The Skull (1965)

“Christopher Maitland sat back in his chair before the fireplace and fondled the binding of an old book. His thin face, modelled by the flickering firelight, bore a characteristic expression of scholarly preoccupation. 

Maitland’s intellectual curiosity was focussed on the volume in his hands. Briefly, he was wondering if the human skin binding this book came from a man, a woman, or a child. 

(…) It was nice to have a book bound in a woman’s skin. It was nice to have a crux ansata fashioned from a thigh-bone; a collection of Dyack heads; a shrivelled hand of Glory stolen from a graveyard in Mainz. Maitland owned all these items, and many more. For he was a collector of the unusual.” 

The Skull is one Amicus’ first horror films. Coming hot on the heals of their first portmanteau flick, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, this is actually a feature length movie though ironically based on a short story, The Skull of the Marquis de Sade, by Robert Bloch, i.e. the kind of material that they would later typically use for the anthology productions.

Horror films about obsessive collectors are a fascinating sub-genre that have very rarely been explored outside of Amicus where Robert Bloch appears to have been the driving force behind that niche (see also “The Man Who Collected Poe” segment of Torture Garden).

For The Skull Milton Subotsky co-adapted Bloch’s screenplay about an esoteric collector (Peter Cushing) who starts a descent into murder and madness when he is being offered the genuine skull of the Marquis De Sade.

Though the movie by and large follows the general plot of the short story to the point where certain lines of dialogue are even lifted verbatim, given the requirements of a feature length production there are added sections that are virtually dialogue free in which the film truly shines.

For these scenes director Freddie Francis managed to create some memorable bravura images that clearly demonstrate the cinematographic skill that would ultimately lead to him winning an Oscar. (Official Director of Photography here was John Wilcox.)

A Gothic pre-credits scene is bathed in a very Bavaesque light and depictures a silent, moody grave robbing. At one stage everything is filmed from the point-of-view of the corpse. It appears as if the corpse was lying in a glass tomb and could look through it to see the dirt removed from the coffin.

The film has lots of those strange angles and we often get to see everything from the perspective of the skull, a type of imagery that Alfred Vohrer was also very fond of in German Edgar Wallace Krimis at the time.

Long periods without sound or talk other than musical cues and purely visual imagery dominate this production that is also chock-a-block with little unnerving details such as somewhat distorted mirror reflections or bizarre camera angles.

The most famous of these scenes is midway through and could have been taken straight out of TV’s AVENGERS series: Maitland appears to get arrested and is brought to a Kafkaesque location, a large but mainly empty room only presided over by a judge surrounded by demonic statuettes who communicates through mute sign language and forces him to play a game of Russian Roulette, probably the most drawn out one prior to Deer Hunter. Maitland afterwards escapes through a maze of red corridors, and is threatened by gas and crushing walls while the skull is seen floating through the air. It’s a wonderfully filmed surreal nightmarish vision that vastly improves on the short story’s equivalent which features a rather more conventional form of torture by Iron Maiden.

The visual opulence of this production is furthermore highlighted by some of the most stunning set designs to be found in a 1960s horror production (courtesy of Scott Slimon and Bill Constable).

The characters all live in individually styled surroundings emphasizing their various collecting interests: Maitland’s library; an opulent billiard room with tribal masks; a phrenologist’s apartment featuring a range of masks and dragons as well as lots of books, crystal balls and skulls; the paintings in the shady dealer’s room.

According to Deborah DelVecchio and Tom Johnson in Peter Cushing: The Gentle Man of Horror and his 91 Films all this was filmed in Shepperton Studios “on one composite set which consisted of five rooms and a hallway”.

The Skull is probably the closest we have to a Cushing/Lee-Team-Up in which Peter Cushing plays a Baddy against Christopher Lee’s Good Guy though Cushing’s character is never inherently evil just involuntarily under an evil influence. (And Lee is not really a Goody, just scared and not-evil.) In actual fact the film ramps up the body-count in comparison to the original short story where there were decidedly less killings and none of which were cause by Maitland. 

The film is a major tour-de-force for Cushing who features in the vast majority of the scenes and often is required to silently act within the confines of a dialogue-free atmospheric scenery.

The only other two actors in this production with any decent screen-time to speak off are Patrick Wymark as a wonderfully sleazy procurator of artefacts and Christopher Lee as a friend and fellow-collector who first of all gets embroiled in a bidding war over some demonic figurines and afterwards wants nothing more to do with them. It’s rare that we ever hear fear in Lee’s voice but this is one of the few occasions where he is made to portray a man at the end of his tethers.

Also watch out for Michael Gough as an auctioneer and Patrick Magee and Nigel Green as a coroner and police officer, all three in tiny blink-or-you-miss-them short appearances that beg the question why so many reasonably well known actors at the time constantly show up in what amount to little more than extra parts at that stage in their careers.

All in all, The Skull is one of Amicus’ best productions if not even THE best. Though the studio is mainly known for their portmanteau movies, it required a feature length adaptation of a short story to help them properly unleash a highly atmospheric feast. Some may consider this to be a bit short on actual horror but for me this is one of the most intriguing visual treats the studio had to offer.

The Deadly Bees (1967)

A contemporary Amicus horror film directed by Freddie Francis, starring Suzanna Leigh and a wild eyed, over-the-top and eccentric Frank Finlay, also featuring Michael Ripper as a publican, with songs by Elkie Brooks (dubbing Leigh) and The Birds on screen with Ronnie Wood and a screenplay co-written by Robert Bloch based on H.F. Heard’s bestselling Holmes pastiche A Taste for Honey.

So what could go wrong?

 Actually not all that much at first glance.

Though mainly known for their anthology horror concepts, these always were a bit hit and miss and it’s therefore good to see one of Amicus’ proper feature length forays into horror. Not making this a Gothic horror production wisely set them apart from Hammer while at the same time securing some of Hammer’s key personnel guaranteeing a certain recognition factor.

Suzanna Leigh plays a popular singer on the verge of a mental breakdown who is sent off to a remote island for some respite. (The doctor who diagnoses her is played by a blink and you’ll miss him Michael Gwynn.) The vibes of Swinging London are represented by Swinging Cameras going back and forth while capturing a performance by The Birds (and the bees… nudge nudge). In contrast rural England is frequented by merry publicans, cheerful lasses, eccentric characters and a dysfunctional couple, the husband (Guy Doleman, best known as SPECTRE agent Count Lippe from Thunderball), a brooding farmer/bee keeper who keeps his raging emotions only barely under control and whose venomous, chain smoking wife (Catherine Finn, Michael Ripper’s wife in real life) never lets him forget who it is that has the money in the relationship and out of spite never even bothers answering the phone even when she sits right next to it.

Watching this kaleidoscope of 1960s genre characters is a joy but of course this is the first killer bee movie ever made and based on a popular Sherlock Holmes pastiche, so how does this fare as either a horror or mystery movie?

Not that well, is the short answer……

The only thing frightful about the killer bee attacks is how awful they look. Given that Freddie Francis was a future Academy Award winning cinematographer it is surprising how bland the production looked. The bee attacks in particular are badly process shot in slow motion while the actors were flailing wildly with plastic insects of a kind stuck to their faces.

And for a mystery there really is very little of that. We only ever have two suspects for being the mastermind behind the bee attacks and one of them is so blatantly obviously suspected by just about everyone that the real killer simply must be the other one.

Given that this is an adaptation of a popular book it is surprising to see how much Amicus didn’t even bother with the novel’s main attraction: the fact that its hero, Mr Mycroft, is a very thinly disguised Sherlock Holmes enjoying his retirement as a rural bee-keeper!

In the movie there is no reference to either Holmes or Mycroft or indeed the male Watson substitute and book’s narrator. It appears that in Bloch’s original version of the screenplay these references were much clearer. Bloch had seemingly envisaged Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff in the main parts. Amicus and/or Freddie Francis, however, took a dislike to Bloch’s concept and changed it further on leaving only the barest hints of its initial source idea.

Still, this may be both a failed mystery and horror thriller and at the time those aspects may have been the primary reason for it being critically dismissed. Nearly 50 years after the movie first hit the cinema screens, however, the then current horror flick has started carrying a patina that easily masks its short comings.

For me it will always be a pleasure to watch Michael Ripper behind a bar and encountering a range of off-beat English characters as well as 1960s starlets, a trip back in time to a mythical England where animals attack and civil servants wear bowler hats. Freddie Francis may just be a journeyman director but he is my kind of journeyman director and the film is a very enjoyable way to spend some 83 minutes.

The Deadly Bees was sometimes paired in a double feature together with The Vulture.

 

Paranoiac (UK, 1962)

What is it with Hammer’s thriller movies? For all intends and purposes they all sound the same – a heroine driven to madness, the dead coming back alive (or do they?), twist endings, filmed in black and white etc etc – yet they all appear quite different and not at all repetitive. Maybe it is because they use a range of different actors for these thrillers whereas they always relied on a number of regular stock players for their horror output, but despite the initial similarities in Jimmy Sangster’s screenplays all of these productions are well worth a look, provide solidly good entertainment and are a great way to pass some 80+ minutes.

Thanks to the release of the cheap Hammer Horror Series box set it is now possible to re-evaluate two of these psycho style movies: Nightmare and Paranoiac.

Paranoiac is the first Hammer movie directed by award winning cinematographer Freddie Francis. He had previously added the lighthouse scenes for The Day of the Triffids starring Janette Scott and was re-united with her for this Hammer movie. She plays Eleanor Ashby, a young woman, who has already lost her parents in a plane crash and her teenage brother a few years previously had killed himself while jumping off a cliff. Her surviving brother Simon is played by Oliver Reed who is intent on driving her insane so that he can get his hands on the family fortune. His plans, however, seem to start going astray when the brother who was considered dead (Alexander Davion) apparently arrives back at their door steps.

This is an exceptionally well cast movie. On top of Janette Scott the following actors deserve a mention: Maurice Denham is the family solicitor. Sheila Burrell has some wonderfully OTT moments as Aunt Harriet: one moment she is the reserved back bone and protector of the family’s good name, the next she turns into a maniac lunatic who has quite clearly lost all her marbles. Lilianne Brousse has previously appeared in Hammer’s Maniac and again impresses as a gorgeous French girl with cute accent. It’s a pity that she subsequently didn’t do much of anything and now appears to be missing in action, a fate she shares with many other Hammer starlet.

Despite the plethora of excellent performances, this is Oliver Reed’s film! He gives a tour de force performance that is unrivalled by any of the other actors and one of his career best. In actual fact, when he plays the drunk, threatening and screaming bully one wonders how close this comes to some of Reed’s real life shenanigans. During the course of the film his character gradually turns from sardonically smiling schemer to enraged spoilt brat – no-one ever drove more vengefully over a flower bed – to certifiable lunatic when he ends up playing the organ to a skeleton. Francis also reserves one of the most imaginatively filmed moments of the movie for Reed when he shoots him from below water level with the waves distorting his facial features as a symbol for him finally crossing the line into madness completely. He sure was a handsome man at the time and wonderfully portrays the beauty of evil.

Some of the spookiest memories carried over long after the film is finished will also involve a freaky mask and a child’s creepy singing voice.

Highly recommended.

Herman Cohen: An American Weirdo in London

by Matthew Coniam

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It’s 1959.

Hammer’s Gothic horrors have only just gotten underway and already, here we are, in present-day London.

Here is a red London bus, and here is a red London post van.
The van stops outside a row of elderly Edwardian terraced houses, sectioned into flats. This is not rural Transylvania, or one hundred years ago in a mountain village in Switzerland. It could be the real world the audience is headed back to when the movie ends, redressed in the sickly primaries of the Eastmancolor palette.
The postman gets out, rings a doorbell, and the door is answered by a busty blonde, cut somewhat imprecisely in the image of Diana Dors. She takes a parcel from him, thanks him, calls him “dearie”.
We go inside to the flat she shares with a little French brunette, accented and perky, perhaps a language student, perhaps an au pair. The package contains a pair of binoculars, and the blonde walks to the window to try them out. The brunette turns to observe, and screams. The blonde has crumpled to the floor, her hands are clasped tight over her face, and there is blood seeping through her fingers, a garish, paint-thick Eastmancolor soup. The discarded binoculars are on the floor beside her, a pair of metal spikes jutting from them, and collecting in a pool on the carpet underneath: more of that blood. Drip, drip, drip...

.This is Horrors of the Black Museum. For Hammer, its inspiration, it was a declaration of war – and proof that they had accidentally kick-started something they would not be able to control. For Anglo-Amalgamated, its producers, it was the first of a notorious trio of modern-dress horrors that aimed to beat Hammer at their own game and resulted instead in a plague of journalistic outrage. (The others were Peeping Tom and Circus of Horrors.)

But for Herman Cohen – the film’s producer and co-writer it was a calling-card: an eccentric new force in British horror had arrived.

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Born in Detroit in 1928, Cohen was a film fanatic from infancy, becoming a cinema usher at 12 and graduating to salesman and film exhibitor. By 24 he was an associate producer, with Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) to show for his labours. It began a lifelong relationship with men in gorilla suits.
By the following year he had formed Herman Cohen Productions, and released Target Earth!, in which Chicago is invaded by Venusians, in 1954. A team-up with AIP was inevitable, and the results defined an era: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (both 1957), Blood of Dracula (1958, and don’t let the title deceive: it’s about a high-school girl who becomes a vampire with enormous black eyebrows and hair that resembles an afro hacked into some vague approximation of a Lugosi widow’s-peak) and How To Make a Monster (1958), shot on the AIP lot, where a disgruntled make-up designer, on the scrapheap when his studio switches from horror films to musicals, uses his creations – including the teenage Frankenstein (still played by Gary Conway) and the teenage werewolf (no longer played by Michael Landon, who had gone on to Bonanza) – to murder the studio heads.
By this time Cohen had garnered sufficient clout to take offices in London’s Wardour Street, a stone’s throw from Hammer House (which is why a packing-case is addressed there in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein). He began full-scale British production with a haunted house comedy called The Headless Ghost (1959). It made little impact, but Horrors of the Black Museum was just around the corner.

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At its heart, the film was more or less a remake of How To Make a Monster, again featuring a dedicated professional in a disreputable industry hypnotising their assistants into killing off their oppressors. (In fact, the film that Monster’s villain is working on is actually called Horrors of the Black Museum!) But this time the looney is a true crime writer (Michael Gough, for Cohen what Cushing was to Hammer) who stages the crimes he then writes bestsellers about. (One is called The Poetry of Murder.) “There’s no doubt we’re dealing with a brilliant maniac!” the police exclaim.
Hammer Horror was scarcely a welcome new phenomenon at the BBFC, but this was something more again. Secretary John Trevelyan (in his memoir What the Censor Saw) recalled it as not “a standard horror film” but instead “both sadistic and nasty”. He particularly disliked the binoculars (“Of course we had to see the blood trickling down her face”), especially since Cohen made a point of boasting that the contraption was based on one used in a real British murder case.
Even grimmer is the film’s other showpiece murder, of Gough’s mistress, who has made the fatal mistake of laughing once too often at his walking stick. We watch her come home, undress to her girdle, stockings and suspenders, and then lie invitingly on her bed… whereupon she is decapitated by a guillotine blade above her pillow.
Despite a British setting and a British director (Arthur Crabtree, once a leading light at Gainsborough Studios) the film’s heritage is unmistakably that of Cohen’s drive-in past, with funfairs, tunnels of love, hypnotism, and a snarling AIP-ish killer, his murderous fits accompanied by an unexplained facial transformation, leaping to his death from the top of a big wheel. There was even the claim that it was shot in ‘Hypnovista’: US audiences got a six minute prologue ostensibly explaining its marvels.
Next, the ape-suit got a dusting-off for Konga (1960), still for Anglo-Amalgamated, but as different in tone from Horrors as conceivable. Michael Gough is a professor with a Lily Munster white streak and the hots for sweater girl Claire Gordon, who develops a growth serum that enables him to create giant plastic carnivorous plants that eat kippers and transform a chimp into a man in a gorilla costume. The ape goes on the rampage, trampling miniature sets and clutching a stiff wooden doll standing in for our mad Mike. This time the phony process is ‘Spectamation’ and the title was originally to have been I Was a Teenage Gorilla.

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After a brief return to America for 1963’s Black Zoo (made not for AIP but for Allied Artists, the former Monogram, with Gough still on board as a zookeeper who hypnotises his animals to kill and serenades them on his Hammond organ), Cohen came back to England to set up Fog, a film he had devised as an encounter between Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Learning that Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger had something similar in mind, the two parties agreed magnanimously to pool resources on what would become A Study in Terror (1965). It was probably the classiest product with which Cohen, credited solely as executive producer, was ever associated.

Next up were his lunatic collaborations with Joan Crawford, luminous former princess of MGM and Warners, whose sensational comeback in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? had condemned her to a twilight in cheapie horror films. With a couple of collaborations with William Castle already behind her it was perhaps inevitable that Cohen would come calling.

First was Berserk! (1967), an aptly-named big top melodrama with Joan as the ringmaster (the part had been written for a man so it’s ideal for Joan), Diana Dors getting sawn in half and Gough – innocent this time – having a tent-peg hammered into his head in one of the film’s several logically-impossible killings. The identity of the killer does come as a genuine surprise, however, so if you don’t want to know that it’s Judy Geeson, look away now. It’s Judy Geeson.

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But seven years was a long time for Cohen to go without using a man in an ape suit, so both it and Crawford were pressed back into service for Trog (1970), the first of two Cohen films to use proper director Freddie Francis. Joan finds a frozen troglodyte in a cave, thaws it out and teaches it to catch a ball in her garden; nasty Michael Gough sets it loose on a murder spree. (For more on Cohen’s collaborations with Crawford, see here.)

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Cohen’s final British production could well be his weirdest: which, if you’ve seen any of his others, you’ll know is no idle boast.

Craze (1973) stars Jack Palance, an excitable actor at the best of times, here left to run riot by Cohen and Francis, as an antiques-dealer compelled to arrange blood sacrifices for an African idol that rewards murders with money and to which he chants in Latin. No Gough this time, but surely only Cohen could have talked Trevor Howard and Edith Evans into taking thankless support roles in this joyous farrago.

This film simply makes no sense at all: at least in Cohen's earlier titles the abundance of drive-in excess - the gorillas, the hypnosis, the mad special effects - never let you forget that what you were seeing was basically just a romp. But this plays straight - it could be Amicus or Tigon at a push - yet the thing itself obeys no rules, either of cinema or of logic. It's like a madman's dream.

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Herman Cohen produced some of the craziest horror films ever produced in Britain, flipping an oddly invigorating bird to the occasionally po-faced Gothic seriousness of Hammer. His films really couldn’t be any sillier had that been their specific aim, but all are supremely entertaining and Horrors of the Black Museum, almost despite itself, remains a highly important milestone in the story of British horror. Cohen, who died in 2002, can rest content with that.

Evil of Frankenstein

Unlike the two earlier Hammer Frankenstein movies (The Curse of Frankenstein, Revenge of Frankenstein), Hammer now got permission from Universal to use a variation of Karloff's classic Monster make up. Given the fact that for their first two Frankenstein entries, not having the monster make up ended up a blessing as the company was properly able to concentrate on the character of the scientist, rather than the monster, this was a bit of a mixed blessing.

Now they had some monster recognition factor, but not a Karloff (or even Christopher Lee) in it, but a wrestler from New Zealand called Kiwi (sic!) Kingston.

The result is a bit of a mixed affair: There are some ingenious moments in it: It is not Frankenstein but a hypnotist who manages to eventually revive the creature and then uses him to seek revenge on people who done him wrong (traces of Caligari here). The production is well photographed: Little wonder as the director is Oscar award winning cinematographer Freddie Francis.

But for every great element, we have at least an equal amount of duds: Frankenstein is seen acting incredibly foolish insisting he can't afford to be recognised by his peers, then throwing a fit in public that nearly gets him arrested. One moment the castle is unapproachable for him, the next he walks in and out seemingly unobserved.

So it's definitely not one of Hammer's finest, but it is a pleasure to watch and Cushing's acting is absolutely superb.