The Beast Must Die (1974)

Self-made millionaire and all-around prick Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) fancies himself the ultimate hunter. Ultimate hunters need the ultimate prey, and Tom has decided the most dangerous game isn’t humans like other rich movie pricks believe. Nope, it’s werewolves.

Consequently, he has invited a handful of people of dubious character – as well as sometimes potentially suggestive hairiness – onto his isolated island home – there’s a pianist and potential full moon based serial killer (Charles Gray), a potential murderess (Ciaran Madden) who is also friend of Tom’s girlfriend Caroline (Marlene Clark), and a hairy one-time cannibal (Tom Chadbon). Also invited is werewolf expert and enthusiast Dr Lundgren (Peter Cushing), typically dressed nattily in black with red applications, come to spout some very peculiar werewolf lore and be Peter Cushing with a dubious Swedish accent.

Tom, being a modern kind of rich asshole, has wired most of the island and the mansion (apart from the bathrooms, which will become a problem) with cameras and microphones, secretly controlled by his very own Man in a Chair (Anton Diffring).

Now Tom only needs to keep his guests on the island and wait for the full moon. However, it does turn out that this werewolf would really rather play And Then There Were None instead of The Most Dangerous Game, and Tom may or may not be a great hunter, but he certainly isn’t even a minor detective.

Because sometimes the gods provide us wonderful gifts, Paul Annett’s The Beast Must Die isn’t just a werewolf murder mystery, but a werewolf murder mystery with a gimmick right out of the William Castle playbook. You see, before the climax, the film stops for a “Werewolf Break”™, during which we, the audience, are meant to come up with the identity of the werewolf – with headshots of the surviving suspects for the very weak of memory. Of course, this isn’t actually much of a fair play kind of mystery, so the whole thing is only ever a gimmick.

Ignoring the gimmick (though who’d want to do such a thing?), The Beast is good, straightforward 70s style fun, with a bunch of highly unsympathetic characters – the nominal hero of the piece being the worst of them even though he isn’t a murderous werewolf - getting on each others’ nerves or murdered, respectively, broken up with Tom’s incompetent attempts at bagging himself the werewolf.

That werewolf is a bit if a problem, alas, because for some reason, the production doesn’t involve werewolf make-up, as was tradition in the werewolf game at that point, but rather goes for putting a shaggy full-body hairpiece on an actual dog – with exactly the disappointing results one expects from that approach. Annett’s direction doesn’t suggest he realizes that this kind of werewolf is best kept out of frame and in the dark and provides us with many a good look at it.

But then, the direction doesn’t exactly suggest much thought having been put into anything – it’s a very straightforward point and shoot affair that does include some of the fashions of its time not because of any interest in style but because everybody was doing them.

Yet still, this neutral directorial effort can’t drag the fun out of the thing, at least not too badly: too irresistible is the idea of the werewolf murder mystery, too wonderfully of its time and place are its ideas, and too great is the lure of the Werewolf Break™. We all should have one.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)

Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is pseudonymously living in some backlot German or Austrian city, committing the occasional murder to further his scientific goals.

On the run from the police, Frankenstein more or less stumbles into the perfect set-up for these goals, the small boarding house of Anna Spengler (Veronica Carlson). It’s not just a great place to hide and act creepily – and eventually worse - towards a young woman. As luck would have it, Anna’s fiancée is a young doctor of what goes for psychiatry at the time. Not only that, Karl (Simon Ward) just happens to work at the asylum where the incurably insane Doctor Brandt (George Pravda) is kept. Brandt is a former associate of the Baron, and has developed a formula Frankenstein would do everything to acquire. Given the ethical framework this version of Hammer’s Frankenstein works under, I really mean everything.

It certainly helps in Frankenstein’s plans that Anna and Karl are young, stupid, and eminently blackmailable – and once he has his hooks in them, there’s ever more culpability for ever worse crimes mounting up. So soon, everyone is involved in a sordid tale of violence, rape and brain transplants.

That “rape” part is generally the element of Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed that breaks the film for quite a few viewers. Even with this, the nastiest and most physically and emotionally brutal version of Frankenstein, the baron also turning into even more of a sexual predator than the first Hammer Frankenstein film, Curse of Frankenstein, had already made him a decade earlier, comes as a kind of shock.

To me, that shock is actually an effective one, one that is really meant to pull away the last illusion an audience might have had of the man indeed working for something he truly believes to be a noble scientific goal. This Frankenstein’s only believes that his wants and impulses are more important than anything and anyone else.

Consequently, Must Be Destroyed is the Hammer Frankenstein movie least interested in presenting monsters or mad science as anything more than another way for Frankenstein to destroy everything and everyone he touches to satisfy his own needs.

Thus, this is certainly the least fun of the Hammer Frankensteins, not the kind of horror of gothic castles – in fact, I’d argue Fisher very consciously films this as the least gothic Hammer movie he can make it – but one where the pseudo-Victorian world of Hammer shambles towards the brutality of the 70s in horror right at the cusp of that decade.

I can’t help but admire the film for what it tries, and mostly succeeds at, to do, but I can also very much understand why people don’t want to see Peter Cushing of all people going the sexual predator route.

Three Films Make A Post: A hunter never leaves his prey wounded

Wounded (1997): A forest ranger played by Mädchen Amick gets into a pretty typical cat and mouse game with an insane poacher (Adrian Pasdar), after barely surviving a first encounter that left her partner and quite a few other people dead. The only person she trusts is an alcoholic cop (Graham Greene). Directed by Richard Martin in a somewhat slick and impersonal manner, this one really lives from a handful of fine performances. Amick, if you can suspend your disbelief far enough to imagine her as someone who spends most of her time outside, does a very credible job with a character wavering between grief, trauma and anger, Greene is his typical low-key inspired self, and Pasdar does pretty sociopathy and murderous scenery chewing very well indeed.

Structurally, this would probably have needed some extra hook, but still stays a pretty worthwhile hidden gem for the acting ensemble alone.

The Creeping Flesh (1973): This Tigon production is certainly not director Freddie Francis’s best, mostly because the script by Peter Spenceley and Jonathan Rumbold never quite seems to have decided what exactly it wants to do with some very Nigel Kneale-ish ideas, and so does quite a few things, none with much follow-through. But it still has the visual flow and flair typical of Francis even on his bad days, and fun work by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as half-brothers with their own respective brands of mad science. Particularly Lee is spectacularly nasty here once he gets going, contrasting nicely with Cushing’s more sympathetic (yet still horrible) kind of mad scientist.

The film features a complicated and not unproblematic view on mental illness and heredity, particularly when female sexuality comes into the mix, but also quietly suggests that certain male behaviours, even well-meant ones, might be among the root causes of the problem there.

If only the titular Creeping Flesh would make its appearance earlier (or, alternatively, only be a metaphor).

The Summit of the Gods aka Le sommet des dieux (2021): While I’m too much of a coward to ever do any climbing myself, I find mountain climbing and its philosophical and psychological underpinnings endlessly fascinating. Consequently, I find this animated French (though based on a Jiro Taniguchi manga and very Japanese in visual style) film directed by Patrick Imbert about mountain climbing, obsessive men, and the reasons for their obsessions very fascinating indeed.

It uses a flashback structure flawlessly, draws its characters clearly and with surprising complexity, and often looks very beautiful indeed, staging suspense, tragedy and the handful of moments when it wanders off into the slightly surreal all with the same calm capability.

In short: Scream and Scream Again (1970)

A serial killer stalks the clubs of London, listening to funky tunes and luring attractive young women into his sports car to drain their blood. Plodding Detective Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks) is on the case but police procedure is little help against the weirder aspects of the case. Perhaps young assistant medical examiner Dr Sorel (Christopher Matthews) will be of more use.

At the same time, we regularly pop in with a man trapped in some kind of medical facility who loses one of his extremities after the other. We also spend a little time in an unnamed Eastern European country where things are rather more fascist than communist. Here, we witness how one Konratz (Marshall Jones) kills his way to the top with his evil version of the Vulcan nerve pinch.

Eventually, these plot lines…well, actually, no, they don’t really converge, and only a very polite viewer will not call Konratz’s sudden appearance in London in the final act utter, pointless and awkward bullcrap.

I understand that this Amicus production directed by Gordon Hessler has found some admirers over time, but I have no idea what’s to admire here: the slow pacing of what should be a potboiler? The decision to slow things down even further by the film’s constant changing between totally disconnected plotlines? The inability of the script (by Christopher Wicking) to actually unite any of it? The total randomness of what will go for an explanation of what’s going on in the end?

Though one might call the film’s chutzpah even calling itself a film admirable. There’s really no connective tissue to any of what we see at all, things just happen for no reason, Peter Cushing pops in for a scene, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price for three, connections are insinuated but don’t make any kind of sense. It’s all very much like a dream – not an interesting one, alas, but just a crap assortment of random nonsense that’s not even interesting to look at.

Madhouse (1974)

Paul Toombes (Vincent Price) has built a nice career in Hollywood for himself by starring in a series of horror films in which he plays one Doctor Death, as written by his close friend, the former actor Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing). When Paul’s fiancée is murdered by someone wearing his Doctor Death costume, most of the world, including himself, is pretty sure he is indeed the man responsible.

After years spent institutionalized, and some time of private seclusion, Flay has convinced Toombes to return to acting and the role of Doctor Death in a British TV show produced by the despicable (so, very much a classic producer type) Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry, squeezing much slime out of a not terribly deeply written part). Paul is really doing this in the name of friendship for Flay. For his friend seems to have hit on hard times financially and, as we will learn after a while, privately with a rather arachnid situation concerning his wife Faye (Adrienne Corri).

Things do go wrong very quickly, for someone dressed as Doctor Death begins to kill off various people Paul meets (sorry, Linda Hayden!), while our protagonist’s public behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. Which is what happens to a guy who isn’t too sure if he is actually committing a series brutal murders.

This AIP and Amicus co-production directed by Jim Clark does have a pretty bad reputation, so I found myself positively surprised by the film when I finally got around to watching it, after literal decades. Sure, it’s not at all on the level of comparable Price vehicles like the lovely Doctor Phibes films or Theatre of Blood, but more often than not, this is a rather delightful bit of meta horror. It is perhaps not as deep as one would like, and sometimes a bit ploddingly paced, but otherwise, I find very little to dislike here.

Price is certainly putting – as was his wont – a lot of energy into his part, portraying Toombes as a bit of an unluckier version of himself, providing nervy energy, big emotions, and a truly frightening shouty mouth, while also keeping the guy sympathetic and likeable.

One might have wished for a bit more of Cushing on screen, but what’s there is as perfectly delivered as always. Plus, there’s a pretty incredible moment I won’t spoil even when talking about a movie nearly fifty years old that’s all Cushing’s right at the end of the movie, a moment silly, darkly funny, perfectly macabre and oh so well delivered. And really, as a fan of both Cushing and Price, it is a great joy to see both of them interact at all.

There are a handful of truly great moments like that very last scene sprinkled through the whole of the film, usually mixing that dark humour, a grotesque or macabre idea, and a tinge of melancholy with perfectly appropriate overacting by Price or Corri.

If I wanted to criticize anything, it’s that Clark (who is much better known as an editor) is rather too workmanlike a director for the material at hand. Certainly, someone with a bit more verve and style behind the camera could have made even more out of the sense of melancholia for things lost that has turned grotesque for quite a few characters, and could probably have given the murder set pieces a bit more weight and dynamics. However, that’s what stands between Madhouse being a great entry into the Price canon instead of merely being a good and interesting one, and so feels like a bit of a non-complaint.

Torture Garden (1967)

After visiting his torture-based mobile cabinet of wax that’s apparently part of a fairground sideshow, the proprietor, one Dr Diabolo (Burgess Meredith), invites five of his customers (Michael Bryant, Beverly Adams, Barbara Ewing, Jack Palance and Michael Ripper, who confusingly enough does not seem to play an innkeeper) to a very special show. There, he presents warnings of possible futures where they do evil by getting them to stare at the shears of a figure of Atropos. Since this is an Amicus anthology movie, every vision makes one segment of the movie.

First up is “Enoch”, in which something that presents as a cat develops a rather unholy influence on a young would-be playboy who basically murdered his uncle.

Then follows “Terror Over Hollywood”, in which we learn the rather boring secret that keeps certain Hollywood stars seemingly immortal. No, it’s not cosmetic surgery or the injection of snake toxins, silly!

Next up is “Mr. Steinway”, concerning that most classic of love triangle between Man, Woman and Grand Piano.

We finish up on “The Man Who Collected Poe”, where the greatest of all Poe collectors (Peter Cushing) meets a rather too enthusiastic sharer (Jack Palance) in his interest.

Poor Michael Ripper doesn’t actually get his own segment but is used to close the framing story. You’ll never guess who Dr Diabolo actually is (if you are very, very slow)!

As friends of weird fiction and literary horror will probably have noticed (if you didn’t simply know already), the segments of this film directed by the great Freddie Francis are all based on stories by the equally great Robert Bloch (who did so much more than just write the novel Hitchock’s Psycho is based on). In fact, this is one of the three Amicus anthology films scripted by Bloch himself. So it’s no surprise it is full of the man’s interest in classic supernatural authors as well as (usually aberrant) psychology, with a healthy dose of the macabre added for good measure.

Quality-wise, this isn’t my favourite of the Bloch/Amicus bunch (that would obviously be Asylum), but it does have quite a bit to recommend it. Well, “Terror Over Hollywood” is just bland, taking way too much time to come to a not terribly interesting or shocking ending, but every anthology needs to have one single bad entry at least. “Enoch” provides Francis with some nice opportunities for creating a creepy, gothic-style mood; this is also one of the few films I know which feature an evil cat the filmmakers actually manage to make look rather sinister.

“Mr. Steinway” works best if you treat it as a work of black humour of the most sardonic type; its psychological basis is a bit too obvious and so outdated it weakens the whole thing considerably if you take it too seriously. On the other hand, a pianist having an unhealthy connection to his supernaturally endowed instrument certainly isn’t without resonance.

The last one’s the greatest treasure here, though, and “The Man Who Collected Poe” doesn’t just have an excellent joke in its title, but also features a particularly huge dose of Francis’s patented gothic mood – this time aiming for a heated version of the same very fitting to the tale’s Poe theme – and a great outing by Jack Palance. Seeing Palance orgasmically (I’m not even sure that’s a metaphor) rubbing himself against all sorts of Poe paraphernalia is quite the thing, as grotesquely funny as it is creepy. Even better is the script’s emphasis on his obsession with Poe and all thing weird being so great, he’d be perfectly willing to die for it, if it only provides him with a kind of total communion with his love.


This final segment alone, in combination with Meredith’s most excellent mugging as the Devil (spoiler?), would be worth the entry, but the rest of the film, “Hollywood” excepted, really isn’t bad at all either to watch on a rainy night.

Past Misdeeds: The Ghoul (1975)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Warning: this can't help but contain some structural spoilers and more knowledge about the fate of one or two characters than some readers may wish to have.

It's the more or less roaring twenties somewhere in England. Members of a party of (movie)-young upperclass people decide that a little car race would be a fun distraction, or rather, Daphne (Veronica Carlson), the most courageous of the bunch does and gets her friends Geoffrey (Ian McCulloch), Billy (Stewart Bevan), and Billy's sister Angela (Alexandra Bastedo) to indulge her. Soon, two adorable cars are racing through the increasingly foggy countryside, though Daphne and Billy (Daphne's driving, of course) are soon lost way out in front of their friends, because Angela has Geoffrey park for a bit so she can vomit. Yes, she's going to be that kind of heroine.

Daphne and Billy end up somewhere in the deepest, darkest part of the countryside, without fuel. Because she's that kind of girl, Daphne doesn't wait out Billy's aimless tromp in search of the 20's middle of nowhere British version of a gas station. First, she stumbles into the arms of a creepy guy named Tom (a young John Hurt, effectively aiming for the kind of creepiness Klaus Kinski specialized in when doing horror, krimi, etc) who'd really rather keep her in his creepy guy hut, but after a well-applied knee to the groin, she comes upon the manor of the former priest Dr. Lawrence (Peter Cushing). At first, Lawrence, who lives alone with his Indian housekeeper Ayah (Gwen "Secretly Hindu" Watford) and a gardener who will later turn out to be Tom, seems eminently helpful and friendly, insisting on Daphne staying at least until the dangerous fog has lifted like a sweet, if sad, old gentleman.

The longer Daphne stays, the clearer it becomes to her that something is not right at all in the mansion - and she doesn't even know that Tom will murder Billy rather sooner than later. Lawrence tells her a rather disturbing story about himself, his son, and his late wife becoming part of a depraved (says he) cult in India, which doesn't seem to have ended so well for anyone involved. Ayah acts secretive and threatening, and really, it seems as if Lawrence doesn't want his young guest to leave at all. It's all enough to even make a rather worldly and tough young woman like Daphne uncomfortable. But will she be uncomfortable enough to safe her from the horrible (or was it horribly obvious?) secret hidden in the attic?

For my tastes, Tyburn Production's The Ghoul is a rather underrated film. At least, I think it is much better than general opinion made me suspect it to be. My love for the Hammer movies Tyburn's owner Kevin Francis (son of Freddie, who directed The Ghoul) clearly adored may influence my opinion there a bit, of course, and it surely doesn't hurt the film that it was directed by an old Hammer hand in an atmospheric style quite close to the cheaper side of Hammer's films, written by an old and rather important Hammer player in Anthony Hinds, and features the great (not just) Hammer star Peter Cushing. However, even seen without nostalgic glasses - and I have seen too many bad films connected to the people involved to have any illusions concerning their perfection - I think the film has quite a bit going for it, certainly enough to make it well worth the effort tracking it down and the time watching it (repeatedly, if you're me).

One of the film's main attractions is clearly the fine acting ensemble. As already mentioned, John Hurt does an excellent Klaus Kinski impression while also later using the opportunity the script gives him to lift the mask of the creepy crazy guy for a scene or two and give some hints about why he is the creepy crazy person he is. I hardly think it's an accident it's connected to the Great War in a film where nearly everything the characters say or do seems influenced (perhaps caused) by it or by the British colonial past, as in the case of Cushing's Lawrence.

Cushing's performance for its part feels nearly painfully emotional to me. Cushing quite obviously puts some of the very real pain about the loss of his own wife into the role of Lawrence, which at times makes for a rather uncomfortable watch in the context of what is a lurid (in an at least partly old-fashioned way) horror movie in a tradition that doesn't usually involve feelings this raw. Apart from this aspect, Cushing provides Lawrence with a perfect mixture of dignity, raw nerviness and sadness that alone would make The Ghoul well worth watching.

Veronica Carlson's Daphne is a rather surprising female character for a film that models itself on the Hammer tradition in that she is an actual character with the same complexity and agency as the male characters possess, or really, more of it than at least her peers Billy and Geoffrey show. Not that any of it saves her, of course, but where this could usually quite easily be interpreted as Daphne being punished for her transgression of not knowing a woman's supposed place, The Ghoul turns out to be rather more of a mid-70s movie than you'd expect, for Geoffrey, who would be the nominal romantic lead in an actual Hammer movie (and still boring as hell) ends up just as badly as Daphne does - after the film gives him twenty minutes or so to give off ex-military upperclass officer bluster that very pointedly turns out to be no help at all in the end.

Angela, the film's mandatory survivor, may be as far away from a final girl as is imaginable. Consequently she doesn't find any hidden inner strength to help her survive in the end but is just lucky that a drama that begun a long time ago just picks a good moment to finally end. The film makes it quite clear this isn't godly intervention caused by Angela's virtue but sheer luck on her part, putting The Ghoul firmly into the field of 70s horror, where following society's rules won't save you.

The Ghoul is rather clever that way, for while it has obvious aspirations at being a Hammer-style horror film it actually works more as a collision of classic British Hammer-style horror with a more contemporary approach to terror, the sort of thing I wish Hammer had attempted themselves as consequently as it is done here. There are even several lines where Cushing states that these "modern times" (nominally the 20s) are rather confusing for him. One can't help but think Francis and Hinds felt the same but decided (for once) to build this confusion into the heart of their film.

And while the plot itself, with its not unproblematic mixture of post-colonial guilt and pulpy ideas about India, and its rather slow pace, might be The Ghoul's big weakness, Hinds does another interesting thing with the plotting, namely using his old Hammer-colleague Jimmy Sangster's favourite plotting trick taken from Psycho where a film's seeming protagonist turns out to not live through its first half. Which would, now that I think about it, then make Geoffrey the private detective, but I might be reading too much into it here.


In any case, The Ghoul is a film very much worth anyone's time, full of interesting ideas, moody moments, and the kind of luridness that must have looked rather old-fashioned in 1975 but can be much easier appreciated for what it is now, when the more contemporary luridness of 1975 looks just as old-fashioned, colliding with an ideological approach very much of its time.

Past Misdeeds: The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Botanist Dr. John Rollason (Peter Cushing), his wife and colleague Helen Rollason (Maureen Connell), and his friend and colleague Peter Fox (Richard Wattis) are spending time in a monastery in the Himalayas to catalogue the local plant life. That the whole botanical business isn't the only reason for Rollason's stay becomes clear when another small expedition, led by the very American Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker), arrives.

John has been hiding from his wife he's been in contact with Friend to help the American in an expedition to the least explored parts of the mountain to find one of John's hobby horses there - the Yeti. Helen is less than amused by her husband keeping this dangerous climbing trip a secret from her until there's no way to keep it secret anymore, especially because the last large scale climbing John took part in nearly killed him and caused him to swear off mountaineering completely. It doesn't help John's case that Helen doesn't believe in the Yeti at all.

Neither Helen nor the monastery's head lama (Arnold Marlé) - who seems particularly interested in people not looking for Yetis - are able to convince John to stay.

So off with Friend, a guide named Kusang (Wolfe Morris), the even more American Ed Shelley (Robert Brown), and a Yeti-haunted greenhorn named McNee (Michael Brill) he goes. The tension between the members of the small expedition mounts once John has copped to the fact that Friend isn't just out to photograph and observe the Yeti, but is in fact on a hunting expedition for a living (or dead) specimen to make a big, international show of P.T. Barnum style. The differences between the men alone would be problem enough, but - this being a SF/horror movie after all - the Yetis themselves are not too keen on letting their existence be known, nor are they dreaming of a freak show career.

The Abominable Snowman was made at a point in the output of Hammer Studios very shortly before the success of their first Frankenstein and Dracula movies would really push their production emphasis in the direction of their own new brand of Gothic horror - though the studio did of course still make films in other genres.

Given that the film is, like The Quatermass Experiment, based on a Nigel Kneale-penned TV film (or mini-series, depending on the source), it will probably not come as much of a surprise to anyone that it's pretty different from the coming wave of Hammer's Gothic horror. Quite like with the Quatermass films, Kneale applies a more cerebral and science-fictional style (and yeah, I know, Kneale said he didn't write SF, but that only proves he was feeling unpleasantly superior to the genre, not that he didn't work in it, see also "squids in space") to typical monster movie tropes.

I don't think Kneale's script is quite as successful as his Quatermass work. It gets a bit draggy in the final third, but it's still thoughtful and intelligent while at the same time putting efforts into holding up the genre-appropriate tension. As is often the case with Kneale, his intelligence is one that puts trust in his viewers to be intelligent themselves, too, so there's nary a hint of unnecessary exposition or of the film telling its audience what to think, yet the script is never vague. Much of the film's qualities lie in Kneale's clever use of telling details, be it his letting the Americans be more racist to what they call "the natives" than Rollason is (though the film's treatment of its Tibetan characters or its lone female character, aren't unproblematic by today’s standards; it's just much better than you can expect from a film made in 1957) without explicitly pointing it out, or just his bothering to think through and explain things like the smallness of Friend's expedition that are dramatically necessary but not exactly realistic.

I also appreciate how Kneale - though it is pretty clear where his sympathies lie - still treats the Americans as actual human beings and not just as symbols for greed and ignorance. They are still shorthand characters, but shorthand characters with the small bit of complexity that makes them more than just parts of Kneale's argument.

Obviously, the most complex script won't take a movie far if the people before or behind the camera aren't up to its standards, but here, too, The Abominable Snowman is in luck.
I hardly need to mention that Cushing (who had played the same role in the TV version) is great, and gives his character just the right mix of a humane softness that makes him believable as the "green", truth-seeking scientist with a physical intensity and energy that makes him believable as a man of action, too. I found it more surprising how well Forrest Tucker - whom I've never pegged as an especially good actor - is able to keep up with Cushing here, but there you have it. The film is of course all the better for having the representatives of its fighting groups of core values both be equally impressively acted.


Director Val Guest always showed his best qualities when it came to adapting Kneale's scripts, too. Guest's direction is far from showy, but if you're actually looking at some of his compositions, or the highly effective way he films the movie's sets, you might realize how effortlessly he emphasizes the script's strengths, deepens the mood and keeps a thought-heavy film moving, while making all this look easy, or rather letting a viewer forget that there's even a need for effort in this sort of filmmaking. Many people writing about movies (I'm definitely not innocent myself here) have a tendency to reserve their greatest praise for the more showy, or just more obviously stylish directors, but there's a real art to a style of direction that makes the director invisible and just lets the film speak for itself.

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.

Island of Terror (1966)

A rather peculiar human corpse is found on an isolated island between England and Ireland (I’m not sure if this is explicitly meant to be Pitcairn): it is boneless and has a jelly-like consistency. The local doctor (Eddie Byrne) has no idea what could be going on – a new infectious disease, perhaps? – so he jaunts off to fetch eminent pathologist Dr Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) who in turn fetches “young” bone specialist Dr David West (Edward Judd as the most boring man alive) who in his turn again will – for reasons of plot contrivance too tedious to get into and so we have a character in the movie who is only there to be in hysterics at all times – fetch useless rich girl Toni Merrill (Carole Gray).

On the island, the doctors quickly find quite a few more dead bodies and soon realize their problem isn’t a new kind of disease but the accidental product of another doctor’s attempt at curing cancer, which somehow resulted in bone-sucking monsters. Nearly indestructible monsters at that, if not for the wonders of that glorious stuff we know as Strontium-90.

Island of Terror is never going to be an important entry in the annals of British SF/horror films, nor one of the important films directed by Terence Fisher, nor any kind of career highpoint for my spiritual house patron, Peter Cushing.
It’s just too leisurely a film, with Fisher only seeming to put the minimum of effort – though the minimum of effort for Fisher is the maximum for many another genre director – into filming a script that itself barely scrapes by. Just look at the way the film isolates the characters on the island and cry bitter tears of It’s In The Script!.

Speaking of the script, apart from being rather silly (which is perfectly okay for this particular genre), it is too often falling back on variations of 50s US monster movie tropes, with a female lead character so useless even said 50s US monster movies would be a bit embarrassed about it, and a romance that’ll send shudders of horror down even the spines of the most hardened of viewers. The script also suffers from making so little out of the somewhat more original or more grim ideas it has. It doesn’t even bother to do anything with the moment where our heroes decide to murder our heroine so she doesn’t have to suffer through being bone-sucked, keeping what could lead off into an actually interesting little scene about a woman’s right to choose her own death (or something like that) a deeply unpleasant paternalistic gesture that probably can still invite a perfectly justified feminist rant.

Fortunately, there’s some enjoyable nonsense in here too, starting with the adorable looking monsters (or “silicates”, as the film calls them) that remind me of a some kind of English dish, only moving and with a single front tentacle, and that make the sort of electronic noises you also could have found in a contemporary  Doctor Who episode. And how many films are there whose grand finales are based on the heroes feeding cows they have poisoned with Strontium-90 to the monsters to then hope the creatures will die before they can bone-suck the rest of the cast?

Peter Cushing’s fine as always, of course, even with the little the film gives him. He milks the scene where he loses his hand for all it is worth and gets a few quips in I very much suspect were improvised on set and not in the script, and is otherwise the sort of presence that will improve every film. His old partner behind the camera Fisher does get around to two or so effective scenes between the parts of the film where he isn’t doing much beyond pointing the camera. Particularly the film’s finale is rather good, while the sting in the tale is not unexpected but fun enough in suggesting an imaginary Toho sequel.

Otherwise, Island of Terror is nothing to write home about, but is enjoyable enough.

Three Films Make A Post: All they had was a skill for violence and nothing to lose but their lives!

The Stranger (2014): This Chilean film concerns s a very interesting variation on the right now second-most overused horror monster, and, if nothing else, proves you can do something worthwhile with it still; at least if you’re the film’s director Guillermo Amoedo. Amoedo not only manages to do something interesting and at least half-way original with his monster but also finds a place where the naturalistic portrayal of pretty shitty lives and a dream-like mood aren’t mutually exclusive approaches.

The fact that the film, mostly cast with Chilean actors speaking their English with more or less obvious accents, takes place in what seems to be supposed to be a US small town (I think), actually furthers the weird mood of proceedings for my tastes, locating the film not in a place as in the idea of a place. However, it is, like The Stranger’s somewhat peculiar pacing, certainly a point that’ll annoy some viewers to no end.

The House of Hanging aka Byoinzaka no kubikukuri no ie (1979): Kon Ichikawa is one of the big Japanese directors outside the pure arthouse realm I often find myself having the most trouble with. It’s not that I don’t think some of his film’s are masterpieces, but he seems – at least for my tastes – to have rather more films like this adaptation of one of the adventures of private detective Kosuke Kindaichi (in this case embodied by Koji Ishizaka) than I’d like. Films that fluctuate in tone so heavily and so (in)consistently – in this case between stuffy comedy and handwringing melodrama – it becomes difficult to ascertain what tone the director is actually going for; films where for every brilliantly and complex staged scene there’s another one bland, boring and lifeless, and a further one where Ichikawa just seems to be showing off; films where contrasts neither rub productively against one another nor seem to have another reason to be there.

In House of Hanging’s case, these problems are exacerbated by one typical flaw of late 70s biggish prestige productions from Japan, needless length that makes a film feel rather bloated and slow, particularly one which really could have been improved mightily by having various scenes of “comically” inept cops removed, and various plot strands tightened.

Mystery on Monster Island aka Misterio en la isla de los monstruos (1981): I don’t loathe Juan Piquer Simón’s family adventure movie quite as much as parts of the Net do, but then, that’s because I’m trying very hard to ignore the odious comic relief taking up half of the film, the idiotic twist ending (which actually is Jules Verne’s fault as author of the novel the film adapts), the plodding pacing, the expected (because nobody in his right mind will expect a production like this to actually afford many shooting days from these gentlemen) underuse of Peter Cushing and Terence Stamp, the film’s dubious racial politics, on account of this being a rather naive children’s film I did indeed enjoy when I was a kid.

For us grown-ups, even for those of us used to “bad” movies, the whole thing just might be pretty unpalatable, but then, it isn’t actually meant for us.

Technorati-Markierungen: chilean movies,japanese movies,spanish movies,horror,mystery,adventure,comedy,guillermo amoedo,kon ichikawa,koji ishizaki,juan piquer simón,peter cushing,terence stamp

On ExB: The Ghoul (1975)

Many of the people working in front of or behind the camera of Hammer Studios did have rather a hard time arriving in the 70s, with the well-known dire consequences for Hammer, and possibly British horror of the time as a whole.

From time to time, though, Hammer alumni did some rather interesting things by letting their old-fashioned style collide with some new ideas. Case in point is The Ghoul, a film that unites Freddie Francis, Anthony Hinds and the great Peter Cushing in a much more worthwhile way than I expected. Read more about it in my newest column at Exploder Button!

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,other places,freddie francis,peter cushing,john hurt,veronica carlson

Three Films Make A Post: So Daring We Recommend A Babysitter!!

Fear in the Night (1972): One of only three movies directed by Hammer's veteran writer, the late great Jimmy Sangster. It's a variation on the old "driving the wife insane" number, enhanced by some clever, low-key twists, a bit of Peter Cushing being eccentric, Joan Collins being not very nice, and some fine shots of autumn countryside.

If there's a real problem with the film it is perhaps that it does not make as much use of the inherent strangeness and creepiness of parts of its backstory as it could have.

Highlander: The Search For Vengeance (2007): Regular visitors to this blog will know of my unhealthy love for the work of anime director Yoshiaki Kawajiri, but as much as it pains me to say it, his untimely addition to the Highlander universe is not a very good film, nor is it a very entertaining film. Part of the film's problem surely is that it was made for the US market first and Japan second, leading to Kawajiri having to scale down his usual excesses of violence, sex, weirdness and women with vaginae dentatae. There's still a bit of his strangeness hidden away in the mess, and what the film presents of sexual subtexts sure ain't healthy, but it's all a bit timid compared to Kawajiri's usual style.

Then there's a script that suffers from a boring and unsympathetic hero, and pacing that's again and again dragged down by unnecessary flashbacks that just don't add much to the film as a whole except running time.

It's all a bit naff, really.

Elevated (1997): Vincenzo Natali really likes films about a handful of people (rather inevitably including David Hewlett) trapped in some sort of enclosed space, surrounded by unexplained danger. Case in point is this short film about a handful of people (including David Hewlett) trapped in an elevator and slowly losing their grip on reality while unseen monsters just might threaten their lives.

It's a pretty neat little film, short, to the point, pleasantly acted, and gifted with a very fine ending.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,japanese movies,canadian movies,jimmy sangster,peter cushing,joan collins,yoshiaki kawajiri,vincenzo natali,david hewlett,thriller,anime,post-apocalypse,horror

Fury At Smugglers' Bay (1961)

The 18th century. An area of the Cornish coast under the dominion of country squire Trevenyan (Peter Cushing) has been invaded by the band of shipwreckers of Black John (Bernard Lee), who are sending many a ship to its doom.

The local honest smugglers - your usual poor bastards trying to survive over-taxation by breaking the law - under the leadership of Francois Lejeune (George Coulouris) are quite disturbed by the development, chiefly because smuggling's one thing, but murdering people quite another one. Yet there's also a - quite correct - fear the 'wreckers' activities will provoke Trevenyan into an aggressive response against crime that'll hit the smugglers just as hard as the wreckers.

In fact, Trevenyan's response will only hit the wreckers, for Black John turns out to be a former servant of the man carrying around a bagful of documents to blackmail Trevenyan with. Trevenyan's son Christopher (John Fraser), also the lover of Lejeune's daughter Louise (Michele Mercier), is quite distraught by his father's curious concentration on the smugglers instead of Black John's gang, distraught enough to get into a bit of violence that ends with the death of one of Black John's men.

That's a good enough reason for the squire to send his boy away "for his own safety". And once the boy's away, it's a good time to round up a few of the smugglers (I'm sure Lejeune being among them has nothing at all to do with Trevenyan's obvious dislike for his son's love for the man's daughter; it's a classist thing) and sentence them to deportation.

Fortunately, Lejeune has a good friend in the local honourable highwayman only known as The Captain (William Franklyn) who will move heaven and earth to help his friend and get rid of the wreckers in the process, too. Perhaps with the help of a returning Christopher, or even a late repentant squire?

Hammer-regular John Gilling - later to be director of the excellent The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies, among others - was working under his own production company's name when he was making Fury at Smugglers' Bay.

As is probably clear, this is an adventure movie/swashbuckler of that particular British sub-genre concerning the exploits of smugglers and pirates who never seem to actually leave the land. Curiously, films of this sub-genre (for which there should be a better descriptor than "landlocked pirate movies") tend to be among my favourite adventure movies. Fury will, unfortunately, not become part of that exclusive club, not because there's much that would be particularly wrong with the movie, but because there's too little that's particularly right with it.

Although the script has its interesting moments (there's for example a somewhat complicated - very typical of UK cinema - argument about class and the dangers of a classist society running through it), Gilling's direction is solid with moments of actual class, and the acting's perfectly alright, Fury suffers from a lack of playfulness and passion that would not necessarily be as much of a problem in a film of a different genre as it is in a swashbuckler, but that leaves a film is this genre feeling somewhat lifeless and slightly bland.

I think this lack of charm is all too well embodied by William Franklyn's character, who is supposed to be a charming rogue, but never feels all that charming or rogue-ish, going through all the motions of his job description, yet never actually convincing me of being more than a guy who grins a lot and knows how to rob people. Bland Franklyn's casting is quite typical for a film that's too professionally made to be bad, yet lacking in feeling and a sense of excitement, the things that actual make an adventure movie an adventure movie instead of a movie about people discussing the weather.

Fury at Smugglers' Cove suffers from taking characters and situations that should be (at least slightly) larger than life, but treats them as if it all were just visits to a tea party.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,john gilling,reviews,adventure,swashbuckler,peter cushing,michele mercier

In short: Captain Clegg (1962)

aka Night Creatures

1792. The impressively rude Navy Captain Collier (Patrick Allen) and a small boatful of his men enter the small British village of Dymchurch following information that has lead Collier to suspect the village of harbouring a rather effective smuggling operation.

Collier is quite right in his assumption too. Many of the village's upstanding citizens, including the jolly coffin maker (Michael Ripper confusingly not playing an innkeeper), the shady innkeeper (Martin Benson) and even the son of the local squire (Oliver Reed), are part of the smuggling operation, and given the way the representatives of royal authorities are presented throughout film, it's difficult not to sympathize with them. To top it all off, the local parson, a certain Dr Blyss (Peter Cushing) is the smuggler's ringleader.

A large part of the smugglers' success is certainly thanks to Blyss's organisational talents. Blyss uses people dressed as scarecrows and children as lookouts, and also lets the local legend about skeleton riders roaming the marshes come alive as a means of protection.

At first, Collier seems quite helpless against the wily villagers, but eventually, his combination of brutality, stubbornness and sheer good luck does pay off, especially once the innkeeper Rash, who is a rather nasty character, slowly starts to unravel. Things for Blyss are certainly not made easier by the strange fixation on killing him the navy men's nameless mascot and slave (Milton Reid), a mulatto (alas, here comes the racism fairy) who belonged to Captain Clegg's crew until he caused the death of the Captain's wife and lost his tongue and nearly his life for it, shows.

By 1962, the Hammer Studios were mostly known for their impressive series of gothic horror movies, but the Studios did still produce films in other genre, even though many of those films were and still are much less seen and talked about. It's a pretty unfair state of affairs when you look at the pure quality of a film like Captain Clegg.

Directed by Peter Graham Scott (who worked as a producer and director on many BBC TV shows we nerds and geeks love), featuring an ensemble of Hammer's stable actors lead by Peter Cushing in a very good mood, and showing off the lush and detailed look typical of Hammer films of this era (as usual, realized on a much lower budget than you'd expect), the film's pretty impossible for me to dislike.

Once you look closely at the movie, you'll realize how peculiar a film this actually is. Not only is Captain Clegg a pirate movie taking place predominantly on land, it also mixes its adventure movie tropes and techniques with elements of the whydunnit mystery and a few tasty moments of Hammer horror as during the night scenes in the marshes and in the character of "the mulatto". What's most surprising about this genre mix is how organically it actually feels when you are watching the film; Anthony Hinds's script makes the integration of disparate elements in a well-paced plot look easy.

The film's other peculiarity is its politics. Now, I'm quite used to the fact that any form of nobility does hide corruption and evil in a Hammer movie, but the sentiments towards the British crown Captain Clegg shows seem to go a step further. One can't help but see the parallels between a village of smugglers robbing a brutal government (the government here is represented by brutal thugs, a fat squire who does not seem to do anything but eat, and a king who doesn't hold to his promises) of tax revenues and a certain revolution in a certain former British colony. Who knew Hammer was that republican?

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,adventure,mystery,peter cushing,peter graham scott,oliver reed,patrick allen,michael ripper

On WTF: The Abominable Snowman (1957)

aka The Snow Creature

Before Hammer became the House of Horror we all know and love, the company had a much broader portfolio of genres. Case in point are films like this Nigel Kneale scripted SF/horror (with the emphasis on the SF) movie made shortly before Hammer's gothic phase truly began.

It's a fine film however you look at it, and - as always on a Friday - I'll explain in more detail what's going on with it on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,val guest,peter cushing,nigel kneale,forrest tucker,adventure,horror,sf,other places

At the Earth's Core (1976)

Eccentric British scientist Dr. Perry (Peter Cushing) has invented a fabulous drilling device, the Iron Mole. Before going on some more interesting travels deep within the Earth's core in it, he and his former student and current financier, two-fisted American David Innes (Doug McClure) are making a test run through some Welsh hills. But the Mole works better than anyone could have expected and transports our heroes right to the centre of the Earth, where they find a whole new world - called Pellucidar - to explore.

Only armed with an umbrella and Doug McClure's fists, the men have to fight off ridiculous suitmation dinosaurs, are captured by the swine-faced servants of a race of hypnotic, telepathic, man-eating dinosaur-birds, romance a princess (Caroline Munro) - alright, only McClure romances, but what can you do - and incite a human revolt against the evil dino-bird people.

Poor Amicus studios, always playing the second fiddle behind the Hammer juggernaut, having to somehow make movies on budgets even lower than those of their more successful rivals. In the second half of the 70s, Hammer was of course already racing towards financial doom itself, and it's not difficult to imagine that times for Amicus must have been even harder.

So, while Hammer was trying to turn Dracula into a James Bond villain without a James Bond to fight, Amicus turned its misshapen but loveable head towards the non-Tarzan works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, of course biting off much more than their budgets could have been able to chew even at the best of times, as At the Earth's Core amply demonstrates.

Seldom have the 70s (this is shortly before the first Star Wars movie, mind you) seen a more rickety looking conglomeration of cardboard sets. The often nearly immobile and always terrible looking giant monster suits are usually crosses between dinosaurs and other animals. My personal favourite here is the toad-o-saurus who seems barely able to move its head but is at least able to breathe fire (as toad-o-saurusses do) and explodes when punctured by arrows shot by famous action hero, elderly (and terribly ill looking) Peter Cushing. The toad-o-saurus is exemplary for the special feeling of ambitious ridiculousness the cramped but colourful sets and the monsters exude, the charm of the inept but beautifully sillily imagined that one can find in certain Taiwanese fantasy films, and that one wouldn't expect to find in a film from the UK. On a technical level, the special effects are of course utterly embarrassing, but I haven't got what it takes to complain that a fire-breathing toad-o-saurus, a boar-o-saurus or the awesome cave octopus doesn't look "realistic" enough.

Where the special effects either embarrass or charm the pants off of one, the script turns Burroughs' rather sprawling (at least as far as I can remember) novel into exactly the theoretically tight, yet easily distractible, simple adventure yarn one usually finds Doug McClure starring in. It's all very silly (and takes place in surprisingly few sets) and somewhat dumb, but it hangs together well enough while providing the basic thrills it promised to deliver.

I also dig (sorry) the trio of B-movie stalwarts at the film's core (sorry, I can't help myself), or rather the professional enthusiasm they bring into a film with such a thin script and dubious production values.

Beloved B-movie icon Peter Cushing looks rather terrible, and has to play an often annoying "idiot scientist" role, but does this with his own peculiar sort of dignity that makes my inner child cheer whenever he does things like trying to fight a chicken-o-saurus with an umbrella, explodes the turtle-o-saurus, or states the obvious with one of the better lines of his career, "You cannot mesmerize me, I am British!" (of course echoing something very similar from Horror Express).

Doug McClure gives exactly the same easy-going, two-fisted manly man performance he does in all of his films (to be honest, I never understood why his films even bothered to give him a character name other than "Doug McClure"), but fortuitously this is exactly what the film wants of him, no more, no less. Caroline Munro is, as was so often the case in her career, relegated to the role of the stunning girl that doesn't wear much clothes and needs to be rescued repeatedly. On paper, it's a waste and a shame, but in practice, she's at least so good at the stunning bit that I'm glad it's her and not blonde bimbo number three playing that role.

So, although probably nobody would want to call At the Earth's Core a good movie, I find it quite irresistibly charming. It's a little weird, a little cheap, a little stupid, and sometimes, that's exactly what a film is supposed to be.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,doug mcclure,peter cushing,caroline munro,reviews,adventure,fantasy

In short: Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966)

(Nah, I don't know either why they thought this title was a good idea)

Dr. Who (Peter Cushing, whose character is actually named Doctor Who in the Amicus pictures) strands his TARDIS on Earth of the year 2150. He and his companions (based - as is Cushing's Doctor - on some of the companions of the contemporaneous Hartnell version of the character; therefore, none of them interesting enough to go into details here) could probably have found a better time and place, for our oh so fantastic little planet has been invaded by the Daleks, mostly to provide the attack salt shakers with the possibility for a very special mining operation in Bedfordshire.

There is resistance among the human survivors, though, and after some reasonably exciting adventures, the doctor is doing his usual genocidal business on his old enemies.

The two Amicus produced film versions of Doctor Who with Peter Cushing aren't too well-loved among Who fans, with Cushing's doctor never counted as canonical at all (even if the scripts of the films were based on some of the TV serials), and it's not too difficult to understand why. The Amicus films are very much in the business of streamlining the Doctor away from anything actually mysterious or mystifying (even compared to Hartnell, whose Who phase - as far as I'm familiar with it - doesn't strike me as all that strange or mysterious to begin with), making the Doctor a not atypical for pulpy SF old scientist guy with a time machine.

If you can ignore that, and have a certain affinity for mid-60s SF, you can have quite a bit of fun with the film. Cushing doesn't have all that much to do, but he's of course as reliable a presence as ever, while the young ones in the cast do their spots of running around and getting captured decent enough.

While it's fun in a pulpy way, I found that the film has its most interesting moments when it is playing with the UK's post-World War II / post Blitz anxieties, a subtext that is in fact strengthened through the fact that the year 2150 of the film does look rather a lot like 1944 (purposefully more so than it does like 1966, if you ask me). There's no deep exploration of this subtext - there's always too much running and shooting to do - yet it is present enough to lend the proceedings a bit more reality-based gravitas than your typical Rupert T. Davies script of today dares to have.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,sf,peter cushing,doctor who,in short

In short: The Masks of Death (1984)

An elderly Sherlock Holmes (Peter Cushing) returns from his beekeeping duties to help his old associate Inspector MacDonald (Gordon Jackson) - the only policeman he doesn't outright despise, though he still treats him like a rather stupid child - unravel the mysterious case of three seemingly causeless deaths. The only visible marks on the bodies of the victims are expressions of abject fear on their faces.

While Holmes and Watson (John Mills) are somewhat stumped by the case, the Home Secretary (an embarrassingly drunk Ray Milland) urges the detectives to take on the "more important" case of the disappearance of a high ranking German personality from a locked room, which puts the Secretary's secret efforts for a peace treaty with the Germans into peril.

Annoyed as he is, Holmes still follows the call of the motherland and uncovers a conspiracy with possibly dreadful consequences. There is also a the return of Irene Adler (Anne Baxter) to awaken the old woman-hater's curiosity.

 

This short British TV movie reunites Cushing (in his last leading role) and John Mills in roles that weren't exactly new to them to nice effect.

Neither the script by Anthony Hinds nor Roy Ward Bakers very pedestrian direction are anything to write home about, but the two lead actors don't seem to mind. Cushing and Mills (whose Watson is not of the dreaded "bumbling idiot" variant) have a beautiful rapport as old friends who are too much in love with classic British stiffness to be all that emotional, yet whose small gestures and friendly bickering betray their closeness all the same.

Especially Cushing provides some telling acting details that seem to come much more from him than from the script (that just ignores how being old must feel to someone like Holmes) and give a glimpse into Holmes as someone who doesn't take to age well - it hasn't made him any milder and now even provides him with ample opportunity to turn his irritation onto his own growing slowness.

I need hardly mention that the idea of an old Holmes played by Cushing (whose calm professionalism I'd take about egomaniac horror icon Christopher Lee any day) at the end of his career brings with itself a certain melancholy even when the script doesn't do a lot with the concept.

The Masks of Death is the actors' film anyway. Besides the quite wonderful Cushing and Mills, Anne Baxter and Anton Diffring are also doing a lot to let one forget the film's slightness, making it a worthy final bow (and yes, I am ignoring Biggles here, even I have standards) for Cushing.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,in short,mystery,sherlock holmes,peter cushing,roy ward baker,john mills,ray milland,anton diffring,anne baxter