaniment of alarms, gunfire, explosions and screams. This ambience is accompanied by a threadbare electronic soundtrack, which envelopes the eponymous Colin (Alastair Kirton) in his new life as a shambling ghoul. Colin is the most sympathetic screen zombie since Bub (Howard Sherman) in DAY OF THE DEAD (1985) - its no coincidence that Colin’s girlfriend Laura (Leanne Pammen) works in Sherman’s Café - and there are some wonderful slices of black humour: a victim’s ear is removed complete with earphone, and Colin is mugged for his trainers.

The title star prefers to avoid confrontation, and it is testament to Kirton’s virtually silent performance that Colin remains such a pitiful figure with echoes of Karloff’s Frankenstein. But many will find COLIN too slow, sombre and uneventful, perhaps missing the human survivor stories we’re accustomed to in the sub-genre. The film does find some room for the living, and perhaps ironically it’s in these scenes that the film loses its way. The bulk of co-stars cannot complete with Kirton, and it’s in the busier, more populated sequences – the street attacks and especially in a house siege – that the DIY nature of the production is most apparent. Unlike most living dead films where you relish the gore and the scale of destruction, COLIN instead leaves you with a sense of melancholy.

The bulk of the £45 budget for COLIN went on tea, coffee and biscuits.

After his own amateur effort EVIL ALIENS (2005), Jake West returns with the immature DOGHOUSE, armed with a budget and the Britflick equivalent of a name cast. It tells the story of a group of men who, leaving behind relationships in varying degrees of dysfunction in London, descend on the rural backwater of Moodley (where women outnumber the men 4 to 1) for a lads weekend. But their destination is filled with ravenous zombirds, or as Neil (Danny Dyer) has it, “an army of pissed-off, man-hating feminist cannibals.” There is a genuine revulsion towards woman and their emotional tirade on menkind as we enter an alternate England envisioned by the CARRY ON team or George Best. The zombirds aren't just normal women who have been infected by a military virus, they're Sid James stereotypes; a bride in her underwear, a dominatrix hairdresser, et al, and there is even a Hattie Jacques saucepot. DOGHOUSE is riddled with in-jokes but this isn't flattery so much as smirking, with the director fittingly calling the bus-hire company West Tours.

Away from the Romeroesque COLIN and juvenile DOGHOUSE, Steve Barker’s OUTPOST is a robust British zombie movie which focuses on that most interesting sub-genre within a sub-genre: the Nazi undead. Equating the Third Reich with the zombie makes perfect sense, as it is easy to see the brutish automatons of Hitler Germany as monsters rather than human beings; in fact, there exists a compulsion to dehumanise all our enemies. Arabella Croft and Kieran Parker mortgaged their Glasgow home in order to raise finance for the film, which is a bunker-bound horror where mercenaries (led by DC (Ray Stevenson)) fight against an advancing zombie tide. The Nazi ghouls here are effectively realised, and owe more than a passing debt to the mariners of THE FOG (1980) as they torment victims by pushing bullets and bayonets into eyes and mouths. But they also adhere to that particular John Carpenter film in their ambiguousness: are they zombies, ghosts, genetic supermen or a combination of all three?

Nazi zombies haunt the OUTPOST.

The lack of budget doesn’t work against OUTPOST because nearly all of the film takes place in the confines of the bunker, and when the camera does venture outside, it is usually at night preceding a mist-bound attack. The performances are strong, yet the nihilistic tone fittingly tells of a mission for people we never meet, and the characters are never fully realised for the audience to care if anyone does pull through. However, the film has developed enough of a following for a sequel to be announced, OUTPOST II: BLACK SUN, which is currently in pre-production.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Carry On Hammer

2009-11-14T05:09:00.000-08:00

CARRY ON SCREAMING! (1966)

Delicious Fenella Fielding is the highlight in this Hammer pastiche.

AS British as you can get, the CARRY ON series spanned twenty years with hardly a pause for breath. In the process they became a national institution, evolving from typical 1950s comedy fare into the motion picture equivalent of a seaside postcard - saucy, lewd but underlying inoffensive. Each entry featured a well-defined character that rarely altered from film to film; Sid James generally headed the cast as the lecherous old devil, Bernard Bresslaw was his gormless side-kick, Kenneth Williams the camp authority figure, Charles Hawtry the effeminate chap brimmin with enthusiasm, and either Kenneth Conner or Jim Dale as the likable bumbler. From a female perspective, Barbara Windsor was the sex kitten, and Joan Sim played James’ long-suffering wife/girlfriend.

Part of the charm was the strange fantasy world that they created; where else could Windsor be constantly presented as the most desirable woman in the world, and what other set of films would have Bresslaw and Peter Butterworth in drag be mistaken for real woman? By the early 1970s, not only did the CARRY ON’s keep reviving the same “ideas,” they were already popular on television, which itself was churning out re-treads. Considering the fact that audiences could sit and enjoy the same joke over and over in the comfort of their own home, its hardly surprising that the films began to decline in popularity. With the parody of Just Jaekin’s French 1974 soft-core hit CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE (1978), the initial run came to an inglorious end, failing to adapt to the changing tastes of audiences and film distributors - a similar downfall to Hammer.

Delirious Kenneth Williams as zombie mad scientist Dr Orlando Watt.

In fact, Hammer had much in common with the CARRY ON’s; both were made on small budgets by a regular production team, both employed a repertory of actors, and the films were dismissed by the critical establishment for many years. CARRY ON SCREAMING! opens with a suitably daft song, then immediately sets the mood with a shot of a creature walking through a misty wood. The night-time sequences are inevitably filled with fog, a cliché mocked in a scene in which Valeria (Fenella Fielding) is enveloped in a huge cloud after asking if the Sergeant (Harry H. Corbett) minds if she smokes. The film ably captures the lurid Eastmancolor look of Hammer, especially with the laboratory set, in which Watt (Kenneth Williams) memorably cries “Frying tonight!” as victims are plunged into a vat of bubbling wax. Aided by Oddbod (Tom Clegg) and Oddbod Junior (Billy Cornelius), Watt kidnaps young women - virgins, for some reason - and vitrifies them, to be sold as store dummies.

The standout performance belongs to the graceful Fielding as the voluptuous Valeria, a worthy companion to Vampira, Elvira and Morticia Addams, with a striking difference: Valeria wears a blindingly scarlet dress instead of the traditional vampire black. Williams also relishes his role as Watt - animated by regular juicing of electricity - and comes across as a fusion of Peter Cushing and Ernest Thesiger.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

HD Hound from Hell

2009-11-01T01:21:00.000-07:00

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)
BEWARE THE MOON: REMEMBERING AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (2008)

Nightmares and curses abound in John Landis' horror-comedy.

BLOODIER than the slashers of the time, but was still recognisably a John Landis film, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON follows David (David Naughton)’s gradual realisation of man into wolf. Victims hang in limbo to haunt him; this enables his best friend and travelling companion Jack (Griffin Dunne) to keep him company - despite advancing stages of decomposition - and subsequent victims joyously suggesting ways to kill himself and severe the curse bestowed upon him.

Back in 1981, the film kept audiences (and critics) off-balance with its mix of gore and humour (which does not make the film a comedy). Apart from the show-stopping transformation sequence - which Landis wanted to withstand the scrutiny of a harshly lit set - AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON contains many rending nightmare scenes (and nightmares within nightmares) which add to the quirkiness. It also surprisingly mocks the need for silver bullets, and is not wholly successful in the director’s insistence for a “four-legged hound from hell,” rather than more of a Wolfman. The cumbersome movement of David’s finished state is shown too much, and is only really effective in long shot (such as the tube station murder).

“Have you ever talked to a corpse? Its boring.” Griffin Dunne is at war with his character on and off screen.

But there is no doubt that the movie still packs a considerable punch. The performances are earnest yet sympathetic (though Nurse Price (Jenny Agutter) inviting David to stay at her home seems as abrupt as the jolting jump-cuts), and while it is true that Rob Bottin’s biped werewolves caused a sensation for THE HOWLING (1980), AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON was so completely different in tone that fans had no trouble in embracing both. The rumoured re-make would be an abomination; no CGI could do justice to the intensity and sadness of David’s metamorphoses.

With the film’s arrival on Blu-Ray, the major new draw is Paul Davis’ accompanying documentary BEWARE THE MOON: REMEMBERING AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (2008). Besides Landis and make-up artist Rick Baker’s extensive involvement, almost all the main cast and behind the scenes personnel are interviewed, in particular Dunne, who has much to say about the physical and psychological effects of looking and acting as a corpse. Davis presents the programme from the original locations as they appear today, therefore serving as a great guide to making your own pilgrimage.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Tortured Soul

2009-10-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

REPULSION (1965)

Hypnotically beautiful Catherine Deneuve.

SUPERFICIALLY in the mould of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), Roman Polanski’s REPULSION couldn’t have had a less auspicious origin: a low-budget British horror film produced by soft-core porn outfit Compton, directed by a young Polish émigré with only one sparse feature under his belt, and starring an icily beautiful 22-year-old French actress who had never spoken English on film before. But the result was a masterwork, an evocation into schizophrenia which follows Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuvre), a Belgian manicurist living with her older coquettish sister (Yvonne Furneaux) in London. When her sibling and boyfriend (Ian Hendry) - whose lovemaking in an adjacent room frightens her - go on holiday, Carol’s fears and isolation in the apartment fester along with the uncooked food, which includes a sinister-looking skinned rabbit.

REPULSION acts as an expressionistic nightmare. The apartment in which most of the film takes place assumes the shape and mind of a anguished consciousness, and Carol’s nocturnal rape fantasies are orchestrated by the metronomic ticking of a clock. These latter sequences are brought to a halt by the ringing of bells (phones, doorbells) just as Carol’s murders are heralded by the bell in a neighbouring convent. The work is full of such weird echoes of disorientation, which act as the perfect complement to the judicious mix of slow, subtle scares (cracks splitting the walls, with hands eventually emerging from within) and sudden shocks (the razor scene).

Koch Vision's ludicrous 2001 DVD cover design renders Polanski's claustrophobic masterpiece as bargain-bin fodder.

For once in a Compton film, sexuality is used as something other than a publicity stunt. Carol’s carnal frustration is contrasted with the openness of everybody else, from casual discussion in the salon to the attempted rape by her landlord (Patrick Wymark). Work colleagues indefinitely refer to Carol’s withdrawal as “day dreaming,” walking across Hammersmith Bridge and through the streets of South Kensington oblivious to buskers, leering workmen and even a road accident. But there is nothing inevitable about the way she falls apart; Carol seems to be in the forceful grip of a malign fate. Deneuve is spellbinding in the role; even at her most catatonic, she remains sympathetic thanks to her amazing, doe-like eyes.

Photographed in cold black and white by Gil Taylor and Stanley Long, REPULSION is a stark and absorbing film which is easier to admire than to actually like. The director’s narrative concentration on confined spaces would be honed over his entire career - most notably in ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and THE TENANT (1975) - and REPULSION can be considered a companion piece to Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION (1981), where love and murder are conundrums in which tormented young women struggle with their mental and physical beauty.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Brains That Wouldn't Die

2009-09-19T02:36:00.000-07:00

THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1958)

THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964)
FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)
THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1970)

Michael Gwynn suffers THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN.

HAMMER’s sardonic THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN - a direct sequel to THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957) - consolidated the feel of Hammer Horror. The Baron (Peter Cushing) has also undergone a rethink, changing from the aloof and self absorbed into a passionate visionary, becoming the obsessive that we would eventually become familiar. The film begins with hunchbacked Karl (Oscar Quitak) helping the Baron escape the guillotine, with Frankenstein promising him a new body for his efforts.

Michael Gwynn is cast as the physical form which incorporates the brain of Karl, remaining sympathetic even after developing cannibalistic tendencies. His emotional confrontation with Frankenstein at a dinner party, which ultimately exposes the Baron's true identity ("Frankenstein - help me!"), is as moving as anything Hammer ever achieved. Elsewhere, performances are equally solid, particularly from Francis Matthews as the Baron’s assistant Hans Kleve who, it's interesting to note, has the only real success in creating an artificial man in the entire cycle. Curiously, THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN has rarely achieved the level of praise and analysis bestowed on other films in the series, particularly in its pointed portrayal of the middle class medical elite callously using the impoverished working class as a mass donor bank, enacting a suspicion of the nurturing welfare state.

The “Cornflake Box” Creature of THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN.

The next film, THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN (1964), sits uncomfortably among the Hammer cannon, and the title is a complete misnomer, for the Baron was never less evil than here. Frankenstein (Cushing) discovers his original monster (Kiwi Kingston) perfectly preserved inside a mountain glacier attended by feral deaf-mute Rena (Katy Wild). The Baron gives his monster renewed life, but its brain has been traumatised by gunfire. A circus comes to Carlstaad, featuring the mesmerist Zoltan (Peter Woodthorpe), whom the Baron recruits to stimulate the creature’s brain. But when officials order Zoltan out of town for operating without a licence, he uses his mesmeric hold over the monster to exact revenge.

Both previous entries were skilfully directed by Terence Fisher; THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN was helmed by Freddie Francis, and legend has it that Fisher was temporarily relieved of his duties as punishment for the commercial failure of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1962). Whatever the reason, it is a rogue entry which negates the genetic advancements made by Fisher by forcing an ill-advised return to the feel of Golden Age Horror. The film was made for Universal, and consequently has an emphasis on ruined castles, sparkling lab equipment, villagers and burgomasters, which recall the American studio rather than the bloody tragedies of Hammer (also the Creature make-up design is very Boris Karloffesque).

“Scientist … Surgeon … Madman … Murderer … Search the length and breadth of Europe … hunt him … track him down. No matter what the risk … FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED.”

The Hammer Frankensteins were always superior over the Christopher Lee Draculas thanks to Cushing; he was always the glue that held them together, his coldly articulate Baron pitch-perfect for FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED, which shows an England struggling under the environmental weight of lunatic asylums and abandoned estates. On the run from the police, Frankenstein blackmails Anna Spengler (Veronica Carlson) and her fiancé Karl Holst (Simon Ward) into helping him kidnap his former colleague Dr Brandt (George Pravda) from a sanatorium. Anxious to exploit Brandt’s knowledge, the scientist cures his insanity and after death transplants his brain into the body of Dr Richter (Freddie Jones). Unable to communicate with his “widow” Ella (Maxine Audley), the “new” Brandt is determined to kill his tormentor.

Fisher’s FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED comes closest of all to Mary Shelley's original concept. For the first time, the Baron’s creation is a sensitive, misunderstood being who finally turns the tables on his maker. Here, Frankenstein avenges himself not only on the medical establishment but also on womanhood. Given that he is working on projects which, in effect, excludes women from the creation of life, it's perhaps understandable that he should treat women with increasing disdain. In the previous FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN (1966), it was a female who unsportingly terminated his experiment by taking her own life. Now he systematically turns on all women, raping and killing Anna and treating a traumatised Ella Brandt with emotional sadism. It is Cushing at his finest, a genuinely frightening performance matched in its quality by Jones’s moving turn as the bewildered Richer/Brandt. That Frankenstein himself is now the monster couldn’t be clearer.

“You’ve put on weight in a couple of places”; Alys (Kate O’Mara) is the bed-warming housekeeper of THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN.

The following film - Jimmy Sangster’s THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN - is detested by Hammer purists for its comedic tone. Initiated as a start-over remake of THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, the film dispenses with Cushing’s services and tries to introduce a younger generation. It opens with Victor Frankenstein (Ralph Bates) at school, with friends Elizabeth (Veronica Carlson), Stefan (Stephen Turner) and Henry (Jon Finch). Victor arranges for the accidental death of his father and travels to university in Vienna, where he acquires sidekick Wilhelm (Graham James) and impregnates the daughter of the Dean. Returning to Ingstad, Victor starts a series of experiments, using corpses delivered by a local body-snatcher (Dennis Price) - who lets his wife do the digging. After electrocuting Wilhelm for complaining about his work, Victor poisons Elizabeth’s professor father (Bernard Archard) for his brain, but the organ is damaged and the resulting patchwork man is a mute thug (David Prowse).

Despite the traditional 19th Century setting, the film is very much of its time - witness Bates’ hair and puffy shirts - and quite anarchic, mixing side issues (Elizabeth’s financial worries, Stefan’s crush on Victor) with comic relief (a severed arm making a V-sign) and grue (the shot of Victor’s hands smearing his face with blood). Duelling femmes fatale O'Mara and Carlson are always watchable, but only Price has anything like the correct tone of eccentricity.
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Jesus Wept

2009-09-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

HELLRAISER (1987)

HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II (1988)

The chamber of horrors that is HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II.

WRITER/DIRECTOR Clive Barker burst onto the scene with HELLRAISER, a raw meditation on human desire and sadomasochism. Unsatisfied with the pleasures available to him in our world, Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) purchases a puzzle box from a mysterious dealer in an unspecified Middle East location. Upon opening it, the Cenobites appear - demons from another dimension - who tear him apart. Larry (Andrew Robinson) moves into his brother Frank’s empty house in England with his frigid wife Julia (a glacial Clare Higgins) and before long Julia is reminiscing about her brief and torrid affair with Frank. When Larry accidentally cuts his hand and spills blood on the floor, his brother is resurrected, but not completely; the undead thrill-seeker convinces Julia to provide him with bodies on which to feed.

Barker's breakthrough arrived at a time when neither pleasure nor pain had much to do with the genre. The NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, FRIDAY THE 13th and HALLOWEEN franchises had turned the horror movie into a joyless but profitable procession. Yet here was a cutting-edge horror replete with adult, sexual tensions: the Cenobites are pallid-skinned fetishists, with “Lead Cenobite” Pinhead (Doug Bradley) possessing a gravely poise which made the character a relief from the wisecracks of Freddy Krueger. Greatly enhanced by Christopher Young’s majestic score, Barker's vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, and is an unwitting product of the AIDS crisis. Scenes of sexual intercourse are marked by the presence of blood - often gelatinous or recycled - and stagnant pools are constantly inhabited by insects. Ultimately, Julia's mission to gather plasma for her lover results in a libidinous, walking disease. The scenes in which she lures unsuspecting men into the house, stripping them to their Y-fronts only to hammer them to death, constitute the best parts of the film.

Angels to some, Demons to others; the "Chattering" Cenobite from HELLRAISER.

It was the flawed and damaged starkness that gave HELLRAISER real bite; its tone has been ransacked by post-punk artists such as Damien Hirst into a medieval torture-garden aesthetic. However groundbreaking, it suffers - like all 1980s horrors - with garish colour schemes, Modern Romantic looks, and outlandish special effects. In fact, the corridor-stalking “Engineer” and the cricket-eating vagrant who turns into a pterodactyl are perhaps two of the most notable examples.

Inevitably HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II followed, leaving the subsequent (at present count, six) sequels to be made in the United States. The only surviving human from the first film - teenage daughter of Larry, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) - is recuperating from her trauma in a sanatorium run by Dr Clannard (Kenneth Cranham). Channard is familiar with the “Lament Configuration” puzzle box and uses his knowledge to resurrect Julia (a returning Higgins). After procuring victims from his asylum to provide new skin for her, he uses autistic patient Tiffany (Imogen Boorman) to solve the configuration and unleash the Cenobites. Despite some harrowing imagery, this second outing directed by Tony Randall is a clear victim of Elm Street Syndrome, where screenwriters could dispense with motivation or logic when dealing with the supernatural. Without a firm narrative hook, HELLBOUND is just a collection of uneven set pieces and money shots, with the series already introducing some Kruegerisms (as in Channard’s “The doctor is in.”)
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Twilight of the Dead

2009-08-24T07:26:00.000-07:00

FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1974)

David Prowse is The Creature in Hammer’s last gasp for Gothic Horror.

SADDLED with an absurdly low budget, Terence Fisher’s asylum-set FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL is a grim epitaph for the Baron and Fisher himself, a Hammer Horror - unlike many of the period - which didn’t rely on sexual overtones to try to elevate its fortunes. Hollywood had once stood in line to finance the studio’s immensely profitable output, yet the vogue for Gothique had passed; when Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is told that he’s mad, he laughs and in a line penned by the actor himself replies “Oh possibly. I must admit I’ve never felt so elated in my life. Not since I first … but that was a long time ago.”

As in TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1969), a franchise character is partnered with a younger equivalent - here surgeon Simon Helder (Shane Briant) - and the film benefits from remaining focused on the making of the monster, rather than cutting away to various asides (even the Baron's servant (Madeline Smith) is mute and inconsequential). Cushing - looking alarmingly gaunt and frail - is ill-served by a blonde curly wig and top hat, which only accentuates his thin frame and bony structure. Despite this, the actor remains as obsessive and athletic as always; a standout scene features Cushing’s trademark leap, jumping onto - then off - a table, and wrapping a chloroformed coat around the Monster’s head. Underneath the awkward, hulking and hairy creature suit, David Prowse gives perhaps his only performance on film. None too pleased about his new skin, the abomination’s dilemma is best conveyed when he caresses the violin possessed in his previous life, only to moments later smash it when realising the futility of the situation.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD made Hammer
seem outdated by comparison.

The decline of Hammer can primarily be linked to its failure to understand the cultural shift that the end of 1960s cinema represented. British filmmakers such as Michael Reeves and Pete Walker - together with American directors George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven - moved the horror genre into a new phase of intense, graphic violence that made Hammer’s output positively quaint. Even by the mid-60s trouble was looming, with rising production costs and increasing competition, but Hammer seemed uninterested in nurturing new talent as their output became increasingly formulaic and threadbare both intellectually and in physical production (a good example being the unconvincing exterior shots of the miniature asylum in FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL).

Romero’s nihilistic NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) did for the horror genre what Hammer achieved in 1957 with THE CURSE OF FRANKESTEIN: it made everything before it seem dated and predictable. Romero’s film looked like a newsreel, where economy was turned into an artistic value; Hammer, still largely stick in a Victorian world of vampires and mummies, lacked any connection to contemporary existence. This New Order created a change away from the tidiness of the British horror film and created a tableau where monsters and humans could no longer be easily distinguished. This loss of generic identity pulled British horror towards sexploitation, which was proving to be a formidable and cost-effective box-office attraction during a period of decline. But there was also an acute divergence and mutation in storylines: consider the Hammer and Shaw Brothers marriage for THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1973), and Amicus’ werewolf whodunit THE BEAST MUST DIE (1974).
~ Stephen C. Jilks

Satanic Scars

2009-08-01T00:24:00.001-07:00

SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)
DRACULA, A.D. 1972 (1972)
THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

"Hammer find of 1971" Caroline Munro on the alter in DRACULA, A.D. 1972.

HAMMER’s bloodiest film, SCARS OF DRACULA is also one of its most maligned. Braking the sequence began with their original DRACULA (1958), no attempt is made to link it to the conclusion of the previous entry, TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1969). Here, the Prince of Darkness (Christopher Lee) is afforded more screen time and dialogue, uttering his lines in a dreamy tone (under pasty make-up) that could be the result of Lee’s oft-quoted desire to express “the loneliness of evil,” but also can be the disenchantment of an actor tiring of a limiting role. The young cast are tepid at best (a fresh faced Dennis Waterman, the beautiful but vapid - and dubbed throughout - Jenny Hanley, and Christopher Matthews as an annoying womaniser), but the real performances come from the supporting cast, with Patrick Troughton transforming Dracula’s urbane butler Klove into a seedy errant boy, and Anouska Hempel as vulpine concubine Tania.

The last of the studio’s Gothic Draculas, the film revels in 70s-style exploitation, with a frenetic stabbing, an impaling, a vicious branding, an acid-bath scene and - to set the story in motion - a bat vomiting blood on the Count’s remains (not forgetting a zoom-in towards Hanley’s bloodied cleavage later on). Director Roy Ward Baker’s preparatory work apparently drew him to actually read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), inspiring the filmmaker to add a shot of The Count scaling his castle’s wall which he claimed was his “only contribution … to the Dracula cycle” (obviously he had never seen DRAKULA ISTANBUL’DA, filmed seventeen years previously). In fact, the film’s “only contribution” is to have the most laughable bouncing rubber bat in British horror film history.

Vampire bats ravage the woman folk in SCARS OF DRACULA.

When Warner Brothers noted the success of AIP's COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE (1970) - in which Robert Quarry prowled present-day Los Angeles - they consequently ordered two Hammer Dracula’s to follow suit, bringing the character to modern-day London and away from the Eastern European neverwhere which had died its final death with SCARS OF DRACULA. What should have been a fresh new direction resulted in DRACULA, A.D. 1972, one of the studio’s most glorious mishaps. Beginning in Hyde Park, 1872, Lawrence Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) dies from the strain of destroying Dracula (Lee). During Van Helsing’s funeral at St Bartolph’s, one of the vampire’s disciples - Alucard (Christopher Neame) - buries his master’s ashes nearby. Jumping to Chelsea, 1972, we see Alucard organising a black mass at St Bartolph’s, supposedly for teen thrills. The culmination of the ritual, however, is the rejuvenation of Dracula, and Alucard lures young victims to the deserted graveyard for his master's pleasure, one of which is buxom Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), descended from the line of vampire hunters and the Count’s favoured target. Her grandfather Lorimar (Peter Cushing) - equipped with all the devices to snare the Count - subsequently confronts his arch enemy.

The major flaw of the film is that once Dracula is resurrected, he never leaves the derelict church where he's been revived, so the movie might as well take place in 1872, where the film's rousing pre-credits sequence takes place. Innovations such as Dracula claiming his first male and black victim are overshadowed by the phoney younger characters, who seem a good decade behind the times with their hilariously misconceived banter. Cushing relishes his Van Helsing role, and at least tries to act as a voice of reason to Jessica and the film in general, although the script insults the audience’s intelligence when Van Helsing - of all people - has to take up pen and paper to work out that Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards.

Vampires in the bargain basement: THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA.

Warner expressed little enthusiasm for the direct sequel - the sombre and apocalyptic THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA - and never released the film in America, where it wouldn’t be in general circulation until independent distributor Dynamite issued the film under the flaccid title COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE late in 1978. This time, rather than the Count skulking in crypts and pouncing on Hammer’s latest nubile protégé, Van Helsing (Cushing) discovers that reclusive property developer D.D.Denham is in fact the Count (Lee), who intends to wipe out the human race with a newly perfected strain of bubonic plague. The script creates another own-goal in a plan which will inevitably deprive the vampire of his own food supply (a mournful echo perhaps of Lee’s own overwhelming desire to put Dracula behind him). The Count is morphed into a hybrid of Howard Hughes and Fu Manchu for an almost James Bond-like adventure yarn; this will probably be the only Dracula film to have the Count employing a gang of motorcycle-riding toughs to do his daylight dirty work.

What makes Hammer’s modern-day Dracula’s so disappointing is that they ignore the maturity and foresight that Stoker bought to the source material. It is a book about the unrestrained movement of the threatening other. Stoker reiterates the sense of London as both heart and image of the Empire, using its familiar locations to heighten fears of invasion, contamination and disease (at least THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA hints at contagion). Association with the East End links The Count with foreigners, especially Jews from eastern Europe and Orientals, as well as with an area connected in the public mind with crime. The author marshals discourses to those we are familiar with now in the war against terrorism: the threat of shape-changing terrorists from the east, among us and invisible. In the invasive other, British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms; Dracula resonates not least because his actions approximates those of the colonising Englishman.
~ Stephen C. Jilks