Gothic Originals / October Horrors # 11: Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

Another year, another straggler crossed off the increasingly short list of “Hammer horror films I’ve never seen”. In fact, if we strictly limit things to their period/gothic horror output, I think this might be the very last one to unfold before my tired eyes.

I suppose I’ve previously avoided ‘Scars of Dracula’ due to the general consensus that it is not very good, but I’ve recently noted some people speaking positively about it, and it’s had a re-release on disc, so… I mean, at the end of the day it’s a Christopher Lee Dracula entry with a reputation for gory violence and Roy Ward Baker calling the shots. How bad can it be, really?

The answer, unfortunately, is very bad indeed. Seriously folks, this one is shockingly poor. It is so unapologetically shit in fact that, if I hadn’t already been in my own living room, and if it hadn’t been raining outside, I probably would have walked out in protest.

Say what you like about Jimmy Sangster’s much-maligned ‘Lust for a Vampire’ and ‘Horror of Frankenstein’ (both of which went into production the same year as this one – ye gods, what on earth was going on over at Hammer House?), at least they were trying to do something a bit different.

‘Scars..’, by contrast embraces the same tone of smirking, half-hearted crappiness, but applies it to a script that is bluntly derivative of earlier entries in the series, barely even summoning the energy to drag itself through the same old clichés one more time.

If you’re feeling charitable (which I tend to be, when it comes to this sort of thing), the two Sangster films could also be excused to a certain extent by the fact that they were helmed by an inexperienced director, trying to bring the blackly humourous aspect of his writing to the screen, with fairly disastrous results.

‘Scars..’ however has no such excuse. Indeed, Baker usually managed to bring some notably superior cinematic chops to the British horror films he directed, sometimes elevating mediocre material to a higher level than it really deserved. Like all work-for-hire directors though, he was at the mercy of what was placed before him by his employers, and it is painfully clear that he has given naff all to work with on ‘Scars..’, whether in terms of budget, scheduling, script, crew or anything else.

The first real warning sign, I think, is the bats. The film opens with the unedifying spectacle of a big, floppy bat-on-a string drooling Kensington gore all over Dracula’s ashes, which are helpfully spread out along with his best cape, on a slab in his mid-European castle at some unspecified point in the fairy tale past (never mind the adventures he had enjoyed in 1890s London in Peter Sasdy’s excellent ‘Taste the Blood of Dracula’ six months earlier). (1)

Admittedly, achieving decent bat effects has always been a problem for gothic horror films, but this one looks particularly onerous, with a sculpted plastic face and an overstuffed body like some giant bluebottle. For a single shot, perhaps we could excuse it, but unfortunately these bats actually go on to play a pretty significant role in the film. Acting as Dracula’s primary avatars, they’re flapping about all over the place, and are central to several of the film’s main horror set-pieces. And yet -- they look absolutely stupid throughout.

The fact that neither Baker nor line producer Aida Young were able to have a quiet word in the ear of one of Hammer’s big-shots to say, look, we’ve got to do something about these bloody bats or the film will be a laughing stock, speaks volumes about how little the company actually cared about the quality of their product at this point in time.

A few years earlier, viewers could have had confidence that even the most mindless horror films Hammer turned out could to some extent be redeemed by their technical accomplishments, proving that a little bit of beautiful photography and classy production design can go a long way. (The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is a good example.) Those days seem to have been long gone by 1970 though, and ‘Scars of Dracula’ is blandly over-lit throughout, leaving no shadows, no room for atmosphere, and nothing to hide its rather ugly, poverty-stricken sets.

In stark contrast to the attention to detail that used to prevail at Hammer, the props and costuming too are almost unbelievably shoddy here. When Patrick Troughton, playing Dracula’s craven servant Klove, is seen dragging an animal carcass over the back of his horse at the end if a hunting expedition, it looks as if he’s been handed a bedraggled soft toy splashed with red paint and told to make the best of it. I’m not even sure what kind of animal it was supposed to be, to be honest.

Again, I only bring this up as a symptom of the wider malaise affecting every aspect of this production. The fact this scene was filmed and printed, rather than being put on hold whilst the art director was bawled out and some production assistants dispatched to come up with something better before the next tea break, again speaks for itself. (2)

I should make clear that it’s not really my intention to get all high-minded when it comes to assessing the quality of Hammer Dracula movies. I have no desire to echo Christopher Lee’s snooty approach to such things, and I’d be perfectly happy to enjoy a ragged, pulpy Dracula movie full of sex and violence (for such is the reputation of ‘Scars..’ has acquired over the years). But… this damn thing can’t even get being sleazy right.

The bawdy behaviour that comprises much of the first half of the film is pitched strictly at a Benny Hill / pre-‘Confessions of..’ level, with Christopher Matthews as a leering, jack-the-lad type chancer getting his end away with a succession of flirtatious barmaids and the like, but with no actual nudity, and none of the (relatively) grown up eroticism that caused such a stir in Baker’s previous assignment for Hammer, ‘The Vampire Lovers’.

As to violence meanwhile, Baker seems to have realised that his only hope of winning the fans over with this one was to just go for it (I’m reminded of Brian Trenchard Smith’s tales of how he started desperately hacking off limbs and throwing blood around when his budget for 1980’s ‘Turkey Shoot’ was cut in half mid-way through production), and if nothing else, ‘Scars..’ is at least a contender for the goriest film Hammer ever made.

Even here though, things are compromised by those bloody layabouts in the art department. Hammer’s preferred shade of bright scarlet house paint never looked as absurd as it does here in the light of Moray Grant’s remorselessly bland photography, and the resulting parade of rubber bat attacks and lurid close-ups of poorly applied wound make-up achieves the rare distinction of simultaneously feeling both prurient and boring. (3)

One of the more interesting aspects of ‘Scars..’ is its apparent attempt to associate Dracula with bladed weapons. (“Be careful, it’s sharp” is his introductory line, as he walks in on Matthews’ character admiring the obligatory crossed swords mounted on his castle wall.)

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea (and I’m sure Lee would have relished the opportunity for a bit of supernatural swashbuckling), but it is poorly developed here – most notably in an absolutely astonishing scene in which, following an almost shot-for-shot re-tread of the bit in Terrance Fisher’s ‘Dracula’ where The Count reprimands his bride for trying to take a bite of the Harker-surrogate’s throat before him, Dracula here proceeds to punish her by whipping out a butcher’s knife and stabbing her to death.

Aside from the fact that it is entirely unmotivated by the script, this is… very un-vampiric behaviour, to say the least. (If Dracula were to resort to sword-play, surely he’d do so purely for the purposes of pageantry and sadism, rather than hacking away at one of his vassals like some back alley slasher?)

This is basically only a taster though for an even more witless moment later on, when the Lord of the Undead, whose mesmeric powers can crush a man’s soul with a mere glance, apparently resorts to drugging the heroine’s soup. As Jonathan Rigby laments in his review in English Gothic, “what use has Dracula for these pantomime contrivances?”

Anyway – on to positives. There must be some, I suppose?

Well, it’s hard work, but… at least Christopher Lee gets some lines in this one I suppose, with Dracula speaking calmly and assuming his ‘cold but polite host’ role for the first time since Fisher’s 1957 ‘Dracula’, I believe.

Given the voluminous litanies of complaint Lee liked to issue each time he was – ahem – “forced” to appear in another Dracula film, one can only imagine how cheesed off he must have been whilst participating in this particularly shabby instalment, but even if he’s not exactly giving it his all, such are the meagre pleasures offered by ‘Scars..’ that merely hearing Christopher Lee say some things is quite nice.

As always, it’s nice to see Hammer lucky charm Michael Ripper getting a significant role too, appearing here as the world’s least hospitable inn-keeper. He gets quite a lot of screen time in ‘Scars..’, and spends almost all of it ordering people to get out of his inn, refusing to let them in in the first place, or telling them to “go to the devil”. He does though have one lovely moment when he temporarily drops his guard, wistfully telling our lead couple they should enjoy their best years together… shortly before he discovers they’re also would-be vampire hunters and manhandles them out of the front door before they’ve even finished their soup.

As a fan of ‘The Sweeney’, I was delighted too to see a young Dennis Waterman popping up as our ostensible hero, although it’s doubtful that this role did much to help propel him to his later TV fame, as he delivers a veritable master-class on the theme of “ineffectual youth”, despite being thirty two years old at the time.

I also found it interesting that – for some reason – ‘Scars..’ takes the opportunity to include the rarely filmed scene from Stoker’s novel in which Jonathan Harker abseils out of his locked room in Dracula’s castle and find himself trapped in the lower chamber which houses The Count’s coffin. This bit was relatively well done, and provided a welcome break from the remorseless grind of reheated cliché that comprises the rest of the film’s action.

And… that’s about it really.

[Deep sigh.]

In general, I tend to feel a great warmth and fondness for British horror films of all stripes, and for Hammer films in particular. As such, I can usually find a certain amount to enjoy in just about any of them, even if it’s just a bit of period charm and some familiar faces popping in for a scene or two. Even on this basis though, I can’t stress enough just how dispiritingly rubbish I found ‘Scars of Dracula’ to be. It’s really the pits.

Essentially playing out like some cruel, self-reflexive pastiche of the company’s public image, ‘Scars..’ feels less like an actual Hammer film, and more like a realisation of what the closed-minded contemporary critics who wrote horror films off as juvenile trash and never went to see them might have imagined a Hammer film to be like.

By pandering to this kind of Lowest Common Denominator public expectation, the company did themselves a dreadful disservice in ‘70/’71, and this one seems to me to be the absolute nadir of the particularly dodgy patch they seemed to be going through at the time.

At least we can take succour in the fact that they bounced back shortly thereafter with great pictures like ‘Twins of Evil’ and ‘Vampire Circus’, keeping themselves afloat creatively speaking for at least a few more years before the inevitable end arrived in the mid ‘70s. Maybe I should watch one of those again to help take the taste away...

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(I do LOVE some of this foreign language poster artwork for this film though…)

(1) At the risk of sounding like the worst kind of nit-picking fanboy, the fact that ‘Scars of Dracula’ completely blunders the (admittedly loose) sense of chronological continuity established by the other Hammer Draculas just seems to add insult to injury. I mean, after Dracula is defeated in London at the end of ‘Taste the Blood..’, it would seem to set things up perfectly for his resurrection in the same city almost a century later in ‘..AD 1972’ – yet we’ve got this damned mess in the middle, which drags him back to the vague, mittel-european gothic setting we’d previously kissed goodbye to (and frankly had quite enough of) in ‘..Risen from the Grave’ a couple of years earlier!

Is ‘Scars..’ thus non-canonical? Is it a prequel? This being 1970, I’d imagine Tony Hinds and Michael Carreras would have had little to say on the subject beyond, “What the bloody hell are you talking about? Get out of my office!”, but it still irks me.

(2) For further evidence of just how badly put together this movie is, I suggest consulting the unusually extensive list of ‘goofs’ on IMDB.

(3) We should make clear that, after serving a long apprenticeship as a camera operator through the ‘60s, Grant did far better work as DP on ‘The Vampire Lovers’ and ‘Vampire Circus’ amongst others – so again, we can perhaps chalk up the fact that ‘Scars..’ looks as if it was shot under office strip lighting to budget and schedule shortcomings.

October Horrors # 10: A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

Welcome to the High Concept Zone, where we find a very 21st century iteration of the ideal American nuclear family living in a state of total silence, in an eerily depopulated version of rural upstate New York.

They are isolated survivors, adjusting as best as they can to circumstances in which the slightest sound brings instant death, courtesy of the huge, apparently unstoppable, alien predators with over-sized hearing apparatus covering most of their heads who lurk just out of sight, waiting to pounce on any outburst of noise with lightning speed.

The extent and immediacy of this threat is made clear to us in no uncertain terms during the film’s opening sequence, when, as the family tip-toe back to their bucolic farmstead following a scavenging expedition to the nearest town (they wear no shoes, and have tramped down their route with sand), the youngest of their three children covertly inserts some batteries into a toy space shuttle he has acquired without his parents’ knowledge. The results are not pretty.

Jumping forward a year or so from this tragedy, the other members of our family remain alive and well, and we learn that they have in fact been granted a significant boon in the survival stakes via the fact that their eldest daughter is deaf. This means that they were already fluent in communicating via sign language (which is helpfully sub-titled for us) before the alien invasion hit, and were to some extent already used to sharing her soundless world.

As the might well imagine, this is a film clearly designed with theatrical exhibition in mind. It was definitely not intended for viewing at home, particularly when your next door neighbours are having a house party, or your pets are making a fuss, or whatever else. The first ten minutes or so of the film play out in total silence, and the sounds we hear thereafter are strictly limited to those the characters hear – each one a potential harbinger of death. IMDB trivia informs me that the first line of spoken dialogue (whispered, naturally) occurs 38 minutes in.

It’s a bold move for a commercial feature, but, after briefly wondering whether I could really make it through ninety plus minutes of this whilst sitting, subject to distractions, in a friend’s living room, I was surprised by how easily I adjusted to the film’s world of silence. (The fact that traditional, non-diegetic music gradually begins to creep in as action intensifies later in the film probably helps in this respect.)

One thing we should make clear straight away is that, to get anything out of ‘A Quiet Place’, one must Indulge The Concept. Spend a few minutes testing its real-world foundations, and it clearly don’t hold up too good. How long can a human being really go without coughing or sneezing or snoring..? How do the family intend to silently harvest and process the golden fields of corn they’ve apparently raised on their farmstead..? The father (played by director Krasinski and his fulsomely moisturised beard) may be a DIY homesteader/inventor par excellence, but surely even he must have trouble sawing wood and hammering nails in silence..? And so on.

We could continue in that vein for quite a while, but what would be the point? Far better just to accept Krasinski (and co-writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck)’s idea as an ingenious, Twilight Zone-style thought-provoker – exactly the kind of thing that Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont might have come up with back in the day, invested with a wistful American specificity worthy of Ray Bradbury - and to see where they want to go with it, basically.

Thematically speaking, I fear their eventual destination is nowhere too remarkable. Aside from a strong emphasis on the virtues of familial love and cooperation (the fact that Krasinski stars opposite his real life partner Emily Blunt probably helped in this regard), and an earnest survival-above-all-else message common to most high-minded disaster/post-apocalypse tales, I suspect there is little that can be pulled out of ‘A Quiet Place’ to beef up anyone’s thesis on the socio-political aesthetics of the contemporary U.S. horror film.

As a straight-forward narrative entertainment however, it is at least extremely well-realised. Assembled with a spirit of hand-crafted professionalism that oddly mirrors the practical achievements of its male protagonist, ‘A Quiet Place’ makes effective use of its reasonably glossy production values (the dread name of Michael Bay appears alongside a bus-load of other credited producers, and there are more people listed in the credits than in probably every pre-2000 film I’ve reviewed this October put together).

Editing rhythms and real-world cause-and-effect remain as tight as the premise demands, and, throughout the film, suspense is tightened, released and re-tightened with confident ease. The keep-quiet-or-die conceit gives the filmmakers the opportunity to explore some novel variations on the well-worn methodology of nail-biting tension, including, as you’d imagine, many hands thrust across mouths at the last second, and a whole bit of business with a loose nail sticking out of the basement staircase that is just delightful.

Spectacle and peril are both kept on a tight leash through a long and convincing slow-burn, only to be let loose in the final act, when certain incidents-which-we-shall-not-spoil-here have made clear that all bets are off. As is only right and proper, the film’s big-eared monsters are initially kept at a distance – gigantic, toothy blurs that crash across the screen, leaving destruction in their wake. When we do get to see a little more of them however (and eventually, we see quite a lot of them), they are very cool and impressive creations.

Next gen descendants of the questionable critters who once galumphed across our screens in Verhoeven’s ‘Starship Troopers’ and clear ‘Quiet Place’-precursor ‘Pitch Black’ (2000, with Vin Diesel - remember that one?), they seem to reflect a positive development I’ve noted in a number of films in recent years, vis-à-vis the creation of CGI monsters that convey convincing weight and physical presence, and, as a result, do not look laughably ridiculous when placed within ‘real’ filmed environments.

The design of theses beasties’ heads in particular – with multiple, overlapping jaws opening like the petals of a flower to reveal some kind of vast, fleshy hearing apparatus – is memorably horrific, hitting some of the same ‘uncanny’ buttons as the original, similarly eyeless, ‘Alien’ blue-print.

One of the most interesting twists in the film’s storyline comes via the fact that Blunt’s character is pregnant. Just think about that for a moment. I mean, you can teach your older children to keep quiet, but how are you going to tell the new arrival..? The thought that holding a new born baby is essentially the equivalent of lighting a stick of dynamite is an unpleasant fact that the human race within this film is basically going to have to find a way around, should they wish to survive.

I’m not sure I find Mr Can Do Dad’s solution – which involves a padded, sound-proofed wooden box with pumped in oxygen – entirely convincing (and the notion of an infant who spends his or her early years confined to a series of increasingly large boxes sounds like material for an entirely different kind of horror film), but… I certainly couldn’t come up with any better ideas, and imagining how the forthcoming birth was going to play out proved a fascinating and rather terrifying prospect.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that I felt ‘A Quiet Place’ dropped the ball somewhat. Somewhere along the line, the more familiar mechanics of modern, commercial horror movies start to come into play, precipitating a gruelling stalk-and-hide sequence which culminates in a landmark “you’ve got to be f-ing kidding me” moment that feels so ludicrous that I hope readers who have seen the film will know what I mean when I say that it comes very close to torpedoing our ability to take the remainder of the movie seriously.

Furthermore, to jump on what seems to have become a personal hobby-horse of mine, I do wish that modern filmmakers could ditch their habit of using child birth and new born infants merely to ‘up the ante’ on horror and suspense set-pieces. Of course, issues of parenthood and reproduction are always ripe for exploration, and of course the ‘child/mother in peril’ trope is as old as time itself, but, now that the unspoken taboo re: placing maternity ward business in close proximity to grisly violence and imminent death seems to have been broken, the way in which this freedom is increasingly exploited (in this film, The Void, and The Witch, to name but three films I’ve reviewed here) often strikes me as merely crass and manipulative. (Admittedly, this could just be because it succeeds in manipulating me so well, but…)

And, whilst I’m getting my licks in, I also need to pre-warn viewers of the regrettable (and unexplained) deus ex machina which occurs toward the end of ‘A Quiet Place’. Just think the movie version of ‘Day of The Triffids’, and we’ll say no more about it. Not that I have any better ideas on how to end the thing I hasten to add, but, as with the pregnancy thing, the suspicion that the scriptwriters have written themselves into a corner is hard to shake

So, in conclusion… well I don’t really have a conclusion. This is a well made, compelling movie. As an example of some well-intentioned Hollywood types making an original, imaginative and highly watchable genre film, it should probably be celebrated, and should certainly be given preference over the thousandth pointless derivation of ‘Amityville’ or ‘The Exorcist’, or whatever else is being advertised in shades of black, grey and red on the side of buses this month.

I didn’t really feel particularly strongly about it however, and a few significant blunders and an overriding feeling of low level, aspirational smugness prevent me from really wanting to pin a ‘Quiet Place’ badge on my lapel and start enthusiastically talking it up to friends, etc. Make of it what you will, but you could certainly dial up far worse from your preferred streaming service, that’s for sure. (Just remember to wait until all potential noise-makers in your immediate vicinity have gone to sleep before pressing ‘play’.)

Nippon Horrors / October Horrors #9: Ghost Stories of the Seven Wonders of Honjo (Gorô Kadono, 1957)

Original title: 怪談本所七不思議 / 'Kaidan Honjo Nanafushigi'

The introduction to this Shintoho b-feature could prove a bit perplexing for us many of us gaijin, as voiceover narration tells us about a Tanuki (Japanese ‘racoon-dog’) who lives in a certain area (is it Honjo?), and seems to have especially noteworthy magical powers, but the narrator never really gives us the full low-down on this, because it seems to be assumed that everybody already knows all about it..?

Well, no problem – such are the pleasures of watching films whose makers would never have dreamed that people on the other side of the world would be assessing their efforts sixty years later.

Anyway, both the film’s title and this intro (in which forthcoming events are briefly ‘previewed’ via super-imposed shots of assorted characters we have yet to meet) would tend to suggest that we’re in for an anthology film -- an extremely cut price ‘Kwaidan’, perhaps? What fun! Actually though, once things get going, it soon becomes clear that the film (which clocks in at a sprightly 54 minutes) intends to concentrate on just a single ghost story, and an achingly over-familiar one at that. But, like most of these Shintoho ghost pictures, it’s an enjoyable business nonetheless, and not without its own quirks and surprises along the way.

Initially for instance, we meet a pair of fishermen, who, eager to get to their favourite drinking place before they run afoul of that aforementioned Tanuki, run instead into a brace of Yokai, including such ten carat spooks as a faceless woman (Yokai ID currently undetermined), a big guy with the eye in his forehead (an Ao Bōzu variant, perhaps?), the ever popular hopping umbrella thing (Karakasa-kozō), the big head dude (Abura-sumashi), and even a brief appearance by everybody’s favourite, the long-necked Rokurokubi.

The effects here are actually pretty great – easily the match of those seen in Daei’s Yokai films from the ‘60s – and, though brief, it’s all lots of eerie fun. (I particularly liked the bit in which, in an odd reverse Charles Fort kinda thing, the fishermen’s catch begins to levitate, and floats off into the sky.)

The next thing we know, the aggrieved fishermen and a bunch of their friends seem to have caught the mischievous Tanuki, whom they hold responsible for sicing the spooks upon them. Before they can turn it into soup however (for such is their stated intention), the animal is rescued by an elderly samurai patriarch (Hiroshi Hayashi) who happens to be passing. Fresh from visiting the grave of his first wife, he takes pity on the poor creature, and feels an urge to save it from the brutish treatment the fishermen no doubt have in mind.

Back home however, the old man has plenty of troubles, not least the fact that his rogueish nephew (the splendidly seedy Shigeru Amachi, whom you’ll recall from The Lady Vampire and several Zatoichi instalments) is trying to scam money off him whilst simultaneously making time with his much younger second wife (Akiko Yamashita), with whom the debauched young samurai had a fling at some point in the past. (1)

Fear not though, as the grateful Tanuki spirit appears to the old man in the form of a charming young girl (Michiko Tachibana) and her accompanying folk dancing troupe. The Tanuki pledges to protect the elder’s interests in return for his saving her life, so… what could possibly go wrong, right?

It’s rare to see a Japanese period film in which the aristocratic patrician guy turns out to be the aggrieved victim of the inevitable crimes and betrayals rather than perpetrator, but Amachi and Yamashita are such a convincingly vile pair of ne’erdowells that, as soon as they’ve teamed up in an adulterous union and started plotting to dispose of the old geezer, our sympathies are firmly nailed down, and we basically know where this is all heading.

Happily though, the film soon breaks away from the formal, ‘staged folk tale’ feel common to many earlier Japanese ghost films, allowing this standard issue tale of supernatural vengeance to become a simple, yet gripping and sensationalistic, b-movie melodrama, dynamically directed by the little-known Gorô Kadono, and played out with theatrical vigour by the cast.

Considering the year of production, a surprising amount of sexual impropriety follows the inevitable violent demise of the patriarch, as the leery Amachi has his wicked way with the bride of his morally upstanding cousin and Yamashita engages in some heavy-duty flirting with craven servant Gosuke (Saburô Sawai). Meanwhile, the lightning flashes and the winds howls outside the noble family’s now thoroughly profaned residence, and we all know that a bad end for the murderous adulterers will soon be on the way.

Justice soon marches in the corporeal form of the deceased patriarch’s aforementioned chivalrous son, who has returned from an extended stay in Edo upon hearing of his father’s death (I like the fact that this good samurai helpfully wears a white kimono, whilst Amachi of course favours black), whilst our mischievous Tanuki meanwhile is of course cooking up a right old storm in the spirit realm.

It may seem a bit disingenuous to claim that a film derived (at some level of remove, admittedly) from Japanese folklore was influenced by ‘Macbeth’, but, given that Kurosawa’s ‘Throne of Blood’ had premiered seven months before this film saw release in July 1957 (just in time for the Obon season, perhaps?), the possibility of a bit of hand-me-down influence doesn’t seem entirely out of the question.

Certainly, the echoes here of Shakespeare’s immortal yarn will be plainly obvious to Western viewers, and the film definitely succeeds in evoking what I can only describe as a ‘Macbeth-type atmosphere’, as what initially seemed like a light-hearted, fairy tale type film is gradually transformed into a doom-laden supernatural revenge tragedy, culminating, inevitably, in a rain-soaked, chanbara blood-bath in which the villainous Amachi gets what’s coming to him via his cousin’s shining blade.

It’s nothing we’ve not seen many times before, but I for one am happy to see it again, and, with all this blood-curdling incident compressed into less than an hour, the story certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. Despite the miniscule budget, the kaidan atmosphere here is thick as a bowl of fermented miso, and all the stuff with the Yokai and sundry other ghostly manifestations is a lot of fun.

There’s also a great bit with a gravel-voiced Buddhist exorcist doing his thing, until his ritual is curtailed by a rain of poisonous snakes (!), and, whilst I won't spoil the details of the fate the Tanuki and her multitudinous ‘friends’ contrive for the bad guys, but it’s rather delirious and wonderful, in the best tradition of these kind of b-kaidan pictures.

Strangely enough, the most disappointing aspect of ‘..Seven Wonders of Honjo’ is probably the music, which consists of lazy/random needle drops that often undermine the painstakingly rendered atmos to a certain extent, particularly during the finale, in which the highly charged sword battle is sound-tracked by what sounds like a jaunty, brass band marching theme that sounds like it was pulled off some dusty old disc left behind by the U.S. occupying forces.

I can’t for the life of me imagine why the film’s producers chose to lay this down over the action in preference to some more appropriate and evocative Japanese music (which must surely have been available to them), but, given the extreme haste with which films like this one were presumably knocked out, I doubt anyone had time to quibble over such details in post-production. Visually, this scene is excellent, so it's a real shame that the music makes such a mess of it, but what can you do?

That aside though, whilst this marginal and rather eccentric item may not exactly be the best place to start with vintage Japanese ghost films, it’s a delightful surprise for those us of who already have a taste for them.

I’m still none the wiser regarding “the Seven Wonders of Honjo”, but I’m sure they can wait for another day.

(My profound thanks to the heroic souls who recently fan-subbed this film and stuck it up on the interweb, incidentally.)

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(1) An actress who seems to have worked almost exclusively in the milieu of Shintoho ghost movies, Yamashita can also boast appearances in in ‘Girl Divers at Spook Mansion’ (1959), Ghost Cat of Otama Pond (1960), and an apparently Western-inclined vampire movie whose existence I was previously unaware of, 1960’s ‘Vampire Bride’ [‘Hanayome Kyûketsuma’].

October Horrors #8: Haunted (Michael de Gaetano, 1977)

I’ve been interested in seeing this film ever since I first caught a glimpse of the poster reproduced above. I mean, just look at it. “It began the day they installed that telephone booth in the cemetery!” What? Crazy, man.

If the same warped mind-set that created this poster to some degree played into the making of the film itself, it surely must be worth a watch.

Such was my thinking when I set out to track it down earlier this month, but, now that I have watched it, I’m sad to say that the craziest thing here is probably the fact that someone actually had the balls to offer this motion picture to cinema-goers as a commercial horror film.

It’s not that I’d consider ‘Haunted’ an objectively terrible film (many probably would, but, as discussed below, I feel a certain warmth toward it). It’s more that… well let’s just say that what we have here is really more of an independent character drama that occasionally hints at the possibility of supernatural events, rather than a horror film.

You know all those regional U.S. horrors from the early 1970s that just feel a bit… zoned out? I don’t mean the really effective and acclaimed ones like ‘Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’ (1971) or ‘Messiah of Evil’ (1973). I mean the really sketchy, marginal ones that are just waaay out there. Things like ‘Death by Invitation’ (1971), ‘Blood Sabbath’ (1970), ‘Moonchild’ (1974), or ‘Track of the Moonbeast’ (1976). Well, despite being fairly late to the game in ’77, ‘Haunted’ has this feeling in spades… just without any actual horror content to balance it out.

Although no hippies or drug users appear on screen at any point, the “action” here feels as if it was orchestrated from behind the viewfinder through a thick haze of quaaludes, marijuana and blinding desert sun. It is reeeeally zoned out. By which I mean, it is slow, basically. Reeeal slow (and I’ll stop filling this review with unnecessary repeated vowels at this point, I promise).

Like the similarly somnambulant ‘Death by Invitation’, the film begins with a jarring and unconvincing period prologue in which a Native American woman named Abanaki (played, unaccountably, by Ann Michelle of ‘Twins of Evil’/’Virgin Witch’/’Psychomania’ fame) is accused of witchcraft by some obnoxious frontier settler types. As punishment, she is stripped naked and sent out into the desert on a horse, to presumably wander alone until she succumbs to the elements.

It’s all quite odd. I’m afraid to say that Michelle seems to have been “browned up” for the occasion, and I’m not really sure whether the extensive exposure given to her undoubtedly impressive hooters was intended as exploitation, or just some kind of dazed historical verisimilitude.

Once that’s all over with, we cut to present day Arizona, and learn that the same locale is now a struggling, family run ‘movie ranch’ built around a standing western town set. When I say the business is ‘struggling’, I mean, it doesn’t seem to have had any business whatsoever for many years. It does have a genuine frontier-era cemetery in the middle of it however, and when the film opens, the phone company are indeed in the process of setting up a call box in the midst of the headstones.

Watching this installation are several people, including a pair of teenage boys, the younger and nerdier of whom is in the process of installing some kind of radio receiver on the roof of one of the buildings, and a burly middle-aged handyman / caretaker guy (played by ‘50s tough guy stalwart Aldo Ray) who seems to be quite agitated by these goings on.

It subsequently becomes clear that the two boys are effectively the heirs to this moribund ranch, upon which they also live. It seems that their father, along with their aunt, perished under traumatic and slightly mysterious circumstances in an automobile accident some years ago. Their mother (former Hollywood starlet and character actress Virginia Mayo) was blinded in the same accident, and seems to spend much of her time wandering around in a state of delusional reverie. Angry old Aldo – a case study in barely articulate redneck frustration – is their uncle.

The older boy, Patrick, played by Jim Negele, is quite athletic and outgoing – he likes cycling and swimming and has a nifty muscle car – whilst his younger brother (Russell, played by Brad Reardon, who went on to achieve immortality in the role of “punk” in ‘The Terminator’) is more introverted, seemingly devoting most of his time to his ham radio set up.

One of the film’s more engaging scenes (relatively speaking) takes place in a disconcertingly authentic looking local bar, where the sheer dearth of activity in the area is highlighted by the fact that the installation of the new phone booth is a lively topic of conversation. Aldo drunkenly argues with some guy over the phone company’s intentions whilst a harried, long-haired barman tries to keep the peace. The legend of Abanaki (who of course left a curse) is also discussed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (and how I cherish the opportunity to use that phrase literally), the family’s unhappy status quo is about to be upset forever – not that you’d know it from the lackadaisical pacing and affectless performances – by the arrival of a young woman with an English accent who is having car trouble.

Yes, it’s Ann Michelle again, now with her natural skin colour. She’s an aspiring actress en route to Hollywood, funnily enough, and, amid much scintillating discussion of whether or not her car will need to be towed to Tucson and when and how she might be able to pick it up, she begins to form a romantic bond with Patrick.

Seeing new possibilities for his adult life opening up before him, Patrick makes the decision to close down the ranch and move on. Mother will go to a care home, where she will get the help she clearly needs. Patrick and Russell will move to Phoenix with Ms Michelle in tow, and Aldo can do whatever the hell he likes, because he’s a jerk, and no one likes him anyway.

In brief, this turn of events pushes Aldo over the edge. He imagines that he receives a call in the cemetery phone booth from Abanaki (or does he actually receive it? – AMBIGUITY ALERT!). Though rather evocative, her words are mystifyingly obtuse (“If you try to look at me, you shall see nothing, yet cast your glance into the night and you shall see, I am that light which reflects across the face of the glass, the bit of day which cuts itself against the darkness of the night..”, and so forth), and poor Aldo seems confused.

The voice on the phone says something about an “old hag” having the answer, and so, clearly in search of more helpful advice, Aldo goes to visit an Indian fortune-teller, who lives in a kind of tepee made from repurposed industrial junk, on an island in the middle of a mountain lake(!) Seemingly a bit of a stirrer, the fortune-teller tells him that “the spirit of Abanaki is reincarnated in the body of the girl”, and sets him loose to do as he pleases.

Needing no further encouragement, Aldo kidnaps Ann Michelle whilst the boys are off in town having a burger, and ties her to a chair in his workshop. Rambling on in a generally incoherent fashion, he menaces her with a knife, and reveals some dark family secrets. She escapes, and, after a few minutes of running around, takes shelter in the phone booth. Whilst attempting to recapture her, Aldo somehow manages to accidentally impale himself on a sharpened broomstick handle and sets himself on fire. It’s a horrible way to go, but it’s probably for the best in the long run.

And, that’s all that happens in ‘Haunted’, really. That’s the end. I’m sorry for spoiling it for you, but as you’ll appreciate, it’s nothing too earth-shattering.

I’ll admit, I really don’t know what’s going on with this movie. Although Aldo Ray, Virginia Mayo and Ann Michelle weren’t exactly what you’d call top line stars in 1977, their appearance at least indicates the participation of a professional casting director or talent agency, not to mention the promise of enough money to make an extended trip to Arizona worth their while.

This sits oddly though with the fact that, in all other respects, the film is only a notch or two above the kind of thing that some ambitious (and chronically stoned) high school students might have thrown together during a long, slow summer holiday. Why would director Michael de Gaetano go to the trouble to sign up ‘name’ actors for his film, but otherwise appear totally unconcerned with including anything that might help sell it to a paying audience?

On the plus side, ‘Haunted’, in common with many films shot on remote and evocative locations, can at least boast a wealth of atmosphere. The ‘movie ranch’ (an apparently genuine one) looks authentically decrepit and sinister, and the natural beauty of the surrounding country is remarkable, even (perhaps especially) via the washed out transfer currently under review.

At one point, we see Patrick emerge from a beautiful mountain lake, jump on the bike he has left on the side of the road and begin cycling home, without even needing to dry off or change his clothes. Filmed in long-shot with an off-hand naturalism that suggests he didn’t even know he was being filmed at the time, this sent me off on a few minutes of delightful reverie, reflecting on what it would be like to grow up in a place like that.

Likewise, the scene in which Patrick reveals a previously undisclosed musical talent, serenading Michelle by the campfire with a genuinely beguiling psychedelic folk number on a 12 string guitar, has “hippie horror” vibes to burn. (Man, what a find he is for her – a gentle, talented hunk of untouched, mountain-raised masculinity; I hope she didn’t go on to corrupt him with her cynical Hollywood ways in the non-existent sequel.)

There is also, it must be said, a lot of intriguing imagery scattered through ‘Haunted’. The phone booth in the graveyard, the radio wires and phone lines somehow intersecting with the past of the mouldering frontier town and Indian curse myths that seems to be trying to invade the present; and the suggestion that the younger characters are trying to escape it, whilst Aldo and Mayo - sad, doomed victims of past trauma - are consumed by it.

In his surprisingly positive write-up in ‘American Nightmare’, Stephen Thrower praises the oblique nature of the film’s plotting, and even floats the possibility that it may have been conceived as an Antonioni-esque reflection on the impossibility of human communication, but… nothing along these lines ever really comes together, to be honest.

In the right frame of mind, the film’s slow drift of non-sequiturs and barely cogent, half-explored ideas could prove rather intriguing I suppose, but de Gaetano’s disengaged direction and the vacant performances (from everyone except Aldo, who seems authentically out to lunch) fail to make any of it very compelling, whilst the fact that de Gaetano’s only other credits comprise a 1974 UFO expose and a 1980 sex comedy tends to mitigate against the possibility that he was actually some kind of inarticulate, backwoods auteur.

If ‘Haunted’ is about anything at all, I suppose at heart it must be about the two young men attempting to overcome familial tragedy, and to find a place for themselves in the adult world and so on… but even pulling that much out of the images and words presented here feels like a stretch.

It’s curious to note that, two years later, a day-or-so’s drive in the direction Ann Michelle was presumably driving in before she broke down, a younger director than de Gaetano would take these same potent themes, together with a similarly disconnected atmosphere and sense of post-gothic American surrealism, and would emerge with results that I can say without any sense of hyperbole were at least one thousand times more effective.

‘Haunted’ meanwhile remains a dustbowl lost in the breeze; a cinematic question mark that no one can be bothered to resolve. A 2.2 IMDB rated 100 movie box-set filler that seems to be trying to say something about something… but who knows what?

GREAT poster though, huh?

October Horrors # 7: Train To Busan (Sang-ho Yeon, 2016)

So, seems like this one pretty much knocked it outta the park as far as South Korean zombie movies go, right?

I actually first became aware of ‘Train to Busan’ a few years ago, when a freelance work assignment required me to do a bit of research on international box office figures. Scanning through the resulting info, I was surprised to see that a home-grown horror film had recently become the highest grossing film of all time in South Korean cinemas. I mean, not just the highest grossing South Korean film in South Korea – the highest grossing film from any country. Avatar, Avengers, Star Wars, whatever – ‘Train To Busan’ smoked them all in the domestic market.

Not bad for a movie that, on the face of it, sticks pretty faithfully to the post-Romero template of grim, zombie-initiated societal collapse, and an achievement that would surely have been unthinkable for this kind of film twenty years ago.

I’m sure I am far from the first person to reflect on how peculiar it is that the idea of malevolent, reanimated corpses eating the raw flesh of the living has become an acceptable subject for mainstream entertainment in the 21st century, but in many ways, ‘Train to Busan’ feels like a new crowning achievement for this trend.

For ‘Train to Busan’ is, make no mistake, a mainstream film. The use of a post-‘28 Days Later’ infection paradigm allows the story’s unimaginably hellish scenario to be portrayed with a bare minimum of gore and bodily corruption, whilst viewers are encouraged to sympathise and/or identify with the central characters through such positive, universal sentiments as concern for family, friendship, co-operation and self-sacrifice.

The complicated networks of sadism, cynicism and voyeuristic prurience that usually define the relationship between viewers, filmmakers and on-screen characters in horror films are never really put into operation here, whilst the ‘monsters-from-the-id’ psychological transgressions that are traditionally key to the appeal of the genre are likewise scrubbed off the film’s squeaky clean surface until only a trace memory of their presence remains.

But, if there are to be mainstream zombie films, I’d nevertheless argue that ‘Train to Busan’ provides a pretty good model for how they can be done well.

I’d not sure how to best put this, but… that aforementioned lack of cynicism actually feels very refreshing. After a few decades in which even the most innocuous Hollywood action-adventure films (and, by extension, their Asian and European equivalents) seem to have been populated by wise-cracking, self-interested loud-mouths, there is something very appealing about following a group of people who are for the most part quite reasonable, soft-spoken and quote-unquote “normal” as they team up to deal with catastrophic, life-threatening circumstances.

In this respect, I can easily see why the film proved so appealing to a general audience – particularly in South Korea, where viewers could presumably relate even more directly to the surroundings and pre-zombie day-to-day concerns of their on-screen surrogates.

It helps too that the film is extremely well-made. Performances are generally convincing and character stuff is well-handled, despite touches of the hand-wringing familial melodrama that seems to be a ubiquitous part of Korean popular culture, and though not as traumatic as it may have been in a “proper”, full strength genre film, the sense of sudden, near-total apocalypse, and the eerie dislocation felt by passengers trapped in the orderly, hermetic environment of a high-speed, inter-city train whilst it unfolds, is very well conveyed.

Even in the era of smart phones and roaming wi-fi hotspots, the confused, second-hand fragments we receive of different locales being ‘quarantined’, of defences of cities having ‘failed’, and of more and more phonecalls to relatives and business contacts ringing out, dead, is extremely effective, building a very modern sense of slow-building, gut-tightening panic that I’d imagine must feel recognisable to anyone who has been unfortunate enough to find themselves adjacent to a terrorist atrocity, or a sudden outbreak of civil disobedience or warfare, in recent years.

Setting the film on a train, it must be said, is also a bit of a masterstroke. I say this for no other reason than that action-adventure scenarios set in or around trains have always had great cinematic potential, as has been proven whenever the necessary factors of budgetary resource and filmmaking talent have aligned – and, whilst I’ll refrain from running through my extremely long list of “GREAT FILMS (OR PARTS OF FILMS) SET ON TRAINS”, I can happily confirm that ‘..Busan’ earns a deserved spot on said list, with its litany of life-and-death struggles with door locks, detached carriages, switching yard derailments and runaway engines feeling both satisfyingly exhilarating and… weirdly old fashioned, in a sense.

(I’m apt to wonder for instance whether the drivers on South Korea’s latest generation of high speed trains really communicate with their central control room solely via a crackly old radio set, as is portrayed here, but no matter – as far as the movies go, this is great stuff.)

Zombie-wise meanwhile, the blank-eyed, hissing, running/infection-spreading creatures of ‘Train to Busan’ may not add much to the sub-genre’s rich legacy, but where the film really distinguishes itself horror-wise is in portraying such a sheer mass of them. Obviously reflective of fears arising from life in the densely populated cities of South-East Asia, these swarming zombies are repeatedly seen smashing through plexi-glass windows in their hundreds - an undifferentiated tide of biting flesh - whilst the complex, multi-level geometry of the station buildings in which much of the action takes place even leads to several moments in which the confined creatures crash through a wall of glass and literally pour down from the skies - a veritable tidal wave of mindlessly animated, chomping death machines.

As alarming and impressive as all this is however, this complete de-humanisation of the zombie threat nonetheless feeds into what most horror fans will have realised fairly soon into the film’s run-time – namely, that ‘Train to Busan’ is far more of an action-adventure movie (disaster survival sub-category) than it is a horror picture.

By the time we reach the scene in which a small group of mis-matched (all male) characters use improvised weaponry and armour to fight their way through several zombie-infested train carriages in order to rescue their (female) dependants from a toilet cubicle elsewhere on the train, it had occurred to me that the threat our heroes were facing could basically be anything – aliens, Nazis, piranhas, lions, dinosaurs, whatever – and the drama would still play out in pretty much the same way. (1)

That’s not necessarily a criticism – it’s a great sequence, perhaps the highlight of the movie overall, superbly edited and full of rousing heroism, hair-raising suspense and Hawksian male bonding, and I was thoroughly on-board with it whilst watching.

In retrospect though, I miss the spikes. I miss the blunt nastiness, the pessimism, the misanthropy and raging despair. The splintered doorframe and raised gardening trowel of our shared zombie history is nowhere to be found here, my friends.

Far more so than the gore and nastiness though, ‘Train to Busan’s greatest loss in retooling the zombie movie to fit mainstream expectations comes from its jettisoning of the questioning of authority that was such a key element of the formula as defined by George Romero.

That’s not to say that ‘Train..’ is mere mindless entertainment, or that it lacks a social conscience, but it is notable I think that the film’s social commentary in confined solely to the level of individual (rather than societal) morality.

A running dialogue continues throughout the film concerning the respective merits of self-preservation vs collective responsibility, whilst, more specific perhaps to the film’s South Korean identity, Dong-seok Ma’s two-fisted working class hero gives Yoo Gong’s salaryman protagonist a hard time about the “parasitic” nature of his employment as a hedge fund manager, and Gong’s inability to maintain a functional family life alongside the demands of his job is also a central (if not exactly original) concern. (2)

All of which is well and good, but in the meantime, there is no real feeling here that the authorities (or indeed the evident inequalities of the nation’s ultra-capitalist society) are in any way to blame for the chaos and mass death resulting from the zombie outbreak. Though cities may be overwhelmed, misleading advice given to survivors, and soldiers and police may be transformed en masse into zombie predators, at no point do we get the impression that the powers-that-be are doing anything other than their very best to cope with this sudden and unprecedented cataclysm.

This is a far cry indeed from the bleak – and far more convincing - vision of confusion, cruelty and incompetence that Romero brought to the screen in ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and ‘The Crazies’. To my mind, ‘Train to Busan’ suffers greatly from the absence of this perspective, even whilst I appreciate that such a pessimistic approach may have been just too much for viewers in a nation as geo-politically precarious as South Korea -- at least assuming that the filmmakers’ (very UN-horror movie-like) intentions were indeed to avoid giving their viewers sleepless nights, and to instead encourage them to bring their friends and neighbours along to the next screening.

As a movie then, ‘Train to Busan’ is well made, thoroughly engaging and great entertainment – it’s well worth a watch, and you’ll probably want to invite your own friends and neighbours around to watch it a second time too. As a film however (and most particularly as a horror film)…. it leaves something to be desired.

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(1) I couldn’t really find a way to crow-bar this into the main text, but another specifically Korean element of ‘Train to Busan’ arises from the fact that it’s action is all *just a wee bit patriarchal*, in a manner that might seem slightly jarring to contemporary Western viewers. As well as the aforementioned scene in which the heroic dudes battle to rescue their women from the toilet, this reaches its nadir at the film’s conclusion, when – hilariously – a close-to-death male hero uses his last breaths to try to instruct a woman on how to drive a train (something he has no experience of himself); “now, I think this must be the brake..”, etc.

(2) Dong-seok Ma, incidentally, kicks ass in this movie. Hugely likeable, he reminded me somewhat of Shintaro Katsu, and I will happily watch any further films in which he stomps around looking sad and punching people.

Gothic Originals / October Horrors # 6: El Mundo De Los Vampiros (Alfonso Corona Blake, 1961)

I confess, I get all these ‘50s/’60s Mexican vampire movies a bit confused. There were just so many of them produced in such a short time frame, all with fairly similar titles.

Consulting the chapter on Mexico in Pete Tombs’ ‘Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around The World’ (Titan Books, 1997) has however helped me to establish that ‘El Mundo De Los Vampiros’ was the third vampire film made by actor/producer Abel Salazar’s company ABSA. (Arriving about five years after Salazar revitalised Mexican fantastic cinema with 1957’s ‘El Vampiro’, ‘El Mundo..’ belatedly followed 1958’s ‘El Ataud del Vampiro’ [‘The Vampires Coffin’].)

Anyway, now that we’ve got that out of the way – ‘El Mundo de los Vampiros’ rules. It gets straight down to business right from the very first frame, as we see our vampire (Guillermo Murray, looking for all the world like a more fresh-faced, Hispanic Christopher Lee) rising from his tomb (it’s velvet-lined and has an automatic lid - nice). He wears a full opera cape, complete with one of those massive, upturned bat wing collars that only movie vampires (and Dr Strange) ever wear, and a huge silver amulet. (1)

Leaving his crypt, the vampire wonders through his splendidly cob-webbed dining room, before descending to the gigantic subterranean cavern beneath his house. Mouldering skeletons hang in chains from the walls, alongside some even more impressive cobwebs. The stone entranceway to the cavern has been crudely carved to resemble a mouth full of fangs, and beyond it, a pair of blazing stone braziers are decorated with human skulls on each corner, standing before a classic sacrificial altar. Naturally, the flames shoot upward when he gestures toward them with his cape.

After taking a few moments to admire the majesty of his interior décor, he moves on to – joy of joys – a full size pipe organ crafted entirely from hollowed out bones and skulls! Man, this is a vampire who knows how to live!

If you look this film up on IMDB, and you’ll immediately find reviewers deriding it as a “cheap Mexican vampire flick” and such like, but bugger that – this bone-organ is one of the most elaborate props I’ve ever seen in a ‘60s horror film. It must have taken somebody weeks to build this thing, and it is absolutely incredible.

As the vampire seats himself herself the keyboard and starts to lay down some dark, dissonant dirges, a brief cut away takes us above ground, to a desolate looking wilderness, in which a young couple are driving around in a land rover, having apparently lost their way.

Seemingly manifesting via some kind of underground gas jet, the vampire appears in the middle of the road, accompanied by a crowd of surprisingly effective animated bats. “Why doesn’t he move aside?”, the wife asks optimistically after her husband sounds the horn, but it is too late. Grinning, the vampire reveals fangs the size and shape of baby carrots. The woman screams, and before you know it, we’re back downstairs in the cavern, where The Count continues to work through some remarkably uncompromising modernist organ jams.

By this point, the vampire’s followers have begun to assemble. Weird looking, zombified guys in sinister, hand-sewn animal masks, body-stockings and capes, they arise from coffins scattered around the cave floor, or simply loom out of the darkness, shuffling around restlessly and awaiting further orders, strongly reminding me of the similar “creatures of darkness” featured in Jess Franco’s delirious ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ (1972).

Acknowledging their presence, the Head Vampire shrieks in the voice of a hissing cat, before returning to his music. His followers meanwhile begin preparations for some black magick rite, bringing goblets and a dagger to the altar, before a gaggle of Vampire Brides (recognisable by their diaphanous gowns and ridiculously OTT eye make-up, seemingly modelled on Carroll Borland’s get-up in Tod Browning’s ‘Mark of the Vampire’ (1935)) make their entrance, dragging the hypnotised wife of the kidnapped couple. Her protesting husband meanwhile is chained to a stake, whilst the follower vampires chew on his neck en masse.

The sacrifice, it transpires, is to be offered to Astraroth, “the evil spirit whom all of us here have come to adore”. Before doing the deed however, the Head Vampire pauses to reflect that “..with this dagger, I was murdered more than one hundred years ago, by a man who carried the cursed name of… Colman!”

Since then it seems, our vampire has dedicated his time to tracking down and destroying the remaining members of the accursed Colman dynasty – and yes, hearing him spit the rather mundane name of Colman with great vehemence and repulsion throughout this film proves very amusing.

You’d think wiping out a single bloodline over the course of a century would be easy work for such a ferocious Lord of the Undead, but he must have been slacking off a bit, because three Colmans remain extant – a father and two daughters. Using the hypnotised bride on the altar as a kind of human scrying orb, he establishes that they are all alive and well. Quoth the Vampire; “..as long as they refuse to join the legion of the living dead, I will not be able to give the signal which will launch the conquest of the universe!” (And you’d better believe that sounds pretty impressive when solemnly intoned in Spanish).

Eventually, after giving her neck a good, erotically-charged chew, the Head Vampire plunges his dagger into the neck of the sacrificial victim, but, instead of dying, his bite revives her as one of the evil brides! Her outré eye make up is already in place, and she turns to the camera and cackles in wild and uninhibited fashion.

By this point, we are over fifteen minutes into the film, and, perhaps sensing that the monster kids in the audience probably need a break from all this blood-curdling brilliance before their little hearts expire, ‘El Mundo de los Vampiros’ takes a deep breath, and reluctantly cuts to the ‘good guys’.

Now, I’ve seen enough Mexican horror films to realise that, when we cut to the good guys, it’s generally time to put the kettle on or visit the bathroom. Although such tedium is, in fairness, a tradition that stretches all the way back to Bram Stoker, these stiffly formal scenes in which well-to-do gentlemen pay effusive compliments to each other and chivalrously praise the beauty and achievement of the film’s soon-to-be-betrothed young ladies seem to be a particular blight upon Mexico’s contributions to horror cinema.

Even here though, ‘El Mundo de los Vampiros’ manages to liven things up a bit, investing it’s inevitable post-dinner party hand-shaking with an element of intriguing weirdness almost equivalent to the extraordinary scenes which have preceded it.

We are at a soiree held, of course, by the refined Senor Colman and his two eligible daughters, and this evening they are joined by an esteemed guest who has recently returned from ‘the capital’ – the handsome musical prodigy Rodolfo Sabre (Mauricio Garcés), who is of course urged to take a turn at the piano. (2)

Rodolfo demures, explaining that his hosts would not enjoy the kind of music he plays these days. “One could say that I study the science of music, in a way – the effect of sound on living beings […] sound can kill an animal, or a human being, or make them insane,” he helpfully explains.

Persuaded to play an example of this daring new music, he sits at the keyboard and knocks out some mildly dissonant, minor key romantic melodies. Dogs outside howl, one guest feels her spirit lift from her body, and another is reminded of the death of her mother. “This music contains elements that are aggressive, humourous, religious and terrifying, it produces an effect on all types of being,” Rodolfo tells his listeners.

He furthermore claims that the music he is playing originates in Transylvania, where it is used to “summon the dead” - and, right on cue, the Head Vampire appears in the doorway, his entrance accompanied by a brief orchestral fanfare that causes everyone to stand to attention.

Adopting the conventional “hey, I’m an eccentric Eastern European aristocrat who just moved to the neighbourhood, what’s up?” approach, Count Subotoi (for that is his human name) introduces himself to the assembled guests, but soon causes a scene when Rodolfo’s sinister music causes him to freak out (as he desperately tried to prevent his fangs from protruding from his lips, we presume), precipitating his hasty departure.

From this point onward, it must be said that the film begins to drag somewhat, as it proceeds along a fairly conventional vampire movie trajectory. As such, the vampire begins the laborious process of seducing the young ladies of the Colman household, mooning outside their windows, gaining entry and neck access in the form of a bat and eventually spiriting them off to his lair, all in the tried and tested manner.

One weakness that emerges once the full-strength craziness of the film’s opening act eases off is that, whilst Guillermo Murray clearly looks the part, he does not actually make for a very charismatic vampire. In this regard, it is worth noting that ‘El Mundo..’ was the first ABSA vampire film not to feature Mexico’s best known vampire actor, Germán Robles, who by this stage seems to have moved on to a bunch of rival vampire films from other production companies.

Could we thus chalk Murray up as Mexico’s equivalent of Mike Raven..? He has a bit of that bland, “unconvincing understudy” vibe about him, but the film is otherwise so strong, and his character so blessed his outrageous, comic book action to perform, that this deficiency doesn’t make much of a dent in the overall quality.

Anyway - naturally the steadfast gentlemen of the picture gradually figure out what The Count is up to and set out to stop him and reclaim their women, etc. One thing I thought was a bit odd in this respect is that, although Rodolfo’s Transylvanian music is supposed to ‘summon’ vampires, it appears in practice to have the opposite effect of freaking them out and making them grasp their heads and writhe about in pain… so I’m not sure what that’s all about. Just a sub-titling error perhaps?

As per Mexican monster movie tradition, ‘El Mundo..’ rallies significantly after its saggy middle section, mustering it’s forces for a great, action packed finale that is easily a match for the extraordinary opening outlined in detail above.

Yet another exciting feature of Count Subotoi’s vampire lair is his impressively huge and deep PIT OF SPIKES, and this gets plenty of play in the final act, including extensive use of a rather splendid, Bava-esque forced perspective shot taken from the bottom of the pit.

Needless to say, there is much fun to be had here with Rodolfo and Senor Colman punching vampires in the face, leaping across chasms etc, all leading up to a denouement in which… well, if you’ve read this review and can’t guess the nature by which our heroes nullify vampires evil power, you’ll probably enjoy the movie even more than I did.

I don’t have much more to say in conclusion, except to note that it saddens me to note how neglected and unfairly derided these vintage South of the Border horror films continue to be in the English speaking world. Though their uneven mixture of classic gothic atmosphere and loony monster bash thrills might not be to everyone’s taste, there is a whole world here that remains more or less invisible in terms of officially-sanctioned, English-friendly releases. Digging into it through, er, other means however reveals a seemingly unending supply of films that, like ‘El Mundo de los Vampiros’, are more fun than the proverbial barrel of monkeys.

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(1) Murray played another vampire in 1963’s ‘La Huella Macabra’ (“The Sinister Footprint”?), before going to on to what I’m sure was sterling work in ‘Neutron Traps the Invisible Killers’ (1965), ‘Planet of the Female Invaders’ and ‘Gigantes Planetarios’ (both ’66). God bless Mexico in the 1960s.

(2) Another Mexican horror veteran, Mauricio Garcés also appeared in ‘La Llorona’ (‘The Crying Woman’, 1961) and the fantastic ‘El Barón del Terror’ (aka ‘The Brainiac’, 1962), amongst other Salazer/ABSA productions.

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

AKA ‘Bloodsuckers’, ‘The Freedom Seeker’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October Horrors # 4: Not Of This Earth (Roger Corman, 1957)

My attempts to gradually familiarise myself with Roger Corman’s pre-‘House of Usher’ filmography may have hit choppy waters last year with The Undead and Creature from Haunted Sea, but we finally make landfall here, with what must be one of the absolute best of his late ‘50s pictures.

‘Not Of This Earth’ first hit screens in February ‘57 as half of a ready-made double bill with ‘Attack Of The Crab Monsters’ and, in view of its title and poster, you may well wonder what it’s doing in the middle of a marathon of horror reviews. Well, like many of the best low budget ‘50s Sci Fi films (cf: The Man From Planet X), this one draws just as much from horror traditions as it does SF, melding the two rather nicely and inadvertently kick-starting the loose cycle of “space vampire” movies that went on to include Bava’s ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965), Curtis Harrington’s ‘Queen of Blood’ (1966), and, eventually, Tobe Hooper’s ‘Lifeforce’ (1985) in the process.

Admittedly, the opening scene may not bode terribly well, as a carefree bobby-soxer bids a chaste goodbye to her eager boyfriend (HIM: “don’t be a drag, you know how you flip me”, HER: “I’m hip, but if my father dug the scene, he’d put small round holes in your head”) and subsequently falls victim to the less than convincingly monstrous figure of a burly middle-aged man in a black hat and shades (Paul Birch), who proceeds to extract her blood using some kind of machinery concealed inside a suitcase.

As a characteristically modernist animated opening sequence unfolds (created by Paul Julian, this one features skulls, paint-dripping alien landscape and a roving pair of shining eyes), we would seem to be en route to yet another paranoiac “the aliens are among us” type yarn (hey, at least the special effects are cheap), but thankfully this initial premise is taken in a very different direction by Charles Griffith & Mark Hanna’s witty and relentlessly imaginative screenplay.

Next up for instance, we see the black-clad killer barging into a quiet suburban doctor’s surgery, where, using slow but precisely enunciated English that leads Beverley Garland’s nurse to assume he is some kind of visiting foreign aristocrat, he declares that he is critically ill and demands an immediate blood transfusion.

Understandably, William Roerick’s doctor is reluctant to acquiesce to “Mr Johnson”s demands, particularly given that he refuses to submit to a blood test, but the application of some voiceover psychic powers soon resolves their disagreement, with the doctor in thrall to “Johnson”, and sworn to secrecy regarding his dealings with this new patient. (1)

In fact, the doc even ends up consenting to Johnson’s wish to recruit his nurse on a full time, private basis, in order to prepare his daily transfusions and – as he puts it - “to see that I do not expire”. When Nadine (for that is Ms Garland’s character name) hears how much this weirdo is willing to pay her, she is happy to go along with this arrangement, and ends up accompanying Mr Johnson to his home, despite the reservations of her cop boyfriend (Morgan Jones), who is outside slapping a ticket on the fiend’s illegally parked sedan.

Mr Johnson’s welcoming of Nadine into his household closely mirrors the old ‘Dracula’ tradition, right down to the alien’s attempt to lock the nurse’s door without her permission, and his offering her comforts (food, access to the swimming pool) that he himself refuses to enjoy.

In fact, whilst he may be largely ignorant of human customs and behaviour, Mr Johnson nonetheless seems to know exactly how a vampire should live, and as such he has acquired an impressive mock-Tudor mansion, and has even employed a local small-time hoodlum (Jeremy, played by Corman regular Jonathan Haze) as his all-purpose cringing crony.

As well as driver, porter, cook and cleaner, Jeremy also serves duty as Johnson’s all-purpose guide to human conduct (“I told you not to drive a car before ya learn how,” he snaps at his employer in first scene). Despite happily admitting that “this guy is six kinds of a freak”, Jeremy is happy to put his suspicions on deep freeze and do Johnson’s bidding. After all, as long as his boss keeps on handing him piles of gold ingots to convert into U.S. currency, who has time for questions?

So, that’s our basic set up, and, with admirable brevity, the remainder of the film gives us something extraordinary to chew on about every five or ten minutes, regular as clockwork.

Johnson’s communication with his home planet of Davanna for instance is accomplished via a hologram-based radio transmitter and matter transfer device that he keeps in his closet, and that will turn any connoisseur of vintage space-age clobber green with envy. Describing the earth’s inhabitants to his controller as “second state, sub-human, weak and full of fright,” he subsequently recites a list of his instructions from on-high, none of the potential results of which sound very promising for the people of Earth, whose fate is either to be harnessed as blood cattle should Johnson be able to subsist on their blood, or flat-out destruction if he does not.

Next up, Johnson opens the door to Dick Miller, appearing here in the role of a dishevelled door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman whose fast-talking patter briefly confuses the stern alien. Though he is barely on screen for two minutes before being unceremoniously stuffed in the incinerator, Miller is great here, with his unruly hair, his weary distaste for his own sales routine and his sardonic use of the word “crazy” as an all-purpose acknowledgement all suggesting that he is actually some down-on-his-luck beatnik reluctantly forced into regular employment. A joy.

Towards the end of the film meanwhile, Johnson is surprised to encounter a female of his species on the street; wearing similar wrap-around shades, she looks like a classic film noir vamp. The two aliens speak telepathically whilst browsing at a magazine stand (I wish the print was good enough for me to see what they’re reading), and the woman explains that she is fugitive who has escaped from Davanna, using the ‘dimension warp’ installed in Johnson’s closet without permission.

Johnson declares that the woman will face severe punishment for this transgression, but she responds by informing him that things have gone south pretty sharp-ish back home on their dying planet. She provides a harrowing account of Davanna collapsing into anarchy, as ‘enemy prisoners’ are drained of blood en masse to quell the hunger of the mob, prompting her to make the jump to Earth to escape the violence. Now, she too desperately needs blood, and begs Johnson to help her, prompting him to break into the doctor’s surgery where, in a horrible mix up, he selects the wrong bottle and doses her with rabid dog’s blood.

Then, just when you think you’ve already got your moneys-worth from this picture, Johnson – who is presumably beginning to feel rather desperate once the woman’s body is discovered – unveils a bizarre, flying jellyfish creature that he keeps rolled up in a glass tube(!), and sends it to attack the doctor. A wonderfully hideous, Lovecraftian creature design, this thing drops from the sky like a demonic lampshade and engulfs the poor guy’s head, Flying Guillotine style, until he ceases to struggle and thick gloops of blood trickle out from beneath it. Yowza!

Though blighted by a few minutes of unnecessary and tension-free running around in the final reel, ‘Not Of This Earth’ is otherwise a more or less perfect sci-fi/horror concoction. Clocking in at a brisk sixty-seven minutes, Griffiths and Hanna’s screenplay is superb, full of way-out ideas, razor sharp (or at least, extremely strange) dialogue and a wide variety of diverting shenanigans.

Like Corman’s more celebrated horror comedies of the era (‘A Bucket of Blood’, ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’), the strength of the writing here makes for a film that is both eerily unnerving and genuinely funny, but with the pendulum perhaps swinging more strongly toward the former aspect on this particular occasion.

Performances too are great across the board. The odd, unnatural phrasing and impossible-to-place accent Birch employs as Mr Johnson also strike a perfect balance between humour and menace, whilst Garland makes for an absolutely swell heroine, obviously taking great pleasure in portraying a smart, capable and hard-headed woman who could easy run rings around any of the male characters.

Haze meanwhile is a gum-chewin’, street corner stupid-smart delight as Jeremy, and hell, even the cop boyfriend is kind of likeable. (You’ve got to love the moment when, after discovering that Johnson is a malevolent alien, he tells Garland “If I didn’t have to go on duty in half an hour, I’d go over there and get you out myself”.)

What I love above all most about the films that emerged from Roger Corman’s orbit across the decades (even the bad ones) is that they never play their audience for suckers. Cheap, simplistic and crassly commercial though they may be, you never get the feeling that Corman and his collaborators set out to make a movie they wouldn’t want to watch themselves.

Rarely allowing levels of enthusiasm or ingenuity to flag, Corman never talked down to his viewers the way that so many low budget operators did, only resigning himself to a “fuck it, this'll do” approach on rare occasions when the extreme haste and poverty under which his productions were undertaken made it impossible to save a picture from ignominy.

In this sense, Corman’s films strike me as a cinematic equivalent of the Marvel comic books overseen by Stan Lee during the ‘60s. Though working at crippling speed in areas of culture widely regarded as disposable, juvenile trash, these men saw no reason to let his own artistic standards slip, ruthlessly applying a credo that I’ve always taken to be one of the key rules of any creative endeavour; namely: if you set out to make something really good, with a bit of luck you’ll make something ok. If you set out to make something “ok”, you might as well give up and go home, because what you make is going to be worthless.

Though he may not have put it in quite those terms, it is this attitude that led Corman and the creatives he corralled around him to create films like ‘Not of this Earth’ – one week wonders that fell so far beneath the radar they didn’t even attract critical contempt upon their initial release, but that remain thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking over sixty years later, keeping them alive in an era when I’ll bet 90% of the movies that gained an Oscar nomination in 1957 have been long forgotten.

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(1) As an aside, I liked the decision here to name the alien “Johnson” – though clearly not a deliberate reference on the part of the scriptwriters, it puts me in mind of the “Johnsons” celebrated by William Burroughs in his novels, referring to the invisible, subterranean brotherhood of quiet, seemingly law-abiding citizens who are nonetheless always ready to help out a junkie, to harbour a criminal without ratting to the law, and to generally act in opposition to ‘straight’ society.