A Child’s Guide to Killing Grounds

My parents, like many others, were quite cautious about letting me watch horror films when I was a child – I don’t feel that I properly started my education in this area until I was just into my teens, with the BBC’s wonderful season commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the first colour Hammer horror film. Nevertheless, as a child you do see things that scare and disturb you – when I was quite young, I remember having several supposedly-educational books which had pages I always avoided looking at – one depicting some creepy deep-sea creatures, the others… I think it was something to do with either organ transplants or prosthetic body parts (possibly both). These things do stay with you.

And then there was the day, when I think I would have been about nine, when my class at school all trooped downstairs to find a screen and a projector had been set up in one of the spare rooms. We were going to see a film! Hurrah! Our excitement was only leavened by the fact that this was surely going to turn out to be something educational. And so it proved – but as well as being educational, the short film in question arguably qualifies as the first horror film I ever saw. I still remember the sense of dread and discomfort I felt while watching it: to say it made an impression on me is an understatement.

The film in question is entitled Building Sites Bite, made in 1978 and written and directed by David Hughes. The object of the piece is to raise the young audience’s awareness of the dangers involved in trespassing on building sites, but the approach is not notably dry or fussy. A rather snooty woman (a young-ish Stephanie Cole), her somewhat-spoilt son Ronald (Nigel Rhodes), and their dog (a dog named Snoopy, playing him or herself) visit their relatives, a distinctly lower-middle-class bunch. To say the atmosphere is throbbing with class-related tension is an understatement. The son of the household, Paul (Terry Russell), is not nearly as impressed with his cousin as Auntie is, and (in his interior monologue) is rather scornful of his ambition to be a surveyor or architect. Is young Ronald even aware of basic health and safety principles?

Well, Paul fantasises that he and his sister Jane are in control of a super-high-tech testing programme with Ronald as the subject of their investigations. Through the miracle of a TARDIS-like teleporting shed, Ronald is transported to the edge of a building site, and told they want him to find Snoopy who has wandered somewhere inside. So in Ronald goes, finding the dog in a trench, which then collapses on him, smothering him to death. Snoopy mysteriously escapes, presumably so as not to upset the audience.

Frankly, I remember being pretty upset at this point anyway, given the hard-hitting depiction of Ronald’s demise, and quite glad the film was surely over. But no! Paul and Jane have the power to resurrect Ronald, luckily enough. Or perhaps not: because they proceed to teleport him to a series of other building sites. He is electrocuted! He is crushed by an industrial vehicle! He smashes his head open on a piece of pipe! He is killed when a stack of bricks collapse on him! He drowns! (Snoopy always scampers away without a scratch.) Educational films like this were outside the remit of the BBFC, and so there are levels of gore and general nastiness far beyond what children would be allowed to see in a film.

I was never a particularly outdoorsy or adventurous child, and so they needn’t have really shown me this film. But they did. Watching it again recently was a rather less traumatic experience than back in the eighties. What really struck me was the subtext of the film, though – most of it takes place in Paul’s head, and he seems to be a genuinely disturbed child, taking great pleasure in imagining his cousin’s death in great detail. This seems to be largely motivated by class resentment – Ronald and his mum are both much posher than Paul and his family, with Ronald wearing a cravat throughout his various misadventures. All of this went over my head at the time, which is probably just as well.

Of course, this was by no means the only film along these lines made in the 1970s, and Building Sites Bite doesn’t have quite the degree of notoriety enjoyed by some of the others. There were lots of other potentially lethal places around back then, and John Krish’s The Finishing Line (1977) looks at another one, the railway line.

Again we are privy to the imaginings of a (presumably quite disturbed) young lad, who – after an unseen headmaster declares that ‘the railway line is not a place for playing’ – imagines a school sports day taking place by the side of railway line, complete with brass band and refreshments. Various events take place: Fence-breaking, Stone-throwing, Last One Across (the line, with a train oncoming), and the Great Tunnel Walk. Needless to say, all of these result in horrific injuries and death amongst the competitors, with an astonishing shot from near the end of the film depicting dozens of bloodied child corpses laid out on the lines, while more of the walking wounded stumble out of the tunnel.

John Krish was an experienced film and TV director – responsible for Unearthly Stranger, and various episodes of The Saint and The Avengers – which explains the deftness with which he creates an atmosphere like that of a surreal, deadpan black comedy throughout The Finishing Line. The conceit is carried through quite rigorously, with umpires and other officials carefully checking and reporting the gory results of the different events, apparently with complete indifference to people staggering around with blood gushing from their injuries. (One familiar actor appearing here is Jeremy Wilkin, who also provided the voice of Virgil Tracy in later instalments of Thunderbirds.)

The question, of course, becomes one of just how disturbing and upsetting one of these films should be. The Finishing Line certainly has a cinematic quality to it, which only adds to its impact. It’s presumably because of this that the film was withdrawn after a couple of years, simply because it was so graphically effective.

Horror-movie style poster promoting the DVD release of Apaches.

Less grisly, but possibly even more memorable, is Apaches, also from 1977, directed by John Mackenzie (later to do The Long Good Friday, The Fourth Protocol, and Ruby, amongst others). The venue for slaughter this time is the British countryside, where we find six young children playing (mostly) cowboys and indians in and around a farm, while elsewhere adults are preparing for a mysterious party.

Well, you can probably guess what happens next: as part of their games, one of the children clambers onto and then falls off a moving trailer and is crushed under the wheels, then a second falls into a slurry pit while playing hide and seek and drowns, and so on. Weed-killer, lethal machinery, heavy and precariously-balanced objects – the film does a sensational job of implying that the average farm is a complete deathtrap; one wonders how The Archers or Emmerdale has lasted this long. (I should say that this does seem to be a fairly poorly-run farm, with the children still allowed to run wild even as the death-toll racks up.)

Then again, the thing about Apaches in particular is that it really does feel like an actual horror movie (albeit a short one): there is that same sense of tension throughout, the knowledge that something grim is inevitably around the corner all the time, and a willingness to stretch plausibility to generate its effects. Moments in Apaches are genuinely disturbing and horrible, and once again the effectiveness of the film is reinforced by the director’s skill. The child acting is actually not too bad (much better than in Building Sites Bite), and Mackenzie understands the power of moments of stillness and quiet. There is an understated realism to the film that meshes surprisingly well with its clear intention to make an impression on its young audience: I watched it for the first time recently, and had to take a break partway through, it was that gruelling an experience.

Any discussion of the public information film as quasi-horror would not be complete, of course, without a mention of perhaps the most famous exponent of the form: Lonely Water, directed by Jeff Grant and made in 1973. This one is much shorter than the other films mentioned here, but punches above its weight due to the way it intentionally adopts the conventions of a horror movie, up to and including casting the great Donald Pleasence.

‘I am the spirit of dark and lonely water,’ whispers Pleasence’s voice-over, as the camera shows a mist-wreathed swamp, in which a dark, cowled figure appears to stand on the water. (Many aspects of this film seem to me to have been nicked from The Masque of the Red Death, particularly the appearance of the spirit.) ‘Ready to trap the show-off, the unwary, the fool…’

Various scenes of young children getting into difficulty in or near water quickly follow, always with the figure of the spirit looming, sometimes almost subliminally, in the background. (One of the children featured is Terry Sue-Patt, later of Grange Hill, who later recalled just having fun on the river-bank while making the film – seeing the finished version was apparently an enormous shock for him.) Eventually, one drowning child is helped to safety by two of his wiser peers. (‘Sensible children!’ snarls Pleasence. ‘I have no power over them!’) With the spirit thus exorcised, its robes are thrown in the river, though it still gets to make its famous, echoing promise – ‘I’ll be back!’

Even the director was astonished by how full-on the horror elements of the Lonely Water script were, and the execution of the film does nothing to tone them down (Pleasence is not pulling his punches in the voice-over, either). This film has become something of a legend amongst those who saw it when it was new. There are stories, possibly apocryphal, that Lonely Water didn’t just reduce the number of accidental deaths by drowning, it actually made some children reluctant to go swimming at all, no matter in what situation. Whether that counts as the film just being too effective at its job, I don’t know: but even today it’s still remarkably accomplished artistically for what’s basically just a public information film.

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The Man in the Shatner Mask

There was a lot of fuss in Oxford a couple of days ago, as the city prepared to go into level 2 virus control. This started one second after midnight on the 31st, which just made me happy, in the end, that I’d decided to make my weekly cinema trip on the evening of the 30th. This all turned out to be worrying and fretting over nothing, as the whole country is effectively going back into lockdown in a few days anyway – which, amongst other things, will mean the remaining cinemas shutting their doors again. Have I said ‘stuck in a moment we can’t get out of’ here before? I can’t remember.

Normally I would have had a go at the Odeon for questionable scheduling, as October 30th is obviously not the right day for a special revival of John Carpenter’s Halloween. Not that I would necessarily have expected the Odeon staff to have clocked that, as most of them were standing around in the lobby discussing which film they were actually about to show, trying to work out if it was the 2018 version, the 2007 remake, and so on. One of them was wearing a Halloween III: Season of the Witch T-shirt and I found myself compelled to wonder aloud if he knew that this was the only film in the series to have a different premise to the original. (Apparently he did, and defended his choice of apparel by saying it’s the best of the sequels. Being a Nigel Kneale fan myself, I could hardly demur.)

There was a pleasingly big turn-out for the movie, made up mostly of younger people who gave the impression of having turned up for a bit of undemanding camp fun – which just meant they got a bit restive during the ‘special introduction’ to the film, what looked like a slightly cheesy DVD extra made in 2015, in which Carpenter himself discussed the origins of the film. Oh well – soon enough the lights went down and – oh, is that someone’s phone going off very loudly? It sounds like a ringtone. Tut. Hang on a minute – sorry, it’s a John Carpenter score (and probably his best).

Carpenter opens with a lengthy, bravura sequence in which an unseen assailant stabs a young woman to death in her home. The camera sees through the killer’s eyes throughout, up until the moment at which his mask is torn off – and we see it is a six-year-old child. Flanked by his incomprehending parents, the child stares vacantly into space as the camera pulls back and up in a crane shot, a magisterial choice from Carpenter. We eventually learn the boy’s name is Michael Myers – nothing to do with the Wayne’s World dude, but named in honour of the British film distributor who helped make Assault on Precinct 13 such a big success.

Nearly fifteen years pass, and we meet Dr Sam Loomis, who has been Michael Myers’ psychiatrist all this time. Carpenter wanted Peter Cushing for Loomis, but couldn’t afford him; Christopher Lee later said that turning the same role down was the biggest mistake of his career. Anyway, Carpenter ended up with Donald Pleasence, apparently because his daughter was a fan of Carpenter’s music, but also because he had an alimony payment due, and I think this bit of serendipity is one of the things that makes the movie so effective – Pleasence may not quite have Cushing’s sheer technical virtuosity, or Lee’s monumental presence, but he brings the part a fantastic nervous intensity.

Loomis has become convinced that Michael Myers is irredeemable, pure evil, and has devoted himself to ensuring he is kept safely locked up. Suffice to say this does not come to pass, and the evening before Halloween 1978, Michael Myers escapes, steals Loomis’ car, and disappears into the night. This is the first big scare sequence of the film – and it’s a long time before the next – but it’s already clear that Carpenter knows his business, deploying camera and music with surgical precision. The moment when the ghost-like figure of Michael Myers scuttles across the rear window of Loomis’ car and onto the roof never fails to give me a start.

Michael Myers heads back to Haddonfield, naturally, pausing to kill a mechanic and steal his overalls on the way. (The point at which he acquires the iconic William Shatner mask he wears for the bulk of the movie is one of a couple of points which the film appears to fudge just a tiny bit.) Here he becomes fixated with sensible, bookish high-school student Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis in her movie debut), apparently simply because she’s the first person he see up close.

Laurie is baby-sitting for Halloween, which mainly involves letting small children watch classic sci-fi movies (one of them is the 1951 version of The Thing, more evidence of Carpenter’s fondness for Howard Hawks films, as well as being an unintended in-joke given his later career). Her friends Lynda (Pamela Soles) and Annie (Nancy Loomis, who was also in Precinct 13) have slightly more adventurous plans for Halloween night, mostly involving their boyfriends. However, Michael Myers’ plans for the evening involve all of them, although ‘adventurous’ may not be quite the word to use in his case…

Slasher movies aren’t really my speciality, but I believe that students of the genre agree that the Golden Age of the Slasher Film ran from 1978 to 1984, inaugurated by this film. Halloween wasn’t the first slasher film – that honour goes to either Psycho or Black Christmas – but it is the film which codified many of the conventions of the genre – a maniac with a mask, young and unsuspecting teenage victims, and so on. The most memorable things about Halloween have all been repeated ad nauseum or parodied to death, to the point where it’s almost difficult to take the movie seriously as a film in its own right.

Certainly, as is often the case with these classic old horror movies, parts of it seemed more likely to draw laughter rather than fear from a contemporary audience. Bits of it could seem a bit melodramatic or even campy by modern standards. That said, as the film got going, there was notably less amusement, and even the occasional yelp of what sounded like genuine alarm and fear. (I imagine there would have been people in the audience even back in 1978, who tutted at the way Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t bother to make sure her attacker is dead, on not one but two occasions.)

The enduring effectiveness of the movie comes mainly from the remarkable patience and confidence shown by Carpenter: after the opening couple of scenes, there is considerably more stalk than slash for a long time – lots of lurking about by Michael Myers, but very little actual mayhem. It’s also worth noting that this is a much more restrained movie than many of its successors: there is relatively little in the way of explicit gore, and only five murders (one of which is essentially a flashback, while another occurs off-screen). This is hardly a splatter movie, more an exercise in suspense.

Of course, underpinning this is the suggestion that Michael Myers isn’t just a homicidal maniac with a knife, but something much worse – a vessel of pure evil, as Loomis has come to believe. Certainly the film plays up the idea of Michael Myers as something less than human – Nick Castle, who mostly plays him, is billed as ‘Shape’ – he never speaks, wears that blank mask for most of the film, and is generally just a cypher, or – as the film suggests – the bogeyman given substance. Again, it’s a potentially slightly corny idea, but the movie sells it, mostly thanks to Pleasence’s performance.

Pleasence does all the heavy lifting in terms of the acting in this movie, lending it gravitas but also the odd moment of leavening humour (the doctor seems gleefully pleased after scaring small children away from the old Myers house). Jamie Lee Curtis is stuck in an almost wholly reactive role for most of the movie, but still manages to bring presence to what could have been another cypher.

In the end, though, it’s Carpenter’s movie, as writer, director, and composer of the music: he seems to have been paying attention to Jaws in particular, as the score for this movie acts as a cue for the audience in the same way that John Williams’ music fills in for the absence of shark. It’s entirely understandable that film executives who saw a rough cut of Halloween before the score was added dismissed the film as nonsense. Even with the music added, it’s still not what you’d call a film of particular depth: Halloween is simply a machine for scaring audiences, no more and no less. But it does this one thing superbly well.

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Witless Daftness

As we have observed many times in the past, a successful formula gets noticed, and this is no less true in the movie business than anywhere else. Whatever else you want to say about the series of portmanteau horror movies produced by Milton Subotsky, usually through his company Amicus, they seem to have made money – why else would there have been half a dozen of them? And, of course, this led to other people having a go at doing the same thing.

Which brings us to Freddie Francis’ Tales That Witness Madness, a very obvious attempt at cloning the style and structure of an Amicus film, with perhaps a few odd tonal innovations. The script is credited on-screen to one Jay Fairbank – however, this was actually a pseudonym for the actress Jennifer Jayne, who actually appeared in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, the first of the Amicus portmanteaus, so there’s a further connection. The film also features Joan Collins, who turned up in the previous year’s Asylum (which this slightly resembles), and Donald Pleasence, who would appear in From Beyond the Grave the following year. It’s a small world when you’re making low-budget British portmanteau horrors.

The frame story gets underway with one Dr Nicholas (Jack Hawkins) arriving at a modern psychiatric facility to see the chap in charge of the place, Dr Tremayne (Pleasence). These scenes are brief to the point of being perfunctory, which is a shame as Pleasence is always reliably creepy in this kind of film – but on the other hand, Hawkins had lost his larynx to cancer some years earlier (he died shortly after completing this film), and he’s fairly obviously being dubbed by an uncredited Charles Gray (so we got some Blofeld-on-Blofeld action going on here, vocally anyway).

Anyway, apparently the powers that be are concerned about Tremayne’s progress, and so Tremayne agrees to introduce Nicholas to four of his patients and explain their weird and unnatural case histories, and if that’s not a cue for a portmanteau segment to get underway, I don’t know what is.

First up is ‘Mr Tiger’, which basically resembles a big-screen adaptation of Calvin and Hobbes, as directed by Dario Argento (while suffering from a migraine). This features a ten-year-old Russell Lewis as the main character, Paul (Lewis has gone on to make a good career for himself writing various cop shows on British TV, including every episode so far of the Inspector Morse prequel). Paul seems to live in a very comfortable house, with his own private tutor, but his parents’ marriage seems to be under stress, with Paul himself being used as a playing piece in their various arguments. One of the points of contention is Paul’s devotion to his imaginary friend, Mr Tiger: Paul insists on doors and windows being left open so Mr Tiger can find his way in and out of the house, steals bones and sides of meat from the kitchen for him, and so on.

But then! (And I should say there will be spoilers aplenty coming up, here and further on.) Paul’s parents sit him down for a good talking to about how Mr Tiger isn’t real – but Mr Tiger is real (at least, judging from the prop they use, he’s a real stuffed tiger), and he turns up and mauls Paul’s parents to death.

Er, yeah, well: that’s your lot, as far as the plot of this bit is concerned. I say ‘plot’, but the so-called twist is so screechingly obvious, especially in this context – I mean, who does a horror movie about a boy whose imaginary friend turns out to be actually imaginary? It is one of the weakest segments of any portmanteau horror that I’ve seen, although to be fair Lewis is a pretty decent child actor.

Mind you, it is at least easy to work out what’s actually going on, which is more than you can say for the next bit, the oddness of which is kind of telegraphed by the title ‘Penny Farthing’. Lead character this time is Timothy (Peter McEnery), an antique shop owner who brings in the vintage bicycle in question, and also a old framed photo of his Uncle Albert. The first obvious sign that all is not quite right is that Uncle Albert’s picture keeps changing: it, or he, is clearly aware of things going on in the shop and reacting to them (this is done in the most basic way: the picture never changes in-camera). Things get appreciably weirder when he finds himself compelled to mount and ride the bicycle, finding himself transported back to (it would seem) the Edwardian era, where he romances a young woman (Suzy Kendall, who also plays his girlfriend in the present-day sequences). The horror element comes from the fact that he is also being stalked by, apparently, the rotting cadaver of Uncle Albert (this is the only example I can think of of a rotting cadaver wearing a deerstalker hat).

Well, if the plot of Mr Tiger is painfully predictable, then that of Penny Farthing goes completely the other way and is almost totally bizarre. It’s not especially well-acted or directed, either. Nevertheless, this is still probably the best story about someone cursed to ride a haunted time-travelling bike ever committed to celluloid. Needless to say, this is such a tiny niche that a story can proudly have this title and still be rubbish.

The needle swings back towards the realms of the excruciatingly predictable, in the form of ‘Mel’, a bizarre – do you see a pattern developing here? – entry in the canon of British botanical horror. Michael Jayston plays Brian, a seemingly ordinary chap who one day, while out for a walk, happens upon a fallen tree-trunk. He is so much taken with it that he drags the log back to his house and installs it in his living room, to the disgust of his wife (Joan Collins). He finds the name ‘Mel’ carved into the bark and starts calling the log by it.

Suffice to say that Bella is not as fond of Mel as Brian is, something not helped by Mel deliberately scattering leaves on the carpet just after Bella has hoovered, or sprouting thorns to impale her on (the monstrous tree costume is better than the one in Womaneater, but not by that much).  Bella becomes very jealous of the log (that’s a sentence which may never have been typed by anyone not summarising the stories in Tales That Witness Madness), and of course, it all ends very predictably: there’s an attempt at a twist which wouldn’t wrong-foot a four-year-old. On the other hand, I suppose the conclusion, which appears to depict Michael Jayston about to be physically intimate with a tree trunk in the marital bed, comes a bit out of left-field. Again, though, while it has a sort of campy appeal, it’s just too obvious to work.

Something very different rounds out the film, though; not a story you could ever imagine Milton Subotsky wanting anything to do with. This is ‘Luau’, starring – and I still find this hard to believe – Kim Novak (yes, the same Kim Novak from Vertigo), in her first film for five years. Novak plays Auriol, a slightly lost-in-her-own-world literary agent who’s planning a big party in honour of one of her clients, Kimo (Michael Petrovitch). As Kimo is from Hawaii, she decides to make it a luau. Kimo’s friend Keoki (Leon Lissek) is very helpful in assisting with this shindig.

Meanwhile Kimo is romancing Auriol’s young daughter Virginia (Mary Tamm), although his designs on her body are not of the usual kind: his mum is dying, and in order to ensure she goes to Hawaiian heaven, Kimo is planning a ritual where people assemble and eat the flesh of a virgin. Having made it look like Virginia has left to visit friends, he lures her to his room, where he has converted the shower cubicle into a shrine to his particular god. Virginia meets a sticky end and is chopped up by Keoki, prior to being cooked and served up to everyone at the luau.

And then the film concludes with… what, sorry, you were expecting more plot? Think again: the film doesn’t even have the moment where Auriol realises she’s been tucking into her daughter’s flesh – in fact, Novak’s character is very tangential to the plot throughout. Her role is to be the one who doesn’t know what’s happening around her, and the scene where the horrible truth becomes apparent to her is missing from the film. This segment doesn’t even try very hard to be frightening, as such: like most horror films about cannibalism, it just dwells on the gory details. As a result, it has a sort of queasy power, even if it’s only looking for the gag reflex rather than a more elevated form of dread.

I suppose it’s kind of impressive that it manages this despite being nearly as ridiculous as the rest of the film. Quite apart from the arguably slanderous depiction of Hawaiian culture, there’s the fact that the supposedly Hawaiian characters look like nothing of the sort: Leon Lissek spent much of his career playing eastern Europeans and would have been a decent choice as the lead in a Stanley Kubrick bio-pic. He’s one of the least Hawaiian-looking people I’ve ever seen, and Petrovitch is nearly as bad a choice. (What did Jennifer Jayne have against Hawaii? Was she once bitten by a wild ukulele?)

We’re back to the asylum for the conclusion, at which point the film reverts to its earlier mode by being predictable and slightly confusing at practically the same moment. At least it’s not the ‘and it turns out they’re all actually dead!’ twist used on numerous occasions in the Amicus films. If all of the film was like this (jerking back and forth between the predictable and the bizarrely unexpected and incomprehensible), I would find it easier to know what to say about it. The first three segments are very much like inept, substandard Amicus, but the cannibal luau… it hits a sustained note of lowest-common-denominator nastiness which the crudeness of the production does little to dispel. (I should say that, with the exception of Raw, I find films about cannibalism to be repulsive rather than scary or insightful, so maybe I’m biased.) It’s certainly the most memorable element of Tales That Witness Madness, also because it has Kim Novak in it and she is so badly underused.

If you like the Amicus portmanteau movies, then this is probably worth watching, if only to help you appreciate that while hardly any of them are consistently great, they could have been much, much worse. For everyone else – well, this is one weird film, almost like a fever-dream of whimsical strangeness with very occasional moments that are genuinely repellent. If it had been wholly innocuous I would probably have liked it more.

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The Anatomy of Pulp

Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage (1966) starts off looking like a conventional thriller of its era: a plane makes a night-time landing, someone in a hat that screams ‘spy’ observes a distinguished-looking older gentleman getting off, pausing to shake the hand of Stephen Boyd as he does so, a motorcade zooms away, enemy agents attack it, and so on, and so on. Only with the onset of the opening credits does one get a sense that this movie is going to be a little further out there: the camera zooms in on the egg-like dome of the older gentleman, now receiving medical attention, teletype rattles across the screen, there are radiophonic pinging and boinging noises. It’s still very sixties, but in a rather different mode.

Soon enough we are back in the plot, with Boyd being picked up by some spooks and delivered to a secret underground base. Keeping the underground base a secret is no small feat (literally) as it is a whopper, as secret bases go. Most people working there travel around on little buggies rather than walking about: that’s how big it is. This is particularly ironic as it turns out it is the secret base of the Department for Shrinking Things (they have another name in the script, but it basically means the same thing). Too bad the Department for Shrinking Things couldn’t shrink their own HQ a bit.

Well, it turns out the chief problem with the Department for Shrinking Things’ shrink-ray is that it only works for an hour before things revert, potentially messily, to their original size: one of those conveniently precise drawbacks one so often finds in pulp SF. The secret of extending the miniaturisation period has been discovered by the older gentleman, but a blood clot in his brain threatens to kill him before he can share his breakthrough with the west.

All this proves to essentially be maguffinery, designed to get us to the high concept for this particular movie:  to remove the clot and save the patient’s life, a small submarine is going to be made considerably smaller and injected into the man’s bloodstream, this allowing a brilliant brain surgeon to carry out an operation as an inside job, so to speak. The brain surgeon is Arthur Kennedy, his winsome young assistant is Raquel Welch (in her movie debut), commanding the mission is Donald Pleasence, and Stephen Boyd will also be going along to keep an eye on things (there are some suspicions that there could be a traitor on the team).

And off they all go: the shrink ray even works on Raquel Welch’s hair, although it remains proportionately about three times bigger than one would expect for a woman her height and build. This is one of those SF movies aimed at a general audience for whom, it seems to be assumed, the simple fact of something science-fictional going on will be endlessly fascinating. So the actual shrinking sequence lasts about ten minutes, for no very obvious reason.

Then, before you can say ‘whoosh’, they are underway, cruising through the bloodstream. Needless to say, things do not go according to plan: one so rarely comes across Hollywood movies where a fistula is crucial to the plot, but this is one of them. Given the batty nature of the story, it hardly seems fair to single any particular moments out as being especially contrived, even though they seem it: they have to travel through the heart, which has to be briefly stopped while they do so; there’s a stop-off in the lungs to refill the air tanks; a detour through the lymphatic system results in the sub being covered in loft insulation. Raquel Welch is attacked by antibodies which cover her in plasticky crystals – she is nearly trampled in the rush as the rest of the crew surges forward to peel the stuff from her wet-suited person. And so on, and so on. In the end the traitor is revealed; his identity should come as no great surprise, given the presence of Pleasence, who sometimes seems to have a genuine problem not being icily sinister in any of his roles.

There was a popular misconception floating around, for a number of years at least, that Isaac Asimov was somehow involved in scripting Fantastic Voyage. Apparently the limit of his involvement was writing the tie-in novelisation, in which he duly did his best to fix some of the problems with scientific accuracy and various other plot holes. There are, as you can probably imagine, many of these, the main one being that come the end of the film, no-one has bothered to extract the submarine from within the patient – which means it should revert to normal size somewhere inside his head, with presumably messy results. Apparently there was a line supposedly explaining this which didn’t make it into the final edit – the operation turns out to be successful, in that the defector survives, but he suffers minor brain damage from having a wrecked submarine in his skull and forgets the bit of information everyone was after to begin with.

The finished movie isn’t big on this kind of irony, or indeed humour of any sort. It takes itself very seriously, and I imagine the makers would say that this is the only approach to be taken with this kind of outlandish story – you can’t run the risk of appearing to send yourself up. Well, there is something to be said for dour naturalism, but it is not the easiest of bedfellows when put next to the visual component of this film: naturalistic is hardly the word for this.

There’s a difference between presentational and representational storytelling: the representational kind apparently ignores the audience and strives for absolute realistic naturalism. Presentational storytelling acknowledges the presence of the audience (and, implicitly, its own existence as a piece of fiction), either explicitly or implicitly. Musical theatre and pantomime are usually presentational; so, arguably, is a lot of genre fiction, simply because it adheres to genre conventions. The script and performance style of Fantastic Voyage are both working hard to be representational and naturalistic (or as close as they can manage in a genre movie). The visuals and special effects, however, are something else again – the garish, surreal visions of the interior of the human body may have won an Oscar fifty years ago, but they just seem trippy today. The consequence is that the film feels camp more than anything else – not intentionally camp, but nevertheless camp.

In the end, it’s a watchable kind of camp, and it does help you overlook all the various plot holes in the story. Most of the performances are not especially memorable (Pleasence is the predictable exception), and Raquel Welch is about as ornamental as you would expect, although she does seem to be working hard to find places to act. Fantastic Voyage passes the time agreeably enough, but whatever reputation it has derives more from its memorable visuals and the strength of its concept than any real distinction in the rest of the film.

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The Garden of Terribly Horrible Tales of Uncanny Madness

There is something remarkably comforting and familiar about sitting down to watch one of the Amicus portmanteau horror movies from the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps it is because this subgenre is so strictly defined by its conventions – you know there aren’t going to be many startling innovations, you know there’s going to be a pretty good cast, and you know that none of the component stories are going to hang around too long. It is almost the cinematic equivalent of a sushi train – if what’s currently going past isn’t really to your taste, well, maybe the next course will do the trick.

1974’s From Beyond the Grave is normally listed as the last of the Amicus anthology horrors, which I suppose is true if you’re going to be quibbly about it, although my own feeling is that 1980’s The Monster Club is really the last of the line, sharing the same format and producer (Amicus’ moving spirit Milton Subotsky). There is another connection in that both films take their inspiration not from other horror movies or American horror comics, but the works of veteran horror author Ron Chetwynd-Hayes.

The movie is directed by Kevin Connor, who went on to have a moderately good line in low-budget genre movies like Warlords of Atlantis. The linking device on this occasion is an antiques and junk shop named Temptations Limited, run by Peter Cushing’s character (Cushing is in camp mode throughout and gives a very funny performance which nicely sets the tone for much of the movie). As the film reveals, the shop has an interesting gimmick (‘a novelty surprise with every purchase!’) and an even more interesting line in customer aftercare.

First story out of the traps is that of David Warner, who plays an arrogant young man who railroads the proprietor into selling him an antique mirror for a fraction of its actual value. No sooner has he put it up in his flat than one of his bright young friends shouts ‘Let’s have a séance!’, and Warner, for reasons best known to the plot, enthusiastically agrees. Well, it turns out that the mirror is a repository for an ancient, dormant evil which now wakes up, thirsting for the blood of – well, anyone it can persuade Warner to kill for it. He starts off with a prostitute (‘Five pounds and no need to rush,’ she says, which if nothing else I imagine says something about the impact of inflation since 1974), moves on to girls he picks up at parties, but draws the line at one of his actual friends (his neighbour seems to be fair game, though).

There are perhaps a few too many scenes of Warner waking up in blood-splattered pyjamas wondering if it was all a dream, but this is quite acceptable on the whole: Warner is always a class act and manages to lift some slightly schlocky material, and the piece has an unusually eerie and effective conclusion. The only thing that makes it sit a little oddly in this film is the unleavened darkness of the story – most of the film feels like it’s pitched as black comedy, but this seems to be aiming for a more serious tone.

The next segment is rather less predictable and feels rather shoehorned into the movie – Cushing and his shop only play a very marginal role. Ian Bannen plays an office drone, unhappily married to Diana Dors with a young son (John O’Farrell, later to find fame as a writer), who strikes up an odd relationship with an ex-army street hawker (Donald Pleasence) and later his daughter (Angela Pleasence). In order to cement their friendship, Bannen steals a medal from the shop, which is the link to the rest of the format. The Pleasences eventually seem to be offering Bannen a way out of his grim situation – but do they really have his best interests at heart…?

Once again, some slightly suspect material is lifted by the skill of the perfomers (Bannen and the Pleasences in this case), although this is much more of a bizarre, whimsical fantasy than a conventional horror story (though the story certainly scores bonus points for its voodoo wedding cake sequence). This is one of the stories which has no real reason to be in a film titled From Beyond the Grave, but it is an interesting change of pace and certainly stands out.

Ian Carmichael turns up playing another one of his posh silly-ass characters in the third section of the film, which opens with him attempting to swindle Cushing by switching the price tags on a couple of snuff boxes in the shop. ‘I hope you enjoy snuffing it,’ says Cushing, deadpan, as Carmichael departs the scene. In the peculiar cosmology of the Amicus horror movies, switching price tags is a sufficiently awful crime to mark you down for vicious karmic reprisals, and Carmichael discovers he has acquired a malevolent (but invisible and thus cheap) elemental companion, who seems to have it in for his wife in particular. Luckily he makes the acquaintance of medium and exorcist Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton), who offers to assist…

Probably the weakest part of the film, probably because the plot hasn’t got a lot going on, and the segment is forced to rely on the comic performances of the actors involved. Once again, they are good enough to make the film watchable and entertaining (some good work from the set dressers in the scene where the elemental demolishes Carmichael’s living room), but it’s not really clever or striking enough to be memorable.

And so to the final part of the film, in which young writer Ian Ogilvy buys, somewhat improbably, an imposing old door to put on the stationery cupboard in his study. You can probably write the rest for yourself, particularly if you’ve been paying attention, not least because it does bear a certain resemblance to the David Warner story at the top of the film – the door turns out to be a gateway to a domain of ancient, dormant evil, which now wakes up, thirsting for the souls of… well, you get the idea, I think.

Still, the production values aren’t bad and the story also manages to distinguish itself by having the closest thing to a genuine plot twist you’re likely to find in an Amicus film – the audience is invited to assume that Ogilvy has ripped off the till at the shop, thus marking his card for a sticky end, but it turns out he’s a decent, honest chap, and thus has a chance of making it out of the film in one piece. If nothing else it provides an upbeat conclusion.

There is, of course, still time for the final twist with the frame story of the shop. This is not the usual ‘everyone is actually already dead!’ twist as deployed in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, Tales from the Crypt, and Vault of Horror, but something very nearly as obvious. Still, Cushing gets another chance to camp it up, being funny and menacing at the same time, and the film does conclude with a couple of good gags. Probably not the best or most colourful of the Amicus anthologies, but still an enjoyable piece of comfort viewing.

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Bondzai!

If Plato’s Theory of Forms has anything to it (which I really doubt, but it’s spurious intro time again), the implications are profound. Basically, the idea is that everything in the world is the physical embodiment of a quintessential version of itself existing in some metaphysical otherworld. Thus every chair in some way is an imperfect recreation of the primal Chair Form, every dog is a flawed embodiment of the Dog Form, and so on. The connection with the Form is what allows us to recognise things as what they are. I am frankly dubious about this, but I got thinking about forms and formulas the other day with particular reference to movie franchises, and the Bond series in particular.

People talk about Bond films being formulaic as if it’s a negative thing and I suppose there’s a case to be argued here. And you can’t really deny that there is a fundamental blueprint for these movies that Eon have been very, very careful about staying close to (it’s almost inconceivable that they’d produce something as left-field as Ian Fleming himself did with his version of The Spy Who Loved Me – for the uninitiated: first-person viewpoint, lengthy pseudo-autobiographical section, two Canadian gangsters as the bad guys and Bond’s hardly in it).

Even people who don’t like these films and haven’t seen many of them know how the game is played: big opening stunt/action sequence, plot is established, Bond gets briefed, Bond gets tooled up, off to another country, meeting with local ally (often marked for death), meeting with first Bond girl (ditto), encounter with main villain (often involving a game or wager of some kind), etc, etc. I expect Wikipedia or somewhere has produced a table showing which elements are in which movie.

Now, you would expect this kind of semi-mandatory tick-list of elements to be the enemy of good, popular film-making, but the strange fact is that the best and most popular of the Bond movies are the ones that stick closest to the formula, while the ones that do wander off into other areas are the least well-remembered. So, the question must be asked – which of the movies is closest to the Platonic Bond Movie Form?

For a long time I thought it was You Only Live Twice. I suspect this is mainly because when people (and here I really mean Mike Myers) set out to parody Bond, this is the movie they mainly take as a template to work with. And up to a point, this is true, but.

You Only Live Twice was made in 1967, directed by Lewis Gilbert. International scallywags SPECTRE (headed by Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld) have built themselves a spaceship which goes around eating other spaceships, all in aid of starting a war between the USA and the USSR. British intelligence get a clue that these troublemaking operations are based in Japan and soon top agent James Bond (Sean Connery, like I need to say so) is sent to investigate.

Well, if the basis of the plot isn’t enough to tip you off as to the kind of film this is, let me explain to you how Bond decides to get to Japan. Does he pop on a scheduled commercial jet flight, possibly under an assumed name? He does not. Instead he fakes his own death in a collapsible bed, has himself buried at sea, is retrieved from the sea bed by a submarine, and then has himself fired out of a torpedo tube onto one of Japan’s many picturesque beaches. None of this, strictly speaking, is demanded by the plot.

Yes, this is an openly and ostentatiously silly film from beginning to end, but it still somehow works even as it floats cheerfully from one outrageously overblown set-piece to another, occasionally waving at logic and credibility as they sit, fuming, somewhere off in the distance (for example: at one point Connery has to disguise himself as a Japanese fisherman. He appears do so by covering himself in fake tan and putting his hairpiece on backwards, and yet the ruse still seems entirely effective). Scriptwriter Roald Dahl almost completely dispenses with the downbeat and internal plotline of Fleming’s novel and seems to have been given carte blanche to do absolutely anything he felt like in its place. Connery swaggers through the whole thing and the rest of the production follows his example. The franchise may have got both feet off the ground for the first time but it’s also absolutely at the height of its powers – silly it may be, but it’s also irresistibly self-confident and lavish.

But at the same time it’s not quite the Bond-by-numbers you would expect, and it departs from the formula a fair amount too. There’s hardly any of the frantic globetrotting you’d normally expect to see: once Bond arrives in Japan, very early on, the story stays based there for the duration. And this leads into another stylistic quirk – Dahl may have dismissed the novel as not much more than a Japanese travelogue, but there are times when the movie is just that. There are relatively lengthy sequences devoted to displays of Japanese customs and martial arts, most notably a traditional wedding. I suppose this all seemed rather more exotic back in the sixties.

That said, the traditional Bond elements are very strong here, and despite the absurdity of the story Lewis is careful to mix in corresponding levels of grit and toughness and wrap them around a solid narrative structure. Donald Pleasence, famously a piece of after-the-last-minute casting, nails the Bond supervillain role in perpetuity. Neither of the Bond girls here are likely to score highly in terms of name recognition, but they’re both highly qualified for the role. The action is nicely put together too.

I don’t think You Only Live Twice is the particularly Bondy Bond film I originally took it for, but it does have a tremendously strong identity within the series, simply due to its scale and energy. Even by modern standards this is a big, fun, engagingly ridiculous action movie, and possibly the overall high point of the franchise.

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