Film Reviews by NP

A bus full of travellers is heading for the town of Bojoni when the driver suffers a fatal heart attack, and the group is forced to stay in the deserted Tolnio village overnight. This and many other films begins with a similar premise.

The first element of note is that this features one of the worst horror film music soundtracks I have ever heard. For example, a scene of a little girl exploring ruined buildings with a small boy who may or may not be a ghost, has every ounce of atmosphere drained completely by this often tuneless jazzy music. It sounds like a pornography soundtrack and does its best, for the most part, to kill all the efforts of Diector León Klimovsky and his team stone dead. Many of the moments uninfected by this rotten score are very effective – although there are no orgies to speak of, the various vampire activities are pretty sinister when not swamped by inappropriate melodies.

Sadly, the whole project suffers because of this. It would otherwise be a fairly effective variation on the ‘Night of the Living Dead’ theme, with vampires replacing zombies. There are some good moments – the female vampire decomposing in the back of the car as Luis (Jack Taylor) and Alma (Dyanik Zurokowska) drive into the sun-set, and the afore-mentioned disappearing ghost-boy who accompanies young Violeta (Sarita Gill), for example. The locations are also very good, as films from this period often are – genuinely dilapidated buildings making haunting, ghostly panoramas proving to be very isolated backdrops.

As part of the BBC’s ‘Omnibus’ strand, this ‘television movie’ had an introductive voice-over from the man who adapted the story, Jonathan Miller.

Beginning with two unsmiling maids making up a pair of beds in a hotel somewhere on the East Coast, all filmed in crisp black and white. Then we are introduced to the terrific Michael Hordern playing Professor Parkin, a scholarly isolationist making his way toward the building. He is confronted with the mighty Proprietor (the excellent George Woodbridge, veteran of many early Hammer horrors). Stilted and awkward their opening pleasantries are, the Proprietor’s words become mangled and incomprehensible when pointing out the amenities. Oddness is immediately confirmed from these two, lending the proceedings a disjointed quality all of their own often exemplified by Parkin’s separation from the other guests, who are all otherwise gracious enough. Parkin’s world acknowledges them, but is content to remain apart.

During his ‘trudge’ across the windswept beaches, Parkin happens across a whistle made of bone obscured by sand. He is intrigued, keeps it, and begins to feel the presence of ‘another.’

Hordern is excellent throughout, his private irritation at the stubborn haddock on his fork, or the sand that clings to the whistle as he tries to examine it, convey a man completely relaxed and comfortable with his complete lack of social interaction. His brief conversations are interesting because he could quite easily be eulogising with himself rather than with whomever he is sharing a scene. His terror is equally private, which allows us the possibility that it exists in his mind alone. And yet, when we are allowed glimpses of it, it is fittingly obscure and well-realised and quite unnerving.

Parkin’s strangled, guttural half-cries at the climactic moments are successfully reminiscent of the noises we sometimes make when emerging from a nightmare. His terror is palpable and disturbing.

Matt Sadler (Steve Garry) wakes up in a field. He doesn’t have any memory of how he got there. As his wearied girlfriend reminds him, this isn’t the first time this has happened. He has been missing for ten days. She decides to leave him. Apart from anything else, she strongly suspects he is seeing someone else – which turns out to be true. Within moments, his second girlfriend decides she’s had enough too. Within minutes, we know Sadler is devious, but we also have a certain empathy for his memory loss, and we don’t blame him when he tries to find out what is happening.

His uncertain searching leads him to the isolated farmhouse of Calham (Michael Dacre). The minimalistic soundtrack makes it apparent Calham is a bad egg. When he calls the surrounding ground ‘real fertile’, the words have an ominous ring. The direction is very effective here; Calham appears to be approaching the cameras and therefore the audience, Sadler seems to be backing away from it. And he is right too. Shortly, Sadler is chained and naked apart from a sack cloth over his head. This is how he has apparently been spending his time during his blackouts, aiding the stocky farmer in his gruesome ‘work’ – work which has clearly effected his mind.

Calham’s subsequent kidnaps and torture are carried out with slow deliberation. Too slow sometimes, as this rural horror stretches the thin but gruesome plot rather too much. The intensity between the main two characters is impressively played, but perhaps not quite interesting enough to take up so much of the 100 minutes running time. This is a slow burning horror that manages to hold the attention if not exactly excite it.

It is an odd decision to have this film open up with scenes of how the Knights Templar became known as The Blind Dead, and then some way into the running time, have those scenes repeated as flashbacks as someone (in this case, ‘village idiot’ Murdo, played by José Canalejas) is relaying the story of their origin.

However, this second film in the Blind Dead series sees Director Amando De Ossario once again making the titular creatures as revolting as cowled, decomposing skeletal zombies can be – although their withered, twig-like hands rarely look anything other than gnarled gardening forks held by the actors beneath the rotting robes and look particularly ineffective when trying to grab various victims. In fact, the cadaverous knights can be astonishingly inept here: usually their agonising slowness adds to their menace – here, a whole group of them completely fail to capture the terrified, screaming Monica (Loretta Tovar). It might be their most ineffectual scene and reduces their effect greatly. Later on, however, a horde of the Knights Templar storming the village present a far more persuasive presentation of their powers.

This is another enjoyable instalment in the series. Each entry manages to be more than ‘just another episode’, however, due to Ossario’s inspiring passion for the subject, and ‘Return of the Evil Dead’ is a substantial project in its own right. It perhaps lacks the atmospheric chill of ‘Ghost Galleon’ and ‘Night of the Seagulls’, but the Knights’ relentless, statuesque vigil throughout the night awaiting the emergence of the last few survivors makes for a morbidly enthralling scenario.

This proved to be the last in Spanish Director Amando de Ossorio's four-part Blind Dead series.

The set-up is far less contrived than in the previous ‘Ghost Galleon’ (1974); instead of an ill-advised publicity stunt gone wrong, here we have the simple premise of a Doctor (Stein, no less, played by Victor Petit) and his wife (Maria Kosty) moving to an isolated fishing village. Although, why he insists on staying here to take up his post when everyone is either openly hostile, or completely ignores him, is typically baffling. And yet, without such wilfulness, where would horror plots be?

Only local Lucy (Sandra Mozarosky, who tragically died not long after filming was completed at the age of 18) and José Antonio Calvo’s village idiot Teddy show any friendship towards the couple.

There is no denying Ossorio’s skill at evoking a creepy atmosphere. Many familiar staples are here – misty graveyards, creaking doors, wonderfully isolated locations and decaying-looking sets. Every effort seems to have been made to make the seaport a closed, sinister, uninviting place. And pretty soon, the Knights Templar are emerging from their foul tombs with agonising slowness, their spindly clawed hands looking as if they could barely give you a tame stroke without turning to dust (perhaps it would have been better to dress the actors’ hands, rather than provide separate twig-like appendages).

The slow build-up to Lucy’s final scene on the beach is excellent, very Jean Rollin-esque. Knowing what is going to happen to her doesn’t make us optimistic of a less than grisly outcome. The ever-present shrieking birds from the title have a part to play too – according to Teddy, the pretty girls taken to sacrifice ‘become the seagulls,’ which is creepily enigmatic.

Other than a fairly standard ending, this doesn’t necessarily feel like final closure for these withered knights. The series could have continued. Perhaps it still might; there is plenty of mileage left in these memorably ethereal creatures.

The trailer for this film severely undersells it. In it, a bevy of shrieking young ladies are endlessly faced with stumbling hordes of skeletal, cowled zombies. The truth is, there is far more to the film than that.

Having said that, there are a collective of briskly-dressed girls paraded before us, rarely more so than in the opening shot of three models enduring a photo-shoot orchestrated by a woman in the most extraordinary trousers. She conducts the session whilst smoking, reminding/informing us that little takes place in the 1970s without the accompaniment of a cigarette.

Noemi (Bárbara Rey) is concerned about her missing friend, who is on an engaged in a secret publicity stunt on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Having been made aware of this, Noemi is kept prisoner in a bunker until the stunt is over, and she proves to be one of the most wonderfully uncooperative hostages ever. President of the company responsible for all this is Howard Tucker, played by Jack Taylor, who would feature the following year in Franco’s ‘Female Vampire’. And yet the story mainly concerns that friend, Lillian (Maria Perschy) who, whilst looking for her departed companion Lorena (Margarita Merino) discovers a deserted galleon in the midst of the ocean fog. The galleon is represented by the most charming model, draped in dry ice. It is easy to notice the ‘limitations’ of special effects from a film from this time, and yet despite that, there is a genuine feeling of unease as the creaking old vessel is explored in a seemingly alternative world of perpetual darkness.

Thanks to the trailers, the creatures – the Blind Dead, or Knights Templar – are hardly a surprise, and yet remain hugely effective and creepy, with their withered claws, rotting cowls and dead-eyed skulls. Resting in dusty caskets, their appearance is often enhanced by ghostly chanting on the soundtrack. Filthy, decaying cadavers, they remain unglamorous frighteners to this day – and there are loads of them! There is no escalating tension to their scenes, indeed apart from the monk-like accompaniment, there is no thumping score to accentuate their menace – instead, their relentlessly sluggish deliberation is conducted in silence, creating a very ethereal style of torture and death – if there is such a thing!

This is the third (and strangely, the least successful) of four Blind Dead films that form a loose series. Inspired in part by the success of 1968’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’, these films were part of the Spanish horror boom of the early 1970s.

Not that it matters, but I’ve found it very hard to stick with a horror film longer than 20 minutes of late. A possible mixture of over-familiarity and the relentless ‘getting-to-know-you’ set-up of characters that are difficult to care about has seen to that. ‘The Survivalist’ is thankfully entirely different.

Martin McCann plays the unnamed titular character who is seen meticulously tending to the allotment surrounding his remote shack. The world’s economy has stopped, society has imploded, and this results in a back-to-basics culture for the few remaining. Occasionally, a glimpse of an ideal world is apparent – all the trappings of modern day culture gone, The Survivalist’s solitary nature is stripped back to the bare essentials. Memories of a brother long dead, a photograph of an unspecified girl kept for masturbationary purposes – all this is shattered by the arrival of Kathrine (Olwen Fouéré) and her daughter Mia (Mia Goth). These two, despite their good deeds, are rarely entirely trustworthy, but a relationship is built – initially on Mia being a bargaining chip in exchange for food, and ultimately on something approaching mutual friendship.

This is a bleak film, but not quite as grim as it may appear. There is no soundtrack other than the beginning and end theme. We hear the irresistible crackling of fires, the plaintive tweeting of the birds, and still feelings of fear, apprehension (but never jollity) are communicated to the viewer. Perhaps those directors who smother their films with mass orchestrated musical stings and bangs and whistles designed to instil fear should take note!

The Survivalist has been nominated for, and won, a variety of awards, for Mia Goth and Director/Writer Stephen Fingleton. Well deserved. The fall and further fall of these characters is compelling viewing.

Of all the gratuitous scenes of gore horror has provided us with, there’s little that makes me wince more than a close-up of a needle going in to someone’s arm and drawing blood. This and other tests are carried out on hard-up student Lucie Donovan (Tuckie White) as she applies to be accepted in what appears to be Top Secret research tests. She meets others in the group who are made up of the usual mix of agreeable and wince-inducing in manner. One by one, they are called into the relevant surgery for ‘treatment’ … and don’t come out again. Naturally, Donovan is left till last, sitting on her own.

The reactions to the resulting degradation and horrors are sadly expected. A torrent of ‘WTF, man?’ and testosterone-flooded males squaring up to each other. Whether this is the results of the treatment, or whether they are just resorting to base alpha-male instincts is unclear, but it doesn’t make riveting viewing.

The military experiment results in the various victims bleeding profusely and becoming ‘zombie-lites’. And ‘lite’ describes this film really. It is played well enough but there is nothing here that hasn’t been seen before, and often without the playground histrionics of many of the characters.

At a top secret military base, three young reporters are determined to uncover the nature of various tests being carried out there. Sinead (Kelly Wines) especially has reasons of her own to find out what is going on – her father, she suspects, was killed by officials who thought he ‘knew too much.’ Laura (Lucy Clarvis), who is in financial trouble, and her partner Marty (Jordan Murphy) have also agreed to be part of the investigations. Camped out amidst rolling Welsh countryside where sheep are being viciously killed, it is clear something nasty is out there in the gloom.

And gloomy it is in this low-budget conspiracy horror. Whilst there is a good sense of remote unease and isolation, things are sometimes too murky to make out clearly. This unfortunate side-effect of the film’s low budget is coupled with another blemish representative of such projects – some of the dialogue (especially that of the photographer Sinead meets, played by whispering Matt Brewer) is often impossible to make out.

Against that, Sinead and the photographer, who also has his own reasons for wanting to find out what’s happening, are caught in the impossible and tense situation where, if the ‘Silverhide’ creature doesn’t get them, the military who are determined to preserve the top secret nature of the project, certainly will.

As things roll on, revelations come thick and fast. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with events, but it becomes clear who the real enemies are. There’s more to the creature than ‘just’ a wolf-man type. In fact, it is a shame we don’t see much more than brief glimpses of eyes, snout, talons because the effect of the werewolf (notoriously difficult to realise convincingly) is good. However, due to the spectral talents it possesses, the audience probably sees more of the animal than the soldiers do …

This is a flawed but interesting film with a good twist. It won’t satisfy everyone and the plotting is sometimes hazy. But it emerges as a very interesting and enjoyable project.

Opening with the least horrific music you could imagine, it seems as if this parody-sounding film could lean towards the comedic. Luckily, however, it isn’t long before bright red blood spatters one of the many posters offering rewards of £200 for capture of the Whitechapel Murderer, a top-hatted fiend who carves up the bodies of prostitutes.

Wearing long hair that would be deigned decidedly foppish for the Victorian period, Ralph Bates is terrific as the driven Jekyll. His caddish friend, hopeful womaniser Professor Robertson (Gerald Sim) and a scowling Welsh cockney Philip Madoc underused as the low-life Byker flesh out interesting supporting characters in a story that not only acknowledges RL Stevenson’s original tale, Jack the Ripper and Burke and Hare too! What drives Jekyll here is the knowledge that his good work will be curtailed by his own eventual death, and so sets about discovering the elixir of life. For that he needs body parts, and therefore the services of the two lecherous scallywag grave-robbers.

This is rich, confident story-telling. It is also Director Roy Ward Baker’s best work for Hammer in my view. His sprawling depiction of fogbound London is all the more impressive when one discovers the entire project was filmed in the studio.

Of the female performers, Bates’ future wife Virginia Wetherall plays typically doomed prostitute Betsy, and Susan Brodrick portrays the neighbour who has a crush on Jekyll, Susan Spencer. Brodrick is delightful in a role that could have been irritating and obsessive. Instead, she is appealing and simply naïve, leading to some terrifically witty scenes with the woman she assumes is Jekyll’s wife – but who is really Jekyll himself. The mighty, sultry and magnificent Martine Beswick is electrifying as his female alter-ego, the unexpected side-effect of his experiment. The transformation scenes are simple but cleverly effective, achieving the first change in one single take. That Howard Spencer (Lewis Fiander) is instantly besotted with her is entirely understandable (leading to an awkward later meeting between Howard and the male version of the doctor). His/her delight at his/her new body is fabulous, as is Susan’s crushed response to hearing ecstatic female laughter coming from Jekyll’s room.

So enjoyable are the lead performers that it is a true shame they are so inherently evil and therefore doomed. There is a scene when Bates is sweatily hacking away at a new corpse in a backstreet, entirely unaccompanied by anything other than the sounds of distant industry, which is very effective.

This remains one of my favourite Hammer films. It is beautifully written by Brian Clemens, played by actors with a slight hint of irony, but emerges as a tragic tale. The inevitability in which evil-doers must die especially when their evil is so entertaining is a necessary evil in itself. Whilst not really frightening, ‘Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde’ is steeped in atmosphere, has some pleasantly gory moments and deserved a vastly more widespread reception at a time when Hammer films weren’t attracting the crowds they deserved. If it had been released during the company’s heyday, it would have been a monster.

If you are of a certain age, you may remember Telly Savalas as the hugely popular, lollipop sucking detective from the 70s/80s series ‘Kojak’. If you happen to be from the UK, you may also remember Elke Sommer from 1975’s ‘Carry On Behind’ as the genuinely funny Anna Vrooshka. It is no spoiler to say they star as this film’s title characters, for, five minutes in, Lisa sees the image of Savalas’ Landro as ‘the Devil’ on a wall mural in Tuledo and keeps running into him, often as he is carrying a suspiciously lifelike mannequin. Suave and charming (he’s even sucking a lollipop here too – a contractual clause?), he nonetheless exudes a palpable sense of threat.

Lisa, and the audience, then meet a succession of suspicious characters. Not quite grotesques, but a menagerie of people flawed in one way or another, so that a collection of them helps to sustain the feelings of unease. One such character is the ostensibly fey Max (Alessio Orano), who expresses feelings for Lisa. All kinds of horrors are thrown at Lisa, and it seems for a time that Elke Sommers’ is merely required to look as terrified as possible as the weird and the apparently dead line up to shock her.

Savalas is excellent as Landro. Occasionally carrying scenes alone and talking to himself, a lesser actor would not be able to make such a natural job of it. With Savalas, talking to himself seems simply an extension of his eccentric oddness. His scenes with the many mannequins creates pleasingly perverse overtones.

Whilst this a good, unusual horror, the actual scares are pretty tame, despite Sommer’s enthusiastic reactions. Methodical, solid and weird, with the overall effect although playful, is sadly lacking in genuine tension.

Much of this documentary-style horror is filmed in flashback. The recreation of the world in 1976 is supremely handled, from the grainy filmic imagery to the fashions of the day to the laboratory equipment being used.

This is as near as what would actually happen should someone be tested for some kind of demonic possession. When someone becomes too uncontrollable and is seen to exhibit such power, governments would have to gain authority over events. And with human beings what they are, corruption is never far away.

Attempting to harness her power for political gain, Judith is told to reveal secrets held by rival governments, especially the Russians, who had previously exploited a telekinetic sensitive of their own.

Beneath all the testing, the electro-convulsive therapy, the bullying, the attempts at control, is the possessed person. Judith was of no concern to her ‘captors’, and for that, the demon inside her gains a kind of empathy with the audience. You want it to emerge and punish the narrow-minded officials. Only a handful of the original scientists (mainly head man Henry West played by William Mapother) exhibit any kind of sympathy, understanding – even acknowledgement – of the punishment being meted out. And yet as the story reveals, the creature is in control the whole time, influencing what her captors say and do.

The acting throughout is excellent. Although ‘The Atticus Institute is as convincing a depiction of supernatural events in the hands of officials as I’ve ever seen, this results in a lack of pace and spectacle – but that’s fine when the results are this good. The ending is low-key, the subtle, enigmatic nature of events in-keeping with the rest of the film. I found this thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, although the excellent Rya Kihlstedt (as Judith) was reduced to convulsing and shrieking throughout the dramatic middle portions of the story, which robbed us of her meticulous attention to shuddering and twitching detail which made the earlier elements of her possession so effective.

We’ve all been attracted to an unattainable someone. It can’t just be me. Jorge (Hector Kotsifakis) is likeable, presentable, respectable and lonely. He spies local girl Isabel (Paulina Ahmed) and contrives to continually run into her in shops, while she is out jogging etc. We’re not sure whether she has been made aware of him or not, but there is a hint of knowing in her eyes as he attracts her attention once again, this time whilst pretending to tend to his car.

Sadly, it is too late by then, for pretty soon she has been tranquilised and tied to a chair in his cellar, miles from where anyone can hear her screams. As you may imagine, she goes through several humiliations as Jorge’s spiralling instability continues to make itself known. Apparently while filming, Ahmed would remain tied to the chair between takes, so as to allow her performance a sense of reality.

Jorge is at odds with most horror madmen. He is perfectly calm and composed virtually throughout. Even his attempted suicide attempt is approached without fanfare. Yet Isabel’s ordeal becomes ever more tortuous and is difficult to watch. As an audience, we are willing her on to gain revenge.

Even I am not going to spoiler the outcome of this. It could be said that reading up the DVD packaging etc, or IMDB tells you all you need to know about the kind of film this is, but it is played so realistically (with Ahmed in particular turning in a powerhouse performance) and events are staged so methodically by Director Diego Cohen that what emerges is wince-inducing and compelling.

Like its sequel The Dead 2: India (2013), Directors Howard J. and Jonathan Ford expertly refine the balance between impressive masses of the living coming at you relentlessly, and the expanse of isolated landscapes – in this case the wilds of Africa – that alternate between stark beauty and deadly wasteland.

Lieutenant Brian Murphy (Rob Freeman), sole survivor of a plane crash, survives meetings with many staggering blank-eyed members of the undead, and is rescued by initially resentful Sergeant Daniel Dembele (Prince David Osei), whose lone mission is to locate his son, lost in the zombie-strewn wilderness.

It is impossible not to get drawn into this maelstrom. How the zombies ever came to be is only fleetingly touched upon. It doesn’t really matter – they are there, and there are loads of them.

There were many behind-the-scenes problems when filming, doubling the initial six-week schedule. Most severely, Rob Freeman contracted malaria and was placed on an IV drip in a local hospital, which saved his life. That this critically acclaimed project was finished at all, never mind with such impressive results, is hugely impressive.

The storyline, again like its sequel, is simply around 100 minutes of what often seems like a doomed attempt to escape walking cadavers. There’s no machismo posturing, no smartass comments as yet another shambling wreck has its head blown apart. It meanders a little in the middle, but every step is taken to make sure full advantage of the landscape is used to full advantage and what emerges is very satisfying indeed.

A group of teens … well, that’s a less than promising start. Vest-sporting, gum-chewing and riddled with hormones and attitude, I find such characters far more terrifying and off-putting than any demonic forces they will probably bluster into. This bunch are just exactly that – impossible to like and pure fodder for ‘whatever is out there’, hopefully to be despatched in the foulest way possible, and yet this cast lack the confidence and assuredness to keep their characters from attaining the true heights of swaggering numb-skullery of other ‘teen’ ciphers. To coax me out of this uncharitable view is the fact that this is directed and co-written by José Ramón Larraz, the man behind 1972’s legendary ‘Vampyres’.

The one character who emerges from the melee of manicure and highlighted hair is a comedy stout fellow Peter (Jerry Kernion) who quotes scenes from famous horror films much to the amusement of his cohorts. “At least it’s dry,” says one hunk as they enter an abandoned building in which they feel compelled to shelter from the storm. “I hear coffins are dry too,” he replies. When it eventually happens, his demise is the goriest and most effective of them all.

Unusually for Jarraz (this was his last horror), there is little sex or gore. When such scenes do come around, however, they are powerfully staged. Two of the group are having sex, and the beautiful young woman featured in many unnerving photographs hung on the walls appears to be watching them. Interspersed with other photographs, this time of corpses and disfigurement, the scene is one of quiet, effective horror.

Hitch-hiker Jack – a dreadful Clark Tufts – looks like he may be responsible for the deaths, when they eventually happen. In an arena where most performances are static, his awfulness excels.

This is not unenjoyable if you don’t take it too seriously. It is impenetrably under-lit during some key scenes, and is sprinkled with moments of spectacle, but is too slow for its flashes of inspiration (the climactic crumbling wall spewing out corpses for example) to raise it from clichéd, horror melodrama. Jarraz’s penchant for doomy atmospherics only occasionally materialises and the resulting whole makes it seem as if the slasher genre – already dying in 1990 – perhaps wasn’t really where his heart lay.