Dead of Night (Basil Dearden, Alberto Cavalcanti, Robert Hamer, Charles Crichton, Michael Balcon)
 |
| "What sort of dummy do you think I am?" |
Amicus are the most prolific and most famous exponents of the portmanteau horrors but Ealing got there first with the chilling compendium Dead of Night. The idea of sandwiching a handful of scary stories into one whole is a notoriously hit & miss affair (stinkers alongside classics) so the viewer will always have their favourites.
Here are some of mine.
'Frozen Fear' from Asylum is hysterical as well as being scary stuff (a film maker at Amicus usually had his bloody tongue poking through his cheek). Adulterous husband (Richard Todd) kills off his unwanted wife (Sylvia Sims) while she stands cooing over the chest freezer he's just bought her. He then chops up the corpse, wraps it all in brown paper and dumps the bits in the freezer. As he closes the freezer door he quips "rest in pieces". Well, as it happens, she doesn't. And how the cheating husband and his mistress (Barbara Parkins) get their just deserts is truly gobsmacking. Once seen, never forgotten.
'...And All Through the House' from Tales from the Crypt, is a little bit rubbish if truth be told. But Joan Collins, after dispatching of her husband with a poker while her young daughter plays upstairs, being tormented by a psychotic dressed as Santa is as much fun as it sounds. Marvelous!
The genuinely shocking outcome of 'Blind Alleys' from Tales From the Crypt is fantastic. The slow drip, drip pace expertly builds up the dread factor and Nigel Patrick pays the price for his cruel treatment of the blind veterans in his care. Nasty
Not one for animal lovers!
'Gatecrasher' from From Beyond the Grave takes its cue from the mirror story from Dead of Night but takes a step further into the abyss with a very dark and bloody bit of gothic nastiness. "Feed meeee... bloood"
Trilogy of Terror, based on stories by Richard Matheson, is not an Amicus film of course (surprisingly it was made for American TV). The highlight of this threesome is Karen Black being chased about her apartment by a pint-sized voodoo doll. I remember watching this one as a teenager with my mom and although we were absolutely terrified we were also in fits of laughter. I also remember dad never shared a taste for gallows humour ("Why are you watching it if you think it's funny?").
Seeing it again more recently proved that it still is pretty scary stuff and still is very, very funny.
Mmm... can I smell dinner??
But, best of all of course, is the forerunner Dead of Night. True to form, it has its misfire - lovely Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne (unofficially doing their Charters & Caldicot shtick), in the 'Golfing Story' segment, is fun, but the whimsical tale is quite out of place and dissipates the chilly atmosphere that's been built up so far with the preceding two tales: of ghostly apparitions at a Christmas party and a man possessed by a haunted mirror.
Luckily the chills return because they've kept the best till last. The last story, a psychological horror of an unhinged ventriloquist being driven insane by his dummy, is one of the most terrifying in all of British cinema. Under Cavalcanti's direction Michael Redgrave is absolutely mesmerising as the ventriloquist, helping to invest his character with enough pathos and horror for us to empathise as well as draw back. A deeply human performance.
As the story unfolds, the dread we feel is palpable (it actually brings a lump to my throat) so that by the final moments, when Max 'kills' Hugo, the brutality of the scene - Hugo's terrified screams, the kicks and the final shot of his caved in scull - is profoundly disturbing. Just as Cavalcanti managed to get away with a surprising amount of shocking violence in the superb WWII drama Went the Day Well? simply because it was a propaganda piece, so he manages it again here because it's only a doll getting it's head bashed in. After all, the flesh and bone of a human head is gonna look pretty much the same in black & white as the wood and sawdust of a doll's head.
Of course, as this segment ends, we're not let off the hook here. We still have the nightmarish finale to deal with (complete with the return of Hugo)... round and round it goes...
No comments:
Post a Comment