Incense for the Damned (1970)

Eventually released under a variety of alternative titles, (including Bloodsuckers, as both on the trailer above and my DVD edition of the film), Incense for the Damned is notorious as the film never actually completed, yet still released.  That there are problems with the 'completed' film is obvious from the opening, when voice over narration from Alex Davion's character tells us who the main characters are and their relationships to each other.  It is a bit like walking into 'Episode Two' of a serial without having seen the preceding episode: the narration is effectively giving us a 'story so far synopsis' of footage that clearly doesn't exist.  In fact, there seems to be a lot of footage that was never shot, with Davion's narration frequently popping up to carry the story through various changes of location and plot developments.  The result is a fragmented narrative that never seems to explain anything entirely satisfactorily.  The fact that characters abruptly come and go from the story doesn't help either.

As it stands, the viewer is thrown into the middle of the story, told that brilliant Greek scholar (and son of the Foreign Secretary) Richard Fountain (Patrick Mower) has gone missing in Greece, having traveled there to undertake research and temporarily escape the domination of the head of his college, Dr Walter Goodrich (Peter Cushing), who also happens to be the father of Fountain's fiance.  After receiving reports that Fountain has fallen in with a mysterious Greek woman who is at the centre of some kind of sex and drugs cult, Fountain's father, in an attempt to head off a possible scandal, dispatches Fountain's friend Tony Seymore (Alex Davion) to find him and bring him back to the UK.  Accompanied by one of Fountain's students, Bob Kirby (Johnny Sekka), and his fiance Penelope (Madeleine Hinde), Seymore travels to Greece, learning that a trail of dead bodies seems to follow the cult as it moves around Greece. Enlisting the assistance of the British Military Attache, Major Longbow (Patrick MacNee), they eventually track Fountain down to a ruined mountain fortress.  However, even after the Greek woman has been killed and Fountain rescued and returned to Cambridge, he still seems to be under her influence, with tragic consequences. 

The story behind the making Incense for the Damned is complex, but boils down to the fact that the money ran out part way through shooting, with the production company, Titan, going out of business.  Exactly how much footage remained unfilmed isn't clear: most of the Greek sequences seem to have been shot, whilst the UK sequences are far from complete, with Davion's narration apparently having to cover for a missing opening section.  The situation is complicated by claims from the director, Titan regular Robert Hatford-Davis, that additional footage was shot by someone else in an attempt to complete the film.  The long and the short of it is that the existing footage was pieced together (either by the film's backers or a distribution company) in an attempt to salvage something from the project.  Sadly, that 'something' turned out to be a frequently incoherent mess which Hartford-Davis refused to put his name to (some prints credit the director as 'Michael Burrowes', others credit no director whatsoever).

The frustrating thing about Incense for the Damned as it stands, though, is that you can still see how it might have been a good movie.  It's basic premise is highly promising: vampirism as a sexual perversion, a cult in which the sucking of blood has replaced penetrative sex as a means of producing an orgasm (which makes it attractive to Fountain, who is impotent, perhaps as a result of Goodrich's emotional and professional dominance).  Interestingly, Terence Fisher, who had directed Hammer's seminal Gothic horrors, including the 1958 Dracula remake and its first two sequels, had long sought to secure the rights to Incense's source novel, Simon Raven's Doctors Wear Scarlet. His interest in bringing the novel made perfect sense: his version of cinematic vampirism is highly sexualised.  The prim Victorian women of his Dracula movies are transformed by the Count's attentions into rapacious and predatory creatures of the night, hell bent on seducing anyone, male or female, who crosses their path.  Moreover, when they are about to staked (effectively penetrated by a very phallic looking object) they writhe around in a manner akin to an adult movie performer simulating and orgasm.  (See particularly Barbara Shelley's performance in 1965's Dracula, Prince of Darkness, in this respect).   Fisher's interpretation of Raven's novel would have been fascinating.

Sadly, however, the rights to the novel fell instead to low budget outfit Titan and Robert Hartford-Davis, an exploitation specialist who had, to be fair, directed a couple of reasonably effective horror films: Black Torment (1964) and Corruption (1967).  To look at the positives about the film: the Greek locations are very nicely filmed and the sequence at Cambridge University where Patrick Mower rails against the academic establishment, accusing them of being 'vampires', is quite effective.  Indeed, the contrast the film draws between the staid and ancient rituals of academia - the formal dinner and all its attendant regalia - and the orgiastic rituals of the Greek vampire cult Mower had earlier fallen victim to, is done well: both are equally ludicrous but potentially sinister attempts to impose ancient power over the participants.  However, the movie's attempts to draw a further parallel between the malign influence of the Greek vampire cult and Dr Goodrich's attempts to control Fountain's life and turn him into a suitable successor are fatally undermined by the fact that so much of the Cambridge academia footage appears never to have been shot.

Unfortunately, the whole film is hobbled by its inability to build up any momentum for its story, let alone any kind of suspense, thanks largely to Hartford-Davis' lacklustre direction.  It just lurches from one set piece to another, with various talky scenes of exposition or narrative in between.  Which is hardly surprising, considering the circumstances under which it was 'completed'.  Worse still, many of the acting performances are poor - in the case of Madelaine Hinde, playing Mower's fiance, the performance is down right awful.  Peter Cushing and Patrick MacNee are honourable exceptions, but both are effectively playing extended cameos.  The ever lovely but ill-fate Imogen Hassell is largely wasted as the Greek vampire besetting Mower - she just has to glare and flash her cleavage a lot in an underwritten role.

The script leaves so much unexplained and so many loose ends hanging that it becomes hugely frustrating for the viewer.  Just who is Alex Davion's Seymore, for instance?   What does he do that makes him the man the Foreign Secretary calls upon to find his missing son - a private detective, a secret agent?  We never find out.  There's also a sub-plot involving Fountain's relationship with his student Bob Kirby, which is quickly shut down, despite looking, initially, as if it were going somewhere.  To be fair, this might be down to the fact that not all of the script was actually filmed.  That said, what was filmed is often confusing and contradictory.  The film's closing image - of Seymore and Kirby descending into the vaults to stake Fountain's body - completely negates everything that had gone before, which had established vampirism as a psychological rather than a supernatural phenomena.

But that sums up the film's problems: it can't make up its mind whether it wants to be psychological thriller or a Gothic horror and ends up being neither.  Despite its tortuous genesis, Incense for the Damned is widely available (under a variety of titles) in several different versions.  The most common DVD release (titled Bloodsuckers) runs under seventy five minutes, but features a psychedelic orgy sequence as an extra.  The BBC used to regularly show a longer version which integrated the orgy sequence and some other footage into the film.  Sadly, this doesn't help clarify the film's narrative.  At any length, the film is a mess.  But an intriguing mess which leaves you pondering the film which could have been made with different talents at the helm. (Not to mention better financing).