“Delightful” was not the word I expected to come to mind when finally watching Shriek of the Mutilated (1974), but here we are. Apart from having one of the Greatest Titles Ever, this offering from the notorious exploitation team of Michael and Roberta Findlay is about as perfect a bundle of drive-in/grindhouse schlock as one could wish for.
I first ran across mention of The Golem from 1967 back in 1980. It has an entry in Jean-Pierre Andrevon and Alain Schlockoff’s Cent monstres du cinéma fantastique (“100 Monsters of Fantastic Cinema”). The entry says litle about the story of this French made-for-TV film, but praises its expressionist beauty, and says that it is faithful to the source novel: a 1915 work by Gustav Meyrink (the book was apparently a favourite of Lovecraft’s).
As subtext is to Garth Marenghi, so are plot and characterization to Renato Polselli. I’m not sure if this is entirely a bad thing. I can’t say that it’s a good thing. But it’s definitely a thing.
It’s been on my shelf for years and years, but I finally got around to watching the hyphen-free Four Sided Triangle, Hammer’s first full-on plunge into SF (not their first horror film — that was 1935’s Mystery of the Mary Celeste). It’s an interesting film, with many embryonic elements that would achieve their full flowering in later films. It’s also much less lurid than the poster would suggest.
Il Demonio (“The Demon”) exists at the (for me, anyway) completely unexpected intersection between Italian neorealism and Italian Gothic. It has the loose narrative structure, pointed social interest and grittily real community grounding of the former, and the intense pictorial beauty, tortured psychology, ominous score and (possibly) supernatural elements of the latter.
This is a movie that makes me smile even before the title screen. Just seeing the PRC logo is a joy. As a child, I used to daydream about resurrecting the studio. I admit, as daydreams go, it’s pretty niche.
Back in the pre-VCR days, PBS used to air Matinee at the Bijou, and I would tune in every week, hoping that this time the B-movie feature would be a horror film. Just once, I was lucky, and the film in question was The Monster Maker, which then became one of the few films mentioned in Denis Gifford’s life-defining A Pictorial History of Horror Movies that I was able to see in the dark ages before home video. The film has had a special place in my heart ever since, and I have even taught it once.
(Spoilers follow.)
(more…)
David Annandale 