The House That Vanished (1973)

Another wilfully obscure low budget British would be shocker from the early seventies, the main reason for my interest in The House That Vanished (1973), is that it was directed by Jose Larraz.  Larraz was a Spanish director who directed a series of low budget exploitation films in the UK during the early seventies, of which Vampyres (1974) is probably the best known.  Most are psychological thrillers, involving protagonists, often women, trapped in remote locations and finding themselves under some kind of threat, either from unstable individuals or sometimes the supernatural.  Isolation, be it psychological or physical, seems to be a key theme in Larraz's work.  The House That Vanished conforms to this basic template, with a model reluctantly accompanying her more than slightly shady photographer to a remote house, where is to carry out some unspecified (and probably illegal) activities.  Getting lost, darkness falls, a mist comes down and they find themselves driving along a dirt track through some woods before finally arriving at what the boyfriend assumes is the right house.  He breaks in and they enter the apparently abandoned house, while the boyfriend searches for some unspecified object, they hear someone else enter the house and hide in a wardrobe.  From their hiding place, they witness a woman being murdered by an unseen assailant, before they flee.  Becoming separated from her boyfriend, the woman gets back to their car, only to find the keys missing.  Pursued by the killer, she eventually stumbles into a scrapyard, where she hides until daylight.  Later, her boyfriend's car mysteriously appears parked across the road from her flat.  In it, she finds her photographic portfolio, but missing a single picture.

It's an intriguing start for the film and further incidents are piled on top of each other: the car vanishes again, only to turn up in the scrapyard, a mysterious new tenant turns up in the flat below and the woman meets a young male designer who, we learn, is having an incestuous relationship with his aunt.  Crucially, of course, despite returning to that scrapyard, she just can't seem to locate that house.  It has, as the title says, apparently vanished.  Worried by the fact that her boyfriend had broken into the house, the woman is advised by her friends not to report his disappearance and the murder to the police.  Not that it would have done her much good as, like most exploitation movie cops of the era, the police seem remarkably complacent, even when they do have a crime reported to them - the rape and murder of the woman's flatmate.  Inevitably, of course, she does end up in that house again, but failing to recognise it because, this time, she is taken there in daylight and, most crucially, to the front of the house, rather than the back.  Equally inevitably, she finds herself in peril again as, while exploring the house, she starts to recognise some of the decor in the back rooms of the house, eventually stumbling on the bodies of the first victim and her boyfriend.  

In common with most of the Larraz films I've seen, the director goes for low key menace and slowly building suspense rather than shocks and gore.  The onscreen violence is very limited, much of it implied, rather than seen.  The opening scenes of the drive to the house and their subsequent exploration of the seemingly abandoned rooms, is very atmospheric and tense, as is the subsequent chase through the woods.  Unfortunately, the film somewhat loses pace as the plot unfolds, with too much dialogue which doesn't seem to be moving the story forward.  One of the film's problems is that both the red-herrings and the real killer are far too obvious.  The mysterious new tenant, for instance, is written and played as so stereotypically creepy, that you just know he's a diversion.  Possibly the film's biggest asset is its depiction of early seventies London in all of its grimy, run down glory.  It also captures the sheer seediness of the bottom end of the modelling business - there's a distinct lack of glamour in Larraz's depiction of the modelling scene.  The performances, like the script (by British sexploitation legend Derek Ford) and direction, are generally low key, with Judy Matheson representing the closest thing to a star name, (she could also be seen in Hammer movies and other UK horror films of the era, later enjoying a career as a local TV presenter in my region), although her supporting role here is relatively brief.  

One thing that struck me whilst watching The House That Vanished was how it didn't seem to flow smoothly in places, with what felt like a huge jump at a key juncture - the rape and murder of the flatmate, which we see nothing of, it is just mentioned as having happened.  The ending also seemed rushed and abrupt, with the police turning up just in the nick of time - and completely out of the blue.  Who called them?  How did they know where the house was?  Why was the downstairs tenant with them?  It just didn't make sense.  A little bit of research revealed that the only version of the film apparently available is the US edit, originally distributed by AIP, which reportedly had around fifteen minutes of footage cut from it.  (Indeed, it was this version which used The House That Vanished title, it had been released in the UK, at its original running time, as Scream - and Die!    This version was also given a limited US release as Please! Don't Go in the Bedroom, before being picked up by AIP for a wider release in an edited form and with a new title).  I'm assuming that these cuts explain the narrative jumps - it seems clear that we're meant to assume that the creepy red-herring downstairs guy found something out and alerted the cops.  Likewise, I'm assuming that the murder of the flatmate had a bigger build up, possibly with a murder sequence similar to that at the beginning of the film.  Once again, this just serves to illustrate the problems we have when trying to properly assess these kinds of films as, as is the case here, the only available version doesn't represent the movie's original form.

The Avengers (1998)

Sometimes - and usually against my better judgement - I revisit a movie that, when I first saw it, I thought was an irredeemable mess.  So, I recently sat down and rewatched, for probably the first time in twenty-plus years, The Avengers (1998), the largely forgotten and largely unlamented attempt to reboot the classic sixties TV series for the big screen. One of the reasons that the film has been largely forgotten is that, for decades, with Warner Brothers not releasing it in any form for home viewing for years and only a brief TV screening (on UK TV, at least), it simply vanished from sight.  Recently, however, The Avengers resurfaced for a couple of showings on ITV4.  Well, it hasn't improved with age.  Although, to highlight the positives, a second viewing did allow me the better appreciate the film's production design and cinematography, both of which are excellent.  The production design does its best to replicate something of the feel of the original, with its exterior shots of largely empty streets rendering the London background almost abstract and lots of sixties British motor cars, giving it all a timeless feeling.  Even the high tech hardware used by the villains to control the weather has a somewhat anachronistic, sixties, feel about it.  Arguably, though, this attempt to recreate the visuals of the TV series is also one of the film's problems, effectively denying it an identity of its own, instead giving it the feel of an embalmed relic.  

The film's real problems, though, lies elsewhere, namely with the script and the casting.  The former never seems sure of what it is trying to serve the audience - an episode of the TV series or something entirely new - let alone who that audience might be - fans of the original or new viewers to whom the TV show and its characters mean little or nothing.  Hence, it gives us a half-hearted 'origin' story for Steed and Mrs Peel, with the film purporting to chronicle their first meeting (something the TV show skipped over, with one series ending with Cathy Gale as his sidekick, the next opening with Mrs Peel, with no explanation offered as to the change).  Now, as I have ranted on about at length, I find Hollywood's burning need to provide 'origin stories' for well established TV show characters and scenarios the bane of my life - most fundamentally because they represent bad writing.  Audiences should be thrown in at the deep end and background details filtered through things like dialogue as necessary.  So it is with The Avengers, regardless of whether the viewers are established fans or new to the story, this 'origin story' is completely superfluous, slowing down the story and altering the dynamic of the Steed/Emma Peel relationship, which was central to a large part of the series' run.  The script also feels very shaky on what tone it should be aiming for, seemingly unsure as to whether it should play it for laughs, as some kind of parody, or present a more straightforward action orientated adventure.  The lightness of touch that the TV series had evolved by the time that Diana Rig joined the cast as Mrs Peel is entirely absent.

But, when all is said and done, the script could have been brilliant, but the final film, as presented for distribution, wouldn't have reflected it.  The Avengers suffered savage pre-release editing from the studio, cutting it down to just under ninety minutes from a reported director's cut of one hundred and fifteen minutes.  (Some reports also claim an initial hundred and forty minute cut, making the release version effectively an evisceration).   Consequently, the film, as available, feels completely disjointed, jumping between scenes and characters in a way that is often barely coherent.  Combined with an already confused script renders the film barely watchable as a narrative.  It looks as if most of the movie's middle section is missing, with a lengthy introduction crashing into a frenzied climax, skipping most of the plot and character development that you'd ordinarily expect.  On top of all of this is the problem of the casting.  Ralph Fiennes seems perpetually uncomfortable as John Steed, far too stiff and formal, entirely lacking Patrick MacNee's relaxed charisma.  (To be fair, though, Fiennes is still better casting that Mel Gibson, who previously had long been associated with the role).  Uma Thurman brings her icy beauty to the role of Emma Peel, but little else, again failing to deliver the sort of charismatic and seemingly effortless performance provided by Diana Rigg on TV.  Jim Broadbent fares better as 'Mother', capturing Patrick Newell's performance from the series,  Sean Connery seems to be having fun as the main villain, relishing his various Roger Moore-style double entendres and bringing some much needed flamboyance to proceedings although, overall, he feels underused.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with The Avengers is that it all too often feels like it is somebody who isn't that familiar with the original idea of what series was about.  It takes various ideas, characters and tropes from the TV show and rather randomly tries to mix and match them in the hope of creating some kind of rough facsimile.  In which respect it reminded rather of that equally unsuccessful recent movie version of Fantasy Island, which similarly plucked ideas and characters from the entire run of the TV series and tried to assemble them into an entirely unnecessary 'origin story'.  So, while a second viewing of The Avengers didn't make me re-evaluate the film and change my initial impressions of it, it did leave me feeling frustrated at what a missed opportunity it was.  With a better script and casting, it might have been a halfway decent re-imagining of the TV series for the late nineties, (not to mention becoming the start of a franchise, which was the producers' original plan, but the film's failure at the box office led to the cancellation of these plans).  Still, if you want to know what those fifteen minutes of missing footage contained, the film's novelisation was apparently based on the script used for the hundred and fifteen minuute version.  So, if you can find a copy, reading it might well make for a more satisfying experience than watching the film, as released by Warner Brothers.

The Dead Are Alive (1972)

An Italian/German/Yugoslav co-production, the fact that The Dead Are Alive (1972) isn't better known is possibly related to it being misleadingly marketed in various territories.  It's English language title seems to imply a zombie movie, while the German release title and marketing - which translates as Mystery of the Yellow Grave - plays up a tenuous Edgar Wallace connection, (it was actually loosely inspired by a short story by Wallace's son, Bryan Edgar Wallace).  The Italian title, which translates as The Etruscan Kills Again, also implies some kind of supernatural horror.  In reality, the film is a giallo movie, made at the height of the genre's popularity - there are no supernatural elements (although this is implied as a plot device a few times) and certainly no zombies.  Unfortunately, it isn't exactly vintage giallo, being far too slow moving with clunky plotting that all too often gets bogged down in various personal melodramas.  While the genre always relied upon throwing in plenty of misdirection in order to keep audiences guessing as a twisty plot unfolded, The Dead Are Alive suffers from having far too many sub-plots going on, with the film's constant jumping between them hurting the story's progression - the film's narrative has a halting quality, with tension and momentum built up in one plot strand being dissipated by abrupt switches in direction to pursue other sub-plots.  There are so many false trails that the film generates enough red herrings to stock a kipper factory.  The sheer number of characters these multiple plot strands bring in also becomes confusing - trying to keep up with who they are and what their relationships are is hugely distracting.

The film's initial set up is certainly intriguing - a group of archaeologists led by recovering alcoholic professor Jason Porter (Alex Cord) open up an ancient Etruscan tomb in Italy, revealing a series of violent wall paintings depicting an ancient Etruscan god and a ritual of human sacrifice to the deity.  Pretty soon, a pair of youths are found dead in the tomb, beaten to death in a manner similar to that depicted in the paintings.  Everything seems to point to the professor - who, when drinking, is prone to violent outbursts and memory lapses - but there are plenty of other suspicious characters: could it be that creepy site security guard who is trading in stolen artefacts and likes burning insects to death?  Or is it the world famous composer (John Marley), who is married (bigamously as it turns out) to the prof's ex (Samantha Eggar) and is also prone to violent outbursts (he disfigured his first wife in a fit of anger years before)?  Then again, could it be the composer's son, who works with the prof and is the son of the disfigured ex-wife?  More murders ensue and 'clues' pile up, the murder weapon is a missing probe used by the archaeological team in surveying tombs, pairs of red shoes, apparently taken from a live theatre production the in which composer is conducting the orchestra, are left at the murder scenes, while the prof keeps hearing snatches of classical music close to the murder scenes.  The audience's constant bombardment with characters, clues and incidents rapidly becomes both confusing and wearing.

Still, the film does look very good, its colourful photography making good use of some attractive Italian locations.  While Armando Crispino's  direction is steady enough, with the murder scenes harrowingly well staged and the scenes in the tomb suitably atmospheric, it is never able to build up the tension and suspense required to make this sort of film work.  Despite the frenetic cutting between sub-plots, the film overall is far too slow in progressing its central narrative and is far too long - you can't help but feel that it would have benefitted greatly from tighter editing.  The film cast strongly, with its three Anglo-American stars and a smattering of Italian, German and Yugoslav actors, most recognisable from other continental films of the era, making up the supporting cast.  Alex Cord as the lead makes for particularly interesting casting - never an exactly charismatic or sympathetic actor, here his lack of sympathetic qualities is deployed to good use, in what is, in effect, an anti-hero role.  For the plot to work, it is essential that, for once, the audience should be able to feel that the lead is something of a bastard who might well be capable of murder - Cord's complete absence of charisma makes this very easy, with his character, even when he does eventually unravel the mystery and identify the real killer, remaining essentially dislikable.  By no means a bad film, The Dead Are Alive is simply too crowded, in plot terms, to work effectively as a giallo, its plethora of sub-plots and proliferation of red herrings meaning that it never fully develops and explores an interesting opening scenario.

W C Fields and Me (1976)

Back in the US' bicentennial year, Universal Pictures decided to contribute to the celebrations with a pair of biopics of some of its best remembered stars.  Both Gable and Lombard (1976) and WC Fields and Me (1976) were critically panned and failed to find audiences.  Both have subsequently become very difficult to see.   The WC Fields movie for instance, I recall turning up only once on UK terrestrial TV, only a couple of years after its release, as part of BBC2's Christmas schedules.  I finally caught up with it again over the weekend and was able to confirm it as being a deeply problematic movie.  At the heart of its problems lies the question of exactly what the function of biographical films actually is?  Should they be faithful depictions of the subject's lives, a sort of moving waxwork museum whisking the audience through an entire lifetime compressed into two hours or less?  Or should they focus on some key event or relationship seen as a defining moment of the subject's life?  Or should they eschew strict historical accuracy in favour of creating a story that fictionalises some events and characters in order to try and gain some insight into the real character of the subject?  WC Fields and Me opts for the latter approach, but whether it actually offers any insights into the comic's character is questionable, despite a bravura central performance from Rod Steiger in the title role.  

The film is ostensibly based upon the memoir of the same name written by Fields' one time mistress, Carlotta Monti, (played by Valerie Perrine in the film), who was close to him during the last fourteen years of his life.  (In truth, the film uses virtually nothing from Monti's book).  The subjective nature of source material is the script's excuse for injecting so much fictional detail into the film - Perrine's opening narration telling us that all she knew of Fields' life before they met was what he told her - and Fields, notoriously, liked to fabricate his past, relating different versions of it at different times to different people.  The film, however, diverges from any of these accounts, coming up with a pre-Hollywood backstory for Fields which has him left destitute by a crooked accountant, travelling to California in a rickety second hand car with his midget sidekick, with whom he runs a wax museum before finally being offered movie roles.  In reality, while bad investments made by a financial advisor did cost Fields $50,000, he travelled to California in his own, brand new Lincoln, with $350,000 of his fortune intact, (he was already a top-billed comic in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York and had previously enjoyed international success with his original juggling act).  He certainly didn't run a wax museum and while he had at least one midget friend - a fellow performer from the Follies - he didn't go to California or go into business with him.  This entirely fictional version of the pre-Hollywood Fields is doubtless intended to provide an explanation for his subsequent miserliness and general insecurity regarding money and relationships - a more easily explained substitute for his much more complicated childhood relationship with his father.

Even when the film gets into Fields' Hollywood career and relationship with Monti, it still insists upon fabricating incidents and characters and completely loses track of the chronology of the latter phase  of Fields' life and career.  His reconciliation with his son, for instance, happened in 1938 not, as the film depicts, shortly before his death in 1946.  Of course, the film's version of events plays more conveniently into the script's determination to portray Fields as the stereotypical movie depiction of comedians as being essential unhappy and troubled individuals, their characters shaped by bitterness at past failed relationships.  But the reality was that Fields, on a personal level, spent the last few years of his life in a much more peaceful place, reconciled both with his estranged son and the estranged wife he never divorced (which was why he could never marry Monti).  Most bizarrely, the film fails to properly get to grips with the collapse, revival and collapse again of his movie career.  It completely fumbles the key part of his film career when, becoming ever more erratic as a result of his drinking, Fields was dropped by Paramount, then revived his popularity on radio to the extent that Universal gave him a contract which allowed him greater creative control over his projects.  But the old problems raised their heads again and he found himself dropped by Universal, subsequently being confined to cameo roles in a handful of films, rehashing old routines, and radio appearances.  This omission is particularly mystifying bearing in mind that not only did Universal produce WC Fields and Me, but two of Fields' best remembered and icon movies  - My Little Chickadee and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break - were made for the studio.

Yet, despite the ramshackle and inauthentic script and the distracting false nose he wears throughout, Rod Steiger still contrives to put together a dominant and compelling performance as Fields, eliciting, particularly toward the end of the movie, a great deal of poignancy for the character.  Whether this performance actually represents the real WC Fields, however, whether it truly gives any insight into character, is highly questionable.  The whole film seems based upon the notion that Fields' onstage persona was simply an extension of his real character, that in real life he was also a curmudgeonly, tight fisted, con-artist.  While he certainly liked to play up to his screen character and was, undoubtedly, an alcoholic, there is also plenty of anecdotal evidence of the real Fields being a far more complicated character, often generous, sensitive and kindly.  But little of this is in evidence in the film version of WC Fields and Me.  Steiger tries hard to go beyond simply providing an impersonation of Fields, but the script, ultimately, simply doesn't give him enough to work with and you come way from the film feeling that you've not really learned anything about the real Fields.  Worse still, as several critics at the time of the movie's release noted, it fails to capture the essence of his comic genius - anyone who watched it not knowing who Fields was would be hard pressed to grasp just why he was funny and considered one of his era's greatest screen comedians.

Dracula and Son (1976)

Another French vampire comedy from the seventies, the Christopher Lee starring Dracula and Son (1976) does have a link with 1974's Peter Cushing led Tender Dracula in the form of Bernard Menez, who appears in both.  While in the earlier film he is a supporting role as one of the two hapless writers who end up as guests at Cushing's castle, here he has the co-starring role, playing the 'Son' part of the title.  Dracula and Son is a far more straightforward parody of the vampire genre than Tender Dracula, lacking the surrealism of the latter.  The plot is simple - Lee's vampire count, (never named specifically as being Count Dracula, but close enough to make no difference), finally has a son after his marriage to a non-vampire woman (who he vampirises once she has given him a child), but to the Count's disappointment, his offspring doesn't actually enjoy being one of the undead, refusing to bite living humans to get blood.  Indeed, he grows up to be a shy, socially awkward, young man.  When, in the twentieth century, they find themselves effectively evicted from their ancestral Romanian home after it is taken over by the communist government, they decide to seek a new home abroad, but find themselves inadvertently buried at sea after co-opting the coffins of two dead French sailors.  While the Count washes up in the UK, his son is picked up by a French trawler and ends up in France, living amongst other illegal immigrants and trying to eke out a living as an undocumented worker, working as a nightwatchman.  The Count, meanwhile, finds himself accidentally becoming a film star who specialises in playing vampires.  When a new production brings him to France, father and son are reunited, but fall out over a woman - an advertising executive whose firm wants the Count to advertise a toothpaste brand.   Each tries to destroy the other in an escalating battle over the girl.

Dracula and Son opens like a Hammer film, with a lengthy prologue set in the nineteenth century in which a group of travellers in a stagecoach fall afoul of vampires as they travel through a spooky forest after dark.  Unfortunately, though these scenes are well staged, the nineteenth century interlude simply goes on for too long, chronicling Lee's seduction of a girl kidnapped from the carriage and the birth of their son, robbing the film of its early impetus.  A whole sub-plot involving a young man who was also a passenger on the coach and who encounters the vampirised girl years later, ultimately adds little to the plot, either, turning out to be a contrivance by which the mother can be eliminated from the narrative.  The film's main plot finally starts when the action flashes forward to the then present day and the two main characters are propelled, reluctantly, into the modern world.  Much of the humour of this section of the film revolves around the tribulations of characters who, in their own time and homeland, were feared members of the aristocracy, who find themselves much reduced in stature when robbed of their natural environment and resources.  While the son adapts somewhat more easily to his new life, he still finds himself constantly having to make excuses to his friends as to why he doesn't eat regular food and is never active during daylight hours.  His father finds life in London, at first, at least, to be something of a trial, forced to wander the streets by night looking for random victims, none of whom have the slightest fear of him, having no idea of who or what he is.  Once he becomes a movie star and effectively a member of the modern aristocracy - a celebrity - the film shifts to trying to explore how a traditional vampire might live in contemporary times.  His desire to have a coffin in his hotel room, or work only after dark, for instance, are indulged as simply being the sort of eccentricities that celebrities are prone to.  Visual gags, such as he and one of his vampirised female stars having their coffins side-by-side on a double bed, for instance, abound.

The film's final act, as father and son vampires battle over a girl, moves the narrative into farce, with the various failed attempts of the pair to eliminate each other: coffins are thrown out of hotel windows, clocks are changed to try and give the impression that it is still night and cause an accidental exposure to sunlight, for instance.  Much of it is mildly amusing, but never likely to provoke hilarty.  It's always difficult to fully assess foreign language films on the basis of an English dub, but doubly so when the film is a comedy,  Certainly in the case of Dracula and Son, one suspects that, as is often the case, much of the subtelities of the humour translates into English only fitfully.  (That said, I was at least able to see a dubbed version of the full movie, rather than the original US release version, which was heavily cut and dubbed with 'comedic' voices following a different script).  Despite these problems of translation, the film is actually very well mounted and, particularly in the opening scenes, quite atmospheric.  The central idea, of trying to imagine how a traditional Gothic-style vampire might exist in the modern world is a good one, (and was explored by a number of 'straight' horror films of the era, most notably the Count Yorga series), ripe with comic potential.  But Dracula and Son, while creating some enjoyable imagery and plot developments with regard to this concept, never really manages to develop them sufficiently to be entirely satisfying.  Nevertheless, Dracula and Son, even in English, is a well produced and sometimes amusing film, with decent performances from its leads - Lee plays his entire role completely deadpan, as if he was playing Dracula in a Hammer movie, lending the character a degree of dignity, even as the situation turns farcical -  and is well directed by comedy specialist Eduard Molinaro, who, a couple of years later, had a major international hit with La Cage aux Folles (1978).  It's not Love at First Bite (1979) or Young Frankenstein (1974) in terms of horror comedies, but Dracula and Son, thankfully, isn't Old Dracula (1974) either, delivering a gentle, low-key comedy of vampirism, with satirical asides on the nature of celebrity and the treatment of illegal immigrants, instead.

Lethal Impact: GBH 2 (1991)

The last completed film of Cliff Twemlow, Lethal Impact: GBH 2 (1991) is, as the title implies, a direct sequel to his first feature, GBH (1983), with Twemlow (billed as 'Mike Sullivan', in common with a number of his later productions), returning as club bouncer extraordinaire Steve Donovan.  The character's apparent demise at the end of the earlier film is brushed aside with a passing reference, mid-way through the running time, to the police marksmen having missed him.  Rather than being six feet under, it seems that Donovan has spent the intervening eight years living in Malta, where we find him early in the film.  He quickly finds himself drawn back to Manchester, with former adversary Keller informing him that Donovan's teenaged niece has been drawn into the world of child pornography, appearing in an illicit video.  Keller has his own motivations for wanting Donovan back in Manchester - the same gang behind the child porn videos are also threatening his club.  Back home, Donovan finds the situation has gotten worse - his niece has committed suicide.  Naturally, Donovan goes on a lengthy rampage, tracking down those who made the video and violently disposing of every one of them.  He then expands his vengeance by taking out the gang of women used by the gang to recruit victims by luring them into a van, before working his way through the ranks of the entire gang.  People have shotguns fired up their backsides, ('How's that for a blow-job, boys?'), are blown up, burned to death and even decapitated after their tie is trapped in a descending lift's door.  Beatings and gunfights proliferate and the bodies pile up, attracting the attention of the police, although the Inspector in charge of the case isn't unsympathetic to Donovan's crusade as the death toll amongst gang members and peadophiles racks up.

As is the case with sequels, Lethal Impact is very much GBH, but bigger, with more fights, more guns and more of the sleazy side of Manchester's club scene.  Even Donovan's sidekick Chris, played by Brett Sinclair, turns up again - only to end up gravely ill in a hospital bed again, (although this time we at least see him make a recovery).  The difference is that this time around, it is all far darker, driven by the peadophile plot, (which encompasses every of the tabloids' contemporary 'peado panic' tropes - Donovan even finds time to deal with a peado priest), with the humour toned down and a dour atmosphere.  This version of Donovan, driven purely by revenge, spouting self-righteous justifications involving protecting children, for his bloody killing spree, feels far less sympathetic and Twemlow's natural charisma, abundantly evident in the first film, only shines through intermittently.  The film is also decidedly overlong, lacking the original's snappy pace, with the litany of killings eventually feeling repetitive.  On the plus side, bearing in mind the film's meagre resources, the fight scenes are well staged, as is the rest of the action.  Indeed, overall, Twemlow regular David Kent-Watson's direction is efficient, if unspectacular, handling the cast and locations effectively, with the streets, bars, clubs and hotels of Manchester giving the movie a feel of raw authenticity.  But even these virtues can't hide a certain air of desperation permeating the film.

There's no doubt that Lethal Impact represented one last roll of the dice for Twemlow.  Finding financing for his films was becoming more difficult, with several of his projects not progressing beyond demo reels.  To get Lethal Impact into production, Twemlow reportedly had to secure financing from some very dodgy Manchester clubland figures, which left some of the cast and crew uneasy.  The film also cannibalised one of those unrealised projects for the peadophile plot line, which feels very much as if it has been inserted into a straight gangster story, sitting somewhat uncomfortably with the gangster elements.  As with several of his other films, though, Twemlow was able to secure the services of a better known, mainstream, actor in a supporting role, in this case Terrence Hardiman, who plays Donovan's bereaved brother, Bill.  With a shorter running time, more humour and the peadophile and gangland aspects of its script better integrated, Lethal Impact would, undoubtedly, have been a far stronger film, much more in the mould of GBH.  As it stands, it is still intermittently enjoyable, but not as exhilarating an experience as the first film, which revelled in its lack of resources and rough edges.  Ironically, it is the greater slickness of Lethal Impact, the result not just of a better budget, but also the increased film-making experience of Twemlow and his crew, which makes it a less interesting film than its predecessor.  Not only did GBH have a certain novelty value, a perfect post-pub direct-to-video movie that had  seemingly come out of nowhere, it was its sheer roughness and gritty feel that gave it a distinctive feel.  Morever, the sheer enthusiasm of its makers comes through the screen, with the whole enterprise imbued with their joi de vivre.  The sequel, by contrast, feels more solemn, perhaps even a little jaded.  Still, it's always good to see Cliff Twemlow doing his stuff on screen - he might not have been the world's (or even Manchester's) greatest actor, but he had genuine screen presence and the sort of energy that could carry an entire film.  It seems fitting that his time as a low-budget filmmaker should have come full circle, beginning and ending with Steve Donovan.  Although the film ends apocalyptically, with a wedding massacre in which everyone seems to have been mown down in a hail of bullets, the end credits still promise us another sequel.  Sadly, though, it wasn't to be as, within a couple of years of Lethal Impact's debut, (in a club owned by one of those dodgy financial backers), Twemlow was dead at the age of 55. 

The Dark (1993)

The Dark has proven to be a popular title for horror films, with the 1979 film of that title possibly the best known.  This, however, is the 1993 movie of the same name - not a remake, but a completely different film.  1993's The Dark is a low budget monster movie that makes the most of its limited resources to create a surprisingly effective, not to mention quite amiable, viewing experience.  Most of the action takes place around a graveyard at night, where something is lurking beneath the surface but which, itself, is being hunted by various parties.  These central graveyard sequences form the backbone of the plot and are filmed in a manner reminiscent of older B horror movies like Macabre or I Bury the Living, both of which featured similar settings, with tombstones poking out of the earth like rotting teeth and pervaded by an unnerving stillness and silence.  With its burrowing menace pulling down headstones and leaving gaping holes in the fabric of the graveyard, much of the film's action ultimately devolves into chases through the tunnels it leaves.  Again, these are very well handled, with the film summoning up a dank, claustrophobic atmosphere for these scenes.  

The film builds up to this climactic monster hunt in an agreeably elliptical manner, with the opening throwing the viewer into the middle of some graveyard action, with the main character, scientist Gary 'Hunter' Henderson, finding himself inadvertently caught up in two FBI agents' encounter with a monstrous 'something', while paying a nocturnal visit to his wife's grave.  We then move to an encounter at a police station between the surviving agent and Henderson - who reveals that his gunshot wound has already healed - which culminates in the agent violently warning Henderson off from investigating the unspecified threat.  After which, we flash forward two years for Henderson's encounter with some bikers in a cafe, making his escape on a motorcycle with a plucky waitress, while also being introduced to the two groundskeepers at that cemetery, who find themselves forced to dig a grave the old-fashioned way due to an equipment failure.  Inevitably, the encounter the monster's tunnels, call in a couple of deputies, before Henderson, the waitress and the now ex-FBI agent all turn up in search of that creature.  

All of which leaves the viewer feeling that they've walked into the middle of a movie, somehow having missed the exposition scenes which might explain it all.  (Which is no bad thing - films which lay everything out in detail too early can be terribly predictable and dull).  This confusion, however, is somewhat ameliorated by a scene in a motel bedroom between Henderson and the waitress, where she looks at his notes and gleans that the creature is a prehistoric survival, a kind of giant rat, which secretes a substance with incredible healing properties, (which is how Henderson recovers from his wounds so quickly).  Henderson is after it for scientific study and the ex-FBI man for revenge for his slain partner (and the possibility of making some money from the dead beast).  It's the barest of outlines for what's going on, but it's more than sufficient and credits the viewer with enough imagination and intelligence to fill in the blanks for themselves.

The film's limitations, in terms of resources, are most apparent in its monster, which is somewhat rubbery looking.  That said, I've seen a lot worse in much bigger budgeted films - The Dark's creature is at least not too obviously a man in a suit, featuring some relatively (bearing in mind the budget) sophisticated animatronic effects for close ups of the head.  By keeping it underground and poorly lit, the film succeeds in making the creature surprisingly effective.  Moreover, for once it isn't a creature driven by some kind of bloodlust - it actually eats the dead, (hence its predilection for graveyards and ensuring plenty of scenes involving musty crypts, rotting coffins and decaying corpses), killing only when it feels threatened.  While the film is both atmospheric and suspenseful, what really lifts it above the average in terms of B-monster movies are a decent script which provides its characters with some witty and amusing dialogue - not to mention a relatively original idea for its main plot mechanism in the healing abilities of the beast's secretions - and an excellent cast who pitch their performances at exactly the right level for this type of film.  Stephen McHattie is, as usual, excellent as the two-fisted, leather jacket wearing and motorcycle riding scientist, convincing both in action sequences and in the role of intellectual scientist.  Moreover, despite the obvious age difference between him and his love interest, the waitress, he never comes over as creepy or predatory.  Equally good is Brion James as the FBI agent, bringing all of customary menace, brutality and underlying madness to the role.  Despite his screen time being limited, James gives a memorable performance.  

The film also features Jamie Woolvett, who around the same time also co-starred with Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, as the younger of the two groundskeepers, whose commentary on the poor judgement of the deputy who elects to explore the tunnels just as night is falling, provides an enjoyably self-reflexive moment in the film.  His love interest is the other deputy, played by Neve Campbell in her film debut.  Campbell, along with Cynthia Belliveau as the waitress, ensures that the film features, unusually for this genre, strong female characters who don't spend the film being victims, instead proving competent and capable monster-hunters in their own right.  A Canadian production, The Dark was directed by Craig Pryce - who is still working today, mainly in TV - who moves things along at a decent pace and handles action, suspense and dialogue scenes with equal aplomb, creating an atmospheric film that never outstays its welcome.  The Dark really deserves to be far better known, having everything required to make a cult movie and is well worth tracking down.  Hell, simply the fact that it stars both Stephen McHattie and Brion James should make you want to watch it!

Tender Dracula (1974)

1974 was a busy year for Peter Cushing who, at this point in his career, was showing no signs of slowing down his prolific output, appearing in no less than seven films that year.  With three films apiece for Hammer and Amicus, it might have seemed that Britain's horror movies - and consequently Cushing's future in the genre - were in robust health.  But it was his seventh film that year, Tender Dracula (1974), which more accurately points to the future, with the rapid collapse of UK film production increasingly forcing Cushing into taking roles in European productions, often of dubious quality and patchy distribution.  An obscure French production - to English speaking audiences, at least - this bizarre and often ramshackle feeling concoction is a curious beast: a would-be horror comedy that, at times, crosses over into sex comedy territory.  Its basic idea is promising enough: Cushing is a horror star renowned for playing monsters who has just declared that he wants to turn his back on the genre and focus on romantic leads, instead.  His understandably upset producer summons a pair of hapless writers who are currently behind a top-rated romantic TV series and orders them to kill off their current lead, replace him with Cushing and re-jig the show to have a more horrific slant.  (It is entirely possible that the script has in mind the US daytime soap Dark Shadows which, after Dan Curtis took over as producer, rapidly shifted from Gothic romance to full on Gothic horror, with vampires, werewolves and witches turning up).  They are dispatched, along with a pair of actresses, to Cushing's home - a remote castle - for the weekend, where they are to try and sell the idea to him.

Naturally, Cushing's home turns out to be a typically gloomy and crumbling Gothic pile, complete with the requisite hulking and largely mute manservant and their host's apparently deranged wife.  The wife, it is explained was previously married to the manservant, until he had a nasty accident with his axe while chopping wood - 'A terrible blow to his manhood', confides Cushing to his guests.  After which she divorced the handyman and married Cushing.  A series of bizarre experiences for the four guests ensue, some of which are obviously faked (at least one by one of the writers, while others may, or may not, be of supernatural origin, with the implication that Cushing might not just be an actor who plays vampires, but possibly a vampire who works as an actor.  Some of the strange goings on are amusing, others disturbing and macabre - Alfred, one of the writers, being pursued by the disembodied lower half of one of the girls is particularly disconcerting.  All of this is punctuated by various episodes of bed-hopping as the writers try to get off with the girls, all of which involve copious amounts of nudity, in the style of a sex farce.  At the same time, Cushing's character is busy lecturing anyone who will listen about his concepts of romance and why it is now the only path for him, occasionally shouting to make his point heard. 

It's a strange combination of elements that never quite gel, with the film's denouement giving the impression that the writers ultimately had no idea where to go with it: the handyman goes berserk and apparently kills one of the girls with an axe, the other girl and one of the writers are trapped by Cushing and his wife in the dungeon and threatened with torture, before Cushing apparently dies, then comes back to life.  During all of this a group of 'ghosts' clad in white sheets with eyeholes, who have been roaming the castle's corridors, are revealed to be the producer and a film crew, who proceed to get involved in and film an orgy instigated by the 'dead' girl who isn't dead, while the other girl and the writer are released by Cushing and get it on in the dungeon while Cushing waxes lyrical to his wife about his love for her.  It's an absolute mess that barely makes any kind of sense.  To be fair, there is some amusing dialogue (even in translation), with Cushing ecstatic when dungeon girl tells him she's a virgin, making her ideal to bear his children, asking her if she's sure, to which she replies that she's 'mostly a virgin', as she's always cast as an ingénue and, in film, they are always virgins.  Some of the production design is also very effective, particularly the main dining hall in the castle, with its giant sculptures and the castle location used to stage various sequences is deployed to good, atmospheric effect, with good use of lighting and camera shots.  The film's biggest strength lies in its cast, headed by Cushing, in a role that one might have thought better suited to Vincent Price.  But he gives a very engaging performance, characteristically charming, with sudden turns into menace.  His delivery of the gags he is given is excellent and his final scenes with his wife, as he lays bare his inner most feelings of love for her are, well, tender.  Indeed, I can't help but feel that the emotions did come straight from the heart for Cushing, with him channelling the grief and love he had felt for his own late wife, who had died only a few years previously.

The rest of the cast contains a number of familiar faces from European film, with Italian actress Alida Valli as Cushing's wife, her characterisation evolving from a mildly demented crone early on to a full on vengeful banshee later on then, finally, loving wife in the face of Cushing's overwhelming romance.  All the while, her appearance subtly changes to match this evolution.  Alfred is played by Bernard Menez, a familiar face from French comedy films, and is suitably hapless and confused in the role.  Most interestingly, the part-time virgin Marie is played by the lovely Miou-Miou, seemingly an obligatory fixture in French films of every genre during the seventies and eighties - often playing an ingénue.  (She is very much the archetypal French movie 'type' when it comes to young female leads - waif-like and vulnerable-seeming, but actually quite uninhibited under the right circumstances).  Overall, there was something about Tender Dracula that reminded me of one of Cushing's other 1974 films, the AIP/Amicus co-production Madhouse.  Not in plot details, but in that both feature a lead character who has been defined and trapped by the horror characters they play and are desperate to escape them.  (The idea of characters being trapped in roles they are no longer comfortable with is echoed throughout Tender Dracula, in particular with one of the writers who is moved to return to his former profession of a make-up artist, which he realises that he found more fulfilling).  In Madhouse, this is Vincent Price, who can seemingly never escape his character Dr Death - who was created for him by Peter Cushing's screenwriter (whose character has a seemingly weird and deranged wife).  I thought that, perhaps, I was imagining the resemblance, but I've found that other reviewers have also noted it.  

So, was Tender Dracula a worthwhile watch?  I have to say that I could never classify it as a good film - it is far too much of a confusing mess for that, undisciplined and flying off at tangents at every turn.  It is, however, a beguiling film, with the cast doing their best to rise above the messy script.  Cushing, in particular, succeeds, against all odds, in delivering a warm and engaging performance which, alone, is worth sitting through the film for.  I have to say, though, despite its short-comings, Tender Dracula has secured itself a place in my heart.  If you are a Cushing completist, or you'd simply be intrigued to see a film that includes such scenes as Peter Cushing spanking Miou-Miou, or a castle blasting off into space, then Tender Dracula could be for you.

Sweden: Heaven and Hell (1968)

The important thing to remember about Sweden: Heaven and Hell, Luigi Scattini's 1968 mondo movie, is that it is an extraordinarily reactionary film.  An exercise in sheer hypocrisy, as are many films of this era claiming 'expose' various aspects of the 'new' permissive society.  They combine a scalding, sceptical and dismissive tone in their commentary, while the images which accompany it happily focus on lots of bared breasts and bums jiggling around for the sole benefit of the very audience the commentary is telling should be disgusted by all this free sex and nudity.  It's a trick still beloved of British tabloids, which like nothing better than to publish articles telling readers just how depraved, say, modern television is, whilst accompanying the article with plenty of stills from the object of their disgust, invariably showing naked women, lesbian sex and the like.  Presumably the readers are meant to feel ashamed if even mildly aroused by what they have had shoved in front of them, (so ashamed and disgusted that they will doubtless flock to see the TV shows or films being condemned, just to check for themselves that they really are that depraved and disgusting).  To get back to Sweden: Heaven and Hell, the film purports to be a documentary about the 'socialist paradise' that was late sixties Sweden, where liberal philosophies supposedly infused every aspect of life, from sexual mores to crime, from housing to education.  But the film's narration, (provided by Edmund Purdom in the English version, using the usual supercilious tone he employed for such jobs), makes clear from the outset that it isn't here to praise modern Sweden, but rather to bury it and everything it stands for.

It's central thesis, (if we can apply such a grand term to a mondo movie), appears to be that despite the freedoms and prosperity of Swedish society, it is, in fact, dysfunctional and its citizens deeply unhappy with their lot.  To prove this thesis, the film's makers, naturally, have to show us copious amounts of nudity and simulated and/or implied sex, mainly between young people, with their elders often looking on disapprovingly.  Which ignores the fact that, far from being a recent phenomena, even in 1968 Swedish society already had long-established liberal attitudes toward sex and relationships.  But why let the facts get in the way of a bit of sensationalism?  This is a mondo movie, after all.  But all this sex, it seems, encourages a higher incidence of rape, (you'd think the opposite would be true, particularly as, historically, the Swedish population has had more women than men, another factor encouraging a more relaxed attitude toward sexual relationships), which, apparently, turns the victims into lesbians, which is why there are so many lesbians in Sweden.  The outrageous claims aren't confined to sexual liberation.  According to Sweden: Heaven and Hell, the country's obsession with youth has resulted in all of their old people being herded into high-rise housing where they all die lonely deaths, neglected by both families and society.  Which ignores the fact that throughout the post-war period, all across Europe, well-intentioned, but misguided, housing policies had focused upon eliminating slums and replacing them with modern tower blocks.  Which, indeed, did leave many people feeling isolated.  It wasn't a problem unique to Sweden, caused by its pursuit of its 'socialist' paradise based on sex and nudity. 

Other outrageous claims include the 'fact' that in Sweden car theft wasn't a crime and that an owner stopping a youth from stealing their vehicle could be arrested, as stopping the thief would infringe their liberty to enjoy themselves!  Not to forget the whole sequence on how child offenders were treated in Sweden - pretty humanely, to modern eyes, as they end up being placed in a community environment for their rehabilitation, with the idea that they can eventually be re-integrated into their families.  While the narration concedes that such methods might work and that they are probably better than locking the kids up in juvenile detention centres, it can't help but question why they were offending in the first place, suggesting that the reason young girls ended up prostituting themselves and so on was down to the failings of that permissive Swedish society, which had left them depressed and feeling disconnected.  But should we be surprised by a mondo movie taking such an approach?  Obviously not.  After all, the genre, from its instigation with Mondo Cane (1963), had, in large part, been about presenting 'primitive' rituals and behaviours (usually involving sex and nudity) to more 'sophisticated' audiences in the 'civilised' west as something to be laughed at, under cover of being a serious anthropological study.  With those 'primitive' societies pretty much mined out by schockumentaries by the late sixties, it was natural for the makers of  such films to for alternative subjects - the occult, sex and violence, swinging London, for instance - with the so-called 'permissive society' becoming a natural target.  bearing in mind that these movies originated in Italy - still a socially conservative country with the Catholic church exerting enormous influence over politics and public morals in the late sixties - places such as Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, must have seemed as exotic and outrageous as all those 'primitive' South Sea islanders who featured in the early mondo movies.  With Italian audiences being the primary market, it is all too obvious just why Sweden: Heaven and Hell presents its subject in the way in which it does - it allows them to glimpse that 'forbidden fruit' of permissiveness, (that, in reality, many Italians, especially younger Italians, were already enjoying themselves), while simultaneously 'tut-tutting' and condemning such filth.

The Manitou (1978)

You ever have that experience of watching a film for the first time and asking yourself, 'Why the Hell didn't I watch this before?'   Well, that was my reaction when I finally got around to watching The Manitou (1978) over the weekend.  I actually remember when this film was originally released - it was heavily promoted in TV spots (those were the days when cinema releases were regularly advertised in commercial breaks on British TV) - but I was too young to see it.  Whilst I'm pretty sure that it turned up in a late night slot on ITV in subsequent years, I never managed to catch it then and its UK TV screenings seemed to dry up.  I don't recall it having a UK VHS release while DVD/Blu Ray releases in the UK have been patchy.  But, thanks to the magic of the internet and its plethora of streaming sites of dubious legality, I was finally able to watch it the other day.  It has to be said that The Manitou fully lived up to its magnificent reputation as a truly lunatic cinematic experience.  Clearly made to cash in on the then current cycle of Exorcist-inspired demonic possession films, in its latter third goes off completely at a tangent and starts crossing into Star Wars territory (which had just been released) with characters shooting laser beams from their hands, star fields and explosions in space.  The film's eccentricity should come as no surprise, bearing in mind its pedigree: co-written and directed by exploitation specialist William Girdler (who had previously enjoyed a hit with Grizzly) and adapted from a popular novel by prolific British pulp writer Graham Masterton.  

I can't claim to be overly familiar with Masterton's work and have never read the source novel, but I'm assured by those better versed in his works that most of the lunacy in the film version of The Manitou actually comes from the book.  The movie is apparently a fairly close adaptation of the book, with the script only changing a few plot details, pruning a couple of sub-plots and characters and shifting the location from New York to San Francisco.  Girdler's style perfectly matches his material, with the film coming over as the cinematic equivalent of the sort of pulpy, mass market paperback you might pick up from a newsstand in a station or airport in both tone and execution.  Backed by Avco-Embassy, the film gives Girdler a somewhat larger budget than usual, which he deploys well in terms of production values, special effects and cast, with the film overall looking very slick, with excellent photography and sound quality.  But it is still the lunatic nature of the plot that lifts The Manitou above the average level of seventies horror films.  Starting with commendable briskness, we immediately meet some of our main protagonists, with Karen (Susan Strasberg) undergoing hospital tests on a mystery growth on the back of her neck, with her doctors concluding that, far from being a regular tumour, it has the charactersitics of a growing foetus.  With this diagnosis, Karen does he obvious thing - she asks her former employer, fake psychic Harry Erskine (Tony Curtis) for help.  After various weird incidents, including one of Harry's regular clients, an old lady, levitating her way out of his apartment and crashing down the stairwell, to her death, Harry and some paranormal investigator colleagues he consults with conclude that the rapidly growing lump on Karen's neck is the 'manitou' of a long dead Native American medicine man, (who has a real grudge against the white man - and who could blame him?), in the process of being reborn in corporeal form.

Advised by a cranky old anthropologist (Burgess Meredith) that they need to consult a living Native American medicine man, Harry persuades John Singing Rock (Micheal Ansara) to help.  With Karen admitted to hospital as the lump grows, the film starts to take a left turn into absolute insanity, with the 'manitou' being born from Karen's upper back (in some surprisingly decent prosthetic effects) in the form of a malignant dwarf, Harry and John battle to contain it in her hospital room.  Both John and the 'manitou' invoke other 'manitous' (or spiritual life force) in their battle, with the more powerful reborn medicine man invoking a lizard man that attacks one of the doctors and eventually freezing the entire floor of the hospital containing Karen's room.  The evil medicine man eventually invokes the 'Great Old One' (Masterton's works frequently reference Lovecraft), causing the whole building to shake.  Harry suggests John channels the power of the 'manitous' of the various electrical devices in the hospital (in particular the main computer) to combat the reborn medicine man (who has never before encountered such spiritual energy) and repel the 'Great Old One' who is gradually emerging into the universe via a portal.  Returning to Karen's room, they now find themselves in an illusion of outer space, a vast star field, with Karen's bed and the shaman apparently floating in the void.  John tries channelling the machine energy, but can't do so effectively as it is from 'white man's technology'.  Luckily, Karen at this point revives and manages to channel the energy herself, sitting up in bed and engaging in a laser beam battle with the evil 'manitou', eventually destroying him and causing the portal to explode before the 'Great Old One' can emerge.  At which point everything returns to normal.

As barmy as all this sounds, the fact is that, to the credit of Girdler's direction, that way out conclusion just seems to flow naturally from what has gone before.  Somehow, Girdler moves the film progressively and smoothly through what starts as an Exorcist/Rosemary's Baby type rip off to ultimate near surrealism, gradually building toward the climax through an escalating series of supernatural incidents and weird occurrences.  The film neatly balances itself, with sceptical Harry and his paranormal investigating colleagues spending the first part of the film trying to explain everything in rationalist terms, while the latter part mirrors this with the rationalist hospital doctors forced to accept the existence of a supernatural threat and eventually help combat it through their scientific technology.  Girdler's success in maintaining audience suspension of disbelief for the endurance of the film, despite the wild stuff occurring on screen is greatly aided by the cast.  Tony Curtis, despite looking as if he'd just been dredged up from a week long session in an opium den (and probably thinking for large parts of the filming that he was still trapped in a bad trip) is truly magnificent as Harry Erskine.  He has the perfect degree of smarmy charm to convince as a fake psychic, donning a cloak and false moustache to fleece old ladies, but is equally convincing as a sceptical investigator, reluctantly forced to accept that the very supernatural forces he has faked and dismissed are real.  By contrast, Micheal Ansara as John Singing Rock, (despite being of Syrian descent, Ansara spent a lot of his career cast as Native Americans), delivers a suitable stolid and serious performance,full of gravitas, which contrasts nicely with Curtis; flamboyance.  The rest of the cast, which includes Stella Stevens, Susan Strasberg, Burgess Meredith, Ann Sothern and Paul Mantee, are all excellent as well, all resisting the temptation which afflicts many such films to play for laughs or simply phone in their performances.  The special effects work throughout the film are uniformly pretty good, with the utterly lunatic climax surprisingly well executed.

Despite proving popular upon its initial release, The Manitou failed to spawn any sequels, despite the ending leaving the door open for follow ups and Graham Masterton writing a number of other novels featuring both Erskine and The Manitou.   This was, perhaps, due to the death of director Girdler before the film was even released, killed in a helicopter crash at the age of thirty.  The Manitou undoubtedly stands as the pinnacle of his career and a fitting epitaph, showing that he was more than capable of making the transition from low budget to mid budget movies.  He makes good use of the additional resources at his disposal for The Manitou, delivering a slick-looking, fast paced piece of exploitation, packed full of incident, enjoyable performances and articulating its narrative clearly and effectively.  Most of all, The Manitou is prime schlock which isn't afraid to fully embrace the inherent ludicrousness of its central premise and run with it, building to a true fever dream of a climax, but unlike its low-budget, poverty row predecessors, it executes it all with aplomb.

The Black Cat (1989)

I started watching this on a dodgy streaming service expecting to find myself enjoying a re-watch of the Lucio Fulci film of the same title, (I really should pay more attention to the synopses put up for these movies).  What I instead got was Luigi Cozzi's 1989 version of The Black Cat, which turned out to be even more deranged and have even less to do with Edgar Allan Poe's story than Fulci's film.  Ok, so like the Fulci film, there is a black cat wandering around, except that unlike in that film, it has absolutely nothing to do with the plot and its appearances seem pretty much random.  The only rationale for its presence and the title being a character noting that black cats are traditionally believed to be witches in animal form.  The key word here is witches, for this is a film about a mythical witch, (although she never turns into a cat, black or otherwise), who is unwittingly invoked by a film crew planning a movie about her.  Ratther than drawing its inspiration from Poe, Cozzi's film is rather an unofficial sequel to Dario Argento's two films about the 'Three Mothers', a trio of ancient witches, Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), (Argento would finally officially complete the trilogy in 2007 with The Mother of Tears).  Indeed, Argento's name is invoked in The Black Cat (and Suspiria's theme music heard) with the screenwriter claiming that his script is based on the same source as Suspiria: De Quincey's 'Suspiria De Profundis'.  Unfortunately, the witch in question, Levana, clearly isn't in the mood to give script approval and starts making warty faced, green vomit spewing, appearances in the would be leading lady's (also the director's wife) dreams.

While this seems to be setting the film up to be one of those horror films where a long dead witch is resurrected in order to take revenge on those responsible for her demise, being a Cozzi film, it quickly starts going off at tangents, as it clearly isn't revenge that Lavana is after.  Her campaign of terror is firmly focused on the lead actress (Florence Guerin), who she assaults with a series of bizarre dreams and visions, to the point that reality and fantasy become blurred.  Apart from the recurrent image of mirrors smashing to reveal the witch's wart covered face, green vomit being spewed over victims and the like, some of the manifestations are even more bizarre and disturbing because of their sheer banality.  Most notably, the heroine has her broken fridge fixed by a repairman who turns out not to exist, (it turns out that the fridge still isn't working either), while a phantom version of the baby sitter's young cousin turns up (then vanishes) in her baby's room.  Things quickly ramp up though, as a plot rendered ever more confusing by the mixing of dreams and reality, (there are also random shots of the earth seen from the moon, for no explicable reason, punctuating the action and regular intervals), serves us up an affair between the director and another actress (played by Caroline Munro) who is also seeking the lead role, a medium whose stomach explodes after trying to warn the director and screenwriter about something, an undead film producer (Bret Halsey) and his cobwebbed house and lots of murders.  It all culminates with the heroine facing off against Levana as they shoot what look like green laser beams from their hands.  Not to forget that, along the way, it turns out that the heroine is being assisted by a good fairy, seen on a TV screen at one point and whose presence is often accompanied by a shot of what looks like a decaying foetus.

It's all as barmy as it sounds, moved along a at a frenetic pace by Cozzi and accompanied by special effects that look as if they came from an early video game and a thumping metal score.  Does any of it make any sense?  Well, sort of - while much of the imagery is confusing, Levana, in her final manifestation, gives a brief explanation of the plot: she's a mutant possessed of various psychic powers and she is desperate to destroy the heroine because she too is a mutant with similar, latent, powers, who the witch must destroy in order to rule unchallenged.  The rest you have to extrapolate - the fairy could be an embodiment of the heroine's powers for good, although the rotting foetus imagery might imply a twin, or even child, that never developed fully, their spirit lingering in the actress' body.  Virtually everything we've seen - the undead producer, the murders, the phantoms, have been illusions conjured up by Levana too drive the actress mad.  Which still leaves us with the black cat and those space shots - God alone knows what they signify.  God or, more likely, Luigi Cozzi.  In spite of this, The Black Cat is a lot of fun to watch, with Cozzi delivering gross-out deaths and horror set-pieces at regular intervals in order to retain audience interest and stop them from worrying too much about the confusing script.  Despite some very garish lighting, giving many scenes a neon-lit feel, (which, along with a preponderance of dry ice gives some scenes a distinct eighties music video vibe), the film is, in places, quite suspenseful, with plenty of schock scares.  

While Cozzi's direction is effective, if frenetic, he wisely makes no attempt to imitate the directorial style of Argento, two of whose films The Black Cat purports to be a sequel to, with the movie feeling quite different to those films.  There is no real subtlety in the finished film, little in the way of the prefiguring  in earlier scenes of action yet to come characteristic of Argento's giallos, nor the sustained use of colour and sound effects favoured by that director.  While, like Argento, he assaults the audiences senses with visual fireworks and audio effects, Cozzi's direction simply isn't as disciplined as Argento's, opting, ultimately, to throw the kitchen sink at the audience as his film builds to its frenzied climax.  That said, the opening scenes of the film, featuring a gruesome giallo-style murder are revealed to be a film-within-a-film, as they are being shot for the director character's most recent movie, titled The Black Cat, neatly prefiguring the film's subsequent confusion of reality and manufactured illusion.  Moreover, like Argento, Cozzi's film does shift into the surreal, except that, by the denouement, it has toppled over into full blown insanity.  As many have noted, stylistically, The Black Cat has more in common with Lamberto Bava's Demons films than it does Argento's films, with its visceral feel, (indeed, it was marketed in some territories as Demons 6).  In truth, it's best to approach The Black Cat as a stand alone film, ratherthan a pseudo sequel to anything, (at best, it is a homage to Argento's Suspiria rather than a sequel), in order to judge it on its own merits.  While it doesn't bear comparison with Argento's movies, The Black Cat is still an immensely entertaining and outright barmy eighties horror film.

From Beyond (1986)

A follow up to Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna's first H P Lovecraft inspired movie, Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986) similarly takes its source story as a framework, expanding upon it to produce an over-the-top piece of body horror.  The film's opening scenario isn't that far from the original story, featuring a pair of scientists developing a 'resonator', whose vibrations allow them to see and interact with other dimensions, with one of them seeing translucent creatures swimming in the air.  Inevitably, the senior scientist turns up the power, becoming entranced with the inter-dimensional experience before the device malfunctions, with the other scientist fleeing the old house where they are conducting their experiments.  When the police are called, they find the senior scientist decapitated and his colleague is arrested for his murder.  His story of inter-dimensional creatures ensures that he end up in a secure psychiatric unit.  From there, the script goes off on its own track, with a doctor treating the scientist finding that his pineal gland has been enlarged and deciding that his story is true.  Believing that the 'resonator' could be adapted to treat mental illnesses, she has the scientist released into her custody and along with an escorting police officer, they return to the house and start experimenting with the 'resonator'.  

Once it is reactivated, the first scientist, of course, crosses back into this dimension, telling the others of an alternative dimension where his particular pleasures can be fully experienced.  Which is bad news, as his particular pleasure was S&M.  The rest of the film chronicles the battle between him and the others as they try to turn off the 'resonator' and banish him back to the other dimension and he tries to take control of the device and ensare them in his fantasies.  In the course of this, he demonstrates his new shape-shifting abilities, transforming into a series of oozing, tentacled manifestations.  Various other inter-dimensional creatures hamper the heroes and the lady doctor starts succumbing to the vibrations and starts turning into a dominatrix.  The various transformations are, obviously, the film's highlight and are handled extremely well, with the prosthetic effects still quite convincing, despite their age.  Which brings us to one of the complaints against the film:  that its sexual content makes it highly un-Lovecraftian.  In truth, though, Lovecrafy's fiction is just chock full of waving phallic tentacles and oozing slime, which could, quite easily, be argued to be expressions of his own repressed sexuality and that From Beyond is merely expanding upon and exploring these ideas in a graphic fashion.  Now, while, as far as I'm aware, there is no evidence that Lovecraft was secretly into bondage, the S&M obsessions of the transformed scientist emphasise the theme of a sexuality that is normally repressed and kept secret in the everyday world, but that can be unleashed via a transformation into a different, secret, world.  As such, it could be argued, the transformed scientist acts as a proxy for Lovecraft himself.  

Interestingly, this character, created by the screen writers usurps the place of the story's main antagonist who is instead relegated to being the film's other scientist, who mostly resists the temptations of the 'resonator' and its vibrations.  Indeed, when he is finally overcome by the urges it awakens in him, causing him to molest the doctor and try to eat her brain, his enlarged pineal gland pops out through his forehead, like some kind of mutant penis.  He only releases her and comes back to his senses when she bites it off.  Perhaps this, also, could be read as a dramatisation of Lovecraft's fears as to the consequences if he ever allowed his repressed sexual urges to be released.  However you choose to read these aspects of the film, the fact is that From Beyond comes over as deeply 'Lovecraftian', from its creepy old house setting, preoccupation with madness, strange bodily transformations to its conjuring up of eldritch, unspeakable horrors from beyond this world.  It might not be as gory as Re-Animator, but like that film, it does a pretty decent job of fully fleshing out a relatively minor work in Lovecraft's canon which sits outside of the 'Cthulu Mythos' cycle he is best known for, into a full-blown story.

Despite its low budget, From Beyond is a good looking film, with excellent production values and visual style - all helped by being shot in an Italian studio.  Stuart Gordon's direction hits the mark, keeping the film well paced, building plenty of tension and contrasting the sleek modernity of the psychiatric hospital with the scientists' lab in the old house, which evokes echoes of the sort of set-up you might encounter in a Universal B horror from the forties.  The special effects, as noted, are surprisingly good bearing in mind the film's age and budget.  The cast are also strong, pitching their performances at exactly the right level for the material: taking it just seriously enough to be convincing while never straying into outright parody.  Ted Sorel is great as the transformed scientist, by turns imperialistic, sleazy and downright crazy, while Jeffrey Coombes is suitably twitchy and disturbed and his colleague.  Barbara Crampton as the doctor and Ken Foree as the cop also contribute strong performances.  All-in-all, From Beyond remains a tremendously enjoyable and exhilarating horror movie, which never seems to drag and has just enough black humour to stop all of the horrendous body transformations from becoming completely repulsive.  My enjoyment of it was greatly enhanced by watching an old VHS rip of it, complete with previews of forthcoming Vestron releases and lots of fuzz and tracking adjustments - it really took me back to the halcyon days of watching illicit videos!

The Hunchback of the Morgue (1973)

I first became aware of The Hunchback of the Morgue (1973) in the late seventies or early eighties, finding it referenced in one of the various books about horror movies that my teenaged self eagerly devoured around that time.  At that time, continental horror films sounded incredibly exotic - the horror films showing on UK TV at the time were mainly the old Universal classics, Hammer films from the sixties and early seventies, AIP's Edgar Allen Poe series and a smattering of stuff from Amicus, Tigon. William Castle and the like.  Dubbed versions of Italian and Spanish productions rarely, if ever, turned up - due, no doubt, to the amount of sex, nudity and gore that was frequently on show.  That would certainly have been the case with regard to just about any of Paul Naschy's films of the period, but especially The Hunchback of the Morgue, (which, as far as I know, has never been shown on terrestrial TV in the UK).   It took me many years to catch up with most of Naschy's seventies oeuvre, with Hunchback always eluding me - until this past weekend, when I finally caught up with a subtitled version.  As I've noted many times before, films you have spent years anticipating often turn out to be disappointing when finally seen.  Hunchback of the Morgue, though, most certainly didn't disappoint, turning out to be the utterly bonkers, bad taste, borderline surreal slice of Euro-horror I had been hoping for.

Like Naschy's werewolf films, The Hunchback of the Morgue combines various traditional Gothic horror tropes, as established in the Universal and Hammer films he admired, with new fangled visceral blood and gore and sex.  Naschy, of course, plays the title role, Wolfgang Gotho, a simple-minded hunchback living in a small Austrian town where, when he isn't having stones thrown at him by local children or being taunted and ridiculed by medical students from the local hospital, helps out in the local morgue.  The only positive in his miserable existence is the friendship he has struck with Ilse, a terminally ill patient at the hospital.  When she dies, Gotho loses it completely, killing two pathologists about to, as he sees it, desecrate her body, decapitating one with an axe, before retreating with her body into a labyrinth of secret tunnels beneath the town.  The ancient tunnels also include a number of cells and torture chambers formerly used by the Inquisition.  Forced to defend Ilse's body from hordes of rats - in one of the film's most infamous scenes, in which real rats crawl all over both Naschy and the actress playing Ilse, culminating with several rats being set on fire (for real) by Gotho - the hunchback determines to enlist the help of local mad scientist Professor Orla (Alberto Dalbes) to bring her back to life.  Orla, coincidentally, needs a new lab to pursue his research into creating artificial life, his research grant at the university having been cut off, so moves his equipment into the catacombs.  Inevitably, his research needs lots of fresh corpses, so Gotho finds himself variously digging up corpses, stealing heads from the morgue and committing more and more murders.  Finally, he finds himself forced to abduct young women from the reformatory school (whose existence provides a flimsy excuse for an entirely gratuitous spanking scene) run by the girlfriend of Orla's reluctant assistant.

All the while, Gotho is still waiting for Orla to revive Ilse, which he clearly has no intention of doing, simply stringing Gotho along with false promises so as to ensure his obedience.  Things get worse for Gotho when the Prof's thuggish henchmen, tired of the stench emanating from Ilse's decomposing corpse, dispose of it in the lab's acid bath.  Gotho is not happy, killing the henchmen in an angry rage.  Unphased by this development, the Prof assures Gotho that he doesn't need Ilse's body to revive her - he can create a whole new Ilse!  Gotho, meanwhile, has found another local woman who has a thing for physically disabled crazed killers, this time a doctor working at the reformatory.  Eventually, everyone ends up down in the tunnels as Orla completely loses his mind and the artificial being he has created and nurtured by feeding it human bodies, breaks out and starts rampaging around the lab - it's left to Gotho (and that acid bath) to save the day.  As you can see, Hunchback of the Morgue has it all: mad hunchbacks, crazy scientists, a monster, grave robbing, decapitations, animal cruelty and more than a hint of necrophilia.  Not to mention dank dungeons, labs full of bubbling chemicals and bumbling cops who can't even catch a man with conspicuous physical disabilities.  The references to classic horror movies are abundant, some overt, like the title character's homage to the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Frankenstein-style body snatching, some less so - the catacombs seem to be evoking memories of The Phantom of the Opera - while the mad scientist and his lab is pure classic Universal B-movie.  Moreover, while Gotho's final confrontation with the monster (which, disconcertingly, looks like a man-shaped pile of oozing shit) isn't exactly Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, it is clearly intended to stir memories of Universal's forties 'monster rallies', with multiple creatures running around and duking it out.

In common with most Spanish horror movies of the period, Hunchback of the Morgue eschews the attempts at stylish visuals and striking production design seen in their contemporaneous Italian cousins, in favour of a plainer, more realistic, look.  The Austrian-shot exteriors are certainly attractive - all cobbled streets and overhanging buildings - but are rarely used in such a way as to create atmosphere.  Likewise, the studio interiors, including the catacombs, are straightforward, avoiding ornateness or extravagance in their design.  They are deployed simply as a backdrop to the action, rather than being a 'character; in their own right.  Effective lighting means, though, that they never seem 'artificial'.  Similarly, Javier Aguirre's direction takes a direct approach to delivering shocks and scares - although, surprisingly, he is quite sparing in terms of gore - providing a steady stream of violence, killings and phobias (in particular, fear of rats) to move the plot along.  I recall that, back in the day, the two things in the film that were considered, in the English-speaking cinematic world, at least, especially shocking, were the aforementioned rat scene and the claims that a real dead body was decapitated on screen.  Whilst it is true that permission was given for the latter to take place (in a morgue, obviously), all you see in the film is Naschy drawing a knife across the corpse's throat, with the decapitation itself involving an obviously fake head.  The rat sequence, however, is clearly not faked and remains deeply disturbing as the blazing rats scurrying off screen in pain are obviously real.

 It's clear that the film wants us to see Gotho as a tragic antihero, driven to madness and murder by the cruelty of others and Naschy works hard to try and draw out the sympathetic side of the character.  Indeed, he succeeds in transmitting powerfully Gotho's unrequited love for Ilse, his gratitude for her kindness and his pain at her demise and the treatment of her corpse.  But his transformation from pathetic victim to psychopathic killer is abrupt, weakening audience sympathy, while the relish with which he goes about dispatching enemies such as the medical student who taunted him and disrespected Ilse, further alienates the audience.  The romance with the doctor, moreover, although obviously designed to try and offset his murderous activities, never really convinces - her continued defences of him in the face of her knowledge of incontrovertible evidence of his guilt in the killings, simply doesn't ring true.  Of course, the film tries to maintain Gotho's status as victim by having him, in the latter parts of the film, grave rob and kill at the behest of Professor Orla, rather than for personal reasons, while making Orla crazier and crazier in order to cast him as the true villain and deflect culpability away from Gotho.  But, in the end, the film can never get away from the fact that its central character is a killer - a pretty vicious and ruthless one, at that.  In fact, the film is short on any truly sympathetic characters: Orla is crazy, his assistant weak willed and hypocriticall, the lady doctor blind to Gotho's murderous activities.  Only Ilse is blameless - and she's a corpse for much of her screen time.

For all of its faults, though, Hunchback of the Morgue is, if you can get past the animal cruelty, an entertaining, if entirely off-kilter, horror movie.  It comes over as a 1940s Universal B-movie with added explicit violence, sex, nudity and overtones of necrophilia.  Aguirre moves it all along at sufficient pace that, while it is playing, its absurdities never quite overwhelm it.  Ultimately, the film belongs to Naschy - although he gets sterling support from Franco regular Dalbes, Maria Perschy as Gotho's doctor love interest, Rossana Yarri and Vic Winner - who, despite having to perform his entire role wearing a rubber hump, gives an energetic performance, clambering over roofs and climbing through windows to steal corpses.  While it might not be easy to sympathise with Gotho in view of his murderous activities, not to mention his necrophilia and rat-burning, Naschy does manage to put over the tortured hunchback's inner turmoil and anguish, while also evoking a more tender side to the character in his relationship with the living Ilse.  A memorable performance in a memorably bizarre and feverish film.

The Love Machine (1971)

Jacqueline Susann's reputation rests upon three best-selling novels which were essentially trashy soap operas.  All three were filmed, with varying degrees of success.  While the movie version of Valley of the Dolls (1967) became a huge success, the adaptation her second novel, The Love Machine (1971) pretty much sank without trace, failing to find favour with either critics or audiences.  (The film version of her third novel wasn't released until after Susann's death - while Once is Not Enough (1975) was dismissed by critics, it still became a commercial success).  It was such a flop that its producer, Columbia, pretty much buried it for many years, with the film becoming very difficult to see.  I finally managed to catch up with it this past weekend and the reasons why it failed, whereas Valley of the Dolls became a success, quickly became apparent.  While Valley of the Dolls found ways to replicate its source novel's trashiness in cinematic terms, The Love Machine is simply too restrained.  Sure, there's plenty of sex, scandal and back stabbing in high places and provides the audience with a constant parade of semi-naked women, outrageous gay stereotypes, prostitutes and sex parties, it is presented far too tastefully, so that the sleaziness audiences expected from a Jacqueline Susann story never really takes flight.  At the root of these problems lies Samuel A Taylor's script, which pares down the novel's sub-plots to leave us with a fairly convention rags-to-riches-to-rags story, chronicling the rise of an attractive, but ruthless and unprincipled, leading character from local TV journalist to TV network chief and his inevitable fall from grace, as his hedonistic lifestyle overwhelms him.  

No cliche is left unturned in The Love Machine: we have the younger wife of the ageing network chief who uses her influence over him to have junior staff promoted so as to pursue affairs with them, the disgruntled executive feeling threatened by a younger rival, so tries to undermine them, the fragile, neurotic girl friend who can't accept her boyfriend's philandering, the jealous mistress, the outrageously camp photographer-cum-best friend, an even more stereotyped closet gay actor.  They're all there, yet seem to entirely materialise as fully developed characters.  Despite Taylor's paring down of the source novel, there still seems to be too many characters vying for limited screen time, to the extent that we never really get to know most of them.  Some significant characters from the novel have their parts reduced so much, as a result of their main sub-plots having been eliminated, that they seem little more than glorified walk-ons and the casual viewer is left wondering what purpose their presence is meant to serve.  Most of all, the central character of Robin Stone, local TV reporter promoted to Head of Network News and then acting network chief, is not only unsympathetic, but, worse than that, he simply doesn't come over as decadent enough.  We keep hearing from others about hos decadent, ex-fueled lifestyle, but ultimately he does little on screen to justify his nick name of 'The Love Machine'.  Sure, we see him in various states of undress with various beautiful women, he even has a three-in-the-shower tryst with the Collinson twins, but it is all presented in such a tasteful and chaste fashion.  We see no evidence of his sexual prowess or his implied sexual vices.  When his mistress, the network chief's young wife, becomes jealous enough of his sexploits that she sets fire to his bed while he's in the shower with the twins (although they don't seem to do anything other than, well, shower), we're left mystified as to exactly what she's so jealous about.

The film also falls down in its failure to properly exploit its milieu - seventies network TV, a potentially fascinating backdrop in itself.  But its portrayal of the behind-the-scenes machinations of a network is, at best, sketchy, giving little insight into the entire business of sponsors, scheduling and production beyond the most broadly drawn inter-departmental rivalries.  The film's utter contempt for the TV industry is obvious throughout - it is reminiscent of those early fifties movies which would decry their deadly rival for audience attention as being cheap, shallow and derivative.  But by the time The Love Machine was made, the battle had been lost, with the film's vituperative attitude to the medium perhaps reflecting the bitterness of cinema's defeat at the hands of TV in the battle for audiences.  Yet the criticisms aren't entirely unfounded and resonate to this day.  As Stone himself notes, most of what is broadcast on network TV is lowest-common-denominator crap, designed solely to appeal to the widest possible audience in order to sell advertising and attract sponsors.  (The same, of course, is equally true of cinema, where the majority of films produced are similarly mass-market would be audience pleasers).  He even dubs the television set itself 'The Love Machine' (thereby giving the film's title a double meaning), in that it invites viewers to love not just the celebrities it brings into their homes, but also the products that they advertise.  Again, nothing really changes.  Interestingly, one aspect of the film that might, at first glance, seem dated is, in reality, still pertinent today.  Stone's downfall is precipitated by unfounded allegations that he's gay, due mainly to his friendship with a gay fashion photographer, who harbours an unrequited love for him, something we'd like to think wouldn't happen nowadays.  Yet TV personalities continue to be tarred with this brush, with implications of same sex relationships touted in the press with the implication that they might, somehow, be 'inappropriate'.  Even without substance, they can still do irreparable damage to a career.  Nothing changes, it seems.

Despite its inadequacies in scripting and characterisations, The Love Machine is still a very smooth and slickly produced film, presenting a sharply filmed slice of seventies jet set life amongst the beautiful people.  The trappings of success are everywhere - characters live in opulent New York apartments or Los Angles mansions, wear designer clothes and expensive jewellery and are seen in all the most upmarket venues.  Success is measured purely in materialistic terms: not just how many 'things' you owned, but also how many people, be they women or subordinates and rivals whose fate your position of power could influence.  By accident or design, though, the film manages to transmit the ultimate emptiness of this existence.  Everyone is scrabbling to accumulate power, but to what end?  To control a TV network putting out crap?  The material evidence of their success is simply an attempt to mask the essential emptiness and pointlessness of their existences.  Unfortunately, the script's excising of large parts of the source novel means that we get no insight into what it is these people, particularly Stone, are using these trappings of success to substitute for.  We get hints, but these are never followed up.  Most crucially, Stone's sudden outbursts of violence against women are never explained.  His photographer friend suggests he sees a psychoanalyst, but this thread is then dropped, unlike in the novel where psychoanalysis eventually reveals the source of his behaviours.

Being a big budget studio production, The Love Machine musters a decent enough cast, who do their best against an unyielding adaptation.  John Philip Law taking the lead as Robin Stone, brings the sort of bland handsomeness you's expect of a seventies TV reporter turned executive.  Never a great actor - although possessed of considerable screen presence and charisma - Law's limited range are to his advantage in the role, putting Stone over as just the sort of superficial, self-regarding, chancer who you'd expect to succeed in the world of network TV, displaying so little character that he succeeds in being all things to all men (and women).  His surface charm carries him through most situations and human interactions, but disguises his essential emptiness and lack of empathy.  Law wasn't the first choice for role, though, coming into the film at very short notice after original star Brian Kelly was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident.  (So short notice that he had to wear much of Kelly's wardrobe, despite being significantly taller than his predecessor, with the result that his designer suits often look ill-fitting).  Dyan Cannon does what she can in an entirely stereotypical role as the network chief's wife, while Robert Ryan lends his considerable presence to the role of her husband, but is clearly only there for the cheque.  The most notable performance in the film comes from David Hemmings as Jerry, the gay photographer.  Hemmings had clearly decided not to take the the film remotely seriously and delivers a performance of outrageous camp, complete with a bizarrely coiffured beard.  His scenes are universally hilarious and a highlight of the film.

As mentioned, The Love Machine is a very good-looking film, presenting a vivid picture of early seventies New York and boasting a catchy theme song performed by Dionne Warwick.  But the presentation is just too classy for the subject matter.  It is one of only two feature films directed by Jack Haley Jr, who was better known for his entertainment industry documentaries and compilation pictures like That's Entertainment!.  His direction ultimately fails to engage with the fundamental trashiness of its source, leaving the film feeling insubstantial and superficial.  One can't help but feel that a better choice of director might have been Russ Meyer, whose parody of Susann's first novel, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) - which had actually originated as Twentieth Century Fox's attempt at a direct sequel to their adaptation of that novel, but became a parody when Susann wouldn't give approval for an actual sequel.  Certainly, his film better encompasses the trashy sleaziness and underlying absurdity of Susann's work than Haley's The Love Machine managed.  While a Russ Meyer version must remain an unrealised dream, the existing adaptation of The Love Machine isn't entirely without merit, not only is it well produced and captures its era well, but it is also, in its shallow way, pretty entertaining.  It just isn't as gloriously and unashamedly trashy as you'd expect from a Jacqueline Susann adaptation.