THE REVEREND’S REVIEW
FT’s resident man of the cloth REVEREND PETER LAWS dons his dog collar and faces the flicks that Church forgot! (www.peterlaws.co.uk)
The House That Dripped Blood
Dir Peter Duffell, UK 1971 Second Sight Films, £21.99 (Blu-ray)
Asylum
Dir Roy Ward Baker, UK 1970 Second Sight Films, £21.99 (Blu-ray)
Orson Welles’s Great Mysteries
Dir Philip Saville, Peter Sasdy et al, UK 1973 Network, £14.99 (DVD)
American Horror Project Volume 2
Curated by Stephen Thrower, US 1970-1977 Arrow Video, £44.99 (Blu-ray)
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, recession and strikes rocked the economy, trusted politicians turned out to be crooks and even Summer of Love hippy types became sadistic monsters, slaughtering folks in the Hollywood hills. We had entered a decade of doubt, fear and unhappy endings – but the good news is that such times of turmoil have a habit of producing great horror movies.
This month we relive the groovy gloom with some recently released 70s shockers, starting with a visit to Amicus studios. The thrifty Hammer rival realised you could get big names to appear in your picture if they only had to work for an afternoon – enter the anthology horror film, which asked the question: why should a movie have just one story, when it can have five? In The House That Dripped Blood (1971) a rambling country house takes on the worst characteristics of its tenants and fires them back, with screams attached. In Asylum (1972), a preJesus Robert Powell tours a home for the criminally insane, hearing each of their stories in gory detail. Psycho scribe, Robert Bloch, lends his economical pen to both films, and it shows. The stories are fun and sometimes scary. The Amicus business model secured a stellar cast for both films, from the always reliable Cushing and Lee to Herbert Lom, Charlotte Rampling, Sylvia Sims, or Jon Pertwee camping it up as a gurning comedy vampire. To see these classics on Blu Ray, with commentaries and special features, is a treat.
In the 1970s, short-form horror thrived on TV, too. Orson Welles’s Great Mysteries (1973) was just one of many scary anthology shows that terrified viewers that decade. With a mixture of thriller and supernatural stories, this one was patchy at best. Some of the segments in this Vol 1 DVD set left me shrugging. Yet there are gems to be found, like an unnerving version of “The Monkey’s Paw”. Welles introduces each story through a cloud of cigar smoke, with a voice and delivery that manages to turn even the vaguest of ramblings into something profound and poetic. There’s a killer John Barry theme tune, too, and the release of the series after more than 40 years is welcome.
Finally, cult horror champion Stephen Thrower returns with the second volume of his carefully curated American Horror Project. If you get a kick out of obscure cinema, these sets are made for you. My favourite was Dream No Evil (1970). It’s a melancholy psycho thriller about a mentally ill woman, obsessed with her missing father. It’s a lovely mix of touching, disturbing and plain old weird. Dark August (1976) sees a city dweller move to rural Vermont. Yet when he accidentally kills a local girl on the road, he’s convinced he’s been cursed, and turns to psychic medium Kim Hunter for help. The slow-paced chills won’t work for everybody, but the mix of beautiful locations, great music and perfectly decent acting gives the film a surprisingly intense, if quiet, vibe. Finally, we get The Child (1977), where a little girl seeks vengeance for her mother’s death by calling up a horde of pasty-faced zombies. At times it’s as ridiculous as it sounds (delightfully so), but it can be pretty darn spooky too. Like when the grandpa and little girl giggle uncontrollably over dinner as they share a local story about dead cub scouts... cues that link it to earlier zombie films, particularly the sense that something bad is imminent, a building of unease reminiscent of the slow-burning strategies of Romero’s older work; Jarmusch’s film feels like an homage at times.
This might not be its director’s greatest work, but it is typical of his unique style and serves as an entertainingly weird detour from the expectations of both mainstream cinema and zombie horror. Offering wit and social commentary, as any decent zombie film should, The Dead Don’t Die doesn’t exactly break new ground; but, imbued with an unadulterated Jarmuschian aesthetic – an absurdist premise mediated through strangely calm cinematography and scoring – it somehow manages to become the most soothing zombie film ever made.
Leyla Mikelssen ★★★★★
Jon Pertwee camps it up as a gurning comedy vampire