Two for sorrow… Goodbye Gemini (1970)

This film is one of those late sixties treats served up with fascinating locations and post-psychedelic style and making the most of the increasing laxity of censorship and the decriminalisation of homosexuality with The Sexual Offences Act 1967. It’s a huge variety bag of richly-flavoured chocolates that leaves you feeling a little queasy by the end and that was probably the intention; folk on IMBD have mixed feelings about it but it’s got a fabulous cast and something to say as it ticks off the boxes of incest, transvestism, queer culture and deep psychological disorder.

 

Sixties It Girl supreme Judy Geeson gives one of her best performances in my opinion playing against type as the firm-willed and more grounded of a pair of twins at the heart of the action. Many times Judy was required to play ultra-pretty and very sweet, which she excelled at, but here her job is not to be likeable but to illustrate how relationships of damaging inter-reliance and child-like intensity can persist in the real world. Not for nothing was this film retitled Twinsanity (yuck) for a rerelease, as Judy is Jacki, sibling to Julian, and together they present what looks like easy pickings for London’s swinging hipsters but, as Jacki keeps on saying, they can look after themselves.

Judy Geeson

The psychopathic Yang to Jacki’s Yin is played by Martin Potter, rolling straight off the back of his startling turn in Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) into a world only slightly stranger. The last time I saw Mr Potter he was playing in the real world as a policeman mixing with the wrong crowd in All Coppers Are… (1971) and here he shows once again how he can be an unsettling presence, a febrile performer whose eyes give everything and nothing away. Whilst Judy presents as fun-loving and ultimately sound of mind, Martin gives only nervy uncertainty. This is true of his obviously inappropriate – and illegal – feelings for his sister, but we just don’t know what he is capable of doing.

 

The twins arrive in the capital from the west country by coach, snaking along the Westway/M4 and making their way to a flat in Cheyne Walk with a fine view of the Chelsea north bank, power station still smoking. We are given an immediate indication of their wayward sense of purpose when they take out their disapproving landlady by placing their treasured toy cat, Agamemnon on the top stair so that she trips and falls as they run from the building, alibi intact. They defer to Agamemnon in all important decisions (the film is based on the novel, Ask Agamemnon by Jenni Hall), a reflection of their childish intimacies but also unhinged morality: they happily let the toy make their choices.

Judy Geeson and Martin Potter, playing an attentive brother...

Another actor whose eyes give away unsettling possibilities is Alexis Kanner, a French born Canadian actor of no fixed accent here but who displays his usual twisted energies as deployed so effectively in The Prisoner, Connecting Rooms (1970) and elsewhere. Kanner plays hipster gadabout Clive Landseer who meets the twins in a crowded bar watching a drag show at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (plus ca change eh?) and pulls them into his sleezy world of free-flowing sexuality, non-stop partying and general debauchery. He focuses attention on Jacki and tries to hand over his friend Denise (Marion Diamond) to Julian who looks on in panic at Jacqui’s removal from his side.

 

Clive invites them to his friend’s river boat for a party, here we find all manner of louche characters, including a smartly dressed Freddie Jones as David Curry, watching the action from a hammock, as the twins arrive and cause a stir as Jacki dances with Clive and Julian stares daggers. Much to Denise’s upset he soon cuts in and the whole room looks on in shock or groovy approval as the siblings get very close.

Mike and Fred

An MP arrives, James Harrington-Smith (Michael Redgrave always a class act even struggling with the early onset of Parkinson’s) who discusses art with an impressed Jacki as, again, Julian looks on with desperation. The twins leave spurred on by Julian’s increasing anxiety and are accompanied by Clive and Denise as whiskey is drunk and arguments are had at the twins’ flat. Clive decides to tackle the main issue by getting Julian to accompany him on an adventure, plying him with more drink and phoning ahead to arrange a special entertainment at a seedy hotel. Staggering into room 104 Julian’s eyes light up as he sees two dolly birds in miniskirts… by the time he realises that they’re boys, not girls, it’s too late and the camera cuts as in his shock he is overwhelmed by the, um, circumstances.

The next morning Julian recovers his poise back in the reassuring presence of his sister but this will not be the last he hears of this night. Clive has been dodging his bookie, Rod (the ace Mike Pratt) who previously came looking for him at the boat party, promising him a beating as an incentive to pay up on his accumulating debt. Rod had visited the flat the night before finding only the two women and when Clive visits Jacki later in the day, he corners him and makes his point; a couple of body blows as a taster for the retribution to come.

Here come the girls...

Clive is in some spot and almost reluctantly, decides the only way is to blackmail Julian to get the money, presenting him with a collection of photographs depicting the previous night’s entertainment. The only trouble is Julian doesn’t have the money and the only trouble for Clive is, you don’t take on one of the twins without taking them both on and, as Jacki has always pointed out… they can look after themselves.

 

The stage is set for a traumatic closing segment in which both Judy and Martin perform superbly as does Redgrave in what appeared to be a bit part.

 

Dusty Verdict: Not a film you watch for pure enjoyment or nostalgia, there are some real points to make and a dedication to the uncomfortable realities behind the rapidly fading myths of sixties hedonism. As I’ve said, the actors are all on form and I really think this is one of Judy G’s most interesting portrayals.

 

The mood has been said to be uneven but director Alan Gibson is just showing the push and pull of reality versus the twin’s world, an unreality dominated not so much by the obsessive sociopathic Julian but the character they project into Agamemnon the cat.

 

 

 

 

Art for art's sake? Vampyres (1974)

Sally Faulkner

Vampyres is one of the biggest cult films of its era, a lesbian vampire thriller with few holds barred and one which kicks off as it means to go on with the bloody murder of two women as they make love in an old dark house, in the silken sheets of a grand old bedroom. It’s an extraordinary start to the film and, you have to wonder, if it was director José Ramón Larraz’s main idea for what is essentially a vampire mystery film. Firstly, it doesn’t seem to fit with any of the traditional origins for vampires, ghosts yes, but not the undead who feast on human blood and secondly, there is no explanation of why this was done to the women and how this fits into the narrative, for a long time I was expecting it to be a flash forward.

I’ve seen Larraz’s work before, notably The House that Vanished (1973) and, whilst he’s so good with building atmosphere and disquiet, there are elements of exploitative violence that I found too much. The best actor in Vampyres is Sally Faulkner who plays a young married woman, Harriet, who is caravanning near the decrepit mansion where the two vampires haunt. She delivers a naturalistic performance that anchors the film’s unreality and narrative acceleration towards the abnormal and all of the director’s horror tropes rely on her counterpoint, otherwise it’s just a bloodbath.

All of this may have been despite rather than because of Larraz’s direction with Faulkner made to feel uncomfortable during the making of a film, an experience she described as unpleasant. Despite her experience on stage and screen, felt the director was disrespectful: "It was not that we were seeking star treatment… José was very single minded and not supportive—he was particularly critical of me." Maybe he wanted to rile one of his more able cast members and perhaps that was for the benefit of certain aspects of his film, but it’s hard not to view this as unpleasant and unnecessary. You get actors in to perform and not just react José.

Murray Brown and Marianne Morris

So, for me these aspects undermine the overall impact of a film that contains many fine moments of weirdness and tension. But maybe I’m too squeamish, although there were certainly enough critics at the time who agreed though with David Pirie, in The Monthly Film Bulletin, opining "it is rare for sex and violence to be so completely and graphically integrated in a British movie..." whilst Screen International's Marjorie Bilbow described the film as "A let down for horror addicts, with fringe benefits for voyeurs."

In between the bloody beginning and some supremely unpleasant scenes towards the ending, we’re treated to an Angle-Spanish take on Daughters of Darkness with less style and more red sauce. We meet Harriet (Sally Faulkner) and John (Brian Deacon) as they head off on holiday with their caravan in tow. They pass a cloaked woman at the side of the road trying to catch a lift although Harriet says she spies a second behind a tree, as with many things to come, John overrules his partner’s judgement, he’s very much in the normal world, a calming presence as is always required in these films were the unthinkable only happens slowly. The two park up in a field overlooking the mansion and there’s a strangeness in the night when Harriet sees lights on in the house and a hand clutches at their window… or does it? John thinks no, of course.

Anulka Dziubinska

The next day, a man called Ted (Murray Brown) stops his car to pick up the glamorous hitchhiker in the exact same spot and she reveals her name as Fran (Marianne Morris) and the two chat as he drives her towards her home, the large shadowy mansion featured in the film’s introduction. She invites him in and, being made of flesh and blood, he can hardly refuse and, after wine and some preamble, they embrace and he decides to stay the night.

He awakes in a daze with a strange wound, he shrugs it off and makes his way to the caravan for some Dettol and a large plaster. Just as we think Ted’s ready for a lucky escape, the memories of last night’s good time cause him to wait for Fran’s return and near dusk she arrives with the blonde Miriam (Playboy model Anulka Dziubinska, in her first film role) along with another young man, Rupert (Karl Lanchbury). The evening’s revels begin and, whilst Ted is passed out, the women kill and feast on the body of this new male body before showering together to wash his blood away if not their sins.

Intrigued by the comings and goings, Harriet follows the two women as they make their way across the countryside in the morning towards a graveyard where she loses their trail. Ted meanwhile had roused himself enough to drive away and he passes a road accident in which he sees the mutilated body of Rupert… Unable to calculate two plus two, Ted is also unable to resist returning to the house where surely his blood count and increasing number of questions will increase his chances of dangerous driving.

Murray Brown's Ted feels drained and confused...

Harriet meanwhile is more and more resolved to find out what exactly is happening even as John tries to get her to focus just on their caravan, tins of corned beef and gas stove. The various pennies are going to drop at some point and perhaps then we will properly understand the beginning.

Dusty verdict: I can see why Vampyres has a cult reputation for its flexing of various vampiric tropes and its focus on female dominance and male victims, even though Hammer has already been there, albeit less explicitly. There has been some re-evaluation in recent years with film scholar Leon Hunt noting that "the male heterosexual narrative of Vampyres, is an explicitly masochistic one," as the male characters in the film are relegated to "props" used for the vampires' sexual encounters with each other. However, I’m not sure I buy that given the amount of female flesh and degradation on show. This is exploitation no matter how much academic revisionism might try and find new meanings.

As I said earlier, it has a good atmosphere and some good performances, notably Sally as well as Murray Brown and Marianne Morris who is really acting for two alongside Anulka. There’s also a surprising cameo form one of the greatest silent film actors, Bessie Love who worked with DW Griffith and everyone else from the 1910s onwards, is shown as the wife of a rich American about to but the cute, haunted house. What could possibly go wrong…

 

The amazing Bessie Love, sixty years in film...

 

 

 

 

Herk Harvey's Hauntology… Carnival of Souls (1962), Criterion Blu-ray

We all come across cult films in our own time and place and for me, before the days of the internet and social media, I was staying in New York City in Autumn ’89, closer to this film’s release than now, when I came across an ad – possibly in The Village Voice or a flyer in Bleecker Bob’s record shop in the Village – promoting a screening of this film at the Bleecker Street Cinema. This was one of the great arthouse cinemas of old New York having been set up in 1960 in two townhouses dating back to the 1830s.

 

As director Herk Harvey and writer John Clifford say in their commentary, this film is best viewed in cinema and that Thursday matinee was indeed a strange and memorable experience. The film’s style had already “dated” by the cynical post-punk, indie late 80s but there was clearly something special about the atmosphere created by the film and the theatre as we watched a dreamy nightmare of dislocation set against that most haunting of all locations; an abandoned fun fair… all laughter, and life long departed and yet with some kind of evil presence drawing the film’s main character back again and again to an unreality unknown.

 

This was Harvey’s only feature film having made his career in industrial and instructional documentary film making and it was after shooting one such film that he was driving home through Salk Lake City and went past the abandoned Saltair Pavilion, standing regal and threatening in the starkness of the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Inspired he began imagining a ghoulish dance of the dead inside the great hall and on his return asked his friend and co-worker at Centron Films, John Clifford, who was a writer there, how he'd like to write a feature which he duly did in three weeks.

 

The Saltair Pavillion

It may have been their only feature but there’s a lifetime of creepy ideas put into play from men who no doubt grew up on horror films, weird science fiction and EC Comics. They were also trained film makers which partly explains how they were able to make $33,000 last over 80 minutes of narrative! It’s a miracle of budgetary constrained innovation!

 

On first sight, I had assumed that most of the cast were amateurs, but watching the film on the Criterion Blu-ray, I can see that most were pros especially the ethereal Candace Hilligoss, as Mary Henry, the woman who came to haunt herself and an actress of the Lee Strasberg School alongside Marylin Monroe and Roy Schieder. She carries the whole film and has to as she is in virtually every scene… Harvey recalled being disappointed when she first arrived and was on the point of telling her that she wasn’t right for the role until the next day when she turned up for shooting and was transformed into Mary. As he said, “an actress” and she is able to convey absence as well as intimacy in a performance that is so well centred and yet so odd that we try to second guess her responses in vain... as with her character we have to let the life she has play itself out.

 

It's Mary’s incredible journey from a friendly car chase between her and two female pals and two guys on the outskirts of a town called Lawrence in Kansas. The girl’s car crashes off a bridge and whilst her friends are killed outright, somehow Mary makes it out alive and struggles onto shore. She takes a room in the town in a house run by a Mrs Thomas (Frances Feist) and we learn that she’s an organist who has come to take up a job at a church in nearby Salt Lake City. Here again the location made the story with Lawrence’s Reuter Organ Company providing a suitably atmospheric setting and dictating that Mary would be an organist.

 

Candace Hilligoss energes from the cold, damp mud

Hilligoss got paid $2,000, so needs must as the remainder of that micro-budget drives was the order of the day and the remarkable thing is how many of these calls Harvey and Clifford got right, especially to the extent they wanted atmosphere to create the unease and not gore or specific violence. They chose well for their cinematographer with the experienced Maurice Prather not only capturing eeriness day and night but also using speeded up film, just like FW Murnau in Nosferatu, to add an uncanny edge to the movements of the ghouls in the Saltair ballroom, and the relentless pursuit if Mary. The music was also perfectly creepy, with Gene Moore hitting the right tones on an instrument that is so very specific in its sound and often jars – trust me, I worked in a Butlins holiday camp in the early 80s, organs were very much a part of weird seaside entertainments for a live or an undead audience.

 

The film shows Mary on the edge, surrounded by normal life whilst increasingly seeing strange visions, and feeling displaced. The moment she is in a clothes store when the sound suddenly stops and she experiences an ominous silence is another masterstroke from Harvey… sitting in Bleeker Street in 1989, in a sunny late Autumn, it still sent shivers up the spine.

 

Sidney Berger plays John Linden, her neighbour who has the everyday hots for Mary and Harvey uses him as another point to which reflect the abnormality slowly engulfing her. He’s a nice enough guy, and in the 1989 reunion featured on one of the Criterion Blu-ray’s extras, the actor remembers the critic Roger Ebert as describing him as the definition of a “horny geek”. By then an acting teacher Berger clearly relished the film’s long-tailed cache, they all did and it’s a treat to see them relish the moment 27 years after the film stumbled onto the market after its distributors went bust (another long story).

 

Candace and Sidney Berger, living up to Ebert's description

Back on screen, Harvey cast himself as “The Man”, the leader of the pack of ghouls, who are seen in Mary’s dreams of the Saltair Pavilion and who keeps on popping up, haunting her waking moments and looking at her with hungry eyes. This intrusions on the everyday we all take for granted are increasingly effective and used sparingly by Harvey, who paces most of his film to perfection. It is the Pavilion itself that provides the most disturbance as the director felt when he first encountered it. He had a long career in film making but if you only had one feature film to your name, this is the one you’d chose. Once seen never forgotten.

 

I watched the Criterion edition which gives the film it’s UK Blu-ray debut and Harvey would have loved it, with so many extras celebrating his work on the film and elsewhere. Perfect or Halloween but really anytime… normal life is not as secure as it seems after all.

 

Stormzy… Maniacal Mayhem, Boris Karloff Universal Box Set, Eureka Blu-ray, Out 17th October!

It was a dark and stormy night… or, in point of fact, it was a succession of dark and stormy nights, weeks of charcoal wet, with nothing quite so black as the dark heart of man and there was one who strode through the wind and rain, each time convincing his audience that evil not only existed but that it could overwhelm even the most rational of minds. These three films may spread from 1936 to 1951 and yet all have the trademark qualities not only of Boris Karloff but also Universal Pictures, purveyors of the finest horror films at budget prices.

As with the Hammer series and others, they key to these film’s success, in addition to tight fiscal control, was the ability of the leads to deliver convincingly, given tight production schedules and the most improbable of stories. As with Hammer they mostly succeed on some level and all three of these films are highly entertaining, with solid support in two from Béla Lugosi, a fine actor it turns out, even without the fangs, who was so also unfairly maligned for Plan Nine, and in one the deliciously over-playing Charles Laughton who is worth the price of admission alone! You might not run from the room screaming but you will be unsettled, shaken and stirred to find out more.

The films in Maniacal Mayhem are all on Blu-ray for the first time ever in the UK as a part of the Eureka Classics range, and all presented from 2K scans of the original film elements. Available from 17 October 2022, the first print-run of 2000 copies will feature a Limited-Edition O-card Slipcase & Collector’s Booklet and is not to be missed!

 

 

The Strange Door (1951)

My favourite of the three is The Strange Door (1951) directed by Joseph Pevney at the tale end of Universal’s classic horror period and very much a companion piece of sorts to the following year’s The Black Castle with Karloff having returned to horror after a few years in broader roles and, erm Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949). He had a lot more range than lazy history might recall and here he manages to convey those dark elements whilst also being loyal and emotionally fragile, sure he can kill if required but those he serves and those he loves, always come first. This is not so easy to pull off as witnessed by so many unsympathetic henchmen through the cinematic ages; Karloff knew the difference between man and monster.

Talking of which, so did the peerless Charles Laughton who genuinely was one of the finest actors of his generation and was here taking a lesser role than his overall career might suggest. Needless to say, Laughton gives it his all as the sadistic Sire Alain de Maletroit, a performance full of casually-revealed cruelties and pure arrogance. His brother deprived him of his one true love and so he has decided to imprison him and make sure that his daughter suffers the same heartache as he.

It was based on a short story The Sire de Maletroit's Door by Robert Louis Stevenson who had clearly been reading Edgar Allen Poe given this level of elaborate cruelty – brother Edmond (Paul Cavanagh) has been locked up for twenty years and his daughter Blanche (Sally Forrest) has been told he’s dead. As it is Edmond pretends to have gone mad so that Alain thinks he’s winning with his only friend the loyal Voltan (Karloff).

The final part of Alain’s evil plot is to marry off Blanche to a man who will be totally unsuited and who she will hate. He selects Denis de Beaulieu (Richard Stapley) as the kind of amoral waster, out for himself and whatever cheap thrill alcohol and wenching can provide… he seems to have every angle covered but, not everyone is as bad as they seem, although some are worse!

Joseph Pevney directs very effectively and whilst things are mostly studio-bound the atmosphere is terrific and the actors rise to the challenge of being in company with Karloff and Laughton!

 

The Invisible Ray (1936)

It’s back to the future for the next film with Karloff playing Dr Janos Rukh, a scientist who develops a, for want of a better phrase, space-telescope that is so powerful it can see far out into space and into our own past. Using this machine, he is able to identify a meteorite composed of an element known as "Radium X" which crashed on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago in Africa. I love the setup, the telescope is just a feint and allows a set-piece opening in which Rukh, nearing the end of his credibility, invites sceptical scientists to come and see his machine at work.

These include Dr Benet (Béla Lugosi) and Sir Francis Stevens (Walter Kingsford) with his wife Lady Arabella (Beulah Bondi) and their young friend, adventurer Ronald Drake (Frank Lawton). Janos lives with his mother (Violet Kemble Cooper) who was blinded by one of his experiments and his much younger wife, Diana (Frances Drake) who soon catches the eye of Ronald and vice-versa. Benet and Stevens are excited by the revelation and invite Janos to Africa on an expedition to find the meteorite which will be a great boon for civilisation.

As is always the case though, there’s a down-side to mysterious unknown elements and the very unmysterious known elements of human behaviour will also come into play. Janos, obsessional by nature but with a good heart, duly finds his Radium X but he is irradiated and can kill anyone by the merest touch. Dr Benet gives him a means of suppressing the affect but soon, driven to distraction by jealousy of the rest of the team as they roll out his discovery to the World as well as of his young wife, he begins to succumb to the dark side…

Directed by Lambert Hillyer, it's another well-made film, and I was especially impressed with Lugosi who has a natural command as the well-intentioned good Doctor. Good turns also from Violet Kemble Cooper and the eye-catching Frances Drake who was not caught out playing bowls when the action heats up!

 

 

Black Friday (1940)

More dark science in this more straightforward horror film with Karloff playing an amoral brain surgeon, Dr Ernest Sovac, who, to save the life of his friend, Professor George Kingsley (Stanley Ridges) who has been injured in a car accident, transplants part of the brain of the man driving the car, a gangster called Red Cannon. The results in the well-known Man With Two Brains scenario and thus begins a fight for dominance between Red and the Professor… shades of another Robert Louis Stevenson tale…

Karloff is nuanced again as his Dr Sovac becomes intrigued by the half-million dollars the semi-ex-con has hidden in New York. With this the Professor could do so much good but the danger is he keeps on having to let so much of Red into his friend’s headspace. “Red” starts to revenge himself on his former comrades, including Eric Marnay (another excellent turn from Bela Lugosi) and the closer to the money he gets the more the risks move closer to home; the Professor’s life begins to merge with the criminal life and when his daughter, Jean (Anne Gwynne), is threatened he must decide on which side (of his friend’s brain) he’s on.

The New York Times wasn’t impressed "Lugosi's terrifying talents are wasted... but Karloff is in exquisite artistic form... good holiday fun." I’d say both are eminently watchable and that this is a strong hattrick of engaging, fun horror.

The special features are also horrifically good:

• Limited Edition O-Card Slipcase
• 1080p presentation of all three films across two Blu-ray discs 
• All films presented from 2K scans of the original film elements
  
• Optional English SDH
• Brand new audio commentary tracks on The Invisible Ray and The Strange Door with author Stephen Jones and author / critic Kim Newman
• New audio commentary track on Black Friday with Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby
• “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door” radio adaptations
• Stills Galleries
• Trailers

Plus A Limited Edition Collector’s Booklet* featuring new writing on all three films by film writers Andrew Graves, Rich Johnson, and Craig Ian Mann

 

*The booklet is available on the First Print Run of 2000 copies only so you’d be well-advised to head over to the Eureka site and pre-order as soon as you can!