Me n' Coffin Joe, Part # 1:Awakening Of The Beast (1970)

So, what did you all do this xmas? I watched Jose Mojica Marins’ “Awakening of the Beast”. In fairness, I also made time for “The Third Man”, “The Last Picture Show”, Corman’s “Tales of Terror”, “The League of Gentlemen” and “The Trouble With Harry” over the holiday period, all under more convivial circumstances than midnight on my laptop, but it is “Awakening..” that concerns us here.

Given the comparative rarity of weird/obscure cinema on DVD release in the UK, I was surprised and delighted to notice recently that some blessed souls (Anchor Bay in collaboration with Rue Morgue magazine if you must know) have seen fit to release a box set of no less than NINE of Marins’ movies, available for less than twenty quid at your local high street retailer. Nine! Man, I didn’t know he’d even MADE nine movies! So, needless to say, ‘The Coffin Joe Collection’ = my xmas list = under the tree. Thanks mum!

My introduction to the world of Coffin Joe came via a late night thread Channel 4 ran a few years back, dedicated to ‘The World’s Strangest Films’ or some such. And, god bless ‘em, they actually made pretty good on that boast. I should clarify that this was back in the good old days when C4 liked to play up their ‘edgy’ reputation by running a range of original programming in the early hours that seemed to be specifically tailored to the stoner/drunken student crowd, leading to such ever-green favourites as that video clips show with those two Welsh guys playing bits of review copies they’d been sent and that show where cute girls would review video games. I’d imagine this golden age came to an abrupt end when some more commercially savvy cat muscled into a production meeting with the sad truth that the young and inebriated crowd these shows were aimed at do not discriminate in their viewing AT ALL, and will just as happily watch sit-com repeats or CCTV footage of other losers sitting around. So: R.I.P. 90% of TV programming that someone like me could actually sit through, gone in one fell swoop.

But anyway, this was the era that gave us the ‘World’s Strangest Films’ season, and like I said, they done delivered! I particularly remember coming in late one night from a gig in London and sitting around with my student housemates of the time, flabbergasted as we turned on the box and ran headfirst into zero budget Pilipino horror classic ‘The Killing of Satan’. Between the crazy, camera trick kung-fu scenes, the cage full of naked girls and the sight of the Halloween costume & foam pitchfork clad Satan demonstrating his evil by doling out Chinese burns and kicking a fat man down a hill, I laughed so much I was actually dry-heaving by the end.

So, needless to say, I was ready and waiting a week later with my own little TV, drinking some coffee with dinner to see me through to whatever-the-hell-time the next feature presentation began – “Awakening of the Beast”. Now I was, I suppose, vaguely aware of Jose Marins, aka Ze Do Caixao, aka Coffin Joe, at this point. I mean: Brazilian stage actor wears a top hat and a cape, grows a beard and gnarly long finger nails, creates the ‘Coffin Joe’ character and directs/stars in a series of low budget horror films – this is a concept I can dig. I was expecting, I suppose, some kinda cut price, South American Vincent Price / William Castle rama-lama.


What I got, “Awakening of the Beast”, absolutely blindsided me. As a clean-living young man, I was more or less sober when it flickered across the screen, but I honestly thought someone had spiked my coffee with something. To this day, I’ve assumed that I must have exaggerated things in my memory over the years, and that this film can’t POSSIBLY be as fucked up as I remember it being.

So naturally it was first out of the Coffin Joe box at midnight Christmas day, just to check. And the word is: duck kid, it’s even more fucked up than you remember.

It should be noted that most of Marins’ other films, if not exactly ‘normal’, do at least sound like recognisable narrative horror films. “Awakening..” on the other hand bears no real comparison to any other motion picture ever made. It is, I suppose, one part surreal mondo/sexploitation flick, one part an 8 ½-style self-referential exploration of the director’s work, and one part psychedelic descent into hell.



I should have known something was up right from the opening credits, which are scrawled in marker pen on top of pages ripped from a horror comic (an official Coffin Joe comic book, it turns out if you look closely), and are accompanied not by a musical score, but by a thundering skree of distorted, echoing animal noises and screams. Intercut with this are shots of a young woman preparing to inject heroin into her foot. After the credits have concluded, we see close-ups of pornography tacked to the walls of a small, bare room, and panning out, we’re shown five furtive, be-suited men who sit on all-fours, watching the woman shoot up. While she proceeds to strip for them, they pass around a parcel and tear off the wrapping, to reveal a chamber-pot, upon which the woman squats, preparing to defecate.

Cut to a darkened room, where some serious men seem to be engaged in a discussion. One of them says something like, “Why, I would have expected such a disgusting fantasy from the mind of Ze Do Caixao, but not from a respected psychologist!”. What can I say when those are the FACTS, the respected psychologist responds, if you need further evidence, check this one out…

In the next sequence, we see a schoolgirl (she has a picture of the Beatles stuck on her school book) being picked up off the street by some love-bead swingin’ Sunset Strip hippies. They take her back to their apartment, where a whole bunch of hip Tropicalia type cats are busy smoking joints, playing rock n’ roll songs and generally acting crazy. They hypnotise the girl (by giving her a joint and repeatedly clicking their fingers in her face), and proceed to sexually assault her in a strange, highly stylised fashion. This unsavoury scene reaches its conclusion when a hairy, priest-type character wielding a long wooden staff that looks like it’s been torn straight off a tree turns up. He announces something about doing what the lord hath commanded him, and he takes his branch and… dear god, I don’t even want to tell you what happens next – imagine the worst, and give thanks that at least it’s only implied off-screen.




Taken alone, this absurd and disturbing sequence makes for a perfect demonstration of the essential, incommunicable *strangeness* of Jose Marins’ direction in this film. Even if we are to accept that he has some reason for throwing us into this unhappy scenario, completely devoid of context or explanation, the execution of the whole thing is still just utterly off the wall. On one level, these scenes have both the same appearance and tone as an American ‘roughie’ sexploitation flick from earlier in the ‘60s, but then… why does the first shot we see of the hippie pad feature a guy balanced halfway up the wall playing a strange assemblage of drums? Why do the hippies circle around the girl with their index fingers extended, humming ‘Colonel Bogey’? Why do people keep jumping in and out of the window? Why the priest guy? – I suspect there are no answers, other than that Marins is just one of those directors, like Lynch or Wojcieck Has or John Boorman, who couldn’t do ‘normal’ if you put a gun to his head.



Assuming you don’t give up on the film at this point like a reasonable human being, it continues in this general vein for quite a while, cutting between increasingly surreal (although not quite so unpleasant) vignettes of sex/drug related ‘decadence’, and brief visits to the darkened room, where the highly respected psychologist and his friends continue to smoke up a storm whilst saying things like “such scenes are happening all the time in this world of violence!” and “this is concrete proof of the insidious nature of drugs and how they stimulate depravity and corruption!”.

By the time we’ve seen an angry man kicking three young girls in the ass after they offer him their underwear, some junkies shooting up whilst listening to a Coffin Joe radio broadcast, and a particularly curious scene in which a well-to-do lady watches a black servant ravage her daughter as her horse suggestively pokes its head through the doorway alongside her, one starts to get a sinking feeling, suspecting that the film is just going to go on like this indefinitely.




Thankfully though that’s not the case, and eventually the parade of lunatic titillation comes to a close, as we return to the psychologist’s discussion panel and notice for the first time that none other than Coffin Joe himself is present! Well, sort of. “I left Ze Do Caixao at the graveyard, gentlemen”, he clarifies, “you are speaking to Jose Mojica Marins”. Marins proceeds to state that he is fairly ambivalent about the psychologist’s ravings about the imminent collapse of civilised society, and doesn’t really understand why his presence has been requested by the group.

This prompts a rather elaborate flashback explanation from the psychologist, in the course of which we get to witness clips from a ‘TV court’ style Brazilian TV show in which Marins was put on ‘trial’ by some critics who reviled his horror movies and comics. When called upon to defend himself, Marins boasts that he is a self-taught artist who’s never had any help from anyone, and that he’s merely giving the people what they want to see. He then gets quite angry and begins ranting about the difficulties of making a film in South America and the expense of importing film stock, etc. Inexplicably, the TV jury acquit him.

Anyway, long story short (skipping over even more gratuitous mondo weirdo sequences featuring footage of an expressionistic avant garde stageplay and a wild looking Brazilian psychedelic band who do a variation of 'Milk Cow Blues' with lyrics like “in the tar mountain / we sing songs of emotion” and “Marmalade Mermaid / reproduce without thinking / smoking to the mounts of Korea”, accompanied by a wild light show, an air raid siren and naked frugging teenagers), the psychologist explains that after seeing the TV show he decided, for some reason I can’t quite fathom, to assemble four ‘drug addicts’ from different social backgrounds, and have them take acid as they stare at a Coffin Joe film poster.

At this point, the film lurches unexpectedly from black & white to lurid, blazing techicolor, as the experimental subjects’ joint acid trip unfolds before our eyes. This trip sequence goes on for about twenty five minutes and is utterly indescribable – one of the most intensely overpowering and uncomfortable car crashes of psychotronic imagery I’ve ever seen. Set to the accompaniment of deafening bursts of distortion and tormented screams, eye-straining oversaturated light and primitive trick photography, Marins here demonstrates a love of sadism and excess to rival that of Jodorowsky or Ken Russell, as our trippers descend to a sort of exploitation movie vision of hell where Ze Do Caixao lauds it over his victims like the devil tormenting the damned.




Where else in cinema have you seen a man in leather boots striding across a steaming chasm on a bridge built entirely from naked human flesh? Or a massed heap of women in their underwear being frenziedly whipped by a guy who looks like Leatherface? – well, ok, I’m prepared to believe there’s some other nutcase out there somewhere filming stuff like that, but when Marins comes to his piece de resistance, I’m betting your answer changes to NOWHERE. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: a line of actors, filmed from behind, at waist height, with demonic faces painted on their asses, stalking toward the camera, with other people waving their hands in between their buttocks to create the impression of an advancing rank of terrifying ass creatures.


So ingenious, so effective, so… utterly insane, it’s really one for the history books.

Assuming you have an hardy constitution and are somehow not already thoroughly disturbed by all this alarming imagery, Marins next drags us permanently across the invisible boundaries of weirdo cinema good taste into the realm of the genuinely upsetting, as Ze Do Caixao confronts the young female among the acid trippers and, in a violent explosion of cheap stop-motion photography, proceeds to tear off her clothes, cover her in magically inflicted wounds and scratch her all over with his sharpened fingernails, repeatedly slapping her across the face in a horrible parody of domestic violence.



Rather shaken by all this, I could scarcely believe what the sub-titles were telling me as Ze mounts a sort of infernal lectern and begins ranting furiously at the audience, proclaiming stuff like “From the beginnings to the end of the centuries, man is the ruler of everything, and woman is his instrument, she is a willing slave before the power of man!”

I mean, my god… how are we supposed to respond to this? I suppose anyone who has actually been paying enough attention to follow the structure of this film, such as it is, can appreciate that the acid trippers are each seeing Ze Do Caixao as a nightmare creature expressing their worst fears and impulses, but what kind of misguided thinking led Marins to throw footage of himself making statements like this into a film where he has earlier been seen – out of character, but in the same costume – talking in a fairly reasonable, sympathetic fashion about himself and his work? You could ask “what was he THINKING?”, only that’s a question that’s been demanded by just about every shot from the opening credits onward. Ze Do Caixao proclaims plenty of other stuff in this sequence too, most of it hopelessly garbled, bombastic nonsense.


After the acid trip finally concludes, the psychologist’s companions accuse him of unethical research practices, until he reveals that he didn’t actually dose his subjects with LSD at all – “merely distilled water” – and produces lab reports (?!?) to prove it. Meaning…. well, what exactly? That these drug-addled individuals have such depraved imaginings hidden in their sub-conscious that the power of suggestion alone can send them off into hellish hallucinations? That Ze Do Caixao is such a powerful figure that merely staring at a picture of him can bring on such reveries? “My message is not to destroy all drugs, but to moderate their use, and to increase vigilance upon those who traffic in them”, the psychologist concludes reasonably enough, making you wonder what in the hell he’s been trying to prove by subjecting us all the outrages of the preceding ninety minutes.

The camera pans back, and the lights go up, revealing that this darkened discussion panel was in fact another TV show, which has just finished, and the participants go their separate ways. Outside the TV studio, the psychologist shakes hands with Marins and thanks him for his time. When he asks what the director has planned for the future, Marins says, oh, this and that, and brandishes a script he has apparently been scribbling down during the filming – “Awakening of the Beast” – ah, ha ha ha.

The film comes to a chillingly ambiguous conclusion as Marins stands alone and watches, in long shot, a car pulling up, and the driver hassling a young girl walking down the street until she gets in and drives off with him – a direct echo of the hippie rape sequence at the start of the film. We cut back to Marins’ face – he gives a “huh, those crazy kids” grin direct to camera, yells “cut!”, and…. FIN.

Aside from anything else, one has to admire Jose Marins’ sheer bravado in making such a daring and unconventional film to try to explore the controversy that his horror movie persona and apparent association with the drug culture had seemingly caused in Brazil. It’s just regrettable that his deeply confused and unstable approach to the material leads to a film that, whilst an unforgettable experience for connoisseurs of celluloid dementia, also resembles ninety five minutes spent inside the mind of a psychopath, making Marins seem like more of a danger to society than any number of gothic horror flicks.

Blue Moon.

So, I’ve been trying to think up a good way to mark the new year, new decade, xmas season in general etc. on a blog that’s essentially dedicated to the celebration of weird, old 20th century junk of one kind or another. As you may have noticed, I didn’t come up with much, and setting myself the task of knocking out fifty record reviews for the other blog probably didn’t help.

Trying to do a similar end-of-year round-up here would have been pretty farcical: I think I saw a grand total of four newly released films during 2009, three of which were the kind of high profile releases you’d probably expect someone like me to go and see, and about which I thought more of less what you’d expect someone like me to think about ‘em. I didn’t read any books published in 2009.

Still, that big ol’ blue moon w/ partial lunar eclipse last night was pretty perfect timing, huh? Hope anyone & everyone reading this is enjoying the first day of the ‘10s, needless to say.

As I write, I’m sitting in a snowstorm downloading some Flamin’ Groovies albums before the phonelines cut out – life is good.

I’ve got a couple of freaky, overblown movie reviews more or less ready to go in the next week or so, so watch this space.

(Picture above purloined from Negative Pleasure 2.)

British B-Movies at the BFI, Part # 2

For my second dose of British b-pictures, I decided to hit the NFT for a double bill of movies that formed part of an apparently long-running series of low budget films based on the work of famed mystery writer Edgar Wallace. These films, it seems, were always introduced by a wonderfully campy title sequence featuring a bust of the great man slowly rotating toward the camera amid a cloud of mist, as a cut price imitation of The Shadows’ ‘Man of Mystery’ plays on the soundtrack. I can only speak for myself, but I found that bit worth the price of the ticket alone.

The programme notes accompanying the screening initially refer to the Wallace series as being “wildly popular”, but both some contradictory comments later in the same text and the reminiscences of the two old gents sitting behind me would seem to somewhat undermine this assumption. Circumstantial evidence suggests that these homegrown quickies were rarely popular with audiences, with cinema crowds regularly groaning, throwing projectiles at the screen or ducking out for a drink when the lugubrious Wallace title sequence hoved into view. Disrespectful behaviour, you might think, but having now seen a few of these movies, I know exactly where they were coming from. While both the films screened tonight undoubtedly have their points of interest and saving graces, they also can’t help but emerge as spectacularly dull and unengaging pieces of filmmaking. Frankly, if these two have been picked out as the best in the series, it’s small wonder they found little favour with audiences and critics, at a time when Hollywood, bloated though it may have been in the early ‘60s, was still offering romance, decadence, shoot-outs, musical numbers, casts of thousands and Charlton Heston parting the red sea in glorious technicolor.

Flat Two (Alan Cooke, 1962) is a drearily sordid tale in which a sleazy casino boss is found dead in his lavish apartment on the same night that two men with entirely unconnected motives for the crime happened to break in, and a selection of police detectives and barristers proceed to hang around in a gentlemen’s club, casually trying to get to the bottom of things. The main point of interest here is an appearance by the superb John LeMesurier, and as ever he’s a class act, although the script gives him precious little to work with. The mannered British performances and stiff upper lip approach to drama is as hypnotically charming as it ever is in these things, but the rest of the cast is dry to the point of dehydration, and the story – which doles out alibis and motives as dispassionately as cards in a Cluedo game – is a bore for anyone who likes their murder mysteries to carry some sort of emotional weight alongside the logic puzzles. Oh, and the only female character is an empty-headed hussy and all the working class characters are small-time crooks on the make – because that’s the way things were done back then. One best kept for the long, dark teatime of the soul, I fear.

Never Back Losers (Robert Tronson, 1961) is altogether more lively, a tale of a rookie insurance investigator stumbling his way into uncovering a South London race-fixing scam. The plot is hokey and unconvincing, but there are some great attempts here to try and imbue the material with an American sense of hardboiled pulp squalor, as our man traipses through the sordid streets of Soho, doing the rounds of crooked bookies and basement clubs, receiving a beating in a dark alleyway for his troubles and falling down the stairs to land at the feet of sultry, fishnet-clad cigarette girl Jacqueline Ellis. Yowza. Also thoroughly entertaining is the presence of the one and only Patrick Magee, playing menacing gang boss ‘Big’ Ben Black with all the subtlety and restraint you’d expect. One of the funniest things I’ve seen in months is the scene in which our insurance man, his dame and her jockey kid brother leave their house in an archetypally dreary South London suburb, only to find they’re being followed! Turning around, they see Macgee and his goons in extremely slow pursuit, in a gigantic, tailfinned Cadillac Eldorado, with Magee leaning out of the window, cheroot in hand, wobbling along like a big, angry toad! Wonderful! A few more scenes like this raise a chuckle, but can’t quite keep the slight story afloat – especially when most of the film’s enjoyable moments result from the director’s brave but doomed attempts to make exciting and striking things happen within the inherently drab and self-deprecating context of pre-Beatles Britain.

And in a sense, maybe that’s the key to why these British b-pictures so rarely hit the mark. Perhaps it’s just a matter of distance, but when British viewers watch an American crime movie, there’s a sense that *anything* can happen – that we’re watching a bulletin from a world where life is dangerous, where deals go down, tough guys live and bad things happen. What’s more, the minutiae of American life can fit INTO this world – Sam Spade could munch a Hershey bar, and it would be cool. Move things across the Atlantic though, and any attempt to inject a stylised sense of danger and excitement into proceedings is sabotaged by the knowledge that just around the corner there’s Weetabix and Marmite, Morris Minors and policemen with funny moustaches, making anything remotely dramatic or threatening just seem implausible and silly. Of course, the true British crime idiom would come into its own over the course of the next decade, crystallised through iconic films like ‘Performance’ and ‘Get Carter’, a whole universe away from the milieu of these tired and anachronistic Wallace adaptations.

The irony of course is that at the same time as the British studios were knocking out these sub-par timewasters, the German film industry was busy transforming the Edgar Wallace back catalogue into the swathe of far more daring, controversial and exciting movies that comprised the much-loved ‘Krimi’ sub-genre, bringing us such shockers as “The Fellowship of The Frog” (1959), “Strangler of Blackmoor Castle” (1963) and “The Phantom of Soho” (1964), whose titles alone probably tell you all you need to know about the continental approach to the same material that was putting British audiences to sleep, and whose influence eventually helped birth the Giallo in Italy, drawing a direct line between Wallace’s work and some of the most eye-popping excesses of European cult cinema in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Score one for the foreigners I’m afraid, Major. Well at least we had Hammer, eh?

Deathblog: Dan O'Bannon(1946-2009)

I haven’t had much time for writing over the past few days, but thought I owed it to myself to at least get down a few words to mark the passing of Dan O’Bannon, a man who I guess never really quite made the grade as a household name or a big deal auteur, but was nevertheless to be found hovering in the background behind many of the most entertaining and influential sci fi and horror movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and, being some hopeless kind of nerd, his name has certainly been lodged in my mind since I was busy watching ‘em all as a teenager.

I’d imagine most obits will have him down as “guy who wrote ‘Alien’ dies”, and whilst I’m sure it was a fine script and all, he gets eternal respect from me for two other projects he was involved with.

Firstly, there’s his directorial debut from 1985, the kind of directorial debut that would have had me writing cheques for a ten picture deal, although sadly things didn’t work out that way, ‘Return of the Living Dead’!

What can I possibly say about ‘Return of the Living Dead’? For all my love of the strange and wonderful and poetic and obscure in cinema, if you were to feed me enough beer and ask me about the elements that go together to create a GREAT MOVIE (as opposed to a good film), ‘Return..’ is pretty much the dictionary definition. For any Halloween “get drunk and watch movies” type party, it’s always the number one choice, now and forever – satisfaction guaranteed for horror freaks and innocent bystanders alike. Frankly, I think the fact the guy who directed ‘Return..’ died without a long and illustrious string of directing credits to his name speaks very poorly of the human race as a whole.



Over a decade before all that, O’Bannon was also co-writer/editor/production designer/actor etc etc. on John Carpenter’s student film turned directorial debut, ‘Dark Star’ (1970/74), a film I love deeply, however much it bored and baffled me as a fourteen year old. For all its obvious debt to ‘2001’, ‘Dark Star’ is a beautifully strange, stoned, dreamlike, funny and affecting thing, the like of which neither of its creators attempted in their subsequent careers.

In fact, however goofy and low budget it may be, I think this might still be the most beautiful ending to a film I’ve ever seen. It gets me every time, and it’s a perfect way to end an obituary post. R.I.P. Dan O’B, hope Benson’s close by.

British B-Movies at the BFI, Part # 1

This December, the British Film Institute has seen fit to run a short season of vintage British b-pictures, pulling some choice items from the NFT archives, most of them rarely screened since their initial theatrical release, backing up the big Hollywood items of the day at the bottom of double or even triple bills. Given how familiar we’ve become with the history and conventions of American b-movies, from the heyday of westerns, RKO gangster flicks and poverty row quickies through to the slide into exploitation and horror, I was interested in getting a feel for their unheralded and largely forgotten British equivalents, and managed to make it along to two of the four double bills that the BFI is running.

In an era when information and a critical consensus on even the most obscure movie can be googled up in a few seconds, it was strangely exciting going to the cinema with no idea at all what to expect. Nobody except maybe archivists and British cinema historians have watched some of these films in decades – could they be lost classics, or just total junk? Well, for the most part they’re neither as it turns out, but they are at least entertaining, competently constructed timewasters and great examples of unpretentious popular cinema, not to mention effective “windows into a lost world”, as organisations like the BFI always like to claim, not unreasonably, when screening low budget films of questionable artistic merit.

Oddly, by far the best film I saw was also the earliest one, Penny and the Pownall Case, a rip-roaring comedy-adventure flick directed by the excellently named Harry ‘Slim’ Hand in 1948. Running to barely 45 minutes, the film was inspired by the popular ‘Jane’ newspaper strip – a daily item which, in typically reserved British fashion, traded on the adventures of a pretty lady who was constantly threatening to take her clothes off but never actually did. As such, Peggy Evans here stars as Penny, a ditzy, detective novel obsessed blonde (hey, this was 1948) who models daily for her own comic strip, as drawn by – wait for it – Christopher Lee, in one of his first screen roles! Sir Christopher’s performance here is camp as canvas, with a naive stage school sparkle in his eye that rather undermines his subsequent decades of moody “I’m a serious actOR” posturing, and it’s at least faintly unbelievable when it transpires that his character is also the ruthless kingpin of a criminal gang smuggling Nazi war criminals out of Europe! It also turns out that Penny’s roommate (Diana Dors!) works as secretary to a Scotland Yard bigwig on the trail of said Nazi-smugglers, and as such Penny is recruited by the Yard to help put an end to Lee’s dastardly schemes. The result is a non-stop cavalcade of thrills, spills and comedic antics, taking in desperate tranchcoat-clad villains, a trip to “Spain” (I think they just borrowed some sets from an opera company and hired some swarthy-looking guys as extras), dinner invitations from dashing detectives, and a speeded up chase through the home counties in Austin 10s (“step on it Jones, he’s getting away”). Remember the good old days when an airport was a scout hut with a few yards of runway…? Obviously I don’t, but this film still brings it all back.

One of the things I found most interesting about ‘Penny..’ is that, whilst it is obviously very, very restrained, some of the scenes and set ups seem to prefigure the kind of thing you’d be more likely to see years later in an American sexploitation flick – two pretty girls wrestling in their pyjamas? Penny running around town with a raincoat over her bathing costume? Plenty of ‘changing behind the curtain’ footage? Not much to go on, sure, but it must have raised a few eyebrows in 1948, when most British films still steadfastly refused to offer anything more visually stimulating than a bunch of Edwardian gents sitting around in a drawing room waiting to die. Also worth a mention are the endless succession of ludicrous outfits Peggy Evans is forced to wear – it’s hard to tell whether they’re an honest attempt at contemporary high fashion or a deliberate parody of such, but either way, her every appearance in a new scene was greeted with a roar of laughter from the crowd at the NFT, and understandably so – between the heart-shaped bonnet with matching waist-level patches and the twelve inch Robin Hood hat feather, I think the costume designer for this movie deserves credit as a visionary maniac of some kind.

In addition to this, we get some tough crime action (“what’s the news?”, “not good sir – he’s been shot through the heart, with a Luger I think”, “oh dear”), innuendo so vague it’s positively surreal (“I get the oddest letters from France”, “I’ll bet you do”), and everybody’s home in time for tea. As the title and short running time suggest, ‘Penny and the Pownall Case’ was planned as the first instalment in a series of adventures, and it’s a shame the rest seemingly never came about, because this one’s still a hoot, sixty years after the fact.

Somewhat less enjoyable was The Third Alibi, directed by b-movie stalwart Montgomery Tully in 1961. Quaint as the idea may seem today, Jack Clayton’s ‘Room At The Top’ sparked a veritable revolution in British cinema in 1959 with its frank depictions of extra-marital relationships and class conflict, and ‘The Third Alibi’ follows Clayton’s lead, in regard to the former aspect at least, with a cynical, melodramatic tale of a brooding songwriter carrying on an affair with his wife’s recently divorced sister, a situation that leads to a bungled murder plot when the sister announces her pregnancy and songwriter guy’s wife cruelly refuses his request for a divorce. As essentially a murder mystery with no mystery, it’s hard to know how to really categorise this one – given the Postman/Indemnity style storyline you could call it a noir, if only it had a decent script or any sense of visual style. As it is, it’s a fairly grim, workmanlike affair, conveying a queasy sense of suburban hopelessness, and is chiefly notable for the visual evidence it provides of an England that the bigger budget films of the period were careful to keep from the screen – a world of ugly interior décor, pebbledashed bungalows and cheap modernist furniture that was new when this film was made, and that I remember fading into the past during my own childhood. Also of interest is an excellent musical interlude featuring Cleo Laine – accompanied on the piano by Dudley Moore according to the BFI site, although I didn’t notice him. That aside, following the logic of the plot would waste an hour nicely enough on afternoon TV, and you’ll get a cruel chuckle out of the ‘poetic justice’ conclusion, but ‘The Third Alibi’ is a pretty empty experience on the whole.

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!

Mistress of Fear by Hank Janson (Alexander Moring Ltd, 1958)

Tonight there is a full moon over the UK, and I was looking forward all day to going for a nice walk this evening in the crisp winter air... that is until the sky clouded up mid-afternoon and it started pissing it down. Bah! I was gonna post a full moon-related book cover to tie in with this celestial non-event, but hey, you know what? I feel more like going for a weird, amateurish, totally f-ed up rendering of a woman jumping(?) out of a window.

Superb!

Hank Janson may have the business of grimly utilitarian thriller names all sewn up ("Murder", "Conflict" etc), but I think he deserves some kind of special recognition for "Sinister Rapture" and "Amorous Captive".

The opening page is spectacularly dull, so if it's alright with you I'm going no further;

No Wooden Overcoat by John Paddy Carstairs (Consul Books, 1961)

Good grief. Not that I'd wish to undermine my feminist principles for the sake of a cheap gag about a pulp cover, but is there an emoticon for *wolf whistle*?


Ah, for the dark days when you could stick a gratuitous leggy blonde on the front of your book, and then dismiss an entire continental coastline as being "vice-ridden" on the back, without anyone batting an eyelid.

This book also boasts perhaps the greatest opening line in my whole library.... at least until you get to the third paragraph and realise John Paddy Carstairs threw it in for precisely that reason, and is actually hellbent on opening proceedings with a far duller scenario;