Hammer House of Horror: Carpathian Eagle (Francis Megahy, 1980)

So we’re up to episode #9 here, and, whilst there were undoubtedly a few clunkers earlier in the run of ‘Hammer House of Horror’, by damn, they’re really hitting their stride by this point! The two preceding episodes were perhaps my two favourites to date, and this one is definitely a strong contender too.

Largely ditching the ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ / “bad things upset the life of a blameless contemporary couple” formula used by most of the earlier episodes, this one (co-written by Bernie Cooper and director Megahy) plays out more like a spec script for a prospective Halloween episode of ‘The Sweeney’ which was ditched for being too weird. (And if that description’s not enough to reel you in… you’re probably reading the wrong weblog, to be honest.)

Anchored around a gritty police procedural framework, ‘Carpathian Eagle’ finds world weary / soft spoken Detective-Inspector Cliff (Anthony Valentine) investigating the exploits of an erotic murderess who, in true Jess Franco style, has been preying upon a succession of outrageously shabby would-be playboys in the dark hinterlands of the Home Counties commuter belt, harvesting their hearts with a curved ceremonial dagger.

A radio interview overheard whilst he’s making his tea n’ toast in the morning leads our detective-hero into the midst of a somewhat Bathory-inspired gothic horror back story, involving the legend of a heart-extracting Hungarian countess whose alleged last living descendant (played by Siân Phillips) is still hanging around in good ol’ blighty, and subsequently also the travails of her nephew, a haughty, Rudolf Nureyev-type character who has defected to the west in order to escape the persecution he faced behind the iron curtain whilst plying his trade as a renowned female impersonator. (1)

All of which you’d think would be more than enough to keep DI Cliff busy, but the lonely lad also finds time to cultivate a budding romance with the be-permed author (played by Suzanne Danielle, star of ‘Carry On Emmanuelle’) whose interview publicising her book on the heart-gouging countess led him to make the connection in the first place, and whose taste in pattern-framed glasses and garishly mis-matched print dresses proves more obscene than any of the kinky outfits donned by the murderess during her seductions.

Indeed, one of the great pleasures for me personally in going through these Hammer House of Horror episodes has come from noting the highly specific fragments of period detail, unique to that peculiar period in UK social history in which a hangover from the flares n’ sideburns ‘70s was gradually blending into the cruel dawn of the Thatcherite yuppie era - and, in addition to having a really odd, interesting story, it is here that ‘Carpathian Eagle’ really shines.

Just about every scene provides an absolute riot of horrendous fashion choices, exquisitely dated interior decor, flashy motors, sexist / homophobic attitudes, nostalgia-swathed branded products and shabby, deadzone suburban locations, the like of which fairly boggles the mind.

The sequences involving the succession of hapless murder victims prove especially remarkable in this regard, painting such a repulsively fascinating picture of life in these isles circa 1980, I could probably write an extended essay about each one.

The first victim is none other than Barry Stokes (the man-shaped alien from 
Norman J. Warren’s ‘Prey’, here sporting an unflattering pencil moustache), who is tooling around the country lanes in his vintage Jag when he picks up a provocatively dressed, rainbow-hued young lady and carts her straight back to the ‘secret’ bedroom he keeps hidden from his wife, where he lies, resplendent and smug, upon a bed of furs, awaiting his bloody comeuppance.

Then, perhaps most memorably, we have ‘Randy Andy’ (“Andy’s the name, and randy’s my game”), a loathsome, lime-green shirted middle-aged singles bar crawler who resembles a local radio breakfast show host, and who bombards his statuesque conquest with a whole pamphlet’s-worth of the world’s worst pick-up lines before dragging her back to a Stone Age Bachelor Pad which must be seen to be believed.

Even more direct in his approach though is no less a personage than Pierce Brosnan(!), who turns up as a tracksuited jogger, latching on to his pink nylon-clad prey in an overcast public park. “I fancy you, you fancy me… why mess about?”, he ventures, before creeping back to his bed-sit and attempting to smuggle his would-be shag-partner (whose luminous gear can probably be seen for miles around) past the eyes of his watchful landlady, who, revisiting a comedy cliché you’d hope would have died out at the end of the 1950s, “has got a bit of a thing about visitors”.

Though it’s difficult not to imagine him transmogrifying into Jon Thaw at times, Anthony Valentine certainly proves a sympathetic male lead in comparison to this lot, a worthy addition to the pantheon of down-at-heel British horror cops alongside Ian Hendry in ‘Theatre of Blood’ and Alfred Marks in ‘Scream and Scream Again’, and to the script’s credit, his character actually seems to grow and become more open-minded as the strange events of the story unfold.

During Valentine’s investigation of the first crime scene, we bear witness to a sterling example of ‘70s style police work. “Any sign the geezer was bent?,” he demands to know - the plod’s logic apparently being that the killing was clearly sexual in nature, but that no mere female would have had the physical strength to carry it out.

Later on though, once things have gotten a bit weirder, we start to see a different side of DI Cliff, as he sticks up for the effeminate nephew character, expressing apparently genuine admiration for his artistry, and cutting off his boorish colleague’s queer-baiting jibes, telling him, “you’re thinking in clichés old son - Tadek’s a hard lad, he’s just very nervous, that’s all”. Which is considerate of him, given that he’s talking about a bloke who’s ostensibly the prime suspect is series of brutal murders, but…. no spoilers here, readers.

Loosely plotted and rattling along at a fearsome clip ‘Carpathian Eagle’ represents a colossal improvement on Francis Megahy’s previous directorial outing in this series (the woeful Growing Pains). 

Throwing in more ideas and imagery along the way than it really knows what to do with, and packed with memorably off-the-wall performances from a host of lesser known character players and TV pros, it in fact constitutes an almost overpowering conjuration of the exact moment in British culture which saw my birth, refracted through a distorting mirror of sketchily-plotted, sex n' violence-drenched cross-genre weirdness.


And, needless to say, I loved every minute of it - just a staggeringly entertaining 50-something minutes of television, which I've not really fully recovered from or properly assembled my thoughts on yet, some 24 hours later. 

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(1) As a curious side note, the nephew character is played by an actor named Jonathan Kent, whose only previous screen credit was in an impossible to see, quite possibly lost, 1976 BFI-financed adaptation of the Marquis De Sade’s ‘Justine’ by director/producer Stewart MacKinnon. Quite a thread for some inquisitive cultural historian to tug on there I suspect…