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.

The Circus of Nights

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. Picking up the gauntlet thrown down by TWINS OF EVIL, this offering pushes Hammer further into the softcore sex and copious bloodletting required to maintain interest amongst pictures made outside of Elstree. Despite the film being Young's first picture, and the inevitable delays resulting from the extensive use of animals, Michael Carreras 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 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 Heinrich (Robin Sachs) and Helga (Lalla Ward), 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. 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, John Moulder-Brown as the most unconvincing romantic lead in the whole Hammer canon, and Lynne Frederick as Dora.