Gothic Horror Round-Up II: Cry of the Banshee (Gordon Hessler, 1970)

And so from the sublime to the ridiculous, as 1970’s ‘Cry of the Banshee’ sees AIP’s long-running series of Vincent Price-led gothics finally spluttering to a halt, with a conclusion as ill-starred as any vengeful witch could’ve hoped for.

Allegedly annoyed that AIP had denied them the preparation time needed for a trip to Scotland to research ancient celtic folklore or somesuch, screenwriter Christopher Wicking and director Gordon Hessler apparently decided to show them the error of their ways by throwing together a screenplay based on nothing whatsoever, reworking Tim Kelly’s initial draft into a hackneyed mess of nonsense set in some non-specific part of 16th century England, where cruel local magistrate Edward Whitman lords it over both the local populace and his own family, in a tepid amalgamation of Price’s far more memorable roles in ‘Witchfinder General’ and ‘Masque of the Red Death’.

Anyone coming to this film hoping to learn a thing or two about banshees and what they get up to will be soundly disappointed, as the fascinating mythology pertaining to said creatures is entirely ignored, leaving us with nothing but some vague were-creature and one of the most annoyingly inconsistent pre-christian witch cults in cinema history to function as thorns in Price’s side.

Hey, wait a minute, pre-xtian witch cults, you say? That sounds like some pretty fun stuff! Yeah, that’s what I thought too, but sadly this concept is handled just as poorly as the banshee stuff, with the sinister, forest-dwelling cult here taking the form of a bunch of obnoxious first-year drama students, prancing about in togas and night-gowns, performing tedious hippie era ‘self-actualisation’ exercises. Head witch Oona, as portrayed by veteran stage and screen actress Elizabeth Bergner, must merit some sort of award as “most irritating witch of all time”, narrowly beating Lila Zaborin from ‘Blood Orgy of the She-Devils’ to the prize as she gurns away under an unkempt fright-wig, rolling her eyes and vocalising her painfully over-enunciated declamations in a voice that’s sort of half Irish, half Romany, and all ‘drunken am-dram auntie’.

The filmmakers seem to have tried to incorporate some belated ‘social commentary’ into this scenario, characterising the cultists as peace-loving drop-outs being persecuted by the cruel and repressive authorities. In fact Wicking is even on record as saying that he meant Price’s persecution of the cultists to remind viewers of Mayor Daley’s crushing of dissent at the ’68 Democratic Convention, if you can believe that. Like most elements of the film through, the execution of this idea too confused and half-arsed to really amount to much.

“Oona is good, Oona heals, Oona is love”, her followers chant, but if these cultists are supposed to be benign and sympathetic figures, why do we also see them praising Satan, conjuring up curses at the drop of a hat, orchestrating the deaths of people who weren’t even remotely to blame for their persecution, and basically doing everything that Vince’s ‘repressive’ regime accuses them of..? Exploiting all the bad karma of Satanism without any of the accompanying cool stuff and gnarly rites, Oona’s cult are just about the most charmless gang of woodland devil worshippers you could ever have the misfortune to encounter.

As regular readers will know, I absolutely loved Hessler and Wicking’s Scream & Scream Again, which they made immediately prior to starting work on ‘..Banshee’. And whilst I suppose a dose of ‘Scream..’s errant pacing and unhinged randomness can be felt in ‘..Banshee’ to a certain extent, the duo’s approach sadly achieves an altogether more negative result here, as a general lack of any of the novelty, enthusiasm or imagination that made the earlier film so unique leaves us with a movie that, beyond just feeling a bit pointless, leaves a bad taste in the mouth in just about every respect.

First and foremost, the film spends much of its run-time exhibiting a distinctly unhealthy strain of cruelty and misogyny that quickly outstays its welcome. If Michael Reeves’ ‘Witchfinder General’ succeeded in introducing a new level of grim realism into period horror films at the dawn of the ‘70s, the makers of ‘..Banshee’ certainly take full advantage of these developments. Unfortunately though, they seem to have missed the point of Reeves’ film entirely, using the ground gained by their predecessor simply as an excuse to fill their own film with as much sleaze and unpleasantness as thought they could get away with.

Throughout the film, breasts are exposed with monotonous regularity, inevitably accompanied by torture, beatings and sexual assault, as the kind of scenes that were powerful and upsetting in ‘Witchfinder..’ are reiterated as pure, mindless exploitation, dwelt upon in a way that, whilst ostensibly less explicit than European efforts like 1971’s ‘Mark of the Devil’, somehow comes across as even more distasteful. In spite – or perhaps because of - its hammy, old fashioned atmosphere, I think ‘..Banshee’ actually stands out as one of the rapiest, most cynically nasty British horror films of the ‘70s (which is saying something, considering the excesses that were to come later in the decade).

Of all the female cast, only Hilary Dwyer (from ‘Witchfinder..’) as Price’s daughter emerges with her dignity intact, and even she has to face up to the challenge of some absolutely senseless dialogue, the script demanding that her character suddenly deliver lines like “it’s as though we were all seeds of evil”, apropos of nothing. It’s stuff like that that dooms most of the performances in this movie, as actors good, bad and indifferent all seem to flounder with the material they’ve been handed. Bergner, despite her storied career, is just plain awful, Swedish actress Essy Persson does the best she can with a thankless role as Price’s much-abused wife, and it’s very sad see the once great Welsh actor Hugh Griffiths wasted (in both senses of the word) as a comic relief gravedigger.

Cheap, ‘who-cares-anyway’ production decisions and highly variable cinematography also take their toll, as exemplified by the face-slappingly awful moment in which two characters casually look out of a castle window at night before their POV immediately cuts to some completely unmatched daylight stock footage of wolves roaming through some woodland. And by the time Persson finds herself being menaced by a disembodied halloween werewolf claw, any hope that this movie might redeem itself has faded pretty much to zero, with not even the ever-reliable Vincent Price able to summon up enough energy to salvage proceedings.

By this stage, Price was apparently already unhappy with the declining quality of the films AIP were offering him, and the half-hearted sleaze and myriad absurdities of ‘..Banshee’ can scarcely have done much to improve his mood. Of course, Price never really gives a ‘bad’ performance, but he’s clearly finding it hard to hide his disgruntlement here, knocking out passages of dialogue that were clearly written with his dulcet tones in mind as quickly as he can before stalking dejectedly off-screen. And it’s hard to blame him really; prior to the upswing his career took in the early ‘70s thanks to such quality vehicles as ‘The Abominable Dr. Phibes’ and ‘Theatre of Blood’, it’s easy to imagine him being a bit worried about where he was headed at this point, perhaps seeing himself descending the same slippery slope toward demeaning trash that had claimed so many aging horror stars before him.

So… yeah. As you might have gathered, I really didn’t like this one much. In the ‘plus’ column, we’ve at least got a terrific, Terry Gilliam-designed animated credits sequence, and a fine, foreboding score by Wilfred Josephs. Some of the woodland scenes are nicely photographed, capturing at least a hint of the mossy, verdant atmospherics found in the infinitely superior ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’. Oh, and the ending is quite nicely executed in a gleeful, twist-in-the-tail kinda way.

But seriously, that’s about all I’m getting here in terms of positives.

I suppose I shouldn’t be that hard on ‘..Banshee’. In the grander scheme of things it’s still perfectly watchable, and it at least tries to explore some interesting ideas, even if it doesn’t get very far with them. In fact, if this was some zero budget regional independent movie from the same era, you’d probably rank it as a good effort. But as a professional production with a wealth of talent and experience behind it, coming at the tail end of a series that had produced almost a dozen far better (and far more *likeable*) movies by this point, it seems like a ropey, embarrassing mess, and a sad way to send the Price/Poe films to their unquiet grave.

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.

VHS Purgatory:Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (Gordon Hessler, 1978)

PRICE PAID:

£1, from that odd furniture/junk shop just up from Brockley station. Man, that shop is so weird… I can never tell who’s a member of staff and who’s just a weirdo looking around… everytime I go there, everything seems to be a completely different price… I don’t know if it’s a charity shop or just some strange, marginal business venture… it doesn’t seem to have a name… when I walked past the other day, their whole back room seemed to be filled with smashed up bits of wood… but, er, anyway…

THE BOX SAYS:

“Mystery and mayhem with Kiss perofmring their greatest hits --- with spectacular visual effects!”

THE FILM DELIVERS:

So long, ‘Slade in Flame’! Get behind thee, Aerosmith tour video I watched when I was twelve! Don’t even think about it, ‘Abba: The Movie’! The ultimate ‘70s corporate rock cash-in movie is here, and I will accept no substitutes.

Produced by those loveable goofs at Hanna Barbera on behalf of the Gene Simmons Evil Mega-Corporation (or whatever), I expected ‘Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park’ to provide a few chuckles and a lot of comforting boredom, and so was ill-prepared for the veritable fungasm that awaited my tired eyes when I hit play on this humble tape.

(By sheer coincidence, I think this is actually a very appropriate post for the 4th of July, even though as a stinking foreigner I myself care little for such festivities.)

A crude opening montage sees the members of Kiss super-imposed on top of night-time fairground footage. Inexplicably, Peter Criss is seen miming the drums on a roulette wheel. Drink it in, Kiss Army recruits, as this is the last glimpse of your commanding officers you’ll be getting for quite a while. Director Gordon Hessler (whose horror credits include ‘Scream and Scream Again’ and ‘Cry of the Banshee’ for AIP, as well as taking over ‘The Oblong Box’ after the death of Michael Reeves), clearly has other things on his mind.

Like FUN, primarily. Beautiful, sun-dappled, 1978 suburban American amusement park fun, to be precise. Thankfully I’m a bit too young and located on the wrong side of the world to be fully smitten by this full-scale nostalgia landslide, but anyone currently in about the 35-45 age bracket and raised somewhere in the Southern half of the USA should probably prepare themselves for paralysing wistfulness and bouts of uncontrollable sobbing, as gentle, smiling ‘Dazed & Confused’ teens fade in and out of focus, enjoying a summer’s day out in their local parentally-approved leisure complex. Costumed mascots caper and light aircraft spell out messages in the sky as bell-bottomed girls giggle over cans of soda. “Don’t forget to be here at 7pm for the first night of the KISS CONCERT”, declares the blaring public address system. Truly, it is paradise.


Not everyone is happy though, and in particular a rift seems to be developing between the park’s manager (a simple, business-minded fellow who wants to give the kids what they want, like rollercoasters and Kiss concerts) and the ‘creator’ (a brooding weirdo who lives in a hi-tech underground research complex and is primarily concerned with making crappy animatronic waxworks depicting macabre historical scenes). You can probably see where this is going.

Also seemingly less than satisfied with the status-quo is a small faction of scruffy, biker-esque miscreants with names like ‘Chopper’ and ‘Slime’ , who seem intent on polluting the wholesome atmosphere of the park with assorted examples of cruel, low-key thuggery.

Now before we proceed, I should state that I’ve never really felt comfortable with Kiss. Sure, a few of their records are cool, and their whole costumed character shtick is pretty amusing, but as a rock n’ roll group – even in the relatively debased mode of ‘70s arena rock – they have always struck me as a distinctly candy-ass proposition. I take the implicit ideology behind my rock n’ roll pretty seriously, and as such, the shallowness of the Kiss brand has always rung hollow as the cracked liberty bell for me, even as many of my grunge-era peers have sought to rehabilitate their cultural legacy.

This ideological disjuncture can immediately be seen in ‘Phantom of the Park’, via the portrayal of the aforementioned ‘delinquent’ characters as stupid and threatening figures. I mean, I ask you: what kind of self-respecting heavy rock band would seek to set themselves up in OPPOSITION to the plight of angry, disenfranchised loser kids? I’m afraid the only possible answer is: a really shitty heavy rock band. If by some quirk of fate you happen to be a grumpy older brother or sister reading this in the mid 1970s, then please, do the decent thing and provide your younger siblings with a Black Sabbath record, that they may see the path before them more clearly lit.


But anyway. As you might expect, this ‘gang’ (they dress like bikers, talk like sit-com beatniks and behave like prototype pseudo-punks) swiftly come into conflict with the eccentric park creator, during a highly amusing scene in which they flagrantly mock one of his dioramas, depicting a chained ape. (“Perfection? C’mon man, you call some baboon doin’ the herky-jerky perfection?” says Chopper). As punishment for their lack of respect, the ne’erdowells are lured into the park’s Chamber of Horrors, where they find themselves gassed or concussed by a series of cunning traps, their bodies deposited in the creator’s subterranean lair, where he has his wicked House-of-Wax style way with them. (Later we see him refashioning the female member of the gang as an automaton of a pioneer-era bride, exclaiming “I’ll make a real American of you yet” – the implied criticism of this transformation marking an odd deviation from this movie’s dominant anti-misfit/pro-conformity agenda.)

Mad though he may be, the park creator is nothing if not efficient, and by the time Kiss have concluded the first night of their residency at the park (we see them playing a forgettable number extolling the virtues of ‘partying’ and ‘turning it up loud’, presumably the opening cut from whichever album they were giving the big push to crica ‘78), he has already fashioned robot doppelgangers of the band to further his evil schemes!

Unfortunately though, the robot Gene Simmons goes haywire and is unleashed upon the world earlier than planned, as he (it?) breaks through a wall cartoon-style, duffs up some security guards and demolishes a lemonade stand! The stunned onlookers don’t know what’s going on. They thought Kiss were the good guys! It’s shocking!


Now, I was kind of assuming we’d be introduced to Kiss-as-characters here via, say, a backstage scene where they towel off and swap banter of the “boy, tough crowd in these theme-parks” variety. But no. Because GET THIS: Kiss in the movie are not merely costumed rock stars raking in the nation’s pocket money, they are bone fide supernatural beings – mystical cosmic warriors with the ability to read minds, fly, fire laser-beams from their eyes and partake in gravity-defying kung-fu battles. Throughout the film, band members are never referred to by their real names: they are 100% in-character as Space Ace, Star Child, Catman and The Demon.

As higher echelon Kiss Army members will no doubt be aware, Kiss’s powers derive from a set of four golden ‘talismans’, each taking the form of an elemental symbol reflecting the role of each Kiss member within the group. Kiss keep these talismans in a lead-lined suitcase, which is protected by a forcefield installed in their personal accommodation. As they explain at one point to the film’s lovelorn heroine, each of us has the power within us to ‘materialise’ our own talisman and take on our own superpowers, joining Kiss in the ranks of the Ubermensch. We just don’t, that’s all. Because we’re lame.


Perhaps due to its complete reversal of expectation, the scene that does eventually introduce us to Kiss is perhaps my favourite moment in ‘Phantom of the Park’, from a choice of many potential favourites. Following the faux-Demon’s polite rampage, a deputation from the park management seek out Kiss to demand an explanation. They find the band seated at the far end of a hotel swimming pool, chilling atop high, tennis umpire style chairs, silver towels draped over their heads, in silent communion with cosmic forces. Kiss speak to each other in a kind of character-specific private language, casually chatting over the heads of their visitors, as if they were corrupt feudal princes receiving a deputation of peasants. The poor shlubby security dudes, who were presumably expecting to merely lay down the law to a bunch of run-of-the-mill hell-raising rockers, get all hot and bothered and generally just don’t know what to make of it.

Now that our lofty heroes have been alerted to the threat facing them, much of the rest of the film is comprised of lengthy nocturnal fight scenes, in which Kiss meet the minions of the park-creator in deadly combat. First they head to the interior of the splendid wooden rollercoaster, to fight some kinda monkey-headed creatures in rubber suits. Next, they move on to an amphitheatre, and fight a series of robotic samurais and kung-fu bad-asses who emerge one by one from an elevator shaft.

I realise I’ve conveyed those notions to you in but two short sentences, but please, take some time to reflect on the fact that these sequences go on for a long time, and feature laser-beams, anti-gravity slo-mo flying kicks and short-circuiting robots, set to a relentless soundtrack of chicken-scratch heavy ‘fight scene funk’, all of which made served to make me very happy indeed as I began to drift into early morning unconsciousness.


Meanwhile of course, the Phantom has sent a mind-controlled dupe to steal Kiss’s talismans from their hotel suite, so by the time the band enter the Chamber of Horror and start mixing it up with the Frankensteins and mummies and so, their powers have deserted them and they soon find themselves captive in the Phantom’s liar! (He keeps them in a big iron cage conveniently overlooking his, uh, computer consoles and stuff, that they may watch him bring his schemes to fruition.)

Naturally the Phantom’s first order of business is to dispatch his evil duplicates to replace Kiss at the next evening’s Kiss Concert. His plan, you see, is to have his Kiss clones perform violent and provocative material which will rouse their audience to a nihilistic fervour which will see them riot, destroying the park and discrediting both band and management!

This is a canny plan on the Phantom’s part, because as everyone knows, Kiss audiences in the 1970s were apt to literally act out the lyrics of their idols’ songs, as soon as they heard them, with no consideration for the consequences of their actions. This is why the band had to be extremely careful about their lyrical content, sticking strictly to discourse on such nebulous concerns as ‘partying’ and ‘crazy nights’, even as their heavy metal peers were free to tackle more challenging subject matter, be it drinking the blood of slaughtered innocents, shagging mermaids, discovering the ruins of lost Lemuria or Livin’ in a Ram’s Head. Kiss must have felt frustrated, being unable to tap into such potent and topical imagery for their own music, but with great power comes great responsibility.

And so, let us shudder as Evil Kiss take the stage and launch into a malodorous ode specially designed to propel listeners into a mindless, destructive rage! I mean, can you imagine it? A popular rock band playing grinding, monotonous music that urges people to “rip and destroy” and “tear down the walls”? It simply doesn’t bear thinking about. And, as sturdy examples of wholesome American youth, the kids in the crowd instantly smell a rat and are having none of it. Yes, the Phantom’s mistake was to underestimate the purity and singlemindedness of the Kiss Army, who now boo the Evil Kiss, turning away from their negative sentiments and demanding the return of their true heroes.


The Phantom’s other mistake of course was to leave the Real Kiss in a big cage within easy telekinetic reach of their talismans, allowing them to quickly regain their powers. Flying to the concert auditorium upon beams of stardust, they proceed to righteously kick the crap out of their doppelgangers as the audience cheers them on, reclaiming their instruments from the fallen clones and triumphantly launching into….. the exact same song they played in the earlier concert sequence! So Party On, Turn It Up Loud (but not too loud), God Bless America, and if you feel at all disgruntled with the corporate wonderland you’ve been born into, well… better keep it to yourself buddy, or some jerky House-of-Wax guy will probably pick you out to be turned into a mindless robo-zombie. Either that or Kiss will just turn up and beat your ass. I think that was basically the message. Something like that anyway – I dunno, I forget easy.

I’m sorry for lapsing so hard into interminable plot summation in this over-long review, but really it seemed the only way to express the wonderful totality of ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’. I mean, I just don’t really have much to say about the cinematography, y’know. It was good. I could see the colours. Most of the time I could understand what was going on. Hey, how ‘bout a Pepsi?

BEST DIALOGUE:

One of the best things about ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’ is that most of the dialogue sounds as if it’s been post-synced by Hanna Barbera voice actors, adding immensely to the overall charm of the endeavour, and providing a wealth of highly quotable, oddly enunciated nonsense for us all to enjoy. The aforementioned baboon exchange was probably my favourite, but I liked these ones a lot too;

#1: Star Child voiceover over shot of the park manager looking uncomfortable:

“He’s sweating the possibility we might pull out… he’s just plain sweating”

#2: Lovelorn heroine in search of her captured boyfriend asks two moustachioed security guards about the whereabouts of the park creator guy’s lab:


GUARD # 1: Oh, that’s underground.

GUARD #2: Yeah… waaaay underground.

I could carry on all day really, but the realisation that it’s a summer’s day outside and I’m sitting here transcribing chunks of the script from ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’ leads me to do the decent thing and leave it at that.

EXTRAS:

The corporate ident for Hendring, the Putney based company who put out this tape, is by far the most elaborate and confusing I can remember seeing. Basically it’s a sorta self-contained short film that features POV shots of a black-gloved burglar breaking into a darkened living room. There are Oscar silhouettes and pages from scripts on a glass table and a big VCR with a flashing ‘play’ button. There are a lot of different shots of these various elements. Eventually, the Oscars fall off the table. It’s sorta hard to describe, but probably worth the entry price alone if you happen to see any tapes originating from this presumably quite marginal operation.

(PLEASE NOTE: screengrabs in the above post are not mine. I pulled ‘em off other people’s sites, primarily this one:

http://happyotter666.blogspot.com/2010/03/kiss-meets-phantom-of-park-1978.html

and this one:

http://itsallforyoudemon.blogspot.com/2011/05/kiss-meets-phantom-yesterday-and-today.html

Hope nobody minds.)