The Ghost of Cap’n Kidd was an action figure that first hit the shops in 1975, as part of the Fighting Furies line from Matchbox. This series began in 1973, and had previously featured such pirate characters as Cap’n Hook and Cap’n Peg Leg. The Fighting Furies were 9 inch figures and came complete with a button in their side which, when pressed, made the figure’s sword arm swing up and down. They also featured assorted accessories – for instance, Peg Leg’s peg had a treasure map secreted away inside it.

The Ghost of Cap’n Kidd was to cash in on juvenile mania for all things spooky, and in many ways resembles the sort of ghostly pirate figure who would crop up in Scooby Doo cartoons from time to time.He was molded in white, luminous plastic and had a skeletal pattern painted on his body, so when seen in the dark, he appeared to be a glowing skeleton! At least, he did if he’s had enough of a daylight charge.

In the USA, The Ghost of Cap’n Kidd was only available by mail order, but in Europe he could be bought in retail outlets, where he was packaged in his very own coffin! Inevitably, intact versions of the figure and his packaging now go for high prices.

http://thegalleryofmonstertoys.com/

plaidstallions.com

Posted by DF

The Horrible Sexy Vampire is a 1970 Spanish horror film (original title: El vampiro de la autopista “The Vampire of the Highway”) written and directed by José Luis Madrid (Seven Murders for Scotland Yard). It stars Waldemar Wohlfahrt [Wal Davis], Barta Barri, Anastasio Campoy, Susan Carvasal, Victor Davis, Kurt Esteban, Luis Induni and Patricia Loran.

A rash of murders leads the local doctor to believe the person responsible is connected with a deceased excentric Baron. The manner in which the killings were performed indicates the murderer to be an inhuman sadist. The closer the doctor comes to the truth behind the murders brings him into greater danger.

‘There’s very little horror in The Horrible Sexy Vampire, and although the girls on display are a welcome sight (after all these are the days when women were shaped like women, rather than either skin-and-bones or plastic-on-bones), these scenes often feel awkward and voyeuristic at best. The invisibility and other special effects are done on the cheap and the whole film feels tired and languid. Acting is horrendous, with Wohlfahrt in particular coming off an uncomfortable.’ Octavio Ramos, Examiner.com

‘As a prime example of the boring and under-achieving co-produced European horror cinema of four decades past, 1970′s The Horrible Sexy Vampire is, well, boring and under-achieving.  Funded with pocket change forked forth by Spain’s Cinefilms and Italy’s Fida Cinematografica and filmed in Germany, Vampire is a pulse-free skin flick that tries to excuse itself with a tiresome Gothic horror framework.  The only noteworthy aspect of the production is its own inherent awfulness, for which the title gets things at least partly right – it’s certainly horrible.’ Kevin Pyrtle, Wtf-Film

‘The pacing of The Horrible Sexy Vampire is on par with most European trash-horror films from the seventies. Meaning it is languid. It is slow. It is plodding. It doesn’t have enough character, violence, or plot to make it engaging. There are exactly zero twists. It even lacks atmosphere, which is a shame because this movie takes place in Stuttgart, which I imagine is a place that only has atmosphere and nothing else.’ Bleeding Skull

‘The film is awful, a little flesh and a story that drags on and on… but, strangely, it is Wohlfahrt’s performance – as bad as it is – that keeps you watching. He hasn’t the skill or presence to pull off one character, never mind two, but somehow he manages to keep an interest going in between the gratuitous booby shots.’ Taliesen Meets the Vampires

‘ … the film is hamstrung by laborious direction and particularly dim-witted writing, the product of which is several almost static dialogue scenes elaborating on an already illogical plot. The sole redeeming feature is the lighting, which produces a suitably Gothic atmosphere.’ David McGillivray, BFI Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1976

‘The action is restricted to the vampire’s endlessly repeated attacks on anonymous women as they come out of the shower, go to bed, and so on – in fact, as soon as a woman undresses, an attack can be expected. The castle’s atmosphere is largely provided by the repetition of a hollow-laughter track at regular intervals. The rest consists of static, overwritten dialogue scenes.’ The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror, edited by Phil Hardy, Aurum Press, 1993

IMDb

Thanks to VHS Wasteland and Vampyres Online for some of the images above

Flavia the Heretic (Italian: Flavia, la monaca musulmana, also released Flavia, Priestess of Violence! in the USA and in the UK as The Rebel Nun in the UK) is a 1974 French co-produced Italian nunsploitation horror film directed by Gianfranco Mingozzi. It stars Florinda Bolkan, Anthony Higgins and Claudio Cassinelli. It is set in Apulia during the Ottoman invasion of Otranto, 

Italy 1600: A convent of nuns is invaded by the Tarantula Sect on their annual pilgrimage. The cultists defile the place of worship, holding orgies in the chapel and desecrating the altar. One nun decides she can’t take the religious oppression any longer and attempts to flee the convent ….

Buy on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

“Arguably the most notorious entry in Italy’s nunsploitation cycle of the 1970s, Flavia the Heretic is a charged combination of arthouse politics and grindhouse sleaze, the exact combination that makes current distributors run screaming. Often released on video in watered-down editions, this nasty concoction is best experienced full strength and gains much of its strength by developing dynamic, interesting characters whose grisly fates pack more of a punch than a dozen slashers.” Mondo Digital

“Flavia The Heretic  is a hard disc to recommend. I personally loved the film, with sweeping visuals, starring personal favorite Florinda Bolkan, and genuinely surprising plot developments that kept me interested throughout the running time. Fans of the film should obviously grab the disc up right away, but any curious newcomers must get rid of any preconceptions and settle in for a history lesson with added blood and guts.” DVD Drive-In

Buy on Blu-ray Disc from Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb | We are grateful to Temple of Schlock for the US one sheet poster image

WH

Horror Films, written by Alan Frank, was published in 1977 by Hamlyn Books. It was Frank’s third book on the genre, after Horror Movies and Monsters and Vampires, but while those two volumes were essentially photo books giving a general overview of horror films, Horror Films aimed to give a decade by decade history of the genre. The book includes a foreword by director Terence Fisher (The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy).

Frank was notable at the time for being one of the few people writing books about horror films that were not wedding firmly to the idea that films stopped being good at the start of the 1950s. Frank is enthusiastic about Hammer films – the early ones, at least – and the longest chapter in the book is devoted to the 1970s, even though the decade was only midway through when he wrote it.

Unfortunately, Frank fell into the same trap as his predecessors, by condemning what he sees as an increase in bad taste and unseemly material in the genre. It is, of course, all a matter of personal taste, but some statements seem rather ludicrous when read today. For instance, his description of The Vampire Lovers – “full frontal vampirism and explicit lesbianism… Fantasy gave way to as much nudity and overt sex as Tudor Gates’ script could extract from what had been some promising source material” – while hardly unique, is a gross misrepresentation of the film (which is currently ’15′ rated by the not-exactly liberal British censors!). House of Whipcord is dismissed as “British exploitation cinema at its lowest common denominator” (“written as clichés by screenwriter David McGillivray in a series of voyeuristic scenes of sadism and violence. McGillivray found in his director Peter walker the perfect complement to his own abilities”), while The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is also savaged for its tastelessness. This prudishness makes the inclusion of full page, full colour gory images from the likes of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell seem rather hypocritical.

He also makes the mistake of critiquing films that he obviously hasn’t seen, stating that I Eat Your Skin was made in 1971 and was as  “equally repulsive” as I Drink Your Blood – something that viewers of this creaky black and white movie might find hard to agree with. And the book rather embarrassingly ends with five pages about the 1976 King Kong, which is pretty excessive. Clearly, it was felt that this would be the big film at the time the book was published, but it has the feel of a promotional piece rather than real film criticism.

However, there is much to admire in the book. It’s more thorough than most mainstream horror film guides of the period and while dominated by British and American films, does acknowledge genre productions from across Europe, South America and the Far East. It’s often opinionated, but that’s no bad thing – while you might not agree with the author, at least you know he is expressing his own opinion – too many horror books in the 1970s and 80s were written by critics who made it clear in their other work that they hated the genre, but who would swallow their pride, take the money and write gushing nonsense about films they despised.

Like Denis Gifford‘s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies before it, Horror Films played a major role in building the obsession and feeding the desire for information amongst youthful genre fans at a time when precious little solid information was available about these movies in books or magazines. While obviously now outdated and superseded by more thorough reference books and online sources, it is still worth picking up if only for the extensive and beautifully reproduced film stills.

David Flint, Horrorpedia

Riziero “Riz” Ortolani was an Italian film composer. Born on 25 March 1926, he recently died in Rome, aged 87 years-old. In the early 1950s Ortolani began his musical career as a founder and member of a well-known Italian jazz band. His score for Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti‘s ‘shockcumentary’ Mondo Cane, whose main title-song was More earned him a Grammy and was also nominated for an Oscar as Best Song.

Director Quentin Tarantino featured Ortolani’s work in more recent productions such as Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) and Django Unchained (2012).

Ortolani scored all or parts of over 200 films, including horror, gialli, spaghetti westerns, Eurospy films, exploitation films and mondo films. Notable horror films and giallo thrillers scored by Ortolani include:

Horror Castle/The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963)

Castle of Blood (1964)

One on Top of the Other (Lucio Fulci, 1969)

So Sweet, So Perverse (1969)

Web of the Spider (1970)

Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972)

Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)

The Dead Are Alive (1972)

Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eyes (1973)

Death Steps in the Dark (1976)

I Am Afraid (Io ho paura,1977)

Red Rings of Fear (1978)

Brutes and Savages (1978)

Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

House on the Edge of the Park (1980)

Zeder aka Revenge of the Dead (1983)

Killer Crocodile (1989)

Killer Crocodile 2 (1990)

Wikipedia | Thanks to Wrong Side of the Art! for some of the poster images above.

Rodan (ラドン Radon) is a fictional Japanese mutated pterosaur introduced in Rodan, a 1956 release from Toho Studios, the company that produced the Godzilla series. Like Godzilla and Anguirus, he is designed after a type of prehistoric reptile (the Japanese name “Radon” is a contraction of “pteranodon“). Radon is usually referred to as “Rodan” in the United States, possibly to avoid confusion with the atomic element Radon; any time his name is written in English in Japan, it is written as Rodan.

In the 1956 film Rodan, two Rodans were unearthed and awakened by mining operations in Kitamatsu along with a swarm of prehistoric insects called Meganulons. After devouring several people and reducing Sasebo to ruins, one Rodan is maimed in a bombardment of their nest in Mount Aso and falls, into a volcanic eruption triggered by the attack. The other Rodan, in a doomed attempt to save its mate, flies into the mouth of the volcano as well. Also, as with Godzilla, the American version differs from the original Japanese release by more than simple matters of language translation; the original Japanese version is much darker in tone. It also has one of the Rodans damaged by a jet fighter, hindering its ability to fly at supersonic speeds.

Rodan went on to cross over into the Godzilla series. Rodan, resurrected by volcanic gas accumulated in the crust, emerges from a volcano in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster first to do battle with Godzilla, then after some persuasion by Mothra, Rodan helped Godzilla and Mothra defeat King Ghidorah. After this point Rodan was no longer a monster of destruction, it was an ally of Godzilla, who after this point turned good as well. Rodan appeared with Godzilla again in Invasion of the Astro-Monster, where both were mind-controlled by Xilians to destroy Earth’s cities. After the mind control was broken on them, they attacked King Ghidorah defeating the creature once again. Both Godzilla and Rodan were plunged into the sea, Godzilla would go on to fight other Monsters, while Rodan was collected with all of Earth’s other Monsters and placed on Monster Island.

In Destroy All Monsters, the monsters of Monster Island including Rodan were used by aliens to wreak havoc on Earth via mind control, this time by the Kilaaks. Again the mind control was broken and the monsters fought King Ghidorah, this time killing the monster once and for all. Rodan was then placed back on Monster Land to live out his days in peace. Rodan would only appear again in the Shōwa series in stock footage used for Godzilla vs. Gigan,Godzilla vs. Megalon and Terror of Mechagodzilla.

Rodan in the Heisei series appeared in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, where he sought to protect Baby Godzilla, whose egg was in the same nest as Rodan. Heisei Rodan, while the suit was much bigger and heavier than the Showa version, is notably much smaller relative to the larger version of Godzilla, standing only about 2/3 as tall as the other monster and having a wingspan 1/2 Godzilla’s height.

Wikipedia

Poor White Trash Part II (1974), also known as Death is a Family Affair and Scum of the Earth, is a Texas-shot American horror film directed by S.F. Brownrigg, starring Gene Ross, Norma Moore, Ann Stafford, Camilla Carr, Charlie Dell and Hugh Feagin.

Helen (Norma Moore) and her new husband Paul (Joel Colodner) arrive at a holiday cottage in the woods where they plan to spend their honeymoon, but their idyll is ruined when a mystery attacker slams an axe into Paul’s chest. Fleeing in terror as night falls, Helen encounters Odis Pickett (Gene Ross), whose shack is the only dwelling for miles around. He persuades the hysterical woman to stay overnight with him and his family, including his daughter Sarah (Camilla Carr), retarded son Bo (Charlie Dell) and pregnant wife Emmy (Ann Stafford). Reluctant, but terrified of the unseen killer, Helen agrees. However, the attacker is not to be dissuaded…

Filmed for three weeks on location in a hundred year old shack in Mexia, East Texas, with a small crew of about seven or eight, Poor White Trash Part II exudes sticky, sweaty sexual malaise and grimy gnat-nibbled discomfort. A consummate tale of backwoods horror, it proves that the promise Brownrigg showed in his debut feature Don’t Look in the Basement was no fluke, emphasising his talent for depicting seedy, morally depraved characters and underlining his consistent streak of compassion for the isolated, under-privileged and vulnerable.

A lot of the appeal of Brownrigg’s films has to do with the strength and talent of his repertory cast, and Poor White Trash Part II is no exception; indeed it’s almost a star vehicle for the most prominent of the troupe, Gene Ross, whose sleazy lascivious good ole boy ‘Pick’ fairly oozes from the screen. Here is a man who introduces his pregnant wife as “the skinny one with the big belly”, and repels her offer of sexual attention by snarling “I don’t want no puckered old blown-up balloon!” We soon discover that he is very friendly with Sarah, his bitterly sarcastic and sexually active daughter: when he tells her that he intends to have a talk “real private, like” with new arrival Helen, she taunts “I know what privates you got in mind – the same sort you been pokin’ in me since I wuz twelve.” This is followed by a heated exchange about how he gave her the clap.

So, not really the sort of film you can imagine the Texas Film Commission being involved with? Think again; actor Charlie Dell (who plays Bo) states that Brownrigg received around $200 a week from the T.F.C. (“and they were very lax about how they counted weeks!”).

Unlike her pig of a husband and her squabbling degenerate children, Emmy (Ann Stafford) is shown to be far more decent, sane and compassionate, but her stoicism in the face of her monstrous husband is perhaps the story’s most horrible facet. She knows how dangerous he is: while father and daughter take delight in taunting the distraught ‘city gal’, Emmy persuades Bo to fetch help, knowing her “likkered up” husband will soon attempt to rape the poor woman. Tucked away within what is essentially an exploitation film is a pointed attack on the primacy of the patriarchal figure in Southern family life: and in the figure of Emmy, the film expresses dismay at the breaking of womens’ spirits in abusive relationships.

In comparison to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, another tale of Deep South family life released around the same time, narrative momentum is not this movie’s greatest asset; instead claustrophobia is the watchword, as Brownrigg revels in confining us to close quarters with the sort of ‘white trash’ the cast of Pink Flamingos might look down upon. Technically the film is better than its predecessor; Robert Alcott (who’d worked for Larry Buchanan before lensing Don’t Look in the Basement) excels here with what at first seems a limited pallette, his subtle use of coloured lighting giving surprising variety to the wretched interiors and shadowy, threatening woodlands. Art direction is more appreciable too – it seems that this time the budget could extend to rolls of hideous wallpaper as well as Don’t Look in the Basement’s battered furniture. Robert Farrar, whose scores for Brownrigg’s movies are an integral part of their sorrowful mood, livens things up occasionally with electric guitar, lending a stylized exploitation crackle to the proceedings.

Most importantly though, there’s a very entertaining script on offer. The credits name Gene Ross as writer of ‘Additional Dialogue’, a fact confirmed to me by Ross himself. Dell and Carr also added new lines to the script, making it something of a co-operative effort. Replete with choice bon mots such as “I’ll whup you till Hell won’t have it!”, this is a movie for connoisseurs of fetid verbal sniping. Indeed the film is compelling as much for what is said as for what is shown: the violence meted out by the killer seems almost prim in comparison to the psychological violence eating away at the dysfunctional Pickett family.

Brownrigg’s original title for the project was Death is a Family Affair, but there’s no evidence that the film saw release as such. After doing the local rounds as Scum of the Earth for a while it was bought up and retitled again for national distribution. “In the tradition of The Godfather Part 2!”, boasted the distributor responsible for calling it Poor White Trash Part II and then putting it on a double bill with Harold Daniels’ re-issued 1957 pot-boiler Poor White Trash (confusingly, the film’s British Intervision VHS release was simply as Poor White Trash (not Part II).

A note on the director’s credit: in interviews conducted for my next book, Nightmare USA Vol.2, Charlie Dell, Camilla Carr and Gene Ross all maintained that their fellow actor Annabelle Weenick (aka Anne MacAdams, Dr. Masters in Don’t Look in the Basement) was in many ways a co-creator of the films, offering the inexperienced Brownrigg technical advice and also making significant contributions to scripting and the handling of actors.

In exciting news, Grindhouse Releasing have announced that the film will be making its debut appearance on DVD and Blu-Ray in the Spring of 2014.

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

Second Opinion:

Scum of the Earth may well be the ultimate back-woods/redneck exploitation film, filthy and grimy, full of characters with no redeeming features and with utterly head-swirling dialogue, what it lacks in cash and dramatic art, it makes up for in sleaze. Brownrigg can be mentioned in the same breath as Andy Milligan, another low-budget director who played to his strengths but has divided critics ever since. The film was released theatrically twice, under two different titles, doing rather better the second time around under the title Poor White Trash II. Whether this is because audiences had a fondness for the Peter Graves-starring Poor White Trash, or simply thought that anything with a sequel must be worth seeing is not known.

Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia

Chewits is the brand name of a British chewy, cuboid-shaped, soft taffy sweet manufactured by Cloetta since 1965. Chewits have been available in a variety of increasingly exotic flavours since their inception.

Chewits were first advertised on television in 1976. The original ads featured the ‘Monster Muncher’, a Godzilla-resembling mascot on the hunt for something chewy to eat. The first ad featuring the Muncher threatening New York was made by French Gold Abbott and created by John Clive and Ian Whapshot.

From then on the ‘Monster Muncher’ chomped and trampled  local and well-known international landmarks such as Barrow-in-Furness Bus Depot, a London block of flats, London Bridge, the Taj Mahal, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Empire State Building. The ‘Monster Muncher’ could only be quelled by a pack of Chewits. The original adverts used claymation special effects, similar in style to those made famous in the movies of Ray Harryhausen. They also included a voiceover style reminiscent of a 1950s radio serial.

A subsequent advertisement, originally aired in 1995, plays on the over-the-top advertising style of the post-war era. To the tune of bright 1950s era orchestration, a salesy narrator exhorts viewers to try a variety of chewy consumer items in the essential guide to a chewier chew. The ad shows the ‘Monster Muncher’ sampling items such as Wellington boots, a rubber boat and a rubber plant in order to be ready for the chewiest of chews – Chewits.

In the late 1990s, Chewits experimented with ads showing multiple news casting dinosaur puppets. The catchphrase advice at the close of each ‘broadcast’ was to “do it before you chew it”.

With a change of ad agencies, the puppets were replaced by colourful 2D animations. The ‘Monster Muncher’ was re-introduced as ‘Chewie’ in two popular adverts from this time. In the first, which aired in 2000, Chewie roller skates on two buses through a busy city scene. The second shows Chewie waterskiing at a popular seaside resort.

In 2003, a new ad was aired showing a wide range of animals auditioning to be the new face of Chewits. The ad announced the return of the iconic dinosaur Chewie mascot, now dubbed ‘Chewie the Chewitsaurus’.

In 2009, the new Chewie the Chewitsaurus look, showing a contemporary, computer-game-style slick design, was introduced. It seems fair to observe that the Monster Muncher’s metamorphosis from the 1970s to the 21st century has not been a positive one. 

A spin-off computer game, The Muncher, was released for the ZX Spectrum in 1988.

Wikipedia

Flavia the Heretic (Italian: Flavia, la monaca musulmana, also released Flavia, Priestess of Violence! in the USA and in the UK as The Rebel Nun in the UK) is a 1974 French co-produced Italian nunsploitation horror film directed by Gianfranco Mingozzi. It stars Florinda Bolkan, Anthony Higgins and Claudio Cassinelli. It is set in Apulia during the Ottoman invasion of Otranto, 

Italy 1600: A convent of nuns is invaded by the Tarantula Sect on their annual pilgrimage. The cultists defile the place of worship, holding orgies in the chapel and desecrating the altar. One nun decides she can’t take the religious oppression any longer and attempts to flee the convent ….

Buy on DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

“Arguably the most notorious entry in Italy’s nunsploitation cycle of the 1970s, Flavia the Heretic is a charged combination of arthouse politics and grindhouse sleaze, the exact combination that makes current distributors run screaming. Often released on video in watered-down editions, this nasty concoction is best experienced full strength and gains much of its strength by developing dynamic, interesting characters whose grisly fates pack more of a punch than a dozen slashers.” Mondo Digital

“Flavia The Heretic  is a hard disc to recommend. I personally loved the film, with sweeping visuals, starring personal favorite Florinda Bolkan, and genuinely surprising plot developments that kept me interested throughout the running time. Fans of the film should obviously grab the disc up right away, but any curious newcomers must get rid of any preconceptions and settle in for a history lesson with added blood and guts.” DVD Drive-In

Buy on Blu-ray Disc from Amazon.com

Wikipedia | IMDb | We are grateful to Temple of Schlock for the US one sheet poster image

WH

Richard Lewis was a novelist who emerged during the British horror fiction boom of the late 1970s, then vanished once that boom turned to bust. Over a few short years, he churned out several pulp in the popular ‘eco-horror’ genre popularised by Gun N.Smith and James Herbert. His real name was Alan Radnor, and he sometimes used that name as a writer, mostly outside the genre.

His first – and probably best known – horror novel was Spiders, a tale of a new strain of flesh eating arachnids rampaging across Britain, which was published in 1978. The spiders here range in size from tiny to giant, and at one point it seems that the authorities will have to take the nuclear option to destroy them!

The book was popular enough to spawn a sequel, The Web, taking place six years after the original horror and featuring more of the same.

Spiders aside, Lewis seemed to struggle to find creatures that would instill terror in the potential reader. The Devil’s Coach-horse (aka The Black Horde) attempts to make mutated bugs that burrow into human flesh seem terrifying, though the cheery looking bug on the original cover didn’t help in that respect. Still, it featured plenty of action:
“Pete Thompson should never have stopped. For from the railings above, a mound of beetles which had been feeding on a dead steer tumbled onto his hair and down over his eyes and began quickly decimating what was left of his face. Screaming, practically blind and his mind almost snapping, he ran into the yard, the blood pouring down his neck.”

He wrote about another sort of bug in 1983 with Night Killers, which sees mutated cockroaches on the rampage. To quote the blurb:

For 300 million years they have existed unchanged – furtive insects scuttling through the shadows. Till modern man began to destroy his environment …

They came the fatal night when a vicious murderer died before he could burn his latest victim.

Ravenous cockroaches devour the corpse, and develop a new craving – for human flesh. Mutating into savagely efficient killers, they prey on the young, the old, the drunk, the injured. Undetected. Unstoppable.

Eventually two scientists guess the truth, but no one will believe them – until a chilling disaster strikes!

And even then the nightkillers have an unsuspected weapon …

His 1981 novel Parasite is a rather grimmer affair about a deadly infection carried by water-borne insects. But the book is also about the breakdown of society s the infection spreads, with the setting up of death camps and the population turning on doctors. It’s surprisingly nihilistic stuff.

He moved away from killer bug and creepy crawlies entirely for his 1983 book Possessed, which appears to be his final novel. This is a story about strange things happening to the people working on a new super computer, the 5000 RX. Weird hallucinations, psychotic behaviour and mind control are at the centre of the tale. The book was originally published under his real name, and this might explain why it is so different in tone and style from his other books. Notably, his only other horror novel as Radnor is The Force, published in 1979 and also dealing with technology, the supernatural and mind control.

Lewis also wrote a novelisation of David Cronenberg’s Rabid, which sticks pretty much to the story of the film without adding much in terms of character or action. Outside the horror field (and again, under his own name, he also authored several other books, fiction and non-fiction, ranging from the sexploitation spy story Red Light Red, through tie-ins for TV shows Whodunit, Dick Barton and Masterspy to a book about the paranormal and a biography of Elton John.

In 1986, he produced the obscure British TV series World’s Beyond, which was an anthology show based around real life cases from the Society for Psychical Research.

He should not be confused with American ‘young adult’ horror author Richard Lewis.

David Flint

Kiss of the Tarantula (also known as Death Kisses and released in the UK as Shudder) is a 1976 US horror film directed by Chris Munger from a screenplay by Daniel Cady (Dream No Evil, Garden of the Dead), Dolly Dearest) and Warren Hamilton Jr. (better known as a sound editor). The film stars Eric Mason (Scream Blacula, Scream), Suzanna Ling, Herman Wallner, Linda Spatz, Beverly Eddins and Patricia Landon.

“This eight-legged take on Willard has some enjoyable moments (mostly in its over the top performances and creepy use of real tarantulas), but it wreaks of the cheap drive-in circuit from which it was spawned. The simple revenge plot rarely breaks the surface, relying more on the bloody deaths than the strengths of its characters to carry the film. What is worse is that the run time is padded with unnecessarily long stalk and chase sequences and an awkward subplot involving Susan’s incestuous uncle that only serve as empty filler.” I Like Horror Movies

“It’s your very standard tale of “don’t mess with that freaky girl or she’ll (quietly) jam a bunch of tarantulas into your car while you’re making out with your girlfriend, thereby causing you to freak out and accidentally kill three people in the process.” Like most mega-cheapies from the mid-70′s, Tarantula is not all that interested in things like cohesive storytelling, strong performances or even professional-looking filmmaking techniques. It’s a dry little shocker, but one that offers at least two or three good sequences for the arachno-fans.” Scott Weinberg, DVD Talk

Buy Ruby + Kiss of the Tarantula on DVD from Amazon.com

” … it’s called Kiss of the Tarantula, but the only real kissing that goes on is with Uncle Walt, who is sort of a metaphorical creepy spider… The other thing is that it’s a kind of unspoken thing that who Susan really wants to be with is her Dad, and she does kill her mom right off in the classic Elektra complex. There is nothing but tenderness and love between her and her big dad, and at the end she does end up with him. It’s all pretty tepid, which I don’t mind, but the problem was that, as I mentioned, there is 45 minutes of story here stretched to feature-length…” Cinema de Merde

“Basically Willard with spiders, Kiss of the Tarantula features a female social misfit with pet tarantulas that do her evil bidding. I’m struggling to think of anything else it features. Mostly that’s it: there’s a shy loner with pet spiders that kill people. This could not have been riveting stuff in the drive-ins of 1976.” Rufus’s House of Horrors

“Despite the fact that that Eric Mason’s sleazy Uncle Walter detective character goes for some kind of world record for the number of times he can say ‘Susan’, this is a little more endearing than some of the other reviews here give it credit for, provided you are in the mood for its languid 70s rural ambiance. The central premise owes a major debt to Willard and Carrie yet the understated sleazy incest elements and the funeral parlour setting add welcome touches of creepiness. Ultimately, the lack of outright horror lies with the slowness of spiders to attack their victims which reduces kill scenes to arachnid-pace.” Adrian J Smith, Horrorpedia

IMDb

We are grateful to Wrong Side of the Art! and Bruce Holecheck at Cinema Arcana for some of the images above

Die Sister, Die! is a 1972 American horror film produced and directed by Randall Hood from a screenplay by Tony Sawyer. It stars Jack Ging, Edith Atwate, Antoinette Bower, Kent Smith. Robert Emhardt and Burt Santos. A loose remake was made in 2013.

Edward is tired of the “allowance” granted him by his sister, Amanda and becomes impatient for her death, and his inheritance. To hasten her demise, or at least stop her suicides from being thwarted, Edward hires a discredited ex-nurse, Esther to watch over her. Esther is less than enthusiastic about killing the old woman, though, and is curious about the secrets held in the house, including a mysterious third sister, Nell…

Buy the Lurkers + Die Sister, Die! double feature DVD from Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

‘This one isn’t a masterpiece either, but it is drenched in a strange atmosphere aided by some Corman-style nightmare sequences (lots of wacky lenses, severed limbs, and a runaway pet bird) and some fun Italian-style colourful lighting during moments of high tension … rumour has it this was originally supposed to be a made-for-TV project (which seems believable given the limited track record of director Randall Hood), but apparently the (still mild) violent content pushed it over to the big screen instead. Not a bad time killer if you keep your expectations in check and have plenty of popcorn handy.’ Mondo Digital

‘The superb acting, excellent locations, perfect build and classic twist ending makes Die Sister, Die! a must-see for horror fans young and old. It may not have the MTV-style crazy editing, or topless models getting slashed like most of us are used to, but it does contain several scenes guaranteed to chill you to the bone. It’s the kind of movie you want to watch late at night with a bowl of popcorn and all the lights off.’ Retro Slashers

‘The fewer amount of faces on screen, the better. With a light cast, somewhat memorable and performance worthy, you never scram around the monitor marking off names as the dialogue passes from one to another. It’s simple, it’s kind of predictable, but it works! Almost like a Shakespearean play, it’s not ‘what’s going to happen’, it’s ‘when’s it going to happen’? The freaky dreams were a major plus, and the visuals, short and sweet, worked wonders.’ Oh, The Horror!

Wikipedia | IMDb

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Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love (aka Necromania) is a 1971 American adult movie with a horror theme written and directed by Edward D. Wood, Jr (Plan 9 from Outer Space, Night of the Ghouls, Orgy of the Dead). The uncredited cast are Maria Arnold, porn actress Rene Bond (Please Don’t Eat My Mother, Invasion of the Bee Girls) and Ric Lutze. The Amazing Criswell‘s coffin is seen in the film, the second of Wood’s films (after Night of the Ghouls) in which it does. Criswell’s family was in the mortician business.

The plot (based on Wood’s novel The Only House in Town) involves a couple, Danny and Shirley, who visit necromancer Madame Heles for a witchcraft solution to Danny’s erectile dysfunction.

Thought lost for years, it resurfaced in edited form on Mike Vraney‘s Something Weird imprint in the late 1980s, then was re-released on DVD by Fleshbot Films in 2005. Opening titles indicate “Produced & directed by Don Miller. Our cast wish to remain anonymous.”

” … the acting is actually kind of funny from all the fringe characters, especially one girl who keeps pronouncing insatiable as “in-sash-able”. The lead girl, 70s porn star Rene Bond (who went on to do some classic b-movies like 1973′s Invasion of the Bee Girls), is cute enough and is clearly having fun making the movie despite the heat. I did enjoy seeing that Ed Woodian mind at work, his hopes and dreams pumped into 8mm film. It’s worth watching for any true fan of his.” Ken Kaba, Mondo Exploito

“Besides Criswell’s coffin, there are other Wood traits. Bond’s name is “Shirley,” which was Wood’s transvestite name. Much of the set is decorated in red, a favorite color of Wood’s. Lutz, early in the film, makes a deliberate reference to former Wood actor Bela Lugosi. According to Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy, Wood wanted Vampira to play Madam Heles, but she, understandably, said no. Wood’s pal John Andrews helped around the set.”  Steve Stones, Plan 9 Crunch

“The title suggests sex and horror; the two elements are cacophonic, as the film is neither erotic nor frightening. This is not to say Necromania is absent of any merits, as it is enhanced by its tactless craft.” Rumsey Taylor, Not Coming

Offline reading:

Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. by Rudolph Grey (1992)

Wikipedia | IMDb

Some animals are guaranteed to inspire feelings of disgust and fear in cinema audiences, and not more so than the humble rat. While many people keep rats as pets, even they will see a difference between their domesticated companions and the sewer-dwelling, disease carrying vermin that we are continually told that none of us are ever more than six feet from (an urban myth perhaps, but with a certain basis in facts – there are a LOT of rats in the world). Collective memories of the black death, horror stories about rats climbing out of toilet bowls or being found in babies cribs and the mere possibility of waking up to find a rat siting on your bed, possibly eating your face (and yes, it’s happened!) ensure that rats will never be seen as cuddly by the majority. And with news stories about oversized ‘super rats’ or claims that they are becoming resistant to poisons, it’s not hard to see why rats make many people shudder. There is nothing we can do to stop their rise, it seems, and if filmmakers are to be believed, even a nuclear holocaust won’t slow them down.

Rats have long been used by filmmakers as shorthand for disgust, decay and dirt. Think of how many times you’d seen someone exploring an old building, a gothic castle or a disused warehouse in a horror film where the sense of creepiness is emphasised by scuttling rodents. Rats have also been the food for mutated throwbacks and subhuman monsters, to show how depraved they are – having your character snatch up a rat and start munching on it is sure to repulse the audience.

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, protagonist Winston Smith is driven to breaking point when confronted with his worst fear – rats – in Room 101. This was memorably shown in the controversial BBC TV version of the story broadcast live in 1954, with Peter Cushing suitably terrified as a ‘rat helmet’ is placed on his head. Viewers were thrilled and appalled in equal measure. This showed the power that rats had to terrify not only Smith, but viewers in general. But oddly, it wasn’t until the 1970s that rats became the central figures in horror movies.

The most famous and successful rat movie was Willard, made in 1971. The film follows social misfit Willard (Ben Davison), who develops a strange relationship with the rats that surround the old, dilapidated house he lives in with his mother. After the old woman dies, this odd relationship increases, as a large number of rats begin living in the house and he develops a close bond with two unusually smart one – Socrates (who is, rather impossibly, white) and Ben. He soon starts using the rats to take revenge on those who have made his life a misery, namely his exploitative boss Mr Martin (Martin Borgnine). But when Martin is torn apart by the rats in revenge for him killing Socrates, Willard is snapped back into reality and decides he must get rid of the rats – but by this time, it’s too late.

An intriguing and effective psychological horror film, Willard was a surprise box office hit and would inspire imitators like Stanley (where snakes took the place of rats) as well as spawning a sequel, Ben.

Ben, made in 1972, sees the titular character – who is considerably smarter than the average rat – leading an army of rodents after escaping the purge on the household after the events of Willard. While the scenes of rat attacks and vast colonies of the creatures in sewers ramp up the horror of the first film, the movie hedges its bets by also introducing a maudlin story where Ben is adopted by a sickly child. This rather schizophrenic storyline ensured that the film would be less successful than Willard, and allowed for the inclusion of the teeth-grindingly sentimental title song, performed by Michael Jackson – possibly the only love song to a rat that has ever troubled the pop charts.

The popularity of Willard didn’t see a massive explosion of rat cinema – most imitators copied the story but used other animals – but the ever opportunist and eccentric Andy Milligan tried to ride the wave with The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! in 1972. This film had started life in 1969 as one of Milligan’s UK-shot low budget period horror films, this time about a family of werewolves, but had sat on the shelf of infamous producer William Mishkin until 1972, when the director was instructed to add around 20 minutes of rat footage to the film in order to cash in on Willard and Ben. The resulting film is as weird as you might expect. Milligan has seen a degree of critical reassessment over the last few years, and it’s true that much of his work is less ‘bad’ as it is bizarre. The unique Milligan style is on full display in this film.

Also possibly showing some influence from Willard at this time was The Pied Piper, a British version of the famous fairy story made in 1972 by French director Jacques Demy. This is a darker tale than you might expect. Set at the time of the Black Death and with English folkie Donovan as the Piper, it mixes in corruption, revenge, anti-semitism in a film that is often an uneasy mix of children’s fantasy and adult drama. Towards the conclusion of the film, the piper takes his revenge on the corrupt townsfolk by unleashing the rats he has promised to rid them of, resulting in amazing and unsettling scenes of rodent rampage – at one point they even burst out of a wedding cake! It’s a curious, unique film that is sadly rarely seen today, possibly because of the strange mix of styles it contains.

If regular sized rats are scary, then imagine how much worse giants rats would be! That, I assume, was the thinking of legendary B-movie maestro Bert I Gordon, when he embarked on a ‘loose’ (to put it kindly) adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Food of the Gods in 1976. Mr BIG had long had a fixation on oversized creatures – his earlier films include The Amazing Colossal Man, War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs The Spider and Village of the Giants, and he would follow this film with Empire of the Ants. In The Food of the Gods, a couple discover a mysterious and miraculous food stuff, resembling porridge, bubbling out the ground and start to feed it to their chickens, as you do. This causes massive growth in the birds. But unfortunately, the local rats, wasps and worms have also developed a taste for the stuff, and soon a small band of survivors are being terrorised by the giant rodents (the wasps and worms only play a minor role in the proceedings).

This is a surprisingly slow moving and unsurprisingly inept effort, with shoddy special effects, but it proved to be an unexpected box office hit. In 1989, a sequel was made – Food of the Gods 2 (aka Gnaw) had no connection to the earlier film, this time telling the unlikely story of a scientist who grows giant rats while trying to find a cure for baldness! These giant rats are released by animal rights activists and cause the expected amount of chaos in a film that is notable only for making the original Food of the Gods look like art. H.G. Wells was presumably spinning in his grave.

The same year, Yugoslavian satire The Rat Saviour sees a writer discover that rats are learning how to imitate and ultimate replace humans. Much like Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, the film is a comment on the loss of humanity and a biting criticism of the socialist state.

Also in 1976, British TV series The New Avengers took a rare step into the fantasy world with the episode Gnaws. While the 1960s series The Avengers was often fantastical, this 1970s spin-off tended to be more ‘realistic’ and was more concerned with espionage than science fiction on the whole. But there were exceptions, and Gnaws was the most obvious, with Steed, Purdy and Gambit chasing a giant rat through the London sewers!

Showing alongside The New Avengers on TV in 1976 was Beasts, a horror anthology by Nigel Kneale, which included the episode During Barty’s Party. In this two hander, a middle aged couple find themselves besieged by ‘super rats’ (the titular radio show fills in what is happening in the outside world). We never see the rats in this story, the horror being effectively conveyed by sound effects and the growing panic of the couple.

The 1922 Nosferatu had featured scenes of rat filled coffins that added to the general creepiness of the film (and similarly, 1931′s Dracula added rats to the creatures infesting the Count’s castle), but Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake emphasised the rat infestation much more, showing Dracula as, quite literally, the plague – the rats he brings with him spread disease just as much as the vampire does.

In 1974, James Herbert’s novel The Rats had become a huge success in the UK, spawning a whole ‘animal attack’ sub genre and eventually leading to several sequels. This graphic and lurid novel about giant rats seemed ripe for filming, and in 1982, it was shot by Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse for Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest. Relocating the action to Canada, the film was decidedly less outrageous than Herbert’s novel, and proved to be a pretty ineffectual and slow moving affair. Things were not helped by the low budget, which didn’t allow for decent rat effects – notoriously, the giant rats were played by dachshunds in rat suits, which fooled nobody. In Britain, the film was released on video as The Rats, but elsewhere – where Herbert’s novel was less well known – it went out as Deadly Eyes, which probably didn’t help much.

Curiously, it wasn’t the only canadian rat film of the time, as 1983′s Of Unknown Origin also features rampaging rodents, though this time on a more domestic scale, as Peter Weller find himself becoming increasingly obsessed with catching a rat that is in his house, even if it means destroying the house in the process. As much an allegorical tale as anything (Weller’s character is literally caught in a rat race), the film is worth seeking out. For a more comedic version of the same story, check out the 1997 film Mouse Hunt.

Director Bruno Mattei had featured a scene involving a zombie rat in his entertainingly trashy Zombie Creeping Flesh in 1982, and a couple of years later expanded on the idea in Rats: Night of Terror, a post-apocalyptic tale where survivors of the nuclear holocaust stumble upon a village full of food and water. Unfortunately, it’s also full of mutant rats… deliriously trashy and gory, it’s no surprise that the film has built up quite a cult following over the years.

In 1986, the spectacularly tasteless Ratman emerged from Italy, courtesy of director. Starring primordial dwarf Nelson de la Rosa, this was the story of a homicidal rat/monkey hybrid creating by a mad scientist in the Caribbean, for reasons that are never made clear. Italian exploitation veterans David Warbeck and Janet Agren turn up in this exploitative effort.

Stephen King’s short story Graveyard Shift was filmed in 1990. The film takes place during the night shift clean up of an abandoned mill that has just reopened, where the workers find themselves attacked by rats… and something much worse. The film invariably pads King’s original story out with ‘personality conflicts’ that add little to the story – you would be better served sticking to the prose.

1991′s The Demon Rat is set in the near future, when environmental pollution has reached new levels and toxic chemicals have created mutant animals, including a giant man-rat! This Spanish film mixes science fiction and satire in a fairly effective manner.

In 1995, Bram Stoker’s short story Burial of the Rats was adapted – if that is the word – by producer Roger Corman. As the plot involves a young Bram Stoker being captured by scantily clad female warriors who use hungry rats to punish evil men, it should go without saying that any connection to the original short story begins and ends with the title. It should not be confused with the 2007 Japanese film of the same name, which has no connection to Stoker or rodent rampages.

Altered Species, made in 2001, sees rats attacking partygoers after the scientist host pours his new formula down the sink. For some reason, one of the rats has mutated into a giant.

2002′s The Rats has no connection to James Herbert, but instead has a department store infested by mutant rats – clearly, regular rats were no longer cutting it as horror creatures by this time. A year later saw the release of the similarly titled Rats, which takes place in a multi-purpose institution that houses both rich drug addicts and the criminally insane. It also turns out to be home to an army of super-intelligent giant rats, the result of past medical experiments of Dr Winslow (Ron Perlman).

2001 German movie Ratten: Sie Werden Dich Kriege (also known as Revenge of the Rats) sees an army of rats brought out onto the streets during a garbage collectors strike. To make things worse, these rats are carrying a deadly virus! Jörg Lühdorff’s film was popular enough to spawn a 2004 sequel, Ratten 2 – Sie Kommen Wieder!

2002′s Nezulla is a Japanese film in which a half rat, half human monster that has been created by American scientists goes on the rampage in Tokyo. Inevitably, the film is let down by its shot-on-video visuals, but might appeal to fans of Eighties monster movies.

Willard was remade in 2003, with Crispin Glover in the title role. Directed by Glen Morgan, the film sticks pretty much to the story of the original film, and is quite effective in its own right, but failed to connect with audiences.

2006 film Mulberry Street sees an infection turning people into mutant rat creatures. Closer to the zombie genre than usual rat movies (the film was retitled Zombie Virus on Mulberry Street for UK release), this is one of the better recent films in that overdone genre.

Most recently, 2011′s Rat Scratch Fever sees giant mutant space rats, who have stowed away on a spacehip and are now  terrorising Los Angeles. Cheap, trashy and unashamed, the film is likely to appeal to anyone who enjoys watching low rent giant monster movies on SyFy.

The days of the serious rat horror film would seem to be over for now, which is a pity – there is still a lot of potential in the genre I would think. Perhaps one day, an enterprising filmmaker will once again remember that rats are both omnipresent and terrifying for many, and exploit that to its full potential…

Article by David Flint

Orror (Italian: ‘horror’) was an Italian ‘adults only’ fumetti comic book published in two different series in the late 1970s. For the first series, publishers Edifumetto issued 21 issues from June 1977 to May /1978; for the second series, 6 issues were issued in 1979.

As was the case with most horror-themed fumetti, the comics and covers often depicted scantily-clad or half-naked young women being terrorised by all manner of predatory ghouls, killers and monsters. Artwork was sometimes based upon images from horror films, such as the first edition’s no.20 which shows a vampire modelled on actor Jon Pertwee from the Amicus movie The House That Dripped Blood (1970) but shows him as Afro-Caribbean, Blacula-style! The cover for number 10 seems to be derived from an image used to promote Blood and Lace (1970), although in this case the hammer murder weapon is replaced with an axe. Second edition, no.6 shows a vampire with a striking resemblance to Jack Palance, who played Dracula for TV director Dan Curtis in 1973.

We are grateful to Comic Vine for the cover images shown here. Visit their site to see more…

Images is a 1972 horror film written and directed by Robert Altman, starring Susannah York, René Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi, Hugh Millais, Cathryn Harrison and John Morley.

Cathryn (York), a writer of children’s stories, is quietly losing her mind. With her husband Hugh (Auberjonois), whom she suspects of philandering, she drives for the weekend to Green Cove, a secluded country retreat, hoping to forestall an incipient breakdown, but instead of relaxing she begins to ‘bump into’ old acquaintances who may or may not be real – René (Bozzuffi), a previous lover believed dead in a plane crash, and Marcel (Millais), a predatory buddy of Hugh’s whom Cathryn finds simultaneously attractive and repulsive. Sinking deeper and deeper into psychosis, Cathryn decides to eradicate the illusory interlopers once and for all; but who is real and who is make-believe?

Robert Altman’s critical reputation is based on a clutch of highly respected films which he made in the 1970s, including M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973) and Nashville (1975), but he’s also notorious for directing wayward, disappointing or just plain awful movies: Quintet (1979), Popeye (1980), Beyond Therapy (1987) and Prêt-à-Porter (1994) for instance have found few admirers. Despite a sprinkling of awards at the time of its release, Images is sometimes misfiled in the latter category, when it is in fact a haunting, consummately disturbing film that deserves to be ranked alongside the contemporary masterworks of Nicolas Roeg and Ingmar Bergman.

As the story begins, Cathryn is home alone while her husband Hugh works late. The telephone rings and a female caller indolently taunts Cathryn about Hugh’s whereabouts. The scene appears set for a conventional saga of marital infidelity. However, we soon become aware that the voice on the line is Cathryn herself.

Here is a woman lost in a tangle of introversion and self-obsession, a perceptual hall of mirrors. She’s in flight from the world, and it’s impossible to say which is the more damaging, the reality she’s fleeing or the isolation to which she turns. By choosing solitude she merely hastens her mental collapse, filling the emptiness with phantom visitors. Her only outlet involves the writing of a labyrinthine children’s story, “In Search of Unicorns”, which she reads in voice-over. In it, a heroic narrator strives for self-knowledge that is forever deferred by mystical agencies, whimsical symbolism, and – truth be told – by Cathryn’s fear of the ‘self’ in question. Turning to her world of elfin magic is an escape route from failed love and unwanted sexual attention, but the painful reality of life invades her reveries, leading to confusion between imagined and real events, and on into murder.

Hugh, Cathryn’s husband, is a wonderfully nuanced creation, at times either solicitous or massively unhelpful when dealing with his wife’s problems. Trying to play along with Cathryn’s harmless fantasies, he misjudges the extent to which she can process his sense of humour, which tends to the facile and the surreal in equal measure (“What’s the difference between a rabbit? Neither; one is both of the same!”). His witticisms are well-meant, but his bizarre non-sequiturs and absurdities simply makes matters worse. Just as much as Cathryn, he’s in a world of his own; one of the melancholy perceptions of the film is that relationships founder when the participants cease to find one another amusing. Exploring the upper floor at Green Cove after Cathryn insists she can hear an intruder, Hugh finds nothing, but instead of merely announcing this he jangles his wife’s nerves by leaning a mounted deer’s head around the corner at her. The effect is funny but unnerving as we find ourselves looking at the world from Cathryn’s paranoid point of view.

“In Search of Unicorns” was in fact written by Susannah York as a genuine book for children, just one of many parallels between the characters and the cast. Real names and character names get swapped around: René Auberjonois plays Hugh, Marcel Bozzuffi plays René, and Hugh Millais plays Marcel. Susannah, the spooky little girl who befriends Susannah York’s Cathryn, is played by the weirdly blasé Cathryn Harrison: “When you were my age, did you look like me?”, she asks, “Because I think, when I grow up, I’m going to be exactly like you.” When Cathryn asks Susannah what she’d do without a friend to play with, she replies: “Tell myself stories, play in the woods… I’d make up a friend.” The first words echo an earlier remark from Cathryn about her own childhood, but the final clause is new, and shows a vital difference; unlike the older woman, this strange, self-aware child can still grasp the difference between fantasy and reality; but for how long?

Altman’s style of filming conveys a constant perceptual ambiguity. He is, like Stanley Kubrick, a master of the zoom, able to achieve great things with this oft-derided tool. Constant shifts of focal length mean that we’re never sure where our attention will slide next, a supple, fluid way of representing Cathryn’s mental state. Complex framing is also a major contribution to the film’s unsettling mood, while the photographic image shifts from luminous clarity to vague softness, finding abstract mystery in the interstices of the real world.

The camera rarely stops moving, panning and tracking with seductive ease to capture odd details and juxtapositions. Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography turns the beautiful countryside of Ireland into a seething array of shifting texture; clouds send shadows scuttling over green hills, the wind shudders through gorse and bracken, and a shale escarpment towers over a car like a slow motion landslide in the corner of a paranoiac’s eye.

In keeping with the schizophrenic quality of Cathryn’s perception, certain gestures and movements are invested with tantalising significance, while the constant presence of mirrors and Hugh’s photographic equipment emphasise both Cathryn’s fractured self-image and our own dialectical involvement in the fiction. Images is thus a meditation on the nature of the cinematic process phrased as a study of psychosis (seeing people who aren’t really there, hearing voices), and a metaphysical enquiry into subjectivity. Along the way, Altman draws our attention to the nature of film viewing, a benign psychosis which – though we may blithely talk about a communal experience – is mostly a solitary, introspective affair.

A stand-out sequence depicts Cathryn making love to someone who appears variously to be Hugh, Marcel or René. Brilliant editing and photography blur the boundaries of the human and the inanimate, sending the camera on fantastical wanderings through landscapes of body parts and bedding. People talk about ‘losing themselves in the act of love’, but this sideways lurch into a space between the living and non-living is unlikely to be anyone’s cup of tantric tea (except maybe Jess Franco’s, whose work explored similar terrain at times). A special mention here too for the film’s extraordinary John Williams score, which blends curdled romanticism with avant-garde percussion and disconcerting oriental twangs from Stomu Yamash’ta, a child prodigy who at the age of fourteen contributed to the score of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Perhaps the pivotal moment in Images occurs quite early on, when Cathryn, out walking with Hugh in the hills above Green Cove, looks down at their house in the distance below. A glint of sunlight on chrome draws her attention to a car pulling up in front of the house. Peering through binoculars, she sees that the car is her own. A woman gets out and turns to look up at the hillside. Somehow it’s Cathryn, and she waves to the figure on the crest of the hill, miles away, silhouetted in microscopic isolation. Smiling, this second Cathryn turns away and walks into the house. We stay with her and never cut back to the first space-time location. This elegant, disturbing ellipse is the divided core of Images; a perceptual dislocation that mirrors the central character’s fractured identity by means of absence, emptiness, rather than presence. Two moments, separated in space and time, impossibly linked, like the subjective and the objective. In between, an abyss beyond representation.

The film was shot in November 1971 in Ireland, centring around a lakeland location of Lough Bray, County Wicklow. For her role as Cathryn, Susannah York was awarded the Best Actress award in Cannes, 1972. In addition, Altman was nominated for the ‘Palme d’Or’. Images was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score, received a nomination for Best English-language Foreign Film at the Golden Globes, and was nominated for Best Cinematography at the BAFTAs in 1973.

Stephen Thrower, Horrorpedia

N.B. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, whose work graces some of cinema’s greatest movies, also worked for Al Adamson on Horror of the Blood Monsters in 1971. Clearly, an aberration in his career.

The Fog is a horror novel by English writer James Herbert, published in 1975 by New English Library (NEL). It is about a deadly fog that drives its victims insane when they come into contact with it. Herbert’s second book, it is completely unrelated to the 1980 film of the same name by John Carpenter. Well before the infamous British ‘video nasties’ moral panic, Herbert’s The Fog was being passed around school playgrounds by hordes of stunned yet fascinated teenagers.

John Holman is a worker for the Department of the Environment investigating a Ministry of Defence base in a small rural village. An unexpectedearthquake swallows his car releasing a fog that had been trapped underground for many years. An insane Holman is pulled up from the crack, a product of the deadly fog.

Soon the fog shifts and travels as though it has a mind of its own, turning those unfortunate enough to come across it into homicidal/suicidal maniacs who kill without remorse, and often worse. Respectable figures including teachers and priests engage in crimes ranging from public urination to under age sex. A Boeing 747 pilot is also made insane and crashes the aircraft into the BT Tower in London.

Soon a bigger problem is discovered – the fog is multiplying in size and nothing seems to be able to stop it. Entire villages and cities are in danger and the only chance left is to use the treated and immunized John Holman to take on the fog from the inside where who knows what awaits him…

Thanks to H.P. Saucecraft at the Vault of Evil: British Horror Plus web board for the reprint cover image

The Axons appeared in The Claws of Axos, a Doctor Who story made in 1971 starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor. They featured only once in the classic series and have so far not been invited back in the revived version, although an Axon can be seen briefly in S01E02 of the unaffiliated Who spin-off K-9.

A strange, organically-formed spaceship arrives in Earth orbit, and the occupants, a quartet of golden-coloured humanoids called Axons, send a distress signal asking for assistance. In return, they offer Axonite, a substance able to mimic other molecules, with wide-ranging applications including the creation of unlimited food supplies for the Earth. However, the humanoids are not what they seem; they and their spaceship are actually part of the same single life-form, Axos, a galactic parasite intent on sucking the life out of planet Earth. When the Doctor uncovers their plan they drop their pretence and adopt a more threatening physical form, bipedal monsters covered in writhing root-like excrescences, and mount an attack on a nearby nuclear power station…

Voice of Axos: “Axonite is simply bait for human greed. Because of this greed Axonite will soon spread across this entire planet, and then the nutrition cycle will begin … Slowly we will consume every particle of energy,  every last cell of living matter. Earth will be sucked dry!”

The Claws of Axos was the first story written for Doctor Who by the team of Bob Baker (writer of the Wallace and Gromit films) and Dave Martin. Location shooting took place in the first week of January 1971 in Dungeness and other Kent locations, with the studio material shot between 22nd January and 5th of February. Transmitted over four weeks between 13th March and 3rd April 1971, it scored 7.3 million viewers for its first episode, rising to 8 million for the second, dropping to 6.4 million for the third and finishing on 7.8 million. The original colour materials were lost in the BBC’s purge of videotape and film prints in the 1970s; fortunately, prints sold abroad were found in Canada, and the story is now available in its entirety on DVD. Episodes One and Two were filmed as “The Vampires from Space”, and credits were completed with this name before being replaced with the final screen title. Prints bearing “The Vampires from Space” were accidentally circulated abroad and can be seen in the extras on the BBC DVD release.

Amid the spectrum of alien menaces in Doctor Who, the Axons fall into the category of monsters with no redeeming features, with whom there can be no dialogue or compromise. In this they embody an ‘old-school’ attitude to the monstrous; the creatures are designed purely to frighten young viewers. In later years such ‘one-dimensional’ threats fell gradually out of favour in Doctor Who (to the point where even the Daleks were deemed unfit for total destruction in stories such as 2005’s Dalek and 2008’s Journey’s End).

The Claws of Axos can perhaps best be summed up by the phrase “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” (from the story of the Trojan horse in Virgil’s Aeneid, a pertinent reference given that the scripts were first commissioned under the title “Doctor Who and the Gift”). Initially, the Doctor is angry with UNIT (The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) for firing on the Axon spaceship without making contact with the occupants: on seeing the golden humanoids for the first time he sarcastically remarks, “There’s your enemy” to the soldiers and politicians, as if the aliens’ attractive appearance says all there is to say about them. However even he changes his view, later on describing Axos as a “cosmic bacteria”.

In design and conception, the Axon monsters are among the most extravagantly weird creations of the Pertwee era. Coloured reddish-orange, spitting smoke and electrical sparks from their ‘hands’ and walking with a distinctive rolling gait, they cut a fearsome, fantastical sight. Combining aspects of Lovecraftian horror with a vibe redolent of the 1950s pulp scifi comics, they combine a high-concept backstory with a generous helping of the bizarre.

Also striking is the malleable, ever-changing manifestation of Axos: from the golden humanoids, to the tentacled monsters, with variations such as a golden humanoid with a tentacled head and an amorphous baglike creature, The Claws of Axos constantly startles the viewer with a parade of curious monstrosities.

Upon viewing Episodes One and Two after they were edited and scored, producer Barry Letts decided that two key scenes of horror were too upsetting for children and ordered that they be electronically obscured in post-production. The first, in Episode One, involves the discovery of a tramp’s desiccated corpse; when a soldier touches the body, the tramp’s face collapses like an empty sac. The second scene, in Episode Two, shows a golden humanoid Axon merging itself into the walls of the spaceship; during the absorption process the face bloats and then collapses, an effect which is authentically disturbing and grotesque. In both cases the effects can still be seen intermittently despite post-production masking.

The UK DVD (recently updated to this ‘Special Edition’ with improved picture quality and expanded extras)

The US Region 1 DVD

The original Target novelisation, published in April 1977 and penned by frequent Who writer / Pertwee-era script editor Terrance Dicks

A second imprint of the novelisation with new cover artwork 

Bell from Hell  - original title: La Campana del Infierno and also released as A Bell from Hell, The Bell from Hell and The Bells - is a 1973 Spanish horror film directed by Claudio Guerin Hill and starring Renaud Verley, Viveca Lindfors, and Alfredo Mayo. On the final day of shooting for Bell from Hell, Claudio Guerin fell or jumped to his death from the central bell tower constructed for the film.

A young man is released from an asylum and returns home for revenge on his aunt and her three daughters, who had him declared insane in order to steal his inheritance…

“Though it adheres to the commonly used plot devices of vengeance and family inheritance, the story is still well written and kept interesting thanks to the quirky dynamics of the young, mischievous, and darkly humorous protagonist, John. Whether or not viewers end up liking him, John is still an entertaining, multidimensional character, a man-child that’s part hero and part villain.” At the Mansion of Madness

“The repeated imagery of the village church’s new bell, which is being hauled to town and installed as the lurid events of John’s saga play out, work so well as a metaphorical motif that when it moves from a symbol to an actor in the events, it’s quite a shock. Other shots use extreme close-ups of beautiful objects in the foreground to obscure the sordid stuff going on behind it–such as thelovely, vivid red roses pushed right up to the camera as, behind them, John completes the crime for which he was incarcerated. Fascinating, beautiful stuff, and always with a storytelling purpose. When a movie’s scenery is as much fun to look at as the focal action, you know the director is an artist.” Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies

“Quite accomplished and filled with the kind of ethereal dread that foreign fright flicks often excel in, it’s not hard to see why fans and critics have generally gravitated toward this scurrilous story of insanity and revenge. But this is hardly a flawless film. Indeed, A Bell from Hell suffers from the equally bizarre circumstances under which it was made. In the end, what Guerìn intended, and what is up on the screen never seems to effectively gel. Consequently, what should have been a violent slice of madness-mired vindication is frequently too dreamy and disjointed for its own good.” Bill Gibron, DVD Talk

Watch the film online:

IMDb | We are grateful to At the Mansion of Madness for a couple of the images above.

WH

Legend Horror Classics was a British magazine published by Legend Publishing and which ran for thirteen issues between 1974 and 1975.

The magazine was very much a second fiddle imitation of Monster Mag, being a format that opened out to feature a large horror “pin-up” poster. Interestingly though, it arguably predicted Monster Mag follow-up House of Hammer, having a mix of comic strips and film features. The comic strips were usually four page adaptations of famous horror stories – the first issue featuring Dracula (the 1973 film rather than the novel), the second Frankenstein (based around the 1931 film) etc. Kevin O’Neill illustrated many of the comic strips and served as art editor, later becoming editor.

Other films adapted included The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in issue 3 and Hammer’s Dracula in issue 5, while more original stories include Blood Lust of the Zombies in issue 4 (which featured a gory cover still from Death Line), Terror from Space in issue 6, Killer Jaws (a shark story, predictably) in issue 8 and The Jokers in issue 9. The magazine also adapted Beowulf in issue 7.

From issue 11, the comic strips were dropped and the final issues were ‘themed’, concentrating on Dracula, werewolves and Frankenstein.

Although not particularly well distributed or popular (certainly in comparison to Monster Mag), Legend Horror Classics remains an interesting, oddball entry in the history of both horror movie magazines and British comic books, and copies are now highly collectable.

David Flint, Horrorpedia