The Monster

Dwarf Spirit

The Monster
aka I Don’t Want To Be Born
aka The Devil Within Her
aka Sharon’s Baby
UK 1975 Directed by Peter Sasdy
Network Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has all the spoilers.
If you don’t want to know, don’t read.

I’ve been wanting to see I Don’t Want To Be Born aka The Monster aka The Devil Within Her aka Sharon’s Baby for some time now and regular readers of my blog can probably guess why... yeah, that’s right. One of my favourite people in the world, Caroline Munro, is in this one. So when Network brought out a Blu Ray edition of the film last year, I was very keen to get my hands of a copy (thanks @cultofthecinema and a Merry Christmas 2021 to you too). Now, although it’s been released under the title The Monster by the company, I’d only ever heard of this as I Don’t Want To Be Born. Trying to find it under any of these titles on the IMDB though (at time of writing) proves a bit of a slog. You’ll find it listed there under the completely ludicrous title, Sharon’s Baby. Why is that a ludicrous title? Well for starters, there’s no character called Sharon in the movie so... yeah.

Okay, the film starts strongly with a pregnant Lucy, played by Joan Collins, screaming her head off as the credits roll and Dr. Finch, played by Donald Pleasence, tries to extract her baby from her. The kid puts up quite a tussle and it’s at this point that Dr. Finch exclaims to his assisting nurse (played by none other than a very young Floella Benjamin), that it’s like the baby doesn’t want to be born. Something which, later on in the movie, he’s reminded of when someone says that, um, it’s like the child never wanted to be born. All I can say that, even at the first utterance of this, I was pretty sold on I Don’t Want To Be Born as being the one, truly genuine title for this film. I mean, I’ve talked about the non-existent Sharon but, did I also mention the baby Lucy gives birth to is a boy? So, you know, calling it The Devil Within Her is a little over the top if alluding to the child and, if it’s not, then it’s certainly only in Joan Collins character for about two minutes before it’s born into the world. Born into the world and, apparently, half scratching Lucy’s face off and looking like it wants to drink more of her blood. So, yeah, this is not the best delivery the good doctor’s seen in recent years.

Okay, so Lucy’s husband Gino, played by Ralph Bates attempting to do an Italian accent, collects gal and sprog but it’s not long before the little tyke is causing a ruckus and, eventually killing people. Lucy’s friend Mandy, played absolutely brilliantly and naturalistically by my heroine Caroline Munro (it’s got to be one of her best performances... she doesn’t just hold her own with Joan here, she acts her off the screen), can’t really suggest much in the way of help but maybe her boyfriend Tommy (played by John Steiner, with a brilliant cockney accent here) whom she works for as a stripper, may know what the answer is. Well, Lucy remembers it might be something to do with when she used to work and sleep with Tommy at a strip show too, where she rejected the advances of Hercules the dwarf (played by George Claydon) and so said little person put a curse on her.

Meanwhile, Gino’s sister Albana (played by Eileen Atkins), who really is a sister with her nun’s habit and holy ways, recognises something amiss with the little darling child. Maybe it’s the fact that it manages to somehow go on a killing spree and do things like chop Donald Pleasence’s head off with a couple of well placed blows with a garden spade... or that time it killed its dad, Gino, who has apparently ‘gone missing’. At the end of the film, after the toddler who shouldn’t be able to even crawl yet has chased mummy with a knife and stabbed her to death, Sister Albana exorcises the demonic spirit from the baby... which also somehow affects Hercules (who somehow was manifesting as the child... not sure how that works), causing him to die of a heart attack on stage at the strip show, due to having his dual spirit exorcised from the kiddies body. It makes about as much sense as anything else in this movie but, well, here’s the thing...

Call it a guilty pleasure, if you like, but I really had a good time with this one. It’s not the fact that Sasdy’s use of camera movement to wander away from a honed in set up to pan somewhere else (which I’m sure I’ve seen him do in some of his Hammer films) or his interesting compositions are all that special. It’s not even the acting which, was quite good from some people and not great from some others... honestly, Caroline was the best thing about this movie for me... and it’s not even super cool Ron Grainer’s wildly catchy but, let’s be honest here, mostly inappropriate score for the movie (which I would love on CD please record companies?). It’s the fact that it’s such a wildly ambitious idea to have a killer baby going on the rampage before CGI was even a thing. I mean, this is literally, you see a knife coming at the camera or a spade coming down towards camera or a window or cot bashed apart and then... cut to cute picture of a completely immobile toddler to somehow show that it was the baby committing all these crimes. It’s just so wildly funny... I hate to say it but, it’s hugely entertaining because of how silly the execution of the premise is (and there have been much better killer baby movies done in the intervening years, of course).

But there you are... a film with some strange influences at work in its genetic make up... intentionally or not. So obviously trying to ride the wave of The Exorcist but, also, that Grainer music is played through in a way almost against the visuals and running as an accompaniment rather than an illustrative score... much like Italian groups like Goblin or Libra might provide for a giallo or horror movie. I thoroughly enjoyed... hmm... I’ll refer to it as I Don’t Want To Be Born... and Caroline Munro looks absolutely stunning in this, as well as being at the top of her game. So, there are good reasons to have this title but, for me, it’s just a fun experience.

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.

Star Trek - Series One

Where No Man 
Has Gorn Before

Star Trek Series One
1966 USA
Produced by Gene Roddenberry
Paramount BluRay Region A/B

Space.

The Final Frontier.

It was back in 1973, I think, when I first started watching the voyages of the Starship Enterprise on BBC1 via my parents old TV set. I was five years old. The year is pretty easy to place for me, actually, because I must have liked the show so much that, at the end of that year, my folks got me the Star Trek Annual 1973, one of many hardcover annual editions put out in the UK with full colour reprints culled from the US Star Trek comic put out by Gold Key. I remember, I used to read that and subsequent annuals a lot until well into my teens.

I loved the show but I was never, at the time, able to appreciate it in colour and it was not until the mid 1980s that I was finally able to see the full spectrum of the show in some much later re-runs. By then, I was a fully fledged Star Trek fan. Merchandise and toy manufacture was not quite as gung ho in those days when it came to tie-ins with film and TV as it became post Star Wars (around about 1978) but there were a few Star Trek items I had in the early to mid 1970s, in addition to the annuals, that I was proud to be the owner of.

My first item was the old Mego action figure of Captain Kirk which I took home with me after my parents spotted it at an early 1970s Ideal Home Exhibition. Mr. Spock was added to my horde within a year. I also grabbed a very handy, paperback reference book from either Dark They Were And Golden Eyed or Forbidden Planet (my two favourite shops at the time) called The Star Trek Catalogue, which probably would seem quite primitive in style to fans today but, back in the 70s, it was the essential guide to the show and included a handy episode guide to the series. I also had another episode guide to the show in a book called Fantastic Television, another essential 1970s book purchase for the discerning sci-fi fan. As were The Star Trek Blueprints and the Dinky die-cast Starship Enterprise (mine broke in a way far more devastating than any found in the original series... but I'm not going to disclose on how that happened).

Then came the 12 famous Star Trek fotonovels which were released by Bantam (and a couple by Corgi too), which were a great way to catch up with the show in an age when re-runs were still fairly scarce and the concept of easy to purchase and watch video tapes were something the majority of the nation couldn’t even begin to comprehend back then. They just hadn’t quite been invented yet. I guess people from later generations must find it difficult to imagine that the planet was stuck in a time when you couldn’t just decide to sit down and watch something you wanted to watch. If there was a film you wanted to revisit, you’d scour the TV listings for years, since there was usually a good two to four year gap between the same film being shown again. It really was a different world we were living in back then and home entertainment systems were pretty much a needle dropped onto a vinyl surface or a bunch of printed pages bound together. That was it, unless you got something like the Scalextric or a train set out. Or played with your Action Man.

I’ve been meaning to revisit this show for some time now but I had been steadily avoiding the recent DVD issues because of either re-tracked in music in the odd episode where license fees were not paid or, in the current re-issues, a lack of being able to see the episodes in their original state at all. A few years ago, Paramount got all “George Lucas” on the show and reshot all the special effects sequences of these things and inserted them into the episodes, along with creating a new title sequence and, even worse, rerecording the opening theme on those titles. However, when I read that on the new Blu-Ray issues, unlike the DVDs, you had the choice to watch them with their original and, sometimes dodgy looking, effects sequences etc. back in place, I knew that these would be the versions to watch.

So here I am.

And I have to say, it was absolutely great watching this first season again.

When you think of classic and groundbreaking television of the era, shows which really dared to go where no man had gone before, Star Trek was very much ahead of its time. While I was watching these it very much put me in mind of an earlier show from the late 1950s and early 1960s which explored similar territory... that is, the territory of ideas... The Twilight Zone (which I am also currently rewatching on Blu Ray, my first series review is here). Science fiction has always been a style of prose where, because of the fantastic realms you can get away with in that genre, you could explore the ideas related to the human condition in such a way that you could push further and take it to extremes you couldn’t get away with in other formats like, say, a hospital soap opera. You can’t examine the idea of the good part of the psyche and the bad part of your psyche and how they would react independent of each other in regular fiction, for example. However, if you have the concept of a transporter beam malfunction which then splits a person into the two separate beings, as it does with Kirk in the season one episode The Enemy Within, you can explore not just the possibility that your id is stronger and more confident than the other part, but also the fact that on their own, those two parts couldn’t exist without certain aspects of the other. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had to use a science fiction base for his own celebrated study of a not dissimilar concept.

This is where shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek really win out, of course, and it’s a stroke of genius that Roddenberry conceived of a format for his show, basically a clipper exploring the stars, that would allow you to be able to bring a whole load of different ideas to the table, just like you could in The Twilight Zone, but with a single, regular cast and a setting that gave enough of an anchor for viewers to see a familiar face each week but be flexible enough to allow for the diverse nature of the stories on offer. And, just like The Twilight Zone, many of those stories were written by gifted science fiction writers who would be very well remembered in years to come.

It was also quite gutsy. When I was watching it again, I was struck how different this series would be if it was made now. There are rarely any punches pulled in the way these stories are told, ideas conveyed. Even when the sequel series, Star Trek The Next Generation, was airing decades later, it was a softer, somewhat watered down and more politically correct version, in some ways, than the good ol’ knock ‘em down, “to the death” days of Kirk and his crew back in the sixties. Blood is spilled, people’s minds are played with and moral stances challenged in the least wishy washy ways you could imagine.

There are many key episodes in this first season which deal with interesting themes. Mudd’s Women, for example, deals with drug addiction fuelled by women who are concerned with their fading beauty as age hits them. Not an idea that would be tackled too easily in our sensitive times today, perhaps, but it even manages to do it with a sense of humour which doesn’t once undercut the pathos of the three ladies in question. Or The Galileo Seven, which is all about the prejudice against Spock and the will to survive and protect the people around you in extreme circumstances when they are almost against you as much as your collective odds of survival. Racial intolerance is also highlighted in this season quite overtly.

Another good one is Miri, which treats adolescence in a similar fashion to William F. Nolan’s novel Logan’s Run, and which guest stars Kim Darby and Michael J. Pollard. And there’s the original story of Khan, as played by Ricardo Montalban in the episode Space Seed, a role he would reprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and which Benedict Cumberbatch would help reboot in the recent feature film Star Trek: Into Darkness. Then there’s Arena, where instead of waging a long and bloody war, Kirk has to fight the alien Gorn on a planet, re-invents gunpowder projectiles and shows mercy, thus saving the day.

And, of course, no one can forget the brilliant, award winning time travel story City On The Edge Of Forever by Harlan Ellison, where Leonard Nimoy’s Spock has to convince William Shatner’s Kirk that his new sweetheart from the 1930s, played by young Joan Collins, has to die in order for history to be restored.

This season also includes my two absolute favourite Star Trek episodes ever...

Shore Leave, in which the crew are endangered (and some of them seemingly killed) by events and situations pulled directly from their imagination. The look on De Forrest Kelley’s face as his character, Dr. McCoy, is confronted with the man-size white rabbit from Alice In Wonderland, asking him the time, is absolutely priceless and the whole episode in general shows off the comic capabilities of the ensemble of actors very well. Devil In The Dark, a chase and shoot creature feature, is another one which becomes high concept when it transforms into being about something completely different by the end of the episode... a mother guarding her eggs. The concept was so good, in fact, that the story was pretty much rewritten and reused for the final episode of the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show in the early 1970s.

This show has brilliant colour and camerawork throughout, throwing bright greens against a wall, for example, even when there is no way that kind of lighting could be naturally occurring in that particular environment. In this way, actually, the show is very Bavaesque in its mise-en-scene.

Another big plus is the level of detail. For a mid-1960s TV show, everything is well thought out and concepts like beacons, sub-space recorders, disc storage and a whole host of things which wouldn’t necessarily be thought of today, are included in the chemical make up of the show. Admittedly, things like uniform colours to show rank or department are a little inconsistent at first, but it all gets worked out by the end of season one. Lieutenant Uhura, for example, looks even more gorgeous wearing the gold variation of her uniform, but eventually the red variant became her regular garb.

The music in the show is phenomenal. There’s lots of original stuff, as the limited edition 15 disc CD boxed set from La La Land showed a couple of years ago, and this is often used in a needle drop capacity throughout many episodes and gives a lot of familiar tunes and textures you can identify with on an episode to episode basis. This is all good stuff (and that CD set is well recommended, by the way).

All in all, Star Trek - Series One is a great start to a show which was cancelled way too early but which came back with a vengeance in the wake of the first feature film. It’s a show which is all about ideas and not necessarily action... although with Kirk and crew in the mix, you can be sure there’s plenty of fist fights and explosions thrown in for good measure. After seeing this series again, I can’t recommend it enough. It has everything a science fiction fan could want... and I can’t wait to start on the next box with series two in it.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond