RetView #86 – X The Unknown (1956)

Title: X The Unknown (1956)

Year of Release: 1956

Director: Leslie Norman, Joseph Losey

Length: 81 mins

Starring: Dean Jagger, Edward Chapman, Leo McKern, William Lucas, Peter Hammond, Kenneth Cope

X The Unknown is one of the few non-anthology movies in existence to boast more than one director. The official line is that original director, Joseph Losey, who had moved from the US to the UK after being placed on the Hollywood Blacklist (an actual post-WWII list of individuals in the entertainment industry with alleged communist links), ‘fell ill’ and had to be replaced by Leslie (father of Barry) Norman who had been a Major in the British Army. That wasn’t the only early controversy to befall this Hammer production, which had been intended to serve as a sequel to The Quatermass Xperiment (1955). That plan fell through when writer Nigel Kneale refused permission to use the character of Prof Bernard Quatermass, which rendered a sequel to the seminal British sci-fi horror flick meaningless. To all intents and purposes, Dr Adam Royston (Jagger) became the ‘new’ Quatermass. At least for a little while. There was yet more controversy after the film’s release when a distribution deal between Hammer and RKO fell through due to the latter company’s demise, before it resurfaced as RKO Pictures Inc, forcing Hammer to strike an alternative deal with Warner Bros.

Given all this off-screen chaos, it’s a testament to the professionalism of those involved that they managed to come up with anything at all, let alone a film with such a tight, streamlined plot and focused narrative. There is very little superfluous material here. The film begins with a group of British soldiers using a Geiger counter on an exercise in a remote part of Scotland. One of them (Cope) finds an unexpected source of radiation, and then gets himself blown up. Oops. Even worse, for mankind, anyway, the explosion reveals a seemingly bottomless crack in the earth. After a series of strange deaths where the victims appeared to be melted, Dr Royston inexplicably (though mightily impressively) concludes that a form of life that existed in distant prehistory when the Earth’s surface was largely molten had been trapped by the crust of the Earth as it cooled, only to return to the surface periodically in order to seek food from radioactive sources. This ‘form of life,’ unseen on screen until the closing stages, turns out to be a dead ringer for the blob from The Blob (1958) which was actually released several years later. Whether or not it was inspired by X The Unknown, is unclear. In any case, can Dr. Royston and his band of merry men find a way to save the world from being melted by the blobby thing (alternatively dubbed ‘throbbing mud’ in some reviews)?

Despite the absurd storyline (which 1950s storyline isn’t absurd?) this is an entertaining film. The acting is superb, though the special effects let it down slightly. I suspect this was in part due to a shortfall created by half the $60,000 budget going towards paying Academy Award winner Jagger’s salary, who had just been given the gong for Best Supporting Actor in the war film Twelve O’Clock High (1949). There is also a notable lack of a female lead, or a female anything. But hey, this was the fifties. Communists were bad and women were in the kitchen. I love the ending which, though ostensibly ambiguous, is actually a stroke of genius, but what really stands out for me is the dialogue. Here’s a sample:

Q: What was that?
A: I don’t know, but it shouldn’t have happened.

A brilliant, concise, straight-to-the-point, no frills, typically British response.

At the time of writing X the Unknown has a 6.1/10 rating on IMDb, based on 3 000 audience votes, and a 5.8/10 rating, at critic aggregate Rotten Tomatoes. AllMovie gives it 3/5 stars, and Craig Butler writes: “While it is not a classic of the genre, it’s a very well-made and quite entertaining little flick” A contemporary review on the website Mike’s Take on the Movies, says: “I liked this film the first time I saw it when it turned up on VHS tape thanks to the Hammer line released by Anchor Bay years ago and I still enjoy it after repeated viewings. It’s far from flashy but it’s direct and the thrills are solid for a mid fifties sci-fi flick with some startling F/X from Leaky. Then there’s Dean Jagger. A consummate pro on screen.” LINK

In a highly recommended in-depth review, the blog Scifist 2.0: A Scifi Movie History in Reviews says: “In comparison to the Quatermass films, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and their other legendary horror movies, X the Unknown remains a footnote in Hammer’s filmoghraphy. However, it is significant as the film in which some of the core personnel of Hammer’s horror franchise started to coalesce. Many key names are still missing, but X the Unknown for the first time brings together a large number of the artists who would go on to create the Hammer Horror cycle.”

Trivia Corner:

According to sources, Jimmy Sangster’s original script described the blobby throbby mystery monster thing as being “made up of millions of writhing worm-like segments” capable of slipping through small cracks and forming up again on the other side. This ability is briefly described in the film, but never shown on screen. Even if the movie had had a significantly larger budget, those effects would have been virtually impossible to achieve with the technology of the day.

RetView #85 – The Orphanage (2007)

Title: The Orphanage (El Orfanato)

Year of Release: 2007

Director: JA Bayona

Length: 97 mins

Starring: Belén Rueda, Fernando Cayo, Roger Príncep, Mabel Rivera, Montserrat Carulla

This acclaimed co-production between Spain and Mexico is the long-form directorial debut of Barcelona-based director JA Bayona, who went on to direct Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Society of the Snow (2023), which told the story of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972. Short on both money and experience, for Orfanato, Bayona enlisted the help of Mexican horror legend Guillermo del Toro Gomez, perhaps best known Mimic (1997), The Shape of the Water (2017) and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019). It’s also the first screenplay by Sergio G Sanchez, who was heavily influenced by the classic literature Turn of the Screw by Henry James and Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, as well as horror movies like The Innocents (1961), The Omen (1976) and Poltergeist (1982). The work was nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2008 Goya Awards after being nominated for no fewer than 14.

The Orphanage opens with some kids playing a game, but you just know things won’t stay this innocent long, in more ways than one. One of these kids is Laura (Rueda) who is adopted only to return to the now-abandoned building thirty years later with her husband (Cayo) and son, Simon (Príncep), with the altruistic intention of turning it into a home for disabled children. Soon after they move in, Simon, who is both adopted and HIV-positive but doesn’t know either (which is certain to make for some pretty awkward family chats at some point) soon starts making friends, kind of unusual given that the place was deserted when they moved in, and starts saying off-kilter things like, “I’m not going to grow up. Like my new friends.” He now has six of these invisible playmates, by the way. He talks about a treasure hunt, presents a box of teeth as a ‘clue,’ and claims that if he finds the treasure he will be granted a wish. He has also taken to drawing creepy pictures of a child with a cloth sack over his head, another massive red flag. Don’t the kids in these films always do stuff like that? By now, it’s pretty clear the old orphanage is haunted and the spirits are exerting their influence on poor Simon. The question now becomes why? Because there is always a ‘why.’ Things are compounded by a visit from a social worker called Benigna (Carulla) who is later spotted acting suspiciously in the grounds. As things escalate, Laura becomes increasingly concerned, and then frantic with worry. All of which seems entirely justified when Simon disappears, driving a wedge between Laura and her husband. This leads to a series of strange discoveries, and as the secret of the orphanage is slowly revealed it turns out Simon is neither the first nor the only child to go missing.

The gothic mansion (the Partarriu Manor) where most of the action takes place is very impressive (pictured below), and some of the cinematography truly stunning. Despite being filmed on location in Llanes, northern Spain, there is a lot of torrential rain (rain in Spain?) and it’s overcast most of the time, which all adds to the menacing mood. The location was chosen due to its diverse natural settings, which Bayona made full use of. It was made in 2007, but looks and feels a lot older. Maybe that was the intention. In 2007 New Line Cinema bought the rights for an English-language remake but that seems to have stalled, and there have been crickets ever since. On this, Bayona noted, “The Americans have all the money in the world but can’t do anything, while we can do whatever we want but don’t have the money,” whilst also pointing out that the American industry doesn’t take chances, and prefers to remake movies that were already hits.

The Orphanage reportedly received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, and when it was released in cinemas became the second highest grossing debut ever for a Spanish film. It was also a hit with international audiences. At the time of writing the film has an 87% approval rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes based on 181 reviews, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The critical consensus reads, “Deeply unnerving and surprisingly poignant, The Orphanage is an atmospheric, beautifully crafted haunted house horror film that earns scares with a minimum of blood.” Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert said the film is “deliberately aimed at viewers with developed attention spans. It lingers to create atmosphere, a sense of place, a sympathy with the characters, instead of rushing into cheap thrills.” A more contemporary review in The Film Magazine says: “The Orphanage might be one the most moving ghost stories ever put to film, and throughout its deliberate, slow-burn telling of a pitch-black gothic mystery it never loses touch with its beating heart. It’s about lost, forgotten, mistreated children and how pain can be passed on decades down the line, but ultimately also that love, care and kindness saves lives and prevents the next generation being both metaphorically and literally haunted.”

On the negative side, the film drew criticism for its ending and several reviewers picked up on the fact that at its core the film is about grief and the mental toll it takes, with some suggesting it is a depiction of a bereaved parent’s slow descent into madness drawing comparisons with The Babadook (2014). Tellingly, this is never definitively addressed.

Trivia Corner:

Though uncredited, Guillermo del Toro Gomez plays the doctor at the Emergency Ward who treats Laura after she injures her leg looking for Simon.

RetView #84 – Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972)

Title: Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

Year of Release: 1972

Director: Bob Clark

Length: 87 mins

Starring: Alan Ormsby, Anya Ormsby, Valerie Mamches, Jeff Gillen, Paul Cronin, Jane Daly, Bruce Solomon

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (also known as Revenge of the Living Dead, Things from the Dead, Cemetery of the Dead, The Siege of the Living Dead, and Zreaks) is an iconic piece of work co-written and directed by Bob Clark, who would go on to direct Deathdream (1974) and the classic frat comedy Porky’s. Riffing off Night of the Living Dead (1968), the script was written in 10 days and the movie shot in 14 on a budget of just $50,000, with most of the people working on it being college friends making it a true labour of love. Most of the cast were not even trained actors, with only a select few going to to have modest careers in TV or cinema. Also, this must be one of the very few zombie movies starring a married couple, Alan and Anya Ormsby who’s characters, hilariously, are also named Alan and Anya. Nod, nod, wink, wink. The quips and one-liners come thick and fast (“What a bunch of stiffs!”). At least, they do until the shit hits the fan.

The story follows a theatre troupe (“I do have talent when I have a good part!”) who travel by boat to an island off the coast of Miami that is mainly used as a cemetery for criminals, for a night of campy fun. When they arrive, their director Alan (Ormsby), a twisted, sadistic individual, tells the motley crew of actors, whom he refers as his ‘children’, stories about the island’s grisly history in a concerted effort to unsettle them. He also digs up the corpse of a man named Orville, which is certain to make any party go with a bang. The names written on the styrofoam tombstones, by the way, are the names of various crew members.

“They’re having trouble all over the world with graverobbbers, ghouls, and people breaking into cemeteries.”

“But we’re the graverobbers. Who’s going to bother us?”

“Nobody but demons.”

And zombies, as we are soon to discover.

Eventually, Alan leads the group to a cottage where they are supposed to spend the night, and then proceeds to get robed up and prepare the group for an ancient ritual to summon the dead. Probably not the smartest move when you’re on an island off the coast of Miami that is mainly used as a cemetery for criminals, but okay then. When some of the group aren’t so keen (understandably) he threatens them with the sack, which I am pretty sure would be a breach of some ethical code or other these days, but this was the seventies. Alan’s bullying and cheap jokes soon stop when the gang realise the ritual they performed had worked, and the entire island is now swarming with freshly reanimated zombies. It kind of makes you wonder what they expected to happen. Even for a low-budget seventies horror comedy film, “They seem pretty slow. Why don’t we make a run for it?” has to be one of the dumbest lines ever uttered.

In a desperate attempt to get themselves out of the mess they had created, the group attempts to perform another ritual to return the zombies to their graves. And it works! For a bit. However, they neglect to return Orville to his grave, prompting the zombies to re-emerge and ambush the group as they leave the house. Alan and Anya retreat back inside, and in a last ditch effort to save himself, despicable Alan throws Anya to the zombies and locks himself in the bedroom where he left Orville’s corpse, not realising Orville is now a zombie, too.

In these #RetView posts I try to keep spoilers to a minimum and not to discuss plot holes or endings. I’m not here to be a killjoy, and my hope is that readers will seek these films out themselves. On this occasion, though, I feel I have to mention it. The zombies get on the boat, see. The boat the group had taken to the island. As the zombies board it, you can see the inviting lights of Miami twinkling in the background, the implication being that the zombies will soon enter the mainstream, so to speak. But… who is going to sail the boat? Sailing a boat is a tricky business, or so I imagine. These zombies are shambling husks that can barely walk. I doubt very much any of them retain enough brain function, let alone dexterity, to captain a boat across a choppy section of water. I know I’m probably pedantic but as the credits rolled all I could think was, “Shit! The zombies got on the boat!” which was, I suppose, the desired effect. But this was quickly followed by, “Oh, it’s okay. they won’t get far. We’re good.”

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things is currently rocking a 42% rating on review site Rotten Tomatoes and in reviewing the later DVD release, Bloody Disgusting said: “[This] is well worth your time if you haven’t gotten around to it yet [and] really should be held among the top zombie movies of all time.” Meanwhile, the website 100 Misspent Hours was less generous, saying, “The biggest problem with Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things is that it’s an 85-minute zombie movie in which the zombies don’t turn up until minute 64.”

Bob Clark was said to have been considering a remake, but plans were curtailed when his Infiniti I30 was hit by a drunk driver in April 2007. Unless, of course, Alan Ormsby decides to raise him from the dead. Since then, other rumours of a remake have circulated, but none have so far come to fruition. It is available as a free download from the Internet Archive.

Trivia Corner

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, a track on Finnish heavy/doom metal band Wolfshead’s 2017 album Leaden, is based on the movie.

RetView #83 – The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

Title: The Incredible Shrinking Man

Year of Release: 1957

Director: Jack Arnold

Length: 81 mins

Starring: Grant Williams, Randy Stuart, April Kent, Paul Langton, Raymond Bailey

Like The Blob (1958) and The Giant Claw (1957), The Incredible Shrinking Man is yet another movie that attempted to cash in on cold war paranoia. It was based on a Richard Matheson book, who expanded it into a screenplay with the help of Richard Alan Simmons. Unusually, the novel and the screenplay were produced concurrently, and the film was already into its second month of production when the novel was published by Gold Medal Books in May 1956.

The movie is told through the viewpoint of the narrator, Robert ‘Scott’ Carey (Williams) who, whilst chilling out on a boat one day with his wife Louise (Randy Stuart, who’s actual name was Elizabeth), is enveloped in a strange mist. Months later, he realizes that his clothes no longer fit and suspects he must be slowly shrinking in size. Understandably concerned, he visits a local quack, who at first is dismissive insisting, not unreasonably, that people are actually taller in the mornings and shrink as the day goes on, as compression on the vertebrae makes you slowly decrease in height. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Scott’s problems are far more acute than that. The doctors are baffled and he becomes a medical curiosity, gaining fame as the ‘incredible shrinking man.’ But all the attention only emphasises his worries and speeds up his mental deterioration. Eventually, he is reduced to living in a doll’s house where he comes under attack from Butch, the family cat. By this point, you can’t help but feel sorry for the little guy. I mean, he’s already been through a lot. But as a result of his battle with Butch he finds himself regaining consciousness in the basement while everyone thinks he perished at the claws of Butch. As if that wasn’t enough, next he has to fight a massive spider, which comes to represent “every unknown fear in the world,” his own hunger, and his own fear. When the basement is flooded, Louise goes to investigate but Scott is so small she can no longer see or hear him. Eventually, she leaves the house and, after killing the spider with a pin (thereby slaying his own fears, as the analysis would have it) Scott becomes so small he is finally able to escape the confines of the basement by simply climbing through one of the holes in a perforated window screen. In a strangely upbeat ending (another was filmed where Scott returns to his original height, but this is the one that made the final cut), Scott seems to accept his fate and looks at the future with a newfound sense of optimism because, although medical science can’t save him and this new world will be full of new challenges to navigate, he knows that no matter how small he becomes, “There is no zero” and he will still exist.

Many innovative techniques and special effects were used during filming. For example, shots featuring Louise were taken against a black velvet backdrop and then composited with shots of Scott on an enlarged living room set. Their movements were then synchronized so they appeared to interact with each other. An oversized dollhouse was constructed for Scott, and food was used to ecourage Butch the cat to ‘attack.’ Jack Arnold, who had previously directed such classics as It Came from outer Space (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) initially wanted Irish actor Dan O’ Herlihy to play Scott. But O’Herlihy turned down the role, prompting Universal to sign Williams instead. Production went over budget and filming had to be extended as certain special effects shots required reshooting and Williams was constantly being injured on set die to the overly-physical action sequences.

Upon its release, the Monthly Film Bulletin praised the film, and declared it, “A Horrifying story that grips the imagination throughout. Straightforward, macabre, and as startlingly original as a vintage short story.” Meanwhile, a contemporary evaluation by Ian Nathan of Empire magazine calls it a classic of 1950s science fiction films, noting how everyday objects found at home are “transformed into a terrifying vertiginous world fraught with peril. A confrontation with a ‘giant’ spider, impressively realised, as are all the effects, for its day, has become one of the iconic image of the entire era.”

The Incredible Shrinking Man spurned it’s own sub-genre, as movies like the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and the Amazing Colossal Man (1957) soon followed, and Matheson scripted a sequel called the Fantastic Little Girl, which had Louise returning to the house where, naturally, she begins to shrink. However, the script was deemed inferior and the movie was never made. The script was, however, published in its entirety in the book Unrealized Dreams in 2005. A quasi-sequel (or a parody, depending on your point of view), The incredible Shrinking Woman, directed by Joel Schumacher of Lost Boys and Flatliners fame, eventually appeared in 1981. A new adaptation of the original was announced in 2013, with Matheson writing the screenplay with his son. However, Matheson the elder died on June 23^rd of that year and things have been eerily quiet ever since.

Trivia Corner

While trying a way to film a scene involving giant raindrops landing, Arnold recalled when he was a child finding condoms in his father’s drawer. Not knowing what they were he filled them with water and dropped them. The director then ordered about 100 condoms to be filled with water and placed on a treadmill so they would drop in sequence.

2024 in Review

January 2024 saw the publication of my short story The Cunning Linguist in the long-delayed anthology Welcome to the Splatterclub, vol III on Blood Bound Books. You can probably guess what that one’s about. I have a long associated with BBB, and they’ve always been great to work with. That was followed by short fiction in Flash in a Flash, the Black Beacon Book of Ghosts edited by Cameron Trost, and Big Smoke Pulp, Vol I, which by my count became my 97^th published short story (not including reprints). A second edition of Handmade Horror Stories, which includes my story Misshapes & Rejects, also came out.

On 27 March I released X6, my sixth volume of short fiction. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that X6 includes some of the darkest things I have ever written, including Holiday of a Lifetime, which I think has drawn the most reader complaints so far. My bad. Here’s the ToC. And here’s another look at the awesome cover by Greg Chapman.

I have been so involved in fiction over the past couple of years, I drifted out of journalism, apart from the day job. I enjoy writing about writing, and I have a lot of experience to mine, so I pitched a few articles to an American magazine called Writer’s Digest. WD is a bit of an institution, and definitely one to cross off the bucket list. I hadn’t been that excited since I wrote for Loaded. By the end of the year WD had published features about making the switch from writing for consumer magazines to the trade press, horror fiction markets, healthy habits for cultivating success, and finding your writing niche. There are also a few more in the pipeline.

Another writing magazine I have built up a good relationship with is Authors Publish. A couple of years ago they ran a piece I wrote about how I got my first book published, then late last year they contacted me out of the blue and asked if they could reprint the piece in a long-form book. Would I like to be paid twice for the same thing with no extra work on my part? Go on, then.

With the revised version of the second Ben Shivers mystery, The Butcher (working title), safely off to the publisher, at the beginning of the year I started shopping Silent Mine around, a horror western novella about a disillusioned cowboy on the trail of a missing husband. The last anyone heard, the husband went seeking his fortune at a place called Silent Mine, and he didn’t come back. Silent Mine is the first of a series featuring a character called Dylan Decker who does his level best to put the ‘wild’ in the West. A new publisher called Undertaker Books soon picked it up and did an amazing job with every aspect of it, from the editing to the promotion and cover art. They also asked for a first option on any more Dylan Decker books, which was music to my ears because I had another one under my belt. Meeting at Blood Lake (provisional title) will be out some time in 2025.

To bridge the gap, and to round out the year, I wrote a Christmas-themed short story, A Christmas Cannibal, again featuring Dylan Decker, which you can grab for free from THIS LINK. If you are a fan of horror fiction, you might want to sign up for the Undertaker Books newsletter.

Meanwhile, here on my faithful blog, judging by the site stats the most popular posts of 2024 were my eyewitness account of Bruce Springsteen’s Cardiff gig and, bizarrely, my review of Ryan Adam’s Nebraska cover album. My RetView series, which examines classic horror movies through a contemporary lens, is also still going strong. Recent entries include the ‘most controversial film ever made’ Cannibal Holocaust, the sublime Incredible Shrinking Man, and the simply superb King of Zombies. However, by far the most popular was The Mutations, another surprise.

If you want a summary of 2023, you can find that here. I have lots already planned for 2025, so watch this space and stay happy.

Remember, the harder you work, the more you achieve.

RetView #82 – Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

Title: Cannibal Holocaust

Year of Release: 1980

Director: Ruggero Deodato

Length: 96 mins

Starring: Robert Kerman, Carl Gabriel Yorke, Francesca Ciardi

A lot of films have been called controversial. Scroll this blog series and you’ll find dozens of them. But not many films can legitimately claim to be ‘the most controversial film of all time.’ Oh boy. This has everything; genocide, mutilation, graphic violence, animal slaughter, sexual assault, nudity, racial discrimination, not to mention portrayals of actual cannibalism. The film was banned, on various grounds, in over 40 countries (including the UK until 2001) and Italian director Ruggero Deodato, who heavily influenced both Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino, was even investigated on suspicion of murder at one point. More about that later. In fact, the film is still banned in some countries, even in its edited form. Not that it mattered much when home video became popular, and even less now with the Internet. There has been so much intrigue around this release that it would require a whole book to explain in full rather than a measly blog post. What a lot of people seem to forget is that Deodato was (he died in 2022 aged 83) a purveyor of exploitation cinema. It was the mechanism he used to shine a light on ‘difficult’ topics. Added to that, he was a master manipulator. If he got a rise out of anyone watching this film, for whatever reason, that was exactly what he wanted, and something he went to great lengths to achieve. Even the use of the word ‘holocaust’ in the title was no accident, and you feel was intended to simply stir up emotions, especially in Europe where the word still held so many negative connotations through World War Two and Italy’s association with fascism.

The movie follows a team of American film-makers led by anthropologist Harold Monroe (Kerman) into the Amazon rainforest (it was filmed on location) as they search for indigenous tribes rumoured to be cannibals. No prizes for guessing what probably happened to them, then. Footage from the trip is recovered (found footage, if you will) and later ends up in the hands of a TV station where execs watch it and together we discover the grisly fate of the expedition. Many have suggested that this marked the beginning of the found footage genre later popularised by movies like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Megan is Missing (2011), and V/H/S (2013). Produced as part of the contemporary cannibal trend of Italian exploitation cinema, Cannibal Holocaust was partly inspired by Italian media coverage of Red Brigades terrorism. Deodato thought that the media focused on portraying violence for salacious reasons with little regard for journalistic integrity, and believed that journalists staged certain news angles in order to obtain more sensational footage. This idea of media manipulation became central to the film, which essentially a mockumentary about a group of filmmakers who stage scenes of extreme brutality for a Mondo-style documentary. For example, ‘recovered’ footage shows the group capturing and raping a local Ya̧nomamö (Tree People) girl. In one of the film’s most iconic scenes they later find the girl impaled on a wooden pole by a riverbank. It is assumed that the natives killed her for loss of virginity, but subtley implied that the filmmakers themselves killed her and staged it as a murder for dramatic effect. The result is that the viewer begins to question everything they see, and ask whether they themselves are being manipulated, which of course, they (we) are. In a 2011 article for The Guardian, journalist Steve Rose remarked, “As a comment on shock value, Cannibal Holocaust succeeded all too well. The get-out is that the film-makers in Cannibal Holocaust are the real savages. They are shown goading, raping and even killing to get sensational footage for the media back home.”

After its premiere in Italy, the film was ordered to be seized by a local magistrate, and Deodato was arrested on obscenity charges. He was later charged with multiple counts of murder due to rumours that several actors were killed on camera in snuff film fashion and faced life in prison. In reality, the cast had signed contracts requiring them to disappear for a year after shooting to maintain the illusion that they had indeed died. When the actors appeared in court, alive and well, the murder charges were dropped, but not before it blew up in every newspaper in the country.

It was alleged that during production, many cast and crew members, including Kerman, protested the use of real animal killing in the film, which is certainly hard to watch at times. I still feel for that poor turtle. The point Deodato seems to be making here is that animals are living, breathing creatures, and they bleed and writhe when they are killed, something society often forgets when all the meat we consume comes in shrink-wrapped packages from the supermarket. This is typical of Deodato’s approach in that his preferred method of inferring a message was to hold it up in front of your face and take a machete to it. He was similarly derided for his ‘exploitation’ of native tribes, actual members of which play key roles in the film but are uncredited and, allegedly, unpaid, though one would assume that with concept of money being so alien to them they wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway. At its core, the film is an attack on sensationalist media, which is often built on flawed journalistic ethics, all of which Deodato used himself to great effect in marketing the film. Love it or hate it, you have to admire the ingenuity. In a 2011 interview with the BBC prior to his death, the director said: “All debates on cinema are good for the artform. The most important aspect [of Cannibal Holocaust] was the original use of reportage style. The special effects aimed to make people believe what they were seeing was real.”

Cannibal Holocaust has never really been out of the public eye, but was thrust back into the limelight in 2013 when it was revealed to be the inspiration for Eli Roth’s Green Inferno which took its title from the opening monologue in Cannibal Holocaust. A planned sequel, entitled Cannibal Fury, was never made. Even knowing what we know today, it remains as shocking as ever. This isn’t a pleasant viewing experience, but it was never intended to be.

Trivia Corner:

Demonstrating once more how media savvy and self aware he was, in 2007 Deodato made a cameo appearance in Eli Roth’s Hostel: Part 2 playing a cannibal, no doubt with his tongue firmly implanted in his cheek.

RetView #81 – The Mutations (1974)

Title: The Mutations

Year of Release: 1974

Director: Jack Cardiff

Length: 92 mins

Starring: Donald Pleasence, Tom Baker, Brad Harris, Julie Edge, Michael Dunn

Sometimes films, no matter how good they are, just get overlooked and then forgotten about, only to resurface decades later on some obscure satellite TV station, in this case Talking Pictures in the UK. In The Mutations (aka The Freakmaker), Donald Pleasence (What a Carve Up! Death Line, the first two Halloween films, and about a bazillion others) stars as mad scientist, Professor Nolter, who has taken it upon himself to pioneer what he sees as the next stage in human evolution by crossbreeding Venus flytraps with college students he abducts from his class (standard dialogue: “We are interested in cloning, not in clowning!”) his ultimate plan being to create a race of “plants that can walk, and men that can take root”. Seems reasonable enough, right? No problem there.

However, friends of the missing students start asking questions and obviously, science being what it is, the vast majority of Professor Nolter’s kooky experiments end in abject failure, leaving the crazed professor with a surplus of mutant human/plant hybrids which are handed over to a cruel circus freak show owner, Mr. Lynch (a barely-recognisable Baker, seen here shortly before his career-defining turn as Doctor Who) who attempts to exploit them for monetary gain which, as we all know, is the, ahem, root of all evil. Boom. This aspect calls to mind another classic Pleasence outing in Circus of Horrors (1960) though The Mutations is generally believed to have been directly inspired by Tod Browning’s classic Freaks (1932), which follows the exploits of a travelling French circus. And like that movie, it’s now frowned upon by modern standards because of the sometimes distasteful exploitation of actors with genuine disabilities who star alongside able-bodied actors with fictional disabilities, among the array of ‘freaks’ are the Pretzel Man, the Bearded Lady, the Monkey Woman, the Alligator-skinned Girl, and the Human Pincushion. Michael Dunn, a well-known American actor with dwarfism who played Lynch’s sidekick Burns, died at the Cadogan hotel in London at the age of 39 while the movie was in production. Other problematic scenes included the professor appearing to feed a live rabbit to a giant Venus flytrap. It seems people are cool with seeing scores of teenagers meet all kinds of inventive, grisly ends in the movies, but the moment you feed a rabbit to a Venus flytrap everyone loses their marbles. As you can probably guess, all this is bound to end in disaster. Good must triumph over evil. And the mutations, kitted out in shoddy costumes and grotesque make up, set out to wreak their revenge.

In much the same way as Tod Browning manages in Freaks (the parallels just keep coming), in the second half of the film the viewer is cajoled into feeling a measure of sympathy for the nutations who, from the outside looking in, would appear to be the monsters. These are the abused, the downtrodden, the disaffected, and the vulnerable, who wouldn’t even consider being evil if something evil hadn’t happened to them first, and you want them to find justice. This isn’t exactly a new mechanism, harking back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and maybe even earlier, but is unusual none-the-less. Mr. Lynch, aka, ‘the ugliest man in the world’ is also a very complex character. Horribly disfigured, he yearns to be normal and refuses to take his place among the ‘freaks’ (“He’s one of us!”). At one point he goes to a prostitute and pays her extra to say ‘I love you.’ Aww.

The Mutations was directed by legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff (1914-2009) and released through Columbia pictures. Though filled with crackpot theories and pseudo-science, it raises all kind of moral and ethical questions, chief among them being how much should (or could) people interfere with nature? Is it selfish to attempt to guarantee the future survival of a species? Or is it necessary? Pleasence is wonderfully cast, though he does tend to resemble Pete Townshend a bit too much for my liking. Speaking of music, also worthy of note is the truly unsettling soundtrack by Basil Kirchin, which starts with something resembling a heartbeat in the opening credits, and twists and writhes throughout. The film has been released on DVD several times since 2005, most notably in 2008 by Subversive Cinema as a part of a 2-Disk ‘Greenhouse Gore’ movie pack with The Gardener (1974) about a deranged landscaper who turns into a tree.

Author and film critic Leonard Maltin criticised The Mutations’ ‘predictable’ story and what he called “grotesque elements” while the TV Guide awarded it one star out of five, saying, “Though at times the film is so bad it’s unintentionally funny, it has a certain cruelty to it.” Contemporary review site My Bloody Reviews notes, “more of a curiosity piece than essential viewing The Mutations is criminally dull and only comes to life whenever Tom Baker is on screen, otherwise this is rather pedestrian and questionable in its depiction of ‘freaks’”. Michael H. Price of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was slightly more impressed, giving it a solid three stars and praising both the effects and Kirchin’s “dissonant orchestral score” which he claims “adds mightily to the mood of unease and gathering madness.”

Trivia Corner

According to Tom Baker, while filming he and Willie Ingram, who played Popeye, so-called for his uncanny ability to make his eyes pop far out of their sockets, struck up an unlikely friendship. They used to frequent a pub, where a particular waitress made it clear that she didn’t approve of Baker, who was white, being friends with Ingram, who was black. To get back at her, Ingram would make his eyes pop out when she passed, then pretend nothing had happened.

RetView #78 – Burnt Offerings (1975)

Title: Burnt Offerings

Year of Release: 1975

Director: Dan Curtis

Length: 116 mins

Starring: Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Burgess Meredith, Eileen Heckart, Bette Davis, Anthony James

What a stellar cast. Oliver Reed and Bette Davis each have (had, sorry) the ability to elevate any only crap to whole new levels, and to have them both in the same film is just absurd. Being an English language geek, however, it took me a while to get past that title. Is it burned or burnt? Turns out it can be both though the former is more common in American English, which makes it even more surprising that they’ve chosen to go with ‘Burnt.’ It takes its title from the book of the same name by American author Robert Marasco published in 1973. Anyway, back to the movie, and this is very much a slow burner (get in!) low on gore and big on atmosphere typical of the raft of seventies haunted house films. Interestingly, Stephen King lists it as one of his favourite horror movies and there is ample evidence to suggest that the original book at least partly inspired his own novel The Shining. It won a slew of Saturn Awards, including Best Horror Film, and Best Director. Bette Davis also won the award for Best Supporting Actress.

Writer Ben Rolf (Reed), his wife Marian (Black), their 12-year-old son Davey and Ben’s elderly aunt Elizabeth (Davis) visit a large, remote, neo-classical 19th-century mansion with a view to renting it for the summer. The home’s eccentric owners, elderly siblings Arnold (Meredith) and Roz Allardyce (Heckart), offer them the property at a bargain price of $900 for the entire summer, which seems too good to be true. And it is. The offer comes with with a request: the Allardyce’s elderly mother, who they claim is 85 but could pass for spritely 59, will continue to live in her upstairs room, and the Rolfs are to provide her with meals during their stay. The old woman is obsessed with privacy and will not interact with them, so meals are to be left outside her door. Like that isn’t a red flag. Anyway, Marian soon becomes obsessed with the house, and eventually starts wearing some Victorian-era clothes she finds and distances herself from the rest of the family. Various unusual circumstances occur: Davey falls and hurts his knee playing in the garden, a dead plant starts to grow again, Ben comes a cropper with champagne bottle, and a malfunctioning light bulb is mysteriously repaired. Ben is also haunted by visions of an eerie, grinning hearse driver (James) who he had first seen at his mother’s funeral years earlier.

Despite the awards and the all-star cast, Burnt Offerings received mixed reviews. George Anderson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette criticized it as being “dependent on typical horror tropes such as shocks and loud music hits” and described the tension as, “A lot of sinister huffing and puffing to little effect”. While praising Meredith and Heckart (who had won an academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1972 for her performance in Butterflies are Free) as the best performers in the film, Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe argued the source material gave the actors too little to work with. He called Black, who was four months pregnant during filming, “particularly inconsistent”, said Reed looked “like an eggplant”, and stated Davis “tries to create a Bette Davis character without any Bette Davis lines to work with.” At the other end of the spectrum, in a contemporary summary, Rovi Donald Guarisco of Movie Guide called the film “worthy of rediscovery by the horror fans who missed it the first time”, concluding that “In the end, Burnt Offerings is probably a bit too methodical in its pacing for viewers accustomed to slam-bang approach of post-’70s horror fare, but seasoned horror fans will find plenty to enjoy.”

For what it’s worth, I thought the performances were superb but found the overall package slightly overwrought and overlong, especially for a film where, frankly, there isn’t much plot. You could easily cut 20-25 minutes off the running time and lose nothing except some snivelling from Bette Davis and some posturing by Ollie Reed. In short, there’s more style here than substance, but what substance!

Trivia Corner

Bette Davis reportedly detested Oliver Reed. She insisted on referring to him as ‘that man’ and only speaking to him when they shared on-screen dialogue. After filming, she described him as “possibly one of the most loathesome human beings I have ever had the misfortune of meeting.” She also had conflicts with Karen Black, feeling that Black did not treat her with an appropriate degree of respect. Oh dear.

RetView #77 – Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959)

Title: Attack of the Giant Leeches

Year of Release: 1959

Director: Bernerd L Kowalski

Length: 62 mins

Starring: Ken Clark, Yvette Vickers, Jan Shepard, Michael Emmet, Tyler McVey, Bruno VeSota

ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES, (aka THE GIANT LEECHES), poster art, 1959.

IMHO leeches are a very underused mechanism in horror. We see far too many rats, spiders and snakes, but not nearly enough of these natural blood-sucking vampires. They are fucking disgusting. Even the little tiny ones that stick to your legs after you go paddling in streams are gross. Imagine giant ones! Luckily, someone else did, so you don’t have to. Produced by Gene (brother of Robert) Corman and directed by Bernerd L Kowalski (who would go on to direct episodes of classic eighties action series’ Knight Rider and Airwolf) Attack of the Giant Leeches came right at the end of the 50’s creature feature craze that was a reaction to the Cold War that gave us such timeless gems as It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), The Indestructable Man (1956) and The Blob (1958). This is reiterated, if you were in any doubt, when a character speculates that the man-eating leeches they are up against have been affected by atomic radiation from nearby Cape Canaveral. It was shot over eight days and released as part of a double bill with the horror comedy A Bucket of Blood (strangely enough, directed by another Corman, Roger, who would later gain fame for his film adaptations of Edgar Allan poe stories) by American International Pictures.

In the swampy Florida Everglades, a pair of massive intelligent leeches live in an underwater cave, presumably subsisting on the local wildlife as several references are made throughout the film to a lack of crocodiles in the area (which one would imagine not being a bad thing). Soon, though, the giant leeches decide to move on to people and begin dragging locals down to their cave, where they are kept alive and slowly drained of blood. Two of the first victims are local vixen Liz Walker (Vickers), who has been cheating on her husband Dave (VeSota), and her latest paramour. Poor traumatised Dave immediately comes under suspicion, mainly because he admitted chasing the amorous couple through the forest with a shotgun, but then he commits suicide leaving more questions than answers. Game warden Steve Benton (Clark) takes it upon himself to investigate, aided by his girlfriend, Nan Grayson (Sheppard), and her father, Doc Grayson (McVey). The intrepid bunch soon discover the giant leech’s underwater lair and blow it up. The end.

Or is it?

The film is notable for featuring Cary Grant’s long-time squeeze Yvette Vickers soon after her appearance in the Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958), who promoted it by appearing as a centrefold in the June 1959 issue of Playboy. After that, her movie roles began to decline and she was last seen alive in 2010 having withdrawn from her family and friends. Tragically, her mummified body was discovered around a year later at her home on Westwanda Drive, Beverly Hills, by actress and neighbour Susan Savage. There were no signs of foul play, the cause of death deemed to be heart failure resulting from coronary artery disease. After her demise, Hugh Hefner issued statements expressing his sorrow.

Attack of the Giant Leeches, while corny and somewhat predictable, doesn’t get nearly enough love. It barely even comes into the conversation. Any conversation. This is despite a remake directed by Brett Kelly and written by Jeff O’Brien being released in 2008 and a stage adaptation performed at The Village Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, in February 2020. The original has proved somewhat divisive on Rotten Tomatoes, where it measures 70% on the Tomatometer but has an audience score of just 18% based on 1000+ ratings. In his book Classic Movie Guide: From the Silent Era Through 1965 (2010) film critic Leonard Maltin awarded the film 1.5 out of 4 stars, calling it a “ludicrous hybrid of white trash and monster genres.” There’s just no pleasing some people.

The original movie is now in the public domain as its copyright was never renewed, and you can watch it in full HERE.

Trivia Corner

The monster costumes were designed by actor Ed Nelson and Gene Corman’s wife, with some claiming they were constructed from stitched-together black raincoats. Other insiders were less gracious and insisted black refuse sacks were used. Honestly, I kinda hope that was the case.

RetView #71 – Hellraiser (1987)

Title: Hellraiser

Year of Release: 1987

Director: Clive Barker

Length: 93 mins

Starring: Andrew Robinson, Claire Higgins, Sean Chapman, Ashley Laurence, Doug Bradley

Liverpool-born Clive Barker has always been a bit more cerebral than your average horror writer, which is probably why his work translates to the screen so much more successfully than some of his contemporaries. There’s just a bit more depth and substance, much of which lends itself very well to horror imagery. Though he has written many more works of note which have been turned into movies or TV series, including Rawhead Rex (1986), Nightbreed (1990), and Candyman (1992) this, Barker’s directorial debut, remains his tour de force. It was based on his novella, The Hellbound Heart, which was first published in the 1986 anthology Dark Visions 3. At the time, Barker was riding a wave of popularity on the back of his Books of Blood series, and had recently been dubbed “the future of horror” by none other than Stephen King himself. No pressure there, then. In a scathing retort to this accolade, critic Roger Ebert gave the film half a star when he reviewed it, saying, “This is a movie without wit, style, or reason. I have seen the future of implausible plotting, and his name is Clive Barker.”

A simple, yet fiendishly clever plot begins when hedonist Frank Cotton (Chapman) comes into possession of an antique puzzle box said to be a portal into an extra-dimensional realm of ‘unfathomable pleasure.’ He opens the box and unleashes the bloodthirsty cenobites led by Pinhead (Bradley) who literally rip him to pieces (“No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering”). The Cenobites are revealed elsewhere as being members of a religious cult in hell called the Order of the Gash (as names go, that has to be in the top few per cent) who exist solely to explore the further regions of human experience and grant sadomasochistic pleasure to those who call upon them. Okay.

Years later, Frank’s brother Larry (Robinson, best known for his portrayal of the psycho killer in 70’s classic Dirty Harry) and his wife Julia (Higgins), who once had a lusty affair with Frank, move in to the house to try to repair their fractured relationship. Whilst moving in, Larry cuts his hand on a rusty nail. The blood drips down through the floorboards and brings Frank, or what’s left of him, back to life. He needs more blood to become more solid so persuades Julia, who still has the hots for him, to bring home a succession of men who she then viciously murders. Frank’s daughter Kirsty (Laurence), who slowly becomes the star of the show, rumbles them, and then has her own close encounters with both the rejuvinated and perpetual horndog frank and the Cenobites. The whole thing ends with Kirsty escaping and the puzzle box ending up with its original owner, so the cycle can begin again.

Several cuts were made post-production to enable the movie to be down-graded from an X (18) to an R (15) rating in order to reach a wider audience. The sex scenes between Frank and Julia were originally a lot more explicit and included sadomasochistic overtones to further enhance Frank’s decadence. Desire is front and centre in Hellraiser, as Barker later explained, “Sex is a great leveller. It made me want to tell a story about good and evil in which sexuality was the connective tissue. Most English and American horror movies were not sexual, or coquettishly so – a bunch of teenagers having sex and then getting killed. Hellraiser, the story of a man driven to seek the ultimate sensual experience, has a much more twisted sense of sexuality.” He added that, “The MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] told me I was allowed two consecutive buttock thrusts from Frank, but three is deemed obscene.” I suppose you could say three would be pushing it. Nevertheless, the movie was still banned in Ontario.

Despite the controversy, the reviews were generally positive, especially in the UK. Time Out London called Hellraiser, “Barker’s dazzling debut,” that “Creates such an atmosphere of dread that the astonishing set-pieces simply detonate in a chain reaction of cumulative intensity.” The Daily Telegraph agreed with these sentiments, stating that, “Barker has achieved a fine degree of menace,” while The Daily Mail went one step further and described it as, “A pinnacle of the genre.”

A reboot directed by David Bruckner appeared in 2022 meaning that to date there have now been a total of eleven Hellraiser movies, alongside various comics and spin-offs, making it one of the most enduring franchises in movie history. For the record, the other movies are: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), Hellraiser: Decader (2005), Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005), Hellraiser: Revelations (2011), Hellraiser: Judgement (2018). Barker himself has had very little to do with any of these, though he has written and released two sequels in The Scarlet Gospels (2015) and Hellraiser: The Toll (2018) but neither have been adapted for the screen (yet).

In an interview with Game Radar, Doug Bradley, who played Pinhead, said the success of Freddy vs. Jason (2003) led Hellraiser distributor Dimension Films to flirt with the idea of a Hellraiser vs. Halloween film. “Clive said he would write it and John Carpenter said he would direct it,” Bradley said. But Moustapha Akkad, who owned the rights to Halloween, vetoed the idea. Thankfully.

Trivia Corner:

During filming, Doug Bradley had difficulty seeing through the black contact lenses he wore as Pinhead, and lived in constant fear of tripping over stuff. According to Barker the character of Pinhead who quickly became one of the most recognizable and terrifying horror icons ever, was inspired by a hardcore S&M club he visited in New York, where he, “Watched people get pierced for fun.”