October Horrors 2019 # 1: Mausoleum (Michael Dugan, 1983?)

 An independently-produced horror film shot in Los Angeles and Ventura County, ‘Mausoleum’ seems to have first surfaced on video in 1983, although evidence would seem to suggest that it was actually shot in the late ‘70s. IMDB meanwhile specifies Feb-Mar 1981 shooting dates, which seems like a happy compromise. Either way, the film’s widescreen 35mm photography and general technical proficiency suggest that its producers were initially gunning for a theatrical distribution deal which never materialised.

Be that as it may, ‘Mausoleum’ is a crudely commercial venture which strays into the realm of high weirdness solely as a result of its fevered determination to “deliver the goods” to a hypothetical target audience. Though the film exhibits a near total lack of talent, taste or originality, its makers nonetheless seem to have had a perfect understanding of the kind of stuff they needed to throw onto the screen in order to keep rubes like me watching, and for that I salute them.

Garish gel lighting, swathes of dry ice, gratuitous nudity, lashings of bright red gore, gruesome prosthetic wound make-up, ridiculous creature designs and a wafer thin grasp of narrative logic…. man, anyone would think this thing was secretly made by Italians, were it not for the complete absence of style or atmosphere. (It does have J&B product placement though, so anything’s possible.)

Whilst taking in the film’s genuinely bizarre prologue – in which disembodied voices lure a little girl in a fairy tale dress toward an artificial fog-shrouded, disco-lit gothic chapel which incongruously lurks in the middle of an otherwise drab suburban cemetery – it occurred to me that ‘Mausoleum’ may possibly have been inspired by the success of 1979’s Phantasm, with its similarly surreal, graveyard-based shenanigans and use of an evocative / antiquated word as a title. If Don Coscarelli’s film was indeed an influence though, the similarities are soon dropped once the main body of the movie gets underway.

The body in question is that of dead-eyed, platinum blonde actress Bobbie Bresee, appearing here in what I believe was her only leading role, though she went on to scale the giddy heights of minor b-movie renown through supporting parts in the likes of ‘Ghoulies’ and ‘Surf Nazis Must Die’. Bresee plays Susan, the grown up version of the girl we saw in the prologue, and her ‘department store model’ physique is ruthlessly and rather mechanically exploited by the filmmakers - so if you like looking at it, you’re already quids in with ‘Mausoleum’.

Susan, it transpires, is now the idle trophy wife of a successful businessman played by perpetually weird-looking former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner (‘Food of the Gods’, ‘Starcrash’, etc). The couple are apparently quite rich, as they live together in an extravagant white columned mansion-house with its own grounds, assorted grotesque-yet-expensive looking furniture, flashy cars etc, but despite these material comforts, all is not well.

I’m not sure I quite have all this straight, so please bear with me, but I think the general idea is that Susan is an unwitting descendent of – wait for it – the thrice-cursed NEMOD dynasty, erstwhile owners/occupants of that spooky chapel we saw in the prologue. As a result of her childhood visit to the mausoleum, Susan has become possessed by a demonic spirit which, now that she is all grown up, occasionally takes over her body, gifting her with luminous, glowing eyes, sharp teeth, sundry supernatural powers, and, in extreme cases, a hob-gobliny face like some creature from ‘The Dark Crystal’ or whatever.

Well, I think that’s basically the gist of it, anyway – my address is in the sidebar if credited screenwriters Robert Barich, Robert Madero or Katherine Rosenwink wish to set me straight on the finer details.

So yeah, from hereon in, what we’re essentially looking at is an OTT ‘80s trash version of an exorcism movie, structured around the idea of the demonically possessed Susan gradually murdering a procession of obnoxious and/or comedic secondary characters, whilst poor old Marjoe frets and wonders what’s wrong with her, and her psychiatrist (ubiquitous Hollywood character player Norman Burton, who must have had an especially big tax bill to deal with in 1981 or something) steps up in the all-important exorcist role.

Susan’s first victim is a boorish, inebriated slob who harasses her whilst she and her husband are ‘enjoying’ an evening at their local night club – a location which I confess I found more terrifying than any of the film’s supernatural horror scenes. I don’t know what benighted corner of Southern California they found this place in, but it’s a low-ceilinged, ‘hotel bar’ type room full of dark wood panelling and plush leather furnishings, in which tired-looking middle-aged couples in formal evening wear shuffle around distractedly to sounds of a white, ersatz disco ensemble (heavy on the Kenny G sax), after being served unappealing cocktails in grotesquely elaborate glassware.

Quite possibly the most comprehensively uncool night spot I have ever seen featured in a motion picture, the horrors of this unsavoury joint entirely overshadow the telekinetic car fire which does away with the drunken groper – an incident which is merely *awkward* for all concerned.

Awkwardness continues to be the film’s defining motif as Susan turns her attentions to here house’s stereotypically lecherous Hispanic gardener (actor Maurice Sherbanee’s performance reminded me of Dr Nick Riviera from ‘The Simpsons’). This whole business takes up what feels like a pretty long stretch of the movie’s middle half hour, with Susan alternately leading the horny devil on with peek-a-boo balcony appearances (whilst demonically possessed), and being repulsed by his attentions (whilst in ‘normal’ mode).

Although I realise I was probably supposed to be looking at Bobbie Bresee’s breasts whilst all this was going on, I instead found myself becoming increasingly infuriated by the way the gardener seemed to be spending ages and ages attempting to remove an unsightly tree stump by half-heartedly swinging an axe into the top of it. That won’t bloody work mate! What the hell are you even doing? You’ve at least got to get a pitchfork under there to pull the roots up, or maybe even use a small digger. What a useless gardener! (Actually, now that I think about it, Susan does eventually butcher him with a planting fork post-coitus, so maybe that’s poetic justice of a sort?)

Mercifully spared from Susan’s wrath meanwhile is the family’s comic relief maid Elsie, played by veteran comedienne LaWanda Page, who is instead called upon to enact a hand waving “fleeing from the haunted house” routine unseen since the days of Mantan Moreland.

I feel a bit torn about Elsie’s character to be honest. On the one hand, she clearly represents an appalling racial stereotype which should have been consigned to the dustbin of history long before 1981, but, on the other hand, she is also hands down the most entertaining character in this movie, raiding her employers’ liquor cabinet with gusto, and delivering lines like “good googly-moogly, I need a drink of the hard stuff” and “no more heaving’, I’m leavin’” with Dolemite-level sass.

Meanwhile, poor old Auntie Nemod (no, really) suffers one of the film’s more elaborately grisly deaths, as she is suspended in mid-air by Susan’s evil powers and has her torso graphically torn open. A delivery guy subsequently gets splatted by invisible evil whilst trying to make a phonecall, and, during a visit to the shopping mall, an art dealer gets impaled on a big, spiky abstract sculpture when Susan’s demonic alter-ego develops an obsessive attraction to a painting that… well, words can’t quite express it, so it’ll probably be easiest if I just give you a quick screen-grab:

Thereafter, the film’s exorcism plot-line picks up speed for the final act as the psychiatrist – who has recorded one of Susan’s demonic transformations on tape - calls in a former mentor of his who specialises in this sort of thing.

Refreshingly for a movie of this vintage and general boorishness, this professor turns out to be woman who is neither sexy n’ objectified nor a crazy old bag, and together, the two of them set about delivering masses of exorcism-related exposition and begin preparing for a showdown loaded with more ridiculous, rubbery demon effects and green n’ purple tinted lighting than even I can really tolerate, culminating in what some viewers may consider ‘Mausoleum’s most memorable moment, as Bresee’s demonic boobs stretch out and develop their own pus-drooling faces. Cor blimey.

Special effects here were handled by John Carl Buechler, who went on to direct stuff like ‘Troll’ and ‘Cellar Dweller’ for Charles Band, which… actually kind of makes sense, I suppose? I mean, I may not have quite as much of a detailed understanding of 80s b-horror chronology as fans more thoroughly steeped in this particular area, but I’ve always had the general impression that it was in the late ‘80s - when trolls, gnomes, killer dolls and god knows what were running amok and films like ‘House’ and assorted ‘..Elm Street’ sequels were ruling the video shelves – that medium budget horror films, perhaps wary of censorship or simply aware of the genre’s increasingly young fan-base, began to focus on fantastical, rubbery creature designs as a substitute for more quote-unquote “realistic” sex n’ violence.

To my mind therefore, 1981 feels very early for the kind of latex monstrosities which dominate the last few reels of ‘Mausoleum’; perhaps we could even see Buechler’s work here as somewhat pioneering in that respect, although the film as a whole could perhaps be better framed as a transitory work, mixing full on, creature-feature goofiness with lurid gore and a defiantly puerile, ‘70s drive-in approach to nudity and sexual exploitation?

Well, who knows. Overall, ‘Mausoleum’ is a strange beast, standing out largely for its EC Comics-on-crack tastelessness, and for the eye-watering ugliness of its production design. In this respect, the film is pitched roughly on the level you’d expect from the kind of teenage SOV movie celebrated by Bleeding Skull, which sits oddly alongside its technical proficiency, orchestral score and cast of industry professionals.

In an attempt to understand this disjuncture, I will close by simply drawing your attention to the background of a couple of the film’s principal architects.

Producer Michael Franzese was an heir to New York’s notorious Colombo crime family who earned himself the nickname “The Yuppie Don” during the ‘80s, reportedly raking in a vast fortune via a gasoline bootlegging operation he arranged with the Russian Mafia. A veteran of numerous Grand Jury appearances, racketeering trials and state indictments, he is widely assumed to have begun investing in the film industry for the purposes of money laundering and/or tax avoidance. After ‘Mausoleum’, he went on to produce the impossibly crass (yet hugely entertaining) Linda Blair exploitation classic ‘Savage Streets’ (1984), before eventually getting hit with a jail term and subsequently re-inventing himself as a born-again motivational speaker.

Meanwhile, the sum total of director Michael Dugan’s other film industry credits to date are, in order: a 1976 kids movie named ‘Super Seal’, a 1999 T&A comedy (‘Raging Hormones’), and a 2015 “TV mini-series” entitled ‘The Adventures of Turkey Dude’, which does not appear to have ever been publically screened.

Somewhere between the aesthetics embodied by these two gentlemen, the essence of ‘Mausoleum’ lies, waiting.

October Horrors # 12 / Thoughts on… Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018)

1.

“Where the mystic swims, the psychotic drowns,” attentive listeners may hear Nicholas Cage growl during his climactic show-down with Linus Roache’s narcissistic, Mansonite cult leader towards the end of Panos Cosmatos’ ‘Mandy’. I’m unsure of the origin of this phrase (it sounds like it could be an unattributed quote from somewhere or other?), but it certainly seems to hit the mark re: Cosmatos’ apparent desire to leave both his characters and, potentially, his audience struggling to keep their heads above water amidst a veritable tsunami of sensory overload.

I recall director Ben Wheatley, in interviews around the release of his (excellent) film ‘A Field in England’ a few years back, lamenting what he saw as the disappearance of the “Head Movie” – a phenomenon he saw as being exemplified by films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’ – from contemporary screens, and declaring his intention to add his own modest contribution to this seemingly defunct canon. Cosmatos, we assume, must have felt a similar absence… but his own reaction to it is anything but modest.

Refracting its director’s apparent desire to create the Ultimate Acidhead Movie through the lens of what I take to be his own childhood aesthetic obsessions, and further filtering it through the grand stylistic excess of some his contemporaries in nouveau-cult cinema (Winding Refn, Strickland etc), ‘Mandy’ is, inarguably, one hell of a trip.

Like a powerful psychotropic experience, it is a film that leaves a long, pungent aftertaste. It’s the kind of movie that sits in the back of your mind after viewing, like a big mental snowball of unearned experience, just waiting to be poked with a stick.

The fact that many of ‘Mandy’s on-screen characters spend much of their time tripping balls provides a none-too-subtle hint that this is indeed a valid way to read the film, but there is far more going on here than just some ‘Fear & Loathing..’/‘Inherent Vice’ styled stoner fantasia. Applying this phantasmagorical portrayal of chemically-altered perception to an ultra-violent horror/fantasy framework, the film offers us characters whose psychotropic intake has taken them to the very edges of humanity, and in some cases terrifyingly far beyond them.

At the opposite end of the scale from those who approach drug-taking from the comfortable, new age perspective of guided meditational growth, this is a film for those wild(wo)men who prefer to go into it weaponised – with extreme metal in their ears, darkened woods or concrete hinterland as their surroundings and physical danger close at hand, as if daring the expanded universe to tear them apart.

I am very much not one of those people, but, so long as it all remains safely within the confines of a motion picture screen, with sound properly balanced and the camera safely mounted on a tripod, I can surely dig it.

Based on reviews I’ve read so far, ‘Mandy’ seems to have left writers unable to resist the temptation to resort to dubious, hyperbolic sound-bites in an attempt to encapsulate the experience of watching the film, so, here’s my shot at the pull-quote bulls-eye: ‘Mandy’ is like watching Jodorowsky direct a ‘Death Wish’ sequel written by Robert E. Howard, as your pupils expand to the size of dinner plates and your fingers begin to wriggle before your eyes like Lovecraftian spaghetti.

If that sounds like a recommendation to you, I highly recommend finding time to catch this one theatrically whilst you have the chance. Please take this opportunity to search for screenings in your local area.

In the meantime, the following numbered thoughts and tangents may be best appreciated by those who have already seen the film, but if you haven’t, I shouldn’t worry – it’s pretty difficult to “spoil” a story that can be expressed in its entirety in one sentence, and that was probably first carved in stone by some ancient scribe before the dawn of recorded time.


2.

‘Mandy’ has rather strange relationship to reality… and not just because of all the acid, either.

In one sense, the film, particularly during its opening (pre-revenge) section, is a detailed and highly specific evocation of a particular time and place (a mountainous area of the USA, 1983). (1)

Every prop, item of clothing, vehicle or piece of furniture, and each small aspect of the web of cultural reference points that drift through the idyllic existence of Red (Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) – all of these have been carefully chosen to scratch a nameless, deeply buried nostalgic itch that many viewers (particularly those born in the ‘80s) will not even have been aware of until they watch this movie and feel a touch of it in their bones. (2)

These temporal conjurations extend even to the texture of the film itself. Though evidently shot with all the smooth, HD clarity that the 21st century has to offer, ‘Mandy’s photography simultaneously swarms with a thick, almost intrusive layer of film grain, recalling more than anything the unique ‘feel’ of 16mm footage blown up to 35, as exemplified during the ‘80s by break-out low budget features such as ‘The Evil Dead’ and Jim VanBebber’s ‘Deadbeat at Dawn’.

Within this scheme, visual textures are deliberately tweaked scene by scene to sink hooks into deep-buried memories. When we see Red engaged in his work felling trees, climbing into a chopper with his co-workers for the ride home, the heavy grain is combined with washed out greens and browns, recalling any number of ‘80s Vietnam / forest survival type movies, whilst a later scene in which he and Mandy drift in a boat upon shimmering lake adopts a blown-out, over-saturated VHS kind of look, flashing us straight back to the gently psychedelic drift of a ‘70s bigfoot documentary.

In this regard, ‘Mandy’ is an exercise in high level aesthetic alchemy – a creative excavation of the recent past comparable to that which the Ghostbox label have carried out for the UK of the 1970s. As an evoker of *feel*, as a wrangler of the wildly divergent strands of temporal-cultural suggestion, Cosmatos here proves himself a master.

Naturally, the more obvious and potentially comedic signifiers of the era have for the most part been avoided; by and large, things are more subtle. This may, for instance, be the most METAL film not to actually feature any metal on the soundtrack. (3)

The use of fonts, cult-ish visual signifiers and the occasional t-shirt is as far as it goes, but the essence of METAL (in capitals) nonetheless runs rich and deep through these two hours. Fans of the genre will be left no doubt that Cosmatos is one of their own, though nary a power chord is struck nor a devil horn thrown. (A battle axe is forged in the shape of the ‘F’ from the Celtic Frost logo however, so… what more proof of good faith could fans possibly require?)


3.

But, on the other hand… well, speaking of battle axes, let’s just say that my reference to Robert E. Howard above wasn’t just plucked out of thin air. After the prolonged and appalling home invasion/murder sequence that constitutes ‘Mandy’s transitional central phase, it becomes increasingly clear that a hologram of Howard’s Hyborian Age has been super-imposed upon the USA of the early 1980s.

(A not inappropriate collision of worlds, given how thoroughly the sword & sorcery genre suffused that era’s popular culture, with John Milius’s 1982 ‘Conan the Barbarian’ in particular instigating an unsettling communion between Howard’s might-is-right prehistoric philosophy and the equally fantastical macho individualism of Reagan-ite political discourse; a heady fusion that, nearly forty years later, still filters through to ‘Mandy’s otherwise rather contradictory notion of a fuzzily nostalgic vigilante revenge story.)

When Red hits up his enigmatic pal Carruthers (a wonderful one scene bit from 80s/90s action vet Bill Duke) to reclaim his crossbow, we’re presented with a fistful of the kind of ominous exposition you’d usually expect some D&D players to receive from an aged traveller in a remote tavern. There have been “rumours of dark riders”, they were last seen heading for such-and-such a place, he “once glimpsed them upon the horizon”, and so on.

Leaving aside the question of exactly what kind of druggy, Satanic grapevine Carruthers picked up this info from, given that he seems to be a total recluse, we may find ourselves rubbing our eyes and wondering where exactly we are again..? The United States in 1983 suddenly seems very far away.

Indeed, from front to back, this is a story that, with a few minor adjustments, could have happened to Conan or King Kull, rather than a 40-something lumberjack played by Nicholas Cage, and the simplistic, video game-like storytelling favoured by Howard predominates from the moment Red’s quest for vengeance begins. [You know - Conan/Cage obtains weapons, confronts enemies, is captured. Escapes, kills enemies, reclaims weapons, proceeds directly to next set of enemies, and so on.]

We know this is not a post-apocalyptic world, because there’s stuff on TV, and people have jobs and visit grocery stores, but at no point do we actually visit a human habitation that comprises more than a single building. Isolated, makeshift homesteads and compounds dotted around the wilderness provide our only points of reference, and signs of wider societal organisation are entirely absent. No vehicles that are not directly connected to our story travel the roads through the forest.

Much of this I think is this is simply the result of Cosmatos’ desire to cut absolutely all connecting tissue out of his narrative. Acting less on the basis of conventional, A-to-B cinematic story-telling and more like some restless, ‘Metal Hurlant’ style comic book artist, this director doesn’t really give a damn about how his characters get from one place to another, or how they find out where they’re supposed to be going in the first place.

Instead, he is happy simply to teleport his hero (who, lest we forget, is actually wielding a battle axe) straight from one spectacular action set-piece to the next, wringing maximum value out of each epic confrontation, with no time for any non-epic messing about in-between.


4.

Boy, those Cenobite bikers (can we go with “Cenobikers”?) are quite a piece of work. I won’t go into their “origin story” (as it is one of the few details of ‘Mandy’s plot that it is probably best for viewers to discover as they go along), but, jesus - what a terrifying conception.

The moment when they are first ‘summoned’ – interrupting what up to this point has been a film ostensibly set in the real world, and a richly detailed version of it at that – is truly startling, causing us to share to some extent the fear we might actually experience if we found one of these creatures standing in front of us.

Deep, nasty dread is henceforth infused into all that follows, and I found the subsequent strobe-lit nocturnal kidnapping almost impossible to watch; it is just too horrible to contemplate, recalling the ghost of childhood anxiety that, no matter how unlikely it seems, or however often your parents tell you otherwise, such horrors – as expressed through the somehow-very-‘80s biker / serial killer / demon composite that I’m sure I recall all too clearly from some nasty comics that my parents should probably have not let me read at the time - may actually be out there somewhere.

And, indeed, they might. One of the things that makes these particular monsters so ghastly is that, though they may lurk at the very far end of unlikelihood and have no real life analogues (I hope), the explanation that is eventually offered for their existence is not actually a supernatural one. As a ready-made urban myth ready so be shared wherever young people gather to take drugs and get up to no good in the dark, they are wonderfully potent. (I mean, there’s a whole slasher movie franchise just waiting to happen there, at the very least.)

Also: along with this fairly direct tribute to ‘Hellraiser’, one of the relatively few blunt, Tarantino-style “homages” that creeps into ‘Mandy’ involves a big shout-out to Phantasm II, of all things. We’re among friends here, no doubt. (4)


5.

Ok, the Nicholas Cage thing. Let’s get on with it.

Personally, I really ‘cannot hang’ (as I believe the phrase goes) with this comedy/meme thing that’s built up around Mr Cage in recent years. To be honest, I prefer to think of him as just a extremely fine actor whose apparent willingness to say ‘yes’ to just about anything, though admirable, doesn’t always help his reputation in these days of social media snark.

To misquote Norma Desmond, it’s not his playing that’s too big, it’s the pictures that are too small. Like a modern day Klaus Kinski, he might get a bit goofy and OTT in the mediocre, run-of-the-mill assignments that take up much of his time, but, once in a blue moon, a project arrives that is worthy of his particular, highly tuned sensibilities - and at that point, you can just wind the fucker up and watch him go.

A few years back, Werner Herzog (funnily enough) gave him one such opportunity with the brilliant (and seemingly quite under-rated?) ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans’ – and, needless to say, with ‘Mandy’ Cosmatos gives him another chance to strut his stuff on the level where he truly belongs. Once again, he does fantastic work here. (5)

I would leave it at that, were it not for the fact that many attendees the screening I attended evidently thought differently in this regard, having apparently pitched up with the primary intention of wringing maximum Cage-laffs from proceedings.

There is, it must be said, a lot of intentional humour in ‘Mandy’. There are zany one-liners and everything, and these tend to be mixed up quite jarringly with passages that are otherwise harrowing or savage. So, I appreciate that people may get a bit disorientated by this and take a “what can you do but laugh?” approach to navigating the choppy waters of this singularly intense and unusual movie.

There are other sections here however that are clearly not meant to be funny. The already infamous ‘bathroom scene’ is one of them, but, in view of the unspeakably terrible things that happen to Cage’s character during this film, I don’t believe he is overplaying here at all. Hell, if anything, he’s underplaying. Few of us, I’d imagine, would proceed in quite such a reasonable manner in similarly dire circumstances.

Seemingly channelling Warren Oates’ devastating portrayal of masculine grief in Peckinpah’s ‘Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia’ (a divisive head-trip of a revenge film with which ‘Mandy’ shares more than a few eerie parallels, now that I come to think of it), Cage is pretty on point here, and I could really have done without the chuckles in the row behind me.

I’d assume that at least some of these chucklers were the same people who were already loudly yakking away on their phones about other things in the queue ahead of me as they left the auditorium, whilst the closing credits were still rolling. I mean… c’mon man. Maybe you liked the movie, maybe you didn’t, but please - give it a few minutes to settle in before you’re planning tomorrow’s fucking brunch.

Thankfully though, these were not the only people who made it to this sold out city centre screening. A middle-aged couple with matching straight black hair, silently putting on their matching leather battle jackets. A big guy with impressive wrist tattoos and an unreadable metal band logo t-shirt, smoking a rollie with shaking hands on the step outside the cinema. Various other lone, scraggle-haired individuals, quickly striding off into the late afternoon shadows; heading straight back to their black light basements, I would like to think.

In aspirational terms at least, these folks feel more like my kind of people, and it is spiriting to see that word of mouth (or word of wi-fi, at least) has already connected ‘Mandy’ to its real audience.


6.

For all its savage violence, drug-damaged black humour and kaleidoscopic visuals, and despite the crassness of its neanderthal boilerplate revenge storyline, ‘Mandy’, like ‘..Alfredo Garcia’ before it, is a love story.

I mean, the clue’s in the name, man. Cosmatos could easily have called his film “Demon Fire” or “Serpent’s Eye” or something, and would probably have sold some extra tickets to people who might currently be apt to mistake it for a romantic comedy whilst scanning the listings - but that’s not what it’s about.

Without Mandy, and the thirty or so minutes we spend with her, none of the other stuff in the film would matter a damn. It would be some huge, empty, post-modern, lol-worthy mega-action laff-fest, and I probably would have concluded my thoughts on it far earlier than this.

Like ‘..Alfredo Garcia’, this is a film split into two halves, hinged around a transitional moment of blackest desolation at its centre. And, as with ‘..Alfredo Garcia’, it is the first half – slow, almost meditative in tone – that will eventually live longest in your memory.

So, how can I best put this? I have a very strong, very good feeling about Red and Mandy’s life together in the early part of the film. Their house and its surroundings are beautiful, the pace of their life and the time they spend together is beautiful. I mean, I may not particularly want to go to work as a lumberjack, but that aside – their life is about as close to a vision of an ideal existence as I could possibly imagine.

Perhaps not everyone will share this feeling, but as we have established, ‘Mandy’ is probably not a film for everyone. For those within a certain age-group though, or those who hark back to the recent past, or enjoy things like rock music, or science fiction, or solitude…? Well I’d imagine that if you’re reading this weblog, you’re probably in the club, let’s put it that way.

Mandy herself is not some generic, pretty wife character who exists solely in order toprovide moral justification to Arnie or Charles Bronson as they embark upon their regulation seventy minutes of cathartic violence. Mandy is different. Mandy is cool.

In spite of a necessarily limited amount of dialogue and screen time, Andrea Riseborough does an amazing job of building her into a fully-formed person (and, she is probably going to have to deal with people staring at her on the street and silently mouthing “mandy” for years to come as a result).

We’re perhaps not going to fall head-over-heels for her like Roache’s creepazoid cult leader does, but she is someone we would all like to play a bit part in our lives. She is the kind of acquaintance we would always think of warmly, wondering what she’s up to, but confident that it must be a-ok, whatever it is – and most of all, we’d appreciate what a good thing she has with Red. She’s the kind of affirmative, self-contained person who might send you a postcard now and then, and you’d always be very happy to receive it.

We in the audience might all chuckle at it when it plays out the first time, but in retrospect, the scene in which Red and Mandy sit together on the sofa, distractedly eating their dinner whilst completely enraptured by Don Dohler’s ‘Night Beast’ (1982) as it plays out on their fuzzy portable TV, is… well it’s something that will stay with us, let’s put it that way.


7.

Perhaps the soul of any revenge movie can be judged by what the revenger does after his or her labours are complete. It is always a tricky, uncertain moment, determining what we will be left with after the fleeting catharsis of vengeance has faded, and there are many directions a story can be taken in during those vital few minutes before the credits roll. Something though tells me that any such film in which the protagonist brushes off their hands and goes home, congratulating themselves on a job well done, is probably not a good one.

As Nicholas Cage sits dazed after his final confrontation, he is closer - in appearance, mental state and deed - to one of the Cenobikers he has recently dispatched than he is to the man who initially set out on his quest for vengeance. He has tasted their sacred acid and worn their armour; he is just as plastered in blood and filth as they were, and has committed acts scarcely less horrendous.

The thought of his returning to any kind of quote-unquote ‘normal’ life after all this is unthinkable. This netherworld of drugs and psychosis and mindless debasement would seem to have swallowed him whole. Has he indeed drowned, as per the aphorism he so recently muttered?

We might worry at this point that the film, along with its central character, has rather lost touch with  where it began, left empty and exhausted after a solid hour of mind-flaying, hysterical madness.

But then – that flashback. Perfectly placed. Devastating. I’ll spare you the details.

Tears in our eyes at the end of a film in which Nicholas Cage snorted a faceful of cocaine off a shard of broken glass after crushing the head of a demon biker?

I know this film has had a lot of hype already, but really – believe it.

Movie of the year? Are you kidding..?

Like Mandy listening to that cult leader’s hippie folk song, I survey the competition and laugh.

Stay metal, friends.

---------

(1) Suitably vague, the film’s stated location of “The Silver Mountains” generates search engine hits for areas in Washington, Idaho and Michigan, and ‘Mandy’ was seemingly filmed in Belgium, rather surprisingly.

(2) Oddly enough, the one thing that didn’t really ring true for me in the film’s production design was Mandy’s Motley Crue t-shirt. She and her husband are more-or-less in their 40s, we presume, and it seems unlikely to me that someone who was this age in 1983 would have much use for Nikki Sixx and co. (They would, in fact, be baby boomers pretty much – of the same generation as the psychotic hippies who proceed to persecute them.) All is forgiven however, when she wears a Black Sabbath T in the next scene. Spot on.

(3) Admittedly, doom-lord Stephen O’Malley’s contributions to the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack probably help in this regard. Before any arguments erupt, we should also probably note at this juncture that the use of the one pre-existing song featured in the movie – ‘Starless’ by King Crimson – is both totally sublime and hugely appropriate… but calling it metal is probably a stretch, for my purposes at least.

(4) FUN FACT: Christopher Figg - producer of the original ‘Hellraiser’ and subsequently of Neil Marshall’s ‘Dog Soldiers’ (2002), amongst other things - can be found prominently listed in ‘Mandy’s production credits. For his apparent role as a behind-the-scenes instigator of superior horror cinema across four decades, we salute him.

(5)As an aside, I wish that Herzog could / would return to his brief dalliance with making fictional, Hollywood-type movies. I mean, we all know he can draw a few thousand quid from the bank and make a weirdo Werner Herzog documentary without breaking a sweat, but the strange collision between Werner wackiness and mainstream genre movie aesthetics made both ‘Bad Lieutenant’ and ‘Rescue Dawn’ fairly extraordinary, IMHO.

October Horrors # 2: Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth (Anthony Hickox, 1992)

Say what you like about this much despised second sequel to Clive Barker’s ‘Hellraiser’, but at least it’s consistent. Whereas the more highly regarded ‘Hellbound: Hellraiser II’ sent us on a vertiginous rollercoaster ride of expectation and disappointment, aiming for a tone of serious, proper horror business before crashing and burning in a heap of nonsense, part III by contrast is troubled by no such lofty aspirations.

Right from the opening crawl, Anthony Hickox’s film sets up its stall as a mildly diverting, VHS-era trash horror movie, and, when the credits roll a distributor-friendly ninety three minutes later, that is exactly what it has delivered.

(Hickox, for those who are unaware, is the son of Douglas Hickox of ‘Theatre of Blood’ / Sitting Target fame, and seems to have spent much of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s making medium budget horror films with colons in their titles.)

Of course, much of the fan-ire heaped upon ‘Hell On Earth’ was likely instigated not by the relative qualities of the work in-and-of-itself, but rather a result of the thoughtless and reductive liberties it takes with the pre-existing Hellraiser mythos. So horrendous in fact is the demolition job undertaken here upon the ideas and atmosphere established by the preceding films, it is easy to see why so many franchise followers have found this instalment impossible to tolerate.

With sad predictability, the Cenobite “family” are nowhere to be found here, and, if we’re ever offered an explanation as to how Doug Bradley’s Pinhead ended up encased in some sort of rectangular concrete sculpture offered up for sale in one of those “macabre” art galleries that only exist in horror movies…. well, I must have missed it.

Although there are a few confused attempts to crow-bar the film into series continuity, ‘Hell On Earth’ basically feels as if it must have originated as a premise for a stand-alone horror movie, and the general consensus seems to be that it would have received a far warmer reception if it had been allowed to reach audiences in that form. (Of course, without the Hellraiser brand name, it’s likely such a project would never have achieved the necessary financing or distribution, but hey – that’s showbiz.)

On the plus side however (opinions may vary), the scriptwriters here do at least seem to have latched onto the idea that Bradley had both the chops and fan popularity to make it as a kind of post-Vincent Price horror star, and as such they do at least give the concrete-encased Pinhead plenty of ridiculously fruity dialogue to chew on (“human dreams... such fertile ground for the seeds of torment..”).

Once the Pinhead block/cube/sculpture thing (“Pillar of Souls”, it says here) has been installed in the grotesquely adorned bed chamber of sleazoid “alternative” night club proprietor J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt), the movie essentially settles down into a sort of early ‘90s Hollywood goth riff on ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’, as Monroe, entranced by Pinhead’s hyperbolic chat, reluctantly begins feeding the souls and flesh of his regular punk-ette conquests to the demonic sculpture, with agreeably messy results.

The tone here remains light and easy-going, streamlined for general audiences both by the near-complete removal of the networks of erotic transgression and emotional suffering that defined the first two Hellraiser films, and by the glossy Americanisation of the settings and characters. What it offers the viewer in return – eg, routine deployment of moderate gore, occasional softcore nudity and alarming musical interludes from late period hair metal band Armored Saint – is unlikely to constitute much of a deal for more serious-minded fans, but as I say, if you’re willing to take it on its own terms, it’s fairly good fun.

One of the things that helped make ‘Hell On Earth’ so oddly appealing to me was its characters, who, happily, are a fairly interesting bunch. Where the traditional ‘Little Shoppe..’ narrative presents a sympathetic figure forced to do the bidding of the immobile monster, Bernhardt’s character by contrast is an utterly despicable creation – a sort of pathetic, goth-a-billy Harvey Weinstein-in-training who lures troubled and impressionable girls to the grim bachelor pad he keeps above his night club, coercing them into (presumably fairly vanilla varieties of) sexual congress whilst all the time imagining himself as some kind of Sadean libertine. When Pinhead eventually makes mincemeat of him, it feels richly deserved.

On the other side of the fence meanwhile, Terry Farrell’s TV-reporter-in-search-of-a-scoop and her older ex-hippie cameraman (Ken Carpenter) make for likeable protagonists, particularly once Farrell gets mixed up with Terri (Paula Marshall), the damaged, scatter-brained punk girl who contacted her after narrowly escaping from a rendezvous with the Pinhead statue over at Monroe’s place.

I mean, it’s not David Mamet or anything, don’t get me wrong, but by the expected standards of a movie like this, the stuff with Terri wondering incredulously at the stability of Farrell’s professional life and tidy apartment, and the uneasy relationship between the two very different women, is conveyed very nicely, thereby putting ‘Hell On Earth’ comfortably over that crucial horror movie hurdle re: ensuring the characters are sufficiently believable and appealing that that we care about their fate when they are inevitably imperilled.

Sadly, it is with all that imperilment that the movie really begins to flounder, as ‘Hell On Earth’s last few reels veer off into the realms of absurdity in a manner that must have put the blood pressure of any self-respecting ‘Hellraiser’ fans who’d stuck it out this far through the roof. There are a few pretty effective moments during this conclusion – I’m thinking particularly of the mass slaughter in the nightclub – but for the most part the FX-heavy grand finale of the movie has dated extremely poorly.

So… let’s put it like this. In Barker’s ‘Hellraiser’, the Cenobites were fascinating and terrifying creations. Avatars of a tantalising, unseen world of extreme bodily sensation, we imagined them to be veterans of deathless centuries of amoral excess; the supernatural reincarnations of human beings who have gone so far into the realm of ecstatic self-destruction that they have long ago since ceased to be human.

In ‘Hellraiser II’, I felt that the stuff tying the Cenobites back to their original, relatively recent, human identities was both reductive and poorly handled, and by the time we get to part III, the Cenobites have apparently been reduced to the level of goofy, action figure-like automatons who stomp about the backlot streets in Frankenstein’s monster poses, throwing polystyrene breezeblocks at policemen.

Helpfully, these new style Cenobites can also be instantly created by taking some supporting characters and jamming the objects most closely associated with them into their faces. Thus, the aforementioned ex-hippie cameraman ends up firing rockets from the lens embedded in his eye socket (!), whilst – most memorably – the DJ from the nightclub witnesses a miraculous, digital vision of some CDs spinning around his head before being transformed by Pinhead-magic into a lethal CD firing Go-Bot.

In the face of such rampaging nonsense, what can you do but laugh? And you know what? I like laughing. It’s fun.

A few thrills and spills, some icky gore effects, a garish period aesthetic, a bit of human interest and some utter WTF bad ideas – what more could you ask of a post-midnight video rental timekiller?

Whether or not this modest result was worth pretty much murdering the credibility of what began as the most potent and inspired horror franchise of the 1980s is questionable, but never mind. As is so often in case in popular culture, we’ve got to make do with what we’ve got rather than playing with “what ifs”, and what we’ve got here scratches that “let’s have another beer and watch a horror movie” itch a lot more satisfactorily than its miserable reputation would suggest.

Also: Motörhead did a song called ‘Hellraiser’ for this movie. It plays over the end credits. This pleases me, and makes me think kindly of the film I’ve just watched. Job well done, cross-promotion marketing guys.

October Horrors # 1: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Tony Randel, 1988)

Warning: pretty heavy duty spoilers for this thirty year old film follow.

As I have stated before in these pages (in last year’s review of The Void, funnily enough - a film that likely has more than a little bit of ‘Hellbound’ mixed into its polyglot DNA) -- there is nothing worse than a film that is almost really good.

In terms of the expectations one might reasonably have for a first sequel to Clive Barker’s (still exceptional) ‘Hellraiser’ directed by someone who is not Clive Barker in fact, the first few reels of ‘Hellbound’ are genuinely, unapologetically really, really good. For half an hour or so here, we have a perfect, “this-time-it’s-war” expansion of the potent themes and ideas inaugurated in the first film, confidently pulled into a bigger budget, commercial arena by a creative team who seem to have broadly understood where Barker was coming from with the whole ‘Hellraiser’ thing, and just itching to start splattering blood across the walls.

From the outset, the idea of letting Barker’s Cenobites loose within the wards of the sprawling, Victorian lunatic asylum where the first movie’s heroine Kirsty (Ashley Lawrence) finds herself confined is a tantalising one, rich in ghastly possibility, whilst the subsequent revelation that Dr Channard (Kenneth Cranham) - the corrupt and perverse, egotistical doctor who cruelly oversees this backwards institution - is secretly an artefact-hunting occultist obsessed with trying to unlock the Cenobite puzzlebox is also a delightful – if rather far-fetched – development.

The extended set-piece that sees Channard undertaking a ritual to resurrect Clare Higgins’ character Julia, utilising the blood-stained mattress upon which she was murdered and using a self-harming mental patient as an unwitting sacrificial victim, is one of the strongest and most effective gore scenes in all of ‘80s horror. Though almost sickening in its extremity (I can’t believe they really expected it to get through either the BBFC or MPAA unscathed in the late ‘80s), this sequence is horrifically compelling, and, though hair-raising in its weird psychological/symbolic implications, its nastiness never feels gratuitous.

Sickening in a slightly different way, the subsequent scenes in which Channard develops a kind of kinky relationship with the mummified, blood-drinking Julia are just as morbidly fascinating. Higgins in particular is great here, clearly enjoying her role as a monstrous femme fatale despite the various gruelling make-up jobs she presumably had to contend with, and Cranham, though clearly not really a ‘horror guy’, is an experienced enough actor to know when to just go with it, giving this villainous duo a fantastic, lip-smacking ickiness all of their own, whilst their scenes together capture a highly period specific “yuppies from hell” kind of vibe, taking the (presumably accidental) “ugly ‘80s” aesthetic that predominated in Barker’s film and running with it, to deliriously grotesque effect.

Just as we’re getting ready for the fur to really start flying as the story enters its second act however, it begins to become increasingly clear that ‘Hellbound’ does not intend to capitalise upon this strong start in quite the way we (or at least I) might have hoped.

Getting Ashley Lawrence to return as our nominal protagonist provides some welcome continuity, and throwing the mute (autistic?) puzzle-solving girl whom Channard hopes will help him unlock the Cenobite box into the mix is an interesting idea. But, whereas Barker’s film established ‘Hellraiser’ as one of the one only ‘80s horror franchises with the potential to incorporate complex, multi-layered female characters into its mythos, by the time these two girls have teamed up in ‘Hellbound’, they’ve already been whittled down to little more than wide-eyed Alice surrogates, and, as soon as they pass through a temporary gateway in the asylum wall and begin exploring the Cenobites’ dimension, the movie finds itself bound for a rather different kind of “hell” to the one the filmmakers presumably intended us to experience.

Although few (if any?) digital effects are used in ‘Hellbound’, watching the second half of the film nonetheless put me in mind of the simultaneous feelings of sensory overload and alienated boredom engendered by so many 21st century CGI “spectaculars”.

With the possible exception of Higgins’ Julia, none of the film’s characters really have a strong enough pull to their individual arcs to keep us focused after this departure from the “real world”, and any investment we initially had in them is subsequently lost, along with any sense of cause-and-effect story-telling, real world logic, suspense or narrative momentum.

As fantastical visuals, melodramatic plot turnarounds and seemingly endless corridor chases pile up with little rhyme and reason –sometimes feeling more like a goth-ified version of ‘Labyrinth’ than anything we’d wish to see in a ‘Hellraiser’ sequel - our senses are soon exhausted, leaving us easily distracted from whatever the hell is supposed to be going on.

As is so often the case in 21st century film and TV, conventional, A-to-B style plot development is more or less abandoned here, as the story turns more toward a series of ham-fisted, phantasmagorical psychodramas aimed at excavating the private traumas and family backgrounds of characters who were little more than wafer-thin to begin with. Most chronic in this regard is the protracted sequence in which Kirsty is reunited with the spirit of her monstrous Uncle Frank. Taking place in some kind of chamber filled with sheet-covered bodies on slabs, this whole business is ultimately just tedious and nonsensical, completely missing the mark of whatever portentous insight the script was presumably trying to invest it with.

Unfortunately, this approach also crosses over into the film’s treatment of the Cenobites themselves. Fascinating, terrifying, morally ambiguous and perversely beautiful creations, the four members of the first film’s Cenobite “family” are easily the most potent horror movie monsters of their era, and yet, Randel’s sequel casually torpedoes their mystery and kicks them out of the movie before the final act with scarcely more than a shrug.

Though again, it’s a potentially interesting notion, I simply do not buy the idea that Doug Bradley’s Pinhead ‘evolved’ from the spirit of a disillusioned World War One officer – at least in the way it is presented here - and to subsequently have him and his hyper-demonic family get all weepy and basically just curl up and die on us after Kirsty reminds them of their lost human identities just strikes me as the lamest, most fanbase-cheating load of weak-ass shit I’ve seen in a franchise horror film in living memory. (1)

Even worse though is the fact that the inglorious demise of Pinhead and co leaves us to battle through another half hour of additional run-time in which the role of the Big Bad is shifted across to a frankly RIDICULOUS looking Kenneth Cranham / dragon hybrid thing – a painstakingly rendered stop motion/latex creature effect than holds the rare distinction of looking even stupider than something a bunch of underpaid CG yahoos working for SyFy/Asylum might have whipped up if handed the same brief twenty five years later. Ye Gods.

In a sense I suppose, it is weirdly fitting that a Hellraiser movie should take us on a giddy journey between cinematic highs and lows, thus mirroring the “pleasure in pain” ideology so beloved of the Cenobites themselves; but, I suspect even Pinhead himself might have found the sharp plunge between the two experienced here quite gruelling. Whilst the self-evident strengths of the film’s first half make ‘Hellbound’ essential viewing for any fan of creatively executed, gory horror, what happens after that properly hurts, especially once one considers the vast potential for good stuff that has been thoughtlessly squandered.

Still, it’s not all bad I suppose. We at least get to enjoy a truly epic forced perspective / matte shot in which some tiny characters navigate a gigantic, Esher-inspired labyrinth (a well-earned round of applause to the production designer and effects team for that), whilst the general ‘look’ of the Cenobite realm reminded me very strongly of the level designs for ID Software’s epochal ‘Doom’, which turned up a few years after this film’s release, thus creating definite flashback potential for anyone who, like me, spent far too many of the golden days of their youth senselessly plasma-gunning cyber-demons. So, there’s that at least.

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(1) Admittedly, I don’t tend to watch very many high numbered horror sequels, so I’m sure that fans of Freddy and Michael Myers et al have probably been subjected to greater indignities over the years, but for now, this “boo hoo, I used to be a real boy [collapses in pile of dust]” guff holds my personal record for lameness – very much the ‘80s equivalent of Count Dracula tripping over a hawthorn bush or falling off a balcony.

October Horrors #10: ITV Playhouse: ‘Casting the Runes’ (Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1979)

Two years after he completed his remarkable run of ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’ for the BBC, winning plaudits in particular for his innovative adaptations of the work of M.R. James, director Lawrence Gordon Clark found himself working on the other side of the dial at ITV, where he was presented with the prospect of helming a (somewhat more modest) version of one of major James stories he hadn't been able to tackle for the BBC, ‘Casting The Runes’.

Presumably rejected from consideration as a ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ on the basis that it doesn’t actually have any ghosts in it, this story is probably best remembered as the basis for Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 classic ‘Night of the Demon’. So yes, in case you were unsure, it is indeed the one about a vengeful suburban sorcerer cursing those who try to interfere with his work, ensuring their precisely timed destruction by demonic forces by means of fragments of runic script he has covertly handed to them.

The source material is here updated for the 1970s by playwright Clive Exton, with our main protagonist becoming female TV journalist Pru Dunning (Jan Francis), who made the mistake of mocking reclusive occultist Julian Karswell (Iain Cuthbertson) during a light-weight exposé of contemporary witchcraft.*

The primary setting for the unfolding drama thus becomes a microcosm of the mid-level media milieu of the UK in the late ‘70s – thus pretty close to home for cast and crew alike, no doubt – and, for a few brief passages during this fifty minute TV play, Clark succeeds in summoning up glimpses of the kind of fearful, impressionistic atmos that made his BBC ghost stories so remarkable. Notably, it tends to be the scenes shot on location (and/or those without much scripted dialogue) that see Clark’s direction coming to life, perhaps reflecting his background in documentary.

In particular, the opening sequence – which sees a man falling victim to one of Karswell’s demonic avatars whilst walking his dog across a snow-covered heath – is excellent. Compositions and editing are painstakingly planned out here, as Clark wrings maximum eeriness out of the seemingly mundane surroundings, giving us a text-book demonstration of his oft-noted ability to locate almost sub-conscious resonances of fear and anxiety within placid, naturalistic environments.

The director is helped in achieving this by the fact that much of the location shooting seems to have taken place during severe snow storms that hit the UK during the winter of 1978/79 (coincidentally recalling the ‘Christmas’ associations of the earlier James adaptations, perhaps), whilst the (uncredited) musical score – a mixture of gently atonal, Elder Gods-style fluting and doom-laden electronic dirges – also contributes greatly to the overall effect.

Other factors however mitigate against any concerted attempt to recapture the feel of Clark’s earlier James adaptations. Whilst the production – which was presumably produced on a budget equivalent to any other ‘ITV Playhouse’ episode - managed to score some 16mm film for the aforementioned outdoor sequences, interiors by contrast are shot on the kind of flat and fuzzed out, domestic camcorder grade video tape that serves to make the majority of British TV from this era look inherently cheap and lifeless (think of a late ‘70s/early ‘80s Dr Who episode and you’ll get the idea).

Drab interior sets are also used extensively, and, unfortunately, both the nature of story itself and the stagey nature of Exton’s adaptation demand that – in stark contrast to the almost existential, landscape-based expanse of the BBC ghost stories – we spend the majority of our time within them, as the characters hash out the details of the fairly complex and idea-heavy plot line.

If it inevitably falls short of Clark’s BBC ghost stories though, ‘..Runes’ does at least work pretty well as a more traditional TV drama, benefiting from very good lead performances from Jan Francis and Bernard Gallagher, both of whom shoulder intimidating quantities of expositional dialogue with verve and enthusiasm, simultaneously adding a warmth and believability to their characters that draws us into the story very effectively.

The TV play’s conception of the malevolent Karswell meanwhile is distinctly different from either the original story or the Tourneur film, and, in my opinion, works very well. Rather than the avuncular philanthropist and shady local celebrity of earlier versions, this Karswell is a full-on scary recluse – a boogeyman / hate figure to people in his local area, he spends his life in complete isolation, pursuing his strange, egotistical vendettas solely through the means of disarmingly folksy ‘sympathetic’ black magic(k) (he utilises corn dollies, and a fully furnished dolls house), without even pretending to function as a regular member of society.

Personified in the form of Iain Cuthbertson, this Karswell cuts a strange figure on the rare occasions when he actually appears. Large enough to physically intimidating, his thinning hair, OAP glasses, thick regional accent (don’t ask me which region) and strange, smirking grin give him an vibe halfway between a hulking, Karloff-style heavy and the kind of creepy maths teacher school governors would be well-advised to keep an eye on.

When Pru infiltrates the deconsecrated rectory Karswell calls home, she is subjected to a disorientating whirlwind of cut-price video effects (again, very Dr Who) and a heavy dose of psychic aggression. According to the local newspaper man who accompanies her on her visit, the housekeeper who answers the door is known to locals as a woman who died three years previously.

An unsettling and rather original villain, the malign influence Karswell wields over the world of the film is emphasised by a wealth of minor, synchronicitous details that are easy to miss upon first viewing – the butterfly broche Pru wears at one point mirrors one Karswell was seen fondling in a preceding scene, whilst a sinister looking latin motto (a banishment or something perhaps?) is casually spray-painted on the wall outside the rectory, a prominently displayed carrier bag featuring an image of an owl mirrors a stuffed one seen in Karswell’s study, and so forth.

Meanwhile, the day-to-day ‘70s landscape within which the more down to earth aspects of ‘Casting The Runes’ takes place now lend the film an overpowering nostalgic resonance that will entrance British viewers of a certain age, with each shopping bag, car, typewriter, carpet or piece of domestic cutlery that appears on-screen threatening to reduce us to shivering wrecks more efficiently than any of the story’s actual horror content.

Though Exton’s writing is a bit brutally functional in places, his script is nonetheless very well constructed, and, despite the collective ravages of video tape, interior dialogue scenes and some truly ropey special effects (an attempt at a giant spider attack proves particularly regrettable), hints of the visionary quality Clark displayed as a director of ghost stories still break through the murk whenever we switch back to 16mm.

This all I think helps to lend ‘Casting The Runes’ a uniquely endearing quality, allowing it to remain compelling viewing to this day, and confirming it as an essential addition to the library of anyone with an interest in the spookier and more experimental end of British TV.

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* Probably best known for scripting ’10 Rillington Place’ (1971), Exton’s other big screen genre credits range from 1972’s ‘Doomwatch’ to ‘Red Sonja’ in 1985.