Son of Dracula (1974)

          In the years immediately following the demise of the Beatles, George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney each found individual musical success, but the band’s easygoing drummer, Ringo Starr, wasn’t naturally suited to solo pop stardom. Therefore, even as he periodically released music, Starr had time for such other endeavors as acting and film producing. Starr’s cinematic hobby reached a strange climax with Son of Dracula, a comedy/horror musical featuring singer Harry Nilsson in the title role. Nilsson, a friend of Lennon’s and Starr’s who was as notable for his epic drinking as for his offbeat pop music, demonstrates zero screen presence as the modern-day heir to Count Dracula’s netherworld throne—despite performing a number of exciting tunes both onscreen and on the soundtrack (including one of his biggest hits, the mournful ballad “Without You’), Nilsson’s appearance in the film is merely a novelty. Similarly, Starr’s supporting role as Merlin the Magician (complete with the silly costume of a gigantic beard, a pointy hat covered with stars, and a robe) feels more like a lark than a proper filmic statement. Plus, the way music-industry pals including John Bonham, Peter Frampton, and Keith Moon show up during performance scenes gives Son of Dracula the feel of a show that Starr put on in his backyard.

          Buried inside Son of Dracula, however, is the skeleton of a serviceable horror movie, because the protagonist, Count Downe (Nilsson), experiences an existential crisis on the eve of taking his father’s place as King of the Monsters. Specifically, Count Downe wants to experience human emotions, so he enlists the aid of Dr. Van Helsing (Dennis Price) for a scientific process that will make Count Downe mortal. Meanwhile, scheming netherworld lieutenant Baron Von Frankenstein (Freddie Jones) wants to expose Count Downe as a traitor, thus usurping the throne. Executed without irony, this plot could have generated an adequate horror show. Alas, Son of Dracula is padded with nonsense including the aforementioned musical numbers (which are weakly justified by the contrivance that Count Downe dabbles in singing), as well as endless montages of Count Downe wandering around London. Veteran horror director Freddie Francis does an okay job of filming city streets and underground dungeons with atmospheric low angles, and composer Paul Buckmaster provides a few evocative moments of dissonant scoring, but none of these flourishes matter. As it wobbles between action, comedy, drama, horror, and music, Son of Dracula elicits no audience reaction more strongly than it elicits boredom.

Son of Dracula: LAME

Tales That Witness Madness (1973)

          UK-based Amicus Productions, a second-tier competitor to Hammer Films, earned a niche in the horror marketplace by making a series of anthology movies, nasty little numbers featuring terse vignettes grouped by framing stories. Examples include Tales from the Crypt (1972) and The Vault of Horror (1973). The success of these pictures inevitably led other companies to ape the Amicus formula, hence this silly project from World Film Services. Although Tales That Witness Madness is a respectable endeavor thanks to decent production values and the presence of familiar actors, the script by Jennifer Jayne (writing as Jay Fairbank) is an uninspired pastiche of hoary shock-fiction tropes. There’s not a genuine scare in Tales That Witness Madness, and most of the humor is of the unintentional sort. Plus, the longest story is almost interminably boring.

          The picture begins with a shrink, Dr. Tremayne (Donald Pleasence), showing a colleague around a psychiatric facility where four odd patients are housed. As each patient is presented, his or her tale appears in flashback. The first bit, “Mr. Tiger,” features a little boy whose bickering parents discover the lad’s imaginary friend may not be imaginary. Next comes “Penny Farthing,” a drab yarn about an antique dealer getting possessed by the figure in an old painting. In “Mel,” the best vignette of the batch, an artist (Michael Jayston) brings home an old tree and then decides he likes the tree better than his wife (Joan Collins). The final sequence, “Luau,” is a tedious tale about people caught up in a ritual-sacrifice scheme. Except for “Mel,” which has a pithy, Twilight Zone-esque tone, the stories drone on lifelessly. (“Mr. Tiger” is fine, but the “twist” ending is so obvious from the first frame that there’s no tension.)

          The actors all deliver serviceable work, with young Russell Lewis (as the boy in “Mr. Tiger”) and Jayston (the artist in “Mel”) providing the most vivid performances. As for the leading ladies, Collins, who inexplicably spent much of the ’70s appearing in bad horror movies, does her usual shrewish-sexpot routine, while Hollywood actress Kim Novak—playing the lead in “Luau”—drains all vitality from the movie with her colorless non-acting. Director Freddie Francis, the former cinematographer who directed numerous frightfests for Hammer and Amicus (including the aforementioned Tales from the Crypt, among other horror anthology movies), handles this project with his characteristic aplomb, but even his smooth style can only compensate so much for the enervated nature of the stories.

Tales That Witness Madness: FUNKY

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

Proving that Hammer Films’ horror-flick formula was hard to duplicate, this meandering knockoff from low-rent company Tigon Pictures features Hammer’s two most beloved stars, plus a storyline suitable for Hammer treatment. What’s missing is the quasi-literary execution that made even the worst Hammer flicks feel like pulpy Victorian novels sprung to life. Therefore, even with regular Hammer director Freddie Francis at the helm, the atrocious script for The Creeping Flesh precludes the existence of coherence or credibility. When the movie begins, obsessed scientist Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing) returns from a foreign expedition bearing the gigantic skeleton of some sort of missing-link creature. Dr. Hildren lives with but mostly ignores his daughter, Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), who believes her mother died when she was young. In truth, her mother went insane, so Emmanuel committed her to an asylum run by his icy brother, James Hildern (Christopher Lee). In quick succession, Emmanuel discovers that the ancient skeleton regrows flesh when exposed to water; Penelope uncovers the truth about her mother and learns that Mom died in the asylum; and a psycho killer escapes from the very same nuthouse. So, as the overstuffed plot grinds along, the skeleton springs to murderous life, Penelope slips into the same madness that once gripped her mother, and the psycho killer fixates on Penelope. To say these varied elements don’t gel would be to understate this picture’s problems. Whereas Hammer flicks generally focused on one horror trope at a time, The Creeping Flesh combines killer-on-the-loose thrills, psychological drama, and supernatural scares, so each element gets short shrift. Worse, the special effects for the skeleton scenes are weak, and neither Cushing nor Lee gets to do anything particularly interesting. Heilbron is fine as a sheltered girl unleashing her inner hellion, but her performance isn’t strong enough to compensate for the movie’s discombobulated narrative.

The Creeping Flesh: LAME