John Gilling Double Bill

MOTHER RILEY MEETS THE VAMPIRE (1952)

THE GAMMA PEOPLE (1956)

"Its enough to make a bat laugh!" Arthur Lucan and Bela Lugosi at the end of their careers in MOTHER RILEY MEETS THE VAMPIRE. A release in America was held over until 1964, by which time it had been retitled to MY SON THE VAMPIRE due to a novelty song by Allan Sherman.

AFTER serving in the Royal Navy during World War II, John Gilling became a prolific director and screenwriter in British cinema. The filmmaker is best known for his masterful take on Burke and Hare, THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS, and the two anti-colonial Hammer "Cornish Classics" PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES and THE REPTILE. As David Pirie states in A Heritage of Horror, Gilling expressed his stories using abstract imagery and, unlike Terence Fisher, his works could end with prevailing gloom. Gilling's earlier directing assignments under consideration here are more of historical note rather than artistic merit; the first Britain's initial vampire picture, the second one of the biggest oddities in 1950s science fiction.

MOTHER RILEY MEETS THE VAMPIRE was the final film in the Old Mother Riley comedies, featuring Arthur Lucan in drag as the eponymous off-kilter Irish washerwoman. Bela Lugosi stars as Van Housen/The Vampire, but his arrival in England is not because of blood, rather to obtain uranium to fuel an army of 50,000 super robots. The two characters meet thanks to a mix-up: Riley's inheritance goods of a banjo and a bedwarmer are mistakenly delivered to Van Housen, while the villain's Mark I prototype automaton ends up at Riley's shop. Designed by Bernard Robinson - soon to become Hammer's renowned art director - Lugosi gives his last great performance before suffering from morphine addiction and Ed Wood appearances. On the suggestion of Richard Gordon, Bela had traveled to the UK to appear in a stage tour of Dracula, which was such a disaster Lugosi and his wife were unable to pay their way home. Luckily, Gordon persuaded fellow producer George Minter to use the actor here to solve the issue. 

"Is this your future?" Filmed mostly in Austria, science meets anticommunist propaganda in THE GAMMA PEOPLE. 

Six years before Bruce Banner became The Hulk due to gamma rays, Albert Broccoli and Irving Allen masterminded the long-gestating THE GAMMA PEOPLE under their Warwick Films banner. American journalist Mike Wilson (Paul Douglas) and English photographer Howard Meade (Leslie Phillips) end up in Gudavia, an out-of-time European hamlet, when their train carriage mysteriously detaches. Greeted by bumbling General Koerner (Phillip Leaver), the two men are suspected of being spies, but released from jail on orders of Professor Boronski (Walter Rilla). It is discovered that Boronski - reluctantly aided by Paula (Eva Bartok) - is using gamma rays to transform the brains of the young to create a race of geniuses (including Hugo (Michael Caridia), who leads a Hitler Youth style gang, and piano prodigy Hedda (Pauline Drewett)). Unfortunately the radiation doesn’t always work, turning subjects into zombie "goons".

THE GAMMA PEOPLE is an uneasy mix of sci-fi, melodrama and comedy, further hindered by cardboard characters and irrelevant detail. Burly Douglas was a latecomer to acting, previously having a successful announcer and hosting radio career, and is a strange choice for a leading man (his sly advances to the stunning Bartok are quite queasy). In contrast Phillips is a joy, effortlessly perfecting his suave ladies man persona. At least the future for Broccoli is shadowed in the James Bond-like climax, with its castle lair, raygun, a laboratory with large signage, mechanised sliding doors and grand explosions.

Have a Butcher's

COVER GIRL KILLER (1959)
THE NIGHT CALLER (1965)

Steptoe and gun: Harry H. Corbett's speech as "The Man" - "surely sex and horror are the new gods in this polluted world of so-called entertainment" - is paraphrased in Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 1984 hit 'Two Tribes.'

WRITTEN and directed by Terry Bishop, and distributed by Britain's low-budget specialists Butcher's, the hour-long COVER GIRL KILLER is a bygone gem. It was made at the same time as PEEPING TOM, Michael Powell's serial killer movie which was a permanent detriment to his career. Cinemagoers could not accept a film so far away from Powell's partnership with Emeric Pressburger, topically covering the growth in seedy under-the-counter merchandise. Somehow such business seems more acceptable in the world of the B picture, and this beguiling Walton Studios piece was a clear inspiration for the 1970s Mary Millington vehicle THE PLAYBIRDS. 

Using a disguise of pebble glasses and ill-fitting toupee, The Man (Harry H. Corbett) is killing models featured on the cover of pin-up paper Wow! ("not for people who can read") in an attempt "to give man back his dignity." In between drinking endless cups of coffee, Inspector Brunner (Victor Brooks), Archaeologist-cum-publisher John Mason (Spencer Teakle) and showgirl girlfriend June Rawson (Felicity Young) plan to spring a trap. It's all flesh and violence free, but depicts the consequences beyond the girls themselves: a husband and father of separate victims both left grieving for females they could not control. Before his comedic persona took over, Corbett's creepy Soho bogeyman is eloquent and calculating ("I assure you miss, your nudity means nothing to me") as he variously poses as advertising executives and TV producers to snare his prey.

Aka THE NIGHT CALLER FROM OUTER SPACE and BLOOD BEAST FROM OUTER SPACE, THE NIGHT CALLER is a bizarre addition to Britain's monochrome SF/horror epics.

Also distributed by Butcher's was one of the weirdest pictures in the annals of British horror: THE NIGHT CALLER. Directed by John Gilling just before his Hammer "Cornish Classics" PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES and THE REPTILE, this is actually two genres in one. We start with scientists Dr Morley (Maurice Denham), Dr Jack Costain (John Saxon) and Ann Barlow (Patricia Haines) examining a small orb which has descended from the sky ("guided down with fantastic accuracy ... inhuman accuracy!"), complete with a geiger-counter equipped military (headed by John Carson). After forty minutes of science babble the film shifts to a much darker tone, as the sphere transports a shadowy alien with a rubbery claw from Jupiter's third moon, who kidnaps nubile Earth women for repopulation.

These abductions are carried out with a plot device similar to that of COVER GIRL KILLER; this agenda driven alien - named Medra - opens a small business (Orion Enterprises) and lures breeding stock by placing a classified ad in Bikini Girl magazine. The creaking narrative is further undermined by Medra's final speech, promising that all victims will not be harmed (tell this to Ann, who has been slashed and strangled in a sleazy second-hand bookstore). Based on a novel by Frank Crisp and scripted by TOWER OF EVIL helmsman Jim O'Connolly, it is all barking mad, the notion of an alien invader needing to advertise in a jazz mag rather than using scientific superiority is fittingly delirious. Yet the excellent cast keep things watchable, including a priceless scene with Warren Mitchell and Marianne Stowe as worried parents.

Monkey Business

TROG (1970)

TROG is played by Joe Cornelius, a professional English wrestler known as The Dazzler. Cast for his physique and athletic abilities, the "missing link" costume was a salvaged 2001 ape mask and some fur.

HAVING grown up in poverty and suffered abuse as a child, Joan Crawford was famous for her fighting spirit. Directed by Freddie Francis from an original story by Peter Bryan and John Gilling, TROG was Crawford's final film. Concerning the discovery of an Ice Age troglodyte in contemporary Britain, the faded star probably needed her then preferred tipple of vodka to get through the production. As The New York Times stated, "[TROG] proves that Joan Crawford is grimly working at her craft. Unfortunately the determined lady, who is fetching in a variety of chic pants suits and dresses, has little else going for her."

When an ape-man is found in a Peak District cave, anthropologist Dr Brockton (Crawford) brings him back to her lab for study. This is especially irksome for businessman Sam Murdock (Michael Gough), who is equally venomous about a waste of taxpayers money for the research facility, and that Brockton has the audacity of being a woman. As the experiments continue, Trog relives his illogical past copiously illustrated by Ray Harryhausen/Willis O'Brien dinosaur footage from THE ANIMAL WORLD. Murdock remains troubled, particularly when the municipal court (headed by Thorley Walters) sides with Brockton and a now international band of scientists. Enraged, Murdock releases Trog, hoping the caveman will be killed by locals or the authorities.

Trog checks out Joan Crawford's muscles on set; in the picture, even a movie star can't save him in the name of science. However, to be fair, the "monster" does kill four men and a dog, plus kidnaps a child.

Developed by Tigon, the project was sold to American B-movie producer Herman Cohen (who can fleetingly be glimpsed as a barman). But TROG is a hilarious misstep by anyone's standards, the caveman's ramshackle appearance summed up by Inspector Greenham (Bernard Kay), when he states "it looks like something out of a student's rag week." Brightly lit in his cage, fully exposing its contrasting skin tones, Trog's initial training involves winding up a toy doll and swaying lovingly to classical music (his affinity to Brockton's scarf also makes one question his sexuality). But during his climactic rampage more brutish qualities come out, such as spiking a butcher on a meat-hook that predates the infamous scene from THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE.

A guilty pleasure even for the most hardened cult fan, TROG does play a significant role in horror history. A young John Landis saw the picture which led him to make his debut SCHLOCK, a homage where the director played an ape-man emerging from a Southern California cave. Having been a Fox mail-boy Landis knew John Chambers, the make-up maestro behind PLANET OF THE APES. The important thread was that after Chambers declined to make the required monkey man on budgetary grounds, Don Post Studios put Landis in contact with Rick Baker. Baker's suit for "The Banana Killer" is wonderful, and clearly the highlight of the movie.

Cushing Centenary (Part I of II)

THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS (1960)
THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR (1968)

100 years young today; Peter Cushing's Dr Knox commands the screen in THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS.

"THIS is the story of lost men and lost souls. It is a story of vice and murder. We make no apologies to the dead. It is all true." So begins THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS, John Gilling's take on Burke and Hare. The film is not only one of the finest British horror films, but a production that may well have provided Peter Cushing with his best ever performance. Capturing the squalid atmosphere of 1828 Edinburgh, the film sees "brilliant, aggressive, provocative" Dr Knox (Cushing) use "resurrection men" Burke (George Rose) and Hare (Donald Pleasence) to supply fresh cadavers for his medical students. When one of these students Chris (John Cairney) becomes involved with feisty prostitute Mary (Billie Whitelaw), the communion begins a chain of events that brings the murders too close to home: Burke is hanged, Hare avoids prosecution only to be blinded by the angry mob, and Knox sees the error of his ways.

Knox is the only person that ultimately changes. Beginning with a flow of intelligence, authority and conviction, this rationality for his beloved medical cause ("men of medicine are the modern miracle workers ... you are entering the most honorable profession in the world") is eventually melted by the fears of a young girl. After instructing Chris that "emotion is a drug that dulls the intellect," Knox quietly tells niece Martha (June Laverick) "as a child, I believed in God and the devil; it took a child to show me what I am now." Cushing's posture and delivery is pitch-perfect across his character arc, and his disagreements with the medical council are laced with a wondrous snideness ("now, if you would be so good as to incline your heads slightly to the right, you will observe the door; please use it.") Cushing is complimented by sly performances from Rose and Pleasence, who further inject the film with sardonic black humour. 

The Vampire-Beast Craves Blood. Together with Japan's Mothra, the creature of THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR is part of a pretty exclusive club of moth-related monsters.

On the other end of the scale, Vernon Sewell's THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR was described by Cushing as perhaps the worst film he ever made. Two murders have left the police perplexed, with the only witness insane and several petal-like scales left at the crime scenes. Inspector Quennell (Cushing) is drawn to the house of entomologist Doctor Mallinger (Robert Flemyng, replacing Basil Rathbone after his fatal heart attack two weeks before principal photography). When a further slaying implicates Mallinger and his daughter Clare (Wanda Ventham) the couple flee, but Quennell traces them and - together with daughter Meg (a stilted Vanessa Howard) - travels to a remote fishing village. It is discovered that Mallinger has created a Death's Head moth/female human hybrid, which drinks blood and kills when sexually aroused.

An erratically-edited programmer, Tigon's THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR suffers from a formulaic script by Peter Bryan (though there is a bizarre departure with an amateur theatrics sequence), threadbare special effects (that makes the moth on a par with Roger Corman's THE WASP WOMAN) and alleged comic relief (from Roy Hudd as the cliched mugging mortuary attendant who enjoys eating lunch among the corpses). Flemyng's mad scientist is blatantly suspicious from the opening lecture scene, and Cushing's customarily stoicism allegedly included extensive re-writing by the actor himself. In America, distributor Pacemaker re-christened the film THE VAMPIRE-BEAST CRAVES BLOOD, followed by some even more deranged hyperbole by the publicity department: "A ravishing Psycho-Field with diabolical power to turn into a Giant Death Head Vampire, to feast on the blood of her lovers before clawing them to death."

Curse of Kah-to-Bey

THE MUMMY'S SHROUD (1967)

South African non-actress Maggie Kimberly escapes the clutches 

of Eddie Powell in Hammer's third Mummy picture. 

EGYPT, 1920: a British archaeological expedition financed by businessman Stanley Preston (John Phillips) - comprising of Sir Basil Walden (Andre Morell), Preston's son Paul (David Buck), photographer Harry Newton (Tim Barrett) and psychic linguist Claire de Sangre (Maggie Kimberly) - discover the tomb of child prince Kah-to-Bey. Members of the find are soon being murdered by the Mummy of Prem (Hammer's regular stuntman and Christopher Lee double Eddie Powell), Kah-to-Bey's devoted servant, who can be revived by reading the words off the Prince's burial shroud.

Following Terence Fisher's magisterial THE MUMMY of 1959 and Michael Carreras' disposable 1964 release THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, THE MUMMY'S SHROUD ("Beware the Beat of the Cloth-wrapped feet!") is a formulaic affair, and the last movie shot at Bray. Written and directed by John Gilling, and scripted by Anthony Hinds, the film starts with a painfully dull and micro-budgeted ancient Egyptian prologue - which includes Dickie Owen, the titular fiend from THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, as the living Prem - and viewers will also be disappointed by the lack of cleavage, especially as so much is on offer from Kimberly's promotional poses. Unusually for Hammer, the glamour girl role is a character with a narrative function (the somnambulist Claire has the ability to read the "words of death"), but unfortunately Kimberly - who had just appeared in Gilling's secret agent spoof WHERE THE BULLETS FLY - is the worst actress in the Classic Hammer canon.

Studio Canal's Blu-ray/DVD was released in October 2012, containing two standout documentaries: an informative making-of and a touching tribute by Madeline Smith for husband David Buck.

As Jonathan Rigby points out in English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema, a telling sign of the relegated stature of Hammer's Mummy sequels is that stunt men were cast as the monster, following Christopher Lee's barnstorming performance in Fisher's original. The real monster of THE MUMMY'S SHROUD is Preston, expertly portrayed by Phillips as an arrogant coward: quick to enjoy the spoils, even quicker to escape when the curse starts to take hold. Elizabeth Sellars, as his wife Barbara, makes an excellent foil, and it is good to see Michael Ripper in a prolonged role as Preston's long-suffering valet, the myopic Longbarrow. Completing the cast are Catherine Lacey and Roger Delgado's scene-stealing turns as the mother-and-son team whose family have barred the entrance to Kah-to-Bey's tomb for centuries. In fact Lacey's role as fortune-teller Haiti, together with Barbara and Claire, form a trio of female characters with second sight, while the male protagonists are lambs to the slaughter. 

The Mummy has always been the slightest of movie monsters. Covered in bandages that barely conceal the decay beneath, and often reduced to stalk-and-slash with a mystical backdrop, the Mummy started life on film as a device for camera trickery; in both Melies' 1899 CLEOPATRA and Walter Booth's 1901 HAUNTED CURIOSITY SHOP, the creature was used to illustrate the joys of celluloid illusion. Unlike the literary origins of Dracula and Frankenstein, the springboard for the Mummy as a potential movie monster was enhanced by real life: the myths surrounding Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon's 1924 expedition to uncover the tomb of Tutankhamen. In Hammer's fourth and final excursion into this sub-genre - BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB - the studio side-stepped including the bandaged menace altogether. Yet unlike Universal's arthritic Mummy movies, at least Hammer's ancient terrors were brutal threats.

Hammer's Cornwall Classics

THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1966)
THE REPTILE (1966)

The stunning Jacqueline Pearce, fresh from RADA, gives standout performances in both of these Hammer favourites.

FILMED back-to-back, and utilising much of the same production crew and sets, THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES and THE REPTILE were both directed by John Gilling. Each picture portrays an anti-colonial stance, and Hammer’s renowned class dynamic (that is, treading a noble path between the ignorance of the working class, bound by fear and superstition, and the unfettered power craving of the upper class). But the notion of the aristocracy as carriers of infection is crystallised in these two releases. Using the same basic story conceit as the Bela Lugosi favourite WHITE ZOMBIE, THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES belongs to the list of genuine classics in the studio’s back catalogue. Here, Sir James Forbes (Andre Morell), Professor of Medicine at London University, receives a letter from former pupil Dr Peter Tompson (Brook Williams). Now practising in Cornwall, Tompson tells of a mysterious malady which has overrun his village. The rash of deaths in the district, of which Tompson’s wife Alice (Jacqueline Pearce) is one of the latest victims, is ultimately traced to local Squire Clive Hamilton (John Carson). After returning from Haiti, Hamilton has become a black magician, using voodoo to reactivate the dead to staff his inherited, reopened tin mine.

Maximising its desolate setting, THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES is a model of economy and invention. The rural English setting, far from the usual Central European milieu, allows Gilling to use the pre-existing class structure to frightening effect; a film in which an aristocrat murders his lowly subjects in order to put them to work in daddy’s tin mine, unpaid as well as undead, would appear to operate on levels deeper than that of schlock horror. Indeed, the zombies' appearance, dressed in ragged brown robes, even suggests a link with medieval peasantry. The director shows sensitivity to Christian themes that characterised Terence Fisher’s work for Hammer; the Squire's enterprise is an immoral subversion of the Christ-story, and Tompson's recollection of his dream - "I dreamed I saw the dead rise; all the graves in the churchyard opened, and the dead came out" - is an allusion to Matthew 27:52-53. The great strength of the film, however, are the three performances from Morell, Pearce and Carson. Morell projects a moral bedrock that is necessary to carry the picture, expertly combining unflappable suavity with a deeply felt moral outrage. Pearce’s account of the living but ailing Alice is one of the most delicate performances in any horror film, and her all-too-brief reincarnation is one of the most terrifying. And Carson’s persona, a cool magnetism mixed with chilling repugnance, inevitably invites comparison to Christopher Lee.

THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES’ lumbering ghouls preceded NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD by two years. Squire Hamilton’s dilapidated characters opened the way for the armies of increasingly malevolent living dead that flowed in their wake; the first zombie appearance on the nocturnal hillside, together with the celebrated nightmare sequence - in which the undead dig their way out of the ground and advance with outstretched hands - are both highly influential.

THE REPTILE - scripted by Anthony Hinds - opens with a lengthy pre-credits sequence, in which a young Cornish landowner is lured across a moor by exotic music, only to be bitten to death by a lethally poisonous assailant. His property is inherited by his brother, Harry Spaulding (Ray Barrett), who learns that he died of causes described by locals as "The Black Death", symptoms of which are identical to those bitten by a King Cobra. In fact, neighbouring theologist Dr Franklyn (Noel Willman)’s daughter Anna (Jacqueline Pearce) has been cursed by the Snake People of Borneo, to transform into a half-human snake creature as punishment for her father’s professional exposure of their religious cult.

Slower and more stately than THE PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, THE REPTILE nonetheless is rich in atmosphere, and its carefully orchestrated tension belie its support feature status. Pearce, in another splendidly intense performance, makes for a fascinatingly sympathetic character, despite her clumsy – but oddly endearing – transformation make-up. The actress transcends the papier mache face mask by investing the Reptile with a sinuous grace, encased in a black gown of watered silk and a pony tail slithering incongruously down her back. Appearing as if to have strayed into the lurid landscape of Hammer Horror, Franklyn is more suited to M. R. James’ stories in which antiquarian scholars pay a terrible price for their academic zeal. The theologist’s Malay manservant (Marne Maitland) seems like the conventionally negative ‘Yellow Peril’ figure, but it is worth pointing out that though the evil in the film originates in the East, it only chooses to infiltrate England thanks to the blundering presumptions of a Westerner. Unlike Squire Hamilton, Franklyn hardly seems a villain at all, but both characters are tainted by their exposure to other cultures; as these two releases appear to illustrate, time spent in a foreign country invariably corrupts an Englishman's soul.