Corruption

Did anyone else watch the true horror rarity that TCM showed recently? The film was "Corruption" (1968), and as a matter of fact, it is so rare that I had never even heard of it before. This film is another retread of the great French horror film from 1960, "Eyes Without a Face," but it branches off into different directions from that earlier classic. Here, the great Peter Cushing stars as a prominent surgeon who is dating a much younger woman, a fashion model (Sue Lloyd, whose work I had just admired in "The Ipcress File"). He attends a swinging party with her (yes, the film does take place during the swinging mod London of 1968) and gets into a fight with a fashion photographer there. During the fight, a floodlight crashes down on his girlfriend's face, burning and scarring her. Cushing swears to restore her looks. He removes the glands of a cadaver at his hospital and inserts the glandular fluid into his girlfriend's face, also using a laser in the process. The treatment works, but only temporarily, and Cushing soon realizes that he must procure glands from LIVING specimens. Thus, he murders one beautiful blonde woman while on a moving train, and, in his cottage in the country (beautiful shots of the White Cliffs are featured in the film), lures in a female hippie drifter to be his next victim. The picture ends with as bonkers a spectacle as one could wish for, with just about all the film's major characters, as well as some nasty house invaders, killed off by that wildly out-of-control laser beam. This film was directed by somebody named Robert Hartford-Davis, who does a marvelous job here. The print of this obscure movie that TCM showed the other night looks fantastic in wide screen, with brilliant colors and high-def images. I believe the film was recently issued on the Grindhouse Releasing label. Cushing, need I even say, is just terrific in this role as the doctor who becomes increasingly unhinged during his mission to restore his girlfriend's looks, only to repent when things have already gone too far. There is really no predicting where this bizarre film will turn next, and the picture surely does have some surprises up its sleeve...right up to those head-scratching final 30 seconds. Very much recommended for your viewing pleasure!!!

After an accident a successful surgeon (played by horror legend Peter Cushing) has to commit murder to preserve the once beautiful face of his fiance (Sue Lloyd). For a start we have here a very odd couple, Cushing being old enough to be Lloyd's father in real life, though I guess she could be a gold digger! When they attend a Swinging Sixties party in London (where the accident happens) Cushing looks uncomfortably out of place, which is intended, but for a fan such as myself who is used to seeing him in Hammer horror movies playing Baron Frankenstein or Van Helsing it just felt strange, and somehow wrong. Naturally it all goes pear shaped - "The more you succeed the more you feel failure" (Cushing). The action moves from London to the couple's cottage on the coast, where near the end we get a frankly bizarre home invasion/robbery. One of the heavies is called Groper, played by David Lodge he looks like he's walked straight of the set of a Carry On movie. Then there is the ending, I'm not giving it away but all I will say is Cop Out! I have waited years to see this but ultimately felt disappointed, despite Cushing giving his usual excellent performance. I did watch the cut UK version with less violence and nudity and would still like to see it uncut, until then it's only a 5/10 for me.

This is one of those UK lost flicks that is really worth hunting down. It's so rare that a flick with the legendary Peter Cushing never had a proper release after the VHS rage. And again he gives a perfect performance as Sir John Rowan a surgeon.

When John got into a fight with a photographer picturing his wife suddenly one of the spots falls on her face. Heavily burned he feels guilty and discovers that he can restore the scarred face of his girlfriend by murdering other women and extracting fluids from their pituitary gland. Sadly the effect of repairing the face doesn't goes on forever and he has to kill again. But he got mixed emotions about it.

There are two versions of this flick around, both are hard to get, the first one the normal version and the second one the uncut strong version. The latter I saw and it is in the first killing, the whore, that there are differences. In the normal, cut, version you only see a knife and some dolls when he is killing the whore but in the strong version she goes naked and is stabbed to death and beheaded by the surgeon. And for the time being I can understand that it was rather gruesome.

All acting was good and some faces did make it, for the horror buffs Billy Murray (Rik) will be recognized in Doghouse (2009) and Dead Cert (2010). A rather good example of British horror worth hunting down, if you will ever find it....

Gore 1/5 Nudity 1/5 Effects 2/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

This is the sixth imitation within the genre of Georges Franju's marvelously lyrical hybrid of art cinema and horror, EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959) – which just happens to be one of my all-time Top 20 movies. For the record, the others have been the Italian Gothic piece MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN (1960), the erotic French-made THE BLOOD ROSE (1970) and three from notorious (and incredibly prolific) Spaniard Jesus Franco – THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF (1961), THE DIABLOICAL DR. Z (1965) and FACELESS (1988). Furthermore, some time ago I had also acquired another Italian stab at the same theme – ATOM AGE VAMPIRE (1960) – but, in its case, the DivX was faulty and I couldn't get the thing to work properly!

Anyhow, director Robert Hartford-Davis has somewhat mysteriously acquired an aura within the ranks of British horror cinema history not unlike that of the much younger Michael Reeves; other exploitation fare of his include THE BLACK TORMENT (1964), THE SMASHING BIRD I USED TO KNOW aka SCHOOL FOR UNCLAIMED GIRLS (1969), INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED aka BLOODSUCKERS (1970) and THE FIEND aka BEWARE, MY BRETHREN (1972). Although I am aware that TCM USA had shown CORRUPTION (presumably in its correct Widescreen aspect ratio), the version I watched as a DivX came via a soft-looking, washed-out, full-frame transfer courtesy of some obscure outfit called Midnight Video with forced Asian subtitles to boot!! The film itself, while no neglected masterpiece, is good enough to survive these deficiencies and different enough from its prototype to stand on its own two feet.

The lead roles are portrayed by Peter Cushing and Sue Lloyd who are both excellent: Cushing is the middle-aged surgical genius married to a much younger beauty who is reluctant to put her modeling career behind her. This exhibitionistic trait proves her undoing as, during a groovy party sequence (the Swinging Sixties also served as backdrop for the contemporaneous THE SORCERERS [1967] – coincidentally directed by the afore-mentioned Michael Reeves and starring another horror legend on his last legs, Boris Karloff!), Lloyd suffers partial but permanent facial disfigurement when a spotlight topples squarely on her face – following an unprecedented outburst of jealous rage in public from the usually calm and collected Cushing which culminates in a scuffle with a fashion photographer (Anthony Booth). Remorse-stricken, Cushing oversteps his bounds at the hospital where he works in search of a miracle cure but when this withers after a few days' success (with the improbable help of a laser beam dreamed up by ancient Egyptians!), he takes to scouring London's red-light district for possible 'live' donors of the required organ specimen.

Lloyd's sister (Kate O'Mara) – who, unaccountably, seems to live at her married sibling's house – is inconveniently (for Cushing) engaged to a suspicious colleague of his. To avert undue attention from their clandestine activities, they take a trip to a house by the sea but, even here, they are needful of an urgent transplant which presents itself in the lone figure of a bathing and seemingly innocuous youngster but she escapes their grips during the night before they can make 'use' of her. So, egged on by his increasingly batty and nagging wife, it's back to the drawing-board for Cushing…or, rather, the train station as he follows a blonde into her carriage and does her in (cutting her head off and stuffing her lifeless body unceremoniously under the seat) when they are left all alone.

Back at the seaside cottage, the ingénue bursts in on Cushing as he is 'playing around' with the blonde's head on the kitchen table – cue a jazzed-up three-way chase sequence across the beach and cliff-tops which ends, inevitably, in the girl's death (but not before she slams Cushing down with a rock in the face). A short while later, it transpires that the girl was married and her husband and his gang of misfits (including a butch and busty blonde and a gruff John Lennon-lookalike!) in search of "bread" crash the couple's household; Lloyd, completely insane by now, spills the beans about Cushing's involvement in the girl's death (even if it was she who actually killed her) and coerces the leader of the gang into forcing her reluctant husband to perform the usual operation on her face.

However, another scuffle breaks out in the operating room as a result of which the laser beam goes berserk and literally slices everybody up (including O'Mara and her doctor fiancé) who appear on the scene unheralded at the very last minute. The ending of the film seems to suggest that all the events that we've been witness to might just be somebody's feverish dream but one can't be too sure but, thankfully, this ambiguity dos not hamper the film's overall effectiveness or render it a cop-out (as usually happens in cheat ending cases like this). Hartford-Davis' direction is only occasionally flashy – particularly during the killings (although an unwilling participant, Cushing was rarely ever this unhinged) and afore-mentioned chase sequence. The latter third of the film – in which the gang impinges on the couple's seaside home – is its least successful element but that part is still relieved by its crazy ray free-for-all coda.

The film seems to have been available for some time in a longer, more exploitative Continental variant which went under the dubious title LASER KILLER! By the way, the cinematographer-producer of CORRUPTION was Peter Newbrook who would himself later helm a notable and cerebral British horror film – namely THE ASPHYX (1972).

After a model's face is burned by a lamp during a scuffle between a surgeon and a salacious photographer, the doctor (who had hopes of marrying the girl) promises to do everything he can to restore her beauty. Screenwriters Derek and Donald Ford concocted this twisted British blood-letter, a violent though somewhat muted variation on 1960's "Les yeux sans visage". Here, the mad doctor doesn't need to kill innocent lovelies for their faces--he needs their pituitary glands! Peter Cushing amusingly begins the picture a dapper, celebrated professional, and his descent into madness is quite a jolt; Sue Lloyd (who resembles Jill St. John) is also good as the vain, shrewish woman who becomes totally dependent on the need for fresh victims. The Swinging London atmospherics are heavily put-on, and the jazzy score from Bill McGuffie is occasionally inappropriate or over-emphatic. The third act, with the doctor and his girlfriend descended upon by thugs at their seaside home, becomes too hysterical, leading to an unsatisfying wrap-up. Still, a good-looking '60s slasher with some tightly-edited sequences and ghoulish suspense. ** from ****