The House in Marsh Road (1960)

Jean Linton (Patricia Dainton) is a bit of a cross patch, and it's not surprising given the feckless behaviour of her husband David (Tony Wright).  He's supposed to be writing a novel but all he ever finishes is the odd book review when he's running out of money for booze.  The pair live in a succession of boarding houses, leaving a trail of unpaid landladies behind them.  And now Jean's had to suffer the ultimate humiliation of getting a job.

But their luck suddenly changes with the death of Jean's auntie (it's all right, she barely knew her), who leaves her a house in the country.  It comes complete with a superstitious Irish housekeeper (Anita Sharp-Bolster - what led her from classic Hollywood films of the 40s like Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street to low-budget British fare like this I don't know) who's convinced the house has a permanent resident: a poltergeist she's named Patrick.  And it looks like she might have something there, what with doors mysteriously slamming and an armchair that keeps scuttling across the floor.

David's all for flogging the house (Sam Kydd's offered him the astronomical fee of £6000 for it) and squandering the cash on living the high life in London.  When Jean refuses he finds alternative entertainment in the form of local strumpet Mrs Stockley (Sandra Dorne, the poor filmmaker's Diana Dors), ostensibly employed as his typist.  Jean, meanwhile, is comforted by local estate agent Derek Aylward.  Gradually David comes round to the idea of murdering poor Jean for her inheritance, but Patrick might have something to say about that...

Directed by b-movie veteran Montgomery Tully, The House in Marsh Road looks exactly like what it is - a cheap, quick, second feature.  but Dainton and Wright snipe at each other entertainingly, Dorne's pouty performance is irresistibly camp, and there are some surprisingly effective shocks (a mirror smashing when Mrs Stockley looks into it, a grate suddenly slamming into place to save Jean's life as David tries to push her down a lift shaft), and it's hard not to admire just how brazen a steal from (sorry, homage to) Hitchcock's Suspicion the scene where David brings Jean a glass of poisoned milk is.

The Terror (1938)

My first post in quite a while, inspired by a viewing of a film considerably older than anything else I've featured here before...

The 1920s: London is being terrorised by a criminal mastermind known as Mike O’Shea, whose true identity is always concealed beneath a gas mask (he’s quite the sinister sight).  It’s even a mystery to his henchmen (Henry Oscar and Alastair Sim), who are eventually caught by the police and sentenced to 10 years in prison, while O’Shea escapes with a fabulous amount of gold.  Understandably consumed with resentment, the pair each plot to track their former boss down and relieve him of the loot once they are released.  When the day comes, the former partners go their separate ways to find O’Shea, but both are eventually led to a curiously inhospitable country guest house run by the conspicuously suspicious Colonel Redmayne (Arthur Wontner), who seems very keen not to add any more guests to the three he already has: self-professed psychic Mrs Elvery (Iris Hoey) and her featherbrained daughter (Lesley Wareing), and mild-mannered retiree Mr Goodman (Wilfrid Lawson). 

Based on a play by the then-exhaustingly ubiquitous Edgar Wallace (whose death in 1932 had, if anything, only accelerated the tide of films based on his work), The Terror’s plot doesn’t hold any surprises, but this is all part of its charm.  Look away now if you don’t want spoilers, but it’s hard to believe that any viewer wouldn’t immediately identify Lawson as the villain due to his character’s excessively underlined pleasantness (everyone even pronounces his name “Goodman” in case we didn’t get it).  Similarly, from the first appearance of pleasingly-named drunken wastrel Ferdy Fane (Bernard Lee) it’s obvious he’s going to both turn out to be the crack Scotland Yard detective everyone’s talking about and get the girl (the Colonel’s daughter, played by beautiful Linden Travers).  But who cares if it's obvious when it's all so entertainingly played by such a brilliant cast? As well as the above-named, there are brief but very welcome appearances from Kathleen Harrison and Irene Handl as the Colonel’s kitchen staff, while Richard Murdoch has a small role as an incompetent detective.  It’s a shame, though, that Wontner, a twinkly Sherlock Holmes in the early 30s, is short-changed by a script that gives him little to do but behave in a sinister manner.

Good fun all the way through, the film steps up a gear in its final third with the return of Sim’s character, who's been absent for most of the film, disguised as a mild-mannered country parson in order to have a good sniff round the ruins near the Colonel's abode.  Even at this early stage in his screen career (he’d made his first film three years earlier) he’s an obvious star, stealing every scene with his facial expressions alone.  The film takes a sharp turn into gothic melodrama territory for its marvellously overripe climax, with Lee and Travers held prisoner in the catacombs of the ruins, garbed in a monk’s habit and giving it the full Tod Slaughter as he exposes the non-existence of his sanity by  promising to marry the luckless pair before killing them (I need hardly add that he then proceeds to play a conveniently-located organ).  They’re saved when Sim, who Lawson thought he’d put out of the way, returns from the grave in a moment of pure Universal Horror.

Obvious though both identities may be, the idea of the identity of both hero and villain being a mystery is makes for a fun twist.  And for modern viewers there’s a good chuckle to be had from a reckless young investigator we first see (with his back to us) being scolded by his crusty superiors turning out to be played by a man who’d become best known as James Bond’s grumpy boss.

Road to St Tropez (1966)

Wendy Richard and Raquel Welch are maybe not names that you'd normally put together, but they're the two women with whom Mike Sarne will always be linked.  In 1962 he and the future Pauline Fowler reached number one with 'Come Outside', which I'm sure you know. 

A change of career later Sarne directed Raquel Welch in the film adaptation of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, which ever since its release has been recognised near-universally as one of the worst films ever made. Road to St Tropez, an enjoyable bit of fluff, was the first thing Sarne directed (he also wrote and sang the theme tune - although Wendy Richard's distinctive vocals are sadly absent).  It's a curious blend of travel documentary, comedy and drama: Fenella Fielding reads us a cheerily ironic commentary over images of the sights of the French Riviera that should delight any fans of Stella Artois adverts, interwoven with a perfunctory and mainly silent romantic drama.  The commentary subtly mocks a very chic Melissa Stribling (Mina in Hammer's Dracula), a lonely traveller who picks up a beautiful couple of drifters (Gabriela Licudi and an especially gorgeous young Udo Kier) and embarks on a naive but temporarily blissful holiday romance with gigolo Udo after Gabriela's packed off on a plane.  It's basic, but charming and very lovely to look at.  Here are some Riviera postcards for you to enjoy:

 









Tip: anything you read on this blog will be more enjoyable if you imagine it being read by Fenella Fielding.  But then, let's face it, that's true of anything you'll ever read.

Twisted Nerve (1968)

“Ladies and gentlemen: in view of the controversy already aroused, the producers of this film wish to re-emphasise what is already stated in the film – that there is no established scientific connection between mongolism and psychotic or criminal behaviour” – the very serious announcement that opens Twisted Nerve.

Film making twins John and Roy Boulting are best known for their satires of the late 50s and early 60s: Private’s Progress, I’m All Right, Jack, etc. This psycho thriller is a bit of a departure for the pair. John produces and Roy directs: like their comedy The Family Way from a couple of years earlier it’s a vehicle for Roy’s future wife Hayley Mills, and as in that film she stars alongside a young, startlingly beautiful Hywel Bennett (he looks a bit like a sexy owl). In The Family Way they played an innocent young married couple unable to consummate their marriage because of Bennett’s sexual hang-ups. Martin, the character he plays in Twisted Nerve, has sexual hang-ups of his own, and they’re a lot more dangerous. Twisted Nerve’s one of a trio of British films (the others being Goodbye Gemini and Straight On Till Morning, both from 1970) that make up a very specific little subgenre: stories about pretty blond boy-men with murderous tendencies. They’re all direct descendants of Psycho and Peeping Tom, but it’s in Twisted Nerve the lineage is most obvious: Peeping Tom’s writer Leo Marks co-wrote the Twisted Nerve screenplay with Roy Boulting (Mills and Bennett’s relationship in Twisted Nerve’s vaguely reminiscent of Carl Boehm and Anna Massey’s in the older film), and like Psycho it’s got an unforgettable score by Bernard Herrmann. In fact, Herrmann’s haunting, whistled theme is far better known than the film itself, having been given a new lease of life by Quentin Tarantino’s use of it in Kill Bill (and, more recently, it was heavily featured in the first series of American Horror Story). It turns up here in several variations, including a wonderfully silly party version and a slowed down, oddly circus-like version used for the film’s denouement.

Aside from the music, the best thing about the film is Bennett’s remarkable performance. Martin’s a spoilt, indolent rich kid who nonetheless is haunted by the fate of his older brother, placed in an institution by their mother (Phyllis Calvert), unable to cope with (but mostly just embarrassed by) his Down’s Syndrome (or ‘mongolism’, in the now rather awkward 60s terminology). When we first see him, visiting his brother, he seems like a perfectly ordinary young man. Next time we meet him, he’s disconcertingly different. He’s invented another persona, the childlike ‘simpleton’ Georgie, which he uses to charm library assistant Susan (Hayley Mills), and, when his exasperated stepfather’s had enough and chucks him out (which eventually Martin takes bloody revenge for), to inveigle his way into her home. Bennett is convincingly innocent as Georgie, and his sudden switches to snarling, dangerous Martin are truly chilling. The split personality angle’s heavy-handedly underlined by his tendency to strip off and fondle himself in front of a mirror. There’s a stack of musclemen magazines nearby to act as a casually homophobic signal that he’s a bit odd sexually.

Susan’s the only person Martin shows any sexual interest toward though – although her slightly tarty mother Joan (Billie Whitelaw) meets a sticky end after a clumsy attempt at seducing him. The sight of Susan helping to dress a clearly aroused Martin, secure in the belief he’s completely unsexual, is the film’s queasiest moment, but dodgy as the premise of someone pretending to be learning disabled might seem, the main problem with the film is that it’s not offensive enough. It’s far too restrained and genteel, and despite its obvious channelling of Hitchcock (most bizarrely when, in an echo of the ending of Psycho, Hywel Bennett starts speaking in the badly dubbed voice of Phyllis Calvert) it’s seriously lacking in suspense. Interestingly, as well as echoing one Hitchcock film, Twisted Nerve foreshadows another: Barry Foster’s Gerry, Joan’s lodger/lover, is an only slightly more benign version of Bob Rusk, the jolly psycho he plays in Frenzy. Gerry works for a film distributor (presumably based in Soho), and is a type you can sense Twisted Nerve’s makers looking down their noses at: “If you want me to sell your crummy films, you’ve gotta give it a dose of the old S&V – sex and violence! Cartoon, ice cream, the old S&V, and everyone’s happy.” If Gerry had been involved with the making of Twisted Nerve it probably wouldn’t look or sound as good, and it certainly wouldn’t have such a top-drawer cast. But I can’t help thinking it would have been a lot more lively.

Night After Night After Night (1969)

Lewis J Force, the curiously named director of Night, After Night, After Night is in fact Britsploitation stalwart Lindsay Shonteff under an assumed name. Take the fact that the man at the helm of such trashfests as Permissive and Big Zapper didn’t want his own name attached to this film as a warning. Night, After Night, After Night is an hour and a half of wallowing in sleaze, and a fine example of the bright lights of the swinging 60s dimming to the gloom that would dominate British cinema in the 70s (even in films that weren’t meant to be gloomy). It’s a genuine B movie, from second feature specialists Butcher’s Film Distributors, and to some degree it feels like an update of another Butcher’s film, Cover Girl Killer, from ten years earlier. Like that film it features a crazed moral crusader in a strange disguise targeting young women they see as depraved but, well, there was a hell of a lot more to make moral crusaders crazed in 1969 than there was in 1959.

Young women are being stabbed to death in London by a mysterious man clad in leather. The case is being investigated by Detective Inspector Rowan (Gilbert Wynne) and becomes very personal when his wife (Linda Marlowe) falls victim to the killer. She’s knifed in the shower, which is a bit of a mistake because the last thing an extremely modest film like this should be doing is reminding people how good Psycho was. Anyway, Rowan begins a vendetta against cocky scofflaw Pete Laver (Donald Sumpter), who he’s convinced is the man responsible. Laver’s attitude to the opposite sex is pretty repellent (“makin’ birds is like a career with me… I bang every bird I meet” – that’s an example of the ridiculous dialogue he gets throughout), but he’s not the only suspect.

Judge Charles Lomax (sepulchural-voiced Jack May, best known to my generation at least as the voice of Igor in Count Duckula and hamming it up a treat here) is a “modern witchfinder” obsessed with putting a stop to “the filth and horror of the age”. He hands out grotesquely disproportionate sentences to defendants he views as morally unsound and has a near breakdown after delivering each verdict. Could he have taken to handing out rough justice of his own? Then there’s his clerk, Carter (Terry Scully, whose shifty appearance is perfectly used here) whose ringing denunciations of the permissive society draw even Lomax’s disdain for their extremity, but who spends his spare time goggling at porn mags and pawing at strippers in the fleshpits of Soho.

The killer’s identity, it must be said, doesn’t come as a massive surprise. And as the reveal comes half an hour before the film’s ending, we’re left with 30 minutes of him going increasingly barmy (including a strange incident of him dressing in appalling drag to evade police and then encountering some queerbashing youths who he swiftly turns the tables on) while Rowan and his colleagues encounter various obstacles in getting to him.

Night, After Night, After Night is not, in itself, a very fulfilling film (unless, perhaps, you’re especially keen on long scenes of heavy petting) but it’s an interesting one in terms of its place in British horror cinema. It revives the themes of Cover Girl Killer and Peeping Tom from ten years before but also looks ahead to the corrupt moral guardians of Pete Walker’s House of Whipcord and House of Mortal Sin. In fact, watching Night, After Night, After Night I found myself regularly thinking how much more frightening and wittier it would have been with Walker and his screenwriter David McGillivray behind the scenes. It can also be seen in terms of a sort of crude British version of the Italian giallo film. That seems almost an inherently funny idea, British filmmakers’ attitudes to sex and violence being generally so different from Italians’ – and certainly Night, After Night, After Night has no trace of the stylishness that makes gialli interesting. But while its killer doesn’t wear black leather gloves, he wears black leather everything else, and its plot’s as easy to imagine unfolding in the glamorously violent world of Dario Argento and his compatriots as it is against the grottier backdrop of a Butcher’s B-feature. Of course if it was a giallo it would need a far more absurd title: in deference to the most eccentric part of the murderer’s get-up it would surely have to be Death Wears a Beatle Wig.

Scream and Scream Again (1969)

Yes, it’s a thoroughly generic title that could have been applied to any horror film ever made, but then a more specific title would probably have been just as confusing as the film itself. Scream and Scream Again is based on a novel by Peter Saxon (a pseudonym used by various writers of horror and sci-fi fiction in the 60s) called The Disorientated Man, and that’s a pretty good description of any man who sits down to watch Scream and Scream Again. For such a thoroughly commercial movie – it was a co-production between Britain’s Amicus Films and Hollywood’s American International Pictures – it’s got a pretty ambitious narrative structure. We’re given seemingly unconnected events in disparate locations, and the connection between them only slowly becomes clear (for some viewers, anyway. Others are left scratching their heads as the credits roll). This approach is largely down to screenwriter Christopher Wicking, confusing scripts for horror films being his stock in trade: see also Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and Demons of the Mind – but Gordon Hessler’s psychedelic direction plays its part in baffling the viewer too.

The puzzle pieces dished out to us: a runner (played, fans of cult TV may be interested to know, by Nigel Lambert, who did the voiceover for spoof schools programme Look Around You) collapses in central London and wakes to find himself in a private hospital ward complete with sinister/sexy nurse, and a new limb amputated every time we cut back to him (wonderfully bizarre, this). Also in London, Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks) is investigating the murder of a girl whose body was drained of blood. The trail leads to her employer, the rather shifty Dr Browning (Vincent Price). And in an unnamed militaristic state (presumably in Eastern Europe somewhere) the seemingly superhuman Konratz (the rather wooden Marshall Jones, hilarious later in the film stalking the streets of London in a bobble hat) is letting nothing and nobody stand in the way of him seizing power, disposing of superiors who get in his way (including Peters Cushing and Sallis) with a deadly shoulder squeeze.

The international intrigue elements of the film are a bit dull – the London sections are much more interesting, greatly benefiting from a droll performance from Marks, playing one of a long line of disgruntled detectives who pop up in British horror films. The gold standard is Donald Pleasence in Death Line, but Marks’ splendidly gruff Bellaver comfortably takes silver. The film’s most memorable character, however, is the mysterious Keith (Michael Gothard) the man behind the vampire murders (sorry for the spoiler, it’s not much of one). A louche dandy with an enormous blond bouffant and ruffled purple satin shirt, he’s the world’s most Swinging 60s looking person. We initially encounter him in the regulation 60s nightclub scene, which is pretty impressive here – the club looks huge and it’s chock-full of people dancing extremely self-consciously in wonderfully absurd outfits. The Amen Corner (of “If Paradise is Half as Nice” fame) are on stage, and their set obligingly includes a catchy number called “Scream and Scream Again”. However, a few rather too close shots of the singer reveal he’s not even opening his mouth. This club is where Keith picks up his victims, who he then brutally rapes and kills. One of them turns out to be an undercover policewoman, and this leads to the film’s main set piece, an incredibly long but pretty absorbing chase sequence that dominates the whole middle section of the film. This sequence is so lengthy compared to the head-spinning speed of the first part of the film that it throws Scream and Scream Again off balance, with scarcely half an hour left to explain what the hell’s going on.

What the hell is going on? Well, I won’t spoil it for you – Scream and Scream Again is definitely worth a watch even if you can’t quite get your head round it. But it all winds up with a glut of exposition from Price (though  there’s nobody I’d rather listen to a glut of exposition from) and a pretty perfunctory twist ending.

Scream and Scream Again’s main selling point was that it featured the big three horror stars of the time – Price, Cushing, and Christopher Lee – all together for the first time. It’s a con really, as only Price has more than a cameo (Cushing’s the worst served, with less than five minutes on screen before falling victim to Konratz’s deadly grip), and though Lee and Price have a scene together it’s more than a tad suspicious that they’re not seen in the same shot.

It’s difficult to see Scream and Scream Again as anything other than a confusing mess, but it is one hell of a confusing mess.

The Sorcerers (1967)

It's not unusual for a marriage to disintegrate from loving companionship into bitter battle of wills, but in The Sorcerers it happens both more quickly and more literally than usual. The film revolves around a trio of characters, linked in an ingenious way: Marcus and Estelle Monserrat are an elderly couple living a meagre existence in a dingy flat that seems a world away from the nightspots haunted by handsome swinging Londoner Mike (director Michael Reeves’ regular hero Ian Ogilvy) – although the film’s low budget means the nightclub setting seems scarcely less grotty than the Monserrats’ home. Marcus (a perfectly shabby, weary-looking Boris Karloff, seeming nothing like a Hollywood star on a visit home) is a medical hypnotist whose claims of his lasting fame are belied by his need to advertise in a poky local newsagent’s. Estelle (Catherine Lacey) is a loving companion who has patiently gone without as Marcus spent a fortune on building a bizarre machine in their spare room. Marcus’ quest for a subject to try his mysterious apparatus out on brings him into contact with jaded, thrill seeking Mike. Their late night meeting in a Wimpy bar (one of a series of joyous period bits, including a stack of Nova magazines and Cliff Richard’s “In the Country” on the radio) seems like an uneasy pick-up – “I could offer you an unusual evening,” Marcus promises, “some extraordinary experiences” – but Mike’s game enough to go along with it.

Marcus and Estelle hook Mike up to the machine, and several minutes of strange noises and a very 1967 light show later, they’re able both to control his actions and feel every sensation he does. Idealistic Marcus has conceived this as a way of allowing old people a new lease of life by letting them share the experiences of the young – and the couple’s initial excitement is rather sweet: the first thing they do is send Mike swimming. But a quick dip isn’t enough, for Estelle at least. Marcus shares the viewer’s horror as it emerges that far from the sweet little old lady she first appeared, Estelle is a monster.  Estelle is one of the most frightening characters in any horror film: because she’s one of the most believable. Seemingly kind and gentle, as soon as she’s offered the opportunity to do anything she likes without consequence she seizes it with both hands, gleefully making Mike steal, viciously attack his friend Alan, and finally murder two girls (including anextremely young Susan George). There’s an uneasy message in all this to us, the audience, sat here experiencing all this violence on screen with no threat to ourselves.

Having been denied pleasure for so many years, Estelle’s impulses easily override Marcus’s more benign ones, and he helplessly finds her gaining complete control of Mike. Catherine Lacey’s performance is just incredible: her transformation from meek housewife to blood-crazed harpy is horribly convincing (the highlight perhaps being her queasily post-coital sigh of “that was the best yet” after she forces Mike to beat up Alan). And poor, good-natured, bewildered Marcus is one of the finest performances of Karloff’s career. It’s a real achievement of Reeves and his actors that The Sorcerers’ most compelling scenes consist of two old people talking.

If there’s one thing central to swinging London films it’s youth. Older people might turn up as local colour in the form of Irene Handl or Arthur Mullard but they’re rarely more than caricatures. This is what makes The Sorcerers startling even now: it’s one of the few films of the era that addresses the feelings of old people left behind by a society geared to the desires of the young. The film’s view of the older generation is stark and unsentimental, but it acknowledges that they’re people with desires as noble or as depraved as those of the young.