Bryant Haliday

You may have noticed we've had a bit of a Bryant Haliday theme going on for the last couple of weeks. A Harvard graduate, Bryant was a successful producer and distributor of art films (that’s not a euphemism for pornography, by the way) , but he also acted a bit when he felt like it and lent his deep voice and awful skin to four genre films ('Devil Doll', 'Curse of the Voodoo', 'The Projected Man' and ‘Tower Of Evil’).

Brent was never a great actor, but he certainly had presence and a very specific look, and his short career as a leading man threw up some off-beat films that are greatly enhanced by his appearances in them. Ultimately, though, Brent didn’t really need the money or the exposure, so he returned to his day job - art films gain, horror's loss. He died in 1996.

Jungle Terror!

Mark Stacey is a great white hunter in South Africa. He’s a heavy drinker, stubborn as hell, a bad husband and absent father and a terrible shot. When one of his clients wounds a lion, Mark takes the decision to track it down and finish it off, despite the fact that his hunt will take him into Simbazi country, a place ruled by a primitive tribe who worship lions and punish those who transgress against them. Mark kills the lion (eventually – he really is a terrible shot, and he gets quite badly injured in the process) and when the Simbazi find out they throw a voodoo bongo party, put on their crazy dancing pumps and curse him.

Back from safari, Mark realises his wife has left him, so he returns to London to try and effect a reconciliation. Racked with fever from his festering wound, he is plagued by visions – a stalking lion, a very tall and scary looking native with a pork pie hat on, plus the usual shadows under doors, rattling door knobs and faces at windows. Most notably, he is chased by two spear wielding Africans across a municipal park – a hazy and hugely atmospheric scene that may be the best part of the film. Close to death, Mark realises he has only one option left: to return to Africa and settle it the way the white man has always settled issues with Africans: with a gun, i.e. confronting the man who put the curse on him and killing him (in the end he actually runs him over. As I said, he’s a terrible shot.)

Lindsay Shonteff’s follow up to ‘Devil Doll’, ‘Curse Of Voodoo’ is less disturbing and nowhere near as weird as its predecessor, although the fantasy sequences (or are they?) occasionally evoke the slow, treacly terror of an inescapable nightmare. The African scenes suffer from obviously having been filmed in England (all the trees are wrong, for a start), but they do okay considering the obvious limitations of the budget.

Curse Of The Voodoo

Living Laser Beam

Professor Paul Steiner is a brilliant, pockmarked scientist working on a teleportation ray. It works on inanimate objects, but guinea pigs hate it. Due to some behind the scenes machinations (the purpose of which is not divulged) Steiner is in danger of having his funding removed, despite the incredible nature of his work (surely governments would pay very good money for a machine which makes people disappear? The re-materialisation is an optional bonus). When a demonstration is sabotaged, Steiner flips out and repeats the experiment with only the ditsy office secretary to assist him. The silly girl aborts the process half way through, making Steiner reappear miles away, horribly disfigured, filled with fatal electrical energy and, frankly, massively pissed off.

Excellent for about forty minutes, ‘The Projected Man’ builds up to Steiner’s calamitous experiment very well, but gradually falls apart after this pivotal event, becoming episodic and unfocused and, despite a rising death toll, rather boring. One of the things I particularly like about the first half is that (as a non-scientist / idiot) the science seems to make sense, and grown up explanations are given for what takes place; I also like the garish colours, the attractive and intelligent female lead (Mary Peach) and good support work from Mr. Smooth himself, Ronald Allen (David Hunter from ‘Crossroads’ for our elderly readers).

Much of the horror is derived from Steiner’s ruined face, a horrible, half made up mess of raw sinews, exposed teeth and a large, clouded over eye, and the rest from his habit of zapping people to death with a mutated claw like hand. He even kills Sam Kydd, and what harm did Sam Kydd ever do anybody?

So - a game of two halves, I suppose, but that’s okay, they mostly are in this line of business.

The Projected Man

Secret Of The Dummy

Ventriloquist’s dummies have been a staple of the horror genre ever since film makers realised that the majority of people found them really creepy. ‘Devil Doll’ is patchy and occasionally amateurish but, at its best, it’s really quite astonishing.

The Great Vorelli (Brent Halliday) is an intense hypnotist with a penchant for humiliating his subjects by making them fear for their life or strip off their clothes at his suggestion. This deeply unethical man with a stick on beard culminates his performance by bringing out Hugo, an ugly ventriloquists dummy with whom he has an extremely uneasy relationship. The act is not so much ‘gottle of geer’ as ‘Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?’ – they bicker and bitch, engaged in a bitter battle of wits which always ends with the browbeaten Hugo standing up and walking towards the audience to apologise for his bad behaviour. There’s not a dry seat in the house.

Vorelli, a first rate cad who was once a doctor but was struck off in mysterious circumstances, ‘studied in the mystic east’ and, it transpires, used mind transference techniques to put the soul of his assistant into the hideous wooden doll. Why? Well, we never get to that but, presumably to see what it would be like. The answer, of course, is creepy, incredibly creepy. What’s more, the evil Vorelli has his eye on voluptuous heiress Marianne (played by the gorgeous Yvonne Romain), hypnotising her to become a twist expert and then, in a nasty turn, his sex slave. Ultimately, Vorelli fancies transferring her soul into a female doll, and having all her money for himself, the bastard.

Can anyone snatch Marianne from the nefarious Vorelli’s mentalist clutches? Well, certainly not her elderly and ineffectual boyfriend – but luckily forty two inches of angry wood containing a tortured soul is on hand to save the day in a tremendous dummy vs. man battle royale.

'Devil Doll’ is the work of Canadian director Lindsay Shonteff. Shonteff specialised in quirky genre films on a shoestring budget, but was also a creative and occasionally surprising director. There are lots of odd shots and effects in ‘Devil Doll’, but they are used intermittently and, as such, the look of the film is slightly uneven. The script is full of holes, of course, but sticks to its rather silly guns and doesn’t pull back from giving us a purely supernatural solution. Most of all, the scenes between Volari and Hugo have a horribly uncomfortable intensity, and the bits where Hugo wanders around are pure horror.

Here’s a clip where Vorelli convinces Hugo to murder his assistant, Magda. There is no strong narrative reason for this (she has only vaguely hinted that she might say something to somebody), but it does give the audience three cheap thrills: Magda’s fulsome breast; Hugo on the move, and an animated dummy stabbing a naked woman to death. The sparse score is particularly good, but I don’t know who it’s by. Anyone know?

As a final thing (for now - I feel that I might come back to this wonky masterpiece), please see this screen grab of William Sylvester (the nominal star, and the eldery and ineffectual love interest we talked about earlier) doing what he does best - nothing, with a drink in his hand. Take a look to his right - interesting and ironic entertainment on offer in London in those days...

Devil Doll