THE MONSTER CLUB: COMIC STRIP PART TWO

DR KNOX: PETER CUSHNG AND DONALD PLEASENCE: THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS (1960)

Peter Cushing, Donald Pleasence and George Rose in John Gilling's 'The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)

RAQUEL WELCH DONALD PLEASENCE: FANTASTIC VOYAGE : PHOTO GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Stephen Boyd (Charles Grant), Raquel Welch (Cora Peterson), Donald Pleasence (Dr Maxwell Michaels), Arthur Kennedy (Dr Peter Duval), William Redfield (William Owens), Edmond O’Brien (General Carter), Arthur O’Connell (Colonel Reid) 

PRODUCTION: 

Director – Richard Fleischer, Screenplay – Harry Kleiner, Adaptation – David Duncan, Story – Jay Lewis Bixby [Jerome Bixby] & Otto Klement, Producer – Saul David, Photography – Ernest Laszlo, Music – Leonard Rosenman, Photographic Effects – L.B. Abbott, Art Cruickshank & Emil Kosa Jr, Art Direction – Dale Hennesy & Jack Martin Smith, Submarine Design – Harper Goff. Production Company – 20th Century Fox.  

SYNOPSIS:

Scientist Jan Benes defects to the West but an assassination attempt leaves him a coma. Agent Charles Grant is recruited by the top-secret organization Combined Miniaturized Deterrence Forces. He learns that he is to be part of a crew aboard a submarine The Proteus. The crew and submarine will be reduced to microscopic size and injected into the Benes’s bloodstream in order to operate on the surgically inaccessible clot in his brain using a laser. Injected into the body, Grant and the surgical team travel through the bloodstream in the submarine, marvelling at the wonders of the human body seen on a microscopic level. They must reach the brain within 60 minutes or else the effect will wear off and they will return to full-size. However, the voyage is undermined by one of the crew who is a saboteur and is prepared to risk everything to stop the mission.

COMMENTARY:

Fantastic Voyage is one of my all-time favourite science-fiction films. It is one of the most ingenious pieces of pure conceptual science-fiction poetry that the genre has ever created. One can ridicule its problems and holes, which are manyfold, but it is impossible to argue with the conceptual brilliance of the film, the sheer imaginative splendour of the idea of conducting a journey by miniaturized submarine through the human body. The script, which comes in part from science-fiction writer Jerome Bixby, knows exactly what a sense of wonder is. And the film creates an amazing view of the human body as a veritable Aladdin’s cave of marvels, more wondrous, colourful and lit up than it could possibly ever be in real life. Even if the superb sets and effects are occasionally beset by grainy mattes lines and the visibility of wires, the imagination of the exercise soars. It is a pure celebration of science-fiction as conceptual poetry rather than as science. Indeed, Fantastic Voyage is an object lesson in what science-fiction can do on screen that the written page can never replicate.  

Jerome Bixby originally envisioned the film as a Jules Verne-ian period piece a la the fad for retro-Victorian science-fiction created by Fantastic Voyage director Richard Fleischer’s own 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). This is something that would have been fascinating – but it was changed during rewriting and the film updated into the Space Age. Now it echoes with the sense that humanity was on the frontier of taking a quantum leap forward and conquering the whole universe. “Maybe the ancient philosophers were right – man is the centre of the universe. Man stands between inner and outer space and there is no limit to either,” says Duval during one of his many such pronouncements. The film is almost a hymn to Space Age technology. 

Richard Fleischer follows the operation with wonderfully methodical exactitude – the journey through the vast labyrinth by golf cart, the operation being monitored by characters in lab coats on blinking, whirring computers, the submarine slowly being placed on an hexagonal dais, the pickup trolley being wheeled in and the submarine being shrunken in a glass tube and then connected to a syringe. The sense of detail and detached clinicism to the operation is enthralling. Contrast this to the wave of hand that usually produced marvels of super science in 1950s science-fiction or the heated fervour of madness under which discovery was conducted in 1930s and 40s mad scientist films – there is the sense that the future is here right now. 

Once inside the body, Fantastic Voyage is dramatically construed as a series of set-pieces involving journeys to a particular part of the body whereupon something goes wrong with regular predictability. It is the things going wrong that makes the story dramatically gripping. The scenes navigating through the temporarily stopped heart, the manned venture into the lungs, and especially the seat-edge suspenseful passage through the inner ear as everybody in the operating room has to remain absolutely still and not make a sound lest they cause the inner ear to vibrate are utterly gripping.

Unfortunately, in the numerous re-writings the script clearly underwent, not much attention was paid to the characters who are all written to type – the square-jawed jock hero, the curvaceous token female, the atheistic traitor. Stephen Boyd and Raquel Welch, in her first leading role, are both wooden, although this is not a film where one has come expecting penetrating character depth. What is worse is the character of Duval the surgeon has no other characterization than to stand around and delivers ponderous pronouncements about “the miracle of life.” “40 million beats a year,” someone comments in reference to the heart, to which his reply is “All that stands between man and eternity.” It is a not particularly subtle debate – the side of good shows religious awe at the miraculous nature of the human body, while the contrary opinion represents godless atheism and is ultimately revealed as being a Communist traitor (even if Communism is not directly referred to in the film), not to mention is also the perpetual voice of cowardice and defeatism on the mission.

You cannot deny that there are numerous logic holes in the film. One can forgive minor quibbles such as the impossibility of squeezing normal-size air molecules into a micro-sized snorkel, or how surface tension would make it extremely difficult to swim inside a tear. However, there is one gaping hole that you could drive a full-size submarine through and that is this:– the film establishes that it is necessary that the operation be completed within a 60 minute limit otherwise the crew and submarine will return to full-size. (Interestingly, the dramatics of the journey take longer than 60 minutes to occur on screen). However, at the end of the film, the crew return to full-size but somehow leave a submarine and the body of the traitor behind in Benes’s brain after both have been consumed by a white blood cell. Do the filmmakers somehow think that being consumed by a white blood cell will fail to cause them to return to full size? Not to mention the fact that at some point between when they complete the operation and swim out, the crew also discard the laser in the brain. Everybody also seems to have forgotten about the fact that a six foot tall cylinder of water was reduced to the size of a syringe and injected into Benes – indeed, the amount of water injected into Benes’s body is far more than his body mass, which would surely cause him to literally explode when it too returns to normal size. At least, the producers had the good sense to recruit science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov to write the novelization Fantastic Voyage (1966), which is one of the finest in the usually creatively impoverished arena of film novelizations, wherein Asimov patches up many of the scientific and plot holes. For all its logical failings, Fantastic Voyage is still one of the most ingenious pieces of total Hollywood bunkum. 

There was a short-lived animated tv series Fantastic Voyage (1968-9). There have been plans in the 1990s to mount a remake as directed by Roland Emmerich of Independence Day (1996) fame. James Cameron also expressed interest, although apparently Roland Emmerich rejected his script. Joe Dante’s Innerspace (1987) was a spoof.

Richard Fleischer has directed a number of other genre films – Disney’s classic Jules Verne adaptation 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), the musical version of Doctor Dolittle (1967), The Boston Strangler (1968), the psycho-thriller See No Evil/Blind Terror (1971), the true life serial killer film 10 Rillington Place (1971), the over-populated future film Soylent Green (1973), Amityville 3-D (1983), and the Robert E. Howard adaptations Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Red Sonja (1985).

REVIEW:HERE

IMGAES: MARCUS BROOKS   

DARIO ARGENTO: PHENOMENA: LOBBY CARDS AND REVIEW

CAST:

Jennifer Connelly (Jennifer Corvino), Donald Pleasence (John MacGregor), Daria Nicolodi (Frau Bruckner), Dalila DiLazzaro (Headmistress), Federica Mastroianni (Sophie), Patrick Bauchau (Inspector Rudolf Geiger)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Producer – Dario Argento, Screenplay – Dario Argento & Franco Ferrini, Photography – Romano Albani, Insect Photography – Ferdinando Armati, Underwater Photography – Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Special Stage Effects – Tonino Corridori, Insect Effects – Maurizio Garrone, Makeup – Sergio Stivaletti, Production Design – Maurizio Garrone, Nello Giorgetti, Luciano Spadoni & Umberto Turco. Production Company – Dacfilm. Italy. 1985.

SYNOPSYS:

Jennifer Corvino, daughter of an American film star, arrives in Switzerland in the area known as ‘The Swiss Transylvania’ to attend the Richard Wagner School for Girls. She arrives at the same time as a killer starts stalking the girls at the school. She is befriended by the wheelchair-ridden Scottish entomologist John MacGregor who discovers that Jennifer has an ability to telepathically communicate with insects. As she explores her newfound ability, Jennifer realises that this also offers a means of discovering the killer’s identity. 

COMMENTARY:

The films of Dario Argento have an extraordinary wildness to them. They cannot be viewed as rational psycho-thrillers or traditional tales of the occult – they are works that exist almost entirely for the sake of displaying scenes of gratuitous sadism, all presented with a wild artistic flair. Argento’s artistic fascination with psychopathology and sadism can take one aback. It is as if Argento treats the human body and its entrails as though it were an artist’s clay that he might pull apart and rearrange as though fascinated to see what sorts of objects might be placed up against or into it 

Many Italo-horrorphiles call Phenomena a slipshod piece of Argento. However, there is much to enjoy – Argento holds one’s attention throughout and the plot is neither any more nor any less coherent than any other Dario Argento film. The setting is admittedly a steal from Suspiria (1977) but Argento only uses it as a springboard and turns the film into a unique detective story. The scenes where Jennifer Connelly realises her psychic powers and starts using the insects to locate the killer are the most fascinating in the film and, although Argento never takes the insect telepathy angle anywhere after introducing it, this slant on a detective story has a uniqueness unlike anything that has ever been done before.

When it comes to his trademark suspense and dismemberment, Argento creates some startling scenes – like where Jennifer Connelly realises that she has been poisoned and starts making herself try to throw up before it affects her. The extended climax is also excellent with wild and weird sequences like where Jennifer Connelly follows a telephone cord down a tunnel into a cellar filled with pools of maggot-ridden dead bodies; or Patrick Bauchau having to break his own hand so that he can get out of a manacle; and Jennifer Connelly’s climactic fight with the killer’s son, being dragged underwater by him as she tries to flee the burning gasoline in the water.

Jennifer Connelly, then only fifteen years old, turns in a reasonably sophisticated performance and Donald Pleasence lends his kindly if aging presence as the wheelchair-ridden scientist.

Dario Argento’s other films are:– The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Deep Red (1976), Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae/Unsane (1982), Opera/Terror at the Opera (1987), Two Evil Eyes (1990), Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), The Phantom of the Opera (1999), Sleepless (2001), The Card Player (2004), Mother of Tears: The Third Mother (2007), Giallo (2009) and Dracula 3D (2012). 

HAMMER FILM NOIR: HELL IS A CITY: STANLEY BAKER : BILLIE WHITELAW STILLS GALLERY AND REVIEW

Director: Val Guest. Writers: Val Guest (screenplay), Maurice Procter (novel)
Stars: Stanley Baker, John Crawford and Donald Pleasence

Based upon the 1954 novel by crime novelist Maurice Procter, a former policeman who served for 19 years with the Halifax police force, Hell Is A City is a highly effective and punchy 1960 British Film Noir/police procedural drama, mostly set on the mean streets of Manchester. 

Made by the famous Hammer film studio and directed and written by one of its star directors, Val Guest (The Quatermass Xperiment, Expresso Bongo, The Day The Earth Caught Fire), Hell Is A City is most notable for a driving, Elmer Bernstein style Crime Jazz score by Stanley Black, Arthur Grant’s (The Curse Of The Werewolf, The Devil Rides Out) lush black and white cinematography depicting a forbidding and mostly vanished post war Manchester and by a fine cast, lead by the irreplaceable Stanley Baker.

The opening titles of the movie set the tone: shot from the back seat of speeding police car, the silhouettes of the driver and his partner face the icky blackness of the night, illuminated by their car headlights, ominous speckles of neon and the street lights of central Manchester, while Stanley Black’s (in the early 1950s he habitually topped the Melody Maker chart of the most-heard musicians on radio) blaring big band soundtrack blasts a suitably portentous accompaniment. Guest transforms Manchester into a twilight vision of urban inferno Manhattan, as it was envisioned by fellow Brit Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 classic Sweet Smell Of Success. 

Harry Martineau (Stanley Baker: The Cruel Sea, Zulu, Accident) is a tough, dedicated police inspector on the trail of Don Starling (John Crawford: The Enforcer), who escaped from prison after serving 5 years of his 14-year prison sentence for a jewelry robbery, and killed a warden in the process. Inspector Martineau was the arresting officer and knew the troubled Starling from his youth. He suspects Starling will be traveling to Manchester to recover the stolen jewels he hid away before being convicted.

 As Martineau deduces, Starling returns undetected to Manchester and goes to see Laurie Lovett (Charles Morgan: Sergeant Cork), who was in on the jewelry heist. Grateful Starling never turned him in Lovett finds him a place to hide at night. He reveals his plans to get a phony passport and flee the country, but not until he gets all the money he needs to implement his escape. He plans the next day to rob the bookmaker Gus Hawkins (Donald Pleasence: Halloween) of his gambling take with the help of Lovett’s gang.

The robbery expectedly does not go as planned and the gang is forced to disappear in different directions. Starling contacts Gus’ wife Chloe (Billie Whitelaw: The Omen, Frenzy) with whom he previously had an affair. She hides him in the attic located in the bedroom but when Gus takes a peek thinking he heard a noise, he is hit on the head and hospitalized with a concussion as the police take note that Starling has been spotted for the first time in Manchester and thereby connect him to the robbery. As inspector Martineau tracks Starling down, the gang fall one by one, until only the murderer is left.

Upon its release in 1960 Hell Is A City was acclaimed for its realism, bold depiction of violence and gritty Manchester locations, while nominated for two British Academy Awards for Best Screenplay and Most Promising Newcomer for Billie Whitelaw. More than half a century later, the films faults are glaringly obvious ”“ the portrayal of the troubled domestic life of Martineau and his wife is unconvincing (all would be well if she would just submit to his desire to bear him children), American actor John Crawford’s complete inability to muster a halfway convincing English, let alone Mancunian, accent, a somewhat cliched illustration of working class life and the sanitized depiction of the Manchester police force, which is without any single taint of corruption lurking in the shadows.

Yet the fantastic Stanley Baker’s intensely committed performance, which highlights the fact that the obsessed Martineau has really no life outside police work and that he will freely use any degree of emotional blackmail upon those he questions, regardless of the consequences, in order to catch Starling, endures. Coupled with Grant’s striking location photography (very well served by this digitally re-mastered DVD) of vintage Greater Manchester locations (including Piccadilly Gardens, Moss Side, Oldham, Levenshulme and Strangeways prison) and Black’s propulsive score, Hell Is A City remains an exciting proposition.

Images: Marcus Brooks

Review: HERE

JOAN COLLINS : MARY TAMM : KIM NOVAK : JACK HAWKINS: DONALD PLEASENCE: TALES THAT WITNESS MADNESS : GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Linking Story:- Jack Hawkins (Nicholas), Donald Pleasence (Dr Tremayne). Mr Tiger:- Russell Lewis (Paul), Georgia Brown (Mother), David Wood (Tutor). Penny Farthing:- Peter McEnery (Timothy), Suzy Kendall (Ann/Beatrice). Mel:- Michael Jayston (Brian), Joan Collins (Bella). Luau:- Kim Novak (Auriol), Michael Petrovitch (Kimo), Mary Tamm (Virginia), Leon Lissek (Keoki)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Freddie Francis, Screenplay – Jay Fairbank [Jennifer Jayne], Based on Short Stories by Jennifer Jayne, Producer – Norman Priggen, Photography – Norman Warwick, Music – Bernard Ebbinghouse, Makeup – Eric Allwright, Art Direction – Roy Walker. Production Company – World Film Services. UK. 1972.

SYNOPSIS:

A psychiatrist shows a friend around his asylum and tells him the stories of various patients. Mr Tiger:- Two parents become concerned when their son Paul develops an invisible playmate Mr Tiger. But then Paul starts collecting bones to feed it and they find claw marks on the door. Penny Farthing:- An antique dealer buys a painting and a penny farthing bicycle. The painting sends out emissions that lift him onto the bicycle and repeatedly transports him back to the same moment in the 19th Century where he is walking along a riverbank with a woman while secretly being observed by a disfigured man. Mel:- Brian brings home a strangely shaped piece of wood that he finds while jogging. Much to the annoyance of his wife Bella, he begins to neglect her and instead spend his time carving the piece of wood into the figure of a woman. Luau:- A Polynesian writer Kimo is invited to a party by wealthy show business agent Auriol. He seduces her daughter Virginia. However, Kimo has a sinister ulterior motive – that of killing Virginia and then serving up her cooked flesh at her mother’s dinner party in order to escape a curse placed on him.

COMMENTARY:

Tales That Witness Madness was very much an attempt to copy the style of the portmanteau horror films patented by England’s Amicus Films. Indeed, Tales That Witness Madness has many similarities to Asylum (1972) released by Amicus the same year – both films feature the same framing device of a psychiatrist in an asylum telling the stories of his patients. Tales That Witness Madness was also directed by Freddie Francis, who was the most prolific director of Amicus’s anthologies, having made the likes of Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), Torture Garden (1967) and Tales from the Crypt (1972). (See below for Freddie Francis’s other genre films).

The first episode Mr Tiger is a rewrite of The Veldt segment of the Ray Bradbury anthology The Illustrated Man (1968), albeit with Bradbury’s science-fiction justification removed. Freddie Francis delivers it with a droll sense of humour. There is a particularly charming final shot to the segment, focused on the boy playing his toy piano as the killings take place off-screen, he unconcerned as welts of blood splatter all over the wall behind him. 

The second episode Penny Farthing is the best of the stories, an intriguing, cleverly constructed time travel puzzle that continues to circle around the same moment in time, before ending on a fascinating causal paradox. The third segment Mel has the camp value of Joan Collins showing down in one of the grand battles of bitchery she would later base her Hollywood career on up against an animate tree. The image of a backlit tree, half-carved into a female shape is given a certain primal eroticism, but no matter how much imagery that Freddie Francis pumps into it, the block of wood supposedly come to life it is not a particularly expressive or threatening menace. Luau, while holding a strong, taboo-crossing premise, is the weakest of the segments, suffering from some awful campy acting on the part of Kim Novak and some bad dialogue from screenwriter Jennifer Jayne.

Freddie Francis has called Tales That Witness Madness his best film. It features his customary sharp and stylish contrasts between fore– and background. Despite fine premises, the stories often suffer from the flat-minded literalness that beset many of the lesser Amicus entries. This is particularly so with the last two segments, which fail to hold up to their initial conceptual inventiveness and taboo-daring.

The screenplay was written by actress Jennifer Jayne under the name Jay Fairbank, adapting several of her own stories. Jennifer Jayne was a minor British actress whose most notable role was as the sister of the psychic Janet Munro in The Trollenberg Terror/The Crawling Eye (1958). She has appeared in a number of Freddie Francis’s films including Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (as Donald Sutherland’s vampire wife), Hysteria (1965), They Came from Beyond Space (1967) and The Doctor and the Devils (1985). As Jay Fairbank, she also wrote the screenplay for Freddie Francis’s flop horror musical Son of Dracula (1974).

Freddie Francis’s other genre films are:- Vengeance/The Brain (1962), Paranoiac (1962), Nightmare (1963), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1964), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Hysteria (1965), The Skull (1965), The Psychopath (1966), The Deadly Bees (1967), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Torture Garden (1967), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), Trog (1970), The Vampire Happening (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Craze (1973), The Creeping Flesh (1973), Legend of the Werewolf (1974), Son of Dracula (1974), The Ghoul (1975), The Doctor and the Devils (1985) and Dark Tower (1987). 

REVIEW: Richard Scheib
IMAGES: Marcus Brooks