Raw Meat (1973)

Posted on October 5, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

There’s a certain subgenre of horror film that takes the form of a police procedural: understated, reserved, doggedly sticking to the facts, sorting through suspects, and chasing the clues until they lead to stranger and stranger conclusions, with either a monster or a madman waiting at the end. Many of these unfold in American urban centers (see: Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To and Q: The Winged Serpent), but just as many, it seems, take place in London. The British have always excelled at this kind of thing; last week I wrote about the British film The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), which took the same approach to a science fiction tale of alien invasion, and stands with the best SF films of the 50’s as a result. Raw Meat (1973), aka Death Line, an AIP film with an American director and a British setting, commits itself so entirely to the police procedural/journalistic narrative device that it almost forgets to be a horror film. Never mind the fact that it’s about grisly murders committed by inbred cannibals in the London Underground.

The first victim (James Cossins) is about to be claimed by a cannibal of the Underground.

The film opens with one of the most stylish opening credits sequences of the early 70’s: the camera shifts in and out of focus while tracking a well-to-do gentleman who’s browsing through sex shops and strip clubs as casually as a teenager at the mall on Friday night, as funky theme music by Will Malone grinds hot and sweaty on the soundtrack. As the credits end, he finds himself in the Underground, and swiftly executed by something unseen. Later, a young American and his British girlfriend come across the victim’s body sprawled on the steep steps of the tunnels. He wants to pass the scene by, assuming it’s nothing but an unconscious drunk; but she demonstrates some inconvenient empathy. When they determine he’s dead, they search his wallet and find out he’s no less than an O.B.E. By the time they can summon a security guard, the body is gone. Still, the very specific identification they can give of the corpse’s identity calls the attention of the police, and so the case falls into the lap of Inspector Calhoun. The inspector, as played by Donald Pleasence of The Great Escape (1963) and You Only Live Twice (1967), can’t summon enthusiasm past a barely coherent mumble, and maintains this disposition for much of the film. Far more interested is Detective Sergeant Rogers (Norman Rossington), though Calhoun merely demands the man keep him constantly supplied with tea. (He berates his secretary, “Tea bags? You’ve been using tea bags?” To which she responds, “They’re standard issue, sir.”) Calhoun shows little patience with the young couple – he sees them as hippies – and makes scant progress in the search for the missing O.B.E. Christopher Lee has a brief cameo as a member of MI-5, which begins to take an interest in the case, and he spars briefly with Pleasence before disappearing from the film; one gathers the intent was merely to place “and Christopher Lee” in the opening credits. Which is fine by me; this is Christopher Lee.

Donald Pleasence, as Inspector Calhoun, demands more tea.

When it comes to plot, there isn’t much to speak of. Some brief exposition-dump about tunnelers trapped long, long ago while working on an expansion of the Underground is obviously very important – especially when it’s speculated that some of those workers, never recovered, may have survived – but Inspector Calhoun’s investigation never really leads him where it ought to; only when the young woman, Patricia (Sharon Gurney), returns to the scene of the crime and is kidnapped does the story finally begin moving forward. But it’s not the plot which makes Raw Meat special. It’s the strangely muted delivery of its potent material: after that groovy opening tune, music is largely absent from the film, whose soundtrack relies instead upon Pleasence’s irritated mumblings and demands for more tea. From these dry-as-toast bureaucratic scenes we’re shaken with sudden bursts of violence, such as the killing of two maintenance workers in the tunnels, one of whom is impaled by a broom handle. And director Gary Sherman frequently contrasts above-ground banality with the cannibals living underground, wandering through makeshift butcher shops decorated with human body parts, feasting on rats and “raw meat.” They even receive some pathos: when “the woman” (June Turner) dies pregnant, “the man” (Hugh Armstrong) falls into such a grief and rage that he’s driven to take more excursions into the occupied tunnels of the Underground, to claim more victims, and, possibly, a new wife. This approach is reminiscent, to a modern viewer, of the X-Files episode “Home,” which also dealt with cannibals and inbreeding, but didn’t shrink from humanizing its killers.

The cannibal (Hugh Armstrong) mourns his wife (June Turner).

And yet, it’s difficult to wholly recommend Raw Meat: it’s an interesting picture, a significant genre film in many ways, but a flawed one. When you realize, after the film has concluded, that all the time spent on the police investigation was wasted – that there is no genuine clues-to-solution progression – you feel a little cheated. Much of the film is merely padding, a semblance of a narrative which exists either to frame some gruesome cannibal horror, or to highlight a rare starring performance by the prolific character actor Donald Pleasence. To that latter end, I can hardly complain (though if that’s all you want, go watch Cul-de-sac instead). And there isn’t enough horror, either. By the time we arrive at the inevitable Underground confrontation with the killer, it’s too little, too late. Regardless, Raw Meat casts a significant shadow on horror films that followed in the 70’s and 80’s, particularly An American Werewolf in London – which made the Underground spooky again, and to bigger rewards. In the glut of low-budget drive-in movies of the early 70’s, it stands apart for refusing to be cheap and exploitative. It’s a serious film. With an awful lot of steaming-hot tea.

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House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Posted on October 3, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Since July I’ve been posting reviews of the films featured on the William Castle Film Collection DVD box set, encompassing Castle’s run at Columbia Pictures; although his career was far from over, I’d like to close out this survey of his horror work (for now) by circling back to the film that became his breakthrough in the genre, House on Haunted Hill (1959). It wasn’t just a big film for Castle, who had heretofore directed B-pictures in a variety of categories, and had just begun to dabble in horror with Macabre (1958); it also played a significant part in the career transition of Vincent Price. Price had been acting in pictures since the late 30’s, occasionally stealing the spotlight in films such as Laura (1944), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and His Kind of Woman (1951) – the latter an eccentric little film that allowed Price to display his knack for comedy. He could be the romantic leading man or a sneering villain in a swashbuckler, but in 1953’s 3-D House of Wax he essayed what would become his signature role: the droll murderer, an antihero at the center of a black-humored horror tale. The subsequent one-two punch of The Fly (1958) and House on Haunted Hill fixed this personality in the minds of moviegoers, and cemented him as a cultural icon. When Price agreed to a two-picture deal for Castle (The Tingler quickly followed), horror film history was made.

The slumber party begins: (L-R) Julie Mitchum, Alan Marshal, Vincent Price, Richard Long, Carolyn Craig, and Elisha Cook Jr.

It’s a very straightforward film, but efficiently designed and executed, like the stately, severely right-angled Frank Lloyd Wright home which stands in for the titular haunted house (it also featured in Blade Runner). At the outset, we sit in the darkness of the theater listening to sounds that could be coming from any Halloween sound-effects tape: screams, creaking doors, moans, rattling chains; then the head of character actor Elisha Cook Jr. (The Maltese Falcon, The Killing) drifts toward us Zardoz-like. He introduces himself as Watson Pritchard, the owner of “the only real haunted house in the world,” which has claimed several lives, including that of his brother. “I only spent one night there, and when they found me in the morning, I was almost dead.” (If you’ve ever read Richard Matheson’s Hell House, or seen the film The Legend of Hell House, this character and his story might seem familiar. Matheson’s excellent novel borrowed liberally from both this film and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, published the same year Castle’s film was released.) Price, as the millionaire Frederick Loren, takes over narration duties; he gets to be a floating head too, lucky guy. He explains that he and his wife have invited a small group of strangers to spend an evening at “the House on Haunted Hill,” to meet up at midnight. He introduces the cast one at a time, as they’re conducted to the estate in hearses. In addition to Watson Pritchard, there’s Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), a pretty young employee of Loren’s company; Ruth Bridges (Julie Mitchum), a newspaper columnist writing an article on ghosts; David Trent (Alan Marshal), a psychiatrist; and cocky test pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long). All of them have been lured by what seems to be easy money: survive one night in the house and Loren will award each of them $10,000. They’ve never met Loren, nor do they understand his motives, but they’re in desperate need of the money.

Frederick Loren (Vincent Price) trades insults with his bitter spouse, Annabelle (Carol Ohmart).

But we know that Frederick Loren has been making death threats to Annabelle, his fifth wife, which she is returning in kind. They seem less concerned with the prospect of murderous ghosts, and more with trying to survive another evening of hate-filled marriage. After some Taming of the Shrew-style exchanges of frosty wit in the bedroom, Frederick goes downstairs to introduce himself to his guests, pour some hard liquor, and begin a tour of the house conducted by Pritchard. The house has no electricity, and after midnight the caretakers will lock them inside; to further up the ante, Frederick gives each of them a loaded gun which arrives in a cute little coffin-shaped box. When the party heads down to the cellar, Pritchard displays a trap door which leads to a pool of acid. Nora nearly falls in, so it’s a wonder that she lingers in the dungeon with Lance when the others go upstairs. As the two begin exploring the adjacent closets and rooms, a door suddenly slams shut between them, Lance is knocked unconscious, and Nora watches all the candles in the room flicker out one-by-one, before she sees an eerie-looking woman with white hair and white eyes drifting toward her out of the darkness. She screams and runs for help, and Lance is shortly rescued, nursing a bad bruise. Refusing to learn their lesson, a few short scenes later and Lance and Nora are exploring the basement alone again. They’re once more separated, and Nora now comes face to face with the ghostly woman, who sneers at her from a few inches away. She screams, and when Lance reaches her a moment later, the old woman is gone. Not to worry: when they return upstairs, they learn that Nora’s ghost is actually just the blind wife of the caretaker; we can only assume she’s given to wandering around in the cellar with the acid pool, lurking in closets and jumping at strangers, just for kicks.

Not a ghost, but an incredible simulation: the blind caretaker.

Here’s the thing: as utterly ridiculous as this sequence of events is – I love it. It has a nightmare logic which is perfect for young, impressionable kids who have no idea how absurd and silly this all is. That Nora is left alone twice, and that on the second occasion the hideous spectre she glimpsed from a distance is now suddenly right before her, bad-breath-close, is just the kind of campfire folklore that drives straight to the center of the nervous system for every bedwetter daring to watch the film between sweaty fingers. But William Castle has a few more tricks up his sleeve. First Frederick’s wife Annabelle is found hanging from a noose in the stairwell. (That’s right – someone manages to laboriously rope her up in the most heavily trafficked section of the house, and nobody witnesses this.) After her corpse is tucked back into bed, the haunting really moves into full swing. Nora is chased from one corner of the house to another, and finds herself at the end of her rope – literally. She witnesses Annabelle’s ghost lurking outside her bedroom window, and one end of the cord that hanged her moves, animate, into Nora’s room and wraps itself around her legs. Later she finds a bloody head in her luggage, and a cobweb-covered organ that plays its own ghostly tune; she even has to fight off a monstrous hand that grasps at her from around a corner. In other words, she’s in a carnival funhouse: always the atmosphere that William Castle revels in. We soon learn that Annabelle is still alive, anticipating that the hauntings hide her escape with her lover, psychiatrist Dr. Trent.  She’s also planned to have her husband murdered at the hands of Nora, who’s been driven to manic hysteria, and shoots Frederick as soon as she sees him. (That this plan actually works is as ludicrous everything else in the picture.) But after it seems that Frederick’s been dissolved in the acid bath, the undead millionaire rises as a walking skeleton. The skeleton chases Annabelle into the acid, and Frederick emerges from the shadows, operating the device with strings: the great puppetmaster. Nora’s gun, it seems, was deliberately loaded with blanks. Frederick has triumphed over his fifth wife after all.

Dr. Trent (Alan Marshal) discovers the body of Annabelle.

Castle had initiated his series of famous marketing gimmicks with his previous film, Macabre, in which life insurance policies were issued to the audience members in case the film scared them to death. For House on Haunted Hill, he decided to make the moviegoing experience more interactive. He introduced “Emergo,” a one-of-a-kind technique that would never be utilized again. When Vincent Price’s skeleton appeared onscreen at the film’s climax, a glow-in-the-dark skeleton was dangled on a wire over the audience’s heads. William C. Wind, a witness to Emergo, wrote to DVD Talk’s Glenn Erickson in 2005, describing the gimmick thus: “As I waited for House on Haunted Hill to start, I noticed a small black booth that had been mounted by one end of the screen. The booth was painted black, with a black curtain on the front. From the booth, a thin wire could be seen leading up to the opposite end of the balcony (I was seated downstairs). When the big scene began and Vincent Price began cranking, a skeleton emerged from the booth and slowly climbed up the wire toward the balcony. Immediately, all the teenage girls in the audience (and some of the boys) began screaming in mock horror.” As cheesy as the technique was, showman Castle received such great publicity that he immediately began plotting a topper – an escalating series of theater pranks which would secure his reputation: The Tingler, 13 Ghosts, Homicidal, and so on. After The Tingler, Price formed a new partnership with a different kind of huckster: young Roger Corman, who initiated a lucrative series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations beginning with House of Usher (1960). I imagine it was a grand time to be a frightened young child.

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When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

Posted on September 30, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Following the worldwide success of One Million Years B.C. (1966), the Racquel Welch/Ray Harryhausen dinosaur adventure, Hammer Films quickly installed “prehistoric cheesecake” as one of their genre specialties. The sets and costumes (fur bikinis, et al) were quickly reused for Slave Girls (aka Prehistoric Women, 1967), which was actually a strange mash-up of the Harryhausen film and another Hammer hit, She (1965), since it involved a modern white explorer in Africa who slips backward in time to the prehistoric past. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) is more of a straightforward sequel to One Million Years B.C. Written and directed by Val Guest, a pivotal player in Hammer’s heritage thanks to his work on The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass 2 (1957), The Abominable Snowman (1957), and The Camp on Blood Island (1958), among others, the film was also notable because it featured dinosaurs, something Slave Girls was sorely lacking. Harryhausen was busy creating dinos for The Valley of Gwangi (1969), a personal project for the animator since it was initiated by his late mentor, King Kong‘s Willis O’Brien. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth would instead call upon the talents of a young stop-motion artist named Jim Danforth. Danforth had done some work on the seminal fantasy film The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), but this would be the first motion picture in which he supervised all the special effects. His work would receive an Oscar nomination, which is amusing not because he didn’t deserve the recognition, but because the film is such delicious camp.

Victoria Vetri, as Sanna, is exiled from the tribe for the crime of being a blonde.

Playboy model Victoria Vetri plays Sanna (only one letter removed from being the voluptuous incarnation of Marvel Comics’ “Shanna the She-Devil”), who is a beautiful blonde, and punished for it. As the film opens, a number of blonde girls are being ritually sacrificed to the rising sun. Their captors have dark hair, for the most part, though many of them wear fearsome alligator heads. Sanna escapes by diving into the sea, where she’s rescued by the hunky Tara (Robin Hawdon), who’s rowing a raft with a number of other bearded caveman warriors. She returns with him to his tribe, where her blonde hair causes a furor. During a ritualistic dance (the men imitate frogs, squatting and jumping and generally acting like acid freaks), Tara begins to fall for Sanna, and so after he lends the newcomer a prize bone necklace, his jealous girlfriend accuses her of theft before the tribal chief. Sanna escapes into the jungle, where she confronts perils such as a python and a tall phallic plant that nearly consumes her. In the mountains she learns why you should never go to sleep in a giant broken egg; in the morning the returning mother, a colossal dinosaur (sort of a cross between a brontosaurus and an allosaurus), accepts Sanna as one of her newborns. Sanna doesn’t really try to convince the mother otherwise, and soon is teaching one of the other hatchlings how to “sit” like a dog.

Tara (Robin Hawdon) slays a pterodactyl on his quest to find his beloved Sanna.

When Tara is finally reunited with Sanna, he rips off her clothes and they make caveman love; this is followed by a nude swim. Although When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth has been pretty risqué so far – thanks to Vetri’s ultra-skimpy bikini, which can barely restrain her breasts – the sudden introduction of nudity so late in the story is surprising; especially so if you happened to pick up Warner’s 2008 Region 1 “Sci-Fi Double Feature” DVD: the back cover proclaims both films (this and Moon Zero Two) to be rated G. Naturally, this was a mistake; Warner had used a rare and uncut version of the picture. (Lest any parents complain, the DVD was allowed to go quickly out of print.) The nudity is welcome but bizarrely inappropriate, considering that a few scenes earlier, with Vetri playing with a baby dinosaur, the film seemed to suggest that children were its target audience. The reason is that Hammer was in a transitional phase at the dawn of the 1970’s. As skin and sex became more commonplace in cinema, and the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) relaxed their standards for such material, Hammer was quick to push the envelope and give audiences more of what they wanted; this is most evident in the studio’s “Carmilla” cycle of female vampire films: The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire, and Twins of Evil (both 1971) all were sold as much for their sexual content as horror. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth was caught between this type of cinema and the more chaste Hammer product of the 60’s. On the one hand, it wanted to duplicate the formula set in One Million Years B.C. On the other hand, it felt increasing pressure for those cavewomen to pop their tops.

Tara (center) commits himself to a tribal ceremony.

There’s another factor which adds to the outrageousness of the film: the nonstop dialogue. For reasons unknown, Val Guest was convinced that audiences wanted to listen to caveman gibberish in extended dialogue sequences just as much as they wanted to see scantily-clad people fighting dinosaurs. He obliges by providing a custom-made vocabulary for his prehistoric characters, rigorously followed in scene after scene. (Though Guest wrote the screenplay, the treatment was by none other than experimental novelist J.G. Ballard.) The actors, particularly Robin Hawdon and Patrick Allen (Chief Kingsor), deliver the lines with nuanced inflection and great intensity; I have no idea why. One imagines that the producer glanced through the script, saw page after page of “Akeeta! Neecro!”, shrugged, and said “get some bikinis and shoot it.” That said, at least one can follow every plot point, not that this is ever a great stumbling-block of caveman movies. After Tara has found Sanna, they confront the angry tribe, and the audience at home should be able to provide their own subtitles by this point. A climax involving a giant tsunami approaching the coastal village is only made more ludicrous when our heroes hurry to get onto a raft and paddle out to sea – directly towards it. This leads to a denouement in which the moon is born in the night sky. That’s right, there was no moon previously. Cavemen watched it come together; it was a really big deal at the time, apparently.

A feast is prepared with a captured plesiosaur, courtesy stop-motion animator Jim Danforth.

Jim Danforth proves himself a worthy successor to the absent Ray Harryhausen; his dinosaur creations are superb, and fully integrated into the sets and Canary Island locations (he would later work with Harryhausen as an assistant on Clash of the Titans). Look, I love this stuff – and here we’re treated to a scene involving a captured plesiosaur that gets loose and stomps on the tribesmen with its fins; a triceratops battle at the edge of a cliff; a remake of the pterodactyl scene of One Million Years B.C., this time with Hawdon carried through the air; and, of course, Sanna’s pet dinosaurs. There’s a nice moment when the mother offers Sanna some food to eat: a giant elk-like carcass is dumped at her feet, and the dino nudges it helpfully with her nose. The subsequent image of the dinosaur obediently following a spear-wielding Victoria Vetri across a rocky plain is memorable, as well. All this delirious pulp is the reason why the film is easily the best of Hammer’s prehistoric cash-ins in the wake of their Harryhausen hit; the more straight-faced Creatures the World Forgot (1971) might be more scientifically accurate – there are no dinosaurs – but it’s also stiff and dreary. The slightly gonzo approach of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth makes the endeavor an unexpected blast.

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