Horror Hospital (1973)

aka The Computer Killers

After witnessing a cold open in which a gentleman we’ll quickly enough learn is Dr Christian Storm (Michael Gough) and his little person assistant Frederick (Skip Martin) murder two people with the help of a car carrying practical in-built blades for beheading as well as baskets that can magically catch the flying heads, we meet our main protagonist.

Having been punched out of his band, obnoxious Jason Jones (Robin Askwith) decides he needs a bit of a break from life. Signing up with a shady travel agency specialized on his particular demographic called “Hairy Holidays” – run by one Mr Pollack (Dennis Price) – our hero (ahem) books a few days in the health clinic of – wouldn’t you know it – Dr Storm, mostly in the hopes of encountering attractive “birds”. As fate will have  it, Jason has a very special meet-cute with Judy Peters (Vanessa Shaw), which includes very early 70s moments of flirting like our hero explaining that he’s not going to rape Judy. Romance is in the air, clearly, when she offers him cheese anyway.

Judy just happens to be on her way to the very same clinic as Jason to meet her Auntie Harris (Ellen Pollock) for the first time. There’s some bad family blood about the aunt’s earlier career as a brothel owner, apparently.

Once the quick couple arrive at the clinic, the place turns out to be rather strange: auntie really rather wouldn’t have Judy there at all for mysterious reasons; the place’s little person factotum seems just a wee bit eccentric; there are bedrooms that look as bloody as slaughterhouses; and Dr Storm is Michael Gough doing his best Bela Lugosi. And that’s before our heroes meet the other guests - all of them very, very quiet, pasty looking, with nasty scars on their heads, and disturbingly happy to carry out Storm’s every order.

Young people, Storm is sure, need a strong hand to guide them, preferably his own, so Jason and Judy are going to have an interesting, perhaps not as healthy as advertised, time there.

Anthony Balch’s Horror Hospital has for a long time been a rather unseen and definitely undervalued little film. Apart from the vagaries of copyright and licensing deals, this may very well have something to do with the film’s very peculiar style that mixes elements of British exploitative horror (think Pete Walker or Norman J. Warren) with weird, on the cheap imagination and a sense of humour that tends to the weird parodic reversal and to black humour so dry, it will not always be clear to everyone watching if they are supposed to laugh at any given detail.

Though, given the film’s general interest in the specific imaginative detail, I’m rather sure the filmmakers have put a surprising degree of thought into nearly everything we see. Clearly, on this set, doing things on the cheap was no excuse for doing things badly or sloppily, so the resulting film is full of those peculiar little moments and details that at once manage to fulfil the quota of weird awesomeness we wish for from the more exploitative side of the movie business but also makes fun of some of these expectations – often at the same time.

If this is going to charm any given viewer and amuse them as much as Horror Hospital does me will most certainly hang on: a) said viewer’s love for 70s British exploitation horror, b) their love for very, very dry humour and c) if they needed the film’s very special limousine in their lives.

Or, come to think of it, if they believe the romantic lead walking into the mandatory shower sex scene wearing the a knight’s helmet is very funny and strange indeed, or just silly and stupid. If you do find this as funny as I do, you’ll also enjoy watching Skip Martin yet again nearly becoming the hero of a film (and yes, we get a meta joke about that) after stealing at least half of the scenes he is in by perfect delivery of dry jokes and asides, and Michael Gough chewing scenery in a very specific way that is supposedly (okay, I believe it) built on Bela Lugosi’s poverty row performances.

It’s that kind of film, and I love it for it.

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.

Past Misdeeds: Black Zoo (1963)

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.


Superficially, Michael Conrad (Michael Gough) leads a charmed life. He is the owner of a small, yet successful private zoo in Los Angeles, where he can live out his love for animals by holding a lot of big cats in way too small cages and feeding a guy in a gorilla suit. By night, the lions, tigers, panther and cheetahs are chilling in Michael's living room while he plays the organ for them. Curiously, seeing as he's obviously quite mad, Michael isn't living alone with his animals. He is married to chimp trainer Edna (Jeanne Cooper). She copes with Michael's erratic and abuse behaviour (he's one of those "I hit you but it won't happen again until it of course happens again and again" types) with the help of lots of booze.

Then there's Michael's mute assistant Carl (Rod Lauren). The zoo owner has had the young man under his thumb for years, systematically destroying his self respect to have a better class of helper than the mere hired help like his animal-hating zoo keeper Joe (Elisha Cook Jr.) can offer.

Of course, this very particular idyll can't last forever. Various people are real and imagined threats to Michael's lifestyle, and the zoo owner deals with these threats by letting his very cooperative animal pals loose on them, exceedingly puzzling the hilariously incompetent police with his murders.

Things come to a climax when Edna realizes how mad her husband truly is, and packs up her chimps and Carl and tries to leave.

Robert Gordon's Black Zoo is the classic case of a film that has all the elements that could make a thriller digging deep into the messed-up relationships and power imbalances in a deeply dysfunctional family by way of not exactly healthy psychology but instead applies all its energy to being as silly as possible.

Although it's easy enough to be disappointed by Gordon's - or producer and writer Herman Cohen's - decision not to make a film that's as much in the vein of Peeping Tom or Psycho as the better written parts of the script pretend it to be, the film's utter silliness does make it practically impossible not to be entertained by it. It all starts out innocent enough, if Michael Gough throwing pointed gazes around as if he were a basilisk is one's idea of innocence, at least. But before long, the film juxtaposes psycho thriller typical scenes about Michael Gough being a jerk to everyone close to him with scenes of a lot of big cats our villainous protagonist calls his children looking very relaxed on couches and settees in his living room (there's a big painting of lions on the wall, of course) while their buddy Mike creates an unholy racket on his organ.

And that's before the film presents us with a dignified big cat burial with the whole cat gang in attendance, again chilling very relaxed on a blue-lit, foggy graveyard set right out of a gothic horror movie, listening to a heartfelt speech by Gough about the deceased's particular kitty virtues.

Another moment of great hilarity follows when our hero visits the multi-cultural animal-lover cult he is a member of (which I didn't mention in the little synopsis because it has no import at all on the film's plot). There, the soul of his dead kitten is transferred to an adorable tiger cub by a high priest wearing the upper half of a dead tiger on his head (that is how true animal idolators dress) while a shirtless black guy plays the bongo and the audience mumbles rhythmically. In one of the greatest moments of acting I have ever had the joy to witness, Gough manages to keep not just a straight face throughout the scene, but one that is so full of fake intense emotion I found myself riveted and laughing tears at the very same time.

There's also an awesome swirly flashback late in the movie that explains Carl's origin story, a final battle to the death in the rain that would be dramatic and poignant if not for all the awesome nonsense that happens before, a gorilla costume that looks really good if you can overlook the fact that it doesn't look like a gorilla at all, and oh so much intense, overly dramatic ACTING by Cooper and Gough, who both manage to treat their roles with total, unwinking earnestness like the true professionals they are.

Surprisingly, given the usual budgetary standards of Cohen productions, the tenor of the script, and director Gordon's nature as typical hired gun director, all this intense, ridiculous beauty is presented with a degree of style that came unexpected to me until I realized that Black Zoo's director of photography is Floyd Crosby. Crosby was of course also the cinematographer of most of Roger Corman's best gothic horror films (and of some other fine budget productions too). His use of contrasting colours - just look at the interplay of deep blues and reds in some of the film's silliest yet most effective scenes - work exceedingly well with William Glasgow's (himself a man with an interesting filmography) more carefully realized art direction, creating a style for the film which may not be as gloriously dream-like and artificial as that of the best Corman productions of the time, but that still lifts the ridiculous up towards the sublime more than once. In fact, the sillier the given scene, the more creative energy the crew seems to have invested in its look, with the burial and the organ playing scenes ending up as particular aesthetic high points.


It's this obvious effort everyone involved put towards a script that really doesn't deserve it that explains Black Zoo's particular charm for me. I see in this not just a demonstration of dogged professionalism, but the result of a group of filmmakers putting everything they have into their cheap drive-in movie fodder instead of just phoning it in. It is this on-screen enthusiasm that helped turn every moment where I should have been laughing at the film into one where I was laughing with it, congratulating it on a job well done.

Konga (1961)

Biologist Dr. Decker (Michael Gough) was lost in the jungles of Uganda for over a year following an airplane explosion. When he makes a surprise return in England, he brings with him a cute little baby chimp named Konga, and an exquisite line of speechifying about how many textbooks will have to be rewritten once he reveals all he has found out in Uganda. But it’s not time yet, of course.

Turns out, his house keeper, secretary, assistant and unofficial (we are British, after all) girlfriend Margaret (Margo Johns) quickly learns, Decker has befriended a witch doctor who provided him with valuable insight into a much closer relationship between plants and animals than science generally suggests, as well as ways to use this knowledge to induce certain genetic changes. Decker goes on to prove this by harvesting parts of the huge, incredibly fast growing flesh-eating plants he has brought with him from Uganda, mixing them with some hypnotic seeds into a nice green fluid (all mad science fluids are green, as you know) and injecting Konga with it.

At first, this turns baby Konga into a full-grown chimpanzee, but of course, that’s not enough for long. After a heated confrontation with the deacon of the university where Decker teaches when he’s not obsessed with growth (GROWTH!), Konga gets his next shot, which doesn’t turn him into an even larger chimp but into a dude in gorilla costume. SCIENCE! Decker then uses Konga to get rid of the deacon. This is – of course! – only the first murder the ex-chimp will have to commit for Decker. Margaret cops to the whole “my boss/boyfriend murders people with a gorilla” thing rather quickly, but as long as Decker is willing to make an honest woman out of her, a bit of mad science murder is quite alright with her.

That is, until Decker decides he’d rather have a younger, blonder and more pneumatically-breasted model of an assistant instead of Margaret.

A Hammer movie, this British monster movie directed by John Lemont certainly isn’t. In fact, it’s as close to the ideals of the US monster movie as British films got at the time. However, it does display rather more temperament than comparable US – and UK productions, to be fair – at the time of its making usually did. I’d be tempted to call the film’s approach “pop art” even though it is certainly a few years early for that sort of thing in genre cinema. A pioneering effort in making a monster movie for the UK teenager? Gosh, now I’m making Konga sound good when it is actually just so unapologetically batshit insane it turns out to be highly entertaining.

This film does have everything you might want from a monster movie, after all: Michael Gough vigorously overacting his way through dialogue reaching from the absurd to the ridiculous, teenagers who act as if they were actually made out of wood, a mad scientist who not only proves his mettle by his ranting and raving but also by shooting his poor cat, much new knowledge about the mating rituals of mad scientists (which include much ranting, surprisingly enough), a gorilla suit meant to represent a chimp, and for the finale the most polite giant monster rampage imaginable (as if the film makers were Canadian, even) that replaces Fay Wray with Michael Gough and a Michael Gough doll. It is rather glorious.

It is particularly so because Lemont breaks various of the monster movie rules of his time by sparing us the square-jawed heroes (or indeed any boring sympathetic characters, unless you count the wooden teens) and even better, by pacing the film in such a way that things aren’t only starting to happen forty minutes in. Indeed, this is certainly among the paciest monster movies of its era made outside Japan, with little time spent on anything that might bore an audience that really came to see a giant ape. Okay, “giant” the ape only becomes for the final non-rampage, but that sort of things is not much of a problem when the non-giant ape scenes are as entertaining as they are here.

But what valuable lesson can the film teach us? Mad scientists should keep romance between themselves and their killer apes!

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 WTF: Black Zoo (1963)

Animals - they're so much better than people, right? That's what crazy zoo owner Michael Gough thinks, too, and if people threaten what he loves, his ani-pals help him out with gusto.

In this week's column on WTF-Film, you'll find me marvelling at the bizarre and ridiculous wonders of Black Zoo.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,other places,horror,robert gordon,michael gough,jeanne cooper,rod lauren,virginia grey,elisha cook jr

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