Tower of Evil

Time for another random movie trailer, I think.  This time we're back in 1972, during the British horror film's Indian Summer, before the UK film industry collapsed and, even if it didn't quite die, ended up on life support a few years later.  Alongside the established purveyors of exploitation movies, Hammer, Amicus and Tigon, various independent producers also started putting out horror movies.  Unlike the traditional Hammer product, which had dominated the market for so long, these movies tended to favour contemporary settings over period Gothic.  They were also increasingly aimed at a younger audience - just witness the trendy young things who dominate the first part of Tower of Evil.  Unfortunately, the young characters here are all too typical of those in other British horror flicks of the era: jazz-listening hepcats written by middle aged script writers.

Despite this gripe, Tower of Evil is a gloriously silly, but very entertaining film, even though the version I've seen on TV a couple of times has an incredibly muddled climax thanks to some cuts having been made at vital points in the denouement.  It features a host of familiar British faces, not to mention a plethora of red-herrings and sub-plots.  In many ways it can be seen as an early prototype of the later US slasher movies, with its unseen assailant gorily knocking off characters one-by-one in a remote setting.  A heady brew of drugs, jazz music and serial murder, the film also boasts an incredible psychedelic hypnotism/interrogation sequence.  As if all that wasn't enough, Robin Askwith gets impaled with a Phoenician spear and the lovely Candace Glendenning spends a large part of her screen time gratuitously naked.