He's Here To Freak You Out...Of This World!

Colchester, Essex, 1983 AD. I am at a party and have become quite heavily involved with a pretty young lady. The new romance comes to an abrupt end, however, when I check my watch and realise that ‘Dracula, A.D. 1972’ is about to start on Anglia telly. It’s a film I haven’t yet seen, but KNOW will be great, so I rather abruptly make my excuses and leave, leaving my paramour both tearful and furious. Thus, the pattern of a life is set.

‘Dracula, A.D. 1972’ is a supremely silly film. At times, it’s educationally sub-normal. But I love it. I love the middle aged kids and the groovy places they hang out where the sixties still cling to the décor like pot smoke to a pair of garish curtains, and I love, love, love the fact that Count Dracula is going to bite them all and turn their groovy scene to shit.

I love the fact that it takes Van Helsing ten minutes and a pad and pencil to work out that Johnny Alucard’s surname is Dracula spelled backwards. I love that you can now kill a vampire with a power shower, or a bush. I love Peter Cushing’s concession to hip, a moderately daring neckerchief. I love the music, even 'The Stoneground', but especially the electronic séance track by White Noise, from 'An Electric Storm', one of my favourite albums ever. I like the vacuity of the male characters, and the fecundity of the female cast, perhaps the foxiest, bustiest bunch of Hammer starlets in history (Stephanie Beacham is outstanding in this respect). Most of all, I love that Hammer are getting a bit desperate and trying something new and, for the most part, getting it wrong – and I love that it doesn’t matter because the dividing line between brilliantly awful and awfully brilliant doesn't exist in this context.    

‘Dracula, A.D. 1972’ is ninety minutes of everything I love and cherish and admire and am obsessed with about British horror films, and I can categorically say that leaving the party and the girl and rushing home to watch it all those years ago had an enormous effect on me, an impact that has reverberated every day since, and, for better or worse, has directly led to this blog and all the stuff attached to it. And it was worth it. It was all worth it.   

Dracula, A.D. 1972

Coming Soon...

The Two Faces Of Evil

Hammer House of Horror is a series of much variety, particularly with regard to quality. ‘The Two Faces of Evil’, however, is an exceptional episode, not least because it is really scary.

Like all the best horror tales, ‘Two Faces Of Evil’ doesn’t mess about with exposition or, indeed, explanation. The ending is utterly inconclusive, but perfectly apt. What it does provide, however, is a world where something unearthly and terrifying is happening, and a nightmare of random violence, madness and death.

It begins with a cheery family unit (Martin and Janet Lewis and blond haired son, David) on their way to a holiday cottage in Buckinghamshire. During a sudden rainstorm they nearly hit a pedestrian, and then offer him a lift. Within seconds, the mysterious, silent man (dressed in a really creepy ensemble of bright yellow sou’wester and matching oilskins) attacks Martin, tearing at his face with his hand and, in particular, a single nasty, dirty pointed fingernail. Struggling for his life as Janet and David scream their heads off in the back, Martin flips the car over and everything goes black. 

Janet wakes up in that most sinister of locations, the Cottage Hospital, made all the more eerie by some interesting camera angles and shifty eyed staff. She’s alright, apart from a big bruise on her head, and David is unharmed. Martin, however, has undergone an emergency operation to remove some broken glass from his throat and is generally torn, scratched and battered (there's a particularly chilling scene where he raises himself up in bed and outstretches his bandaged hand in a gesture that is equal parts pitiful plea and evil monkey point. As he does so, blood slowly seeps through the bandage around his neck.) Nobody knows anything about the psychotic passenger - although, coincidentally, the authorities have found a corpse in the area that they have been unable to identify.

Janet finds that all of their luggage has been savagely ripped apart, and begins to have disjointed flashbacks to the immediate aftermath of the accident, seeing her husband fighting for his life (and theirs) against the frenzied onslaught of the passenger, who apparently lost a hand in the accident. 

Janet is asked if she can identify the corpse in the morgue and, although it is missing a hand, she cannot definitely say if it the body of their attacker although, bizarrely, it looks exactly like her husband.

Martin is discharged from the hospital and the family continue on to their holiday let. His throat is still bandaged, so he can’t speak, and he alternates between utter exhaustion and bouts of fury. One night, as he reaches to touch Janet's face, she notices he has a single nasty, dirty pointed fingernail. This Martin also has terrible teeth, in strict contrast to her 'real' husband’s pearly whites.

What follows is an increasingly frantic descent into the abyss, as Janet finds herself in a place that makes no sense and where everything she trusts and loves has becomes sinister and dangerous, including, eventually, her son, in an unforgettable moment that has haunted me for thirty odd years.

It is never explained why Martin has been ‘replaced’, or how. There's no quick tie up with some nonsense about aliens or doppelgangers or the compliant locals all being part of a coven. In actual fact, I don’t think there could be an adequate explanation, apart from the obvious answer that Janet is mad or concussed or dreaming, and everything that happens after the accident is a delusion, but I think that would be a cop out, and this is not a cop out sort of story – this is paranormal, primordial horror – urban myth, fairy tale, folk legend.     

One final note: in an apparently inexplicable story where a bizarrely dressed psycho stalks the land randomly ruining peoples lives, seemingly with the collusion of the authorities, is there possibly a clue to be had in the location?  

When I Kill, You Kill

'Goodbye Gemini' (aka 'Twinsanity') is a complex and occasionally confusing tale about the unhealthy relationship between twins and the even less salubrious relationships they have with others. The film addresses such adult issues as incest, transvestism, drug use, male rape, murder and suicide and places them all in the milieu of London as it swings decadently into the seventies. Virtually everyone in the film is either a lunatic or a scumbag, sometimes both. It's not a particularly uplifting film, but it has some striking moments, great music and a very cool cast.

Judy Geeson and Martin Potter play the freaky twins, Jacky and Julian. Potter has one of those faces that is unwholesomely handsome: his features are well formed, but there's something sickly and slightly creepy about it (no offence, Mart, Christopher Walken had / has the same look). The cast is rounded out by the incredibly annoying Alexis Kanner, Sir Michael Redgrave, the great Mike Pratt (aka Jeff Randall, the non deceased detective) and your friend and mine, Sir Freddie Jones.

Here's some music from a critical point in the film: 'Ritual Murder',  by Christopher Gunning.  

Goodbye, Gemini