Island of Terror (1966)

A rather peculiar human corpse is found on an isolated island between England and Ireland (I’m not sure if this is explicitly meant to be Pitcairn): it is boneless and has a jelly-like consistency. The local doctor (Eddie Byrne) has no idea what could be going on – a new infectious disease, perhaps? – so he jaunts off to fetch eminent pathologist Dr Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing) who in turn fetches “young” bone specialist Dr David West (Edward Judd as the most boring man alive) who in his turn again will – for reasons of plot contrivance too tedious to get into and so we have a character in the movie who is only there to be in hysterics at all times – fetch useless rich girl Toni Merrill (Carole Gray).

On the island, the doctors quickly find quite a few more dead bodies and soon realize their problem isn’t a new kind of disease but the accidental product of another doctor’s attempt at curing cancer, which somehow resulted in bone-sucking monsters. Nearly indestructible monsters at that, if not for the wonders of that glorious stuff we know as Strontium-90.

Island of Terror is never going to be an important entry in the annals of British SF/horror films, nor one of the important films directed by Terence Fisher, nor any kind of career highpoint for my spiritual house patron, Peter Cushing.
It’s just too leisurely a film, with Fisher only seeming to put the minimum of effort – though the minimum of effort for Fisher is the maximum for many another genre director – into filming a script that itself barely scrapes by. Just look at the way the film isolates the characters on the island and cry bitter tears of It’s In The Script!.

Speaking of the script, apart from being rather silly (which is perfectly okay for this particular genre), it is too often falling back on variations of 50s US monster movie tropes, with a female lead character so useless even said 50s US monster movies would be a bit embarrassed about it, and a romance that’ll send shudders of horror down even the spines of the most hardened of viewers. The script also suffers from making so little out of the somewhat more original or more grim ideas it has. It doesn’t even bother to do anything with the moment where our heroes decide to murder our heroine so she doesn’t have to suffer through being bone-sucked, keeping what could lead off into an actually interesting little scene about a woman’s right to choose her own death (or something like that) a deeply unpleasant paternalistic gesture that probably can still invite a perfectly justified feminist rant.

Fortunately, there’s some enjoyable nonsense in here too, starting with the adorable looking monsters (or “silicates”, as the film calls them) that remind me of a some kind of English dish, only moving and with a single front tentacle, and that make the sort of electronic noises you also could have found in a contemporary  Doctor Who episode. And how many films are there whose grand finales are based on the heroes feeding cows they have poisoned with Strontium-90 to the monsters to then hope the creatures will die before they can bone-suck the rest of the cast?

Peter Cushing’s fine as always, of course, even with the little the film gives him. He milks the scene where he loses his hand for all it is worth and gets a few quips in I very much suspect were improvised on set and not in the script, and is otherwise the sort of presence that will improve every film. His old partner behind the camera Fisher does get around to two or so effective scenes between the parts of the film where he isn’t doing much beyond pointing the camera. Particularly the film’s finale is rather good, while the sting in the tale is not unexpected but fun enough in suggesting an imaginary Toho sequel.

Otherwise, Island of Terror is nothing to write home about, but is enjoyable enough.

Curse of the Fly (1965)

The newest generation of the Delambre family – as represented by Henri (Brian Donlevy) and his sons Martin (George Baker) and Albert (Michael Graham) – still hasn’t learned a thing about research safety standards, and is continuing with its ancestral (by my calculation, the film should take place in the 2030s) teleportation experimentation. Yup, they still haven’t realized inventing a teleporting device that’s only good for dead matter would still be an incredible technological leap.

Anyhow, when Martin’s driving through beautiful Canada one night, he meets Patricia Stanley (Carole Gray), running in her undies through the woods in slow motion. Some short words about her fictitious employer’s fictitious husband convince Martin that there’s nothing strange about her behaviour at all, and before you can say “slow down, cowboy”, the two are married and moving into the mansion where the family conduct their experiments.

In truth, Patricia has escaped from an asylum where she was treated for a nervous breakdown. Of course, she’s not the only member of the new family who has secrets. Martin suffers from some weird sporadic aging sickness that leaves him in rather a bad state from time to time, but that’s really not the worst problem here, for Martin and his dad have been conducting their experiments on human beings, and keep the irradiated results (no flies here, I’m sorry to say) locked up in some nice little cells in the garden. Oh, and one of these results is Martin’s wife Judith. And no, they never got divorced. Add to that Henri’s total lack of scruples, Albert’s disgruntlement with his crazy family ways, and the fact that the Delambre’s Chinese (cough) servants hate her, and soon you’ll find a drugged up by her husband and father in law Patricia slowly driven insane by the mutants and the servants, among the less troublesome developments.

The belated third The Fly film was directed by sometimes mediocre, sometimes nearly brilliant genre film veteran Don Sharp in one of his good weeks. It’s barely a sequel to the first two films – which is a good thing given that you can do only so much with a human fly, I think – and could really be about a family of totally unrelated mad scientists without losing anything. Sharp, or writer Harry Spalding, really seems to be more interested in crossing the more science fictional horror approach of the first two films with typical gothicisms. The film’s sense of the gothic doesn’t  just offer the expected mad scientist type but also includes a huge dollop of gothic romance of the sort the post-Daphne Du Maurier generations were actually beginning to churn out (unless I’m off a few years, in which case this would be something of a predecessor of the type). “Rebecca”, it turns out, only further improves with the addition of mad scientist family troubles and mutants.

It’s a rather interesting combination that leads to a film recommending itself at the very least through the originality of unexpected sub-genre crossings. I’m also quite fond of Curse’s moments of delicious strangeness, executed with style (and a lot of rather beautifully staged scenes) by a Sharp who is clearly in his element whenever it comes to the gothic and the strange.

What Curse of the Fly isn’t, is a film whose plot will withstand any kind of logical scrutiny. Everything that happens here makes sense thematically and atmospherically, though, and if you’re willing to accept the basic silliness (and who wouldn’t be?), then you might even call the film’s treatment of different kinds of mentally illness, and its sombre thoughts about the troubles with family and trust rather intelligent; one might even think there’s a reason behind the way this unassuming little horror film contrasts Patricia’s relatively open and only dangerous for herself mental illness with the Delambres’ secret and much more destructive ones. I’m even willing to go as far as suggest there’s a bit of a hint of criticism of how much more willing the society of 1965 seems to accept “aberrant” behaviour of men when compared to that of women packed into this delicious sandwich of mad science and mutants.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,horror,don sharp,brian donlevy,george baker,carole gray