The Beast Must Die (1974)

Self-made millionaire and all-around prick Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) fancies himself the ultimate hunter. Ultimate hunters need the ultimate prey, and Tom has decided the most dangerous game isn’t humans like other rich movie pricks believe. Nope, it’s werewolves.

Consequently, he has invited a handful of people of dubious character – as well as sometimes potentially suggestive hairiness – onto his isolated island home – there’s a pianist and potential full moon based serial killer (Charles Gray), a potential murderess (Ciaran Madden) who is also friend of Tom’s girlfriend Caroline (Marlene Clark), and a hairy one-time cannibal (Tom Chadbon). Also invited is werewolf expert and enthusiast Dr Lundgren (Peter Cushing), typically dressed nattily in black with red applications, come to spout some very peculiar werewolf lore and be Peter Cushing with a dubious Swedish accent.

Tom, being a modern kind of rich asshole, has wired most of the island and the mansion (apart from the bathrooms, which will become a problem) with cameras and microphones, secretly controlled by his very own Man in a Chair (Anton Diffring).

Now Tom only needs to keep his guests on the island and wait for the full moon. However, it does turn out that this werewolf would really rather play And Then There Were None instead of The Most Dangerous Game, and Tom may or may not be a great hunter, but he certainly isn’t even a minor detective.

Because sometimes the gods provide us wonderful gifts, Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die isn’t just a werewolf murder mystery, but a werewolf murder mystery with a gimmick right out of the William Castle playbook. You see, before the climax, the film stops for a “Werewolf Break”™, during which we, the audience, are meant to come up with the identity of the werewolf – with headshots of the surviving suspects for the very weak of memory. Of course, this isn’t actually much of a fair play kind of mystery, so the whole thing is only ever a gimmick.

Ignoring the gimmick (though who’d want to do such a thing?), The Beast is good, straightforward 70s style fun, with a bunch of highly unsympathetic characters – the nominal hero of the piece being the worst of them even though he isn’t a murderous werewolf - getting on each others’ nerves or murdered, respectively, broken up with Tom’s incompetent attempts at bagging himself the werewolf.

That werewolf is a bit if a problem, alas, because for some reason, the production doesn’t involve werewolf make-up, as was tradition in the werewolf game at that point, but rather goes for putting a shaggy full-body hairpiece on an actual dog – with exactly the disappointing results one expects from that approach. Annett’s direction doesn’t suggest he realizes that this kind of werewolf is best kept out of frame and in the dark and provides us with many a good look at it.

But then, the direction doesn’t exactly suggest much thought having been put into anything – it’s a very straightforward point and shoot affair that does include some of the fashions of its time not because of any interest in style but because everybody was doing them.

Yet still, this neutral directorial effort can’t drag the fun out of the thing, at least not too badly: too irresistible is the idea of the werewolf murder mystery, too wonderfully of its time and place are its ideas, and too great is the lure of the Werewolf Break™. We all should have one.

Three Films Make A Post: VHS Goes to Hell

V/H/S/99 (2022): I was pleasantly surprised to find that even this epitome series of bro horror has become a more diverse project behind and in front of the camera. This apparently doesn’t change my traditional reaction to all VHS films, where I find all but one segment of any given movie insufferably uninteresting. It’s all epileptically wobbling cameras, overdone fake VHS artefacts, and tales of asshats I don’t care one whit about being killed off in not terribly interesting ways by not terribly interesting monsters. Until, finally, the last segment, “To Hell and Back”, by Vanessa and Joseph Winter (also responsible for Deadstream), stabilizes the camera a bit and goes on to create a preposterous and absolutely awesome low budget hell dimension out of very little but sheer creative force and the imagination most of the other segments lack; that imagination is overflowing enough to design monsters for one single shot. The narrative drive as ridiculous as it is inspired. Reappearing from Deadstream is Melanie Stone in another awesome over the top performance that suggests somebody has found her niche.

The Arrival from the Darkness aka Príchozí z temnot (1921): This Czech silent movie by Jan S. Kolár ends on the worst explanation for the supernatural known to mankind, but before everything was a dream, there’s quite a bit to like: the visuals are often more naturalistic than expressionistic – though there is a pretty great alchemist’s lair in the Black Tower – but it’s the reality of old and half-ruined castles, so the film still has a certain uncanny gothic power. It is also an early example of the trope where some kind of reawakened evil from the past decides some poor woman to be the reincarnation of the love of his life, features the very Czech combo of Rudolf II and alchemy, and is generally an interesting entry into the sadly sparse number of silent films of the fantastic we can still see today.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959): This tale of an artist and mad scientist (Anton Diffring) who has become immortal thanks to gland transplantations is a usually ignored, and certainly very minor, bit of Hammer horror. It is still directed by Terence Fisher, shot by Jack Asher and written by Jimmy Sangster, so it’s certainly a technically well made film. There is even quite a bit of clever psychological business going on below the somewhat too melodramatic plot. Also of note are a couple of scenes of Diffring growing green in the face and a bit murderous as well as some pleasantly unpleasant business about his ideas about romance as exemplified by his relationship to a character played by Hazel Court, all situated between scenes of perfectly appropriate ethical deliberation between Diffring and an old friend played by Arnold Marlé. It is also interesting to see Christopher Lee in what amounts to a for him very uncommon role as the romantic lead – which is to say, he has very little to do in this one, in classic Hammer tradition.

Still, there’s just something missing that would turn this from “interesting” to “good” or “great”, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

In short: Schatten aus der Zeit (1975)

aka H.P. Lovecraft: Schatten aus der Zeit

The genres of the fantastic have generally played a tiny, nearly non-existent role in German-made TV programming. Before the advent of the “Privatfernsehen” (“privately owned TV channels”, about the German equivalent of what was cable in the US) with their early thirst for any content whatsoever, even getting to see imported genre fare outside crime series was a bit of crapshoot, though the situation was by far not as dire as with homegrown product.

German TV and streaming production companies – despite a handful of pleasant positive surprises – still haven’t quite developed the knack or the interest getting these things right. In 1975, when future soap opera director George Moorse made this somewhat experimental, fifty minutes short, and surprisingly close to the text adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella “The Shadow Out of Time”, these things simply weren’t done at all. I’d love to tell you how Moorse managed to get the ZDF (Germany’s second publicly funded TV channel) to finance this piece, but my sources are dry and the – obviously still very important – DVD version doesn’t tell. It was quite the find when the disc came out a couple of years ago in any case, for the film hasn’t been available in any form since its last TV showing in 1981, when your humble blogger was all of five years old.

Moorse’s approach to this adaptation suggests a direct influence by La Jetée, because this is shot as a series of stills of mostly actor Anton Diffring accompanied by Diffring’s voice narrating the action. For the most part, this works curiously well for the material; Moorse has a fine sense for an editing rhythm that gives the film the impression of heft and movement, creating a strange and rather strong pull that adds a feeling of true weirdness to the tale, as is only right and proper. Schatten is particularly effective when it treats the peculiar “dreams” its protagonist has about the time when he was quite literally not in his own mind. Moorse managed to hire the artist Waki Zöllner for these scenes, and Zöllner provides a series of collages, drawings, abstractions and found bits and pieces that do via the non-naturalistic and staunchly non-realistic what no special effect at the time (and most certainly not at the budget this must have had) could have achieved by creating a feeling of true, dream-like strangeness.

It’s all rather evocative and brilliant, and not at all the sort of project you’d expect of German TV of this era – and most certainly not one ending up quite this artistically successful and satisfying.

A Thrilling Development: Kiss Me and Die (1974)

aka “The Savage Curse”

“Thriller”, season 2, episode 3

For some general remarks about the British TV show “Thriller” and its stylistic setup, please take a look at my first write-up of an episode.

American Robert Stone (George Chakiris) supposedly comes to one of those small English villages for a bit of rest and relaxation and a bit of photographing. He’s rather good at becoming friendly with the people living in the village too, quickly and effectively becoming a part of the local pub culture. But then, in truth he isn’t a tourist, but is working in the investigative business, so he is supposed to be good at these things. At the moment, Robert is on a rather personal mission, looking for his brother who was last seen in this charming little hamlet before he mysteriously vanished.

Robert is quickly drawn to the mysteries of the local manor house (always a good place to look for the creepy stuff when you’re in the UK). As his brother before him, he is very quickly smitten with Dominie Lanceford (Jenny Agutter), who is rich, utterly charming in a gothic romance heroine way, and seems just a little bit eccentric. Her uncle Jonathan (Anton Diffring), on the other hand, while perfectly polite, even friendly, is clearly crazy as the bird of your choice, apparently spending most of his day exhorting the virtues of Edgar Allan Poe to whoever wanders near him. Given the Poe connection, I’m sure there’s nothing problematic at all going to happen at a masked ball, and taking up the offer of some amontillado is certainly not dangerous at all.

But then, one of the charms of this particular episode of thriller is that Robert is completely clueless about Poe’s work – he clearly hasn’t even seen the Corman movies – and rightfully seen as a barbarian not knowing some of the best parts of his own culture by Jonathan. Therefore he is a perfectly valid target for Poe-style shenanigans, as well as the sort of main character whose denseness really makes a Poe reader groan. Detective or not, Robert’s a bit of an idiot, not just for repeating – doppelganger-like, as Poe would approve of – his brother’s doomed love affair but also for not taking a look at Poe’s work even though he quickly starts to think that something is very wrong with the Lancefords.

Despite of its typically low budget, the episode/film, as directed by John Sichel does make quite a bit of the Poe connection, putting effort if not money into the most excellent masked ball as well as the expected premature burial. This is also one of the Thriller entries that spends quite a bit of time in outside locations in its first acts, and so can work in some rather good suspense sequences on actual film stock.

This one’s really rather lovely, with fine early work by Agutter, a cracking gothic villain turn by Diffring, and a plot that clearly enjoys playing with Poe and gothic tropes.

Seven Dead in the Cat’s Eye (1973)

Original title: La morte negli occhi del gatto

Freshly thrown out of school, young Corringa (Jane Birkin) arrives at the MacGrieff family castle in Scotland after years of absence to meet up with her mother Lady Alicia (Dana Ghia) who is in her turn there to visit her sister, Lady Mary (Françoise Christophe). It’s going to be a rather interesting holiday there, for soon Lady Alicia is murdered in what turns out to be only the first in a series of killings, and it more or less falls on Corringa’s shoulders to find the murderer

Alas, Corringa’s not exactly the most capable of heroines, a problem that is further exacerbated by the fact that the castle is populated by more suspicious weirdoes than an Edgar Wallace krimi. There’s Mary, who could really use the money of Alicia’s – or now Corringa’s – side of the family, her son James (Hiram Keller), who is mad, mad, I tell you, James’s pet gorilla James (some dude in the rattiest gorilla suit this side of the 30s), Mary’s lover Dr. Franz (Anton Diffring), a falsifier of death certificates, a liar, and a cheat, Suzanne (Doris Kunstmann), the “French teacher” Franz and Mary hired to seduce/cure James (Freud is blamed) and who is of course actually a lesbian, a priest (Venantino Venantini) so friendly he’s just as suspicious as the rest, and last but not least a bunch of servants of exactly the skulking and secretive type the skulking and secretive rest of the cast deserve. Oh, and the local police inspector is played by Serge Gainsbourg dubbed with a truly frightening “Scottish” accent.

And that’s before we come to the family curse that says inter-familial murder will turn the victim into a vampire, and the adorable fluffy cat present at all of the murders.

Antonio Margheriti’s Seven Dead in the Cat’s Eye is a giallo dressed in the set design and costumes of Italian gothic horror (though the film seems to take place in the 1920s, I guess?), and as a film directed by one of my favourite directors working in two of my favourite genres, you’d expect me to be rather happy with it.

And I sort of am, or rather, I am deeply pleased by the enthusiasm with which the film hits all the beats of its two chosen genres, and even adds a fake gorilla, but I gotta state the obvious for people not-me in emphasising the resulting film isn’t exactly a great one, certainly not as phantasmagorical as Margheriti’s best gothics, and just lacking in the depth these Italian genres generally achieve through a judicious mix of exploitation and style as substance.

Sure, Seven Dead does play around a little with changed mental states, some tiny suggestions of incestual feeling and starts from the deeply giallo-esque foundation that all rich people – perhaps except for certain slightly outsider-ish ones - are decadent shits, but all this doesn’t amount to as much as one might hope for. Instead, the film really is just a series of set pieces dressed in pretty colours and fashionably dubious yet excellent gowns worn by pretty people of dubious acting acumen but excellent build, with some wonderfully garish blood and a cute kitty, and nary a thought spent on anything not having to do with everything looking pretty in a decadent and somewhat morbid way.

If you’re into this sort of thing as I am, Seven Dead is a lot like falling into a very pretty and very comfy bed for a pleasant dream of nudity, random violence and gorilla costumes (of course accompanied by a dramatic Riz Ortolani soundtrack), and that’s a fine state of mind for a movie to produce, I think. However, there’s something not quite quantifiable missing here – perhaps danger, perhaps subversion, or perhaps the nastiness that never was Margheriti’s specialty (even some of his jungle action films are a bit friendly, for their genre); the thing that would turn this from a very pleasant diversion into the giallo/gothic mash up of my dreams.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,horror,gothic,giallo,antonio margheriti,jane birkin,hiram keller,doris kunstmann,anton diffring,serge gainsbourg

In short: The Accursed (1957)

aka The Traitor

A former German resistance group against the Nazis (among them Anton Diffring, Christopher Lee and Jane Griffiths) annually meet at the British country home of their second leader, Colonel Price (Donald Wolfit) to commemorate the murder of their first leader Gerhardt by fascist hands. This year, though, Price has gotten the disquieting information from someone in his employ that one member of the group had betrayed Gerhardt to the Nazis. Who exactly the traitor was is apparently the sort of thing one can’t mention on the phone, so Price’s man will make a personal appearance at the reunion.

Alas, once he arrives, someone knifes the spy in the back before he can tell Price much, so now everyone in the Colonel’s old dark house is under suspicion. Things become mildly more complicated when a British intelligence officer of no consequence and US Major Shane (Robert Bray, the usual third rate American actor this sort of British production hired to be able to sell overseas, for Americans always were constitutionally unable to stomach films not containing Americans, it seems) arrive under a thin pretext. Soon, everyone emotes melodramatically, Shane barks questions, and, if the audience is really lucky, somebody else is going to get murdered.

So yes, it’s another Old Dark House mystery, though one without a gorilla, instead making an attempt to give the usual tale of a bunch of character actors under suspicion of murder in a conveniently small number of sets a bit of a grounding in at the time still very near history. One would be tempted to say “to give it a twist”, but that would afford a more interesting script than the one director Michael McCarthy delivered - you know, one that is actually interested in exploring what the times they had to live throw did with its characters instead of one just using it for a bit of melodramatic shouting.

What we get instead is a competent yet deeply unexciting parade of character actors having the usual melodramatic outbursts, taking on silly accents if they’re not actually continental Europeans, and suffering from being terribly underwritten and just not very interesting. There’s some good lingering by Lee, and Diffring does his usual neurotic shtick, but there’s little of substance in the film for them to get their teeth into. The plot moves slow as molasses, and I found myself drifting away while the film went through 70 long minutes of motions I’ve seen made with more conviction in many earlier films.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,crime,michael mccarthy,donald wolfit,christopher lee,anton diffring,robert bray

The Double Man (1967)

High ranking US intelligence agent Dan Slater (Yul Brynner) has given the education of his son into the hands of his old friend - as far as a man like Dan can have friends - and former intelligence man Frank Wheatley (Clive Revill) who is now running a school in the Austrian part of the Alps. Consequently, and because Dan's a jerk, he hasn't spoken to his teenage son in two years. Still, when news reach Washington that his son has been killed in a skiing accident, Slater takes the next flight to Austria in the conviction somebody murdered his son to get to him.

Slater is just too right with this theory: his son's death is the first step in a needlessly complicated plan of Stasi agent Berthold (Anton Diffring) with the goal of replacing Slater with a surgically enhanced double.

Very, very slowly, Slater begins to investigate the circumstances of his son's death, following clues to a woman named Gina (Britt Ekland) who may be a witness or may be part of communist spy ring. However that may be, Slater's whole investigation is part of Berthold's plan, and every step he takes only leads the US agent further in the direction his enemies want him to go.

On paper, The Double Man is sure-fire satisfaction. A spy film starring a customarily intense Yul Brunner playing an agent who is also an utter bastard with stunted emotional development (or who just has locked away all of his emotions so securely it's questionable if he's even still human), confronted with his failings as a father and falling victim to a complicated conspiracy sounds pretty awesome on paper to me; alas, large parts of the film turn out to be just dull. For too many scenes in the film's first hour nothing much of interest is happening, unless you're very interested in watching a scowling Yul Brunner traipsing through an Austrian ski resort and stalking Britt Ekland; it doesn't help that the bad guys' plans on how to kidnap Slater seem just needlessly complicated, and not in an interesting silly spy movie way (the film's tone is too earnest for that) but in a "how can we fill these twenty minutes without having anything actually happen" kind of way. Frankly, it's just not very interesting at all.

That part of the film - most of its first hour - isn't really helped by the more often than not intrusive soundtrack, nor by the fact that an Austrian ski resort is not a location that provides much visual excitement (and I say that as a lover of snowy landscapes).

Director Franklin J. Schaffner may have directed some memorable films, but The Double Man again shows him to be an unmemorable director, a man whose films are technically perfectly fine, yet which lack any kind of personality; the film might as well have been directed by a robot.

The Double Man gets better in its last thirty minutes, when things start happening that are at least a little exciting. Suddenly, Schaffner even puts the rather dull ski resort and its strange social rituals to somewhat effective use, and the film culminates in a climax that is as cynical as anything I've seen in a spy movie. In how many other spy films, after all, does the hero survive the final confrontation because he didn't even really love his own son, or would at least never admit it?

For my tastes, these final thirty minutes are not quite enough to rescue the movie as a whole. The first hour is just too dull, everything in it too needlessly stretched out to be excused by the climax. I just can't shake the impression that The Double Man's script only ever provided plot for an hour-long movie, and Schaffner decided to just add forty minutes of filler to get the film up to feature length.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,spies,franklin j. schaffner,yul brynner,britt ekland,clive revill,anton diffring,reviews

In short: The Masks of Death (1984)

An elderly Sherlock Holmes (Peter Cushing) returns from his beekeeping duties to help his old associate Inspector MacDonald (Gordon Jackson) - the only policeman he doesn't outright despise, though he still treats him like a rather stupid child - unravel the mysterious case of three seemingly causeless deaths. The only visible marks on the bodies of the victims are expressions of abject fear on their faces.

While Holmes and Watson (John Mills) are somewhat stumped by the case, the Home Secretary (an embarrassingly drunk Ray Milland) urges the detectives to take on the "more important" case of the disappearance of a high ranking German personality from a locked room, which puts the Secretary's secret efforts for a peace treaty with the Germans into peril.

Annoyed as he is, Holmes still follows the call of the motherland and uncovers a conspiracy with possibly dreadful consequences. There is also a the return of Irene Adler (Anne Baxter) to awaken the old woman-hater's curiosity.

 

This short British TV movie reunites Cushing (in his last leading role) and John Mills in roles that weren't exactly new to them to nice effect.

Neither the script by Anthony Hinds nor Roy Ward Bakers very pedestrian direction are anything to write home about, but the two lead actors don't seem to mind. Cushing and Mills (whose Watson is not of the dreaded "bumbling idiot" variant) have a beautiful rapport as old friends who are too much in love with classic British stiffness to be all that emotional, yet whose small gestures and friendly bickering betray their closeness all the same.

Especially Cushing provides some telling acting details that seem to come much more from him than from the script (that just ignores how being old must feel to someone like Holmes) and give a glimpse into Holmes as someone who doesn't take to age well - it hasn't made him any milder and now even provides him with ample opportunity to turn his irritation onto his own growing slowness.

I need hardly mention that the idea of an old Holmes played by Cushing (whose calm professionalism I'd take about egomaniac horror icon Christopher Lee any day) at the end of his career brings with itself a certain melancholy even when the script doesn't do a lot with the concept.

The Masks of Death is the actors' film anyway. Besides the quite wonderful Cushing and Mills, Anne Baxter and Anton Diffring are also doing a lot to let one forget the film's slightness, making it a worthy final bow (and yes, I am ignoring Biggles here, even I have standards) for Cushing.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,in short,mystery,sherlock holmes,peter cushing,roy ward baker,john mills,ray milland,anton diffring,anne baxter