Howery's Review

CAHIERS DU HOWERY

Oct. 2-4, 2025

On a season 3 episode (2025) of the prequel series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Mr. Spock has the following exchange with his new Vulcan friend, Doug:

DOUG: “And humans view these for the express purpose of being scared?”

SPOCK: “Yes, they are horror movies.”

DOUG: “And are the movies horrible?”

SPOCK: “Yes. No. Sometimes.”

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OCT. 2

“It takes a village to raise a child,” as the not-really-African adage goes. And, in many cases, it takes a hit movie to raise a sequel, or at least a semi-sequel, as was the situation with the U.K. productions Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned, which, back-to-back, will kick off the list of genre films in TCM’s month showcasing horror, science fiction, and fantasy.

In late August, an advance, incomplete TCM schedule for October went live. When I saw the following two MGM films near the top, I thought: Why not also screen Hammer Film’s These Are the Damned and make it a threesome? Well, I’ll be darned: The “TBA” that followed the first two films was soon replaced on the sked by These Are the Damned! (Great minds, etc.)

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VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)

An invisible force renders unconscious all the inhabitants of the tiny English village of Midwich. The fertile women wake up pregnant and, when the fullness of time has come, give birth to blond alien devil children. Barbara Shelley and George Sanders are the main mommy and daddy.

Ten-year-old Martin Stephens, who portrays the children’s spokesperson, earlier creeped out viewers in The Innocents (1961), based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

The MGM picture is adapted from The Midwich Cuckoos, a novel by John Wyndham, who also penned The Day of the Triffids. The co-scriptwriters were Stirling Silliphant, who later won an Academy Award for In the Heat of the Night; director Wolf Rilla; and producer Ronald Kinnoch, who used the pseudonym George Barclay.

“Director Wolf Rilla achieves a Hitchcockian brew – a mixture of terror and everyday atmosphere in its story of a supernatural bewitchment of the young.” – Judith Crist

“As a quietly civilized exercise on the fear and power of the unknown, [Village of the Damned] is one of the trimmest, most original and serenely unnerving little chillers in a long time.” – Howard Thompson in The New York Times

“Rilla’s direction is as cool as the hybrid children who result from the cosmic rape, building with deceptive calm to moments of pure terror.” – David J. Hogan

“The children are played as variations on the Hitler Youth from two decades earlier: ultra-Aryan in appearance, methodical in attitude, unable to either feel or express love, and utterly amoral.” – Douglas Brode

“Baffled many reviewers, who felt the lack of clear explanation for the events of the film implied some murky supernatural agency. To the knowledgeable, the wonderfully ambiguous questions of from where and why the children only added to the scariness; this was an invasion from space like no other.” – Baird Searles

“There is something sinister, I think, about a child who does not move like a child, or laugh like a child, who has none of the physical vitality of a child.” – Wolf Rilla

“Soft-pedals on horror, but expands the human side of its fantastic tale.” – Kinematograph Weekly, a former British trade paper

“Proves what can be achieved with a low budget if the talent involved is right.” – Howard Maxford

“Still imaginative, but dialogue is often trite, pacing erratic, some sequences weak.” – Castle of Frankenstein magazine

“This just tapers off from a taut beginning into soggy melodrama.” – Variety

“The story is told with a slowness and lack of involvement almost worthy of silent cinema. … The entire film lacks a coherent style.” – John Baxter

CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1964)

“Why are you here, Paul? What do you want?”

“We don’t know.”

A UNESCO study shows six children of the same age (from China, England, India, Nigeria, the United States, and the USSR) have IQs through the roof. The four boys and two girls – who were born via parthenogenesis, are gifted with telepathic and telekinetic powers, and are characterized by blank stares – are all brought to respective London embassies for further tests. With the world powers fighting over them, the six escape and hold up in an abandoned church. (They do things with the organ that Keith Emerson never dreamed of.)

At the end of this somewhat lame attempt at allegory, everyone discovers that war is not healthy for children and other living things.

Ian Hendry stars as a psychologist. His other genre credits include Polanski’s Repulsion; Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter; 1972’s E.C. Comics-based Tales From the Crypt; and the Vincent Price-Diana Rigg vehicle, Theatre of Blood. (Hendry was Patrick Macnee’s original partner on the spy show The Avengers, five years before Rigg came on board.)

Clive Powell, who plays Paul, the English kid, looks like a miniature, male Carey Mulligan. (He played Martin Stephens’s character as a toddler in Village of the Damned.)

American-born director Anton Leader was already making a career with episodes of some of our favorite U.S. television series.

American-born screenwriter John Briley won an Oscar and other awards for Gandhi (1982) and penned Cry Freedom (1987). He cowrote a Eurotrash guilty pleasure, the spy flick Hammerhead (1968).

Trivia time: According to a 2024 article in Far Out magazine, Children of the Damned was one of Kurt Cobain’s 20 favorite films.

“Children of the Damned is unequivocal in its denunciation of the human race. Whatever humans don’t understand, they will first try to exploit for their advantage, defined as the destruction or at least the subjugation of others. Failing that, they will destroy it.” – T.S. Kord

“The super-powered kids … are victims rather than villains: they represent a new generation who want to live together peaceably despite their ethnic differences, without subscription to the outmoded nationalistic prejudices and suspicions of their parents.” – Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn

“One of the finest pieces of sf cinema to come out of England, or for that matter of any other country.” – John Baxter

“Stands up as better than the original due to literate (for a change) script, thoughtful theme. … Some interesting ideas about behavior of mankind and the psychology of aggression.” – Castle of Frankenstein

“The sequel pales in comparison, as do most sequels. But it is filmed with taste and acted in crisp style.” – Time magazine

“A dull, pretentious successor to that marvelous little chiller of several seasons ago, ‘Village of the Damned.’ … Let’s only hope Metro doesn’t grind out a third one, about grandchildren.” – Howard Thompson, The New York Times

“What weakens this sequel is the fact that, unlike the original, it is burdened with a ‘message.’ The attempt at endowing it with moral significance is heavy-handed, unnecessary and too pretentious an aim for so relatively modest a production venture.” – Variety

“The story suffers from an overabundance of ambiguity and a lack of dramatic inspiration.” – Gary A. Smith

“Some good ideas, but execution far too ragged, and a bit given to hammering the obvious.” – Sight & Sound magazine, published by the British Film Institute

THESE ARE THE DAMNED (1962; U.K. title = The Damned)

“There are many things which you’ll only understand when you’re older. You’ll be told everything in time, each new thing as you are able to understand it, and not before.”

This is a very disturbing Hammer Film production from blacklisted American director Joseph Losey. The cynical, near-nihilistic dialogue is only one reason for viewer disquiet.

I’ll gloss over the first half of the sci-fi picture to arrive more quickly at the core: In seaside Weymouth, retired American tourist Simon (Macdonald Carey) and the beautiful and slightly mosquito-bitten Joan (Shirley Anne Field) meet-not-so-cute, fall in love, but are hunted down by Joan’s possessive brother, King (Oliver Reed), the leader of a gang of seven other bikers, who has an unnatural attachment to his sister.

The central message of the plot involves a group of nine children whom the three stumble upon in a secret underground military base at a limestone quarry, as Joan and Simon attempt to escape King and his thugs.

These kids are held prisoner, in a totally enclosed space, as part of a horrific experiment involving supposed preparation for imminent nuclear conflict. All are 11 years old and (so they’ve been told) have the same birthday. They are regularly visited by feared persons whom they call the Black Death. Two of the youngsters have died, and one may be dying. They’ve developed their own mythology, believing they’re being punished for sins, and that their parents will someday rescue them.

King, with typical motorcycle-gang tact, calls them “zombies.”

But the youngsters are those – to quote Lord Byron’s “The Prisoner of Chillon,” cited in the drama – “[t]o whom the goodly earth and air / Are banned and barred – forbidden fare.”

Don’t expect a happy ending.

And try not to be repulsed by the main theme song, “Black Leather Rock.”

A number of critics have seen The Damned as a forerunner of A Clockwork Orange. Writer/lecturer David Simmons likens the 1962 drama to The X-Files.

Casting a fading American star, like Carey, in the lead role was de rigueur for British sci-fi of this period (see The Cosmic Monster [w. Forrest Tucker] on Oct. 5; The Giant Behemoth [Gene Evans] on Oct. 22; Burn, Witch, Burn [Janet Blair] on Oct. 30; as well as The Gamma People [Paul Douglas], X the Unknown [Dean Jagger], The Quatermass Xperiment [Brian Donlevy], Fiend Without a Face [Marshall Thompson] …). Carey starred in Losey’s 1950 noir The Lawless, which deals with racism against Mexican American laborers.

Oliver Reed made a total of nine movies for Hammer Film between 1960 and 1965; the studio gave him his first starring role, in The Curse of the Werewolf (1961).

Shirley Anne Field’s (1936-2023) other genre credits include Horrors of the Black Museum and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom.

Swedish-born Viveca Lindfors (A Bell From Hell; Cauldron of Blood; George A. Romero’s Creepshow; Oliver Stone’s The Hand [TCM, Oct. 25]; Stargate) portrays Freya, an artist who sculpts wingless birds (actually created by Dame Elisabeth Frink). I strongly disagree with author Howard Maxford’s appraisal of Lindfors’s acting: “Garboesque posturings and mumblings.” Freya is the ex-lover of the base’s scientist/leader, Bernard (Alexander Knox), and rents her home/studio, near the secret installation, from him. Losey biographer Colin Gardner calls Freya the film’s “anti-establishment conscience.” She hates Bernard’s “secrets.”

Horror encyclopedist Phil Hardy equates Bernard and King: “gang leaders both.”

Canadian Knox had played a psychiatrist wedged into a love triangle in Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger (1954).

German-born Walter Gotell is an army major at the base; he was in seven James Bond adventures, six as KGB chief “Gen. Gogol.”

James Villiers, a professional villain who looked the part, is a captain. He’s in one of Gotell’s 007 flicks, For Your Eyes Only (starring Roger Moore), and in Bette Davis’s The Nanny, Polanski’s Repulsion, Hammer’s Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, and Hammer rival Amicus’s Asylum.

Kenneth Cope (1931-2024), perhaps best known as the ghostly latter half on the comedy/detective series Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased), is a biker gang member who has feelings for Field.

Nicholas Clay (“Richard”), who had the longest screen career among the nine child stars, has the title role in Patricia Neal’s The Night Digger (1971), is Lancelot in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), and the murderer in 1982’s Christie-Poirot mystery Evil Under the Sun (sorry to give away the ending).

Losey’s direction is excellent, as always, but the repeated, jittery blue-screen work with the English Channel backgrounds may jangle viewers’ nerves. The director, a victim of the McCarthy witch hunts, moved to London in 1953. He’s known for his British-made The Servant, The Go-Between, and other classics. (His fine pre-exile noir The Prowler will run at 4 p.m. Eastern Oct. 29.)

The Damned is based on a 1960 novel, The Children of Light (see Luke 16:8, KJV), by H.L. Lawrence.

Playwright Evan Jones did the film script. Later he cowrote Losey’s comic strip-based Modesty Blaise, Elizabeth Taylor’s Night Watch (TCM, Oct. 11), and penned the powerful 1975 docuseries The Fight Against Slavery.

Columbia Pictures distributed the Hammer production. The Damned was made in mid-1961, but not released in Australia until late in 1962, in the U.K. until 1963, and in the United States until 1965. (Thus Judith Crist called it a “remarkable movie unsold and, when finally sold, unsung.”) Authors vary on the reasons the release was delayed: Losey biographer Edith de Rham says Hammer CEO James Carreras disliked the picture; another biographer, Joseph Caute, says, “Columbia shelved the film because of its political message”; and Ian Cooper writes that the British Board of Film Classification was “disturbed by the strong hints of incestuous desire as well as the gang violence.”

In a foreshadowing of the U.S. federal government’s current executive branch, Losey biographer James Leahy wrote in 1967 that The Damned’s secret project “could only be an act of public service in the time of a public indifference and abdication of responsibility so complete that it amounts to a rejection of life.”

“Chillingly effective…. In Mr. Losey’s hands the Orwellian secret … becomes frighteningly plausible.” – The New York Times

“Exudes a mesmerizing air of intangible menace…. Although Losey’s ban-the-bomb arguments by now sound stale and conventional, the film’s climax fuses foolishness and fission in a poetically persuasive nightmare.” – Time magazine (1965)

“One of the most significant recent British movies, a disturbing work of real importance.” – The Observer

“Undoubtedly one of the most important British films of the year, even, perhaps, of the ’60s.” – Raymond Durgnat

“THE DAMNED is a sad poem; a vision of a world of corruption, fear and broken scientific promise. It’s not an angry vision, but a disillusioned one which holds little hope for the future, if any…. Certainly it’s one of the most important films in recent years.” – Joe Dante in Castle of Frankenstein magazine

“One of the best British science-fiction films and one of the most controversial. … Unrelentingly grim and haunting.”– The Motion Picture Guide by Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross

The Damned reflects “its director’s … keen sense of how established certainties of class and education have become unhinged in a world of nuclear tests and arms races.” – James J. Ward

Losey “achieves here a fine balance between the elucidations of the obvious and the enlightenments of the subtle.” – Carlos Clarens

“It is not science or the scientist that is insane here; typical of the time in which the movie was made, it is the establishment.” – Baird Searles

Trivia time – I can’t decide which is worse: “Black Leather Rock” on the film soundtrack, or the two sides (collectively) of a single record that Oliver Reed cut for Decca during the time he was making These Are the Damned in 1961. The performances on the attached sides are at least superior to his monotone in Ken Russell’s Tommy!…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jHNxWbgdWM&list=RD6jHNxWbgdWM&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFFKSBhQXyg&list=RDcFFKSBhQXyg&start_radio=1

OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE (1967)

The mother of seven young children dies in their London house. The kids fear they’ll be put in an orphanage, so they bury mother in the garden and devise ways to keep the death a secret while they attend school as normal.

Their mother – whom we later learn was a vicar’s daughter – has had them memorize biblical passages, and she clearly had a particular affinity for the Song of Solomon, from whence cometh the (paraphrased) movie title (ch. 8, v. 2).

The siblings form a kind of cult revolving around their mother, seemingly worshipping her spirit. They carry her bedroom furniture to a shed, which they dub “the tabernacle.” There, the second-oldest daughter, Diana, believes she can channel the deceased mater, relating the dead woman’s wishes to the others.

A distinctive personality is made evident in each child character: e.g., Elsa, the eldest daughter, is a take-charge person and extremely suspicious; Willy, the youngest boy, is inquisitive (“What’s ‘dead’?” … “What’s a will?” … “What’s an orphanage?”); Dunston, the second-oldest son, is angry, vindictive, and cynical; Jiminee, the No. 3 son, stutters and has an exceptional talent for forgery.

(Willy also seems to have an odd relationship with a golliwog doll, his “black wife.”)

Things move along relatively smoothly for the kids until the oldest boy, Hubert, secretly writes to his mother’s estranged husband, Charlie (Dirk Bogarde) – a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, and worse – and asks him to come live with them. The kids can’t even remember him; Elsa only knows the negatives her mother told her and warns that Charlie is a “bad influence.” The action then hints at statutory rape.

And the ending is quite a shocker.

Some points could have been made clearer: identifying the mother’s cause of death, for example; more of a backstory on a “kidnapped” child, Louie; and more details about a break-in at a neighbor’s home.

Best-known among the child stars are Pamela Franklin (b. 1950 – The Innocents, The Nanny, And Soon the Darkness [TCM, Oct. 4], Necromancy, The Legend of Hell House, The Food of the Gods), as Diana, and Mark Lester (b. 1958 – Oliver!, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo), as Jiminee. Yootha Joyce has a key role here, and an even meatier part in Die! Die! My Darling! (Oct. 10).

Actress Phoebe Nicholls, who at age 9 played the baby sister, Gerty, is the mother of Tom Sturridge, star of the DC Comics miniseries The Sandman. (She portrays the title character’s cook in three episodes.) Her parents, Anthony Nicholls and Faith Kent, are also in the 1967 cast. Nicholls has a more substantial role in Burn, Witch, Burn (Oct. 30).

Director Jack Clayton piloted The Innocents, Room at the Top, The Pumpkin Eater, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the not-so-hot Robert Redford adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Speaking of family affairs: The 1967 script was cowritten by Jeremy Brooks, the real life father of “Elsa” (Margaret Brooks Leclere), and by Clayton’s future wife, actress Haya Harareet (Ben-Hur). Our Mother’s House is based on a 1963 novel by Julian Gloag.

Georges Delerue, who composed for 11 Truffaut films, wrote the beautiful score, which the New York Times critic called “pastoral.”

“[Deals] with a children’s world where the innocence and the absolutes and the imaginings of the young can strike terror and evoke tears and touch the heart…. Clayton succeeds in capturing the essence of the terror-suspense film; the realization that the monsters among us are human.” – Judith Crist

“The most innocent among us are potentially the most dangerous, says ‘Our Mother’s House,’ and let us have no nonsense about the natural goodness of man…. How far you are willing to go along with all this depends on your susceptibility to melodrama that goes in for gray, rather than black-and-white, characterization.” – The New York Times 

“The tale of innocence and evil spun around these children is both warm and chilling.” – the (New York) Daily News

“The situation is ingenious – though the story is neither probable nor particularly suspenseful…. But everything else about Our Mother’s House is splendid.… Each of [the children] is such an accomplished scene stealer that it is hard to tell whether the director deserves more credit for evoking acting ability in his brood or for keeping it under control.” – Time magazine

“It is a beautifully, professionally handled picture that makes you wonder where they got so many talented young performers. In England, of course, where all children are pretty much like that, orators from the cradle….” – the New York Post

OCT. 3

THIRTEEN WOMEN (1932)

We all know the story of the actress who committed suicide by jumping off the H in the Hollywoodland sign.

This is the solitary film made by Welsh-born Peg Entwistle, who killed herself at age 24, and she’s on-screen for a total of about two minutes. (More on that later.) A pity this Broadway performer doesn’t have a better motion picture as a memorial.

Her character is one of the victims of Myrna Loy’s Ursula Georgi, who seeks revenge on girls’ seminary schoolmates (all members of the same sorority) who persecuted her. (Think: 1988’s Heathers.)

The targeted women, who still remain in touch with one another, might be called remote victims. As a result of Ursula’s power of suggestion, they’ve taken part in a “round-robin” that led them all to write letters to Swami Yogadachi (C. Henry Gordon) in New York, to ask for horoscopes prognosticating their futures. As part of her intricate scheme, Ursula has become the swami’s secretary, hypnotically seduced him, and is forging his signature and replacing his positive readings with false ones that she mails her schoolmates, predicting their respective dooms.

Among the school clique, Irene Dunne’s Laura is an unbeliever. A Beverly Hills widow, she is the mother of a young son (Wally Albright) who becomes Ursula’s potential prey. And, in this part of the plot, Ursula has the help of an inside man, another seducee.

L.A. Detective Sgt. Clive (Ricardo Cortez, who doesn’t appear until 26 minutes into a 59-minute film) is on the case.

Ursula, who was born in India, is variously described by other characters as a “half-breed type” and a “half-caste Hindu.”

With the guarded language required even before the Hays censorship code was strictly enforced, she describes how white sailors raped her at age 12. She stops just short of mentioning prostitution.

The reason for Entwistle’s lack of screen time: The movie was trimmed by 14 minutes before its released. In the original script, Entwistle’s character, Hazel, has a lesbian relationship, and the causes of her downfall are more fully explained. All this was cut, according to James Zeruk Jr.’s biography of the actress. The fate of Ursula’s second seducee, mentioned above, is another loose end. And the opening segment, in which Hazel reunites with Ursula’s first two victims, May and June, was shortened. Otherwise, Entwistle only appears in a 14-second lap dissolve segment depicting her undoing. Thus we’re left with the remains of what might have been a better or at least a more intriguing film (which should have been renamed Eight Women, considering the cuts).

Before her tenure as Nora Charles in the Thin Man franchise (1934-47), Loy wowed audiences as another stereotypical Asian femme fatale, the daughter of the title supervillain in Karloff’s Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). She later called Thirteen Women a “racist concoction.” Both she and Karloff played their Fu Manchu roles with tongues planted firmly in cheeks.

The typically sleazy C. Henry Gordon can be seen in the genre movies Kongo and Gabriel Over the White House, and (speaking of stereotypes) in three Charlie Chan mysteries.

Albright was the curly-haired rich kid in six Our Gang/Little Rascal shorts.

Relatively simple: Other seminary friends are portrayed by Florence Eldridge (wife and sometime costar of Fredric March), Jill Esmond (then the spouse of Laurence Olivier), and Kay Johnson (mother of James Cromwell).

Actresses who wound up on the cutting-room floor included Phyllis Fraser (future widow of Bennett Cerf; later the widow of New York Gov. Robert F. Wagner Jr.), Broadway star Julie Haydon (who in the late ’50s attempted to become a nun), and consumer advocate/game show panelist Betty Furness (this would have been her first motion picture). But you can still get a peek at everybody’s photos in Ursula’s school yearbook.

For two years (1927-29), Entwistle was married to actor Robert Keith and was the stepmother of Brian Keith (who also committed suicide).

Blanche Friderici, who briefly plays the schoolmistress at the women’s San Francisco-area alma mater, tread the boards in the original stage production of The Cat and the Canary in 1922, in the blackface role of a maid. She reprised the part in the 1930 screen version, The Cat Creeps, a “lost” film.

Thirteen Women was adapted from a racy novel by bestselling author Tiffany Thayer. His book Call Her Savage was the basis of the 1932 Clara Bow movie of that name, about the child of another interethnic relationship (this time, a Native American and a Caucasian). F. Scott Fitzgerald once referred to Thayer’s works as “slime.”

In the 1950s, cinematographer Leo Tover lensed The Day the Earth Stood Still, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the Jack (Palance) the Ripper tale Man in the Attic.

Director George Archainbaud is perhaps best known for Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry Westerns.

Max Steiner – whose compositions graced King Kong, The Most Dangerous Game, Son of Kong, and 1935’s She – scored Thirteen Women.

The Internet Movie Database says Thirteen Women was released on the day Entwistle killed herself, Sept. 16, 1932. It’s wrong, as the site is wrong about many things. The picture’s earliest release, Zeruk says, was 10 days later.

Postscript – For all you believers in gematria out there: “Hollywoodland” has 13 letters.

“As in most horror films, Ursula’s monstrous revenge is excessive, brutal, and sometimes misdirected – and perhaps it is ‘inhuman,’ as Laura declares – but it nevertheless points to a sexual and racial injury that is otherwise absent in 1930s popular culture.” – Dawn Keetley and Gwen Hofmann of Lehigh University

“If you have ever had any idea of assassinating all your college classmates, you may find a certain vicarious satisfaction in ‘Thirteen Women’ …. The photoplay is so clumsily managed that it lacks such comparatively necessary qualities as suspense, drama, excitement, mystery and terror.” – the New York Herald Tribune [whose reviewer also noted the misnumbering in the title]

“Thirteen Women is brief enough to keep things moving steadily from one accident/suicide/murder to the next, but overall it remains a mildly diverting disappointment.” – Bryan Senn

“A flimsy piece of tripe that handled differently might have made a terrific thriller.” – Leonard Maltin

OCT. 4

AND SOON THE DARKNESS (1970)

One screenwriter, one screenwriter/producer, the second producer, the director, and the composer in this U.K. film’s credits had all worked on Patrick Macnee’s spy series The Avengers (1961-69).

Need I say more?

Jane and Cathy (Pamela Franklin and Michele Dotrice), young nurses from Nottingham, are on the second day of a biking tour through rural north-central France (“the real France”) – a region whose main commodity seems to be junked cars. The two women rest on the grassy side of an isolated road, argue, and separate. Jane stops at Epicerie a la Mal Tournée Café (the Wrong Turn Grocery Store and Café, or, alternatively, Grocery Store Gone Bad Café).

Cathy disappears.

Amid her search for her friend, Jane learns from locals of the unsolved rape-murder of another young woman, who fit Cathy’s general description, three years earlier.

Spoiler Alert! As with any good mystery, the killer is not who you think he is. No, it’s not him either. Nor him. End Alert!

A climactic sequence prefigures 1978’s Halloween. The penultimate shot, rain on a skylight, will stick with you.

A big flaw in the plot: The irrational behavior of one character is never explained, and our heroine, Jane, reacts to it with an irrational response. Of course, she has the excuse of being scared out of her wits. At least these moves push along the action.

Some of Pamela Franklin’s oeuvre are listed higher up, under Our Mother’s House. Michele Dotrice (daughter of actor Roy) was in my favorite film from the U.K.’s Tigon studio, The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). AStD costar Sandor Elès was in Hammer Film’s The Evil of Frankenstein and Countess Dracula.

Jean Carmet, a bistro owner in AStD who says the previous murder was good for business, appeared in Black and White in Color and My Mother’s Castle.

Director Robert Fuest went on to helm Vincent Price’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972). (We’ll forgive Fuest for his star-studded mess, The Devil’s Rain [1975].)

One AStD scripter and producer was Brian Clemens, who cowrote the second episode of The Avengers (1961), penned the series finale (1969), and worked on many segments in between. The other film scripter, Terry Nation, wrote several Avengers installments during the A.D. (After Diana) era, when the cult spy show costarred Linda Thorson. Nation is best known as the creator of Daleks, the oldest surviving nemeses on Doctor Who. And Soon the Darkness cinematographer Ian Wilson rejoined the Avengers veterans for my favorite Hammer Film production, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974).

A pointless remake of And Soon the Darkness, starring Amber Heard, came out in 2010.

“It is the terror Director Robert Fuest extracts from bright sunlight and open fields at high noon that makes And Soon the Darkness an uncommonly successful spine-tingler.” – Rex Reed

“When it’s over you can’t blame yourself for not having solved it ahead of time, but you’ll probably admit you had a chill or two.” – the New York Post

“And Soon The Darkness, which makes use of many Hitchcockian techniques, is thin in comparison and at times repetitious in its use of landscape. … although uneven, the film does have its moments of real suspense.” – Films and Filming, a former British monthly

“If [the plot of] ‘And Soon the Darkness’ hadn’t fallen off into mystery and melodrama, it might have been a much better picture than it is.” – Leo Mishkin

“Ultimately ‘And Soon the Darkness’ tries to keep you guessing by the expedients of disguising good as evil and of providing so many false clues that not even the fruitiest denouement (in fact there is no denouement) would justify them.” – The New York Times

“It’s a suspense-thriller, with sex and crime leavening, which lacks the bite and surprise high spots needed to turn it into a chilly, exciting nail-biter…. It’s doubtful whether the French Tourists Board will care for this angle.” – Variety

“France should suffer another setback in tourism after this film.” – the (New York) Daily News

POLTERGEIST (1982)

This hyped-up, not very scary, not very funny ghost tale was produced and cowritten by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper. Critic Phil Hardy posits that the film thus “shows a split profile” and is “fatally divided against itself.” There has been an ongoing controversy over how much of the directing was actually done by Spielberg.

It certainly overflows with Spielberg’s signature cutesiness.

A real estate developer and his wife find their suburban California house possessed and their 5-year-old daughter then ghost-napped by what the youngster has dubbed “the TV people.” The parents call in an ineffectual trio of ghostbusters, who in turn summon a clairvoyant (Zelda Rubinstein, whose scenes are the highlight).

The special effects seem as primitive now as those of today probably will appear several decades hence.

I kept thinking of how other horror directors would have done a superior job with certain sequences: Dario Argento would have finessed the resurrected corpses; Czech animator Jan Švankmajer would have really cooked with the shots of the haunted steak and drumstick.

Hooper arguably did better when he wasn’t encumbered by a big budget.

The Star Wars product placement is simply annoying.

Poltergeist might have made a good half-hour episode of The Twilight Zone. As a matter of fact, it did: “Little Girl Lost” (1962). More than one observer points out that Spielberg was inspired by the Richard Matheson short story of this title, which the writer had adapted into the Zone teleplay, and by another Matheson tale, “Through Channels.” Spielberg requested a videotape of the Zone installment before making Poltergeist, says biographer Joseph McBride. Yet Matheson gets no screen credit.

“Poltergeist is … [a] satire about American values in general and the role of TV in our society in particular.” — John Kenneth Muir, arguing that this is definitely a Tobe Hooper work

“There’s no doubt that with its overemphasis on technical razzle-dazzle, suburban California rather than rural South atmosphere, and repeated shots of characters being awed rather than sawed, Poltergeist looks and sounds much more like a Steven Spielberg film than a Tobe Hooper one.” — John McCarty

“Spielberg’s amused tolerance of suburban triviality jostles with Hooper’s grouchy view of city slickers treading on the countryside.” — Kim Newman

“Although Poltergeist (1982) begins with a promising visual exploration of darkness within the family home, it soon degenerates into the infantile mindset of typical Spielburbia, oppressing any of the differences Tobe Hooper intended.” – Tony Williams

“It is tempting to dismiss it simply as Tobe Hooper’s worst film, but it clearly belongs to the Spielberg oeuvre rather than to Hooper’s. … Spielberg enlists the genre’s potential radicalism and perverts it into 80s conservatism.” — Robin Wood (2003)

“One of the few really frightening films of the eighties … . Admittedly, logic and consistency are not its strongpoints. … Its major flaw is that shock follows shock with such rapidity (though always with the saving grace of humor) that by its end one only has an impression of the movie, no clear recollection of individual scenes.” — William K. Everson

“Little more than a made-for-TV haunted-house story with an added light show.” — The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

“Why don’t white people just leave the house when there’s a ghost in the house? … Get the f*** out! … And not only did they stay in the … house in Poltergeist; they invited more white people over! Sit around going, ‘Our daughter Carol Anne’s in the television set.’” – Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983), an inspiration for 2017’s Get Out

FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974)

Inspired by the stories of English writer R. Chetwynd Hayes, this is one of the better U.K. horror omnibuses. The stock in trade of Hammer competitor Amicus Productions was the package film, and FBtG was its last. (Several of the others are adapted from MAD-man William Gaines’s EC horror comics of the 1950s. Three of those were scripted by Robert Bloch, who basked in reflected glory after Hitchcock’s Psycho was based on his novel of the same name.)

The framing device in From Beyond the Grave involves a creepy antique shop, Temptations Limited (“offers you cannot resist”), owned by Peter Cushing. Four successive patrons, each central to one of the anthology stories, enter the store. Three of them steal from Cushing in one way or another and suffer the consequences.

What a cast! Ian Bannen, Ian Carmichael, Diana Dors, Lesley-Anne Down, Margaret Leighton, Ian Ogilvy, Angela and Donald Pleasence, Nyree Dawn Porter, and David Warner.

Still, the themes of three of the four stories are pretty run-of-the-mill: a demonic mirror, an exorcism, a demonic door. The standout, the second tale, stars Pleasence père et fille, Bannen, and Dors. British critic David Pirie calls it “superbly Pinterish.” The twist ending should be a lesson to bad parents everywhere.

Margaret Leighton is very funny as a clairvoyant/exorcist in the one segment (the third) that is played for laughs.

The first and fourth stories, critics point out, owe a debt to a more acclaimed portmanteau, 1945’s Dead of Night.

Keep an eye on the bloke who is skulking around the alleyway outside Cushing’s store.

This marked the directorial debut of film editor/sound editor Kevin Connor, an Aussie whose other claims to fame in that chair are the Edgar Rice Burroughs-based trilogy The Land That Time Forgot (1974), At the Earth’s Core (1976; w. Cushing), and The People That Time Forgot (1977), and the gory Motel Hell (1980), his first American job.

“Effectively handled horror compendium, above average of its kind.” – Howard Maxford

“Connor, who began his career as an editor, has a special understanding of pace and technique, one that he successfully applies to the low-budget film. The film thus builds momentum from story to story …” – John Kenneth Muir

Of Donald and Angela Pleasence: “There is no combination of English acting talent more liable to frost up the vertebrae. – The Observer

Of the Leighton segment: “Whimsical, energetic, frightening and violent, the ending beats anything in The Exorcist.” – Leonard Wolf

SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

“People were always rotten. But the world was beautiful.” – Edward G. Robinson’s “Sol Roth,” reminiscing about the good ol’ preapocalyptic days

The true measure of a “cult movie” is realized when people who have never even seen it know how it ends.

In the overpopulated, smog-laden near-future New York of Soylent Green – 2022, to be precise – human beings are garbage.

The deceased are put in refuse trucks rather than hearses or ambulances. Police control hungry rioters with “scoops” – the department’s front-end loader trucks.

The film title refers to a new type of ration for the poorer masses, freeze-dried wafers made of “high-energy plankton.” Its antecedents were the soybean and lentil concoctions soylent red and yellow, “high-energy vegetable concentrates.” Robinson’s character, Sol, calls the stuff “tasteless, odorless crud.” Soylent Corp. is a global monopoly; its workers are prison labor.

In this movie’s dystopia, most people swelter in weather that the greenhouse effect has rendered perpetually hot. They’re periodically allotted small portions of soylent and potable water. Vast numbers of folks sleep on the streets.

Meanwhile, an elite few have access to luxuries: fancy apartments, electricity, AC, running water, soap, perfume, paper, pencils, privacy, video games, ice, alcoholic beverages, produce, and a rare chunk of black-market red meat. More affluent males are pleasured by long-term, full-time, resident female prostitutes, called “furniture” – i.e., each woman comes with the apartment.

The main duty of the police – who dress as drably as the majority of the populace – is to maintain order.

One detective, Thorn (Charlton Heston) – a character whom The New Yorker’s Penelope Gilliatt dubbed “terrifically brave and uniquely dumb” – is assigned to investigate the bludgeoning murder of wealthy Soylent Corp. board member Simonson (Joseph Cotten), which Thorn determines was an assassination. Thorn and Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), who was Simonson’s “furniture,” feel a mutual attraction.

What Thorn discovers, for one thing, is that Soylent Corp. has trimmed operating expenses in a unique way.

Brock Peters is Thorn’s pliable superior. Chuck Connors is Simonson’s nominal bodyguard, Tab. Paula Kelly is Tab’s “furniture.” Whit Bissell, who was in more ’50s sci-fi/horror than you can shake a stick at, is state governor and a top Soylent exec.

Lincoln Kilpatrick is a Roman Catholic priest who says the truth is destroying him. (The actor is also in the cast of Heston’s The Omega Man.)

Celia “T’Pau” Lovsky and Dick “Eight Is Enough” Van Patten have small but pivotal parts.

In his final role, Edward G. Robinson gives it everything he’s got as Thorn’s live-in researcher, what is known as a “police book.” As in Fahrenheit 451, actual paper books are banned. (Heston and Robinson’s improvised bit of dining, as their characters enjoy goodies that detective Thorn has pilfered, is not quite as sprightly as the eating sequence in 1963’s Tom Jones, which was a likely inspiration for this segment.)

We get to hear Robinson using cuss words and a little Yiddish. The consummate performer died about three months before the film’s May 1973 opening.

Director Richard Fleischer – son of Betty Boop/Popeye animator Max – piloted Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; 1967’s Doctor Dolittle; Fantastic Voyage; Conan the Destroyer; and 1985’s Red Sonja.

The Soylent script has some tenuous relationship to science-fiction author Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel, Make Room! Make Room! (set in 1999).

Someone at Quora.com, the user Q&A website, has asked, “Is the have’s and the have not’s becoming the have’s everything and the have’s nothing?”

Many readers will have seen these stats: In the United States right now, the richest 20% of citizens own 71% of the country’s total wealth (and can be blamed for 40% of the nation’s carbon emissions), the top 1 percent control about 30% of the wealth, and the bottom half of the population hold a mere 2.5% to 4%. And, like the privileged in the film, the very rich pay for multimillion-dollar apartments and homes with filtration systems that perfectly purify their air, while the rest of us breathe in the funkiness.

Perhaps the screenwriters weren’t too far off the mark in setting Soylent Green in 2022?

“Soylent Green’s real achievement is to create a 21st Century world that’s convincing as reality; we somehow don’t feel we’re in a s-f picture.” – Roger Ebert

“A frighteningly logical extension of present day trends and turmoil.… A genuine attempt to reach into the heart of the deceptions that each day bring us closer to downfall.” – Marion Fox, Castle of Frankenstein magazine (1973)

“We are presented with a New York that bears all the more horrifying aspects of contemporary Calcutta and Beirut. All is done with exemplary intelligence.” – Baird Searles

“Lively futuristic yarn with a splendid climax … marred by narrative incoherence.” – Halliwell’s Film Guide

“Though the film is only a routine thriller beneath its clothing of environmental concern, at least it is dressed with some care.” – Film Quarterly

“Well-intentioned but cardboard adaptation.” – Leonard Maltin

“Soylent Green is languid, preachy, unconvincing and ultimately very unshocking…. The attempts to show the future world are mediocre at best and laughable at worst.” – Craig W. Anderson

“Overall it’s a pretty minor affair which blows the potential (limited as it was) of Harry Harrison’s original novel.” – Joe Dante, Castle of Frankenstein magazine (1973)

Soylent Green “is not only bad science and worse fiction and quite mindless – but it’s the unforgiveable: dull, dull, dull – and slightly nauseating.” – Judith Crist

“Sadly, the film suffers because it relies on box-office violence instead of an intelligent script to make its point.” – Daphne Davis, Women’s Wear Daily

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941) 

“Can this be evil?” – newborn Hyde, staring in a mirror  

Director Victor Fleming’s adaptation stresses psychology. Dig the Freudian dream sequence, in which Spencer Tracy whips two carriage horses, one dark and one white, which transform into bare-shouldered Ingrid Bergman and Lana Turner! 

“This is probably the first drug flick and the best of the mad monster movies, and Tracy gives the aristocratic doctor-fiend added dimension as well as thrills. When he drinks that bubbling potion and grows fangs, you just know nobody on the MGM lot was safe for days.” – Rex Reed (1992) 

“The tone of the 1941 version is not so much the macabre, as it is a sexual sadism – quite strikingly delivered for the era.” – Gregory William Mank 

“What Fleming and [scenarist John Lee] Mahin ultimately produced was a deft exercise in sadomasochism … a sort of tour of the psyche of an addict.” – Tracy biographer James Curtis  

“In the long line of Jekyll and Hyde movies, we must single out Fleming’s, which rises far above the theatrical and decorative preoccupations of horror-film hacks.” – Michel Perez in France’s Positif magazine (1966) 

“There are those, of course, who’ll carp and haggle that Tracy’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde isn’t up to par with the 1922 Barrymore or 1931 Fredric March version. But Tracy’s production was better on many counts. So was his interpretation in certain ways: Hyde’s evil emerges more subtly out of Tracy; with each transition we become increasingly more involved, more alarmed … realizing that Jekyll is fading away and turning more and more into the degenerate, monstrous Mr. Hyde. Tracy had a remarkable understanding of emotion, timing and underplay, which truly only helps to heighten the feeling of horror in the long run.” – Calvin T. Beck in Castle of Frankenstein magazine 

“The film fails totally because of Tracy’s performance which never manages to make anything of either Jekyll or Hyde and a script which ingeniously invokes Freud to no effect. … ‘Which is he now, Jekyll or Hyde?’ asked Somerset Maugham, on the set.” – Alan G. Frank  

“Long, generally uninspired version.” – Donald C. Willis 

“Solemn, ponderous and dreadfully insubstantial, a sort of perverse love story drenched in opulent MGM trimmings.” – Phil Hardy 

“Faced with the choice of creating hokum unabashed or a psychological study of a man caught in mortal conflict with himself, the producers have tried to do both – and failed by nearly two hours of pompous symbolism. … Mr. Tracy’s portrait of Hyde is not so much evil incarnate as it is the ham rampant.” – Theodore Strauss in The New York Times 

“The fact is that, in the evident striving to make Jekyll a ‘big’ film by elaborating the theme and introducing new characters and situations not found in the original story or earlier stage or screen adaptations, some of the finer psychological points are dulled. … It may be that Fleming, keeping closer to the literal than to the spirit of the text, missed some of the more subtle points.” – Variety