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HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1970)

In the same year that David Prowse became The Green Cross Code Man, the Bristol native appeared in the second of his three roles as Mary Shelley's most famous creation.

JIMMY Sangster's HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN is detested by Hammer purists for its comedic tone, and plays out as a parody of the previous respected entries. The film opens with Victor Frankenstein (Ralph Bates) at school, accompanied by friends Elizabeth (Veronica Carlson), Stefan (Stephen Turner) and Henry (Jon Finch). Victor arranges for the 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 - which includes reanimating a tortoise - 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).

Initiated as a start-over remake of CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, the picture dispenses with Peter Cushing's services and tries to introduce a younger generation (a failed attempt, as Cushing returned four years later in FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL). Despite the traditional 19th Century setting, HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN is very much of its time - as illustrated by Bates' hair and puffy shirts - and quite anarchic, mixing additional plot threads (Elizabeth's finances, Stefan's crush on Victor) with comic relief (a severed arm making a V-sign) and grue (Victor's hands smearing his face with blood). Duelling femmes fatale O'Mara and Carlson are always watchable, but only Price can deliver a performance at the correct pitch. Bates, at this point being groomed to become the studio's next big star, is not so much a mad scientist but a psycho scientist, enjoying the thrill of the kill and rejoicing in the fact that he has this powerful monster ready to do his bidding. And when the creature eventually appears - an hour in, and sporting white cycling shorts - Prowse goes through the motions with a checklist of victims and a perfect physique which bestows its fragmented origins.

"You’ve put on weight in a couple of places"; Kate O’Mara is the bed-warming housekeeper of Hammer's relaunch of its Frankenstein franchise.

Reusing the Karnstein Castle set from THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, and even shooting most of its forest scenes on Elstree stages, there is a distinctly cheap and recycled feel. Furthermore, HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN was not helped by a misleading marketing campaign, where it went out on a double bill with the sombre and gristly SCARS OF DRACULA (as Sangster states in Wayne Kinsey's Hammer Films: The Elstree Studio Years, "if people had gone to see it knowing it was shot light hearted they would have enjoyed it more [instead of] thinking it was a Gothic horror.") However, this twin feature did hold the distinction of the first Hammer movies to be totally financed by British companies, thanks to a deal between Sir James Carreras and ABPC/EMI. But Hammer's new partner would only distribute to England and the Commonwealth, leaving Carreras able to acquire just a small American distributor - Continental - to impossibly cover the whole of the United States market. 

The notion of deriving humour from such pseudo-scientific source material is an interesting one. Since Frankenstein was published in 1818, and Boris Karloff's seminal interpretation hit screens in 1931, Mary Shelley's serious text - and similar works - generate mythical themes and uncomfortable laughter. As the initial power of the book recedes in a collected consciousness, the tome gathers extraordinarily wide responses, snowballing a range of spoofs and humorous asides now over 200 years on. The level of comedic takes is mind-boggling, even to the point of delicious meta-levels: Mel Brooks' celebrated YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, for example, used many pieces from James Whale's original laboratory set, and even in The Beatles film YELLOW SUBMARINE we had the Monster drinking a potion and becoming John Lennon.

Downe and Out

SON OF DRACULA (1974)

CRAZE (1974)

"I can't live, if living is without you"; chums Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr in SON OF DRACULA, cinema's greatest musical travesty. Attempting to cash in on the success of Mel Brooks' YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, the film is also known as YOUNG DRACULA.

WRITTEN by TALES THAT WITNESS MADNESS scribe Jennifer Jayne in the failed hope of casting David Bowie, Freddie Francis' rarely seen SON OF DRACULA - made by Apple Films and produced by Ringo Starr - begins in 1800's Transylvania, where Baron Frankenstein's dwarf assistant (Skip Martin) stakes The Prince of Darkness (Dan Meaden). Merlin the Magician (Starr) discovers that one of The Count's brides is pregnant and will give birth to a son in a hundred years. The offspring Count Downe (Harry Nilsson) is due to be crowned King of the Underworld in 70's London, but in the seventy-two hours beforehand he is vulnerable in deciding his future. Eventually he wants to become human in the name of love - especially that of Amber (Suzanna Leigh) - thanks to the help of the wheelchair-bound Van Helsing (Dennis Price), and despite the plotting of the immortal Baron (a barnstorming Freddie Jones).

Actually completed in 1972, Starr's excruciatingly dull vanity project failed to pick up any distribution. Realising that this comedy actually had no jokes - and hid behind Nilsson's musical numbers and message of love - the ex-Beatle turned to Graham Chapman to re-write and re-dub. However this version allegedly made even less sense, and has never been made public (SON OF DRACULA eventually was shown on a limited run in the States). The film is a pedestrian pantomime at best, with generous amounts of padding (Count Downe foils a completely random attack by a werewolf, for instance). Francis further laces the production with classic interpretations of monsters (Meaden's Dracula actually takes Nosferatu as a blueprint, and there are also appearances by Frankenstein's creature, the Mummy and even a Medusa and a Fu Manchu). In fact the only point of interest are the musicians on show, which includes John Bonham and Keith Moon exchanging drumming duties in Downe's band.

Jack Palance offers Julie Ege to Chuku in the delirious CRAZE.

Coming off this catastrophe, Francis' increasing distain of horror films and its fans made the director/cinematographer admit that his reliance on the zoom lens for CRAZE was due to a "lack of interest." But this Herman Cohen production is far from uninteresting, an exploitation fever-dream ripe with idol-driven mayhem and possibly the greatest array of starlets and seasoned character actors ever to grace a single British horror. Neal Mottram (a potent Jack Palance) is a psychotic antiques dealer who owns Chuku, a googly-eyed African fetish object he keeps in his basement. Mottram believes that by sacrifice to Chuku, the "love God" will reward him with wealth, and his victims include Helena (Julie Ege) who ends up in a furnace, and sex toy-loving Sally (Suzy Kendall in a horrendous curly black wig). As part of his unhinged quest Mottram even hatches an alibi plot, using ex-girlfriend Dolly (Diana Dors) to enable him to murder rich Aunt Nash (Dame Edith Evans); but with the police honing in (and a nod to PEEPING TOM), Neal is impaled on Chuku's trident.

CRAZE has a pathological hatred of women, a stance it shares with source novel Infernal Idol, a brisk 1967 Helmut Henry Hartmann pulp written as Henry Seymour ("she was that slightly seedy suburban housewife type who carried too much weight around the hips and spent too much of the housekeeping money on unsuccessful attempts to look glamorous.") But Francis' movie really goes for the throat, illustrated by Detective Sergeant Wall (Michael Jayston)'s comment on ditzy Dolly ("one would have to be pretty desperate to sail into that port.") Despite Mottram's literal lady-killing, there is a distinct homosexual yearning between the dealer and his younger live-in colleague Ronnie (Martin Potter). Mottram has apparently saved him from "sleeping in Hyde Park hustling old queens," but their domestic arrangement seems characteristically bitchy.

"Wet with Terror"

SECRETS OF SEX (1969)
HORROR HOSPITAL (1973)

"Imagine you are making love to this girl. Imagine you are making love to this boy ..." Also known as BIZARRE and TALES OF THE BIZARRE, SECRETS OF SEX is an omnibus oddity that has it all.

EXPLOITATION film distributor and director Antony Balch started with the moving image by writing subtitles for European movies and making adverts for Camay soap and Kit-E-Kat ("Your cat will stay younger, live longer.") While briefly living in France he befriended William Burroughs, before returning to run two movie theatres in London: The Jacey Piccadilly Circus, and The Times Baker Street. Balch made surrealist shorts in collaboration with the American beat poet, and Burroughs also provided narration for the distributor's 1966 re-packaging of HAXAN as WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES. With a proposed adaptation of Naked Lunch starring Dennis Hopper falling through, Balch found a more solid partner in producer Richard Gordon, which created cult favourites SECRETS OF SEX and HORROR HOSPITAL. Unfortunately future projects such as THE SEX LIFE OF ADOLF HITLER never materialised, and Balch succumbed to stomach cancer in 1980 at the age of just 42.

SECRETS OF SEX was Balch's feature debut, a dotty collection of tales fusing comedy, horror, spies and softcore using a framing device of a Mummy voiced by Valentine Dyall. There are six segments in total, each illustrating the age-old battle between the sexes: a female photographer asks her male model to straddle a 'Spanish Horse' torture device; an old man yearns for a son after a previous bereavement, only for his young scientist lover to keep a birth defect from him and deliver a monster; a man catches a burglar only to discover "Christ! It's a bird!"; Lindy Leigh is Mayfair's Special Agent 28, whose main talent is to shed her clothes at every convenience; a man beckons an escort in an attempt to have sex with his reptile; and an old women confesses to kidnapping the souls of past lovers and trapping them in her greenhouse. Amazingly, this inoffensive and often banal picture was censored by John Trevelyan to the tune of nine minutes, but the film was still a hit and shown up to seven times a day at the Jacey, often with an accompanying Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Graham Humphrey's DVD/Blu-ray cover for HORROR HOSPITAL, discs released in August 2015.

HORROR HOSPITAL sees songwriter Jason Jones (a pre-CONFESSIONS Robin Askwith) taking a break from London's cutthroat music business by going to "Hairy Holidays", a country spa provided by gay travel agent Pollock (Dennis Price). On the train journey there Jason meets Judy (Vanessa (actually Phoebe) Shaw), who is also travelling to the alleged health farm Brittlehurst Manor to meet her long lost aunt. Actually, the Manor is run by Dr Christian Storm (Lugosiesque Michael Gough), who uses lobotomy to turn wayward youth into zombie slaves ("fresh air, birds, flowers - and storm your way back to health.") The wheelchair-bound scientist is aided by Judy's Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock), a former Hamburg brothel madam, comic-relief dwarf Frederick (Skip Martin), and two biker thugs; and if anyone escapes, Storm has a Rolls Royce fitted with a scythe to stop any such insubordination ("make a clean job of it Frederick, the car was washed this morning.")

Utilising Knebworth House exteriors and Battersea Town Hall interiors, HORROR HOSPITAL - released as THE COMPUTER KILLERS in America - is a washed-out but endearing pastiche of the mad doctor genre, complete with requisite fiery climax. Guest star Price shines as the lecherous Pollock, ogling Jones' package and as camp as Christmas on his visit to the Manor ("Mirror, mirror on the wall, don't say a word, I know it all") before his bloody demise. Askwith and Gough turn in solid performances in roles specifically written for them - Gough is overtly stern and almost a Bond villain  - and it is only a somnambulant Shaw that lets down the troupe. The influence of this piece of 70's schlock even extends to hip-hop, when in 2003 Norwich-based Stonasaurus recorded a concept album about the release; internally, actual 1960's psychedelic group Tangerine Peel appear at the beginning as 'Mystic', fronted by a cross-dresser who is actually co-writer Alan Watson.

Behind Forbidden Doors

THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (1969)

THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR makes the cover of German magazine Film Neues-Programm, where it was released under a title which translates to GOOSEBUMPS.

AN early attempt at the teen slasher movie that would explode a decade later, Michael Armstrong's THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR begins during a less than swinging shindig in Carnaby Street. A group of bored youths - including Chris (twenty-nine year old Frankie Avalon, in a role intended for Ian Ogilvy), Sheila (Jill Haworth), Gary (Mark Wynter) and Peter (Richard O'Sullivan) - leave the party and drive to a deserted mansion haunted by a killer who murdered his family in a frenzied knife attack twenty years previously. When Gary is slayed, rather than report the incident to the police, the group hide the body and try to solve the mystery themselves.

After all the problems with THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR, it is amazing that director/writer Armstrong had the inclination to continue in the industry. Developed from his script THE DARK from 1960, Armstrong envisioned the film as a vehicle to showcase the talents of then unknown David Bowie, who the filmmaker had worked with on the 1967 avant-garde short THE IMAGE. With this being a joint Tigon/AIP picture, American International's head of British productions Louis M. Hayward ordered a new draft to add sex scenes, Americanise characters, and include an ill Boris Karloff so the literally fading star could see out the last three days on his AIP contract. "Deke" Hayward also rejected any involvement with Bowie, insisting that Stateside audiences wouldn't except any songs unless they were sung by Avalon. Deke then butchered Armstrong's revised draft anyway, turning Karloff into a crazed Police Inspector in a wheelchair, somehow rampaging around a derelict house before proving to be a red herring; this was a similar synopsis for Karloff that actually reached some kind of fruition a year previously with CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR.

Michael Armstrong encountered endless front office interference while making his debut picture, but things didn't get better for his next project, filming the notorious MARK OF THE DEVIL in Austria. The Bolton-born filmmaker would later write numerous 1970's British sex comedies and Pete Walker's HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS.

To ease tensions between Armstrong and Hayward, Tigon head Tony Tenser intended to shoot two versions: essentially Armstrong's third draft, and Deke's AIP/Karloff version. But when it became evident that Karloff was too ill to participate - even in a desperately proposed introductory speech - the inspector role was awarded to Dennis Price. While Hayward was called away on problems with Cy Enfield's DE SADE, Armstrong shot his scenes while Tenser attempted to capture Deke's wheelchair killer; with a rough cut not ready for an international sales pitch by AIP heads Arkoff and Nicholson, Tenser cut together what he could - to disastrous results. With Tigon trying to appease AIP and Hayward attempting to hide his meddling, Armstrong then discovered that Gerry Levy was shooting additional scenes (essentially giving Sylvia (Gina Warwick) an affair with sugar daddy Kellett (George Sewell), a pub sing-a-long, and generally toning down the feel of the film - under the pseudonym Peter Marcus). Filled with clichéd lines ("I really dig this place", "Let's hold a séance!", "I think its a gas!"), Armstrong's intended darker, sexually edgier piece is not surprisingly lost in the mess.

Much Ado About Murder

THE HOUSE IN NIGHTMARE PARK (1973)
THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973)

"What a funny lot!" Frankie Howerd hold the key to 

THE HOUSE IN NIGHTMARE PARK.

SINISTER shenanigans are afoot in Peter Sykes' THE HOUSE IN NIGHTMARE PARK, an alleged horror comedy written by Clive Exton and Terry Nation. Described by George Melly as "as British as nailing a kipper to the underside of an unsympathetic seaside landlady's dining-room table," the film follows Edwardian thespian Foster Twelvetrees (Frankie Howerd) - "Greatest Master of the Spoken Word" - scraping a living by giving hammy performances to embarrassed audiences. Invited to give a reading - so he believes - at a spooky mansion owned by the Hendersons, the actor finds himself embroidered in a nefarious plot involving deadly snakes, hidden family secrets and a mad woman in the attic. For the turn of the 1970s, the sets here have a fittingly faded and tired look for the dilapidated gothic sub-genre, and direct references are plenty: THE CAT AND THE CANARY and PSYCHO are chiefly evoked, and the Henderson's heritage - like the protagonists of THE REPTILE and THE GHOUL - are Anglo-Indian.

Howerd looks uncomfortable in his starring role: with no asides to camera and his opportunity for innuendo cut to a minimum, the comedian seems subdued (apart from the classic line "Do I play the piano? Does Paganini play the trumpet?"). Aside from Howerd, the actors portraying the Henderson's are an arresting group: Ray Milland heads the clan as the blandly evil Strewart, Hugh Burden is abrasive retired major Reggie, Kenneth Griffith is homicidal vet Ernest and Elizabeth MacLennan is effective as unconventional heroine Verity. If the humour itself falls flat, the film works better as a straight horror, especially a veiled old crone in black with a meat clever and a truly bizarre dance sequence - akin to an episode of THE AVENGERS - where the family relive their time as "Henderson's Human Marionettes."

Vincent Price - in a tour-de-force performance - and
Robert Morley in Harbour's THEATRE OF BLOOD.

Douglas Hickox's THEATRE OF BLOOD tells of Shakespearean actor Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) who - with the aid of daughter Edwina (Diana Rigg) and a community of down-and-outs  - murders members of a self-absorbed 'Critics Circle' for failing to give him the recognition he feels he deserves. Apparently committing suicide, Lionheart returns to mastermind a series of Bard-inspired demises, including nods to Julius Caesar (stabbing), Cymbeline (beheading), The Merchant of Venice (an improvised pound of flesh) and in the most memorable scene Meredith Meridew (Robert Morley) is fed his own "children" in a pie (here, poodles) in a reference to Shakespeare's bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus. The most literate of all horrors, THEATRE OF BLOOD is also filled with sly visual Shakespearean motifs, down to the name of an outside broadcast unit ([Stratford-Upon-]Avon Television). Price was particularly enthused by the quality of cast around him - which included Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Dennnis Price, Diana Dors, Madeline Smith - and brings pathos to a role that gave him a an opportunity to exorcise his own critical demons.

Aliens, Mutants and Terence Fisher

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.

Menacing bone-sucking tendrils erupt in this German poster 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. 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."