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’.

It Couldn't Happen Here

Happiness Is
A Warm Nun

It Couldn't Happen Here
UK 1987 Directed by Jack Bond
BFI LTD Edition Book Version 
Dual Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2

Earlier this week the British Film Institute released this limited edition of the Pet Shop Boys’ feature film, It Couldn't Happen Here... and I bet they wish they’d manufactured more because the thing sold out in less than a week, by the looks of it. I’m glad I pre-ordered mine though and if you want to see the film but were too slow to hit the order button, they have announced they will be releasing a standard edition later in the year. I grabbed this one because I remember I really liked it at the time and it stirs up a few memories.

I was into the music of the Pet Shop Boys back then and, in particular, their second album Actually, which was released in 1987 (the same year that this film previewed at the London Film Festival). A lot of the songs in this movie come from that album and I was interested in seeing just how you put visuals to these works. My memory is a little hazy on these things (being as it was so long ago) but I think I first saw it at my local ABC/Canon/whatever cinema it was, just around the corner from me in Enfield, when it was released theatrically in 1988. I can’t remember if my best friend Kerry was with me at that screening or if I showed him the VHS tape a year or two later but, I remember he must have liked it a little because he kept reciting one of the lines used by Gareth Hunt in the movie to repeatedly irritate those around him... “Ha, ha, ha! Only a laugh, no harm done.” Kerry also used it like this and I enjoyed him slipping it into conversation with people who had no idea what he was quoting.

Anyway, the film was... and still is for that matter... at least in some ways, a typical ‘pop star movie’. Only a tenuous story at best (or not really at all in this case) as the stars are put in situations where they get caught up in little episodes with people and get to sing their songs. You know the score... films like A Hard Day’s Night (The Beatles), Head (The Monkees) and Spice World (the Spice Girls)... all of which I admire for different reasons but, yeah, you can certainly tell a pop promo style musical.

Here we also have the usual load of star actors supporting our heroes... Tennant and Lowe... as they wander aimlessly through a series of pop video styled visuals and keep us, hopefully, entertained for the length of the feature. In this one we have people like the aforementioned Gareth Hunt (who was famous in the UK for playing Gambit in The New Avengers), Neil Dickson (playing a World War I fighter pilot, similar to his turn a few years earlier in Biggles), Joss Ackland (well he gets in everything) and the one and only Barbara Windsor. What a Carry On.

There’s also a big side helping of quite deliberate surrealism underlying the film, in a way which only Head (out of those examples above) shares with it in intent. It’s distinctly British and it belongs to what I would call a certain kind of ‘almost golden’ era of British cinema which I sometimes refer to as... the Palace Pictures era. If anything, the film kind of has the atmosphere and visual density in some parts, of the kind of films directed by Peter Greenaway around the same time. In fact, if somebody asked Greenaway to make a movie to a bunch of pop songs, I can’t help thinking that he might have come up with something similar to this - the two zebra men leading the zebra around, the free moving ventriloquist’s dummy waxing lyrical about the nature of time and the not entirely inevitable creation of tea cups, the nuns with their suspenders and garters who strip off and do a lovely dance to the hit song It’s A Sin (one of a few in the film choreographed by Strictly Come Dancing star and Hot Gossip choreographer Arlene Philips), a man going about his day but on fire and, of course, Joss Ackland as a blind priest/serial killer getting away with, as only he could by this point, telling the old nymphomaniac who only gets turned on by Jewish cowboys joke.

And it’s of its time. There’s lots to look at if you don’t mind the sometimes pretentious use of Tennant’s lyrics recited by him straight on the voice over narrative but delivering it in his distinctive style. For instance, in the performance of the hit song by the Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield, What Have I Done To Deserve This?, we have Neil Tennant on the phone with Barbara Windsor miming to Dusty’s singing and, at one point, she’s spinning around in front of the camera on a swivel chair. This is cross cut with the telephone box that Neil Tennant is making the call from also spinning around in front of the camera and it’s the kind of shot where you might not at first click what’s going on until you realise it’s not the camera moving... it’s the people and their props. Effective and interesting stuff like this certainly helps you forget the lack of substance to the content of the film and both the Pet Shop Boys hold up pretty well in this movie... especially when you consider the wealth of acting talent they’ve surrounded themselves with in this film. It’s also very colourful and I can’t help think but the film must have played really well when it was screened at the old Scala Cinema at Kings Cross at the time. I think Tennant, at least, was a semi-regular attendee at some of those outrageously off kilter Scala double bills (which I talk about a little in my review of Jane Giles book on the Scala here) and one wonders if some of that atmosphere and sensibility was injected both into his music and, certainly, into this movie.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about this one except the limited edition packaging of the film by the BFI is pretty nicely done, with both the Blu Ray and DVD discs housed in a hardback book which comes out from the bounding slipcase and which features a fair amount of essays on the film and the people behind it. There’s also a round of extras (as yet unwatched by me) which include the pop video, partially culled from this movie, for the hit Pet Shop Boys song cover version of Always On My Mind and an interview with dance choreographer Arlene Phillips. My one regret is that there’s no extra feature on the music of Ennio Morricone, who collaborated with Tennant and Lowe on the song which gives this movie it’s title. Nobody ever seems to mention this and I remember accidentally discovering his name included in very small print on the Actually CD when it came out but... with absolutely no fanfare. Strange that. Anyhow, It Couldn’t Happen Here maybe looks a little dated in places but it’s a great film for capturing a certain time and feel of British cinema. If you’re old enough to remember that time... or if you’re a Pet Shop Boys fan obviously... then you should have a good time with this movie, actually.

Mr. Forbush And The Penguins (Cry Of The Penguins)

For-sight

Mr. Forbush And The Penguins (Cry Of The Penguins)
1971 UK
Directed by Alfred Viola
Network DVD Region 2

Warning: Sorry for the long lead in to get to the actual review 
on this one, but I had to get this stuff out of my system.

Mr. Forbush And The Penguins is written by the famous Anthony Shaffer (identical twin of Peter Shaffer, apparently) and based on a novel by Graham Billing.

Cry Of The Penguins is what this movie was known as in America... and even then it didn’t get a release over there until a full ten years later than the UK got it (which is why some of the actors and actresses involved have this listed in their IMDB filmographies as coming out in 1981, although one look at just five minutes of it should be able to signal it as a product of the late sixties/early seventies to anyone half interested in the short history of cinema).

I didn’t know about the American title and release date until today... but I did know of the film because it’s always been a lurking presence in my mind since I used to catch snatches of it on television in my pre-teen years throughout the seventies. Back in the dark ages, that is... before the commercial release of video recorders, when you caught what you could catch at whatever time the TV channel in question decided you were going to have the opportunity to watch it... and even then in the wrong aspect ratio.

It’s a film I’ve always had a vague memory of being very impressed with as a child, but one which I have never been able to catch up with properly until now. The timing of which was a bit of a tiny miracle in itself seeing as it was obviously bubbling up in my mind again. I used to check out the listings on Amazon regularly for a while to see if it would ever turn up some day. Maybe I should have been looking for Cry Of The Penguins after all, eh?

The story of this review, though, starts just a few short weeks ago, on Saturday 7th September 2013, at a celebration screening of Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law to mark the completion of a film called Noirish Project, to which I have done the promotional campaign and provided opening credit cards for. After the screening I got together with a bunch of people in a restaurant/bar thingy and had, what I worryingly call in my fear of such incidents... a social situation.

It was a strange day because I had been angry with one of my best friends, Chris B, for about four years now. Four years where I hadn’t been able to forgive him something he’d done to me and, consequently, hadn’t seen him or talked to him for all that time. This was partially my fault too, though, because of being in a bad and suicidal headspace when he did what he did, so it took me four years to cool down again and contact him. Which I did, and I arranged to meet him on a Saturday... forgetting that I had already committed to the director of Noirish Project to go to the aforementioned Down By Law screening. So I met with Chris in a pub for two hours before, so we could hopefully forgive each other, and then I took him along with me to this screening where we met a bunch of cool people at the aforementioned restaurant/bar thingy and had a thoroughly good time. I don’t do well in social situations and tend to stay quiet and characteristically dumb under such cordial hostilities, but the people at this thing were all pretty bubbly and so the “Talky Tawny” part of my personality came out to play and regale everyone with complete nonsense at a substantially energetic rate.

At least that’s how I felt about it anyway.

Present at the event, who I actually talked to, were the great writer/director and co-starring actor of Noirish Project... James Devereaux, the astonishingly lovely, actress extraordinaire Lian-Rose Bunce, who also has a role in the film, the incredible soundscape composer Jay Harris, expressive character actor John Giles and, last but not least, the film's other main co-star, the always hat-worthy thespian and Carry On expert, Mr. Alfie Black. 

Oh, there was also another sexy goddess woman there with fair hair on our table who was properly interested in world cinema, sitting to the right of me, but I never caught her name and so she will have to remain, sadly, un-highlighted in this article.

So there we all were and my friend, Chris B, was regaling a few of these people of the story of the day he met John Hurt at a signing... well met may be the wrong word but it’s good enough for this already interminably long blog post, at least. I chipped in with my... “Oh. I’d love to see Mr. Forbush And The Penguins again but, sadly, it’s never been released on home video, from what I can tell.” Everyone, and when I say everyone I mean, not everyone... just a few people, looked at me blankly. “You know.” I went on, “The one where it’s just John Hurt and a load of penguins.” Glazed eyes and the thoughtful looks of people trying to sugar coat an answer met my outburst. Finally, my mate Chris, being as he’s lost none of the definite lack of panache which has rubbed off from me like an acid eating away at ones subtlety, chimes in with... “Hmm. Yes. Well there’s a reason these films don’t get released, you know.” Which everyone laughed at, including me, because, ha, it was good to see Chris again and be with all these wonderful people. Plus, I always give him an equally hard time about a multitude of minor sins whenever we’re in the same room together.

So that was that evening which was, frankly, one of the better “talking with real people” evenings I’ve had in a very long time when, less than 48 hours later, midway through the following Monday morning, I got a mailshot from Network video telling me that this weeks new release was, yeah you guessed it, Mr. Forbush And The Penguins. I leapt into action immediately and ordered it from Amazon that very evening.

And yesterday it arrived.

As I slowly started to watch it, the film felt odd at first. I can’t remember if I ever, before, saw it all the way through or not. I suspect I had, but even if that was the case, I certainly couldn’t remember the beginning of the movie. Which is a shame because it sets up the arrogance of John Hurt’s rich and privileged title character immediately, by showing him failing to show up for his graduation ceremony because he has been in bed with a gal all night. The cross cutting between the two situations, John Hurt in his apartment and his awaiting graduation ceremony, are used to both highlight his main concerns while also proving you with a name check with who he is. It’s quite nicely done and, although this kind of thing was done a lot more in this era of cinema, it’s not so common these days when big movie studios don’t trust their younger audience to make even the faintest leap in their brains from two sequences without some kind of over defined establishing shot thrown into the mix.

We then go through a nice, comedic half an hour which establishes three very important things about Mr. Forbush. One is that he has a very brilliant mind. Two is he is very rich, spoiled and ultimately rarely interested in anything outside of his fairly small and narcissistic world. Three, the only thing he is interested in is sleeping with a number of attractive young women and this is what gives the movie its thrust. When one of these young maidens, played by Hayley Mills, says “No” in many ways and in no uncertain terms to him, it suddenly becomes very important to him to do something big enough to impress her and attempt to win her heart. Being as he is seen as something of an embarrassing and unmanageable prodigy, he is offered the job of spending 6 months in Antarctica* in Shakleton’s old hut to observe and research the penguins when they arrive back, give birth and attempt to fend off attacks by hostile birds, called skuas, before they leave their cold stomping ground until the next time.

Much to Forbush’s surprise, he ends up accepting the job role, stocking up on Beluga caviar, champagne and the like, just to help get him through those cold, Antarctic days and nights. He says good bye to his friends and relatives, including such character actors as Thorley Waters, Joss Ackland and Dudley Sutton, and its off to the cold climate for him. The fact that he has a girl who is now interested in him is a shrewd move because when he writes letters to her or tapes recordings of himself to send to her in her flat in London, we get to hear his inner thoughts about his lonely life with the penguins and we get to see how he changes.

Yeah, I know. He changes.

Changed by the things he sees in the Antarctic into a more humble and generally warm blooded human being while he is away... a cliche, to be sure, but it’s all done quite well and young John Hurt is a wonder to watch and listen to as the tale plays out and we start to sympathise with the plight of him and his, now beloved penguins. We  see him slowly go mad and when human interaction takes him by surprise, like when Dudley Sutton’s Starshot character, who is entrenched in a similar job somewhere not too far away, in husky and sled terms, drops in for a Christmas celebration (Forbush is unaware, even, that it Christmas)... he almost rejects human company and has to remind himself what it is to be in the land of the living again.

The movie is more than competently filmed, with long looks at the landscape which make up in sheer beauty and desolation what they might lack in shot design. Being as it is, at least on some level, a silent movie for much of it’s last hour (not literally, but certainly metaphorically), it does tend to rely on a lot of montage sequences to get its message across, which is fine actually.... it doesn’t feel too overdone and it’s the best way to solve certain situations and get the right kind of tone across, I think.

Two scenes which stood out in my memory and which I relived again in the movie yesterday were the sequence where John Hurt battles a blizzard (and barely wins, it has to be said) and the ‘almost climax’ of the movie where he builds some kind of elasticated trebuchet device to attack the ‘headquarters’ of the skuas, before sanity finally catches up with him and he once again remembers his place in the great scheme of mother nature, and all who sadly sail in her. Unfortunately, when John Hurt is shouting his heart out at said birds and yelling at them to die, his voice does sound a lot like a Dalek and you can certainly imagine him replacing that word with “Exterminate!” quite easily. Ah well, maybe that may serve him well in the upcoming Doctor Who 50th Anniversary story being broadcast on November 23rd, later this year, in which he plays a “dark incarnation” of The Doctor.

It was great seeing this movie again. I even remembered bits of John Addison’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes irritating, score for the picture, a 40 minute suite of which is included as a maddeningly unsearchable or in any way wind-able/rewind-able extra on the new Network DVD. I can appreciate that anyone who didn’t grow up seeing bits of this on TV back in the seventies may find it a bit clunky and unwatchable in places, but personally I found it a joy to behold and it’s a film which is definitely all about performance. Thankfully, when you get an actor like John Hurt in a role like this, even in his early thirties, before he was properly internationally famous, you really cant go wrong. An actor’s film perhaps... but one which everyone can enjoy, I think.

*I recently found out that Antarctica is the only place on Earth that doesn't have ants. I find this very strange, given its name.