Hammer House of Horror: Witching Time (Don Leaver, 1980)

For reasons of pure cinephile snobbishness, I have never previously bothered to watch the thirteen episodes of the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ TV series first broadcast on ITV in 1980.

My feeling, I suppose, was that this series would almost certainly prove a tacky and opportunistic post-script to the great studio’s legacy, best avoided for fear of disappointment.

But, contemplating this decision few months back, it occurred to me that these episodes were shot on 35mm (meaning that they pretty much, almost, look like movies in the new blu-ray restorations). They did reunite at least some significant figures from Hammer’s golden era, and…. well, basically I love shoddy British horror anthologies and ‘70s TV, so what the hell is my problem, anyway?

As such, this autumn has presented the perfect opportunity for me to pause my ongoing attempt to watch the entire run of ‘The Sweeney’ and instead get stuck into the best stab at Hammer grandeur that the combined forces of Roy Skeggs, ITC and ITV could muster at the dark dawn of Thatcherism.

First stop: the awkwardly named ‘Witching Time’! (Do you think maybe they were going for ‘Witching Hour’, but then some smartarse pointed out that nothing in the script actually happens at midnight, so…?)

Anyway! After noting how uncharacteristically contemporary and cool James Bernard’s pop/library-influenced theme for ‘Hammer House of Horror’ sounds, my first thought here was: boy, Jon Finch had certainly taken a tumble since his glowering, Byronic glory days in Polanski’s ‘Macbeth’ and Robert Fuest’s ‘The Final Programme’ (not to mention ‘The Vampire Lovers’, which presumably helped to get him this gig).

Instead, we here find him sporting a ratty-looking proto-mullet with a horrendous, Ian Dury-style kiss curl, resplendent in a grubby green polo shirt for his role as cuckolded horror movie soundtrack composer David Winter. Little wonder that he has lost the affections of his wife Mary, a triumphant exemplar of horse-riding, champagne-quaffing, upwardly mobile ‘80s womanhood, played to perfection by the fittingly named Prunella Gee.

Mary is an actress (she appears in the horror movie David is busy scoring), and I suppose she must be a fairly successful one, because I don’t think anyone ever acquired a renovated 17th century farmhouse with a Ferrari in the garage off the back of recording synth music for ‘80s British horror films. Indeed, Mary’s social aspirations are made clear by the fact that, when we first meet her, she is in bed with the smug, tweed-clad local doctor, played by Ian McCulloch (the star of ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ and ‘Contamination’, not the Echo & The Bunnymen bloke, obvs). Phwoar!

As David sits home alone, sipping Chivas Regal and trying out some primo elbows-on-the-keyboard drones as he ruminates on his marital failures, an unscheduled lightning storm and subsequent power failure heralds the arrival of Lucinda Jessup (Patricia Quinn from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’), a 17th century witch who has escaped a grisly death at the stake by travelling through time, somehow arriving in the 20th century sporting an awful chemical-hued perm, looking rather like Saxana’s embarrassing backwoods auntie or something.

Clearly the weak link here in terms of acting, Quinn enunciates her lines in overstated, am-dram fashion with an affected West Country drawl, making her less the seductive, menacing supernatural presence the script presumably intended and more, just, well… really annoying. In fact, there are sections of ‘Witching Time’ in which Finch and Gee seem more as if they’re dealing with an especially irksome houseguest than the spirit of a malign, vengeful witch.

Having said that though, we can’t really blame Quinn for these failings, as evidently no one on either side of the camera was really taking this shit seriously. The cast seem to have been instructed to play it for pure camp, and are happy to oblige, with Gee in particular going for gold; her gurning and eye-rolling as she extracts nails from a voodoo doll modelled on herself must be seen to be believed.

Equally fruity, Lennard Pearce (Granddad from the early series’ of ‘Only Fools & Horses’, no less) pops up for a great cameo, distantly reminding me of Ernest Thesinger or Graham Crowden in the role of a helpful local rector who fills Mary in with the necessary dose of exposition re: historical witch trials and so forth.

Meanwhile, I also very much enjoyed McCulloch’s turn as one of those great movie doctors who speaks to his patients on a first name basis and is always happy to make house calls in the middle of the night on the vaguest of pretexts, whether to dispense handfuls of potentially hallucinogenic pills or to deal with time-travelling lunatics locked in the spare bedroom. (Not an NHS man then, I’m assuming.)

Somewhat more explicit than anything I would have expected to see on UK TV in 1980, ‘Witching Time’ also boasts brief yet utterly gratuitous nudity from both its female leads, along with more than respectable quotient of blood, thunder and general hullaballoo, along with spirited use of broadcast acceptable not-quite-swear words like “STRUMPET” and “WHORE” - both of which which scriptwriter Anthony Read seems to have enjoyed so much that they even get scrawled on the walls in lipstick by our errant witch.

Though not in any sense a good tale well told, ‘Witching Time’ is nonetheless an uproariously entertaining bit of pulp horror nonsense, snappily directed by TV veteran Don Leaver, who avoids both artistry and boredom in equal measure. Its absurdist vision of demonic domestic melodrama actually rather put me in mind of Peter Sasdy’s I Don’t Want To Be Born / The Devil Within Her - which, around here at least, stands as a compliment.

It would have been all too easy for ‘Hammer House of Horror’ to veer straight toward stodgy, respectable drawing room Victoriana, so I heartily commend the team behind this debut episode for steering things in completely the opposite direction, offering up a shamelessly prurient and cartoon-ish vision of 1980s Home Counties exploitation, guaranteed to disgust those fuddie-duddies at the Radio Times and leave the Mary Whitehouse brigade spitting feathers.

The fact that ‘Hammer House of Horror’ was broadcast just on the cusp of the Thatcherite resurgence of social conservatism, and several years before the “Video Nasties” furore, is hopefully instructive in this regard - but I suppose we’ll find out in due course whether future episodes in the series followed Leaver & Read’s lead and matched the kind of dizzying heights scaled / depths plumbed here. Watch this space!

Gothic Originals / Horror Express 2020 #8: The Ghoul (Freddie Francis, 1975)

 I make a point of trying to cover at least one previously unseen Peter Cushing film each October, and I've had this one lying around as a VHS-rip since god knows when, so here we go.

As anyone who has read up the history of British horror cinema will probably recall, Tyburn productions (named for the infamous site of London’s public gallows) was a short-lived outfit founded by Kevin Francis, son of Freddie, with the deliberate intention of reviving the more old-fashioned style of gothic horror filmmaking which had pretty much been driven to extinction in the UK by the mid-1970s.

(Precisely the kind of films the then 25-year-old Kevin had grown up watching his father work on in other words, although this is neither the time nor place to dwell upon the psychological motivations underpinning forty-five year old entrepreneurial ventures.)

Be that as it may, Tyburn was not a success. To put it bluntly, there were good reasons why production of traditional gothic horrors had flatlined in the preceding years, and the young Mr Francis had no ace up his sleeve to help overcome them. Greeted with almost total disdain by audiences and critics alike when they scraped into cinemas in ‘74-‘75, the three feature films Tyburn produced attracted little interest, and the company faded from existence shortly thereafter.

Released in June 1975, ‘The Ghoul’ was the last Tyburn film to see the inside of a projector, and, true to its producer’s intentions, it’s a sombre, slow-moving and ultimately pretty dispiriting attempt to revive the ‘stately’ (read: stuffy / Victorian) feel of classic-era Hammer.

Indeed, Hammer’s own Anthony Hinds (writing under his John Elder pseudonym) provided the script, a substantial portion of which is directly recycled from his work on 1966’s The Reptile - only, this time around, there’s no reptile, which gives you an immediate insight into what a bloody-mindedly uncommercial production we’re getting into here.

Dour as it may be though, ‘The Ghoul’ does have its charms - not least an excellent, late-era Cushing performance. As so often in this era, the actor seems to be drawing pretty heavily on his own well-publicised battle with grief, and I really hope that the scene in which his character cradles a photograph of his late wife, reflecting that they will “always be together” and so forth, was not added to the script simply to capitalise on the star’s personal circumstances. (1)

Either way though, Cushing handles it all with the grace and dignity we’d reasonably expect of him, whilst his character Dr Lawrence - a morally compromised former missionary, returned from India with a dark secret and henceforth dedicated to his solitary passion for building violins - incorporates enough psychological nooks and crannies for the actor to really get his teeth into (so to speak), irrespective of the relatively shoddy stuff which surrounds him.

It's a shame therefore that second-billed John Hurt pretty much phones it in as the simple-minded groundskeeper/hobo type character who skulks about Lawrence’s swampy, dilapidated country pile, luring young ladies back to the literal chicken-shack he calls home and falteringly attempting to abuse them. Despite being painfully uninteresting, this vacant numbskull is assigned an absolute ton of screen-time, and although he essentially representing the film’s only portrayal of a working class character, neither script nor actor bother to put in a very good showing.

Having already played leading roles in several higher profile films by this point, as well as being nominated for a BAFTA for his harrowing supporting performance in Richard Fleischer’s ‘10 Rillington Place’ (1971), it’s possible that Hurt simply felt this gig was beneath him - and indeed, with its Wurzel Gummidge costumery, moptop wig and clunking, remedial dialogue, it quite possibly was. But, he could still have taken a few tips from Cushing vis-à-vis counting one’s blessings and making the best of things, I would suggest.

Elsewhere, it's great to see Ian McCulloch (‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, Zombi Holocaust) popping up a few years before his Italio-horror glory days (there’s some uneasy, class-based tension when, noticing that Hurt’s character is a former soldier, McCulloch’s young officer starts bossing him about in regimental fashion, igniting an awkward battle of wills), Whilst Veronica Carlson (‘Dracula Has Risen From The Grave’, ‘Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed’) makes for a far ballsier heroine than you normally encounter in this sort of thing, taking charge during the film’s opening car race, and generally lording it over her male co-stars in no uncertain terms.

Despite of ‘The Ghoul’s all-pervading atmosphere of nostalgic gloom in fact, some efforts have clearly been made here to bring a more contemporary feel into proceedings. The unusual 1920s setting for instance seems to have been introduced largely in order to facilitate some rambunctious, jazz-age merrymaking into the film’s opening scenes (retro ‘20s hi-jinks were, oddly, often a by-word for envelope-pushing modernism in ‘70s cinema, post-‘Bonnie & Clyde’), whilst the aforementioned nocturnal car race - in which the movie’s hateful young toffs recklessly roar around ill-lit country roads in their vintage motors - is both well-executed and quite exciting, surpassing the similar scenes featured in ‘The Devil Rides Out’ (1968).

Beyond ‘The Reptile’ meanwhile, Hinds’ script also seems to have borrowed at least some of its structure from ‘Psycho’, and the film’s scenes of violence, few and far between though they may be, are effectively gory and hard-hitting.

Indeed, given that it is inevitably being tagged as a boring, old fashioned throwback by British horror fans, it is ironic that ‘The Ghoul’s “bright young things find themselves at the mercy of doddering old weirdos” plotline entirely mirrors the far edgier films being made by directors like Pete Walker at around the same time, realigning the class-based conflicts underlying most of Hammer’s output to reflect the generational rifts more frequently explored by younger filmmakers during the ‘70s.

Conversely however, some viewers might be liable to find other elements of ‘The Ghoul’s script more retrogressive and objectionable - specifically, its apparent portrayal of Indian culture as an ‘exotic’, sinister sort of business which serves to undermine steadfast, Christian morality; a conduit for depraved, pagan beliefs which Cushing’s character has opened himself up to by “going native”, destroying his family in the process.

Embodied in the figure of Cushing’s taciturn housekeeper Ayah (a ‘browned up’ Gwen Watford), who rather unfairly emerges as the primary villain of the piece, this strain of pulp fiction-era racism was already present to some extent in ‘The Reptile’, but regrettably it becomes more emphatically pronounced here.

Whilst I certainly couldn’t argue with anyone who would wish to dismiss the film on this basis however, I personally found that the ambiguous atmosphere (Freddie) Francis and Cushing bring to the film help to steer the material in a more interesting direction than that of mere xenophobic scare-mongering.

Though the elder Francis’ talents as a horror director were often taken for granted, even his lesser efforts are usually characterised by their close attention to production design, lighting and camera-work, and the pungent atmospherics he summons up during the better passages of ‘The Ghoul’ are no exception. Thus, the idea of an “alien” Indian/Eastern culture subtly underlying the prosaic surface of a conventional English country house is given a great deal of play here, and actually becomes quite intriguing.

The house is kept sweltering by roaring fires in every room because “we’re used to the heat”, whilst the residents speak primarily in Ayah’s native tongue, awkwardly reverting to English for the benefit of their guests. Meanwhile, in a striking visual metaphor, the shrine of the black onyx Thuggee goddess worshipped by Ayah literally sits directly behind Dr Lawrence’s modestly adorned Anglican chapel, hidden from sight by a flimsy screen, as the compromised patriarch writhes in culturally conflicted mental agony before his impotent, gold-plated cross.

Imaginatively rendered through the film’s production design more-so than its writing, this all adds up, in its own way, to a curious sideways reflection on the ‘end of empire’ and the effects of the Indian experience upon upper-crust British identity, whilst Cushing, mindful no doubt of these sensitive themes, making a lingering sense of guilt and displacement the keynote of his performance.

In saying this, I realise I’m probably giving ‘The Ghoul’ more credit than it deserves. To the casual viewer, much of the movie will simply seem clumsy, boring and amateur-ish, in addition to its questionable racial political. This all comes home to roost when, after well over an hour’s painstaking build up, the climactic reveal of the titular ‘ghoul’ (played by prolific bit-part actor Don Henderson and a couple of buckets of blue paint) proves a crushing disappointment all round.

Filmed in perfunctory, one-take fashion amid a haze a Vaseline-lensed blurriness, it feels as if Francis was reluctant to even put this nonsense on camera (which is saying something, given that his recent directorial assignments had also included Herman Cohen’s ‘Craze’ and Ringo Starr & Harry Nilsson’s atrocious ‘Son of Dracula’). Just a hideous embarrassment for all concerned, the less said of this farrago of a finale, the better, to be honest.

Sad to say, these final scenes serve as an absurd and rather pathetic final pratfall for the traditional British gothic, of which this was, effectively, the final example. It feels especially fitting therefore that, with a thoughtfulness characteristic of the sub-genre’s most gifted and iconic performer, Cushing claws back some degree of dignity in the film’s last moments, furnishing it with an appropriately sombre grace note and a memorably doomed closing image. Nice work Pete - you earned your fee on this one, and then some.

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(1)As per IMDB trivia; “according to Veronica Carlson, director Freddie Francis made Peter Cushing do multiple takes during the scene where he talks about his love for his wife. This caused Cushing great distress, and reduced him, and some of the crew, to tears.” So that would seem to confirm my worst suspicions then.

Exploito All’Italiana: Zombi Holocaust (Marino Girolami, 1981)

(In the absence of any decent scans of an original Italian poster, let’s enjoy this splendid effort from Thailand.)

When it comes to the “rip off” aesthetic that increasingly dominated Italian genre cinema from the late ‘70s onwards, wherein cash-strapped producers ceased even trying to differentiate their product from the prior hits they were cashing in on, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more glorious example of the phenomenon’s ultimate, self-consuming end-point than ‘Zombi Holocaust’ – an infamously shoddy venture that forms something of a line in the sand for fans of Euro-horror/exploitation.

For many, this film represents the bottom of the barrel in terms of mindlessly derivative cine-sludge, whilst for others of a less discerning / more adventurous nature [delete as applicable], it instead forms the gateway to a whole new subterranean kingdom of trash-horror wonderment. Either way, it’s quite the thing to behold, and even the highest minded aficionados of this-sort-of-thing probably owe it to themselves to sit down and give it a try at some point – if only to test their individual tolerance for further trash-gore spelunking.

Often playing more like an extended cult cinema in-joke than a stand-alone movie, the sheer opportunistic shamelessness of the logic behind ‘Zombi Holocaust’s existence (basically: ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ was a hit? ‘Zombi 2’ [aka ‘Zombie’ (U.S.), ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ (U.K.)] was a hit? Et Voila = ZOMBI HOLOCAUST!) is already somewhat irresistible, whilst the fact that one of the films it is chiefly cannibalizing was *already* an unauthorised Italian sequel to a successful American movie (‘Dawn of the Dead’, released in Italy as ‘Zombi’) takes cinematic plagiarism to what at the time must have been new and giddy heights. (I’m sure if you follow the bread-crumb trail a few years down the line, you’ll find that someone in turn started making rip-offs of ‘Zombi Holocaust’, and so the glorious cycle continues.)*

Actually, the lengths to which ‘Zombi Holocaust’ goes to rip off Lucio Fulci’s film in particular are really quite extraordinary. I mean, I can see the rationale for borrowing the basic plot outline, using similar zombie make up and even rehiring the same lead actor (fan favourite Ian McCulloch) - but was there REALLY an audience back in 1980 who were liable to sit there thinking, “OMG, that isolated house in the jungle looks EXACTLY like the one in ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, and that low angle shot where the Landrover arrives in the village is exactly the same too! I am so psyched!”..?

I don’t know, but if such peculiar viewers did exist, they certainly would have found themselves well catered for here, as ‘Zombi Holocaust’ repeatedly reaches that baffling point on the “rip off” spectrum wherein the effort taken to painstakingly recreate entirely incidental details from an earlier film exceeds that which would have been necessary to feign originality by actually just shooting some new stuff that might have proved more appealing to the target audience… and scratching one’s head over the twisted logic of such decision-making is but one of many, many small pleasures that help make Girolami’s film such endlessly charming viewing for us jaded 21st century know-it-alls.

Taking a “2 + 2 = ?!?!” approach to combining elements of its two source texts, ‘Zombi Holocaust’s New York set opening – in which cultists belonging to an obscure Asian cannibal sect are found to be rampaging around a city hospital misappropriating body parts – is a pure, politically questionable b-movie delight. Reminding me somewhat of the equally unlikely Quetzalcoatl cultist sub-plot in Larry Cohen’s ‘Q: The Winged Serpent’, I can’t help wishing that they’d spun this idea out into an entire movie of its own.

But at the same time, I’m also glad they didn’t, because then we would have missed out on the earnest discussions conducted between the police and the pipe-smoking “Professor Drydock” (no, really) from the University, and their decision that the best solution to this problem is to ask the Mighty McCulloch (is his character a doctor of some kind, or a policeman? I’m not really sure it’s make clear) to step in and head up an expedition to the remote islands in the East Indies from which the cult originated, where, accompanied by a photogenic anthropology-studying nurse (Alexandra Delli Colli), some other guy and the obligatory interfering journalist, he will uncover the secrets of this benighted cannibal tribe and… well, I don’t know really.

I mean, wouldn’t be easier to just arrest the people who are getting up to all the monkey business at the hospital, and go from there? You know, interrogate them, look for witnesses, that sort of thing? But what do I know of police work. Pack your khakis and don’t forget the mosquito net - the boat leaves at dawn!

And so, as absurdity piles upon absurdity, ‘Zombi Holocaust’ repeatedly demonstrates that, despite its aspirations toward innard-chewing, brain-sawing video nasty infamy, at heart it really has more in common with old psychotronic favourites like ‘Mesa of Lost Women’ (1953) or ‘Horrors of Spider Island’ (1960) – a goofy, comforting little b-movie that is fully aware of its own silliness, whilst simultaneously remaining conscious of the fact that actually cracking a smile would cause the audience’s enjoyment to crumble like the Walls of Jericho.

That the credited director of this mess was actually the FATHER of Italian action supremo Enzo G. Castellari was something I initially found inordinately amusing (it’s easy to imagine Enzo taking breaks from whatever ‘Jaws’/’Dirty Dozen’ rip-off he was making at the time to field excruciating “No Dad, THIS is how you do a tracking shot..” style phone calls) - until that is, I checked IMDB and discovered that ‘Zombi Holocaust’ was actually Marino Girolami’s seventy second film as director, and that he had in fact been calling “action” on lower budget genre pictures pretty much non-stop since 1950.

We could speculate as to whether it was a deficit of quality or sheer bad luck that ensured that none of Girolami’s films prior to this one have ever gained much exposure outside of Italy, but given the number of technically accomplished European directors who found themselves delivering absolute rubbish when the VHS horror boom hit in the ‘80s, it would seem manifestly unfair to make a judgment call on his work based solely on ‘Zombi Holocaust’ - so I won’t.

Either way though, it seems likely that the director’s veteran status may have contributed somewhat to the strangely old-fashioned feel of ‘Zombi Holocaust’. Whilst it is ostensibly still a gore-soaked rampage through a tropical hell, the film somehow ends up feeling just sort of… I don’t know… nice, even whilst poorly paid local extras in ridiculous b-western Indian get-up are gobbling cream of tomato soup from some poor unfortunate’s latex torso.

Despite what I take to be the producers’ best efforts to pile on the nastiness, this one entirely lacks the mean-spirited extremity or queasy gross up agenda of a contemporary Fulci or Deodato film. Much like the minimum-of-effort “bloodshed” usually employed by Jess Franco, this is purely emblematic gore – any resemblance to the real thing is purely coincidental. Like everything in ‘Zombi Holocaust’, it’s all offered up in a spirit of pure, casual fun, with little suggestion that anyone is ever actually in pain.

And, essentially, I could continue trudging through a blow-by-blow account of all the great stuff in ‘Zombi Holocaust’ until the cows come home. There’s the square-jawed, cheque-collecting determination of McCulloch’s “I-failed-the-audition-for-Indiana-Jones-and-woke-up-here” lead performance for instance - or how about the perfectly shaped stone mold that the cannibals have lying around ready for Delli Colli after they strip her naked and body-paint her with some pretty flowers? (Hippy cannibals, eh? Well, you live and learn.).

From the adorably off-beat antics of Donald O’Brien as one of the least hygienic yet most strangely sincere mad scientists seen this side of the 1950s, to the to the bit where one of expedition’s dubiously portrayed ‘native porters’ almost throws an “oh man, you mean I gotta bury ANOTHER body..” style teenage strop after our heroes respond to the grizzly demise of his friend with scarcely more than a “huh, there ya go” shrug… well, you get the picture. There is just so much to enjoy here.

You can mock ‘Zombi Holocaust’ all you like, but to give Girolami his due, at the end of the day it is a vastly more entertaining prospect than most of the other bottom-feeding zombie/cannibal snoozefests that emerged in the early ‘80s (yes, I’m looking at you, Eurocine). This is chiefly due to the fact that, for all of its many shortcomings, the picture rattles along like a goddamned freight train, never resorting to dreary ‘padding out the run time’ type footage and rarely going more than a couple of minutes without throwing us something divertingly awesome and/or ridiculous to chew on.

Add one standing ovation-worthy Classic Gore Moment (all I need say is: outboard motor), the eventual appearence of some genuinely kind-of-scary looking zombies (well, I liked them), and a pitch perfect grinding, electronic dirge of a score from Nico Fidenco (whose 70s/80s CV is so sleazy, this almost counts as a career highlight), and, for those with the alchemical suss to suitably process it, ‘Zombi Holocaust’ is pure gold - a mighty anti-classic that no one with even the slightest fondness for Italian trash cinema could fail to love like a disfigured child.

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* On the cannibals-meet-zombies tip, Bruno Mattei’s actually-pretty-great ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’ aka ‘Hell of the Living Dead’ (which premiered about six months after this film) springs to mind as an obvious ‘Zombi Holocaust’ descendent, although I’m not exactly about to call the lawyers in over that one, y’know what I mean.