The Cameraman's Revenge

Did I really leave off watching this box set at the end of November? Oh dear… Anyway, this film unfortunately doesn’t have Boris Karloff to ease it along (though it does have Roger Delgado in a tiny role as a semi-comic relief Mexican official), but equally it doesn’t have Corridors of Blood‘s aura of trying to be a respectable film while never actually rising above exploitation level. Conversely, this film has few pretensions to be anything more than a semi-knockoff of The Quatermass Xperiment. Hampstead in England doubles (with doubtful success) for New Mexico, home to a US military facility testing rockets and space planes. Two brothers work there, one a staid commander, the other a rather more impulsive pilot. On one mission, the latter decides to extend the remit of his task and take his plane out beyond the atmosphere and into space; needless to say this doesn’t quite go as expected, and, well, let’s just say the first man into space is no longer quite a man by the time his vehicle returns to Earth, and the audience will have connected the mysterious end of the mission with reports of something monstrous terrorising the area long before the film’s characters do. All very B-grade, obviously, though it was filmed just after the first Sputnik went up so it was actually kind of cutting edge in a way. A bigger star like Karloff in one of the roles might’ve made a better drawcard, but the cast isn’t too bad for this sort of thing, and I did quite like the climax: rather than a big spectacle of the monster being destroyed in a fire, we get a rather gentler rediscovery of the humanity that still lies under that somewhat crusty surface. And, at 77, minutes, it doesn’t exactly overstay its welcome…

A documentary on a subject I’m not interested in that nonetheless manages to grab me must be doing something right, whatever it is. And I was intrigued by Senna cos it was the subject of a number of raves, particularly from people who were avowedly not fans of Formula One racing. And I am in their position: I’ve no especial interest in cars, not much more interest in sports, so sports involving cars don’t really stand a chance with me. Why yes, I am a failure as a man, why do you ask? Having said that, though, I’m not completely ignorant of at least some of the bigger names involved in the sport, so even I was at least dimly aware that Ayrton Senna’s death was a big deal when it happened… “dimly” being the admittedly operative word. Anyway, like I said, I was intrigued by the big ups the film was getting from non-F1 fans, so that drove me to finally check the thing out, and though I don’t know that I’d quite go along with some of the grander statements about its greatness, it is indeed pretty good viewing. The approach the film takes of sticking only to original visual material, rather than a mix of old footage and new talking head interviews (restricting the latter to additional voiceovers), and presenting events in historical order rather than jumping around in time is an interesting one, and the sheer range of visual material is fascinating too; in the DVD commentary, the director and producer may often be heard marvelling at some of the stuff they were able to turn up. Even if I don’t think it was quite as amazing as some, it’s still pretty impressive, and I can understand why people were angry that it was ineligible (some rule, apparently, disqualifying documentaries made completely from archive footage) for the best documentary category at the last Oscars…

When I watched The Quatermass Xperiment yesterday, it was for the first time in probably nearly a decade, but I’d never seen the sequel at all before tonight. Happy to report the wait was worth it. Obviously the success of the first film meant a follow-up was evidently desirable, to which end a film called X the Unknown was written as a sequel, but Nigel Kneale objected to his character being used in it, so Hammer rewrote that film and got the screen rights for Kneale’s actual second Quatermass story instead. At least this time Kneale also got to write the early version of the film script, though again he was unhappy with the casting of Brian Donlevy as Quatermass. Which is a little sad, cos Donlevy’s markedly better here than in Xperiment; the character is a bit less abrasive here, and rather more sorely beset by the situation he’s now in (aliens invading Earth, taking over village, etc), perhaps not as in command, but at the same time he seems like a more active participant in this film than he did in the first. Looking at it now, it’s a goddamn shame the film was apparently so hard to get hold of for so long, cos its profile should be a lot higher; if not quite a classic, it’s damn close to one. Val Guest thunders through proceedings at quite some speed, resulting in a film that’s tighter than the first one (and that wasn’t exactly slack) and somewhat heavier on the action (there’s still something startling about the scene where Quatermass runs down a “possessed” guard); I’ve said often enough about the comparative economy of storytelling in older films compared with more recent ones, and Guest rather proves my point here. Another terrific example of this sort of film; I look forward to revisiting Quatermass and the Pit…

The other day I picked up the Quatermass Double Bill DVD featuring the first two Hammer adaptations of the BBC’s Quatermass TV serials, so that’s what I’ll be looking at over the next day or two… I also have the big Hammer Collection box with Q. and the Pit, so I’ll look at that when I start going through that set. Meanwhile, here we are at the beginnings of Hammer Horror… of the three Hammer films, this is obviously the hardest to compare with the TV original, as most of the latter is lost. That said, it’s obviously quite a reduction of the original, which would’ve lasted over three hours in total compared with the eighty-odd minutes of the film, though this is true of all the Quatermass films, and we do know series creator Nigel Kneale was unhappy with some of the changes made—most notably the ending—and loathed Brian Donlevy’s performance in the title role. And yet I’m not sure I share his disappointments, Val Guest was probably right about his ending working better on film, and I actually quite like Donlevy’s bluntness and science-marches-on-regardless arrogance (having just narrowly disposed of the monster his experiment in rocketry brought to Earth, what else does he do but launch another one); it’s not the same as the TV version, but it works here. By this time Hammer had a fair track record of adapting TV and radio series to the big screen as double bill programmers, and had dabbled in science fiction before, but the horror angle here was new for them, and the money it made at the box office (remember the original series had been a major hit too, and the release of the film was nicely timed to just precede the broadcast of the second series) obviously convinced them it was a direction to pursue further. A splendid example of a basically well-made B thriller, nice to see this again.

I wasn’t going to do Silent Sunday this week, what with it being Christmas and all, but changed my mind… not a Christmas-y film (if the VCR still worked I could’ve watched my tape of Kino’s Christmas Past shorts, but I didn’t want to subject myself to that again anyway), but another title I can cross off the Rosenbaum list. This is apparently unique in the Hitchcock canon, by virtue of it being his one and only original screenplay, and the choice of subject matter is accordingly an interesting one, i.e. a love triangle set in the world of boxing. As this review notes, this isn’t exactly Raging Bull we’re dealing with (is that necessarily a bad thing?), and Hitch seems less interested in the actual fighting than the surrounding atmosphere (an impression confirmed by an interview with him I read before writing this). Not much of a story: Jack is a boxer in a carnival, Mabel is his girlfriend selling tickets to his fights, and Bob is the Australian heavyweight champion who bests him. Out of a job, Jack marries Mabel and enters the world of real boxing in which Bob moves, and, well, she decides Bob’s more interesting. Complications, etc. No real prizes for guessing that Jack will work his way up the ladder to a showdown with the wonder from down under. Still, though this is early Hitchcock, there’s few signs of inexperience; as with Downhill, we can see him practising the lesson he learned about minimising intertitles and telling the story visually. I’m not sure about some of the comic elements of the story (particularly during the wedding scene), not sure how well they worked, and on the whole it’s hard to deny that The Ring is relatively minor Hitchcock; still wondering what led Rosenbaum to put it on his top 1000 list. Still, perfectly passable viewing.

Alas, this is the last we’ll be seeing of Vincent Price for the moment, but I think you’ll agree it’s a good note to go out on with him for now… certainly he regarded it as a career highpoint and not without some good reason, not only is he terrific in it but it’s the sort of story I’m sure almost any actor would’ve wished to be in. Apparently Price himself considered it part of a trilogy with the two Dr Phibes films (indeed, Robert Fuest was apparently supposed to direct this too but for whatever reason he didn’t), which makes sense given that the plots do have a remarkable similarity… in this case, he’s not a vengeful musician wiping out the doctors he believed killed his wife, but a vengeful actor wiping out his critics (it’s nothing if not living the dream); Price plays a hammy, critically savaged Shakespearian actor (who in turn plays a series of distinctly non-Shakespearian roles, the most astounding of which is a hairdresser with a killer afro) passed over for a coveted acting award, whereupon he embarks upon a Shakespeare-themed campaign of revenge against the critics’ circle. The result is a mix of the hilarious (Price fencing with one of his critics on trampolines) and the frankly kind of ghoulish (Robert Morley’s critic being fed his own beloved poodles a la Titus Andronicus) that’s somewhat blunter than the first Phibes film; plus this review observes another key difference between them, i.e. the modern setting… being shot wholly on location, it simply never really looks as nice as Phibes, whose art deco settings, as we saw the other day, are a major part of the film’s appeal. Maybe a comparable period setting would’ve given this the edge, I don’t know. But it’s still an awful lot of fun (plus a lot of awful fun), no wonder Price liked it so much. Yet again, one of those films I really should’ve seen years ago.

OK, I’m flummoxed. While I pretty much knew what Psychomania was about—motorcycle gang dies, returns from dead, terrorises people, etc—I was much less prepared for the kind of eccentric way in which it would go about depicting said story (although I can’t quite describe what I mean by “eccentric” here). There is a theory that the film was intended as a comedy, of a markedly peculiar sort to be certain, and after seeing it I’m inclined to think that’s the only way in which it makes sense, insofar as it does at all… apart from certain not-unimportant scenes whose actual meaning elude me (particularly the climax), the bikers’ scheme is frankly odd: to die with the express intent of returning to life. Admittedly, once you do this you become immortal, but even so, how do these kids use their immortality? By essentially being a pack of arseholes on bikes, just like they were when they were alive… And they’re kind of odd for a motorcycle mob, too, seemingly middle-to-upper class as they are… and having the gang name written on the back on their jackets is one thing, but surely having it written in pink is another. Still, if it was meant as a comedy or spoof of this sort of thing, it gives remarkably few indications of it apart from the rather astounding suicide montage as the gang members hilariously wipe themselves out in assorted ways. The motorcycle action is pretty neat, and there is some actually clever stuff in the film (that 360 degree pan around the morgue is kind of inspired, subtle enough that it took me a moment to actually work out what happens at the end of it), and other stuff that’s decidedly rum too. Curious indeed. I think I kind of liked Psychomania but I’m not sure; next time I watch it I’ll treat it as a comedy from the beginning to see how it goes down then…

So it’s the early 70s, times are changing for the horror genre and the British film industry in general. Hammer are struggling to work out what to do next, and so are their competitors at Amicus. Amicus’ solution is to look back at what’s worked for them lately and just do a lot more of it; having had a mid-60s hit with Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, that meant making more anthology films like it. The House that Dripped Blood was the first, and it was swiftly followed by Tales, but unfortunately I didn’t like it nearly as much as its immediate forerunner. This time, rather than Robert Bloch writing it, Amicus looked to the old EC Comics of the 1950s (as evinced by this film’s title and that of its successor, Vault of Horror), and so we get five people who converge on a mysterious crypt, where they’re waylaid by a mysterious robed figure who warns them of the assorted unpleasant fates awaiting. The five people are of varying degrees of ghastliness and commit acts of varying degrees of nastiness, and all five tales basically boil down to the old moral about the wages of sin being death of a preferably violent nature. I don’t know, though, I missed the mix of the straight and the comic that House found; instead, I was kind of struck by ho-hum writing and ho-hummer acting. Freddie Francis was probably better known as a cinematographer, which is no doubt why the film at least looks nice at all times (Amicus evidently aspired to Hammer’s production values as well). It was the biggest hit to date, but I can’t really work out why. And I definitely don’t get the assertion here about the 50s American comics being used to reflect the anxieties of 1972 Britain. Maybe you really did have to be there at the time…

Another one of those films I probably should’ve seen years ago. If nothing else, this is a film that knows how to make an entrance: Vincent Price’s eponymous doctor rising through the floor playing a theatre organ, followed by music from a small cafe orchestra composed of, well, mannequins, before going to kill a man with a cage full of bats. No dialogue until about ten minutes in. Even when you know the outline of the story, it’s an opening that still makes you want to see just what’s going to happen next. In broad outline, Phibes is a revenge story; Dr Phibes spends the film exacting vengeance for the death of his wife upon the surgeons he believes killed her on the operating table. Essentially, it’s a killing spree film. It’s the baroque nature of said vengeance that’s the selling point here, with Phibes basing his plans upon the Biblical plagues sent to try the Egyptians (like Scott Ashlin, I was perplexed by the policeman’s odd ignorance of same); the end result is totally preposterous, and yet magnificent in its preposterousness, containing at least one line of dialogue of such brilliance—”A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon. Words fail me, gentlemen”—that you can only bow to it. Director Robert Fuest places all of this in eye-catching art deco period settings (the mid-20s period seems exactly right somehow for this story), and this review draws an interesting parallel with the Italian gialli of the same period, though obviously this is a lot funnier; there’s a particularly amusing running gag involving names constantly being gotten wrong. The mix of  fairly black humour and the oddly straight face with which the murders are (mostly) presented gives the whole film a particular air of the fantastic and not-quite-right that makes for quite remarkable viewing. Like I said, I should’ve seen this years ago.

As Sinclair McKay observes in his book on Hammer Films, this film appeared in the same year as Rosemary’s Baby, Night of the Living Dead and Witchfinder General, thus making it look almost instantly old-fashioned by comparison. Yet I suppose even in 1968 it must’ve already seemed that way to some extent, with its unquestionably good heroes and unquestionably evil villains (we’ll quietly ignore the fact that our hero resorts to magic much like our villain does) and the blatant God-vs-Satan (or Set, I should say) business. These days, of course, that old-fashioned vibe is why we still like Hammer, and this really does represent a kind of apotheosis of their particular gothic, just before they were disrupted by behind-the-scenes turmoil and their inability to really cope with the 1970s. Plus it offers the rare spectacle of Christopher Lee in actual heroic lead mode, which is probably why he was so fond of it. As the Fortean Times article on author Dennis Wheatley observes, “Satanism” was kind of code for Communism in Wheatley’s books (apparently he was a supporter of fascism pre-WW2, and remained pretty reactionary thereafter despite opposing the Nazis by then), but the film has none of that; this is a much more straightforward and literal battle of good vs evil. Generally it’s pretty cracking stuff and the pace rarely lets up (to the point at times where it probably should’ve done), but I can sympathise with those who think the film falls down in the special effects department; even Lee’s said a remake with CGI might be a good thing. And yet I doubt it; a story like this isn’t really about the technical polish of the special effects anyway, and I don’t know if you could retell this particular one now with the same seriousness the film embodies. Maybe some stories are best left to other decades and to accrue charm with the passage of time…