October Horrors #1: Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, 1960)

Released, I believe, one year prior to Franju’s definitive ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’, this early outlier in the ever-popular field of plastic surgery / facial reconstruction-themed horror differs slightly from the norm, in that Anton Diffring’s Dr Schüler [formerly Rossiter] is actually really good at restoring facially scarred women to their former beauty, requiring neither non-consenting skin-donors nor years of gruesome trial and error grafting experiments to get the job done.



Unfortunately however, despite his exceptional expertise and high success rate, fame and fortune do not await the good doctor and the brother / sister team of assistants who inexplicably follow him around, partly due to that stuffy ol’ medical establishment refusing to countenance his radical innovations… but largely due to the fact that he is also shady as fuck, in addition to being played by everybody’s favourite cold-eyed, expressionless Nazi officer.



As such, Schüler / Rossiter instead finds his true vocation acting as the tyrannical manager of a continental travelling circus, whose artistes are in fact petty criminals and prostitutes whose faces the Doc has surgically altered in order to grant them a new identity (as well as apparently training them all to be world class acrobats in the process), and whom he inevitably ends up murdering via various circus-appropriate staged accidents when they decide to leave his employ and/or threaten to expose his sinister racket. All of which falls pretty far from anything which might normally be deemed to make “a lick of sense”, but hey, who’s counting?

Unleashed upon the British public by Anglo-Amalgamated productions shortly after they’d delivered the sublime-to-the-ridiculous double whammy of Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ and Arthur Crabtree/Herman Cohen’s ‘Horrors of the Black Museum’, it’s probably fair to say that ‘Circus of Horrors’ falls somewhere between those two poles, quality-wise, but a lot closer to the latter than the former.

Indeed, most of the plotting and character stuff here consists of tacky, ultra-lurid sado-melodrama, very much in the vein of the three films Cohen made with Michael Gough during this era, the details of which need not concern us here. But, at the same time, the production values are FAR higher than on any of Cohen’s flicks, with the use of a genuine circus (and its performers) lending a sense of scale and visual interest to proceedings which belies the low budget, whilst the cast also do a bang-up job breathing life into their corny, under-motivated roles.

Douglas Slocombe’s photography though is what really seals the deal, balancing rich colours with deep shadows, and adding real depth to Hayers’ oft-imaginative framing, especially during the scenes set in the big top, which (unusually for circus stuff in movies) have some decent atmosphere to them, and are quite fun to watch.

By the standards of a late ‘50s British production, this is strong stuff content-wise too, beating Hammer at their own game by including at least one absolutely startling bit of gore, whilst the circus setting meanwhile allows the glamorous (and numerous) female cast members (notably including both Yvonnes - Monlaur *and* Romain) to display acres of pulchritudinous flesh, whether crammed into kinky outfits, getting frisky with the ever-lecherous Diffring, or indeed with the equally randy cop/hero character who belatedly attempts to, uh, save the day?

Also - there’s a superbly fruity early Donald Pleasence performance to enjoy here too, as he pops up (with hair!) in the 1947-set prologue, playing the shell-shocked, alcoholic owner of a destitute circus, collapsing into despair amid the ruins of post-war France. And boy, does he ever get his teeth into it. It’s a shame he exits the film so early, but seeing him meet his sorry fate, crushed beneath the weight of an entirely inanimate dancing bear, is worth the entry price alone.

Cormania: The Intruder (Roger Corman, 1962)

Though not quite the overlooked masterpiece it is sometimes hailed as, this unique entry in Roger Corman’s filmography - a rare and impassioned excursion into the treacherous realm we would today call ‘non-genre’ - certainly still packs a punch, remaining as sickening, uncomfortable and difficult to shake off as a random kick to the kidneys.

One thing which must be understood straight away about ‘The Intruder’s status as a political / message movie, is that it is a diatribe. Anyone in search nuanced characterisations, multiple points of view, or a general recognition of the ever-shifting shades of grey which define the contours of our lives on earth, should probably look elsewhere.

Thankfully though, it is at least a diatribe with which I (and, I would suggest, all reasonable and right-thinking people across the globe) can wholeheartedly agree, and as an unflinching exposé of the manipulative tactics employed by self-serving demagogues seeking to squeeze personal power from the rotting fruit of pre-existing hatreds and social inequality, well… blindingly obvious though may be to say so, it remains as relevant to life in the western world circa 2024 as it was in 1962, if not more so.

Taking its cue to some extent from Orson Welles’ similarly button-pushing ‘The Stranger’ from 1946, ‘The Intruder’ takes us to the emblematic, petri dish-like environment of Caxton, Missouri, a small town into which a dangerous outside element has just been introduced - Adam Cramer, played by William Shatner, an agent provocateur apparently dispatched to the town from Washington DC on behalf of something called the “Patrick Henry Society” (a fairly obvious analogue for the far right John Birch Society).

Stepping off a Greyhound and checking into the town’s only hotel, Cramer, armed with a distinctive white suit and oversized personal confidence, immediately begins canvassing the local citizenry vis-à-vis their views on the Kennedy administration’s then-recent anti-segregation laws, which are due to result in a small number of black pupils soon beginning to attend the town’s previously all-white high school for the first time. Suffice to say, the down home folks’ responses to this topic prove a lot encouraging to Caxton’s purposes than they do to those of us implicitly liberal viewers.

In fact, Corman’s main jumping off point from the template laid down by ‘The Stranger’, and the element which ultimately makes ‘The Intruder’ so much more disturbing, is that, whereas Welles’ film began by evoking a familiar ‘white picket fence’ ideal of the benign American small town into which a corrupting fascist element is introduced, L.A. native Corman’s conception of down home Americana is already pretty close to hell on earth, even before the demonic influence of Shatner’s transient, shit-stirring carpet-bagger is added to the mix.

Shooting in the southeast Missouri towns of Charleston and East Prairie, it’s safe to assume that Corman and his brother Gene (credited as executive producer) very much hedged their bets when it came to letting the townsfolk know exactly what kind of film they were making here. Details of the script were kept a secret, but this reticence apparently didn’t prevent the filmmakers from being thrown out of the latter town by the sheriff on account of being “communists”, whilst Shatner has reported that the production also regularly needed to contend with threats of violence, sabotaged equipment and the like.

Whilst the film’s primary actors were cast in L.A., locals in Missouri were employed on an ad-hoc basis to fill out the rest of the supporting and non-speaking roles, and perhaps the single most disturbing aspect of ‘The Intruder’ when viewed today is that, after Shatner’s character has gotten warmed up and started delivering a series of anti-integration tirades, dropping the N-bomb incessantly as he demeans and demonises the town’s (thus far invisible) black population, the (presumably genuine, and minimally briefed) locals simply listen to him and nod in quiet, uncontested agreement, as if he were talking about repairing potholes, or repainting the local fire station or something.

None of the non-actors and white passers by bearing witness to his hate-filled oratory seem to register even the slightest surprise or unease, whether in the context of a hotel lobby, main street diner, or eventually, at a mass rally on the steps of the town hall. It’s pretty chilling stuff.

Retrospectively adding to this profound sense of discomfort of course is the casting of Shatner, seen here in one of his first significant screen role after a few years spent cutting his teeth in TV and the theatre. Of course, no one in 1962 could have known the path his career would take, but needless to say, the sight of the future Captain Kirk practically frothing at the mouth preaching racial hatred has the potential to prove pretty alarming to multiple generations of Americans, and this cognitive dissonance is only enhanced by the fact that Shatner’s performance here is absolutely superb.

In terms of conventional acting chops in fact, I think this is the best work I’ve ever seen from him by a country mile. Having apparently not yet developed the hammy, staccato diction which would make him such a beloved figure of fun in years to come, Shatner instead plays it totally straight, capturing that very particular brand of weaselly, ingratiating, blank-eyed intensity unique to psychopathic politicos and conmen to an extent which is little short of terrifying.

To 21st century eyes though, the most obvious failure of ‘The Intruder’ is the chronic absence of actual black characters, and the reluctance to assign much of a voice even to those who do appear on screen.

Early in the film, Cramer views the poverty of “N***ertown” through the glass of a taxi window - just as the filmmakers, capturing this more-or-less documentary footage, presumably also did - and effectively, that’s all we in the audience get to see of it for quite a long time thereafter. Eventually, we get a few scenes of a black family group, some more vérité footage of some suitably apprehensive, disheartened looking dudes silently hanging out on their stoops, and then - in the film’s primary image of Civil Rights era emancipation - the sight of a column of primly attired new black pupils, led by the handsome Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), making their way to high school for the first time, as the white populace radiates hatred in their general direction.

It’s a great sequence actually, orchestrated and edited by Corman with Eisensteinian immediacy, but, of all the black school pupils, Joey is the only one allotted much screen time or a role in the narrative - or even a name and personality for that matter. And, even he fits neatly into the reassuringly well spoken, well turned out mould established on screen in the preceding years by Sidney Poiter and Harry Belafonte - a decidedly conventional, unthreatening presence.

Very much the weakest aspect of the film, this limited engagement with actual black life can’t help but nail ‘The Intruder’ squarely as the work of the kind of well-intentioned white liberals who lack the experience or insight to actually conceive of black people as human beings, complete with flaws, complexities and ranges of interests and opinions which extend beyond a set of benign, outdated stereotypes. (Exactly the kind of attitude punctured so brilliantly in a SF/horror context by Jordan Peele in ‘Get Out’ a few years back, funnily enough.)

About the only moment in which the filmmakers even consider the possibility that young black people might want to do something other than be ‘integrated’ into the institutions of a cowardly and gullible white society inhabited by pinch-faced creeps who hate their guts, is the sole scene featuring by far ‘The Intruder’s best black character - Joey’s pre-teen younger brother (who sadly remains uncredited, insofar as I can tell).

A resplendent hep-cat in waiting, this kid is introduced licking on an ice lolly as he listens to blaring be-bop on the radio (“whatchu talkin’ about ‘junk’, that’s MUSIC, man”), and he clearly gets an almighty kick out of mocking his square older brother; “well it’s too bad I ain’t old enough to go to school, I wouldn’t be scared, that’s all … man, you know what you oughta do? I’ll tell you what you oughta do, get yourself a gun, play it cool see, and the first grey stud looks at ya sideways, BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM…”

A bit more time spent with this kid brother, or some similarly outspoken black adults, might have allowed the filmmakers to wrangle a hell of a lot more verisimilitude into ‘The Intruder’, but… what can you say - at the end of the day, they meant well.

I mean, it would certainly have been a lot easier, and a lot more profitable, for Roger, Gene and scriptwriter Charles Beaumont to chill out by the pool back in Hollywood and knock out a couple of radioactive monster flicks, so we at least owe them props for standing up and being counted, putting their careers, their money, and even their personal safety on the line to make a film like this one, live on the scene in the south, whilst the battles of the Civil Rights era were still raging.

A far more interesting element of Beaumont’s script meanwhile is the nature of Cramer’s main antagonist, Sam Griffin, played to perfection by Corman regular (and occasional script writer) Leo Gordon. Griffin and his demoralised wife Vi (Jeanne Cooper) are, ultimately, the only characters in the movie who become more than cyphers, developing an intriguing and contradictory mess of personality traits as we get to know them better, and the material dealing with Cramer’s interactions with them yields many of the film’s strongest dramatic moments.

Staying at the same rundown hotel as Cramer, Griffin is initially introduced as a loud-mouthed, drunken braggart, apparently employed as some kind of showman / barker charged with luring customers into a shop in a neighbouring town. Much to his chagrin, Cramer initially reads Griffin as a clown, and, as a result, hones in on the clearly-sick-of-it-all Vi with an especially predatory look in his eye.

After Cramer ‘seduces’ Vi in a horribly uncomfortable scene which modern audiences are liable to read less ambiguously as a ‘rape’, prompting her to flee the rest of the film in shame, her husband’s character turns on a dime, dropping the ‘comedy drunkard’ shtick and squaring his shoulders as if he’s suddenly realised he has seriously nasty little fucker to take care of here.

Evidently the immature Cramer’s superior in terms of guts and life experience, Griffin initially disarms and humiliates him in a sweaty hotel room confrontation that pushes the film about as close as it gets to the realm of film noir, whilst, back on the rails of the central political narrative, the decision to put Gordon up against Shatner during the story’s final act proves absolutely inspired.

More-so than a conventional liberal saviour (such as the film’s mild-mannered school principal), Griffin’s background as a store front barker and confidence man means that he instantly recognises the kind of two-bit crap Cramer is peddling, and knows how to deal with it too - publically tearing him down, exposing his lies and allowing the ephemeral power he holds over the suckers to drain away like filth down a storm drain, leaving Cramer sitting alone and forlorn on the high school swing-set from which, just a few short minutes earlier, he was orchestrating an out of control lynch mob baying for blood.

Viewed at this particular point in history, it’s nigh on impossible to get through this closing scene without fervently wishing that a similar scenario could play itself out on a nationwide scale in the USA today… but unfortunately, life is never quite that simple, is it? Just as it’s never as simple as the strawman-baiting and scapegoating of the ‘other’ peddled by Cramer and his ilk.

And just as, likewise, the true darkness of Corman’s film lays not in the spectre of Cramer himself, but in the spectacularly bleak fact that, when the would be lynchmobbers shamefacedly shamble away from their erstwhile leader, they’ve still learned nothing from the experience. They may have given this week’s demagogue the heave-ho, and they may be temporarily willing to observe the law and allow black people to remain alive and attend their schools… but there is no suggestion here at all here that the townsfolk are any less dyed-in-the-wool racists than they were at the start of the film.

The good looks and clear diction of Joey Greene have clearly not won over these representatives of Ugly America, and the town’s black population remains silent, cowed and fearful. After Cramer slinks off to nurse his psychic wounds like a defeated alley cat, how long will it be before the next mean-spirited agitator shows up, or until the next black boy gets accused of looking at a white girl the wrong way, as the fuse on that same old powder keg starts tediously fizzing away yet again?

Enjoy yr ‘happy ending’ whilst you can folks, the film seems to say, because in the long run, this shit is going nowhere, irrespective of who’s holding the mop and bucket at any given time.

AND SO, let’s pencil in a parallel discussion of exactly why this ended up being the only film Roger Corman made during the ‘50s and ‘60s which failed to turn a profit shall we? How about, ooh, let’s say, 4th July in a couple of week? See you there!

Penguin Time/Psyched Out Sci-fi: The Squares of the City by John Brunner (1969)

Only marginally qualifying as science fiction, John Brunner’s 1965 novel is really more of a high concept socio-political thriller, taking place in Ciudad de Vados, the purpose-built capital city of the fictional South American nation of Aguazal.

Presumably modelled on President Juscelino Kubitschek’s construction of Brasilia in the early 1960s, the city is the crowning achievement of the charismatic President Vados, and we arrive in its environs in the company of one Boyd Hakluyt, an Australian expert in urban planning who has been engaged by the city’s municipal authorities in an initially rather vague consultancy role.

Upon arrival, Hakluyt soon discovers that  his expertise in the fields of traffic management, industrial rezoning on so on will primarily be put to use in solving the problem presented by the masses of impoverished, disenfranchised rural peasants who are now migrating to the new metropolis, settling in a series of sprawling shantytowns and slums beneath the gleaming overpasses, and rather undermining El Presidente’s vision of a shining beacon of civilised modernity in the process.

Less than enthralled by this task, and unnerved by the evidence of creeping authoritarianism and violent political disorder he sees broiling away beneath the city’s tranquil surface, Hakluyt becomes drawn into a complex web of subterfuge and treachery, crossing paths with bureaucrats and politicians, dissidents and revolutionaries, union leaders, industrialists, media personalities, generals, journalists, gangsters and so on, all engaged in an exhaustingly complicated wrangling for influence and power which seems to eerily mirror the Aguazalian nation’s all-consuming obsession with the game of chess.

And beyond that, I will keep quiet, as ‘The Squares of the City’ is a novel which is very easy to “spoil”. 

Suffice to say that, like much of Brunner’s work, it takes a bit of patience to get into - his prose initially seems quite dry, and his plotting needlessly convoluted - but it ultimately proves a very rewarding read. It is certainly a unique entry within its supposed genre, that’s for sure, and if the above synopsis has piqued your interest, I’d recommend giving it a go.

As to Franco Grignani’s cover illustration meanwhile - well, it’s not one of my favourite examples of his work for Penguin to be honest, but it certainly conveys the novel’s idea of an urban eco-system collapsing into entropic chaos fairly effectively.

Those little white dots on my scan of the cover, by the way, are not stars or any other part of the design - I’m afraid they’re just remnants of damp, of concrete dust, or something, which have become stuck to my copy of the book, suggesting it might have spent some time sitting atop a pile of paperbacks in an attic or similarly insalubrious environment.

As you may have gathered, these Grignani Penguins often ain’t cheap, and my insistence on picking them up for pennies does not lend itself to acquiring them in primo condition - but at least this one was readable.

Random Paperbacks: Trailer Camp Woman by Doug Duperrault (Bedside Books, 1960)

Another example of a ‘60s US sleaze paperback recently discovered on these shores - I scored this one at a car boot sale in Peckham, no less.

Though pretty boilerplate stuff in terms of concept and content, the cover art here is way above average (albeit poorly reproduced). Unfortunately, it resides permanently in the “artist unknown” category on the Greenleaf Classics web archive (which is about as comprehensive a reference on this stuff as exists anywhere).

Bedside Books were an early exemplar of the multiple imprints which flourished as part of the wider Greenleaf Classics empire, effectively flooding the market with ‘adult reading’ throughout the ‘60s. According to the aforementioned archive, at least 110 books were published under the Bedside banner between 1959 and 1963.

‘Trailer Camp Woman’ is actually a re-print - it was first published, with different artwork, by Beacon Books in 1959, if anyone cares. An online review on goodreads.com states that it reads like the work of the ubiquitous Orrie Hitt, and I’m content to take their word for it.

Probably more interesting in this case however is what I discovered when I first skimmed through the book’s pages;

Oh boy.

Immediately, my mind conjures up an image of the lair of some debauched early ‘60s pervert, his stash so glutted with (then rare and illicit) pornographic photos that he’s taken to tearing them up and using them for bookmarks.

Or, perhaps a more likely possibility, could the book’s former owner have been a transient person or serviceman, carefully stashing their, uh, ‘favourite’ dirty picture somewhere where it wouldn’t be found?

Either way, I’ll keep it where I found it - preserving the sordid mystery for whoever ends up taking ownership of ‘Trailer Camp Woman’ once I’m obliged to part with it.

Random Paperbacks: Stranger in Town by Raoul D’Orque (Unique Books, 1967)

A rare example of a ‘60s U.S. sleaze paperback snagged in the wild here in the UK, I recently picked this up at Oxfam of all places, for a bargain price presumably reflective of the fact that the binding and spine are absolutely shot.

I mean, as if they actually expected anyone to read it! The cover art by Bill Alexander is the big draw here, and I’ll freely admit to staring at its warped, weirdo beauty for far longer than is healthy.

Though the artist’s intention was probably for our attention to be focused on the figure of the innocent (white-haired?) nymphet being assaulted by a jumpsuit-clad dominatrix immediately after stepping off the bus in the Big City, my focus instead keeps getting drawn back to the male figure on the left, with his Clint Eastwood scowl, jaunty neckerchief and fragile, elongated hands, clutching at the victim’s pasteboard suitcase.

Is he working in cahoots with the dominatrix, or has he just scuttled round the corner, drawn magnet-like by the opportunity to snatch some luggage? (“Yoink!”)

Either way, the demented cartoon world created by Alexander in this one mad vignette is sublime; the implicit idea that moral standards in America’s cities have collapsed to such an extent that a buxom, mid-western lass can’t even make it out of the bus station without getting clobbered by perverts and ripped off by rat-men… and the unspoken promise that, if you’re enough of a freak to be checking out a volume like this, you should probably find this prospect exciting, and hit the mean and sticky streets in search of flesh forthwith. Yowza!

I’ve always felt you could draw a direct line between this kind of sleaze paperback artwork, the more highly regarded/subversive fetish illustration which was its contemporary cousin, and the similarly ugly/beautiful atmosphere conjured up (albeit in more self-aware fashion) by ‘90s comic artists like Dan Clowes and Charles Burns - and indeed, clicking through to the above-linked ‘This is Horror’ story on Bill Alexander reveals that his long and varied career touched on all these areas, and plenty more besides.

A rare example of an African-American commercial artist, Alexander began his career in the ‘40s, illustrating the labels of 78rpm records by cats like Roy Milton (see some examples here), before helping to create “arguably the first black superhero strip”, ‘The Bronze Bomber’, which appeared in the Los Angeles Tribune from 1941-43. (Sadly, all artwork from this strip appears lost - for more detail, see the Wikipedia entry for Alexander’s contemporary Gene Bilbrew.)

After seeing service in WWII, Alexander seems to have moved on to paperback covers and S&M / fetish illustration through the ‘50s and ‘60s, including work for the legendary Irving Klaw, before achieving renown of a different order through his covers for the Eerie Publications line of horror comics in the 1970s - for more on which, I’ll refer you back to the This is Horror article, which is a great read.

As to the book itself, this appears to be the sole volume credited to the supremely named Raoul D’Orque -- and if I was ever looking for an alias to use for anonymously checking into hotels or making pornography, I think I just found it.

Rather than trying to provide a plot synopsis or similar, I’ll just hit you with this scan of the novel’s opening pages:

I realise coherence wasn’t a big concern for authors of single draft roughie sleaze books or their publishers, but still - there’s something fairly awe-inspiring about the idea that a manuscript which descends into gobbledegook within its third sentence can still go to print unaltered.

Just imagine the Burroughs-esque cut-up mayhem and made up words (‘matine’?) which might unfold across the following 150 pages, and shudder with misplaced ecstasy.

Oh, and - you see that ‘UB’ logo stuck in the middle of the above cover, like a sticker on an apple or something? That’s not actually a sticker on the book, it’s printed on. Someone must have artlessly slapped it onto Alexander’s original artwork whilst setting it out for printing.

This practice seems to have been standard operating procedure not only at Unique Books, but across all the associated imprints operated out of Buffalo, NY during the ‘60s by frequently indicted Times Square porno/sleaze entrepreneur Eddie Mishkin. (Also see: ‘After Hours’, ‘First Niter’, ‘Nitey Night’ etc, all of which used near-identical typography, and frequently featured the work of fetish-affiliated artists like Eric Stanton and the aforementioned Gene Bilbrew.)

I wonder, incidentally, whether Eddie Mishkin was any relation to Andy Milligan’s producer / nemesis William Mishkin, who was based out of nearby 42nd street, and frequently worked with other Mishkin brothers on assorted dubious enterprises? My sole reference on such matters, Jimmy McDonough’s essential Milligan biography The Ghastly One, ain’t telling, but either way, the spider’s web of subterranean cultural connections uncovered by my visit to Oxfam grows...

Summer of Santo: The Diabolical Hatchet (José Díaz Morales, 1965)

 After taking a well-earned break from Mexico’s cinema screens following his memorable visit to The Wax Museum, Santo, The Man in the Silver Mask, returned some eighteen months later to face an altogether more intractable problem in director José Díaz Morales’ ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ (‘El Hacha Diabólica’, 1965).

Turning to my go-to source of info on Luchadore cinema, the late Todd Stadtman’s Lucha Diaries website, I learn that ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ was actually one of a series of quickie, low budget pictures The Man in the Silver Mask made for producer Luis Enrique Vergara, following the completion of his prior contract with the slightly more up-market Filmadora Panamericana.

Now, I’ve previously had bad experiences with jumping blindly into these off-brand, Vergara-produced Santo movies (witness the listless Santo Attacks The Witches from '64), but rest assured - though its budgetary constraints are plainly evident, ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ at least hits way above its class in terms of sheer weirdness - which is the main thing that draws us to these films in the 21st century, let’s face it.

In fact, this one actually turns out to be something of a crack-brained pulp masterpiece, compressing an epic tale of time travel, diabolism, hereditary super powers, atavistic hauntings, Manichean dualism and the cyclical nature of myth into 74 minutes and still finding time for both several extended wrestling bouts and loads of boring footage of people walking from one place to another.

Right from the outset, the film immediately wrong-foots viewers, as we see a procession of hooded, torch-bearing monks bearing a stretchered body toward a funeral service. As the solemn corpse-bearers progress through several moody shots, we gradually realise that the body they are carrying is that of none other than El Santo himself!

Furthermore, when the monks reach their destination, they lower our hero into a tomb bearing the legend, ‘Santo, El Enmascarado de Plata - Year of Our Lord 1603’.

What the hell is going on here?! I don’t know, but I bet you’re dying to find out, right?

After the chief monk has intoned a moving eulogy, declaring that the departed El Santo was “a man who knocked on our door many years ago, seeking peace and rest”, and who “fought against the dark forces which came after him and woman dear to his heart,” the brothers file out of the crypt, only to be replaced at the graveside by menacing figure clad in black boots, a black wrestling tunic and an executioner’s hood, wielding - yes - a bloody great hatchet.

“I won’t ever let you rest,” gloats The Black Mask (for it is he), “I will follow you through time until I carry out my vengeance!”

And with that, we jump forward to the twentieth century, where Modern Day Santo is performing some rather half-hearted warm-up exercises in his dressing room before the evening’s big match at The Coliseum. (I found it spiriting to observe that the champion’s routine actually resembles my own morning exercises - which are no grand spectacle, let me assure you, readers.)

Anyway, our hero’s subsequent bout is rudely interrupted when The Black Mask appears out of thin air waving his axe around, and basically begins trying to fuck shit up. Unfortunately, the villain proves a tough man to bring down, but the combined efforts of El Santo, his original opponent in the match, the referee and several members of the audience eventually prevail, forcing the supernatural blaggard to beat a hasty, spectral retreat.

Understandably spooked following a further incident in which the Black Mask attacks him at night in his bed (the curtains in his high rise apartment are lovely), Santo turns for advice to the latest in a long line of learned scientist-friends whose daughters he happens to be dating. (As his fans will be aware, El Santo’s passion for scientists with beautiful daughters rivals even that of Fu Manchu in those Harry Alan Towers-scripted movies.)

Evidently a man of wide-ranging talents, Santo’s scientist-friend (sadly I have been unable to identify the actor who plays him on this particular occasion) immediately confirms the titular hatchet (abandoned by its own following his night time escapade) does indeed date from the 17th century, and notes that it is inscribed with “a symbol of evil, the powers of Satan” (ie, a skull and cross-bones).

Moved by the doctor’s observations, Santo is seemingly prompted to begin making an absolutely astonishing revelation about his own origins.

So, as it turns out, El Enmascarado de Plata’s iconic mask and cloak were actually bequeathed to him by his father, and are made of a mysterious, indestructible material which also helps charge him with energy in times of need. Sewn into Santo’s mask is a triangle inscribed with repetitions of the word “ABRACADABRA”.

“The word abracadabra comes from the name of a wise man who practiced the science of good, called Abraca,” the doctor informs us, rather questionably, after consulting one of inevitable dusty volumes of occult lore.

This disconcerting discussion of El Santo’s metaphysical origins is interrupted however when, right on cue, lightning strikes, and a female ghost whom Santo is inexplicably able to identify as “Isabel” (played by his frequent co-star Lorena Velázquez) appears, warning our hero that he must destroy The Black Mask, a feat which can only by accomplished by removing said mask and laying bare the evil-doer’s face.

She also says this, which is kind of cool:

How to solve a problem like this then, eh? Well, waiting until the bugger next shows up and pulling his mask off would seem like a satisfactory plan to me, and, clearly conscious of the fact the movie has another 45 minutes or so left to run, the doctor has an alternative suggestion for getting to the bottom of things.

“I can send you into the past, Santo,” he announces within seconds of the ghost’s departure, “you can solve the mystery.”

Naturally, the big man is up for the challenge, and, if you were wondering what that weird machine which looks like a radio set with a kind of modernist wind vane sticking out of the top of it in the corner of the doctor’s under-furnished lab is, well… guess what;

Back in ‘the past’ (presumably the late 16th century), we’re treated to a series of murky, rather poorly staged vignettes concerning a romantic rivalry played out between two Zorro-esque masked caballeros - one of whom of course wears a white mask, the other black - who are competing the affections of the still-very-much-alive Isobel.

These scenes seem to be attempting, rather shoddily it must be said, to replicate the feel of a contemporary historical melodrama, but, even here, high weirdness abounds.

Spurned by Isobel, the Black Caballero retreats to his taxidermy-strewn subterranean lair, where he… kneels before the altar of a moth-eaten bat god named Ariman, apparently.

Considerably upping the ante on his conflict with The White Caballero, the bad guy pledging his eternal soul to his diabolical master, in exchange for possession of Dona Isobel. He is, of course, swiftly transformed into The Black Mask, and heads off, axe in hand, to kidnap his beloved. Returning to his regulation gothic horror dungeon, he then attempts to win her heart by chaining her to the wall and waving piles of the jewels in her face whilst gloating like a fiend, the ol’ charmer. 

Not to be outdone, the Good Caballero responds to this provocation by hiking out into the desert and consulting a benign, white-haired hermit / wizard man who lives in a poorly wrought polystyrene cave. This is, of course, a descendant of the aforementioned Abraca.

“You will never use weapons to fight your enemies,” the hermit tells his visitor, “for that would destroy your strength and eclipse your heart’s kindness. You will fight against the forces of evil for generations to come. You are now Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask.”

And thus, our hero is born - well over three hundred years earlier than was previously assumed to have been the case.

It’s difficult to convey just how bizarrely off-kilter this hastily bolted on origin story feels, over a decade into El Santo’s real life career as a wrestler and public figure. 

Drawing comparisons is difficult, but… let’s just say that it’s as if you went to see the latest James Bond movie, and Bond suddenly revealed that he was actually part of a lineage of smarmy establishment thugs dating back to the crusades, and that the thread of his tuxedo had been blessed by Merlin the Magician, or somesuch. Unexpected, to say the least.

Given that the spirit of 20th century Santo has travelled back in time to observe the heroic rebirth of his noble ancestor, you would think the natural next step would be for the filmmakers to raise the implication of what happens when he bumps into his outwardly identical 16th century forebear, but… mercifully perhaps, the possibilities arising from that one are skipped over. In fact, I think the implication is that Santo and his scientist-friend have merely returned to the past ‘in spirit’, helpfully allowing them to view a bunch of pre-edited flashbacks.

Anyway, after a bit more uneventful scrapping on the one bit of suitably old looking street which the filmmakers were able to shoot their 16th century segments on, The Black Mask finds himself arrested by the inquisition, who naturally take a dim view of him marauding around the place calling upon the powers of his diabolical gods and suchlike. Thus, we’re treated to one of the stranger reiterations the famed opening of Mario Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’ (1960) you’re ever likely to see.

As 16th Century Santo calmly looks on, the black-clad miscreant is burned at the stake, vowing infernal vengeance against his opponent’s descendants, before - in a winningly peculiar twist on the formula - he escapes the flames by transforming into a particularly scrappy looking, rather overweight bat and making his wobbly, wire-bound exit, accompanied by a deluge of traditional bad guy cackling.

Once 20th century Santo has returned to the present day, back story duly filled in, fight fans in the film’s original audience may have been forgiven for assuming that ‘El Hacha Diabólica’ was finally about to settle down into a pattern of more traditional, down-to-earth luchadore business, as our hero inevitably sets about breaking the curse by removing his supernatural antagonist’s mask in the manner which comes most naturally to a seasoned grappler.

And indeed, several extended, fixed camera bouts between El Santo and The Black Mask do follow in quick succession, but, even here in its final stages, ‘Diabolical Hatchet’ is still determined to be as weird as hell.

In particular, I enjoyed the plot point which sees Santo determine that he must lay to rest the spirit of Isobel, by tracking down the location of the basement in which The Black Mask imprisoned her. Excitingly, The Champion of the People achieves this goal by sitting at his desk, studiously consulting an enormous reference work cataloguing colonial-era buildings.

This pursuit obsesses him to such an extent that, when his latest girlfriend (the daughter of the professor, of course) calls late at night to let him know that, “something terrible is happening here,” as lightning strikes and shadow of The Black Mask looms upon her wall, instead of nobly rushing off to save her as we might reasonably expect, Santo takes an uncharacteristically cynical approach, merely calling the police and informing them that a woman has just been murdered at a certain address, dutifully promising to take his revenge upon the killer, before returning to his reading! 

(“Just tell your boss Santo called,” he growls down the phone line, briefly turning the movie into some kind of morbidly surreal film noir.)

In technical terms, it must be said that ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ is no great shakes. Though the extensive nods to Poe-derived gothic horror are a nice touch, we're a far cry from the era’s more lavishly appointed Mexican gothics. Morales’ direction is pretty perfunctory, largely comprising awkwardly-framed, point-and-shoot medium shots, whilst the sets are threadbare, the performances muted, and… oh boy, all those extended scenes of people walking from one place to another really become intolerable after a while.

The most egregious example of this phenomenon is a sequence at the film’s conclusion in which, having finally discovered the ancient house in which The Black Mask’s historical depredations were committed, our hero proceeds to walk around every inch of it very s-l-o-w-l-y for six solid minutes… right at the point at which any sensible action-adventure movie would be gearing up for its rip-roaring finale! 

Admittedly, Santo walks like a boss, but still, it is rather perplexing to see this kind of blatant padding employed to such an extent in the midst of a film which, as I think has been demonstrated above, contains enough crazy ideas to keep the wheels spinning for hours, if only the filmmakers had bothered to explore them properly.

Once again though, it is the sheer, shameless weirdness of ‘El Hacha Diabólica’ which makes it worth seeking out. From wantonly assigning a previously unguessed at mystic / supernatural origin story to an otherwise earth-bound franchise character, to creating its own highly specific yet totally random mythology of demons and wizards, to the callous murders of several major characters at the hands of the gloating villain…. its total refusal to give a fuck about the continuity and conventions governing pop cinema storytelling make it feel more like a story written by an imaginative eleven year old than a professional screenwriter.

Three months after ‘El Hacha Diabólica’s release, Santo was back on solid ground, taking on ‘The Strangler’ in René Cardona’s ‘Santo vs El Estrangulador’; must have been a relief after this caper.

I mean, I can't absolutely say for sure, but what’s the betting that, in the course of his myriad subsequent adventures, Santo never again deigned to mention that he and his ancestors were gifted with magical powers by the descendent of a wizard named Abraca, or that his mask and cloak date from the 16th century and convey protective and restorative powers?

Well, modesty is one of the Champion of the People’s many virtues, I suppose. He probably wouldn’t want to shout it from the rooftops, would he? I’m sure a few bewildered kids who ended up stuck in front of this one at the Saturday matinee had a few tales to tell the playground about Santo’s secret origin story, and I’m sure they wished they’d never bothered, as the strange tale of Ariman and Abraca and Santo’s distant Caballero ancestor faded into (probably quite justified) obscurity. 

 

Krimi Casebook: The Green Archer (Jürgen Roland, 1961)

It’s been far too long since we last took a peek into the head-spinning world of Rialto Films’ series of West German Edgar Wallace adaptations, so what better way to get re-acquainted with their particular brand of ersatz-English weirdness than by screening 1961’s ‘The Green Archer’ (or ‘Der Grüne Bogenschütze’, as the Germans more poetically have it)?

This was the fourth entry in the series insofar as I can make out, released just one month prior to Alfred Vohrer’s definitive The Dead Eyes of London, and… it certainly gets off to a flying start.

Thunder crashes, and lightning splits a tree in the midst of a field of rain-lashed stock footage countryside overlooking an imposing gothic manor house. Immediately kicking a few bricks out of the ol’ fourth wall, series mascot / comic relief supremo Eddi Arent adjusts his regulation Stan Laurel-esque bowler and speaks straight to camera; “You couldn’t possibly make a movie out of this. Impossible!”

The scene, we gradually realise, is a dark and stormy night in Garre Castle, wherein elegantly attired secretary / caretaker Julius Savini (Harry Wüstenhagen, looking rather like a young Martin Landau) is conducting a public tour, apparently without the permission of his absent employer.

Arent’s characteristically eccentric reporter character (he works ‘for the newsreels’, and carries an antiquated box camera, despite this film being set in the early 1960s) is among the guests at this rare function, who, helpfully, are in the process of being briefed by Savini on the legend of The Green Archer - an emerald-hued avenger who is said to have fought against the house’s tyrannical medieval owners back in the 12th century, and whose spirit is now alleged to haunt the joint.

Quite why the aforementioned tyrannical owners chose to retain a statue of this irksome individual in their study is anyone’s guess, but… there ya go.

As the tour moves on, an elderly gentleman lingers, carefully examining the statue of the archer with an eyeglass. Shortly thereafter, the man turns up dead, with a bloody great green arrow sticking out of his back!

In true Krimi style, the other guests respond to this cold-blooded slaying with a mixture of amusement and mild annoyance, whilst a crash zoom brings us back into Arent’s confidence. “Yes, I think this will make a very nice movie,” he concludes.

Roll credits (featuring more rollickingly weird, Peter Thomas-esque music from the delightfully named Heinz Funk), and…. before we know it, we’re being haphazardly introduced to a bewildering multitude of loosely sketched out characters and sub-plots. Trying to keep track of what the hell is actually going on here in fact proves quite challenging, but, for the sake of this review, I’ll gird my loins and try to give it my best shot.

So, first of all, there’s this wealthy young man named John Wood (Heinz Weiss), who appears to have bought the abandoned building which sits opposite the gates to Garre Castle, with the intention of turning it into an orphanage. (“Bringing happiness to children is my greatest joy,” he exclaims, not at all suspiciously, shortly before we see his face reflected in a broken mirror.)

He is accompanied in this mission both by Valerie (the flawlessly beautiful Karin Dor), and by a silver-haired gent who appears to be her father, though the exact relationship between these three characters remains somewhat unclear. Valerie is apparently in desperate search of her biological mother, and believes (for reasons which also initially remain mysterious) that she can make progress in this direction by snooping around Garre Castle. As such, I suppose the implication must be that she is a former resident of one of the other orphanages administered by Weiss, and that the silver-haired fellow must be her adoptive father, but… who knows.

Anyway, Valerie also appears to be involved in secret tryst with one Mr LaMotte (top-billed Klausjürgen Wussow), whom we initially meet lurking around in a darkened room in her new home. It subsequently turns out though that he is actually a police inspector working undercover, and in this capacity he subsequently pops up, cunningly disguised behind a set of false whiskers, as a kind of handyman / wood carrier within the castle.

In doing so, he is replacing yet another ancillary character, an even shiftier, disgruntled handyman who some comes a-cropper, becoming the second latter-day victim of The Green Archer after inviting Arent’s reporter character back to his bungalow in, uh, Stanmore, apparently (hmm, someone’s been looking at the tube map, methinks) to dish the dirt on his employer.

This leads us on to the police contingent, sadly not headed up on this occasion not by everyone’s favourite playboy detective Joachim Fuchsberger or his principal Sir John, but by the rather more down-at-heel, fish-faced Inspector Higgins (Wolfgang Völz). He and his unequally unmemorable crew of underlings are of course soon all over Garre Castle like a rash, though they initially seem less intent on solving the attention-grabbing murder that has recently occurred there than they are on merely keeping tabs on the house’s errant and disreputable owner (of whom more later).

Meanwhile, there’s also this gargantuan, bald-headed fellow named ‘Coldharbour Smith’ knocking about. Resplendent in white suit and dark glasses, Coldharbour Smith (played by Stanislav Ledinek) runs “a disreputable nightclub down by the docks”, named ‘The Shanghai Bar’. (In a regrettably lazy touch, this more urban locale is introduced via stock footage of Piccadilly Circus - an area of London not notably close to any “docks”.)

Within the rather groovy, tiki-styled interior of the Shanghai Bar, we are introduced to an additional floozy (Edith Teichmann) whom, it transpires, is the wife of Julius Savini (you remember, the castle secretary guy), and who also appears to be somehow involved in… whatever the hell it is that may or may not be going on in or around Garre Castle.

Amidst this scattered and salty crew however, by far the most memorable character in the film turns out to be the aforementioned owner of the castle, Abel Bellamy (Gert Fröbe), who eventually arrives, disembarking from a flight at good ol’ London Airport, having apparently just spent some time over in the USA.

Indeed, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the German language track, Bellamy is meant to be FROM the USA, where he appears to made his name as a notorious, Al Capone-styled gangster who, for some reason, has bought himself a historic English manor house, where he wishes to live in privacy.

Fat chance of that however, as he is mobbed by a phalanx of reporters at the airport, firing questions at him about his unsavoury associations back in Chicago, and the murder which just took place on his property. A bullish and aggressive man whose Churchillian girth surpasses even that of Coldharbour Smith, Bellamy responds with rage, intimidation and violence - qualities which continue to define his interactions with pretty much everyone through the remainder of the movie.

Now, if you’re wondering how all of the above is able to coalesce into a coherent plotline, well… cards on the table, I haven’t the faintest idea. Simultaneously horrendously convoluted and hopelessly vague, Wolfgang Schnitzler and Wolfgang Menge’s adaptation of Wallace’s 1923 novel represents a singularly unsatisfactory example of the screenwriter’s art. (1)

In fact, by the time the thread of the narrative degenerates into a repetitive series of nocturnal creeping about, confinements and escapes during the latter half of the film, it’s probably best just to give up trying to figure things out, and just go with the flow.

After all, we have essentially got everything a Krimi fan could ask for at easy reach here. A creepy, ancient house full of labyrinthine corridors, complete with the inevitable secret passage leading down to a set of subterranean caverns; an over-stuffed cast of shifty, scheming oddballs; touches of urban modernity provided by nightclubs and gangsters; and, most importantly, some loon in a costume derived from a medieval spectre, running around murdering extraneous characters in a suitably outlandish manner.

Jürgen Roland’s direction is… decent. Though he lacks the attention-grabbing eccentricity of Alfred Vohrer or the pulp kineticism of Harald Reinl, he nonetheless utilises some stylish framing here, revelling in the pleasures of cramped, chaotic, multi-layered compositions, perhaps mirroring the film’s tangled plotting. He rarely fails to arrange the all-too-numerous figures on-screen into interesting patterns anyway, throwing in plenty of nice, looming foreground objects and subtle, gliding camera moves to keep things lively whilst he’s at it.

He is greatly aided in this by both Heinz Hölscher’s top notch black and white photography, and Mathias Matthies & Ellen Schmidt’s splendid production design, which incorporates many of those neat little props and macabre oddities found in all the best Rialto Krimis. (The skull and crossbones flag appended to castle gates to warn of an electric fence, the arm of the archer statue serving as the secret passage lever and the scurvy stuffed monkey in the interior of the bar, provide just a few examples).

The cast do solid work too, on the whole. I found Arent a lot less annoying here than in some other films in the series (or, perhaps I’m just gradually warming up to his unique comic stylings, god help me). Dor meanwhile is absolutely radiant, and Frobe certainly makes an impression as perpetually furious Abel Bellamy (both he and Ledinek’s Coldharbour Smith prove great heavies).

It’s a shame then, that - as I may have already mentioned once or twice - the film’s egregious scripting deficiencies mean that none of these qualities ever quite gel together the way they should.

Despite providing a fair amount of ambient / aesthetic enjoyment, ‘The Green Archer’ eventually sinks under weight of its own convolutions, combined with a lack of any fully sympathetic or charismatic characters, and a failure to deliver anything truly memorable or outlandish.

Most egregiously, The Green Archer himself is given very little to do, ultimately playing only a minor role in proceedings. A decision seems to have been taken to keep the phantom bowman either entirely off-screen or confined to the shadows, which strikes me as a very bad move. After all, the titular evil-doers in Monk with a Whip or The Face of the Frog weren’t at all shy about turning up to wreak on-camera havoc on a regular basis, lending a sense of berserk surrealism to proceedings which is sorely missed here.

That said though, after dragging rather dreadfully through its middle half hour, ‘The Green Archer’ does at least come to life a bit in its final ten minutes, briefly descending into all-out chaos as Abel Bellamy launches all-out war against the men of Scotland Yard, who are attempting to lay siege to his castle.

Suddenly, we’ve got machine guns blazing, detectives brandishing fizzing, cartoon-style bombs, half the remaining cast desperately trying to escape from one of those classic rapidly flooding dungeons, Eddi Arent roaring around in a weird little car… and all is right with the world.

This is all topped off with my favourite bit of ersatz-English weirdness in the film, which occurs during the the closing wrap-up scene, where we find a burly police constable moving between the shell-shocked survivors, sternly offering them “TEA WITH RUM” - a hearty beverage which seems to perfectly capture the essence of this uniquely odd sub-genre, and which I will henceforth make a point of enjoying each time I brave a visit to Krimi-land.

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(1)Quoth IMDB trivia: “The producers originally wanted Wolfgang Schnitzler to become on of the regular writers of their Edgar Wallace Series. When Schnitzler’s script of this film was re-written by Jürgen Roland’s regular screenwriter Wolfgang Menge, Schnitzler was displeased and decided to leave the series.”

Random Paperbacks: Always Say Die by Elizabeth Ferrars (Fontana, 1962)

Given that cover artist John L. Baker appears to have never actually seen a cat (or at least, couldn’t remember what they looked like very well), his decision to illustrate this particular incident from Elizabeth Ferrar’s 1956 mystery novel seems nigh-on inexplicable. But, his decision to go with it nonetheless, reference materials be damned, has helped make this strikingly bizarre effort one of my favourite paperback acquisitions of recent years.

(I also like the fact that that blue-tinted illustration on the back cover has clearly been swiped wholesale from a different book cover, complete with a different artist’s signature still visible on the bottom left.)

For the record, the alleged cat attack occurs on page 32, when a stray moggie leaps onto the shoulders of heroine Helen as she stands around in the grounds of the house belonging to her absent Maiden Aunt’s former home, and it comprises about two paragraphs of what otherwise seems to be a pleasantly atmospheric, old fashioned potboiler, set in the depths of darkest, uh, Berkshire, apparently.

Two-Fisted Tales: The Star Witches by John Lymington (Macfadden, 1970)

I was recently hipped to the work of John Lymington via a great piece written by Jacob Charles Wilson in the estimable Books Review of Books (issue # 3, June 2021), wherein Wilson basically makes the case for Lymington as a kind of forgotten idiot savant of British pulp SF, citing his 1965 giant spider opus ‘The Green Drift’ as “..a terrible book and an amazing book. It’s a miracle it was ever published.”

Suitably intrigued, and noting that I already have several Lymington joints stashed unread on my shelves, I chose to begin my investigation with ‘The Star Witches’, because… well, how could I not? It sounds bloody brilliant.

Well, what can I tell you readers - a sense of morbid fascination saw me through to the final pages, but I’m not much inclined to repeat the experience. First published in the same year as ‘The Green Drift’ (though this U.S. edition dates from 1970), ‘The Star Witches’ is, unquestionably, a terrible book. An amazing one though…? I fear not.

Although nothing in the exciting back cover copy Macfadden’s editorial staff managed to wring out of this damned thing is technically incorrect, the arrangement of these events within Lymington’s text is… not quite as compelling as we might hope, to put it mildly.

The Reverend David James, for instance, only discovers that “..a coven of witches was using his church for worshiping Satan..” via a few throwaway dialogue exchanges towards the end of the novel, and he scarcely has much time to be perturbed by the issue amidst the thunderous rumblings, “cold smells”, petty bickering and great globules of misbegotten, barely coherent, shapeless prose through which Lymington attempts to convey the descent of his (far too numerous) cast of characters into a state of supernatural hysteria as they are buffeted by the assault of some kind of incorporeal alien intelligence.

The Reverend James, by the way, is in no sense the novel’s hero or protagonist - instead he is merely one member of an ever-expanding ensemble of pointless and dislikeable individuals Lymington conjures into existence to stretch out his word count, each chiefly defined by their assorted weaknesses and grotesquery. (The Reverend, for instance, is a venal, self-serving type, possessed of prodigious girth, multiple chins, and invariably described as either picking remnants of fish from his teeth or tripping over his impractical ecclesiastical vestments.)

Mirroring both Wilson’s description of ‘The Green Drift’ and the staggeringly uneventful 1967 film adaptation of Lymington’s ‘Night of the Big Heat’, the “action” of ‘The Star Witches’ is largely confined to the interior of one cold, strange, smelly house (the squire’s abode in a fictional Cotswolds village), wherein upward of a dozen characters gradually accumulate and spend the entire first two thirds of the novel fretting about the absence of one Harry Royce, owner of the gaff in question. An amateur scientist, Royce seems to have disappeared, ‘Marie Celeste’-style, mid-way through his dinner, whilst carrying out some vague researches into matter transference and inter-planetary telepathy, or, y’know - something along those lines.

Harry’s dinner, incidentally, was paprika stew, “with the cheese on the steak,” which his housekeeper (a gargantuan, simple-minded West Country stereotype, like all of the book’s working class characters) repeatedly insists he would never have voluntarily left unfinished. And, if you feel it would be beneficial to receive frequent updates on how long this dinner has been left sitting in his study, and what happens to it as it gradually congeals, and to read several discussions on the subject of whether or not it would be a good idea to clear it away, then, friends - John Lymington is the author you’ve been looking for!

A similar dialectic is invoked on a slightly grander scale during the final third of the book, when, after discovering the body of the absent Mr Royce in a trance-like state within a wall cavity, the characters spend most of the remaining pages arguing about whether they should kill him - in order to destroy the ‘bridge’ his consciousness has formed with the evil alien intelligences which are trying to take over everyone’s minds - or alternatively, just, y’know, not kill him, even though they probably should, just due to general milquetoast queasiness and procrastination on the part of the middle class contingent.

Meanwhile, in the grounds of the house, pound-shop Nigel Kneale vibes are soon the order of the day, as reality warps and frays around Royce’s ‘pepper pot’ private observatory, wherein he has trained his high-tech telescope on the distant planet from which the book’s malign, shapeless entities originate. Eventually, the local residents, tiring of both subterranean rumblings ‘spoiling’ the beer at the pub and their assorted husbands and wives failing to return from the indecisive palaver going down at the manor house, do the decent thing and assemble a pitchfork-wielding mob to take care of business.

Spoiler alert: they do not really succeed, and the book ends, hilariously, with a field report composed by one of the extra-terrestrial invaders, who apparently intend to continue sending signed and dated letters to each other and compiling paper records whilst they conquer the globe, despite being shapeless, nameless telepathic beings from a wholly unknown realm of distant space.

John Lymington is credited with having written over 150 books between 1935 and 1989 - not quite matching the output maintained by his fellow British ‘mushroom pulp’ godhead Lionel Fanthorpe during his peak years, but regardless, Lymington also pumps out his prose like a fog of inarticulate, stream-of-consciousness blather, showing little regard for whether the ends of his sentences bear any relationship to their openings. It reads as if he (like Fanthorpe) was simply dictating the novel into a tape recorder, ‘first thought = best thought’ style, as the clock ticked down to his deadline, before sending it straight off to some poor, underpaid typist to be transcribed.

Fanthorpe however was a worldly and charismatic individual, meaning that the random digressions into his day-to-day which inevitably filtered through into his writing often proved interesting or amusing. (I mean, who wouldn’t want to read 200 bad science fiction novels written by this guy?) 

The incessant irrelevancies which accumulate within Lymington’s prose by contrast feel mean, narrow-minded and crushingly banal. It’s all suggestive - though I may be projecting unfairly here - of a kind of culturally blinkered, unhappy existence, the experience of which feels more unhealthy than the writhing, inter-dimensional tendrils of the alien mind-stealers the author rather half-heartedly seeks to invoke in ‘The Star Witches’.

In the first chapter here for instance, we learn that ‘bovine’ housekeeper Clara suffers from wind in the mornings, because her husband Bill puts far too much sugar in the mug of tea he brings her at six o’clock, and which she needs to drink quickly because she needs to get up before seven. We learn that lecherous gardener Bert Gaskin (“known throughout Keynes as a big, blundering, blustering, beggaring knowall”) wears ‘yachting shoes’, because his feet “suffer in hot weather” and “linen shoes can be good for that”. We learn that the doorbell in Harry Royce’s residence is “an original installation from 1850,” and that he “likes original installations”. “Sometimes he had them put in even if they weren’t there when he came,” Lymington would have us know.

Perhaps you think I’m being a bit unfair here. I mean, isn’t it through this kind of detail that all authors develop character, and create a sense of place for their stories? Maybe, but after suffering through a few dozen pages of Lymington, I’d defy you make a case for this excruciating drivel adding up to anything except his daily word count.

It certainly succeeds in torpedoing any promise of the kind of cosmic grandeur which the SF and horror genres are conventionally supposed to deliver, that's for sure, but beyond that, Lymington’s hum-drum eccentricities fail to even register as perversely fascinating or unintentionally funny. Carelessly tossed off, and full of minor lapses of logic so painfully mundane it’s barely worth even registering them, instead it’s all just really annoying. 

Indeed, the main feelings generated by spending 140 pages enveloped in the sweaty, feeble mess of ‘The Star Witches’ are those of futility, tedium, mild revulsion… and a creeping realisation that, even for us most dedicated excavators of forgotten 20th century popular culture, there are some stones which are perhaps better left unturned.