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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Horrors of the Terror Asylum of the Crypt of the Uncanny

One day, I’m sure, I will have written about all the portmanteau horror anthology movies made by Milton Subotsky’s Amicus Films in the 1960s and 1970s; one day I may even have written about all the knock-offs copying the Amicus style (things like Tales that Witness Madness and The Uncanny). But not yet, obviously: it still feels like I am trapped in some kind of recurring nightmare, where my bad deeds have condemned me to endlessly revisit an eclectic range of movie stars hoist by their own petards in inventive but slightly thrifty ways…

Freddie Francis’ Torture Garden (NB.: contains very little actual torture, but no actual gardening either) was made in 1967 and thus comes very early in the lineage. Whereas some of the other films were either written by Subotsky himself (drawing quite heavily on common horror-movie tropes) and/or derived from things like American horror comics, Torture Garden is scripted by the distinguished writer of horror and crime fiction Robert Bloch (Bloch is perhaps best remembered for writing the original novel that Psycho was based on, but also contributed a few well-remembered episodes to the original run of Star Trek). Bloch wrote a few movies for Amicus; this isn’t the best, but it has its moments.

The setting for the frame story (there’s always a frame story in this kind of film) is the Torture Garden of Dr Diablo, a circus sideshow being visited by a mixed group of British and American characters (Amicus wanted to use more British actors – Christopher Lee was inevitably in the frame – but the film’s American financiers insisted on big names from the States). Overseeing events is Diablo himself, played with enormous relish by Burgess Meredith. Meredith starts off in a variation on his Penguin outfit, with top hat and cigarette holder, but soon adopts the persona of an American gangster (for some reason).

Well, after the main show, a few of the punters stick around for the ‘special tour’ (only a fiver extra) and Diablo shows them his waxwork of Atropos, Goddess of Destiny, and wielder of the Shears of Fate. (I am tempted to say that shear terror ensues, but probably best not to). Each of the five visitors – Michael Bryant, Beverly Adams, Barbara Ewing, Jack Palance and Michael Ripper – must take it in turn to gaze upon Atropos’ Shears and be given a vision of their own destiny…

And off we go. First up is the tale of an unpleasant and dissolute young man named Williams, played by Michael Bryant (a very fine actor, well-remembered for The Stone Tape and his guest role in Colditz), who visits his wealthy but sick uncle (Maurice Denham) to try and shake him down for some cash. Well, uncle doesn’t play ball, and Williams decides to bring his inheritance forward a bit. Searching the house, he discovers a coffin buried in the cellar, and inside the coffin is a rather peculiar cat. Needless to say Williams soons find himself becoming very familiar with the kitty – or perhaps that should be the other way around…

Pretty basic stuff, this one, but a strong performance from Bryant just about holds it together: at various points he has to declaim exposition to the cat, basically repeating things the cat has just telepathically informed him of. Normally this would be a recipe for the most ridiculously eggy nonsense, but Bryant manages to ensure it’s all just bad rather than disastrous. Decent direction and a very Hammer-ish score help too.

We continue with a story subtitled ‘Terror Over Hollywood’, which strikes me as overstating things a bit. Beverly Adams gets to be the first woman to lead an Amicus segment as actress Carla Hayes. How good an actress she actually is is debatable, but she quickly demonstrates an enormous aptitude for two-faced ruthlessness in pursuit of success in the movie business. One thing about this segment is that it’s arguably just a little bit over-plotted, with a lot of faffing about before we get to the heart of the matter: Carla’s co-star (Robert Hutton) is apparently killed by the mob, but whisked off to a mysterious clinic where he makes a miraculous recovery. What gives?

There’s a nice idea here, sort-of anticipating The Stepford Wives (there’s a bit of a giveaway) and with great potential as a satire of Hollywood and the superficiality of movie stars and their relentless appetite for celebrity, but the reveal comes a bit too abruptly and the story isn’t properly developed. As a result it comes across as a nice idea, not particularly well-realised, but Adams isn’t bad and there’s a cameo from Bernard Kay as an evil doctor.

Barbara Ewing is up next, playing journalist Dorothy Endicott. She meets a famous pianist (John Standing) for an interview and the two of them become romantically involved, despite the concerns of his manager that this will be a distraction from his practising and touring. He does seem very devoted to his work, especially the beautiful old grand piano his mother gave him, which he calls  ‘Euterpe’ (the Greek muse of music). But who will win if it comes down to a contest for his affections between Dorothy and Euterpe?

One thing about this movie is that the different segments all do have their own visual style, and this one is particularly distinctive, with a certain minimalist look to it and mostly black-and-white costumes and sets. The story itself is fairly routine stuff, though, building up to a delirious moment of kitsch nonsense where Ewing is attacked by the piano. It’s not quite up there with Fluff Freeman grappling with the killer vine, but it’s about as close as Torture Garden gets.

Following this it’s Jack Palance’s segment. Palance is in the role initially earmarked for Christopher Lee, playing a obsessive collector of Edgar Allen Poe memorabilia (given Bloch’s mentor was H. P. Lovecraft, himself an enormous admirer of Poe, one wonders if there isn’t a subtle sort of tribute going on here). Palance’s character, Wyatt, meets another collector, Lancelot Canning (the always wonderful Peter Cushing) – Canning really does seem to have every possible piece of Poe material, including some original manuscripts – even a few which are completely unheard of. Can Wyatt resist the temptation to let his envy of Canning’s collection get the better of him?

Well, once you know the background to the film, you can’t help but imagine what this bit would have been like with Lee and Cushing playing the two lead roles. As it is, Palance makes an unusual dance-partner for Cushing, but it’s still an interesting little piece with Palance not disgracing himself opposite the great man. Palance seems to have relished the chance to play more of a character role than one his usual tough guys and perhaps indulges in a bit too much business with his pipe and glasses, but this is an engaging tale with a good twist to it.

Which leaves us with Michael Ripper. Ripper is an actor who gets pigeon-holed as the chap who plays all the inn-keepers and local constables in classic Hammer Horror movies – and, to be fair, he did play a lot of these parts – but he was a performer of considerable range and ability (see, for example, 1964’s Every Day’s a Holiday, where he is required to do a song-and-dance number opposite Ron Moody and is in no way outshone). I was rather looking forward to seeing his chance to shine in this movie.

Well, suffice to say it doesn’t really happen, for we are in twist ending territory. The good thing about the twist ending of Torture Garden is that it isn’t the same one as in all the portmanteau horrors written by Subotsky himself. The bad news is that, like most of the punchlines to the stories in this film, it somehow doesn’t quite connect with the viewer as well as it might, with the result that the movie is a just a bit underwhelming.  Bloch is a very fine writer, but the segments here don’t have the same cartoony power and colour as the ones in Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, to name but one. If memory serves, Bloch’s script for Asylum (1972) was rather an improvement – but that’s a set of stories for another day. If you like the Amicus anthology films, this is fun, but not one of their best.

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The Terribly Horrible Vault of Graves beyond the House of the Crypt

Sometimes I could almost believe the people at Lovefilm are reading this blog and sitting in judgement upon it. One of the unusual (and, to my mind, rather enjoyable) aspects of my soon-to-be-defunct DVD rental service is the random nature of it – you basically get very little control over what films from your list they decide to send you. Is there some sort of lucky dip system in effect at Lovefilm HQ? Somehow I doubt it, for there have been several occasions when I have received a string of suspiciously similar films in a row. On these occasions I can almost hear a spectral voice saying ‘We enjoyed your review of that last Woody Allen film. Have another one.’ And my thoughts on Tales from the Crypt seem likewise to have earned the approbation of the DVD gods, for landing on my figurative mat this week was another Amicus portmanteau horror movie – the daddy of them all, in the form of Freddie Francis’ 1965 film Dr Terror’s House of Horrors. All I can say is: DVD gods, please send Tiptoes before your service closes down.

Anyway – yes, this is the one with Fluff Freeman and the killer vine. This was the original Amicus portmanteau, and as a result it does feel a little less formulaic than later films in the subgenre. Scripted by Amicus head honcho Milton Subotsky, apparently the film originated in the late 1940s, with the script hanging around for fifteen years or so before it finally went into production – scholars of American horror movies of the mid-40s have suggested that all the segments of House of Horrors are to some extent derivative of other movies and stories from that period, but this is not especially obvious to a modern audience.

The movie opens with a group of men gathering in a train compartment, and you do get a sense almost at once that this isn’t a film completely trapped in the horror ghetto – true, you do have Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee giving their legendary imprimatur to proceedings (although both are somewhat cast against type), but there’s also a very young Donald Sutherland, not to mention all-round entertainer Roy Castle and the disc jockey (and not very good actor) Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman. Something for everyone there, I’m tempted to say.

Anyway, Cushing is playing the enigmatic Dr Schreck (German for ‘terror’, naturally), which allows the actor to have some fun with a peculiar accent, and really go to town with the make-up box: his fake eyebrows suggest a couple of hairy caterpillars are engaged in a courtship ritual on his forehead. When he reveals he’s carrying a set of tarot cards in his luggage, and they have mystical powers to foretell the future and shape destiny, the others are initially doubtful – especially Lee’s snotty art critic. But one by one they consent to have their fortune told…

First up is Werewolf (the segment subtitles leave a little to be desired, if you ask me), a slightly overplotted tale of an architect (Neil McCallum) who returns to his recently-sold family home to do some surveying work for the new owner (Ursula Howells). Soon enough he discovers the coffin of a legendary sorcerer and werewolf, the magnificently named Cosmo Valdemar, walled up in the cellar, and recalls old tales of Valdemar’s undying hatred of his family. Better start melting down the silver crucifix to make bullets, then… but is there something else going on that our man is not aware of?

The least you can say about any of the stories in House of Horrors is that they are atmospherically filmed, and this one is no exception. However, each of them also stands or falls on the strength of its punchline, so to speak, and the question of exactly what’s going on here always seems to me to be a little confused. Or, to put it another way, you don’t really expect to have to work out the plot of an Amicus portmanteau story for yourself. Hey ho.

No such worries in the next one, The Creeping Vine – yes, the time has finally come. One of the distinguishing things about this film is that it’s not about dodgy types receiving their well-earned comeuppance, which is basically the rationale of later films like Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horrors and From Beyond the Grave – it’d be a stretch to describe any of the protagonists here as actually wicked, they’re petty or foolish at worst. And yet their fates are uniformly pretty grim. In this case, Fluff Freeman plays a very ordinary bloke who comes back off holiday to find a peculiar vine has sprung up in his garden. The vine violently resists any attempts at pruning, which is enough to prompt Fluff to head off to consult some boffins.

‘I’m pretty good at handling garden tools, I don’t think those shears slipped!’ says Fluff to the experts (I can’t understand why that line has not become one of the most celebrated movie quotes in history). The boffins (Jeremy Kemp and Bernard Lee), who obviously have far too much free time, speculate that rather than being a gardening mishap, this may be evidence of a sentient mutant plant having appeared, and one of them actually moves in with Fluff to investigate.

Well, who’d have guessed it, but the boffins are right, and soon the malevolent vine is strangling family pets and covering the whole house. Bernard Lee brings remarkable gravitas to an uproariously silly story, all the more so given he was apparently so much the worse for drink during most of his scenes that he had to deliver his dialogue sitting down. Fluff, meanwhile, just stands around looking slightly bemused by the whole thing. Very entertaining, but hardly the high-point of the British botanical horror tradition, and once again the ending is just a bit too ambiguous.

Next up is Voodoo, the tale of Roy Castle’s hapless jazz trumpeter (it’s Roy Castle, of course he’s going to have a trumpet), who is sent off for a residency in Haiti along with his band. We’re heading into slightly problematic territory here, with Haiti depicted as a hotbed of black magic and voodoo (Castle’s attempt at a West Indian accent at one point is also rather embarrassing), but the casting of Kenny Lynch allows the film to undercut the stereotypes a little.

Castle is much taken with the music of the local voodoo ceremonies and plans to arrange it for his jazz group, despite the objections of the local houngan, who insists it is ancient and sacred to his god Dhambala. ‘Oh, well, if it’s that old, it’s out of copyright…’ says Castle. Needless to say the playing of the music leads to unfortunate events back in London. A slightly lighter tone to this one, mainly because of Castle’s deft comic performance (hard to imagine first-choice actor Acker Bilk being quite so capable), if (a pattern develops) the climax is a little underpowered.

Christopher Lee’s stuffy art critic consents to have his future told next, and suffice to say it is entitled Disembodied Hand. Lee’s pompous and snobbish character gets involved in a feud with an artist (Michael Gough), which spins out of control. Gough is maimed and commits suicide as a result, but his severed hand is still on the loose and seeking revenge on Lee…

A really good performance from Lee here, who is miles away from his traditional kind of role – here he plays a vain, foolish man who gradually succumbs to terror as the hand’s relentless attempts at vengeance go on, and on, and on. The crawling hand prop is actually rather impressive, given this is not exactly a big-budget film – the hand would go on to have a fairly distinguished career in other Amicus productions, playing one of Richard Greene’s severed hands in Tales from the Crypt, for instance. A strong ending, too, finally.

And so to (spoiler alert) Vampire, in which doctor Donald Sutherland sets up in small town USA with his faintly exotic foreign bride. No sooner have they settled into their new home than mysterious cases of anaemia start cropping up amongst the townsfolk, often accompanied by strange marks on the neck…

I think this is a fairly witty little story, provided you don’t know the twist going into it. Not a great showcase for Sutherland, though, partly because while his character may be a qualified doctor, he’s also depicted as rather a dim bulb, but mainly because Sutherland gets bulldozed off the screen by Max Adrian, here playing the town’s other doctor, one of those actors with a tremendous capacity for stealing scenes.

Then it’s time for the final twist of the framing story. Now, as I’ve observed before, the thing about the Amicus portmanteaus is that the final twist is nearly always the same in all of them, but bearing in mind it would have been new and original on this occasion, I think it’s a reasonably good way of ending the movie.

All in all, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors feels rather less schlocky and threadbare than some of its successors, possibly because it’s not principally based on American horror comic books (as a couple of the other films were). Derivative it may be, but its choice of subject matter is sound – a vampire, a werewolf, a crawling hand, voodoo magic, and a killer plant… again, something for everyone here – and the film has an interesting mixture of styles. The werewolf story is properly gothic, the vine is more of an SF B-movie, the voodoo story is somewhat played for laughs, and so on. This, along with the extraordinarily eclectic and interesting casting, gives the film a real sense of variety and colour. You can see why Amicus and many others have endlessly reused this formula in the years since Dr Terror’s House of Horrors was made, but this film has a touch of class almost all the others lack.

 

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Stories from the Garden of the Crypt of Torture beyond the Asylum

So, just recently I was writing about the vital contribution to my education which was made by the main commercial channel’s tendency to show endless old genre movies in the middle of the night, back when I was a teenager. Doesn’t happen these days, of course: even old movies are now too expensive, given there are a dozen other channels in the market for content, so the wee small hours are the domain of rip-off phone-in competitions and ultra-cheap home-grown repeats. And, as it happens, just the other day I was writing about the fractured dream-logic of a certain kind of horror movie. There is something oddly satisfying about the way these two themes combine in Freddie Francis’ 1972 film Tales from the Crypt.

Or should that be Milton Subotsky’s Tales from the Crypt? Subotsky is one of the (largely) unsung heroes of low-budget British genre movie-making of the 1960s and 1970s, most frequently through his company Amicus. Amongst other things, Subotsky oversaw the two 1960s movie adaptations of a famous BBC fantasy series the name of which I will not utter here, and the first few Trampas movies (the last one, Warlords of Atlantis, was the work of other hands). But if Subotsky left an indelible mark on the fabric of cinema, it is in the form of the portmanteau horror movies which he oversaw both at Amicus and elsewhere. He was not the first to make this kind of movie – I suspect that credit goes to Dead of Night, made in 1945, and widely credited as the best of the subgenre – but if you stumble across one of these, the chances are it’s one of Milton’s.

Subotsky was not the kind of man to mess with a successful formula, and it must be said that most of these films are rather samey, to the point where they all start to merge together in one’s head after a while. When an Amicus portmanteau comes on the TV, I have to take a moment to work out if this is the one with Fluff Freeman fighting the carnivorous vine, or Tom Baker misusing his voodoo paintbrush, or David Warner contending with a haunted mirror.

Tales from the Crypt is not any of these, in case you were wondering (oh, what delights remain as yet unconsidered by this blog). This one opens in classy style with a bit of Bach’s toccata and fugue on the organ and some shots of a cemetery. Geoffrey Bayldon, soon to appear as a homicidal psychiatrist in the next Amicus portmanteau, Asylum, plays a guide showing a group round the cemetery catacombs. Five of them get separated from the rest, and find themselves in, well, a crypt, with a robed and hooded figure (Ralph Richardson).

One thing about the moribund state of the British film industry in the 1970s, you got some heavyweight actors appearing in slightly suspect material. This is, as the title would indicate to the in-the-know, a fairly low-budget movie based on some disreputable American horror comics – a proper slab of schlock, not to put too fine a point on it. And yet it has Ralph Richardson, an actor from the same bracket as Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, and John Gielgud, and apparently taking it quite seriously. And he is not the only big name to appear.

Well, anyway, each of the five characters appears in their own short tale, revealed to them by the enigmatic Crypt Keeper. But is he showing them their future or their past?

First up is And All Through the House, featuring Joan Collins as an avaricious housewife who is unkind enough as to bash in her husband’s head on Christmas Eve, solely for his life insurance. (Best not to worry too much about finer details of character and motivation, to be perfectly honest.) However, no sooner is the deed done than the news is reporting that a homicidal lunatic has escaped from the local asylum and is on the loose, dressed in a Santa Claus outfit (well, of course). Sure enough, the psycho Santa is soon lurking in Joan’s garden, leaving her with the awkward problem of what to do – she can hardly call the police with her husband’s corpse still on the lounge floor…

Some effective jump scares in this one, I suppose, and it’s an especially camp segment of what’s a rather camp film overall. The contrived plotting and particularly fake-looking fake blood (all the Kensington gore in this film is completely the wrong shade of red) just add to the fun, but it’s just as well this is the hors d’oeuvre in this particular collection.

Along next is Reflection of Death, an unusually short segment starring Ian Hendry as a man leaving his wife and children to be with his mistress (this is a sufficiently heinous crime to make you a marked man, and put you in line for spectacularly cruel and unusual punishment, in the odd cosmology of the Amicus portmanteaus). Well, they are driving off to their new life together when there is a car crash, and…

Well, the thing is that this one is so short and so insubstantial that it barely stands up to even a cursory review. If it were any longer it probably wouldn’t work at all – as it is, some slightly gimmicky direction and the re-employment of the ‘endless nightmare’ idea from Dead of Night just about keeps it afloat. You might wish for Ian Hendry to get some more substantial material, but you take what you’re given in this particular genre.

On next is Poetic Justice, in which a grasping, good-for-nothing, rich Tory bastard (Robin Phillips) schemes to ruin the life of a sweet old widowed bin-man (the legend that is Peter Cushing), having his numerous pet dogs taken away by court order, and spreading malicious rumours that, um, he’s a paedophile. What can I say, it was the 1970s, tastes were a bit different back then. Cushing is finally driven to suicide by a load of vindictive Valentine’s cards (the Tory bastard seems to have put an awful lot of effort into writing all the insulting doggerel involved), but his tormentors have failed to realise he has mystical connections beyond the grave. Or something. This is not really made very clear, but suffice to say, one year later, Cushing comes back…

Another textbook example of Peter Cushing deploying his powers to their full extent to lift some rather dubious material. There’s also the added poignancy of the recently-widowed Cushing taking on this role – I couldn’t help noticing that his character’s dead wife has the same name as Cushing’s own partner, and I’d be prepared to bet this wasn’t a coincidence. Sometimes you think you understand just how much this loss defined the last two decades of Peter Cushing’s life, and then sometimes you suspect it’s impossible to fully appreciate that.

Oh well. Onto Wish You Were Here, in which another ruthless Tory type (Richard Greene) finds himself financially embarrassed and on the verge of serious debt, at which point his wife discovers that a mysterious statuette they bought in the Far East has the power to grant three wishes. Any self-respecting viewer will at this point groan ‘Oh, no, not The Monkey’s Paw AGAIN,’ but the movie earns a degree of respect for having the characters also be aware of WW Jacobs’ famous cautionary tale and actively try to avoid making the same mistakes as their counterparts in the story. It doesn’t help them, of course, and the film earns bonus points to go with the respect, for finding inventive ways for their ill-considered wishes to screw them over.

And finally, Blind Alleys, in which yet another callous and greedy Tory type (I’ll say one thing for Tales from the Crypt, it may be campy schlock, but ideologically it’s completely sound) takes on the job of superintendent of an institution for the blind. As our man (played by Nigel Patrick) does not run the place in the most compassionate manner, resentment builds up amongst his charges, led by Patrick Magee (someone else who appears in Asylum). Suffice to say the assembled blind men prove unexpectedly good at DIY and a sticky end is on the cards for someone…

So, the guilty all get punished in suitably outlandish style, and all that remains is for the twist of the frame story to be revealed. I say ‘twist’, because another of the defining features of the Amicus portmanteaus is that the final twist is almost always the same, and hardly difficult to guess if you pay any attention whatsoever to what’s been going on in the film.

I really don’t know about Tales from the Crypt: by any objective standard, it’s really quite a bad movie, with silly stories, obvious twists, and unconvincing fake blood, lifted only a bit by the presence of some properly talented actors. The same could really be said for most of the other, similar films produced by Milton Subotsky. And yet it also manages to be quite marvellously entertaining. If 1970s British horror movies are not your thing, you should probably give it a very wide berth, but if they are – well, you probably already know what to expect. Hardly a great film, but – for some of us – great fun.

 

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‘…and you’re back in the Castle!’

As I’ve said before, probably a number of times, Hammer Horror and I go back quite a few years: one night in the early Summer of 1987, to be precise – I’d give you the exact date, but unfortunately BBC Genome seems to have packed up [It’s working again and the exact date was June 27th 1987, if you must know – A]. ‘The Count and the Baron are back in business!’ promised the trailer for a double bill of Dracula, Prince of Darkness and The Evil of Frankenstein, and what can I say? They had me. They have me still.

That said, while Prince of Darkness is a film I have strong memories of, and which I’ve watched countless times in the intervening years – I might even call it the quintessential Hammer horror film – The Evil of Frankenstein is one I never got back to. I don’t even recall it being on TV that often. Looking at it again now, it’s no worse than a lot of other Hammer Horrors… and yet…

Freddie Francis directs competently, and with moments of real style too. Things get under way with a spot of – well, it’s not even graverobbing, as someone just leaves a freshly-dead body too close to an open window, from whence it is half-inched by a grave-robber in the employ of Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing, inevitably). However, the locals put two and two together and soon enough the Baron and his surprisingly loyal assistant Hans (Sandor Eles) are forced to go on the run.

Finding himself financially embarrassed, the Baron decides to head home to his ancestral seat at Karlstadt, only to find it has been ransacked. (Frankenstein insists on referring to his castle, which is obviously a castle because it looks like a castle, as a chateau – a touch of pretension, Baron?) Telling Hans the story of what happened here occasions a fairly lengthy flashback to Frankenstein’s most famous experiment, which involves a stitched-together corpse, a big thunderstorm, and some angry villagers. This concludes with the Baron being run out of town and his creation (Kiwi Kingston) being shot off the top of a mountain by a gun-toting mob.

Events start to repeat themselves and Frankenstein and Hans find themselves having to flee, assisted by a deaf-mute gypsy girl (Katy Wild). As luck (and the magic of plot contrivance) would have it, they wind up taking shelter in a cave under a glacier – and who should be frozen into the glacier in a state of perfect preservation but Frankenstein’s old monster?

Old flat-top is duly defrosted and revived, but his brain is stubbornly dormant. Faced with this dilemma, the Baron makes one of the worst decisions of his career (and with a career like his, that’s saying something), recruiting a sideshow hypnotist named Zoltan to use his mental powers on the monster. Zoltan is played by Peter Woodthorpe, a little-remembered actor these days, but responsible for memorable performances as Reg Trotter in Only Fools and Horses and Gollum in various Lord of the Rings adaptations, and here he has a damn good go at stealing the movie from Cushing.

For Zoltan has an agenda of his own, and it involves using the creature to get rich and get even, regardless of the consequences to anyone around him. Have those blazing torches to hand…

This was Hammer’s third Frankenstein film, not that it matters much. This is, I suppose, a bit of a minor landmark for the company, inasmuch as it marks the first time they casually abandon the existing continuity of a series and start over without any explanation. The film totally ignores the established events of The Curse of Frankenstein and The Revenge of Frankenstein, except in the most general way. In parts this feels like a sequel to another film which was never actually made.

Occasioning all this were some legal doings between Hammer and Universal. The two previous Hammer Frankensteins (which, I say again, have absolutely no narrative links with Evil of Frankenstein) had to tread extremely carefully to avoid intruding on the various trademarks connected with Universal’s cycle of Frankenstein movies, specifically Jack Pierce’s make-up design and any references to dark and stormy nights. By this point the two companies had thrashed something out, and all these things were potentially available to Hammer.

Well, it’s a touching tale of corporations coming together for a common good, but I’m not sure it helped this film very much. The really special thing about the 1930s Frankensteins is not the make-up, but the performer inside it, and inside the monster gear in Evil of Frankenstein is a wrestler from New Zealand who’s given virtually nothing to work with. Never mind that it’s not until the closing stages of the film that he gets a chance to show any kind of pathos or personality, the monster make-up itself is just bad: the creature has a head like an Easter Island statue and appears to be made of clay or stone.

Hammer Frankensteins are all about the Baron, anyway, and Cushing gives another impeccable performance, of course. He’s good even when the film around him is slapdash, as it is here: why is this film called The Evil of Frankenstein (or even, according to the title card, The EVIL of Frankenstein)? We are required to take the Baron’s villainy for granted, because he just comes across as a scientist with some fairly radical and uncompromising beliefs, more sinned against than sinning. When he arrives home and finds his family home has been plundered, Cushing makes it a genuinely poignant moment, and whatever misdeeds are done in the course of the story, they seem to be much more Zoltan’s fault than Frankenstein’s.

Indeed, it’s only really in the stuff with Woodthorpe’s brand of grasping, beady-eyed nastiness that the film really comes to life and has anything more to offer than a selection of empty Frankenstein cliches. And even here credulity has to be throttled until it’s comatose: ‘go and punish the burgomaster for me,’ Zoltan instructs the monster (the nature of his beef with the guy is never really established – it feels like something left over from an earlier draft of the script), which duly lumbers off out of the chateau castle, and in the next scene it’s breaking into the burgomaster’s house. How the hell did it know where to go? Did it stop and ask for directions along the way?

To be fair, the film is stuffed with these kinds of odd non sequiturs and rambling diversions: it doesn’t feel a second too short, even with a very modest running time of only about 85 minutes. One almost gets the feeling that the people at Hammer were so delighted at making the deal with Universal, meaning that they didn’t have to come up with another outrageous variation on the Frankenstein story, that they didn’t bother coming up with any real story worth mentioning. The Evil of Frankenstein sort of meanders along without ever really arriving anywhere, saved from utter bad moviedom only by Cushing and Woodthorpe. Looks aren’t everything, and I know now that going 27 years without watching this movie wasn’t exactly a great privation.

 

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Grave Thoughts

Oh, my friends, I feel a terrible sense of encroaching doom and rising dread. A dismal shadow is on the horizon, for I have inadvertantly made what feels like a deal with the Devil. The full details of this will become ineluctibly apparent in the fullness of time. For now, let me bolster myself and reaffirm my dedication to the right sort of genre movie, with a proper look at Freddie Francis’ 1968 Hammer offering, the arguably badly-titled Dracula Has Risen From The Grave.

Groovy psychadelic titles out of the way, we find ourselves in a familiar mittel-European setting, some time round about 1905. In a decent sequence, included mainly to establish the tone, a young altar boy discovers a buxom maiden stuffed into the local church bell – if there are bats in the belfrey, they are clearly of the vampiric persuasion. (This presumably happened off-screen at some point during Dracula, Prince of Darkness – not that inter-film continuity was ever Hammer’s strong point.)

One year later, the local Monsignor (Rupert Davies) visits the village to find the local priest (Ewan Hooper) is a boozer and church attendance has fallen virtually to nil: everyone is still living in fear of the King of the Undead, despite him having fallen into the lethal waters of the moat of Castle Dracula at the end of the previous film. Instantly winning himself a place on the all-time Counter-productive Stupid Ideas List, the Monsignor drags the priest off to the castle in order to exorcise it and plonk a crucifix in the doorway to stop Dracula’s spirit ever emerging.

Of course, what he is failing to take into account is that Dracula isn’t in the castle anyway: he’s frozen into the moat. The exorcism provokes a terrible thunderstorm (this is another quite well put-together sequence), during which the priest gets separated from his boss, falls onto the ice, and cuts his head: the blood conveniently trickling through the ice into Dracula’s mouth. (At this point Christopher Lee is dragged kicking and screaming onto the set to reprise his signature role.) Dracula is very annoyed to find himself effectively locked out of his own castle and, as usual, declares a terrible revenge on his enemies.

Completely unaware of what a total balls-up he’s made of his pastoral visit, the Monsignor heads home to the charming town of Kleinenberg: notable citizens thereof include his beautiful niece Maria (Veronica Carlson), her boyfriend Paul (Barry Andrews) and nice-but-trampy barmaid Zena (Barbara Ewing). But Dracula is coming to town as well, and where he’s concerned beautiful nieces are always on the menu…

Well, as you can probably tell, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave is not an especially accurate title, though it does score points for being evocative. Dracula Has Been Defrosted From A Moat would not look nearly so good on the poster. For a long time I was inclined to dismiss this film, coming as it does between the quintessential Hammer horror Dracula, Prince of Darkness and the fascinatingly different Taste the Blood of Dracula – and, to be fair, it’s not close to being as good as either of those.

The opening and closing sections around Castle Dracula itself are quite nicely done, even if the climax telegraphs its resolution in a painfully obvious way (my 13-year-old sister came across me watching this film, many years ago, and was able to accurately predict the denouement despite being a complete Hammer ingenue). However, all the stuff in town is bit ho-hum. This is not to say the film looks bad: the production values are strong and there is always James Bernard’s score to savour. And the script negotiates the stock characters and set-pieces of a Hammer Dracula with reasonable dexterity, helped by decent performances from nearly everyone in the cast. It just doesn’t have a single strong idea or really great piece of acting to make itself distinctive.

At least, not in what you’d call a good way. Barbara Ewing does sterling work making the Bad Girl something other than a total cipher, and the central young lovers are a bit less insipid than usual – but, by a cruel quirk of fate, Barry Andrews – both physically and in his performance – is astoundingly like Hugh Grant around the time of his rise to stardom. Hugh Grant Vs Dracula is a memorable idea for a movie, but not a memorably good one. And yet this is what Dracula Has Risen From The Grave turns into, for modern audiences at least.

Oh well – set against this we have a film which is doing interesting things with the concept of faith. The Church itself does not exactly emerge covered in glory – of the two ecclesiastical characters, one is an alcoholic thrall to the villain, while the other one is inadvertantly responsible for all the trouble in the movie – but, on the other hand, Hugh Grant Paul is an atheist and thus incapable of dealing with Dracula unassisted. The film’s most contentious scene has Paul staking Dracula, who is able to shrug it off and pull out the stake due to Paul’s lack of belief. An interesting idea – some people suggest that the climax shows Paul regaining his belief in God as Dracula is vanquished; personally I don’t think it’s that explicit. In any case it reminded me again of the irony that the only film genre which routinely accepts the existence of God is Horror – which, of course, is the genre actual believers are least likely to watch. Some moving in mysterious ways going on here, perhaps.

Anyway, this is not the greatest Hammer horror, nor even a particularly good Dracula film – but at least Christopher Lee has some dialogue. What the film doesn’t have is any new ideas about Dracula or new things for him to get up to. Later films would fix this, to considerable effect. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave is really just marking time, but it does it in an atmospheric and very enjoyable fashion.

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