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

Dr. Who and the Daleks

 Year of Release:  1965

Director:  Gordon Flemyng

Screenplay:  Milton Subotsky, based on the Doctor Who serial "The Daleks" by Terry Nation

Starring:  Peter Cushing, Roy Castle, Jennie Linden, Roberta Tovey

Running Time:  82 minutes

Genre:  Science-fiction

In London, eccentric inventor Dr. Who (Cushing) shows his granddaughters Barbara (Linden) and Susan (Tovey), and Barbara's clumsy boyfriend Ian (Castle), his latest invention the Tardis, a machine disguised as a police telephone box which can travel anywhere in time and space.  When Ian accidentally activates it, they are catapulted to a mysterious, desolate planet, where they encounter deadly cyborgs called Daleks, who plan to destroy the planet's other inhabitants, the peace-loving Thals.

This is based on the second serial from the BBC television series Doctor Who (1963-1989, 1996, 2005- ) which introduced the series' most popular antagonist, the Daleks.  This is an adaptation of the seven part serial "The Daleks", not really the Doctor Who series itself, while it more or less follows the plot of the serial, it changes a lot about the characters and backstory.  Peter Cushing's Doctor Who (who is definitively named as such in the film, but is always just The Doctor on TV) is a doddery, eccentric, grandfatherly old gentleman, rather than William Hartnell's portrayal of The Doctor on TV as an abrasive, crotchety alien antihero.  On TV, Barbara and Ian (as played by Jacqueline Hill and William Russell) were staid, responsible schoolteachers, whereas here their occupations are never given and Ian in particular is more of a klutzy comic relief character.  Susan (played by Carole Anne Ford on TV) was a sixteen year old high school student, but in this film she appears to be about twelve years old.  The film is a colourful affair, although it's low budget is painfully obvious in several places.  The blonde, blue-eyes Thals are supposedly starving, but their supply of mascara, lip gloss and hair care products seem to be plentiful, because they all seem to style themselves after David Bowie.  The Daleks themselves seem to have a fondness for lava lamps and salmon-pink plastic sheeting.  Originally the guns were supposed to shoot fire, but this was vetoed on the grounds of health and safety, and also that it would be too frightening for the kiddies, so instead they shoot jets of CO2 gas.  The Daleks were hugely popular in the 1960s, appearing in comics, games, toys, books and even a terrible novelty song by The Go-Gos called "I Wanna Spend my Christmas with a Dalek" (which contains the lyrics "I wanna spend my Christmas with a Dalek / and hang him underneath the mistletoe /and if he's very nice / I'll feed him sugar spice / and hang a Christmas stocking from his big left toe").  

The film suffers from bad dialogue (particularly the Daleks' long speeches which serve as clunky exposition) and storytelling, the climax is especially ludicrous and seems to largely hinge on the Daleks immediately becoming extremely stupid, and misplaced humour.  Peter Cushing does what he can with what he is given, and Roy Castle (who would later go on to present the long running children's TV series Record Breakers from 1972 to 1993) hams it up although he did have a gift for clowning.  The big problem with the film is that it just hasn't aged well, not that it is really offensive or anything like that, but it looks so cheap and such a product of it's time, that it just appears comical today.  If you are a Doctor Who completist or interested in sixties science-fiction it's worth a look, and to be fair it can serve as a guilty pleasure on a dull afternoon.  It was followed by Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150AD (1966).

Dr. Who (Peter Cushing) and Susan (Roberta Tovey) encounter the mechanical meanies in Dr. Who and the Daleks