The Pit Of Panic

Ah, Robert Hartford-Davis: a terrible film director who made some of my favourite films.'The Black Torment' is a Hammer-esque tale with an olden day setting and lashings of the olde Gothic, just don't watch it if you're even slightly tired as you will fall asleep, it's as simple as that.

When Sir Richard Fordyke returns to his ancestral home with his new bride, Elizabeth, he is surprised to find that very few people are pleased to see him. The reason? A nasty rape and murder (is there any other kind?) in which the poor victim gasped his Lordship's name before expiring, even though he was miles away in that London. Very soon, he finds himself seemingly pursued by the unquiet spirit of his first wife (unable to give him an heir, she jumped out of the window) and by a series of witnesses who have seen an angry version of him under circumstances that he has no recollection of. So, if it's not him, then who is it that looks like exactly him and is terrorising the village? & why isn't Sir Richard called Giles like every other eldest son of the Fordyke dynasty? It's a tricky one.

Remarkably restrained for a Hartford-Davis film, the pressure to show some decorum seems to have sucked the life out of the production. The first five minutes has an atmospheric sequence where a busty, frightened woman tries (and fails) to lose her unseen pursuer in a darkened wood, but the rest is flat, slow and, despite a couple of murders, a banging window and the odd flash of wenchly cleavage, pretty dull. When the 'twist' we saw a mile off suddenly staggers into view about five minutes from the end, there's a burst of long overdue activity:  women are threatened, villains revealed, murderous imbeciles drool, a bullet is fired into a face, two former friends have a sword fight and, finally, there's an impaling and a happy ending.

I think this is a film that Hartford-Davis made to show people that he could deliver a solid, fairly respectable piece of work after several fairly seamy b-movies and, in doing so, tried out some new things: colour, horror, period drama, a proper story - with mixed results. It's a boring film, but a good career move.

The Black Torment

Suckers

‘Incense For The Damned’ is a film of contrasts: it’s annoying and boring. As a yardstick of just how badly it all turned out, Robert Hartford-Davis (the director of ‘Gonks Go Beat’) actually tried to have his name removed from it. In the end, it was delayed for a couple of years, re-edited (seemingly with a bread knife in the dark) by the studio and stuck out for a couple of weeks in 1970 as a supporting feature before disappearing, only re-emerging in the 1990’s as a BBC1 Friday night film favourite (I have a theory that the regular showing of this film is a Corporation in-joke).

Based on the book ‘Doctors Wear Scarlet’ by Simon Raven, ‘Incense…' (also known as ‘Bloodsuckers’) tells the story of a promising Oxford Classics student (Patrick Mower, the walking nostril) who has an illustrious academic career and a good marriage all mapped out for him by his mentor (Peter Cushing, wasted) until he embarks on a field trip to Crete where he becomes the mindless suck bag of a busty Mediterranean vampire, Chriesis (Imogen Hassall, slathered in so much fake tan that she looks like permanently dirty 'Playschool' doll Hamble).

Cushing sends two men to bring Mower home and, before you know it, there’s a whole lot of donkey riding, a papier mache rock slide and a near seven minute orgy scene with a freakbeat soundtrack that is probably the best part of the film but does not appear in all the versions. Ultimately, busty vampire dispatched, Mower is returned to Oxford, only to prove publicly and bloodily that vampirism is not cured by simply a good talking to and a change of scenery…

Not a good film by any standards, one can only hope that the cast and crew enjoyed their holiday. Here's the best bit...

Incense For The Damned AKA Bloodsuckers

Not A Woman's Picture

We’ve looked at the oeuvre of director Robert Hartford-Davis before: he’s a bit of a sleaze meister. ‘Corruption’ (1968) is the film in which Hartford-Davis falls into the muck and mire again but, this time, as he stumbles, clutches at the sleeve of Peter Cushing and dumps him in the shit as well.

Cushing plays Sir John Rowan, a brilliant and eminent surgeon: dedicated, hard-working, precise, correct at all times. Well, not quite all the time, as crafty Sir John has a dolly bird girlfriend and a wardrobe full of natty neckerchiefs to show that’s he’s not quite the cube we thought he was. It’s actually quite shocking to see the fifty five year old Peter Cushing ardently pressing his dessicated lips against his much younger love interest Lyn (Sue Lloyd) and pestering her for car sex, but it gets a lot worse and doesn’t get any better.

Lyn is fond of Sir John but sees him as a safe bet: he’ll provide security and status whilst she continues her groovy model lifestyle. Unfortunately, Sir John gets into a jealous rage at a swinging party and, during a violent tussle with Anthony Booth (who wouldn’t want to smack him?) a halogen lamp falls onto Lyn and before you can say ‘does anyone smell bacon?’ her pretty face and fabulous career are ruined.

Sir John isn’t the sort of man to let a little setback like a sizzled face put him off, however, and spurred on by an increasingly unhinged Lyn he packs in his job and takes to experimenting with pituitary glands to effect tissue regeneration. At first he is successful with the glands from dead women but the rejuvenating effects are temporary and it is with horror that he realises he must kill to get the living tissue required for a long term solution…

And kill he does. In a prostitute’s parlour, in a train carriage, on a beach as the tide comes in. In fact, he can’t stop killing and we are presented with the dismal spectacle of the usually immaculate Cushing, his eyes darting guiltily from side to side, sweating and slashing and descending into hell. It’s actually pretty unpleasant.

The film ends almost on a non-sequiter as a sinister group of hippies (including a gurning David Lodge with stick on sideburns) break into Sir John and Lyn’s holiday home and proceed to terrorise them in scenes that seem taken from another film entirely but, deus ex machina like, swiftly navigate the narrative to a violent end as, yes, there’s a laser scalpel in the spare room that goes out of control and everybody, yes, everybody, is sliced, diced and left a smouldering corpse. The End.

Cushing tries his best here but, ultimately, just like Sir John, all his huffing, puffing and utter degradation just leads to a humiliating loss of face. Hartford-Davis didn’t know any better, of course, and watching this and the films he made later in his career, it becomes apparent that he didn’t want to know any better. Billed as a film to which women would not be admitted unless accompanied by a man, even the promotional campaign is vintage Hartford-Davis: it’s crass, sensational, misogynistic and it doesn’t make any sense…

Corruption

Sinner Meet Your Maker

Fiendish moments from the original lobby cards. 

Beauty Beware

When I am dead and gone, say only this of me: he really, really liked 'The Fiend' ('Beware My Brethren' in the US). Like it? I love it. I love the music, the performances, the brown and olive world of the early 1970's, Tony Beckley, Patrick Magee, I love it all.

Beckley plays Kenny, a deeply religious security guard who lives with his aged Mum and, in his spare time, is a perverted sex killer. He's grown up twisted as a result of belonging to a very odd (but pretty funky) cult led by the ever bonkers Patrick Magee. The resulting tale is one of the most entertaining in the British horror canon, and it's just come out on DVD, so go and get it got immediately.

Here's the opening sequence of the film, which should probably clear up the whole 'shall I - shan't I' debate immediately. Bloody marvellous.

The Fiend