Dracula Has Risen From the Grave

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968)

Dir. Freddie Francis

Written by Anthony Hinds, using the name "John Elder"

Starring Chirstopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barbara Ewing

 

The bad news first: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE --Hammer's third sequel to their studio-defining 1958 DRACULA (aka HORROR OF DRACULA), second with Christopher Lee, and second which Lee openly did not want to be a part of-- is broadly more interested in the character drama than the horror. That is a highly questionable decision for a movie called DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE to make, and probably reason enough for most folks to just ignore it entirely and focus on genre movies that would actually like to, you know, do genre movie stuff.

 

The good news, though, is that for those who stick around, that character drama is surprisingly tolerable. Which is not to say that it’s an overwhelming good story; or even much of a story at all: this time Dracula gets revived after a uptight Monsignor (Rupert Davies, WITCHFINDER GENERAL, CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTER, winner or the inaugural Pipe Smoker Of The Year Award [yes, really]) decides that even though Dracula is already dead (having drowned like a chump at the end of DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS) he should not leave well enough alone and instead should march up to Dracula's Castle and exorcise it. In the process, a dorky local priest (Ewan Hooper, KINKY BOOTS) manages to fall down and hit his head and the blood flows into a nearby body of water (implied in the last movie to be far from Dracula's Castle, but no good ever came of trying to parse the continuity between these movies) which happens to be the very short-term resting place of our titular character, so of course that brings Drac right back, to get up to his old tricks. And if those old tricks (i.e., visiting the bedrooms of virginal maidens to gradually vampirize them) happen to coincide with getting revenge on the Monsignor who exorcised his castle (even if he did revive the Count in the process) because the victim is the old codger's niece, well, so much the better. 

The odd thing is, although that is the plot you'd have to summarize if you were, say, trying to write a review of DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM HIS GRAVE, it doesn't really accurately describe the movie. All that business with Dracula and the Monsignor and the nocturnal visits and all that makes up a relatively small portion of the runtime. Mostly, the movie chronicles the lives of various denizens of a local inn, one of whom (a fellow named Paul, played by Barry Andrews, BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW) happens to be the boyfriend of said virginal Monsignor's niece. They all notice some strange goings-on, and eventually begin to fall prey to Dracula's depredations, but a lot of the time is simply spent hanging out at the workplace, or dealing with the tension caused by the uptight Monsignor's extreme displeasure at the prospect of having his niece date anyone, least of all a --gasp-- hunky atheist like our handsome generic white boy™ Paul. 

As I mentioned above, you'd have every right to doubt that this focus would prove as fruitful as doing something crazy like centering your movie with DRACULA in the title around, you know, Dracula. But it turns out to be a surprisingly charming time. In fact, basically every major role is more interesting and better played than you’d have any right to expect. The script, by Anthony Hinds (alias: John Elder, THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, THE REPTILE, and the next two DRACULA films, replacing previous series scribe Jimmy Sangster, whose script had so displeased Lee last time around) contributes to this by making each character and their corresponding web of relationships more complex and multi-dimensional than they need to be, and the actors across the board respond by giving spirited, lively performances. OK, so the main victim girl (Veronica Carlson, far better in FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED) is pretty boring, another naive, virginal damsel, so innocent she sleeps with a doll. But that’s to be expected; when was the last time Hammer had a young male lead who seems as vivacious as Andrews makes Paul, or who looked kind of like Roger Daltrey? Rarely if ever. And he's surrounded by a whole crew of able character actors who do their part to make these stock types feel distinct. I'm particularly taken with Zena (Barbara Ewing, TORTURE GARDEN, MUTE, EYE OF THE NEEDLE), Paul's fellow bar-worker, a bawdy, worldly lady with her own unrequited affection for the young man, who brings a world-weary melancholy to her poor doomed role. But honestly everyone is doing good work; even the stodgy old Monsignor --who has a complex, not-quite-romantic relationship with his widowed sister-in-law-- proves to be a little more interesting and worth spending time with than you'd suppose.      

In fact, the only person who doesn’t seem to be trying very hard is Christopher Lee, who is not really bothering to hide how much he doesn’t care by this point. He speaks again, after his controversial mute turn in the previous film... but it’s probably only four or five unimportant lines, and he’d be better off staying quiet. They also have this dumb effect where they make his eyes all bloodshot, which just makes him look high and distracts from Lee’s naturally cold, imperious gaze. It's hard to say if the script gives him short shrift, or if Lee was being such a baby about returning to the role that they just tried to write a movie around him doing as little as possible, but the end result is that he is almost comically inactive here. He simply doesn’t do that much, and the stuff he does is just recycled from the last couple films (basically, just menacingly visit an innocent virgin in her bedroom a few times). But at least director Freddie Francis (TALES FROM THE CRYPT, TROG) knows how to shoot him so he looks cool and imposing; even a totally coasting Lee can hardly look otherwise, but having the movie shoot him like a total boss certainly helps make the case that Dracula is in some way important to this Dracula movie. And he does get a real hum-dinger of a death, almost certainly the best he's ever going to get, and a real significant upgrade from the lame watery demise he met last time. And again, Francis (who had won an Oscar for best Cinematography back in 1960 for SONS AND LOVERS, and would win another for GLORY in 1989, though he's working as director in this case with Arthur Grant [QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED] behind the camera) gives it the epic framing it deserves.In fact, it’s one of the nicest-looking Hammer pictures, full of cool sets and some of the most intense abstract lighting I’ve ever seen in a British movie, coming within shooting distance of what Bava was up to in Italy around the time he was making KILL BABY KILL and THE WHIP AND THE BODY. Francis and Grant also use some kind of odd prismatic lens which creates an iris effect, with the edges of the screen glowing red and orange. It’s a cool effect which might benefit from a little more restraint than is shown here, but when it works it’s pretty baller. 

The ultimate result is a movie which is more amiable than terrifying, and more handsome than consequential, but that's still enough to qualify as a pleasant surprise, given that this is the third sequel to a movie which arguably didn't need any sequels. It does not make one particularly confident that this series should continue for another five more entries, but for those who appreciate that special Hammer vibe, it's a tolerable, if very inessential, way to spend 90 minutes. I mean, Michael Ripper plays a drunken innkeeper, for heaven's sake. And who could resist that poster?

HAMMER’S DRACULA SERIES:

1: THE HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)

2: THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

3: DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1966)

4: DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)

5: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA (1970)

6: SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)

7: DRACULA A.D. 1972 (1972)

8: THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

9: THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

(see also: Hammer’s FRANKENSTEIN series)

Trog

Trog (1970)

Dir Freddie Francis

Written by Peter Bryan, John Gilling, Aben Kandel

Starring Joan Crawford, Michael Gough, Bernard Kay

            Once upon a time in rural England, three handsome young men (including future genre staple David Warbeck, RAT MAN) strip down to their underwear and explore, one at a time, the inside of a deep, previously undisturbed crevasse. The eyebrow-raising Freudian implications thereof take a backseat to the potential scientific ones, however, when they encounter a pissed-off long-time resident of the cave who kills one of them and sends the rest fleeing to the safety of a laboratory headed by the inexplicably American Dr. Brockton (holy mackerel, it's Academy Award Winner Joan Crawford! From 1926’s THE BOOB!). Obviously, we’ve got some kind of relict pre-human ape man on our hands here. Predictably, the ignorant locals, especially this total dipshit Mr. Murdock (Michael Gough, 90’s BATMAN QUADRILOGY, THE SKULL) want to kill the cave-dwelling “troglodyte,” but Dr. Brockton and her extensive collection of large-collared button-down jackets have the crazy idea that a living Trog might be a great benefit to science, especially that newfangled and still-controversial theory of evolution.*

            So far, so standard for a creature feature like this. Despite the odd murder or two, the movie understands that we’re squarely on Trog’s side here; he’s who we came to see, although of course we assume we’ll only get a few fleeting glimpses of him, budgets being what they are. And of course we can also expect a lot of dry scientific prattle from people in lab coats about modernism and the dangers of superstition and so on. That’s just what you’re gonna get in these monster movies from the 1950s… wait a tick, this was released in fucking 1970??

            That must explain, if there is an explanation, why despite the pro forma setup, TROG is a very different movie than you might expect. For starters, we’re not going to be treated to just a few glimpses of our title character at the beginning and end. In fact, he’s going to be on-screen for basically the entire thing. It’s very possible that he gets more screen time than Joan Crawford. And as soon as we get a good look at him (which happens almost immediately) it becomes clear why Dr. Brockton thinks he might be such an important scientific find: he is, it turns out, basically just a normal human, wearing fuzzy boots and loin cloth, with an ape mask he never takes off the terrifying head of a prehistoric ape! He looks like an ape-minotaur. The fact that he’s obvious just some sporty Englishman (Joe Cornelius, who had been a pro wrestler under the name “The Dazzler”) wearing an impressive but clearly artificial mask,** and no effort whatsoever is being made to disguise this fact through lighting or editing, makes for a wonderfully bonkers sensation that stretches credibility until it firmly snaps back into camp. In fact, for much of the movie I couldn’t help wondering if this was somehow a clue that this was all a weird hoax, and Dr. Brockton would eventually realize that she’s locked up a English prep school lad who donned an ape mask in a prank that ended up getting out of control.

This is not a Halloween costume or something, this is an actual frame from the movie.

            Alas, that does not turn out to be the case, and this odd physiological specimen, once caught, ends up in Dr. Brockton’s lab for a rigorously scientific regimen of tests that hahaha, I’m kidding of course, instead she teaches it to enjoy classical music and play fetch. Seriously, for virtually the entire middle two acts, this thing is fucking Pygmalion*** with Joan Crawford trying to “civilize” a buff human body topped by an ape head fixed with a single perpetually antagonized expression. And it works! Trog doesn’t change expressions or seem especially eager about any of this, but he tolerates it and can be taught the basic principal of throwing a ball back and forth and what have you. Dr. Brockton seems thrilled by this, and even brings in a series of specialists who perform surgery allowing Trog to speak! Holy shit, science is fucking nuts. She seems right on the cusp of teaching him to sing opera or play cricket, which would surely win her the Nobel Prize.

            Wouldn’t you know it, though, those ignorant townsfolk don’t understand the, uh, sophisticated scientific precision of this approach, and want Trog put down. Dr. Brockton protests on the grounds that this is her apeman, and it would be a darn shame if he was euthanized before she can teach him to play bridge or whatever. Drawing from the rich tradition of criminal jurisprudence the British Empire was so known for, the local magistrate convenes some kind of unnamed court proceedings to figure the matter out, in the most punishingly dismal square gray concrete box England has ever produced. Holy shit, TROG turns into a tense courtroom drama!

            Unfortunately, despite Dr. Brockton’s strident legal defense winning over the judge, that dickhole Mr. Murdock is not going to accept the idea that he can’t murder an unbelievably ancient and unique physical specimen that can even talk (!) just because a judge says he can’t. In fact, he expresses his contempt for legal jurisprudence by sitting in the crowd and constantly shouting out his opinions during the trial, which the judge seems to accept as qualifying him to be the prosecuting attorney. Murdock doesn’t believe in this newfangled evolution hocus pocus that the PC liberals are always cramming down his throat, and is none too pleased that this evolutionary missing link basically proves it. With the impeccable logic we’ve come to expect from religious reactionaries, he reasons if he just kills it, that will solve the problem and God will reward him for changing reality to make the Bible true.

            (END SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH) Things do not go as planned, however, and Trog ends up killing Murdock and escaping to a small but satisfying rampage, which includes impaling a butcher on a meat hook and using his prehistoric strength to tip over a car (which immediately burns to ashes, killing the driver. I hold, however, that this death was really more on the car manufacturer than the rampaging apeman. Unsafe at any speed!). Even poor Dr. Brockman has to admit that this is too far, and so the military is roused to snuff out the poor brute. Because they are the military and he is just an athletic human wearing a loin cloth and an ape mask, this proves surprisingly easy, but at least he goes down in epic style, kinda a WHITE HEAT sorta ending (spoilers for WHITE HEAT). And then poor Dr. Brockton just sadly walks off, and the credits roll. No denouement, no epilogue, no lecture on what science could have learned if only people would be more tolerant of murderous unfrozen ape men, no sad speculation on how the world could have benefitted if he’d only had time to learn to ride a unicycle. Old movies used to understand you just wanted to see the cool part of the story and could figure the rest out for yourselves. And thus, the tragic tale of TROG ends, at a breezy 91 minutes with credits.

            Obviously I desperately wanted to see this movie since I first learned of its existence, and I’m happy to report it does not disappoint. It is, of course, completely ludicrous, but it’s both earnestly ludicrous and diversely ludicrous, with new layers of insanity introduced every time the movie threatens to get into a rut. Most importantly, the two marquee stars – Joan Crawford and Trog—are in the entire thing! You could hardly be called a hopeless cynic for suspecting they roped ol’ Joan Crawford (in her final film role) into two or three days of shooting by promising bottomless martinis so they could get her name on the poster, but no, she’s the main character, on-screen for practically every scene, probably only slightly drunk and still wildly charismatic enough for us to tear our eyes off the title character to watch her. And as silly as Trog looks with his big fake ape head, look, you paid to see a Trog here (and I did! I actually paid to see this!) and the movie delivers all the goddam Trog you can handle. Director Freddie Francis orchestrates this without much style or grace (too bad, since he started his career as a cinematographer, and his two Academy Awards in that field prove he’s capable of directing better-looking material) but who the fuck cares about that shit? You get to see Joan Crawford playing ball with an apeman. If that sounds good to you, TROG delivers. If that doesn’t sound good to you, I’m sorry that you know nothing of true happiness.

            In conclusion, TROG was released October 24, 1970. Alas, The Kinks’ immortal Apeman was released a month later, on November 20, 1970, so it couldn’t be in the movie. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way they should, but that shouldn’t stop you from using science to teach animals to play sports. At least they sing it in LINK.  

* Although I’m not sure how much this will help, since despite theorizing that Trog is a relic of the ice age frozen in a glacier until recently, Dr. Brockton’s words conjure a vivid image in her listeners’ minds of Trog co-existing with some amazingly well-animated stop-motion Dinosaurs. This turns out to be recycled footage which was produced by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen for the 1956 Warner Bros. nature documentary THE ANIMAL WORLD. Not very scientifically accurate in my opinion, and also rather strange since she never mentions dinosaurs but does specifically mention Trog getting frozen in a glacier. And by the way, even that little theory seems pretty questionable. How recently, exactly, were there glaciers covering Berkshire? Even by the most generous numbers, this assumes Trog was unfrozen 16,000 years ago. No wonder he’s such a crotchety old grouch!

** IMDB and TCM both contain trivia sections claiming the mask is a leftover from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which seems plausible even if I can’t confirm it.

*** Fine, MY FAIR LADY, you philistine.

 

What else can one say?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	From The Boiling Rage Of A World Hurled Back One Million Years Comes… TROG. I honestly don’t understand what that means and question whether it’s even a sentence.
TITLE ACCURACY	100 fucking percent.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature Feature, Mad Science
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Joan Fucking Crawford!
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Michael Gough, Freddie Francis, and co-writer John Gilling
NUDITY?	No, although some strapping young men strip down to their underwear.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No, but Trog does have a dolly he’s fond of
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	No monster-vision here.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Science = teaching newfound animals how to be properly British.

Torture Garden

Torture Garden (1967)

Dir. Freddie Francis

Written by Robert Bloch

Starring Burgess Meredith, Jack Palance, Beverly Adams, Michael Bryant, Barbara Ewing, Peter Cushing

TORTURE GARDEN is not the first anthology horror film I’ve seen. It’s not the first Amicus Productions anthology horror film I’ve seen. It’s not the first Amicus Productions anthology horror film directed by Freddie Francis that I’ve seen. It’s not even the first Amicus Productions anthology horror film directed by Freddie Francis from the late 1960s and starring Peter Cushing that I’ve seen.

But you know what? It’s a damn fine one. I think it’s not only one of the studio’s best, but one of the best of the era’s many portmanteau films, period. And it’s not hurting for competition.

I mean, Amicus --scrappy competitor to the comparably more venerable British horror powerhouse Hammer Studios--  made a whole bunch of anthology horror films, it was kind of their thing. TORTURE GARDEN was an early one, but not the first (that would be 1965’s DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS); it was followed by THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970), ASYLUM (1972), TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972), VAULT OF HORROR (1973), and FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974), and THE UNCANNY (1977). And that’s just Amicus’s output; if you want to take a broader look at the anthology landscape from this period, you’ve also got Mario Bava’s BLACK SABBATH (1963) from Italy, DEAD OF NIGHT (the 1977 one, not the 1945 classic), THE DEVIL’S MESSENGER (1961), JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS (1968), Masakai Kobiyashis’s KWAIDEN (1968) from Japan, THE MONSTER CLUB (1981), NIGHT GALLERY (1969), PARAPSYCHO - SPECTRUM OF FEAR (1975) from Austria, SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968), TALES OF TERROR (1962), TALES THAT WITNESS MADNESS (1973), TRILOGY OF TERROR (1975), TWICE TOLD TALES (1963). And that’s an almost-certainly incomplete list of horror anthology films only from the two decades between 1960 and 1980. So yeah, there’s a lot of these.

And yet, TORTURE GARDEN manages to stand out.

Part of that is director Freddie Francis; a veteran cinematographer by the time he became a director (a career to which he would later return --to great acclaim and a couple Academy Awards-- after his days as a horror schlockmeister were over), he had a pretty uneven career, but, especially in his early days, still seemed to have enough ambition to make his films look nice. No Brit ever dared go as purely psychedelic with their lighting as the Italians, but here and there he and cinematographer Norman Warwick (THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES) manage to sneak some surreal green or feverish red into the lighting scheme, which nicely compliments the pushy, slightly heightened reality of the production design and the camerawork. It's not showy direction, but it has a careful attention to detail which subtly informs the tone and adds to its amiably creepy vibe.

Another part of TORTURE GARDEN's success is writer Robert Bloch; originally a short-story author in the Lovecraftian vein (he spent his early years corresponding with Lovecraft himself), Bloch had matured by the 1960s into a style distinctly his own, staking his claim to stories of prickly, abnormal psychology laced with a dark sense of irony (he wrote the novel which became Hitchcock’s PSYCHO in 1960). His stature as a titan of horror fiction is not in dispute, but his tenure as a film writer was as uneven as Francis’; I really dug the far-out weirdness of his work in ASYLUM, but his script for THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD isn’t nearly strong enough to survive the limp direction, and the movie is a total bore. And let's not forget, he wrote at least one draft of THE DEADLY BEES, a movie which -- I cannot stress enough -- technically qualifies as a war crime if shown to enemy combatants. The stories here, though, are some of his better, more fully realized work, and even if they probably worked better in their original form as short stories (especially the one with the murderous piano, which, as we will see, looks a little silly when visualized literally) they provide a solid foundation which Francis fleshes out admirably.

So the talent behind the camera is there, and that helps immensely. But the real ace in the hole this time around is the cast. Amicus supposedly originally wanted the old reliable duo of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as their anchor stars, but American distributor Columbia Pictures demanded they ditch the Brits and bring in some big American stars, so instead of Lee we get Burgess Meredith (ROCKY) and Jack Palance (SHANE) (Cushing got to stay on in a small guest role).

Even by 1967, Palance was long, long past the point in his career where he was interested in working very hard (as weird as it is that this stoic Western star would go on to win an Academy Award after doing z-movies movies like WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY and CRAZE [also for Freddie Francis!], it’s even weirder that the film that did it was fucking CITY SLICKERS. 1991 was a weird time), and he’s mostly a non-presence in this one. But Burgess Meredith --at the time, right in the middle of his tenure as The Penguin in the Adam West Batman TV series-- was always one of those actors who you could always count on to put in a little effort, whether he was working for Otto Preminger or voicing a character named “Golobulus” in G.I. JOE: THE MOVIE*. Meredith was also from an old school tradition of Hollywood vaudeville hams, and correctly identifies his appearing in a movie called TORTURE GARDEN as sufficient reason to play to the cheap seats. And he is absolutely correct: as much as I love Lee and Cushing, their brand of redoubtable British class can be a bit stuffy at time, and having Meredith in their place brings a huge influx of anarchic, broad energy to the proceedings and gives this particular horror anthology a very distinct feel.

Meredith, of course, plays “Dr. Diablo,” a gaudily-attired carnival barker at a macabre “torture garden” attraction, which I guess must have been a real thing at the time because nobody seems to be confused as to why there’s a tent filled with grotesquely mutilated wax dummies at this carnival, and seem to feel they’ve got their money’s worth. Once the show’s over, though, he appeals to five straggles to pay an extra £5 -- £83 in 2016 money, or a whopping $110 bucks US!-- and step into his back room for a very special show. This turns out to be a statue of Atropos, one of the three Greek Moiroi, and the Goddess who determines the ultimate death of mortals. Not really a good use of 100+ bucks (good thing everyone came to the county fair flush with a hundred bucks cash in their pocket), except that when you stare into her shears, you get to experience a neat little self-contained vignette which ends in your death. So, arguably a better value than it would first appear.

Even so, Palance looks a little bit more excited than I'm comfortable with, and he's definitely not wearing pants. I think Michael Ripper's expression on the left speaks for all of us here.

The first taker is Max (Michael Bryant, who at the time had every reason to believe he would soon be a big star with the inevitable release of his showy role in Orson Welles’ THE DEEP**), who murders his wealthy uncle for his mysterious stash of gold, only to discover the source of the gold is decidedly, shall we say, unexpected: a demonic man-eating cat who demands he commit murder! And is not interested in taking 'nice kitty!' as an excuse. Obviously, a diabolical, man-eating cat is a difficult thing to film without looking silly, and this is certainly the sort of thing which would work better as a short story. But somehow Francis actually pulls it off here; rather than using a lot of lame cat puppets (or just hurling unwilling cats at actors, as Dario Argento did in INFERNO), he tells the story through implication and meaningful close-ups of a tragically uncredited cat actor who has charisma like you wouldn’t believe. Though the gore leaves a little to be desired, the segment proves a surprisingly effective opener.

This cat should have been a huge star

Next up, we get aspiring Hollywood actress (Beverly Adams, mostly a TV actor who struck it big when she married hairstyle tycoon Vidal Sassoon and later divorced him and launched her own line of pet care products***) who has her sights set on clawing her way to the top, no matter what the cost. And she’s well on her way (muscling past her naive roommate to a date with a producer, and dumping him for a big star [American B-movie stalwart Robert Hutton, TALES FROM THE CRYPT]) before she starts to get the sense that something is a little… off about Hollywood’s ultra-elite. Before long, she’s risking her career (and life!) to uncover the horrible truth. If that sounds a lot like SOCIETY, well, it is (though the truth doesn’t turn out to be quite as colorfully goopy), but Francis again does a fine job of cultivating an atmosphere of incipient menace, clearly perceptible but never quite visible, and Bloch’s nasty, misanthropic take on these Hollywood clinger-ons --who aren’t even phonies, but wannabe phonies-- gives it the bite it needs to differentiate itself from countless “ain’t Hollywood a drag” tales of woe.

Following that, in the second-to-last slot where they inevitably stick the weakest segment, we find Kiwi actress and later crime novelist Barbara Ewing (DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE) as the girlfriend --and aspiring wife-- of a famous piano prodigy (John Standing, V FOR VENDETTA, BBC’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Game Of Thrones). She’s something of a controlling, demanding character, but not nearly as controlling or demanding as the other woman in the musician’s life -- his mother, who is currently residing as a ghost in a possessed piano which demands he constantly practice. The two women are immediately thrust into a competition for the musician’s time and affection, which Ewing seems to be winning, until the competition becomes a physical altercation and, well, it turns out a 98 pound blonde doesn’t have what it takes to go 10 rounds with a pissed-off, 'roided up aggressive grand piano (ROCKY hadn’t come out yet, so the piano doesn’t know it should play Eye of the Tiger while it dukes it out with its rival). Alas, this setup is just as funny to watch as it sounds on paper, which is a shame, because riiiiight up til the big piano vs woman throwdown, the segment does a perfectly respectable job as an escalating battle of wills. But there’s no getting around it, that ending, while appreciably eccentric, is just plain silly.

Fortunately, the film rallys for the last segment, which finds Jack Palance, as an obsessed Edgar Allan Poe fan, pumping rival Poe fanboy Peter Cushing (who recently returned to the big screen as a cartoon zombie made of money in ROGUE ONE) for the secret to his unparalleled collection of Poe memorabilia. The segment has one major hurdle to overcome: Palance is a bizarre choice for this character, who needs to come off as nerdy and manic and vulnerable in a way which Palance isn’t even close to achieving, though he makes a game effort. Really, this segment is obviously written for Cushing and Lee, but even without Lee to balance things out, it could not be more clear that the roles here should be reversed, with stone-face, intimidating Palance as the character holding all the power and tiny little Cushing as the obsessed, desperately curious interloper. The dialogue even makes it clear that Cushing has had at least three generations of his family living in America, so what the fuck is up with his posh accent? Argh!

Anyway, all that aside, Cushing is a delight to watch, as he inevitably is, and working with the old British pro seems to inspire Palace to at least make an effort. I don’t know how successful he is --or is even capable of being in this inexplicably miscast role-- but he’s definitely not phoning it in, and as one twist leads to an even crazier twist, the whole thing builds magnificently. While the first three segments are sturdy, well-constructed horror shorts, they’re pretty standard stuff, playing with timeless horror tropes which go back ages and ages. Here, though, the Robert Bloch who wrote the segment from ASYLUM where Herbert Lom obsessively builds tiny, anatomically accurate robot dolls with his own face on them makes himself known. This story is absolutely fucking nutty, and I love it, from the more staid opening --where Cushing and Palance trade nerdy, obsessive anecdotes about Poe-- to the screaming mad out-of-the-blue climax. My only complaint is that for a segment so fixated on Poe, his writings, and his legacy, it ought to have a touch more of Poe’s actual influence. Bloch and Poe shared a fixation on abnormal psychology as a gateway to a deep, subliminal horror, but Bloch’s instinct for dark irony and ambivalence to Poe’s baroque, brilliant use of language seems to put an insurmountable gap between the legacy of the two greats, and consequently the segment has the feeling of a affectionate reference more than a true soul-deep tribute. But no matter; it’s fun and crazy and I’m for it.

After this final segment, we return again to our five carnival attendees, and you recall that there’s actually a fifth person here -- Hammer Studios mascot Michael Ripper (more than half of all Hammer films 1956-1970)-- and you briefly wonder if he’s going to have his own segment, which would be highly unusual for the guy (who spent most of his career a bit player, and never a leading man). Alas, it’s not to be, but he does get one good showpiece moment right at the end, before Burgess Meredith swoops in to bid us adieu in his inimitable broad style. It’s an odd ending, and I must confess I’m not even exactly sure that I understand what’s going on here (obviously Meredith is the Devil, taunting wayward souls about their evil ways, but what exactly does he need these accomplices and all the hokey carnival fakery for?) but no matter, it’s a delightfully colorful end to a rock-solid anthology which makes exceptionally potent use of the talents of nearly everyone involved. Francis, Bloch, Cushing, Palance, Meredith, --and Amicus itself, for that matter-- all had the capacity for greatness in them, but rarely indeed did the stars align so perfectly to bring that capacity out. TORTURE GARDEN is, then, anything but.

(I mean the “torture” part, obviously. To watch, I mean. But it’s not really a garden of any kind either, so that interpretation would also be acceptable)

*Wait, was he cast in that because of his famous turn in the 1945 WWII veteran porn classic THE STORY OF G.I. JOE? If so, I hope they asked Robert Mitchum too. If that was an intentional referene, it definitely went over my head as a kid.

**The release of which did not turn out to be quite so inevitable as it surely appeared at the time

***The American Dream really can come true.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Do You Dare See What Dr. Diabo Sees? Which is pretty much the same thing as Can You Smell What The Rock Is Cooking? When you get down to it.
TITLE ACCURACY	There is a “torture garden,” with a sign explicitly naming it as such. Still not sure that’s a real thing, but hey, the magic of cinema.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Robert Bloch adapts from four of his own short stories
SEQUEL?	Arguably part of Amicus’ loose series of anthologies, being preceded by Dr. TORTURE’S HOUSE OF HORRORS and followed by THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Anthology horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	I suppose neither Palance nor Meredith were exactly on the A-list at the time, but they were definitely Marquee names
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Cushing, of course, and Michael Ripper. Also arguably director Freddie Francis, and certainly Robert Bloch.
NUDITY?	No, although there is a truly startling live bikini snow globe in one of the segments, which goes uncommented on.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Killer Cat! But then again, there’s a killer grand piano too, so it’s not that special.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Definitely a zombie, and a haunted piano, too.
POSSESSION?	Possessed piano
CREEPY DOLLS?	The wax dummies in the “torture garden”
EVIL CULT?	Arguably SPOILER some kind of crazy new age Hollywood bodysnatcher cult, though not exactly in a religious bent.
MADNESS?	Certainly!
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Yes!
VOYEURISM?	We get a killer grand piano POV, that’s unusual
MORAL OF THE STORY	If a shifty carny in a slapdash schlock murder-porn torture garden asks for a hundred bucks to go backstage and get a “real show,” definitely do it.