Basil On Film

Basil Kirchin scored relatively few films and even less TV, but his name on the titles always gives me a frisson of pleasure.

The Mutations.

Assignment K.

The Strange Affair.

The Shuttered Room.

Primitive London.

I Start Counting.

Negatives.

Out Of The Unknown: The Indian Spirit Guide.

Freelance.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

The Freakmaker

Released in 1974, ‘The Mutations’ turned out to be the last film that Jack Cardiff directed, and the last film that Basil Kirchin scored, so you might well expect it to be a career ending disaster, a monumental flop that derailed the hitherto promising careers of two excellent people. In actual fact, it isn’t bad at all: just a little cheap and tacky. But it’s fun, which goes a long way, and the music is great.

Donald Pleasance plays Professor Nolter, a brilliant biologist and geneticist who is working on creating animal / plant hybrids so that mankind can live by photosynthesis and the world hunger issue can be eradicated, which is fair enough. But why do the annoying (and really old) students in his seminar group keep disappearing, and what exactly is going on at the local Freakshow? That’s right, the local Freakshow. It’s that sort of film.

The Freakshow is the centre of the mystery, and is populated by a cast of real sideshow performers with a variety of deformities (including a man who can pop his eyeballs out of his sockets) and it is their presence that raises issues of exploitation and sensationalism. The majority of their screen time is documentary type footage of their tent show where they introduce themselves and their ‘talents’ in time honoured carnival style, but they also have some dramatic scenes that are deliberately staged to recall Tod Browning’s ‘Freaks’, including appropriating some of the dialogue. These scenes have a real pathos that is not in the script, but written by their haunted faces, awkward movements, and the obvious sadness of their limited lives. In classic horror style they become killers at the end, of course, and give a fairly impressive demonstration of deadly knife throwing.

Pleasance is very understated and utterly convinces as a dedicated, if somewhat sardonic man of science. You could almost believe he might even be the hero of this story until you see him tenderly stroke a large rabbit before shoving it into the open trap of a massive carnivorous plant. No matter how many times I see this, it always makes me laugh.

Scott Anthony is the male lead (well, he shares the honour with screen vacuum Brad Harris) and is perfect casting as a know-it-all student with a shit quip for every occasion. Equally insufferable as sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brezska in Ken Russell’s shrill and embarrassing ‘Savage Messiah’, Anthony’s career ended here, too – I can’t say I’m sorry as he is one of the least likeable male actors I have ever seen, and I’ve watched films with all of the Baldwin brothers (Memo to the Baldwin Brothers: you have made life unnecessarily complicated by all becoming ‘the fat one’.)

The most striking element of the enterprise is Basil Kirchin’s amazing music, including extracts from his first ‘Worlds within Worlds’ LP and additional material written with John Nathan. Surprisingly experimental for a mainstream (horror or otherwise) film, it utilises trumpet, animal roars, hums, clicks, pops, scratchy strings and the sounds of autistic children to provide an avant garde accompaniment to the story, lending a gravitas to the action even when it gets really silly. The combination of music and image probably work best in the opening sequence: the stop-motion footage of flowers and toadstools growing is beautiful on its own terms, but Basil’s music and sound makes it transcendent.

The Mutations

US Title.

Bedabbled!

Amazing news, the third issue of 'Bedabbled' is out! & it's a Vampire special! & I have some bits in it! If there's a better Brit Horror publication out there I just don't want to know about it, I simply couldn't take the excitement.

More here. Be very quick.

F*** Me, It's Freddie!

FMIF as Professor Richter, or rather Doctor Brandt in Professor Richter's body in the excellent  'Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed'.

Back To Screeching Life

'Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!' was the fifth in Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle and, from its sensational title down, is one of the goriest and most glorious of all the sequels. Full of incident, packed with severed heads and brain operations, the film whizzes along brilliantly, and even gets by without having an obvious monster. The closest we get to a shambling, reanimated corpse is the ever amazing Freddie Jones, who gives a great performance under difficult circumstances – he’s playing a man trapped in another man’s body, a tortured being who has been saved from death but wishes they hadn’t bothered.

Cushing is brilliant, too, more of a ruthless and driven bastard than ever. In a scene added at the producers insistence, the Baron uncharacteristically deviates from his passion for anatomical DIY to rape Veronica Karlsen, an unseemly piece of action that doesn’t do anything for the film apart from giving it a flash of nipple for the distributors. Cushing, ever the gentleman, was decidedly not impressed.

Fast moving, shocking, exciting and, ultimately, very poignant, ‘Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed!’ is a fantastic use of eighty minutes, the embodiment of just how good Hammer films can be when they’re firing on all cylinders.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

Burn, Baby, Burn

'The Wicker Tree’ is nowhere as bad as I expected it to be, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is any good. Robin Hardy’s somewhat belated follow up to the 1972 classic ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘Tree’ is not a sequel so much as a rather arch attempt to recapture the spirit of the earlier film, but without the clever script, strong performances and genuine shock and surprise of its predecessor. What we’re left with is an uneven mix of horror and comedy, a kind of modular construction where key scenes from the earlier film are recreated – badly – as a foundation and vastly inferior elements are bolted onto the shaky framework. It falls over long before the end.

It’s not all bad, of course, but the worst is awful, and the good merely average. Christopher Lee’s utterly pointless cameo sort of sums up the whole misadventure – it serves no purpose and makes no narrative sense – it only works as a nod to the original, which, under normal circumstances would be okay but slightly indulgent - but here, when everything is a nod to the original, it just seems like a waste of forty years.

The Wicker Tree

Derren Nesbitt, Actor

Derren Nesbitt as nasty gangster Sid Sabbath in Dick Emery vehicle 'Ooh...You Are Awful' from 1972. Here he subtly conveys the various stages of being being covered in cream from an exploding milk float.

Later, Derren goes head to head with Dick Emery in a horrible cross-dressing face off. The results are disturbing, to say the least, with Derren looking like the missing link between Alejandro Jodorowsky and Damaris Hayman.



Alejandro Jodorowsky.

Damaris Hayman.

Unseen Things

‘Unearthly Stranger’ is a short, sharp, smart science fiction thriller from 1964. In it, the world’s scientists are close to a breakthrough on space travel – not by rocket, but by harnessing the power of the human mind, a sort of intergalactic astral projection. That’s the theory, anyway, and it’s an interesting one, although every time anyone gets near to cracking the formula they die from a cerebral haemorrhage.

Will British scientist Dr. Mark Davidson (John Neville) finally find the answer, or will he be too distracted by gorgeous new wife, Julie? On the subject of Julie, why does she frighten children, or not need oven gloves to touch white hot casserole dishes?  And why does she never blink? The answer may or may not surprise you, but it’s extremely well done, and the conclusion is supremely unnerving.

An unsung gem, ‘Unearthly Stranger’ really is genuinely very good – tense, atmospheric and, most of all, intelligent. It certainly made me look at my wife in a new light.

Unearthly Stranger