CORRUPTION
You Need Glands
RELEASED OUT NOW! 1968 | 15 | Blu-ray
Director Robert Hartford-davis
Cast Peter Cushing, Sue Lloyd,
Noel Trevarthen, Kate O’mara
An outlier in Peter Cushing’s filmography, Corruption is a movie you suspect this perfect gentleman may have regretted making – and not just due to the indignity of his hairpiece visibly flapping about. He later called it “fearfully sick”.
Blending Eyes Without A Face, Jack the Ripper and Macbeth, it casts Cushing as a surgeon whose life spirals into insanity after a falling light burns his fiancée model’s face. The fix he devises involves a pituitary gland – but the results are short-lived, requiring a steady supply of donors… Though pretty tame by modern standards, the film’s air of cruelty and seediness makes it feel like an ancestor of the video nasties. But it can be good fun too – especially a sequence which plonks Cushing in a swinging ’60s party. A frantic beach chase is very effective. And come the end it’s so deranged that it tips into hysterical camp.
Extras Indicator’s immaculate UK debut offers three cuts: UK, US, continental. The latter is especially disconcerting for Cushing fans, inserting an alternate scene where he murderously wrestles with a topless prostitute.
A wry, well-researched commentary by horror maven Jonathan Rigby and Cushing biographer David Miller regularly dips into the novelisation and old print interviews. That’s ported from 2013’s US Blu, as are three cast interviews (totalling 39 minutes). The Bill’s Billy Murray has the best story, about an on-set facial injury which put him on Cushing’s Christmas card list.
New goodies include another soso cast interview (15 minutes), a decent intro (seven minutes), and two pieces of archival audio. Cushing is charmingly dotty in a career-spanning BFI interview from 1986 (72 minutes, ropey quality); while ’90s chats with producer Peter Newbrook touch on the film for two of 91 minutes.
Plus: isolated music/effects; a Trailers From Hell entry; alternate titles; trailers; TV and radio spots; galleries (including the script). The package comes with an 80-page book and five art cards. Ian Berriman
According to actor Billy Murray, the film’s dream-like circular ending came about after he suggested it to the director.