Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

Year:  1965

Director:  Freddie Francis

Screenplay:  Milton Subotsky

Starring:  Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Max Adrian, Alan Freeman, Ann Bell, Peter Madden, Donald Sutherland, Roy Castle, Michael Gough

Running Time:  98 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Six strangers meet in a train carriage.  One of them, Dr. Schreck (Cushing), whose name, we're told, means "terror" in German, offers to tell the others' fortunes with his tarot deck (which he calls his "house of horrors").  His five companions are each told their grim fates in a series of stories involving werewolves, killer vines, voodoo curses, vengeful disembodied hands and vampires.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Hammer Films held British horror cinema in it's cold, undead grasp.  However one of their main competitors was Amicus Films, which had a similar look to the Hammer Films and often used the same actors (Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were both regulars in Amicus films as well as their better known Hammer films).  However Amicus usually had a contemporary setting, as opposed to Hammer's usual period settings, and they really found their niche with a series of anthology, or "portmanteau", films.  Instead of having a single narrative running throughout the film, these consisted of four or five separate short stories usually connected by a framing story.  Dr. Terror's House of Horrors was the first of these (and was followed by Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), The Vault of Horror (1973) and From Beyond the Grave (1974)).  These films, by their very nature, were usually something of a mixed bag, but if you weren't enjoying one story, you didn't have to wait too long for something else to come along.  As with all of these films, the title promises far more scares and gore than it delivers, it really is very mild particularly by modern standards.  The special effects are really basic, with the killer plant being someone shaking a vine off-screen, the disembodied hand is a rubber glove fitted with a pump and then there is the rubber bat bobbing along on a wire.  The cast is very eclectic with veterans such as Christopher Lee as an obnoxious art critic, Peter Cushing as the creepy fortune teller and Michael Gough, alongside Roy Castle who would later become beloved to decades of British children as the host of Record Breakers (1972-1994), jazz singer Kenny Lynch, future Hollywood star Donald Sutherland in an early role, and a rare acting role from DJ Alan "Fluff" Freeman ("Not 'arf, pop-pickers!") doing battle with killer weeds.  Everyone plays the material as best they can, providing impressive gravitas.  The stories are enjoyable, with some welcome humour.  The story with the vengeful hand is probably the best of the bunch, the worst being the voodoo story which has not aged well (even though it does feature a weird little in-joke where Roy Castle is terrified by a lurid poster for Dr. Terror's House of Horrors).  It all ends with a surprisingly eerie conclusion.  

       

Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alan Freeman, Neil McCallum and Roy Castle in Dr. Terror's House of Horrors

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Year of Release:  1978

Director:  Philip Kaufman

Screenplay:  W. D. Richter, based on the novel The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

Starring:  Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy

Running Time:  115 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction, horror

Elizabeth Driscoll (Adams) is a laboratory scientist for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, with an interest in botany.  She becomes aware of unusual pink flowers growing out of small pods.  Shortly afterwards she notices that her boyfriend (Art Hindle) is acting strangely, and she becomes convinced that somehow he has become someone she doesn't know.  She approaches her friend and fellow employee at the Department of Health, Matthew Bennell (Sutherland).  At first Matthew doesn't believe her, but when he notices increasingly strange things happening, he realises that what has happened to Elizabeth's boyfriend is just the beginning.  Alien seed pods have landed on Earth and are somehow replacing people while they sleep: replacements that are physically identical to the original, and have the same memories and personalities, but lack emotion or basic humanity.  Matthew and Elizabeth have to save themselves and stop the invasion, but it may already be too late.

Jack Finney's 1953 science-fiction novel The Body Snatchers had previously been adapted in 1956 as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, one of the classics of science-fiction cinema.  It was later adapted in 1993 as Body Snatchers, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Gabrielle Anwar, and most recently as The Invasion (2007), starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig.  Of course, it's a very risky proposition to remake a classic.  This film updates the setting from 1950s small town California, to 1970s San Francisco.  While Jack Finney denied that the novel was intended to be anything other than an exciting adventure story, the 1956 film is usually seen as a parable about the Communist scare of the 1950s, either a warning that there is a "Red under every bed" or a warning about the McCarthyite witch hunts of the time.  This film could be seen as a film about urban alienation and paranoia.  The mobile camera frequently following the actors like a surveillance camera.  The fact is that this has a very scary premise, your loved ones becoming someone that you don't recognise; the idea of losing your own humanity, and worse yet, they get you while you sleep, while you are at your most defenceless.  Also there is the general uneasiness of city life, living cheek by jowl with countless strangers, some of whom may not have your best interests at heart.  Seen in 2021, the film has the added resonance of the age of social distancing, with the fear of catching a fatal disease just from being around people.  The film has an interesting cast, with Donald Sutherland handling the heroics; Brooke Adams affecting as the first person to become suspicious; an early role for a nervously funny Jeff Goldblum as a struggling poet; Veronica Cartwright, who would later have to deal with even more unpleasant pods in Alien (1979), as Goldblum's frantic wife; and Leonard Nimoy as a pop-psychiatrist (this was the '70s, remember).  Nimoy's casting is interesting, as his best known role was half-alien half-human Spock in Star Trek (1966-1969) who was constantly trying to suppress his human emotions, and almost marks him as an emotionless "pod-person" right from the start, and he gives an effective and quite sinister performance.  Kevin McCarthy, who starred in the 1956 film, cameos as a man yelling warnings at passing cars, as in the previous film's famous ending.  The film is stylishly directed, opening with strangely poetic images of the gossamer pods drifting through space, and the film is shot with the afore-mentioned roving camera, and odd camera angles, right from the start everyone appears suspicious and strange, including Robert Duvall appearing in an uncredited cameo as a priest on a park swing set, gazing at the camera.  It sets itself up slowly, and has some genuinely nightmarish imagery.  The film is very much a 1970s movie, but it has aged very well, the tone is very bleak and there is a real sense of inescapable doom throughout (which makes it feel very current).  It all ends with one of the most famous screams in science-fiction history.

Broke Adams and Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)