Nothing but the Night (1972)

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS**

Adults use a lot of rather creepy threats to keep children in line.  “The boogeyman will get you.”  “You’ll shoot your eye out.”  “You’ll go blind if you keep that up.”  My grandmother used to say she’d put me outside for the gypsies if I didn’t behave.  True to her word, one night she did, in fact, lock me out of her house at night, and I was left to wait (for what felt like hours but was likely only a few minutes) in sheer terror for the gypsies to snatch me up.  I swore I could hear the clip-clop of their horses’ hooves (no doubt engulfed in the very flames of Hell) on the then-brick road leading to her place.  Needless to say, I was scared shitless but pretty well-behaved after that.  But what we also had in my area was the Kis-Lyn reform school for boys, and this was the place where the bad kids were left to fend for themselves from the other bad kids, according to popular gossip.  The mother of a friend of mine even packed his things in a suitcase and dropped him off at the doorstep of a different local boys’ home which he believed was Kis-Lyn to put the fear of God in him.  Even though the school had been closed for eight years by the time I was born, you would still hear the name bandied about as a form of punishment for some time.  It’s funny, most parents today wouldn’t dream of intimidating their children with some of the things with which we were coerced into good behavior.  But the impact was immediate and undeniable (at least in the short term).  The kids at the Inver House orphanage in Peter Sasdy’s Nothing but the Night (aka The Devil’s Undead aka Castle of the Living Dead aka Devil Night aka The Resurrection Syndicate) get the double whammy of being menaced not only with death but also with the far worse fate of becoming adults. 

On the Scottish island of Bala, various elderly people are murdered, all of whom are trustees of the Van Traylen Trust which funds the Inver House orphanage.  Colonel Bingham (Sir Christopher Lee) calls on acquaintance and pathologist Sir Mark Ashley (Peter Cushing) to help him investigate after a busload of children crashes with more trustees aboard.  One survivor, the young Mary Valley (Gwyneth Strong), holds the key to all the answers.

Nothing but the Night is a deceptively simple thriller with a rather dark underbelly.  The greatest and clearest piece of that seedy dark side is in how the children in the film are treated.  Kids in this film are little more than pawns.  For the trustees of the orphanage, they are vessels to be filled with their selfish venality.  For Mark and Bingham, they are clues to a deeper mystery.  Bingham even admits that the whole reason he wants the case is because a friend of his was involved; the deaths of the children on the bus are “incidental.”  Mark resents being pulled into the whole affair, only getting involved because he doesn’t like being put in his place by the hoi polloi.  For Dr. Haynes (Keith Barron), children are painful memories screaming to be dragged out into the light of day.  For reporter Joan Foster (Georgia Brown), they are a hot, tabloid-y story to be exploited and splashed across the front page.  For Anna Harb (Diana Dors, in full-on late stage Shelley Winters mode), her daughter Mary is a piece of property, her ownership of which is more important than the girl’s well-being, and this isn’t the only reason that Anna is a poor candidate for motherhood.  Never are the children really treated as individuals, Mary being the exception as she’s the sole clue to what’s going on.  Despite the protestations of the adults who claim to have the children’s best interests at heart, they are more intent on probing them to satisfy their own ends.  It’s a tragic statement on the callous abuse of children as things, and it’s all the more terrible in this instance, because the children are already considered castaways, unwanted by society, and therefore, prey.

In this vein, but to a lesser degree, are issues of identity and maturation.  The orphans are a collective.  We see them playing, and that’s about it.  Mary, as the focus of the narrative, is the exemplar for the film’s depiction of the aforementioned themes.  On the fateful bus ride, she is the cheerleader, conducting her fellow children in a variation of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”  She usually has the innocent exuberance we expect from a girl her age.  This is the genesis of the person she should grow to become; it should be a process.  Her “repressed memories,” then, are the loss of her childhood identity/individuality and the domination of a new identity, an adult one.  That these two actions are instantaneous and simultaneous is indicative of their nefariousness.  There is no development.  There is only the loss of childhood, and this absence is what produces monsters.  The juxtaposition of virtuous children with iniquitous adults and the unification of the two is where the film derives its horror.

The film’s tonal shift from giallo-esque thriller, a la What Have You Done to Solange? (sort of), to science fiction/horror film is rather jarring, even though the groundwork is laid out from the beginning.  Said groundwork, however, is cleverly disguised with a few guileful twists you probably won’t see coming because the filmmakers wisely don’t emphasize them.  Lee and Cushing get to play on the same side of the moral coin, much like in the superlative Horror Express, though Cushing infuses his character with just enough of his classic Baron Frankenstein portrayal to give yet another in a long, long list of fantastic, fully-realized performances.  The locales are all gloomy, casting a predetermined pall over the proceedings.  Sasdy (primarily a television director [most notably responsible for the 1972 production of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape], though he directed a few films, such as Hammer Studio’s Taste the Blood of Dracula, one of the less traditional offerings in the series but no less worthy) brings a workmanlike sense of direction that grounds the film in a reality which is both straightforward and twisted.  Overall, the film is satisfying, and the aftermath is chilling, but I can’t help but think what could have been had Sasdy and company played the story straight.  I know I would like to have seen more entries in a franchise featuring Bingham and associates (this was the first and the last film produced by Lee’s Charlemagne Productions; it was adapted from a series of novels by John Blackburn, and the original plan was to produce more of them).  Especially if the dynamic lead duo from this one starred in them.  Alas…

MVT:  It’s Lee and Cushing all day long.  It usually is when they appear onscreen together, and this is no exception.

Make or Break:  The finale slaps all the pieces together, but I could see it not working for some people.  That, and that the reveal of a certain character’s fate made little sense to me, considering the timeline of the film.

Score:  6.5/10

Island Of Terror (1966)

Back before the internet, back before the proliferation of cult toys, back before the rise of comic book culture to regal status, kids had essentially two things when it came to playtime: really shitty toys and their imaginations.  Not all of the toys were shitty, to be fair.  Some were even well-designed and encouraged some form of thought (whether that be through their scarcity or intent, I can’t say, though I doubt the latter), and when we would play War, the toy guns weren’t colored like a pack of bubble gum; they actually looked like guns (shocking today in a world brimming over with street gangs and overzealous police).  I fondly remember a line of toys called Pocket Super Heroes and had quite a few of them.  Seeing photos of them now, I have to say that said fondness is clearly fogged by nostalgia, however when I was a child there was no other way to get an action figure of a character like Aquaman or the Green Goblin, so that does need to be taken into account.

Still, like Moses (Sidney Dawson) in Raising Arizona said, “…when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.”  And so it was, especially for those of us who loved monsters.  Oh, there were the odd model kits, and you could probably find a nice hard rubber gorilla that you could pretend was King Kong, but characters like Godzilla and his cohorts were simply not to be found (unless of course you had a store nearby that imported toys and a wad of cash in your pockets; I had neither).  There are reasons why phrases like “necessity is the mother of invention” are coined, and this is just such a one.  Since I wouldn’t even lay eyes on a Hedorah action figure until well into my adulthood, I had no option but to make one.  Armed with crayons and paper, I drew all of my favorite monsters which were non-extant in action figure form (that’s a lot of monsters), cut them out, and used those for my monster mash flights of fancy.  I even drew cityscapes for them to demolish.  

The pros and cons should be readily apparent.  Being made of paper, they were pretty fragile, but the beauty of this particular coin’s flip side is that they were also cheaply re-attainable.  Another downside was that if you admired the way a certain likeness came out and that “figure” got wrecked, the odds on you being able to reproduce said likeness the way that caught your eye the first time were slim (conversely, there was also the chance that the new one would catch your fancy more).  It was like those drawn out army fights with which so many of us used to litter our notebooks, but with moveable “parts” (and before things like Presto Magix [another toy I relished] though not before Colorforms, which is probably where the inspiration for the former came from anyway). I’m going to such lengths with this because some of the creatures I created via loose leaf were Silicates from Terence Fisher’s Island Of Terror.  I don’t remember if mine were Godzilla-sized, but I would guess so.  Everything else was back then.

Off the coast of Ireland lies Petrie’s Island, a small, agrarian community whereupon resides the hermitic Dr. Phillips (Peter Forbes-Robertson).  Phillips’ cancer research goes slightly awry (with a flash of white and red and a wicked sting on the soundtrack), and soon thereafter local villager Ian Bellows (Liam Gaffney) is found with no bones in his body and no apparent wounds.  Island doctor Reginald Landers (Eddie Byrne) calls upon pathologist Dr. Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) who calls upon bone disease specialist Dr. David West (Edward Judd) whom they interrupt while working on a bone of a different sort with paramour Toni Merrill (Carole Grey).  The lot takes off for the island and discover just how awry Phillips’ research has gone.

This is one of those films that skirts the line between traditional and unusual Horror.  After all, it was around this time we got a Were-Moth in The Blood Beast Terror (also with Cushing), a Were-Snake in The Reptile, and a Were-Gorgon in…um…The Gorgon.  But what Island Of Terror does, and to my mind does so well, is does a marvelous job of balancing its two aspects.  The Petrie’s Island community is small, its characters very traditional, even superstitious in some ways.  They have no phones, a problematic power generator, and a supply boat that comes by once a week; the perfect setup for a Horror film.    The manse where Phillips’ lab is housed could easily have been a hand-me-down from Dr. Frankenstein (“it looks like Wuthering Heights”), with its gothic masonry and twisting stairways.  Yet the rooms where Phillips’ experiments are performed are modern, antiseptic, metallic.  And even here, there are concessions with tanks full of bubbling, brightly colored water (or whatever).  As a compromise to modern times, we get some nice effects work with the boneless bodies, and there’s even a nice, quick gore shot when a character loses an appendage (replete with a nifty spurt of blood).  The film takes its time in its pacing, allowing the mystery to play out of its own volition.  This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, and even though the audience knows that the explanation is going to be outlandish to at least some degree, they are engaged by the asking of questions, the compiling of the monster’s profile.

The Silicates themselves are clearly an example of Body Horror (and a fairly early instance to my mind, although I also think cases could be made that a whole slew of Horror films could be considered Body Horror).  They are artificial life intended to eradicate cancer, but this is one of those times where the cure is arguably worse than the disease (think: Dr. Raglan’s Psychoplasmics from The Brood).  They are cells enlarged and outside the body.  They divide like cells (with the help of a great deal of chicken noodle soup), and they attack organisms like any aberrant bodies but from the outside in (rather than preying on individuals from the inside out, yet they are still exemplars of the body in revolt, even while not being naturally occurring).  Silicates have no intellect, no reasoning.  They are pure of purpose.  They live only to eat and propagate.  Nevertheless, they are an unfortunate byproduct of mankind’s search for answers, but when confronted with the concept that there are some areas in which men shouldn’t meddle, David pulls a Quatermass and offers the rebuttal, “Science has its risks.  But the risks aren’t enough to hinder progress.”  There is the acknowledgement that these things happen, but there also doesn’t seem to be any indication that precautions need to be taken to prevent their recurrence.  It’s almost as if the creation of monsters is something we just have to live with, even though we’re the ones who create them.  

MVT:  I love the Silicates.  They’re gross and silly and visually interesting.  And did I mention that chicken noodle soup pours out of them when they divide?  It’s disgusting and delicious, all at once.

Make Or Break:  The Make is the cell division scene.  See above.

Score:  7/10               

Horror Express (1972)

Floccinaucinihilipilification is, to my knowledge, the longest word in the English language.  Now, I know the kids like to throw it around and drop it into every sentence the same as “like,” but some of us may be completely unaware of it (the mind boggles).  It is defined as “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.”  It’s kind of interesting in two senses to me as of this writing.  Number one, the story of today’s film, Eugenio Martin’s Horror Express (aka Panico En El Transiberiano), deals with two anthropologists.  Their job is digging through dirt most people would find worthless and finding things they feel may or may not be of value from a scientific/historical perspective.  Imagine if you will an anthropologist who mistakes the greatest find in the history of mankind or even life on this planet for a Tanzanian pot holder or something.  It’s a value judgment (an educated one, but still…), and at least in some part, hubris plays a role in its estimation.  Number two, the act of being a film reviewer also has to involve floccinaucinihilipilification at some time or another.  Some reviewers make a practice of this, turning every critique into a hyperbolic screed, and that’s fine when they feel a film genuinely warrants such dismissal.  But I somehow get the notion that when almost every picture that’s brought up is treated with merciless derision, either the writer shouldn’t be writing about film, or they’re writing because they want to show everyone how clever they are.  Either way, it’s a reason to quit film review.  But misery loves company, I suppose.

In 1906, while on an expedition in Manchuria, Sir Alexander Saxton (Christopher Lee) discovers a “missing link” frozen solid in a cave.  Carting it back with him on the Trans-Siberian Express, Saxton runs across rival scientist Dr. Wells (Peter Cushing) and makes the acquaintance of the beautiful Russian Countess Petrovski (Silvia Tortosa).  As the train hurtles across the barren landscapes of Siberia, it’s soon discovered that Saxton’s specimen may have a bit more life in it than previously thought.  As well as having a few surprises up its hirsute sleeve.

This is yet another of those movies that I initially encountered in a nasty, grotty print late on a Saturday night on some local cable channel (I’m thinking WWOR out of Secaucus, New Jersey, but that’s really neither here nor there).  The experience of seeing something like Psychomania or Horror Express at an early age and of that quality of presentation was eye-opening to say the least (or maybe just eye-straining, hence why I’ve had spectacles since the fourth grade).  The marvel of these films isn’t the quality of their respective productions, though both have more than enough to be very effective (and Martin’s use of miniatures as well as the interior sets is impressive).  It’s also not in their originality, since neither one has an original bone in its body.  The latter film, in fact, borrows much from John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? (most likely unknowingly), and it did it ten years before John Carpenter went back to the same source material for his remake of The Thing From Another World.  Obviously, Martin doesn’t wring quite the amount of tension and paranoia from the premise as Carpenter does, but I think the two make nice companion pieces.  

And yet I can honestly say that, at the time, there was nothing else like these movies coming across my path.  It’s not the elements; it’s the mixture of them and their treatment.  Horror Express runs the gamut from Cosmic Horror to Creature Feature to Siege film to Zombie film to Disaster film, but it gives you just enough of each genre/subgenre in just enough of a dose that you swallow it down whole, and the instant that your mind starts to question anything, gets bored, etcetera, it’s on to another facet and back again.  Playing partly into one idea from the film, the effect comes from a gestalt of the pieces, rather than focusing strictly on any one of them.  Furthermore, the fact that almost no one else I knew seemed to have seen this film and no books or magazines I read had any sort of information about it was mind-blowing to me.  Today, everyone and their brother expound the virtues of this film, and it’s easy to see why.  But back then?  If you mentioned this film’s title, you’d likely get little more than a momentary narrowing of the eyes and a slight shrug from most people.

A major portion of the film is concerned with eyes and looking.  Everyone wants to see what’s in Saxton’s crate.  The monster’s eyes glow red when its powers are in effect.  The monster steals the memories and skills of its victims through their eyes, leaving them devoid of the capacity for sight (even if they were still alive to see; which they are not) and turning them into automatons, bereft of identity.  The monster’s own memories are stored in its eyes.  In these ways the film reveals its own truth, that knowledge and individuality come from observation or at least from the power to observe.  Yet, the eyes can be deceived, and this is the flip side of the notion.  Saxton thinks that Father Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza) is a simple conjurer employing tricks, despite seeing that the same piece of chalk which writes on the stones of the train station won’t write on the anthropologist’s crate.  Even after a fellow scientist avers that there is nothing unique about the chalk, Saxton refuses to accept that anything other than a deception is at work.  Wells and Saxton are taken in by a passenger who turns out to be up to nefarious purposes.   The beast itself has the ability to move from person to person, always disguised as a means of survival.  In other words, even what can be plainly witnessed with the naked eye cannot be trusted absolutely.

The film also contains concepts about social classes, to some degree or another (summed up for me by the classic Cushing retort, “Monster?!  We’re British, you know!”).  Though Saxton and Wells are both anthropologists, Saxton is haughty and upper class in mien.  Wells, by contrast, is not above bribing a station agent to get a couple of compartments on the departing train or to sneak a peek at what’s in the crate.  He’s friendlier to the common man.  Naturally, Saxton dislikes Wells, and he only seems to put up with those he considers lower in class because they serve some purpose for him.  The Inspector aboard the train (Julio Peña) is strictly working class, but he holds power over others due to his authority.  He’s a cog.  The Countess and her husband (George Rigaud) are clearly in the most rarefied of air, and they therefore do not need to bother themselves fraternizing with the Plebes or burdening themselves with matters of the soul (to Pujardov, the Count says, “our immortal souls are your concern”).  The priest is little more than a mongrel in the eyes of all, and it is this humiliation which will color his decisions later in the film (though he’s the most dichotomous character here I would argue).  Captain Kazan (Telly Savalas) is the ultimate display of Tsarist power, second in stature only to the Count (whom he still treats with sarcastic obeisance), but he is intent of purpose (“the Devil must be afraid of one honest Cossack”).  He also has no compunction about using brute force in order to meet his ends.  He has his men hit Saxton and Wells with their rifles.  He whips Pujardov.  Yet his methods, though cruel, are nevertheless effective.  Clearly, Kazan would never Floccinaucinihilipilificate his own work techniques.

MVT:  I love the story of this film.  It moves along at a nice clip.  It hits just enough sweet spots and turns just enough of its well-worn clichés to make for satisfying viewing.

Make Or Break:  The Make is Savalas’s ranting, scenery-chewing display of histrionics after he boards the express.  It’s a delightful little cherry on top of a sundae loaded with awesomeness.  

Score:  8/10