Lovecraft On Film: The Shuttered Room (David Greene, 1967)

When I instigated this blog’s on-going survey of “Lovecraftian cinema” last year, I realised of course that most of the films we’d be looking at would, at best, bear a pretty marginal relationship to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, but with David Greene’s ‘The Shuttered Room’ – the third feature made in the 1960s to include Lovecraft’s name on the credits – that thin thread of connective tissue is stretched about as far as it will go, as we are forced to contemplate an extremely loose adaptation of a story that, in all likelihood, Lovecraft never actually wrote a word of in the first place.

To be honest, I was in two minds as to whether even include ‘The Shuttered Room’ under the “Lovecraft on Film” banner, but, given that the film seems to have been consciously planned as a Lovecraft adaptation, with the author’s name appearing prominently on the credits and advertising material, I thought it best to let it in, especially in view of the fact that it’s a pretty interesting and overlooked little film that I’m actually quite keen to write about.

To begin at the beginning then - I’m assuming that most of this blog’s readers will already be familiar with the situation vis-à-vis the posthumous “collaborations” that Lovecraft’s literary executor August Derleth began to publish in the years following his friend’s death – stories which bore the names of both authors, but, to put it bluntly, featured little if any input from the more saleable and less living of the two gentlemen. (1)

‘The Shuttered Room’ was one of the last of these ill-starred tales to see the light of day, first appearing in print in 1959, and, having re-read it with what I hope is an open mind prior to writing this review, I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t have a great deal to recommend it, even when considered solely as a Derleth story.

Framed as a quasi-sequel to both ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, ‘The Shuttered Room’ sees a young scion of the Whateley family returning to Dunwich from his more cosmopolitan life in New York to settle the estate of his late grandfather, Luther (brother of good ol’ Zebulon) Whateley. Trouble of course ensues however when the young chap takes down the shutters on the abandoned mill his grandfather called home and unlocks the door to the forbidden room in which – via some traumatic childhood memories – our protagonist recalls his grandfather imprisoning his Aunt Sarah, who, as far as anyone recalls, lived and died within the confines of her room after she incurred her father’s wrath by tarrying with a male cousin, an heir of the cursed Marsh dynasty, whilst visiting kin in nearby Innsmouth. Soon of course, a hellzapoppin’, size-shifting example of froggy Cthuloid spawn (the offspring of Sarah and her Innsmouth beau) is on the loose, munching cattle and scaring hillbillies, and so on and so forth until a reassuringly fiery climax puts a stop to things.

In keeping with most of Derleth’s “mythos” tales, ‘The Shuttered Room’ is passable as a bit of good-natured Lovecraft fan fiction, but it is entirely lacking in the evocative prose, vistas of archaic antiquity or the sheer sense of weirdness that make HPL’s genuine writings so endlessly compelling, instead limiting itself to simply reshuffling various ideas from the master’s stories to no particularly worthwhile effect, whilst adding precious little of its own to the mix.

With such a wealth of legitimate Lovecraft stories to choose from, it remains a mystery to me why independent Anglo-American producer Philip Hazelton should have chosen to adapt this particularly forgettable little number for the screen in 1967. Searching for an explanation, I can only assume that either, a) Arkham House demanded more money to license a ‘proper’ Lovecraft tale, or, b) after deciding a Lovecraft film was the way to go, Hazelton misguidedly began his research with a copy of ‘The Shuttered Room & Other Tales’, and never got past the first story.(2)

Either way, the film’s choice of source material is particularly regrettable given that assigned screenwriters Nat Tanchuck and D.B. Ledrov seem to have decided to systematically remove all of the story’s supernatural / Cthulhu Mythos-related elements, thus reducing the already weak tea of Derleth’s tale to a so-thin-it-barely-even-exists “crazy sister in the attic” yarn that would scarcely suffice for an Amicus anthology segment, let alone a feature.

To be honest, it would have been difficult for even the most gifted of filmmakers to breath much life into the under-cooked script that Hazelton & co eventually settled on, but we can at least be thankful that the producer did at least proceed to hire some exceptionally talented personnel to help bring his project to the screen, making ‘The Shuttered Room’ a veritable who’s-who of under-the-radar British cinema talent from this era.

Making his debut feature here, director David Greene would soon go on helm a series of stylish, underrated thrillers including ‘Sebastian’ (1968) and ‘I Start Counting’ (1970), whilst editor Brian Smedley-Aston could justifiably claim to be something of a ‘cult film’ legend on the basis of his subsequent work, having edited ‘Performance’ alongside Donald Cammel before collaborating with Jose Larraz on ‘Symptoms’ and ‘Vampyres’ and eventually masterminding the Brit-sleaze classic ‘Expose’ [aka ‘The House on Straw Hill’] in 1976.

My argument regarding the wealth of talent behind ‘The Shuttered Room’ is somewhat undermined by the discovery that director of photography Kenneth Hughes is not the same Ken Hughes who directed ‘Casino Royale’ and ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, but nonetheless, the second Mr Hughes does extremely good work here, and meanwhile, perhaps the most noteworthy name on the credits for some viewers will be that of composer Basil Kirchin (who also went on to score ‘The Abominable Dr Phibes’ and ‘The Mutations’). Kirchin remains one of the most fascinating experimental musicians to have emerged from mid-century Britain, his name enough to send record collectors of a certain stripe into paroxysms of excitement to this day – but more on his contributions later.

Beyond merely outlining the history of this merry band of collaborators, ‘m afraid I know next to nothing about the production circumstances of ‘The Shuttered Room’, but my guess would be that it represents one of those instances – common during the ‘60s and early ‘70s – in which financial necessity demanded a horror film, and the aforementioned creatives, presented with a pre-existing script by the producer, decided, what the hell – I mean, it’s a chance to work on a proper movie, innit?

You certainly get the feeling that no one here really had much of an affection for horror films, or indeed much interest in abiding by the conventions of the genre as they existed in the mid-1960s, and – as much as I love ‘60s horror - it is the results of this attitude that are largely responsible for actually making the film worth watching.

In this respect you could almost place ‘The Shuttered Room’ in close proximity to Michael Reeves’ ‘The Sorcerers’ (1967) and ‘Witchfinder General’ (1968), and, although it is not remotely as memorable or artistically daring as either of those films, in a more modest sense it remains noteworthy for the unusual and somewhat forward-thinking approach it takes to material that, in lesser hands, could easily have emerged a singularly tiresome gothic timewaster.

After a rather awkward and unimpressive pre-credits ‘flashback’ sequence, featuring the parents of a terrified young girl being slaughtered by a furry-clawed POV monster-cam, the credits sequence itself shifts gears considerably, as fields of light and shadow flowing across a car windshield create a gentle, semi-abstract psychedelic effect that is emphasized by the ecstatic, minimalist textures of Kirchin’s score, immediately alerting us to the fact that we are in for a rather different kind of horror movie than the blunt exploitation stylings of the preceding sequence might have led us to believe.

Like every other Lovecraft movie made to this date, the story proper begins with a couple of conspicuously urbane strangers arriving in a forbidding and remote rural locale – in this case, the topographically reimagined “Dunwich Island” - in order to investigate their familial connection to some thrice-cursed local dynasty; but what an odd couple they are, in this instance.

When I first watched ‘The Shuttered Room’ a few years back, I remember thinking that Gig Young was just about the most dislikeable leading man I’d ever seen in a picture (yes, even worse than Nick Adams in Die Monster Die!). Now however, I’m wise enough to appreciate that he was simply appallingly miscast.

A Hollywood workhouse through the ‘40s and ‘50s (mainly specialising in comedic ‘second lead’ roles), Young was more than capable of turning in some excellent, off-beat performances in later years (see for instance his ‘suave psychopath’ turns in Sam Peckinpah’s ‘..Alfredo Garcia’ and ‘The Killer Elite’), but his days as a romantic lead were clearly long behind him by the mid ‘60s.

Apparently troubled by alcoholism and severe personal problems, Young had by this point acquired a “vibe” more befitting of villains, bastards and, well, people in Sam Peckinpah films, and as such, ‘The Shuttered Room’ finds him clearly struggling to get an angle on what the hell he’s supposed to be doing in a dashing, upstanding hero role. Apparently at a loss, his chosen response to this dilemma – that of continually smirking like a prick and occasionally drifting into Bob Hope impersonations – proves less than helpful.

Even worse is that Young’s wife is played by twenty-four year old Carol Lynley (who had recently enjoyed her first major role in Preminger’s ‘Bunny Lake is Missing’ (1965)), and the thirty year age gap between the couple is painfully apparent. Whilst Lynley appears baby-faced, barely out of her teens and as fragile and conventionally ‘beautiful’ as the role of a gothic heroine demands, Young by contrast is a smug, perma-tanned middle-aged ad exec who looks as if he’d be more at home picking a fight with someone on a Miami golf course.

Whereas an actor like Vincent Price could make this kind of age-gap relationship seem natural in the context of a horror movie, Young is just a step too far, and with zero chemistry between the couple and no background offered up to justify their unlikely romance, we’re left with the unfortunate impression that he must have tricked the poor girl into marriage by some nefarious means or other, with the result that he comes across as creepy and manipulative where the script would prefer us to see him as entirely sympathetic.

As the mismatched couple arrive on the ‘island’ to check out the derelict mill property left to Lynley’s character (maiden name Whateley, of course) by her deceased grandfather, they immediately encounter the usual cocktail of glowering hostility, doom-laden warnings and mutated/mutilated villagers, all of which adds to the suspicion that Charles Beaumont’s script for 1963’s The Haunted Palace may have exerted a considerable influence upon the development of ‘The Shuttered Room’, right down to the prominence awarded to the “mutant sibling locked in attic” trope that was also introduced in Corman’s film.

Factor in a corresponding similarity to the opening of ‘Die Monster Die!’ and it’s easy to speculate that a go-to formula for “Lovecraft movies” was already beginning to crystalise by this point, as a sub-set of the existing gothic horror blueprint epitomized by AIP’s Poe films. Predictably enough of course, it is a formula that has very little in common with anything Lovecraft actually wrote, instead incorporating a weird mish-mash of stuff that filmmakers and producers decided should probably happen in a Lovecraft type story. (Regrettably, ‘The Shuttered Room’s rather more low-key approach mitigates against the possibility of a finale that sees Lynley being sacrificed to some beast in a glowing, subterranean pit, but never mind – Daniel Haller’s ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1970) was just around the corner.)

One of ‘The Shuttered Room’s biggest assets is its shooting locations, which see the desolate plains of, uh, Kent standing in for the wilds of the New England coastline. As utilised by Greene and his crew, several different areas in the vicinity of Faversham, Dover and the Oare Marshes Nature Reserve are combined into a cohesive filmic environment that not only allows us to believe that the film was shot on an actual sparsely populated island, but also conveys a very real sense of back-end-of-nowhere isolation that a more studio-bound film could never have achieved, suggesting a landscape in which human habitation seems like an unwelcome intrusion upon some vast and inhospitable green and brown desert. (3)

The film’s ‘set in USA / shot in UK’ status adds a faintly unheimlich air to proceedings too, as a landscape that looks unmistakably British (though I couldn’t quite tell you why) is cross-bred with American-derived names, titles and cultural references, whilst actors like Charles Lloyd Pack and William Devlin try out their best growly Hollywood tough guy accents, further contributing to the sense of geographic uncertainty.

For all this though, ‘The Shuttered Room’ still achieves a ‘sense of place’ that few ‘60s horror films can match (even if we’re never 100% sure where that ‘place’ is), very much anticipating the more atavistic, born-from-the-soil approach to the genre employed by the more widely acknowledged ‘folk horror’ classics of the early ‘70s.

Speaking of which, one element I particularly enjoyed during the opening scenes of ‘The Shuttered Room’ is the authentically perilous-looking ‘one-car’ car ferry (basically a small barge plus some ropes) that transports Young & Lynley to the “island”. The surreal sight of their gleaming Cadillac precariously balanced atop the rusty barge, hesitantly steered by two pole-wielding local extras, somehow manages to perfectly encapsulate the theme of smug, urban sophistication blundering its way into wilful, rural isolationism, strongly reminding me of Sgt. Howie’s arrival by seaplane at the start of ‘The Wicker Man’.

It is accidental details such as this that allow ‘The Shuttered Room’ to capture the feeling of a marginal and poverty-stricken rural community quite well, incorporating a subtle undertone of menace (again, quite reminiscent of ‘The Wicker Man’) that renders the obligatory “turn around and go home” type parroting of the script’s suspicious yokels wholly surplus to requirements.

Apparently warming to this theme, Greene makes much of the ‘Deliverance’-esque implications of incest and mental/physical deterioration that naturally ensue within such a set-up, dropping hints that one suspects H.P. Lovecraft might well have approved of, given his unhealthy fixation with such issues (“there’s a lotta people around here named Whateley”, glowers Devlin as a surly blacksmith).

Indeed, Greene seems to have had a yen to turn this story into more of a ‘Straw Dogs’ / ‘Deliverance’ style backwoods thriller than anything a 1967 audience would have recognised as a horror picture, and the material in this vein plays pretty well, even as the grit and menace of the urban/rural conflict narrative gels rather imperfectly with the pastoral, otherworldly impressions frequently created by the music and photography (an interesting tonal combo, for viewers with the right palette to appreciate it).

As such, one of the first things Carol & Gig encounter on Dunwich Island is your friend and mine Oliver Reed as (what else) a hulking, intimidating ne’erdowell, who proves to be the chief instigator of the film’s backwoods menace, backed up by a crew of shiftless loafers to whom he plays gang leader & all-purpose alpha male.

To be honest, I find it quite surprising that Reed was still willing to take on this kind of faintly demeaning ‘man-child’ role at this point in his career, despite having already proved his thespian chops via more challenging roles in films like ‘The Party’s Over’ (1965) and Michael Winner’s The Jokers (1967), but then, officially speaking his big break didn’t come until ‘Oliver!’ the following year, so he was still bringing home the bacon any way he could at this stage, one supposes. Still, ‘The Shuttered Room’ must have been very good for his health if nothing else – he spends most of the movie sprinting around the “island” like a maniac, when he’s not rolling around in the dirt or engaging someone in fisticuffs.

In the absence of any actual monster or horror-ish threat during the film’s first seventy minutes, Reed’s sheer physical bulk and threatening demeanor make him by default the scariest thing in ‘The Shuttered Room’, with his character emerging as a slightly goofier variant on his brooding, proto-droog gang leader from Joseph Losey’s The Damned, exhibiting an uneasy mixture of wide-eyed, childish enthusiasm and black-hearted, criminally-minded power-play. That Reed is extremely good at such a task almost goes without saying, even as the script gives him precious little to sunk his teeth into. (Given that his obligatory American accent leaves something to be desired, it’s probably just as well he opts primarily for the “physical acting” route, to be honest).

Moreso perhaps than the more obvious touchstones listed above, the bestial menace of Reed and his buddies, and the particularly harsh discomfort induced by their interaction with the urban interlopers, reminds me of nothing so much as the approach to this sort of material that became an integral part of Australian genre cinema in the 1970s and 80s, from ‘Wake in Fright’ (1971) through to ‘Fair Game’ (1986), and of course ‘Mad Max’ (1978). Certainly, the suggestion of men becoming ‘dehumanised’ when forced to survive in an isolated, ‘unnatural’ environments found in all of those films can also be strongly felt in ‘The Shuttered Room’, despite the obvious difference in the society and landscape portrayed.

(The scene in which Reed’s gang is first introduced – tearing along a dusty farm track in a beat-up truck as one of their number “dirt skis” on a plank of wood – is particularly pertinent in this regard, resembling those Australian movies stylistically as well as thematically, as Greene mixes up some wild, non-Health & Safety approved stunt-work with stylish, low angle vehicle shots and motion-blurring / focus-pulling effects.)

Should you wish to, you could probably go full circle with the exploration of this theme in ‘The Shuttered Room’, looping it right back to the horror of ‘degraded’ and ‘decadent’ rural communities that pops up with near obsessive frequency in H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction - even if Lovecraft’s assignment of the blame for these supposed problems was inevitably somewhat more reactionary than that of the implicitly liberal mid-century filmmakers who followed.

A counter-point to the bestiality of Reed and his cronies is meanwhile provided by Flora Robson, adding the obligatory “touch of class” beloved of all low budget UK productions in the role of ‘Aunt Agatha’, a character who represents one of the scriptwriters’ few attempts to actually add something new to the bare bones of Derleth’s tale, transforming the geriatric uncle who periodically turns up to beset the story’s protagonist with prophecies of doom into a far more interesting and ambiguous presence.

Aunt Agatha lives upon the upper floors of what appears to be a heavily fortified clifftop lighthouse [actually one of the two South Foreland Lighthouses in St Margaret's Bay, Dover – thanks again to Reel Streets for that one], which she shares with a fabulous-looking bird of prey (I’m unable to identify the species, but maybe any birders or ornithologists in the audience can help). Though the dialogue the script assigns to her sometimes drivels off into nonsense (a few “science vs mysticism” exchanges with Young prove particularly toe-curling), Robson – always a forceful personality - nonetheless manages to sell the character beautifully.

As the doddering yet intimidating matriarch of this sinister, marginalized community, mixing grand gestures of home-spun, quasi-pagan philosophy with razor-sharp practicality and psychological judgment, Aunt Agatha puts me in mind of an early draft for – yes, you guessed it - Lord Summerisle in ‘The Wicker Man’, whilst the sight of her at one point striding determinedly across the heath with her falconer’s gauntlet and black cloak almost takes us back to the kind of eccentric supporting characters who populated Powell & Pressburger’s rural fantasias.

Though her screen time is limited and her character’s background and motivations never satisfactorily fleshed out, Robson’s very presence makes ‘The Shuttered Room’ a more interesting and memorable viewing experience than it might otherwise have been, earning her cheque for a few days filming with aplomb.

As has already been mentioned, another great boon for ‘The Shuttered Room’ is Basil Kirchin’s exceptional score. A wide-ranging and expansive soundtrack that rarely repeats itself, Kirchin’s cues here are full of extraordinary sounds and textural juxtapositions that, like Greene’s direction, make little concession to the expectations of the horror genre circa 1967. In fact, the music here is so distinctive that it often seems to be almost telling its own story in parallel to the one being played out through the visuals, and at some points it’s a tough call as to which is the most compelling.

From the pungent, tripped out Terry Riley-esque vibes conjured during the film’s dreamy credits sequence (reeds and tape loops maybe..?), Kirchin brings in a timbrous, British folk sort of feel to accompany the couple’s arrive on Dunwich Island, with fiddle, stand-up bass and an eerie, high-pitched drone gradually giving way to more conventionally cinematic cool jazz passages and big band crescendos as the plot develops, occasionally descending into politely cacophonous improv discord during action sequences, whilst always in the background are odd, hesitant snatches of lithe, psyche-folk melody that seems to pre-empt some of Paul Giovanni’s cues for ‘The Wicker Man’ (that comparison yet again), leaving lost slivers of Pentangle-ish unease cascading across the Kentish coastline in a generally quite enchanting manner.

As you may have gathered on the basis of such hyperbole, I think Kirchin’s score here is absolutely superb – it adds hugely to the film, and in the rare event that a representative of some crate-digging record label might be reading, I would certainly love the opportunity to own it on disc. (4)

Matching their composer for open-mindedness meanwhile, Greene and DP Hughes experiment with a variety of inventive techniques in ‘The Shuttered Room’, demonstrating an particular skill for incorporating landscapes and natural features into the texture of the film, utilising compositions that make full use of the widescreen shooting ratio (an obvious technical point perhaps, but one that still stymied a surprising number of directors in the ‘60s, particularly in the horror field).

Weird-looking wide angle / fish eye effects are used to represent POV of the attic-dwelling sister (when she finally makes an appearance), and somehow this works far more effectively than such a hackneyed devices really should, adding at least some degree of horror-ish tension to a film that is otherwise entirely lacking in such, whilst good ol’ shaky handheld work, disorientating cross-cutting, extreme low angles and soft focus pastoral dreaminess are all much in evidence elsewhere.

Aided by feverish, free-form jams from Kirchin, the sequence in which Lynley flees from Reed across a plateau of stony rock pools proves a particular filmmaking tour de force, as Greene cross-cuts between footage of Reed molesting a local girl as his leering gang look on and Lynley inexplicably ignoring their antics as she strolls along the rocks, upping the tempo as Reed notices her and gives chase, switching restlessly between close ups and clifftop long shots before slamming on the breaks and using extended shot transitions to super-impose faces and landscapes, giving the chase an unaccountably delirious feeling and temporarily wrenching us out of the narrative with an outburst of ‘pure cinema’ that, given the soporific nature of the scripting, proves extremely pleasing.

As vague and ineffectual as ‘The Shuttered Room’s storytelling may be, Greene and his on-set collaborators clearly put their all into rising above it and the trying to deliver worthwhile footage, and in purely atmospheric terms they absolutely nail it, more often than not.

Far more subtle and naturalistic than the set-bound bombast of most ‘60s gothics, this plays like a more modern – more grown up? – kind of horror film, in which the ‘spookiness’ (such as it is) creeps up slowly, lurking behind and in between the words and actions of the human beings on-screen, hinting ever so gently at something intangible, just out of sight.

That that ‘something’ never really amounts to anything is obviously a disappointment, but all the same, ‘The Shuttered Room’ in some ways directly anticipates the kind of counter-cultural sensibility that would begin to creep into commercial cinema (and horror in particular) within a few years of this film’s release, with Greene’s direction incorporating an almost meditative aspect that encourages the viewer’s eye to drift across minor details within the frame - light, reflections, foliage, textures of wood and rock – whilst the story, thoroughly outgunned, falls into the background.

Making his feature debut after a long apprenticeship in TV, the director certainly seems to be having a ball with the opportunity to prove his chops on 35mm, and indeed his style is so accomplished that you could almost use ‘The Shuttered Room’ as a classroom case study in how sound and visuals can be used to overcome the constraints of mediocre subject matter. But unfortunately, at the end of the day there’s just no getting around that mediocrity. The vacuum at the centre of the film’s narrative remains so vast that no amount of behind the camera talent could have succeeded in turning the finished product into an unqualified success.

For all that I’ve rhapsodized over its finer points above, ‘The Shuttered Room’ was, is and probably always shall be a film that will leave the vast majority of viewers cold on first viewing. For horror fans, it’s an “Is that it!?” let-down, whilst for cinephiles and UK cinema aficionados, it’s a pretty but entirely aimless ramble through the countryside, prevented from developing into anything more interesting by its corny pandering to tired genre cliché. Any kind of more mainstream audience meanwhile, lacking such patience, will be liable to simply write it off as total bore, and it is hard to imagine that they would have felt much different on the issue in 1967. (I’m not sure how widely it played in the USA, but drive-in fodder this most assuredly ain’t.).

Probably the only thing that has helped keep ‘The Shuttered Room’ in circulation during the 21st century is its nominal status as a Lovecraft adaptation, and, needless to say, anyone approaching the film purely from that angle is liable to be especially disappointed by its total lack to connection to anything Lovecraft actually wrote, beyond the reuse of a few proper nouns.

As such, Greene’s film is liable to remain a footnote at best, whether in the annals of horror, Lovecraftiana or UK cinema, whilst its stilted narrative, disastrously miscast leading roles and total failure to figure out what the hell it’s all about before the credits roll reduce it, at worst, to a complete waste of time – one hundred minutes of under-cooked bru-ha-ha leading up to nothing more significant a thoroughly dreary “crazy sister in the attic” revelation that any conscious viewer will have copped to from the opening reel.

If ‘The Shuttered Room’ must ultimately be filed as a waste of time though, the combined forces of Greene, Kirchin, Hughes, Reed, Robson and the other eminently talented individuals involved in its production at least serve to render it a highly edifying waste of time, for those viewers with the right temperament to appreciate the more subtle virtues that lie just below its surface. Approach it in the right state of mind, and, as I hope I have demonstrated above, it is a tarnished gem that’s well worth the investment of a quiet evening.

As a closing testament to ‘The Shuttered Room’s unique status within the canon of ‘60s horror, let’s simply consider the fact that almost every other film I’ve compared it to in the text of this review was made later, and see where that leaves any modest claims Greene & co might make toward originality and influence.

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(1) For further info on the nature of Derleth’s “collaborations” with Lovecraft, see the summary provided here within the H.P. Lovecraft online archive here.

(2) A little known figure who seems to have been operating on a similar Transatlantic basis to producers like Herman Cohen and Michael Gordon during the 1960s, Philip Hazelton’s other ventures included ‘Psyche 59’ (1959) and a German co-production named ‘Eye of the Cat’ (1969), before he relocated to the USA in the ‘70s to work on a string of (one assumes) slightly more successful Fred Williamson vehicles, including ‘Hammer’ (1972), ‘That Man Bolt’ (1973) and ‘Bucktown’ (1975). (Incidentally, I believe this must be the only article of any kind ever published which mentions August Derleth and Fred Williamson in close proximity, although I’d love to be proved wrong on that.)

(3) Anyone wishing to find out more about the locations used in ‘The Shuttered Room’ should head straight for this fantastically informative photo gallery on the Reel Streets website, whose compilers I would like to thank hugely for their help in instantly erasing the geographical uncertainty that previously afflicted me whilst watching this film.

(4) To be honest, I’m not sure whether or not the Kirchin tracks used in ‘The Shuttered Room’ have ever been issued in any form, but any soundtrack aficionados or night-haunting bootleggers who can point me in right direction will find themselves richly rewarded.

Psychedelic Sci-Fi round-up: New Writings in SF # 18 edited by John Carnell(Corgi, 1971)

Whilst the sublimely trippy (unaccredited) artwork on this anthology is more than worthy of a place in my Psychedelic Sci-Fi Hall of Fame, I’m afraid I must confess that it initially jumped out at me simply due to the fact that the cover painting (well, the nudie floating-in-space lady and the weird tangle of machinery at least – looks like they nixed the dreaming old geezer head) was appropriated by perpetually charming stoner metal band Monster Magnet for the cover of their 1995 album ‘Dopes To Infinity’ – the second release of the band's increasingly ludicrous major label tenure, and one that I have fond memories of playing incessantly through my late teenage “I want to be psychedelic and take drugs, but I haven’t got any” phase.

Actually, comparing the two more closely, it looks as if Monster Magnet’s cover designers have reworked the weird machinery a bit, and in fact the stars around the lady and the details of her hair are slightly different too, suggesting that the band’s artist (I can’t find a credit online, so s/he will have to remain anonymous for the moment too) has repainted the image in its entirety, using the paperback as a close reference. Curious.

Well, whatever. Dave Wyndorf and A&M Records owe some dough if you’re reading, mysterious SF-18 cover artist dude!

(If you’re thus inclined, I believe this album still kind of rules, by the way.)

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up: In The Kingdom of the Beasts by Brian M. Stableford (Quartet, 1971)

Yes folks, after his novel ‘To Challenge Chaos’ appeared in our last Psychdelic Sci-Fi Round Up, young Brian Stableford is back to bamboozle us again with more headache-inducing, order/chaos themed science fantasy hullabaloo… but thankfully on this occasion, illustrator Patrick Woodroffe has a suitably retina-punishing cover design on hand to help get our poor minds softened up in advance. Pretty freakin’ far-out.

A specialist in this sort of thing, Woodroffe went on to bestride the ‘70s with a wealth of similarly intense fantasy/sci-fi artwork, as well as creating a handful of stone-cold classic prog era LP covers, including Greenslade’s Time & Tide (which I bought as teenager based solely on the artwork), Budgie’s Bandolier (which I WISH I’d bought as a teenager) and Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny.

Sadly, Woodroffe passed way in 2014, but a wide variety of his artwork (and a terrific photo of the great man in the early ‘70s) can be found here.

(The faded colours on the above scan are accurate to the appearance of my copy of the book by the way, in case you were wondering. God only knows how mind-flaying this thing looked when it was fresh off the presses.)

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up: Nightmare Blue by Gardner Dozois & George Alec Effinger (Fontana, 1977)

Cover illustration by Justin Todd.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this one. Sounds like one of the counter-culture influences early ‘70s sci-fi novels that could either be genius or utterly insufferable. Perhaps worth a go?

Cover illustration by Justin Todd is definitely some quintessential ‘70s ‘SF for heads’ gear though, right down to the big, freaky syringe.

A prolific British commercial illustrator and painter whose work often seems to have taken a garish, fantastical or comedic turn, a brief bio of Justin Todd can be found here, and an interesting gallery of his work can be seen here. Apparently still working today, he maintains a website showcasing some recent paintings.

Psychedelic Sci-Fi Round-up: The Uncertain Midnight by Edmund Cooper (Coronet, 1971 / Originally published 1958)

Cover illustration unaccredited.

Well, it seems I blew my stash of ‘British apocalypse’ paperback posts a few months early. If I’d read the runes a bit more accurately, maybe I could have saved a few of them up to provide oblique commentary on the wretched events “our nation” has endured over the past week or so… but I didn’t, so we’re all out of eerily plausible catastrophe scenarios for the time being I’m afraid.

Escaping instead into the realms of fantastical abstraction then, now seems as good a time as any to update you on some of the latest additions to my seemingly ever-growing collection of psychedelic sci-fi cover art, beginning with this curious little number.

Whilst ‘The Uncertain Midnight’ doesn’t exactly sound like the most thrilling SF novel ever to see print, I absolutely love the singularly weird cover illustration used for this Coronet edition. The pleasing shade of green, nicely chosen font and neat, right-aligned text all serve to sooth the rough edges from the painting’s freakiness too, making for a really nice design all round.

Not sure the mushroom cloud on the back does it any favours, but hats off to the anonymous artist & designer here nonetheless.

Krimi Casebook: Das Verrätertor / ‘Traitor’s Gate’ (Freddie Francis, 1964)

BLOGGER’S NOTE: It was actually a complete coincidence that I had this post, which discusses the intricacies of a curious Anglo-German co-production, scheduled to appear on the day of the UK referendum on membership of the European Union. As a strong believer in co-operation between nation states, open borders and the breaking down of cultural & economic boundaries, I’m unsure at the time of writing whether I’ll be weeping tomorrow morning or merely putting the whole sorry mess behind me and moving on, but – checks watch – I believe there’s still time to get to the polls today, so would urge all UK citizens reading to please consider rejecting petty nationalism and doing the decent thing. And hey, why not let this tale of zany Germans running around idyllic 1960s London waving guns about guide your hand..? (Ok, maybe not.)

[Political mithering ends. / Movie review begins.]

By late 1964, Copenhagen-based Rialto films had been churning out Edgar Wallace ‘krimis’ for the West German market for nearly five years, and had released no less than seventeen entries in the loosely connected series.

Given this level of productivity, and the creative burnout it must inevitably have incurred in the studio’s small stable of writers, directors and actors, it makes sense that someone in Rialto’s boardroom must have sat up one day and realised that the film industry in the UK – where all of these films were ostensibly set – also boasted its own, equally efficient, genre movie production line, as exemplified in particular by Hammer studios, whose unprecedented international success in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s could scarcely be ignored by other European producers.

Perhaps those fuzzy stock shots of Big Ben and Trafalgar Square were starting to get a bit ragged, or constantly redressing those ‘Scotland Yard office’ and ‘cobbled East End back street’ sets was getting a bit tedious - or perhaps Joachim Fuchsberger and Harald Reinl just REALLY needed a holiday - but whatever the reason, feelers were extended, hands shaken, and when ‘Das Verrätertor’, the 18th entry in Rialto’s Wallace series, went into production, it did so in actual, real life London, with Freddie Francis (fresh off ‘The Evil of Frankenstein’) in the director’s chair, and a script provided (under a pseudonym) by Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster.

Sadly, the eventual result of all this bold co-productionin’ sass is an odd mish-mash that basically plays out as if a few of the more distinctive faces from the ‘krimi gang’ (Klaus Kinski and Eddi Arent) had accidentally blundered into a mediocre British thriller in which everyone inexplicably speaks German - but nevertheless, it is not without its merits, and it remains vaguely interesting as a historical curio, at the very least. (1)

Things certainly get off to a good start, with an edgily shot prison break from a joint that I suppose is supposed to be Dartmoor (eventual destination of all krimi ne’erdowells). Bleak, wide angle overhead shots are here mixed with juddering, handheld footage and a tense, mod jazz soundtrack, as our protagonist (British actor Gary Raymond) scrabbles across scrubland with armed guards in close pursuit, only to find himself rescued by a Luger-toting Kinski, who ushers him into a waiting helicopter in which the pair make their getaway.

Back in London however, it soon becomes clear that this going to be another one of those creaky old “plan to steal The Crown Jewels” type heist capers, with all the discussions of alarm systems, guard duty rotas and unspeakably tedious footage of Beefeaters trooping about exchanging keys that that invariably entails.

Perhaps this might have all carried a bit more of a sense of novelty to German audiences than it does to us Brits, but it’s more likely that ‘Das Verrätertor’ simply suffers the kind of narrative structure that – much like that of the routine whodunit – has withered particularly badly under the glare of our somewhat different 21st century entertainment expectations.

I mean, first off, hands up who really gives two shits about the Crown Jewels? I suppose back in the ‘60s they probably still carried a certain mystique and cultural importance vis-à-vis British identity and so on, but now… well, you tell me when concern for their security last crossed your mind. And do any of us *really* care that much about the rather routine and unsurprising methods by which some fictional crooks might go about stealing them..?

No, what we really want to see in a story like this is the excitement that ensues during the after the heist, as things go wrong and people get hurt, as the perpetrators flee the law and double-cross each other, and so on. The jewels themselves should be little more than a McGuffin to set up the human drama. Unfortunately though, this is a point that Sangster and Francis (and perhaps Wallace, assuming anything in this yarn can actually be traced back to him) largely fail to appreciate, instead choosing to take us again and again through the not-terribly-riveting aspects of the gang’s planning whilst saving the big jewel-grab itself for the final reel.

Normally, Sangster was a writer who could be relied upon to put a cynical new twist on the formulaic genre material he was assigned to work on, but, perhaps playing it safe for a co-production aimed at an overseas audience, ‘Traitor’s Gate’ is an uncharacteristically bland effort, hitting the expected beats of its plotline with nary a trace of surprise or innovation. (A shame, as the twisted aesthetic of the krimis might in other circumstance have made for a perfect match with the black humour and imagination of Sangster’s better writing.)

Elsewhere in the film, Eddi Arent pops up as – I bet you never saw this one coming - a bungling German tourist, who gets inadvertently involved in the heist gang’s plans when, in the course of his day-to-day bungling, he accidentally visits a pleasantly authentic-looking Soho strip joint, the “Dandy Club”, wherein he witnesses triggerman Kinski doing away with a snitch – the gunshots muffled by the drummer in the house band playing a roll on the snare.

Slickly staged by Francis, this episode is just as much fun as it sounds, and indeed, there are some lovely bits of authentic London street footage to enjoy here too, largely shot around Piccadilly and Soho, all of which serves to make the corresponding passages of ‘changing of the guards’ / ‘buggering about with the beefeaters’ type material go down a little easier. (2)

In fact, Francis’ direction is probably the film’s strongest suit. He keeps things brisk and visually interesting through even the dullest stretches, occasionally experimenting with bold techniques and stylish moments which, it must be said, do not really equate to anything found in the British horror films he was directing at around the same time. This leads me to wonder whether he was in fact simply following the dictats of his producers in tailoring the look of the film to fit Rialto’s preferred “house style”, incorporating the kind of tricks (wide angle and deep focus shots, use of on-screen camera lens and mirrors, handheld shots and the like) that we have previously attributed to ‘krimi’ specialists like Reinl and Alfred Vohrer.

As you might have expected given the plot-line, ‘Traitor’s Gate’ features absolutely none of the macabre or fantastical elements that have livened up the others krimis we’ve thus far examined in this review strand, but as a straight-down-the-line crime caper, it is executed with what must have passed for a somewhat glamorous, high-tech sheen in 1964, exhibiting a particular fascination for camera lenses, telescopes, hidden tape recorders, clocks and so forth, verging momentarily into the realm of total ridiculousness for one particularly enjoyable moment in which the film’s heroine falls afoul of a specially modified taxi that fills the back-seat with knockout gas at a simple button push from the driver.

For the most part however, ‘Das Verrätertor’ is disappointingly down to earth. Presumably due to the fact that it was actually made in the UK with the participation of British personnel, the “bizarro world London” flavour that gave films like ‘Dark Eyes of London’ such a unique, out-of-time atmosphere is entirely lacking here, as the more buttoned down, English way of doing business vis-à-vis low budget thrillers leaves us instead with a far more quote-unquote “realistic” portrayal of London in 1964, completely devoid of psychotic masked villains, knife-wielding vagabonds, subterranean gangster hideouts, blood-thirsty fetishized murders and the like, although the presence of Kinski does at least bring a hint of this kind of thing to the table.

Spending much of his time obsessively licking his fingers and dispassionately threatening people with guns as only he can, one particularly surreal scene back-stage at the aforementioned strip joint sees Klaus lurking about near the head of a pantomime horse, whose teeth he at one point pretends to examine. In fact, I’d say that Kinski’s presence alone makes ‘Das Verrätertor’ worth seeking out, were it not for the fact that the unspeakable bastard made so many other films through the ‘60s in which he similarly delivers the goods, making such completism unnecessary for any but the most dedicated fans of his unique brand of strangely hilarious psychopathic menace.

Above and beyond the various drawbacks I have outlined above, there is one central fault that I feel stops ‘Traitor’s Gate’ from overcoming them and hitting home as a decent bit of entertainment, and that is the fact that no one else in the film is remotely interesting. With the exception of Kinski and Arent (who are both basically just goofing on their established screen personas), there is not a single character here who will stick in your mind after viewing – in fact I can barely remember a thing about any of them, and I watched this damn thing twice for review purposes.

A far cry from the sweaty-palmed blackmailers, seedy servants and playboy detectives we expect to find rounding out a krimi cast-list, in ‘Das Verrätertor’, the crooks, the innocent lead couple whom the persecute and the cops who peruse them barely have two character traits to rub together, and the blandly professional cast play out their assigned roles within the story as if they were simply experiencing a mildly stressful day working in an insurance office.

As a result, there is simply no suspense, and nothing beyond the occasional nice shot or visual flourish to even keep us awake. Will the heist succeed or not? Will the crooks be brought to justice? What do we even care, when we barely know enough about anyone concerned to decide who we should cheer or boo?

Though the film’s production values and technical credits are solid and the Rialto crew do their best to entertain, it is easy to conclude that ‘Traitor’s Gate’ – which remains one of the more obscure entries within the already obscure krimi canon - has been lost to history for good reason, relevant only to genre historians seeking an easy explanation for the reasons why the rich possibilities for Anglo-German krimi co-productions were never really followed up. (3)

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(1) According to IMDB, Rialto’s only production partner on ‘Traitor’s Gate’ was an outfit named “Summit”, and my assumption is that this must be said company’s only known venture into the film industry, given that IMDB lumps them in with a US distributor of the same name who have no credits prior to 1983.  (Actually, it’s a fair bet that the IMDB page in question amalgamates the credits of at least three different companies, but it’s scarcely our business to complain about that here.)

(2) Outside of central London, one particularly lovely establishing shot captures the riverside beer garden of the London Apprentice pub in Ilseworth, Middlesex, which remains largely unchanged to this day.

(3) In so far as I can tell, only other Rialto krimi to feature significant UK input was 1966’s The Trygon Factor, which was directed by Cyril Frankel (‘The Witches’, ‘Never Take Sweets From A Stranger’) and starred Stewert Granger and Robert Morley. Again, no actual UK production partner is listed, and I’m not aware of the film being much of a hit on either side of the channel.

A Visit to Jean Rollin’s Grave.

Earlier this month, I visited Paris for the first time in many years, and naturally I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit the resting place of one of my favourite filmmakers, the great Jean Rollin.

Approaching Père-Lachaise Cemetery through the quiet lanes leading to the side entrance off the Rue de la Rèunion, the city’s muted roar of traffic gradually gives way to bird song from the trees overhead and the muffled clamour of morning break-time at the nearby primary school, and it is hard not to reflect that, as much as his fans might have envisaged his ashes being scattered into waves at Dieppe, there is really nowhere more appropriate for Rollin to be entombed than alongside the great and the good of his city, deep within this veritable cité des morts.

Despite the frequent intrusion of ill-mannered tourists wrestling with their google-map equipped devices in perpetual search of Jim Morrison’s regrettably placed monument, Père-Lachaise retains its unique atmosphere, with its sheer scale and prevalence of overhanging foliage giving the cemetery’s central portions a sense of complete isolation from the outside world – a feeling that Jean Rollin must surely have appreciated, even as he endeavored to embody a similarly rarefied atmosphere in many of his films. [Needless to say, Rollin actually used the cemetery as a location in both ‘Lèvres de Sang’ (1975) and ‘Les Deux Orphelines Vampires’ (1997).] When night falls, as the gates are locked and the tourists depart, is there anywhere he would feel quite as at home as here?

A small, wedge-shaped block in the central Eastern part of the cemetery, Division # 27 of Père-Lachaise can be easily reached by climbing the winding steps surrounding the colossal tomb of the Baroness Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stroganova (pictured above), just off the pathway known as the Chemin des Chèvres.

Though #27 is thankfully one of the smaller Divisions in the older part of the cemetery, it still took us a good fifteen minutes of off-the-path searching to locate the modest Morel / Le Gentil family tomb within which Jean Rollin is interred, commemorated by a simple stone plaque appended to the tomb’s frontage, next to that of his son Carel, who sadly passed away in 2001. Though he was born Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil, Jean’s plaque simply bears the name by which the world knew him best.

Raising the metal bar that secures the gate to the railings around the tomb, I took a brief step inside to leave my own small tribute. Perhaps not quite un rose de fer, but the closest I could come up with at short notice. Rest in peace Jean, and may your spirit run free among these mysterious stones, dreaming of stories and pictures, for as long as they stand.

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Appendix # 1: Whilst kneeling at the base of the tomb, I couldn’t help but notice a small red and black beetle with a striking ‘deaths head’ type design on its carapace making its way across the step. Not exactly being an expert on beetles, I have been unable to identify this species, and am uncertain of their commonality within the cemetery, or whether or not any significance is attached to them, but either way, it seemed an odd bit of synchronicity.

Appendix # 2: The location of the Le Gentil / Rollin tomb, it should be noted in closing, actually borders on the cemetery’s larger 28th Division, which is seemingly the chosen resting place of assorted military generals and 20th century descendants of the Morat / Bonaparte dynasty. The thought of Jean Rollin quietly sneaking in under the grandiose noses of these representatives of a very different French culture amused me greatly.

Appendix # 3: Some bonus cemetery photographs? Why not.

Random Paperbacks: A Woman in Spaceby Sara Cavanaugh(Ace/Stoneshire books, 1983)

When I added this early ‘80s romance paperback to my library, certain parties questioned my decision.

All I can do in response was to draw their attention to the cover photograph and back cover blurb, and to paraphrase Electric Wizard: you think you’re civilised, but you will never understand.

Research-wise, any chance I may have had of finding a brief history of the ‘Tiara’ series of books via google has been effectively obliterated by a popular children’s manga series of the same name, and the internet also gives us nada on ‘Sara Cavanaugh’ beyond a few cover scans and broad mockery of this novel, suggesting either a one-off house pseudonym or an unsolicited manuscript that got… well I hesitate to say “lucky”.

SF columnist & humourist David Langford obviously made his way through ‘A Woman in Space’ at some point however, as he picked out the following passage as part of a collection of sci-fi goofs & howlers:

“A few hours had passed since they had been pulled away from the moon. A few hours and millions of miles. The moon was no longer visible, not even as a star. The whole thing was so crazy, weird and far-out. It was as though they were floating in a giant vacuum.”

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).