Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

As pointed out by the previous reviewer, although Hammer is the studio that springs to mind when you think of British horror films from this period (or indeed any period), their less prolific rival Tigon had a very different style which has aged better. After their unexpectedly big hit "Witchfinder General", Tigon naturally wanted to follow it up, but, since the villain had very definitely died at the end, a direct sequel was impossible. Instead, they came up with a completely unrelated film along similar lines, though with the major difference that, this time around, the arrogant, ruthless witchfinder is not a hypocritical madman, and the Satanic presence is 100% real.

What stopped it from being a true five-star classic was a very unfortunate executive decision. The movie was shot as a series of separate episodes in which the same events were seen from the perspectives of different people. Then, once filming had been completed, the studio decided that approach was too unconventional and edited the footage into a standard movie with only one narrative, which of course changes direction in jarring ways and loses track of the person you thought was the main character at regular intervals. Also, the climactic scenes were apparently watered down because the budget was running out, so the ending doesn't quite pack the punch it should. And you can't help feeling that they could have spent a bit more on the monster costume.

Apart from that, it's one of the very best horror films of that era, and still packs a real punch today. The central theme of the burgeoning sexuality and casual cruelty of children being warped and perverted is in fact even more disturbing from a modern perspective than it was then, and the film is nowadays almost unshowable on TV, though it used to be a regular late-night treat on BBC1. Bearing in mind cinematic conventions of the time, we're clearly meant to accept that the young people mostly played by actors in their twenties were, as the way they behave at the start of the film suggests, 14-16 years old at most. Linda Hayden was only 18, and Wendy Padbury, an ex-Doctor Who companion who never appeared in anything like this ever again, genuinely looks about 14, though she was in fact 23. Which makes everything that happens more disturbing by far.

This is definitely one of the top ten movies that deserve "cult" status but for some reason don't have it, and it's a lot better than at least half of those that do. Watch out for a lengthy sequence which, with added slapstick, was pinched in its entirety by "The Evil Dead II". The original version of that scene is just surreal nightmarish horror, made scarier by the fact that at this point in the movie we don't know why it's happening. So, for a few minutes at least, this 1971 film is almost identical to "The Evil Dead II", only scarier. In fact, that particular scene was deemed so scary that American prints darkened it to the point where you could barely see all the nastiness.

If you want to see a classic horror film which goes as far, if not further than modern examples in pretty much all ways other than wondrous CG effects and torture porn, and without a shred of self-referential irony, you should see this. If, on the other hand, you find the concept of being made to care about characters who may suffer horrible fates because there are no generic conventions in place to tell you which of these one-dimensional clichés will live or die a bit too scary, it's probably not the ideal film for you.

This is what happens when you try to make a spaghetti western 30 years too late and your name isn't Quentin Tarentino. Every single thing in the film, starting with the name of the production company, is a nod to an earlier, better spaghetti western, apart from the bits pinched from other films that weren't westerns but did involve lots of gunplay. Bored with all those Sergio Leone references? Never mind, suddenly it's gone all John Woo, and the hero is shooting people with two pistols at once while flying through the air sideways in slow motion! There are even borrowings from Luc Besson and the Coen brothers somewhere in the muddle. I was going to say "train-wreck", but strangely no trains are wrecked in this wannabe epic, or indeed featured at all, presumably because the budget didn't run to anything more expensive than blowing up a few patches of dirt and half a stagecoach.

The result is, of course, an incoherent mess. I don't know what director Gene Quintano looks like, but I picture him as a middle-aged man who still wears a backwards baseball cap and says "awesome" a lot. The use of plot-elements from other movies purely for the sake of name-dropping is so overdone that, although the hero spends almost the entire film toting around an unexplained coffin, nobody comments on this, or even seems to notice, because everyone this movie is aimed at can guess what's in the box, so I assume the director just plain forgot that the characters couldn't. Confusing action scenes in a mixture of styles, some of them too dark to see properly, don't exactly help. And although Emilio Estevez does his best to talk like Clint Eastwood, he has the charisma of a dead fish, and pretty much the same facial expression.

I awarded it two stars because it does at least deliver plenty of the promised action, much of which is so silly that you can't help smiling. And for real movie buffs, spotting the more obscure references partially distracts you from a terminally chaotic plot and a hero so wooden that he almost makes it seem as if the rest of the cast can act. By the way, at no point in the film are any dead people given any dollars.

This is one of those films you're far more likely to have heard about than actually seen, and, like almost all such films, it doesn't really live up to the hype. The main theme of the first act - respectable citizens are inexplicably committing mass murder for no reason except that allegedly God told them to is, like many of the concepts around which Larry Cohen bases his movies, sufficiently off-the-wall to be intriguing. Unfortunately, what happens in the second act throws far too many big ideas our way without having either the time or the budget to adequately explore them.

It's not easy to discuss the latter part of the film without giving away things which are meant to be huge surprises. However, it shouldn't surprise anyone to learn that the mysterious killer-by-proxy our hero, an NYPD detective, is trying to catch does not, fortunately for him, turn out to literally be God Almighty. The truth about who and what this character is may have seemed a little bit controversial in a country as religious as the USA 40 years ago, but the film only touches in the most tangential way upon such questions as whether the existence of a fake God makes the real one less likely to exist, and the unanswered questions about the validity of religion feel less like subtle ambiguity than dodging an issue so controversial that it might affect the film's distribution (they did in fact have to change the title to "Demon" in some states).

There's also a strange void at the heart of the movie. A major character's backstory, which we need to know in order to understand his seemingly pointless actions, is left almost completely mysterious, though we could and should have seen it in flashback. From the very little we do get to know, it looks suspiciously as though there was meant to be a subplot shamelessly ripped off from Stephen King's recent bestseller "Carrie", but it was dropped at the last moment because Brian De Palma's "Carrie" was in production at the same time as this film. It's certainly true that the most shocking (and blasphemous) image in the movie owes a lot to David Cronenberg's "Rabid". But to be fair, I was reminded so often of "Scanners", which came out 5 years later, that it looks as though maybe Cronenberg pinched more from Cohen than Cohen stole from him in the first place.

That being said, you can't fault Larry Cohen for lack of ambition. This is particularly apparent in the St. Patrick's Day Parade scenes, where Cohen, never a man to be discouraged by having to work within a tiny budget, used several thousand real policemen as unpaid extras without telling them, or indeed bothering to obtain a filming permit because they're really expensive. And if there are as many poorly-explored grandiose concepts crammed into this little independent film that barely qualifies as a B-movie as Sir Ridley Scott managed to stuff "Prometheus" with, Larry Cohen has a far better excuse for a somewhat incoherent end result than Sir Ridley! I'd love to have seen what Larry could have done with that kind of budget. It would probably have been a mess, but a gloriously entertaining mess. Though not the kind that gets you a knighthood.

So overall, worth watching as a very bold experiment that didn't quite work, with characters, even the minor ones, who come across as flawed, complex, believable people, thus making the unbelievable situation more credible (a Larry Cohen trademark that very few Hollywood screenwriters have borrowed, though most of them should). Watch out for Andy Kaufman's screen debut as the cop who goes nuts during the big parade. Also, there's an unintentionally hilarious easter egg for anyone who remembers "Space 1999".

Younger cinema-goers probably think that Michael Gough's career consisted of playing Batman's butler a few times before Alfred regenerated into Michael Caine. But back in the day, he was a prolific character actor who, though not exactly subtle, was one of the go-to guys if you wanted a magnificently arrogant mad scientist or a creepily suave serial killer and you couldn't afford Vincent Price. One time he even played the Emperor of the Moon.

This is one of several obscure low-budget outrageously over-the-top psycho killer or mad scientist movies he made at more or less the same time, and they're all worth a look if you can find copies. Plot? There isn't one! It's no spoiler to reveal that Michael Gough's character is responsible for all those horrific and ludicrously elaborate murders the police are baffled by, since the entire film focuses on him, and even before the disclosure early in the film that he's the killer, we've had plenty of very broad hints that he might have rather a lot to do with the murders. And not for one moment does he behave like a halfway sane person should.

So there's no mystery as to whodunnit. Nor are we in the dark about why he dunnit - as he explains several times, notably in one speech where he really pulls the stops out and throws all remaining shreds of subtlety to the four winds, he's just trying to prove how much smarter he is than the police. Though I'm not sure why he bothered - saying that the police in this movie are as dumb as a box of rocks is an insult to geology.

If you like movies in which the bad guy has a secret room in the basement where he keeps his collection of torture devices, oddly-shaped knives, and very cheap waxworks of people being executed in nasty ways, along with an acid-bath, a death-ray, and what appears to be a computer because every mad scientist has to have one, you'll probably like this movie. Oh, did I forget to mention that halfway through the film, he suddenly switches genres and turns out to be a mad scientist in addition to everything else? Yes, it's that plotless, and all the better for it!

What stopped it getting four, or even five stars from me is that, not being a Hammer film, it mostly chickens when it comes to the actual murders, which are few and far between to the point where they're almost incidental - the demented excesses of "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" or "Theatre Of Blood" are sadly lacking. But as a story about a crazy guy doing horrible things for no particular reason while overacting furiously, it ticks all the boxes. Absolutely everybody in the supporting cast is evil, sleazy, too stupid to live, or all of the above, so there's none of that saccharine romance between the bland male lead and his equally tedious girl that clutters up so many similar films. In fact, the subplot which threatens to go in that direction (and which is blatantly stolen from "Peeping Tom") does something so different that it comes as a genuine shock. It looks very much as though the writers were going for the blackest comedy ever, but nobody told the director - this is especially apparent in the scenes where doomed characters give master-classes in how NOT to behave when you're alone in a room with a man you know to be a totally insane serial killer!

So overall it's a lot of fun, though marks off for not being horrific enough, despite that X certificate. By the way, when David Essex and Ringo Starr visit the cinema in "That'll Be The Day", this is the film they're watching. I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.