Reviews

Robert Quarry makes his first and best appearance as the pasty-faced Bulgarian Count with excellent English in Bob Kelljan's 1970 minor classic Count Yorga, Vampire. The plot is simple enough.

After the recent death of his girlfriend, Count Yorga is welcomed into the upscale home of his lover's daughter (Donna Anderson) where he conducts séances that are secretly designed to manipulate women to do his bidding by the use of mind control. After one such séances two young lovers Paul (Michael Murphy) and Erica (Judith Lang) give the mysterious Count a lift back to his mountaintop pad-come-castle. When their van breaks down on his property, they decide to bed down for the night but the Count reappears, this time all vamped-out, and attacks them. Paul is injured but Erica is bitten and becomes one of the undead. Paul turns to his trusted friends Mike (Michael Macready) and Dr. Jim Hayes (Roger Perry) for help, setting in motion a series of events that will lead to a final confrontation with Yorga, his scar-faced assistant Brudah (Edward Walsh) and his undead brides at their secluded retreat.

Count Yorga, Vampire was originally intended to be a porn film and some of the production values and acting betray this sordid little secret. However, those expecting Quarry to be some kind of tin-pot Christopher Lee will be surpprised here as he cuts a commanding figure as the titular vampire. This is best illustrated in a particularly effective scene when the Count coldly assures the inquisitive Dr. Hayes, who has been intentionally delaying him until the sun rises, that they WILL meet again under different circumstances. The rest of the cast are competent enough but Perry is given all the best lines such as these two classic rhetorical questions; "How would you like to wake up knowing you had parts of a cat inside you?" and not forgetting "Michael, how would you feel about driving a wooden stake through someone's heart?" The twist-ending, when it comes, is effective but not entirely unexpected. However, the rest of the previous ninety minutes does contain several unnerving moments such as Paul returning home to find his lover eating a kitten and Yorga's undead brides rising from their marble slabs to eat a poor unfortunate. The film is sombrely narrated by veteran actor George Macready (son of Michael) and the contemporary setting of 1970's Los Angeles anticipates later efforts such as The Night Stalker (1972), the superb Grave of The Vampire (1973) and Tom Holland's eighties favourite Fright Night (1985).

A sequel, inevitably titled The Return of Count Yorga (1971), was released the following year and in spite of a bigger budget and higher production values, it fails to match the power and rough elegance of the first film. That said, Quarry is in equally fine form.

La Cabina (1972) is a justifiably famous short film directed by Antonio Mercero and written by Mercero and Jose Luis Garci. Made during the final years of General Franco's political regime in Spain it remains a telling and ultimately harrowing account of the price of personal freedom.

A man (played by Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez) becomes trapped in an ordinary-looking telephone box in the street. Despite the desperate efforts of several passers-by, no one can seem to free him. Later, a truck arrives and loads the telephone box, still containing the hapless man, onto its rear taking him on a long journey through the Spanish countryside to meet his destiny. The final denouement is rightly celebrated as one of the most chilling ever in the short film format.

Running at thirty-five minutes this is slightly longer than most shorts but is a compelling and powerful production that haunts the viewer long after any initial viewing. I saw this film in the eighties as a child and it has remained in my memory and my nightmares ever since. A DVD release is deserved and long overdue. Highly recommended.

Creepshow 2 was released in 1987 and was directed by George Romero's regular cinematographer Michael Gornick. Gornick, who was a late replacement for the original director FX maestro Tiom Savini, cut his directorial teeth on several episodes of Laurel's Tales From The Darkside and was a natural choice to make the film. He does a commendable job with what is clearly a modest budget and three stories that are not as engaging, gripping and frightening as those available to Romero in his original 1982 film.

Only one of the three stories has been previously published, the other two being originals devised for the film by Stephen King and scripted by Romero. The first story is called Old Chief Woodenhead and stars Hollywood veterans George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour. It concerns a wooden storefront statue of an old Indian chief that comes to life to avenge the death of two elderly people by a gang of youths. It is the least impressive of the three tales but retains a certain ghoulish charm.

The second story is The Raft. Originally published in King's 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew (with a slightly different ending). The segment is about four scantily-clad teenagers who arrive at a deserted lake, late one summer, for an afternoon swim but find that something thoroughly unpleasant is waiting for them. The special effects are well below par with King himself commenting that the monster in the lake looks something like "a dirty old man's raincoat". However, this episodes's grim punchline would make The Cryptkeeper himself chuckle with approval.

The third and probably best story is The Hitchhiker and stars Louis (Moonraker) Chiles as a bored, rich housewife who regularly enjoys the services of a handsome gigolo. On her way home from such an encounter she accidentally runs over a young Hitchhiker (played by stuntman Tom Wright) killing him instantly. Terrrified by the consequences of her actions she quickly leaves the scene of the accident. However, a few miles down the road she sees the Hitchhiker, bloodied and amazingly returned to life, limping towards her. To reveal any more would be to dampen this segment's sick delights but I will say that it features a neat cameo by King himself as a foul-mouthed truck driver.

A fourth story called Pinfall was planned for the movie but later dropped due to the faltering budget. It concerned an overweight band of beer-chugging bowlers that are murdered by a rival bowling team and come back from the dead for revenge in true EC style. Its a shame we will never get to see this story but it is very close in theme and structure to both Oldf Chief Woodenhead and The Hitchhiker.

All in all, Creepshow 2 is worth a look and remains a guilty pleasure of mine that I have enjoyed with alarming regularity over the years. It may not be up to the standards set by the first Creepshow but there are more painful ways to spend an evening. Ask The Hitchhiker...

Late one night, a child is sent to bed by his mother and is visited by a strange, feathery, hook-nosed man who creeps into his darkened bedroom at night. To say anything more would be to spoil the nasty sting in this short's tail as The Sandman (1992) is a deliciously dark and amusing slice of animated horror.

That the style and execution of the piece resembles The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) is no accident as the director and animator Paul Berry worked on both this film and the later Tim Burton production James and the Giant Peach (1995). His death at the tragically young age of forty has robbed us of the chance of seeing his work as a fully mature artist. On the strength of this film alone I'm sure it would have been very special indeed.

Released by Paramount in 1979, Prophecy, along with Alien, Phantasm and George Romero's Dawn of the Dead formed an unholy quartet of horror movies that assaulted the hearts, minds and stomachs of cinema-goers during that infamous 'summer of fear'. Of these four films probably the most neglected, and deservedly so, is John Frankenheimer's ecological horror film starring Robert Foxworth, Talia Shire, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart and a carnivorous, drooling fifteen foot mutant bear.

Working from a ludicrous script by David Seltzer, author of The Omen (1976 & 2006), the film makes a plaintive plea about the dangers of a contaminating industry on the natural environment and how it could spawn obscene freaks of nature that may one day bite back. Seltzer specialises in films that explore the end of the world as exemplified in both incarnations of The Omen as well as his bug-movie The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971). Needless to say, Prophecy is equally dour in its predictions.

Tagged with the subtitle 'the monster movie', it has its moments of genuine suspense, especially in the impressive opening sequence where several mountaineers descend into a gloomy, Lovecraftian-like pit where the titular monster decimates them in the darkness. Unfortunately, there are not enough scenes of this kind and most other shocks in the film are not so cleverly engineered by the director. This is a shame.

The performances by Foxworth and Shire are heartfelt and everybody else tries hard but the material is so ridiculous that the results are sometimes painful to watch. The special effects by Tom Burman are not up to the standards of his work on Philip Kauffman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) or Paul Schrader's remake of Cat People (1982) and at times look distinctly fake and rubbery.

Now forget all my previously negative comments and go rent or buy this film immediately. Prophecy is the kind of z-grade, messy, misguided, big-studio trash that is so bad its simply quite brilliant. On the positive side, the film does build nicely towards its climax, wringing quite a few moments of suspense along the way. This isn't the Frankenheimer of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) or Seconds (1966) but Prophecy, though not an entirely successful synthesis of its themes and ideas, is a joy to behold.