Happy Halloween Everyone.

 Well, I certainly enjoyed that.

My records indicate that I managed to fit in 36 feature length horror films during October, which I think may be a personal record (although I can’t claim I managed to entirely stay awake through all of them).

I confess it proved a struggle to find the time to write about at least some of them here whilst also attending to a bare minimum of real life responsibilities, but I hope you enjoyed at least some of the stuff I came up with.

Thank you to everyone who posted a comment this month by the way, and huge apologies for the fact I didn’t get a chance to reply, but, well… deadlines for posting were pretty frantic. Your thoughts and kind words were hugely appreciated, anyway.

Now that this blog is finally back in action, I’ll do my best to keep in going… I might take a week or so off, and aim to get back in business with some book-related posts to start off with. Let’s see how it goes.

In the meantime though, here are a few links to some of the more substantial new reviews I’ve done this month, in case anyone missed them along the way:

Draguse ou le Manoir Infernal (1974)

The Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes (1955)

Love Brides of the Blood Mummy (1972)

Glorious (2022)

Murder Obsession (1981)

In The Earth (2021)

The Horrible Sexy Vampire (1971)

Anyway, enjoy whatever devilry you’ve got planned for the big night tonight, and we’ll catch up soon, I’m sure.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: The Horrible Sexy Vampire [‘El Vampiro de la Autopista’] (José Luis Madrid, 1971)

Well, I've got to hand it to ‘em - his behaviour is horrible, he’s somewhat more sexy than most movie monsters, and he is, indisputably, a vampire… as well as an invisible man to boot!

Leaving aside its modest success in living up to its unforgettable English language title however, it saddens me to report that, in most other respects, José Luis Madrid’s film is unimaginative, amateurish and astoundingly dull.

Disappointingly short on action or what most viewers would define as ‘interest’, this hum-drum tale of an atavistic bloodsucker returning from the great beyond to (oddly) strangle a bunch of women in the countryside around Stuttgart instead relies heavily on extended, procedural dialogue/investigation scenes, many of which drag on for so long that listening to the long-suffering English dubbing team desperately trying to come up with enough mindless banter to fill all the dead air becomes more entertaining than anything being enacted on the screen.

Even the frequent scenes of female nudity, which have earned the film a certain notoriety over the years, and which must have been quite risqué for some markets at the time of release, now seem laughably quaint. 

Misogynistic to a fault, these diversions tend to centre around the inherently comic notion that the very first thing most women do upon returning home is take off all their clothes and look at their boobs in the mirror (just to check they’re still there, I suppose); thus making best use of those few, valuable seconds before the horrible, sexy invisible-vampire-man inevitably barges in and throttles them.

Why does the vampire become invisible, exactly? This seems to be a question whose answer is lost to the vagaries of time, but possible explanations include: a) to allow additional footage to be shot in the absence of star Waldemar Wohlfahrt, b) to assist in overcoming the technical challenges of shooting scenes in which Wohlfahrt, who also plays the great-grandson of the vampiric baron, needs to struggle with his undead forebear, or c) just for the sheer bloody-minded hell of it.

Although ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’ is not a film which could be honestly recommended to anyone on any conventional basis, it does at least present us with such a succession of oddities such as the one outlined above that it nonetheless makes for strangely compulsive viewing for… well, for me, at least. I can’t claim to speak for anyone else around here.

Not least among these eccentricities is the extraordinary presence of Wohlfahrt himself. 

Later known as Wal Davis (in which capacity he stared as an extremely unlikely Maciste in two of the strangest and most elusive films Jess Franco ever made, ‘Les Glutonnes’ and ‘Maciste Contre la Reine des Amazones’ (both 1972)), Wohlfahrt is a lanky weirdo with a shock of unkempt, peroxide blonde hair, who plays the film’s ‘present day’ protagonist, Count Obelnsky, as a kind of gloomy, self-serious aristocrat who wants nothing more out of life than to be left alone to spend his evenings indulging his passion for taxidermy and getting absolutely hammered on hard liquor.

This unusual characterisation becomes even stranger when one learns that ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’ was essentially a vanity project for Wohlfahrt, dreamt up to capitalise on the tabloid notoriety he’d gained after being falsely accused of a series of serial strangulation murders which took place on German highways during the 1960s. (Hence the film’s original Spanish release title, which translates as ‘Vampire of the Autobahn’.)

Although Wohlfahrt - who appears to have been some kind of roving playboy chiefly resident in the German tourist enclave of Benidorm - was acquitted of involvement in the crimes when it was proven beyond doubt that he was in Spain when several of the murders were committed, parallel charges brought against him for illegal possession of a firearm (also overturned), and pimping (for which he served a short prison sentence) suggest he was not exactly what you’d call a gentleman of good character - a suspicion borne out by his highly questionable attempts to use the publicity surrounding his arrest to launch a career in show business.

After a novelty pop single (released in Spain under the name ‘Waldemar El Vampiro’) failed to chart, Wohlfahrt appears to have turned to the film industry… which brings us to ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’.

Tastefully, the film was shot around Stuttgart, near to the locations of the real life crimes of which its star was accused, and its script is packed with references to the murders and to the details of Wohlfahrt’s highly publicised arrest… all of which proves a lot more interesting than anything which actually occurs on-screen in ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’, sad to say.

[Readers wishing to appraise themselves of the full details of this sordid affair are advised to consult either Ismael Fernandez’s booklet accompanying Mondo Macabro’s recent blu-ray release of the film, or David Flint & Adrian J. Martin’s audio commentary on the same disc.]

Meanwhile, another aspect of the film which helped to keep me engaged was its English dubbing, which is executed with a vibe of perfect, dead-pan absurdity which put me in mind of classics like ‘The Devil's Nightmare’ (1971).

This is perhaps best exemplified by the faux-British accent assigned to Count Oblensky (who has flown in from London to reclaim his ancestral seat), which has him preface every other remark with “I say..” or “Now look here..”, and also by the unfortunate decision to name the film’s vampire ‘Baron Winninger’ - invariably pronounced by the voice actors as ‘Baron Vinegar’.

Bonus points need to be awarded too for the bit where, having being asked a fairly reasonable question re: how come a coffin happens to be empty, a police detective responds, “there could be lots of reasons... why should I bother to explain? It's stupid!” A feeling keenly shared by everyone involved in the writing or translation of this film, I’m sure.

In a similar vein, I also liked Count Oblensky's weird insistence that, having taken possession of his family’s castle, he must act in strict adherence to the strange rules imposed in the will of his ancestor, who died in 1886. (I mean, who the hell does he think is going to take him to court to enforce them?)

As you’d hope, the wardrobe choices sported by both Wohlfahrt and leading lady Susan Carvasal (who, as the only female character who does anything other immediately stripping and dying, is introduced way after the film’s halfway point) are frequently jaw-dropping in their gaudy splendour, and, finally, I also really enjoyed the score, which contains several memorable cues composed by Spanish film music mainstay Angel Arteaga.

Most notable of these is an absolutely delightful, somewhat Morricone-esque piece for acoustic guitar, vibraphone and shrill female vocals which plays incessantly during the second half of the film, following Carvasal’s belated arrival. It’s a real ear worm, and I’d love to be able to obtain a copy on 7” or something. (“Love theme from The Horrible Sexy Vampire”, anyone?)

And…. that’s all I got. ‘The Horrible Sexy Vampire’, ladies and gents. You can meet him if you wish, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. (If nothing else, the disc will look good on the shelf.)

 

Hammer House of Horror: Charlie Boy (Robert Young, 1980)

Episode # 6! This one was very enjoyable.

After all the down at heel suburban atmos of the preceding episodes, we’ve finally got a big ol’ manor house on-screen right from the outset here (Hampden House in Bucks, for the record), furnished with an impressively opulent array of priceless antiques, and soon to be squabbled over by a clan of scheming toffs, when, during the pre-credits sequence, affable Lord of the Manor Sir Jack takes what I believe we’re obliged to call ‘the Rod Hull exit’, tumbling from the battlements as he fiddles with the TV aerial.

Were malign vibes emanating from an especially scary-looking fetish doll he had recently added to his collection of African art to blame? Well, we’re watching ‘Hammer House of Horror’ here, so what do you think?

In the aftermath of what seems to have been an unexpectedly contentious ‘reading of the will’, we join Sir Jack’s nephew, struggling aspirant movie producer Graham (Leigh Lawson), as he picks out a few favourites from the art collection he’s now inherited, whilst setting the rest aside to be flogged.

Much resentment is seemingly in the air, on account of the fact that Graham’s smug and entitled older brother Mark (Michael Culver) has been assigned the house and most of the dough, whilst Sir Jack’s loyal and long-serving housekeeper (and assumed romantic partner) Gwen (Frances Cuka) has been effectively disinherited - a situation exacerbated by the fact that Mark has cruelly decided to sack her with immediate effect for ‘getting ideas above her station’, thus cementing his reputation as a massive twat.

Whilst all this familial bother is brewing however, Graham’s girlfriend Sarah (Angela Bruce) finds herself unaccountably drawn to - yes - that same sinister fetish doll we saw the camera lurking around during the opening. Naming it “Charlie Boy”, she decides that the foul thing (which comes complete with the teeth of former victims hung around its neck and slits in its side for knives to be shoved into) is coming home with the couple to their swankily upholstered (yet comparatively modest) flat in Barnes.

Much could of course be made of the fact that writers Bernie Cooper & Francis Megahy decided that this week’s evil artefact from the darkest heart of the Congo should be latched onto by a black British character, but for better of for worse, this aspect of the story is never really explored.

To the episode’s credit - I suppose? - Sarah’s race is never exploited (or indeed even mentioned) by the script, and any suspicion of questionable intent is further undermined by Angela Bruce herself, who delivers a strong and engaging performance, her Geordie accent and no bullshit attitude clearly marking Sarah out as someone cut from a very different cloth to the sorry stereotypes of black characters generally featured in older British horror films (on the rare occasions on which they appeared at all).

Indeed, one of the key strengths of this episode is the fact that Sarah and Graham are such likeable and unconventional protagonists. For his part, Graham initially seems like a cardboard cut-out of the kind of ‘smarmy yuppie arsehole’ archetype which would become ubiquitous over the coming decade, but as we get to know him, he becomes a lot more sympathetic. He has turned away from a lucrative job in advertising to pursue a more satisfying (but far less profitable) career in the arts, and his choice of a black, working class life partner speaks for itself vis-à-vis his disenchantment with the expectations of his aristocratic family.

The same cannot be said however of brother Mark, who, in the grand tradition of Hammer horror’s own strange brand of Class War ideology, is a bullying, plummy-accented bastard who seems entirely fixated on breeding horses (never a good sign). And so, when he casually breaks off a handshake agreement he had previously made to provide funding for Graham’s dream of a new film studio, well… no prizes for guessing who’ll be first to get the chop.

Although ‘Charlie Boy’s “I inherited a voodoo doll” plotline is old as the hills, and the clumsy scripting necessitates some extraordinary leaps of logic on the part of the protagonists (“why, the doll must be killing people in the exact order in which they appear in this photograph”) - but, that aside, this episode’s execution is generally top notch.

In addition to the aforementioned cast of likeable/unusual characters, we’ve got some excellent production design (not least the fetish doll itself, which is quite a piece of work), plenty of satisfyingly bloody violence (Mark’s demise is an especially good ‘un, as you’d hope), and very strong, imaginative direction from Robert Young (which is perhaps no surprise, given that he had previously directed one of Hammer’s very best ‘70s films, ‘Vampire Circus’ (1972).)

For me, the highlight of the whole affair was probably the vaguely ‘Performance’-esque sequence in which a scar-faced East End villain who had previously menaced Graham & Sarah in a ‘road rage’ incident finds himself stabbed to death in a nightclub basement on ‘Charlie Boy’s behest. Bluntly intercut with footage of the lead couple making love, reflected in the glistening eyes of the fetish doll, his murder makes for a startling psychic juxtaposition of sex n’ violence which any theatrically released ‘70s/’80s horror film would have been proud of.



In short, best episode of HHoH thus far, I reckon.

Horror Express: In The Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021)

Shot in a remarkable fourteen days during the summer of 2020, when such concerns must have still felt quite scary and new, Ben Wheatley’s most recent horror film begins by using the conventions of old school British post-apocalyptic SF to casually outline the parameters of a world in which a pandemic has progressed in a considerably worse direction than the one we've all been living with for the past few years.

Our protagonist Martin (Joel Fry) has just emerged from four months in isolation, and is met by staff in hazmat suits and subjected to extensive - if inconsistently applied - health and hygiene checks before being allowed to enter the ‘sterile area’ within a lodge on the outskirts of a national park. We soon learn that granulated coffee has become a rare and valued commodity, and there is grim speculation about families fleeing the city to camp out in the forest (“Bristol was hit very badly in the third wave..”).

This unsettling human background gradually fades in importance though once Martin and park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) set out on foot through an expanse of ‘old growth’ woodland, with the aim of reaching the remote camp where Martin's former colleague Dr Wendel (Hayley Squires) has been alone for some months, conducting research on the possibility of boosting crop yields through stimulation of the neural networks within plant roots, or somesuch.

(I need to break my plot synopsisin’ here to note that I’m not sure I quite buy the idea that there are still areas of forest of the west of England so dense and inaccessible that they can also be reached through several days solid hiking, especially given that, when we eventually reach it, the doctor’s set-up is kitted out with at least a lorry-load of specialist equipment… but never mind, let’s just go with it.)

Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that the gruelling and terrifying events which Martin and Alma experience during their journey through the forest contain strong trace elements of a modern horror film, incorporating such checklist ticking essentials as axe-wielding psychos, forced incarceration, desperate fights for survival and an uncomfortable preoccupation with gruesome injury detail. 

Beyond that though, it’s easy to see why many viewers were disappointed with and/or perplexed by this film upon release (and the fact it was marketed by Univeral as a straight genre piece probably didn’t help).

What Wheatley has actually gone and done here, y’see, is to funnel a modest studio budget into making another totally zonked out, bad trip ‘head movie’, following a wafer-thin structure which at times put me in mind of ‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘Stalker’, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and Saul Bass's ‘Phase IV’, but that in essence can probably be traced all the way back to the grail myths or ancient Sumerian scriptures or whatever else.

Which is to say: Quest > confrontation/catharsis > revelation, basically. You know the score, I’m sure. (As a pattern for storytelling, it’s curiously compatible with the Marxists’ beloved “thesis / antithesis / synthesis” equation, isn’t it? But, that’s a big pile of navel-gazing for another day, I realise.)

What ‘In The Earth’ reminded me of more than anything though is Wheatley's own ‘A Field in England’ (2013). Indeed, it struck me that the core premise of both films is essentially the same; ie, a pair of innocents being coaxed into a fixed and inescapable rural space in which they are menaced and generally fucked with by a more-or-less insane practitioner of uncertain magickal arts, subjected to non-consensual drug experiences, forced to re-examine their conception of the laws which govern the universe, and at one point obliged to participate in a kind of supernatural tug of war.

Here though, that premise finds itself revisited and greatly expanded in a quasi-realistic contemporary setting, its impact amped up through the use of an extreme and confrontational cinematic aesthetic which basically seeks to replicate the textural & emotional experience of making multiple bad drug decisions at an experimental music festival (with added gory violence).

(In fact, seekers after an auteurist thread running through Wheatley’s work could even go further here, citing the fact that films as disparate as 2015’s ‘High Rise’ or 2017’s brilliant Free Fire also centre around the idea of a zero sum game of survival played out within a single, confined environment, in which characters gradually accumulate wounds and physical impairments as their determination to get out alive transmutes into a kind of despairing, entropic embrace of self-immolation.)

Thankfully though, the mere opportunity to crown Wheatley as the unwilling king of “closed environment injury movies” is pretty much the least interesting thing going on in ‘In The Earth’ - a film which, thematically-speaking, leaves all kinds of fascinating stuff floating around in the ether, just waiting to be plucked out by the critically engaged and/or stoned viewer.

In no particular order then, we’ve got: the nature of English identity and the malign/atavistic aspect of people’s connection to the land, the interplay of science, culture and ritual in understanding the natural environment, the fine line between learning from nature and being consumed by it, the unimaginable psychological impact of contact with non-human intelligence…. and probably a dozen other things besides.

Personally, I couldn’t help latching onto the fact that both of the ‘questers’ within the film are of mixed race / non-white ethnicity (and thus implicitly urban, as well as relatively young), whilst the two characters who have fully lost themselves to the atavistic forces stirred up within the the forest - dwelling within it and becoming at least somewhat crazed and dangerous as a result - are Anglo-Saxon, middle-aged, and recognisably middle class.

Filtering this through the dialectics currently in play within UK society, I couldn’t help but see this as some kind of exaggerated depiction of the underlying menace potentially experienced by bold young urbanites when (as they are want to do) they step out into the remoter depths of the countryside, perhaps seeking that uncanny frisson that comes from connection with the ancient, ancestral earth… only to find that, socially speaking, things have a tendency to get a bit weird, and not necessarily in a good way, as soon as they venture more than a few miles from the nearest train station.

I’m sure this was nowhere near the forefront of Wheatley’s mind when he was conceiving ‘In The Earth’, but, it’s definitely buried in there somewhere, waiting (if you’ll excuse the pun) to be unearthed. Indeed, quite what the film is trying to say about any of the stuff listed above remains nebulous and vague in the extreme; nothing is ever really unpacked or nailed down amid the onslaught of bloody forest mulch and editing room psychedelia.

In short then, it’s easy to see why so many people had such a negative reaction to this film. I appreciate that some viewers may find its style too emphatic and aggressive, or feel that its ideas are mixed up and under-developed to the point of being meaningless; and, they may have a point.

Likewise, Wheatley’s embrace of shop-soiled talismans of the ‘folk horror’ and ‘hauntology’ movements (cf: the film’s ‘Owl Service’ referencing standing stone, and the Julian House-styled faux-Penguin closing credits) may strike some as contrived and opportunistic, whilst the digital psychedelic freak-out effects which comprise much of the finale certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste (not least a few moments which throw caution to the wind and basically turn into a ‘90s new age / techno-pagan screensaver).

But, personally, none of these potential stumbling blocks bothered me. Hell, I enjoyed them! In fact, I got a lot out of the film on all levels. For my money, it’s arguably the most frightening, provocative and impactful film Wheatley has made to date. 

In the long run, I foresee it accumulating a more appreciative audience as the years go by, and in the short term, I imagine it will spend a long time lurking in the back of my mind, as the question of what it all “means” stews around in there, taking on new forms, drawing me to contemplate repeat viewings, in spite of the mild psychic trauma initiated by the first go-round.

Which is exactly what you’d expect of any good zonked out, bad trip ‘head movie’ really, isn't it?

Hammer House of Horror: The House That Bled To Death (Tom Clegg, 1980)

Episode # 5. Pretty cool title, eh? Could have made a good sequel to ‘The House That Dripped Blood’ in an alternate world. But anyway, yes - this is ‘the haunted house one’, much as you’d expect.

Director Tom Clegg’s sparse feature credits however include such hard-boiled items as ‘Sweeney 2’ (1978) and ‘McVicar’ (1980), so it’s perhaps not surprising that, in keeping with all preceding episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’, he and writer David Lloyd entirely forgo gothic/period atmos here, instead telling the quotidian tale of a young family who have the misfortune to move into a pebble-dashed suburban semi previously occupied by an old codger who cut up his missus with a pair of Gurkha knives, which, after being eerily rediscovered by the new occupants, remain ominously nailed up on the kitchen wall.

When it came to this episode, I confess I mainly found myself enthralled by the ambient details and textures of lower middle class British life circa 1980 which fill almost every second of screen time. This is more-or-less where I came from, but my memories are sketchy, so I couldn’t help just drinking it all in, thinking about the life lived by my parents, and their neighbours and friends, around the time of my birth.

Of course, unlike husband/father Nicholas Ball here, my old man didn’t look and act like an attempt to genetically cross-breed Mel Gibson and David Hemmings; there’s something fishy about that guy right from the start I thought, although the double denim outfit he wears to the first day of his gig as a hospital porter is admittedly pretty spectacular.

(And just imagine, incidentally, a world in which it was a reasonable expectation for a bloke who works as a porter to have not only managed to buy his own family home, but to support his wife, who can comfortably stay home caring for the kid and doing the shopping. Outdated patriarchal assumptions aside, and bearing in mind that we probably shouldn’t regard an episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ as a barometer of social realism, it gives you an insight into how sorely the lot of the common (wo)man has declined over the years, doesn't it?)

BUT ANYWAY. Horror-wise, most of this episode is pretty excruciating and/or boring to be honest, as the family’s daughter is traumatised by the highly suspicious death of her beloved cat (who seems to have eviscerated himself on a broken window), and as her parents meanwhile develop a creepily intimate passive/aggressive relationship with their across-the-road neighbours (TV stalwarts Pat Maynard and Brian Croucher - the latter so shifty and pervy he makes Ball seem like a paragon of trust in comparison).

But, it’s difficult to resist the show-stopping chaos of the central children's party drenched in blood set-piece, and the story’s final act brings forth a splendidly cynical, self-reflexive twist which I really enjoyed (but won’t spoil), closing on a note of vengeful nastiness worthy of a Pete Walker movie.

Gothic Originals / Exploito All’Italiana: Murder Obsession (Riccardo Freda, 1981)

An odd duck within the canon of Italian genre/exploitation directors by any measure, Riccardo Freda can often be a difficult character to really get an angle on.

On the one hand, he turned in two of the pre-eminent classics of ‘60s Italian gothic horror (The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock (1962), ‘The Ghost’ (1963)), and his extensive background in swashbucklers and historical epics ensured that his films always carry a dramatic, painterly visual flair and a rich sense of atmosphere. (Born in 1909, he had already been directing for nearly twenty years when he instigated his nation’s gothic horror cycle with ‘I Vampiri’ in 1957.)

At the same time though, he was also a slap-dash, inconsistent and self-sabotaging filmmaker with a highly divisive personality, as is evidenced by both long periods of inactivity his later years and the multitude of productions he walked away from or left unfinished (famously passing some of them on to his friend/protégé Mario Bava).

From the mid-‘60s onward in fact, even the work he did complete and sign off on is characterised by a woozy, rather incoherent/unfinished quality which makes it difficult to fully engage with.

All of these contrasting traits can be seen in spades in Freda’s swan-song, ‘Murder Obsession’ [‘Follia Omicida’], an intriguing but chronically uneven melange of classical gothic, giallo, supernatural horror and even slasher DNA first unleashed to bamboozle Italian audiences in February 1981.

Allegedly set in the UK, our tale here concerns movie actor Michael (Stefano Patrizi) who, along with his girlfriend Debora (Silvia Dionisio), travels to Surrey’s finest shadow-haunted Italianate palazzo to reunite with his mother Glenda (giallo veteran Anita Strindberg, who scarcely looks much older than Patrizi to be honest, but never mind) after many years of separation.

As per gothic tradition, Michael’s family pile turns out to be a decrepit, dust-enshrouded stone edifice with an intermittent electricity supply, presided over by deeply sinister man-servant (Oliver, played John Richardson from ‘Black Sunday’) who is expected to saw logs, tinker with fuse boxes, cook and serve all the food and prepare guest bedrooms at a moment’s notice whilst still finding time to lurk around every corner looking menacing.

Far more worryingly though, it also soon becomes clear that this is Michael’s first visit home since he inexplicably murdered his father (a celebrated musician and conductor, referred to by all and sundry as ‘il maestro’) whilst still a child, leaving his mother heartbroken and intermittently bed-ridden. Awkward.

And as if that weren’t uncomfortable enough, Debora is also forced to pretend to be Michael’s ‘secretary’ and is instructed to sleep alone in a pokey attic room, whilst the moody and reclusive lady of the house meanwhile fawns over her returned son as if he were a lost lover, repeatedly noting how much he resembles his long dead father.

In view of all this, it’s safe to say that a fun weekend in the countryside is not really on the cards for anyone, although a note of relative normality is at least sounded when a carload of victi -- I mean, uh, Michael and Debora’s glamorous film-making friends -- arrives on the scene, amongst their number such welcome Euro-cult faces as Martine Brochard and Laura Gemser.

Sad to say though that, despite all this, ‘Murder Obsession’s opening act feels like a bit of a bust (and not the kind that Gemser and Dionisio are frequently called upon to thrust in the general direction of the camera in an attempt to keep the presumed hetero-male audience engaged, either).

On the plus side, the film certainly inherits some of the grand, aristocratic sweep of Freda’s earlier horror classics, successfully adapted here for a lower budget production shot primarily on location. Some of the photography (by Cristiano Pogany) is painstakingly gorgeous, whilst the atmospheric potential of the echoing footsteps, vast, empty spaces and flickering candlelight of the palazzo are all expertly utilised.

That aside though… sigh. The pacing is leaden, the gossamer-thin plotting is both vague and boring, and the acting (particularly from Patrizi) is stilted and disengaged.

Most dreary of all though is the musical score, credited to the usually reliable Franco Mannino, who had frequently worked with Freda during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Largely consisting of indifferently recorded renditions of Bach and Liszt solo piano pieces, it really got on my wick.

Of course, Freda had gone to solo piano route before, with 1969’s ‘Double Face’ [‘A Doppia Faccia’]. On that film though, he’d had a haunting theme and sympathetic playing from the great Nora Orlandi to help him out. Here by contrast, we have to put up with hearing some of the film’s wildest and most intense sequences accompanied by (as Jonathan Rigby notes in Euro Gothic) a school assembly-level recitation of ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Not to rag on J.S. Bach or anything, but it’s a drag, man.

A more propulsive, contemporary horror score could really have given this film a welcome shot in the arm, especially through the rather lugubrious first half, during which Freda seems entirely uninterested in furnishing his public with any of the exploitation goodies a horror crowd in the early 1980s might reasonably have expected.

But, fear not. ‘Murder Obsession’ does at least get a lot better - by which I mean crazier, basically - as it goes along.

Mirroring the unusual ‘massive halfway point freak-out’ structure utilised in Freda’s penultimate horror film ‘Tragic Ceremony’ (originally released as - deep breath - ‘Estratto Dagli Archivi Segreti della Polizia di Una Capitale Europea’ (phew) in 1972), we’re suddenly roused from our languor when - ironically - we’re plunged into Debora’s head as she recounts the mother of all nightmares to Michael in the cold light of morning.

The ensuing dream sequence constitutes a ten minute(!) explosion of absolutely all the bat-shit / brilliant horror imagery a Euro-horror fan could possibly wish for, and which ‘Murder Obsession’ has so conspicuously failed to provide to this point.

This includes (but is not limited to) a black-gloved killer, pus-drooling zombie cultists, a ridiculous ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’ style giant spider, a rubber bat attack, a wall of skulls with bleeding eye sockets, a lengthy sequence in which Dionisio runs through fog-drenched, swampy undergrowth with her breasts hanging out of her flimsy nightie, getting sliced up by loose branches, and, finally, a scene in which she is tied to one of those classic X-shaped wooden frames and forced to drink the blood of a black cockerel as part of a black mass.

Good grief! It’s as if Freda had made a list of every kind of clichéd horror situation he’d quite like to include in his film… and then just threw them all together randomly to get it all out of the way in one go. (In a nice nod to Italio-horror heritage, this sequence also features prominent usage of a variation on the Bava family’s patented ‘wobbly glass’.)

After this, the second half of ‘Murder Obsession’ is more liberally dosed with good ol’ fashioned Italio-horror delirium (and indeed, murder, and obsession), as we get to enjoy flashbacks to a number of ‘Rashomon’-like variations on the ‘Deep Red’-esque primal scene which may or may not have precipitated the death of Michael’s father, prompting Michael to start to lose his grip on reality, as the film’s assigned cannon fo -- I mean, uh, glamorous friends -- simultaneously begin to be meet their inevitable, gory demise.

Most memorably, Michael finds Laura Gemser slaughtered next to him when he awakens following an adulterous, lake-side tryst, whilst meanwhile, Oliver the handyman has taken to conspicuously lugging a chainsaw up and down the palazzo’s crumbling staircases, and we also need to deal with the belated revelation that Michael’s mother is in fact a freakin’ SATANIST.

In the context of all this irrational, oneiric goodness, ‘Murder Obsession’ totally abandons the glum, self-serious air which dragged down some of its early scenes, even allowing the film’s astonishing parade of continuity blunders and production design SNAFUs to become rather endearing, instead of merely infuriating.

Chief amongst these is probably Gemser’s role as the most egregious ‘breathing corpse’ in cinema history. Which is not just nit-picking on my part, I’d like to make clear; I mean, she is not just breathing a bit when she is supposed to be playing dead - it’s as if she’d just finishing running a couple of laps around the castle’s grounds when Freda commanded her to lie down and act still and lifeless!

Elsewhere, the traditional gothic horror reveal of a hidden portrait of Michael’s father is rather spoiled by the fact that it seems to consist of a xeroxed photo of Patrizi pasted onto a background of random colours, and you’d need to be a pretty tolerant viewer not to remark on the tendency of John Richardson’s costume to change from a formal white uniform to a flamboyant red shirt between shots as he serves dinner to the palazzo’s guests.

Clearly, these are the kind of clangers which no remotely committed director would ever send to the lab for printing - much less a filmmaker like Freda, who had spent nearly four decades behind the camera at this point. Which leads us to speculate on what the hell he was up to here. Was he sending a message to his producers, letting them know that he was done with this stupid film? Or, was he just signalling to his audience that nothing here was meant to be taken remotely seriously?

Either way, such moments of amateurishness clash markedly with other parts of the film, which were clearly crafted with great care and attention, not least Debora’s discovery of Martine Brochard’s character’s body, and her subsequent flight through a thunder storm, which recalls the vibrancy of Bava’s ‘Blood & Black Lace’, and the breathtaking tableau towards the end of the film wherein a shot of the prone Michael reclining across his mother’s knees is staged to recreate the majesty of Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Pietà (1498-99), an image enhanced here by almost Caravaggio-like use of subdued colours and shadow.

As with the film’s anachronistic musical score, could such classical allusions represent attempts on the part of an elderly filmmaker to smuggle elements of the culture he really loved and valued into an example of the popular genre cinema in which he’d make his name decades earlier, but which he had subsequently come to despise..?

If so, it was likely a doomed effort, given how thoroughly such gestures are overwhelmed by the film’s deranged smorgasbord of gratuitous nudity, bloody violence and jarring tonal and narrative inconsistencies.

Though hugely enjoyable for fans of the more eccentric and outlandish end of Italian horror, ‘Murder Obsession’ is ultimately a dishevelled and confused refugee, not just from the austere gothic horrors of the 1960s, but also from the ‘Erotic Castle Movie’ cycle of the ‘70s, finding itself staring down the barrel of a notably unsympathetic new decade with no plan in mind except panic, flight and desperate self-immolation.

In all likelihood, we’ll never know just what was going through Riccardo Freda’s mind as he called ‘action’ and ‘cut’ on his set for the final time in his long career. But then, he always was a bit of an odd duck… which I think is where we came in.

Hammer House of Horror: Growing Pains (Francis Megahy, 1980)

Fourth episode in the series, and I’ll bang through it quickly, as I think this was the weakest to date.

Gary Bond (the lead from ‘Wake in Fright’ (1971)) is a borderline mad scientist, busy creating artificial food stuffs to ease world hunger and testing them out on super-cute giant rabbits in his home laboratory. His wife (Barbara Kellerman from Norman J. Warren’s ‘Satan's Slave’ (1975)) is some kind of philanthropist raising funds for assorted charities.

Pre-credits, the couple’s young son wanders into his Dad’s lab, eats some random stuff from a jar, freaks out, dies. So, the grieving parents replace him by adopting a weird, affectless kid with a bad attitude from the nearest children’s home.

Their new son either has telekinetic powers, is possessed by the ghost of their dead son, or some combination of the two. (Simple though the plot is, I didn't quite get what was supposed to be going on here.)

The rather mean-spirited message here seems to be that, whilst these rich, do-gooding parents are off solving the world’s ills, they've forgotten to give either of their children the love and attention they need, so thus they must suffer (as if their first son dying wasn't punishment enough).

It’s all a rather glum business, leavened with dead rabbits and poisoned dogs (all fake, of course, but still not exactly my idea of top flight entertainment), which leaves a somewhat unpleasant taste in the mouth.

I fell asleep a bit towards the end, so I think I might have missed the gist of the surprise ending. I should go back and check before posting this really, but… is there really much to be gained?

Probably better just to move on to potentially more rewarding future episodes with exciting names like ‘The Carpathian Eagle’ and ‘The House that Bled to Death’...

Horror Express: Glorious (Rebekah McKendry, 2022)

This was my first time venturing into the blighted realm of ‘a Shudder original’, but Rebekah McKendry’s third feature as director got a rave from Denis at The Horror!? weblog, which was all it took to persuade me to dive in.

So essentially, ‘Glorious’ starts off as a rather pleasing high concept oddity; fleeing from a catastrophic break-up, a sad-sack, emotionally strung-out man named Wes (Ryan Kwanten) finds himself forcibly confined to the bathroom of a remote highway rest stop, with only a Lovecraftian Elder God in the adjoining cubicle for company.

The God is named something along the lines of GHATANOUTHUA (its explanation of how to correctly enunciate this provides one of the film’s comic highlights), and it speaks to Wes in deep, sonorous, ingratiating tones (courtesy of veteran character actor J.K. Simmons).

Ghat (as it will subsequently be known) won’t let Wes leave, because it needs something from him in order to complete a ritual which will prevent it being trapped in sanity-shatteringly horrible corporeal form, and thus avoid the ensuing annihilation of all life in the universe (that being the purpose for which Ghat was originally brought into being by the indifferent creator of our material realm).

Could the ‘something’ Ghat requires from his mortal prisoner possibly involve the glory hole in the side of the God’s cubicle...?

By and large, the cosmic horror stuff ‘Glorious’ is very well done, and the decision to illustrate mind-bogglingly vast, abstract concepts via ‘Watership Down’-esque animated animated devotional drawings and toilet stall graffiti proves effective, both greatly enhancing the movie’s visual / psychedelic appeal and helping communicate some pretty out-there metaphysical concepts to the audience with a minimum of fuss.

The film’s script (for which Todd Rigney, Joshua Hull and David Ian McKendry all share writing credit) seems to draw pretty heavily on August Derleth’s more orderly / gnostic reinterpretation of the Cthulhu Mythos, which I’m not generally a big fan of, but as this one is strictly ‘non-canon’ and exists within the context of its own cosmology, I’ll give it a pass.*

Indeed, it is the conflict between Lovecraft’s trademark cosmic nihilism and the idea of there being a kind of moral balance to the universe which eventually fuels much of the film’s drama - which may sound like heavy-going on paper, but again, is actually all unpacked quite casually, with a minimum of self-serious pretention, which I appreciated.

That said, this one does rather sag in the middle, despite an admirably concise 79 minute run-time, with the travails of one unhappy man speaking to a disembodied voice in a grubby location inevitably threatening to degenerate into some kind of self-exploratory / avant garde solo theatre piece from time to time.

Meanwhile, whilst avoiding spoilers, I also need to note that the film’s final act centres around a plot twist which I just plain could not buy, and which indeed seemed to me to undermine the essential points about human nature which the movie seems to be trying to articulate elsewhere. (Pure speculation on my part, but perhaps director McKendry felt similarly, as the revelation of said twist is handled in a fairly ambiguous / off-hand manner, as if the filmmakers' hearts weren't really in it..?)

But, regardless - ‘Glorious’ nonetheless remains a really interesting and thought-provoking low budget effort which never forgets to time time-out for a few good laughs and some crowd-pleasing gore amidst its high-falutin’ philosophical musings; well worth a watch, especially for my fellow Lovecraft nuts out there in blog-land.

--

* For some quick background on the controversy surrounding Derleth’s take on the Mythos, try here?

Hammer House of Horror: Rude Awakening (Peter Sasdy, 1980)

Episode #3 of ‘Hammer House of Horror’, turns out to be another Peter Sasdy joint, and, if The Thirteenth Reunion proved a bit sub-par, this one is just, well… weird. Which is probably an improvement.

Basically, what we have here is a ‘dream within a dream’ / ‘unpeeling the layers of the onion’ type affair, wherein sleazy provincial estate agent Norman Shenley (Denholm Elliot, no less) wakes up to face the hatchet-faced harridan of a wife who refuses to grant him the luxury of an easy divorce (Pat Heywood), before he heads off to his high street office, there to be greeted by perky, fashion-forward secretary Lolly (Lucy Gutteridge), with whom he may or may not be having an affair.

Then, a saturnine man (James Laurenson) enters, invites Shenley to undertake a valuation on a remote, antique property, wherein a variety of scary and inexplicable things (eg, conversations with Edwardian ghosts, close encounters with a wrecking ball, etc) occur…. at which point, Norman awakens once again, realises he was still dreaming, and the whole cycle starts again with the details shifted round a bit. Meanwhile, the memory of him having murdered his wife at some point constantly looms somewhere in the background…

Although this one initially seems like more of a ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ type affair than a real horror tale, those expecting a concrete, ‘twist in the tale’ type explanation for Elliot’s descent through the annals of delirium will be disappointed.

Are these all guilt-addled hallucinations he’s experiencing in a padded cell, or whilst undergoing experimental brain surgery? Has he just plain gone nuts? Or, are the other characters conspiring to drive him crazy?

Each of these possibilities is implied at some point (the latter, intriguingly, when Lolly the secretary exchanges some potentially conspiratorial banter with a policeman and furtively pockets the diamond necklace the crazed Norman gifted her, after he is hauled away for his wife’s murder), but in the end, the precisely reasons for our protagonist’s immersion in a walking dream-state are allowed to remain ambiguous. We’re never really given any clear, cut-and-dried explanation of what’s been going here, or any reassurance that the ‘reality’ presented to us in this final scenes s really what it seems.

Some may be inclined to see this as mere lazy / undercooked scripting on the part of writer Gerald Savory, but really, this episode seems to have been intended less as a neatly resolved short story than as a very strange mood piece.

It is noteworthy, I think, that whilst all three episodes of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ we’ve viewed thus far have rejected the kind of gothic/period imagery one might have expected this series to embrace, at the same time they’ve been united by their determination to explore a variety of mid-20th century British suburban/commuter-town lifestyles and stereotypes, and ‘Rude Awakening’ in particular puts this element centre-stage - even though it’s chosen subjects seem to date from a somewhat older vintage than 1980.

In essence, this episode spends the bulk of its run-time repeatedly dissembling and re-contextualising a set of archetypes pulled straight from those one-panel cartoons which used to be so ubiquitous in men’s magazines, tabloids and the like: the lecherous small businessman, the sexy secretary, the vengeful, rolling pin-wielding wife.

All of these figures have long been left in the rear view mirror our 21st century culture (and probably rightly so), which makes it all the more curious to see them all resurrected here, lost in a cyclical, ever-changing fugue as they move from dream to dream like some low rent / low ambition variation on the cast from Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories.

In more practical terms, ‘Rude Awakening’ is at least very well put together, with snappy, colourful (perhaps deliberately cartoon-ish?) direction from Sasdy matched to a memorably sweaty, dithering central performance from Elliot, who plays up his character’s gradual descent into madness with just the right balance of simpering camp and hyper-ventilating hysteria.

Gutteridge too is great value as Lolly the secretary, clearly having a wail of a time in wardrobe & make-up as she adopts a different, equally eye-popping look for each of her boss’s ‘dreams’, dressing up at various points like a London ’76 style punkette, a Marilyn Monroe / Diana Dors type, a St Trinian’s schoolgirl and… well I’m not really sure what the scarlet silk two-piece and blonde afro wig get-up she’s got on through the episode’s longest sequence is supposed to be all about, but it looks pretty cool.

All in all then, a bit of a head-scratcher, but an intriguing and enjoyable one nonetheless.

Horror Express: The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (David Kramarsky / Roger Corman, 1955)

Over the past few years, I’ve got into the habit of tuning in to ‘50s American sci-fi/monster movies for a dose of comforting, mid-week escapism. Perhaps it’s just me, but somehow, that distinctive combination of remote desert town settings, flat, TV-style staging, woozy theremin music, reassuring techno-babble, clean-cut squaresville vibes and that distant patina of eerie, cold war paranoia… all of this just goes down perfectly with a whisky & soda after a hard day in the office (and the short run-times help, too).

Imagine my consternation then when 1955 ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ brutally overturned my expectations. Despite boasting Roger Corman as an executive producer (and uncredited director), the opening half hour of this extremely low budget, Palm Springs-shot outing feels a world away from the cheery hi-jinks of Not of This Earth or It Conquered the World. Instead, it presents us with a vignette of bleak, psychologically harrowing b-movie existentialism which Corman’s later collaborator Richard Matheson would have been proud of.

Our setting is an isolated, family-run ranch which has been steadily losing money for three years, or so husband/father Allan (Paul Birch) tells us in voiceover. He feels like a failure, having lost his family’s affections as a result of this financial turmoil, but is unable to find a way to reverse their sorry fate.

Allan’s shrewish wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) is meanwhile introduced to us as a seething vortex of negativity. Trapped in a kitchen she clearly hates with every ounce of her being, she spends her days labouring away at the Sisyphean task of trying to bake cakes, repeatedly burning them, and flying into a rage as a result.

So bitter is Carol that she won’t even allow the couple’s teenage daughter Sandy (Dona Cole) to leave to go to college. “Why should she get the chances I never got?”, she demands to know. Sandy in turn bitterly resents her mother for condemning her to a life of drudgery on the isolated ranch, all culminating in an atmosphere which at times feels as suffocating and inescapable as the pit in which the characters toil in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s existentialist classic ‘Woman of the Dunes’ (1964).

As if all this wasn’t bad enough meanwhile, the family’s problems are silently observed by a lumbering, mute simpleton (Leonard Tarver) who - for reasons that are not really made sufficiently clear until the film’s conclusion - lives in a shack adjoining their house.

Charmingly, this fellow is known to the family simply as “Him” (“he can’t tell us his name, assuming he ever had one,” Sandy sneers), and he seems to spend much of his time shivering on an unkempt mattress next to wall covered in girly pictures - when he’s not spying on the family members or lurking about with a wood axe, that is. Allan insists that “He” is harmless, but the women aren’t so sure, treating him with a mixture of fear and outright contempt.

At the heart of this tsunami of bad vibes, Allan himself remains an inert, helpless figure. Staring out into the desert, he meditates on the threat posed by the dry, lifeless expanse which stretches beyond the limits of his unhappy homestead. “Maybe the hate started out THERE…,” he muses, gazing at gleaming animal bones in the sand.

Already living in vision of the American Dream transfigured into a hermetically-sealed, loveless hellscape, it’s safe to say the last thing any of these folks need is the arrival of a Beast with a Million Eyes. Thoughtfully though, when the film’s allotted visitor from another world does eventually make an appearance, it does so in a manner which initially feels more annoying than actively apocalyptic.

The Beast’s ship (or meteorite, or whatever it is - the nature of the vessel is never really made clear) overshoots the ranch house, breaking all the windows, and shattering Carol’s beloved glassware. Her sense of futile, outraged frustration in the face of this inexplicable domestic calamity feels horribly palpable; as she gazes forlornly at the shards of a water jug, it honestly feels for a moment or two that she might be about to slash her wrists.

Long before it deigns to make any kind of physical appearance however, it becomes clear that The Beast’s modus operandi involves taking psychic control whatever ‘inferior’ intelligences happen to be hanging about in its general vicinity of its landing zone, dispatching them on malign and destructive missions on its behalf. (Herein lies the rationale for the creature’s purported “million eyes”, or so I’m assuming, as it sees through the optics of all the local insects and animals, etc etc.).

So, first a flock of suicidal birds attacks Allan’s station wagon, before the film reaches what is surely it’s nadir (in both emotional and cinematic terms) during a sequence in which the family’s beloved sheepdog Duke allegedly ‘turns bad’ under the influence of the alien entity and attempts to attack Carol whilst she is alone in the house.

I should clarify that, up to this point, ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ has been reasonably well made on its own low budget terms, but the problem here is that the production obviously had no means of creating the illusion that poor old Duke had gone crazy / become rabid. True, they manage to rustle up a few close-up insert shots of him growling and bearing his teeth, but in the long shots which comprise the majority of the scene, he just looks like a normal, happy doggie, making Carol’s decision to run screaming in fear and subsequently blast him with a shotgun seem entirely inexplicable in visual terms - as well as making us hate her even more in the process - even as we grudgingly acknowledge the idea the script is trying to convey.

Strangely, the catharsis caused by Duke’s death (along with the impact of the other low level disasters the family have suffered) somehow succeeds in bringing them back together, allowing them to escape the depressive fug in which they were previously trapped and reminding them of the familial bond they all share -- and it is here that the essential point of Tom Filer’s screenplay finally becomes clear.

It is soon noted, y’see, that the alien’s hypnotic powers only have an effect on people when they are alone. When we’re together, when we have LOVE, we’re safe! (Like all malign invaders/super-computers/killer robots etc, the Beast is flummoxed by by the concept of love, although its clumsy voiceover here at least acknowledges a distant, historical memory of such a thing once existing on its long-dead home planet.)

Corny as it may seem in retrospect, this grand theme is actually quite effectively unpacked by Filer’s script, aided by a set of characterisations which are more multi-faceted and psychologically realistic than those generally encountered in ‘50s monster movies. Crucially, the core idea that, beneath all the dysfunctions and resentments inherent in family life, we still share an unbreakable bond with our relatives and life partners, is allowed to develop naturally here, rather than just being preached in our general direction, as was more standard in this genre/era.

Unfortunately however, nobody thought to include poor old “Him” in the group hugs, so… you can probably guess how that whole plotline plays out, although there is at least quite an interesting, socio-political twist thrown in vis-à-vis the revelation of who the hell “He” actually is, which I won’t spoil for you here.

Thematically speaking, I found this story’s emphasis on the virtues of togetherness - and its implied rejection of individual agency - quite interesting, in view of the anti-communist / pro-‘freedom’ ideology which (in allegorical terms at least) was pretty much obligatory in American SF films of this era.

But then, if you look at it another way, I suppose the alien entity’s attempt to create a kind of invasive hive mind provides just as good a stand-in for the Reds as anything else, so ok - fair enough. Nothing to see here folks, just a bit of unusually thoughtful ambiguity on the part of the scriptwriter - let’s move on.

Of course, the philosophical resonance and character drama in ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ could have soared to Shakespearean heights of achievement, and it still wouldn’t have saved the film from living in reviled infamy in the minds of the millions of ‘50s monster kids who presumably sat bored out their minds in matinee screenings, demanding to know: where in the fucking hell is the Beast with a Million Eyes?!

Legend has it that this was also the reaction of producer James H. Nicholson, whose American Releasing Corporation financed and distributed the film shortly before morphing into the legendary American International Pictures. True to form, they already had the movie pre-booked with title and poster artwork ready to go, so…. WTF are you trying to do to us here, Roger?

Having committed the cardinal sin of turning in a monster movie without a monster, ‘executive producer’ Corman was thus allegedly dispatched to make right on his mistake with a mere $200 in hand, hooking up with master monster sculptor Paul Blaisdell to produce… well, for the most part, they seem to have resorted to just using a kettle with some flashing lights on the top, to be honest.

Seen in insert shots earlier in the film, this object seems very small (like some kind of sensor or radio receiver or something?), so when we see the surviving characters approach it during the film’s final minutes and discovering that it is actually supposed to be big - like, a spaceship, with a monster in it - the effect is disorientating.

When the door on the side of thing finally opens, we belatedly get a 30 second glimpse of some kind of scary, brain-headed monster thing (with TWO eyes, for the record), somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the same year’s ‘This Island Earth’. In an attempt to boost the impact of this revelation, these shots are super-imposed with the image of a big, throbbing eyeball, lending them a rather wild, proto-psychedelic quality which could, at a stretch, perhaps be seen as a very early indicator of the direction Corman’s directorial work would take during the 1960s.

All this is actually quite cool, and psychotronic as heck, but it’s likely audiences at the time merely saw it as a load of cheapjack crap - a pathetic, last minute attempt to try to justify the movie’s title and poster artwork, delivering far too little, far too late -forever condemning ‘Beast..’ to the lowest rungs of the monster movies canon.

Viewed with nearly 70 years-worth(!) of hindsight however, ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ feels like a more-than-respectable addition to the Corman/AIP catalogue. Sure, it suffers more than usual from budgetary constraints, and the lack of a tight directorial hand on the reins allows some extremely clumsy elements (eg, the dog scene and the monster’s ridiculous voiceover) to make it into the final cut, but at the same time, the film’s strong writing and well-rounded characters nonetheless keep us engaged throughout.

As such, it to some extent helped establish a formula which Corman would re-visit again and again over the next few years, with increasing confidence and success each time around. In marking the start of this cycle, it deserves to be viewed sympathetically as a minor landmark in American genre cinema, as well as for its own not insignificant points of interest.

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!

Horror Express: The Climax (George Waggner, 1944)

Mild horror elements and the presence of Boris Karloff provide intermittent points of interest in this otherwise justifiably forgotten Universal Technicolor spectacular, which seems to have been conceived largely as a means to squeeze a bit more revenue out of the set dressing, costumes and female lead from the studio’s commercially successful 1943 version of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’.

It tells you something about the extent to which tastes change over the decades that, back in the ’40s, someone at Universal apparently emerged from a screening of the already notoriously watered down ‘Phantom..’ remake and thought, “you know what that needed? Less mystery, less of that guy in the mask - more singing and frilly dresses.”

Even by the standards of a frothy musical melodrama, the narrative here feels woefully half-hearted - a grab-bag of poverty row clichés and rehashed ‘Phantom..’ elements, devoid of any real suspense or surprise. As for the film’s frequent, and lengthy, musical numbers meanwhile…. christ almighty.

I mean, I’m certainly no opera buff, but even if I had ambitions in that direction, I’m pretty sure that a series of light comic librettos written by the director of ‘The Wolf Man’ would probably not be the best place to begin my education, especially when performed by Susanna Foster in glass-shatteringly shrill fashion.

Indeed, it’s pretty difficult to buy the idea that Karloff’s brooding, self-serious character would give a hoot about the performance of the kind of chintzy, insipid material which apparently comprises his opera house’s bread and butter.

(In case you were wondering, Karloff portrays a sinister doctor employed by the opera house to minster to its performers. Some years back, he throttled his one true love - a preternaturally gifted soprano - to death, and has subsequently led a furtive existence as a kind of love-lorn closet psychopath, determined to ensure no one performs her signature piece, ‘The Magic Voice’.)

On the plus side, the film’s Technicolor photography is pretty ravishing, and, even if the stage performances and backstage stuff is sometimes a bit eye-watering, the darker scenes in Karloff’s office / lair convey a hazy, mouldy kind of atmosphere which puts me in mind of Warner Bros’ early ‘30s colour horrors (cf: Doctor X).

It’s interesting too meanwhile to see '40s Universal horror’s specialist in *cough* ‘ethnic’ roles, Turhan Bey, cast here as the earnest romantic lead, in which capacity he proves quite likeable (certainly moreso than the bland, whitebread chumps who usually occupy such roles).

It’s also a nice surprise to see Karloff getting the chance to play a flat-out malevolent, Svengali-esque villain here, rather than the ‘sympathetic, bumbling scientist’ bit he usually ended up trotting out during periods in which horror was out of fashion. As with Claude Rains in the previous year’s ‘Phantom..’, his performance is actually pretty brilliant - a “worth the entry price alone” level plus point, assuming you can tune out all the rubbish that’s going on around him and concentrate instead upon his vengeful, soft-spoken glowering.

The wild, Vaseline-lensed opening flashback sequence, in which Karloff’s character viciously disposes of his aforementioned one-true-love, is likewise pretty damn great, with the OTT colours and lighting effects lending a bit of a ‘50s exotica kind of feel to proceedings, whilst the malicious doctor’s eventual downfall in the final reel also has a nice gothic kick to it, pre-empting the fiery denouements routinely inflicted upon Vincent Price in Corman’s Poe cycle a generation later.

Outside of that ten minutes-or-so of rewarding screentime however, I fear ‘The Climax’ stands as a cultural artefact whose relevance as an entertainment for humans has long since dried up and crumbled to dust. Here in our benighted 21st century, it’s a recommendation for Universal/Karloff completists who don't mind keeping a finger on the ‘fast forward’ button only, I suspect.