October Horrors #1: Circus of Horrors (Sidney Hayers, 1960)

Released, I believe, one year prior to Franju’s definitive ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’, this early outlier in the ever-popular field of plastic surgery / facial reconstruction-themed horror differs slightly from the norm, in that Anton Diffring’s Dr Schüler [formerly Rossiter] is actually really good at restoring facially scarred women to their former beauty, requiring neither non-consenting skin-donors nor years of gruesome trial and error grafting experiments to get the job done.



Unfortunately however, despite his exceptional expertise and high success rate, fame and fortune do not await the good doctor and the brother / sister team of assistants who inexplicably follow him around, partly due to that stuffy ol’ medical establishment refusing to countenance his radical innovations… but largely due to the fact that he is also shady as fuck, in addition to being played by everybody’s favourite cold-eyed, expressionless Nazi officer.



As such, Schüler / Rossiter instead finds his true vocation acting as the tyrannical manager of a continental travelling circus, whose artistes are in fact petty criminals and prostitutes whose faces the Doc has surgically altered in order to grant them a new identity (as well as apparently training them all to be world class acrobats in the process), and whom he inevitably ends up murdering via various circus-appropriate staged accidents when they decide to leave his employ and/or threaten to expose his sinister racket. All of which falls pretty far from anything which might normally be deemed to make “a lick of sense”, but hey, who’s counting?

Unleashed upon the British public by Anglo-Amalgamated productions shortly after they’d delivered the sublime-to-the-ridiculous double whammy of Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ and Arthur Crabtree/Herman Cohen’s ‘Horrors of the Black Museum’, it’s probably fair to say that ‘Circus of Horrors’ falls somewhere between those two poles, quality-wise, but a lot closer to the latter than the former.

Indeed, most of the plotting and character stuff here consists of tacky, ultra-lurid sado-melodrama, very much in the vein of the three films Cohen made with Michael Gough during this era, the details of which need not concern us here. But, at the same time, the production values are FAR higher than on any of Cohen’s flicks, with the use of a genuine circus (and its performers) lending a sense of scale and visual interest to proceedings which belies the low budget, whilst the cast also do a bang-up job breathing life into their corny, under-motivated roles.

Douglas Slocombe’s photography though is what really seals the deal, balancing rich colours with deep shadows, and adding real depth to Hayers’ oft-imaginative framing, especially during the scenes set in the big top, which (unusually for circus stuff in movies) have some decent atmosphere to them, and are quite fun to watch.

By the standards of a late ‘50s British production, this is strong stuff content-wise too, beating Hammer at their own game by including at least one absolutely startling bit of gore, whilst the circus setting meanwhile allows the glamorous (and numerous) female cast members (notably including both Yvonnes - Monlaur *and* Romain) to display acres of pulchritudinous flesh, whether crammed into kinky outfits, getting frisky with the ever-lecherous Diffring, or indeed with the equally randy cop/hero character who belatedly attempts to, uh, save the day?

Also - there’s a superbly fruity early Donald Pleasence performance to enjoy here too, as he pops up (with hair!) in the 1947-set prologue, playing the shell-shocked, alcoholic owner of a destitute circus, collapsing into despair amid the ruins of post-war France. And boy, does he ever get his teeth into it. It’s a shame he exits the film so early, but seeing him meet his sorry fate, crushed beneath the weight of an entirely inanimate dancing bear, is worth the entry price alone.

Gothic Horror Round-up: The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961)

The only werewolf movie ever attempted by Hammer, and to be honest it’s not hard to see why. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘Curse..’ exactly, but it’s certainly one of the most peculiar, loosely structured horror films the studio made during their ‘classic’ era, marred by a number of downright odd production decisions.

For a start, it’s supposed to be set in Spain, a circumstance that seems fairly inexplicable for a film made in England with a screenplay based on Guy Endore’s book ‘The Werewolf of Paris’. Apparently it was down to Hammer’s desire to reuse a bunch of sets that were lying around from an aborted Spanish Civil War film. Despite the best efforts of cast and production team though, this unconventional setting never quite gels, and the film is full of weirdly incongruous elements of ‘local colour’ that lend a certain feeling of dislocation to proceedings.

Funny isn’t it how a gothic horror film can purport to be set pretty much anywhere in central or Eastern Europe and still seem plausible as everybody storms about with English accents, but Spain just doesn’t ring true at all? (Hammer ran into the same problem again a few years later of course with ‘The Devil Ship Pirates’, only there it was exacerbated by the fact that the Spanish English were pitched against the English English, leading to confusion all round.)

(Whether or not this geographical detail gave the film a higher profile in Spain I’m not sure, but it’s an interesting point to ponder, given the possible influence exerted by Hammer’s sympathetic werewolf-hero on the wolfman created by Paul Naschy later in the '60s..?)

Perhaps more crucial to ‘Curse..’s commercial failure than the cockney Spaniards though is the decision to open the film with a whole half hours-worth of historical prologue, much of which seems less like a horror flick and more like some particularly morbid variation on an old Alexander Korda costume drama. There is at least an engagingly gruesome tale being told here, of a mute serving girl (Yvonne Romain) who, as the Mounds and Circles weblog put it recently, “..is unjustly imprisoned, raped by a feral lunatic, commits murder, gives birth to a werewolf and then kills herself”. Nice.

With an appropriately cruel and downbeat tone to them, these scenes – including Anthony Dawson’s fine turn as a cringing, debauching aristocrat - are actually very good, but with no central character or linear narrative to hang our hats on, even the most patient viewer will be asking WHERE THE HELL IS THE GODDAMN WEREWOLF ALREADY by the time the first half hour creeps by. Subsequently, we have a long segment detailing the adoption, christening and early life of our wolfman character, together with an extensive deviation into the nature of disagreements between a number of local shepherds and the ineffectual night watchman charged with protecting their flocks from wild animals, before we cut to ‘the present’ and our leading man Oliver Reed finally strolls on-screen with a carefree swagger just before the 50 minute mark.

Now, I don’t have to tell you that Oliver Reed as the wolfman is a bit of a hole in one and should naturally have been allotted more screentime, but in fairness to Hammer this was a good few years before Reed became a household name. In fact, like some of his other early b-movie roles (think ‘Beat Girl’ or ‘67’s ‘The Shuttered Room’), it’s interesting to see him cast not as the brooding tough guy, but as more of a feckless, happy-go-lucky young fellow, capering ‘round the screen like a bull in a china shop. Of course, being a werewolf and all, it’s not long before he gets to bring a more characteristic palette of angst, confusion and physical menace to the role.

As with ‘Baskervilles’, production values are top-notch in spite of the fell-off-the-back-of-a-lorry sets, and from his introduction onward, the film really picks up steam, finally heading in the direction we might have initially expected from a Hammer werewolf movie starring Oliver Reed. Well, kind of. First our hapless young lycanthrope gets a job bottling wine at a vineyard (“there’s the labels y’see, and there’s the bottles – you put the wine inside, you put the labels outside” says his layabout buddy Jose, showing him the ropes –another great low-key performance from TV actor Martin Matthews). Then he cultivates an unthinkable, Romeo and Juliet style relationship with the daughter of the vineyard owner, a circumstance confounded both by a long-standing family enmity and, more pressingly, our lad’s frequent full moon rampages.

A lot of fun if you’ve got a bit of patience, there is much to enjoy in ‘Curse..’ – some fantastic moments, quality performances, Oliver Reed being a frigging werewolf, and a well-told, heart-string tugging take on the old doomed wolfman tale at its core. With it’s rambling prologue, frequent down-time and odd digressions into low-rent historical epic territory though, the overall impression you’re left with is less that of a classic Hammer, more one that’s just… kinda peculiar.