October Horrors # 14: The Monster Club (Roy Ward Baker, 1981)

Yet another British horror film that I’ve put off watching for a long, long time, ‘The Monster Club’ sounds on paper like a uniquely unappealing prospect.

The very last gasp of Milton Subotsky’s Amicus productions, it saw the company considerably toning down the more violent elements of their long-running horror anthology series, going instead for a family friendly, tongue-in-cheek approach, whilst simultaneously making a desperately misguided attempt to court a youth audience more interested in slasher and zombie flicks by adding a pop music / variety show aspect to proceedings.

Clearly smelling embarrassment a mile off, both Cushing and Lee declined to participate, and I wonder to what extent they regretted their decision in subsequent years, given that, against all the odds, ‘The Monster Club’ somehow turned out to be an absolute delight.

Vincent Price, always game for this sort of caper, conversely described it prior to shooting as “..the best script I’ve been offered in years”, and indeed he anchors the anthology’s extensive framing sequences with gusto, playing an urbane vampire who takes a midnight snifter from the neck of the miraculously-still-alive John Carradine, portraying these stories’ real life author, R. Chetwynd-Hayes.

I confess, I’m not familiar with the work of Mr Chetwynd-Hayes (despite having spent much of my life skulking around second hand bookshops, I don’t recall ever actually seeing one of his books), but, based on the version of stuff that made it to the screen here, I think Price had a point.

Although each of the three stories presented here (four if you count the framing narrative) sounds pretty twee on paper, they all manage to temper their Halloween party silliness with a reassuring edge of pitch-black nastiness that causes them to linger longer in the memory than they really should.

The “monster genealogical chart” – tracing the complicated results of inter-breeding between vampires, werewolves, ghouls and humans – which provides a jumping off point for the three segment is a strange and imaginative conceit that I’ve never really seen explored elsewhere, and most people’s pick for the best of the stories will probably be the tale of James Laurenson’s lovelorn ‘shadmock’ (a creature who makes up for his position as the lowest and most diluted form of monster with his uniquely destructive whistle).

Aside from the fact that everyone treats Laurenson as if he is hideously deformed when clearly he’s just a fairly normal looking fella with heavy make-up and a bad haircut, this tale is really beautifully done, mixing some doomed, fairy tale-style emotional yearning with some proper, EC Comics style poetic justice and a cat-incinerating gimmick reminiscent of Jerzy Skolimowski’s then recent ‘The Shout’ (1978).

Furthering the spirit of the in-jokery introduced by featuring Chetwynd-Hayes as a character, the stakes are upped when the movie’s second story is introduced by a much-loved movie producer named, uh, “Lintom Busotsky”(!), who introduces what is purportedly a preview of a film he has made based upon his own childhood.

You see, Lintom’s dad (Richard Johnson) was a vampire – an exiled Count who now has to “work nights”, commuting from the suburbs to the West End for his nocturnal fix, leaving the youngster in the care of his adoring mother (Britt Ekland!). Admittedly, this business skims pretty close to the realms of tweeness, but the stuff about the exiled aristocratic vamps having to slum it as down-at-heel refugees, bullied and feared by their neighbours, adds a nice bit of verisimilitude, and things get considerably more interesting once Donald Pleasence is introduced as the chief of “The Bleeney”, a sinister, black bowler-hatted police division charged with the investigation of “blood crimes”(!).

Splendidly enjoyable stuff, this segment ends up toying with our sympathies in an uncomfortably ambiguous fashion; where do we stand, between the cheerily blood-thirsty, family-man vampire, and the cold, pinched-lipped cops who want to make poor Britt a widow..?

Somewhat surprisingly, both of these first two stories boast pretty solid production values, with some impressive set design, striking compositions and beautiful photography. (The vampire story even achieves some Bava-esque moments, with saturated gel-lights blurring into deep shadow.) Having presumably put the ignominy of Scars of Dracula far behind him, the sixty-four year old Roy Ward Baker proves here that he was still capable of knocking out of the park when circumstances allowed.

The third story, it must be said, looks considerably more poverty-stricken, but its tale of a ghoul-haunted village lurking just off the M4 nonetheless delivers the film’s most sustained dose of fetid, horror-ish atmosphere. As several commentators have noted, the fog-shrouded village with a graveyard at its centre seems like a deliberate call back to Amicus’s very first horror film, 1960’s ‘City of the Dead’, and the self-aware vibe continues as we’re introduced to a film director - a brash, Porsche-driving American played by the perpetually hungover-looking Stuart Whitman. (Named “Sam”, and notable for his cantankerous attitude and insistence upon realism, I briefly wondered whether this character was intended as a kind of vague skit on Sam Peckinpah.)

After he finds himself imprisoned in the village inn whilst in the process of scouting locations for his latest horror movie, Sam befriends a sympathetic young “humegoo” (human / ghoul hybrid), and also enjoys a few run-ins with the one and only Patrick Magee. It must be said, Magee doesn’t really seem to be putting a lot of effort into his role as the inn-keeper here (perhaps he was miffed at the absurd make-up he had to wear?), but it’s nice to have him around nonetheless.

Sadly this segment is regrettably over-lit (nixing the fancy lighting seems to have been a common Baker move when pressed for time), which serves to draw attention to the iffy sets and abysmal ghoul make-up (green faces all round), but things are once again saved by the strength of the writing, including some grisly details of the ghouls’ corpse-chomping lifestyle, and some interesting reflections on the torn loyalties of the unfortunate Humegoo.

A strong as these stories are however, I think it’s fair to say that ‘The Monster Club’ will always be chiefly remembered for what goes on in-between them, as Price introduces Carradine to the pleasures offered by the titular club, including performances from a selection of the very finest rock n’ roll acts that a bunch of elderly men working for a small film company on the verge of bankruptcy could persuade to record vaguely monster-themed songs for them during the uncertain, transitional year of 1980.

First, we get a sort of tough, new wave-aspirant pub rock band called The Viewers, whose members are probably still lurking in various North London pubs bitterly complaining about the fact that the only thing anyone remembers them for is this stupid bloody film. Though blighted by a truly dreadful set of lyrics, their song ‘Monsters Rule OK’ has a good, Stiff Records style power-pop chug on the verse and an affirmative, sing-along chorus that you’ll find impossible to shake after hearing the track twice during the movie.

Next up, the bitter ending to the Shadmock story is swiftly forgotten as we head straight into a performance by some character named B.A. Robertson. I confess, I’d never heard of this guy before, but according to Wikipedia he recorded for the Asylum label through the late ‘70s and early ‘80s with a certain amount of success, before becoming a bit of a minor celeb on UK TV.

‘Sucker For Your Love’, Robertson's contribution to ‘The Monster Club’, is actually a bit of a banger - in fact it’s easily my favourite song in the film, and I’d definitely commend it to any contemporary garage / punk band in search of a good, off-beat song to cover.

Filmed entirely in sweaty close-up (we never get to see his band members – maybe they didn’t make it to the shoot?), Robertson works through some fairly bizarre shtick here, alternatively rolling his eyes and staring at the ground whilst delivering extraordinary lines about “making love to a colander” and such like. Wild stuff indeed.

Probably the most awkward segment in a film that often seems entirely predicated on awkwardness comes from a band named Night, who deliver the next musical performance. The musicians here resemble a Rorschach test of guys who all got kicked out of different bands for being too sleazy and/or thuggish, whilst out-front a Bonnie Tyler styled female vocalist belts out a tune entitled ‘I’m a Stripper’, which I refuse to describe further, simply on the basis that I don’t even want to think about it anymore.

After this traumatic experience, our septuagenarian protagonists enjoy The Monster Club’s own strip routine. Filmed in silhouette, this is actually a quite inventive bit of animation in which – surprise, surprise - the performer strips right down to her skeleton! (“What a glorious set of bones,” exclaims Price).

In what seems to be a bit of an R. Chetwynd-Hayes trademark, all of this jolly business suddently takes a darker turn than expected, as Price instigates a debate with the “club secretary” (who resembles a member of The Goodies dressed as a werewolf) over whether or not the author’s fictional analogue should be allowed to become the first human to attain membership of The Monster Club.

“Can we truly call this a monster club if we do not boast amongst our membership a single member of the human race?” Price asks, before running through a quick list of humanity’s more monstrous achievements before an audience of startled-looking extras in Halloween masks. The death camps, the trenches of WWI, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the witch trials and the horrors of the inquisition all get a look-in – oh, such laffs.

A celebratory closing number was clearly needed after that jarring bit of heavy-handed moralising, and who better to provide it than pioneering ‘60s/’70s psyche-rock wildmen The Pretty Things? As a fan of the band, I was very much looking forward to seeing them close the show, but - oh boy.

I know it has often been said that most survivors of the ‘60s found themselves in a pretty dark place at the dawn of the ‘80s, and, on the evidence of this footage, it seems as if the Prettys were feeling the pain more than most. I’ll spare you the sartorial details (although vocalist Phil May’s short-sleeved shirt must be singled out for its sheer awfulness), but, far more onerously, the band seem to have been taking some tips at this point from the cod-reggae sound of UB40 (who also contributed something or other to ‘The Monster Club’s soundtrack, although mercifully they declined to appear on-screen) and the results are… not good, to put it mildly.

The Pretty Things’ Wikipedia page notes that “the new wave sound did not improve their sales figures,” and that they split up shortly after filming their appearance for the film, but their gently skanking, prog-funk direction nonetheless apparently held enough appeal to get Price and Carradine out on the dance floor, where they proceed to boogie away unsteadily for a few minutes, Vincent dancing hand in hand with a young lady in an alien mask and a fat suit. It is not a sight easily forgotten.

Despite the evident silliness of these Monster Club segments, it’s still a shame I think that Cushing and Lee turned this one down. In spite of everything, the evident good feeling and ‘anything goes’ attitude that characterised the making of this film could have make it a delightfully irreverent farewell for the old gang.

I know that the wizards at Cannon deigned to bring us ‘House of Long Shadows’ a few years later, but, aside from the wonderful performances from all the horror stars, I’ve always found that film to be a rather dour, poorly conceived mess, in which director Pete Walker’s darker sensibility mitigated against the gentler, more whimsical take on gothic tropes that his stars (and their fans) might have preferred for their final curtain call.

If they’d all decided to call it a day with ‘The Monster Club’ though, well, just imagine – Vince, and John, and Peter all arthritically jiving to the last, spluttering gasps of The Pretty Things’ career, as Sir Chris sits glowering at a table in the corner, spluttering at the indignity of it all. Never fear though, I’m sure Vincent could have had a quick word in his ear, promising to insert some high-falutin’ reference to The Seal of Solomon into the script or something, at which point he’d have perked up a bit, and perhaps even smiled and snapped his fingers. Ah, it would have been lovely.

But -- he have what we have, and happily ‘The Monster Club’ is still far better than it really has any right to be. More than anything, it feels akin to watching a top quality Amicus anthology movie interspersed with a particularly barrel-scraping instalment of Top Of The Pops 2 - and what better entertainment could we in the British public possibly ask for than that? Why this hasn’t become a much-loved Christmas TV fixture, I can’t possibly imagine. I almost felt like swapping my usual hard liquor for a box of Quality Street and a milky cup of tea whilst watching it. Perfect comfort viewing for all the monster-lovin’ family.

October Horrors #4: And Now The Screaming Starts (Roy Ward Baker, 1973)

Word of mouth regarding this late period gothic throwback from Amicus (not to be confused with Scream and Scream Again, ‘The House That Screamed’ or ‘And Soon The Darkness’) has never been terribly good, but by jove - just zoom in on the poster and look at that cast; Cushing, Lom, Magee, Ogilvy, Beacham - together at last!

Add to that the new-found respect I’ve gained for Roy Ward Baker after finally watching ‘Quatermass & The Pit’ last year, and it was inevitable that I was going to have to sit down and give this one a try at some point.

And, well, I don’t think I’ll be watching it a second time at any point in my life, I can tell you that. Dear lord, the first half of this thing is a drag.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it as such – the age-old “new wife arrives at the home of family with a dark secret” yarn plays out in much the way that tradition deems it should (rendered slightly more contemporary via an additional dose of post-‘Rosemary’s Baby’ pregnancy paranoia) and Stephanie Beacham and Ian Ogilvy are engaging enough as the central couple, even if they’re not given a great deal to do.

The production design meanwhile is grand indeed (making excellent use of the familiar Oakley Court in Windsor, previously seen in these pages in Die Monster Die!, The Reptile and more besides), whilst Denys Coop’s cinematography hits some splendid gothic high notes and Baker’s direction is confident and fluid as ever.

But, at the same time the whole thing is just so… uninspired. Events plod along rather joylessly, everything staying well within the established remit of this particular sub-genre, and the intermittent horror/shock moments are particularly poorly handled. As is so often the case in Amicus’s movies, the “spooky stuff” here – involving mischievous severed hands, eyeless apparitions and sundry other spectral nonsense – is knowingly silly, yet refuses to take the full leap into comedy or surrealism, instead maintaining a dogged pretence of dramatic seriousness that simply makes these scenes seem cheap, opportunistic and – crucially - dull.

Geoffrey Whitehead is very good in his few dialogue scenes as the sinister, birthmark-scarred woodsman who carries much of the story’s menace, but, even if you’re willing to roll with ‘And Now..’ as a kind of dumbed down, Poundland version of Jack Clayton’s ‘The Innocents’, the film’s sub-William Castle “shocks”, which I suspect must have been foisted upon the production from above, generate little tension and make naff all impact.

At least Robert Hartford-Davies’ similarly themed ‘The Black Torment’ from a decade earlier had the decency to summon up an atmosphere of looming, malignant dread to disguise its uneventful storyline, but attempts to achieve an equivalent feel here are ruined by laughable, ‘will-this-do?’ touches like the inexplicable ball of day-time fog that appears to exist solely within the gates of the estate’s tiny family cemetery, whilst the sun shines outside.

As in his similar doctor role in Peter Sykes’ far superior ‘Demons of the Mind’ (’72), Patrick Magee lowballs it here with an uncharacteristically mellow, soft-spoken performance, but things do at least pick up considerably when Peter Cushing finally makes the scene, at about the fifty minutes mark.

Playing one of his fastidious, polite-yet-rude Holmesian investigator roles, and sporting a truly flamboyant hair-piece, Cushing is, as ever, magnificent. When he is on screen, the script’s rather hum-drum mystery plotting momentarily becomes quite interesting, and even Douglas Gamley’s ham-fisted score suddenly gets a hell of a lot better. It feels as if if the whole production team was deliberately holding back the good stuff to impress the Cush, and, following his appearance, there’s a stretch in which ‘And Now The Screaming Starts’ becomes pretty good fun.

For many viewers, one of the most memorable parts of ‘And Now The Screaming Starts’ will probably be the extended flashback that reveals the “primal scene” from which the film’s haunting/family curse has arisen. As with many Amicus productions, this sequence achieves a distinctly nasty, mean-spirited tone whilst holding back (insofar as is possible) on any actual on-screen violence or eroticism, and, though it is certainly more eventful than much of the hour or so that has preceded it, personally speaking I couldn’t really get on with it.

Herbert Lom appears here as Oglivy’s sadistic, decadent ancestor (there are definite shades here of the aristocratic debauchery that opened Hammer’s Hound of The Baskervilles way back in ’59), and, well… I dunno. Maybe it’s just me, but I can never buy Lom when he finds himself in a role that calls upon him to get sleazy. For some reason, people kept casting him in these lecherous, rapey roles in horror films (Franco’s ‘99 Women’ springs to mind), but the inherent dignity and formal manner of Lom’s on-screen persona just makes it feel all wrong, adding an unwholesome, icky sort of vibe to his turn here. Like I say, maybe it’s a personal thing, and I suppose ‘unwholesome and icky’ was very much what they were going for… but it just didn’t ring true for me.

Anyway, moving on, there’s some enjoyably melodramatic dementia to enjoy in the closing stretch of ‘And Now The Screaming Starts’. It’s all very thunderous and Old Testament, and I’ll admit to being genuinely quite taken aback by the scene in which Ogilvy (harking back to his freak-out at the end of ‘Witchfinder General’) actually wrenches his grandfather’s mouldering bones from their coffin and begins smashing them to pieces against the side of his tomb.

I recall that, when covering this film in ‘English Gothic’, Jonathan Rigby runs down an extensive litany of the Freudian imagery underpinning this story, so, presumably this scene represents the point at which Sigmund right have buzzed security and prepared a straight jacket.

Generally speaking though, it’s a real shame that, despite a handful of startling moments like this one, ‘And Now..’ never quite comes together the way it should. After all, we’ve got a great Peter Cushing performance, a fantastic supporting cast, a solid director, relatively lavish production values, a workable old warhorse of a story full of all kinds of potent themes and images… what went wrong?

I’ll bite my tongue and refrain from saying “bloody Amicus went wrong”, but… basically this has the feel of a horror film made by a lot of very talented people who didn’t really have any interest in making a horror film. The half-hearted manner in which tired “shock horror” tropes are exploited feels condescending – token gestures that, though Baker and his collaborators may have initially factored them in to appease the producers, nonetheless leave those of us in the cheap seats feel like we’re being played for fools, which is always a drag.

If – like many early ‘70s British horrors – the film had opened up and included a bit of humour, campiness or outright craziness, we perhaps could have shrugged this off and enjoyed a laugh alongside the filmmakers, but, given the prevailing tone of dour seriousness, we simply end up feeling as if we’re having our time wasted – and what feels like a hell of a lot of it too, given that the film’s most compelling performer doesn’t even turn up until over halfway through the run time.

Though ‘And Now..’ is not an objectively terrible film by any means, it is one that clearly has no particular enthusiasm for the genre tropes it is exploiting, and little reason to exist beyond wringing a bit more cash out of British horror’s swiftly fading box office popularity. As a result, it’s almost up there with ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’ in terms of its wasted potential, and probably best filed under “worth watching once, but don’t get yr hopes up”. Ho hum.

Scream And Scream Again (Gordon Hessler, 1969)

With its daft one-size-fits-all title and unassailable front-line of Cushing, Lee and Price, one could easily be forgiven for writing off ‘Scream and Scream Again’ as another entry in the ill-fated cycle of ‘old boys club’ horror movies that began to take off as the box office for old-fashioned horror flicks started to diminish through the ‘70s. All bets are off however the second one sits down to actually watch ‘Scream and Scream Again’.

By some strange quirk of fate, this modest Amicus/AIP co-production turns out to be one of the most beserk, imaginative and unconventional British horror movies ever made - a real kick in the teeth for anyone who bought a ticket expecting to see Vince and the gang rattling around dark old house for eighty minutes. That’s not to say it’s actually all that great, but… well, we’ll get to that in a minute.


The duo of director Gordon Hessler and scriptwriter Christopher Wicking gained something of a reputation in the late ‘60s / early ‘70s for their attempts to single-handedly instigate a ‘new wave’ of British horror, building on the foundations laid by the late Michael Reeves in trying to tear the genre free from mouldy gothic cliché and open it up to more challenging and contemporary ideas. Or at least, that’s what you imagine they might have told anyone who bothered to ask. In truth, their campaign met with what might charitably be termed mixed results – certainly few would hold up the handful of last gasp gothics they made for AIP as shining examples of a bold new direction in horror. But on ‘Scream and Scream Again’ at least, their more ambitious notions of narrative construction and directorial shock tactics were allowed free reign – and perhaps too free, at that.

Regardless of expectations, the initial reaction of anyone sitting through the first twenty minutes of ‘Scream..’ for the first time will likely be WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? And for better or worse, that’s not a question that won’t have received an entirely satisfactory answer by the time the credits roll seventy minutes later.


The film opens with a jogger being taken ill on a London common. Waking, he finds he is being kept sedated in an anonymous hospital room, being attended to by a sinister silent nurse. In a series of short scenes, we see him repeatedly drifting back into consciousness, only to discover that his limbs are being amputated one by one as he sleeps.

Meanwhile, in what we must presume to be a fictional fascist state somewhere in Europe, an English couple are being pursued across open country by soldiers who wear a curious three-arrowed crest on their armbands. Captured and taken to a dungeon cell after her man is shot, the woman (Yutte Stensgaard) is tortured by a nasty man. Peter Cushing, playing some sort of general, summons the nasty man to his office and gives us his best ‘troubled, reluctantly humanitarian authority figure’ as he tells him that he disapproves of such extreme methods. Unfortunately, the nasty man promptly kills Peter Cushing.



Next thing we know, we’re back in swinging London, where a tough, Sweeney-esque cop (Alfred Marks) is on the trail of a rapist/murderer who has been picking up girls from trendy nightclubs and dumping their bodies in remote locations. You’ll not be surprised to hear that circumstantial evidence seems to link the crimes back to the home of a certain Dr Browning, as portrayed by your friend and mine, Mr. Vincent Price.


Interspersed with all this, just to keep us on our toes, are a few scenes in which Christopher Lee turns up playing some sort of British Intelligence big-shot. He delivers a fairly mystifying briefing to a group of other big-shots, regarding… well he seems to be talking about an aircraft self-destruct mechanism that’s malfunctioned, leaving a British airman in enemy hands – presumably referring to the couple we earlier saw fleeing from the fascists, although I don’t think we ever find out why said airman had his girlfriend with him, or why he was dressed like he was on a camping holiday. Later on, Lee has a covert meeting in Trafalgar Square with the aforementioned nasty man from the fascist country, during which he makes a deal for the return of the airman (no mention of the girl), in exchange for “..all the information your police possess relating to the so-called vampire murders”.


It’s fitting that the story that eventually emerges from ‘Scream And Scream Again’ should involve the creation of 'composite' human beings, as the movie seems pretty damn composite itself, at times almost resembling a slightly classier version of some Al Adamson / Geoffrey Ho cut n’ paste atrocity, as seemingly unconnected scenes are jammed together at high speed irrespective of intelligibility or tonal cohesion. With no central character or guiding voice to help us navigate between these scenarios, the drama in the first half of the movie derives less from any fictional conflict, and more from wondering just how the hell Hessler and Wicking are going to cope with the high wire act of tying all this stuff together into a single narrative.

You certainly have to admire them for trying, and there is a touch of Nigel Kneale in Wicking’s ambitious combination of science fiction, gothic horror and cold war paranoia. But whereas Kneale always managed to blend his elements in a convincingly naturalistic fashion, and was careful to work within his means, Wicking takes a far wilder approach, throwing his ideas around like squash balls and ducking as they ricochet off the walls, with little regard to the limitations and proprieties of low(ish) budget commercial filmmaking.

It’s surprising that such a wayward screenplay made it into production at all really, especially under the noses of such conservative overlords as AIP’s Louis M. Heyward and Amicus’s Milton Subotsky. In fact, the reaction of any hard-nosed script-editor or producer taking a butcher’s at Wicking’s script would seem pretty obvious: drop all the espionage and fascist state stuff entirely, and concentrate on the central tale of Vincent Price and his crazy composites. Simple. I mean, all that other stuff is basically just expensive, unnecessary and confusing, right? And there’s more than enough meat in what remains to make for a tightly focused, action-packed horror film. Hell, with its human/cyborg paranoia, mad scientists, acid pits, gritty police procedural stuff and rampaging bionic mod vampires, it still crams in enough to see most filmmakers through a whole trilogy. Why be greedy? Sure you’d lose Cushing and Lee’s parts, but you could always fit them in elsewhere. Job done.


I guess Heyward and Subotsky must have just been looking the other way at the time though, because such a ‘sensible’ solution was never enforced, and Hessler and Wicking were allowed to plough on regardless. And thank god for that - naturally we here at Breakfast in the Ruins rejoice in the expensive, the unnecessary and the confusing, and offer thanks to whoever let them get away with turning a routine genre movie into an out of control juggernaut of weirdness.

Pity though the poor technicians and designers who found themselves having to help them turn this vision into reality at short notice. With the budget of a modest gothic horror movie stretched across a set of locations, characters and special effects that would have challenged a Hollywood A picture, it’s hardly surprising that the exteriors of Cushing’s fascist state look like a Shepperton car park and Lee’s Whitehall briefing room looks more like a BBC production office, with haphazard lighting and poor sound recording in some scenes veering closer to the kind of ‘cut n’ run’ filler footage found in a Jess Franco movie than to the base-line professionalism that distinguishes most British-made horrors.



Closer to home, the police procedural stuff is far more convincing, with Alfred Marks offering the closest thing the film has to a star turn as Detective Superintendent Bellaver. Hard-boiled banter and two-fisted determination as far as the eye can see, he’s the natural forerunner to any ‘70s fictional British cop you’d care to name, and the scenes in which the camera follows him through the chaotic police station offices are just plain great. (“This bloody chicken wasn’t killed, it died of old age”, he complains, taking a bite out of a leftover sandwich he grabbed off the top of an overflowing filing cabinet on his way to the autopsy room.)

Shocking too is the sheer grimness of the serial killer plotline, as evidenced when Ballaver informs the gentle Dr Browning that his late maid “wasn’t just murdered.. if you know what I mean”, before we cut to police pathologist Kenneth Benda pointing out a few salient features on the victim’s body as it lies naked on the slab. (“I haven’t seen anything like this in donkey’s years”, he says with glee.)

I bet you could hear a sharp intake of breath in the cinema for that scene; as much as British horror might have traded on images of implied sexual violence, instances of rape being actively acknowledged were rare indeed during the ‘60s, and were usually met with extensive criticism and threats of censorship (witness the controversy that greeted Hammer’s attempts to deal with such themes in ‘Curse of the Werewolf’ and ‘Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed’). As such, wading right in proto-‘New York Ripper’ style seems like some deliberate post-Reeves envelope-pushing on the part of Hessler and Wicking – another reminder (as it were needed by this stage) that we’re not in Castle Dracula anymore.

And as to the killer – well he’s quite a piece of work too. In scenes eerily reminiscent of a number of later British horrors, Michael Gothard stalks around a seedy faux-psychedelic nightclub (a brief shot of the doorway reveals that it's named ‘The Busted Pot’) as pop-psyche combo Amen Corner perform in the background (their overblown Shel Talmy-produced theme song for the movie is a hoot). Reeling in naïve girls (Judy Huxtable amongst them) with his Byronic charm, he zooms them off to isolated spots in his Jag, where blood-curdling unpleasantness ensues.



All this leads up to what’s generally regarded as the film’s highlight – a protracted action set-piece that sees the super-powered and apparently unstoppable Gothard fleeing from the combined forces of the British constabulary, screeching down the motorway, scattering coppers like ninepins, charging on foot through a convenient home counties forest like “..some bionic Mick Jagger”, as Jonathan Rigby puts it in his book ‘English Gothic’, and even finding a gruesome new method of escape when he’s finally handcuffed to a car bumper after a dramatic showdown in a chalk quarry.

Impressively staged and edited, this is all pretty frantic, high octane stuff, and it comes as little surprise to learn (via Rigby’s book) that Hessler and Wicking – like Reeves before them – were huge fans of Don Siegel, with Wicking apparently conceiving of ‘Scream and Scream Again’ as “a combination of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and ‘Coogan’s Bluff’”, if you can believe that. In fact, with 40+ years hindsight, perhaps the most innovative aspect of ‘Scream…’ is the way it approaches horror via the structure of a thriller (or indeed, fragments of several different thrillers), an idea which prefigures many of the best horror films of the coming decade.



Hessler took a rain check on the horror scene in the early ‘70s, moving on to a steady career in American TV, where we last encountered him presiding over Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park, of all things. Chris Wicking kept plugging away in British horror though, and the more films I watch based on his screenplays, the more respect I have for the uniquely chaotic vision he brought to the genre. Both troubled and troubling, the films based on Wicking’s scripts may all be significantly flawed, but they nonetheless rattle along with a kind of disjointed, unheimlich fervour that takes them far closer to the core of genuine unease found in the work of Lovecraft or Bram Stoker than most of the films that clung more stubbornly to gothic tradition.

As wildly entertaining as it is inconsistent and baffling, ‘Scream And Scream Again’ perhaps represents the crowning achievement, certainly the most extreme example, of Wicking’s defiantly fragmented approach to narrative, and if it failed to shake up the British horror establishment quite as thoroughly as he and Hessler might have hoped, they had to wait only a few short years for their film’s true legacy to become clear. In spite of all its misfiring lunacy, ‘Scream..’ at every turn seems to anticipate the grimmer, more contemporary vein of British horror that independent filmmakers like Pete Walker and Norman J. Warren would embrace in the decade that followed, keeping the genre alive as the wider British film industry collapsed around them.

Short Reviews # 2: Sci-Fi

Sunshine
(Danny Boyle, 2007)

Well I’m only, what, four years late finding time to watching this one? Relatively quick off the mark by the standards of this blog, even if its director has subsequently managed to win all the Oscars with some multi-cultural musical and make a movie about a guy who cuts his own arm off or something. Who knows, maybe I’ll get ‘round to watching those one day, although to be honest the idea of a good old no-nonsense science fiction movie appeals to me a lot more. I’ll admit I’ve got a bit of a soft-spot for the kind of earnest SF blockbusters that I used to dutifully troop off to watch as a kid, in the days before irony and ‘crossover appeal’ and CGI and Will Smith and ham-fisted ruinations of Phil Dick stories conspired to piss on my multiplex chips. And I’m happy to report that, on that level at least, I thought ‘Sunshine’ was pretty damn impressive.

Like most sci fi that sets out to be taken seriously, there were a few chasms of disbelief to be overcome from the outset. (Ok, deep breath: why would the sun suddenly be ‘dying’ as early as 2053? And if it were doing so quickly enough to jeopardise life on earth by that point, wouldn’t we have, like, started to notice that back in the 20th C.? Furthermore, assuming a +50 years evolution of our current technology that incorporates comfortable interplanetary space-flight, would we *really* need to equip a space-ship with a gigantic HAL 9000-esque computer mainframe that needs to be stored in a sub-zero cooling tank? Why would this minimally crewed mission, which doesn’t even include a medical doctor as far as we can tell, be assigned an additional ‘psyche officer’? And so on…) Once we accept though that Boyle and Alex Garland aren’t so much interested in trying to create a feasible future scenario here as they are in paying tribute to the older SF movies that inspired them, we can hopefully put such concerns aside and just enjoy the direct and indirect references to ‘2001’, ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Alien’ that litter just about every scene.

Although it’s far from perfect (some attempts at cosmic profundity fall laughably flat, and the final act’s shift into a kind of ‘space-slasher’ storyline seems clumsy and unnecessary – more or less the same faults that I recall sunk ‘90s Boyle/Garland joint ‘The Beach’, oddly enough), I found ‘Sunshine’ extremely enjoyable. Modern audiences may have baulked at the idea of a hundred minute movie without a single moment of levity, but I found the film’s straight-faced earnestness strangely comforting – there’s a rare sense of naivety in the Howard Hawks/John Carpenter solidity of the whole affair that helped draw me into the drama, helped me gasp in polite awe at the effects shots, just as much as I would have done as a ten year old. Shame that this one got a bit overlooked on release because, even allowing for its faults, I think it’s probably the noblest bit of popcorn-fodder I’ve seen in a long while.

Timeslip
(Ken Hughes, 1955)

Offering further dispiriting proof that the majority of lost ‘50s-‘60s British b-movies were probably lost for good reason, this borderline SF caper – released in the states as ‘The Atomic Man’ - concerns a nuclear scientist whose body has been exposed to so much radiation that when his heart stops for seven seconds on the operating table after some crooks attempt to murder him, his consciousness ‘slips’ seven seconds into the future, meaning that after he’s revived he finds himself answering questions before they’re asked, saying hello to people who haven’t entered the room yet and so on, thus confusing the hell out of everyone, audience included.

Have pity for the poor actor playing another scientist who has to deliver a straight to camera monologue attempting to explain the ‘scientific rationale’ behind thus unlikely occurrence.

But actually, even if you find this peculiar notion absolutely fascinating, its wider implications are barely touched upon by the film’s script. Instead most of the running time is devoted to the unravelling of a Scooby Doo-level mystery concerning a criminal conspiracy presided over by a stereotypically greasy and rotund South American mining kingpin seeking to maintain his dominance over the international zinc trade. Yes, you heard: he wants to stifle scientific progress in order to artificially inflate the price of zinc, the dirty foreign fiend!

Swiftly heading downhill from a promisingly moody opening, ‘Timeslip’ is one of those chintzy faux-thrillers where the cast all seem to be playing dress-up, pretending they’re in some hard-boiled American movie, with a screenplay full of cheesy pronouncements and third rate zingers to match. I’m sure there are still plenty of minor masterpieces to be found lurking in the waters of low budget British cinema from this period, but ‘Timeslip’ certainly isn’t one of them. Thoroughly tedious business all round really – an archetypal ‘quota quickie’ with little to recommend it beyond some nice nocturnal London location shots in the opening sequence. Nonetheless, director Ken Hughes certainly went on enjoy a rich and varied career, taking in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, segments of ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Cromwell’ and the much maligned Mae West car crash ‘Sextette’.

The Terrornauts
(Montgomery Tully, 1967)

A far more enjoyable prospect, this modest Amicus programmer from b-movie warhorse Montgomery Tully is a partial rewrite of ‘This Island Earth’ on a Dr-Who-level special effects budget, introducing us to the plight of an intrepid astrophysicist whose funding for his search for extraterrestrial radio signals is under threat from stuffy superiors at a radio telescope facility. But the joke’s on them when our hero’s project accidentally attractss the attention of an alien spaceship, which proceeds to tractor-beam the control hut and its occupants (including Charles Hawtrey as a snooping accountant and Mrs. Jones the cockney tea lady), and whisks them off for an outer space adventure!

Not even remotely as salacious as the poster would tend to suggest, ‘Terrornauts’ is a delightfully cheery, old fashioned bit of interplanetary fun that could (and probably should) have been made ten years earlier, but executed with so much charm and visual invention that it’s difficult not to love it. A solid SF script from John Brunner (adapting Murray Leinster) ensures that the film never quite approaches ‘Fire Maidens from Outer Space’ level goofiness, but it’s still full of chuckles (intentional and otherwise), and also manages to tap into a rich vein of utter surrealism that’s only enhanced by the eye-watering faux-technicolor photography and spit n’ polish production design.

I really liked the stuff about how the heroic astrophysicist was inspired to take up his chosen profession by a vivid dream he had as a child, in which he saw a weird alien landscape with twin suns and standing stones. He has the creepy painting he did of this landscape framed on the wall of his lab, and stares at it questioningly in moments of doubt. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to call you at 1am with proof of my starry-eyed dream”, he declares when his grumpy superior demands results.

Too many other highlights to go through them all, but the segment in which the heroine accidentally stumbles onto a Star Trek style transporter pad and find herself transported to an alien world where she is chased and captured by green-skinned savages who want to sacrifice her to their gods is pretty classic. The hero jumps in after her, grabs a handy raygun, zaps the savages, rescues her and pops back home again with slightly tousled hair and a spear he nabbed from the savages. All this happens in about five minutes, and the other characters turn to them like; “what on earth happened to you, and where did you get that bloody thing?” – then they shrug it off and just get back on with pursuing the main plot without a word. Brilliant. Anyone with a passing interest in authentically weird British science fiction should find some time in their schedule for ‘The Terrornauts’, I feel.

Forbidden World
(Allan Holzman, 1982)

So apparently the story behind this one goes kinda like this: Roger Corman’s New World Pictures finished off their first Alien rip-off of 1981 (‘Galaxy of Terror’) ahead of schedule, and still had a couple of weeks booked on the sound stage where they’d built the sets. So Corman got Allan Holzman on the blower and said, hey buddy, how’d you fancy making your first movie – it’s gonna be another Alien rip-off, and it’s gonna have gore and naked chicks, and it’s gotta be done by the end of the month, whattaya reckon?

Holzman took the bait, and if ‘Forbidden World’ (I have no idea why it’s called ‘Forbidden World’) isn’t exactly a classic, there’s still no way I can imagine a film made under similarly compromised circumstances today being remotely as worthwhile. Sure, it’s cheap, stupid, derivative and sleazy (not to mention SHORT, just about scraping minimum feature length by way of obligatory recycled space battle and several ‘clips show’ montage bits). But it’s also fun, fast-moving, visually stylish and effortlessly watchable, aided by sharp direction, brilliantly resourceful production design and a cool Carpenter-esque synth score from Susan Justin.

You won’t *quite* be able to take it seriously once the hilariously gratuitous nudity kicks in (despite finding themselves in a grimly utilitarian interplanetary research lab crawling with malevolent genetic mutations, the movie’s female characters demonstrate a disdain for clothing that rivals a ‘70s Jess Franco cast), and a few prize “that’s the stupidest piece of movie character behaviour I’ve EVER SEEN” moments don’t help either, but, y’know… it’s getting there. I’ve certainly seen far thinner screenplays than this attached to productions that presumably had longer than, like, a day to get their shit together.

As mentioned in the ‘Sunshine’ review, I grew up watching a lot a cheap (and not so cheap) sci-fi, and am thus starting to recognise the weirdly comforting kick I inevitably get out of post-Alien, pre-Starship Troopers space adventures like this one. Even though ‘Forbidden World’ considerably predates the period in which I was heading down to the video shop for a night’s PG-rated entertainment, the film’s dark tone and mixture of action movie tropes with genetic mutation and gory body-horror actually makes it seem strangely ahead of its time – more aesthetically reminiscent of an early ‘90s straight to video sci-fi than an entry in the Star Wars/Alien rip-off sweepstakes, perhaps?

Anyway, watching it today, I can’t help but draw unfavourable comparison between contemporary low budget filmmaking, and the way things were done back when they knocked out ‘Forbidden World’. Anyone who has ever taken part in any creative endeavour will know that when you’re aiming for ‘good’ you’ll hopefully get ‘reasonable’, but if you’re aiming for ‘average’, you’ll inevitably get ‘shit’. Throughout his career, Corman tended to make sure his people were aiming for ‘good’, even on a stupid and sleazy movie like this one, with the end result that ‘Forbidden World’ is still worth the entry price thirty years later, whereas the majority of post-2000 straight-to-cable/DVD efforts are so painful they’re difficult to even sit through for free on the week of release.

So long as you don’t think about it too hard, ‘Forbidden World’ is a great bit of pulpy fun that stands as a testament to Corman’s unrivalled ability to get the best out of people on short notice with minimal resources. You’d tempted to say Holzman seemed a director worth keeping an eye on after this reasonably promising debut, but sadly his CV on IMDB begs to differ, comprising documentaries, TV work and something called ‘Grunt! The Wrestling Movie’. Oh well.

Deathblog:Roy Ward Baker(1916-2010)

Sad today to hear of the death of Roy Ward Baker at age 94. I can’t really claim any familiarity with Baker as a person, but I’ve seen his name scrolling across so many forboding, red-lettered Hammer credit sequences, it almost feels like I know the guy.

It seems Baker got his start in filmmaking serving in the 'Army Kinematograph Unit' during the war, and subsequently became a prolific jobbing director through the ‘40s and ‘50s, splitting his time between Britain and Hollywood and helming some surprisingly high profile pictures, including “Don’t Bother To Knock” (1952) with Marilyn Monroe and Anne Bancroft, and the definitive Titanic movie “A Night To Remember” (1958).

His horror credits include one of my all-time favourite Hammers “The Vampire Lovers”, a few I care for somewhat less (“Quatermass & The Pit”, “Scars of Dracula”), and a veritable hat-trick of Amicus anthology flicks, including the totally bonkers “Asylum” (whose Herbert Lom/Patrick Magee killer robot segment is so off the hook I can still scarcely believe it exists), “Vault of Horror” and “Now The Screaming Starts”.

He also found time for some true oddities, including the ill-stared Hammer/Shaw Bros crossover “Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires”, and Hammer’s swinging sixties ‘sci-fi western’ “Moon Zero Two”, which sounds like… a film I must see as soon as is humanly possible.

Innumerable episodes of “The Avengers”, “The Saint”, “The Persuaders”, “Jason King” and “Department S” help round out an impeccable CV of weird British pop culture, and his last feature film credit was horror old boy’s club nostalgia-fest “The Monster Club” in 1980.

Good work Roy!