Hammer House of Horror: Rude Awakening (Peter Sasdy, 1980)

Episode #3 of ‘Hammer House of Horror’, turns out to be another Peter Sasdy joint, and, if The Thirteenth Reunion proved a bit sub-par, this one is just, well… weird. Which is probably an improvement.

Basically, what we have here is a ‘dream within a dream’ / ‘unpeeling the layers of the onion’ type affair, wherein sleazy provincial estate agent Norman Shenley (Denholm Elliot, no less) wakes up to face the hatchet-faced harridan of a wife who refuses to grant him the luxury of an easy divorce (Pat Heywood), before he heads off to his high street office, there to be greeted by perky, fashion-forward secretary Lolly (Lucy Gutteridge), with whom he may or may not be having an affair.

Then, a saturnine man (James Laurenson) enters, invites Shenley to undertake a valuation on a remote, antique property, wherein a variety of scary and inexplicable things (eg, conversations with Edwardian ghosts, close encounters with a wrecking ball, etc) occur…. at which point, Norman awakens once again, realises he was still dreaming, and the whole cycle starts again with the details shifted round a bit. Meanwhile, the memory of him having murdered his wife at some point constantly looms somewhere in the background…

Although this one initially seems like more of a ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ type affair than a real horror tale, those expecting a concrete, ‘twist in the tale’ type explanation for Elliot’s descent through the annals of delirium will be disappointed.

Are these all guilt-addled hallucinations he’s experiencing in a padded cell, or whilst undergoing experimental brain surgery? Has he just plain gone nuts? Or, are the other characters conspiring to drive him crazy?

Each of these possibilities is implied at some point (the latter, intriguingly, when Lolly the secretary exchanges some potentially conspiratorial banter with a policeman and furtively pockets the diamond necklace the crazed Norman gifted her, after he is hauled away for his wife’s murder), but in the end, the precisely reasons for our protagonist’s immersion in a walking dream-state are allowed to remain ambiguous. We’re never really given any clear, cut-and-dried explanation of what’s been going here, or any reassurance that the ‘reality’ presented to us in this final scenes s really what it seems.

Some may be inclined to see this as mere lazy / undercooked scripting on the part of writer Gerald Savory, but really, this episode seems to have been intended less as a neatly resolved short story than as a very strange mood piece.

It is noteworthy, I think, that whilst all three episodes of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ we’ve viewed thus far have rejected the kind of gothic/period imagery one might have expected this series to embrace, at the same time they’ve been united by their determination to explore a variety of mid-20th century British suburban/commuter-town lifestyles and stereotypes, and ‘Rude Awakening’ in particular puts this element centre-stage - even though it’s chosen subjects seem to date from a somewhat older vintage than 1980.

In essence, this episode spends the bulk of its run-time repeatedly dissembling and re-contextualising a set of archetypes pulled straight from those one-panel cartoons which used to be so ubiquitous in men’s magazines, tabloids and the like: the lecherous small businessman, the sexy secretary, the vengeful, rolling pin-wielding wife.

All of these figures have long been left in the rear view mirror our 21st century culture (and probably rightly so), which makes it all the more curious to see them all resurrected here, lost in a cyclical, ever-changing fugue as they move from dream to dream like some low rent / low ambition variation on the cast from Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories.

In more practical terms, ‘Rude Awakening’ is at least very well put together, with snappy, colourful (perhaps deliberately cartoon-ish?) direction from Sasdy matched to a memorably sweaty, dithering central performance from Elliot, who plays up his character’s gradual descent into madness with just the right balance of simpering camp and hyper-ventilating hysteria.

Gutteridge too is great value as Lolly the secretary, clearly having a wail of a time in wardrobe & make-up as she adopts a different, equally eye-popping look for each of her boss’s ‘dreams’, dressing up at various points like a London ’76 style punkette, a Marilyn Monroe / Diana Dors type, a St Trinian’s schoolgirl and… well I’m not really sure what the scarlet silk two-piece and blonde afro wig get-up she’s got on through the episode’s longest sequence is supposed to be all about, but it looks pretty cool.

All in all then, a bit of a head-scratcher, but an intriguing and enjoyable one nonetheless.