No.76. British sitcom films: BLESS THIS HOUSE (1972)

BLESS THIS HOUSE (1972)

The early 1970s saw a wave of successful British sitcoms come to the big screen, and in 1972 the highly popular BLESS THIS HOUSE joined them. The brainchild of Vince Powell and Harry Driver, creators of eleven shows including the other 70s monster hit LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR, this show about suburban familes lasted for six series on Thames TV.

For the cinema, they bolstered the comedy by bringing in the CARRY ON team of producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas. This influence is most obvious in the casting additions of the film series regulars like Peter Butterworth, Terry Scott and June Whitfield to support the much-love Sid James and most of the original sitcom family, but also the over-use of the duck whistle to unsubtly hammer home a sight gag. It’s colourful, pleasant enough and thankfully lacks the crass racism of LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR. The most obvious change to fans of the TV show was the replacement of Robin Stewart as Sid and Diana Coupland’s son Mike. He was unavailable due to a summer season booking. Instead we have the likeable bundle of energy  Robin Askwith, surely an icon of the 70s as readily identifiable and nostalgic as Spangles and the Bay City Rollers, and later to find infamy in the bawdy CONFESSIONS sex ‘comedies’.

Sid and Diane are the perfect TV suburban couple. She gets her way around her husband, he displays the sexist, sarcastic curmudgeon qualities which make an ideal foil to her needs and the idealism and foibles of his student children. Whilst Askwith creates a haphazard iron skeleton of art school awfulness in the garage, and drives around in a psychedelic smoke-belching literal old ‘banger’, the lovely Sally Geeson is also retained as his sister Sally. Her main role is to cause friction with her radical politics, which interestingly here foreshadows the environmental concerns we take for granted today about recycling – back then it served as a comedic device for creating a ‘crank’ opposition to staid older-generation reactionism. Sally also inadvertently gets on one’s nerves further by the way she delivers her lines. She explains them with such earnest, squeaky innocence, she seems to be in a school’s programme for teaching English to foreigners.

Rogers and Thomas cleverly recruited CARRY ON stars (and later TV’s ) ‘Terry and June’ as the new neighbours, an instant chemistry package which also allows Terry Scott to play well an aspirational snob angle. The wives in BLESS THIS HOUSE are without edge - it’s the husbands who are the endless schemers. Speaking of which, it’s nice to see Peter Butterworth dialling down the furtive chiseller he essays so well in CARRY ON movies to play Sid’s best mate Trevor. Other welcome supporting players include Janet Brown as neighbour Annie Hobbs, Bill Maynard as Oldham, the sleazy stall landlord who likes to hands-on with his female talents; a brief turn from Frank Thornton as a client of Sid’s, and Tommy LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR Godfrey as Murray the plasterer who leaves Sid high and nowhere near dry as he tries to cover a hole left from removing an over-mantle from the wall at his new neighbours’.

Another member of the Rogers/Thomas stable of co-opted talent for this film is Carol Hawkins as the neighbours’ daughter Katie. She was often labelled the posh crumpet in both their films and the PLEASE SIR series - before admirably avoiding the atrociously cheapjack CARRY ON ENGLAND due to its’ excessive nudity – surely only the most convenient reason!

After Sid and Trevor’s explosive attempt at a whisky distillery in the garden shed, it’s up to the young ones to provide the skulduggery as Mike and Katie covertly enjoy a Romeo and Juliet clandestine romance while their gently seeething Capulet and Montague-like fathers feud – until the cat is out of the bag and they are wed. This sub-plot from first meet-cute to marriage is rushed, the only breathing space given is when the parents uncover their children’s deception by going to the greasy spoon where both Katie and Mike work. This allows an amusing gag where Mike tries to perform short-order cooking on his knes so only his chef’s hat and hands are seen the work surface.

BLESS THIS HOUSE is inoffensive painting-by-numbers comedy played with energy. I’d like to have heard a better version of the jaunty theme tune from the TV show, but even so it harks back amiably to a more innocent time, especially in the lack of post-millenial modern cynicism by the student-age children!

No.75. British sitcom films: STEPTOE AND SON RIDE AGAIN (1973)

STEPTOE AND SON RIDE AGAIN (1973)

The successful translation of the much-loved series onto the big screen led inevitably to a sequel, STEPTOE AND SON RIDE AGAIN, which managed equally well to open out the environment somewhat whilst still retaining the claustrophobic comedy of the oppressive father and son relationship between Albert and Harold.

This time Harold’s grand scheming revolves around two  consecutive connected plots. I’ve always felt the best translations of sitcoms to the cinema are those that construct a series of episodes in a linked arc, rather than one overall plot which always stretches the characters too far and dilutes the comedy of the ‘situation’. Here, Galton and Simpson do this superbly.

As a warm-up in more ways than one, we get to see Diana Dors as the curvy predatory widow, offering Harold more than just her dead husband’s suits. Her overpowering sexuality is such that she is happy to have her way with him in the next bed to her only just-deceased. Even the promise of much-needed profit from the schmutter in the wardrobe isn’t enough to stop him fleeing the macabre scene. It’s an all-too brief appearance by her but welcome all the same.

The real meat of the plot comes when the Steptoes’ beloved horse Hercules is put out to pasture and Harold opts, instead of buying a horse, to purchase a racing greyhound from enjoyably dodgy, diminutive gangster Frankie Barrow, (Henry Woolf) the second of a wave of great character actors recruited for this sequel. Fans of classic Doctor Who by the way will recognise not only Woolf as the evil financial wizard from THE SUNMAKERS, but the fleeting vet cameo is Stewart Bevan, Jo Grant’s love interest Dr Clifford Poole in THE GREEN DEATH.

Hercules the Second is an expensive investment, being fuelled by raw eggs and steak. Albert solves this outgoing by memorably sneezing all over a prime cut at the butcher, much to Welsh TV comedy stalwart Richard Davies’ chagrin. The dog appears to be a dud on the greyhound track, as expected from such a crooked source, until the Steptoes discover he is short-sighted, and with the aid of contact lenses he becomes a contender – until on racing day he breaks off from the track to smother his owners. Another scheme’s wheel falls off the wagon.

The second half of the film is a great opportunity for more TV character cameos and farce construction when Harold persuades Albert to fake his own death for the insurance money needed to pay off the remainder of the dog’s fee to Barrow. Milo O’ Shea is a splendidly dotty, pissed-up neighbourhood doctor who Harold and Albert hoodwink for the all-important death certificate by substituting a mannequin’s limbs for his during the medical inspection. Frank Thornton is a more benign insurance agent than his imperious Captain Peacock in ARE YOU BEING SERVED, and the gaggle of friends who make up the colourful waKe of funeral well-wishers include Bill Maynard and Yootha Joyce amidst the cockney ‘Knees-up Mother Brown’ jollity and and progressively more drunk hangers-on. 

The comic stakes are heightened when Harold finds out the policy was switched to an unknown lady beneficiary, meaning that he now has to fake Albert’s sudden revival. Since Albert misses his cue to emerge from the coffin by falling asleep, Harold’s desperate need to believe he is alive is hilariously mistaken for grief during the procession to the church. His stuntman pulls off a great pratfall crashing through a vault doorway. Albert’s cadaverous emergence from the grave is then coupled with his son’s zombie-like appearance from the vault before all the attendants.

In the epilogue, the careful construction is slightly weakened when the insurance agent uncovers that the policy holder broke the terms of her arrangement, thus reverting back to the Steptoes and entitling them to a surrender value of 85% of the full amount. If the surrendering for such a large amount was always an option, why did they go through all the rigmarole of faking Albert’s death? This aside, it creates a happy ending of sorts for father and son, no better off than before, and no worse.

The furious energy of the insurance scam and familiar supporting faces for me makes a suerior sequel to the first film, and allows the STEPTOE AND SON franchise to go out on a high as the series did a year later. (We can draw a veil over the late ‘70s shoddy Australian theatrical tours…)

No. 74. British sitcom films: STEPTOE AND SON (1972)

STEPTOE AND SON (1972)

As the second batch of series of the hugely popular sitcom STEPTOE AND SON ran through the early Seventies, like so many TV comedy shows of that era it was given the big screen treatment. Wisely, the talented writing team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were kept to support the unforgettable character double-act of Harry H Corbett and Wilfred Bramble as the father and son rag-and-bone men.

Although in films, sitcom plots are usually opened out, often watered down to their detriment, both this translation and its sequel managed to stay true to the bleak trap of the ‘situation’ of the comedy.  Harold is still endlessly trying to extricate himself from his seedy, conniving old man’s self-centred clutches, his lofty pretensions continually punctured by his father’s cynicism and shabby personal habits. (Who can forget Albert bathing in the sink with Vim?) Both the writing and the playing of the show’s principals somehow had the rare skill of making you alternately appalled and frustrated by Albert’s vice-like hold and Harold’s inability to break free, and yet both men earn your sympathy all the while. Harold’s dreams are understandable yet shamefully snobbish toward his father. Albert’s ruthless, selfish disregard for his son’s healthy independence is aggravating yet is borne of fear and loneliness. Ultimately, they are doomed to never leave each other and this is the show’s heart, a strong reason for its success.

Whilst I've always found the show funny and can admire the terrific scripts and acting, the depressing nature of the Steptoes’ trapped lives of oppressive gloom made it hard for me to repeatedly watch it. However, the films are admirable examples of how to stay true to a formula whilst extending the format into long-form.

In this first movie, STEPTOE AND SON, Harold comes home from a night out, besotted with a stripper, Zita, (Carolyn Seymour). He already plans his future with her like a junkyard older Romeo. Albert dismisses her as a ‘scrubber’ with his usual sour grimaces, jealously plotting how best to sabotage her from taking Harold away from him. As the couple wed and set off on their Spanish honeymoon, inevitably they have the old man in tow. Has there ever been a more nightmarish set-up for wedded bliss?

After scoffing down an expensive lobster in the hotel, there is a peculiarly pervy sequence where Albert tries firstly to spy through the connecting door on the happy couple and then listen via a glass against it. It seems somehow wrongly prurient and yet in keeping with his inexhaustibly disgusting propensity for making a nuisance of himself. Just as Harold and Zita get amorous, groans from next door gradually increase till they are forced to check on Albert. He is in agony from contracted food poisoning and once more pushes his son’s buttons to force a premature end to the holiday. With only two last-minute seats on the plane, Zita is left behind. We can see that this will end in tears – but only for Harold. (Albert makes a suspiciously miraculous recovery once back home). There is a beautifully poignant scene where he reads a batch of postcards sent back from her over future days. They begin gushing with love and yearning and end with a crushing ‘Dear John’. Obviously Albert rubs this in as confirmation that she was no good: “She’s blown you out”, conveniently overlooking his role in the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Months later, Harold finds where Zita lives and that she is pregnant by what she claims is his baby. Albert soon sends her packing from a second attempt at usurping him.

More comedy is found after the surprise discovery of a baby in the Steptoe’s stable. This coupled with a trio of tramps and a shooting star create an amusing confluence of Nativity imagery, but to Harold the accompanying note convinces him it must be his baby left by Zita. His characteristic flights of fancy about working every hour God sends to give his son the opportunities he never had cleverly allow the character to indulge both his social pretensions about public school and also his need for an aspirational name, whilst Albert tries to keep him in harness once more, by pleading for the plebeian ‘Albert’ instead of Jeremy. The christening Vicar is asked by Harold for his first own name by way of a solution, only to find it too is Harold. For Harold, there is no escape from his past even in the next generation.

After earning our pity and sympathy by holding down multiple jobs to finance a future for Jeremy/Albert, Harold’s hopes are once more crushed when the baby is secretly taken away again by the mother and when Harold confronts Zita, he sees that actually her real baby is by the multiple-heritage band leader. Just like the circular world of the sitcom, the lives of father and son at the end once more shrink to the humdrum drudgery of the beginning.

STEPTOE AND SON was a well-deserved smash hit, making back six times its £100,000 cost and leading to a sequel the next year…

No.73 - George Romero - Part III: THE CRAZIES (1973)

THE CRAZIES (1973)

By 1973, having suffered the debilitating effect of unreliable backing and distribution for THERE’S ALWAYS VANILLA and then SEASON OF THE WITCH (causing him to virtually disown them), George Romero returned to the full-throttle horror exploitation realm that had made his name with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1968.

THE CRAZIES is a tense, energetic horror thriller with the premise of what would happen should a small town (Evans City) be infected by a chemical bio-weapon that releases uncontrolled homicidal and erotic impulses in its populace. This leads to the declaration of martial law and rapid mobilisation of the army into the town in anonymous white bio-suits and gas-masks - an invasion by occupying forces. The film essentially follows three factions: the infected crazed citizens, the army and those civilians unaffected but unwilling and suspicious to be compliant with the state’s heavy-handed intervention. On this level, THE CRAZIES works well as a mirror of the ongoing war in Vietnam still raging at that time; the army having to react in-the-moment with no clear idea of their mission or how to resolve the crisis, the public not only mistrusting and resisting them but also incubating hidden symptoms that could rise up at any point.

The movie features themes personal to Romero’s view of modern society that he would return to often in the future. THE CRAZIES features no single crusading hero as 1980s films would capitalise on later. Rather than a Schwarzenegger, Stallone or even the lone ‘everyman’ protagonist Bruce Willis, Romero focuses on rag-tag groups of people trying to work together amid paranoia, the dynamics of leadership struggle and a terrifyingly unpredictable foe in an apocalyptic scenario that could overwhelm us and destroy civilisation if we cannot unite.

The story’s genesis was the first ten pages of ‘The Mad People’, a script written by a friend of the team Paul McCullough. The idea of a released bio-weapon resulting in regional quarantine and the imposition of the army was enough for Romero to make it a springboard for his own take. The film was also a chance to work again with exploitation producer, Lee Hessel, who’d made money from a soft porn film called CRY UNCLE and was keen to expand his range.

THE CRAZIES was filmed in the real Evans City, which was also used in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Romero’s team had a budget of $270,000, which although minuscule by studio standards, was more than he was used to. It became his first film shot on 35mm and with SAG union rates of pay. This still had to be stretched thinly, so  much use was made of real locations and real townsfolk in the cast. There were no stuntmen on the gig but Romero had already built up great creative relationships with his pyrotechnic team of two guys whose background was simply an expertise with fireworks. All the fire, immolation and flamethrower effects were supervised by the two men.

The director also couldn’t afford such standard filming equipment as dolly tracks, yet this was a limitation that became a plus; the pace of the film is superbly cut due to not having the ability to utilise long tracking takes. Instead, Romero’s years of skilled, energetic editing (his favourite part of the creative process) from the scores of fast-paced commercials he made with Latent Image gives the film a fast, driven rhythm, always cutting on action and piling on the detail. He shot thirty to forty set-ups a day, a phenomenal workload, but it pays off handsomely with multiple angles on the scenes and a relentless kinetic movement of the plot.

Fans of Romero’s zombie cinema will recognise the enjoyable imperiousness of Richard France as one of the army scientists. He lends the film a grandeur and command similar to his eye-patched, laboriously patronising expert in DAWN OF THE DAWN.

Bill Hinzmann, the opening graveyard zombie of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD again served as director of photography. In fact the all hands pitching in work ethic of Romero’s team was in full evidence here despite the relative increase in the budget. All of the foley effects (sounds recorded after-the-fact) and extras’ dialogue were recorded by Romero, Hinzmann and Mike Gornick in Latent Image’s basement.

THE CRAZIES has some stand-out horror moments amidst the military/civilian politics, some of which delve queasily into primal and taboo areas. The opening scene of children discovering their dead mother and watching helplessly as their father runs amok setting the house on fire powerfully sets the awful tone of the sudden lawless break-down of family security.  There’s a chillingly serene granny stabbing a soldier to death with her knitting needle. (Is no-one safe from the corrupting corrosiveness of this water-carried infection?) Evidently not as we see when Lynn Lowry (later a memorable nurse in Cronenberg’s SHIVERS) willingly gives herself to incestuous sex with her father, a cringingly potent sequence that would never have been permitted in a studio picture.

Unfortunately, unlike the bio-hazard in the film, Romero’s fourth movie suffered an evaporation on release into box office doldrums. The demoralisation resulted in him taking a number of years away from that world, spending three of them working in TV. However, the period introduced him to producer Richard Rubinstein, an alliance that would begin to bear fruit later with MARTIN and DAWN OF THE DEAD…

No.72 - George Romero - Part II: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1973)

SEASON OF THE WITCH (1973)

(Anchor Bay DVD special edition)

After the huge success of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, George Romero was keen to show he wasn’t just a writer/director of gory horror films. His follow-on, the ‘romantic comedy’ THERE’S ALWAYS VANILLA sank without trace, disparaged by Romero due to problems with undercommitted funding by wayward backers and distributors. Together with his wife Nancy as producer, he then made a film that dealt with witchcraft in modern-day suburbia and and also, unusually for this genre,  placed great emphasis and sympathy with female characters and the fuflfillment of their needs. In fact, it was pointedly Romero’s take on women’s liberation, very much a new hot topic in the zeitgeist then. This was to be a double-edged sword -  yielding artistic satisfaction but frustratingly to no avail at the box office.

Joan ‘Joanie’ Mitchell (no relation to the singer) played with commitment by Jan White is a bored suburban housewife who finds herself plagued with disturbing dreams filled with hallucinatory symbolic images: her domineering husband Jack abusing her, a lone baby in a field (a reference to her deceased child, unexplained in the script) and others more inexplicable. She goes to see a therapist who muses while sucking his Meerschaum pipe that “The least qualified to understand a dream…is the dreamer”.

Clearly, that was why she was seeing him but since he isn’t going to make himself useful, Joan must seek solace elsewhere. She is intrigued to discover there is a witch, Marion,  living in the neighbourhood so she and her friend Shirley go over and receive a Tarot reading. Later they return to Joan’s house and she meets Greg, a student teacher who is sleeping with Nikki, Joan’s daughter. Gregg has a dark secretive air about him which initially repels Joan. This is heightened when he cruelly tries an experiment on Shirley to trick her into believing he has given her pot instead of a regular cigarette. This is an interesting and vaguely unsettling scene as Shirley appears to veer from blissed-out to freaked-out, all entirely from auto-suggestion of what she images such forbidden  psychoactoive substances to do to her. Joan rids the house of Gregg, but after taking the hugely embarrassed Shirley home, she returns to hear Gregg and Nikki having sex. This awakens Joan’s own sexual frustration and she touches herself alone in her room.

After Jack goes off on a business trip, Joan’s loneliness compels her to activate her interest in witchcraft. She goes to a shop to buy herbs, books and other spell tools and creates a spell that attracts Gregg to her so they begin an affair.”You’re not bad in the sack” he tells her. Fortunately his physicality seems to console her more than his verbalisms. Her daughter Nikki goes missing but is then reportedly found by the police. She cuts off her affair with Gregg.

Gradually, Joan’s increasing absorption into the occult manifests nightmares involving a masked intruder in black who attacks her at home, dredging up her vulnerabilities to the fore. The night Jack returns, in a shock scene reminiscent of the ending of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Joan blasts him to death with a shotgun. It seems accidental as he is not clearly seen, but this motivation is clouded as she willingly joins her friend’s coven in a ritual after she is acquitted of blame and at a later party she states simply and enigmatically to a friend that she is a witch.  She smiles with inner contentment for the first time as the film ends…

SEASON OF THE WITCH is certainly a worthy exploration within the field of a welcome, rare female-centric plot. The women not only outnumber the men, but their issues of role fulfillment and relationships with self-centred men are the main focus instead of merely being passive victims or flamboyant monsters. What it lacks for me is the payoff of what appears to be the promise of sex mixed with the occult. There is the tasteful suggestion of both but little that is graphic enough to hold continual interest, so what we’re left with is neither a domestic drama exactly nor a horror movie but something falling and failing between the two.

The circumstances of the making and release seem to have been largely responsible for the uncertainty of the film’s tone. The original script, called JACK’S WIFE, was off-putting to Jan White when she was first offered it. “ There were all these nude scenes in it. I really don’t wanna do a porno.” She told the Romeros. George assured her that it was only written so explicitly to gain the funding. He and Nancy were so keen on White, a local ex-soap opera actress, that they agreed to get her a body-double on the days requiring nudity. As it turned out, she became so comfortable during the actual shoot that she said she would have done the scenes herself but didn’t feel brave enough to voice changing her mind on-set. 

White also mentioned some spooky phenomena during the shoot which she attributed to the occult nature of the film, despite unusual events always being a possibility by law of averages in a creative environment of many people over time. The most interesting one concerns the scene in which she writes the Lord’s Prayer backwards. This had to be shot multiple times as the first two or three versions were sent to the lab for processing and each time failed to show up on the print.

The 30^th anniversary reissue by Anchor Bay on DVD is a print that is slightly grainy yet the colour scheme really pops, distracting so much that at times it almost looks like a black and white film that’s been slightly tackily colourised. The attention deficit caused by the lack of driving action caused me to be inadvertently side-tracked by the lurid blue and red couch, not to mention the oddly jarring blues, greens and purples of the women’s clothes. To be fair, the period seems not to have been a high-point for such things; the ladies at times visually resemble the trashy 1970s’ mistresses satirised by Scorcese in GOODFELLAS.

The taint of ‘adult porn entertainment’ lasted through the planned original release  as the title was swapped from JACK’S WIFE to the more misleadingly exploitative HUNGRY WIVES on its first run. Eventually it became SEASON OF THE WITCH which also referred to the titular groovy Donovan song used in the film. Producer Jack Harris also turned a deaf ear to Jan White’s plea to put Romero’s name above the title to capitalise on his international reputation in horror earned by NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Sadly, this meant that the new film’s attempt at mature progressive themes within the genre never earned an audience. This is not to denigrate or patronise the risk that Romero willingly took as a maverick operating outside the system. He later felt that like THERE’S ALWAYS VANILLA, he was severely hampered before the release of this film by money men jumping ship part-way through the process. However, he would be on surer tonal ground wth his next pure horror movie – THE CRAZIES….

No. 71- George Romero - Part I: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

The 25^th anniversary reunion documentary for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD begins with this neat introduction: “In 1967 a group of dedicated industrial film-makers, broadcast professionals, stage actors and actresses, ambitious amateurs and assorted family and friends became a virtual creative army in an attempt to pull off the seemingly impossible – a regionally produced feature film.”

Director George A. Romero at that time was part of a team of creative colleagues including Richard Ricci and Russ Streiner (and later John Russo) who formed the Latent Image commercials agency, a highly successful firm who won 37 awards for their superb, cost-effective adverts for big name brands such as Heinz, U.S. Steel, Alcoa and Calgon – often costing a tenth of the budgets of their competitors. One day, amidst bitching about the usual industry problems, Russo suggested they try their hand at producing their own feature-length horror film - with the original title of MONSTER FLICK. It was funded by each of the ten members of the partnership kicking in $600 and aimed at breaking in to the commercial movie business beyond the limited world of TV ads that they had clearly mastered. Ultimately the film cost much more, roughly $117,000, (but made back around $700,000 in its first year at neighbourhood theatres and the drive-in circuit). The team could not have known that the finished film as NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD would grow to become one of the seminal modern horror films, and its director Romero the under-appreciated godfather of zombie cinema…

The plot is pretty straight-forward, opening with two siblings, Johnny and Barbra (Russell Streiner and Judith O’Dea) making their annual pilgrimage to their father’s grave to plant a wreath. In the cemetery Johnny teases his sister about the spooky atmosphere as a stumbling sinister man approaches. He is a zombie, part of a horrific unexplained reviving of the dead, who proceeds to attack them both, fatally killing Johnny as he falls and strikes his head on a gravestone. Barbara flees to an isolated house, where she encounters Ben (Duane Jones), a level-headed black fellow escapee from the developing terror. Ben is a capable, level-headed survivor whereas Barbra retreats into a catatonia-like PTSD. They are joined by a likeable young couple, Tom and Judy (Keith Wayne, Judith Ridley)  and an older married couple, hot-headed bully Harry Cooper and his bitter wife Helen (Karl Hardman and Marilyn Eastman) who bring their daughter Karen (Kyra Schon) and an inter-‘familial’ tension that soon affects the siege-mates as they struggle to barricade themselves against the gradual waves of ‘ghouls’ from the outside.

Meanwhile the emergency broadcasting networks try to explain the phenomenon as triggered by a Venus orbiting satellite, Explorer, destroyed owing to the presence of some form of radiation  - but that has seemingly infected the eastern third of the U.S, causing the recently-dead to reanimate and cannibalistically devour living humans. They advise the crudest method of dispatching the walking dead, using bludgeoning, fire and bullets and foregoing civilised burial procedures to prevent the just-dead from rising as well: “The bodies must be burned immediately. They’re just dead flesh – and dangerous”.

In the final act, the plans that the impromptu housemates make fall apart: Tom and Judy are blown up in their truck as they attempt to refuel it for a planned group getaway. Harry’s streak of cowardice gets him fatally wounded during the climactic waves of zombie attack on the house when he wrestles a gun from Ben, who shoots him in the heat of the conflict. Harry stumbles down to the cellar he was so keen to hide in all along and dies of his wounds. Helen retreats there also where she witnesses the awful sight of their daughter Karen consuming her dead husband on the floor. Karen stabs her mother to death with a garden trowel. Barbra is shocked to see her brother Johnny as part of the undead horde forcing their way into the property. They envelop and kill her. Ben, the last survivor, hides in the cellar, shooting the revived Harry and Helen.

As dawn breaks, the posse of townsfolk led by Sheriff “Beat ‘em or burn ‘em. They go up pretty easy” McClelland cuts a neutralising swathe toward the house. A groggy Ben comes to the window, where he is mistaken for a zombie and clinically shot, leaving no survivors from the night’s desperate stand…

Despite its limitations, or maybe because of them, NOTLD is ground-breakingly effective in many ways: Firstly, the budgetary restrictions created a tight comradeship among the cast and crew, many of whom blurred the lines between the two by having to perform double or even triple duty in functions – Russell Streiner was not just acting in the film as Johnny, he was a co-producer, like Karl ‘Harry’ Hardman, who added a third role as one of the make-up artists on set.

The close collaboration off-screen was superbly warped on-screen to create a pressure cooker of bubbling tensions within the makeshift family unit in the house. After eroding our character identification by rendering Barbra catatonic (much like killing off Janet Leigh so early in PSYCHO), the threat level of being ripped open by the zombies outside is matched by the potential of being structurally torn apart indoors, Hot-headed Harry bull-dozes his way in, masking his cowardice with intimidation, pushing for the group to hide down in the cellar from the get-go whether they agree or not. He and Ben constantly duel for top-dog status, the latter losing his cool at the older man’s dangerous selfishness: “I oughtta drag you out there and feed you to those things!” Harry’s wife confirms that his behaviour is not situational - his combative, insecure nature is a catalyst in accelerating their demise. There is sociological commentary here about how a supposedly civilised society may descend into chaos if our instinct for self-preservation is allowed to dominate our humanity.

The elements that make up the grammar of the zombie movie originate here.  As well as the fraught vying for dominance between alpha males thrown together by necessity under the claustrophobia of siege conditions , the rules - the standard methods of dispatch so familiar as horror lore now of either burning or putting a bullet in the brain - began with NOTLD.

Linked to this, the casting of Duane Jones as the leader within the group was an important step in affirmative ethnic role models on-screen, all the more impressive as he was slotted into a script where the character was written as caucasian. No changes were made following his casting, no traces of tokenism - his ethnicity is not referenced in any way, and he emerges as a well-spoken, calm, resourceful, middle-class character, like a young Bill Cosby, but one with much-needed practical skills. (Today, I fancy this type of role would be cast more narrowly with a young, streetwise ‘gang-banger’ personality). During the filming, it took Jones some time before he felt comfortable with the opportunity as it was so rare in a society still supportive in many places of residual segregation and a period where civilian rioters and the Black Panthers battled militantly for equality.

The gory feastings by the zombies on human entrails (supplied by a local butcher shop) were fiercely graphic for their time, and although not as visceral as, say the later eye gouging of Olga Karlatos in ZOMBI 2 or some of the ‘head traumas’ and disembowelments in Romero’s awesome sequel DAWN OF THE DEAD and DAY OF THE DEAD, they still deliver strikingly queasy moments. Watching the undead hungrily devouring the remnants of Tom and Judy in the moonlight outside the house is memorably unsettling as is the quasi-Freudian snacking of young Karen upon her mother in the cellar.

The monochrome cinematography and raw feel adds to the almost documentary veracity of NOTLD. During the film, we are fed pieces of rolling news from the media as a state of emergency results in shelters being set up and newscasters attempting to gather expert advice from scientists and the government. Watching it now, it foreshadows the 24-hour news cycle coverage of today’s war and disasters covered by the likes of CNN. These scenes are credible in how they move from vague guesswork to concrete specifics of trying to handle the situation and public panic as more facts are known.

NIGHT’s cinéma vérité grimness of aspect is also powerfully amplified at the end. The shooting of Ben is a shockingly downbeat conclusion; just as we are led to believe a new day brings new possibilities for life, his death robs us of hope – an admirably brave choice for a movie aiming at commercial success. (The early ‘70s would usher in a similar air of cynicism in many film endings). This is reinforced by the added one-two punch of the casuality with which Sheriff McClelland deadpans “Okay, he’s dead. Let’s go get ‘im. That’s another one for the fire” and the cut to a final sequence of grainy newsprint-style photos of the clean-up operation. The all-night fight for survival of the people we have become invested in is now nothing more than routine sweeping-up.

It’s worth mentioning the effectiveness of sound-track cues as well. Whilst making understandably inexpensive use of open source music, the echoing screams chill as Karen slaughters her mother and the synthesised thudding pulse accompanying the closing still images compounds the hopelessness.

Romero and his colleagues ultimately lost a lot of revenue on the film owing to naivety. Before releasing it, they had copyrighted not the film of NOTLD, but simply the former script-stage title of NIGHT OF THE FLESH-EATERS, which meant that when the name changed to the one we all know it as, the copyright no longer applied. Subsequently, companies were able to print their own VHS releases and avoid paying any royalties to its producers. This did not prevent NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD from making George Romero’s name in the horror movie world. He would always labour outside the established studio system, forging a hard road but one with arguably more artistic control, later refining and expanding his apocalyptic vision with the more ambitious DAWN OF THE DEAD and the damagingly budget-constrained DAY OF THE DEAD, then to my mind over-extending his pioneering property a few films too far (DIARY? SURVIVAL?). He earned his place as a firm genre favourite and is hugely influential to this day as each generation re-draws his zombie territory.

Coming up next, I’ll be covering two of Romero’s follow-on films that explored other areas of horror – SEASON OF THE WITCH (1971) and THE CRAZIES (1973)…

No 70. David Cronenberg - Part II: SHIVERS (1975)

SHIVERS (1975)

By 1974 David Cronenberg was worried that after three years his film directing dream would never properly come to fruition. He’d made his two short experimental films STEREO and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE and the TV shows he has hired for had not helped to build a reputations. He went to Los Angeles, wondering after reluctance if he would have to consider being part of the Hollywood machine to get funding for his latest script ORGY OF THE BLOOD PARASITES. Roger Corman’s company loved it, feeling its inexpensive sensational horror premise would be viable for their undemanding drive-in audience. 

Upon returning to Canada, Cronenberg suddenly found that the exploitation company Cinepix had come through with backing themselves, and so in wary conjunction with the government body the Canadian Film Development Corporation, his first feature was in business to the tune of $179,000. He narrowly avoided an early assimilation into Hollywood by just one month. This is something which he has still adhered to, having never shot any of his films in the industry environs of L.A.

SHIVERS deals with the horrific transmission of parasites between residents in the lavish apartments of the new Starliner high-rise complex on the fictional Starliner Island in Montreal. It is activated by the creation of a parasite by Dr Hobbes, who infects his young mistress with it as an experiment to connect people to their primal fleshy selves, but doesn’t realise how free his mistress is with her affections. Hobbes kills his mistress early on and then himself but he is too late to stop the infection outbreak.  Thus, the leech-like creatures are passed orally amongst the whole building, causing a psychosexual frenzy of lust and homicide-driven insanity across the Starliner’s occupancy. Finally, after the heroic efforts of the medical clinic’s doctor result in his being infected also, we see that come the morning, the hordes of libidinous occupants now drive out into the city and beyond, now apparently normal but calmly focused on spreading the terrifying contagion.

Shooting covered August to September 1974 and was a valuable first opportunity for Cronenberg to understand how to delegate to a professional crew; for his previous films he had been forced to handle all the technical roles himself. Now he needed to learn the various department’s names and duties and entrust them. Fortunately he had Ivan (later famous for GHOSTBUSTERS) Reitman as producer and music composer as well as Joe Blasco, whose under-skin bladder FX earned great admiration from make-up guru Dick Smith who had pioneered the technique. Cronenberg also saved money by living in one of the apartments in the Nun’s Island high-rise used for shooting – by doubling it as the FX workroom.  He had intended to use real leeches for the close-ups but they were accidentally frozen by a fellow crew member in the freezer.

The cast was made up of virtual unknowns for the most part, except for Lynn Lowry who’d been in George Romero’s THE CRAZIES the year before, as the nurse here, and famous horror genre star Barbara Steele as the vampy lesbian Betts. Those who’ve seen STEREO and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE will recognise Ron Mlodzik as the unruffled, soothing promotional agent for Starliner (It’s his voice you hear as well on the promo film at the start selling the complex’s virtues). He has a chillingly effective scene near the end where he helps take a terrified couple to a room and then reveals it’s a trap to throw them to the libidinous wolves waiting for their next sexual victim. Paul Hampton, the smooth Doctor Roger St Luc is overly-relaxed for the most part until the tension is amped to critical. He is more famous in real-life as a writer of pop songs. Probably the most accomplished performer of the supporting cast is Joe Silver as the researcher Rollo Linsky, making the connections between Dr Hobbes, the girl and the infection. He is also almost never seen without eating a pickle, even when driving.

The horror sequences and the almost documentary feel of SHIVERS have a nightmarishly effective tone. Despite some haphazard acting and awkward fight scenes, they have a macabre edge. The passing of the parasite through the throats of Steele and Lowry is unsettling, as are the corridor rampages and a great sequence where St Luc escapes outside from the pool only to be confronted by a zombie-esque chain of residents looming up out of the dark.

It’s not surprising that there are staging weaknesses occasionally in the scenes. Because of the intense budget strain, many more set-ups had to be shot each day than would be normal including FX, car-crashes etc

The title changed upon release to THE PARASITE MURDERS and then finally once the French-Canadian distributors saw how well it did under the French title FRISSONS, they used the English equivalent SHIVERS (aka THEY CAME FROM WITHIN in the USA). French critics saw the film as almost a political attack on the insulated, middle-class bourgeoisie and Cronenberg at least agreed enough to admit that “people vicariously enjoy the scenes where guys kick down doors and do whatever they want to the people inside… a vicarious thrill in seeing the forbidden”.

In the UK, James Ferman’s BBFC passed SHIVERS uncut, which is slightly surprising as he was known for being highly sensitive to film-makers who exploited clear combinations of sex and violence. Clearly, he felt that there was justification for sexualised brutality in the plot. There were complaints back in Canada from appalled people getting wind of taxpayers’ money being used to fund such a graphically-unpleasant horror movie. However, the film made a profit  - unlike many. Like Clive Barker later, Cronenberg had no patience with the idea of hiding the horror from the audience: “The very purpose was to show the unshowable, to speak the unspeakable…”.Also, as he pointed out, in a film that relies on visual depictions, if you cut away from the FX shots, the audience wouldn’t know what was happening.

SHIVERS not only made money, it began to make the writer/director’s reputation in the horror field. Even Martin Scorcese was quoted as admiring the ending’s power: “The last scene…with the cars going out to infect the entire world…is something I’ve never been able to shake”.

The perversion of science for human experimentation, the revolt of the body from the inside against its owner, public panic in the face of infection, all these themes would be developed by David Cronenberg in the follow-on RABID and then beyond into the decades to come…