"From Beyond the Grave" (1973) d/Kevin Connor

We'll wrap up September with another one of those groovy early seventies British horror anthologies from the folks at Amicus, with segments based on four short stories from R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and featuring the likes of David Warner, Donald and Angela Pleasence, Diana Dors, Lesley-Anne Down, and Peter Cushing tying the whole thing together, as a creepy, old antiques dealer with a clientele of cheats, chumps, and burglars who all get more than they bargained for in the end. The first-time director, Kevin Connor, would move on to Doug McClure drive-in fodder like The Land That Time Forgot (1975) and At the Earth's Core (1976) before moving on to campy cult classics like 1980's Motel Hell and 1982's The House Where Evil Dwells, which, for those of you that happened to be wondering, also stars Doug McClure.


"I seem to have stumbled out of my flat and onto a Mario Bava set..."
In "The Gate Crasher", we see an artsy know-it-all twat (David Warner) con The Proprietor (Peter Cushing) on the sale of an antique mirror, which after an obligatory seance, proves to contain a murderous spirit that resembles Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, leading the man down a dark path that surely can't end well for anyone involved, especially birds picked up on the fly at a dance club. Then, in "An Act of Kindness", an unfulfilled husband (Ian Bannen) pockets a wartime medal  from the shop without paying, thus becoming the focus of a down-and-out war vet named Underwood (Donald Pleasence) and his pin-happy lookalike daughter, Emily (Angela Pleasance). Diana Dors is in there, too, and she's delightfully abrasive, up until her untimely demise.


"He's bad, bad Leeroy Broooown, baddest man in the whole damned tooooown..."
Next, a chap named Warren (Ian Carmichael) switches out the price tags in a pair of antique snuff boxes, and manages to get a troublesome, invisible titular "elemental",  burrowing psychically into his shoulder, strangling his wife in bed, and making a general nuisance of itself until he calls upon the services of  Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton) who's apparently just the woman for the job. Then, a young fellow (Ian Ogilvy...shee, there's a lot of Ian's in this one) purchases a ornately decorated, bulky antique door for a linen closet in his flat, only to discover that it sometimes leads into a blue room from another era, belonging to an evil nobleman who dedicated his life to the pursuit of, as if you couldn't guess, more evil. Finally, an enterprising criminal enters the shop with designs on relieving it of any excess cash lying around, only to provide the final twist for the audience, whom the Proprietor addresses directly before closing his doors and end credits roll.


For those about to rock, Donald salutes you.
Amicus Studios filled a genre niche with a fine run of pormanteau-style anthologies, starting in 1965 with Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, followed by Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1971), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), Vault of Horror (1973), and this, which would turn out to be the final one they'd tackle. Nothing out of the ordinary going on here, but the whole production is handled so well by all involved, you'll be too entertained to notice. On the scale, Grave earns a solid score of three Wops, and should really be checked out, if you're on board with this style of film. Recommended.


"No, you certainly may not have the freeze-dried crocodile for five quid."

"The Devil Within Her" (1975) d/ Peter Sasdy

Hungarian-born director Peter Sasdy has had some great genre moments over the years, from Taste the Blood of Dracula(1970) and Countess Dracula(1971), to Hands of the Ripper(1971) and Nothing But the Night(1973). Tonight's review, alternately known as The Monster, Sharon's Baby, and I Don't Want to be Born, is an entirely different story altogether. Besides Joan Collins showing her full acting range as a pleasure-starved trollop in various states of undress, you've got Donald Pleasence, Caroline Munro, and Ralph Bates and Eileen Atkins in a "Worst Italian Accent-Off" that'll have your ears bleeding out like a pair of emo-cutters on a suicide pact in a warehouse full of cutlery. Wait, it gets worse...


Acting 101: Is Joan Collins giving birth or in the sensual throes of earth-shattering orgasm?
Despite being in her forties, we first see Lucy (Where does "Sharon's Baby" factor in to any of this? I don't think anybody in the whole cast is named Sharon...) as she's clearly enjoying the arrival of a nearly twelve pound baby boy through her birth canal. Dr. Finch (Pleasence) notes that her son "doesn't want to be born", before the little bugger scratches up his mother's facepiece (off-camera) to further amplify that sentiment. So troubled she is from the outset at her boy's antisocial behavior, that her ridiculous-sounding Italian husband Gino (Ralph Bates) seeks out his even more ridiculous-sounding Italian sister, a nun called Albana (Eileen Atkins) for help, as his little troublemaker makes a general off-camera nuisance of himself; shoving his pram-pushing babysitter into the Thames, punching Lucy's former lovers in the face, and biting anyone foolish enough to let their baby talking rubber faces slip too close to the little devil, or " dev-EEL" as Albana would say.


" 'Ere, Bates, was that supposed to be an Italian accent, then?"
A distraught Lucy confides to one of her stripper mates named Mandy (Caroline Munro), in between shopping sprees and candlelit dinners, that all of this strange phenomena may be occurring since she once denied the amorous advances of the co-star of her stage show during her own dancing days, a British dwarf named Hercules(!), and the jilted little fellow slapped a curse on her. Sounds legit. In any case, Lucy's son escapes his playpen, bending the bars on his nursery window, and hanging-ah poor Gino-ah from a tree outside-ah. He later lops off Dr. Finch's head with a spade, and runs his own mother through with a dagger in the tit. Albana performs a mostly uninteresting exorcism on the troubled infant in the end, while Hercules unconvincingly slumps dead on stage at the strip club, surrounded by showgirls. Phew, that one hurt.


" I've 'eard you was a free-thinking sexy broad with a dirty mouth. Wanna try for 'free-thinking sexy broad with a dirty mouth wot's shagged a randy dwarf in a jester costume' ?"
Pleasence gives the only performance that doesn't reek of week old rubbish here, and even then, it's not even one of his better turns, by a fucking long shot. Even the ever stunning Caroline Munro is wasted as a stripper who never strips, only spouting mundane Cockney dialog that seemingly always ends in exaggerated hand gestures and "Dahhhhhling!". Ralph Bates probably should have known better, too. Despite possessing exactly zero moments of on-screen tension and plenty of hokey off-screen mayhem, you just might spend the whole screening laughing out loud, as I did, and whether that was the intent of the film's producers or not(it wasn't), laughing's never a bad thing. One wop on the scale...


So that's how Donald Pleasence's head comes off. Always wondered about that.

"Alone in the Dark" (1982) d/ Jack Shoulder

The pioneer release from New Line Cinema, director Jack Shoulder's first effort, is this tidy little slasher that features no less than three mammoth genre names among its cast members, with Donald Pleasence, Jack Palance, and Martin Landau all doing their respective part in raising this one above the standard stalk n' slash fare that permeated theaters of the day, despite the familiar "psychos are loose!" vein, as heavily mined as it had already been, to that point.


"Was that 'two Charlies, two Bunnies, and a Black and White'? Or 'a Charlie, no Bunnies, and two Black and Whites'?"
Dr. Potter (Dwight "Murdock" Schultz) lands a gig replacing Dr. Merton on the staff of  Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence), a reefer-toking, left field psychiatrist with an unorthodox approach to his patients at the Haven mental hospital, with only electrically locked third floor windows and doors keeping the most psychopathic, homicidal cases from escaping into the general populace. It's a good thing, too, with the likes of  Hawkes (Jack Palance) the paranoiac, Preacher (Martin Landau) the pyromaniac, Fatty (Erland van Lidth) the child molester, and Bleeder (Phil Clark) the sociopath in there, and all under the impression that Potter killed Merton, one of their favorites...At home, Potter's got his hands full with his wife, Nell (Deborah Hedwall), young daughter, Lyla, and sister, Toni (Lee Taylor-Allan), fresh from a mental breakdown, herself, all occupying space in his pad. Toni drags her unreceptive brother out to a local club, where a punk band's set is interrupted by a state-wide power outage. The next morning at the institution, there's a dead security guard, and four inmates missing. Hmmm, I wonder which ones...


"...and I once saw a bee on a butterfly bush, while pounding Stegmaiers outside the Tomhicken recreational building..."
Pretty soon, Toni's meeting strange men while getting arrested at anti-nuke protests,  Lyla's learning how to make origami shapes from giant strangers, and when the teenage babysitter shows up to check on her, she and her horny beau end up getting added to the film's minimal body count. After a tense dinner, a visiting detective finds himself pinned to a tree by arrows, while the escaped lunatics have surrounded Potter's home. Dr. Bain makes the frantic scene, but his attempt at reasoning with the men leaves him one ear short, and but a bloody notch on Preacher's righteous axe in the end. After Preacher manages to set the basement ablaze and Fatty gets a back rub with a massive meat cleaver, Toni's new love interest turns out to be Bleeder, whose pesky nosebleed gives him away as he tries to strangle the young woman, eating  knife blade-inflicted death, himself, instead. Hawkes shows up in time to see Dr. Merton alive on television, storming out angrily after waxing poetic upon murder, and ending up at the punk rock club,  fitting in perfectly amid the regulars. Ba dum bump.


"Love lifts you up where you belooooong," sings Fatty (Erland van Lidth).
Interestingly, the two singers from "The Sic Fucks", opened the first punk rock boutique in America back in 1977, called Manic Panic, located on St. Mark's Place in the East Village; also providing the boldly hued hair dye of the same name that would decorate the heads of young top heavy playthings that often found themselves on all fours in front of me, in the throes of tantric multi-O's, for decades to come. You'll remember mountainous Dutch noble, van Lidth, as "Terror", the head of the Fordham Baldies in 1979's The Wanderers. Lin Shaye has a brief cameo towards the beginning here, and her older brother, Robert, who snagged a co-producer credit, also provided the story behind tonight's review. Also worth noting,  the era's Gore God, Tom Savini himself, serves up a practical FX nightmare along the way. On the scale, Alone earns two Wops, a highly watchable slasher in a genre already ripe with brainless carbon copies as early as 1982. Check it out.


A fine example of Camel(toe), domestic blend.