Three Films Make A Post: A hunter never leaves his prey wounded

Wounded (1997): A forest ranger played by Mädchen Amick gets into a pretty typical cat and mouse game with an insane poacher (Adrian Pasdar), after barely surviving a first encounter that left her partner and quite a few other people dead. The only person she trusts is an alcoholic cop (Graham Greene). Directed by Richard Martin in a somewhat slick and impersonal manner, this one really lives from a handful of fine performances. Amick, if you can suspend your disbelief far enough to imagine her as someone who spends most of her time outside, does a very credible job with a character wavering between grief, trauma and anger, Greene is his typical low-key inspired self, and Pasdar does pretty sociopathy and murderous scenery chewing very well indeed.

Structurally, this would probably have needed some extra hook, but still stays a pretty worthwhile hidden gem for the acting ensemble alone.

The Creeping Flesh (1973): This Tigon production is certainly not director Freddie Francis’s best, mostly because the script by Peter Spenceley and Jonathan Rumbold never quite seems to have decided what exactly it wants to do with some very Nigel Kneale-ish ideas, and so does quite a few things, none with much follow-through. But it still has the visual flow and flair typical of Francis even on his bad days, and fun work by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as half-brothers with their own respective brands of mad science. Particularly Lee is spectacularly nasty here once he gets going, contrasting nicely with Cushing’s more sympathetic (yet still horrible) kind of mad scientist.

The film features a complicated and not unproblematic view on mental illness and heredity, particularly when female sexuality comes into the mix, but also quietly suggests that certain male behaviours, even well-meant ones, might be among the root causes of the problem there.

If only the titular Creeping Flesh would make its appearance earlier (or, alternatively, only be a metaphor).

The Summit of the Gods aka Le sommet des dieux (2021): While I’m too much of a coward to ever do any climbing myself, I find mountain climbing and its philosophical and psychological underpinnings endlessly fascinating. Consequently, I find this animated French (though based on a Jiro Taniguchi manga and very Japanese in visual style) film directed by Patrick Imbert about mountain climbing, obsessive men, and the reasons for their obsessions very fascinating indeed.

It uses a flashback structure flawlessly, draws its characters clearly and with surprising complexity, and often looks very beautiful indeed, staging suspense, tragedy and the handful of moments when it wanders off into the slightly surreal all with the same calm capability.

Past Misdeeds: Tales That Witness Madness (1973)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Some middle-aged guy (the body of Jack Hawkins and the awkwardly dubbed voice of Charles Gray) visits the high-tech - by way of what looks a bit like a set from a cost-effective (but awesome) SF TV show – psychiatric clinic of one Professor Tremayne (Donald Pleasence). Tremayne shows off his four favourite patients while mumbling something about how his deep research into the cases and the truth about them will change everything.

This being a British horror anthology movie, with each patient lies a tale. There’s little Paul (Russell Lewis), who has a pair of permanently warring parents (Georgia Brown and Donald Houston), a nice private tutor (David Wood), and an imaginary friend who just happens to be an invisible tiger cleverly named “Mr. Tiger”. The obvious thing happens.

Next up is Timothy Patrick (Peter McEnery). His tale involves the inheritance of quite a few antiques, among them the (soon to be moving) picture of one Uncle Albert (Frank Forsyth) and a penny-farthing that once belonged to the man. The unicylce or the picture or both have telekinetic powers that violently draw Timothy onto the cycle, make him cycle quite hard and transport him into the unicycling past where he takes the place of Albert and repeats a scene or two from a doomed romance (his past adventure love and present day love both being played by Suzy Kendall, the former one in a hilariously melodramatic manner) while being observed by what looks like mud zombie Uncle Albert. Obviously, past and future catastrophe looms.

Patient number three is Brian (Michael Jayston). Brian lives peacefully in a large house in the woods with his mildly irascible –she’s being played by Joan Collins after all – wife/girlfriend Bella until he finds an about human-sized and vaguely woman-shaped piece of a tree in the woods. Obviously, he’s dragging it home and putting it in his living room. Soon, the age-old tale of a man’s affections split between a piece of wood and a woman repeats again.

Last but not least, we witness the tale of Auriol (Kim Novak), a literary agent who’s rather fond of her best client, the “Polynesian” – or maybe “Hawaiian”, going by the whole luau thing - writer Keoki (Leon Lissek, obviously neither Polynesian nor Hawaiian but then it is rather difficult to imagine somebody with the appropriate ethnicity taking on this particular role). Little does she expect that Keoki is in the process of fulfilling the last wish of his dear old mum, namely, to sacrifice a virgin to their favourite god and have a nice cannibalistic get-together afterwards. As luck will have it, Auriol’s daughter Ginny (Mary Tamm) just happens to be a virgin. And wow, isn’t it quite the coincidence Auriol is actually planning a little luau for him! Accidental inter-family cannibalism just might ensue.

As the observant reader might have noticed, the stories contained in this not Amicus produced - despite being directed by dear old Freddie Francis and featuring a structure and actors you might know all too well from the Amicus films - British horror anthology are utter, preposterous tosh, ending on notes as obvious as moonlight, while still managing to be flat-out crazy.

If you’re looking for something moody, thoughtful or just vaguely believable, you’ve come to the wrong film. Like a lot of these anthologies, this one’s a horror comic made flesh, but – apart from tale number four – it’s less EC style horror than the sort of thing Charlton Comics would have put out in comics code times (with perhaps a bit more blood than would have been allowed there on screen), stuff that at the best of times distracts from how pedestrian it should be by being outright crazy. Which is pretty much exactly what Tales That Witness Madness does after the somewhat useless first story, adding utterly peculiar elements to the stories that would seem ill-advised in a film actually out to scare its audience. Seriously, a haunted penny-farthing? And let’s not even talk about the whole of story number three, which just might be one of the major achievements of human arts.

Talking of ill-advised, it is rather difficult not to realize – even if you pretend very hard not to notice - how much of a racist fever dream the film’s last tale is, with its evil brown people killing a white virgin and feeding her to her own mother, and there’s really nothing I can find to excuse it, barely anything to explain it, so if that sort of thing offends you (and good on you), you’ll probably loathe the rest of the film for it, too, I suppose. On the other hand, I found this tale so preposterous and silly in tone while also being gloriously lurid I couldn’t help but enjoy it more than a little, despite it being racist claptrap. It’s just very difficult for me to look at this sort of thing (particularly in a film made more than forty years ago) and take it seriously enough to get angry or even very annoyed at the dead people responsible; not that I approve of it, mind you, nor would I want to see any contemporary movie that descends into these depths.

Be that as it may, Francis is pretty much the ideal director for this whole beautiful mess, combining his usual wonderful sense of visual style with the appropriate shamelessness to actually bring these deeply stupid tales to glowing life. Francis has just the right sense for movement and colour to turn this into a moving comic strip, clearly realizing that attempting to add class to this stuff would be a fool’s errand and opting for being as lurid and peculiar as possible, a task he fulfils with aplomb (as well as, one assumes, on time and on a not very large budget). Despite being quite so silly, the film also shows a wonderful sense of the telling (yet weird) detail that is best demonstrated by how the tree thing in tale number three is a bit more shaped like a woman in every scene, until the rip-roaring denouement that suggests a piece of a tree is preferable to poor Joan Collins.


Clearly, it pays off putting effort even into the silliest things.

Torture Garden (1967)

After visiting his torture-based mobile cabinet of wax that’s apparently part of a fairground sideshow, the proprietor, one Dr Diabolo (Burgess Meredith), invites five of his customers (Michael Bryant, Beverly Adams, Barbara Ewing, Jack Palance and Michael Ripper, who confusingly enough does not seem to play an innkeeper) to a very special show. There, he presents warnings of possible futures where they do evil by getting them to stare at the shears of a figure of Atropos. Since this is an Amicus anthology movie, every vision makes one segment of the movie.

First up is “Enoch”, in which something that presents as a cat develops a rather unholy influence on a young would-be playboy who basically murdered his uncle.

Then follows “Terror Over Hollywood”, in which we learn the rather boring secret that keeps certain Hollywood stars seemingly immortal. No, it’s not cosmetic surgery or the injection of snake toxins, silly!

Next up is “Mr. Steinway”, concerning that most classic of love triangle between Man, Woman and Grand Piano.

We finish up on “The Man Who Collected Poe”, where the greatest of all Poe collectors (Peter Cushing) meets a rather too enthusiastic sharer (Jack Palance) in his interest.

Poor Michael Ripper doesn’t actually get his own segment but is used to close the framing story. You’ll never guess who Dr Diabolo actually is (if you are very, very slow)!

As friends of weird fiction and literary horror will probably have noticed (if you didn’t simply know already), the segments of this film directed by the great Freddie Francis are all based on stories by the equally great Robert Bloch (who did so much more than just write the novel Hitchock’s Psycho is based on). In fact, this is one of the three Amicus anthology films scripted by Bloch himself. So it’s no surprise it is full of the man’s interest in classic supernatural authors as well as (usually aberrant) psychology, with a healthy dose of the macabre added for good measure.

Quality-wise, this isn’t my favourite of the Bloch/Amicus bunch (that would obviously be Asylum), but it does have quite a bit to recommend it. Well, “Terror Over Hollywood” is just bland, taking way too much time to come to a not terribly interesting or shocking ending, but every anthology needs to have one single bad entry at least. “Enoch” provides Francis with some nice opportunities for creating a creepy, gothic-style mood; this is also one of the few films I know which feature an evil cat the filmmakers actually manage to make look rather sinister.

“Mr. Steinway” works best if you treat it as a work of black humour of the most sardonic type; its psychological basis is a bit too obvious and so outdated it weakens the whole thing considerably if you take it too seriously. On the other hand, a pianist having an unhealthy connection to his supernaturally endowed instrument certainly isn’t without resonance.

The last one’s the greatest treasure here, though, and “The Man Who Collected Poe” doesn’t just have an excellent joke in its title, but also features a particularly huge dose of Francis’s patented gothic mood – this time aiming for a heated version of the same very fitting to the tale’s Poe theme – and a great outing by Jack Palance. Seeing Palance orgasmically (I’m not even sure that’s a metaphor) rubbing himself against all sorts of Poe paraphernalia is quite the thing, as grotesquely funny as it is creepy. Even better is the script’s emphasis on his obsession with Poe and all thing weird being so great, he’d be perfectly willing to die for it, if it only provides him with a kind of total communion with his love.


This final segment alone, in combination with Meredith’s most excellent mugging as the Devil (spoiler?), would be worth the entry, but the rest of the film, “Hollywood” excepted, really isn’t bad at all either to watch on a rainy night.

Past Misdeeds: The Ghoul (1975)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Warning: this can't help but contain some structural spoilers and more knowledge about the fate of one or two characters than some readers may wish to have.

It's the more or less roaring twenties somewhere in England. Members of a party of (movie)-young upperclass people decide that a little car race would be a fun distraction, or rather, Daphne (Veronica Carlson), the most courageous of the bunch does and gets her friends Geoffrey (Ian McCulloch), Billy (Stewart Bevan), and Billy's sister Angela (Alexandra Bastedo) to indulge her. Soon, two adorable cars are racing through the increasingly foggy countryside, though Daphne and Billy (Daphne's driving, of course) are soon lost way out in front of their friends, because Angela has Geoffrey park for a bit so she can vomit. Yes, she's going to be that kind of heroine.

Daphne and Billy end up somewhere in the deepest, darkest part of the countryside, without fuel. Because she's that kind of girl, Daphne doesn't wait out Billy's aimless tromp in search of the 20's middle of nowhere British version of a gas station. First, she stumbles into the arms of a creepy guy named Tom (a young John Hurt, effectively aiming for the kind of creepiness Klaus Kinski specialized in when doing horror, krimi, etc) who'd really rather keep her in his creepy guy hut, but after a well-applied knee to the groin, she comes upon the manor of the former priest Dr. Lawrence (Peter Cushing). At first, Lawrence, who lives alone with his Indian housekeeper Ayah (Gwen "Secretly Hindu" Watford) and a gardener who will later turn out to be Tom, seems eminently helpful and friendly, insisting on Daphne staying at least until the dangerous fog has lifted like a sweet, if sad, old gentleman.

The longer Daphne stays, the clearer it becomes to her that something is not right at all in the mansion - and she doesn't even know that Tom will murder Billy rather sooner than later. Lawrence tells her a rather disturbing story about himself, his son, and his late wife becoming part of a depraved (says he) cult in India, which doesn't seem to have ended so well for anyone involved. Ayah acts secretive and threatening, and really, it seems as if Lawrence doesn't want his young guest to leave at all. It's all enough to even make a rather worldly and tough young woman like Daphne uncomfortable. But will she be uncomfortable enough to safe her from the horrible (or was it horribly obvious?) secret hidden in the attic?

For my tastes, Tyburn Production's The Ghoul is a rather underrated film. At least, I think it is much better than general opinion made me suspect it to be. My love for the Hammer movies Tyburn's owner Kevin Francis (son of Freddie, who directed The Ghoul) clearly adored may influence my opinion there a bit, of course, and it surely doesn't hurt the film that it was directed by an old Hammer hand in an atmospheric style quite close to the cheaper side of Hammer's films, written by an old and rather important Hammer player in Anthony Hinds, and features the great (not just) Hammer star Peter Cushing. However, even seen without nostalgic glasses - and I have seen too many bad films connected to the people involved to have any illusions concerning their perfection - I think the film has quite a bit going for it, certainly enough to make it well worth the effort tracking it down and the time watching it (repeatedly, if you're me).

One of the film's main attractions is clearly the fine acting ensemble. As already mentioned, John Hurt does an excellent Klaus Kinski impression while also later using the opportunity the script gives him to lift the mask of the creepy crazy guy for a scene or two and give some hints about why he is the creepy crazy person he is. I hardly think it's an accident it's connected to the Great War in a film where nearly everything the characters say or do seems influenced (perhaps caused) by it or by the British colonial past, as in the case of Cushing's Lawrence.

Cushing's performance for its part feels nearly painfully emotional to me. Cushing quite obviously puts some of the very real pain about the loss of his own wife into the role of Lawrence, which at times makes for a rather uncomfortable watch in the context of what is a lurid (in an at least partly old-fashioned way) horror movie in a tradition that doesn't usually involve feelings this raw. Apart from this aspect, Cushing provides Lawrence with a perfect mixture of dignity, raw nerviness and sadness that alone would make The Ghoul well worth watching.

Veronica Carlson's Daphne is a rather surprising female character for a film that models itself on the Hammer tradition in that she is an actual character with the same complexity and agency as the male characters possess, or really, more of it than at least her peers Billy and Geoffrey show. Not that any of it saves her, of course, but where this could usually quite easily be interpreted as Daphne being punished for her transgression of not knowing a woman's supposed place, The Ghoul turns out to be rather more of a mid-70s movie than you'd expect, for Geoffrey, who would be the nominal romantic lead in an actual Hammer movie (and still boring as hell) ends up just as badly as Daphne does - after the film gives him twenty minutes or so to give off ex-military upperclass officer bluster that very pointedly turns out to be no help at all in the end.

Angela, the film's mandatory survivor, may be as far away from a final girl as is imaginable. Consequently she doesn't find any hidden inner strength to help her survive in the end but is just lucky that a drama that begun a long time ago just picks a good moment to finally end. The film makes it quite clear this isn't godly intervention caused by Angela's virtue but sheer luck on her part, putting The Ghoul firmly into the field of 70s horror, where following society's rules won't save you.

The Ghoul is rather clever that way, for while it has obvious aspirations at being a Hammer-style horror film it actually works more as a collision of classic British Hammer-style horror with a more contemporary approach to terror, the sort of thing I wish Hammer had attempted themselves as consequently as it is done here. There are even several lines where Cushing states that these "modern times" (nominally the 20s) are rather confusing for him. One can't help but think Francis and Hinds felt the same but decided (for once) to build this confusion into the heart of their film.

And while the plot itself, with its not unproblematic mixture of post-colonial guilt and pulpy ideas about India, and its rather slow pace, might be The Ghoul's big weakness, Hinds does another interesting thing with the plotting, namely using his old Hammer-colleague Jimmy Sangster's favourite plotting trick taken from Psycho where a film's seeming protagonist turns out to not live through its first half. Which would, now that I think about it, then make Geoffrey the private detective, but I might be reading too much into it here.


In any case, The Ghoul is a film very much worth anyone's time, full of interesting ideas, moody moments, and the kind of luridness that must have looked rather old-fashioned in 1975 but can be much easier appreciated for what it is now, when the more contemporary luridness of 1975 looks just as old-fashioned, colliding with an ideological approach very much of its time.

Past Misdeeds: They Came From Beyond Space (1967)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


A number of meteors crashes onto a field belonging to a farm in Cornwall. It's the most curious thing though - usually, meteors don't fly in a V-formation. The UK government thinks the phenomenon requires investigation and decides to send a group of scientists lead by an astronomer with a special interest in the discovery of extraterrestrial life, Dr. Curtis Temple (Robert Hutton), to Cornwall.

There is a tiny problem, though: Temple's love for vintage cars (slightly prefiguring the Third Doctor, like some of the film's tone, if you ask me) has resulted in an accident some months ago that left the astronomer with a silver plate in his head, and - at least that's the opinion of his doctor - still too sick to work away from home, even though he'll act as fit as James Bond throughout the movie. We all know about the dangerous wilds of Cornwall, far away from civilization, after all.

So there's nothing to it than to send Temple's colleague and girlfriend, Lee Mason (Jennifer Jayne) to lead the expedition and send all pertinent data up to Temple.

Alas, things at the crash site fastly become problematic. The meteorites contain alien consciousnesses that take over the scientists, break off all contact with the outside world and slowly begin to infiltrate a close-by village too (starting with the local banker, of course, as if that were necessary). Then, the aliens begin to requisition large amounts of building materials and weapons through government channels.

After a time without news, Temple, as well as someone in government, realizes that something's not right at all. An attempt by the aliens to take the astronomer over too failing thanks to that practical silver plate helps Temple's thought processes there. Temple's investigations in the village and around the crash site turn up curious developments: it's not just that the scientists and the dozens of people they have taken on are obviously not themselves anymore, they have built an underground lair all the better to be able to shoot rockets to the moon. Fortunately, Temple is one of those two-fisted scientists from the 50s, and his astonishing abilities (yeah, I know, he must have survived World War II, but how many astronomers really were astonishing commandos and still were when they hit middle-age?) at fistfighting, shooting, and escaping from cells will be very helpful in thwarting the plans of the aliens and their leader - the Master of the Moon (Michael Gough). Not even a strange alien illness that is also part of the aliens' overcomplicated plan can touch Temple; I suspect the illness is afraid to be infected by Hutton's well-known right-wing real life opinions about everything.

Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make a 50s alien invasion movie in 1967. This time around, much-kicked – when it comes to non-anthology movies - Hammer rivals Amicus are throwing their shoestring budget at that old stalwart of British cinema, the alien invasion movie with the American no-name actor in the lead role. One suspects Quatermass and the Pit might have had something to do with that decision, though They Came counters the complexity and intelligence of the Quatermass approach to SF with a tale of a properly dumb alien invasion with a badly delivered 60s peace and love twist at the end that wants me to believe that the two-fisted American scientist whose adventures we have witnessed up to the point is willing to shake hands with aliens who wanted to kill him or make him their slave because they say they now think better of it - twice. Let's not even talk about these aliens' idea of secrecy (or the idea of the film's UK government about how a quarantine works; hint: generally, letting people come and go as they please isn't a part of it).

This may sound as if I were rather dissatisfied with They Came, but nothing could be further from the truth. The alien invasion plot may be dumb, it is however dumb in the most delightful manner, easily convincing me that I may not live in a world where this sort of plan would sound logical, but really rather would. Not only are the aliens' plans and the film's hero - who reminds me of a more conservative version of one of these non-professional Eurospy movie protagonists - a delightfully groovy age version of 50s traditions (a total improvement on the model, obviously), the way to thwart them is just as beautifully insane, seeing as it consists of knocking one's possessed girlfriend out, kidnapping her, and using her as a test object while working on a (of course very silly looking) anti-alien-possession helmet, even sillier alien detection goggles and alien re-possession methods with a friendly scientist (Zia Mohyeddin) who just happens to live somewhere in the country close-by, and also owns many silver trophies and as well as utilities to melt metal. In an especially pleasant development that helpful man is a Pakistani Englishman, who is not played as a comical figure, doesn't have to die to prove how evil the bad guys are, and will turn out to be save-the-day-competent. Given his role, and how competent Lee is allowed to be once she's not under alien control anymore, it's pretty obvious this is a film that may love to indulge in silliness for silliness' sake but that also has a clear idea of which parts of his 50s models just don't cut it anymore in 1967.

When people - though too few of them do - talk about They Came's special effects, they unfailingly mention their quality to be comparable to contemporary Doctor Who (this was the time of the Second Doctor Patrick Troughton, if you're not quite up on important historical dates). That's an old chestnut when talking about British SF cinema, yet in this case it is indeed true. Consequently, the effects' execution has more than just a whiff of cardboard and spit, but it also shares the other, more important part of the Doctor's legacy, a decidedly British visual imagination that makes up for the unavoidable cheapness and threadbareness. My favourite set piece is the yellow and black striped elevator that sits right inside a typical British country home, exemplifying at once the loving absurdity and the Britishness (for wont of a better word) of the film's production design. It's the mix of the local and the strange that gets me every time.

What the Doctor generally didn't have at the time (though the show did have some good ones) were directors quite like They Came's Freddie Francis. Francis, veteran that he was, was someone seemingly unable to not put real effort even into his cheapest and silliest films, and he works his magic here too, milking every possibility to turn the cheap yet creative sets and the landscape of the locations into a cheap pop art dream that feels saturated with colours even when the surroundings are rather brown more often than not, and that builds visual interest even from the smallest thing.

The movie's pop art feel is even further strengthened by James Stevens's score that belongs to the jazzy swinging kind you often find in Eurospy movies, though it has a peculiar habit to just fall into an unending series of drum rolls when Hutton punches people in the face.


The cheap pop art feel of, well, everything about They Came From Beyond Space suggests a film made to treat the old-fashioned tropes of the 50s alien invasion movie with the sensibilities that produced the Eurospy movie. In a wonderful turn of event, Francis's movie actually succeeds at that mission, for words like "groovy" and "awesome" come to my mind quite naturally when I think about it.

Some shouting about Trog (1970)

Thrill to the ratty upper half of one of the ape man costumes from Kubrick’s 2001 being worn by a big guy who didn’t fit in the rest of it! Enjoy the thought of the costume department not giving a crap about the way this looks and not doing anything with the rest of his body! Delight in Joan Crawford’s final movie role, given drunk, spouting dialogue that would be bad enough spoken by an actress who actually understands what her lines are supposed to mean instead of just reading from the script (or, I’d not be surprised to learn, from cue cards)!

Cry at the sight of Crawford testing out state of art (of 1970) children’s toys on said guy in the ape costume half! Cry some more when the film has Trog (as is ape guy’s name) project his stone age memories onto a screen! Or rather, cry when it’s exactly the recycled special effects footage you now imagine it is! Wonder at Michael Gough hysterically overacting the most obnoxious prick ever put to screen while somehow managing not to break down laughing and still breaking his own overacting record!

Break down laughing when the film puts on its serious hat with trial scenes that somewhat sabotage the film’s attempts at serious messaging by being utterly ridiculous, and containing particularly embarrassing/sad parts of Crawford’s performance! Really lose it when SCIENCE is done!

And have a little think about what (house favourite) director Freddie Francis (as well as the script writers and producer Herman Cohen) might have been thinking when making this one!

Possibly be annoyed by my writing style, but that’s the only way to talk about Trog I know!

On ExB: Tales That Witness Madness (1973)

Amicus wasn’t the only company making British horror anthology movies during the 70s, of course. Where there’s money to be made, there’s an imitator, particularly if said imitator can just hire a lot of the same people in front of and behind the camera.

Read all about how this particular Freddie Francis film turned out over at my column on the penny-farthing-riding website for the tasteful set, Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,horror,freddie francis,kim novak,donald pleasence,joan collins,suzy kendall

On ExB: The Ghoul (1975)

Many of the people working in front of or behind the camera of Hammer Studios did have rather a hard time arriving in the 70s, with the well-known dire consequences for Hammer, and possibly British horror of the time as a whole.

From time to time, though, Hammer alumni did some rather interesting things by letting their old-fashioned style collide with some new ideas. Case in point is The Ghoul, a film that unites Freddie Francis, Anthony Hinds and the great Peter Cushing in a much more worthwhile way than I expected. Read more about it in my newest column at Exploder Button!

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,other places,freddie francis,peter cushing,john hurt,veronica carlson

On WTF: They Came From Beyond Space (1967)

This piece of 50s alien invasion cinema re-thought as 60s pop art excellence is inexplicably unloved by large parts of the cult movie public, despite it being directed by the great Freddie Francis and being rather fantastic.

In this week's column on WTF-Film, I attempt to do my part to put things right for what should by all rights be a fan favourite.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,sf,freddie francis,robert hutton,jennifer jayne,zia mohyeddin,michael gough,other places

Craze (1974)

London antiques dealer Neal Mottram (Jack Palance) is in financial trouble, with creditors and the IRS breathing down his neck.

Neal also just happens to be the leader of a small cult that worships the idol of a demon named Chuku (or something of that sort) he keeps in his cellar. Neal's situation begins to improve when he has an altercation with a former member of his coven and accidentally pushes her onto the (not very spiky looking) trident the idol carries. Neal - not the sanest of men - decides to interpret the woman's death as a blood sacrifice, rolls up the dead body in a carpet and throws it in the Thames.

A bit later, Neal suddenly finds a secret drawer full of gold coins that should take care of his most dire financial troubles. Clearly, it's Chuku's reward for the sacrifice!

With this sure sign of godly intervention in hand, it does not take long until Neal loses it completely and decides to sacrifice more women to satisfy Chuku. Neal's live-in "associate" Ronnie (Martin Potter), a young man whom the antiques dealer took in from the street where he was working as a (gay) prostitute, soon enough cops to what his boss is doing, but a weird mixture of loyalty and what one assumes - though the film does never actually show it - must be at least a part-time physical relationship between the men, possibly something more romantic, keeps him in line while Neal continues killing.

The police (with a short appearance by Trevor Howard and a young David Warbeck) are soon on Neal's case.Yet even though the antiques dealer acts as suspiciously as humanly possible, the cops can't prove anything. That may have something to do with the fact that the leader of the investigation, Sergeant Wall (Michael Jayston), seem more used to letting his fists speak than to the actual investigation of crimes. Still, Neal's luck (or Chuku's blessing) can't hold out forever.

Craze is a minor film in the body of work of the great Freddie Francis (here working for producer and writer Herman Cohen) that is quite below much of the director's best work in quality, but that functions perfectly well as a time capsule of early 70s London as seen through the eyes of the elderly.

Consequently, the film is full of everything you expect from the first half of the 70s: blinding fashion (and blinding wallpapers), random occult nonsense that tries to give itself an "exotic" sheen, cops who may have once heard of civil rights, awkward sex scenes (they do after all include Jack Palance as an irresistible ladies' man, though his character seems to assume that's Chuku's - big scriptwriter in the cellar that he is - blessing too and so on. These pleasures/eyesores all come together into a thick miasma of the mood of the film's time.

As a time capsule, Craze is highly entertaining, and really pretty brilliant; as a horror film, it's okay when one has a tolerance for middling genre pieces whose strengths don't have much to do with them being horror films. Francis was incapable to shoot a bad looking movie, as he again and again demonstrates through his lovely eye for visual detail here, yet the director was well capable of making a film that just doesn't do much of interest when it comes to its actual storyline. The plot meanders a bit too much, the murders tend to the absurd, yet are never absurd enough to get Craze into the zone of irreality, and most of the interesting thematic avenues are never really explored. There's a bit of subtext in the movie that could lead to one interpreting Palance's murders as his attempt to deny his attraction to Ronnie, but honestly, that's stretching interpretational freedom in the manner of Mister Fantastic.

So what's left when one tries to watch Craze as a horror film are scenes of Jack Palance mugging, Jack Palance killing women, some very brightly coloured blood, and Jack Palance's bare chest. That would leave the film barely watchable in a "point and laugh" sort of way, but for me, there's something utterly irresistible about a film so desperately trying to be part of its time, and to be pop. I do doubt Francis or Cohen actually understood contemporary pop culture in the least, but that's part of the fun of the whole affair.

 

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