Horror Hospital (1973)

aka The Computer Killers

After witnessing a cold open in which a gentleman we’ll quickly enough learn is Dr Christian Storm (Michael Gough) and his little person assistant Frederick (Skip Martin) murder two people with the help of a car carrying practical in-built blades for beheading as well as baskets that can magically catch the flying heads, we meet our main protagonist.

Having been punched out of his band, obnoxious Jason Jones (Robin Askwith) decides he needs a bit of a break from life. Signing up with a shady travel agency specialized on his particular demographic called “Hairy Holidays” – run by one Mr Pollack (Dennis Price) – our hero (ahem) books a few days in the health clinic of – wouldn’t you know it – Dr Storm, mostly in the hopes of encountering attractive “birds”. As fate will have  it, Jason has a very special meet-cute with Judy Peters (Vanessa Shaw), which includes very early 70s moments of flirting like our hero explaining that he’s not going to rape Judy. Romance is in the air, clearly, when she offers him cheese anyway.

Judy just happens to be on her way to the very same clinic as Jason to meet her Auntie Harris (Ellen Pollock) for the first time. There’s some bad family blood about the aunt’s earlier career as a brothel owner, apparently.

Once the quick couple arrive at the clinic, the place turns out to be rather strange: auntie really rather wouldn’t have Judy there at all for mysterious reasons; the place’s little person factotum seems just a wee bit eccentric; there are bedrooms that look as bloody as slaughterhouses; and Dr Storm is Michael Gough doing his best Bela Lugosi. And that’s before our heroes meet the other guests - all of them very, very quiet, pasty looking, with nasty scars on their heads, and disturbingly happy to carry out Storm’s every order.

Young people, Storm is sure, need a strong hand to guide them, preferably his own, so Jason and Judy are going to have an interesting, perhaps not as healthy as advertised, time there.

Anthony Balch’s Horror Hospital has for a long time been a rather unseen and definitely undervalued little film. Apart from the vagaries of copyright and licensing deals, this may very well have something to do with the film’s very peculiar style that mixes elements of British exploitative horror (think Pete Walker or Norman J. Warren) with weird, on the cheap imagination and a sense of humour that tends to the weird parodic reversal and to black humour so dry, it will not always be clear to everyone watching if they are supposed to laugh at any given detail.

Though, given the film’s general interest in the specific imaginative detail, I’m rather sure the filmmakers have put a surprising degree of thought into nearly everything we see. Clearly, on this set, doing things on the cheap was no excuse for doing things badly or sloppily, so the resulting film is full of those peculiar little moments and details that at once manage to fulfil the quota of weird awesomeness we wish for from the more exploitative side of the movie business but also makes fun of some of these expectations – often at the same time.

If this is going to charm any given viewer and amuse them as much as Horror Hospital does me will most certainly hang on: a) said viewer’s love for 70s British exploitation horror, b) their love for very, very dry humour and c) if they needed the film’s very special limousine in their lives.

Or, come to think of it, if they believe the romantic lead walking into the mandatory shower sex scene wearing the a knight’s helmet is very funny and strange indeed, or just silly and stupid. If you do find this as funny as I do, you’ll also enjoy watching Skip Martin yet again nearly becoming the hero of a film (and yes, we get a meta joke about that) after stealing at least half of the scenes he is in by perfect delivery of dry jokes and asides, and Michael Gough chewing scenery in a very specific way that is supposedly (okay, I believe it) built on Bela Lugosi’s poverty row performances.

It’s that kind of film, and I love it for it.

Snowbound (1948)

Post-war Britain. Demobilized Blair (Dennis Price) is trying to earn his keep by working as a movie extra, when he’s not failing at selling whatever it is he writes (we only learn it isn’t screenplays). His new director turns out to be a man called Engles (Robert Newton), Blair’s former CO before Engles got drafted into intelligence operations. Engles has a much better proposition for Blair than the movie extra lark: why not go on a well-paid vacation to a ski cabin in the Italian Alps and observe what the other people living there are up to?  Officially, Blair’s supposed to write a screenplay for Engles. Despite his old boss not giving him any further details, Blair agrees, perhaps a little intrigued, perhaps a little stupid – a combination that’ll get him through the rest of the movie.

Because our protagonist is officially at the hut to write a screenplay for Engles, Blair is accompanied by one Wesson (Stanley Holloway), an oblivious director of photography who manages to know even less than our protagonist does.

Once at the hut, Blair encounters quite the rogue’s gallery of not at all suspicious people. There’s shady Brit Mayne (Guy Middleton), shady Greek Keramikos (Herbert Lom), a shady fake countess and Blairish love interest actually called Carla (Mila Parély) and her shady fixer Valdini (Marcel Dalio). Come to think of it, even the owner of the hut, one Aldo (Willy Fueter) is pretty shady. It’s quite obvious even to Blair – who is not a terribly insightful sort of thriller protagonist – that these people know one another, even though they strenuously pretend not to, that not one of them seems to be using their real name or nationality (apart from Valdini, perhaps), and that they are clearly there for sinister and mysterious reasons.

David MacDonald’s Snowbound, based on a Hammond Innes novel, is an interesting, if sometimes a little creaky, post-war thriller. The creakiness isn’t really the film’s fault: MacDonald certainly couldn’t know how the suspense techniques popularized by Hitchcock he uses, the know-nothing/innocent everyman protagonist who just happens to look like a film star, and so on, and so forth, would be regurgitated in the following decades so often by so many filmmakers that by now even a film which uses them well but not brilliantly (as Snowbound mostly does) can feel a little less well made than it actually is.

At times the film also nears the borders of the noir, but usually tends to step away from them at the last moment, out of British politeness and the abhorrence of making a scene, one supposes.

But let’s talk about Snowbound’s strengths. Certainly there’s no fault to be found with its main actors, a party of character actors whose somewhat ambiguous nationalities are a perfect fit for the just as ambiguous characters they are playing. Lom’s performance is particularly fine, balancing on the line between the sinister and the personable in an excellent acrobatics act, but everyone else works out great as the sort of people looking for any shady get rich quick scheme that populated Europe shortly after World War II in popular fiction (and perhaps in parts of reality).

There’s a palpable anxiety running through the film, a consciousness the war may be over, but the people fighting in it, and particularly the people who fought it behind the scenes are still there, lingering, searching something or someone, or planning to one day continue the madness they started. The ambiguity of characters’ identities or motivations only seems the logical conclusion to this state of affairs. Apart from Blair, of course. He somehow managed to make it through the war without getting a case of ambiguity or cynicism, and without learning that you probably shouldn’t go skiing with every shady character with attractive facial hair. Fortunately, Price for most of the time manages to sell him as a man in over his head instead of the complete idiot a lesser actor might have come up with when confronted with the same script.


Visually, the film is often atmospheric, generally attractive and usually clear. DP Stephen Dade certainly wasn’t a John Alton but he knew his way around night shots, lingering shadows, and other elements typical of black and white photography of the time, so there’s usually visual pull to any given scene, even if its is only another tableau one of men talking somewhere or other. The exterior and skiing shots – apparently done by Reg Johnson – are attractive too, if perhaps used a bit more indulgently than strictly necessary.

In short: Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Some time in the late Victorian or early Edwardian age. In theory, Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) is a member of the illustrious noble D’Ascoyne family (all of them independent of gender and age to be played by Alec Guiness), eight people away from a dukedom. Unfortunately, he is the product of a (shudder) marriage of love, his blue-blooded mother having married an Italian opera singer and consequently having found herself struck from the family books. Dear mother never really let Louis forget his oh so noble heritage, and the British class system certainly doesn’t help a boy of meagre means to feel valued. So when she dies and the family even refuses her last wish to be interred in the family crypt, Louis decides to take vengeance by somehow killing every single family member, who just happen to also stand in the way of his becoming a duke.

As it turns out, Louis has quite the knack for this sort of thing.

The very, very black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets is one of the most beloved films of the UK’s posh Ealing Studios most beloved films, and even from a position of not being British and nearly 70 years later, it’s not difficult at all to see why. This is one of those perfectly acted, perfectly scripted, perfectly paced films with perfect production design and perfect direction (by Robert Hamer) of the style that is never so crass as to ever hint at its own existence. In other words, its a bit of chore to actually write the film up because “everything’s perfect” might be a big compliment for a film (and one that happens to be a rather good description of Kind Hearts and Coronets), but it’s not really the sort of thing you want to read a blog post for.

Fortunately, the British class system is coming to the rescue here, for, while the film isn’t out to call anyone to revolution and really hedges its bets a bit by placing its plot in the past, its comedy can very easily be read as a deeply acerbic commentary on a society that poisons every human interaction with the concept of class, wasting talent, minds and lives while an absurd class of inbreds who never need show any merits as actual human beings lords it over everyone else. As the film presents it, it’s the kind of world where Louis’s patient campaign of murder seems perfectly logical and reasonable, even if it is in actuality just a different expression of the values demonstrated by the the world around it. The basic tenets of society being utterly absurd, it lends itself wonderfully to comedy.

A handful of thoughts about A Canterbury Legend (1944)

Not to get mildly confessional here, but one of the joys of blogging as relatively regularly about movies as I do here is that it’s unavoidable to watch films I’d never expected to watch, and find joy in films I’d never expected to find it in. Not that I’m afraid of Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s war time efforts, but this particular film, with its exploration of the English national character (which is a thing I don’t believe in), and its near-spiritual feelings for the countryside (which I don’t have but admittedly enjoy in my fiction) is pretty far off from my usual interests and obsessions.

The thing is, of course, that the way Powell and Pressburger treat them, these things I don’t usually feel or relate to become relatable, human, and therefore turn into something curiously universal, at least curiously for a film so focused on the very local and highly specific. It’s as if Powell and Pressburger, while setting out to explore a national character - and certainly doing that also - couldn’t help but recognize that there are other, even deeper experiences and thoughts connecting people. And because this was made by the Archers, the film also carries a sense of whimsy, a sense of joy, and one of believable sadness. I’m not suggesting someone’s putting the whole of the human experience into what was supposedly meant as a piece of wartime propaganda about American/English friendship and a paean to the countryside; in fact, I’m quite sure that’s exactly what’s going on here.

Speaking of propaganda, the British really had the superior sort, what with the film not only not pretending war isn’t hell but also more interested in truths than lies; thanks to some incredible filmmaking even the film’s “miraculous” parts feel true to this atheist, not providing some kitschy way to help keep calm and carry on but merely suggesting that hope does exist as much as loss does. Selling that to a natural born pessimist like me, born in a very different country in a very different time, is no mean feat.

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The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

One day, the world's population falls down dead wherever it stands (at least in that corner of the world we get to see in the movie), as if struck by a poisonous gas pumped out by unfriendly aliens.

A small group of survivors - manly man test pilot Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker), the gangster-ish tough guy Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price), his girlfriend Peggy (Virginia Field), alcoholic Edgar Otis (Thorley Walters), his lover Violet Courtland (Vanda Godsell), and later on the young couple of pregnant Lorna (Anna Palk) and her first pouting, then competent husband Mel (David Spenser) - all of whom have for some reason or the other not breathed the air when the end of the world was taking place, find themselves thrown together in a small, pretty English looking village.

As if it weren't already difficult enough for a group this badly mixed to keep together and themselves away from doing some sort of violence to each other, they are from time to time very politely attacked by slow-moving robots who look like cigars that have been pressed into space suits. Unimpressive as the machines' speed is, they at least have the ability to kill people with a mere touch. What's worse is that these robots - or their potential unseen masters - are able to revive the bodies of killed humanity to do their bidding zombie-style.

The survivors' only hope is the fact they are taking part in the sort of movie that can't end in anything other than optimism, and is willing to give them the easiest way out of their predicament you could possibly think of.

When Terence Fisher wasn't making films for Hammer, the director lend his immense talents to other production houses too. In the case of the beautifully titled The Earth Dies Screaming, Fisher was working for the company of Robert Lippert, an American who had moved his B movie production machine from the USA to the UK to save some bucks.

It's pretty obvious that Lippert was really into this not giving his films much of a budget thing, and so The Earth Dies suffers from quite a few problems that could have been avoided in an even only slightly better financed movie. As it stands, the end of the world takes place exclusively in a small British village, and while that's certainly a good idea to emphasise the characters' isolated position and helps explain why there are so few robots and zombies attacking them, there's something a bit too un-apocalyptic about an empty village street with only a few bodies lying around, and something much too polite and convenient about how the apocalypse turns out for the characters. This politeness in the face of the end of the world is quite typical for British apocalypses of the time (and of decades before, too), but for my tastes, it robs The Earth Dies of some of its potential punch, leaving its audience (or at least me) with the appearance of a film nearly ready to push things in horror/SF cinema truly forward.

There are some (obvious) parallels between some of the scenes here surrounding the not-zombies and the basic humanity under siege set-up, and Romero's later classic Night of the Living Dead, but if Romero (who may or may not have seen this film at all) had learned something from the earlier film, then it was to put more energy into the character work, and to stop pretending that everything's always going to be alright, even after the end of the world as we know it. At least the script is clever and consequent enough not to explain its monsters.

That doesn't mean Fisher's movie is bad. Though I would have wished for a bit more complexity in the film's characters, the cast gives solid performances throughout, keeping the stock character types they are working with pleasantly two-dimensional. The script - while missing out on taking that decisive step towards honesty - has its moments whenever it's called on to set up one of the film's few, yet effective scenes of suspense and terror. The film's monsters - both the silly but effective robots and the completely effective white-eyed zombies - are fine in concept and execution, though I suspect some may find it difficult to overlook the robots' glittery stiffness and won't be able to just go with it and enjoy the conceptual creepiness of their design.

Fisher was of course one hell of a director, even when he had to cope with budgets and shooting times that must have made his circumstances at Hammer look absolutely luxurious. Although his classic horror movies at the bigger studio were shot in colour, Fisher had years of experience in black and white work (including some British noirs and thrillers for Hammer), and had no problem going back to black and white for this one. This experience working in black and white helps the director create some wonderfully creepy effects through the use of stark shadows and the play of light that work especially well with the not-zombie attacks.

In the end, Lippert probably got more bang for his buck from his director than he wanted or could appreciate.

 

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