Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968)

There have been quite a few movie adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft, and the one thing they all have in common is that they have all left Lovecraft’s fans dissatisfied. Tigon’s 1968 Curse of the Crimson Altar is no exception to this rule.

Antiques dealer Robert Manning (Mark Eden) is looking for his missing brother, Peter Manning. He received a letter from Peter some days earlier. The letter is on the notepaper of Craxted Lodge in the village of Greymarsh so Robert sets off for Greymarsh to see what he can find out.

Craxted Lodge belongs to a man named Morley (Christopher Lee). Morley denies having ever set eyes on Peter Manning but he invites Robert to stay at the house. He explains that there’s no chance of getting a room at the pub because the villagers are celebrating the Witch’s Night. Back in the days when witch-burning was a popular spectator sport a witch named Lavinia was burnt in the village. This witch was an ancestress of Mr Morley. Before she died Lavinia cursed the villagers and all their descendants (that being the sort of thing that was expected of a witch in such circumstances and Lavinia being the sort who likes to play by the rules). Considering the curse you might wonder why the anniversary would be such a cause for celebration but I suppose people have commemorated stranger things.

While staying at Craxted Lodge Robert has strange dreams in which he sees his brother being tortured in an attempt to persuade him to sign a certain paper. The viewer already knows this because this is the scene that opened the movie. In charge of these torturings is Lavinia (played by Barbara Steele in spectacular makeup), now transformed into some kind of Queen of Hell. Later Robert will have dreams in which he is the one being tortured.

Morley’s decrepit butler Elder (Michael Gough) warns Robert to get away while he can. Robert has no intention of leaving, partly because he is convinced that he is now hot on brother Peter’s trail and partly because he thinks he has a pretty good chance of getting Morley’s bodacious blonde niece into bed.

Of course we know by now that Robert is in great danger and Robert has a pretty fair idea that something unpleasant is in the offing, especially when Professor Marsh’s chauffeur takes a potshot at him with a shotgun. Professor Marsh (Boris Karloff) is Morley’s houseguest and is an expert on witchcraft. The plot then follows a fairly predictable course, with Lavinia determined to recruit Robert into the ranks of the damned. There’s the obligatory Black Mass kind of ceremony with the obligatory naked young woman about to be sacrificed.

Superficially the plot is clearly going to put most viewers in mind of The Wicker Man, The Night of the Eagle and Eye of the Devil, all movies dealing with the survival of witchcraft in the modern world. The movie also has a certain amount in common with Hammer’s Dracula AD 1972, with the collision between evil supernatural forces and 1960s/early 1970s youth culture. It also resembles Dracula AD 1972 in obviously having been made by people of the previous generation who view the whole youth culture thing as presaging the end of civilisation as we know it, which it sort of was.

The biggest attraction here is the stellar cast. Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Barbara Stele and Michael Gough! All in the one movie! With that sort of cast the movie has to be worth seeing, doesn’t it? Actually the movie is worth seeing, although possibly not for the reasons the film-makers had in mind.

Boris Karloff was incapable of a bad performance. Christopher Lee is pretty good as well, in a part very similar to the one he would play a few years later in the aforementioned The Wicker Man. It’s the sort of role he did well - amusingly pompous with a slightly obsessive and ever so slightly unhinged quality lurking just beneath the surface. Michael Gough gets insufficient screen time and is largely wasted although he does manage to convince us that he’s totally bonkers. Barbara Steele doesn’t get to do much acting but she does get to look wonderfully perverse in some very extravagant makeup and costumes.

There are some major problems with this movie. The script is more than a little on the incoherent side, the pacing gets a bit sluggish at times and the viewer can’t help forming the impression that no-one involved with this production was entirely certain what it was they were trying to achieve. These are all valid criticisms and they’ve contributed to this movie’s reputation as being a bit of a turkey. If you’re going to approach this as a serious horror film then this reputation is perhaps deserved but to view the movie that way is to miss all the fun.

This movie is very much a product of its time, with its puzzled and rather hostile view of youth culture, its confused attempt to be in tune with the times (with drug references and some gloriously silly psychedelic special effects), its embarrassed attempt to be daring by throwing in a bit of totally gratuitous nudity, and its generally shambolic air. That’s what makes it so much fun. Plus the stars were obviously not taking all this very seriously and were instead intent on having a bit of fun. Except for Christopher Lee who naturally takes it all very seriously, which makes it even more fun.

Apart from the fun angle it does have some real virtues. It looks absolutely splendid, in an outrageous late 60s way.

The German DVD release from e-m-s claims to be uncut, although I must say I’m somewhat dubious about that claim. It’s a reasonably good anamorphic transfer. It includes the original English soundtrack with German subtitles that are unfortunately non-removable (or if there is a way to remove them I couldn’t find it). It seems to be the only DVD release currently available at an affordable price.

Curse of the Crimson Altar manages to be entertaining in spite of itself and I couldn’t help enjoying myself. Recommended if you promise not to take it seriously.

Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)

Adapting Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 Confessions of an Opium Eater for the screen would have presented considerable challenges, to say the least. Perhaps wisely the makers of the 1962 film Confessions of an Opium Eater made no attempt to do so. What they did instead was to make a movie very loosely inspired by De Quincey’s classic. It really has very little to do with De Quincey’s book although it does also involve opium. The results are bizarre but fascinating.

A hundred years after the publication of the famous book Gilbert De Quincey (Vincent Price), a descendant of Thomas De Quincey, arrives in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He has lived a life of adventure in China and other parts of the East but he is still searching. What he’s searching for he has no idea. What he finds is the strangest adventure of his life.

A tong war has broken out. At issue is the auction of girls for wives. The girls are kidnapped in China and then sent to San Francisco where they are destined to be married to the highest bidder. A Chinese-American journalist, George Wah, has been campaigning against the auctions and has been killed for his troubles. Gilbert De Quincey bears a tattoo identifying him as belonging to the tong responsible for the auctions but whether his loyalties lie with the tong is a matter of some doubt, not least to Gilbert De Quincey.

Whatever his loyalties De Quincey does not like the idea of the auctions. He finds himself becoming more deeply embroiled than he intended in the conflict over the auctions. After meeting the beautiful, enigmatic and quite possibly evil Ruby Low (Linda Ho) who appears to be the effective leader of the tong he decides to investigate the activities of the late George Wah. He breaks into George Wah’s office by means of a kite (yes, really). He finds an unfortunate Chinese girl destined for the auction that night and then he and the girl are forced to take refuge in a secret compartment, a secret compartment that leads to a hidden elevator that leads in turn into the city’s sewers.

After various further adventures involving girls in suspended cages and a meeting with an ageing Chinese midget who claims to be a prized sing-song girl he finds himself in an opium den. After he samples the merchandise we are treated to a delightfully strange opium dream sequence.

Of course there are times when we can’t help wondering if the entire movie is an opium dream. Only Gilbert De Quincey could tell us if this is so or not. Or perhaps even he could not answer that question. The strength of the movie is that it manages subtly to suggest such a possibility without ever giving us any clear indication if we are on the right track or not. Perhaps none of us can truly say if our lives are reality or illusion?

The events in which De Quincey gets caught up are certainly strange enough to be a dream, although once the viewer accepts this world as real they do follow with a certain logic.

This movie overall is a crazy mixture of action, drug dreams and general weirdness. The whole movie, not just the opium dream sequences, has the feeling of a drug-induced fantasy. Albert Zugsmith had the kind of varied career that made him the ideal director for such a strange film (he worked as a lawyer, a newspaper publisher and a band publicist as well as producing and directing exploitation movies). We’re never entirely sure whether we’re meant to believe anything that is happening, which presumably was Zugsmith’s intention. Robert Hill wrote the screenplay and can therefore take some of the credit for the film’s oddness.

While it’s unlikely that star Vincent Price had any more idea than anybody else what this movie was about he adapts extremely well and his unique screen presence is well-suited to such odd material. Linda Ho makes a deliciously over-the-top villainess.

This movie is available on DVD in the Warner Archive made-on-demand series. It’s an excellent anamorphic print. Picture quality (the movie was shot in black-and-white) is exceptional.

Confessions of an Opium Eater is a truly bizarre but undeniably intriguing and totally unclassifiable movie. Cult movie fans will certainly want to check his one out, especially given the fact that it has apparently never been released on home video before. A highly recommended slice of cinematic weirdness.

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Despite his immense cult popularity H. P. Lovecraft has tended to be avoided by horror film-makers. And for obvious reasons. Translating the horrors described so memorably in his gloriously purple prose into visual images entails an incredibly high risk that the results will look silly and unconvincing and will provoke laughter rather than chills.

A.I.P.’s 1970 Lovecraft flick The Dunwich Horror sounds at first like an incredibly bad idea. Combining Lovecraft with psychedelia in a contemporary setting will surely end up looking very very silly indeed. Even worse, they were going to try doing this on a very low budget, with Roger Corman as executive producer keeping a very tight hold on the purse-strings. In fact it not only works remarkably well, it’s probably the most satisfactory movie adaptation of Lovecraft ever made.

A rather disturbing young man wanders into the Miskatonic University library and announces that he’d like to borrow their most prized possession, the famed (or rather infamous) Necronomicon. The most evil and dangerous book ever written. His interest in the book seems even more worrying when it’s discovered that he is Wilbur Whately (Dean Stockwell), of the notorious (and feared) Whately family. His great-grandfather had been lynched, ostensibly for a murder but in fact he had been trying to bring back the Great Old Ones, ancient and malevolent creatures from another dimension who had ruled the Earth aeons ago.

Could Wilbur be planning something similar? And what of the stories of Wilbur’s mysterious birth, the alleged still-birth of his brother, the madness of his mother and the terrifying possibility that Wilbur’s father was not exactly human. The townspeople are very much afraid of Wilbur, and of his crazy grandfather (Sam Jaffe). No girl from the town would ever go out with Wilbur. So it comes as a surprise that pretty young student Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) should not only offer to drive Wilbur home to Dunwich, but that she should decide to stay for the weekend.

Dr Henry Armitage (Ed Begley) is the university’s resident expert on the Necronomicon. He knows all about the Great Old Ones, and he knows all about the Whatelys. He has his suspicions as to Wilbur’s intentions towards Nancy, and those suspicions don’t involve romantic walks on the beach. They involve sinister rituals and sexual congress with tentacled aliens.

Nancy has in fact been drugged by Wilbur, but even without this he appears to exert a strange hold over her. Other women find him creepy but she is oddly fascinated, a fascination that may well involve some kind of occult mind-control. She starts to have dreams, psychedelic dreams with sexual overtones (and Nancy is clearly not a girl who is especially comfortable with the subject of sex). Dreams of being pursued by hordes of half-naked hippies (and surely there can be no horror to equal the horror of half-naked hippies). Nancy’s friend Elizabeth, Dr Armitage and the town doctor are all determined to save her from a fate that will clearly be a good deal worse than death, but will they be too late? Can Wilbur be prevented from bringing back the gods of old?

The movie works to a large extent because director Daniel Haller had been Corman’s art director for years. He was accustomed to finding ways of producing striking visual images on the cheap. He had a fine sense of visual style. And he’d absorbed valuable lessons from working with Corman - he understood the importance of keeping things moving, of always having something interesting happening.

The effects at times rely too much on solarisation but mostly they are remarkably effective. The wind effects are especially good. And the truly frantic cutting not only provides the right level of disorientation, it also cleverly means we never see an image for long enough to notice how cheap it is or how unconvincing the monsters might be. Haller only ever allows us the briefest glimpses of the monsters so we can readily believe they’re a lot more terrifying than they actually are. This is always a sound method in low-budget films and Haller does it superbly.

The movie also benefits from a truly inspired piece of casting. Dean Stockwell’s absolutely flat delivery of his lines, the extreme creepiness he brings to the character, and the sense that he’s not really part of our universe at all, that his mind is off somewhere else, a long way off - all this adds up to a brilliantly effective performance.

Sandra Dee is quite good. This is a long way from Gidget but she comes across as a repressed virgin which makes it quite plausible that she’s exactly the type of woman Wilbur would be looking for. Ed Begley is great fun, and Sam Jaffe is wonderfully crazed.

Even the decision to add sex, which at first seems rather un-Lovecraftian, works surprisingly well. There might not be sex in Lovecraft but there’s certainly perversity and the sexual elements added to the story help in this regard. They make the townspeople’s horror of the Whately’s much more comprehensible. The movie definitely has a genuine Lovecraftian feel.

Modern audiences who expect CGI and gore won’t understand this movie at all. But if you value atmosphere and weirdness more than gore you’ll love this one. Lovecraft and psychedelia certainly works for me.

The Big Cube (1969)

By 1969 the counter-culture flower-power psychedelic freak-out thing was starting to look like the next big thing as far as movies were concerned. Even the big studios were jumping on the bandwagon. The Big Cube was one of the results.

It’s an interesting mix - a psychedelic acid-trip movie combined with a psychological horror thriller and some totally over-the-top melodrama. Of course it doesn’t work but watching it fail is great fun.

Lana Turner is middle-aged Broadway star Adriana Roman who has married wealthy financier Charles Winthrop and has decided to give up the theatre to concentrate on being a wife. Her new husband has a daughter, Lisa, who has ben away at school in Switzerland for some years but has now finished school and returned home. There’s initially plenty of tension between the new wife and the step-daughter.

Lisa is a very innocent young woman and she soon falls in with a bad crowd. Her new friends are acid-heads but Lisa is entirely oblivious to all this, although she is puzzled a to why they keep dropping sugar cubes into their beers. She falls for handsome and charming medical student Johnny (George Chakiris) but Johnny has a thriving sideline selling drugs. He’s not overly concerned when he gets kicked out of medical school because Lisa has lots of money and persuading her to marry him should be child’s play.
Predictably Lisa’s dad and step-mom aren’t impressed by Johnny.

When Lisa’s father is killed in a boating accident Johnny sees his chance but unfortunately Winthrop senior’s will leaves Adrian in control of the purse-strings. Johnny’s devious mind had a solution to this. They’ll add LSD to Adriana’s sleeping pills and send her crazy so they can get their hands on the money. It doesn’t take long before Adriana starts to lose her grip but can they prevent things from going too far?

It all climaxes with a bizarre therapy-by-theatre scene.

There are the expected psychedelic special effects, there’s plenty of amusingly cringe-inducing dialogue and there’s as much bad acting as you could ever desire. All this combined with a wonderfully silly script. But the icing on the cake is that it takes itself way too seriously which makes it even more fun.

There’s also some terribly music, some cool discotheque scenes and some brief nudity to give the picture a suitable air of sin and wickedness.

Lana Turner’s performance is mind-boggling. I have no idea if she realised how silly the movie was. Mostly she looks very confused. She deals with this by pulling out all the stops and giving a performance that is constantly on the verge of hysteria. It works for me. And she has a delightful puzzled expression that takes the movie into camp overkill.

The other actors are uniformly horrendously awful, which is as it should be in this type of movie.

It’s a terrible movie but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It was released on DVD as part of Warner’s Cult Camp Classics 2 Women in Peril boxed set. The image quality is superb. If you have an appreciation of camp then you’ll certainly want to see this one.

Head (1968)

The late 60s saw Hollywood discover the counter-culture, and produced a wave of psychedelic movies as a desperate attempt to capture the youth market. These movies ranged from cringe-inducingly awful to surprisingly interesting. One of the oddest of them all was Head, starring The Monkees.

By 1968 it was all over for The Monkees. Their records were no longer selling and their TV show had been cancelled. They were never going to gain the recognition they craved, and their commercial standing was non-existent. Their fan base had collapsed. This would normally be seen as a bad thing, but by this time the band no longer cared, and just wanted it all to be over.

What this gave them was a a wonderful sense of freedom. So when Rob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson wanted to make a Monkees movie, the band were happy to let the do whatever they wanted. They no longer cared about their image, and they were prepared to do anything at all.

The results were very strange indeed. Head is a bizarre mix of music video, teen movie, drug movie, counter-culture movie, anti-war film, avant-garde surrealist art film ad the sort of general all-round weirdness you got in those days if you were rash enough to let Jack Nicholson run amok.

Of course much of it doesn’t work, but that’s part of its charm. What’s surprising though is that a good deal of it does work, in its own strange way. Sudden switches from horrific war scenes to concert footage to sequences in which the band play the role of dandruff in Victor Mature’s hair and get sucked into a gigantic vacuum cleaner, and then suddenly the boys are in a western movie until they become bored and walk straight through the scenery which turns out to be cardboard and find themselves in the middle of a surprise birthday party for Mike Nesmith - this sort of thing has no right to work, but somehow it does.

The political elements are the least successful, as you’d expect in a late 60s movie. Fortunately they’re not overdone, and the overall tone is an odd mix of whimsy and weirdness. Despite their perennial frustration with not being taken seriously the band is happy to make fun of its own teeny-bopper image, because it simply no longer mattered.

This is a Monkees movie without any hit songs, because by this time they didn’t have any hit songs any more. But in fact the music isn’t bad at all. By this stage they were writing a lot of their own material and the film includes a couple of acid-rock songs written by Peter Tork that are actually a good deal better than much of the embarrassingly pompous drug-addled acid-rock that was being churned out at the time by bands who really were taken seriously. As an acid-rock band The Monkees were certainly more convincing than the Rolling Stones during their psychedelic-rock phase that produced such horrors as We Love You and She’s a Rainbow.

And Mike Nesmith’s Circle Sky demonstrates that Nesmith was already a very accomplished somg-writer. The great irony of The Monkees’ career was always the fact that they were a great band if only you could get past the bubblegum-pop image.

To appreciate Head you’ll certainly need a fair degree of tolerance for off-the-wall experimental 1960s film-making and you’ll need a certain degree of fondness for the band as well. But if you can manage those two things you’ll find this to be an unexpectedly intriguing little movie.

The DVD release is a bit disappointing - it’s fullscreen and very very grainy, although given the mixture of concert and documentary footage used in addition to newly shot scenes some of the graininess may well be intentional.

Psych-Out (1968)

Psych-Out, made in 1968, was one of the many cinematic attempts to cash in on the hippie/drug culture/teen rebellion thing of the 60s. Even at the time most of the movies that focused specifically on the drug culture were pretty embarrassing, Roger Corman’s The Trip being one of the better efforts. Psych-Out falls into the more usual trap of trying much too hard to be hip while at the same time delivering a moral message on the evil of drugs.

It is however quite entertaining in a campy sort of way. Susan Strasberg is Jenny, a deaf girl who arrives in San Francisco looking for her missing brother. The brother is on a quest of his own, to find God and the meaning of life and all that sort of thing. She falls in with a bunch of hippie musicians. After that, very little actually happens. But with Jack Nicholson as the band’s guitarist Stoney and Dean Stockwell as Dave, a seriously drug-addled former member of the band who now serves them as a kind of guru/spiritual advisor, there’s plenty of delightfully entertaining over-the-top hamminess. Dave appears to have split from the band when there seemed to be a danger they might achieve actual success, which would of course mean selling out and having to deal with the nightmare of having lots of money and lots of sex-crazed groupies. This is a risk that Stoney seems to regard as being worth taking.

Things get weirder (and the acting reaches new heights of badness) when Bruce Dern turns up as the lost brother, looking a bit like Jesus. Towards the end Jenny naturally decides to drop some acid and learns at first-hand that drugs are really really bad.

There’s some truly appalling psychedelic rock courtesy of the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the drug freak-out scenes are moderately interesting, and the dialogue is what you’d expect with lines like “it’s all just one big plastic hassle man.” Psych-Out is silly fun if you’re in the mood for such things.

The Trip (1967)

The 1960s psychedelic acid-trip movie is something to be approached with considerable trepidation. The potential for truly embarrassing disaster is just so enormous. In fact Roger Corman’s 1967 entry in this sub-genre, The Trip, is not too bad. It has no plot whatsoever – it’s just an acid trip taken by a guy who directs TV commercials, played by Peter Fonda. It still manages to remain entertaining for an hour-and-a-half, and despite the customary Corman low budget it’s visually reasonably impressive. Peter Fonda is, well he’s Peter Fonda and of course he can’t act at all (Jane obviously got all the acting talent in that particular generation of Fondas), but it doesn’t really matter. Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper are both amusing in supporting roles. Although Corman couldn’t escape the necessity of having an anti-drugs scare intro to the film, the movie is actually very non-judgmental on the subject. He gets into a few scrapes, and has some bad moments, but he doesn’t turn into an axe-murderer or end up in a psych ward. I don’t think Roger Corman was capable of making a boring movie and he seemingly had the ability to come up with something interesting in just about any genre he attempted (and he attempted most of them). It’s a movie to watch purely for fun of course, and if you approach it that way it’s rather enjoyable.