THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT boasts a pretty terrific roster of talent, with Christopher Lee and Charles Gray in front of the camera, and Terence Fisher and Arthur Grant behind it. The source material comes courtesy of the great Dennis Wheatley, here adapted for the screen by Richard Matheson. All the pieces are in place for a good, spooky time. But THE DEVIL RIDES OUT isn't interesting in frights. It's interested in thrills. What emerges during the near 90 minute running time of the film is a tale of adventure, not a tale of terror.

In many ways it resembles one of Hammer's Dracula films. The Satanic antagonist is after a young woman, can hypnotize people at will and meets his end in front of a large holy cross. This is, by the way, one of the great joys in watching THE DEVIL RIDES OUT. Lee, iconic for playing the Prince of Darkness, is here cast in the Van Helsing role of a well-mannered and brave pseudo-mystic, the only one capable of stopping the evil before it can succeed with its nasty plans.

But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Perhaps a simple synopsis is in order?

Lee plays the Duc de Richleau, or as his friends call him, Nicholas. He is in town to visit with his two friends, Rex and Simon, though no one has seen Simon for quite some time. He's become a bit of a recluse, it seems, but that doesn't stop Nicholas from stopping by his home one evening. Simon is having a party with his new friends, the members of an exclusive astronomical society. As Rex flirts with the pretty Tanith, Nicholas takes a closer look at the people attending the party, especially Mocata, an intimidating chap with piercing blue eyes and a bad attitude. Putting two and two together, Nicholas comes to the conclusion that the people at the party are all Satanists, a suspicion confirmed when he discovers a basket of chickens in the upstairs observatory. Nicholas knocks Simon out and the three friends make a run for it. 

And that's basically the first ten minutes of the film. From that point on, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT hurdles along at a breakneck speed. There's very little downtime during the first half of the film, just a relentless barrage of exposition and light action set pieces, all culminating in a rescue at a Satanic ritual. Up until that rescue scene, you could have mistaken THE DEVIL RIDES OUT for a serious film. But it's difficult to hold that opinion once the devil shows up (just a man with hairy shoulders wearing a goat mask, I'm afraid). “Oh my, Lucifer himself!”, you say? Yes, indeed, the devil himself makes an appearance, only to literally explode when Rex hits him with a crucifix.

The final half of the film dives straight into the bowels of camp, with plenty of corny hallucinations, a young girl threatened by a giant spider, Christopher Lee spouting gibberish to ward off evil, deus ex machinas left, right and center, and a final battle that looks and feels like the production just ran out of cash. At one point, the Angel of Death shows up riding a black horse. The horse rears up. Then it rears up again. And again and again. And then you think “hold on… are they just playing the same five seconds of footage over and over of the horse kicking the air?. Well, yes. Yes, they are. Then the Angel of Death pulls off its hood to reveal a laughably fake plastic skeleton head, Lee screams more gibberish and POOF end scene. Oh, and at one point, a smiling black man in what looks like an adult diaper materializes on screen in a cloud of fog because why the hell not?

Look, let's not mince words here. This movie is fucking great. What? Expected me to say something different? 

In fact, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT is an absolute blast of a film and a must watch around Halloween time. It is a total celebration of witchcraft tropes and hokey Satanic horror. There are so many wonderful moments here, like when our not-so-intrepid heroes defeat a giant spider by splashing it with a little water or when God shows up to save the day by reversing time, a la SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE. I'm really not sure if anyone involved with this film meant for it to be taken seriously (even though both Lee and Charles Grey play the material exceptionally well), but it's difficult to imagine that anyone ever could. It isn't scary or disturbing. It's just a massive load of fun.

And who doesn't like fun?

THE WITCHES

A woman moves to a small, quaint town only to find out that it is home to a coven of witches.

Now that single line synopsis could be used to describe a whole lot of movies. If you replaced “woman” with “man” and “witches” with “Satanists”, it could be used to describe a whole lot more, too. It's one of the most common horror movie set-ups and it is exactly what THE WITCHES is all about. And that's a problem, because all of its narrative twists and shocks are ruined by familiarity. There isn't a single element here that you haven't seen before.

Look, I know formulaic is often used as a pejorative (even I use it that way from time to time), but there really isn't anything wrong with watching and enjoying movies that adhere to a very specific narrative formula. Sub genres are popular for that very reason. Hell, people love to bitch and moan about the lack of originality in movies these days, but when January 1^st comes 'round and we sit and look at the previous years box office results, a clear trend towards the comfortable becomes clear. People clamor for sequels to films they love, new entries in franchises they love, etc. Originality isn't well received. If it were, movie theaters would be packed full of art house films during the summer. People like what they like and want more of what they like.

So don't get me wrong. Taken on its own, THE WITCHES is a perfectly decent film. But watching it in 2016, a full 50 years after its premiere in 1966, is difficult to do. If we were in a classroom all taking a course called “Outsider Discovers the Town is Full of Occult Types 101”, THE WITCHES would be the introductory film we would watch. This kind of narrative had already been around for awhile, but THE WITCHES is perhaps the single best example of it at its most pure and basic. The films that came after it all provided the variations and deviations that kept the narrative formula feeling fresh. Remember the ending of THE WICKER MAN? Or how ROSEMARY'S BABY brought this kind of pastoral cult terror into the modern world of New York City? Those were deviations. There is no grand deviation from the norm in THE WITCHES, but that's largely because this kind of film had not yet become routine enough to need deviation.

Beginning its life as a novel called The Devil's Own, written by a female author known for her historical romance novels, THE WITCHES was adapted as a black comedy by Nigel Kneale, the great British science fiction and horror writer. Unfortunately, whatever overt humor there was in Kneale's screenplay was removed, leaving behind only the unintentional kind. This is the type of film wherein a handful of over-middle aged men and women conduct an orgy fully clothed before engaging in ritualistic “dancing”, essentially just running in place while flailing their arms about, all  while someone's granny spouts gibberish in the background. It's meant to be threatening and spooky, and the gibberish is supposed to sound menacing. But it actually just looks like a bunch of people doing geriatric jazzercise while someone tries to recite the lord's prayer through a mouthful of marbles.

And stuck in the middle of all of this is Joan Fontaine, acting her heart out. Perhaps the single best thing about the film, Fontaine's performance manages to somehow hit all the right notes, even as the film descends into ridiculousness. Another interesting thing about the film is how it seems to be written from a singularly female point of view. It's a story that includes among its talking points the puritan obsession with virginity and the societal obsession with feminine youthfulness, especially the fear of aging into obsolescence. There isn't much to chew on in THE WITCHES, but there are scraps of life here and there. But mostly, it's just a lot of the same old thing.

But maybe that “same old thing” is “your old thing”, hmm? If so, THE WITCHES might be just what you're looking for. Personally, I just couldn't get into it. Maybe the problem is with me and not the film? That's a definite possibility. For right now though, I'm comfortable with saying that THE WITCHES is a decent film and a decent bit of history, but that's all it is.

DEMONS OF THE MIND

When we first meet Elizabeth, she is running through the woods. Who or what she is running from is unknown to us. She encounters Carl Richter, a medical student. They spend just a few days together, making love and enjoying the company, before Elizabeth is abducted and returned to her family estate in Bavaria. We meet her distraught father, the Baron Zorn, and her aunt Hilda. They return Elizabeth to her bedroom, locking the door. We also meet Elizabeth's brother, Emil, a gaunt and pale faced chap who also spends his days locked inside his bedroom. The Baron refuses to let them see each other and for good reason. Neither is well off mentally and the two siblings share an obvious incestuous attraction to one another.

A few days later, we find Richter in the company of Falkenberg, a hypnotist on his way to visit the Zorn family. He was the “doctor” treating Elizabeth in Vienna shortly before her escape into the woods. While Falkenberg heads off to the Zorn estate, Richter stays behind in town. The townsfolk are in a panic. Several women have recently gone missing in the woods surrounding the estate. Superstitious to the extreme, the townsfolk believe a demon is afoot, a suspicion spurred on by the recent arrival of a wandering, ranting Christian priest.

Meanwhile at the Zorn estate, we learn more about the inner workings of the family. The Baron's wife committed suicide many years ago, back when Elizabeth and Emil were only children, slashing her own throat in front of them. Hilda is using bloodletting to keep the siblings weak. Falkenberg tries to alleviate the madness in the family, a madness the Baron puts down to a hereditary stain, a severe madness passed down through the generations, a lunacy carried in the blood.

Equal parts Satanic Panic film and psychosexual thriller, DEMONS OF THE MIND is a film about madness. More precisely, about how madness begets madness. The Baron's tall tale of hereditary madness turns out to be true, only not quite in the way he believes it to be. The townspeople burn Pagan effigies for protection, a harmless bit of violent abstraction, only to be drawn into committing actual physical violence by the words of a lunatic priest. A trustworthy companion enables a character's madness by setting a brute upon helpless women, dutifully cleaning up the mess afterward. Instead of a man of science, we have a hypnotist acting as family doctor, promising cures and offering solutions not grounded in scientific reasoning, but in folk tales and delusion.

There are no heroes in this film. Even the most well-meaning of characters is informed by some line of faulty reasoning. The whole damn world of DEMONS OF THE MIND is insane. As such, it's a difficult film to get emotionally invested in, even after we learn the truth of what is going on, a revelation that turns a couple of characters we thought were simple nutty deviants into the films most tragic victims. What the film offers up in lieu of emotional resonance is visual splendor. DEMONS OF THE MIND is a gorgeous movie that aims for simple, naturalistic realism. It contrasts that realistic depiction of its setting and time period with the absolute madness of the narrative and its many instances of gruesome violence. This creates a film that feels itself unbalanced in vision and clarity, almost like the movie is slowly going mad right alongside the characters.

It's impeccably acted too, with strong lead performances from Robert Hardy and Patrick Magee, as well as wonderful supporting turns from Gillian Hills and Yvonne Mitchell. When you add in assured direction from Peter Sykes and gorgeous Arthur Grant photography, you have one hell of a film to be reckoned with. But alas, it under performed with both critics and audiences, and was largely dismissed as yet another example of just how far Hammer had fallen in 1972. It is certainly better appreciated these days and for good reason. It's a far more demanding film than most Hammer productions of that era and one that is largely free of any kind of tacky romanticism or tawdry melodrama. It contains all the requisite nudity and violence you would want from a Hammer production, and marries it to a tale that is measured but messy, psychologically complex but strangely reductive. It makes tonal consistency out of cacophony. DEMONS OF THE MIND is a film that by and large shouldn't work as well as it does, and it may take more than a single viewing to really figure out why it works at all. But make no mistake, there is glorious method in all its wonderful madness.

THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH

Meet Georges Bonner, surgeon, aspiring sculptor, discoverer of eternal life. He's 104 years old, though he barely looks 45. What's his secret? Well, science, of course. In particular, a special kind of surgery involving a gland replacement. And if you find yourself getting a little older a little quicker than normal, just drink some of his patented green elixir, the perfect impediment to slowly rotting to death as your body's cells play catch up with your actual age.

Georges' next gland transplant is quickly coming due and to conduct the surgery, he calls upon his old friend and colleague in dastardly science, Dr. Ludwig Weiss. Unfortunately, Ludwig has recently suffered a stroke, crippling his right hand, and worse, the back-up glands Georges had in storage have gone off. So what is Georges to do? Not having the transplant means that his body will age rapidly, turning to dust in a matter of minutes. There's only one thing he can do.

Georges has a complicated romantic history with a pretty socialite named Janine. The two have recently started seeing one another again, a development which annoys Pierre Gerrard, a French surgeon (this film takes place in Paris in the year 1890, by the way). After speaking with Ludwig, Pierre agrees to do the procedure, thinking that it is a routine medical operation needed to save Georges' life. However, once he learns the truth of Georges' condition, he quickly changes his mind. So Georges has little recourse. If moral persuasion isn't enough, maybe a little blackmail will do the trick. But first, he has to obtain a shiny new gland…

How cool does that sound?

Trust me, on paper THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH sounds pretty great, but on film, it's one long bore. A remake of Ralph Murphy's much better thriller THE MAN IN HALF MOON STREET, Terence Fisher's film is a lethargic melodrama for most of its running time, only picking up steam at around the 40 minute mark. That's around the time Ludwig and Georges begin to butt heads. Georges is willing to kill to get a new gland for his operation, but Ludwig refuses to play any part in it. For a good ten minutes (and I mean good), the film becomes an interesting treatise on mortality, the ethics of life extension and the morality of selfishness. All of the films underlying philosophical concerns are laid bare in these scenes, with great dialogue and a passion in the performances that is not found anywhere else during the films 83 minute running time.

But then the film quickly descends back down into routine melodrama for another long half hour stretch of lifeless performances, stiff dialogue and languid pacing. The film ends with a kind of fevered ferocity so out of place with the rest of the film that it almost feels like someone swapped out the final reel of this film with the final reel from a typical Italian Gothic horror film. This has one of those “shrieking women in a burning building” endings that generally gets my pulse pumping, but by the time sparks started to fly, all of my patience had run out. I just sat there, waiting for it all to end, feeling like I too had aged 100 years over the course of those 83 minutes.

THE NANNY

If I could only use one word to describe THE NANNY, my choice would be “measured”. This is a slow burn of a film, a really insidious piece of work that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. It deals with child murder, parental neglect, back alley abortions and, most of all, madness. But it does all of that in a real low key style, never descending (or ascending, depending on how much you like that kind of thing) into histrionics. It's a thriller in the classic sense of the word, with its chills and thrills generated out of pure characterization and precision narrative control.

So when I say the film is a slow burn, do not take that to mean “padded” or “dull”. The set-up is simple. Joey, a ten-year old boy, has returned home after a two year absence. His father is your typical British stiff upper lip. His mother seems to be one step away from a nervous breakdown. She can't even bring herself to go pick up her son to bring him home. Instead, she sends the live-in Nanny (she's never referred to by a name, just “Nanny”). Once he returns home, Joey begins acting up, insisting he move his things into a smaller guest bedroom instead of the room prepared for him by the Nanny. He refuses to eat any food prepared by the Nanny, refuses to take a bath without locking the door, and generally acts like your typical problem child. While all this is going on, we learn more about the Nanny and how integral she is in the home. She's just as much the Nanny for the mother as she is for Joey. 

Along the way, we also learn that Joey had a little sister named Susy.

It takes the film a good 40 or so minutes before we learn why the mother is as unnerved as she is and more importantly, why little Joey spent two years away from his family. Little Susy drowned in the bathtub one afternoon and Joey was the one who killed her, leading to his stay in a facility for troubled children. Or did he kill her? Joey claims it wasn't him. It was the Nanny. His refusal to eat her dinners is out of fear that she will poison him. He refuses to bathe without locking the door because he fears that she will drown him too. 

But who is really to blame for all of this? Was it Joey who poisoned his mother's food, leading her to be hospitalized? Or was it the Nanny, tricking everyone into believing it was Joey, removing the mother from the home so she can finally take care of Joey once and for all without interruption?

Once all the pieces are in place, this quietly chilling little film barrels towards its conclusion with unnerving intensity. The finale boasts a triple whammy of nastiness that makes a remarkable impact. In terms of sheer visual terror, it cannot hold a candle to that shower curtain being pulled aside in PSYCHO. But in terms of raw emotional terror, the kind that creeps up on you, slowly wrapping its claws around your throat, THE NANNY is tough to match. This is a truly cunning bit of filmmaking, expertly conceived and executed, that earns its suspense and terror honestly, rather than relying on cheap scares and gimmicks.

The whodunit aspects of the film are engaging, playing off the audience's preconceptions of the “troubled child” and “nosy nanny”, character types that pervade these kinds of thrillers. Either one could be the guilty party. Either one could be mad or bad. Regardless, neither answer provides catharsis. When we finally learn the truth, its even more horrible than we could have imagined. In the end, THE NANNY proves to be every bit as great of a tragedy as it is a great thriller, easily one of the best Hammer productions ever made.

TERROR OF THE TONGS

The year is 1910. A Chinese scholar has arrived in Hong Kong aboard a ship captained by Jackson Sale. As a thank you to the captain, the scholar gives him an ornate book. Just after leaving the ship, the scholar is killed by a hatchet wielding assassin. The reason for the murder is simple. The scholar is in possession of a sheet of paper containing incriminating evidence against the Red Dragon Tong, an underground criminal network that has much of Hong Kong under its thumb. Not knowing that the scholar stashed the paper inside the pages of the book, Sale gives the gift to his teenage daughter. The Tong, under the leadership of the shadowy Chung King, kills Sale's first mate and housekeeper while searching for the paper. Later that night, they also murder his young daughter.

Driven to find the men responsible, Sale begins exploring the underbelly of Hong Kong, prying information about the Tong from anyone he can, unaware that he is being manipulated all the while by rebellion forces eager to take their city back.

Not much of a horror film, I'll admit, but there is definitely a rougher side to this seemingly simple tale of a man seeking justice for his daughter's murder. TERROR OF THE TONGS is littered with scenes of fingers being chopped off, hatchets cleaving people's chests and shoulder blades, insinuations of sex trafficking and drug abuse, and even a scene of a man having his bones scraped with long, thick needles. It's rough stuff, for sure, but it clashes with the workaday, almost trite action side of the narrative. It's difficult to take the film seriously when grown men are literally slapping each other into submission one moment and stabbing people to death the next. There's a tonal disconnect going on here.

The film stars the late, great Christopher Lee as Chung King, the leader of the Tong (in what is basically a dry run for his later roles as the maniacal Fu Manchu) and that alone should tell you all you need to know about what kind of film TERROR OF THE TONGS is. Yes, this is a film where nearly every major Chinese speaking role is played by a British or Irish actor in yellow face paint and large, comical fake eyebrows. In terms of racial sensitivity, it's miles above Mickey Rooney's horribly racist performance in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, but it's undeniably problematic at times (Sale's deck hand is a young Chinese boy named Confucius, for Christ's sake). The portrayal of Sale's age inappropriate love interest, Lee, is perhaps the single worst offender in the film. Portrayed by a barely disguised white actress, Lee is submissive, her dialogue overly dramatic, her English stunted and her style of dress approaches fetish levels of cringe worthiness.

But the English-as-Chinese roles are not the real problem here. The biggest problem is that Captain Jackson Sale is an underwritten character portrayed by an underperforming actor. It might just be the fact that everyone else is acting so obviously odd that Geoffrey Toone's performance comes off as a bit flat, but it was undeniably underwhelming to watch a loving father barely react at all to the death of his daughter. For most of the film, Sale appears to be as emotionally invested in finding his daughter's killers as I am in grocery shopping every Sunday evening. The only time Toone really lets loose, really displaying any anger, is when he finally comes face to face with Chung King. In that scene, Toone is fully convincing as a man whose daughter was brutally murdered. But the rest of the time, he is so flat and collected that Chung King might as well have just spilled coffee on Sale's new rug instead of killing his kid.

Thankfully, the movie has a way of making up for these shortcomings. Simply put, the damn thing is glorious to watch. The period setting is wonderful, the sets are ornate and visually inspired, and the whole thing shines thanks to the glorious color photography of Arthur Grant. Despite tonal inconsistencies, the film breezes through its relatively short running time, stopping only for moments of necessary exposition (all the better too, as we can stop and stare at the scenery). The score is great, the direction is solid and the performances that work (especially Lee and Marie Burke) more than make up for the performances that fall flat. So if you're willing to overlook some obvious surface issues and more than a few instances of really lamentable racial stereotyping, TERROR OF THE TONGS might just make for a decent Saturday afternoon flick. There's little reason to recommend it over several of the other action thrillers Hammer put out during the time, like THE STRANGLERS OF BOMBAY or THE PIRATES OF BLOOD RIVER, but it's a good enough film to recommend, even with a few justifiable reservations.

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT

A rocket crashes back to earth, landing in a field in the British countryside. It was the first of many planned manned expeditions to space, the brainchild of one Professor Bernard Quatermass. When the Professor and his team arrive on the scene, they're relieved to find one of the crew members, Victor Carroon, is still alive. Their relief is short-lived however when they discover that the other two crew members have seemingly disappeared. A shell shocked and ill Carroon is taken back to Quatermass' research lab. They discover that Carroon is undergoing strange changes. His metabolism has slowed to a crawl, well beneath normal human levels. His skin is thinning, ice cold to the touch, and his facial features are shifting.

A Scotland Yard inspector, Lomax, is trying to investigate the disappearances of the other two crew members, but is largely stonewalled every step of the way by Quatermass. To the Professor, this is a scientific investigation, not a criminal investigation. But Lomax still suspects foul play, ordering his men to fingerprint the near catatonic Carroon. Even more questions surface when it's discovered that the fingerprints of the returned Carroon no longer match the fingerprints taken before the man boarded the rocket. All questions of guilt are answered once the film contained within the rockets on-board surveillance camera is developed. As the men sit and watch, a strange, unseen force terrorizes the crew of the rocket, killing two, leaving only Carroon alive.

In a desperate attempt to get her husband proper medical treatment (and distance him from Quatermass), Carroon's wife hires a private investigator to break her husband out of the hospital. Turns out, that was a massive mistake. Because Carroon isn't really Carroon anymore. He's now part space creature and he is mutating rapidly.

Hammer Studios' rise to the top of the British genre hierarchy begins here. THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (the “E” was dropped to capitalize on the film receiving an “X” classification from the BBFC) is a watershed moment in the history of British horror cinema. A feature film adaptation of the successful Nigel Kneale BBC mini-series, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT would go on to make bank at the box office, spawning two sequels and cementing its namesake in the annals of niche sci-fi horror flicks. It's easy to see why. Despite being over 60 years old, the film still packs a wallop, easily one of the best pulpy sci-fi horror films of the 1950s. In fact, this film must be downright horrifying back in the day, with its numerous scenes of exsanguinated corpses, all husk-like in appearance, their eyes caved in, jaws open.

For fans of 1950s sci-fi horror films, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT will feel like a warm trip home. All the pieces are here, from the straight-talking coppers to the scientists more interested in the personal glory of scientific advancement than in anything resembling humanism (at one point, Quatermass screams into the face of Carroon's justifiably worried wife, “there's no room for personal feelings in science!”). It's the kind of film where seemingly well-educated men will say “it's beyond human understanding” right after issuing long explanations for things. At the end of the day, its up to the cops and lab rats to set up an elaborate trap for the monster which, as custom dictates, includes more than a few fireworks. It's classic stuff.

In fact, it's almost a perfect 50s sci-fi horror film. But one thing kinda ruins it for me and that's Brian Donlevy's performance as Quatermass. Brought in to provide some kind of appeal to American audiences, Donlevy feels remarkably out of place here. His brash American mannerisms clash strongly with his predominantly British co-stars, all of whom feel natural in their performances. Donlevy seems to be playing Quatermass as a military man, not a scientist. He enters every scene with a lead foot, stomping through the scenery, barking out orders like a pissed off district manager at a costume shop. He always feels like he's one sideways glance away from slamming his fist down on a table, angrily shouting “I'M IN CHARGE HERE, DAMMIT!”. I'm not sure if it was his well-documented alcoholism or just his complete misunderstanding of the material, but Donlevy's performance as Quatermass, who you would assume to be the hero of the piece given its title, makes the character almost completely unlikable.

So oddly enough, it isn't the actor playing the protagonist that ends up carrying the movie, but rather the man playing the antagonist of the piece. Richard Wordworth's portrayal of Carroon is simply brilliant, almost effortlessly creepy yet sympathetic. In reducing the story from a six part mini-series to an 80 minute feature film, some sacrifices needed to be made. As a result, Carroon isn't quite as fleshed out a character here, but Wordsworth's portrayal definitely succeeds in creating a character worthy of empathy. In Kneale's original work, Carroon, now a monstrosity, is able to take control of his mutating body, committing a kind of suicide to save the planet. That angle was written out of this film, replaced with a flashy, typical B-movie style ending. But there are moments here when Wordsworth legitimately pulls off a Karloff-worthy miracle, making the monster into something worth feeling sorry for. Watching him twitch and stumble down a street, running away as fast as his body will allow him, his face perpetually wrenched in agony… It's difficult not to feel something for him, even if that “him” is rapidly becoming more “something” than “someone”.

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN

During the 40s and 50s, Hammer Film Productions was known mainly for their run of cheap B-movies, mostly crime thrillers or lukewarm melodramas. Their first foray into the realm of genre cinema didn’t come until 1953 with the release of an adaptation of William Temple’s science-fiction mad scientist potboiler FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE. Like Hammer’s next journey into campy sci-fi, SPACEWAYS, FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE didn’t exactly light up the box office. Their real genre breakthrough would have to wait a couple of years. In 1955, Hammer released a big screen adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s popular BBC Television serial THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT. While not a blockbuster success in the UK (though it earned Hammer quite a bit of profit), the film proved to be a major success overseas, signaling a way forth for the still burgeoning studio.

The first order of business for Hammer was to get a sequel out into the theaters, which they did in the summer of 1957. To tide audiences over (and keep the momentum going), they had released another piece of sci-fi horror camp, X THE UNKNOWN, a year earlier. By this point, Hammer was beginning to be not just a fledgling studio with a growing audience, but a bankable brand as well. The release of THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN later that year forever cemented Hammer in the public consciousness as a purveyor of contemporary, gruesome, and risqué horror thrillers. Strange then that the immediate follow-up to Hammer’s first color foray into full-blooded horror would be THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, shot in black and white, a slight but charming bit of moralistic horror that could not be more different than the film that preceded it.

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN is set in some remote village at the foot of the Himalayas. John Rollason, a botanist, his age improbable wife Helen, and Rollason’s assistant Peter are staying in a monastery headed by an old, wise (and slightly sinister) Lhama. The arrival of an American researcher, Tom Friend, prompts an expedition into the wild. The aim of the expedition? To prove the existence of the Yeti, a bipedal, enormous ape-like creature. Leaving his wife and Peter back at the monastery, Rollason tags along, quickly realizing that Friend’s motives are more commercial than anthropological. He aims to take the creature back with him, alive or dead. After one of their party members suffers a broken ankle thanks to a poorly placed bear trap, the party is visited in the dead of night by a large humanoid creature. They manage to kill it, transferring its corpse back to their camp. By the next night, it becomes very apparent that the party is being hunted by a very vocal, very determined pack (or is a shrewdness?) of Yeti.

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN, like THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, is an adaptation of a BBC Television serial, also written by Nigel Kneale. Directing duties went to Val Guest, frequent Hammer film director (including the two Quatermass films), and many actors from the BBC Television serial were cast, including Peter Cushing in the role of John Rollason. The interiors were shot largely on sets constructed at Bray and Pinewood Studios while the French Pyrenees stood in for the Himalayas. In contrast to the later Hammer films which were almost entirely set-bound and almost painterly in composition, THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN feels at times almost documentary-like. Guest’s decisions to utilize handheld cameras, allow for actors to speak over each other’s lines and capture the cold, miserable conditions of the films setting adds a kind of unmeasured immediacy to the proceedings that is frankly missing in Hammer’s later highly ordered and impeccably controlled (and much better) films.

The unfortunate reality though is that while the film has an unmistakable energy to it behind the camera, the results are not all that apparent on screen. Unlike THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, there really isn’t much modernity in THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN. It feels five years older than it is and that is largely due to the fact that Kneale’s screenplay trades much of the films energy for the kind of simplistic moral message usually found in early 50s American sci-fi B-movies. I don’t know much about Kneale’s inspirations for the film (outside of reports of Yeti encounters from people like Eric Shipton), but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Kneale had read Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo before sitting down to write this script. There are several familiarities, from the party lost in the wilderness, to a creepy encounter in a tent during the night, to the screams of a lost party member carried by the wind to the ears of his terrified companions. THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN is at its best during these scenes. At times, this is a genuinely effective horror film and I cannot help but think that it should have never strayed from that path.

But Kneale wanted to subvert audience expectations. In the same way the Italian jungle cannibal films love to toy around with the idea that maybe, just maybe, WE are the savages, THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN gives us monsters that are not really monsters, prompting us to contemplate the inhumanity we display whenever we tread on nature, taking animals for food or sport or entertainment. The film contains many discussions about Darwin and evolution, about where these Yetis sit on the evolutionary tree, about how similar we would be to them. The film works in bizarre metaphysics including thought transference and psychic empathy in an attempt to paint these creatures as something not only along our evolutionary line but maybe beyond it. You can feel Kneale prodding you in the side the entire time.

“Oy. You think you’re better than them, don’t cha?”

The final twist then comes off as more Z-grade The Twilight Zone than genuine thought provocation. It’s obvious and actually rather trivial. The monsters never actually kill anyone, at least that we can see. We’re left to infer that they’re simply harmless while we, the human beings, are so uncompassionately barbaric by nature that we’ll eventually just destroy ourselves. In fact, there is speculation about this in the film. Maybe these creatures are just waiting for our human apocalypse, biding their time until we all shuffle off this mortal coil. That’s a good question. Would the world be better off without us? That’s a serious philosophical discussion to have, along with discussions about over population, dwindling natural resources, deforestation, etc. But it’s not a discussion that will ever be prompted by a movie featuring men in Yeti suits giving Peter Cushing the stink eye. THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN needed to stick to the horror and leave the gotcha moral condemnations at the door. It derails the film during its most crucial moments.

But don't take that statement as a dismissal of the film because I genuinely enjoy my time with THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN. It's a good little sci-fi horror film, even if I enjoy the journey far more than I enjoy the destination.