The Mutations

Made in 1974 by Cyclone & Getty Pictures Corp and occasional director Jack Cardiff - more famous for his work as a cinematographer for the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston - 'The Mutations' (also known as 'Freakmaker') is the story of a mad scientist by the name of Professor Nolter (Donald Pleasence) who's attempting to create a plant / animal hybrid by feeding rabbits to a tree and by kidnapping and experimenting on his own students.  Helping him in these endeavours is  freak show owner Mr Lynch played, under heavy prosthetics, by Tom Baker in a very familiar looking outfit and who 2 months and 4 days on from the movie's release make his debut as The Doctor.

Truly it's a bit of a mess and really only composer Basil Kirchin who provides an often beautifully dissonant but also groovily jazzy and filmic score and the various cast members populating the freak show come out of the movie with their heads held high.  Pleasence and Baker are both reliable enough and the fabulous Jill Haworth ('The Haunted House of Horror', 'It!' & 'Tower of Evil') is reduced to a little more than a bit part with the leads being given to the woefully wooden Brad Harris and Julie Ege neither of whom have the charisma or the acting chops to carry the film.

Cardiff isn't much of a director and after a promising start the film begins to lag and the monster when it appears is hysterically bad but beyond the creature feature there's a rather lovely little riff on Tod Browning's masterpiece 'Freaks' that's bursting to get out but never quite manages too.

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Vault of Horror

Directed by the great Roy Ward Baker (Quatermass and the Pit (1967) The Vampire Lovers (UK /  US) and The Monster Club (UK) and numerous episodes of ITV and ITC spy-fi serials including The Avengers, The Saint and The Champions), Vault of Horror was the sixth of the seven portmanteau horror films made by Amicus Productions.  It consists of five stories wrapped in a framing story of five men in an elevator finding themselves trapped in a clean and well lit basement that handily has five chairs and a ready supply of booze.  In the great tradition of these sort of things each man then  tells a story, in this case of a recurring dream.

Unlike other portmanteaus that often featured at least one comedic story in order to lighten the mood, this one's the other way round with 4 of the 5 stories in 'Vault of Horror' being very much played for dark laughs in the estimable EC Comics tradition.  From the lamentable fangs of the bourgeois patrons of the vampire restaurant in 'Midnight Mess' via a fabulous slapstick performance by Glynis Johns as the bullied wife of obsessive neat freak Terry-Thomas in 'The Neat Job' to venerable actor Curt Jurgens wrestling with a rope in 'This Trick’ll Kill You' and Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davies riffing on their characters from the hugely successful 'Doctor...' comedies in 'Bargain in Death'.  The final story, 'Drawn and Quartered', featuring a magnificantly hirsute Tom Baker - soon to be de-bearded and be-scarfed in the role we all know him for - is the exception to the frivolity in a voodoo tale of artistic revenge.

In a slightly odd twist 'Vault of Horror' takes most of it's stories, from the pages of 'Tales from the Crypt' comic book rather than from the one whose name it bears and whilst being eminently watchable and featuring some good performances from some fine actors it is a rather slight and disposable sort of thing which isn't really meant to be an insult.  When I'm in the right sort of mood this is one of my go to movies as for the expenditure of very little effort it provides plenty of smiles.

Buy it here - UK / US - or watch it below.



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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much appreciate a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

The Boy Who Kicked Pigs

Tom Baker
Faber & Faber

This is the story of Robert Caligari - a thoroughly evil 13-year-old who gets his kicks from kicking pigs. After a humiliating episode with a bacon butty, Robert realises just how much he loathes the human race - and his revenge is truly terrible. 

This one has sat on my book shelf for a good long while.  It's sat there for the same reason I didn't buy it for years after it was released.  I didn't want to read it and find out it was a bit shit.  I'm the Tom Baker era type of book geek.  I was 4 when he woke up on the floor of UNIT HQ and 11 when he swan dived off the TV mast.  His is the face I picture when I think of madcap eccentrics and his is the voice I hear when I think of the same.  I really didn't want it to suck. It didn't. Phew!

This fun little novella is entirely Baker.  So entirely him that you hear his voice as you read his words.  His irreverence, his absurdity, his contempt for authority and his anarchic spirit all shine through as he tells the story of the malicious little boy, Robert Caligari, of his misdeeds and his misstep that leads to his grizzly end.