Horror Express 2020 #1: Sugar Hill (Paul Maslansky, 1974)

Well, who on god’s earth could resist a poster like that if it popped up outside their local cinema?

Say what you like about American International Pictures, they sure knew their marketing, and the decision to mix up a blaxploitation female revenge story in the ‘Coffy’/ ‘Foxy Brown’ mould with a voodoo / zombie movie was not just a great idea, but an inevitable one, in view of the company’s place in the market circa 1974.

Not only were AIP the originators of the aforementioned Jack Hill/Pam Grier classics, but the success of the Count Yorga pictures had also put them in the forefront of the brief trend for contemporary, U.S. set reinventions of classic gothic horror tropes. Indeed, their blaxsploitation/horror crossover line was already thriving in its own modest fashion thanks to ‘Blacula’ (1972) and ‘Scream, Blacula, Scream’ (1973).

As it transpires, ‘Sugar Hill’ arrived right at the tail end of these trends’ parallel box office ascendency, just before Arkoff and Nicholson started trying to realign the AIP’s output from 1975 onwards. As such, it should really have been the crowning glory of the company’s achievements in this fertile era; the icing on an already fiendishly overstuffed grindhouse cake.

Trying to assign blame for the fact that it isn’t makes for a less than edifying assignment, but…. let’s just say that, whilst watching ‘Sugar Hill’, the only thing running through my mind from start to finish was: I wish Jack Hill had made this with Pam Grier.

I mean, clearly those guys would have knocked it outta the park. Can you even imagine? Pam in full effect as the voodoo queen, commanding her zombies, as Jack got the chance to mix up the visceral pulp mayhem of his black action films with the gleeful monster kid craziness of ‘Spider Baby’. Wonderful. The late Sid Haig would no doubt have been ragin’ around as some spike-toothed mob enforcer, and no doubt they’d find someone totally far-out - like Exuma, maybe? - to play the Baron Samedi / Vodou Loa character. Allen Toussaint and Dr John might be thrown into a studio together to cook up the soundtrack, and… oh man. It would have been incredible.

Unfortunately though, that’s not the film we got. I believe Hill was still finishing up ‘Foxy Brown’ around the time this was shot, and he subsequently cut his ties with AIP following disagreements with management on the set. Grier meanwhile stayed with the company, but after ‘Foxy Brown’ she (or perhaps, her management) seemed intent on trying to make a dent in the mainstream via watered down, PG-rated re-hashes of her earlier hits like ‘Sheba Baby’ and ‘Friday Foster’ (both 1975).

In lieu of the A-team, Arkoff instead placed a call with his buddy Paul Maslansky, erstwhile producer of such AIP-distributed European horror titles as ‘Castle of the Living Dead’ (1964), Michael Reeves’ ‘She Beast’ (1965) and Gary Sherman’s classic ‘Deathline’/’Raw Meat’ (1972). Having recently returned to America after fifteen years abroad, Maslansky apparently had a yen to direct. So, Sam gave him a brief run-down on what black exploitation films were all about, suggested that combining one with voodoo would be a dead cert, then he basically just handed him the keys and told him not to dent the bumper.

In order to keep costs down and avoid hassle with the unions, production took place in the less than atmospheric environs of Houston, Texas, subbing imperfectly for New Orleans, on a punishing tight three week schedule. A script was cobbled together from somewhere or other, and actress Marki Bey - top-billed for the first and last time after playing supporting roles in a couple of pictures for AIP director/producer Arthur Marks - was recruited to play the title character. She’s not bad, but… she’s no Pam Grier, that’s for sure. (1)

Likewise, ‘Sugar Hill’ is not a terrible film by any stretch of the imagination, but… it’s certainly not an exceptional one either. The very definition of ‘adequate’, it’s one of those movies that’s just kind of…. there, for the most part. It delivers exactly what you’d expect of a 1974 AIP-produced blaxploitation voodoo movie, nothing more, nothing less. Glimpses of innovation or inspiration are few and far between.

Predictably, the story begins with Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill propping up the bar in her upstanding boyfriend’s kitsch, voodoo-themed nightclub, where we get to see a bit of the floorshow, and hear Motown group The Originals’ laboured and rather heavy-handed theme song, ‘Supernatural Voodoo Woman’. (‘Theme from Shaft’ it ain’t.)

The club is proving a runaway success, so naturally the local, multi-ethnic mob (led by Count Yorga himself, Robert Quarry) want in on the action. Upstanding BF of course is having none of it, so before you can reach for the fast forward button, he comes a cropper in the car park, and Sugar is out for sweet revenge.

Naturally, her first stop is Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully), who lives a ghostly existence in a decaying colonial mansion amid a swampy estate swathed in prop department Spanish moss and gallons of dry ice. After the requisite sacrifices and incantations, Baron Samedi (a wild-eyed, permanently grinning Don Pedro Colley) arrives resplendent, as his ping-pong ball-eyed zombie slaves rise from the mulch of the forest floor to take care of business.

Before you can find any more synonyms for ‘predictably’/’naturally’/’of course’ etc, Quarry and his assorted despicable cohorts begin to meet their supernatural doom in a neatly episodic fashion, and….. that’s about as far as a plot synopsis needs to go, really.

On the plus side here then; even if the swampy, Louisiana atmos isn’t quite what it should be, the blind, silver-eyed zombies are an effective, distinctively creepy creation, and must have made quite an impression on audiences back in the pre-Fulci/Raimi era, when such soil-covered, filth-encrusted revenants were a rare sight indeed on the big screen.

Colley is full of fun too as Baron Samedi, going waa-ay off the deep end performance-wise, even if his top-hatted Loa character never really manages to move beyond the more obvious clichés of his part, and the ‘gags’ he dishes out as he drops in on his assorted victims are uniformly woeful.

Also providing excellent value for money is Quarry, who, despite reportedly being cast in this film simply because AIP were legally obligated to provide him with one more job before nixing his contract, nonetheless does sterling work. Giving every indication of having thoroughly enjoyed himself, he transforms his underwritten mob boss character into a hip, razor sharp figure who actually becomes strangely likeable, especially when sparring with his dim-witted, racist blonde girlfriend Celeste (Betty Ann Rees).

Those minor highlights aside however, there’s not really a lot to shout about here. Though there’s some nice lighting and camerawork here and there, in stark contrast to Hill, Maslansky’s direction is depressingly inert. It’s bad sign that he fails to invest even the calamitous early death of the boyfriend character with much dramatic weight, and for the most part proceedings remain equally flat thereafter.

Although he went on to enjoy a highly successful production career through the 70s and 80s (masterminding the ‘Police Academy’ franchise, of all things), it is notable I think that ‘Sugar Hill’ represents Maslansky’s only directorial credit. The drably utilitarian, “will this do?” vibe of most of the footage he captured here answers the question of why he never gave it another shot pretty concisely.

I probably can’t entirely blame Maslansky (who seems like a perfectly nice guy in interviews incidentally) for my next complaint – it sits more with a combo of him, Arkoff and Nicholson, writer Tim Kelly, the whole outfit really I suppose, but…. well, how can I best put this?

Whilst employing white writers and directors to make majority black cast films in the U.S.A. was never going to be an ideal scenario, my belief is that, when AIP hired hip white filmmakers like Hill, Larry Cohen and Jonathan Kaplan to make black action films for them in the early 1970s, those directors at least gave the impression that they were trying to engage with black audiences.

They positioned themselves on the same level as their hypothetical viewers and took an honest stab at reflecting their concerns back to them, sometimes pushing back against the more objectionable content demanded by the studio, and often allowing their actors to bend the material to their own creative/personal needs. To not put too fine a point on it, good movies resulted.

‘Sugar Hill’ by contrast merely feels like it’s patronising its target audience. Though the “revenge against whitey” plotline essentially isn’t much different to that of ‘Coffy’ or ‘Black Caesar’, there’s no real depth here, no impact or involvement. As each of the bad guys in turn prove themselves racist, corrupt or despicable before getting iced by Sugar Hill’s zombies as the guffawing Baron Samedi looks on, the payback is so predictable, so simplistic, that viewers – be they black, white, blue or green – simply feel as if they’re being played for fools, more than anything else.

It’s as if Arkoff told Maslansky, look, you’ve gotta knock off whitey (and some corrupt, black criminal types too, just for the sake of balance) – that’s what sells the tickets. Lesson learned, he’s just ticking the boxes for his boss here. Social relevance? Implicit understanding of the economic inequalities underpinning racial strife? Reflections on the blighted legacy of slavery lurking behind all that voodoo/colonial mansion shtick? Sadly there is precious little of any of that here.

And that’s before we even get to the “only in the 70s” ending, which sees the aforementioned Celeste (the real villain of the piece, to all intents and purposes) being ritually offered up to Baron Samedi as the ‘offering’ to repay him for his hard work icing all the bad guys, leading to us being implicitly invited to cheer in approval as Colley, grinning ear-to-ear, closes in for what he must assume to be a post-credits supernatural rape scene. HAPPY ENDING, everybody!

Boy oh boy. Let’s just skip over unpacking the questionable implications of that one, shall we? It might take a while.

In a sense, ‘Sugar Hill’ reminds me more than anything of the British horror directed by Vernon Sewell for Tigon in the late 1960s, ‘The Blood Beast Terror’ and ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’ (both 1968). It carries the same terrible stench of wasted potential, of the lightning-in-a-bottle potential of a unique confluence of time, talent and ideas being squandered, just because the guys in the back office were more concerned with delivering exploitable pictures as quickly and cheaply as possible than they were with actually making a movie anyone in their right mind would wish to see more than once.

When undertaking creative work, I’ve always tried to remember the old axiom that, if you aim for ‘good’, hopefully you’ll get something average - but if you aim for ‘average’, you’ll inevitably end up with shit. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘Sugar Hill’ is shit – it’s a perfectly serviceable movie, and certainly worth a look for fans of this particular aesthetic terrain. But, if the film’s makers had borne the above wisdom in mind, it could easily have been worth two looks, or even eight or nine, if you get my drift. And the restless spirit of Mr. Arkoff may wish to note that we’d still be paying for it every time too.

Now if only they’d got Jack Hill to make this, and persuaded Pam Grier to star, and….

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(1)In fairness to Bey, this is a criticism which can just as easily be levelled at literally anyone else in the film industry. (Werner Herzog? I mean, he’s ok, but he’s no Pam Grier.)

Arrow Round up: Eaten Alive (Tobe Hooper, 1976)

Independent producer Mardi Rustam must have thought he’d hit the grindhouse horror jackpot when he signed up the director of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (then still knocking people’s socks off on its initial theatrical run) to make a movie about a backwoods hotel proprietor feeding his guests to a giant alligator, starring a bus load of old-hand Hollywood character players and a handful of pretty girls.

Forty years later, when I threw this disc on without much prior research to headline a Friday night of mindless horror movie fun, I’ll confess I had broadly similar expectations…. but as it turns out, fate dealt both Mardi and I a pretty ugly hand on this one.

To put it plainly: ‘Eaten Alive’ (also widely known as ‘Death Trap’) is a real fucking weird one, and not necessarily in a good way. Despite the foolproof simplicity of its drive-in friendly premise (‘Psycho’ + alligators + tits & gore = $$$, basically), the film that eventually emerged from the production’s evidently quite troubled set is one of the most ramshackle, disquieting and uniquely off-putting attempts at making a commercial horror film I’ve ever seen. (1)

The reasons for this are many and varied, but I suspect, at the end of the day, there was simply a bad moon on the rise (or some equally calamitous astrological conjunction) the day that the film’s creative principals convened on a low-rent Hollywood sound-stage to throw this thing together. There is just something.. off.. about the whole venture. Depending on circumstances and personal taste, some may find that this freaked out, weirdie vibe could add greatly to the film, but…. well, let’s just say that on this occasion it didn’t do a lot for my proposed programme of popcorn consumption and solfa-based relaxation, and leave it at that.

Although ‘Eaten Alive’s consciously artificial, set-bound visual style – all glowing red gel-lighting, swathes of candy floss fog and garishly camp costume/set design – suggests an intention on Hooper’s part to take a 180 degree U-turn from the realism of ‘Chainsaw..’, the spirit of that film was clearly still very much on the director’s mind, and his actual direction here is just as disorientating and stylistically extreme as it was on his earlier classic. Dutch angles, sweaty facial close-ups and prolonged sequences of twitchy discomfort are all very much in evidence, whilst the director’s favoured soundtrack (recorded in conjunction with Wayne Bell, as per their work together on ‘Chainsaw..’) comprises a genuinely alarming selection of jagged, atonal noise loops that, combined with a near-continuous barrage of shrieking, squelching, canned animal noise and incoherent radio chatter, makes the film a constant, low level assault on the senses. (2)

Whereas this approach worked very well for ‘Chainsaw..’s assaultive “descent into hell” structure however, it wreaks havoc with the slower, more conventional narrative utilised here, leaving viewers lost and confused, unable to grab hold of anything to help us connect with or understand the parade of increasingly grotesque insanity unfolding on-screen.

One of the main problems here (if indeed you see it as a problem) is that, of the distractingly large cast of characters, most appear just as unbalanced and unpredictable as Neville Brand’s psychopath hotelier, leaving us searching in vain for the kind of vaguely sympathetic protagonist figures necessarily to anchor (and more importantly, drive the suspense of) this kind of slasher / bodycount set-up.

Robert Englund’s smirking cowboy rapist, Stuart Whitman’s sleazy, ineffectual sheriff, Carolyn Jones’ doddering brothel madam – all of these are potentially intriguing characters, but they’re also almost comically dislikeable and entirely absorbed in their own strange tangents, giving the film a rambling, “lunatics have taken over the asylum” feel that persists despite the belated introduction of Mel Ferrer and Crystin Sinclaire as a theoretically sympathetic (but actually also quite dysfunctional) father / daughter team about halfway through the run-time. (3)

I don’t know what kind of advice and/or freaky treatment Hooper gave his cast here, but, whether their characters demand it or not, just about everyone on-screen is completely out-to-lunch, which doesn’t exactly help matters. This is most evident early in the film, when a bickering family unit of rent-a-victims (the parents played by Brian De Palma regular William Finley and ‘Chainsaw..’s Marilyn Burns) pull up outside Brand’s decaying boarding house. Finally, we think, some normal people to help put things in perspective… but it’s not to be.

Shot dispassionately from above as they stomp around their hideously decaying hotel room, Finley and Burns’ domestic disagreements soon assume the quality of shrieking, operatic hysteria, with Finley in particular going so far off the map it’s hard to believe anyone let him get away with it. By the time he begins scrabbling around on the floor, apparently channeling some acid-damaged reject from a way-out experimental theatre production as he mimes a search for his “eyes”, which he accuses his wife of having scooped out of his skull, we’re forced to wonder whether the couple’s terrified child – currently hiding under filthy bed sheets having already been traumatized by the sight of her pet poodle getting chomped by the alligator – wouldn’t be better off taking her chances with the muttering, brain-damaged axe murderer downstairs.

So yeah – it’s that kind of movie.

At the centre of all this derangement, probably the most genuinely disturbing (as opposed to just fingers-down-the-blackboard grating) aspect of ‘Eaten Alive’ is the casting of Neville Brand in the central role of the aforementioned psychopath.

Apparently one of the most highly decorated American veterans of World War II, Brand often claimed that he initially turned to acting (with a particular emphasis on The Method) as a means of coping with the ravages of what we would probably now term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (back then, they probably just went with “shell shock”, or did that ‘silently tapping the side of yr head’ thing). Though extremely successful in his new career (his filmography is quite a read), by the time he got to ‘Eaten Alive’ Brand had also resorted to treating his condition through the more traditional means of raging alcoholism, resulting in a tendency toward dysfunctional behavior that shines through all too clearly here.

It is often difficult to discern how much of Brand’s incoherent performance is a result of his “immersion in the role” and how much is simply a reflection of his damaged mental health at the time of filming, but either way, he makes for an extremely uncomfortable presence on screen. Constantly muttering to himself and occasionally raising his voice to make odd, fractured pronouncements to whoever happens to be around, the vast majority of Brand’s dialogue is either inaudible or meaningless, meaning that, although we spend a great deal of time following him stomping about his living space as distorted country n’ western blares on the radio, we learn very little of his character’s personal history, or the motivation for his apparently random crimes.

He does sometimes seem to experiencing flashbacks or hallucinations of a military nature, suggesting that the character, like the actor playing him, is a traumatised veteran of some kind (thus aligning ‘Eaten Alive’ as a potential distant cousin to the sub-genre of “shell shock” horror flicks represented by Bob Clark’s ‘Deathdream’ (1974) and Buddy Giovinazzo’s ‘Combat Shock’ (1984)), but this is never really explored, and again, the ratio of “stuff that was in the script” versus stuff that Brand was simply improvising on the spot remains unclear.

All we can say for sure is that, based on opinions culled from the extensive extras on Arrow’s release of the film, most of the cast and crew were frightened of Brand, finding his behaviour threatening and unpredictable (one interviewee recalls him eating from a huge jar of honey between takes, like some perverted Winnie the Pooh), whilst many of his scenes convey the impression of a man suffering from severe dementia who has been pushed onto the set and left to fend for himself.

As with many of his later films, Hooper himself doesn’t seem to have been an easy collaborator either, and his constant clashes with ‘Eaten Alive’s producers appear to have led to his walking off and returning to the production like a yo-yo, with many cast members recalling pivotal scenes instead being directed by cinematographer Robert Caramico (whose attitude could be summarised as “LET’S GET THIS FUCKING THING DONE AND GO HOME”), or by Rustam himself.

Under the circumstances, it is a testament to the strength of Hooper’s vision that the finished film continues to embody his directorial sensibility so strongly, but his obvious absence from large chunks of the shooting nonetheless lends ‘Eaten Alive’ a fragmented, piecemeal quality that makes it an even stranger viewing experience, full of threads left hanging, entirely gratuitous bits of character business and some sequences whose very existence remains entirely inexplicable.

An example of the latter is provided by one extraordinary diversion during a scene set in a local bar, when David Haywood, the wondering cowboy with the violin case from Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’, turns up, apparently playing the same character he portrayed in that film. Haywood proceeds to be terrorised in an exceptionally odd manner by two unsavory gentlemen – cohorts of Englund’s character – who rival Brand in the “authentically fucking creepy” department, in a meta-textual bit of pre-Lynchian menace that defies any kind of rational explanation.

Buried somewhere beneath ‘Eaten Alive’s distressed, almost avant garde surface is a great little fun-time horror movie (the one Rustam initially wanted to make, presumably) just fighting to get out. It is ironic that, despite turning off most of horror crowd with its sheer, rambling weirdness, the film’s actual murder set pieces are outstanding. More audacious and explicitly gory than most mid-‘70s American horrors, they border on the cartoon splatter of ‘80s Italian fare in their best moments – in fact I’m sure a carefully assembled trailer of the bloodier highlights could have had gore-hounds queuing ‘round the block, were it not for the fact that the total failure of the movie’s animatronic crocodile (alligator? I dunno, who cares..) simultaneously undercuts the laudable achievements of the film’s effects team in other areas, making a laughing stock out of any hopes the producers might have had of scoring some topical, ‘Jaws’-style action.

The more acclaimed classics of 1970s American independent horror might have gained a rep for their dark, twisted innovation, but for sheer berserk extremity I think ‘Eaten Alive’ pretty much tops them all, even whilst it’s lavishly eccentric production design instead seems to hark back to the ‘60s gothics, or early Technicolor melodramas. Going considerably further in its audience alienation tactics than most viewers are liable to tolerate even today, I can only assume it must have been met with consternation, walk-outs and general bafflement when it first made the rounds of America’s grindhouse/drive-in circuit back in the mid ‘70s.

Like most of Hooper’s post-‘Chainsaw..’ films, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘Eaten Alive’ is a ‘good’ or artistically successful film – and it is certainly not one I’m be liable to recommend to anyone for the purposes of ‘entertainment’ – but it is definitely a unique experience, and that counts for something. Whatever you make of him as a director, Hooper’s bloody-minded pursuit of his own peculiar vision, combined with his apparent refusal to ever actually make the film his producers or audience want him to, is difficult not to admire.

Just spare a thought though for poor old Mardi Rustam, head in hands beside his account ledger a year or so after ‘Eaten Alive’ wrapped, wondering what the hell went wrong.

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(1)Other AKAs include ‘Horror Hotel’, ‘Starlight Slaughter’, ‘Legend of the Bayou’, ‘Brutes and Savages’ (appropriate?), ‘Akuma No Nuwa’ [‘The Devil’s Swamp’] in Japan and, as demonstrated via the superb poster above, ‘Quel Motel Vicino alla Palude’ [‘The Motel Near the Swamp’] in Italy.

(2) I’m sure all this has been widely discussed before, but with my “music fan” hat on, I can’t help but reflect on how ahead of their time Hooper & Bell were with their scores for ‘Chainsaw..’ and ‘Eaten Alive’, and how influential they must have been on the emergence what we’d today classify as ‘harsh noise’ or power electronics. I mean, who else, outside of the farthest reaches of avant garde composition, was busting out this kind of thing in the mid-‘70s?

(3)Amusingly, the perpetually dignified Mel Ferrer also ended up appearing in Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Eaten Alive!’ (1980).

Gothic Horror Round-up: Terror-Creatures from the Grave (Massimo Pupillo, 1965)

Another doozy from the man who brought us ‘Bloody Pit of Horror’! Presented in English translation by the promisingly named Pacemaker Pictures, this rather more straight-laced affair (original title ‘5 Tombe per un Medium’ ) still stands as one of the more eventful and entertaining of Barbara Steele’s post-Black Sunday Italian gothics, telling a tale of undead plague victims rising from the swamps to wreak vengeance upon a clique of small town personages (including Luciano Pigozzi from ‘Black & Black Lace’ and ‘Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory’, and Alfredo Rizzo from every Italian movie ever) who have contrived to send Barbara’s husband, the local aristocratic mad doctor/occultist type, to his grave. Our upstanding bland hero guy (Walter Brandi, from ‘Bloody Pit..’ and ‘Playgirls & The Vampire’) is a big city lawyer who has received a mysterious letter from the dead man asking for his estate to be settled. Presumably he realises he’s stuck in a gothic horror movie about the same time he finds his car won’t start because there’s an owl stuck in the engine(!), and figures he might as well hang around for the duration.

Although adding little to the tradition as filtered through Whale, Corman, Fisher, Bava, Margheriti and the rest, Pupillo’s directiorial style is still enjoyably lively, his camera wobbling around on some kind of makeshift steady-cam, refusing to allow even the most stultifying dialogue scenes (and, god, if there’s one thing you’ve got to learn to live with in Italian gothics, it’s the stultifying dialogue scenes) to remain static for long, throwing in gruesome cut-away shots and atmospheric tableaus whenever good taste (or what passes for it in Italian b-movies) allows.

A slightly more down to earth example of gothic than the ethereal likes of ‘Castle of Blood’ or ‘Nightmare Castle’, ‘Terror Creatures..’ is largely concerned with real world malice and physical threat. Rather than a ghostly waif, Steele’s character is a frustrated dancer and socialite, angry at her husband for locking her away in the countryside, and the use of the old chestnut about a supposedly dead man returning to wreak vengeance on those who wronged him seems to mark out the point at which gothic horror meets the conventions of an early ‘60s mystery, krimi or proto-gialli flick (think Coppola & Hill’s ‘Dementia 13’, or Harald Reinl’s ‘The Strangler of Blackmore Castle’).

At the same time though, the bloodcurdling supernatural elements here are as bold and weird as anything in the work of Bava or Freda. A scratchy gramophone cylinder replays the thoughts of the deceased doctor’s supernatural investigations (“October 30th, today I made contact with them again..”), a device reminiscent both of the voiceovers and letters in ‘Messiah of Evil’ and of the diabolic conversations transcribed in Lovecraft’s ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. An iridescent water-nymph sits on the edge of the fountain outside our hero’s window, singing a creepily beautiful folk song (presumably an entirely different one from that featured on the original Italian version). The severed hands of plague-ridden criminals come to life, wriggling in their glass case as the wonky, theremin-addled score blares, and some supernatural agency drains the water from a bowl of flowers on the dining room table.

Fearing the approach of the plague-creatures, a wheelchair-bound old man kills himself by falling onto an outstretched sword blade, whilst another censor-baiting scene has Steele commanding her step-daughter to help her scrub up in the bath (steady now). The only disappointment really is an ill-judged (and presumably budgetary) application of the old “never show the monster” principal during the finale, which marrs the action somewhat when things go full-on zombie, leaving the survivors battling half-heartedly with an unconvincing monster-cam.

Scarcely likely to be anyone’s idea of a masterpiece, ‘Terror Creatures..’ is still a fun b-movie, packed with incident and memorable moments, in spite of all the tedious blather and wooden dubbing. Widely available in a mangled public domain print that looks like it’s been rescued from the bottom of a well, a copy is no doubt available from your usual supplier of such things, deterioration and dust-on-the-needle sound mix giving even the film’s more banal moments an eerie period pallor that only increases its charm.

The Witchmaker (William O. Brown, 1969)

A regional oddity written and directed by the otherwise unknown William O. Brown, ‘The Witchmaker’ was filmed partially on location in the Louisiana bayou (I could have sworn it was the Everglades, but it might as well have been shot in the Dagobah System given the quality of the print I saw) in 1968, for release on the drive-in circuit in ’69.

I’m not sure how it fared on initial release, but the film’s unprecedented (for an exploitation movie) running time of nearly two hours, its lack of explicit sex n’ violence, and its steadfast dedication to character-building yakking would not seem to be ingredients destined to make it a horror smash, perhaps resulting in its almost total obscurity even today. From the point of view of the more discerning devotee of low budget horror filmmaking though, (that’s us, in case you were wondering), ‘Witchmaker’ is an outright winner – a smart, well made and grimly atmospheric witchcraft shocker whose frequent descents into outright WTF goofiness only serve to sweeten the brew. So let's dive in...

This is Luther The Beserk:


Luther is a hulking Shakespearean ham who seems preoccupied with stalking around the swamps, slaughtering bathing beauties as and when he finds them. I wouldn’t have thought he was ideally placed for such activity – who the hell goes sunbathing in the middle of an impenetrable swamp? – but nonetheless, we’re told he’s knocked off eight young ladies in the past year – a pretty good score, considering.

The poor victims end up hanging by their feet, drained of blood, with an Egyptian ankh daubed on their bellies. A beastly business, and no mistake.



We get the facts and figures about all this from a well-informed swampboat captain, who is ferrying Dr Ralph Hayes and his team of psychic researchers out to a remote cabin deep in the swamp for a week of… well, at this point who knows – research, presumably. Our captain reckons it’s witches that are the problem, and he seems to know plenty about them too. All these new age kids toying with the occult are a load of baloney, he counsels, but a REAL witch – like the ones local legend says live in the swamps – they’re “damn near immortal”, provided they get a regular supply of blood to keep them alive. And them gurls wuz completely drained of blood, were they not?

Unconvinced by this jovial fellow’s reasoning, smug Dr Hayes sends him packing with $21, and his party – including psychic sensitive Anastasia, inquisitive reporter Victor and his secretary Maggie – start settling into the rat-infested shack that the doctor deems the perfect spot for a bit of psychic research.


Almost as soon as they arrive, the girls set out for a bit of topless sunbathing (my question above neatly answered), and it is here that we begin to see the film’s somewhat confused attitude toward its own exploitation elements. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some disagreement behind the scenes as to whether or not the film should include nudity and bloodshed, but whatever the circumstances, they seem to have ended up with a distinctly peculiar compromise. All the set up and implication is here, and it’s as sleazy as you could ask of a ’69 b-movie – brutal slayings, unclothed ladies, satanic orgies, all present and correct.

But at the same time, someone (or someTHING) seems determined that ‘The Witchmaker’ should remain within the bounds of good taste at all times. Which is fine – I couldn’t care less either way, and the lack of ‘money shots’ in the opening murder sequence is actually extremely effective in its grim restraint. But that’s not something that can be said of perhaps the film’s most obvious laugh-out-loud moment, when a sunbathing Anastasia senses Luther lurking in the undergrowth and flees (in slow motion, no less), guarding her modesty like so;


Chase that PG-13 certificate!

Luther The Beserk, as we’ve no doubt established by now, is quite into his witchcraft, although it turns out he is not a witch himself. As a ‘Beserk’, he is something of a combined handyman and overseer to a coven of immortal diabolists. He lives in a big, dark cave where he worships a bronze effigy of Satan, keeps the random gouts of flame burning, and performs the blood rituals necessary to keep the spectral witches alive.

For connoisseurs of vintage occult ritual action, ‘The Witchmaker’ is a must. It may be none too imaginative (apparently drawing ankhs on stuff and throwing blood around will usually get you the results you’re looking for in the black arts), but with all kinds of blood-curdling flame/altar/dagger/parchment/goblet type shenanigans going on throughout, and a great candlelit seance from our psychics, it’s hard not to just sit back and enjoy.




Witchmaker was filmed in Techniscope, the same process used on many Italian movies, and some low budget American films, including William Huyck and Gloria Katz’ 'Messiah of Evil', oddly enough. Like that film (absolutely fantastic by the way – review coming soon hopefully), 'The Witchmaker' benefits from widescreen framing, rich contrast and a groovy technicolor colour palette, which together with imaginative lighting and great use of the swamp locations create a really unique looking movie.

Sadly though, this uniqueness is often hard to appreciate, partially because the version I’m watching – an .avi downloaded from the now defunct Cultrarare Video site, probably sourced from an ‘80s VHS release - is about as bad as picture quality can get, and partially because, imaginatively lit though it may be, Witchmaker is also one of the darkest films I’ve ever seen, with many scenes seemingly shot night-for-night, lit by torches, solitary spotlights and so on. Not a good combination. Once you clean all the shit off the negative, I suspect the scenes in Luther’s cave might convey a Bava-esque splendour, and the exterior shots around the shack might seem to prefigure woodland atmospherics in “Evil Dead”. But for the moment, many scenes seem to take place in total darkness, with only vague shufflings to let you know what’s going on. Such is life.

I purposefully took screengrabs from lighter moments, but here’s a possibly more representative shot, and the absolute worst title screen ever:



Making up for the paucity of light though, I found the performances in “The Witchmaker” to be an absolute joy. The cast sound unusually committed, and bring a wonderful “local theatre group” feeling to proceedings, whilst the script provides them with some great, no nonsense material to work with – smart, but never clever, writing reminiscent of an above average ‘50s b-movie. Those raised on Hollywood’s huffin’& puffin’, post-Brando idea of what constitutes a good performance may deem the acting here stiff and workmanlike, but formality should not be mistaken for ineptitude, and I think it serves the film perfectly. Cut from a different cloth to the neurotic windbags and cynical losers who began to populate horror movies as the ‘70s went on, our heroes here are likable, reasonable guys and gals – they get along just fine, they make plans, they act in each other’s best interests and they keep it together. How refreshing is that for a daft witchcraft movie?

Alvy Moore, who was also the film’s co-producer, is especially noteworthy in the role of Dr. Hayes, as he makes the transition from smug know-it-all to determined leader, realising the danger he has put himself and his students in, thanks to what turns out to be his own hare-brained scheme to track down a modern day witch using Anastasia’s psychic powers. Laugh all you like, but the scene where he stumbles across the body of one of the girls is a genuinely moving portrayal of grief, and of horrified disbelief that this fucked up shit is actually happening.



By contrast, our villains really are a good laugh, with Luther and chief witch Jesse both taking their acting cues straight from an amateur production of Macbeth, making sure to project to the back of the hall at all times – “Satan, give me my PURPOSE!”

By now, we’re likely wondering why a promising young lad like Luther would dedicate his life to running around a swamp with a car mat draped over his shoulders, slitting people’s throats and arguing with a comedy hag. Must be a pretty miserable existence, right?

The answer comes loud and clear in the final twenty minutes, when Luther’s coven convene for their Candlemass celebration. The summoning rituals complete, a whole gang of voluptuous witchy maidens – and a few shifty sorcerer types, Satanic barbarians etc to make up the numbers – emerge from the shadows, each announced by Luther’s booming tones. Marta of Amsterdam! The Hag of Devon! El-Har Ishma! Ah, good times…




They proceed to get the party started, quaffing wine and making out, to a soundtrack of appropriately bacchanalian horn & kettle drum music! Awesome. In fact I think this has got to be one of the best witch hoedowns in cinema history.



And whilst all that’s going on, our dogged and resourceful heroes are working to bring things to a thrilling and action-packed conclusion, by way of hypnotism, invisibility, pig blood, fireballs and quicksand! Too much man, too much.

What more can I say? Despite being a 111 minute movie full of lengthy dialogue scenes, equally lengthy silences and people wandering around the woods in pitch darkness, 'The Witchmaker' kept me thoroughly entertained and happily weirded out through every one of those minutes. Consider it recommended!