October Horrors #2: X… The Unknown (Leslie Norman, 1956)

One strand I want to try to work into my horror marathon this October involves filling in a few gaps re: films I really should have seen by now, but for some reason have not.

Given that I’m a big fan of both Hammer Films and eccentric, black & white British sci-fi movies more generally, the awkwardly titled ‘X… The Unknown’, Hammer’s immediate follow up to the success of ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’ a year previously, and the very first scripting credit from Jimmy Sangster, certainly fits the bill.

Essentially dealing with the travails of a giant, sentient oil slick from the centre of the earth as it rampages around some less picturesque areas of Scottish highlands eating radioactivity (and people), Sangster’s story is an admirably straight-down-the-line, bullshit-free exemplar of a ‘50s radioactive monster movie, but one which still, somehow, remains curiously compelling, touching at least in passing on the kind of Big Ideas and weird thematic resonances which Nigel Kneale reliably brought to his Quatermass stories.

By and large though, the feel of the movie is… dour in the extreme, reminding me somewhat of other military-focussed British films like Cliff Owen’s ‘A Prize of Arms’ (1962), whilst also pre-figuring the ‘Doomwatch’ franchise of the early ‘70s via its emphasis on lengthy scenes featuring blokes in great-coats stomping about in the frozen mud, poking patches of oil, taking Geiger counter reading and talking about science, whilst bored squaddies hang around in the cold awaiting orders. Grim weather, military manners, very few smiles, and no female characters whatsoever.*

A bit less of this kind of thing and a bit more excitement might have livened things up during the first half of the picture, but nonetheless, it’s all very well made (much as you’d expect of a Hammer production of this vintage) and moves at a fair old clip, with a varied and interesting cast (including such notables as Leo McKern, Anthony Newley and - of course - Michael Ripper) all doing good work re: keeping the audience engaged. It’s also worth mentioning meanwhile that, as the token American ‘star’, the bumbling, softly spoken Dean Jagger proves a vastly more likeable and convincing presence than Brian Donlevy did in the Quatermass movies.

The shock / horror scenes, when they eventually arrive meanwhile, are pretty great too. There are some really cool effects, and the black, amorphous crawling creature is genuinely quite unnerving - a totally alien presence, not so far removed from the kind of thing which might have slurped its way up from the depths of some ancient, pre-human vault at the end of a Lovecraft tale.

In fact, it is the few brief moments in ‘X… The Unknown’ which veer into gothic horror territory, splitting the difference between a scientific and occult threat, which prove to be by far the most memorable. 

For all the nuts n’ bolts SF logic of Sangster’s writing, it’s difficult not to feel that some weird, atavistic race memory has been unleashed, as we see the residents of a remote Scottish village cowering for protection in a cold, stone church as an evil, nameless menace which has literally crawled up from the depths of Hades slimes its way through the misty graveyard outside, demolishing the pretty dry stone walls, and narrowly missing an errant toddler who is pulled to safety at the last moment by the heroic vicar.

Great stuff, needless to say, and hey, check out this amazing Japanese poster I found (featuring a far cuter monster, apparently sourced from a different movie altogether, but never mind).

--



* Ok, precisely speaking, I realise there’s a nurse who turns up at one point and has about five lines, and there’s the mother of a boy who’s killed by the monster, and some old dears being hustled into the church by the vicar… but we’re pretty much looking at an all-male affair here, perhaps reflective of the same awkwardness / inability to find things for women to do which later became a hallmark of Sangster’s gothic horror scripts?

Gothic Originals / October Horrors # 11: Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

Another year, another straggler crossed off the increasingly short list of “Hammer horror films I’ve never seen”. In fact, if we strictly limit things to their period/gothic horror output, I think this might be the very last one to unfold before my tired eyes.

I suppose I’ve previously avoided ‘Scars of Dracula’ due to the general consensus that it is not very good, but I’ve recently noted some people speaking positively about it, and it’s had a re-release on disc, so… I mean, at the end of the day it’s a Christopher Lee Dracula entry with a reputation for gory violence and Roy Ward Baker calling the shots. How bad can it be, really?

The answer, unfortunately, is very bad indeed. Seriously folks, this one is shockingly poor. It is so unapologetically shit in fact that, if I hadn’t already been in my own living room, and if it hadn’t been raining outside, I probably would have walked out in protest.

Say what you like about Jimmy Sangster’s much-maligned ‘Lust for a Vampire’ and ‘Horror of Frankenstein’ (both of which went into production the same year as this one – ye gods, what on earth was going on over at Hammer House?), at least they were trying to do something a bit different.

‘Scars..’, by contrast embraces the same tone of smirking, half-hearted crappiness, but applies it to a script that is bluntly derivative of earlier entries in the series, barely even summoning the energy to drag itself through the same old clichés one more time.

If you’re feeling charitable (which I tend to be, when it comes to this sort of thing), the two Sangster films could also be excused to a certain extent by the fact that they were helmed by an inexperienced director, trying to bring the blackly humourous aspect of his writing to the screen, with fairly disastrous results.

‘Scars..’ however has no such excuse. Indeed, Baker usually managed to bring some notably superior cinematic chops to the British horror films he directed, sometimes elevating mediocre material to a higher level than it really deserved. Like all work-for-hire directors though, he was at the mercy of what was placed before him by his employers, and it is painfully clear that he has given naff all to work with on ‘Scars..’, whether in terms of budget, scheduling, script, crew or anything else.

The first real warning sign, I think, is the bats. The film opens with the unedifying spectacle of a big, floppy bat-on-a string drooling Kensington gore all over Dracula’s ashes, which are helpfully spread out along with his best cape, on a slab in his mid-European castle at some unspecified point in the fairy tale past (never mind the adventures he had enjoyed in 1890s London in Peter Sasdy’s excellent ‘Taste the Blood of Dracula’ six months earlier). (1)

Admittedly, achieving decent bat effects has always been a problem for gothic horror films, but this one looks particularly onerous, with a sculpted plastic face and an overstuffed body like some giant bluebottle. For a single shot, perhaps we could excuse it, but unfortunately these bats actually go on to play a pretty significant role in the film. Acting as Dracula’s primary avatars, they’re flapping about all over the place, and are central to several of the film’s main horror set-pieces. And yet -- they look absolutely stupid throughout.

The fact that neither Baker nor line producer Aida Young were able to have a quiet word in the ear of one of Hammer’s big-shots to say, look, we’ve got to do something about these bloody bats or the film will be a laughing stock, speaks volumes about how little the company actually cared about the quality of their product at this point in time.

A few years earlier, viewers could have had confidence that even the most mindless horror films Hammer turned out could to some extent be redeemed by their technical accomplishments, proving that a little bit of beautiful photography and classy production design can go a long way. (The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is a good example.) Those days seem to have been long gone by 1970 though, and ‘Scars of Dracula’ is blandly over-lit throughout, leaving no shadows, no room for atmosphere, and nothing to hide its rather ugly, poverty-stricken sets.

In stark contrast to the attention to detail that used to prevail at Hammer, the props and costuming too are almost unbelievably shoddy here. When Patrick Troughton, playing Dracula’s craven servant Klove, is seen dragging an animal carcass over the back of his horse at the end if a hunting expedition, it looks as if he’s been handed a bedraggled soft toy splashed with red paint and told to make the best of it. I’m not even sure what kind of animal it was supposed to be, to be honest.

Again, I only bring this up as a symptom of the wider malaise affecting every aspect of this production. The fact this scene was filmed and printed, rather than being put on hold whilst the art director was bawled out and some production assistants dispatched to come up with something better before the next tea break, again speaks for itself. (2)

I should make clear that it’s not really my intention to get all high-minded when it comes to assessing the quality of Hammer Dracula movies. I have no desire to echo Christopher Lee’s snooty approach to such things, and I’d be perfectly happy to enjoy a ragged, pulpy Dracula movie full of sex and violence (for such is the reputation of ‘Scars..’ has acquired over the years). But… this damn thing can’t even get being sleazy right.

The bawdy behaviour that comprises much of the first half of the film is pitched strictly at a Benny Hill / pre-‘Confessions of..’ level, with Christopher Matthews as a leering, jack-the-lad type chancer getting his end away with a succession of flirtatious barmaids and the like, but with no actual nudity, and none of the (relatively) grown up eroticism that caused such a stir in Baker’s previous assignment for Hammer, ‘The Vampire Lovers’.

As to violence meanwhile, Baker seems to have realised that his only hope of winning the fans over with this one was to just go for it (I’m reminded of Brian Trenchard Smith’s tales of how he started desperately hacking off limbs and throwing blood around when his budget for 1980’s ‘Turkey Shoot’ was cut in half mid-way through production), and if nothing else, ‘Scars..’ is at least a contender for the goriest film Hammer ever made.

Even here though, things are compromised by those bloody layabouts in the art department. Hammer’s preferred shade of bright scarlet house paint never looked as absurd as it does here in the light of Moray Grant’s remorselessly bland photography, and the resulting parade of rubber bat attacks and lurid close-ups of poorly applied wound make-up achieves the rare distinction of simultaneously feeling both prurient and boring. (3)

One of the more interesting aspects of ‘Scars..’ is its apparent attempt to associate Dracula with bladed weapons. (“Be careful, it’s sharp” is his introductory line, as he walks in on Matthews’ character admiring the obligatory crossed swords mounted on his castle wall.)

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea (and I’m sure Lee would have relished the opportunity for a bit of supernatural swashbuckling), but it is poorly developed here – most notably in an absolutely astonishing scene in which, following an almost shot-for-shot re-tread of the bit in Terrance Fisher’s ‘Dracula’ where The Count reprimands his bride for trying to take a bite of the Harker-surrogate’s throat before him, Dracula here proceeds to punish her by whipping out a butcher’s knife and stabbing her to death.

Aside from the fact that it is entirely unmotivated by the script, this is… very un-vampiric behaviour, to say the least. (If Dracula were to resort to sword-play, surely he’d do so purely for the purposes of pageantry and sadism, rather than hacking away at one of his vassals like some back alley slasher?)

This is basically only a taster though for an even more witless moment later on, when the Lord of the Undead, whose mesmeric powers can crush a man’s soul with a mere glance, apparently resorts to drugging the heroine’s soup. As Jonathan Rigby laments in his review in English Gothic, “what use has Dracula for these pantomime contrivances?”

Anyway – on to positives. There must be some, I suppose?

Well, it’s hard work, but… at least Christopher Lee gets some lines in this one I suppose, with Dracula speaking calmly and assuming his ‘cold but polite host’ role for the first time since Fisher’s 1957 ‘Dracula’, I believe.

Given the voluminous litanies of complaint Lee liked to issue each time he was – ahem – “forced” to appear in another Dracula film, one can only imagine how cheesed off he must have been whilst participating in this particularly shabby instalment, but even if he’s not exactly giving it his all, such are the meagre pleasures offered by ‘Scars..’ that merely hearing Christopher Lee say some things is quite nice.

As always, it’s nice to see Hammer lucky charm Michael Ripper getting a significant role too, appearing here as the world’s least hospitable inn-keeper. He gets quite a lot of screen time in ‘Scars..’, and spends almost all of it ordering people to get out of his inn, refusing to let them in in the first place, or telling them to “go to the devil”. He does though have one lovely moment when he temporarily drops his guard, wistfully telling our lead couple they should enjoy their best years together… shortly before he discovers they’re also would-be vampire hunters and manhandles them out of the front door before they’ve even finished their soup.

As a fan of ‘The Sweeney’, I was delighted too to see a young Dennis Waterman popping up as our ostensible hero, although it’s doubtful that this role did much to help propel him to his later TV fame, as he delivers a veritable master-class on the theme of “ineffectual youth”, despite being thirty two years old at the time.

I also found it interesting that – for some reason – ‘Scars..’ takes the opportunity to include the rarely filmed scene from Stoker’s novel in which Jonathan Harker abseils out of his locked room in Dracula’s castle and find himself trapped in the lower chamber which houses The Count’s coffin. This bit was relatively well done, and provided a welcome break from the remorseless grind of reheated cliché that comprises the rest of the film’s action.

And… that’s about it really.

[Deep sigh.]

In general, I tend to feel a great warmth and fondness for British horror films of all stripes, and for Hammer films in particular. As such, I can usually find a certain amount to enjoy in just about any of them, even if it’s just a bit of period charm and some familiar faces popping in for a scene or two. Even on this basis though, I can’t stress enough just how dispiritingly rubbish I found ‘Scars of Dracula’ to be. It’s really the pits.

Essentially playing out like some cruel, self-reflexive pastiche of the company’s public image, ‘Scars..’ feels less like an actual Hammer film, and more like a realisation of what the closed-minded contemporary critics who wrote horror films off as juvenile trash and never went to see them might have imagined a Hammer film to be like.

By pandering to this kind of Lowest Common Denominator public expectation, the company did themselves a dreadful disservice in ‘70/’71, and this one seems to me to be the absolute nadir of the particularly dodgy patch they seemed to be going through at the time.

At least we can take succour in the fact that they bounced back shortly thereafter with great pictures like ‘Twins of Evil’ and ‘Vampire Circus’, keeping themselves afloat creatively speaking for at least a few more years before the inevitable end arrived in the mid ‘70s. Maybe I should watch one of those again to help take the taste away...

---

(I do LOVE some of this foreign language poster artwork for this film though…)

(1) At the risk of sounding like the worst kind of nit-picking fanboy, the fact that ‘Scars of Dracula’ completely blunders the (admittedly loose) sense of chronological continuity established by the other Hammer Draculas just seems to add insult to injury. I mean, after Dracula is defeated in London at the end of ‘Taste the Blood..’, it would seem to set things up perfectly for his resurrection in the same city almost a century later in ‘..AD 1972’ – yet we’ve got this damned mess in the middle, which drags him back to the vague, mittel-european gothic setting we’d previously kissed goodbye to (and frankly had quite enough of) in ‘..Risen from the Grave’ a couple of years earlier!

Is ‘Scars..’ thus non-canonical? Is it a prequel? This being 1970, I’d imagine Tony Hinds and Michael Carreras would have had little to say on the subject beyond, “What the bloody hell are you talking about? Get out of my office!”, but it still irks me.

(2) For further evidence of just how badly put together this movie is, I suggest consulting the unusually extensive list of ‘goofs’ on IMDB.

(3) We should make clear that, after serving a long apprenticeship as a camera operator through the ‘60s, Grant did far better work as DP on ‘The Vampire Lovers’ and ‘Vampire Circus’ amongst others – so again, we can perhaps chalk up the fact that ‘Scars..’ looks as if it was shot under office strip lighting to budget and schedule shortcomings.

The Reptile(John Gilling, 1966)

Given my particular fondness for Hammer’s ‘Plague of the Zombies’ (which you may recall I declared my 13th favourite horror movie of all time), it’s surprising that up until a couple of weeks ago, I’d never seen that film’s companion piece, ‘The Reptile’.

As every fool know, these two films were shot back to back in 1966 as part of some sort of two-for-the-price-of-one economy drive at Hammer, utilising the same director, the same crew, much of the same cast, the same sets, and the same temporal/geographical location (an isolated village in 19th century Cornwall). As a result, the two are generally considered as a peas-from-the-same-pod deal by Hammer fans, and furthermore they tend to receive the same critical thumbs up, being jointly regarded as among the more unusual and successful low-key horror pictures produced by Hammer in the mid-’60s.


Clearly I know all this, so I don’t know why I’d never got around to watching ‘The Reptile’, to be honest. I guess it’s just that age old problem of marketing: when I find myself idly browsing the DVD shelves in some insalubrious second hand shop or desperate high street clear-out sale, and the mood takes me to pick up a few new Hammer titles, this one just kept getting overlooked. I mean - ‘The Satanic Rites of Dracula’, ‘Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb’ - these sound like things worth five pounds of anyone’s money, right? ‘The Reptile’ - not so much.

I mean, what can you expect is gonna happen in a movie like this, y’know? Guy in a reptile mask wonders around. People are alarmed. Footage of guys exploring some fake swamp sets pads things out, a girl in a nice nighty gets menaced, Michael Ripper serves the drinks, and when the clock hits 78 minutes everyone breathes a sigh of relief and goes home. Not that that’s a bad way to spent an evening by any means, and not that I was actually *adverse* to watching ‘The Reptile’, but… you know what I mean. I’ve seen enough second rate ‘50s monster movies to know that a plot synopsis like “there is a reptile – stuff happens” is not exactly a foolproof recipe for cinematic fun-times, and I kind of figured ‘The Reptile’ would probably be the throwaway b-side to ‘Plague..’s heavenly pop hit – something I’d get ‘round to eventually, but I’d wait ‘til I tripped over a copy or saw it on TV (some hope) rather than making a special effort.


Well needless to say, the time to watch ‘The Reptile’ finally arrived, and, as I would surely have realised if I’d thought about the matter for five minutes or paid more attention to the critical consensus on the movie, ‘The Reptile’ is pretty brilliant. I’m ashamed it took me this long to get around to it.

Whilst it apparently doesn’t stop dur-brains like me from selecting their Hammer priorities based on how cool the title is, it has long been acknowledged that by the late ‘60s, the movies Hammer made with marquee stars and recognisable monsters were often cruising by on auto-pilot, whilst their cheaper, more off-beat productions had to try harder to find an audience, and as such more frequently hit the bullseye.

If the Christopher Lee Dracula movies – which locked into a one-a-year treadmill after the character was revived in ‘Dracula: Prince of Darkness’, also released in ’66 – arguably represent Hammer at it’s most lacklustre (none of them are unwatchably terrible, but at the same time none of them are really all that great), then ‘The Reptile’ is at the other end of the spectrum – a classic example of what you might call ‘Jacques Tourneur Syndrome’.

Taking a tip (whether deliberately or otherwise) from the well-worn playbook of Tourneur classics like ‘Cat People’ and ‘Night of the Demon’, ‘The Reptile’s production team obviously realised that when you’re lumbered with making a horror movie that has no distinctive stars, no attention-grabbing new concept, and a special effects budget that doesn’t stretch much beyond one questionable monster suit, your best bet is to fall back on more old fashioned virtues. Y’know – like tight scripting, solid acting, and that old chestnut… atmosphere.



And sure enough, ‘The Reptile’ has atmos by the bucketload, pushing the fecund, mist-shrouded Cornish backwater feel of ‘Plague of the Zombies’ to even greater heights of decrepit eeriness, adding additional location shots of barren moors and bogs to the mix and working with an extra smaller cast to create a locale that feels so isolated and bypassed by civilisation, the village in ‘Plague..’ starts to seem almost cosmopolitan by comparison.

Like ‘Plague..’, ‘Reptile’s storyline involves a form of ‘evil’ migrating from an exotic foreign location and taking root with worrying ease in this benighted corner of England, and both films convey a heavy, strangely tropical atmosphere that makes this transition seem entirely plausible. How they manage to make it seem tropical and freezing at the same time, I’m not sure, but somehow that’s the idea that comes across. Rather like the weirdly tainted rural locales in some of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, a different, rather unhealthy, sort of climate seems to apply here.



Plot-wise, ‘The Reptile’ seems to owe a certain debt to Bram Stoker’s sublimely weird ‘Lair of the White Worm’, but you probably wouldn’t guess as much from the first two thirds of film, which concentrate instead on building a sense of mystery and vague unease that is rare indeed in a Hammer production. Pity they had to give the game away with a clunking title like ‘The Reptile’.

Usually I very much appreciate Hammer’s “does exactly what it says on the tin” approach to naming their movies. Barring a few vague ‘Curse of..’s and ‘Evil of..’s, they were steadfast in their dedication to giving you what you paid for – ‘Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb’ does actually feature blood coming from a mummy’s tomb, and even with those aforementioned Frankenstein sequels, you kind of get the feeling that was just the marketing department dusting up scripts called ‘More Frankenstein’ or ‘Frankenstein Again’ or something.

For ‘The Reptile’ though, I kind of wish they’d taken a chance with a different approach. If this film had been made on the continent, they’d probably have called it something like ‘Seven Scales on the Neck of Venus’ (in Italy), or maybe just ‘Bloodbath of the Sorceress’ (in Spain), and we’d have had a gloriously creepy opening hour, in which assorted items of strangeness – an unidentified plague, a rumoured killer on the loose, a suspicious and aggressive doctor and his largely unseen daughter – are woven together into a fabric of mysterious creepery. But no, ‘The Reptile’ it is, no doubt prompting cries of “where the god damn hell is this reptile, anyway? I’m bored!” throughout the civilised world.


Another thing that serves to push ‘The Reptile’ closer to the realm of European horror is the ambiguity of the character relationships in the film. In yr average Hammer film, characters’ actions are determined almost entirely by their social or familial position. Be they the protective husband, obedient wife, devoted servant, philanthropic scientist, ignorant working class lunkhead or whatever, even the villains usually seem to at least acknowledge this sense of social propriety.

The power relationships which hold sway in the country estate where most of the action in ‘The Reptile’ takes place though remain somewhat uncertain, right up to the film’s conclusion. Is the silent Malay man-servant working as an enforcer for the shifty Dr Franklyn, who is attempting to scare off outsiders and keep his daughter Anna locked away from the world? Or is Anna actually exercising control over her unstable father, slowly driving him crazy as the servant implacably looks on? Or, is the servant dominating both of them, silently keeping them in line using dark powers or threats, as they squirm like rats in a trap? It is this kind of ambiguity – like a very, very distant echo of Pinter and Losey’s ‘The Servant’ – that helps make ‘The Reptile’ such compelling viewing.


In my favourite scene in the movie (which I dedicate a paragraph to for no other reason than that I think it’s really great), Dr Franklyn (played with perfect twitchy obstinacy by Noel Willman) suddenly decrees that Anna (Jacqueline “OMG, Jacqueline Pierce from ‘Plague of the Zombies’!” Pierce) shall play some music for their guests (Ray Barrett and Jennifer Daniel as our straight/normal protagonists). In keeping with her father’s apparent preoccupation with Eastern culture, Anna sits before the fire and proceeds to let rip on a sitar.

(This in itself is a surprisingly timely inclusion and rare example of a Hammer film giving a nod to contemporary pop culture – The Beatles ‘Norwegian Wood’ and The ‘Stones ‘Paint It Black’ had both charted in the year prior to ‘The Reptile’s release, making the previously little known instrument flavour of the month in the popular consciousness.)

As the tempo and intensity of Anna’s fiery raga increases, she fixes her father with a burning stare, the editing hitting montage-speed in time with the music until, in an absolutely extraordinary outburst, the doctor leaps from his chair, cries “ENOUGH!”, and grabs the instrument from his daughter’s hands, smashing it to pieces and throwing the remains into the fire! I may be spoiling the moment for any readers who’ve not seen the film, but if you ask me the internet is somewhat lacking in images of enraged Victorian patriarchs destroying sitars, so here’s a quick visual summation;









Fantastic. If not quite on a par with the spine-shivering erotic dread of Pierce’s emergence from the grave in ‘Plague..’, this is still a scene I don’t think anyone’s going to forget in a hurry.

Perhaps even more subversive within the Hammer universe though is the prominence ‘The Reptile’ assigns to good ol’ Michael Ripper. After working solidly for years as Hammer’s resident barkeep/mortuary attendant/police constable, ‘The Reptile’ is one of the only films in which Ripper’s character is actually allowed take a more significant role in proceedings. This alone is reason for celebration for Hammer fans who have learned to appreciate Ripper’s distinctive presence, and the obvious relish with which he has delivered his few lines in innumerable movies. But Ripper’s role in ‘The Reptile’ is noteworthy for more than just giving some much-deserved screen-time to a consistently underappreciated actor – it’s an implicit blow to the status-quo of the Hammer class system.


As usual, Ripper plays the pub landlord, and as usual, he’s the only local to act courteously toward our protagonist Captain Spalding (Ray Barrett) after the superstitious locals shun him by deserting Ripper’s pub en masse. Unlike previous movies however - in which Ripper would probably have said “take my advice, get out of here before sunset mister” and turned his attention to giving his pots a thorough scrubbing - here the landlord actually establishes a pretty good rapport with Spalding, and insists he call him by his first name, Tom, giving every sign of being ready to help the Captain and his wife out, should they ignore the vague warnings of ‘trouble’ from all and sundry and persist in their attempt to set up home in Spalding’s late brother’s cottage.

When the weirdness does start to hit the fan, so to speak, the Spaldings seem to be practically crying out for assistance from the contractually obligated Van Helsing/noble doctor character, to reassure them, explain what the hell is going on, and help them fight back against whatever evil turns out to be afoot. Initially they turn to the aforementioned Dr Franklyn, dragging him down from his mansion to examine a vagrant who is dying from the mysterious ‘black death’ in their cottage. Franklyn though turns out to be grouchy and rude – not a very helpful character at all in fact - and leaves the couple feeling even more helpless than they did before. Seeing their plight, and apparently realising that there’s no Peter Cushing on the horizon to take care of things this time around, the rural working class innkeep finds himself stepping up to the plate and reluctantly taking on the Van Helsing role, at least to a certain extent.



Ripper is superb in the role of Tom, building him into a far more rounded character than he has ever been allotted before, and Barrett too makes for a far more interesting leading man than the usual forgettable dolts who constitute Hammer’s ‘straight men’, his pock-marked face, cauliflower ears and slightly pugnacious military demeanour lending him a welcome dose of personality.

One of the movie’s best scenes is the one in which Tom and Spalding meet on a stormy night to discuss their predicament over a glass of brandy. Neither of them are scientists or experts in the occult or whatever, but both give the impression of being men whose military service has taken them to ‘far off lands’ where they have seen ‘many strange things’ - including the fate of a man bitten by a King Cobra. Broadly speaking, they've got an inkling of what's going on here, and what needs to be done about it. Even when faced with a scenario as patently ridiculous as a village being menaced by a blood-thirsty cobra-monster, Ripper brings a real gravitas to his character’s situation, as he reflects that having finally come home from a lifetime at sea, he doesn't want to risk the future of his cozy pub, and confesses to Barrett that “..for the first time in my life, I’m frightened”.


As mentioned, this is really where the pleasures of ‘The Reptile’ lie – slow-building atmosphere, convincing character scenes and some extremely good acting (John Laurie – Frazer from ‘Dad’s Army’ - is a good laugh too as the ill-fated hobo Mad Peter). If I say that the film’s denouement / obligatory reptile rampage is perfectly satisfactory, that doesn’t sound like much of it compliment, but it is – it’s exactly what is expected of a film like this, and it’s fine – nothing special, but because by this stage we’re committed to the characters, deeply immersed in the story and it’s peculiar atmosphere, it is all very effective.

Plus: no trekking-through-the-swamps padding, no lady in a nighty being menaced, no pitchfork n’ shotgun wielding villagers. What lingers in the mind after ‘The Reptile’ is a disquieting mixture of Asian splendour and overgrown English hedgerows, jewelled tiaras and grey corpse mud; roaring fires, caged birds and plywood coffins; mugs of cocoa and bubbling subterranean geysers – a strange and rich palette of jarring imagery, quietly reflecting the underlying angst of colonialism and imperial decline that informs so many British horror and adventure stories.

Solid as a ship’s biscuit, rousing as an Irish Coffee, but with a welcome strain of woozy, taboo-breaking European weirdness clawing up from beneath the surface, ‘The Reptile’ is as high quality a piece of idiosyncratic mid-century British horror as you could hope to find.