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. 

Don't Bother To Knock

Knock Around The Clock

Don’t Bother To Knock
1952 USA
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Warning: There are a few spoilers here, but I... 
don’t bother to... give away the ending.

Don’t Bother To Knock is a movie I hadn’t seen for a very long time. Not for at least thirty years, in fact, since I was a teen and was obsessed by Marilyn Monroe... not so much for being a great actress (I haven’t seen a great deal of her movies, to be truthful) but as much for the way her imagery was used and exploited as a powerful female icon to many generations (a practice that still remains today). If she’d been allowed to grow old and die a natural death she would, I fear, be nowhere as famous as she is today. Instead, her “brand image” has gone on to inspire and sadden people even now, as much as her acting performances are there to be enjoyed and admired in the modern, home viewing era.

Out of the movies I’ve seen her in, where she’s usually playing flirty, comical roles, this film is among my top three favourite Marilyn performances, along with Niagara and Bus Stop... although don’t ask me where in that top three this one comes because I’ve really not thought about it that much.

This was one of her early films, only five years into her career while she was still finding her feet and the studio really didn’t know what they were doing with her. It’s also, apparently, her first straight dramatic role, I’m informed, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the incredible performance she pulls off in this movie is what directly led to her being cast as the “femme fatale” in Niagara, a year later (and reviewed here).

Shot in black and white, Don’t Bother To Knock is one of those rare films, like High Noon and Before Sunset, which is actually set in real time. That is to say, time passes for the audience at exactly the same rate as the events that take place on the screen and, although the approach to the movie in terms of music and snappy dialogue starts off all bright and breezy with the young Ann Bancroft, making her movie debut as Lyn Lesley, singing old musical numbers in the hotel which provides the setting for the whole story... it’s not long before a decidedly dark tone sets into the piece when we meet our main male protagonist Jed Towers, played by the always reliable Richard Widmark.

Lyn has sent Jed a letter telling him that they are “over”! Naturally, this encourages Jed, an airline pilot, to get a room at the hotel and pester Lyn between songs from her floor show to find out where he went wrong and if there’s any hope of reconciliation. Lyn wants him there but she rejects him again (I’ll never understand the female mind) and he gets naturally frustrated and demonstrative. I don’t blame him when she comes out with confusing statements like... “I’m not angry... I’m just furious.” She said what now?

Even the bar tender, who wants to see Lyn happy, has words of wisdom for Jed when it comes to commitment and caring (which is kinda, I think, where Lyn is going with her psychological shenanigans), and it’s just another example of some great, crisp dialogue moments the movie has. When Jed and he get talking on the subject of “wives” he unleashes this little gem at Jed...

JED: “Get married and you become a statistic.”
BARTENDER: “Stay single and you end up talking to bartenders!”

Meanwhile, the main plot has turned up in the form of Marilyn Monroe playing Nell (originally Munro in the source novel on which the film is based, but apparently changed when the former Miss Norma Jean was cast in the part). Her uncle, who is one of the elevator operators (played absolutely solidly by the great Elisha Cook Jr), has fixed Nell up with the job of babysitting a couple’s 7 or 8 year old girl while they go downstairs to an important party in the ground floor of the building (the father is played by Jim Backus, who many will know as the voice of the short sighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo).

All well and good and all we know about Nell is that she desperately needs a job... but we will slowly begin to piece a lot more of her past together as we go through the movie. Her uncle promises to look in on Nell when he gets off his shift, to see she’s doing okay.

Meanwhile, Jed has given up on Lyn for a while. He goes back to his room, exchanging some more crisp dialogue with Elisha Cook Jr’s elevator operating character, Eddie, on the way up...

JED: “You’re lucky to have such a steady job.”
EDDIE: “Oh, it has its ups and downs sir.”

The film is noirish and Jed’s frustration is palpable as he paces his room, listening to Lyn’s voice on the live floorshow pumped in to the hotel room’s radio set. Then he glances out his window opposite a court in the middle of the hotel and sees Nell in the room across, wearing a sexy dress. He phones her and invites himself over to the room where she’s baby sitting. What he doesn’t know is that the dress and the ear rings and the watch that Nell is wearing belong to the couple who she is baby sitting for. With the kid tucked up in bed (or so she thinks), she starts to try the mother’s perfume and clothes on and eats the candy she so politely refused when offered earlier, in a greedy, gluttonous way which really starts to tell you that... yeah... their might be something a little wrong with our darling Nell.

After Jed has spent ten minutes with her, he begins to get a measure of her too, especially when the little girl comes out and gives the game away that this is not Nell’s apartment. Those tell-tale scars on the underside of Nell’s wrists where she’s tried to kill herself recently are not very reassuring either and, once the child nearly goes out of the window, but for the intervention of Jed... then he really begins to twig. Especially since Nell now mistakes him for her former husband, a pilot who died in an airline crash a few years before. After some shenanigans with busy body neighbours and Uncle Eddie, who Nell knocks cold, leaving him with a big gash in his forehead and... a little later... locked in a closet, Jed slips away to go downstairs and try to patch things up again with Lyn, once he’s made sure the kid is okay. He can see her silhouette sleeping in the dark as he slips out the door so she must be okay, right?

Nope. Another shocking moment in a movie which keeps building the suspense slowly is the revelation that, after all the noise the child has been making, Marilyn has hog-tied her on the bed. When Jed is telling Lyn about his evening and realises what he must have actually seen, in a moment of personal revelation that is similar to those experienced by lead actors in an early Italian giallo in terms of the way the mind plays tricks on one, he rushes up to the floor to find the child’s mother and Nell slugging it out in the girls room and all hell breaks loose.

The house detective arrives to take names and get to the bottom of the story and Nell takes this opportunity to escape, although she’s so out of it by now she doesn’t even realise it’s an opportunity. She grabs a razor blade and “wanders” off without anybody realising and makes her way to the lobby where she threatens to kill herself on account of all the attention she is getting. Then... oh, hang on, I don’t want to spoil everything. Let’s just say that Jed behaves in a manner that Lyn realises Jed has a part of him that he doesn’t show much... a part of him she’s been missing... and through Nell’s tragic tale, the two lovers start their relationship healing process.

This threadbare framework of the movie in no way tells you just how amazing the film is. The direction is quite throwaway in some respects, but the shot design is also be quite clever without making a fuss about it (including a nice conversation moment between Nell and Jed conducted through a shot in a mirror, in one sequence) and long steady shots are the order of the day. The artistry behind the camera is quite evident, even if the delivery is more pedestrian in it’s lack of vertiginous tracking shots and manipulative stylings. It’s a stark noirish milieu with sharp black and white photography and a sense of time ticking by at its own rate. The film is only 76 minutes long but never feels rushed at all or, considering the simplicity of the incidents depicted, in any way padded.

All the acting is top notch and solid, as you would expect from the cast on hand, with even the young Ann Bancroft turning in a fine performance in her first feature. The absolute icing on the cake, though, is Marilyn Monroe’s unbelievably worrying blend of her oft seen child-like naivete coupled with an intense darkness which she is able to let you see play across her features. Seriously, it’s like watching the cogs turning around in her brain, the facial expressions and tone with which she plays the piece is that good. If this was a brand new film this performance would be guaranteed to snag a best actress  oscar away from whoever this year’s hot contenders are. It’s absolutely stunning. The expression on her face when she starts getting her... “dark thoughts”... is absolutely chilling when seen in the context of the rest of her personality. I’m amazed Marilyn wasn’t given a lot more roles like this to do because the way she manages to play the tightrope delicacy of the part is absolutely exquisite. Anyone who thinks Monroe was just a brilliant comic actress or just an icon of female beauty (and she was both of those things too, of course) really needs to sit and watch this film. It won’t take up too much time and the intensity of her performance increasing as the running time wears on is absolutely brilliant.

So anyway, there it is. Don’t Bother To Knock. You can get this movie for a fiver or less at Amazon and if you haven’t seen this one, you really ought to. A classic piece of movie making, the style of which is all but forgotten these days and Hammer Horror enthusiasts might want to look at it to see what the director of such movies as Moon Zero Two (reviewed here), The Vampire Lovers (reviewed here), Quatermass And The Pit (reviewed here) and certain other genre favourites was up to before working on those things.

Moon Zero Two

High Moon

Moon Zero Two
UK 1969
Directed by Roy Ward Baker
Warner Archives Edition Region 1

Woohoo! I still love this terrible, terrible movie. I think, next to the Quatermass remakes they did, it’s probably the greatest movie Hammer ever released. I’ve had a bit of a thing going for this one ever since I first watched the promise of the opening credits sequence evaporate into something... well... something “entirely unlike the opening credits sequence” when I was a kid.

Since it starts off with a jazzy, teeny bop pop song pitched against a Pink Panther meets It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World cartoon sequence (someone’s kindly put the opening titles on YouTube here), in which an animated “funny American astronaut” and a “funny Russian cosmonaut” land on the moon and start getting into fights and chases across the lunar surface, you know you’re in for a madcap comedy of epic and inter-stellar portions. Just scan a few of the lyrics here to find out what a wild and swinging treat you’re in for with this movie...

“Ooh, take me soon.... riiiiiiiiiiide me to the Moon” and “We’ll love the world we land on, and love is what we’ll be making, you know the way we’re flying, me and you”...

... and then, of course, you have to start asking yourself how these kinds of sexy lyrics and grooved up arrangements are “in any way” appropriate to two funny spacemen chasing each other with their nation’s respective flags over the lunar surface... but anyway... sometimes you just have to go with it...

So there you are, you’re all set to enter the world of the movie and you’re fully prepared to watch a sexy riot of laughter and heavy humour as the cartoon moon transforms into the “live action” moon of the opening shot and you’re met with... cold, dead, vaccuous, humourless space. Wow. The pacing has definitely dropped here already. After a while a spaceman picks up some debris for his his spaceship, which gives the main protagonist the chance to prove that the delivery of his lines leaves him as dead and humourless (possibly vaccuous, but I kinda like the guy) as the interstellar constellations outside his beaten up old lunar spacecraft.

Billed as the “first space western” (which it ain’t), Moon Zero Two is actually, as far as I’m concerned, an unrecognised gem of british genre cinema. It’s slow and sluggish and that’s as much as it is to do with the editing and general speed of the camera movements as it is to do with the “trying to come off jokey and fun but ending up deadpan anyway” acting by the main leads. This is not exactly a sharp and funny film... even when you’ve got two well known comic actors playing villanous roles... Warren Mitchell as the evil and exploitational mastermind Mr. 100% Hubbard and his heavy/henchman played by Bernard “Well I only arsked” Bresslaw, perhaps as well known to genre fans for his role as an ice warrior in Doctor Who as he was for his comedy shenanigans.

James Olsen plays the deadpan but, in my opinion, quite watchable in a realistic kitchen sink kind of way, Captain Kemp who gets himself hired by the less than legal Mr. 100% Hubbard to ensure an asteroid made of sapphire is kitted out to land on the dark side of the moon. Along with his faithful Russian engineer/copilot, he also gets involved with a young lady played by Catherine Schell, engaged in trying to find her missing brother who was trying to file a claim for a discovery on a piece of the moon’s surface which also just happens to be where Mr. Hubbard wants our hero to control-crash the asteroid, by a strange coincidence... or is it?

And all the while our hero tries to juggle these two tasks while also keeping out of trouble from his casual sex-buddy, space cop lady played by Adrienne Corri. On the way there are dancing girls, a zero gravity saloon brawl, a skeleton in a space suit, a shoot out on the moon's surface and an excuse for Catherine Schell to strip down to her underwear in order to stay alive (I’m so not complaining about this, by the way). It even has a scene with Michael Ripper in it which, if you’re a Hammer fan, counts for a lot. And if you think this sounds like a great plot and a fun time... well, you’re half right, It does have a classic B-movie plot which is kinda wasted on the presentation, if truth be told, and if ever there was a movie ripe for remaking with a modern sensibility then Moon Zero Two would be it!

Is it fun? Well I find it kinda fun to watch but then again, I’m watching it with a certain amount of fondness that most audiences wouldn’t allow it. So I think, for the majority of people the answer would be a resounding “no”. But it tries so hard and I kinda like it.

Within six years of the movie, a live action TV show by Gerry Anderson started airing on British TV. The show, called Space 1999, had a certain look and feel to it which, frankly, is not a million miles away from what’s on screen here. It wouldn’t surprise me, in fact, if some of the props or costumes were later “procured” for the TV show... although I’m just guessing here. It even had Catherine Schell as a regular alien shape-shifter called Maya in the second series... again, whether they saw her in this movie is anybody’s guess.

For a film which is slow as treacle (which I actually like) and has flat delivery of a lot of the smart one liners... the score by jazz guy Don Ellis, who would go on to score The French Connection films for William Friedkin, is particularly interesting. It’s like the producers realised they had a slow movie on their hands and asked the guy to artificially speed the movie up by making the music more up tempo and exciting, in much the same way that Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Magnificent Seven functions. So right from the start, a shot of the hero just walking across a room becomes full of musical excitement with jazzy pulses and big musical stings on the soundtrack, playing completely innapropriately against the content of the shots. And don’t get me wrong here... I love this score and wish the damned thing was out on CD already... I just think that, for a lot of the running time, it just doesn’t work in the context of the film itself. Which is a shame because I would love to see the kinds of images that could have gone with the music in this movie... which is often feeling like it’s Mickey Mousing* stuff which just isn’t visually present.

All this makes for a very entertaining film as far as I’m concerned and I could watch it often... I just find it entertaining for reasons other than those intended by the producers, I’m afraid. Although I love it dearly, and lets face it, in what other movie do you see two classic comics playing villains who come to a violent end (yeah , right, as if you didn’t see that was coming... they’re the villains!)? I couldn’t bring myself to recommend it for those readers who are into the fine art of movie watching. If, however, you’re like me and you cherish these kinds of spectacular celluloid disasters as much as I do, then you might want to rocket on and catch Moon Zero Two before people forget about this movie completely. It’s a nicely downbeat remedy to a lot of the other stuff kicking around at the time and you might just find yourself smiling more often than you think.

*Mickey Mousing is the practice, often used by film composers even to this day, of catching specific actions in a film with specific notes and stings to further express the timing of an action or enhance it within the context of the movie.