D. Arnold Pouter
B&W
That rarest of things: an English Boris Karlofff movie.
Boris Karloff just seems such an international figure. Even though his career was predominantly American, the name he took and that sinister screen persona made it seem like he was from some strange forgotten land. Bela Lugosi had a similar name, but he had an accent which gave away that he was from a fixed Eastern European locale. Karloff with his more mid-Atlantic tones was just impossible to place (and you certainly wouldn't have imagined he was from Catford in South East London. Somehow I can’t imagine Karloff on a Cockney fruit stall). No, Boris Karloff the star of scary movies hailed from some mysterious isle, maybe the same one as King Kong, and no doubt he hatched from an egg fully grown as the dapper, sinister and yet vulnerable gentleman we know.
Here he is back home, in that version of England which existed in a film studio’s polite and ordered mind, as a man who occupies the corner stool of a saloon bar and tells eerie tales. (In many ways like P.G. Wodehouse's Mr Mulliner, without the jokes, but with a surprising amount of horror and death.) Karloff relates these stories with a sinister smile on his face, his voice rumbling with menace, his hand forever stroking a scary, one-eyed black dog. Indeed what gives away that this pub isn't quite normal is the fact that everyone else in the pub just accepts Boris as one of them and don't run a mile from him – while in reality his presence would make any pint of warm ale feel uncomfortably chilled.
On a stormy night a charisma void of an actor, Robert Wainwright, stops by this country pub for a gin and water and a relief from his long drive. Boris has already embarked on that evening’s tales and the young man is drawn into listening, and so begins a portmanteau of stories - one about a young man breaking his father's heart by running away and the comeuppance that falls upon him; one is an act of cowardice in the war which has terrible consequences, and one is a man who breaks his fiancée’s heart in a tale which leads to murder and destruction. The realisation slowly dawns on this young visitor to the pub that all of these are all sinister twists on events which have happened in his own life.
The confrontation between him and Karloff swiftly escalates beyond all reasonable disbelief, and the (SPOILER ALERT) revelation that its Karloff's dog who is the sinister force is too silly for words, but in the main this is a scary and tense film where Karloff comes gloriously home, purring at his most superbly sinister in an unmistakably British setting.
At the end the young man runs into the darkness and the pub goes back to how it was, presumably before a name change and a visit from those poor young lads in ‘An American Werewolf in London’.
Showing posts with label folk-horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label folk-horror. Show all posts
Sunday, 30 November 2014
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
The Chrysalids (1971)
D. Michael Anders
Colour
‘The Chrysalids’ is a fantastic novel which I’ve travelled too far in life without reading and, now I have, I whole-heartily recommend it. As such I really wanted to enjoy this obscure and barely released film adaptation. John Wyndham’s ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ are much more wired into the psyche of the British public, I think, because of the film versions (the latter, of course, as ‘The Village of the Damned’). I wanted this film then to right a wrong, so that even if it wasn’t as well known it may one day get a cinema re-release, or a big DVD push, and the reputation of both it and the book would rise. Unfortunately, even though it doesn’t shy away from ambition, there are performances here so ropey they could be used in rigging, dialogue so mouldy it’s like it’s been delivered from a petri dish, the kind of continuity errors that would get most film-editors beaten, whipped and then sacked, and a plot which even a casual observer would stare at and wonder where all those bloody great holes came from.
Set in a harsh puritan society of a post-apocalyptic world, we follow decidedly mature teens Ian Ogilvie and Jane Seymour, who like nuclear Romeo and Juliet fall in love despite the enmity of their families. When the pair’s passion is discovered, the arguments which ensure result in the two of them revealing hitherto hidden telekinetic powers that mark them both out as devil’s spawn in their world. Their only chance for survival is to flee into the badlands outside the civilised world, but such is the fear they’ve provoked, they are pursued relentlessly by the mad preacher who runs the town.
I can handle Seymour and Ogilvie not really looking like teenagers at all. I can handle that the moment they escape, they ditch their buttoned up puritan garbs for some battered and revealing swimwear, as clearly they’re now rebelling. I can handle that the telepathy in the book has become the far more visually pleasing telekinesis in the film. I can ever handle that both Seymour and Ogilvie’s performances are bland, particularly when compared with the ridiculously and enthusiastically evil turn Roy Dotrice gives as the town preacher – and Seymour’s dad.
But what I really can’t get a grip on is the way telekinesis is only used when the plot needs it. At points the film just forgets that its lead characters can move things with their mind – which we can all agree, would be a useful ability to have in a scrape – and just finds some other way to get them out of trouble. Similarly the unexploded nuclear bomb they find at the end feels like deus ex grande machina. The book’s different ending also has a similar charge against it, but here we have two people, hundreds of years after a nuclear war that’s ill-defined in their history, instantly clocking what this weapon is and figuring out how to use it to their advantage. It’s like watching a caveman have a flash of inspiration on how to programme a digital watch.
There are some scary moments en route, particularly for Seymour who is very much screaming peril monkey of the movie, but this is a film which rides its way through the pretty English countryside with only a faint grasp on its own plot, and so never captures Wyndham and fails even on its own terms.
Colour
‘The Chrysalids’ is a fantastic novel which I’ve travelled too far in life without reading and, now I have, I whole-heartily recommend it. As such I really wanted to enjoy this obscure and barely released film adaptation. John Wyndham’s ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’ are much more wired into the psyche of the British public, I think, because of the film versions (the latter, of course, as ‘The Village of the Damned’). I wanted this film then to right a wrong, so that even if it wasn’t as well known it may one day get a cinema re-release, or a big DVD push, and the reputation of both it and the book would rise. Unfortunately, even though it doesn’t shy away from ambition, there are performances here so ropey they could be used in rigging, dialogue so mouldy it’s like it’s been delivered from a petri dish, the kind of continuity errors that would get most film-editors beaten, whipped and then sacked, and a plot which even a casual observer would stare at and wonder where all those bloody great holes came from.
Set in a harsh puritan society of a post-apocalyptic world, we follow decidedly mature teens Ian Ogilvie and Jane Seymour, who like nuclear Romeo and Juliet fall in love despite the enmity of their families. When the pair’s passion is discovered, the arguments which ensure result in the two of them revealing hitherto hidden telekinetic powers that mark them both out as devil’s spawn in their world. Their only chance for survival is to flee into the badlands outside the civilised world, but such is the fear they’ve provoked, they are pursued relentlessly by the mad preacher who runs the town.
I can handle Seymour and Ogilvie not really looking like teenagers at all. I can handle that the moment they escape, they ditch their buttoned up puritan garbs for some battered and revealing swimwear, as clearly they’re now rebelling. I can handle that the telepathy in the book has become the far more visually pleasing telekinesis in the film. I can ever handle that both Seymour and Ogilvie’s performances are bland, particularly when compared with the ridiculously and enthusiastically evil turn Roy Dotrice gives as the town preacher – and Seymour’s dad.
But what I really can’t get a grip on is the way telekinesis is only used when the plot needs it. At points the film just forgets that its lead characters can move things with their mind – which we can all agree, would be a useful ability to have in a scrape – and just finds some other way to get them out of trouble. Similarly the unexploded nuclear bomb they find at the end feels like deus ex grande machina. The book’s different ending also has a similar charge against it, but here we have two people, hundreds of years after a nuclear war that’s ill-defined in their history, instantly clocking what this weapon is and figuring out how to use it to their advantage. It’s like watching a caveman have a flash of inspiration on how to programme a digital watch.
There are some scary moments en route, particularly for Seymour who is very much screaming peril monkey of the movie, but this is a film which rides its way through the pretty English countryside with only a faint grasp on its own plot, and so never captures Wyndham and fails even on its own terms.
Sunday, 29 September 2013
The Good Children and the Bad (1970)
D.
Piers Haggard
Colour
That thought occurred while watching ‘The Good Children and the Bad’, one of the English pastoral shockers of the 1970s. The sunlight, the dreamy shots of corn, the blonde hair of heroine make this one of the more aesthetically pleasing of English horror films, but surely the subject matter is what we would now know as torture porn.
It’s ‘Celebration Day’ in a lovely English village, which seems to be somewhere in the West Country. Possibly the most beautiful place in the West Country, every shot glows with luminous light, like the world’s best Flake advert. If you’ve ever been an English country fete you’ll know the kind of thing to expect; there are coconut shies, a local dignitary in stocks, various bobbing games and a maypole. However this is more sinister than your average cakes and tombola village fete. Towards the end of the day some of the younger children in the local school, the ones who have been naughty, are led to the maypole. There they are tortured by the good older children. The idea being that after such treatment, they’ll never be naughty again.
Only this year local teacher, Ingrid Pitt, decides she isn’t going to stand for this and attacks the older children – and then anyone who gets in her way – with a truly huge machete.
What follows is good gory fun, which at the time was an emulation of the American work of Hershell Gordon Lewis, but now looks more Eli Roth. The kids go down one by one, and when the locals react badly to this disruption of their local traditions, they are brutalised too. The only person to stand with the teacher is her lover, David Prowse, who makes full use of his West Country brogue. They are the good couple who are railing against the old orders, radical and righteous youth rising up to challenge the stifling conservatism of tradition. The film is unabashedly on their side and we as an audience is supposed to root for them, though their morality of their stand is somewhat sullied by the mayhem of their killing spree. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway would never have looked so cool as Bonnie & Clyde if they’d kicked proceedings off by murdering twenty kids.
It’s a minor film, one which deserves to stand a little behind the likes of ‘The Witchfinder General’, ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ and the original ‘The Wicker Man’ (not the Nicholas Cage travesty). However, I cannot imagine how it would look if it was made today. The air of reactionary rebellion, the very white Englishness of the village fete and the body painting that’s indulged in during Pitt’s obligatory nude scene all mark this down as a film of the age of Aquarius. A film whose air of menace and atmosphere of rebellion seems almost impossible to transport to modern cinema. And that’s before we get to the violence. The violence is extreme and nasty. And it heavily features children. As such, if it was made today, Mumsnet would scream outrage and demand we all have our eyes washed with soap; The Guardian would write long hand-wringing, mealy-mouthed articles about how it deplored censorship, but the violence of this film means that with a heavy heart it should be banned and all copies tossed into a landfill; while Paul Dacre of The Daily Mail would no doubt be so filled with rage and fury he’d no doubt immolate himself outside Northcliffe House as a final cry of despair against a country which could produce such a filth.
The fact is that this country did produce such filth, but in a different time so that it is now seen as a forgotten gem, rather than a full-on, screaming, naked assault on everything that is good and decent in this sceptred isle.
Colour
It’s interesting to imagine how horror films would have been
made in different eras. Obviously there are remakes that allow you to see a
more modern take of a classic film, but then ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre’ and even that travesty of Nicholas Cage’s ‘The Wicker Man’
retain substantial DNA of the original. No, what I’m talking about is taking a
film, one that was strange and innovative and daring in its time and imagining
how it would be done today. If there had been no ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ or ‘The Wicker Man’ in the 1970s, how would some
young, ambitious and original filmmaker tackle them now? How would he or she
make them distinctive and yet still give them a flavour of the modern world?
That thought occurred while watching ‘The Good Children and the Bad’, one of the English pastoral shockers of the 1970s. The sunlight, the dreamy shots of corn, the blonde hair of heroine make this one of the more aesthetically pleasing of English horror films, but surely the subject matter is what we would now know as torture porn.
It’s ‘Celebration Day’ in a lovely English village, which seems to be somewhere in the West Country. Possibly the most beautiful place in the West Country, every shot glows with luminous light, like the world’s best Flake advert. If you’ve ever been an English country fete you’ll know the kind of thing to expect; there are coconut shies, a local dignitary in stocks, various bobbing games and a maypole. However this is more sinister than your average cakes and tombola village fete. Towards the end of the day some of the younger children in the local school, the ones who have been naughty, are led to the maypole. There they are tortured by the good older children. The idea being that after such treatment, they’ll never be naughty again.
Only this year local teacher, Ingrid Pitt, decides she isn’t going to stand for this and attacks the older children – and then anyone who gets in her way – with a truly huge machete.
What follows is good gory fun, which at the time was an emulation of the American work of Hershell Gordon Lewis, but now looks more Eli Roth. The kids go down one by one, and when the locals react badly to this disruption of their local traditions, they are brutalised too. The only person to stand with the teacher is her lover, David Prowse, who makes full use of his West Country brogue. They are the good couple who are railing against the old orders, radical and righteous youth rising up to challenge the stifling conservatism of tradition. The film is unabashedly on their side and we as an audience is supposed to root for them, though their morality of their stand is somewhat sullied by the mayhem of their killing spree. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway would never have looked so cool as Bonnie & Clyde if they’d kicked proceedings off by murdering twenty kids.
It’s a minor film, one which deserves to stand a little behind the likes of ‘The Witchfinder General’, ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ and the original ‘The Wicker Man’ (not the Nicholas Cage travesty). However, I cannot imagine how it would look if it was made today. The air of reactionary rebellion, the very white Englishness of the village fete and the body painting that’s indulged in during Pitt’s obligatory nude scene all mark this down as a film of the age of Aquarius. A film whose air of menace and atmosphere of rebellion seems almost impossible to transport to modern cinema. And that’s before we get to the violence. The violence is extreme and nasty. And it heavily features children. As such, if it was made today, Mumsnet would scream outrage and demand we all have our eyes washed with soap; The Guardian would write long hand-wringing, mealy-mouthed articles about how it deplored censorship, but the violence of this film means that with a heavy heart it should be banned and all copies tossed into a landfill; while Paul Dacre of The Daily Mail would no doubt be so filled with rage and fury he’d no doubt immolate himself outside Northcliffe House as a final cry of despair against a country which could produce such a filth.
The fact is that this country did produce such filth, but in a different time so that it is now seen as a forgotten gem, rather than a full-on, screaming, naked assault on everything that is good and decent in this sceptred isle.
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