Hammer House of Horror: The Silent Scream (Alan Gibson, 1980)

Continuing last October’s trawl through the ‘Hammer House of Horror’ archives where we left off, here we go with episode # 7, originally broadcast on ITV on 25th October 1980. 

Probably the most unsettling and seriously intentioned instalment of the series thus far, this one tells the tale of a feckless safebreaker (Chuck, played by Brian Cox), who, having just completed a debilitating prison sentence, grudgingly accepts a part-time job offered by sinister pet shop owner Martin Blueck, played by your friend and mine, Mr Peter Cushing.

Beginning with the unfortunate death-by-electrocution of a caged tiger, followed by Chuck’s return to the isolated roadside cottage he shares with his wife Annie (Elaine Donnelly), the first half of Francis Essex’s script is almost comically over-loaded with themes and imagery related to imprisonment and confinement.

Upon his return home, Chuck tells Elaine that she can’t possibly understand the misery he has experienced as a result of being incarcerated, causing her in turn to point to the virtual imprisonment she has faced while he was inside, as a result of poverty, isolation and societal disapproval. (To hammer home the point, her introductory shots are even framed through the bar-like partitions on the kitchen window.)

When Chuck visits Blueck’s shop, initially to thank him for visiting him in prison and gifting him with some money as part of a charitable programme, he scarcely finds much reassurance. Backed by the budgerigars and puppies he keeps caged in the shabby, public facing front room of his shop, Blueck quietly acknowledges his history as a concentration camp survivor, before inviting Chuck into the secret back room where his real work is done.

Therein, we find an appalling mockery of a zoo, in which a variety of flagrantly illegal animals (a panther, a leopard, assorted other big cats, a few apes and even a wallaby) subsist in cramped, bare cages, trained via the application of massive electric shocks to remain within their allotted spaces until a bell is sounded to let them know the circuits have been disengaged, at which point the sorry creatures can poke out their heads and gobble up the raw meat which comprises their chow.

For any animal lovers in the audience, the footage of these obviously unhappy beasts prowling around their tiny cages will prove immediately upsetting, whilst the idea that a veteran of the holocaust has become obsessed with imprisoning and controlling his fellow creatures - like a victim of familial abuse growing up to perpetrate the same cycle over again - is horribly perverse and disturbing.

As you’d imagine, it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic for us to realise that Blueck is set upon expanding his unsavoury “research” to human subjects, and that his motives in offering a questionable job to a hapless ex-con - and placing a very tempting safe in plain view when he leaves Chuck to look after the joint - are less than wholly philanthropic.

In fact, Blueck makes this fairly plain from the outset, expounding upon his Orwellian dream of creating “prisons without bars”, in which the terror-stricken inmates are ostensibly free, but paralysed by mind-destroying Pavlovian conditioning - a concept which pushes the story into the realm of the truly nightmarish. (Again, note the insane perversity of a man who finds the physical paraphernalia of imprisonment so repugnant, he is fixated on removing it, even as he craves the power of control over others which it represents.)

Perhaps inevitably given that we’re watching a mainstream TV production here, Essex’s script rather sidesteps the darker psychological implications of this tale, downplaying the whole concentration camp angle just, just as Cushing likewise rather downplays his characterisation of Blueck. Providing something of a call back to his always fascinating portrayals of Baron Frankenstein in previous decades, he keeps the character soft-spoken, slow and pointedly non-emphatic in his gestures, allowing his evil and mental instability to reveal themselves more in his actions than through any displays of cackling villainy, but still managing to radiate a certain, implacable coldness.

As his fans will be aware, accents could sometimes prove Cushing’s Achilles’ heel as an actor, but he handles this one very well, betraying just a hint of Blueck’s Eastern European origins, gradually eroded over decades spent settled in a particularly seedy corner of England, allowing him to add just the right amount of unholy relish to his dialogue.

(There’s scarcely a bigger chill in the whole episode meanwhile than the lazy, off-hand cruelty Cushing manages to inject into his character’s tired attempts to fob off an investigating police officer visiting his shop with “..a hamster for the boy, perhaps?”)

Relatively few of the big-hitters from Hammer’s feature film era deigned to lend their talents to Roy Skeggs’ venture into TV, so it is of course wonderful to see the ever-loyal Cushing stepping up for what I believe was his penultimate horror role (followed up only by his touching farewell to the genre in Pete Walker’s ‘House of Long Shadows’ two years later). Needless to say, the producers of the series could scarcely have found a better, more challenging role for him to get his teeth into.

Cox and Donnelly are both excellent too (the former doing a fine thick-yet-sympathetic turn, the latter convincing as the brains of their marital operation), allowing ‘The Silent Scream’ to develop into a strongly played three-hander drama, lending these characters a sense of realism which transcends the excesses of the increasingly far-fetched premise.

Perhaps mercifully, the second half of the episode becomes slightly less distressing, as the script concentrates more on the nuts-and-bolts survival horror of Chuck and Annie’s attempt to contend with the fiendish travails Blueck has devised for them, temporarily turning ‘The Silent Scream’ into what feels perhaps like an early prototype for the ‘Cube’-style “puzzle box” horror film.

A less high profile veteran of Hammer’s feature film era, Alan Gibson directs efficiently, with a certain amount of style, as befits the voluminous CV of TV work he’d racked up since helming the last two Christopher Lee Dracula movies in the early ’70s. Rather ironically in view of the episode’s subject matter, there is also some very nice location work to enjoy here; both Chuck and Annie’s remote rural cottage, lonely and isolated just off the motorway, and the thoroughly seedy row of commuter-belt businesses which houses Cushing’s shop (perhaps just a few doors down from Denholm Elliot’s estate agents from Rude Awakening), are very well chosen.

In view of my above observations on Cushing’s character however, I can't help but feel that Essex fumbles the ball rather dreadfully in the final act, when he drops what is clearly intended to be the blood-and-thunder revelation that Blueck was not actually a prisoner within the concentration camp, but a captor.

As well as stealing the punch-line to my all-time favourite bad taste gag, this misfiring twist actually succeeds in making the story far less disturbing than would otherwise have been the case. (After all, a mad Nazi on the loose is a far easier threat to deal with than that of a traumatised victim becoming secretly obsessed with exercising control over others.)

Sadly, this casual revelation also robs Cushing of the opportunity to give Blueck a touch of that sublime, sympathy-for-the-devil pathos he always did so well in his villainous roles - or indeed to invest the character with any of the knotty complexity we may have hoped for. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that the scene in which this twist is revealed is also that in which Blueck finally bursts out in a fit of ol’ fashioned villainous cackling.)

An unfortunate misstep, this can’t help but make the episode’s conclusion feel a little flat in dramatic terms, but regardless - on the surface of it, we still get a satisfyingly nasty and hopeless denouement, worthy of any grimy ‘70s British horror shocker, cementing ‘The Silent Scream’s place as easily the best episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ I’ve watched thus far.

Be sure to tune in this time next week, and we’ll learn whether episode # 8 proves a contender to the throne…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pointless List Making / October Horrors # 14: Hammer Vampire Movies, in order.

Happy Halloween / All Hallows / Samhain / whatever everybody! I’m sorry that I’ve fallen behind on my self-imposed one-post-every-two-days October schedule over the past week or so. I was confident I could stick to it so long as I didn’t get to busy in real life, and provided nothing too unexpected or time-consuming happened... but guess what?

Anyway, having re-watched a few of Hammer’s vampire films recently, I thought it would be fun as an act of pure self-indulgence this October to rank them all in the order in which I like them, and to knock out some quick text to show my workings. The results are below, and I would like to think there are a few CONTROVERSIAL choices, so hang on to your suitably gothic hats, Hammer fans!

1. Brides of Dracula (1960)

Having not watched this one for a few years, I’d started to suspect it might actually be a bit over-rated, but revisiting it recently soon set me straight. [NOTE FOR NERDS: I finally acquired a version of the film sourced from the old Region One U.S. DVD which, unlike subsequent Blu Ray editions, is framed correctly at 1.66 and to my eyes still looks very nice – recommended.]

‘Brides..’ remains a masterpiece of gothic horror, especially during its opening half hour. Not only for its magnificent photography and production design, or for the brooding atmosphere of decadence and dread conjured by Terrence Fisher’s flawlessly classical direction, but also with regard to more down-to-earth matters of narrative and character drama. To my surprise, the story here remains gripping for a modern audience, and genuinely horrific in its implications. The script is rich with beautifully turned, evocative dialogue, and the entire supporting cast do fantastic work in bringing it all to life, with every single character who appears on screen enriching the proceedings in one way or another; far too many to list here, but to pick just one example, even the bloke manning the stable at the girls’ school gets to use his one minute of screen-time to deliver an evocative soliloquy about his collection of horse brasses reminding him of the seasons of the year.

It’s a shame then that things go a bit silly in the last few minutes – inaugurating not only Hammer’s long-running tradition of killing off vampires in really stupid, anticlimactic ways, but also of ineffectual vampire brides who dither about the place doing absolutely nothing – but until that point at least, this is Hammer Horror at its absolute finest, arguably the text-book example of the heights the studio could scale in their Bray-era heyday.

2. Twins of Evil (1972)

From October 2017: “Tudor Gates’ ultra-pulpy script drives things way over the edge of self-parody (perhaps the reason I’ve underrated the film in the past?), but the chaps in charge of production design, cinematography etc don’t seem to have noticed the shift in tone, instead delivering one of the best-looking and most atmospheric (not to mention most violent and erotically charged) films Hammer produced during the ‘70s. The result is a film that is really funny (the almost ‘South Park’-like antics of Cushing’s puritan witch-burning club), slyly subversive of the Hammer formula (no moral black & whites to be found here), and an exceptional example of straight up, late period gothic horror all round.”

3. Vampire Circus (1971)

One of the darkest (in both sense of the word) films to ever carry the Hammer name, ‘Vampire Circus’ goes off-brand in pretty hair-raising fashion, adding a brooding, Eastern European flavour to its grimly relentless and exceptionally gory reinvention of familiar “sins of the father” gothic tropes. With vampires who look like depraved ‘70s rock stars, disturbing intimations of paedophilia and nods to Camus’s ‘The Plague’ (and/or Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’ – take your pick), this is a heady brew by anyone’s standards, and Robert Young directs with an intensity that sometimes boils over into a nigh-on visionary fervour, lending a hellish, hallucinatory feel to the film’s intense and spell-binding horror set pieces.

Patriarchal authority – aided by John Moulder-Brown from ‘Deep End’ as one of Hammer’s best ever juvenile leads - may win out in the end as tradition demands, but it takes one hell of a battering along the way, making for a pyrrhic victory that leaves ‘Vampire Circus’ feeling like an unlikely cousin to the nihilistic, post-Romero horror films that genre historians like to tell us were making Hammer’s efforts look old hat by the early ‘70s.

4. Taste The Blood of Dracula (1970)

Not only my favourite of the brace of ribald Victorian London movies Hammer made in the early ‘70s, but by far the best of the Christopher Lee Dracula films, ‘Taste the Blood..’ finds relatively young n’ fiery director Peter Sasdy breathing new life into the franchise, not just through the imaginatively rendered new setting, but by delivering what is arguably the only instalment in the series since the 1958 original to have been made with serious dramatic intent (the Dracula-free ‘Brides..’ notwithstanding).

Far stronger meat the any of the earlier sequels, ‘Taste the Blood..’ pre-empts the aforementioned ‘Twins of Evil’ by pushing back hard against the patriarchal authority and Manichean certainties of earlier Hammer horrors, introducing a transgressive note of moral ambiguity as its nightgown-clad young ingénues (Linda Hayden amongst them) find themselves pushed into a perilous spiritual interzone, forced the choose between the seductive and exotic evil of Dracula and the equally predatory depredations of their own morally bankrupt fathers - a cabal of depraved big-wigs and aristos whose private pursuit of perversion not only allows the Prince of Darkness an entry-point into the ‘modern’ era, but makes his no nonsense Satanic evil seem positively sympathetic in comparison to their own sweaty, corrupt and very British hypocrisy. (Heaven knows, there are certainly a few contemporary power-brokers viewers might enjoy super-imposing onto these sorry specimens as they face their grisly comeuppance…)

5. The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

Ok, I know that production difficulties, cross-cultural confusion and general creative desperation may have prevented this one from being quite as earth-shattering as the full scale Hammer horror / Shaw Bros kung-fu crossover of our dreams, but it’s still at least 75% as good as the one in my dreams, so that’s something right? In fact, the very fact this film exists at all fills my soul with joy each time I think of it, just as the sight of Peter Cushing getting busy alongside David Chiang and Szu Shih in the middle of a chaotic, Chang Cheh directed vampire kung fu brawl does each time I watch it.

I also love the crazy, proto-‘Black Magic’ Hong Kong horror type shit going down here as the genuinely horrid, cadaverous, golden masked vampires chain down writhing naked virgins in the lair and drain their blood into a bubbling cauldron; I love witnessing the exultant return of wild, expressionistic gel lighting and moth-eaten, cobweb shrouded sets to the hammer universe (Shaw Bros certainly didn’t mess around when it came to ensuring their horror movies looked the part), and I love the way the British scriptwriters seem to keep trying to rip off ‘The Seven Samurai’ during the big, climactic save-the-village battle scene (was it the only Asian film they dredge up from the memories to use as a reference point?) – yep, there’s a lot to love here, that's for sure.

What I love somewhat less however is the fact that the filmmakers were forced to crowbar Dracula into the story at the behest of Warner Bros (who then never even bothered releasing the damn thing), necessitating the last minute employment of some truly hopeless geezer to play him in Lee’s absence (no disrespect intended to the late John Forbes-Robertson, for turns out it is he, but seriously, W and indeed TF). Also, Dracula’s presence here raises a question that has long haunted me in the dark hours of the night: if, as the prologue makes clear, Dracula upped sticks and buggered off to China one hundred years before the events of this film take place, then who the hell has Van Helsing spent his life traipsing across Europe fighting..? I’ve never quite figured that one out.

6. The Vampire Lovers (1970)

From May 2013: “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.”

7. Kiss of the Vampire (1962)

AKA, the one everybody always forgets, this modest production is another splendid piece of ‘60s gothic horror, its atmosphere of brooding decadence very much in keeping with ‘Brides..’ two years earlier. Though perhaps a tad over-lit in places, the scenes in the castle and at the masque ball nonetheless feature some striking, proto-psychedelic photography, whilst the plight of our honeymooning lead couple is actually quite affecting, and Noel Willman and Isobel Black are wicked sinister as members of the predatory vampire family. I’m also pretty sure this must be one of the first films to have ever directly connected vampirism with Satanism and black magic, and the latter element plays directly into a bat-shit crazy climax (no pun intended) which must be seen to be believed. Fantastic stuff.

8. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)

Notorious for playing out more like a ‘70s pulp spy novel or an ITC action show than a traditional vampire movie, this tale of the diabolical Count using a Satanic coven as a front for manipulating a gaggle of weak-willed politicians and scientists into providing him with enough super-charged bubonic plague to blackmail the entire globe is…. well, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher, to be honest. It certainly left me happily confused when I videoed it off late night TV as a teenager, that’s for sure, but you’d be hard-pressed not to find it one hell of a lot of fun too. In retrospect, it’s wild tonal inconsistencies and cavalier approach to genre expectations kind of reminds me more than anything of Gordon Hessler & Chris Wickings’ wonderfully bizarre Scream and Scream Again from a few year earlier.

Cushing in particular plays a blinder here, proving once again that he could lend gravitas to an outer space volleyball match should the need arise, and, as I mentioned in the comments on this blog just a few months back, the scene he shares where the late Freddie Jones – playing a tormented bacteriologist – is a real highlight, a tour de force of thespian muscle, with a few fistfuls of ominous dialogue helping out too. Likewise, the desk-bound confrontation between Van Helsing and Dracula is great, perhaps reigniting some of the fire of their original ’58 face-off for a stranger new age.

In fact, Lee gets some considerably more interesting stuff to do here than in most of the previous Dracula instalments, what with the Count passing himself off as some kind of reclusive Eastern European billionaire, more like a blood-drinking Bond villain than anything else, with the genuinely horrifying prospect of Count Dracula presiding over a global plague pandemic inadvertently returning the figure of the vampire to the rat-like death-bringer of Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’, perhaps.

Elsewhere meanwhile, we’ve got, oh, I dunno – motorcycle stunts, shoot-outs and moody, hirsute cops running around, loads of campy Satanic hoo-hah, plus a few moments of startling, mean-spirited gore and…. Joanna Lumley being consumed by the Sapphic attentions of the chained up vampire brides…?! Good lord.

It’s a shame the whole thing culminates in the most egregious you’ve-gotta-be-fuckin-kidding-me ending of any film on this list (hawthorne bushes, I ask you), but… that in itself was almost a tradition by this point, I suppose.

9. Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

Oh, man…. I mean, what can you say? I mean, as bad as ‘1972 AD’ undoubtedly is, I don’t know if there’s a single fan of British horror who could refuse to unconditionally love it on some level. If you’re reading this, you know the score, I’m sure. Stoneground performing ‘Alligator Man’! Reversed tape recordings and Caroline Munro getting blood all over her cleavage at Johnny Alucard’s swinging Black Mass! And how about that opening prologue with Dracula getting a cart-wheel where the sun don’t shine? Beat THAT, Terrence Fisher!

10. Dracula (1958)

A bit of a shocker I realise, but, despite the impossibly vast scale of this film’s influence on genre cinema, as a stand-alone viewing experience, it’s never really clicked with me, despite numerous attempts to go back to it with a fresh eye.

Moreso than any of the other early Hammer horrors, ‘Dracula’ strikes me as having dated really badly, making it difficult to dredge up much contemporary relevance from it. All of the scenes that don’t directly involve Dracula feel dry and tedious, suffocated by those plush, Gainsborough interiors and formal, stiff upper lip acting styles. The dismissive treatment of the female characters within the film meanwhile plays as flat-out comical to modern audiences (even more-so than in Stoker’s novel, where Lucy and Mina are allowed at least a certain amount of agency), and, personally, I’ve always found the make-up and hair-styling in this one to be pretty disastrous too.

On the plus side however, marvellous performances from Cushing and Lee, obviously, and the final confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing is impossible to fuck with – an immortal and historic scene, still exhilerating to this day, without which this film would likely be languishing even further down this list, despite it’s having directly fathered all of the other entries.

FUN TRIVIA: I know everyone has heard this story before, but my dad was working in a regional cinema in South Wales when ‘Dracula’ was released, and he actually did once tell me that he remembered people screaming and fainting in the aisles, and complaining to the management that they hadn’t been able to sleep for a week etc. after seeing it. Imagine that! Incredible to reflect upon how thoroughly our senses must have been blasted over the subsequent six decades, given that this film is now barely able to keep most modern viewers awake, to be perfectly honest.

11. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968)

The boilerplate script for this ho-hum ‘Dracula’ sequel may be thoroughly uninspired, but I nonetheless have a soft spot for the film, based largely on the extravagant, fairy tale-like production design overseen and quite beautifully captured by master cinematographer turned uneven horror director Freddie Francis. Never has mittel-European fantasyland of pre-1970 Hammer looked as richly colourful and unreal as it does here, with the entire movie seemingly taking place inside some dark recess of Tim Burton’s fevered childhood brain, where he keeps the long-supressed good stuff. The climax, which as I recall sees Dracula impaled upon a massive stone cross on a windswept mountainside as lightning flashes above him, is pretty cool too.

12. Countess Dracula (1971)

Hungarian director Peter Sasdy’s under-stated take on the Countess Bathory mythos is a perfectly creditable historical drama, with fine performances from Nigel Green and Sandor Elès, but its dour formalism and pointed refusal to dish out the horror / exploitation goods soon becomes a drag. Despite her top billing, Ingrid Pitt has very little to do here, whilst the special effects brought in for her brief supernatural scenes feel silly and incongruous, and the sketchy vampire component has all too obviously been grafted onto the script for the sake of commercial necessity, creating a ruinous disjuncture between the film promised by Hammer’s marketing, and the one which Sasdy actually delivered.

13. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

Like a number of films on the lower reaches of this list, ‘Prince of Darkness’ has always struck me as simply playing like a realisation of the Hammer back office’s idea of what a bog standard, utilitarian vampire movie should look like. No spark, no invention, and certainly no unnecessary expense; just eighty-something minutes of the same old stuff, assembled in the customary order to appease the market. You’ve got some coaches rumbling through the woods, a big ol’ pasteboard castle, a few rubber bats, some bits with Dracula popping up in ladies’ bedrooms and rather comically enfolding them in his cloak… what more do you want, blood? (Sorry.)

I dunno – am I missing something here? I remain eternally disappointed that the Fisher / Sangster / Robinson dream team turned in a picture this uninspired. Basically the only things which really stick in my memory are Dracula’s initial resurrection scene (which is pretty damn cool), and Andrew Keir as the priest, warming his arse on the fire in the tavern.

14. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)

I know this one has its fans, so I’ll throw in a “I’ve only seen it once, quite a while ago” disclaimer, but I remember being decidedly underwhelmed by this one. In theory, the idea of letting Brian Clemens re-invent the Hammer vampire film as a swash-buckling, action-adventure type franchise sounds like a brilliant one, but sadly I recall the result delivering precious little action and a total lack of adventure. Perhaps budgetary constraints and production difficulties were to blame, who knows, but Horst Janson is certainly wooden as a box of stakes in the title role, little of interest happens in the script, and basically the cast just seem to spent half the movie half-heartedly trudging around in a patch of woods and some out-buildings. On the plus side, well…. Caroline Munro. That’s all I’ve got. Perhaps I should give this one another try some time?

15. Lust for a Vampire (1971)

The story of how Jimmy Sangster made the transition from an incisive and inspired scriptwriter to a frankly terrible director, crassly attempting to reinvent Hammer’s most iconic franchises as low-brow, self-parodic comic capers, may have been told many times, but you’ll get to revisionism from me on this score. ‘Lust for a Vampire’ is witless, embarrassing guff which can’t even seem to get the simple business of being sexy right, replacing the genuine eroticism of ‘The Vampire Lovers’ with woeful, sub-Benny Hill type tomfoolery. I’ll confess, I happily sat through this one a few times on late night TV back in the day and wasn’t too appalled, but woe betide anyone who tries to watch it sober.

16. Scars of Dracula (1970)

I think my review from last year’s October Horrors marathon probably already did a pretty good job of setting out the extent to which I hated this one. Let’s just say that it gets my vote as Hammer’s absolute worst (‘Holiday On The Buses’ possibly notwithstanding) and leave it at that.

October Horrors # 11: The Creeping Flesh (Freddie Francis, 1973)

Although I can’t 100% confirm that this is an accurate memory, I seem to recall that, long ago in the distant past, my initial viewing of a VHS copy of ‘The Creeping Flesh’ might well have marked the point at which my interest in old British horror films first surpassed the level of idle, time-killing curiosity, prompting me to think, “my god, these things are amazing – I think I should probably try to watch as many of them as possible”.

Revisiting the film all these years later, it’s easy to see why my response was so favourable – in a profound sense, it really does the business. Whereas contemporary productions such as Amicus’s And Now The Screaming Starts and Don Sharp’s ‘Dark Places’ appeared to show the British gothic horror tradition on its last legs, exhaustedly dragging itself toward its own grave, ‘The Creeping Flesh’ by contrast is an exuberant, imaginative and confidently realised production, seemingly inheriting a sense of joie de vivre (and, it must be said, a few plot details) from Cushing & Lee’s previous assignment, the equally wonderful ‘Horror Express’.

Although this co-production between Tigon and the utilitarian-sounding World Film Services may not have been planned as an epitaph for this particular strain of British cinema, it was certainly amongst the last batch of such titles to enjoy widespread distribution, and in retrospect, it can’t help but feel like an attempt to give the classical approach to the genre the all-guns-blazing send-off it deserved. (1)

Whilst the film makes a point of evoking as many of the tropes that had helped define the legacy of the preceding fifteen years as possible though, imbuing proceedings with a warm feeling of tried-and-tested familiarity in the process, it also engages intelligently with the more psychological / visceral approach which was already beginning to twist the genre into weird new shapes as budgets plummeted and declining audiences began to demand harder-edged exploitation content (perhaps taking a few notes from Hammer’s envelope-pushing ‘Hands of the Ripper’ (’71) and ‘Demons of the Mind’ (’72)) – a cake-having / cake-eating combo, which, against all the odds, works brilliantly.

An introductory framing narrative features an infirm and unhinged looking Peter Cushing in his lab, ranting about the nature of good and evil and the grave responsibility he holds for saving humanity from a plague of darkness, and so on. As he begins relating his sorry tale to a younger doctor who has apparently turned up to assist him, we move into ‘flashback’ mode as the story proper begins with a scenario akin to what might have happened had Cushing’s character from ‘Horror Express’ managed to return home without incident, and with his crated up specimen still intact.

Upon arrival at his isolated country home, Dr Emmanuel Hildern (for such is Cushing’s character name) is immediately reacquainted with his devoted daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), whom he has left alone at the house during his costly and arduous expedition to the wilds of New Guinea. Naturally enough, Penelope declares her wish to catch up with her beloved father over tea and toast, but Dr Hildern has other priorities, immediately retreating to his laboratory to unpack his big crate.

Excitedly filling his assistant (George Benson) in on the results of his trip, Hildern reveals his prize discovery – a gnarly-looking, giant sized skeleton of some ancient, previously unknown species of hominid, whose very existence throws conventional theories of human evolution into disarray!

Consulting his surprisingly extensive library of work on “the spiritual beliefs of the New Guinea primitives”, Dr Hildern is subsequently inspired to make some even more earth-shattering claims concerning the veracity of his discovery, including the suggestion that it in fact belongs to an ancient race of “evil giants” who once went to war against the people of the islands – and his speculations become even more far-fetched after an attempt to clean the skeleton reveals that the dead bones are capable of actually regrowing their living flesh when exposed to water.

Soon thereafter, Hildern makes the astounding declaration that the blood samples he has taken from this freshly-grown flesh actually contain the essence of pure evil, determining that he and his assistant must get straight to work preparing a prototype vaccine from it, which I suppose in theory should function to rid mankind of all its negative impulses?! (Whoa, back up there Doc, one thing at a time please...)

Whilst begrudgingly taking a break to partake in that aforementioned familial breakfast meanwhile, Dr Hildern gets stuck into his years’ worth of unanswered correspondence, and swiftly learns that his wife, who had been committed to an asylum many years previously, has passed away during his absence. Significantly, it transpires that he had lied to Penelope about her mother’s fate, telling her that she had died whilst she was still a child – so now of course, he must stick to his story and hide his grief from his daughter.

Even more awkwardly for Dr Hildern, the proprietor of his friendly local asylum is none other than his half-brother James, played by Christopher Lee (I suppose the “half” has been appended to the script to account for their obvious lack of family resemblance). Another scientist of questionable propriety, this younger Dr Hildern is soon revealed to be an ice-cold authoritarian who manages his mental hospital with an approach to patient well-being seemingly inspired by Torquemada, whilst spending his spare time engaging in his own Frankensteinian experiments (you know, hand-crank generated electrical charges applied to severed arms in tanks of formaldehyde – all that kind of good stuff).

Clearly there is no love lost between the brothers. Apparently suffering from a severe case of sibling rivalry, James lords his superior wealth and public standing over the grief-stricken and destitute Emmanuel, announcing straight off the bat that he will refuse to subsidise any of his brother’s foolish expeditions, and furthermore declaring that he intends to go head-to-head against Emmanuel to win the much-coveted Richter Prize!

As you’d rather imagine, Emmanuel’s frantic and rather sloppy attempts to knock up a vaccine against Original Sin, Penelope’s calamitous discovery of the truth about her mother (it turns out she was a former Parisian night club performer who allegedly succumbed to a form of hereditary insanity!) and James’s attempts at scientific espionage add up to a whole heap of trouble for all concerned -- especially when you factor in an escaped lunatic rampaging around the place and a big, gnarly skeleton which threatens to turn into an atavistic remnant of a lost race of pre-human destroyers as soon as it’s left out in the rain.

And, as life in the Hildern house becomes ever more dysfunctional, the older Dr Hildern’s extremely bad decision to test out his vaccine on his beloved daughter (I mean, it’s only injecting a solution made from the blood of an ancient evil giant into the blood-stream of an emotionally unstable teenage girl…. what could possibly go wrong?) is basically the last straw that tips the whole thing into complete chaos.

With Cushing and Lee as rival mad scientists, a hot-house gothic house melodrama with overtones of sexual repression and parental abandonment, an ancient, atavistic supernatural menace and a lurid Victorian milieu of hellish asylums, riotous taverns and buxom wenches, ‘The Creeping Flesh’ delivers everything a gothic horror fan could possibly wish for, but, rather than merely coming across as a mega-mix of Brit horror clichés, Peter Spenceley & Jonathan Rumbold’s admirably ambitious screenplay actually succeeds in incorporating all this stuff into an example of that rarest and most valuable of horror movie virtues – a good story, well told.(2)

Critics of the film have tended to draw attention to the unlikelihood of Dr Hildern’s extraordinary leap of logic in determining that he has extracted ‘the essence of pure evil’ from his pet skeleton, and have taken a dim view of the film’s apparent endorsement of the grimly puritanical, Manichean worldview this implies – especially once the injection of the botched ‘evil’ vaccine into Penelope appears to provide the catalyst for her catastrophic sexual awakening. Rarely, it seems, has a horror movie’s “sex = evil = death” message been so explicitly spelled out, and even given scientific credence, no less.

What is easy to overlook on first viewing however is that what we are seeing here is the story as recounted in flashback by Dr Hildern himself – an unreliable narrator to say the least. Whilst the supernatural nature of the creature he has unearthed remains unquestioned, we are never actually given any verifiable proof that the Doctor’s babbling about ancient mythology and good and evil has any basis in fact. Indeed, Spenceley & Rumbold’s script subtly undermines the doctor’s reactionary assumptions at every turn, clearly implying a far more mundane, psychological explanation for the tragedies which plague his family life.

Although Dr Hildern is a genial, sympathetic figure when we first meet him, as the film goes on it becomes increasingly clear that his problems run far deeper than mere bumbling absent-mindedness and nutty-professor style eccentricity. Beyond all of the mad science and monster movie hi-jinks which result from his sloppy professional practice, the clear implication here is that the malady which sends Penelope out on the town in a scarlet dress is the exact same one which drove her mother to the asylum -- and that Emmanuel himself is chiefly responsible for it, irrespective of any botched vaccine injections and vague talk of hereditary insanity.

Through his insistence that his wife and daughter remain closeted from the outside world, and through his failure to understand their needs or to return their affection, Emmanuel has inadvertently destroyed the lives of the two women he loves, and his transition from a lovable bumbler to a tragic, ruined lost soul is, of course, brilliantly realised by Cushing, adding yet another variation to the gallery of morally tormented patriarchs he had previously essayed in films as varied as The Flesh & The Fiends, ‘Cash on Demand’ and The Gorgon. Working here just a few months after his return to active service following the devastating loss of his wife, it is spiriting to see him firing on all cylinders, bringing energy, commitment and emotional nuance to a demanding lead role.

Lee, for his part, falls back on his tried and tested ‘archly superior, cold-hearted cad’ routine, and I’m sure we all know how great he was at doing that. I’m not sure what his characteristically strident thoughts on this particular production may have been, but he certainly seems to be enjoying the opportunity to indulge in a slightly more refined form of full spectrum villainy than his horror roles usually allowed for.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast is excellent too, with Heilbron (who went on of course to work with Jose Larraz on ‘Symptoms’ the following year) on fine, hysterical form as Penelope, and some great one-scene-wonder bits from a few old favourites too; Michael Ripper as one of the porters who carries Cushing’s crate into the house, Harry Locke improvising wildly as the pub landlord, and Duncan Lamont as a drawling Scottish police inspector. There’s even an extended cameo from Jenny Runacre as Cushing’s late wife during some flashback-within-a-flashback scenes of Parisian debauchery.

(The only disappointment in fact is that the hulking, mute asylum escapee is inexplicably NOT played by Milton Reid. Perhaps he was on his holidays at the time? [Cue mental image of Milton relaxing on a sun-lounger drinking a cocktail with an umbrella in it, as Hawaiian music plays.] Oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose.)

Freddie Francis was always rather uneven in his work as a horror director, but he certainly had his moments, and ‘The Creeping Flesh’ is undoubtedly one of them. In particular, he was always a director who seemed to have a good feel for production design, and the staging, props and set dressing here are indeed all top notch. I don’t know where ‘The Creeping Flesh’ actually sat in budgetary terms, but it certainly looks like one of the more extravagantly realised British horrors of its era, with location shooting taking place both around Thorpe House in Surrey and the London Docklands, whilst the standing sets used for the urban exteriors (identified as such by the film’s entry on the Reel Streets website) are so elaborate that I actually mistook them for genuine streets given a period make-over.

Meanwhile, the special effects used to realise the monster – in both its skeletal and fleshy form - are satisfyingly icky and menacing, especially during the film’s climactic nocturnal coach crash – a genuinely thrilling, beautifully evocative sequence featuring great, blue-tinted nocturnal photography, lashing rain, thunder crash editing and a sense of all-consuming chaos as the newly reconstituted revenant makes its getaway in a sutiably menacing hooded cape.

And, as to the ending, well – oh my gosh, it’s so good. The hooded creature banging at the doctor’s door with its clammy paw is just so ‘Weird Tales’, and the vengeful, sanity-wrecking price it eventually exacts from him is so E.C. Comics – just absolute classic stuff (even if Francis does ill-advisedly revive his “camera inside the skull” gimmick from 1965’s ‘The Skull’ to considerably lessened effect).

As you will have gathered, I like ‘The Creeping Flesh’ rather a lot. For some reason, it seems to have remained a fairly under-rated and infrequently discussed entry in the British gothic cycle over the years, but it really is one of the very best, managing to embody all of the arcane joys which this form of filmmaking represents for its fans, whilst at the same time presenting a solid, serious and exciting tale, compelling enough in its own right to make a perfect ‘gateway drug’ for any British horror neophytes who stumble across it. If for some reason you’ve overlooked it until now, please do make the effort to track it down - you’ll be in for a treat.

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Check out this amazing poster artwork from Italy (title translation: “The Terror From The Rain”(?)), West Germany (“At Night, The Skeleton Awakens”), and Belgium (more or less direct translations of the English title in French and Dutch).

In the UK meanwhile, Tigon put this out on a double-bill with Mario Bava’s ‘A Hatchet For The Honeymoon’ – now THAT’S what I call a good night out!

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(1)An eclectic production outfit to say the least, World Film Services appear to have had a hand in everything from Peter Watkins’ ‘Privilege’ (1967) and Joseph Losey’s ‘Boom!’ and ‘Secret Ceremony’ (both ’68) to the sub-Amicus portmanteau effort ‘Tales That Witness Madness’ (1973), the inexplicable David Niven vampire comedy ‘Vampira’ (1974), and post-E.T. kid’s sci-fi movie ‘D.A.R.Y.L’ (1985).

(2)Given how accomplished their script for ‘The Creeping Flesh’ is, it is surprising to learn that neither Spenceley nor Rumbold had much of a background in the film industry, and nor did they go on to much recognisable success. Spencely worked intermittently as an assistant editor in the UK, whilst Rumbold next popped up in Greece in 1978, directing a film which no one ever seems to have seen, before occasionally contributing script work to a number of low key productions based out of Greece, Yugoslavia and Iceland.

October Horrors # 5: Incense For The Damned ([no credited director], 1971)

AKA ‘Bloodsuckers’, ‘The Freedom Seeker’.

It has been many years since I last watched ‘Incense For The Damned’, and although – uh, spoiler alert? - it is not a good film by any stretch of the imagination, I still think of it fondly, recalling the time I stayed up until 2am to see it, back in the glory days when BBC2 in the UK used to screen double bills of random British horror films in the early hours of Saturday morning.

How well I remember those evenings in my rented attic room; limited to half a bottle of wine (because I could only afford one per weekend), watching Tom Paulin moan his way through Newsnight Review, wishing they’d bloody well get it over with. Blu-tacing the aerial for my tiny TV set to the best possible position on the wall, turning out the lights, and – crucially - having absolutely no idea what I was about to be presented with.

I had no background in horror movie fandom at this point in my life, and no reference works to guide me. All I had to go on was the film’s title, and perhaps a three line synopsis in the newspaper listings. On that basis, you can appreciate that the name ‘Incense for the Damned’, year 1971, Peter Cushing, plus some slightly garbled copy involving vampires, Greece, hippies and Oxford University sounded absolutely unmissable. Could I have another ‘Psychomania’ or ‘Horror Express’ on my hands…? (1)

Well, needless to say, I didn’t. I chiefly remember being staggered by how shoddy and disjointed the film seemed. I probably fell asleep a few times, but nevertheless, I got some eerie psychedelic thrills from the acid trip sequence, and some bad movie chuckles from seeing Patrick Macnee out of ‘The Avengers’ getting pushed off a cliff by a witch on a donkey (so funny).

Not a total write off then, and in fact I welcomed the experience as a necessary reminder that I shouldn’t expect to win out every time in this strange new hobby I’d developed – after all, watching stuff like this in bored bafflement is very much part of the deal one strikes with the Horror Movie Gods, and what value the wheat without the chaff etc, right?

Returning older and wiser, I now of course have some background to help me make sense of the cinematic train-wreck that is ‘Incense for the Damned’. Most pertinently, I am aware of the dread fact that Robert Hartford-Davies – the man who happy signed off on 1964’s ‘Gonks Go Beat’ – actually demanded that his name was removed from this film, leaving many prints without a credited director. If that’s not a bad omen, I don’t know what is.

In fairness, Hartford-Davis’s argument was simply that the film he had intended to make was never finished. Beginning life in 1969 as a straight adaptation of Simon Raven’s novel ‘Doctors Wear Scarlet’ with location shooting in both Greece and Oxford, the project that eventually emerged as ‘Incense for the Damned’ was abandoned prior to the completion of shooting when financing fell through.

Two years later, some nefarious producer (I’m currently unable to ascertain WHICH nefarious producer), presumably in search of an easy way to complete a double-bill, disinterred the raw footage from this unfinished project and had it cut together into ‘Incense for the Damned’, possibly incorporating some newly shot material, possibly not [see speculation below].

The result is, indisputably, a complete dog’s dinner. In the opening minutes alone, voiceover narration and heavy-handed montage are used to graft a narrative onto what seems very much like a series of unconnected fragments, and throughout the film, shots that most professional filmmakers would have abandoned due to photographic gaffs or muffed performances are proudly displayed, in-between long stretches of what seems like unedited master-shot / coverage footage.

Although few are liable to hail Robert Hartford-Davies as an overlooked cinematic visionary, the best films he directed (I’d nominate ‘The Black Torment’ (1964) and ‘Corruption’ (1967)) are actually quite accomplished, and it is easy to imagine his anger and embarrassment at seeing his dirty laundry publically aired here without his permission – especially given that the footage incorporated into ‘Incense..’ strongly suggests that it may not have just been money trouble that shut down the original production.

Seemingly shot in great haste, much of the material from Greece is so flat and muddled that it is difficult to imagine even the most sympathetic editor pulling anything reasonable out of it, whilst the cast (particularly Macnee) look confused and unhappy throughout.

As you might expect, the storyline of the film that eventually reached cinemas is fairly incoherent, leaving ‘Incense..’ feeling chronically uncertain of what kind of film it is actually supposed to be. Is it a ‘Devil Rides Out’-inspired black magic movie? (Patrick Mower plays exactly the same young-man-fallen-prey-to-evil-cult character as he did in that film.) Is it a vampire movie? (Well, there’s a vampire in it, but she’s also a witch, so..) A jet-setting travelogue / missing person thriller? (Much of the film proceeds in this vein, with a flustered Macnee holding tedious meetings with Greek Colonels and traipsing around rural areas on a donkey, etc.) (2)

Or, is it simply a ‘60s social fable about a privileged young Oxford scholar who turns his back on the establishment after discovering sex, drugs and ancient mysticism? In many ways, this seems like the most convincing interpretation of what is on offer here, with the film’s finale – in which Mower delivers an outrageous, counter-cultural “fuck you” address to the University’s assembled provosts before murdering his shallow, status-hungry fiancée and escaping across the college rooftops – feels more like a weird exploitation homage to Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If..’ (1969) than anything that belongs to a horror movie.

It is worth noting here that the Oxford-shot footage in the film’s last few reels feels a lot stronger and more ‘together’ than much of what precedes it, and indeed, this memorably off-beat conclusion is one of several isolated bits and pieces that are diverting and/or strange enough to make ‘Incense for the Damned’ worth watching at least once.

The first of these is the hippie cult “drug orgy” sequence early in the film, which made quite an impression on me during that long-ago TV viewing, and indeed remains pretty cool. Looking as if it was properly edited as a stand-alone sequence (presumably at the time of Hartford-Davis’s original production?), it sticks out like a sore thumb from the drab padding that surrounds it, with full-on, hallucinatory application of warped reflections, fish eye lens and kaleidoscopic what-nots, crazy focus pulling and some ragin’ sitar-infused psyche rock on the soundtrack, all leading up to the surprisingly explicit murder of fully nude sacrificial victim. (3)

A fine example of the kind of post-Kenneth Anger psychedelic freak-outs that so often found their way into late ‘60s / early ‘70s horror films, this sequence gives us a tantalising glimpse of the direction ‘Incense..’ might have taken had actually been made properly… even whilst our psyche-horror buzz is comprehensively harshed by the subsequent, shakily rendered daylight scene in which the victim’s mutilated body is discovered on a hillside by her mother and fellow villagers. (I’m fairly certain that all of this nudity and bloodshed must have been excised from the version of the film I originally watched on TV, by the way.)

Another definite highlight is a one-scene-wonder cameo from Edward Woodward, who appears here as an eccentric Oxford academic with a special interest in the occult. Striding purposefully around the Ashmolean Museum, Woodward enthusiastically appraises our nominal protagonist Alexander Davion of his own personal take on vampirism, which he rationalises as a kind of sexual fetish. This scene calls upon Woodward’s talents to put across a few handfuls of the most jaw-droppingly bizarre dialogue I’ve ever heard in a horror movie, and he accomplishes the task with admirable gusto.

“Are you telling me that a girl sucking the blood from a man’s neck could induce an orgasm?” Davion asks him at one point. “Now, come, come, Tony, don’t be naïve,” he replies, sounding positively thrilled by this line of chat. “Man works and loves in many ways. Some men, for instance, get excitement only from statues – the ‘Pygmalion Syndrome’. Other men can only make love in coffins. You have voyeurs, transvestites, narcissists, bestialists. Ah, it’s a funny old world we live in!”

Isn’t it just? Davion’s character, by the way, seems to have been one of the biggest casualties of this film’s unfinished/cobbled together status, in that, although he delivers the narration that ties the film together and ostensibly leads the search for Mower’s character that the opening two thirds of the movie revolves around, his performance is entirely wooden, and he basically does absolutely nothing, remaining almost invisible through much of the run-time.

In the absence of a strong lead, the role of ‘protagonist’ instead getting pushed onto other characters, with much of it landing in the lap of Senegalese actor Johnny Sekka, whose character (another gifted Oxford graduate) provides an extremely rare example of a black hero in British horror, in an era when black actors were still only liable to make an appearance in the genre as servants or voodoo cultists.

Although Sekka’s character to some extent resembles one of the heavy-handed “look, a black man can be cultured and educated too” gestures common to liberal-minded British film and TV of the ‘60s and ‘70s (see Dennis Alaba Peters’ character in ‘Department S’ for example), hints of a little more nuance still remain in the scripted dialogue that made it to the screen.

For one thing, Sekka is not terribly likeable – his character is annoyingly highly-strung throughout, and seems particularly touchy with regard to his race (“should I wear feathers and a head-dress?!” he explodes at one point when his companions question his unverified insistence that Mower has fallen under supernatural influence).

Perhaps he is right to be defensive however. In his absence, Macnee and Davion are heard to mutter darkly about how Sekka’s ‘background’ gives him a special understanding of mystical mumbo-jumbo – this despite the fact that he has presumably spent much of his life engaged in legitimate scholarly pursuits in the heart of England, and that the mumbo-jumbo they are currently investigating originates in Greece.

As in most other respects, it is difficult to figure out quite what ‘Incense for the Damned’ is trying to say here, so muddled is the film’s construction. More than anything in fact, watching it again this month makes me want to track down Simon Raven’s source novel.

There is clearly a good story with some interesting characters buried in here somewhere, if only we could piece it together, and Raven is an author I’ve been meaning to investigate for a while, so ‘Doctors Wear Scarlet’ might be a good place to start, even though the title makes it sound like a medical comedy.

In closing, you will no doubt have noted from the poster and text above that Peter Cushing appears in this film. Well, indeed he does. As the senior Oxford provost who has sponsored the career of Mower’s character, Cushing has limited screen time prior to the film’s conclusion, playing the kind of “stone-faced, conniving patrician” role he could probably do in his sleep by this point. All in a day’s work.

In the film’s final scene however, Cushing’s character addresses an internal University inquest, and makes a report on the circumstances surrounding the death of his daughter, who was killed by Mower. This speech is played out in a fixed close up on Cushing’s face, and, in stark contrast to just about everything else that has happened in this silly and blundering film, he looks absolutely distraught, barely making it through his dialogue before breaking down in tears. Genuine emotional pain seems deeply etched upon his face, and though brief, the scene is starkly upsetting. If Cushing was indeed acting here, he was doing so with an intensity that seems wholly inappropriate to the film in which he was appearing.

So… it pains me to do this, but I had to check the dates. According to IMDB, the original shoot for what became ‘Incense of the Damned’ took place in April 1969. I believe that this was before Cushing’s wife Helen became seriously ill, but I could be wrong (those more familiar than I with the details of his biography can perhaps advise).

If, however, this concluding scene was actually shot later, whilst the film was being prepped for release during 1971, that would place it in the months immediately following Helen’s death, and horror fans will not need to be reminded of the effect that this had upon her husband. If my speculation here is correct, then including this footage in the final film feels like a deeply callous and irresponsible decision on the part of whoever was in charge at this point, and I rather wish I hadn’t seen it, to be honest.

But – this is only speculation. Perhaps Cushing was simply demonstrating his prowess as an excellent actor, giving his sketchily written character a redemptive emotional arc similar to the one he played out in films like ‘Cash On Demand’ and The Flesh & The Fiends (both 1960)? Perhaps if Hartford-Davies had actually been able to put this damn thing together in the way he’d intended, we might have seen a bit more of his character, and it might have all made sense? But then again, perhaps not.

I’m not sure if anyone on the British horror scene has ever really dug into the history of this production, or whether or not there are any books or articles I could track down that might help to fill in the gaps, but there seem to be a lot of unanswered questions here. And, as the tone of this review will probably have made clear, the answers to these questions hold the potential to be considerably more compelling than the film itself.

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(1) A gold star for whoever came up with the ‘Incense for the Damned’ title, incidentally. Second only to ‘The Bloodsucker Leads The Dance’ with regard to really awful vampire movies with richly evocative titles.

(2) I was happy to note that the Greek Colonel who lends Macnee a helicopter is played by David Lodge, an actor who seems to have made a running joke out of appearing in extremely unlikely roles in Robert Hartford-Davis films.

(3) I initially suspected that the whole drug orgy sequence might have been shot at a later date, to liven up the film when it was prepared for release in ’71, but the cross-over of personnel and locations seems to suggest that it must actually have been shot alongside the other 1969 Greek footage.

October Horrors Bonus Edition (#15): The Devil’s Men /‘Land of the Minotaur’ (Kostas Karagiannis, 1976)

Yes, I know it’s no longer October and Halloween has long been and gone, but - would you believe that, on the same night that I watched The Flesh & The Fiends last month, I took another random pick from my pile of unwatched British horror films and *accidentally* managed to cue up a Peter Cushing & Donald Pleasence double bill? I didn’t get a chance to finish my review of the second feature in time to slot it into October’s marathon, but, in light of such a splendid synchronicity, it would seem a shame to leave the second Don & Pete extravaganza un-reviewed, so here we go.

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A long, drifting, rather sun-dazed expanse of nothing of particular importance, ‘The Devil’s Men’ (released in the USA under the somewhat more instructive title ‘Land of The Minotaur’) forms part of a small sub-set of ‘70s horror films that attempted to relocate the familiar atmospheric traits of gothic horror to the more ‘exotic’ terrain of Greece - a country that had recently become a lot more accessible to foreign visitors as a result of the contemporaneous boom in package holidays.

Sitting in a loose triumvirate of “Hellenic horror” alongside Robert Hartford-Davis’s troubled ‘Incense For The Damned’ (1970) and Julio Salvador & Ray Danton’s ‘Hannah: Queen of The Vampires’ (an American/Spanish co-production, aka ‘Crypt of the Living Dead’, 1973), I'm sorry to have to report that, even when placed in this less than august company, ‘Land of the Minotaur’ probably stands as the weakest entry in this most marginal of sub-sub-genres, despite being the only one actually directed by a Greek, and the only one to make use of the opportunities presented by Greek mythology and culture.

The story here posits an island (Crete presumably, although I’m not sure where the film was actually shot, and an exact location is never specified in the script) on which a remote, mountainous town has rather unfeasibly fallen under the control of – wait for it - Count Corofax, an exiled Carpathian aristocrat, played of course by Cushing.

In his new home, Corofax (did he live in the next valley over from Count Filofax or something?) has seen fit to revive an ancient Minoan fertility cult, convincing the local populace to join him in a kind of Lord Summerisle-type arrangement that sees them assist him in sacrificing wandering tourists to a fire-breathing Minotaur statue(!) located in a secret chamber beneath the town’s (extremely impressive) ancient ruins.

For some reason, the sacrificial victims must always take the form of a male/female couple, which would rather seem to contradict the conventional notion of the Minotaur being offered an annual selection of virgins, but… well, as you’ve probably already gathered, this is not the kind of movie in which attention to such historical detail plays a big role.

On the other side of the island meanwhile, Father Roche (Donald Pleasence) is an irascible but good-natured Irish priest with a penchant for befriending the happy-go-lucky, hippie-ish traveller types who seem to keep crossing his path in their VW camper vans. Several of the Father’s young friends have already gone missing after venturing into Corofax’s realm, and being at heart a priest of the old fashioned type, he needs little encouragement to begin ranting about how said land belongs to the devil and no god-fearing person should go near it etc etc.

Early on, ‘Land of the Minotaur’ pulls a bit of a ‘Psycho’ by initially presenting some of Father Roche’s archaeology student chums as our protagonists… only to see them fall victim to the Minotaur cult in pretty short order after they disregard the priest’s advice and start mooching about in the cursed ruins.

The girlfriend of one of the missing men (Luan Peters, from ‘Twins of Evil’ and ‘The Flesh & Blood Show’) is subsequently left high and dry at the airport when her beau fails to meet her, and, after she hooks up with Father Roche and explains that their mutual friends have disappeared, the latter decides the time has finally come to take action.

Somewhat surprisingly, Roche’s first step in this direction is to get on the blower to his buddy Milo (Kostas Karagiorgis), a jet-setting New York-based Private Investigator who takes the call whilst hanging out in the nude with a young lady in his swanky Manhattan penthouse apartment.

One might well wonder how on earth swinging fellow ended up being close friends with a cranky old priest on a remote Greek island, but 21st century viewers in the British Isles at least will have no time to ponder such questions – they will instead be busy trying to recover from the revelation that Milo looks almost exactly like Father Ted Crilly, as played by the late Dermot Morgan.

Anyway, Ted Milo is soon jetting off to Greece whilst Father Roche prepares his arsenal of holy water and crucifixes and, with Ms Peters in tow, our heroes are soon off toward Count Corofax’s neck of the woods in Milo’s rented Cadillac, where, needless to say, much sinister ‘Wicker Man’ –type business and ‘The Devil Rides Out’/’The Devil’s Rain’ style blasting of evil awaits them.

Now, based on the above plot synopsis you’d be forgiven for thinking that ‘Land of The Minotaur’ sounds like quite a lot fun, and I dearly wish it were so, but… well let’s start off looking at the positives, at any rate.

Karagiannis’s film does at least come through with some nice atmosphere. The genuine ancient ruins and authentically down-at-heel mountain-side town in and around which much of the film is shot convey a slightly different feel from more familiar euro-horror settings, simultaneously sun-dappled and haunted by weird ghosts of classical antiquity. There is a lot of creepy stuff with KKK-hooded cultists lurking around the village and hunting Peters’ character that, though not terribly well accomplished in the technical sense, nonetheless oozes menace in a manner slightly reminiscent of the same era’s more strung-out and poverty-stricken U.S. horror films.

The cave-set cult ritual scenes are pretty great too, with some beautiful lighting, lots of colourful robes, gouts of flame and psychedelic super-imposition effects, all as Cushing’s none-more-cadaverous visage presides over things in an appropriately authoritative manner. (These sequences are significantly undermined however by the use of some deeply unconvincing English language incantations, and the inclusion of an absolutely absurd disembodied voice that is apparently supposed to represent that of the minotaur itself. Really an awful decision on someone's part.)

The film’s soundtrack meanwhile is provided by no less a personage than Brian Eno, undertaking what was apparently his first ever work on a film score. One suspects that Brian – who by my calculations must have been somewhere between ‘Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy’ and ‘Another Green World’ at this point - must have smelled a cheque for a new hair-piece or some shiny shoes in the offing when he turned in this “will-this-do” concoction of eerie, pulsing synths and discordant string-plucking… but it’s groovy stuff nonetheless, a nice example of an early electronic horror score might well serve to induce some low level psychotropic flutter in late-night viewers.

And on the negative side meanwhile, he have… just about everything else in ‘Land of the Minotaur’, I’m afraid. The film’s pacing is slack as hell, full of long, dry passages of tension-free meandering, whilst the editing and direction feel shockingly rudimentary for a film with such a high profile cast, perhaps reflecting Greek crew’s relative lack of professional experience.

It would have been difficult to imagine Cushing or Pleasence appearing in a film this rough n’ ready even a few years earlier, which serves to emphasize ‘Land of the Minotaur’s position as one of the very last gasps of the more traditional British (or UK-financed, at least) horror film. And, sadly, the sense of dwindling enthusiasm for this kind of caper is perhaps reflected in the performances of the two leads.

Though it is rare indeed to find a film in which either of these gentlemen could be accused of ‘phoning it in’, I’m afraid we have one here – a problem that perhaps arises in part from the fact that most (if not all) of the film’s dialogue seems to have been post-dubbed without a great deal of skill or enthusiasm, resulting in uncharacteristically bland and one-dimensional turns from both of these great screen actors.

Pleasence spends a lot of his time getting comically agitated and shouting in heavily-accented single syllables, and in this sense his role here could perhaps be seen as a warm up for the avalanche of “cranky powers of good” roles he would play in horror films in the wake of ‘Halloween’, but if so, it’s not a terribly memorable one in truth.

Cushing meanwhile puts on his faux-charming “come into my parlour..” routine for the film’s young ladies, and it’s always nice to have him around, but, as with some of the other projects he appeared in during the mid-‘70s, precious little of the spark that animated his best performances shines through, and it is painfully clear that, by this point in time, his heart was no longer in these kind of routine assignments.

In spite of all this though… I kind of enjoyed ‘Land of the Minotaur’. To get the most out of it, viewers may have to recalibrate their expectations somewhat – certainly anyone anticipating the relative professionalism and narrative logic of a classic British horror film is going to be in for a shock, but, as mentioned above, the vibe really swings far closer to one of the less note-worthy entries in the wave of hippie-inclined indie horror films that emerged from America in the early 1970s (think ‘Blood Sabbath’, Death by Invitation’, ‘The Velvet Vampire’ – stuff like that).

There’s a whole lot of eye-rubbing, sun-dappled wooziness, a great deal of aimless wondering around and plenty of nice local colour - a stoned, “sea breeze and grimy youth hostel” kind of feel that undoubtedly has a certain appeal. It may be strange to encounter Cushing and Pleasence under such circumstances, but if you can dig the resulting cognitive dissonance and get with the vibe, I think this one can make for an extremely pleasant early hours drifting-off-to-sleep kind of flick. Ambient horror perhaps… a concept I’m sure Mr. Eno might have appreciated.

Actually, reviewing a film like this makes me realise just how heavily my view of cinema is dominated by nostalgic/retro tendencies, and how cruelly unfair I am to more recent films as a result.

Just think, last month I watched The Void – a movie full of nail-biting set-pieces, impassioned direction and superb special effects – and did nothing but bitch about it. Today I consider ‘Land of the Minotaur’, a film that does pretty much EVERYTHING wrong, whose few good elements are largely accidental, and I can give it a pass because…. hey, come on. It has Donald Pleasence running around on a Greek island with some hippies. In the ‘70s. It has Peter Cushing wearing a nice robe, sacrificing people to a fire-breathing minotaur statue, and squelchy synth noises on the soundtrack. The place it was shot in looks lovely. What more could you ask for? A good film? Gedouttahere.