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.

The Playbirds

Softcore Giallography

The Playbirds
UK 1978 Directed by Willy Roe
Odeon Region 2 DVD

Warning: Yeah, this is going to have spoilers for those
of you who care about such things in these kinds of films.

Okay. So you may remember I reviewed the Mary Millington sex comedy Come Play With Me on here a little while ago (click here for my review). I remember being rather surprised by the lack of actual soft core pornography in it and amazed about the general tone of it which is, pretty much, the same as a Carry On movie. So... populated by loads of British character actors of the time but with sex and nudity inserted into the story. If you can call it a story.

Well, I thought that experience would have at least prepared me a little bit for watching Mary’s second big breakthrough movie, The Playbirds, which takes its name from The Playbirds magazines which were one of the cornerstones of producer David Sullivan’s porn empire, and which featured Mary as the regular figurehead/mascot. However, although the movie does have some sex and nudity scattered at intervals throughout the picture, this one is a complete sea change from the previous picture and it’s a much more sombre affair. In fact, given the small part that nudity and sex play in the finished product and it’s preoccupation with a police procedural plot as a serial killer murders centre spread girls from the magazine, I’m going to go right ahead and call it right here...

The Playbirds is, pretty much, the British equivalent of a giallo movie.

It really isn’t about sex... although that is the currency which it uses to forward the story. Instead, it follows a police investigation which becomes a giallo style whodunnit in exactly the same way that the Italian movies would fix it so it’s almost impossible to guess the identity of the killer... implausible jumps in logic included. Like The Playbirds, though, it stars a wealth of British characters who you wouldn’t expect to see playing in a movie of this... um... calibre.

The film follows the exploits of Chief Superintendent Holborne and his partner, Inspector Harry Morgan. Holborne is played by Glynn Edwards and, if that name is not familiar with you, he played the pub landlord on the TV show Minder for many years, as well as starring as one of the title roles in Burke and Hare (reviewed here) along with Derren Nesbitt (who also has a small role in this movie as one of the pornographers responsible for printing the titular magazine). And if you think that piece of casting is extraordinary, his partner Morgan in this is played by none other than Gavin Campbell and, for anyone who used to watch the TV show That’s Life with Esther Rantzen... oh yeah, that Gavin!

The two go around trying to patiently solve the murder of various girls who have all been strangled (mostly with no clothes on... it’s a Mary Millington movie, after all) by a man in a Sherlock Holmes style Deerstalker... and then numbered with lipstick on their foreheads by someone who presumably doesn’t like their involvement with The Playbirds magazine. The magazine, of course, is highlighted constantly in the movie and I’m sure Mary Millington can be seen in some posters in the background of the printworks in some shots, even though the character she is playing is not in any way associated with the magazine until the end of the movie. I’m not sure how early metatextual references like this started appearing in what are considered, technically, British softcore movies but I’m guessing this was one of the first.

So who is Mary actually playing in this movie? Well, the film starts off with a model in a naked photo shoot and then, after a brief scene highlighting a racehorse which Holborne keeps betting against and which serves absolutely no purpose as a subplot of any relevance at all, although its referred to all the way through the movie, we first meet Mary walking the beat on the streets of London as Sgt. Lucy Sheridan. Yep, she’s a copper although, given her attitude and opinion of her majesty’s constabulary in real life, it seems a bit of an ironic role for her to have taken on. She’s also accompanied by a truly terrible theme song which is a shame since the movie was scored by David Whittaker, who worked on a couple of Hammer films and who also provided a pretty good score for The Sword And The Sorcerer. Mary keeps cropping up throughout the movie and even has an attempt at a foot chase at one point in the film but, for the first three quarters of the movie, she has more of a peripheral role until her unique talents are required to further the plot, such as it is, by the end of the movie.

And what we have is a movie set on the streets of 1970s London (which is always lovely to see, as I best remember it, back in the day) with character actors like the aforementioned cropping up. Also on the police force are Kenny Lynch (remember him?) and Holborne’s boss is played by none other than Windsor Davies (who you may remember as the Sergeant in the TV show It Ain’t Half Hot Mum). We also have Dudley Sutton in here, looking exactly the same age as he has for decades, playing some kind of bizarre and religious fanatic.

In between the police procedural scenes we have various Playbirds photo shoots going on as, presumably, an essential part of the plot. For instance, an occult theme is brought into the spreads and a shoot based, quite loosely I suspect, on shenanigans at The Hellfire Club is shown as one big orgy including a lady having sex with the underside of a rocking horse... surprised the BBFC let that through, actually. There’s also a witch being burned at the cross naked in a photo shoot scene too, which goes horribly wrong when the killer somehow manages to turn it into a real burning... although the way the special effects, such as they are, have been shot here may well mean you take a while to realise that this is actually what’s happened, it has to be said.

And we also have another nice tie in to the Italian giallo movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s in that one of the victims is found, by Gavin, in a room lit with both red and green lights. The effect of this, of course, is like a poor man’s Mario Bava has been on set so, yeah, I’m still sticking with this giallo parallel because it makes me wonder what kind of movies the director and cinematographer had been watching at the time. It does kind of compliment that style of shooting very well, especially in this scene.

And then we have Mary herself. The police get the idea to plant a girl working for Playbirds who will start at the massage parlours and then work her way into being the cover girl of the month so she can be bait for the killer. What this means for the audience, of course, is that we have Holborne and Morgan ‘interviewing’ hitherto unseen lady members of the police force by having them do a sexy strip routine so they can give the job to the most likeliest person to succeed. It’s almost like the film suddenly stops for a while so the director can showcase various ladies stripping for the audience... well... um... yeah. And, of course, Mary’s character wins hands down and it’s not long before she’s the magazine owners girlfriend... which I understand she more or less was in real life for a while, despite being married to someone else.

The really hilarious thing about this movie, bearing in mind the age of the film, is the police relying constantly on getting their leads by punching in information to be analysed in the ‘computer room’. And, yes, it’s a room full of cheap computers where nobody really looks like they know what they’re doing and with a printer which gives our heroes leads when the correct information is, somehow, or other, fed in. Let me tell you, though, those computers back in those days must have been absolutely miraculous. The police learn the identity of the killer thusly: They see a head looking out of a window on a photo and they get the computer to enhance and blow this up (not that you see any of this, of course). Once the shape is blown up they get the computer to take ‘x-rays’ of the face on the photo so they will reveal the bone structure of the person and then they compare it to the bone structures of x-rays of suspects in their computer records. What the f***? Quick, someone alert Microsoft and Apple now that someone has managed to figure out a way to take ‘x rays’ of a person from a still photograph. They need to get that patented fast.

The ending of the movie is almost as equally astonishing and certainly way more downbeat than you would expect from this kind of sub-genre. The killer is unmasked by the police and taken into custody. In the last scene of the movie we see Mary Millington answer a phone call from her police colleagues and receive the news that he’s just been locked up. How then, can he suddenly crash into her apartment and strangle her in a really downbeat ending, leaving her naked body floating in the bath. Does he have some kind of supernatural powers that we’ve previously not been made aware of over the course of the film? Seriously, this is just the kind of twisted, deranged anti-logic that lets a lot of gialli down and, sadly, this film does exactly the same thing. I have no idea how this ending can even work within the context of everything else we’ve been told but... well, there you have it.

So, yeah, the movie is mostly a load of old cobblers, to be honest, but it’s certainly also entertaining to be watching all these distinguished character actors prop up a soft core porn film which, in itself, seems to be less about porn and more about being a thriller. Certainly a curio in both cinema in general and also, I suspect, in the soft porn genre. As such, I would kind of tentatively recommend it to film goers who have seen just about every kind of movie and want to see something just a little bit different to what they would comfortably expect a producer and director to be able to get away with. Certainly, it’s not a rerun, by any means, of Come Play With Me... the two are like chalk and cheese. So whatever you say about The Playbirds, it certainly isn’t cashing in on the success of the former film.  One to... possibly... look out for.