Noir Diary # 16: The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)

 Even before he achieved card-carrying ‘auteur’ status following his celebrated collaborations with Harold Pinter, Joseph Losey already had a long history of turning genre conventions outside out. Early American films like psychological noir ‘The Prowler’ (1951) and anti-war allegory ‘The Boy With Green Hair’ (1948) were already total one-offs, and, after the blacklist forced his relocation to the UK, he was soon busy turning humble crime programmer ‘Time Without Pity’ (1957) into an exhausting treatise on post-industrial anxiety, before instigating an unprecedented mash-up of JD youth movie, Kneale-esque science fiction and cold war existentialism in 1962’s extraordinary ‘The Damned’.

All of which makes it interesting to consider just how uncharacteristically normal Losey’s three early collaborations with iconic Welsh tough guy star Stanley Baker turned out to be. The first film they made together, 1959’s ‘Blind Date’ [hastily reviewed on this blog way back in the mists of time] is a stylish but unremarkable whodunit, whilst 1962’s ‘Eve’ [ditto] may have allowed Baker to stretch his thespian wings a little, but is otherwise just a frothy continental melodrama, feeling uncomfortably like a strained British attempt to catch a whiff of post-‘La Dolce Vita’ decadence.

By far the strongest entry in this loose trilogy, 1960’s ‘The Criminal’, is, as its title suggests, just about as generic a crime movie (gangster & prison sub-divisions) as can possibly be imagined. Credited to playwright and future ‘Hard Day’s Night’ screenwriter Alun Owen, from an original draft by Jimmy Sangster, the script manages to trot out a formidable assemblage of hoary old clichés, as Baker’s London-Irish mob boss Johnny Bannion drifts in and out of the slammer whilst punishing his enemies, executing an audacious racetrack heist, hiding the loot, instigating a passionate affair with his ex-girlfriend’s flatmate (Margit Saad), and eventually being betrayed by his trusted right hand man (Losey’s fellow ex-pat Sam Wanamaker).

Could it have been Baker himself who reined in Losey’s more outré tendencies on these projects, I wonder? After all, he got his parallel career as a producer of no nonsense action-adventure pictures off to a flying start with ‘Zulu’ (1964) just a few years later. Indeed, ‘The Criminal’ plays to a great extent like one of the projects its leading man went on to produce (not least the similarly themed ‘Robbery’ (1967)), mixing a sense of raw nerve energy with dour, realistic brutality, whilst showcasing the talents of an extraordinary cast of character players.

Whatever the behind-the-scenes balance of power may have been though, Losey’s presence can still be felt, especially during the film’s prison sequences, which were shot on a vast purpose-built set modelled after the Victorian edifice of HMP Wandsworth (the genuine article was used for exteriors). Though impressively realistic in most respects, this set allows Losey - aided no doubt by cinematographer Robert Krasker, a veteran of Carol Reed’s ‘Odd Man Out’ and ‘The Third Man’ - to frame the action in suitably expressionistic, Kafkaesque fashion, dialling up the claustrophobia to an uncomfortable degree as he obsessively explores the complex power dynamics at play between the inmates and wardens.

In this respect, it would be easy to file ‘The Criminal’ away as the UK’s answer to Jules Dassin’s ‘Brute Force’ (1947) or Jacques Becker’s ‘Le Trou’ (1960). A more relevant point of comparison however might be Raoul Walsh’s classic ‘White Heat’ (1949), which is echoed here in the ‘out-and-in-and-out-again’ structure of the prison story, as well as by the steady accumulation of tension through the film, the betrayal/paranioa tropes and the intermittent outbursts of vein-popping male hysteria.

More importantly for its director perhaps, ‘The Criminal’ also shares with Walsh’s film the underlying notion that its tormented, working class anti-hero never really gets to experience true freedom, finding himself imprisoned just as much by the strictures of the ruthless socio-economic system which defines his actions on the ‘outside’ as he is by the more literal bars and truncheons which confine him on the ‘inside’.

Unpacking all that would be quite enough to keep most filmmakers busy, but Losey, being Losey, also insists on intermittently trying to punch through to the audience via some woefully self-conscious application of Brechtian distancing technique.

This can be most clearly seen during the ‘home-coming’ party which follows Bannion’s initial release from prison, when all music and sound effects suddenly cut out to announce the entrance of his estranged girlfriend Maggie (Jill Bennett). As the assembled partygoers split off to either side and observe her subsequent hysterical outburst like a bemused Greek chorus, what should rightfully be a fairly troubling, low key character exchange is instead imbued with the feel of a ‘West Side Story’-esque ritual showdown. Later in the film meanwhile, an emotionally troubled prisoner is allowed to deliver a long, introspective monologue direct to camera, staring fixedly at the lens in close up as the background shifts out of focus behind him.

In fairness to Losey, he soon found other, better ways to imbue his characters with an inner life, and even managed to incorporate these jarring techniques into his later, more formally experimental, films to great effect. Here though, surrounded by the dour (albeit exaggerated) naturalism of London’s criminal underworld, these attention-grabbing cinematic affectations just seem absurd, bordering on camp - which is frankly the last thing anyone needed, in a movie which was still predicated largely on the simple pleasures of watching Stanley Baker punch people in the face.

Speaking of which, Baker may have railed against being typecast in ‘hard man’ parts in subsequent years (three films in five years with ‘Hell’ in the title will do that for you, I suppose), but for those of us who love the hard-boiled persona he brought to British crime/noir cinema of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, rest assured - we’re pretty much at Peak Stanley with ‘The Criminal’, and it’s beautiful thing to behold, even as he’s hamstrung to some extent by the necessity of slurring his trademark Welsh baritone to attempt some semblance of an Irish accent.

Essentially, Baker lends Johnny Bannion the feel of a man who, above all else, simply wants to be alone, but is cursed to be forever surrounded by other men (and even more troublingly, women) - scheming, wheedling and generally getting in his grill, 24/7. Left to his own devices, we assume, he’d be happy to remain in his outrageously decorated London penthouse, brooding over his impressive collection of jazz LPs; but alas, it’s not to be.

Lest we think we’re dealing with some Jean Gabin-esque sensitive, aesthetically-minded gangster here however, please note that Bannion has a life size photo of a nude model pasted on the back of his bathroom door, and when he is forced to resort to violence (which, of course, is frequently), there is a pure, underhanded street-fighting nastiness to his conduct which is genuinely frightening, whether belting a guard with his hand-cuffed wrists as makes an escape from a prison van, or (in one of the movie’s highlights) reducing a pair of hulking, feckless thugs who have been assigned as his cellmates to tearful agony in a matter of seconds.

Great as he is though, Baker is in constant danger of being upstaged by the rest of the ‘The Criminal’s top drawer cast of cinematic reprobates - not least BITR hero and Losey’s fellow Brechtian, Patrick Magee, getting stuck into one of his very best screen roles as the devilish-yet-craven Prison Warden, Barrows.

Venomous to a fault, Magee builds Barrows into a terrifying and fascinating figure, plumbing depths of weird perversity which I’m 99% sure the film’s script never thought to assign to him. One minute a cowering, authoritarian jobsworth, the next a Mephistophelian provocateur, Barrows seems to be perpetually attempting to stifle his true nature as a glowering sadist, but, he scarcely ever succeeds.

He can’t help addressing his underlings with a hissed, derisive “…mister”, making it sound like the disgusting insult imaginable, whilst the film’s opening sequence finds him pushing obviously-doomed stool pigeon Kelly (Kenneth Cope) down the steel steps to the prison mess hall with all the finality of a witch-hunter lighting a pyre.

Basically, you could write a whole treatise trying to get to the bottom of what makes this gimlet-eyed cur tick, and you’d still never quite get to the bottom of it. Magee’s every gesture appears to conceal some horrible, hidden purpose, and his scenes with Baker in particular crackle with an electrifying antagonism.

Elsewhere meanwhile, British horror fans will immediately feel at home as ‘The Criminal’ opens with the heart-warming sight of Patrick Wymark (‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’, ‘The Skull’) and Murray Melvin (‘The Devils’) enjoying an inevitably crooked game of poker, each looking almost impossibly shifty, and it’s likewise great to see such esteemed players as Tom Bell, Nigel Green and Rupert Davies popping up blink-and-you’ll-miss-it supporting roles. Each of these gents helps contribute to what must surely rank as one of British cinema’s most impressive gallery of villainous grotesques, creating a world so devoid of moral fortitude that Baker’s violent, self-serving antihero appears almost admirable by comparison.

For all this though, ‘The Criminal’ is also noteworthy as an example of a British film in which barely anyone on screen in actually English… well, not in the genealogically correct, WASP-centric manner which would have been recognised as such in the late 1950s, at least.

Bannion and most of his gang members are Irish, as, presumably, is Barrows, whilst the loosely allied gang (led by the affable Grégoire Aslan) who run the prison’s black market are Italian. In fact, it’s striking that, during a scene which takes place in the prison’s Roman Catholic chapel, pretty much our entire cast of characters - inmates and screws alike - are present, solemnly receiving communion!

The few ostensibly English inmates meanwhile tend to have prominent Northern accents, whilst all purpose thug ‘Clobber’ (played by Milton Reid lookalike Kenneth J. Warren, last seen around these parts in The Creeping Flesh) is Australian. As portrayed by the Jewish-American Wanamaker, the ethnicity of Bannion’s right-hand-man Carter is difficult to pin down, whilst Johnny’s girlfriend Suzanne, as played by Saad, is evidently German. In fact, the film’s the only definite, RP-enunciating southern Englishman is actually the haughty prisoner governor, marvellously played by Noel Willman (‘Kiss of the Vampire’, The Reptile).

A near-comically stern yet weak-willed exemplar of English good manners, everything in the tiny world of the governor’s office appears perfectly symmetrical. He is mildly perturbed when a dish of arrow-root biscuits accompanies his morning tea-tray (a cringing lackey apologises for the lack of digestives), seemingly oblivious to the violence, chaos and rampant corruption which define the defiantly heterogeneous community of incarcerated troublemakers beyond his door. 

Even more surprising is the notable presence of black characters in ‘The Criminal’. At the outset of the film, one of Bannion’s cellmates is a West-Indian - though seemingly not fluent in English, he seems a trusted ally nonetheless, communicating through ritual chants of “ok, sailor, ok”, along with the occasional patted shoulder - whilst, delightfully, Johnny’s cellblock also boasts a Sir Lancelot-esque calypso singer, who strums his guitar in the canteen, improvising new lyrics to reflect the prison’s latest dramas, in what seems like a homage to Jacques Tourneur’s ‘I Walked With a Zombie’ (1943). (1)

Elsewhere, during the racetrack scene, the camera briefly zeroes on a black man decked out in some kind of far-out witch doctor get-up (perhaps a real life hawker or busker of some kind?), whilst at Johnny’s home-coming party, we can even see a fully-fledged black gangster strutting his stuff in the background. (Probably not something the Krays or their bigoted ilk would have stood for, needless to say.)

Though not exactly the most progressive representations of black Britons ever seen on screen, the very presence of these characters in an era in which non-whites were generally entirely absent from popular cinema feels like a deliberate statement on the part of the filmmakers. Were they perhaps attempting to portray the criminal class as a kind of loose coalition of oppressed minorities, or just trying, however haphazardly, to provide a more realistic portrayal of working class life in the post-Wind Rush era than had usually been seen on screen up to this point..? Who knows.

Music too contributes hugely to ‘The Criminal’s overall power. In what became a recurring trope in Losey’s films, diegetic music is everywhere - not only in the myriad of songs, chants and rhymes through which the inmates communicate during the prison sequences, but also in Johnny’s prominently displayed jazz collection. As is almost inevitable for an early ‘60s Losey film in fact, UK jazz luminary Johnny Dankworth provides an exquisitely nuanced score, even as viewers are far more likely to remember the contribution made to the soundtrack by his better half, the equally ubiquitous Cleo Laine.

A striking, Nina Simone-ish, near a-cappella blues, Laine’s ‘Prison Ballad (Thieving Boy)’ plays over the film’s opening and closing sequences, and indeed is reprised a number of times in-between. You could accuse the filmmakers of over-playing this track, were it not for the fact that its haunting, icy simplicity proves so astoundingly beautiful that it stops us in out tracks each time it is heard.

Evoking a contemplative, melancholic air which eventually colours the entire film, Laine’s ballad allows this brutal, boot-to-the-face drama to veer, momentarily at least, toward the kind of fatalistic, stylised noir being explored at around the same time by directors in France and Japan.

Would it be too much of a stretch to claim that the snow-covered, rural locations in which the film’s predictably grim final act takes place reminded me of Truffaut’s ‘Tirez Sur Le Pianiste’ / ‘Shoot the Piano Player’, which premiered one month after ‘The Criminal’?

Probably, but nonetheless, that feeling is in there somewhere, helping Losey’s opus slog its way into viewers’ affections with a steely determination worthy of Baker himself. Though overlooked by critics upon release, ‘The Criminal’ now stands out as one of the strongest entries in the cycle of late 50s/early 60s British noirs within which its star proved such a defining presence, remaining sharp, brutal and disconcerting enough to make vicars, governors social workers choke on their arrowroot biscuits, however many decades down the line.

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(1) Hearteningly, Tommy Eyrtle, playing the calypso singer, went on to enjoy a prolific career in British film and TV, notably performing his own composition ‘Man Smart (Woman Smarter)’ in the 1965 ‘Dangerman’ episode ‘Man on the Beach’. Prince Monolulu - presumably playing the un named West Indian prisoner, although he is credited as “himself” on IMDB(?!) - had less luck however. Born in the Danish Virgin Islands in 1881, he died in London in 1965, his only credit subsequent to ‘The Criminal’ being an appearance on ‘The Ken Dodd Show’ the same year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lovecraft on Film: Die, Monster, Die! (Daniel Haller, 1965)

“Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in.”
-HPL

At what point does a H.P. Lovecraft adaptation sufficiently depart from its source material that it ceases to be classifiable as a ‘Lovecraft movie’? This is the question we will probably find ourselves asking with increasing frequency as we plough through the troubled legacy of Lovecraftian cinema, and it occurs for the first time when contemplating American International Pictures’ second attempt to squeeze HPL’s uncooperative stories into the shape of a ‘60s gothic horror film - an extremely loose adaptation of 1927’s ‘The Color Out of Space’, retitled with characteristic AIP subtlety as ‘Die Monster Die!’ (a title that, along with the attention-grabbing poster-art reproduced above, remains arguably the best thing about the entire project).

I actually know very little about the circumstances of ‘Die Monster Die!’s production, but, given that it was filmed largely on location in England in early 1965 and marks the directorial debut of Daniel Haller, the much-celebrated art director on AIP’s Poe series, my guess is that DMD! (as it will henceforth by termed for the sake of brevity) must have been produced as an adjunct to Roger Corman’s last two Poe pictures, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and ‘The Tomb of Ligeia’, which were shooting in the UK during 1964.

Given the rushed and rather confused feel of DMD!, it is easy to believe that it might even have been fitted in around the slack in the production schedule on Corman’s films, much as 1963’s ‘The Terror’ was infamously pulled together to capitalise on a few days of studio time left over from ‘The Raven’. Having said that though, the relatively low level of cast & crew crossover between the films tends to suggest that DMD! was actually shot in parallel by a different unit, thus wringing maximum value from AIP’s transatlantic jaunt - even if Jerry Sohl’s threadbare script doesn’t exactly speak of a great deal of advance planning.(1)

Speaking of planning, I’d also be interested to find out why AIP – who had insisted that The Haunted Palace be rebranded as a Poe film before they’d release it – suddenly came round to the idea of making H.P. Lovecraft movies as the ‘60s wore on.

We might presume that, urged on by Corman, Haller or other HPL boosters amongst their creative staff, AIP took a chance on DMD! as a low budget experiment to fill the lower half of a double-bill. But, given that Haller’s film didn’t exactly set the box office aflame, and in fact generated precious little enthusiasm even from horror fans, why did they let Haller go back to the well yet again for the comparatively high profile ‘The Dunwich Horror’ in 1970? Changing times perhaps, and the growing popularity of Lovecraft amongst the ‘counter-culture’ audience that the studio was trying to attract by that point..? No idea. (2)

I mean, for all I know, Nicholson & Arkoff might have just told their people “make us some more of them horror movies” and left the specifics to producers lower down the food chain. I don’t know. That I even care at this stage perhaps speaks poorly for my priorities in life, though one imagines any AIP experts in the audience may have some thoughts on the matter. (As ever, thoughts are welcome in the comments.)

Anyway, getting back to the matter in hand – ‘Die Monster Die!’ is an odd one and no mistake. Not ‘odd’ in a good way necessarily, but it is certainly one of the strangest and most thematically unglued of AIP’s ‘60s horror films – a drifting and uncertain production that quickly loses sight of whatever point it was trying to make and never really regains it, despite some diverting moments of all-out weirdness.

To begin at the root of the film’s problems, ‘The Color Out of Space’ has always struck me as being one of the most thoroughly ‘unfilmable’ of Lovecraft’s many unfilmable works. Admittedly, it does take place entirely in a real world location and doesn’t call for any cyclopean cityscapes, cosmic vistas or gigantic alien deities, which is helpful from a budgetary POV. But at the same time, it is also singularly lacking in human characters or interactions, with its success as a story resting largely upon the author’s evocative descriptions of impossible colours, weird alien flora, pungent, stifling aromas, and other such things that are extremely difficult to recreate in a motion picture, regardless of financing.

If such material presents a challenge to filmmakers, then I fear it is one that Haller and his collaborators were singularly unprepared to meet on this occasion, resulting in the immediate jettisoning of so much of Lovecraft’s story that they might as well have changed a few names and just presented it as an original screenplay. As in ‘The Haunted Palace’, there are a few token attempts to infuse new “Lovecraftian” ideas into the film, but these are never very well integrated into the main narrative, meaning that, beyond the basic kernel of “a meteorite falls in a place, weird stuff happens”, they were pretty much off into uncharted territory straight away with this one - and sadly, the resulting lack of direction shows through all too clearly.

Also problematic is the fact that, once HPL’s distinctive macabre prose is removed from the equation, ‘The Color Out of Space’ is basically a pure science fiction story, making it an awkward fit for the AIP’s preferred gothic horror template. For the lack of anything better to do, Sohl seems to have decided to get around this problem by rehashing various bits of Richard Mathesons’s script for The Fall of the House of Usher, expanding on Matheson’s concept of the lands surrounding the Usher house being ‘blighted’ by some unknown malignancy, and tying it in with the effects of the infernal meteorite that crashed upon the remote country estate of one Nahum Witley (Boris Karloff), back in the days when his father was lord of the manner.

Deciding to rekindle one of the more evocative and under-utilised ideas in Matheson’s script wasn’t such a bad idea. In fact it serves as a somewhat ingenious way of introducing familiar gothic tropes of familial decay and dysfunction into a plotline whose pseudo-scientific basis leans more towards a ‘50s-style cold war monster movie than a castles n’ cobwebs flick, and indeed, the by-now-traditional foreboding trudge through the blighted wasteland is actually one of the film’s most rewarding sequences, with real life woodland locations enhanced by some splendid matte paintings and a touch of fog whilst regular Hammer composer Don Banks goes all out for ‘ominous’ on the soundtrack.

Sadly though, Sohl didn’t leave his cribbing from Matheson there, instead porting over whole swathes of narrative structure, character interaction and dramatic set-pieces straight from ‘..Usher’, to the extent that DMD! often begins to resemble a rather tepid, under-funded remake of the earlier film, as our obligatory straight-talking leading man Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) strides across the aforementioned blasted heath to Witley’s crumbling manse and demands to see the suspicious old geezer’s beautiful daughter Susan (Suzan Farmer) whom he previously met in college in Boston, and so on and so forth. (3)

Yet another bump in the film’s road to the screen comes via the circumstantial decision to shift the action from the backwoods of Lovecraft’s beloved New England (as so indelibly described in his story’s celebrated opening passages) to, well, old England - which is rather less atmospherically introduced by having Nick Adams step off a commuter train at, uh, ‘Arkham’ station and wander around an A-road bisected village that looks a bit like somewhere you might pass through whilst taking a diversion off the motorway in Leicestershire. [It's actually the village of Shere in Surrey, as previously seen in The Earth Dies Screaming and the telescope sequence in ‘A Matter of Life & Death’, no less. – fact-checking Ed.]

Maybe this will be a problem specific to UK viewers, but the quaintness and everyday realism of such a location sits very poorly with the foreboding gothic fantasia that the script is going for, and makes the straight-from-central-casting obstructive locals who shun Reinhart’s requests for help in getting to “the old Witley place” seem outright ridiculous, as exemplified by the proprietor of a bicycle hire shop whose first response to a stranger looking to hire a bicycle is an accusatory “WHERE WOULD YOU BE PLANNIN’ TO RIDE IT?”.

None of this is exactly helped by the fact that, during these scenes, Nick Adams gives every indication of being a singularly dislikeable leading man, speaking, scowling (and indeed dressing) as if he were midway through failing an audition for the part of a tough in a local theatre production of a Mickey Spillane story. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t want to give him accurate directions either if he accosted me outside the greengrocers.

In the grand tradition of Mark Damon in ‘..House of Usher’ and John Kerr in ‘The Pit & The Pendulum’, he’s basically an overbearing, out of place jerk, but, whereas those films made sure that more appealing characters were swiftly offered up for us to invest in, DMD! opens with a fifteen minute stretch in which we are expected to identify solely with frustrating and seemingly pointless travails of this rude and boorish man, fostering a sense of audience alienation that bodes poorly for the tale that follows.

When Adams finally does reach the “old Witley place” (as if anyone would ever refer to a local stately home as such in rural England), it turns out to be none other than good old Oakley Court, near Windsor – a location that will need no introduction to fans as Hammer’s stately home of choice, in addition to its usage in many other British horror titles over the years (José Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’ foremost amongst them).

Despite the overly familiar aspect of the main house’s frontage, Haller nonetheless manages to achieve some suitably atmospheric shots during Adams’ approach the estate, concentrating on readymade details such as the rickety, wrought-iron gates and the imposing, moss-covered fountain on the front lawn to bring out a whole new aspect of this much-exploited location.

Sadly though, details such as these are rarely returned to in the later sections of the films, and, acknowledged master of artificial sets though Haller may have been, he somehow manages to get surprisingly little value out of the interiors here. Once we’re inside the house, it’s difficult to really establish whether the drab and slightly claustrophobic antechambers were filmed on location or built as sets, but either way, they fail to really make much of an impression, despite some pleasantly cluttered set dressing. The stuff that was definitely filmed on sets meanwhile fares better, with Witley’s eerie subterranean crypt (complete with wheelchair lift) and the house’s dusty, picturesque chapel both fulfilling their purpose very nicely.

Once we’re safely ensconced within the house, the movie more or less continues to trudge through a loose variant on the ‘..Usher’ template with no great enthusiasm. Despite the filmmakers’ intermittent attempts to liven things up via hints of a very odd mystery, a crazed maid on the loose outside and eerie consultations with Karloff’s bed-ridden, vengeful wife, it all just lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

Freda Jackson actually very good in the latter role, hitting the appropriate frenzied gothic notes very nicely, but Farmer as her daughter is a rather different story. A bright and cheery co-ed in a pink angora-sweater, with early ‘60s ‘torpedo’ breasts in full effect, she makes for a comically incongruous addition to the cloistered weirdness of the Witley household, reminiscent of the misfit ‘normal’ daughter in The Munsters.

As to Karloff himself, I can only imagine that his fans, having seen him apparently on fine form in ‘The Raven’ just two years earlier, must have been shocked to see Boris confined to wheelchair - seemingly out of necessity rather than for the purposes of a particular characterisation - with the effects of a sudden decline in health written all to clearly across his newly drawn, somewhat wizened features.

Although DMD! represents the first entry in what I suppose might be termed Karloff’s “geriatric era”, he is, as usual, all business here, delivering a direct and solid performance in his familiar ‘genteel, domineering patriarch’ mode that bears little sign of his more obvious physical deterioration, and making the absolute best of the few good ‘horror’ bits the script offers him. (“Chains… for devils…”, he remarks apropos of nothing at one point whilst fishing a length of chain from an old trunk, in a moment that’s worth the entry price alone.)

As with so much else in this film, the problem is that the script seems to have little idea what to do with Karloff’s character. Though Witley is ostensibly the main figure of threat through much of the picture, in truth the malign aspects of his persona never really extend much beyond being a bit grumpy and secretive, and by the movie’s final act he has more or less entirely redeemed himself, belatedly becoming something of a misguided good guy as he sees the light and attempts to rid his household of the weird radioactive curse that has overtaken it.

Such an approach is workable of course – after all, Vincent Price specialised in turning initially antagonistic characters into sympathetic figures in his horror films - but crucially, DMD! bungles it by failing to establish any other credible threat for the characters to face up to, meaning that Karloff’s abdication from evil-doing leaves the movie with a chronic “villainy vacuum” - and frankly a glowing rock in the basement just isn't going to cut it, monster-wise.

DMD!’s various attempts to address this – first via a homicidal, deformed maid running around the grounds, and eventually through Karloff’s ludicrous transformation into a silver-skinned, radioactive monster-man straight out the cheapest of ‘50s b-movies – are too inconsistent and half-hearted to really make much of an impact on the story, meaning that the central good-evil / hunter-hunted conflict essential to a good horror movie is simply absent, with the result that DMD! eventually leaves us with the impression that we’ve simply been watching a bunch of slightly weird stuff happening to some odd, unhappy characters, all to no very clear purpose.

It’s just as well then that some of this “weird stuff” is fairly diverting, and it is in this spirit of curious perplexity that much of DMD!’s remaining appeal lies.

From Konga in 1961 through to Jack Cardiff’s ‘The Mutations’ in 1974, the notion of “strange goings on in the greenhouse” seems to have exercised an inexplicable fascination for budget-conscious American producers making horror films in the UK, and DMD! certainly provides one of the more memorable sequences in this particular micro-genre, as Adams and Farmer negotiate a couple of padlocks to get a look at the results of Old Man Witley’s meteorite-enhanced botanical experiments.

The ‘effects’ used in realising Witley’s giant-sized produce may leave something to be desired (basically they just stick some tomato plants in the foreground and have the characters stand further back and remark upon how huge they are, seemingly trusting that the audience won’t understand perspective), but, once our protagonists move on to investigate the eerie, dolphin-like shrieks emanating from a darkened potting shed, well - good grief.

If they may not be exactly what the Old Man of Providence had in mind, the creatures we are briefly shown therein are probably the closest thing to a genuine encounter with the unknown that we’re exposed to in any of these ‘60s Lovecraft adaptations. Some kind of strange, globular hand puppets with wobbly, fluid limbs, these beasties really are exceptionally bizarre in both conception and realisation – halfway between some previously undiscovered forms of deep water sea life and mutant rejects from the Star Wars cantina.

It’s hard to think of many other horror films that would go to such lengths to create non-threatening monsters, but these things are so repulsive and surprising in their aspect – more piteous than scary – that they are actually quite memorable and impressive. Of course, in keeping with just about every potentially interesting aspect of Sohl’s screenplay, they are allotted a bare minimum of screen-time, and both Adams and Farmer seem to entirely forget that they’ve witnessed seen such an extraordinary sight for the remainder of the picture, but hey – it’s a really weird moment, which is probably about all we can ask for by this stage in proceedings.

Also worth chalking up in the film’s favour is a regrettably brief cameo from this blog's offical favourite actor, the ever-wonderful Patrick Magee, who pops up as the local doctor whom Adams consults to get a second opinion on the Witley family.

Appropriately, Magee seems to be lurking in some stifling Victorian parlor in which you can almost smell the damp seeping off the walls, and the script’s intimation that he has been driven to drink and had his medical career ruined as a result of the trauma he experienced when called to the Witley place to preside over the death throes of Karloff’s father (of course, no one else ever saw the body, and there was no autopsy) is a splendidly Lovecraftian idea (if admittedly one borrowed from ‘The Dunwich Horror’ rather than ‘The Color Out of Space’).

With his patented steam-out-of-the-ears over-acting prowess cruising comfortably at about, say, 6 out of 10, it’s a delight to see Magee giving Adams his best hate-filled stare and sloppily downing an early morning glass of scotch – the perfect traumatised victim of prior Lovecraftian hullaballoo - but the extreme brevity of his appearance proves a real disappointment. I suppose the great man must have had something more pressing in his diary that week.

A few other interesting, authentically ‘Lovecraftian’ touches are introduced into DMD! here and there, largely arising from the film’s attempts to meld occult/spooky imagery with a sci-fi storyline, but yet again, these ideas are left largely undeveloped, probably inspiring more confusion than anything else in the minds of casual viewers.

Although Karloff’s character claims to be a man of science for instance, the underground chamber in which he keeps his glowing meteorite (housed in a gated well with a hand crank, reminiscent of the one in ‘The Haunted Palace’, as if he fears the stone might jump out and run away) is clumsily decorated with skull-shaped carvings and Satanic murals.

Viewers who have been paying attention to the dialogue might presume that it was the old man’s father who, being of a more superstitious bent than his son, was responsible for these decorations. But if so, why are they of such an unhinged, ‘primitive’ character, looking like the kind of thing remote tribesmen or beatnik artisans might have come up with, rather than reflecting the more ‘refined’ tastes one might expect of a titled gent in Victorian England?

I mean, they’re quite nice morbid carvings and murals, I’ll give them that, but like so many things in this film, their presence just doesn’t quite click on an aesthetic level, as if something was lost in translation when the action was shifted from the redneck American backwaters of Lovecraft’s story to the English Home Counties.

Similarly, the brief appearance of a ‘forbidden’ grimoire that Adams flicks through in the Witley library – rather bluntly titled ‘The Cult of the Outer Ones’ - turns out to be a complete non-sequitur, clarifying little beyond perhaps the origin of Witley Snr’s more outré tastes in interior décor, and basically just functioning as an opportunity for the filmmakers to say, “well ok folks, we might have thrown out just about everything in his story, but look – a Lovecraft thing!”

The fact that none of Lovecraft’s beloved lurid tomes are referenced anywhere in the text of ‘The Color Out of Space’ sadly renders this a bit of a wasted effort, whilst the fact that the railway station Adams arrives at is named ‘Arkham’, and that the name ‘Witley’ (which is not featured in the original story) is clearly derived fron HPL’s oft-used ‘Whateley’, seem equally tokenistic gestures – notable solely as early examples of the kind of “see what we did there” in-jokes that would be soon become ubiquitous as horror cinema became increasingly self-aware from the ‘70s onwards. (Along similar lines, keen-eyed viewers will also spot a version of Lovecraft’s ‘elder sign’ amid the murals in Witley’s crypt, suggesting that there was at least some hardcore HPL fandom going on amid the film’s creative staff.)

In a nutshell, I think perhaps the essential problem with ‘Die Monster Die!’ is that it is a project thrown together opportunistically, taking a pile of promising elements – Karloff, Haller, a Lovecraft story, an English manor house, a van full of nice props – then mixing them all up and hoping for the best, but failing to account for a total lack of vision, direction or self-belief that makes the finished product feel like far less than the sum of its parts.

A  wash-out though it may be as a horror film however, DMD! is another one those misbegotten Lovecraft adaptations that I find it difficult to really hate. In a way, it is its very failures - its fuzzy logic, shoddy special effects and aimless meanderings - that render it oddly enjoyable if approached in the right state of mind; that preferably being what we might euphemistically term a ‘mellow’ one.

Even if it is more than likely entirely accidental, the film’s sheer off-beat vibe, nearly, almost, kinda, sorta serves to tie it in with the aesthetic of the later ‘60s counter-culture that was emerging at around the time of its production.

Although none of the explicit nods to California beat culture and new age spirituality found in Roger Corman or Jack Hill’s AIP films are present here, the general ‘feel’ of DMD! is nonetheless so out to lunch that at times it almost works as a kind of zonked out ‘head movie’, in much the same way that something like Ed Wood’s ‘Bride of the Monster’ (which the loopier second half here to some extent resembles) does.

Even when viewed on DVD or Blu-Ray, it is the kind of film that is impossible to fully separate from the warped and faded “I-can’t-believe-what-I’m-seeing-here” vibe of a late night UHF broadcast. Factor in the wonderfully ominous, trippy title sequence and the weird, non-threatening puppet creatures, and the gentle ebb and flow of post-midnight psychotronic otherness eventually conquers all.

And… that’s about the best way I can find to explain the strange appeal of ‘Die Monster Die!’, which I have to admit I still quite like, despite having just spent the best part of three thousand words slamming it. For all its faults as a Lovecraft adaptation and a piece of cinema, it’s still a shonky, crack-brained b-movie that throbs with its own febrile glow of dementia and decay, and sometimes that’s enough to see you through the night.

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(1) Primarily known as a TV writer, with episodes of ‘The Twilight Zone’, ‘The Outer Limits’, ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents..’ under his belt, Jerry Sohl also wrote a number of science fiction novels, and stepped in to ghost-write for ‘Haunted Palace’ scriptwriter Charles Beaumont after the latter became seriously ill… which perhaps explains the AIP connection.

(2) Though overlooked as a potential b-feature for ‘Masque of the Red Death’, ‘Die Monster Die!’ eventually saw release in the US in October 1965, propping up Mario Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’. Leaving aside the evidently superior qualities of Bava’s film, the fact that AIP didn’t even consider DMD! worthy of headlining over a dubbed Italian sci-fi flick perhaps tells us something about their thoughts on Haller’s finished film.

(3) Suzan Farmer was Hammer’s virginal victim of choice for the 1966 season, with roles in both ‘Dracula: Prince of Darkness’ and ‘Rasputin’, after which she went on to a ton of groovy British TV work. Nick Adams meanwhile spent the ‘50s rubbing shoulders with Hollywood’s finest via supporting roles in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, ‘Hell is For Heroes’ and ‘Pillow Talk’ amongst others. I don’t specifically recall him in any of those, but going by his ‘bullying jerk’ screen persona in DMD!, one imagines he spent quite a lot of time getting punched by heroes. He even got a “Best Supporting Actor” nod for ‘The Charge is Murder’ in 1963, but sadly died of an accidental drug overdose in 1968.

Top Fifteen Hammers:Part # 1.

Posted as part of the Peter Cushing Centennial Blogathon.

For no reason at all beside the fact that I enjoy making pointless lists, and that thinking about Hammer horror films makes me feel warm and cozy as I plod through the dreary complexities of the working week, I’ve recently found myself casually pondering what my favourite entries in the studio’s filmography are, and why. Just a bit of harmless, everyday nerd-think, but I thought it might translate into some nice, easy-going blog posts to keep things ticking over until I feel like I’ve got the energy to handle some more heavy duty movie review-age.

Not that cutting things down to a workable top fifteen was easy, mind you. I mean, I can reel off my top three at the drop of a hat (long-term readers with good memories may recall what they are), but beyond that, things get a bit murky. With the untouchable top level out of the way, my second tier of Hammer favourites consists of a large number of movies (most of the Frankensteins and Mummys, a few of the better Draculas, the Carmilla/Karnstein films and so on) that are just plain good - so consistent and enjoyable that it’s difficult to really pick any one over the others. They all do exactly what horror movies are supposed to do whilst still including enough quirks, nuances and unforgettable moments to make each one unique, and for that I am very grateful.

Perhaps inevitably therefore, the list below swings somewhat in the direction of the studios more eccentric and low-key productions - they being the ones that tend to stick most strongly in my memory. But that’s not to say that I couldn’t happily watch their more ‘routine’ offerings all day for the rest of my life and have a perfectly nice time in the process.

I’d imagine that most of this blog’s readers probably have more than a passing familiarity with the Hammer catalogue, but if there are any newcomers in the audience, I hope my list might lead you to some good entry points into the world of these films. And for the old hands out there, well, dumb lists like this are always a good way to spark discussion, and I always like talkin’ Hammer, so by all means feel free to let rip in the comments box.

Oh, and before we begin, probably also worth mentioning that this list is by no means supposed to be read as a complete or final judgement on the Hammer canon. Given prolific nature of the studio’s output, there are still plenty of their films that I’ve never even seen, so who knows, perhaps there are some whole other top twenty lurking out there that I’ve not yet even become acquainted with… and what a nice feeling that is.

So without further ado…

15. The Gorgon (1964)

 I wrote about this one pretty extensively here, and for me it remains one of Hammer’s most romantic, impenetrable and philosophically unglued outings, as the limitations imposed by a rather poorly thought out supernatural conceit are countered by one of the studio’s grandest fairytale gothic production designs, a chillingly ambiguous Cushing performance, and some soul-aching ruminations on the nature of entropy and confinement. Not exactly a good choice for a laugh and a few beers, but compelling viewing all the same.

14. The Vampire Lovers (1970)

 Amid all the misfires, oddities and strange diversions that comprise Hammer’s catalogue of vampire films, ‘The Vampire Lovers’ is one of the more straight-forward entries, and also, I think, one of the best. Delivering pretty much exactly what you’d expect in terms of lavish Victoriana, nocturnal cemetery hi-jinks, furtive hints of lesbianism and craggy-faced puritanical ass-kicking, Roy Ward Barker’s initial take on the Carmilla mythos essentially defines the agenda for the ‘70s Euro-vampire movie, setting a bar that the continent’s other purveyors of such material could proceed to soar above or mambo under as they saw fit. Although it never really achieves anything exceptional (beyond a gentle bit of first-time-in-a-British-horror same sex petting), ‘..Lovers’ is solid as a brick shithouse - as generic and satisfying as horror movies get.

13. Demons of the Mind (1972)

As noted above, most of my favourite Hammer films serve to evoke a warm, nostalgic atmosphere that I find very reassuring. This nasty little number though is a different kettle of fish entirely. With disorientating, bombastic direction from Peter Sykes and a script from the reliably out-to-lunch Christopher Wicking, ‘Demons of the Mind’ is a decidedly un-Hammer-like production that seems to be aiming instead to smash a hole in the side of your head, draining out the bits of your mind that think about the weather and what’s for dinner, and replacing them with endless close-ups of Robert Hardy’s sweaty moustachioed face, screaming in tormented delirium. Coming on like ‘The Black Torment’ on steroids, or a dark old house murder mystery spiked with some lethal extract of psychotropic mould, this psychologically assaultive, dark-family-secrets country estate slasher farrago simply defies description. Much like Coppola’s ‘Dementia 13’ a decade previously, you’ll know you’re onto a bit of a rum do when Patrick Mcgee turns up halfway through and actually seems like one of the more relaxed and well-balanced individuals on-screen.

12. The Lost Continent (1968)

Probably the biggest WTF in the Hammer filmography, this ill-starred Dennis Wheatley adaptation is a colossally misguided, schizophrenically inconsistent, directionless, crippled-at-birth vanity project disasterpiece that I’m afraid to say I absolutely love. The subject of so much behind the scenes aggro that it nearly tore Hammer apart, with James Carreras eventually stepping in to forcibly shut down his son Michael’s floundering production, the film that eventually emerged is so astonishingly strange, I’m surprised it hasn’t been cited more often as a bone fide ‘what-the-hell-were-they-thinking’ cult classic. I could say a lot more about this one, and hopefully at some point I will, but for the moment let us simply shake our heads in disbelief as a narrative framework seemingly requisitioned from a cynical ‘70s airport disaster novel stumbles headfirst into an anything-goes world of ridiculous stop motion sea monsters, fanatical Spanish Inquisitors, random tentacle attacks, descendants of marooned 16th century mariners bouncing around on giant, balloon-aided hovercraft shoes and, notably, no bloody lost continent. Incredible.

11. The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Another film that was been somewhat overlooked due to a perceived failure to directly deliver on the title, characteristically solid Val Guest joint ‘The Abominable Snowman’ has long been dismissed by monster fans as talky, stagy, uneventful. Once one can accept the fact that few bigfoot-related hi-jinks are forthcoming however, I think it can be appreciated as a very fine piece of work indeed – not a horror movie as such, nor a daring-do action-adventure flick, but as an atmospheric and intelligent study of men coming face to face with the unknown, finding their assumptions about the world mutating and collapsing, as physical peril and the quest for basic survival becomes ever more urgent. Whilst ‘..Snowman’s scientifically-inclined, remote location monster movie set-up was already pretty boilerplate stuff by the late ‘50s (there are clear nods here to both ‘The Creature From The Black Lagoon’ (’54) and Howard Hawks’ ‘The Thing from Another World’ (‘51)), Nigel Kneale’s script nonetheless takes a deeper and more challenging approach to the material than his predecessors, resulting in something wholly unique.

As with much of his best SF writing, Kneale here concentrates on mixing up the scientific with the sublimely mysterious, challenging both rationalists and mystics to come to terms with a more nuanced reality that fits nobody’s blue-prints. A careful balance of location and set-bound shooting (Hammer actually flew a crew out to the Pyrenees for this one, believe it or not) and a commanding central performance from Cushing really sells us on the reality of the on-screen drama as it unfolds, with Guest wisely taking a Val Lewton-like fear-of-the-unseen approach to proceedings, emphasizing Kneale’s conception of the yeti as not just a physical presence but a wholly alien, telepathic intelligence, and giving the film an aura that is both chilling and actually kinda beautiful, even as the bolts tighten on a subdued but persistently effective bit of survival horror.

To be continued…