The Fiend

The Fiend (1972) Dir. Robert Hartford-Davies. Written by Brian Comport. Starring Ann Todd, Patrick Magee, Tony Beckley,

Could it be that I'm finally losing interest in early seventies horrors; that the "Kensington Gore" has finally reached saturation point? "The Fiend" should be a favourite of mine; there are murders a plenty, Patrick MaGee in full-on weirdo-priest mode, seventies dolly-birds, choice dialogue: "Get off your fat arse!" "Charming! Not so much of the fat arse!". And Camp Freddie from The Italian Job as a mother-fixated, religious-zealot, swimming instructor. There are a few knocked-off references to "Peeping Tom" and the soundtrack is surprisingly funky.

So why did I find it so...meh? Well, the story didn't really go anywhere. Freddie is a nutter for no obvious reason; some bits of business about his mum and dad. Well I'm sorry but you don't see Bruce Wayne carrying on like that! There are extended and tedious parallel scenes between the swimming pool and the baptismal font. The police, personified by always delightful David Hodge, show up and do nothing. The two sisters at the centre of the plot, a nurse and an investigative journalist, are poorly sketched at best and the resolution seems to be a bit self consciously "controversial".

And of course every girl who dies in the film, and they're all girls, dies with her tits out. I think maybe I'm just getting tired of the casual despatching of blameless women, that seems to have no consequence other than a newspaper headline or a radio report. A blonde girl in a short skirt in a 1970's film is a juicy big-eyed cow wandering blithely into an abattoir. One of the victims actually ends up on a hook in a meat-locker; discovered by a courting butcher* and his fancy-piece. No wonder they had a three day weeks in the seventies - who wants to empty the bins or bury the dead when you could be having a squalid fumble by a side of pork?

Still the music is very good. Music to kill girls by.


*the most un-erotic words in the English language are "Courting Butcher"

Death Line

There is a consensus on the Big Three of British Horror films. They are, in reverse order, "Blood on Satan's Claw" "The Wicker Man" and "Witch-finder General". While they are all excellent films, each sharing a sense of rustic dread, an arable 'istory if you will, (though the binding cheerfulness of the Summerisle community is a million miles away from the cruel, blasted heaths and sheep-like peasantry of "Witch-finder") I have problems with each of them.

"Blood on Satan's Claw", the least well known of the three, has an extraordinary plot, incredible music and a fabulous cast. It suffers from having a very confused second act and a protracted, lip-smacking rape scene. "Witch-finder General" is certainly an excellent film in a lot of ways, not least for Vincent Price's "you'll wish I was camp again" performance and unlike a Dali painting I find it a hard watch. It's too cruel, too bleak, too nihilistic. I like a bit of fun in my 70's horror romps and this, like the similar but weaker "Cry of the Banshee", is unrelenting in its depiction of man's inhumanity to woman. The Wicker Man is brilliant, obviously; the soundtrack beautiful, the plot hilarious and Chris Lee is hot buttered charm all the way through. It's my problem really; I've just seen it too many times. There was a point in my life where I was watching it on a weekly basis. Nothing holds up to that level of scrutiny, not even the very worthy remake starring Nicholas Cage.*

The major problem that I have with these films however is that they are not the best of 70's British Horror. I wouldn't ordinarily pitch perfectly worthwhile and clearly unrelated films into spurious competition with each other, and if I do so now it is because the truly best 70's horror is so over-looked. Even Gatiss and Rigby ignored it on their laudable exploration of horror cinema on BBC4. That film, as you may have guessed if you've read the above title, is DEATH-LINE. And it is a pip!

Death-line starts like no other horror film. We are introduced to what sounds like a stripper's anthem played on a mini-moog and a spare drum-kit. The music accompanies a colourful blur with what appears to be a smudged keyhole in the centre of it. As the camera gradually focuses we see it is the bowler hatted silhouette of a man staring into the window of a Soho peep-show. We're a long way from Summerisle. The camera blurs in and out as we follow the moustachioed perv around the porn warren, neon signs in red and blue deliquescing like lava lamps, the unnatural Formica yellows and greens lending the streets an indelible verisimilitude. This is Soho in the seventies. It could be nowhere else.

Having completed his circuit, to no obvious end, our saucy salary-man makes his way to Russell Square (bit of a walk) where he propositions a young woman and gets a knee in the knackers for his pains. Wheezing, as well as dealing with the crushing sense of ennui that comes with a blow to the under-carriage, he suddenly realises that things can get a lot worse than a kick in the balls.

On the last train home come Alex (David Ladd) and Patricia (Sharon Gurney - last seen in the Corpse where she play's Michael Gough's daughter. In real life she is his daughter-in-law). He's a deeply unpleasant American student and she's a woefully soppy English one. As they step over the body of the businessman these credentials are quickly established: "Patricia, in New York you walk over these guys!". Patricia insist that he goes to tell the guard and he does so, grudgingly, telling her to stay with the body. She doesn't want to be left with it a follows him awkwardly up the stairs like a beaten dog. They find the guard and then a policeman. But when they return to view the body it has disappeared! So they look like dicks!

Cut to the offices of Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasance); a ranting, unshaven lunatic in a misshapen hat and soiled raincoat: he's our hero! It is the next morning and Calhoun is going about his day; blaming tea-bags on "Indians", fishing said tea-bag out of his cup with a biro or a dart, bollocking a female officer and confiding to his assistant "I fancy 'er". While all the "business" is going on he has been listening carefully to Detective Inspector Roger's retelling of the incident on the platform of Russell Square. It seems the bowler-hatted perve was not without influence. He is James Manfred O.B.E. a big shot (Calhoun pronounces it "shit") at the Ministry of Defence. This rings a bell with Calhoun as he remembers another person going missing at Russell Square. He brings in the hapless Alex for questioning and accuses him of being a thief. As a parting shot Calhoun barks "Get yer 'air cut!" at the sullen hippy and gives him a look of such malicious joy that it's impossible not to like him.

Next comes one of the truly remarkable scenes in British horror and for my money in all cinema. After a brief expositional detour with Clive Swift, where he explains that in the 18th century an Tube tunnel collapsed on the workers who were digging it (men and women) and the bankrupt, morally and otherwise, Rail Company left them there to die, the camera works its way through the glistening bowels of the abandoned tunnel. In what seems like one glorious tracking shot we move past dripping masonry to the empty eyes of the half-dead Manfred, propped up beneath the hanging corpses of other half eaten victims, Manfred's certain fate. The camera continues its unblinking journey through more rotting viscera and piles of rubble until we come across "The Man", a shuffling Neanderthal figure and his dying and apparently pregnant sister-wife. Hugh Armstrong, the actor who plays "The Man" didn't work as an actor for another ten years after "Death Line" and after that assayed roles such as "Jun Priest" in "Beastmaster" or "Station Officer" in "Minder". This is baffling. His performance as "The Man" is a towering achievement, turning a shuffling madman role into something sympathetic and sensitive, quite a performance considering he has to communicate his entire emotive spectrum through straggling hair, a thick beard and a single line of dialogue! How the Oscars missed this astonishing turn I will never know. It's like they had something against murderous, incestuous, subterranean sub-humans in low budget British horror films! After this sentimental introduction to the Man and the Woman, the camera continues its journey, through piles of corpses, fallen family members arranged in neat stacks, each commemorated with stolen jewellery arranged on their chests. The distracted sobs of the grieving Man abate and what we get now is a dumb-show of the tunnel collapse story, from the pounding of pick-axes on rock, to the tunnel's collapse, to the screams of the condemned. It is told beautifully in sound, effectively negating Clive's thumb-nail sketch, the cold eye of the camera drifting onto salient details, the sign for the abandoned "Museum" station, the illuminated hoops of tunnel walls, the forbidding pile of rubble that sealed the fate of those trapped behind it and then the camera lifts up, like a departing spirit, and out into the still familiar Russell Square tube. People tell me I like bad films but that scene, with its economy, technical accomplishment and nagging suggestion, can compete with anything in cinema.


Calhoun and Rogers nip round to Manfred's flat, Calhoun helping himself to booze and breaking into his locked drawers ("suspicious bastard") until Chris Lee turns up as a patrician M.I.5 enforcer and warns them off. Calhoun isn't having it!

Alex and Patricia break up, but bless her, she can't last five minutes on her own and pitches up back at the flat with a bottle of chianti and her mascara running down her cheeks. She still continues to use the tube, late at night, alone, as if nothing odd has happened.

The Man attacks and kills three London Underground workers, one of whom might reasonably be called the most Cockney man who ever lived. This is his day in his own words. "Yesterday? Let me see, ah. Got up 11. Had a nice day in. Got up 11 o'clock. Ham, eggs for breakfast. In the afternoon went to the pictures. In the evening I saw that bird. What a sort, what a performer I tell ya! Lovely...hey!". He stops there to get his head kicked in by The Man.

Calhoun and Rogers go to the pub and get pissed for no reason at all. The scariest thing in the film is Calhoun pissed. As Rogers plays pinball in his over-coat, Calhoun mercilessly harangues the bar-man, his mood swinging like Benny Goodman in a gibbet, alternating pissed joshing "Are you aware that it is an offence to sell alcoholic beverages outside of proper drinking hours?" with surly digs "What's the matter with you?" "Where'd you get that coat? Are you aware that that is stealing by finding?" to apoplectic ranting "The Queen? Indeed god bless her. AND DON'T YOU SMILE WHEN YOU SAY THAT TOO! Are you aware that her gracious majesty is over there, over-seas, working the far flung empire, helping to keep the world safe for the likes of...flogging her pretty little guts out, so you can live in a democracy? Look at this place, a knocking shop!". This scene doesn't move the action on or have any bearing on the film at all really but it's my favourite scene and by far the most frightening. Calhoun is the sort of raging repressed lunatic you feel could do anything!

Late at night, on the platform, Alex and Patricia become separated. The Man drags her off to his lair immediately. The police find blood on her handbag. The abductor is suffering from acute anaemia and plague! Calhoun knows he's onto something very unusual indeed and the film spirals into a desperate man-hunt before The Man can kill Patricia. Or eat her. Or worse.

Actually the film gets bit lost here, there are no real surprises and, while the suspense is ratcheted up, Alex gets most of the screen time so inevitably some of the tension is lost. David Ladd's performance as Alex is both wooden and sullen, like a teenage wardrobe on holiday with its parents. But it's not his film, it's Donald Pleasance's film, in a role I would have liked to see him play again and again. An alarmingly hairy police officer hands him a file and says "Anything else sir?". Without looking up he replies with gravitas, "Beards".

It's the way he tells 'em.









*kidding! Alright? KIDDING!

I think I like the "Charlie's Angels" films. I'm very surprised.

Gold.

Gold certainly has an interesting history. Filmed in a month in 1968 by Bob Levis, Gold is a self conscious attempt to break down the conservative attitudes prevalent in American culture. It was banned in America, made its cinematic debut in London in 1972 and is finally making its DVD release for its fortieth anniversary. It was considered a lost film for 40 years and its legend fore-shadows it as the craziest, most out-there blast of counter-cultural craziness ever committed to celluloid.

And it is almost unremittingly awful. In 1968 America was entrenched in the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement had reached a boiling intensity after the assassination of Martin Luther King and in Paris the students were fighting the police in the streets. The smell of cordite and burning hair was in the air and the world seemed ripe for revolution. The tag-line for this movie is: “The Revolution has Begun – Clothing Optional”. It’s that level of bone-headed, stoner credulousness that scores through this film; there’s no script, no jokes, no story. There is no technical aptitude or anything worth conveying – that’s what society wants them to do with its rules!

The dialogue is inaudible, even when it’s been re-dubbed, the acting is like a fourth-form drama club sponsored by Red Bull and the politics equates to “Hey wouldn’t the world be a better place if, like, uptight squares could just like mellow out and go skinny dipping?”.

And yet there’s a lot more of the “the Man” lurking in these hippy’s make-up than they realise. The women here have nothing to offer the revolution but their tits and some occasional backing vocals. In one scene Jinks, having rigged the elections introduces a stripper named Miss Gold-Nugget (Caroline Parr) to entertain the bovine local electorate. Back stage he beats her into unconsciousness for acting like a whore. Oh the hypocrisy, but whose is it: the reactionary Jinks or the revolutionary film-makers who play violence against women for laughs?

A plot coalesces eventually like a scab on a wound: Jinks imprisons the local hippies on trumped up charges of public-indecency in what looks suspiciously like an over-grown tennis court. It’s up to limping local half-wit Hawk (Del Close) to save them which he does using his home made bombs. Eventually Jinks is captured by the naked mob and forced to skinny dip until he likes it. He does.

The film does have one thing going for it: the soundtrack is uniformly excellent with tunes from the MC5, David McWilliams and Beastly Times. But these songs are all available else where and really have no bearing on the film other than making it more palatable than it has any right to be.

You know what they say: if you can’t remember the sixties you’re probably trying to block out the primal trauma of seeing this film.

Wetherby

directed and written by David Hare. 1985. starring Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench, Tim McInnerny, Suzanna Hamilton


A quietly disturbing, beautifully written meditation on alienation in Thatcher's Britain. They really don't make 'em like this anymore. They didn't make many of them then.


This is a story of loneliness, about the unbridgeable gaps between people. It is quiet and it is savage; full of unspoken/unspeakable moments and furious drunken soliquising. And while it is unmistakably a period piece now it is also a timeless study on what it means to "live a life of quiet desperation"; or what it is to be English.

Vanessa Redgrave, in a TOWERING performance, plays Jean Travers, a teacher in the Yorkshire suburb of Wetherby. A drunken dinner party she holds for her friends is attended by John Morgan (Tim McInnerny) an enigmatic young man whom she assumes is a guest of Marcia, (Judi Dench) her best friend. Shortly afterwards he returns to her house carrying a pair of dead pheasants and without warning commits suicide in front of her at her kitchen table.

So there is a puzzle at the centre of "Wetherby" - why did Morgan choose to shoot himself in front of Jean? Was it the desperate act of a lonely man looking for any sense of connection. The police investigation reveals that Morgan was obsessed with local librarian Karen Creasy (Suzanna Hamilton) described by Jean as "the sort of girl people become obsessed with" but known to Marcia for her "central disfiguring blankness". Karen invites herself to live with Jean for the next few days until a tense confrontation sends the young woman away.

This is a film about emptiness and dislocation, about one generations inability to interact with another: the drunken ranting post war generation and the numbed separateness of Thatcher's babies. This dislocation is reflected in the film non-linear structure too, and in the haunting parallel narrative of Jean's doomed romance with an Air Man.

This is a quiet film, intercut with splenetic ranting, a simple human story, striated with shadows thrown forward and back, colouring, shaping and obfuscating. And it is simply a classic of English cinema from a time when English cinema was about to stop.

The Night of the Demons

Adam Gierasch's re-make of the "big-in-Detroit" 80's gore-fest is a surprisingly fun way to waste your time. Assuming you can get past the soundtrack: there's horror and there's just bloody awful.

Well this was a surprise. I was expecting a version of "Night of the Demon", Jacques Tourneur's inky black foray into shadow and suggestion, fatally flawed by the unwanted intrusion a big scary monster. But this is a remake of "Night of the Demons": tawdry 80's shlock-horror gore-fest. And things dont stat well...

Director Adam Geirasch's "mission statement" ( and I am franky horrified by the idea of a director's mission statement! ) reveals "My aim for "Night of the Demons" was to make the ultimate film that my seventeen-year old self wanted to see. Punk rock, demons, scantily clothed women, gore and big scares!" I suspect me and Adam were very different kinds of 17 year olds, given that my idea of a good time was wearing an off-the shoulder cardigan, covered in badges and hanging around in record and coffee shops never buying anything. But I'm older now and sufficiently coarsened so I can see where he's coming from.

The film opens with some dodgy sepia back-story. Eighty years ago, on Halloween night, Evangeline Broussard hanged herself from the balcony of her New Orleans Manor house. This Halloween Angela (Shannon Elizabeth) has rented the place out and everybody who's anybody is going. This doesn't include local drug dealer Colin ( Edward Furlong, and he's really let himself go - he looks like James Dean Bradfield!) who is desperate to get inside and reap the rich rewards of a captive audience. When the police arrive and break up the party only seven guests remain behind: three moronic men and four nubile young women in light bondage gear. It's then that they realise that the gates have been locked and their "cell-phones" have stopped working. And that's when weird shit starts happening.

Inspired stuff, eh? Did i mention it comes with that dull, chugging American version of goth-music that was everywhere in nineties, and fewer acting chops than you might expect from your local butcher's window.

However, HOWEVER. I did quite like it. Sure, it's the sort of film that IMDB reviewers would describe as a "turn off your brain, get a pizza and a six-pack" classic but in fact it's not quite that stupid. Furlong is remarkably unaffected and scuzzy and, despite the uber-boobedness of many of the women, the playing is fairly naturalistic. There are some great lines: "Maybe pantry is French for fucking deathtrap" and "she stuck a lipstick in her boob and it fell out of her pussy, okay?". It's the okay that gets me every time!

And it has the best "breasts-behaving-badly" scene since Ken Russell's "Gothic".

By the end you are really rooting for Monica Keena's Maddie, so much so that at the rather matter of fact end to the film,she makes it seem cool and stylish, rather than hastily pat. No mean feat.

So "Night of the Demons" came from behind, hacked bloodily away at my preconception and eventually made me like it. Though maybe i'm not such hard-arse after all: I DID thrill to the blink and you miss it Linnea Quiqley cameo. And it takes a special kind of pathetic nerd to do that!

Daughters of Darkness

From the sheer oddness of seeing the words "Cine Vog" before the credits sequence, from the squat black font of the titles played out against the blood red back-drop, from the oscillating progishness of the music, you know that "Daughters of Darkness" is going to be a wild ride. And it doesn't disappoint. There is something cruel and kinky at bottom here; this is a world (well a Belgium) where relationships are marked by violence and betrayal, where nothing is tender or kind, and words when spoken are not used to mollify and placate but to wound. That's when words are used - the Francois de Roubaix' furious player-piano soundtrack does a lot of the talking here.

Daughters of Darkness is the story of newlyweds Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) and Stefan (John Karlen - Harvey from "Cagney and Lacey" unrecognisable here as a kind of evil Bjorn from Abba!) who arrive at the amazing Hotel des Thermes in Ostend as a stop-gap before taking the ferry to England to meet Stefan's mother. It's at the hotel that they meet Countess Elizabeth Bathory (the sublime Delphine Seyrig) and her secretary Ilona ( an astonishingly foxy Andrea Rau.) A rash of bloody murders anticipate both of their arrivals and all is not what it seems: Stefan is in no hurry to get back to England, and the Concierge recognises the Countess from 40 years before and though he is in in late middle age she hasn't aged a day.

There is a lot going on in Daughters of Darkness. It's an exercise in glorious style which never-the-less has a coherent narrative. It has a truly international cast but this only adds to the starkness and oddness of the circumstances: the two couples wander around the enormous, Art deco hotel haggling over who will get the Royal Suite to the only member of staff! The food is delicious but there is no one to cook it! The film should be a picture postcard from Belgium, in the same way "In Bruges" was, but Ostend pictured here is unremittingly bleak, the sea view from the hotel window turbulent and dotted with ferries. The retired detective who investigates the murders "as a hobby" spends much of the film standing on the grey sand-flats outside in almost comically torrential rain.

There are old and new horror tropes here; when Stefan cuts himself shaving, a la Jonathan Harker, he is wearing a modish shorty dressing gown. The Countess clearly models her style on Marlene Dietrich but Ilona is a dead-ringer for Guido Crepax's "Valentina" comics, themselves a a reference to Louise Brook's timelessly chic bob. (Crepax's creation was filmed as "Baba Yaga" in 1973 but I maintain Andrea Rau's creation is he more impressive).

It's Delphine Seyrig's film, from the first time we see her; her brilliant teeth framed by blood-red lips, framed by the darkness of her veil, like a 40s key-light was trained upon her. She is seductive, mesmerising and controlled, perfectly presented and precise. Her fluttering hands, the way her inner life moves like changing weather across her bone white face. And then suddenly she is ruthless and pragmatic. The masks slips to reveal another mask.

I love this film. Beautifully shot, wonderfully realised, stinking of decadance and amorality like three day old lillies. And this is a rare bloom, director Harry Kumel made hardly any other films of note ( barring 1973's little seen "Malpertuis") his last outing being almost 20 years ago. This is a timely realease and while it's difficult not feel short-changed by the complete lack of extras ( a travelogue around Ostend from the time would have worked !) it's good to see this amazing film released for a wider audience.