Mr Sardonicus (1961)

William Castle may have been the master of the gimmick and may well have been greater as a showman than as a director but his 1961 offering Mr Sardonicus demonstrates that he could produce the goods when needed.

He’s helped considerably by the writing. Ray Russell wrote the screenplay based on his own novella and it manages to avoid the worst clichés of the gothic horror genre while at the same time being a very effective gothic chiller.

It is 1880 and Sir Robert Cargrave (Ronald Lewis) is a celebrated London physician who has achieved outstanding success with cases of paralysis. He receives a letter from the woman with whom he had been in love. She is now married and living in central Europe. Her husband is Baron Sardonicus and he owns a castle but apparently all is not well. The message leads Cargrave to believe that the Baroness may be in real danger.

His arrival in central Europe leads us to expect a typical gothic horror plot. The villagers warn him to keep well away from the castle; they are clearly terrified of the Baron. He is met at the railway station by one of the Baron’s retainers, a man who fulfills all our expectations of gothic horror servants. Krull (Oskar Homolka) is a shambling one-eyed rather sinister character who speaks of his master in suitably awed and mysterious tones.

When he gets to the castle itself he is in for several shocks. Firstly there is a servant woman covered in leeches, the victim of what appears to be some ghastly medical experiment. Sir Robert is a modern doctor who does not approve of the use of such antiquated methods. The Baron himself provides another shock, with his face covered by a mask. When the mask is removed it reveals a face permanently frozen into a hideous grimace, a grimace so severe that he can take only liquid nourishment.

The explanation for this disfigurement reveals a shameful secret involving grave robbing.

It is clear that Baron Sardonicus and his wife are not having normal marital relations and that the Baron is indulging his passions with unfortunate peasant girls.

Sardonicus himself was responsible for luring Sir Robert to his castle - he hopes the eminent physician can cure him. It is not merely his body that requires curing - his disfigurement has made him violent, cruel and unpredictable. The cure proves to be more difficult than expected and Cargrave is blackmailed into using dangerous and untried methods.

It’s not a William Castle movie without a gimmick. This time it’s the Punishment Poll. Just before the end of the movie Castle himself interrupts proceedings to conduct a vote by the audience. Those attending the movie had been issued with a card with which they could vote on whether Sardonicus had been sufficiently punished for his misdeeds or whether further punishment was required. In fact only one ending was shot - Castle assumed that no horror movie audience would vote for mercy for the villain!

Where the movie departs from gothic horror cliché is in the role of the scientist/doctor. We expect either a mad scientist or at the very least a dangerously deluded and misguided scientist whose work leads to evil. In fact in this story the scientist is unequivocally the hero. It’s difficult to think of another gothic horror flick in which science is presented in such a positive light.

The movie is also somewhat unusual in that it not only avoids supernatural explanation, it also avoids fanciful science fictional explanations. The entire case is shown to be a perfectly realistic example of extreme psychological states, of pathological guilt in fact. There are no real monsters, only a man made monstrous by a combination of misfortune and of his own actions.

Ronald Lewis is a likeable hero, Guy Rolfe is suitably creepy as Sardonicus and Oskar Homolka steals every scene he’s in.

Castle was not an inspired director but he was thoroughly competent and he knew what audiences wanted. Mr Sardonicus is not a great movie but it’s very entertaining indeed.

Columbia have done William Castle proud with their boxed set of his movies. The transfer is superb.

Your Turn Darling (1963)

Before James Bond there was Lemmy Caution. He was the hero of a whole series of French movies in the 50s and early 60s, movies that were the ancestors of both the eurospy and spy spoof movies that boomed during the 1960s. Your Turn Darling (À toi de faire... mignonne) was the seventh such movie to feature Eddie Constantine in the role.

The character was created by British hardboiled crime writer Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) and figured in ten novels between 1936 and 1945. They were hugely successful at the time and built up a major following in France. Lemmy Caution remains something of a pop culture icon there.

Eddie Constantine (1917-1993) was a gravel-voiced American-born singer and actor who spent most of his career in France and Germany. He’s best-known for his role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville in 1965, where he again played Lemmy Caution but in a very different kind of film.

Cheyney’s novels were pulpy and tongue-in-cheek and the movies captured the same feel. They’re great fun although sadly while English-dubbed versions exist there are no official English-friendly DVD releases and those that can be found are fullframe (which is not a problem with the earlier movies in the series that were shot in 1.33:1 but is a problem with the later entries in the cycle which were filmed in 2.35:1.

Lemmy Caution is an FBI agent whose cases always seem to take him to France. This time scientist Elmer Whittaker has been kidnapped, and this scientist has developed a secret formula for something terribly important and it must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Lemmy is hot on the trail and the trail (as always) leads him to an assortment of beautiful but dangerous women. Luckily Lemmy likes beautiful but dangerous women almost as much as he likes Scotch whisky, and he likes Scotch whisky very much indeed.

The beautiful but dangerous women spend almost as much time trying to kill each other as they spend trying to kill Lemmy. The most dangerous of all is the widow of a famous Italian painter who is not what she seems to be.

Lemmy has little trouble figuring out who the kidnappers are but getting Dr Whittaker back is not so simple. The kidnappers are threatening to sell him and the formula to an unfriendly government and Lemmy has to persuade the FBI to come up with a million dollars in ransom money. He has some tricks up his sleeve but so do the kidnappers.

Compared to later spy movies there are very few gadgets and no spectacular sets or action sequences. In that respect the Lemmy Caution movies are more like the spy movies of the 40s and they’re a mix of espionage and hardboiled crime.

This is not the best of the Lemmy Caution movies by any means. The earlier films combined hardboiled dialogue, international intrigue and tongue-in-cheek humour in a balanced mix, a mix very similar to that of the later Bond movies. This time around the comedy completely predominates. You’re certainly better off starting with the earlier movies from the 50s like Poison Ivy or Dames Don't Care (both of which feature the wonderful and very exotic Dominique Wilms).

Having said that, Your Turn Darling is still good-natured fun and Eddie Constantine is always worth watching.

Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World (1961)

Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World (Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan) is a peplum with a difference - it’s set in China during the 13th century.

Making a peplum set in China might seem an odd thing to do but apparently the producers of a relatively lavish movie on Marco Polo felt that it would be silly to use the sets for just one movie so they decided to use them again to make a peplum. They also had quite a few Asian actors and extras available so that made it even easier. Japanese actress Yoko Tani played the female lead in both films.

As the Italian title makes clear the hero of this movie is not in fact Samson but Maciste. Maciste is not a figure from folklore or mythology. He had been the hero of the 1914 Italian movie Cabiria, a movie that has strong claims to being the first movie epic. The character caught on so well that he ended up being the hero of countless sword and sandal movies.

So what is an Italian hero doing in China? The movie solves that problem by simply ignoring it. We just have to accept that he happens to be there. Let’s face it, if you’re going to start worrying about logic in a movie like this you’re watching the wrong type of movie.

China (or most of it) at this time was part of the enormous Mongol Empire. Garak Khan has a problem. He is acting as regent for the young Chinese crown prince and his sister Lei-ling. Of course the reality is that he runs the country and has no intention of allowing a Chinese dynasty to re-establish itself, but the Chinese prince and princess are being used as symbols of resistance by a rebel army dedicated to the overthrow of the Mongols.

Garak decides to do the obvious thing and have them killed, but just as he’s about to feed the prince to a tiger along comes Maciste and ruins everything. Maciste has made contact with the rebels and has offered to help them. The immediate problem is that Garak’s plans to murder the princess having failed he has now decided to marry her instead. To do this he will have to kidnap her.

Garak already has a girlfriend and she is not overly pleased by this new development. She was all set to become the beautiful but evil queen without which no peplum worth its salt is complete but now she’s ready to change sides and fight for goodness and justice. At least until Garak’s marriage plans fall through.

Gordon Scott plays Maciste and he’s a perfectly acceptable muscleman hero. Yoko Tani makes a reasonable princess heroine. Hélène Chanel is a fun would-be beautiful but evil queen and Leonardo Severini as Garak is the smooth but villainous Garak.

There are no supernatural elements or monsters in this movie but there’s plenty of action and mayhem, including an eight-horse scythed chariot used by Garak Khan as a novel method of executing his enemies.

Director Riccardo Freda made some excellent gothic horror films as well as many sword and sandal epics and in fact he had a go at just about every genre going including spaghetti westerns and eurospy thrillers. He was always a very capable director.

The movie itself is a terrific example of its species and is highly recommended.

The same cannot be said for Retromedia’s DVD presentation. The good news is that it’s in the correct Cinemascope aspect ratio and that’s a major plus given the number of Italian genre movies that are only available in terrible pan-and-scan fullframe versions. Unfortunately that’s the only good news. This is an absolutely abysmal print, and even worse it’s cut by about half an hour! Which means the plot is badly rushed and not entirely coherent. Picture quality is lousy.

The English dubbed version is the only soundtrack option but that’s less of a problem since bad dubbing tends to enhance this type of movie.

It’s probably not Retromedia’s fault since it may well be that there are no other surviving English dubbed or subtitled prints, and while image quality is poor it’s watchable and at least it’s not pan-and-scanned. It’s just a pity a better print could not have been found of such a very entertaining peplum.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell was released in 1974 but was really a throwback to an earlier era of British horror. That’s not intended as a criticism - this is classic Hammer.

This film saw Peter Cushing playing Baron Frankenstein for the last time and it was also director Terence Fisher’s final film. With music by James Bernard and a screenplay by Anthony Hinds this is like a Hammer reunion from the studio’s golden days.

As the movie opens a young doctor named Simon Helder (Shane Briant) is trying to continue the work of the late Baron Frankenstein. Frankenstein had died in a lunatic asylum some years earlier. Dr Helder is too young to have ever met the baron but he has all his books and is an eager disciple. Unfortunately the authorities remain unsympathetic to those at the cutting edge of science and Dr Helder is convicted of sorcery and committed to an asylum for the criminally insane. In fact it’s the same asylum in which Frankenstein passed his final years.

Young Simon has a major surprise in store for him. Not only is Baron Frankenstein still very much alive, he now effectively runs the asylum. He has collected enough damaging evidence against the director of the asylum (a man who is clearly both sexually depraved and mentally unstable) and most of his underlings that no-one will now dare to question his authority.

For Frankenstein it has been a congenial arrangement. He has the necessary privacy in which to continue his experiments and he has a source of human raw material. He also has a faithful assistant, a beautiful young female inmate named Sarah who is known to all as The Angel. Sarah is mute but quite sane. She has been a valuable, intelligent and capable assistant but it would obviously be very useful to have a second assistant with proper medical training. He is therefore extremely pleased to make the acquaintance of Dr Helder, and even more pleased when he discovers that the brilliant young surgeon is an admirer of his own work.

One inmate of this madhouse who had particularly attracted Frankenstein’s interest was a man who had regressed to a more primitive stage of human evolution. When he was killed trying to escape the Baron wasted no time in restoring him to life. He is now the subject of Frankenstein’s latest experiments. As always with his creatures the brain has been a problem but there happens to be another patient who is a genius, albeit an insane genius. His brain would be ideal.

Dr Helder’s enthusiasm for the work is soon tempered by ethical concerns. Frankenstein has no problems in that area. The Frankenstein of this movie is entirely lacking in anything resembling a moral sense. Frankenstein had always been inclined to allow his ambitions to overrule his conscience and this tendency has now reached an extreme. He is also now very close to complete madness.

Cushing is in fine form, giving one of his most chilling performances. Shane Briant is quite adequate, as is Madeleine Smith as Sarah. John Stratton is delightfully creepy as the asylum director while Patrick Troughton contributes an entertaining cameo as a grave robber.

The monster in this final film is more human than in most previous productions. He can speak, and he can understand his horrifying situation. David Prowse had played the monster before, in Hammer’s The Horror of Frankenstein.

Terence Fisher shows that he hadn’t lost his touch. The very low budget (a real problem for Hammer in this period) is evident but art director Scott MacGregor does a pretty good job within those constraints and the movie has a brooding claustrophobic feel that is perfect for the madhouse setting.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell ends the Hammer Frankenstein cycle on a very satisfying note.

Grip of the Strangler (1958)

Grip of the Strangler (AKA The Haunted Strangler) is a very good idea that doesn’t quite come off but it remains an interesting attempt.

American-born producer Richard Gordon rode the British horror boom fairly successfully, being responsible for a good many entertaining low-budget British horror films.

This low-budget 1958 British horror flick stars Boris Karloff as a man investigating a murder that occurred 20 years earlier. The movie opens with the hanging of Edward Styles, the Haymarket Strangler. The time period is not specified exactly but is presumably the mid-19th century. Since it’s the days when public executions were a popular spectator sport it must be some time before 1868.

A novelist named James Rankin has become obsessed with the case. He is convinced that Styles was innocent. He suspects that a young doctor named Tennant, who performed the autopsies on the strangler’s five victims as well as on the convicted man, had some involvement in the murders. Dr Tennant mysteriously disappeared from Guy’s Hospital in London shortly after the execution of Styles.

Dr Tennant had been an habitue of the Judas Hole, a rather low dive that was also the scene of at least one of the murders. One of the dancers there had been a key witness at the trial of Styles but it now becomes clear that her evidence was much less solid that it had appeared at the time.

Rankin has found personal papers belonging to Dr Tennant, papers that do suggest that Tennant was obsessed by the case to a morbid degree. He has also found Tennant’s surgical kit and believes there is some significance to the fact that a surgeon’s knife is missing from the kit. He thinks the missing knife may be in Edward Styles’ coffin

Superintendant Burk at Scotland Yard has been willing to give Rankin every assistance within reason but decides he must draw the line when Rankin insists that Styles’ body must be exhumed. Rankin bribes a prison guard at Newgate to allow him to enter the prison cemetery at night to dig up the coffin himself. He finds the knife, and he finds the answer to the puzzle, but it’s an answer that will drive him to madness.

The premise is a good one and I won’t ruin it by revealing the twist. The problem is that the movie relies a bit too much on excessive and not entirely necessary makeup effects and these tend to make the movie seem silly when it fact it isn’t. They also draw attention to the low budget and give it a cheap feel that is rather unfortunate.

This minus is more than balanced out however by some impressive pluses, the most notable being Karloff. At the age of 70 he could still deliver a powerhouse performance. The other actors are quite adequate.

The screenplay is a clever variation on one of the classic tales of gothic horror but I won’t tell you which one because this would reveal too much of the plot.

Despite the low budget it manages some effectively atmospheric moments and the black-and-white cinematography is competently handled.

Although it has its faults it’s a reasonably entertaining gothic chiller.

The all-region UK PAL DVD release from 2entertain is barebones and it’s fullframe but it looks reasonably good and it can be picked up very very cheaply.

4D Man (1959)

What would happen if a scientist managed to conquer the fourth dimension? Judging by the 1959 sci-fi flick 4D Man the first thing that would happen would be that logic would fly out the window. This is an amazingly silly movie.

But then some of my favourite science fiction movies are amazingly silly. Amazingly silly is something I can live with if it’s combined with fun. 4D Man doesn’t quite make it on this score but it comes close.

Dr Tony Nelson (James Congdon) is a brilliant if erratic scientist who believes he is on the verge of an extraordinary scientific breakthrough. At one stage he managed to get a pencil to penetrate a steel plate by persuading the molecules of the pencil and the steel plate to occupy the same space at the same time. And I use the word persuaded deliberately - he did this by an act of will, aided by a force field.

Unfortunately Tony then managed to burn down his employer’s laboratory and consequently got himself fired. So he set off for another city to join his older brother Scott (Robert Lansing). Dr Scott Nelson is also a brilliant scientist although up till now he’s been more disciplined than his brother.

Scott is working at the laboratories run by Dr Theodore Carson, his current project bring the development of cargonite, a substance so tough that it is for all intents and purposes indestructible. Dr Carson has the unpleasant habit of allowing his staff to do all the work and then taking all the credit himself. Scott hasn’t been too worried by this - he’s dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and besides he’s in love with his glamorous assistant Linda Davis (Lee Meriwether) and she’s going to marry him so really he has everything he wants.

Tony’s arrival upsets all his preconceptions. As he’s done in the past Tony proceeds to steal Scott’s remarkably fickle girlfriend, and just as disturbingly Tony also announces that cargonite is not indestructible after all. Tony’s own research proves that nothing is indestructible. By harnessing the powers of the fourth dimension it is possible to concentrate years of willpower into a few seconds thus allowing any object to be penetrated.

Scott has been suffering from severe headaches and his doctor has advised him that his EEG readings are very abnormal. The shock of discovering Linda’s betrayal pushes him over the edge. He starts to work on Tony’s theories and finds that he doesn’t need the amplifier and force field that Tony has developed - he can pass into the fourth dimension at any time merely by exerting his will. In his increasingly unbalanced mental state this proves to be a dangerous discovery. Scott is out of control.

And there’s a downside to this fourth dimension stuff - it ages you. The only way to keep young is by draining the years from other people and this has the effect of killing them. I warned you that this movie was very silly!

The special effects are reasonable enough - walking through walls and that sort of thing.

Robert Lansing was a fairly competent actor and although Scott’s sudden personality change is a difficult sell he does reasonably well in the role. Tony Nelson ends up the hero but really he’s a thoroughly slimy character and James Congdon fails to make him a sympathetic hero. Lee Meriwether as Scott’s faithless girlfriend is somewhat on the dull side. Look out for a very young Patty Duke showing even then a desire to chew any scenery she can get at.

The movie’s biggest problem is the ending which seems very perfunctory.

But this is not a movie to take even remotely seriously - this is 50s American science fiction and no-one should expect it to make sense. Just settle back and enjoy the campy ridiculous fun.

This DVD release is not one of Image Entertainment’s prouder moments. In fact it’s a thoroughly lousy DVD. It’s full frame and picture quality is very poor. So although the movie is fun the DVD is so awful it can’t possibly be recommended.

Witches' Hammer (1970)

Witch-hunting has always been a popular subject for both art-house and exploitation films in most countries. There are many well-known examples from British, American and European film-makers. Witches' Hammer (Kladivo na carodejnice), made in Czechoslovakia in 1969, is a rare example of such a movie from behind the Iron Curtain.

Writer-director Otakar Vávra already had a long career behind him when he made Witches' Hammer in 1969 (it was released in January 1970). And he had a long career still in front of him - his final film was released in 2003. He died in 2011, aged 100.

He’d lived through countless changes of regime. When he was born his birthplace in Bohemia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the late 30s it was under the control of the Nazis. By the time he reached middle age the horrors of the Nazi regime had given way to the horrors of communism. He outlived all those regimes. He survived, and managed to go on making movies for more than seventy years.

This is one case where it’s absolutely essential to know the historical background to a film. The tentative moves towards freedom in Czechoslovakia, the so-called Prague Spring, had been brutally crushed by the Soviets in 1968 and hardline communism reinstated. It’s impossible to believe that any Czech film-maker could have chosen witch-hunting and the Inquisition as subject matter in 1969 without there being a political intent to the film. And in later life director Otakar Vávra made it clear that that was indeed his intention, that the movie is really about the oppressiveness of the communist regime.

The plot is your basic witch-hunt plot. The time is the late 17th century. An old woman is spotted stealing a consecrated host from a church. The priest immediately suspects that witch-craft is afoot. After consultations with the local grandees the fateful decision is made to call in the Inquisition.

The problem here being that calling in the Inquisition is relatively easy but getting rid of them is next to impossible. Accusation follows accusation, the number of convicted witches sentenced to burning grows steadily, and soon it is obvious that no-one is safe. A number of local notables are concerned, the priest who stared the ball rolling is sure that most of the victims are in fact innocent, but anyone who questions the activities of the Inquisitor risks being accused of witchcraft himself. If you doubt the guilt of the accused witches then you must be a witch, just as anyone who doubted the guilt of the victims of the Stalinist show trials automatically came under suspicion.

The acting is generally good. Vladimír Smeral as the Inquisitor Boblig is a frightening study in evil and hypocrisy, more interested in enriching himself and cementing his own power than in anything else. He’s the sort of person who would have been equally successful as a Party apparatchik in the mid-20th century. Elo Romancik gives a moving performance as Deacon Lautner, a man with the courage to stand up to the Inquisition but unfortunately also a man with a guilty secret.

The film was shot in black-and-white and looks extraordinarily bleak. The mood of the film is every bit as grim. 1969 being an incredibly grim time in Czech history that’s probably not surprising. There’s not a great deal of hope on offer here.

While the movie’s real subject is what was happening in Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring it’s also an effective indictment of the witch-hunting mentality in general making it as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. That witch-hunting mentality is still alive and well.

It’s not exactly enjoyable but it is a powerful film. This is an art-house rather than an exploitation flick but there’s copious nudity and there are plenty of grisly scenes.

It’s been released on DVD by an outfit called Facets Video. It’s a so-so transfer. The liner notes (by Susan Doll) are informative but that’s the only extra included.