Doomwatch (1972)

... aka: Island of the Ghouls

Directed by:
Peter Sasdy

Environmental issues have been prevalent in the horror genre ever since the 1950s, where nuclear waste and pollutants of all kinds have been responsible for creating giant monsters and mutants. This one is based on the Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis created television series, which was popular enough on BBC to last for three seasons (1970 to 1972) and spawn this feature-length film (Clive Exton is credited with the final screenplay). A new government agency called "Doomwatch" has been formed to combat a worldwide pollution problem. To find out what effects lead additives from a recent oil spill and the detergents used to clean up said oil spill are having on sea life, Dr. Del Shaw (Ian Bannen) travels to Balfe; a small, sparsely-populated island worst hit by tanker spill. Sent to retrieve samples of seaweed, gastropods, bivalves, crustacean and possibly gulls for study, Shaw plans on just staying long enough to gather samples and then be on his way. Upon arrival, he notices the villagers living on the close knit island are an odd bunch and less than hospitable. He's constantly questioned about how long he'll be staying and what he's doing there, he has a difficult time finding accommodations and notices nearly everyone acts secretive or even downright hostile, including the local policeman and priest. He's finally able to get a room from Miss Johnson (Constance Chapman) and there meets fellow foreigner Victoria Brown (Judy Geeson), a school teacher who seems to be turning a blind eye to whatever is going on there.

The next day, Del ventures out to gather specimens on the beach but thanks to more peculiar behavior from the villagers - and the fact someone seem to be following him everywhere he goes with a shotgun - he decides to stay a few extra days to see if he can figure out just what is going on. While taking a stroll through the woods, he catches two dogs digging at the dirt. After getting attacked by one of them, he discovers the body of a young child in a shallow grave. When he reports it to the police and returns there, the body has been moved. One of the villagers destroys his camera and he's attacked by something hideously disfigured in the barn. Eventually, Victoria agrees to help him under the condition that nothing bad happens to the islanders. She confides in him that people are starting to refuse to leave their homes, the men suffer from violent outbursts and people have been disappearing. Many townspeople also seem to be changing physically, with overhanging brows, widening of the nose and lips and worse. While catching some fish, Dr. Shaw notices a prohibited area of the island called Castle Rock, which used to be a military dumping ground for "mild" radioactive waste.

Shaw returns to London to piece together the clues with a few colleagues. He gets underwater photographs of what the military actually had dumped there... along with hundreds of mysterious canisters the military didn't dump there. Turns out the unaccounted for drums (dumped there illegally) are full of a growth hormone which stimulates the pituitary gland and, in large enough doses, can causes mutation. The fish in the nearby waters have been contaminated and thus some of the folks living on Balfe have also been contaminated, resulting in widespread epidemic of the disfiguring disease acromegaly (which 40s horror star Rondo Hatton suffered from). The islanders, who are ashamed of their past history of inbreeding and immorality and want little to nothing to do with progress, aren't all that willing to cooperate either.

Going into this expecting a mutant horror flick is absolutely the wrong way to go, though the film has been advertised as such over the years. It's non-exploitative for the most part, quite dialogue-heavy and has only a handful of shock sequences. In short, it's not very exciting to watch in an action-oriented sense. However, it is intelligently written and a well thought out film, with a more credible science component than usual. It accurately disassembles the pecking order of illegal chemical dumping, with the chemical company who produced the toxic chemical subcontracting the actual dumping work to a disreputable firm and then playing stupid so that they're not actually responsible for any of it. How all of this goes down is approached from a multitude of perspectives and we see how different groups; the science community, the business community, the religious community (represented by Joseph O'Conor's vicar who believes the epidemic is punishment from God) and the military (George Sanders has a few brief scenes as an admiral) react. And much of the reaction is sadly quite accurate to how something like this would pan out in real life.

The film made its biggest splash in America re-titled Island of ther Ghouls and playing on "The Ghoul Show" triple feature along with GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE (1972) and GARDEN OF THE DEAD (1972). Paul and Simon Oates (who apparently did not like this film adaptation) reprise their roles from the BBC series and - along with Jean Trend - comprise the primary Doomwatch team. The solid supporting cast also includes Percy Herbert, Shelagh Fraser (doing a very nice job as an islander with an infected husband), Geoffrey Keen, Norman Bird, James Cosmo and George Woodbridge.

★★1/2

Devil Within Her, The (1975)

...aka: Baby, The
...aka: Evil Baby
...aka: I Don't Want to Be Born!
...aka: It Lives Within Her
...aka: It's Growing Inside Her
...aka: Monster, The
...aka: Sharon's Baby

Directed by:
Peter Sasdy

Former stripper Lucy Carlesi (Joan Collins) has just given birth to a 12-pound baby boy... who scratches her face and licks her blood just minutes after it exits the womb! Dr. Finch (Donald Pleasence) recommends she not breast feed because what just occured is clearly a sign of post partum depression. Lucy, her bland Italian husband Gino (Ralph Bates) and infant Nicholas all return home and things quickly go from bad to worse. Lucy relates a howlingly funny flashback to her former glory days as an exotic dancer to her completely useless best friend Mandy (Caroline Munro). You see, a year or so earlier, right after performing her patented Hunchback of Notre Dame-inspired strip act (!!) Lucy's dwarf co-star Hercules (George Claydon), Quasimodo to her Esmeralda, decided to try for some backstage action. After a failed attempt to grab her breast, Lucy shrieks, her sleazy boss Tommy (John Steiner) barges in and kicks the dwarf out so he can have sex with her instead. As Lucy is exiting the building later that night, the spurned dwarf emerges from behind the stage to curse her and tell her she's going to have a possessed baby.

So what does having a possessed infant entail? Well, it's messy. The baby manages to completely destroy its room and all its toys in a matter of seconds. It's super-strong. The baby easily draws blood by clawing and smacking people around. It hates crosses and has a fit during an attempted baptism. And it's deadly. The baby pushes its sitter (Janet Key) into a pond, where she hits her head on a rock and drowns. It also manages to tie a noose, climb into a tree, lower it around someone's neck and then lift them off the ground until they're dead. And it's even got enough oomph to pick up a shovel and swing it with enough force to decapitate someone during the film's only gory moment. Thankfully, Gino's full time nun / part time animal pathologist (!?) sister Albana (Eileen Atkins), who shows her affection for her brother by rubbing noses with him (!?) has flown in from Italy for a visit. After nearly everyone is already dead, Albana finally gets around to performing an exorcism on the baby during an exciting climax where the crib shakes, the baby rolls over onto its stomach twice and the dwarf keels over dead in the middle of a showgirl act. The end.

Sound like one of the most ridiculous and ill-conceived films ever created? Yep, it pretty much is. Obviously the filmmakers were wanting to cash in on both the big early 70s devil craze created by ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) and THE EXORCIST (1973) while also tapping IT'S ALIVE (1974), the surprise 'killer baby' hit made the previous year. Needless to say, they fail hard on both counts. The baby itself is never actually shown really doing anything. The film simply has one of the actors lean over the crib and suddenly jerk back, exclaiming "It bit me!" or "It hit me!" or "It spat on me!" followed by a shot of the baby lying in its crib wondering what the hell that big contraption is pointed in its face. I'll admit that I did laugh quite a few times watching this movie, but it also grows tiresome after awhile and has so many incredibly dull stretches that I'm not going to give it a "SBIG" rating.

There are many familiar faces in the cast... and most of them are terrible! While Collins does put some effort into her role, the woman just isn't a very sympathetic presence and her near-constant hysterics get highly irritating after awhile. And it pains me to say this, but Pleaseance and Bates (two actors I usually enjoy) are even worse. Pleasence is so subdued he might as well not even be there, while Bates' Italian accent is one of the worst ever commited to film. Atkins is also asked to do an Italian accent and while hers is pretty bad too (some of the unintented comic high points are her constant exclamations of "Day-Veeeel!") she's at least not utterly boring to watch like her male co-stars. Munro is around simply to look good but her character, who's screwing the same scrawny sleazebag who used to run around with her supposed best friend and may actually be the real father of the killer baby, has nothing to do and is distasteful. The most solid performance in the film is contributed by Hilary Mason (from DON'T LOOK NOW) as an elderly housekeeper who loathes the baby.

Even though I haven't seen everything from the usually-competent Sasdy, I can assume this is the low-point of his career. It's well-distributed in the UK and other countries, but there's no R1 release of this one.

★

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

Directed by:

Peter Sasdy

The fifth Hammer Dracula entry - picking up right where DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968) left off - is a step back for the series. The last time we saw the evil Count (Christopher Lee), he was impaled on a large bronze cross and disintegrating to a bloody mess at the base of his mountaintop castle home. Greedy Weller (Roy Kinnear) somehow stumbles onto the scene just in time to witness the entire thing and makes sure to take a few souvenirs back with him to his antique shop. Meanwhile, three middle-aged, upper-class married men; William Hargood (Geoffrey Keen), Samuel Paxton (Peter Sallis) and Jonathan Secker (John Carson), are looking to escape from their humdrum family lives by paying their weekly visit to a neighborhood brothel. There they meet a handsome young aristocratic man - Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates) - who promises to reward them with excitement if they'll accompany him to a few places about town. Their first stop is an antique store to buy Dracula's cloak, pendant and a vial of his powdered vampire blood. Next up is an abandoned church, where Courtley will perform a ceremony to resurrect the count. He slices his hand and drips blood into the powder, which swells into a full glass of bubbly vampire blood. The three older men chicken out on drinking it, but Courtley obliges, starts convulsing on the floor and is then beat to death by the three men, who vow to keep it a secret.

But the sins of the father are about to revisited upon each man's entire family as Count Dracula, resurrected from Courtley's ashes, comes back to destroy them all. William is shown to be the ultimate hypocrite and manages to be a more imposing and unlikable presence than Lee! A church-goer who claims he's off doing charity work while he's actually off with his buddies at the whorehouse, William is not only a liar and hypocrite, but an abusive alcoholic who bosses his weak wife Martha (Gwen Watford) around and accuses his cherubic daughter Alice (Linda Hayden) of being a "harlot" for simply talking to a boy. The boy - Paul (Anthony Corlan) - is actually Samuel's son, who's in love with Alice (and vice versa). Samuel also has a daughter -Lucy (Isla Blair) - who is being courted by Jonathan's son Jeremy (Martin Jarvis). Both daughters become entraced by the vampire and are used to help lure the men to their deaths.

Unfortunately, despite acceptible performances and production values, this chapter never really seems to take off. Both the characters and the scenarios said characters find themselves in seem dull and recycled. The exceptions here are Bates and Hayden. Bates vividly portrays a dashing, arrogant eccentric and his black magic scene is a nice departure from the norm. Hayden also makes an impression for her ability to switch from baby-faced innocent to evil, voracious seductress. It's easy to see why both actors - making their genre debuts here - would become familiar faces in the British horror industry of the 70s. Lee on the other hand has just a few lines and seems to have even less screentime than he did in the previous films. No wonder he was getting fed up playing the part at this stage in his career! Hammer regular Michael Ripper pops in briefly as a police inspector.

Followed by SCARS OF DRACULA (1970).

★★

Nothing But the Night (1973)

...aka: Devil Night
...aka: Devil's Undead, The
...aka: Resurrection Syndicate, The

Directed by:
Peter Sasdy

Best known as the one and only film from producer Anthony Nelson-Keys and co-star / (uncredited) executive producer Christopher Lee's Charlemagne Productions, this project was intended to usher in a return to serious horror films, but was such a flop it single-handedly killed off the company. Despite that, and despite the fact this generally receives awful reviews, I didn't think it was bad at all. The only survivor of a fiery bus crash that killed everyone else on board, little Mary (Gwyneth Strong) is forced to remember the details of the accident via hypnosis while also getting involved in a bitter custody battle with her crazed mother Anna Harb (Diana Dors in likely her best genre performance), a former criminal and prostitute. Meanwhile, elderly trustees of an orphanage are being murdered one by one. Clues lead back to a large orphanage on a Scottish island, where a secret cult seeks immortality. Colonel Charles Bingham (Lee), pathologist Sir Mark Ashley (Peter Cushing) and a female reporter (an excellent Georgia Brown) team up to uncover and hopefully stop the evil plot. Though a bit meandering and overly complicated, the film does manage to bring it all together during a finale that brings to mind the same one in THE WICKER MAN (1973). The strong cast also includes Michael Gambon as an inspector and Keith Barron, Kathleen Byron and Duncan Lamont as doctors.

Originally released to video in the States by Monterrey under the title The Devil's Undead, but it makes the cable rounds under its original title (also the name of the John Blackburn novel from which it is based). As of this writing, the film has only received a DVD release in Japan, under the title Devil Night.

★★1/2

Countess Dracula (1971)

Directed by:

Peter Sasdy

Another treatment of the Elisabeth Bathory legend from Hammer studios, based on the novel "The Bloody Countess" by Valentine Penrose, is a pretty decent vehicle for Polish-born beauty Ingrid Pitt, who'd just gotten some attention for playing Carmilla in the hit THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970). The evil, aging Countess Elisabeth Nodosheen arrives in a small village to take command of a castle, where she discovers that she can regain her youth and beauty by bathing in the blood of young women. She has her own daughter Ilona (Lesley-Anne Down, who's young, whiny and a little grating here), then impersonates her and romances soldier Imre Toth (Sandor Elès), while killing busty Euro-babes with help from faithful servants Captain Dobi (Nigel Green) and Julie (Patience Collier). Though it got middling reviews when released, like most other Hammer films it isn't bad at all, especially compared to the crap we're subjected to nowadays. Pitt apparently was dubbed here for some reason (probably because of her thick Polish accent), but she's still responsible for a good deal of this films success because of both her sex appeal and the fact she's a good enough actress to delineate Elizabeth's distressed aged and glowing youthful personas.

Other aspects of the film, from the photography to the score to the costumes to the set/production design are pretty top notch. And don't be turned off by the PG rating, this features enough blood and nudity for an R. Also in the cast are Maurice Denham as the castle historian Master Fabio, Peter Jeffrey as the chief bailiff, Nike Arrighi and Susan Broderick and Marianne Stone as maids.

★★1/2