The Changeling (1980)

The Changeling was an attempt at a haunted house movie and if you were going to compile a list of all the mistakes you could make that would render such a movie ineffective then this one ticks every box.

George C. Scott stars as John Russell, a professor of music whose wife and daughter are killed in a freak car accident. He slowly starts pulling himself together and feeling that a change of scenery might help he accepts a teaching position in Seattle. At first he seems he’s made a great choice. Through his contacts in the faculty he is able to rent a glorious (and huge) old house from the local historical society. It’s perfect, giving him the peace and quiet he needs for his work (he’s a composer as well as teaching music). And the lady from the historical society (played by Scott’s real-life wife Trish van Devere) is rather nice and a friendship is growing up between them.

Everything would be fine except for the pesky ghost in the attic. It soon becomes obvious that John has not recovered from his personal tragedy as well as he’d thought. He’s a bit of an emotional mess and, perhaps because of this vulnerability, he’s also inclined to be remarkably ready to accept supernatural explanations for the odd goings-on in the house.

He makes a call to the local psychic research expert and is put in touch with a medium and soon it’s séance time. This ghost is very anxious to communicate and before long John is busily digging up people’s floorboards looking for murdered bodies and what he uncovers is a scandalous conspiracy from the past.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like subtle horror. I much prefer it to the more obvious kind. I dislike gore. Give me atmosphere and a slow building of suspense and dread any day. It has to be said however that it is possible to be too subtle. At some point you have to get scary. And in this movie it just doesn’t happen.

Even worse there is never any sense that the two main protagonists (John Russell and his new lady friend) are in real danger from the ghost. And there’s no-one else in the movie that we can possibly be expected to care about.

The movie’s flaws don’t end there. Too much of the explanation for the haunting is given away too soon and the explanation is banal and predictable. The villains are obvious and are such tedious clichés that their evil is too boring to make any emotional impact.

The whole movie has a bad TV movie feel to it, both visually and in the ineptness of the scripting and the flatness of the direction. The big horror set-pieces towards the end are silly and distinctly non-scary. Director Peter Medak has spent most of his subsequent undistinguished career in television.

George C. Scott is adequate but he doesn’t seem overly interested. No-one else in the cast makes any impression at all.

This one is not even worth a rental I’m afraid.

The UK DVD from Optimum looks OK but has no extras at all.

The Young Master (1980)

I’ve never been a huge fan of martial arts movies but I have slowly developed quite a love for the movies of Shaw Brothers Studio. I’m less familiar with the output of the major producer of Hong Kong action movies, Golden Harvest. After seeing The Young Master I’m inclined to think I might stick to Shaw Brothers productions in future.

This was Jackie Chan’s triumphant return to Golden Harvest and he wrote and directed the movie as well as starring in it.

I must confess that I have only the haziest notion of what the plot as all about. Two orphans, Tiger and Dragon, had been taken in and raised by the master of a kung fu school. Tiger betrayed his master by helping a rival school to win the lion dance competition, and was banished in disgrace. His master later relented and sent Dragon (Jackie Chan) to fetch him back.

Somehow the plot then gets involved with bank robbers and with Dragon being mistaken for an escaped criminal. The action sequences are non-stop and there’s little time for coherent plot development, but then coherent plot development is probably not what the audience for this film was going to paying their money to see.

It’s mostly played for comedy and the comedy is very broad and relies a good deal on slapstick. It’s a style of comedy that has never done much for me and as a result I found this movie to be pretty heavy going. Of course if you enjoy this type of humour your reaction to the movie is probably going to be quite different. It’s just a matter of personal taste.

The fight scenes are frenetic and spectacular enough but they lack the elegance of the fight scenes in Shaw Brothers movies. Again it’s a matter of personal taste.

The acting is as broad as the comedy. Jackie Chan is likeable enough.

I don’t want to put people off because really my fairly negative response to this film is mostly due to the fact that this sort of movie is just not my cup of tea.

Pilot X (Death in the Air)

Pilot X (also known as Death in the Air) is a mystery thriller, but it’s odd enough to be of interest to cult movie fans. Any movie that combines aerial dogfights, a murder mystery, a love story and psychiatry is a winner in my book. And being the 1930s (it actually came out in 1936) the psychiatry is in the form of delightfully half-baked Hollywood Freudianism, so that’s another major plus!

It was produced by an obscure Poverty Row studio. Director Elmer Clifton had been making pictures since 1915, most of them evidently low-budget efforts including hordes of B-westerns. His career had started promisingly but by the end of the silent era he had become strictly a B-movie director.

Passenger aircraft in the US are mysteriously disappearing. It soon becomes evident that even though it’s peacetime, they’re being shot down. By an insane pilot identified only by the huge X painted on his aircraft’s wings. Several of the downed planes belong to an American aircraft manufacturer rather unfortunately (this was 1936 remember) known as Mr Goering. He hires US Army pilot and part-time amateur detective Jerry Blackwood to track down the mad killer, with some assistance from psychiatrist Dr Norris. Dr Norris decides it’s a case of war-time neurosis, an air ace who is driven to keep increasing his score of kills even after the war is over.

It transpires that there just happen to be five wartime air aces living in the neighbourhood so they are all invited to participate in the hunt for the crazed killer, who is presumably one of their number. They are all invited to base themselves at Mr Goering’s house while they fly patrols looking for Pilot X.

The acting is wonderfully bad even by B-movie standards, but the concept is so pulpy that it just adds to the enjoyment.

The aerial sequences are reasonably impressive - in fact by low-budget movie standards very impressive. The murder mystery is at least moderately clever. Of course it goes without saying that the aircraft manufacturer has a beautiful daughter (OK, in this case she’s his ward, but she fulfills the same plot functions) and naturally she becomes involved in a romantic triangle between Mr Goering’s son and Jerry Blackwood.

There’s also a memorable mad scene of operatic proportions involving one of the air aces, an RAF flyer with a very bad case of shell-shock. It’s all very silly but it’s fairly well-paced, it’s off-beat and it’s highly entertaining if you accept on strictly B-movie terms. It’s certainly worth a look.

It’s released on DVD by Alpha Video and it’s also available for download at various sites (quite legally since It’s a public domain movie).

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Hammer Films had been around for quite a while and had enjoyed considerable success with their excellent 1955 science fiction horror offering The Quatermass Xperiment but it was The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 that really put them on the map, and in the process relaunched gothic horror as a profitable movie genre.

Terence Fisher had already helmed many movies for Hammer including a couple of science fiction films and a superb and somewhat gothic-influenced film noir, Stolen Face. He was an obvious choice to direct Hammer’s most ambitious project to date. Hammer has decided to redo the most famous of the Universal monster movies of the 30s, but in colour and widescreen and with rather more sex and violence. It proved to be an extremely astute decision, and Hammer’s choice of Fisher as director and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as the stars was equally inspired.

With Jimmy Sangster writing the screenplay and Bernard Robinson as production designer Hammer had assembled what was to prove a formidable creative team.

The plot of The Curse of Frankenstein does not stick too closely to Mary Shelley’s novel or to Universal’s 1931 version. Which was probably just as well. The enormous success of the film was due to the fact that it felt like a completely fresh approach to the gothic horror genre.

In this new version Baron Frankenstein’s assistant is his former tutor. Paul Krempe had been his willing collaborator until Frankenstein’s experiments started to become more extreme, and his methods more morally dubious. Paul stays only because he is afraid to leave Frankenstein’s beautiful cousin and intended bride Elizabeth alone in the house with the increasingly obsessive Baron. Paul tries to persuade Frankenstein of the danger posed by his latest experiment, the creation of an artificial creature made up of assorted body parts, but to no avail.

Paul’s efforts to stop the Baron result in damage to the brain that has been earmarked for the creature. This not only has disastrous consequences for the creature - it also pushes Frankenstein even closer to the edge of madness as he blames Paul for sabotaging his great experiment.

The most revolutionary thing about this version is Peter Cushing’s performance as Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s book and most film adaptations raise the question as to who is the real monster, Frankenstein or the creature he has created, but in this version there’s absolutely no question at all - it’s Frankenstein who is the monster.

And he’s not an idealistic scientist who gradually succumbs to the temptation to play God, nor is he a well-meaning essentially good man who slowly loses his moral compass as his experiments get out of hand. With Cushing’s Frankenstein it’s clear that the seeds of madness and evil were there right from the start. Right from the beginning of his scientific career he was prepared to pursue ends and to utilise means that were not just morally dubious - they were clearly and unequivocally immoral.

While Boris Karloff had endowed the creature with a certain dignity and made him rather sympathetic in Hammer’s version Christopher Lee’s creature is a pathetic shambling wreck, a hideous reflection of the moral vacuum in its creator’s soul. The focus in this film is entirely on Frankenstein, and on the character flaws that drive him to destruction and disaster. It’s an acting tour-de-force by Cushing. In the later Hammer Frankenstein films the Baron would at times be portrayed in more equivocal terms and Cushing arguably gave more nuanced performances but the sheer power of his performance in the 1957 film is breath-taking.

The first half hour is a little on the slow side but after that the pace picks up and Fisher is in complete control. Some of his earlier films are extremely good but it’s clear that gothic horror was the perfect genre for his talents and his mastery is already evident here.

It’s not my favourite movie of the Hammer Frankenstein cycle but it was certainly an impressive beginning.

Warner’s DVD release can’t really be faulted so far as the transfer is concerned although the lack of worthwhile extras is a little disappointing.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

The Creeping Flesh looks superficially like a fairly typical Hammer gothic horror flick, and mostly it is, although in fact it was made by Tigon Pictures rather than Hammer. With Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing heading the cast and Freddie Francis directing this is a solid effort with a few interesting features that make it worth seeking out.

Peter Cushing was always at his best playing mad scientists, and Professor Emmanuel Hildern is certainly eccentric if perhaps not actually mad. He’s a much more kindly character than Cushing’s Dr Frankenstein from the Hammer Frankenstein films, and that is in some ways the professor’s downfall. He really wants to do good. He is obsessed with the idea of evil as a disease, a disease than can be cured. It might even be possible to inoculate people against evil. His obsession stems from personal tragedy. His wife, a music hall star, has been confined to an asylum for the criminally insane for many years. he is terrified that the madness might be passed on to his daughter Penelope.

The asylum is run by his half-brother, James Hildern (Christopher Lee). James is also involved in scientific investigations into the nature of madness. He has always been somewhat in his older brother’s shadow professionally but Emmanuel has become increasingly isolated from the scientific community (apart from his ideas on evil he also holds eccentric opinions on human evolution). Emmanuel’s star is fading while James’s is rising.

Emmanuel has brought back a skeleton from an expedition to New Guinea, a skeleton he believes will restore his standing in the word of science. This skeleton seems to have some very unusual properties - when exposed to water it grows new flesh. Emmanuel thinks New Guinea folklore may hold the key to this mystery, and that the skeleton is a representative of pure evil. As such the blood (for it grows blood vessels as well as flesh) could be used to manufacture a vaccine against evil.

Of course things go horribly wrong. Emmanuel receives word that his wife has finally died. His daughter believed that her mother died many years earlier and when she discovers the truth she does not take it well. Emmanuel has tried, perhaps too hard, to shelter her from the world. Now he will pay the price for his mistake.

Emmanuel Hildern is not an evil mad scientist but his own obsessions have clouded his judgment very badly, and his isolation from the scientific mainstream has made him increasingly prone to idiosyncratic and even deluded ideas. Cushing is very much the star and he gives an impressive and rather subtly nuanced performance.

Christopher Lee as James is almost as interesting. If personal tragedy and scientific neglect have distorted Emmanuel’s character then ambition and jealousy of his more famous elder brother has also distorted James’ mind. He dreams of winning a major scientific prize and he is prepared to adopt very unethical methods in order to do so. He’s a delightfully smarmy and sinister villain and Lee has a great time with the role.

Lorna Heilbron is superb as Penelope, the daughter who becomes an unwitting victim of her father’s unwise experiments. Her descent into madness is quite chilling.

Freddie Francis was always a reliable enough horror director and on rare occasions when a story really engaged his interest he could be quite inspired. He has some very good moments in this production. He was of course more famous as a cinematographer than as a director and this background allows him to pull off a couple of good visual set-pieces, especially the flashback sequence of Emmanuel’s wife’s mental breakdown. Francis’s use of distorted images is both visually impressive and a very economical and effective way of filling in the backstory.

By the standards of 1973 it’s rather tame - no nudity, very little gore.

All in all it’s a pretty decent gothic horror effort, and certainly worth getting hold of if you’re a fan of Cushing and Lee.

Columbia Tristar’s DVD is a satisfactory widescreen release although some extras would have been nice.

The She-Beast (1966)

Michael Reeves has a huge reputation among horror fans, a reputation based entirely on one film, Witchfinder General. It was his third and final film before his death at the age of 25. His second movie, The Sorcerers, is less known but is an underrated gem. Sadly the same cannot be said for his 1966 debut film, The She-Beast (La Sorella di Satana).

The She-Beast was made in Italy. Reeves, whose ambition and determination to break into directing were breath-taking, apparently turned up one day with a suitcase containing £17,000 of his own money and announced that he intended to make a movie. His friend Ian Ogilvy would star (in fact Ogilvy appeared in all three of Reeves’ movies), but Ogilvy was completely unknown and he needed a big name to attract some attention, In Italy the biggest name in horror was Barbara Steele and somehow he persuaded her to do it (she has no idea how he did it since she has only the haziest recollection of making the film). Steele was paid $1,000 for one day’s work but wasn’t told that it was going to be a very very long day’s shooting, 22 hours in fact!

Reeves had a screenplay already but Amos Powell was brought in as a kind of script doctor. In fact the script arguably needed a whole team of script doctors and that’s just one of the problems with this movie.

So, the plot. We open with the execution of a witch in Translyvania, and as is traditional in horror flicks she makes use of her dying breath to curse the villagers and their descendants. Two hundred years later a young English couple, Veronica (Barbara Steele) and Philip (Ian Ogilvy) decide that Translyvania would be a wonderfully romantic place to spend their honeymoon.

Their hotel is a bit of a disappointment. It’s basically a hovel. They decide to make the most of it and pretty soon they’re doing what you’d expect a honeymooning couple to be doing but the mood is somewhat spoilt when Veronica notices that the hotel manager (who rejoices in the name of Ladislav Groper) is watching them through the window. In a fit of righteous husbandly indignation Philip beats up Groper. Groper takes his revenge by sabotaging their car and on the following day they end up driving into the lake Philip escapes but Veronica is drowned.

At least that’s what is assumed to have happened, but the corpse seems to have disappeared. On the previous day they had encountered an eccentric local nobleman named Count von Helsing. His family were hereditary vampire and witch hunters. He now informs Philip that Veronica can still be saved.

The biggest problem here is that it’s not really clear what Reeves is trying to achieve. It’s obviously not meant to be taken as a straightforward horror movie. It’s obviously meant mostly as a comedy. I suspect he was trying for the Theatre of the Absurd feel that Polanski captured so well in his early films like Knife in the Water and more particularly Cul-de-Sac (which came out in the same year as The She-Beast). Reeves was an obsessive cinephile so he was probably familiar with Knife in the Water. That absurdist feel is all very well but to maintain it in a comedy you need to keep the humour fairly dark, but then we’re treated to a pure Keystone Kops chase sequence which doesn’t fit.

There’s also a fair amount of satire here although I’m not sure exactly who his main targets were, the communist regimes of eastern Europe or British tourists.

Horror comedy is not easy to pull off successfully and Reeves just wasn’t experienced enough to do it. It has its moments but really it’s only worth watching for curiosity value.

Dark Sky’s DVD release is truly superb when compared to the earlier DVD appearances of this movie which were atrocious. The commentary track features both Ian Ogilvy and Barbara Steele and is more entertaining than the movie.

Stoney (1969)

I bought Code Red’s double-feature DVD Stoney/The Killer Likes Candy on the assumption that these were eurospy flicks, a genre of which I’m very fond. In fact Stoney (AKA Surabaya Conspiracy) hails from the Philippines and isn’t really a spy movie. It’s still worth a look.

Made in 1969, it’s more of a heist movie but with a background of international intrigue that makes it at the very least a first cousin of the spy thriller.

The details of the plot are somewhat murky and convoluted and there are so many players all trying to double-cross one another that it’s easy to lose track of exactly where everyone fits in.

Harvey Ward (Michael Rennie) is a businessman with various interests in the East, almost all of them illegal. Gunrunning is one of his businesses. Now he’s got wind of a possible fortune in buried treasure. During the war the Japanese had looted the vaults of various Dutch banks in Indonesia (or the Dutch East Indies as it then was). A Japanese general serving a long prison sentence for war crimes has revealed the hiding place of the loot. It’s an enormous fortune, and Harvey Ward wants it.

Ward doesn’t like getting to personally involved so he sends his mistress Irene Stone (known to her friends as Stoney) to make arrangements to have this loot smuggled out of the Indonesian city of Surabaya. Her qualifications for the mission seem to be that she’s extremely beautiful and thus finds it fairly easy to persuade men to do what she wants them to do, and her ethics are exceptionally flexible.

Steven Blessing, who appears to be a kind of freelance adventurer and who happens to be an old acquaintance of Stoney’s, is also on the trail of the treasure. Other players include Indonesian government officials and a guerilla army. Things have the potential to get messy, and that’s exactly what happens. Much mayhem ensues.

Before we get to the mayhem we get the sex and the glamour. Stoney has been negotiating with a very senior Indonesian official who introduces her to the glamorous side of life in Surabaya. He also hopes to make her his mistress. Stoney is more interested in bedding the hunky Steven Blessing. These are characters who find it easy to combine the pleasures of flirtation with the fine art of the double-cross.

Once the heist is under way the action starts and it’s fairly relentless. The body count is prodigious. The movie was morally pretty dark to begin with and it gets steadily more cynical as it goes.

Mike Preston plays Steven Blessing and while he’s not the world’s greatest actor he’s competent enough. He doesn’t have the charm you expect of a protagonist in a movie of this sort but that makes him slightly more interesting. Whether he’s the good guy or the bad guy is a moot point. It depends on who’s paying him. But he’s the closest the movie has to a hero. He does have some redeeming features.

The movie’s biggest asset is Barbara Bouchet as Stoney. Apart from adding considerable glamour she gives a nicely cynical performance with some amusing tongue-in-cheek moments. Some viewers might also be interested in the fact that she doesn’t keep her clothes on for the whole film.

Technically it’s surprisingly good given that it was presumably made on a shoestring budget. This was Wray Davis’s only directing credit but he does a reasonable job.

If you’re prepared to make allowances for this being a very cheap movie trying desperately to jump on any bandwagon that happened to be passing then it’s actually fairly entertaining.

There’s some print damage but on the whole (considering the obscurity of the movie) the picture quality is quite acceptable, and it is in the correct 2.35:1 aspect ratio.