In short: The Vulture (1966)

The new school teacher of a Cornish village (Annette Carell) makes a terrifying discovery while taking a short cut over the local graveyard that leaves her in a state of shock and suddenly white-haired. Once she'll be able to talk again, she'll relate having witnessed a vulture with a human face and human hands having arisen from a grave. Can it be mere chance that exactly this grave has been described as being cursed by a lynched Spanish-British with a thing for his pet vulture in a freshly discovered parchment?
Scotland Yard, at least, thinks it is. Clearly, the school teacher is just being hysterical.

But US nuclear scientist Eric Lutens (Robert Hutton), arriving in the village with his wife Trudy (Diane Clare) to visit her uncle Brian (Broderick Crawford), has a more scientific explanation once he has learned of the legends and picked up a few feathers and coins. Obviously, somebody's experiments in "nucular transmutation" have gone horribly wrong, creating a man/vulture hybrid that is influenced by vengeful thoughts of the dead man from the ether. Even worse, Trudy's family must be in danger, for the dead man with the bad thoughts has reasons to hate them especially. SCIENCE(!) says so.

Curiously, nobody believes this deeply rational and scientific explanation, so Eric, Trudy, and local antiquarian Professor Hans Königlich (Akim Tamiroff) will have to solve the vulture problem all on their own. But why does Königlich always wear that ridiculous cape? And what's wrong with his feet?

As this plot synopsis should make perfectly clear, Lawrence Huntington's The Vulture is what happens when the basic idea for a British ghost story about vengeance from the grave crashes headlong into an especially ridiculous example of the 50s US monster movie. This culture clash might have led to an interesting little movie in the right hands, but Huntington - also responsible for the script - does not possess them. In fact, even if I were to ignore the script for a second, that would still leave a film as boringly directed as humanly possible (in fact directed in a style as if Huntington had never left the 50s), taking place in a few apathetically photographed locations and some sets so aggressively bland it's difficult to imagine someone actually designed them, played by actors who seem utterly indifferent to anything that's going on.

And with this I'm really leaving out the massive failings of the script. Just to take some examples: Huntington's problems to differentiate between nuclear physics and alchemy (really, the "science" here is about on the level of The Giant Claw just infinitely less hilariously put into dialogue); the obviousness of the film's bad guy whose identity seems supposed to be a surprise but could not fool a toddler; the slow, slow pacing - oh, the horrors go on and on.

Some of the film's problems can be somewhat amusing, of course. It's difficult not to crack up when Hutton begins to relate his scientific (cough) theories, or when everybody treats Königlich as if he were not obviously shifty; and witnessing Tamiroff in his full vulture gramps get up at the film's supposed climax is an astonishing example of why certain films should never show their monsters that can't help but grant one the gift of the giggles. However, for most of the time The Vulture is just boring and bland, aggressively avoiding everything interesting that could have resulted when the British ghost story met the 50s monster movie.

 

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The Hand of Night (1968)

aka Beast of Morocco

After the death of his wife and children in a car accident that left him unscathed, architect Paul Carver (William Sylvester) has fallen into a deep depression. Carver now sees himself as someone "standing between life and death, light and darkness" and craves death, but doesn't seem ready to take the obvious step.

Instead, he travels to Morocco to distract himself. A rather mean-spirited destiny has other ideas for him, though. A dream of a Moroccan crypt, very Western coffins, a "bearded Arab" and Gunther (Edward Underdown), a German archaeologist sitting next to him on the plane into the country, is the first prophetic warning for the American that he will soon enough encounter actual darkness.

Once arrived in Morocco, Carver learns that the friend (colleague?) he was planning to stay with has suddenly died. For Carver, that's as good a reason for a drinking spree as any, but he still has a certain craving to be saved from himself, it seems, and decides to take an invitation of Gunther's to come visit him that very same night.

At Gunther's house, where a party is held, Paul meets Marisa (Aliza Gur), a mysterious beauty who likes disappearing at will, discussions about the nature of light and darkness and being a vampire. Paul is fascinated by the woman, even obsessed, just as if the part of him that craves death and the dark side of life had just waited for her to appear. From the moment of their meeting, Paul is stumbling between Marisa's world and ours. The situation is further complicated by Chantal (Diane Clare), Gunther's non-biological daughter who'd very much like to save Paul from himself.

The Hand of Night is one of those films that have some generally interesting ideas and some atmospheric scenes, but have to fight with the indifference of their execution. Somewhere inside Hand, there's a fantastic film about depression, a death wish and how to escape it, and a peculiar interpretation of the vampire myth, but neither writer Bruce Stewart nor director Frederic Goode seem to know how to make that film and instead like to hide the actually interesting elements behind melodramatic dialogue and drab direction.

Goode often even manages to waste the mood-enhancing powers of the actual Moroccan landscape this was filmed in, as if he were actively trying to let Morocco look as quotidian to the British eye as possible; the film's more effective scenes seem to exist despite Goode's efforts and not because of them, for sometimes, the dream-like strangeness of the desert is too strong for him to make boring, like the call of Marisa's "darkness" is for Paul. It is, as a matter of fact, quite ironic.

Where - after a cheap yet impressive dream sequence right at the film's beginning - director Goode is just not very good (sorry), writer Stewart isn't able to get a grip on a fantastic basic set-up. The film's beginning is an up and down of (sometimes clever) pseudo-philosophical discussions, symbolic psychology of the workable sort, dialogue written as if it were 1938 and not 1968 (and, by the way, spoken by actors acting like it's 1938 by using a cartload of bad fake accents, too), and a few choice moments where the "darkness" the characters talk so much about actually shows in subtle ways. That's nearly enough to satisfy me in a film so clearly trying to be profound instead of just going for the easiest thrills, however, in its final half hour The Hand of Night wastes all this potential on a particularly long-winded and boring finale, turning out like a Hammer Dracula movie made by people who have heard about drama, but don't know how to execute a dramatic finale.

It's a bit of a shame, really, for it's not every cheap little horror movie that shows as much ambition and willingness to build its own strange little mythology as The Hand does. As it stands, this is a film I find impossibly to actually recommend to anyone not highly interested in off-beat independent horror films, yet too interesting to rue having watched it.

 

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