A Face Only A Mummy Could Love

Germany in the early 1910 is probably the last place you'd expect to find 'The Gorgon', but this is Hammer, and anything goes, especially when the sets have already been built for another production.

Writer John Gilling specialised for a short while in bringing something slightly different to Hammer - the superb and unusual 'Plague Of The Zombies' and 'The Reptile' were also his work, and 'The Gorgon', which marries the good old gothic to Ancient Greek mythology is an equally odd work, a true one off.

The film has a lot going for it: a small village haunted by ignorance and fear; a series of bizarre murders; a great cast, including Peter Cushing, Barbara Shelley and Patrick Troughton; some excellent effects; haunting music from James Bernard, and a brilliantly 'excuse me?' concept - that Medusa's sister Megaera survived Perseus' attack and moved to Bavaria...

Expertly directed by horror genius, Freddie Francis, 'The Gorgon' comes highly recommended, not least because of its superbly sustained atmosphere of dread, unique storyline and Peter Cushing's fantastic sidewhiskers. Good stuff!

The Gorgon

The Many Moods Of Jason King

20/30

Strange...

Dr. Menkin: "Until the people from the Cryonic Society arrive to replace the dry ice, there's nothing else we can do to preserve your wife".

Strange Paradise

Strange Paradise

Woah, 'Strange Paradise' is a bit of an odd one to get slightly obsessed with but, I'm afraid, it has me in its wobbly clutches. A daily, live soap opera produced in Canada (part of the Commonwealth, so technically within The Island's remit) the show ran between October 1969 and January 1970.

Designed as a rival to the hugely successful US gothic soap 'Dark Shadows' (1,000 episodes and a film), it never really captured the public imagination in the same way but is its equal in its unholy mix of banal soap opera and horror. The actors are poor and quite often struggle with their lines, the scripts are alternately boring and outrageous, the locations limited (many episodes simply cut back and forth between two sets) and, best of all, it occasionally tries to be hip and happening with highly amusing results. But it's strangely compelling, like watching an amateur production of Lovecraft with all the atmosphere and tentacles taken out. Despite only being on air for four months, there's 185 episodes of this, and three distinct story arcs and casts. 

As a flavour, here's a synopsis of the mind boggling first episode: Jean-Paul Desmond is the millionaire owner of a tropical island called Maljardin. His beloved wife Erica has just died suddenly. Jean Paul cannot accept this, and decides to have her body cryonically frozen. In the front room of his mansion, Jean Paul is addressed by the portrait of his notorious ancestor, Jacques Eloi DesMondes. DesMondes (who is the spitting image of Jean-Paul, allowing the same actor to play him in flashbacks) offers to return life to Erica if Jean-Paul will help him to live again. To this end, Jean-Paul visits the family crypt, locates DesMonde's coffin, opens it, finds a a voodoo doll with a silver pin through its head, removes the pin and is promptly taken over by the malevolent DesMondes...

Yes. I know, I know. Here's a clip from a randomly selected episode, number 64, I believe. I haven't quite got this far myself, so I don't know what's going on either.   

  

Faces Of The Sweeney

David Lodge.

Beasts: Special Offer

Noreen (Pauline Quirke) is rather an unfortunate young woman. Apart from her awful name, she is overweight, myopic, spotty, lank, clumsy, socially inept and shit at applying make up. Her father is dead, her mother is an invalid, and she works in Briteway, a low grade supermarket run by a lecherous, bullying manager who thinks she is a 'stupendous, giant sized unrepeatable drag' and wants her out of his shop a.s.a.p. Unfortunately for him, Noreen is not only in love with him, but is in possession of latent psychic powers that are about to be unleashed upon his crappy, cut rate domain in the most surprising way.

'Special Offer' was the opening episode of Nigel Kneale's 'Beasts', a six part ITV series that presented a series of unrelated stories loosely themed around the title. Kneale being Kneale, of course, the beasts are seldom from the animal kingdom and are, in some cases, merely the scapegoats for havoc caused by darker and far more complex forces.

This episode is notable for all sorts of reasons, but is especially recommended for Quirke's dopey, lumpy, deadly Noreen, for some excellent E.S.P special effects (peas popping in refrigerators; washing up liquid bottles springing leaks; exploding milk bottles, etc.) as well as giving us a number of long, lingering nostalgic looks at the brand names and packaging of yesteryear. Beware, though, you will end up fancying a tin of Coq au Vin 'Cook In Sauce'.     

Milton!

I hope you enjoyed the break, but, sorry, I'm back now - I'm refreshed, rested and raring to go, so let's celebrate the return of normal weblog service with a brand new feature: 'Milton!'.

Milton Reid was an extraordinary looking Anglo-Indian wrestler / actor who made numerous appearances in films and TV from the fifties until his somewhat mysterious death in the nineteen eighties*. Often mute, always lurking, Milton may not have been a star in the normal sense, but he remains an unforgettable presence.

Here is as the ill-fated Cheng in 'Dr. Phibes Rises Again'.

* Milton supposedly died of a heart attack in India in 1982, but his son was apparently still receiving letters from him up until 1986.

Wait, Listen

We've All Been There

Chalky

Meaninglessness

Dreadful City

Slayer

Strike A Light

Prehistoric Poking

We Can Be Flexible

One Tree Hill

Genius Street

Welcome, Vikings

No Entry

Interlude

I'm going to take two weeks off. In the meantime, the Blogbot will be posting stills from Patrick Keiller's remarkable 'Robinson In Space'.

We'll 'Carry On Screaming' on the 14th November. Yes, you're right, that is a pretty poor pun. That's why I'm taking a break.

Halloween III: The Season Of The Witch

In 1981, eager to turn his 'Halloween' franchise into more than just a series of slasher films, director / producer John Carpenter approached Nigel Kneale for a script for a third, Michael Myers-less story to diversify the brand.

Kneale came up with a typically interesting tale about a respected captain of industry, a toy maker, who is secretly a Druid. His crazed plan, which involves a stolen chunk of Stonehenge, is to return Halloween to its original status: a pagan celebration of darkness and evil, and he is prepared to use his toys (specifically latex masks which are marketed as the must have Halloween accessory) to kill millions of children to make his point.

Hollywood being what it is, of course, several changes were made to the original script, most of which inserted the obvious shocks and scares that Nigel always tried to avoid, as well as some explicit violence. Not surprisingly, Nigel asked that his name be removed from the credits and disassociated himself from the project, although it turned out to be pretty good, considering, although most of the best bits are obviously derived directly from Nigel's initial ideas.

I've often wondered what the film would have been like if Carpenter had the courage of his convictions and alowed Nigel to take the series to the next level, especially as I find it enjoyable and interesting in its compromised form which leads me to think that, un-fucked about with, it could have been a masterpiece. As it was, the film found little favour with Michael Myers fans and failed to atract a new audience, effectively killing the franchise for several years. Shame.

Happy Halloween to all our readers. Don your Silver Shamrock masks now!

Five Million Years To Earth

'Quatermass & The Pit' starts as it means to go on, with a shock discovery which becomes ever more shocking upon further investigation. Yet nothing about this film is sensational for sensation's sake, although many of its ideas are startling.

It begins in the underground station at Hobbes End, where a gang of builders are working on an extension to the Central Line. Work halts when they discover an anthropoidal skull and other remains buried in the mud. Archaeologists are called in, and the bones are dated as five million years old. Further excavations uncover another embedded object of a similar vintage - a Martian spaceship, complete with a long dead crew of locust like aliens...

'QATP' is a real slow burner of a film, imbued with Kneale's sharp intelligence and subtle but strong direction from Roy Ward Baker. The narrative unfolds carefully, logically, priming the viewer for the next twist, the next amazing revelation. Kneale's excellent screenplay (adapted from his 1958 TV version) includes several of his favourite themes: a scientific explanation for the seemingly supernatural; the distant past (or in 'The Road', the future) haunting the present, and the awesome power of the unknown. It's a fantastic piece of work - in fact, it's probably my favourite film, and I've seen quite a few, believe me.