Lovecraft on Film Appendum: The Evil Clergyman (Charles Band, 1987 / 2012)

As anyone familiar with his work will be aware, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Evil Clergyman’ is a brief, half-formed fragment, obviously written in haste, perhaps extrapolated from a bad dream, and presumably never intended for publication in its extant form. Nonetheless, it saw print several years after Lovecraft’s death, in the April 1939 edition of ‘Weird Tales’, and - rather irksomely - it has formed part of his accepted canon ever since, seemingly more by accident than design.

As such, it seems appropriate that the story’s movie adaptation should take the form of an orphaned, 28 minute short, originally intended for inclusion in a 1988 Empire Pictures anthology flick named ‘Pulse Pounders’ which never saw the light of a projector at the time, remaining unreleased due to (it says here) circumstances arising from the company’s bankruptcy.

Furthermore, it appears that the original film elements for ‘The Evil Clergyman’ were subsequently misplaced or destroyed, leaving the footage presumed lost until, a quarter century later, Charlie Band found a VHS work print knocking about in his attic and smelled a quick buck to be made.

A bit of a clean up, a new credits sequence and a newly commissioned score from brother Richard later, and ‘The Evil Clergyman’ finally premiered, streaming on Band’s Full Moon Features website, in 2012.

I’m unfamiliar with the back story re: how exactly those film elements ended up disappearing, but I can only assume it must have been the result of some terrible and unprecedented freak accident, as any other explanation would frankly beggar belief given the breadth of talent involved in creating this segment, and the relatively lavish budget obviously invested in this thing.

With the exception of an AWOL Stuart Gordon in fact, ‘..Clergyman’ is effectively a ‘Reanimator’  reunion, with Dennis Paoli providing the script, photography by Mac Ahlberg, effects by John Carl Buechler, and a cast comprising Barbara Crampton, Jeffrey Combs and David Gale, with the ever wonderful David Warner (R.I.P.) thrown in for good measure.

In the grand tradition of Poe/Lovecraft adaptations through the ages, the film’s narrative has pretty much nothing in common with the supposed source story whatsoever. Instead, Paoli’s script sees Crampton taking centre stage, playing a woman returning to the attic chamber of a medieval castle which she had previously shared with her lover (Combs), a lapsed priest and alleged black magician who has recently taken his own life, prompting her to flee and leave the room vacant.

This ill-stared chamber is apparently still up for rent from the castle’s acid-tongued landlady (Una Brandon-Jones) however, and, once ensconced within it (ostensibly to “collect her things,” although the room looks bare), Crampton begins to experience a series of increasingly hair-raising manifestations related to her deceased partner, and reflective of the unholy depredations the pair apparently got up to prior to Combs’ decision to sling a noose slung over the high beams, and depart this mortal coil… temporarily, at least.

Along the way, Warner pops up as the revenant spirit of another dead priest, who pops up to warn Crampton of the error of her ways, whilst Gale is in full effect as Combs’ familiar, a chittering, man-faced rat-thing straight out of ‘Dreams in the Witch House’.

And... it actually all works really well. Paoli’s story is weird, memorable and unnerving, leaving plenty to the imagination, whilst the production design and performances are excellent.

Though she’s not really called upon to do much more than act terrified, confused and distraught here, Crampton achieves this quite brilliantly. Always a good few rungs up the ladder from yr average ‘80s ‘scream queen’, the sheer intensity scruff of the neck and drags us through this compressed ghost train ride of a viewing experience very effectively.

By contrast, we get a relatively low-key turn from Combs, but there is still a hell of a lot to enjoy in his sleazily sinister presence. His introductory “hi” at the moment his character first takes on corporeal form is a delight in itself, and the spectral love scenes he shares with Crampton take on an appropriately fevered quality, drawing us further into the odd story being told here.

Warner meanwhile seems a bit surplus to requirements here in terms of the narrative, but it’s great to have him along for the ride, and he’s clearly having a fine time regardless. In the midst of a seemingly endless series of rent-a-villain / mad scientist roles at this point in his career, the old boy knows exactly how to pitch a high-handed spectral priest, managing to deliver lines like “I’m a bishop, from Canterbury, sent to expel your lover from our church” entirely straight, without eliciting laughs from the peanut gallery.

As for the long-suffering David Gale meanwhile, one shudders to imagine the indignities he must have been subjected to in the process of realising Buechler’s man-faced rat effects - an inspired mixture of puppetry and facial prosthetics which is actually extremely effective, allowing Gale’s face and voice remain present, even when seemingly attached to a repulsive, ankle-high critter capering about on the castle floor.

Essentially functioning as a foul-mouthed, perpetually enraged manifestation of the Combs character’s id, Gale manages to deliver a memorable performance under what we might reasonably assuming were challenging circumstances; his spittle-flecked delivery of words like “WHORE” and “SLUT” in particular are imbued with an old world, puritan gusto which I very much enjoyed.

Shot, inevitably, amid the imposing environs of the swanky Italian castle which Charles Band inexplicably ended up owning in the late ‘80s (also see: ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1991), ‘Castle Freak’ (1995)), ‘..Clergyman’ benefits greatly from the location’s in-built atmosphere, adopting an almost abstract / fairy tale-like vibe which slips further into delirium as Crampton’s visions take told, and the world outside her lofty chamber effectively ceases to exist.

Moodily lit by Ahlberg in a none-more-80s manner, with deep shadows and shocks of blue-tinged moon light drifting in across the ancient brick-work, this is certainly one of the more accomplished efforts I’ve seen bearing Charles Band’s name as director. As is often the case, it’s perhaps questionable to what extent creative decisions here were actually taken by Band, but for what it’s worth, everything here is very solidly done. (I particularly liked the striking use of vertiginous high and low angles, reflecting the constant presence of both the swinging noose above, and the skittering rat-thing below.)

Even Richard Band’s retrospectively recorded orchestral score goes over gangbusters, really classing up this murky VHS-sourced work-print, much like his similarly bombastic/melodic work on Gordon’s ‘80s films, hovering just on the precipice of Elfman-esque parody, but never quite taking the plunge, or overpowering the action on-screen.

Given how strong this short is overall, it’s easy to see why a few elements ended up being recycled in other productions during the years in which the material shot for ‘Pulse Pounders’ remained unreleased.

Most notably, the effects used to create the human-faced rat creature were repurposed pretty much in their entirety for the creation of Brown Jenkin in Gordon’s 2005 TV adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘Dreams in the Witch House’, whilst the “erotically charged predatory haunting” conceit of Paoli’s script also strongly reminded me of another Gordon-adjacent film, Danny Draven’s 2002 ‘Deathbed’ (not to be confused with the late George Barry’s outsider masterpiece of the same name), an interesting obscurity, also shot by Ahlberg and executive produced by Band, which saw release on DVD under the rather niche banner of “Stuart Gordon presents…”. (Were there any other entries in that series, I wonder? I don’t recall ever seeing any...)

In summary then, ‘The Evil Clergyman’ stands as something of an unexpected minor miracle for fans of the Empire/Full Moon/Stuart Gordon milieu. Alongside this year’s Suitable Flesh, it offers encouraging proof that the spirit of Gordon’s Lovecraft movies could live on and flourish, even in circumstances in which the man himself was unable to call the shots. Well worth making a small amount of time for if (as is understandable) it passed you by upon its belated release in 2012.

Horror Express 2020 #4: The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)

Within the realm of sequel-driven horror franchises, it’s fair to say that the Exorcist series has always been a bit of an outlier. Admittedly, it got off to an earlier start than most of them, and began from a far higher level of critical acclaim and self-serious artistic intent - but still.

In stark contrast to the “iconic/ground-breaking original followed by reams of (at best) entertaining crap” furrow ploughed by ‘Halloween’, ‘..Elm Street’, ‘Hellraiser’ et al, ‘The Exorcist’ seems to have attracted highly strung, artistically-minded filmmakers like moths to a flame, each determined to fight tooth and nail with the studios to bring their own unique visions to the screen. A strategy which, unfeasibly, multiple generations of studio execs actually seem to have encouraged, even after the ridicule unfairly heaped upon John Boorman’s commercially disastrous ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ back in ’77.

Boorman, William Peter Blatty and Paul Schrader may all in turn have lost their battles with the suits, ultimately delivering compromised, imperfect movies which they were never truly happy with, but, viewed with a few decades of hindsight, I believe that these sequels can be viewed as a disparate trilogy of wildly ambitious, unconventional films, each of which I personally find more rewarding than Friedkin’s original (which I’ve never really cared for, truth be told).

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to the fact that I watched the theatrical release cut of Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist III’ [pedants will wish to note that it had not yet gained the ‘Legion’ sub-title applied to the later reconstruction of the writer/director’s preferred cut at this point] for the first time last month, and, though it can’t hold a candle to the weird majesty of ‘The Heretic’, I nonetheless enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than I was expecting to.

Although Blatty’s high-minded thematic concerns to some extent fall by the way-side here, that’s fine by me, as again, his particular brand of existential Catholic dualism has never really floated my boat. But, when it comes to the more down to earth matter of making a Bloody Good Horror Movie, it’s difficult to watch ‘Exorcist III’ and not conclude that this gentleman had the chops.

In purely audio-visual terms, the writer/director’s approach to this task basically seems to have consisted of throwing in way too much of everything. Every single thing in this movie is creepy and foreboding and upsetting and scary, and every time there's a chance to throw in a jump scare or a disembodied demon growl, you're damn well gonna get one.

Outside of some suitably evocative Washington DC location work, settings here run to lofty, shadow-haunted churches, forced perspective hospital corridors and sombre, steel-shuttered asylums - all photographed by DP Gerry Fisher in a drained, colourless palette which may be tediously familiar to us these days, but must have seemed a pretty fresh approach back in 1990.

(It’s interesting to note that Adrian Lyne’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, the other film which immediately springs to mind as a precursor to this now ubiquitous grim-dark, institutional aesthetic was also released in 1990.)

Barry De Vorzon’s score of course also deserves a big shout-out in this regard. Presumably asserting a huge influence upon post-2000 horror movie (and indeed video game) music, the composer’s relentless soundscape of treated, disembodied vocal textures, rusty gate shrieks and bowel-shaking rumbles pretty much defines the kind of thing which would become de rigour for straight-faced horror in the wake of Kenji Kawai’s soundtracks to Hideo Nakata’s ‘Ring’ films a decade later.

THAT hospital hallway scene (if you’ve looked up anything horror movie-related on Youtube in the past decade or so, you’ll know it) is of course the film’s unquestioned cinematic highlight, but viewed in context, it forms part of a steady succession of exquisitely nerve-jangling sequences spread across the opening two thirds of this picture, each executed with a seemingly impossible mixture of Lewton-esque restraint and utter, baroque excess.

In terms of plotting meanwhile, I’m happy that Blatty chose to entirely dispense with the old “possessed little girl” routine here, as the “occult crime story” angle extrapolated from his source novel is a lot more fun all round.

The movie-obsessed Lieutenant Kinderman (previously played by the late Lee J. Cobb) is my favourite character in Freidkin’s ‘Exorcist’, so it’s great to see him return as the protagonist here, and even greater that he seems in the interim to have transmuted into the gargantuan figure of George C. Scott.

As a life-long devotee of the ‘Go Big’ school of acting, Scott has always been a favourite of mine, and he here delivers what must surely count as one of his absolute best late-era performances, taking his usual ‘simmering human pressure cooker’ thing to a whole new level, playing it taut and low key during his character’s most emotionally trying moments, before boiling over and completely losing his shit when we least expect it. As a showcase of repressed rage, hardboiled, craggy compassion and a dogged determination to resist the rigours of age, it’s pretty awe-inspiring stuff.

Opposite Scott meanwhile, our resident demonically-inhabited, body-jumping psychopath The Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif, with a little bit of help from the first movie’s Jason Miller) boasts the most ridiculous collection of show-boating serial killer trademarks I've ever encountered pre-‘Silence of the Lambs’.

Not only does he only kill people whose names begins with ‘K’, but he uses an extremely obscure, specialist drug to paralyse his victims, cuts off a certain finger from each hand, draws astrological symbols on their backs, and replaces pieces of their bodies with vandalised religious paraphernalia! Man is certainly not short of ideas.

In fairness to Blatty though, I suppose this convoluted MO does indeed represent the kind of symbolic cluster-fuck which I suppose might occur should an already thoroughly coo coo killer end up bouncing around the same bonce with a host of demons and the restless spirit of a tormented priest.

As heavy-handed as some of these story elements may seem though - and as ‘on the nose’ as the director’s favoured imagery of mutilated statuary, demonic crucifixions and angelic visitations may be - this is all balanced out to some extent by Blatty’s deeply eccentric approach to screenwriting.

Drawing on his oft-forgotten background as a scripter of screwball comedies, he seems determined to leaven the metaphysical hand-wringing we’d expect of an Exorcist movie with frequent excursions into high stakes, oddball humour and touches of quasi-Lynchian surrealism which I’m surely the studio must have considered totally ‘off-brand’, as well as seeding the movie with a dense tapestry of synchronicitous inter-textural referencing, touching on everything from Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’ to the Rider Waite Tarot deck to Powell & Pressburger’s ‘The Red Shoes’ and (believe it or not) Mel Brooks’ ‘Space Balls’.

We could perhaps glimpse this trait to a certain extent in the first film via Kinderman’s cinephile banter, and it was given free reign in his directorial debut ‘The Ninth Configuration’, but it’s really turned up to eleven in ‘Exorcist III’. 

The sheer density of Blatty’s dialogue can take a while to get used to, and I’ll freely admit that I was more or less instantly lost by the early scene in which Kinderman obliquely criticises his fellow officers for their racism and lethargy by angrily throwing passages from ‘Macbeth’ in their general direction. Once you get into the swing of it though, it brings a really unique feel to proceedings, adding spice and flavour to what might otherwise have become a pretty po-faced exercise in over-cooked, airport blockbuster bombast.

Speaking of which -- we probably need at this point to address the film’s final act. Shot under duress by Blatty and the principal cast after studio Morgan Creek rejected the anti-climactic conclusion of the director’s initial cut, instead demanding a bit more action and an actual, gosh-darned exorcism, it’s… a bit of a mess, to say the least.

I mean, of all the actors you could have hustled in to play a new character needed for a bunch of pick-up shots for a major studio film with the clock ticking down to release… the legendarily temperamental Nicol Williamson (google up yr own anecdotes) is probably not the man I would have chosen. But, his casting here as hastily parachuted-in bell, book & candle guy Father Morning seems reflective of the sheer level of graft, blundering and back office vanity involved in these reshoots.

Actually, Williamson does perfectly fine work here, adding a certain amount of gravitas to a part that basically amounts to cipher created to satisfy box office expectations, and Blatty directs his scenes with a conviction comparable to the main bulk of the film. Sadly though, neither of them are a match for the risible hullaballoo of snakes, flame-pits, elderly, levitating Oscar winners, glowing gateways to hell, spectral crucifixes, indoor hurricanes and general shrieking hysteria which the producers apparently deemed necessary to provide the punters with the requisite bang for their buck.

Kinderman, had he been able to peel himself off the special effects-drenched cell walls at some point during these proceedings, might well have returned to The Scottish Play and muttered something about “sound and fury” - and indeed, this whole ridiculous finale only serves to confirm my suspicion that, despite Blatty’s noble efforts, ‘Exorcist III’ doesn’t really succeed in saying anything terribly profound about anything (in this cut, at least).

Viewed purely as a horror movie though, for the most part it is absolutely cracking stuff. Imaginative, unconventional, viscerally effective and often brilliantly executed, it now also has the added advantage of feeling extremely prescient, vis-a-vis the ways in which the genre has developed in subsequent decades.

To not put too fine a point on it, prior to 1990 very few horror films looked or sounded like this one. After 2000, they pretty much all did. Coincidence? Just ask all those kids currently at film school who probably spent their formative years watching SCARIEST EVER MOVIE SCENE eight thousand times on Youtube, then consult with Blatty’s restless spirit re: thoughts on Playing The Long Game.

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.