The Vulture (1966) Revisited

So we come to the second part of my weekend double bill, (a recreation of an actual sixties double bill), with a look at the lower part of it: The Vulture (1966).  Now, I've written here about this film before, but not only was that a long time ago, but rewatching it made me realise that there was a fair bit about it that I'd missed the first time around.  An independent production, its finance was cobbled together from a variety of international sources - which explains some of the more eccentric casting - and was written, produced and directed by British B-movie veteran Lawrence Huntingdon.  The limited budget is painfully obvious, with the film having a scrappy feel, with abrupt editing and a hurried look to most scenes, giving the impression that the whole thing was shot on the fly, with a minimum of planning, let alone rehearsal.  The hesitant performances of most of the cast reinforce the impression that it was all very hurriedly shot on a tight schedule.  Despite being set and partially filmed in Cornwall, the cast deploy a wild variety of accents, ranging through local squire Broderick Crawford's American accent, through a local police superintendent's Irish brogue to Akim Tamiroff's supposed German accent, (actually more Eastern European, unsurprisingly, bearing in mind his Armenian origins).  Nobody in Cornwall, it seems, speaks with a Cornish accent, not even a vaguely West of England accent.  Interestingly, while Crawford's character is clearly American, his brother speaks with a German-tinged English accent.  The lead is another down-on-his-luck American actor, Robert Hutton, who could be found in a number of low budget British movies around this time and looks old enough to be Diane Clare's father rather than her husband.

What really stymies the film is its storyline which not only is ridiculous, but is also far too ambitious for the budget.  Basically, it involves someone who believes that they are the descendant of a long dead pirate buried in the local graveyard attempting to retrieve a treasure he was rumoured to have been buried with by teleporting themselves into the grave, in place of the pirate's remains.  (If they could teleport the body out, one can't help but feel that it would surely have been easier to just try and teleport the treasure out).  Unfortunately, they didn't reckon with the fact that the pirate had been buried with a large bird, a vulture, that he had kept as a pet and find themselves combined with the bird, (making the film a distant cousin to The Fly (1958) and its sequels).  At which point, the hybrid creature bursts out of the grave clutching the treasure in its talons and flaps off into the night - or so we're told, as the budget didn't run to actually realising the scene.  Instead, we have to be satisfied by the fevered ramblings of the only witness, the local librarian who was taking a short cut through the graveyard at the time - her experience was so frightening that it turned her hair white.  It also happens that the pirate had a grudge against the family of the local squire (whose ancestor had sent him to the gallows), vowing to kill all of his descendants, which 'The Vulture' duly proceeds to do, swooping down and carrying them off, before dropping them to their deaths from a great height.  Unfortunately, the budget only runs to showing a giant set of vulture legs and talons descending into shot, grabbing the shoulders of the creature's victim and lifting them off of the ground.  It looks as ludicrous as it sounds and inevitably provokes hilarity in the viewer.

Improbability piles upon improbability as the film proceeds, with 'The Vulture' apparently still being able to pass as human (their head is untransformed and they appear to have retained arms and hands along with their wings), during daylight hours.  They have also been able to build a well-equipped laboratory, with its own power source, in their basement without anybody noticing.  We finally get a glimpse of the creature at the film's climax, (if, by this time, you hadn't realised it was Akim Tamiroff, thanks to his suspicious accent, swirling cloak and sudden need to walk with sticks, you really need to hand in your 'Junior G-Man' membership badge), where we get a flash of black feathered body with Tamiroff's head atop it.  Another scene guaranteed to provoke hilarity.  The Vulture truly is a bad film, with unspeakable dialogue, a ludicrous monster, wooden acting performances and some very undistinguished direction from Huntingdon, who can't even make anything of his Cornish locations.  It isn't helped by some very murky colour, (it lacked even this for its US release, with cheaper black and white prints being used instead) and an excessive running time, which it crawls through, with too much talk and not enough action.  The film's main entertainment value, sadly, comes from the unintentional laughs it provides.