The Appointment (1981)

After an intro sequence in which a twelve year old girl hears strange, mocking voices in the woods and is suddenly dragged away, never to be seen again, the film comes to a point in time three years later.

The family of Ian (Edward Woodward), Dianna (Jane Merrow) and their fourteen year old daughter Joanne (Samantha Weysom) seem in a happy place. They are rich and apparently happy, Joanne going to a private/public (please delete the appropriate word depending on the country you live in) school where she is groomed as a budding star violinist.

There’s something not quite typical in the relationship between Ian and Joanne, though, for there’s some very Freudian thing going on concerning Joanne’s budding womanhood, the closeness between the two, and Ian’s clear inability, perhaps unwillingness, to build useful emotional borders. So it is not a complete surprise that Joanne takes news that Ian won’t be able to come to a concert that is inordinately important to her the next day because he has to drive a day or so to an important judicial hearing, very badly indeed.

Joanne’s mood – or is it perhaps something else? - seems to infect the house’s other inhabitants that night. Both Ian and Dianne have strange dreams about cars and travels, and some rather more symbolic things, all of which are imbued with an air of dread. Alas, they do not meet in the morning before Ian has to go on his road trip, so they can’t realize the most disturbing thing about these dreams: that they have both been dreaming the same dreams.

Needless to say, Ian’s trip is not going to go terribly well.

If ever I saw a horror movie not made for every horror fan, this one, directed as well as written by the mysterious Lindsey C. Vickers, is it. It’s not just that The Appointment is a slow film, very fond of visual symbolism, it’s how much it insists on staying ambiguous and letting the audience figure out their own version of what’s going on by interpretation and an act (well, rather a lot of acts) of filling in the blanks, while still having a clear idea of its own what’s going on in it. Seen in the wrong mood, or by someone who just doesn’t like films working exclusively via hints and moods – really, it’s as if this were a case of Slow Horror come thirty years too early – this would be properly infuriating stuff, as obnoxious and annoying as a YouTube personality to me (I’m showing my age here, sorry, YouTube personalities).

If you have a general appreciation for this sort of thing, though, The Appointment might very well be your new favourite secret gem. At first, the film is built to keep even a sympathetic viewer pretty unsure about what they are actually watching here: the Freudian family business is certainly easily enough parsable, but what does that have to do with the film’s intro, or with the camera’s tendency to linger unnervingly on certain quotidian details, either loading them with meaning in the process or hinting on some hidden or future importance. Yet slowly, things come together, the film’s stylistic choices, be they visually, on the acting side (well, Weysom isn’t actually good at all, but her approach is so weird it fits the film perfectly), or a score that wavers between dramatic somewhat modernist classical and sporadic synth noises, not exactly explaining the film but giving the impression of the viewer being in the hand of filmmakers who know what they are doing very well indeed.

For me, the film reaches a near magical intensity in the long scenes of Ian’s and Dianne’s very bad night, full of shots of the camera slowly gliding over sleeping faces while nothing outwardly happens, intercut with dreams full of symbols and things that could be symbols but feel like premonitions of the most dreadful kind. After this night, the film keeps up its quiet intensity without ever letting up. Simple sentences, movements and gestures seem – and indeed are – loaded with hidden, second meanings, and there’s a feeling of doom and dread running through proceedings until the end. An end that also shows how good Vickers is at portraying things that aren’t metaphorically loaded anymore but have actual physical impact.

The final scenes also suggest that we have indeed been watching something of folk horror film, the black dog motive (and some of its folkloric meaning), the suggested idea of terrible kind of sympathetic magic, and the importance of a patch of woods all resonating with that particular genre. 

In short: Night of the Big Heat (1967)

aka Island of the Burning Dead

aka Island of the Burning Doomed

Despite it being winter and the rest of Britain complaining about freezing temperatures the British island of Fara suffers under a terrible heat wave. Experts are baffled by the phenomenon.

The weather is only the start of the islanders’ problems, though, for there’s much worse, much stranger and much more fried egg shaped to come. At first, there’s only an inexplicable high-pitched noise in certain parts of the island upping the pressure but soon, sheep and people are cooked while electronics burst. And what does the mysterious guest of the island’s only inn, one Hanson (Christopher Lee), do with the science-y instruments he has in his room, and the tripwire and camera constructions he builds in the woods?

If your answer to that is: trying to find proof for an invasion by heat-producing giant, glowing fried eggs from outer space, then give yourself a gold star! Now the only question is: will you get through the film’s main concern, a love triangle between writer/innkeeper Jeff Callum (Patrick Allen as some sort of mid-60s John Agar-like manly man monstrosity who likes to blame the woman he fucked for their extramarital affair with charming declarations like “She was a slut! And I wanted her!”), his former lover Angela Roberts (Jane Merrow) who has smuggled herself onto the island as Jeff’s new secretary and is characterised in a way even a gracious interpretation can’t not call misogynist, and his wife, the wifely – yes, that’s her only character trait – Frankie (Sarah Lawson) to reach a finale where the aliens are beaten through a bit of rain, which never happens on the British isles?

Oh boy, this just might be director Terence Fisher’s worst film. It was produced by the same company responsible for the somewhat superior Island of Terror  with quite a few overlaps in cast and crew, with the addition of Christopher Lee and the relegation of Peter Cushing to a guest starring role. Which is rather unfortunate, seeing as Lee does the usual low effort thing he did when cashing his cheque for projects he was embarrassed by – looking grumpy, then looking grumpy, then looking grumpy some more – while Cushing doesn’t get anything to work with at all and still comes out looking the dedicated professional.

Though, to be fair, the script really doesn’t give Lee much to work with. It is much more interested in a love soap opera sub-plot that is badly dated, deeply unpleasant in his loathing of female sexuality and which can’t help but make every character involved in it look like a deeply horrible person. Sure, a better script could have used this approach to do something interesting about or with its characters’ general unpleasantness; unfortunately, this one’s not even average and therefore leaves us with a bunch of protagonists we have no reason to care about.

Night also suffers from sluggish pacing (that at least fits the whole heat wave concept, so there’s that), monsters that turn out to look like downgraded versions of the creatures in Island of Terror when we finally get a look at them in the last act, and the lamest deus ex machina ending imaginable. It’s really a rather dire film.