Creeping Flesh, The (1973)

... aka: El esqueleto prehistórico (The Prehistoric Skeleton)
... aka: Essência da Maldade (Essence of Evil)
... aka: Il terrore viene dalla pioggia (The Terror Comes from the Rain)
... aka: La chair du diable (The Devil's Flesh)
... aka: Nachts, wenn das Skelett erwacht (At Night, When the Skeleton Awakens)

Directed by:
Freddie Francis

Competing for the same audience as Hammer and Amicus in the 60s and 70s was a smaller outfit called Tigon British Film Productions. Founded by Tony Tenser in 1966, Tigon would produce over 20 films in a brief span of time lasting no longer than a decade. Around half of those were horror films and, truth be told, most have gotten brushed aside for good reason. Their collection is highlighted mainly by WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968), a good period witch hunt film / commentary on religious hypocrisy with a great Vincent Price performance, and The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), a creepy and atmospheric rural witchcraft tale. While other Tigon productions were generally at least watchable, most were forgettable and sometimes even outright duds, like THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR (1968), which star Peter Cushing reputedly wasn't very fond of, and THE CRIMSON CULT (1968), which is best-known now for getting together one of horror cinema's all-time best casts yet somehow still managing to suck. The Creeping Flesh, the studio's final film as production company, is neither the best nor worst of what Tigon had on offer. Afterward, the company mostly distributed sex films until they fizzled out for good in the early 80s.

Frantic and quite possibly mad Victorian-era scientist Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing) arranges for a young assistant to meet him at his lab to continue research "of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race!" Emmanuel seems to have somehow discovered the very origin of evil, with evil itself not being an abstract but its own living organism; its own entity entirely and one that's also capable of infecting man. He then flashes back three years in an effort to explain just what he's talking about.

It's now 1893, and Emmanuel has just returned from a year-long trip to New Guinea with a strange new specimen - a complete skeleton of a primitive man - that he hopes will be the most important scientific discovery of the century. The skeleton strangely predates a neanderthal skeleton yet is much larger, with an especially huge head and rib cage, and seems to have come from a much more advanced and intelligent species. The Missing Link? Well, Emmanuel seems to believe so. He and his assistant Waterlow (George Benson) immediately get to work examining it to find out more.

While he spends almost all of his time slaving away in his lab, Emmanuel's about to face the consequences of both ignoring his responsibilities and ignoring his lovely teen daughter, Penelope (Lorna Heilbron). He's always told Penelope that her mother, Marguerite (Jenny Runacre), had died when she was only a child. In reality, Marguerite has only recently (within the past few months) died. All this time she's been locked up at the Hildern Institute for the Criminally Insane; an institution run by Emmanuel's stuffy brother James (Christopher Lee). Fearing that she may inherit her mother's insanity, Emmanuel has not only lied to Penelope about her mother's mental illness, but has also forbidden her from talking about her, entering her bedroom or even leaving their home unless he can accompany her. She's basically been been kept locked safely away. And while he's been working on his various experiments and away on expeditions, the bills have been piling up and they may even lose their home.

Meanwhile, James and Perry (Hedger Wallace), another doctor in his employ, keep busy doing all kinds of unorthodox experiments... often on his living, screaming patients! They not only practice some primitive form of electroshock therapy at the asylum, but also keep most of the patients locked up in the cellar; treating them little better than animals. James has no problem shooting disobedient patients dead and also somehow manages to be well stocked on spare body parts to experiment on. He's working on a manuscript titled "The Cause and Prevention of Mental Disorder" that he hopes will win him the coveted Richter Prize; the same exact award Emmanuel is sure he's going to win with his discovery. But just to make sure he stands an even better chance at winning, James informs Emmanuel that he'll no longer be financing any of his future expeditions.

Late one night while attempting to clean up the skeleton, Emmanuel makes the amazing discovery that simple water can regenerate the flesh of whatever it is he's found. He cuts off a finger and then further examines both it and New Guinea folklore, drawing the conclusion that the skeleton belongs to an ancient species representing pure, undiluted evil. And if evil is something cellular that can be found in the blood, why not use the creature's blood to create an antidote to cure all of man's ills? After Penelope discovers the truth about her mother (who was a Parisian dance hall trollop) and bad memories come flooding back to Emmanuel, he decides to inject her with the "inoculation" he's created. Needless to say, that's a big mistake.

Penelope runs off to London and starts frequenting a seedy pub where she drinks, dances, fends off an attempted rape by clawing the man's face bloody and then slashes the throat of a horny sailor who makes a grab for her. She flees into the night and runs afoul of bald escaped lunatic Charles Lenny (Kenneth J. Warren). Penelope manages to kill him but is apprehended by authorities and ends up exactly where he mother ultimately did: Hilbert Institute. However, after his latest experiments have fallen short, James decides to use this as an excuse to blackmail Emmanuel and sends a thug to the home to steal the skeleton. He just picks a bad time to do so... in the middle of a thunderstorm!

This is well directed, produced and shot (by Norman Warwick), with excellent sets, costumes and period detail plus fine performances from the entire cast, with Cushing and Heilbron being especially good here. Where it's lacking a bit is in the screenplay department. While there are plenty of decent ideas here, the focus frequently shifts due to one too many competing subplots; some of which are simply more interesting than others. The big payoff at the end (in this case, the full regeneration of the creature) also feels a little bit anti-climactic, though there's an OK little twist to the tale at the very end.

The cast includes Duncan Lamont (inspector), Catherine Finn (maid), Harry Locke (bartender), Michael Ripper (guy who delivers the skeleton) and Marianne Stone (asylum worker). Roy Ashton did the make-up fx. This has been released countless times on VHS and DVD over the years (Columbia, Image, RCA, Sony are just some of the distributors), and received a blu-ray release in 2017 courtesy of Mill Creek.

★★1/2

Brain, The (1988)

... aka: La mente (The Mind)
... aka: Manipulations
... aka: Satanic Brain

Directed by:
Ed Hunt

Prior to achieving cult fame, actor David Gale was mostly a New York stage actor who'd only occasionally land a low budget film role, most notably one of the male leads in the bizarre but not particularly good proto-slasher SAVAGE WEEKEND (1979), which spent three years on the shelf and went through several titles changes before someone bothered to release it. When Gale wasn't on the stage, he primarily did soap operas to pay the bills and had guest sports or semi-recurring roles on nearly every single soap being filmed in the New York area, including The Edge of Night, The Search for Tomorrow, One Life to Live, Another World, The Secret Storm and Ryan's Hope. It wouldn't be until he landed the role of Dr. Carl Hill in Stuart Gordon's breakthrough hit Re-Animator (1985) that his career trajectory completely changed. Suddenly the press were proclaiming him the next big horror star and, as a big fan of the genre and an admirer of actors like Vincent Price and Christopher Lee, Gale more than happily pursued that.

But, as fate would have it, Gale wouldn't live to see any of that really come to fruition and passed away unexpectedly in 1991 right as he was starting to cement his place within the genre. During the brief window of time from the late 80s until his death, he did at least manage to appear in around half a dozen horror films, including reprising his role as Dr. Hill in the first Re-Animator sequel and playing bad guys in both SYNGENOR (1990) and The Guyver (1991). He also ended up in Canada playing yet another bad guy, and yet another mad doctor, in The Brain. In a 1991 interview with Gorezone Magazine, The Brain is described as the one movie the actor would just assume forget. He calls it "one of the worst experiences I've ever had" and goes on to elaborate that by the time he arrived on set "the morale was zilch," the shooting conditions "were horrible" and the director "had no vision whatsoever and barked his orders."

After her powder puff starts smoking, her teddy bear starts bleeding and things in her bedroom start moving around all on their own, high school girl Becky (Susannah Hoffmann) is attacked by both tentacles and clawed hands that burst out of her walls and TV set. When her mother comes to help, one of the tentacles wraps around her neck and starts strangling her. Becky attempts to cut it off with a pair of scissors only to discover her jabs have gone right into her mother, killing her. A giant brain then bursts out of her mirror, grabs her with its attached spinal cord and throws her out of the window. Did Becky go crazy and hallucinate these events before murdering her own mother and then taking her own life, or is the giant brain monster for real?

We then meet teenager Jim Majelewski (Tom Bresnahan), who's quite the little smart ass. Despite possessing "one of the highest I.Q.'s in [his] entire high school," Jim is channeling all of his energy and intellect into causing trouble. After getting caught blowing up the john with the old sodium-down-the-toilet trick, Jim's parents are dragged in for a conference where they're informed that Jim will be suspended and thus not graduate if something isn't done to curb his behavior right then and there. Mr. Woods (Kenneth McGregor), the principal, has the perfect guy lined up to help whip Jim into shape: a world-renowned psychologist and behavioral expert who has already supposedly helped countless teenagers. Perhaps he's the one to give Jim a much-needed attitude adjustment?

The shrink in question is Dr. Anthony Blake (Gale), who runs the Psychological Research Institute and is a local celebrity due to hosting a popular public access show called "Independent Thinkers," which he's hoping to soon take to a nationwide audience. And as Jim's mother points out, "Dr. Blake wouldn't be on TV if he wasn't any good!" Once Jim shows up at the institute he's greeted to zombie-like people shuffling through the corridors, a crazy muttering something about aliens and Blake's unfriendly assistant Varna (George Buza), who takes him back to Blake's lab where nurse Vivian (Christine Kossak) attaches electrodes to his head. That information is then fed right to a, uh, giant, living brain that Blake keeps in a vat of green liquid.

The brain is also the mastermind behind the TV show and is transmitting hypnotic waves over the air to make people go crazy and kill. Resisting the brain's hypnotic waves causes hallucinations, which is precisely what happens to Jim when he imagines the nurse coming out of a TV monitor topless and the brain heading toward him. Jim proves to be too smart and strong willed to be brainwashed so easily and angrily storms out. And just in time to miss the bit when the giant brain leaps on the nurse, devours her whole and then grows in size to an even larger brain with eyes and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. However, even linking up with brain the one time is enough to make Jim suffer some of the side effects.

On his drive back home, hallucinations cause him to flip his car and almost get blown up in the process. He has more hallucinations that cause him to lose it at a burger joint until Blake's assistant comes in with a syringe, injects him with a sedative and drags him back to the institute. That doesn't sit too well with Jim's sweet, virginal ("I'm not gonna do it till I get to college!") girlfriend Janet (Cyndy Preston), who decides to break into the place to bust him out. From then on out, Jim and Janet are implicated in several killings and must run from the cops, while we get to see just what effect Independent Thinking is having on its viewers, like making a woman to cut her husband in half with a chainsaw. Eventually Jim must crash the debut nationwide showing of Blake's show before it causes more damage on a global scale. "Surrender. Join the wave of the future."

While the premise is undeniably ridiculous, this never quite gets there explaining just what's going on (we're basically left to assume some kind of attempted alien takeover) and the running-up-and-down-stairwells-100-times finale could have been better, this is still good cheesy entertainment. One of the most criticized aspects is the design of the brain monster. But I ask you, is it even possible to design a giant brain and it NOT look just a little bit silly? Of course not! I actually thought they did a pretty good job on it all things considered. There's the occasional bit of social commentary / satire and the story at least contains some interesting ideas about popular entertainment being used to brainwash / control the masses, though none of that is satisfactorily fleshed out.

While Gale is the biggest draw for horror fans, this isn't the best showcase for his talents, he's often shoved to the side and only appears sporadically. Likewise, Preston is OK but not used to the best of her abilities and can be seen to much better effect in the same year's Pin. However, this does prove to be a good showcase for the male lead, who's in nearly every scene and somehow manages to be appealing despite being handed a potentially unlikable / abrasive character. Most of the other smaller roles are amateurishly played, though the "actors" don't get enough screen time or dialogue to do any real damage. As long as you don't go in expecting Cronenberg, there's plenty to enjoy here. And despite Gale having a terrible time making this, and Gorezone insisting it was a career low for the actor, this isn't even close to the worst film - horror or otherwise - that he appeared in.

★★1/2