The Vault Of Horror

 

Taking It EC

The Vault Of Horror
UK 1973 
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
Amicus/20th Century Fox  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: A vault of spoilers. 

The Vault Of Horror was another of the Amicus portmanteau horror films with which they had a lot of success and, as the title suggests, the five stories found within (not including the framing story, I would guess) are adaptations from various 1950s EC comics, repeating the formula from their Tales From The Crypt movie (reviewed here). Despite the title and what it claims on the opening credits, which play out mostly over shots of London, none of the stories in the film are actually taken from the original The Vault Of Horror comic... instead, the segment entitled The Neat Job is taken from an issue of Shock Suspense Stories while the others are versions of stories first published in the pages of Tales From The Crypt. 

The film starts off with an elevator picking up various of the five main characters, played by Michael Craig, Curd Jürgens, Terry Thomas, Daniel Massey and Tom Baker. They are all going down but, down way further than any of them expect, as the elevator deposits them all in an underground chamber. They can’t get the elevator to take them back and so, for the rest of the film, they exchange stories about various nightmares which have been bothering them, allowing the audience access into the five segments which make up the majority of the film’s running time. 

Now, I’ve actually read four of these stories but only remember three of them in terms of a little of the details, because I read the entire run of Tales From The Crypt a few years back. So in the first story, I can definitely tell you that the term adaptation is loosely used. Don’t get me wrong, we still have the same story and the final panel of the comic is rendered as the final shot of that story but, yeah, it’s been watered down somewhat.

To explain, the first story is based on the Tales From The Crypt story Midnight Mess. In this, Daniel Massey pays a private detective who goes to find his lost sister, who has been left everything after their father has died. The detective, played by Mike Pratt (Randall, from Randall And Hopkirk Deceased) finds her but is killed by Massey, who then goes to find his sister. He can’t get served in a restaurant because it closes early in the village she is staying in, so he goes to her house and kills her. He then goes back to the restaurant, which now appears to be open. However, when he’s served dishes made from blood and human flesh, he complains and gives himself away. The waiter pulls back the big curtains in the restaurant to reveal a big mirror... casting only his reflection. All of the other diners are vampires, including his sister who also has a drink when the patrons set him up in the bar as a human bar tap, syphoning his blood ‘fresh from the source’ as the still alive Massey has a tap plugged into an open wound on his neck. Incidentally, his sister is played by real life sister Anna Massey. 

The problem with this segment... and why it’s watered down, in my opinion... is that in the original comic book, the lead character was an innocent. He doesn’t kill anyone but he suffers the same fate anyway... with the last panel being much more graphic in its depiction, if memory serves. I get the feeling the writers here turned him into an evil character so that it feels morally right to have him killed in such a grim fashion. Which kinda weakens the story but, there you go, this film pulls its punches a bit, that’s all. 

The next segment, The Neat Job, is the one told by great British comic actor Terry Thomas, where he marries a character played by actress Glynis Johns. This one is actually quite fun and you can tell these two must have really enjoyed working on this. It turns out that, after they are married, the wife finds out her husband is one of those people with a mania for neatness and everything in its proper place... with even his tool room with jars for each different kind of screw thread or length, kitchen cupboards with tick boxes to indicate stock replenishment etc. After a while, her attempts to please her husband culminate in a sequence where she bumbles about and manages to wreck a couple of rooms as she tries to re-tidy them for him when he comes home. On his discovery of the shambles, she deals him a huge hammer blow and we see the comedian with a claw hammer sticking out of the top of his head before he topples. In the final scene of this story, his wife has pulled out all his various body part and internal organs and put them all in correctly labelled, categorised jars. 

The third story is This Trick’ll Kill You and it’s features a stage magician played by Curd Jürgens and his wife played by Dawn Addams. While on holiday in India, looking for magic tricks, he stumbles onto a really good version of the old Indian rope trick but he can’t persuade the young lady performing the trick to sell it to him at any price. So he arranges a private show for his wife in their hotel room and, while the girl is performing the trick, he stabs her dead. He then re-performs the trick and his wife climbs up the rope but, suddenly, she disappears at the top of the rope and a slowly spreading puddle of her blood forms on the ceiling where the rope was leading too. The rope then gets out of control and has its revenge on Jürgens. 

The fourth story, Bargain In Death, is the worst of the five and features Michael Craig in a dire and slight tale of a man who slows his heart to fake death so he and his friend can split the insurance money... and then expects his friend to dig him up but, obviously, that part doesn’t happen. He does get dug up though, by a gravedigger played by Arthur Mullard at the request of two young medical student friends who need the body. In a curious piece of what would now be called stunt casting, the two med students are played by Robin Nedwell and Geoffrey Davies, who were known as the ‘comedy doctor’ duo in the long running British TV sitcom Doctor In The House. The other nice part of this is when one of the characters is seen reading the novelisation of the Amicus Tales From The Crypt movie.

The fifth story, Drawn And Quartered, stars Tom Baker as a British artist living in Haiti. When an old friend stumbles on him, he finds out that his old agent who had deemed his paintings worthless and bought them for a song, has colluded with an art critic and buyer and his paintings are now fetching high prices in London. So he goes to a voodoo man who gives his painting hand magical powers and he returns to London to take his revenge. Anything he paints and then erases or destroys gets erased or destroyed in a similar fashion and so he paints the three and causes them pain and death by taking their hands or eyes or, in the case of his agent, played by Denholm Elliot, gets him to shoot himself due to drawing a red dot on the forehead of the painting. However, he shouldn’t have left his own self portrait out in the open after he found leaving it in his safe was depriving him of oxygen after a while! Any kind of accident could happen to it. 

And that’s the five stories and then, of course, the elevator doors open to a graveyard and it turns out the men are all dead and forced to tell the same stories to each other for eternity. However, unlike the comics, the Vault Keeper who used to present the tales didn’t make it into the movie.

But it is an entertaining movie and it’s easily one of my favourites in the Amicus portmanteau horror series, falling just behind Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed by me here). Roy Ward Baker’s direction is assured and, once again, he uses some interesting camera movements... like that trick he does where he will zoom into something at the end of a camera pan to change the focus of the frame. Douglas Gamley’s score is also pretty good and he seems to use the Dies Irae musical motif a lot throughout the movie (darn, I wish there was a soundtrack CD to this one... or to any of Gamley’s music, to be honest). 

And, yeah, not much else to add to this. The Vault Of Horror, despite being the only one of the Amicus horror portmanteaus that didn’t star Peter Cushing, is a really entertaining little film and one I would happily watch a number of times. Something about the print or transfer on this seemed a little dodgy, I thought but, it’s still pretty watchable and I’m sure the Blu Ray authors have done the best they can with the materials. Definitely worth a look sometime if you are into this period of British horror movies, for sure.

Asylum

Taking Over

Asylum
UK 1972 
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
Amicus/Second Sight  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers in this one. 

Asylum is the next movie in my watch of the old Amicus portmanteau horror films. Dating from 1972 this has four main story segments which include, if you go by the end credits of the print itself, Frozen Fear, The Weird Taylor, Lucy Comes To Stay and Mannikins Of Horror. All of these are written by Robert Bloch (although it’s suspected the first segment may have been more than inspired by a Clark Ashton Smith story) and the spelling of the Mannikins of the last story seems wrong. Modern sources tell me the last story is actually Mannequins Of Horror but, looking at the different spelling uses and the slightly different meanings attributed to each spelling, I think it’s much more likely that the fourth story is actually called Manikins Of Horror. This is not to say that no mannequins appear in the movie, as you’ll see as you read further but, specifically in the fourth segment, they seem to be manikins rather than mannequins.

Indeed, the idea of some kind of reanimated figure seems to be predominant in three of the four shorts in this one. The linking material in this one is of a young psychiatrist, played by Robert Powell, who drives to an old manor house acting as an Asylum, seeking a position there. His car ride over the opening credits is scored with a booming version of Mussorgsky’s Night On Bare Mountain. The current assistant, Dr. Rutherford, as played by Patrick Magee, tasks him with finding the identity of the former head of the place, one Dr. Star, who has gone mad and is, we are told, one of the four patients Rutherford wants Powell’s Dr. Martin to interview. If he can pick out from the four personalities just which one is a blind for the former head of the facility, he can have the job. 

So off Martin goes with the orderly, played by Catweazel himself, yup, Geoffrey Bayldon, to listen to the little horror and thriller stories so he can work out which is the real doctor. It’s at this point that I suspect, even before we meet any of the unlikely candidates, that most people will see the obvious twist ending of the piece coming so, yeah, I won’t say anything further but I thought it was pretty self-evident.

So the first segment, Frozen Fear, is told through the recollections of Bonnie, played by Barbara Parkins. She is having an affair with a character played by Richard Todd, who decides to take his wife, played by Sylvia Sims, permanently out of the equation. So he orders a new freezer for the cellar, bashes her in the head and disposes of the body by slicing her up into six segments (head, arms, legs, torso) and, curiously, wrapping each body part up in brown paper and string before disposing of it all in the new freezer. However, when the brown paper head escapes the freezer and starts rolling around on its own... you know something’s up. When Bonnie arrives on the scene, she finds Todd’s body in the freezer, from where one brown paper covered, severed arm has strangled him... and then she is attacked in the cellar by various bits of his wifes scattered body. It’s silly but hugely entertaining and the brown peper covered limbs give an unusual feel to this kind of material, for sure. 

The next segment, The Weird Tailor, is about a tailor played by Barry Morse, who is threatened with being thrown out of his shop for late payment of the rent by his landlord. Then, however, he gets a customer in the form of Peter Cushing, who wants the tailor to make a special suit for him, to the tune of £200. The conditions are that it has to be made of a certain, special material brought by Cushing’s character and the suit must only be worked on between midnight and 5am each day. Now, we know there’s something up with the material when Morse pricks his finger and it magically absorbs his blood but, he continues working on it and, when he delivers it to Cushing, finds that it’s a special suit to bring life back to Cushing’s long dead son. A special spell suit the client has learned to make from an arcane book of black magic which, given writer Robert Bloch’s long standing friendships in his life, is an obvious homage to H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, I’m pretty sure. Cushing has no money, it turns out and, in a struggle, Morse accidentally kills him. He returns home and tells his wife to burn the suit but, instead, she dresses up their store mannequin with it. And, yes, as you’d expect, the store mannequin comes to life and tries to strangle Morse, who is now obviously driven insane. 

The third segment, Lucy Comes To Stay, stars young Charlotte Rampling as Lucy, who has returned home from a ‘special’ hospital and is being more or less imprisoned by her brother in her house as a form of recovery. It’s not long, however, before Lucy’s friend, played by Britt Ekland, comes to spring her from her house and lures away the nurse on an elabourate ruse. Murderous shenanigans ensue but I think most people would have figured out the real identity of Lucy’s friend when she first enters the narrative so, alas, no surprises here.

The fourth and final segment, the incorrectly spelled Mannikins Of Horror, is more a quick prelude and stars Herbert Lom as a former doctor who has made various miniature, robot like manekins of former colleagues and one of himself. This leads directly into the bookends with Dr. Martin who is about to return to London, no longer wanting the job, when the last manekin, made to resemble Lom himself and with his own brain willed inside the tiny brain inside the model*, gets into the office downstairs and stabs Magee’s character dead with a scalpel to the back of the brain. Dr. Martin crushes the manekin, it’s tiny internal organs leaking onto the floor and, this has the effect of also crushing Herbert Lom’s character in the upstairs room. Then the real Dr. Star is revealed, another murder is committed and the film ends as a cycle with another doctor arriving for an interview to join the asylum.

And it’s a nicely done, mostly fun but unsurprising set of small horror and thriller yarns. Director Baker livens things up with some nice shot set ups (such as when a taxi cab pulls up and is viewed from the other side of a big arch in the street) and some nice camera movement ideas. One is where, instead of just following the action down, for instance, when Charlotte Rampling goes to look for something in a drawer, he pans down and zooms simultaneously to take us right into the drawer from looking at her in the shot. 

He moves the camera quite a lot actually, and there are some nice moments where he uses it to highest effect. For example, when Morse and Cushing are locked in a struggle, the camera movements, while still smooth, are short twisty turning movements resembling something similar to a hand-held camera shot and throwing the chaos of movement into the scene to depict the feeling of the fight. And when Robert Powell slowly drifts upstairs to meet the patients, he stops to look at a fair few black and white engravings depicting scenes of mental illness through the ages... something which is enhanced by Baker’s continually roving camera panning up and around and sometimes spinning 360 degrees around in the frame as it takes in the content of the black and white engravings... or they might be etchings, come to think of it.

All in all, Asylum is nicely acted, written with a certain tongue in cheek feeling and has some nice music by Douglas Gamley, although there seems to be more ‘classical’ needle drop in this one than there is original composition, it has to be said. And, yeah, there are absolutely no surprises in this one and it can hardly be called all that scary, either but, the stories have a certain charm of their own... it’s well shot and I had fun with it. Not the best of the horror anthologies I’ve seen put out by Amicus but... it’s certainly not the worst of them either. A decent watch and Second Sight’s Blu Ray transfer is excellent, accompanied by some extras worth having although, I have to say, like a lot of this label’s releases, the price is a bit steep for what it is. I would have liked to have seen Indicator tackle the Amicus portmanteau horror movies in a more price friendly boxed collection, it has to be said. 

*Since watching and writing this, the great Severin Films have also relelased their own edition of the movie and, although I was tempted, I didn't double dip in this case. I did, however, buy their new pin badge based on the film which is a wonderfully crafted likeness of the Charles Gray manikin with a little front door which actually opens on the badge itself, revealing the grim, brainy matter inside the chest cavity. The height of fashion accessories for sure. 

Tales From The Crypt

Ghost Crypt

Tales From The Crypt
UK 1972 Directed by Freddie Francis
Amicus/20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers here.

Okay then, I’ve seen three previous Amicus horror portmanteau films this year and the reason I’ve been holding back on watching these since I bought them is because the first segment of Tales From The Crypt is actually set on Christmas Eve so, yeah, I really didn’t want to be watching this film anytime other than in December. So this is the first of three Christmas movies I shall be reviewing for the blog this year. Tales From The Crypt is, of course, based on the 1950s EC comics of the same name, which featured five or six short horror strips with, usually, a twist ending. I’ve been reading those for this blog over the last few months but I still haven’t worked through all three EC horror title runs yet to be able to write a review (hopefully you should see that mid 2021). What this means is that I’ve only read two of the stories on which segments are based on in this film because other segments are based on stories from The Vault Of Horror and The Haunt Of Fear. Of course, it’s these EC comics which were the cause of all the shameful outrage ushered in by Wertham in the 1950s, leading to the reduction of free speech in comics for many decades and introducing the self regulating ‘Comics Code Authority’, with their famous seal of approval.

The film is nowhere near as good as the first film in this unofficial series, Dr. Terrors House Of Horrors (reviewed by me here) but it’s pretty consistently entertaining and makes for a more watchable, consistent experience than Torture Garden (reviewed here) and The House That Dripped Blood (reviewed here). The idea of adapting EC comics, which were horror compilations anyway, absolutely fit what Amicus were doing like a glove and so it’s kind of a marriage made in heaven (they would also go on to do one for The Vault Of Horror but, that will be another review, I haven’t watched it yet).

The location of ‘The Crypt’ in this movie version is Highgate Cemetery and the opening credits are views of this famous landmark grave yard but, it’s all rendered a little heavy handed, it seemed to me, with Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor roaring over the credits and, as far as I’m concerned, totally failing to set the tone of the original horror comics, which were never once poe faced or serious, tempering their grim tales with a large dollop of humour. In fact, despite their source, the first and fifth stories of this collection don’t even stray into the horror genre but, this is made up for by the supernatural shenanigans of the other three stories.

After the credits we join a guided tour of Highgate with guide Geoffrey Bayldon who, when they all enter the catacombs, wants his party to stay by him as the place can be dangerous. Almost immediately after he says this, five characters played by Joan Collins, Ian Hendry, James Elliot, Richard Greene and Nigel Patrick become accidentally separated from the tour group and, instead, enter a crypt... the crypt of terror! Or the crypt of actor Sir Ralph Richardson, actually, who keeps them there in the tomb (the entrance way slamming shut behind them) so he can tell his tale of each of the five to themselves... so, yeah, this is the kind of framing story which we are all familiar with now. Mr. Richardson is, I have to say, dreadfully miscast as The Crypt Keeper, who talked to the audience and presented each tale to the readers in the original comics. He’s fine for the script but, yeah, there’s nothing of the character, the look and the humour of The Crypt Keeper in this movie so, I reckon they really fumbled the ball here.

The first tale, which is probably the shortest but also the strongest, is called ... And All Through The House and its the one that is set in the home of Joan Collins, her husband and her daughter on Christmas Eve, the night a maniac from a lunatic asylum has escaped and is prowling the neighbourhood in a stolen Santa Clause costume. However, the maniac is not the person the husband should be worried about. After he creeps downstairs and puts his presents under the tree, with his daughter already tucked away in bed, he sits down to read the paper. Now the film has no real stylistic traits that stick out in the mind as a signature of the director to lift the film (it’s not a patch on the Dr. Terror film that Freddie Francis directed) but this first segment is easily the most dynamic of the five. As we look at the front of the newspaper that the husband is reading we hear the loud cracking of his skull and it’s a nicely done shot as the blood from his mortal wound seeps through the front of the newspaper before he drops to the floor with a 'caved in' head. We see Joan Collins revealed as his murderer behind him. It’s made clear she’s much more interested in his insurance policy than him and with her daughter relatively quiet in bed and after locking her doors against the escaped maniac, who seems to be lurking outside her house and trying to get in, she elaborately re-stages the killing to look like an accident in the basement of the house but, when she’s done, the little girl has let ‘Santa’ in and the maniac ‘gets her’. This is the only sequence in this film (which is untypical of the time but I’m guessing this is one of the earlier films to employ this technique) which includes one or two genuine ‘jump scares’, which are quite effective when they happen, thanks to Francis using a lot of moving camera to invest a sense of paranoia and panic in Joan Collins’ character. A brooch she is gifted by her husband in this scene is pretty much a foreshadowing of the timeline of the whole movie, if you spot it.

The second section, Reflection Of Death, is one which is based on a story I’ve read in the comic and, frankly, it’s not one I would have picked but it’s done fairly competently. This involves ex-Avenger Ian Hendry covertly leaving his wife to escape with his lover. However, they are caught in an accident and when he stumbles from the wreckage, something is different about him and, unknown to him, some time has passed. All is revealed with the second half of this short tale being done almost completely as a point of view shot from Hendry’s character’s eyes (pretty much the only way you could keep the, not so twisty, reveal kinda secret), just like in the comic.

The third section, Poetic Justice, finds Peter Cushing playing a widower (he had recently lost his wife in real life), a man whose face doesn’t fit in with the well to do neighbourhood and whose rich neighbours, especially the son played by James Elliot, try to get him to sell his house up and go. Although Cushing is in touch with his dead wife through a ouija board, he doesn’t count on the cruelty shown him by his neighbours and some insulting St. Valentine’s cards are the final nail in his coffin. He kills himself and his neighbours get what they want (if not in the way they wanted it). However, one year later, he rises from his coffin and gets a very poetic revenge on the son and, frankly, it’s the only tale in this collection which comes close to the humour of the original comic in the irony of the final denouement that finishes this section. Cushing is absolutely brilliant here as a kindly but broken old man and, seriously, the brilliance of his performance is very moving.

The fourth segment, Wish You Were Here, is a quick retelling of The Monkey’s Paw (with references made in the actual dialogue) and what happens when Richard Greene’s wife, played by Barbara Murray, uses the three wishes granted to them by a Chinese idol to try and get them out of bankruptcy. The demise followed by the unpleasant ‘fate worse than death’ conclusion to Richard Greene’s character oddly, in a way, doesn’t match up to the endgame of the framing story very well but, well, I guess it doesn’t really matter all that much.

The fifth sequence, Blind Alley, is what happens when an ex-military, penny pinching Nigel Patrick takes over a blind people’s home. This is the other story that I’ve read in the comic. He treats the people there poorly and lets one of them die unnecessarily. Then the ring leader of the group of blind people, played in his usual, wonderfully grim manner by Patrick Magee, hatches an elaborate plan of revenge involving Patrick’s ravenous Alsation dog and a wooden alley made by the blind people with walls decorated by many razor blades. The ending is suitably grim but, I honestly remember the comic book story seeming a lot harder hitting than this version of the tale.

And that’s that. When the five stories have played out, The Crypt Keeper reveals to the five characters what the audience has, by now, surely already figured out in an ending similar in intent to that of Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors. And I’ve not got much else to say about this one, to be honest, other than to add that Douglas Gamley’s score for the movie is much better suited to the material than the heavy handed Bach piece at the opening and closing credits. Tales From The Crypt is a nice enough film but it’s certainly not the best, or worse for that matter, of the Amicus portmanteau horror films. I think I’ve got two more of these on my ‘to watch’ pile, which I hope I’ll get to sometime next year.

The House That Dripped Blood

Dwelling Point

The House That Dripped Blood
UK 1971 Directed by Peter Duffell
Amicus/Second Sight Blu Ray Zone B

The House That Dripped Blood is the third of the famous Amicus portmanteau style horror films, following on from Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed here) and Torture Garden (reviewed here). There had been a bit of a longer gap between this and the previous film but the format is more or less the same, we just don’t have Freddie Francis in the director’s chair. Instead, we have Peter Duffell working from a script by Robert (Psycho) Bloch, who had also written Torture Garden (for better or worse).

This one is kind of in between the previous two in terms entertainment value, I believe. It’s not quite as adventurous or intriguing in concept as Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors but it’s certainly not as dull as the first hour or so of Torture Garden. In the previous films you had linking stories consisting of a train carriage and a wax museum fortune teller respectively... this one has a story about a police inspector who is trying to find out why a big film star has gone missing from his home, the titular dwelling which, despite that title, doesn’t once drip blood and, indeed, was nearly awarded an A certificate from the UK film censors if the film makers hadn’t pleaded for a stronger rating, fearing that the lack of credibility of a movie which such a light rating would harm its chances with horror film fans.

So each story is of somebody telling the inspector about one of the previous inhabitants of the house and the demise which was visited upon them. Actually, the house seems to have absolutely nothing to do with things at all other than at the insistence of a policeman and the estate agent (a Mr. Stoker, if vampire fans are paying attention). I’m guessing that setting the vast majority of the action of each tale there, where the main characters of each segment found themselves back at the house between adventures, was appealing because you didn’t have to go to go out and shoot on other locations quite so much.

The five segments are Method For Murder, Waxworks, Sweets To The Sweet, The Cloak and the framing story... Framework. Here’s a quick run down of the stories as they appear:

In Method For Murder, Denholm Elliot plays a crime/horror writer who rents the house and moves in with his wife to give him the proper atmosphere to write his next best seller. Early on he devises a new character, Dominik, an escaped strangler from a mental asylum. Alas, not long after he creates him, he starts seeing Dominik around the house and grounds. I have to say, the 'gaslighting' plot is pretty obvious here and the final reveal is thoroughly expected. Perhaps that’s why, after this reveal, something else is piled on which, to be honest, seems a little hasty and somewhat of a clumsy attempt to add an extra bite to the proceedings. Not the best idea but the segment plays along nicely up until then.

The second segment, Waxworks, follows the adventures of Peter Cushing, who moves into the house for his retirement, looking forward to reading, music and gardening his remaining years away pleasantly. However, when he visits a local Wax Horror Museum, he is enthralled by the exhibit of Salome, who startingly resembles a woman he obviously once loved but lost. He is told by the owner of the waxworks that the model is based on his own dead wife, who was a murderess. Joss Ackland, a friend from Cushing's past and an equally unsuccessful rival for the same girl, it transpires, drops by on a visit and also discovers the enchanting Salome. Needless to say, with both gentlemen under the spell of the wax model, something is amiss and there are some violent (but in no way graphic) resolutions in store for certain characters.

Up until now, the stories feature killers rather than anything or anyone that would bring this film into the horror genre but, luckily, the next two segments do stray back into that classification, starting with Sweets To The Sweet, featuring Christopher Lee as a widower who moves into the house with his young daughter, who he won’t let have a normal childhood. Instead, he hires a new 'live-in' tutor played by Nyree Dawn Porter but, although the teacher and the little girl hit it off, the real villain of the piece is not necessarily who you think it might be. Well, okay, it was for me but I’m sure some people will not be expecting the way this one goes.

Finally we have the fourth segment, The Cloak... which dovetails also into the resolution of the framing story. This is the story of a famous star of horror films, played by Jon Pertwee not long after he started playing the lead role in Doctor Who. He moves into the house and is in a new movie with an actress played by the stunning Ingrid Pitt (who also played in Countess Dracula, reviewed here and The Vampire Lovers, reviewed here). The tale tells of the pompous actor who is working on sets that are not good enough for him and with costumes he doesn’t think will do. So he goes to a local shop to buy a decent cloak for his vampire character. And it’s nice that the owner of the shop, who sells Pertwee the cloak, is none other than Catweazle himself, Geoffrey Bayldon. Of course, less than a decade later, the two would be regularly starring opposite each other in Worzel Gummidge, with Pertwee as Worzel and Bayldon as The Crowman. Anyway, Pertwee gets more than he bargained for because, whenever he dons the cape he gets the urge to suck blood, casts no reflection and, in a scene which really pushes the comic nature of this last segment (horror and comedy have always been natural bedfellows), levitating and flying around his room. Pertwee really does a great job here and, as usual, relishes his over-the-top comic performance (which would sometimes come out in his Doctor Who work from time to time too). The end of the segment has a twist reveal and a case of vampirism that is then, more or less, repeated less than ten minutes later in the wrap up to the film, followed by the estate agent breaking the fourth wall and asking if, perhaps, a member of the audience would like to rent the house next.

And, it’s not brilliant but it is fairly entertaining and, with a cast that strong, a pleasure to watch. There were some nice little touches and references to both film and horror history and, strangely, a bit of unintentional future casting foreshadowing, as there is a scene where Christopher Lee is reading the exact same paperback edition of Lord Of The Rings that my father used to read and revisit again and again in the 1960s and 70s. Who knew at the time that he would, decades later, go on to play one of the main characters in that work.

There’s also some nice camerawork and shot design throughout. This isn’t brightly coloured with primaries like some of the films which it can name as its kin, instead relying on a mostly subdued colour palette throughout, barring a scene or two at the Horror Museum where it strays briefly into Italian giallo/horror territory. However, the director does do some nice things with the camera which offsets the lack of dynamic colour in the film. For instance, a shot of Christopher Lee’s head front and centre of the screen when he answers a phone call is contrasted by the big staircase and landing around the hall, which we can see up and above past Lee’s head as his daughter walks around it. Another really nice moment is where the Inspector is being told about one of the previous owners of the house and he is in extreme foreground with his head on the right of the shot and with his arm coming up from the left of the shot, holding a cigarette. The policeman telling the story is also in deep focus in the middle groove of the shot made by the negative shape of the foreground character and his arm. So, yeah, some great shot ideas here.

The music, by a guy I’d not heard of called Michael Dress, is serviceable and appropriate throughout most of the film, really coming into its own in the framing story whenever anyone goes inside the gloomy house, where he manages to weave a quite creepy and subtle atmosphere into the music. This matches a visual device of the director, who tends to sometimes cut around to sinister objects in the house by way of short breaks from scene to scene to imply a time transition. The composer seems to have died only a few years after this, at the tender age of forty years old, so I guess that’s why I’ve not come across him before.

And I don’t have too much more to say about The House That Dripped Blood, to be honest. I enjoyed this much more than Torture Garden and am really looking forward to watching the next film in this unofficial series of Amicus Portmanteau horrors. That will hopefully be sometime very soon as one of the segments also brings it into the realm of... ‘Christmas movie’.

Torture Garden

Fair Warning

Torture Garden
UK 1967 Directed by Freddie Francis
Amicus/Columbia Indicator  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some story set up spoilers.

Torture Garden is not, as I’d once assumed as a teen, an adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s late nineteenth century novel (from which I can only assume the famous fetish night club takes its name) but is, in fact, the first kind of ‘follow up’ portmanteau horror film from Amicus, riding on the success of their tremendous Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (which I reviewed here). Now, I have to say, I was very taken with that first one when I watched it fairly recently. Alas, the same can’t be said of Torture Garden which, asides from having the same director and one of the original stars, I’d have to say is a very mixed bag indeed.

The film’s opening credits are all superimposed over footage of various fast moving fairground rides and, once these finish, we are introduced to one of the fixtures of the fair, the horror museum of Dr. Diabolo. Yeah, if you’re right in thinking they replaced the train in Dr. Terror with the fairground attraction of Dr. Diabolo, you’d be right. It’s another device to open up the narrative into four separate, short(ish) horror (again ish) stories. We are presented with Dr. Diabolo showing off his exhibits and then, after the ‘official’ show, he invites members of the audience into his private rooms to see, if they so dare, the real horror they carry inside of them... for the price of a fiver each, which was a lot of money in those days (to some of us it still is). Five ‘victims’ agree and he leads them to a wax figure of Atropos, Goddess of Destiny (played by Clytie Jessop), whose countenance turns up in the odd place throughout the movie. Of course, she’s not really a waxworks figure in real life and, in the long shots, she is having a hard time keeping still. I suspect, in some of the close ups of her, a static image is inserted. Anyway, the five victims (well four of them anyway, I’ll get to that soon), have to gaze between her shears and see their ultimate fates, in the form of a short story.

Now, like Dr. Terror, there are some famous people turning up in this one but they’re not all in the bookend scenes. Dr. Diabolo himself is played by Burgess Meredith and this would have been around the time he was playing The Penguin in the Batman TV series. Which is interesting because he has a couple of costumes in this and the first one includes a top hat and cigarette holder just like the ones he used as Penguin. Also, you know he’s not quite what he seems because, when the five ‘customers’ aren’t looking, he burns the five pound notes they gave him. Of course, Meredith is one of those very interesting actors who are easy to watch, so it’s a shame he doesn’t actually appear in any of the four segments... just the binding story between them and bookending them. I’ll go through a few more of the actors as I get up to them but let me give you just a brief flavour of them as I go through the film.

Unlike Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors, the four segments here are all adapted by the same writer who actually wrote all of the short stories on which they are based... Robert Bloch, who’s name may be familiar to some of my readers as being the man who wrote Psycho. Although not titled on the screen, the four shorts are called, in order as they appear in the binding narrative... Enoch, Terror Over Hollywood, Mr. Steinway and The Man Who Collected Poe.

The first sequence, Enoch, shows a young man (played by Michael Bryant) who goes to visit his sick uncle (played by Maurice Denham) in the hopes of getting money out of him. He causes a heart attack which kills the uncle and then searches the house for the old gold coins which the uncle seems to be paying for everything with. It turns up, alright when he unearths a coffin in a dungeon beneath a trap door. There’s a cat trapped inside the coffin with the skeleton and the furry fiend houses the spirit of an old witch, which takes over the young man’s mind and makes him kill so she can feed off the victim's energy. Now, this may sound quite interesting but, honestly, this overly long segment (and the next one) is incredibly dull and not worth watching for anything other than for seeing director Freddie Francis’ various shot set ups. Indeed, there’s a remarkable shot taken from just next to the underside of the bed with the action going on in the far end of the shot, which alerts us to the presence of a trap door long before the central protagonist sees it. Also, when the cat is filmed in close up, it’s done so with the kind of bright red and green lighting scheme which instantly reminded me of the way Mario Bava used to light his movies.

Segment number two, Terror Over Hollywood, tells of a ruthless young lady played by Beverly Adams, who blags her way into being an actress in a substantial role in an American movie but, to her cost, finds out the terrible secret as to why the top ten movie stars of Hollywood look so young for so long. Out of the four segments here, I’d have to say that this one is more of a science fiction story with a possibly slight horror tinge but, even though it deals with an interesting subject matter, it didn’t exactly grab me and we were maybe an hour into the movie by this point (not leaving too much time for what I thought would be another three segments but... there’s a great little trick when you get up to the fifth person... I’ll get to that in a minute). And it was an extremely dull and hard to watch movie up until now, I thought. Not a patch on the previous Amicus portmanteau movie.

Things turn around for the last two, briefer segments, though. The first of which, Mr. Steinway, tells of a female reporter who falls in love with a successful pianist, only to find the Goddess who lives inside the piano, gifted to him by his long deceased mother, harbours a grudge and is jealous of her. So, yeah, it’s a short but sweet segment and, wonderfully, includes a killer grand piano. It’s nicely done and the combination of Francis’ shot compositions when coupled to a less dull story seems to work wonders.

The fourth segment, The Man Who Collected Poe, concerns the man who has remained wordless in the linking scenes until now, letting his presence add mystery to the proceedings until he explodes into speech for this final segment. This man is played by the wonderful Jack Palance and it’s essentially a two hander between him and the even more wonderful Peter Cushing. Oh yeah, by this point you know you’re in really good hands with a story about two collectors of paraphernalia associated with the writer Edgar Allan Poe. Palance is the jealous guy in awe of Peter Cushing’s collection and, when he gets him drunk, he gets Cushing to show him his 'even more private' collection in the basement. Here he finds brand new stories written by Poe and a surprise in store as it’s revealed that Cushing, once he has been ‘done away with’ so to speak, is from a family which has used powers of black magic, ensuring he is the owner of what I will only say here is... the ultimate Edgar Allan Poe collectible. This is a terrific piece and Palance’s nervy, 'threatening to explode in his fanaticism' performance is a joy to watch... as is Cushing’s. Anyone who thinks of Cushing as someone who is just a solid character actor should watch his performance as a slightly drunk collector in the last part of this sequence. It’s an amazing turn and really calls to attention to just what a great performer he could be, when the script gave him the chance.

And then we have the bookend scene, where the fifth victim, the great Michael Ripper (who you will probably know from damn near every other Hammer film which was made), completely flips out and... no I won’t spoil that for you other than to say... when you think you know how it’s ended, stick around for a few more minutes... not everything is as it appears and I was immensely pleased with this because, for once, I didn’t see the coming twist reveal until it was almost upon me.

The score for the film is a double hander between two composers who I only really know from Hammer film productions, Don Banks and James Bernard. I suppose they both got one or more segments to score and, I have to say, that whoever scored the first sequence, wrote a great score which I would gladly listen to as a stand alone experience (if it were possible and actually got a release) but in terms of being a back up to the ‘on screen’ images... well it just comes across as a little heavy handed, is all.

And, that’s more or less that. I couldn’t get into Torture Garden nearly as much as I could with Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors but, having said that, there were things which made it worth sticking around for. Asides from the quirky and sometimes brilliant third and fourth sections, there’s also the odd interesting idea here and there. Such as a night club scene which had a giant sized snow globe with a Christmas scene inside, with real people in it. So I’m glad I saw it but I’m very glad this wasn’t the first of these films I watched. Definitely worth persevering with if you are into 1960s British horror movies though and, once again, Indicator have done a truly marvellous job with this Blu Ray restoration. As is usual for them, it has a fistful of accompanying extras included. Not one to miss if you’re a fan of these kinds of productions.

Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors

Sin Tax Terror

Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors
UK 1965 Directed by Freddie Francis
Amicus Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah, this one will have some spoilers.

Okay... so I finally got around to watching the very first of the Amicus studio horror films, Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors. The studio would go on to make many more films in this vein and were particularly noted for their famous portmanteau horror movies such as Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror (which were adaptations of some of the tales in the old, pre-code EC Horror Comics, of course). There had been other movies around before which pitched mostly horror stories as a collection of tales, obviously but... not that many of them. Perhaps the most famous of these was the 1945 Ealing production Dead Of Night, which the producer of this movie was said to have been inspired by. Even one of Roger Corman’s ‘Poe inspired’ films from a few years earlier would fit the bill but, for the most part, this idea of having three to five different horror stories with a linking narrative device was not so commonplace... but the success of this one opened up a flood of similar product, including many by Amicus studios themselves.

Now I wasn’t exactly expecting a bad movie when I sat down to watch this but I was certainly surprised by the quality and entertainment value of this film. I can kinda see why both audiences and, perhaps puzzlingly, critics of the time reacted so positively towards this and, not having seen any of the others (yet, there’s a pile of unwatched Blus sitting directly opposite where I am typing this) I’d have to wonder if this is the best of the batch.

The film starts with five passengers, strangers to each other, boarding the compartment of a train... they are played by (in order of the segments which star them as the lead) Neil McCallum, Alan Freeman (that’s right ‘pop pickers’, the famous radio DJ), Roy Castle (in what I think is his debut role, a last minute replacement for Acker Bilk who had a heart attack), Christopher Lee and, another unknown but up and coming young star to be, Donald Sutherland. Then the great Peter Cushing as the titular character, Dr. Terror, comes on board. Actually, the title of the film is a complete cheat but Cushing does go on to elaborate when we find his name is Dr. Schreck, a doctor of metaphysics it would seem (obviously a nod to the actor who played Orlock in the original Nosferatu). In German, he says, the name means ‘terror’, although I don’t think it actually quite means that in the German translation, according to somebody very close to me. We also find out that the Tarot cards in which he reads the fortunes of each of the five passengers in turn, are often referred to by ‘clients’ as his House Of Horrors.

Yeah, the cast list sounds great and it doesn’t stop there. It’s filled with loads of great character actors or British celebrities such as Bernard Lee, Michael Gough and singer Kenny Lynch. Cushing was doing a lot of films released in ‘65 actually, including Dr. Who And The Daleks (again with Roy Castle), The Skull (reviewed here) and She (these last two with Christopher Lee in them too). With a cast like this, the acting is practically taken care of but the brilliant ridiculousness of the mini stories, as Peter Cushing tells each character his possible, ultimate fate which we see play before us as a little mini movie, coupled with some fine cinematography of note, really helps seal the deal on what is a very entertaining package.

The stories are just enchanting and it’s no wonder that Amicus hit upon the idea of aping those EC comics a few years later... this could almost be an issue of any of those old EC titles. Here’s a quick run down of the basic ideas showcased here in terms of plot...

Neil McCallum’s story is of an architect who goes to look at the possibility of knocking out a wall for the current owner of his childhood’s home but, instead, he accidentally knocks out a coffin hiding the dead ancestor of a former owner from centuries before, complete with a threat of werewolvery. Is there a werewolf lurking in the area? Well you’ll soon find out. Actually, as I was watching this section and came to the bit where he’s knocking the plaster out of the wall and uncovering the formerly locked cellar’s dark secret, I found myself wondering if Dario Argento had maybe seen and been influenced by this movie at some point. That could easily have been David Hemmings chipping way at the wall in Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso, reviewed here). When I watched the documentary extra on this Blu Ray (something which I don’t usually do... who has time to watch all these?), I found myself somewhat justified/validated as one of the people on the extras said more or less the same thing about the possible Argento connection.

The second segment, top lining Alan Freeman, tells of him and his family coming home from holiday to find a vine that’s been growing outside their house, getting increasingly hostile as the days/weeks go by. It slaps the garden shears out of Freeman’s hand when he tries to give it a prune and even kills the family dog when it gets too close. Eventually it reaches in through one of the windows and strangles a ‘Man from the Ministry’, played by Jeremy Kemp and, when his boss played by Bernard Lee comes to investigate, they are all held siege in the house by the killer plant. Will they get out or will the plant have its wicked way with them?

The third segment, featuring Roy Castle as jazz band leader Biff Bailey (what a brilliant name!), is pretty run of the mill but the tension and shot compositions more than make up for this riff on the old voodoo tropes. When playing in the West Indies, where he discovers Kenny Lynch singing too, he comes across a religious voodoo ceremony and starts copying down the notes of the melodies and rhythms used in it so he can rearrange it for his jazz band at some point. There’s a wonderful scene as he is lurking in the jungle where we cut from the voodoo dance ritual back to him and we have a native who has discovered him, glaring at him from behind. The edit repeats the trick three more times, each one adding another glaring native behind him until there are four of them. Later, when he takes the notes home and plays the new ‘jazz arrangement’ at a nightclub, voodoo winds wreck the joint and follow him home... for more consequences.

The fourth segment is a nice little riff on the old movie The Beast With Five Fingers (which is obviously one of the influences here). Christopher Lee is a stuffy art dealer who picks on an artist played by Michael Gough, with particularly scathing reviews. When Gough’s character has his revenge on the critic by showing him up as somebody who really doesn’t know what he’s talking about, Lee gets so fired up that he runs over Gough in the hopes of killing him. Alas, Gough survives but with his right hand severed. Unable to pursue his art, he kills himself in a wonderfully realised shot where the gun is aimed at the camera POV and then cuts sharply after the shot to the arm dropping the gun. The effect it creates here is even better than the version of a similar gun shot suicide in Hitchcock’s Spellbound, which is where I suspect the inspiration for this moment resides. Of course, with the artist out of the way, his severed hand begins to pursue Lee’s art critic to get its five fingered revenge on him.

The final ‘inner story’ segment is the tale of Donald Sutherland marrying and bringing his new French bride back to his home town in New England. Alas, despite signs which are pretty obvious to the audience, complete with a parody of the scene in Dracula/Nosferatu where Jonathan Harker (or his stand in here) cut their finger, the lady in question is a vampire who starts to prey off the blood of children in the district. The final little twist in this is genuinely one... possibly the only one... where you don’t ‘see it coming’ but it’s treated somewhat as the punchline to a joke, which possibly makes it a little less effective but, as far as I’m concerned, gives it a sense of fun which is not unwelcome.

Finally, after all five stories have been told, the train reaches its final destination and the ‘real identity’ of Dr. Terror is revealed... which is something I won’t spoil here. However, getting there is a wonderful journey and even the cluttered train carriage, which you would assume has limited space, although I suspect they possibly rebuilt it and just moved walls out of the way where needed, has some nicely composed and inventive shots. The way a number of heads are crammed together into one frame in the carriage in an early part of the film is superb and the director also does some nice stuff with the large head of Bernard Lee in the foreground and to the side of a shot where, in the mid-ground, two other characters form a triangle down to his head by their height in the shot. Great stuff.

One last cherry on the cake is the wonderful scoring by Elisabeth Lutyens, daughter of famous architect Edwin Lutyens and it evokes the kind of sound which has always been absolutely synonymous with this kind of movie in my head for decades. This is yet another I can number in the unreleased scores of this concert hall composer, which would include The Skull (only a re-recording has been made available) and The Earth Dies Screaming (which I reviewed here). Superb stuff and I wish somebody would find and restore these scores for a CD release at some point soon.

And that’s that. It’s no wonder, with films of this quality, that Amicus soon found themselves as the number one competitor, at least in the UK, for Hammer and their domination of the horror market at this period. Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors is a wonderful little comfort horror movie I could easily come back to a number of times in my life so, you know, that was six quid well spent, as far as I’m concerned, for this cracking Blu Ray release which also includes the trailer, a documentary of the film directed by Jake (Razor Blade Smile) West and a profile of Christopher Lee, which I haven’t got around to watching yet, alas. Certainly a recommended purchase from me and worth every penny, as far as I’m concerned.

Amicus - The Friendly Face of Fear

Am I Cursed?

Amicus - The Friendly Face of Fear -
The Definitive History of Amicus Productions
by Allan Bryce
The Dark Side
No ISBN?

Amicus, The Friendly Face of Fear: The Definitive History of Amicus Productions
is pretty much one of those ‘does what is says on the tin’ books, to a certain extent. This tome was bought for me by my cousin for Christmas, who last year gifted me Bruce G. Hallenbeck’s The Amicus Anthology (reviewed here) and it’s more like the book I thought that first one would be... although, ironically, it’s not as detailed as the former.

It’s not a bad little book though, especially for someone like me who knows very little about the Amicus studios and who hasn’t seen... that many... of their films. Starting off with the usual kind of mini biography of the two former partners MIlton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, the book then goes on to look at each film, mostly assigning a chapter per movie. I really didn’t realise that Amicus had made this few films in their mere 15 year history so that was an eye opener for me.

Each mini chapter discusses the production of one film or other and uses occasional interviews by people who worked on the film themselves... usually the directors and producers, for the majority of those sources, although the words of some actors and actresses are also included.  There’s not too much about the musical scores for the films here, which is a shame, but it does take you through some of the censorship issues, although they really didn’t have that many of them, by the looks of it. Not even a fraction of the trouble their more successful rival Hammer did, it would seem.

Actually, looking at that censorship issue, it’s almost like they had the exact opposite problem to Hammer. This may seem quite strange when you compare things to modern audiences and their effect at the box office but an X rating wasn’t the kiss of economic death like the nearest equivalent mostly is today. In those days, if you were making a horror film... and the majority of the Amicus films were, barring the odd thriller or their science fiction stuff like the Doctor Who movies, The Land That Time Forgot (and its sequel, which didn’t actually have the Amicus name on it), At The Earth’s Core and so forth... then it was more desirable for your film to be granted an ‘X’ certificate to show your audience you meant business and to get the punters in.

Ironically, however, it was almost like a mission statement of one of the producers that their films would not be anywhere near as gory or as violent as their Hammer counterparts... indeed, he wanted to be making horror films for children. So when it came to the censorship issues, I was surprised to find that, on occasion, the films were awarded a much lower certificate and Amicus would have to request a higher rating from the BBFC to maintain credibility with their target audience... sometimes even going so far as to shoot the odd, slightly bloodier scene to help raise the rating.

The book is quite well designed for the most part and, one thing it does have in abundance, is plenty of picture content... some in black and white but a lot of colour stuff too and, of course, this includes the poster designs for a lot of the productions plus some behind the scenes stuff. It’s nothing, if not densely illustrated and, although I was disappointed in the lack of full on detail in the content (I could have done with thirty or so pages per film as opposed to 5 - 7 pages per production), the writing style is not too bad and it makes for a warm and cosy read.

Throughout and especially towards the end, the book also tells us the state of Subotsky and Rosenberg’s partnership as time went on and how it deteriorated over the 15 year period due to a variety of different reasons, especially when a producer called John Dark appeared on the scene. It’s sad to read of this stuff but there’s also a sense of... “well at least we got as much as we did from them” and the book does also go into how the two thrived or survived after the company went under.

So there you go... a short review for a short book. Amicus, The Friendly Face of Fear possibly won’t tell people who know a lot about the company much that is new and so, in all honesty, I wouldn’t recommend it to them. I would, however, recommend it to folks like me who haven’t actually got a lot of knowledge on the studio in the first place and who want a quick, introductory primer to the films. This is something which is a valuable addition to my book shelves until, at some point, a suitably more substantial version looking at the entire history in detail is researched and written (one can hope, I guess). Top marks, though, for Allan Bryce who makes this look at the studio and the reputation they built as entertaining as possible.

British Cult Cinema - The Amicus Anthology

AA Meeting

British Cult Cinema - The Amicus Anthology
by Bruce G. Hallenbeck
Hemlock Books
ISBN: 978-0957676282

Once again, author Bruce Hallenback gives us a book about an aspect of British Cinema history which isn’t very often covered, in a fairly inexpensive reference work put out by Hemlock Books. Now, it has to be said, I was mistakenly expecting this book to be about the history of Amicus studios, something I know next to nothing about and was therefore thinking this to be a quick primer in the development of the studio. Not so, in fact, although in some ways you could say it does do some of that job. Primarily, though, British Cult Cinema - The Amicus Anthology is doing exactly what it says on the cover, which is giving a unique and fairly charming overview of the specific anthology films which Amicus put out over the period they were in business... all of which were horror anthologies, of course.

Now, I’ve never seen any of the movies in this book while I was at an age that I can actually remember them now (I’m sure I must have seen over half of them when I was about 7 or 8 years old) and so one of the nice problems to have with a tome of this kind is that Hallenback gives some good descriptions, including the weak and strong points, of a number of films that I now have to somehow find the money to be able to purchase them all. A few of them, to be fair, I already have sitting on the shelf in a ‘to watch’ pile but even in terms of the ones I already have, I believe there are some nice new, restored and uncut Blu Rays coming out or already in UK stores... so I will have to find some cash from somewhere to give a few of these things their due.

As he did in his tome British Cult Cinema - Hammer Fantasy And Sci Fi (reviewed here), Hallenback starts off by first giving the reader an overview of the specified film format as it was before Amicus Studios started churning out their productions. So you’ll find a chapter highlighting films such the famous (infamous?) Dead Of Night in here. It’s always good to have some historical context thrown into the mix and to root the subject matter in and the writer does a fine job of picking out interesting highlights (and lowlights) over the years before then giving us a brief history of the originations of Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg’s Amicus Studios and the financial state they found themselves in before the first of these was ready for the cameras to roll on. After this, he goes on to detail each of the Amicus anthology movies in turn, starting with a film I must get around to seeing soon, Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors, assigning a new chapter to each film.

Of course, this experienced writer (it looks like he’s written a fair few of these types of books for Hemlock over the years) knows very well about giving the reader context for the specific movies he is bringing to life here, so you will also know what some of the other key Amicus films were being made at around the same time as the ones highlighted in this volume. More importantly, he gives you a handle on the script process and the development of each project for the films in question.

For example, since a lot of the stories in these anthology films started off as short stories by famous writers such as Robert Bloch (most popularly remembered as being the writer of the original novel Psycho, which Hitchcock made famous) or comic strips in the infamous EC Comics, he also gives you examples of the original works which inspired the ‘episodes’ contained within each film, often pulled and boxed out by the designers of the book. I was actually a lot less impressed with the design on this one than the actual writing but the principle of execution for the layout is sound, at least. Hallenback even, to a certain extent, goes on to compare what ended up on screen with the original source novel and sometimes script and highlights the differences, which is handy.

The writer also details the more prominent career points of the various stars in these films which I found most enlightening, especially in the case of Geoffrey Bayldon. I originally knew the actor on television, when I was a nipper, in the title role of a show I used to love, and which I’m sure many of my readers must be familiar with... that of Catweazle. Years later, he became as much loved by the young un’s in the regular role of The Crow Man, opposite Jon Pertwee’s Worzel Gummidge. For years, growing up, I was wondering why nobody had thought of offering Bayldon the role of The Doctor in one of my favourite TV shows, Doctor Who. Well, all I can say is it took this book for me to find out that Bayldon had, indeed, been twice offered the role of The Doctor, once before William Hartnell established the role and again before Patrick Troughton took over from him and, each time, Bayldon had rejected the offer. It’s a shame though and I wonder if,  with hindsight, the gentleman in question regrets his decision nowadays... I think he would have been just right for the part.

Anyway, I digress. Also, for each movie covered here, Hallenback lists any changes for markets once the product was finished. Being extremely interested in censorship issues myself, this information is worth its weight in gold... especially useful for fairly active DVD and Blu Ray buyers researching which versions of the films to get from which countries, so as to get the fullest print possible. The writer also gives a brief synopsis of the separate stories in each of these films - so beware there are spoilers - and also goes on to excerpt extracts from reviews and so forth in order to give the reader an idea of the critical reaction to each work, before also going into how strong the box office was for each offering.

And so the book goes on, with a chapter on all of the Amicus anthologies (there really weren’t all that many of them) and also some very close relations to them where one or the other of the partners was involved in a similar product which didn’t, for whatever reason, carry the Amicus name. Which is also good to know.

To finish the book, Hallenback goes on to detail the most prominent ‘Horror Anthology’ films which hit the screen since the end of Amicus’ reign of ‘cinematic terror compilations’ and so you’ll also find movies such as The Monster Club and The Twilight Zone The Movie detailed in here. Again, this section is equally full of facts about the productions and I, for instance, had no idea how many years had passed since The Monster Club was ‘in the can’, so to speak, before it was released on UK shores. We knew nothing of the long delay at the time and I can remember seeing it in cinemas over here in the 1980s.

So there you have it. Bruce Hallenback gives us a truly entertaining and, at least as importantly, enlightening tome on the Amicus horror anthologies such as Tales From The Crypt, The Vault of Horror and Tales That Witness Madness. If you’re into British horror than this book, like more than a few by the same author in this series, I suspect, is an indispensable tome to have on your bookshelf. Not the best looking book in terms of design but, in terms of sheer information imparted by someone who’s obviously enthusiastic about his subject matter, worth its weight in blood and bone.

The Terrornauts

Terror Firma

The Terrornauts
1967 UK
Directed by Montgomory Tully
Amicus via Network DVD Region 2

Warning: Kinda spoilers here I guess, although it’s not the 
kind of film I would worry about that kind of thing for.

When I first found out a few years ago there was a late sixties sci-fi movie made which had Charles Hawtrey in it... I set about trying to find it immediately, but to no avail. The mixture of the Carry On star and a movie which had a title like The Terrornauts was just too irresistible for me to bear. Alas, my search bore no fruit but, luckily, Network DVD have come to my rescue with their brand new release at a more than reasonable price (aka value for money... aka cheap).

In all honesty, I bought this film for a laugh because I couldn’t conceive of this movie being any good but, as luck would have it, it’s really a charming curio which I wish I’d known about earlier and, maybe, had the opportunity to see as a kid.

The Network DVD has two different prints on it. A sharp transfer of the trimmed re-release version of the movie and, hidden in the extras menu, the original full theatrical release which, to be fair, does say it has a noticeable drop in quality. Well, I suspect most of the audience who want to see such movies as this one are going to prefer watching a not very good print of the longer version rather than a crystal clear print of the shortened version, so that’s the one I’m reviewing here. I’m glad I did choose that version to watch too because there is an alien creature in one scene which is both a badly suspect costume while simultaneously being a triumph of surrealism in design. You kinda have to see it to believe it but, when I went through the chapter menu of the film so I could show my dad the bizarre and noteable monster, it wasn’t there. I soon realised that the scene must have been cut from the shorter version of the film so... if you want to see a cool (for possibly the wrong reasons) monster, then you need to watch the bad quality version, I’m afraid. But the monster really makes up for any drop in quality... since the drop’s not half as long as your jaw will drop when you see this thing.

When I saw on the credits that the screenplay was written by the legendary John Brunner (from a novel called The Wailing Asteroid by Murray Leinster), I realised that this film might not be the unintentional laugh fest I was expecting and, as it happens, my suspicions were proven correct.

The film stars Simon Oates, Bond girl Zena Marshall and Stanley Meadows who, along with an accountant and a tea lady played respectively by British comedy actors Charles Hawtrey and Patricia Hayes, along for comic relief, make contact with a signal from space... the source of which promptly sends a spaceship to Earth to haul them, and the building they are in, back to an abandoned asteroid base manned by alien robots. Here, our heroes are put through through a series of intelligence tests before revealing how they can save humanity from certain death at the hands of an oncoming fleet of space aliens (presumably, The Terrornauts of the title).

The film is, in a word, charming.

The colours, including an abundance of pinky reds and faded greens are amazing (and what I’d expect from my experience of the two Doctor Who films put out by the same studio) and all the characters are pretty much likeable. Patricia Hayes’ “tea lady common sense” is especially endearing as the group encounter alisen concepts on the asteroid.

The story is really interesting too in that it doesn’t really follow a formula so much and there’s lots of different things pulled together to make the short running time of the movie seem anything but padded. For example, two of the characters have a short romp on an alien planet when Zena Marshall gets accidentally teleported there and has to be rescued by Simon Oates from green skinned aliens who want to sacrifice her to... um... whoever they want to sacrifice her to. Luckily, our hero is armed with a space gun so the primitive spears of the tribe prove no match for him. Actually, the consistency of the way the teleporter works and the way it gets our heroes out of a hole towards the end of the film is somewhat inconsistent and convenient, to say the least, but if you’re not taking the film too seriously (and by this point, you probably won’t be) then you’ll have a fine time with it.

The special effects are a bit ropey in certain sequences - the alien monster costume, for example, or the twin moons of a planet which are obviously painted onto a piece of glass in front of the camera lens - but this all just adds to the charm and I have to say, to the general atmosphere of the film. The music, too, by famous concert composer Elizabeth Lutyens (The Earth Dies Screaming, The Skull) is pretty good... apart from maybe the comic interlude she uses for the entrance of Charles Hawtrey into the narrative. This is yet another one of her scores that I would have hoped to have been made accessible to us at some point. Her film scores seem, like most of her works, actually, sadly under-represented on CD or download.

So will science-fiction fans love this movie or not? Well, I guess some of them will but those looking for some hard core sci-fi movie might be best to stay away. If, however, you’re in the market for a charming, late sixties British sci-fi movie and are happy with the kinds of failings and the big rewards that such films can unfold before you, then you’re going to have a real blast with The Terrornauts. It’s time to give this under-rated gem of a movie a go but, if you do, I’d definitely recommend you watch the longer cut which is found in the extras menu of this new Network edition.

The Skull

Amicus Gives Good Head

The Skull 
1965 UK
Directed by Freddie Francis
Amicus/Paramount Region 1

Well this was a bit of a surprise to me.

I’ve not seen very many Amicus films and, I’m pretty sure, none of their horror movies before now. I think the only ones I’ve actually sampled of theirs are the two Doctor Who movies and the three movies they did in the seventies based on the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’ve had a bit more exposure to their nearest rivals of the time, Hammer Films, which based on this viewing, I have to say, seem to be a lot less subtle and effective in comparison to this minor masterpiece.

Written by Robert Bloch, writer of Psycho, and directed by Hammer/Amicus alumni Freddie Francis, The Skull starts off with a gentleman in a graveyard who digs up a coffin, removes the head and takes it back home to boil the skin off to be left with just the skull. However, the skull has extraordinary powers and when his mistress comes to see him, concerned about the unnatural smoke coming beneath the door of the bathroom, she finds something and screams into the camera to usher in the opening title music.

Following this, at an auction of macabre rarities, hosted by Michael Gough, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are trying to outbid each other on various items for their collection. Both collectors of bizarre and unusual items, the friends also have a mutual acquaintance who supplies them with rare, black market goods and it is this guy who tries to sell Cushing the skull of the Marquis De Sade (Bloch’s source story for this movie was called The Skull Of The Marquis De Sade) but is initially turned down due to the high asking price. However, Cushing's mistake is he changes his mind and it’s here that his troubles begin...

The Skull is an absolutely beautiful horror film, I have to say. Right from the outset, the design of the shots, the clean framing, the use of various unnatural coloured lighting schemes which subtly recall the hallucinogenic colour palette of Mario Bava and foreshadow Dario Argento’s work and the way the camera moves through the shot set ups really make this film stand out. The principal actor in the pre-credits graveyard sequence can even be seen crouching down a little as he walks towards the camera and leaves the graveyard, you might notice, so that the director can keep him cleanly framed in the shot (wonder how many times they made him shoot that before he could adjust his height correctly?). Either that or he’s got a very funny walk.

The editing is good too. Nicely cutting on closer shots at key times to pull you into the movie and, it has to be said, this film is also filled with some great close-ups to allow the actors to really just use their facial expressions to the utmost, but in a way that takes you by stealth because of the well timed editing. And, of course, when you have such great actors as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, not to mention the likes of Nigel Green and Patrick McGee, then you know you have some of the best people making use of those close-ups.

It’s really great, also, because it’s very nearly a silent movie in many ways. Lots of the film plays out with very litttle dialogue and, for the last 20 minutes or so, there is almost none. A nightmare sequence in the centre of the film involving Peter Cushing, when things get decidedly real and Kafkaesque on him, involving an enforced game of Russian roulette where he is the sole player, is quite amazing to watch because everything is done with body language and it makes for a really effective sequence. Especially since each time he pulls the trigger the shots cut to a more close up version of the act, until eventually you are just left with Cushing’s head filling the frame, reminiscent of some of the scenes in the westerns shot by Sergio Leone.

And because of the long periods of dialogue free stretches, the film relies quite heavily on an amazing score by avant garde, concert hall composer Elizabeth Lutyens, who also provided scores for such films as Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors and, of course, the astonishing British B-movie The Earth Dies Screaming. It’s a really strong score full of eerie atonalities and definitely supports and lifts the visuals when required. This, like many of her works, definitely needs a proper CD release.

Christopher Lee’s scenes are sparse but very effective... this is one of his most interesting performances, it seems to me. There are a few, quite startling compositions where he and Peter Cushing are arranged so that they are in conversation but with their backs to each other and, lovely though the design of these shots are, I couldn’t help thinking of Vincent Price’s story of The Return Of The Fly where he and another actor had to be shot back to back to avoid them looking each other so they wouldn’t keep cracking up at their ridiculous lines. One wonders if there’s an element of that, too, in these sequences.

It matters not, though. The Skull is a wonderful antidote to some of the work these two British stars were doing with Hammer and I have a feeling I’m going to be dipping a lot more into the back catalogue of Amicus horror titles in the coming months. If you like your horror lurid and gory then, alas, The Skull is probably not for you... if you want something a bit more subtle then this movie might be worth giving a go. And when I say subtle I should probably point out that this film has a flying skull mentally controlling people to commit murder, so maybe not the best use of the word but certainly it doesn’t bathe itself in blood and nudity just for the sake of it (although I’m personally not ruling out either of those elements as fine ingredients to any horror movie). Certainly, if you’re a fan of Christopher Lee and want to see him in fine form in what is ostensibly a small series of cameo appearances to lend context to the narrative, then this one should definitely be on your ‘to watch’ pile. So definitely check this one out, if you are so inclined.