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.

The Forest Has Claws

BY OUR SELVES (2015)

Director Andrew Kotting in Straw Bear costume that marks the Fenland start of the agricultural year. Graphic novelist Alan Moore guest stars in Kotting's on-foot road movie about John Clare; in fact, Moore gave us a highly anarchic version of the poet in his debut novel Voice of the Fire, in the chapter 'The Sun Looks Pale Upon the Wall, AD 1841.'

THE son of a farm labourer, John Clare (1793 - 1864) championed the English countryside and mourned its disturbances, his poetry also exploring heart-felt mental instability. After this idyllic rural childhood, Clare observed the Agricultural Revolution and the Enclosures act, which resulted in widespread uprooting and segregation of common land. Not only did he see destruction of his Olde England, but Clare was distressed of rural poverty as a mechanism for migration to towns and factories. Subsequently Clare's mental state worsened when struggling to support a wife and seven children, and he spent four years in Dr Matthew Allen's progressive private asylum at High Beach within Epping Forest. In his Man Booker prize-nominated The Quickening Maze about Clare, Adam Foulds paints the institution more of The Priory of its day for the Victorian London smart-set. Later Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now St Andrew's Hospital) where he remained for the rest of his life; under the guidance of Dr Thomas Octavius Prichard - a pioneer for the humane treatment of the mentally ill - Clare wrote his most famous poem, I Am.

The idiosyncratic work of Andrew Kotting - a hybrid of Derek Jarman and David Lynch - increasingly has opened up the notion of when does a film become less a film but more an art instillation. From absurdist, experimental beginnings, Kotting's first feature GALLIVANT in 1996 was a travelogue following his grandmother and daughter Eden - who suffers from Joubert Syndrome - around the British coastline; his second THIS FILTHY EARTH showcases landscape in all its beautiful but brutal glory. Kotting's 2012 SWANDOWN followed the director and writer Iain Sinclair in a swan pedallo, highlighting his interest in eccentric journeys of identity and history. Simon Kovesi, head of English at Oxford Brookes University and editor of the John Clare Society Journal, describes Kotting's work as "anti-pastoral," and "revels in the sodden awkwardness of Englishness. For him our eastern culture is outside, is wet and deliquescing, fluid and yet grounded in thick sod."

Toby Jones as John Clare. The actor can now add the poet to his list of obsessive artists roles on screen and stage, which includes Truman Capote, Alfred Hitchcock and J.M.W. Turner. 

Inspired by Sinclair's Edge of the Orison, Kotting's BY OUR SELVES is a drama-documentary about Clare's eighty-mile, four-day walk from Epping Forest to Northampton in July 1841. Escaping from High Beach asylum, Clare's journey through hunger and madness has the goal of reaching his love Mary Joyce, who actually has died three years previously in a house fire. Young Clare is portrayed by a voiceless Toby Jones, whose father Freddie plays Old Clare as well as a narrator, often regurgitating lines from his performance as the poet from a 1970 OMNIBUS presentation (a female voiceover from the programme consistently taunts "Clare was a minor nature poet who went mad"). Along for this ethereal jaunt are Sinclair (often behind a goat mask), Kotting (always in Straw Bear garb), Kovesi (as a boxer) and magus Alan Moore, who not necessarily laments his confinement in Northampton and describes his birthplace as a cultural black hole ("nobody ever gets out unless they're sucked back in.")

Beautifully photographed by Nick Gordon Smith in black and white, Clare's Victorian route is punctured by the modern landscape (endless traffic, wind turbine blades, humming pylons), underpinning his famous line "I long for scenes where man hath never trod." The filmmaking process itself is also exposed, as the full-bearded soundman with his mop-head microphone always appears in shot. Actual characters and particularly females are kept at arms-length - musician MacGillivray is Joyce and Eden Kotting appears with the Straw Bear in home movie-style footage previously seen in the short THE SUN CAME DRIPPING A BUCKET FULL OF GOLD - as if Kotting's use of blurred film stocks with natural sound can only act as a conduit for Clare himself, forever encased in a past which infiltrates his space and verses.

Satan's Playthings

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 1980 re-release ad mat for a Miami theatre.

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.

Brains That Wouldn't Die

THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1958)

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

Michael Gwynn suffers THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN.

HAMMER's THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN - a direct sequel to THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN scripted by Jimmy Sangster - consolidated the feel of Hammer Horror. The Baron (Peter Cushing) has also undergone a rethink, changing from the aloof and self absorbed into a visionary, becoming the obsessive that we would become familiar. The film begins with hunchbacked Karl (Oscar Quitak) helping the Baron escape the guillotine, with Frankenstein promising him a new body. 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, 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 analysis bestowed on others in the series, particularly in its pointed portrayal of the middle class medical elite using the impoverished working class as a mass donor bank.

The next film, THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, 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.

New Zealand wrestler Kiwi Kingston is the “Cornflake Box” creature of THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN. Kingston reunited with Hammer and Freddie Francis in the murder mystery HYSTERIA a year later.

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. 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 Karloffesque).

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.

"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.”

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 FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN, 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.