Horror – The Magnificent 60s

Quatermass and the Pit / Five Million Miles to Earth (1967) ****

Five million dollars. That’s roughly the budgetary difference between Hammer’s Quatermass and the Pit and Twentieth Century Fox’s Fantastic Voyage. Although the protagonists in the latter face the unexpected, the movie is (as would be 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968) an exercise in awe, in controlled exploration of wonder, whereas Quatermass, lacking the money for special effects, concentrates more on story and human impact. The government funds the experiment in Fantastic Voyage while Professor Quatermass (Andrew Keir) finds nothing but obstruction from his superiors.

Quatermass and the Pit is a masterpiece of stealthy exposition. Virtually every minute brings another development, gradually building tension, stoking fear. The principals – Dr Roney (James Donald), Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley) and the professor – are cleverly kept apart during the early stages. A human skull discovered on a building site for a London Underground station is followed by a skeleton. Palaeontologist Roney determines it is five million years old, older than any previous find.

A metallic object is found nearby. First guess is an unexploded bomb from the Second World War. But it’s not ticking. And a magnet won’t stick to it. Col Breen (Julian Glover) is called in along with hostile rocket expert Quatermass. They have been locking horns from the outset.

There’s a whole bunch of apparent red herrings, mostly of the demonic variety. The location, historically associated with weird occurrences, is a nickname for the Devil. A pentagram is detected. Touching the object can give you frostbite. Col Breen argues it’s a leftover German propaganda machine from World War Two. A hideous dwarf and other spectral images are sighted. Telekinesis is involved. And tremendous vibrations.

Some people, such as Barbara, have a more receptive brain and can play memories millions of years old that reveal the alien truth. But this is an alien race with genocidal tendencies and able to unleash psychic energy.

The genre requires the scientists to discover an improbable solution which of course they do. Given the miserly budget, the special effects are not remotely in the Fantastic Voyage league. But that hardly matters. The movie coasts home on ideas, marrying sci-fi, the demonic, dormant and institutionalized evil, the militarization of the Moon and the ancient infiltration of Earth by Martians, no mean achievement, and a vivid narrative.

Director Roy Ward Baker (aka Roy Baker) provides many fine cinematic moments as he chisels away at the story, finding clever methods of revealing as much of the aliens as the budget will permit, focusing on very grounded characters, concentrating on conflict, and human emotions, mainlining fear rather than awe, building to an excellent climactic battle between man and monster.

Barbara Shelley (The Gorgon, 1964) is the pick of the stars, in part because she is at such a remove from her normal Hammer scream-queen persona, but more importantly because she brings such screen dynamism to the role. It’s refreshing to see her step up, as she carries a significant element of the story. Oddlyenough, although she has as good a movie portfolio as Andrew Keir and is certainly superior to James Donald, the denoted star, in that department, she is only billed third.

While Andrew Keir (The Viking Queen, 1967), warm-hearted for an intellectual, and James Donald (The Great Escape, 1963), trying to keep a cool head in the middle of inclination to panic, are good, they don’t bring anything we haven’t seen before. Julian Glover (Alfred the Great, 1969) is never anything but imperious and/or irascible, so ideal casting here.

The innovative electronic music was down to Tristram Cary and the unsettling credit sequence deserves some recognition. Nigel Kneale, who originally explored similar ideas for the character on television, came up with the screenplay.

Hope (2026) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Heck of a wild, sometimes insane, ride with, in the stunt work, shades of Indiana Jones. But its length is a drawback. And that’s a shame because even I with no cinematic editing skills could see how easily it would be to trim 20-25 minutes from its unwieldy running time. There’s too many characters for a start, too much unnecessarily exposition and I’d chuck out wholesale all the business at the end of anything falling from the sky. And while we’re at it, I’d add one word to the title. Hope Harbour, where the action is set, is more prosaic and honest than Hope which carries pretentious symbolic and metaphysical undertones.

Part of what makes this so much fun is both the characters and the lack of characters. No scientists fill us full of mumbo-jumbo and no interfering pompous government officials get in the way of this narrative. The local inhabitants are, on the whole, gleefully gung-ho. Let’s show this critter, appears to be their watchword, as amateur hunters and a vengeful junior cop plan to show the invaders who’s boss. All the characters, that is, except for police chief Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min) who spends most of the time crapping in his pants.

But it’s the action and mystery we’ve come for and this doesn’t disappoint. After discovering some creature has wrecked the town, the chief tries to hunt it down, only to find the roles are reversed and this scampering alien terror, even faster than a Ridley Scott alien, is coming after him. Having, between them, rendered the town a complete shambles, the action shifts to the forest where a small family of aliens has made their home.

Headstrong and to a large extent dumb hunters just fancy a more interesting trophy than a tiger and set off in hot pursuit, some on horseback. Rookie officer Sung Ae (Hoyeon) is the pick of the vengeful forces, having raided the armory for topline weapons including a grenade launcher.

Usually, by now, the place would be swarming with militia, helicopters, airplanes, thousands of crack troops armed to the gills, but all the help the cop can call on are all away dealing with wildfires. It takes a while to untangle the mystery. The aliens are anatomically related to humans but have a tendency to sprout antlers and maybe even turn themselves into trees though trees are hardyl safe when they’re around, any hunters they collect are liable to be sent hurtling straight through a tree by the force of their throw.

A child alien has gone missing and turns up dead in the freezer of a numbskull who killed it with the aim of selling it to the highest black market bidder. The police chief has detected anguish in the monster ripping the town apart and he reckons the alien is a mother searching for the lost child. The other two aliens are mistress and obedient servant.

The aliens are not just hard to kill but don’t observe the rules of the road thus triggering a mad chase that also involves a hunter on horseback who tries to do one of those action tropes of jumping from some thing moving very fast, in this case a horse, to something moving as fast, a cop car.

There are none of the traditional character cliches you usually find in the genre. No power struggle, no romance, unspoken or otherwise, no considering the fate of the universe, no deep thinking. In fact, like the new-look Resident Evil the characters are distinguished, if that’s the word, by being all too human, with frailties exaggerated in the heat of battle. They spend all their time annoying each other or arguing.

I’m not familiar with the work of Korean writer-director-producer (that level of control probably the reason why it’s overlong) Na Hong-jin who’s hardly prolific given his previous picture The Wailing was a decade ago. But this is certainly worth the wait. The set-up is imaginative, the narrative inventive, the characters appealing and once it gets going a pure pedal-to-the-metal actioner.

Foolishly, this has been sold via the arthouse festival vibe which will put off the audience of action fans it is aiming for. Catch it while you can because it won’t last long in cinemas and the action will be depleted on the smaller screen.

Well worth seeing.

I Saw What You Did (1965) ***

You can see why producer-director William Castle (The Night Walker, 1964) employed Joan Crawford (Berserk, 1967) in what is effectively a bait-and-switch ruse because the story, even for those times, takes a very disturbing tone. These days audiences might well shy away from what is effectively a tale of an innocent teenager becoming enamored of a much older man and imitating, by telephone and without adult encouragement, the seductive tones of a much older girl.

It wasn’t so unusual for young girls to come into harm’s way at that period. Hayley Mills, in a kind of Nancy Drew fashion, gets herself into trouble in The Moon-Spinners (1964). But what makes this piece so distasteful is the sexual undertone. Modern audiences might also recoil from parents leaving their kids alone overnight so they can go to a dinner party. And what was termed a “prank phone call” would take on a more unsavory element these days.

Otherwise, it is well done, especially the bait-and-switch.

While her parents are away teenager Libby (Andi Garrett) and her pal Kit (Sarah Lane) start phoning round numbers they find in the phone book. Initially, Libby pretends to be a girl friend of the man (it’s the male name in the book) she’s phoning, putting on a silky voice and hoping to upset an unsuspecting wife.

However, mostly people don’t fall for that line. So then, silky voice intact, she starts going with the line, “I saw what you did and I know who you are.” Unbeknownst to her, one of her victims, Steve (John Ireland), has just done away with his wife Psycho-style in the shower and buried her body in a narrow grave.

He’s been having an affair with his neighbor Amy (Joan Crawford) who is initially happy to fall for the line that his wife’s left him. Amy is so besotted with him that when he seems less keen on marrying her she, finding blood in the bathroom and the murder weapon, resorts to blackmail. This does her no good and in a straight rip-off/homage to Psycho the director is killing off his top-billed star halfway through the picture.

That leaves us with the foolish Libby, so determined to meet up with the alluring (in her mind) mystery man that she drives up to see him (addresses were listed in phone books back in the day). Instead of some strictly romantic assignation, he not only frightens the life out of her but gets hold of her driving license/registration and so has her address. Convinced that she is indeed a witness, off he heads to off her and, presumably, her baby sister.

By this point it’s only Libby and the child in the house, Kit having been collected by her more responsible father. The anxious mother, unable to reach Libby by phone, asks the local police to check on the kids, which is promptly done, prior to Steve reaching the house.

Now we follow the traditional scary bits, but without the jump shocks that are part-and-parcel of today’s horror picture. There’s only one really tense moment, when Libby thinks she’s going to escape in her car, only for an arm to creep over from the back seat.

This looks like it was a box office success which shows you how much audiences back in the day were worried about child safety. I’m not sure given the film’s treatment that it would be so acceptable to a modern audience.

But I’m being fair to the rest of it. While Joan Crawford is her usually immaculate-dressed and -coiffed self, she plays more of a victim than a predator, overwhelmed by love for Steve that she’s willing to marry a murderer. John Ireland (The Ceremony, 1963) has the chance, for once, to shine and, except when wielding the knife, manages to keep a lid on his inner beast.

It’s hard to recommend for the reasons outlined but it might appeal to Joan Crawford and William Castle completists.

The Projected Man (1966) ***

You might well have ruminated on the notion that laser had been invented simply for the purposes of terrorizing James Bond. So, here, long before Star Trek got into the game with its teleporting machine, is the ubiquitous laser being employed to move a human from place to place. Though Brits would just head for the nearest available Police Box a la Doctor Who should they wish to shift from place to place, not to mention from planet to planet.

Standard science hooey is stoked by office politics and internal sabotage by department boss Dr Blanchard (Norman Woolands), somehow open to threats of blackmail, and rivalry between colleagues Dr Paul Steiner (Bryant Halliday) and Dr Chris Mitchell (Paul Allen) for the affections of Dr Patricia Hill (Mary Peach).

In any case, the experiments don’t always go according to plan, a transmitted mouse only lasts a few minutes and a watch goes backwards. The whole project looks like being scuppered after the equipment catches fire during a demonstration for renowned visiting Swiss scientist Professor Lembach (Gerard Heinz).

Steiner recruits his secretary Sheila for one last attempt, which just goes to show you hardly need a PhD to take part in top-secret ground-breaking work, in defiance of orders to shut down the laboratory. Mitchell and Hill, who’ve been cozying up, arrive in time to see Steiner disappear. Good news though when he does reappear it’s to prevent, however unintentionally, a burglary, but killing, however unintentionally, the perpetrators. You might think, given one side of his face is destroyed, that they died of fright but instead he’s got some secret superpower where he can kill with a touch.

Given this occurs halfway through we’ve got plenty of time left for Steiner to go on a killing spree and target all the people who were working against him. But such murders leave a trail and a cop, Inspector Davis (Derek Farr), starts to connect the killings. In an interesting twist, it’s not a contender for MCU world for Steiner – he needs energy to survive so heads to a power plant for a top-up ignoring attempts by the lovebirds to tempt him back to the lab to have a go at reversing the experiment.

By now Steiner exudes such energy that he’s, literally, bullet-proof. Still, eventually he’s tempted back to the lab. But he doesn’t want to be turned back into his old self and sets about destroying the lab. Unfortunately, the laser is reactivated and hits him again and this time he disappears for good.

This is the kind of low-budget operation that can’t afford to show a laser beam so the scientific razzamatazz is limited to flashing lights. But there’s some decent plotting and an attempt to show the sadder side of the monster, a la King Kong and Frankenstein. However, an audience is more interested in a monster on the rampage.

Competent acting throughout since the cast aren’t given much to play with. British star Mary Peach (No Love for Johnnie, 1961) won top-billing over American Bryant Halliday (Devil Doll, 1964). A directorial curiosity since it’s the only movie for Ian Curteis, later better known for teleplays such as Churchill and the Generals (1979) and The Falklands Play (2002).

Written by John Croydon (First Man into Space, 1959), Peter Bryan (The Blood Beast Terror, 1968) and Frank Quattrochi in his movie debut.

Budget restrictions don’t harm this one’s entertainment value.

Onibaba / The Hole (1964) ****

Female empowerment doesn’t come any sharper. Two women slaughter exhausted samurai trying to escape a civil war in feudal Japan, dump the corpses in a deep hole, and sell their weapons and armor for food. Into their midst comes a deserter and the action slips into the sexual jealousy mode of The Fox (1967) and then takes another sudden shift into horror. And it manages all three incarnations of the tale with dexterity.

I knew all about this film long before Seven Samurai (1954) was on my horizon. As one who scanned newspaper advertisements and read contemporary movie magazines, I was well aware – though forbidden by dint of age to see it – of its controversial nature. I wasn’t exactly privy to what the controversy involved except that it was initially banned by the censor and that British posters hinted at the controversy.

I would soon learn that “exotic” and “primitive” were code words for nudity. A double standard operated in the offices of the British censor. Until the late 1960s, the only movies that could get away with a glimpse of forbidden flesh were foreign pictures destined for an arthouse.

Coming to it now for the first time I was more aware of it as a horror movie so I wasn’t ready for the first two elements – the blatant murder of men by supposedly vulnerable women and the sexual jealousy.

An older woman (Nobuto Otawa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) share a hut in the middle of fields and make a living killing any soldiers that come their way, exchanging their loot to a dealer, Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama), for small sacks of millet. Into their lives comes deserter Hachi (Kei Sato), who brings news that the son/husband of the women is dead.

He proves useful in adding to their meager supply of food through fishing. After participating in their next killings, he also proves a more adept negotiator with Ushi and returns with a bigger bag of millet than the women ever secured plus some saki and a couple of birds.

He’s clearly got his eye on the younger woman and she responds, sneaking out for a sex. This makes the older woman furious. There’s more than jealousy at stake. If Hachi and the younger woman decide to leave together, the older woman will be unable to capture and kill any passing strangers. Perhaps hoping Hachi might be in the mood for a threesome, she attempts to seduce him but is rebuffed.

But then the older woman comes across a samurai wearing a demon mask. When he ends up down the pit, she climbs down and steals his mask, revealing the samurai’s disfigured face. She uses the mask to scare the younger woman away from Hachi, persuading her that the demon is punishment for her affair. At first it looks as if the scheme works, but the younger woman soon takes to sneaking out again at night.

But then the mask proves impossible to remove. When they finally get it off, the older woman’s face is as disfigured as the original wearer and the younger woman is convinced the older woman is actually a demon.

This is tremendously well done. In the first 10 minutes there’s no dialog as we watch the women hunt their prey. The reeds in the fields are taller than any human, and there’s a Hitchcockian element when they sway and conceal. A good chunk of the picture relies merely on facial expression. And the three changes of tone are well managed so that we move from mere murder to the sexual and then the demonic. The eeriness is hard to shift.

Hypocrisy and lust are strange bedfellows, the possessive mother-in-law loses her power, the daughter-in-law is freed by the death of her husband, bad deeds go unpunished.

Written and directed by Kaneto Shindo (The Naked Island, 1960) and based on an old Japanese legend, this is so starkly filmed, with a unique three-act structure, that you come away thinking this must be due for a remake.

Holds up very well.

Insidious: Out of The Further (2026) **** – Seen at the Cinema

I can hardly keep up with the endless permutations of the MCU never mind keeping up with the various iterations and side hustles of horror series such as The Conjuring and this. So I tend to come at these fresh, as if they are an entirely new movie and I don’t have to spare a thought for how this ties in with what’s gone before. It was only when it was over I realized I had been tensed up the entire time, my heart constantly in my mouth, such was the dexterity with which the material was handled.

And while this isn’t in the same league as this year’s horror breakouts Backrooms and Obsession, it follows a similar line in that threat rather than gore is the keyword. Perhaps the one stroke of genius is to set parts of this in a dentist’s surgery, a place where our incipient fear never goes away, probably the only medical professional whose attentions we desperately try to avoid, whether that’s because, regardless of any soothing words, treatment is accompanied by pain, or whether, mouth willingly or reluctantly open, we are inviting invasion.

Momentarily in the middle of the picture it gets stuck in low gear as exposition takes center stage and we transition from haunted house to what was previously known as the “astral plane” but here is known as “The Further”, a kind of limbo where the dead, with the right guide, can return to Earth. And they’re not planning, having regained life, to subsist on blood so that’s a mercy, and they’re not, either, the sexy teenagers who abound in the genre. They’re old and decrepit, might require tanks of oxygen to survive.

Single mom Gemma Hall (Amelia Eve) still lives in the house where her mother went mad and seemingly committed suicide in conspicuously violent fashion 20 years before. The neighbourhood is beginning to be occupied by odd types, three old crones wheeling oxygen tanks. Gemma is beset by nightmares, one of which echoes the Backrooms notion of crawling further and further into intimidating confined space, entered not through a mysterious door in a wall as with Backrooms, but in something as un-mysterious as the makeshift den concocted by daughter Maya (Island Austin).

There’s another door in the proceedings, the Red Door that formed the title of the previous episode, but to be honest, I couldn’t recall its purpose in the prequel, and fact, here, it turns out (cue another IP involving other doors denoted by other colors) not to be the only one.

One awful crone turns up at the surgery and from his mouth Gemma draws a long string of human hair and various other bits of gunge from his decrepit teeth before discovering he has two sets of gnashers. Gradually, she realizes she is a conduit to this other world, with the help of tattooist-cum-mystic Claire (Maisie Richardson-Sellers).

The exposition, always a bit dodgy, leads her to believe that she can enter The Further and get back out of it without much ado, but that’s a misconception and in quick succession three generations of Halls are caught up in the scary proceedings with the steel-fingered monster leading a gang of trapped people back to life. Gemma’s boyfriend Nick (Brandon Perea), a cop, is on hand mainly to prove that you can’t trust a man to do a woman’s job.

All told, I found this riveting stuff, especially the nightmares that turned into supernatural reality and the gradual encroaching on the normal by every shade of abnormality. There were a number of standout sequences, including the long crawl behind the sofa, the excavation of the terrible mouth and the onslaught of creatures from The Further.

Sometimes in horror films, just as the main criteria of presenters of cookery shows is too ooh and aah convincingly, all the heroine has to do is provide a varied register of screams but like the main characters in Backrooms and Obsessions, Amelia Eve (The Blind, 2023) is several levels above the basic.

Director and co-writer Jacob Chase (Come Play, 2023) helps make this a banner year for horror.

Stomach-clutching.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) * – Seen at the Cinema

Pretentious rubbish. An almighty bore masquerading as a) a spoof on slash horror films and b) having something important to say while c) not coming anywhere close to achieving either. Another of the dumb propositions foisted upon us by the connivance of the film festival industry to chuck at the general public movies that hoity-toity festival progammers and audiences believe deserve wider attention.

The most annoying element of this is that the subtext is merely a variation of the Dracula hypothesis that women are sexually drawn to dangerous men who can drive them into ecstasies of fear and penetrate them with sharp weapons. Here, this is spelled out in more detail, “the heroine” only able to achieve orgasm through terror and after running terrified with her breasts bouncing around and her erect nipples visible through translucent material.

And if you can work out how anyone can walk around with a slab of metal stuck to their head, you’re better than me. Oh, and to keep the woke element happy, the killer transforms from male to female.

And while we’re at the barking mad end of the horror subgenre let’s ensure that it’s the monster who’s creating the movies from his lair deep under a lake and that everyone who appears in the movies are his creations.

This is in the Anora (2024) league for repetition. Where that was sex, sex, sex, until we got the point, and way after we had got the point, this is blood, blood, blood, gushing literally like fountains or explosions from what’s left of a body once the monster, known as Little Death (which as you’ll no doubt be aware is a sly nod to “le petit mort”, the French description of orgasm), has finished chopping off select body parts.

Too much of this film is bits of the Camp Miasma series of films, initially big hits but then fading to direct-to-video flops, and which contain little more than variations of blood, blood, blood and people being impaled or chopped up.

If there is any emotional element it’s frigid lesbian Kris (Hannah Einbinder), technically in a polyamory relationship but that’s only because she permits her female bisexual partner to regularly have sex with a male, finally managing to overcome her inhibitions, helped along by Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original star of the Camp Miasma picture who bowed out after the first episode, and now lives on an abandoned tourist attraction based on the original or the original set (I couldn’t work out which).

In between making eyes at Gillian and watching the old movies in a cinema at Camp Miasma, the full-of-herself Kris is pitching her barmy notion for a horror picture where all the characters are figments of the monster’s imagination. Actually, the movie business section is the only bit that works, although Kris fails to note the negative response from potential stars.

Given that blood is the dominant color scheme, it’s not surprising that Kris and Billy end up soaked in blood and wandering, in surreal splendour, around a service station where, with equal surreality, kids are more interested in shooting each other with water guns than any stray adults who haven’t bothered to change out of their blood-soaked Halloween costumes.

This has come at us with the glow of critical approval, but, actually beyond the very repetitive obvious and some smartass intellectual dialog, this is an over-inflated mess.

I felt sorry for Hannah Einbinder (Seekers of Infinite Love, 2026) who clearly can act but less so for X-Files star Gillian Anderson who draws too much on Sunset Boulevard (1950). Written and directed Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw The TV Glow, 2024) who should stop believing her own publicity.

Truly awful.

The Shuttered Room (1967) ***

More Straw Dogs (1971) than The Old Dark House (1963) with for good measure a side helping of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) thrown in. After a super menacing opening, a sustained sense of threat is all the fuel we get to keep the story going, the horror elements kept at bay as much as the creature imprisoned behind the titular room in a mill.

The mill’s long since been abandoned since Susannah (Carol Lynley) spent a terrifying night there as a child when the creature broke out and had to be battered into submission by Susannah’s Aunt Agatha (Flora Robson). The mill’s on a remote island and Susannah’s back aged 21 to claim her inheritance. Only trouble is her cousin Ethan (Oliver Reed) thinks he tops the line of succession to inherit the tumbledown building.

Although her uncle is long dead, her aunt lives in a tower complete with hawk and strides around in the kind of black cape previously assigned to vampires. The mill’s still got a reputation, a local worker blinded and disfigured after being attacked by a fire-breathing demon. Susannah and husband Mike (Gig Young) have the idea of turning the mill into a summer home and have come by to try it out, though Susannah’s dormant fears keep spilling over.

So while we’re waiting to either the creature to break out again or for Susannah, in the manner of all foolish heroines, to trot up the stairs and push through the door, it’s up to Ethan and his gang to attempt to terrorize the couple. Clearly never being educated about incest, Ethan sets his heart on carnal relations with cousin Susannah.

If only he could get Mike out of the way. Trouble is Mike isn’t as meek as he looks and like Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock he’s got all those tricky karate moves so that when Ethan comes after him it’s the local who ends up in the river.

But Ethan’s got a cunning plan and sets up an ambush. The gang block the road with their truck and when Mike gets out of his car to investigate is hog-bound in a fishing net, receiving a few more traditional punches to boot. To pass the time the gang commandeers his vehicle and race up to their bound captive, braking just in time.

Meanwhile, Ethan is pursuing Deborah through the mill, intent on rape. Although she manages to humiliate him by calling his bluff that just enrages him and his rage intensifies. It’s still unclear how/why the creature escaped but we know it’s on the loose because it’s previously despatched a local girl who sneaked into the mill to steal Susannah’s nylons.

So while Mike manages to escape the thugs and hit them with some more karate chops, Susannah doesn’t really need his help, the creature coming to the rescue. Beyond the creature being her sister, there’s no further explanation for her imprisonment. There is a (kind of) shock ending.

The main problem is this looks as if it’s been filmed without any rehearsal, as if the actors have been hired for their previous roles. It’s no stretch for Carol Lynley (Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1965) to come across as a somewhat vacuous blonde. Menace is Oliver Reed’s (Hannibal Brooks, 1968) middle name and Gig Young (That Touch of Mink, 1962) has always got by on a certain easy charm though the chop-suey came as a surprise.

The real achievement from director David Greene, in his debut, is to get away without much real horror. By now H.P. Lovecraft was major source of horror. This was the fourth movie out of five in the 1960s drawn from his portfolio. In the current century there’s been no shortage of adaptations. Despite the lack of genuine horror, the other ingredients make up

The Vampire Lovers (1970) ***

Should have a lot more going for it. Female empowerment for a start. This would also, in today’s terms, be called a reboot of the Dracula legend, though it does originate from a different source than Bram Stoker. Or you could look at the bold exploration of lesbianism, none of the angst of The Killing of Sister George (1968) or the lyricism of The Fox (1967). Or you could fall back on that old chestnut – a camp reinterpretation of the vampire world, where female breasts rather than necks are the prime target. At the very least, it should have set up Ingrid Pitt (Where Eagles Dare, 1968) for stardom.

And while all these hold true, it lacks the key ingredient of the horror picture, any kind of tension or imminent threat. Nor does it carry the emotional weight of Countess Dracula (1971) – also starring Pitt – a twist on Dorian Gray, of a woman trying to hold age at bay with infusions of virgin blood.

So, in the end, it comes off as little more than a commercial decision to revive a fading genre with lashings of nudity, sex and lesbianism. Director Roy Ward Baker (Moon Zero Two, 1969) brings significant style to the proceedings even though the backdrops look as if they’ve been picked from a cast-off bin.

The tale is based on a story Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, that predated Bram Stoker. On the production side, Hammer and its American rival AIP teamed up, with the latter blamed for insisting on the sexual overdose. Although on that score you could as easily point the finger at the British censor known for his liberal approach to such shenanigans.

While it’s true that Dracula, especially as interpreted by Christopher Lee in Hammer offerings, carried a sexual frisson, there was never anything more than that, allowing the audience to determine whether the vampire was ever interested in a woman except for the purpose of sucking blood from her neck. Previously, diaphanous gowns and cleavage had been the extent of the sexual element. To switch the target from the neck to the breasts is a determined commercial move.

So, basically, with a gender twist, we’re following the old story – vampire stalks victims, finds acolytes, and falls victim to a vampire hunter. In the 19^th century, the beautiful Carmilla (Ingrid Pitt), traveling with her mother, a countess (Dawn Adams), is adept at inveigling herself into high-class households where she seduces the daughters and staff of the rich. Her first victim Laura is niece to General Spielsdorf (Peter Cushing) who subsequently enlists the help of vampire hunter Baron Hartog (David Wilmer), who mistakenly believes he had rid the world of the female vampire clan.

Next for the bloody breast treatment is a Mademoiselle Perrodot (Kate O’Mara), governess to Emma (Madeleine Smith). Perrodot becomes her lover and accomplice. Carmilla is an inclusive kind of vampire and if need be will seduce any male obstacle such as Morton’s suspicious butler Renton (Harvey Hall) while sucking the blood out of any passing male of more modest means.

Carmilla has the same get-out-of-jail-free as any male of the species and can take refuge in her grave until the heat passes. However, this time she’s intent on taking Emma with her. By now Baron Hartog has filled the general in on the threat, explaining that the Karnstein clan go back to the sixteenth century, and that he has dispatched many of the breed in traditional fashion, decapitation or stake through the heart, but he had been unable to find the night-time resting place of Carmilla.

So when Carmilla heads off to Karnstein Castle with Emma, she’s not expecting vampire hunters lying in wait. This time it’s the general who does the killing, making doubly sure by both cutting off her head and driving a stake through her heart. Emma recovers.

Given that any version of Dracula was essentially a franchise, Hammer/AIP managed to keep the Karnsteins going for another two episodes, Lust for a Vampire (1971) – which gave Yutte Stensgaard a shot a stardom – and Twins of Evil (1972) starring Playboy Playmates the Collinson twins.

While The Vampire Lovers was a launching pad for Ingrid Pitt as a new top-billed femme fatale, her marquee attraction didn’t last beyond the superior Countess Dracula. However, Pitt certainly brings gusto to the part and there’s an argument that the contemporary world deserved more explicit expression of that previously restrained sexual frisson. The counter-argument is that it’s blatant sexploitation.

Kate O’Mara (The Horror of Frankenstein, 1970), a future Scream Queen, would have been an obvious contender for the main role rather than a supporting one except that she refused to take off her clothes. Madeleine Smith (Taste the Blood of Dracula, 1970) became another future Scream Queen.

With Ingrid Pitt’s physical allure to the fore that limited the involvement of Peter Cushing (Frankenstein Created Woman, 1967). The more prominent of the wannabes was Jon Finch (Macbeth, 1971).

Written by Tudor Gates (Danger: Diabolik, 1968).

Still the argument continues – groundbreaking approach to the genre or mere sexploitation.

You decide – Amazon Prime currently has this.

The Devil’s Mouth (2026) **

What you have to remember is that the streamers are stuck with the same problem as the big movie studios back in the day when Hollywood was broken up into majors (MGM, Fox, , Paramount, Columbia etc) and mini-majors (United Artists, Disney, Embassy etc). The bigger the studio the more movies – in the 1950s/1960s, for example – you were expected to churn out. You had to feed the exhibitor system and if you cut back on production, exhibitors would stop favoring your product.

But there was no way every film you made was a big-budget production helmed by a top-name director and headlined by a top male and female star. For a start, there were not enough stars to go round, though certainly far more than the paltry handful who have any marquee attraction today, and studios could not afford to turn out so many films with big budgets.

But at least they were initially fair to exhibitors and the public. The lesser productions were tabbed B-pictures and they didn’t carry the marketing weight of the bigger movies.

And when the B-picture per se disappeared, the movies that came in at the lower end of the budget scale were called “programmers.” They were movies that filled a slot, heading out into distribution as the supporting feature, or going out on a wave of advertising in the knowledge that they would not last more than one week anywhere, once word-of-mouth came out.

So the problem for the streamers is that they can’t differentiate. They don’t own up to the fact that there’s just no way they can produce a substantial number of original content features a year so that subscribers feel they’re getting a good deal. So every new film is given the same big-push treatment.

This is just a programmer and misses the shark mark by a big margin. Not only is there no attempt to beef up the narrative – if not Paris, find a way for sharks to invade New York or London, why doncha – it’s nearly half the picture before the marauder appears and unlike others in the mini-genre nobody’s taken the trouble to come up with some scientific mumbo-jumbo to explain its unlikely presence in the a bunch freshwater Thailand caves.

And none of the characters are remotely interesting or jar with each other in an interesting fashion. There’s so much whooping of delight going on that it’s about as loud as the later screams.

And I’m not sure that the cheesecake/beefcake element can sustain the picture for 100 minutes, not when the buffed bodies are, with one exception, so empty-headed. You’re waiting for the shark – c’mon already – to start whittling down their number because they’re just so annoying.

The best scene has nothing to do with sharks. Sara (Kathryn Newton) – the only character of any interest – is attacked by a swarm of jellyfish and when the camera pulls back to reveal that she’s not just being stung by one of the creatures but has swum into a whole nest of them, that strikes a sharp note. Of course, one minute she’s wailing for her life, twisting this way and that, and the next she’s safe on the boat.

You might be tempted to keep going because you want to see easily the most annoying character, the big-mouth know-it-all Max (Lana Condor), get hers. But no such luck, because she’s whining all the way to the end. When their guide does a runner, there should be tension as they have to find a way out from the maze of caves but unfortunately, they don’t appear to have a single brain cell between them. Scooby Doo would have had a better chance of solving the puzzle.

And the shark ain’t much to write home about either although he’s pretty good on the threshing front and inclined, for reasons that are soon revealed as narrative necessity, to batter his head off the cave walls. This picture is so lacking in common sense that even though one of the group has a knife they don’t think to rip out the creature’s eyes when it’s trapped in a hole in the cave.

This started life as an acclaimed screenplay called Apex so who knows what happened to it along the way. It’s perfectly possibly that one of the trapped quintet could make it big in the movie business in the future and can look and laugh at this turkey and laugh.

Kathryn Newton (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, 2026) can’t hold this together and director Jeff Wadlow (Imaginary, 2024) should have known better than to try. Debut screenwriting gig for Aja Gabel (Five Star Weekend series, 2026) and Myung Joh Wesner (Skeleton Crew series, 2024).

You know how big a fan I am of shark movies, so I don’t need much to whet my appetite. This doesn’t come close

Another dud from Amazon Prime.