MISS LESLIE’S DOLLS. (1973) A NAUGHTY VIDEO-NASTY REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

MISS LESLIE’S DOLLS. (1973) DIRECTED AND CO-WRITTEN BY JOSEPH G. PRIETO. STARRING SALVADOR UGARTE, TERRI JUSTON, MARCELLE BICHETTE, KITTY LEWIS AND CHARLES PITTS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I loved this one, as fine a low-budget piece of exploitation cinema as you’ll find anywhere. It’s a cross between a video-nasty, an early slasher movie and a porno flick, with a really cool ‘Seventies music soundtrack and tons of lady-nipples, lol. It reminds me a bit of DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE, another ‘Seventies film that would also fall into the category of video-nasty. The basic premise is as follows.

A young University teacher called Alma Frost is travelling somewhere with three of her students, two beautiful young ladies called Martha and Lily and then there’s Roy, who’s driving. Their old jalopy runs out of gas in the middle of the night. In the middle of a cemetery. In the middle of a storm. They really planned that well, didn’t they? Snigger.

There’s a spooky old abandoned-looking house by the cemetery. Miss Frost thinks it might be a good idea if they sought shelter there, although personally I’d rather sleep in the car with the doors locked than try to deal with whatever dwells within the walls of that old mausoleum. Still, the folks in horror movies, they just won’t be told, will they?

The house is owned by one Miss Leslie Lamont, a queer old duck who’s only too happy to be receiving company as she lives alone in her isolated house (except for her cat, Tom) with little or no contact with the outside world. It’s a strange set-up but then we gotta live and let live, right? To each their own.

The little school party don’t seem to notice that she’s distinctly masculine-looking and built like a brick outhouse with hands and feet the size of dinner plates, but I did. I was onto that rum dame in the blue dress right from the start, lol.

She’s awfully forthcoming about her private and personal business, and so in no time at all the schoolies and their teacher have discovered the following snippets of information about her.

Her mother is dead, but when she was alive Mother owned a small doll factory. I don’t know if it’s the factory or the dolls that was/were small…! Anyway, the factory mysteriously burned down years ago, killing Maw Lamont and a young woman who worked for her.

Miss Leslie is a self-confessed student of the occult, reincarnation and all things other-worldly. She moves and speaks slowly and deliberately while all the time stroking her pussy (cat, that is, Tom the cat!) and there’s something distinctly odd about her, even once you get past the fact that she’s built like a WWF wrestler in a very big frock. She’s both calm and placid and yet also highly sensitive and emotional as well, a lady who obviously feels things deeply.

While Miss Leslie’s off kindly organising some ham and cheese sambos for the little lost lambs, the lambs are off sticking their noses into a room of hers which she calls her ‘sanctuary.’ It contains five or six life-sized dolls that look suspiciously like dead human females and which would put you in mind immediately of Vincent Price’s HOUSE OF WAX.

Anyway, bedtime comes and the three silly-billy females have seemingly only packed see-through shorty nightdresses of the kind that used to be called ‘baby doll.’ They must all be freezing with the cold. There’s a storm on, after all. There are so many perky little nipples on show that you’d hardly know where to look.

There’s even one scene in which Miss Leslie appears to be confiding in a pair of bare breasts with some lovely standy-uppy nipples…! I know I talk to my own boobies sometimes (in you go, girls, that’s it, easy now, like when I’m squishing them into a brassière) but this is ridiculous.

There’s a very permissive ménage-à-trois thing going on between the sex-mad Roy and the two beautiful, horny-as-feck young ladies, Martha and Lily. He’s sleeping with both of them, the dirty dog, with the full knowledge and consent of all parties. I know it was the permissive ‘Seventies, but still…!

So Roy has sex with Martha while the seemingly uptight and sexually repressed Miss Frost whips off her frumpy librarian spectacles, unpins her glorious strawberry-blonde hair and strips off her teacher clobber to commit an act of what these days would pass for rape against Lily, the student who’s not having sex with Roy at this moment in time. (But don’t worry, readers, she soon will be…!)

Still unsated after her unexpected bout of lesbian sex, Lily afterwards goes in search of Roy and Martha for a spot of heterosexual shenanigans just to mix things up. Meanwhile, Miss Leslie, who’s already rather creepily told the schoolies that Martha is the living image of a girl she once knew who’s now dead, is having a full-on earnest conversation down in the basement with what remains of her mother. Cuckoo, right…?

All we need now is for the four schoolies to suddenly decide they urgently need to wander around the house in their ridiculously skimpy nightwear in the middle of the night and the stage is set for the bloodiest high-jinks since Carrie got her first period in the Stephen King novel of the same name.

Will the college party unwittingly be the cause of Miss Leslie’s finally achieving her lifelong dream, which I can’t tell you about because it would be a definite spoiler? We’ll see, gentle reader. We’ll see…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

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STEPHEN KING’S THE STAND. (1994) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

stand nadine stephen king

STEPHEN KING’S THE STAND. (1994) BASED ON THE NOVEL BY STEPHEN KING. DIRECTED BY MICK GARRIS.

STARRING GARY SINISE, MOLLY RINGWALD, JAMEY SHERIDAN, LAURA SAN GIACOMO, RUBY DEE, OSSIE DAVIS, MIGUEL FERRER, CORIN NEMEC, MATT FREWER, ADAM STORKE, RAY WALSTON, BILL FAGERBAKKE, PETER VAN NORDEN, KATHY BATES, ED HARRIS, ROB LOWE, SHAWNEE SMITH, SAM RAIMI AND STEPHEN KING IN HIS TRADITIONAL CAMEO ROLE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘We are dead and this is hell.’

Nadine Cross, on the occasion of her ‘honeymoon’ with Randall Flagg.

I love a nice long Stephen King mini-series watched in film-format, ie, all at once, and this is probably his longest ever mini-series. It’s a whopping six hours long, making it twice as long as SALEM’S LOT or THE LANGOLIERS, so I felt like I was getting terrific value for money with it.

My viewing of it happily coincided with my cable TV’s deciding to go on the blink for the weekend, so that I had a working telly but no TV programmes. THE STAND kept my mind somewhat off missing STRICTLY COME DANCING and THE X FACTOR live Saturday night show. I said somewhat, lol. Nothing could keep my mind off that sad, sad loss entirely…!

We’ve got to synopsise an epic six hours into a few short sentences, so here goes. We’ll try to keep it as succinct as possible. There are four ninety-minute sections, entitled THE PLAGUE, THE DREAMS, THE BETRAYAL and finally THE STAND, so if you don’t have six hours to spare all at once you can just watch a section at a time.

First of all, we’re dealing with an American Apocalypse here, people. A terrible plague, ironically known as ‘the superflu’ because you start off by coughing and sniffling, is accidentally released from a top-security government containment facility in a little town called Arnette in East Texas.

The plague decimates everyone in America who comes in contact with it. Well, not quite everyone. A small number of people are, for some reason, immune to it. These are the lucky people who’ll eventually be called upon to re-populate the Earth, heh-heh-heh.

The United States gummint tries to isolate them and study them, but it’s not long before the doctors and the gummint officials in the white spacesuits are dead of the plague too, leaving the survivors free to go wherever they damn well please.

The survivors, of whom more exact details in a bit, are all having the same dream, a dream that tells them to go to Nebraska and find an elderly black woman called Mother Abagail Freemantle, who sits on the porch of her little country house playing her guitar and waiting for the ‘chosen ones,’ ie, the survivors, to come to her.

The survivors all make their way to Mother Abagail, who tells them that their real pilgrimage is only just beginning. Can you imagine the groan that Homer Simpson would let out to hear that his hard work was not ending but merely starting? Lol.

Yep, now the survivors have got to travel to Boulder, Colorado, from where they’ll presumably put down roots and from which they’ll make the titular ‘stand’ against the real evil, the Devil’s emissary on Earth, a chap called Randall Flagg.

Flagg’s base is Las Vegas, ironically the Mecca for those who want to spend their filthy lucre on fancy whores and roulette, and any survivors not called by Mother Abagail have made their way to Flagg to join his unholy army of the night .

Randall Flagg is an hilariously brilliant villain. With his long greying locks and his undoubtedly impressive supernatural powers, he looks like how Scottish comedian Billy Connolly might look if he were a country-and-western singer in cowboy boots and a denim jacket.

He has the ability to shapeshift into a crow or a demon at will (the demon make-up is great, by the way), and his real strength lies in knowing the weaknesses and secret desires of his enemies, even better than they know them themselves.

If Flagg and his minions (former convict Lloyd Henreid, escaped mental patient Trashcan; madcap and immensely volatile slut Julie Lawry, it’s a good group!) ever get to rule the world, it’ll end up being one big crap-table and a monument to the unholy Mammon. Four of Mother Abagail’s disciples set out from Boulder, Colorado to make their final ‘stand’ against the evil of Randall Flagg.

They are Stuart Redman, the only surviving occupant of the town of Arnette in East Texas; Larry Underwood, a singer with huge gambling debts whose career was just about to take off when the plague took hold (that is some bitchin’ luck, isn’t it? On the one hand, his singing career is dead in the water but, on the plus side, his debts are all automatically wiped out because his creditors are all dead of the plague!); a sweet and deeply patriotic retired college professor called Glen Bateman (and his mutt, Kojak!) and a lovely cuddly fella in a checked shirt and jeans called Ralph Brentner.

Stuart is a regular Joe Soap who finds his inner ‘leader’ when the plague hits town. The survivors look to Stuart to lead them out of the mess they’re in and, by golly, he gives it his best shot, when he’s not knocking up Molly Ringwald’s wide-mouthed Frannie, another survivor, that is, and stealing her away from the man who’s loved her his whole life, one Harold Lauder.

Harold is a touchy character, very sensitive, a poet-nerd suffering from unrequited love of the big-toothed Frannie. Frannie’s defection to Camp Stuart and her subsequent pregnancy wounds Harold deeply and makes him an ideal target for Randall Flagg, who sends his own fancy whore-wife Nadine Cross to seduce Harold and bring him over to the Dark Side.

Nadine, who’s also had relations with Larry Underwood but fails to convert him to Flagg’s evil cause because Larry’s now married to and in love with fellow survivor Lucy, is possibly the most interesting character in the movie next to Flagg himself.

She’s played by Laura San Giacomo (PRETTY WOMAN, SEX LIES AND VIDEOTAPE), an extraordinarily beautiful woman whom I personally could look at and listen to all day, she’s so striking-looking.

When she’s brutally raped by a demonic Flagg on their so-called ‘wedding night,’ a travesty of a genuinely lovely and happy wedding night, she loses her mind altogether, proving that she’s not entirely evil and not wholly on board with Flagg’s evil plans for world domination.

The rape scene and its disturbing aftermath, when we see how traumatised Nadine is and how white her hair has become as a result of it, is really quite shocking. On the plus side, however, Nadine’s lovely boobies stand straight up in their Wonderbra when she’s in a lying-down position and they look absolutely marvellous. If they’re fake, which I’m not entirely sure of, then the plastic surgeon has done a most commendable job.

Rob Lowe, an actor I’ve never really cared for, plays a deaf-mute survivor called Nick Andros. Nick Andros is only really interesting from the point of view that he discovers poor ‘retarded’ Tom Cullen, who later turns out to be quite the hero of the piece, living alone in his small town as the sole survivor of the plague.

Nick finds Tom re-arranging the local store mannequins into little tableaux on the village square, through which no traffic ever runs any more. Everyone who used to drive through the now-deserted town is long-dead. It’s really quite creepy, what he’s done with them there mannequins…!

Anyway, I loved THE STAND. It’s six good hours of pure enjoyable entertainment, and Stephen King himself makes his trademark cameo as one of the ‘chosen ones.’ He looks really well in jeans and a jacket and he has quite a few lines and appearances in this one as well.

There’s a good soundtrack that includes songs from ZZ TOP (Sharp-Dressed Man), Crowded House (Don’t Dream It’s Over) and Blue Oyster Cult (Don’t Fear The Reaper, what else?).

The make-up for the plague victims is positively top-notch and it’s really freaky when the survivors go into the church to clean up the bodies and they see all these hideous corpses sitting silently there. Traditionally, people turn to God when an Apocalyptic event such as the plague occurs, we’re told, and we can well believe it, too.

Kathy Bates has a cameo role as a radio talk-show host whom the Marines have to shut down and Ed Harris (STEPMOM) as an Army Major who can’t stand the heat when the ‘superflu’ looks to be cutting an unstoppable swathe through the rapidly dwindling American populace.

Some of the scenes are really emotional, too. When the survivors are in the town hall of their new home singing the American National Anthem with such pathos, I actually really wanted to stand up and sing right along with them, with my hand on my heart and the tears streaming down my face. I’ve never in my life felt so American, despite the fact that I’m one million per cent Irish, lol. ‘Oh, say can you see…?’

I must say that the survivors have a nice cushy number in some ways. Was your pre-plague house a rubbishy crap-shack, or maybe you were paying through the nose to rent some dump that wasn’t big enough to swing a cat in? No problemo. Just take your pick of the fabulous now-empty houses whose owners have all died of the plague, no questions asked. And no pesky mortgages either…!

Tired of your old pre-plague husband or wife? Just get yourself a brand-new one from amongst the survivors and you’re right as rain. This new post-Apocalyptic America has its advantages. Larry Underwood rid himself of his debts and Harold Lauder of his disfiguring acne in this Brave New World of theirs. Every plague-cloud has a silver lining…

I have yet to read the really big long book that inspired this cracking mini-series, believe it or not. I might go and look it out now while I’m still on this major Stephen King buzz. The size of it is so impressive, I have a vague notion that, God and Stephen King forgive my terrible blasphemy, I might have been using it as a doorstop in one of the rooms…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

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You can contact Sandra at:

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THE SKULL. (1965) AN AMICUS FILM REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE SKULL. (1965) AN AMICUS PRODUCTION. BASED ON THE SHORT STORY ‘THE SKULL OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE’ BY ROBERT BLOCH.

DIRECTED BY FREDDIE FRANCIS. PRODUCED BY MILTON SUBOTSKY AND MAX J. ROSENBERG.

STARRING PETER CUSHING, CHRISTOPHER LEE, PATRICK WYMARK, PATRICK MAGEE, NIGEL GREEN, MICHAEL GOUGH, PETER WOODBRIDGE, APRIL OLRICH, MAURICE GOOD, GEORGE COULOURIS AND JILL BENNETT.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is an utterly gorgeous film, one of my favourites of all the films in which horror icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee appeared together. THE SKULL isn’t exactly one of their double acts, however, as Peter Cushing is undoubtedly the star of the film and he appears in nearly every scene, unlike the handsome Mr. Lee who appears in just four scenes. I must stress that it’s not a competition, however, as there’s more sexiness and acting talent in Sir Chris’s four scenes than there would be in most actors’ entire Curriculum Vitae, lol.

Peter Cushing does a magnificent job here of playing Professor Christopher Maitland, a writer of books relating to the occult and an obsessive collector of all and any items relating to his passion. Books, skulls, masks, bric-a-brac, you name it and he’s probably got it, stashed away on his shelves or on display in a glass cabinet in his huge sprawling study.

His study is one of the finest Amicus sets I’ve ever seen. It’s been referred to as cluttered and practically ‘unlive-able in’ but I disagree. I could make myself perfectly comfortable in a gaff like that. I live surrounded by books anyway. I’m very much at home in that milieu, although I don’t go a bundle on the old bric-a-brac.

Someone who owns- or hoards!- as many books as I do can’t be seen to be collecting old bits of rubbish as well or else they’d look mad, lol. Like a crazy hoarder, the like of which you’d see on one of those TV shows, IRELAND’S BIGGEST HOARDER or something like that. Still, Peter Cushing’s study here is a marvel of set design, and kudos to the props person too. Wherever they sourced all their materials from, they’ve done an absolutely smashing job.

Professor Maitland is one day offered a book on the life of the Marquis de Sade, that jolly chappie from French history and literature who died in a lunatic asylum in 1814 and incidentally from whom we’ve derived the word ‘sadism.’ A sadist is a person who derives pleasure from giving others pain.

While, yes, the word can technically apply to employees of the Post Office who put up the sign ‘THIS WINDOW IS CLOSED’ just when you reach their counter after queuing for an hour, the word is more correctly applied to pervy types who like to whip or flagellate others during sex or cause pain by dripping hot candle wax onto the private parts of others, and so on.

That’s the pure meaning, I suppose you could say, of the word ‘sadist,’ although the word is frequently applied to people in all manner of other professions too: mean bosses, bitchy teachers who pile on the homework, auditors, employment officers who quiz you on your skill-set and then get you to apply for a job wholly unrelated to your field of expertise just because they can, etc.

Anyway, the book on the life of the Marquis de Sade is ever so beautifully bound… in human skin. It’s a mere snip at two hundred smackers. Maitland snaps it up, as Marco, his unsavoury and maybe even slightly dodgy ‘source’ for such rare materials, knows he will.

Marco, marvellously played by Patrick Wymark (an actor I’m always confusing with Patrick Magee, who’s also in the film, and Patrick McNee and Patrick McGoohan who are not), returns the next night with an item of even more interest to the nutty professor. This time it’s the actual skull of the aforementioned Marquis de Sade. One thousand pounds and it’s Maitland’s to keep. For ever and ever, Amen…

The skull comes with a back-story from Ye Olden Times which is told in a flash-back. The young woman who plays the phrenologist’s mistress, April Olrich, is stunning to look at and her dresses and hats are fabulous. Well, you know how chic the French broads are, lol. I love when she’s nervously clearing the bathroom of her bath oils and skin lotions, careful not to go too near the bath-tub where the phrenologist, her lover, met his lonely, eerie death.

That’s the thing about the Skull, you see. It has a strange effect on the people who possess it, making them suddenly want to destroy themselves and/or others. Christopher Lee’s Sir Matthew Philips, first seen purchasing four statues of occult figures for well over the odds without knowing why he’s doing it, knows full well how evil the Skull can be, and how strong a will you’d need to have to be able to withstand it.

Maitland ignores his old friend Sir Matthew’s advice and dire warnings, however, and decides to keep the Skull. Whatever happens from here on in is pretty much a case of ‘well, on his own head be it, then.’ Will he rue the day he acquired such an oddity for his prized and treasured collection? You might say so…

Michael Gough from the original Hammer DRACULA (1958) and THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1962) has a cameo role here as the auctioneer who sells Christopher Lee’s Sir Matthew the occult figurines.

Peter Woodbridge- Zoltan the Hypnotist from Hammer’s THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN- does a brilliant job of playing the sly and sleazy Bert Travers, the landlord or caretaker of Marco’s apartment building. What a sneaky, nasty self-serving little individual Bert Travers is! Just like Zoltan, so.

Nigel Green (JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, COUNTESS DRACULA, ZULU) plays Detective Inspector Moustache (my personal nickname for his splendidly moustached person), the copper who comes into the picture to investigate certain Skull-related shenanigans.

Patrick Magee, who stars in one of the vignettes in Amicus’s star vehicle and most famous anthology film, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, is here also as the police surgeon who wonders aloud about who- or what- could have severed this or that jugular.

It’s interesting that he’s here because he once created the role of the Marquis de Sade in the original stage and screen productions of MARAT SADE, otherwise known as: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Yes, I know, try saying that little lot when you’ve had a skinful.

Jill Bennett (Hammer’s THE NANNY) does a good serviceable job as Maitland’s wife, who worries about her husband’s terrible obsession with the occult and all things supernatural. People do generally say that when you start messing about with all that weird stuff, you never know what bad mojo it’ll lead to. In the case of Professor Maitland, this sadly turns out to be more than apt…

There are some terrific Skull’s-eye-view shots that frame Peter Cushing neatly in the centre of the gaping nose socket, if you get me. Apparently, the director Freddie Francis shot these scenes through a giant replica of the Skull while whizzing about on roller-skates like a mad thing. How cool is that…?

The Skull itself is extremely proactive. It travels around the place with impunity, on strings that you can sometimes see but mostly you can’t. It likes to sit on a certain table marked with the sign of the pentagram and God help you if you’re in its place.

The power it has is quite similar to the eye-power the Creepy Kids have in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED. They can ‘make people pitchfork each other and junk,’ according to one Milhouse Van Houten from THE SIMPSONS, and so can the Skull. And I daresay the Skull cost less to feed and house than those pesky child actors and actresses did, lol.

One scene I don’t get in the film is Maitland’s nightmare scene, although other critics enthuse over it. As De Sade was known for his sexual sadism as practised on women, I personally would have replaced Maitland’s sexless nightmare with a nice sexually-charged whipping scene.

A stripped-to-the-waist Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing take turns whipping a stunning topless Hammer Beauty… whoops, Amicus Beauty, I mean, whom they then take turns ravishing, although she’s perfectly willing and ready for their loving. I might even add in a little oral pleasure at this point. I don’t suppose that this scene would have ever gotten past the censors, though. Sigh. Still, I know what’ll be in my dreams tonight…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

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CAPTAIN CLEGG. (1962) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

CAPTAIN CLEGG. (1962) A HAMMER FILM PRODUCTION. DIRECTED BY PETER GRAHAM SCOTT. PRODUCED BY JOHN TEMPLE SMITH. SCREENPLAY BY JOHN ELDER (AKA ANTHONY HINDS).

STARRING PETER CUSHING, MICHAEL RIPPER, PATRICK ALLEN, MARTIN BENSON, DAPHNE ANDERSON, MILTON REID, SYDNEY BROMLEY, JACK MACGOWRAN, DEREK FRANCIS, OLIVER REED AND YVONNE ROMAIN.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Their oath was… Terror! Their cry… Blood!’

This isn’t one of my favourite Hammer movies, as I tend to prefer the ones with Christopher Lee as Dracula in them, heh-heh-heh, or beautiful lesbian lady vampires bursting at the seams with bounteous bosoms, but it’s still a most enjoyable swashbuckling romp.

Patrick Allen stars as Captain Collier, the leader of his little band of rowdy sailors or ‘King’s men.’ They come to the picturesque little English coastal village of Dymchurch in the late 1700s to investigate various rumours that have been circulating about the place.

Firstly, that a marauding band of ‘Marsh Phantoms’ have been seen riding out and terrorising the countryside by night and secondly, the slightly more Earth-bound rumour that illegal smuggling activities have been taking place there. What Captain Collier finds at Dymchurch, situated on the edge of the Romney Marshes, looks like this.

He finds Peter Cushing in splendiferous form as the aptly-named Dr. Blyss, a happy chappie who occupies the role of village Parson and who delights in delivering lengthy sermons to his long-suffering parishioners. Dr. Blyss thinks nothing of making these lazy parishioners sing the various hymns again if he feels that they were lacking in gusto first time round, lol. The sadist…!

The Parson passive-aggressively makes it known to the King’s men, in the sweetest way possible, that there is no room at the Inn for the sailors. And of course the villagers have every reason not to want the King’s investigators sniffing around the darling little village of Dymchurch, because they’re up to their very tonsils in the aforementioned illegal smuggling activities.

They’re running quite a nice profitable little bootlegging operation out of Dymchurch, keeping their illicit booze from France in coffins supplied by Michael Ripper as Mr. Mipps, the local undertaker.

Dear me, most ingenious, most ingenious indeed. The Parson is in on it, the surly local inkeeper Mr. Rash is in on it, the local Squire Cobtree’s son Harry (Oliver Reed) is in on it, the whole damn village is in on it.

Captain Collier will have the devil’s own time proving it, however, especially as a local scarecrow has been conscripted into keeping watch for the smugglers and sightings of the ‘Marsh Phantoms’ are keeping Collier and his drunken sailors busy running round the countryside in the middle of the night on wild goose chases.

There’s a romance underway in Dymchurch as well, between Squire Cobtree’s handsome, dark-haired womanising son Harry and the local barmaid Imogene. I don’t believe for one second that Harry has the remotest intention of making an honest woman out of Imogene like he’s promised her.

He’s coming up with the lamest-sounding excuses for putting off their nuptials and intended running-away-from-the-village-to-start-a-new-life-together-where-nobody-knows-them. Does his constant delaying of their plans have anything to do with Imogene’s mystery-shrouded origins?

Imogene, the ward of the disagreeable Mr. Rash, who’s simply ‘itching’ to get his hands on her splendidly ample goodies (geddit? Itching? Rash?), does not seem to be correctly informed as to her parentage. And who is the almost mythical figure whose mouldering bones have supposedly been taking up space in the quiet little village churchyard for some time now? Since around 1792, to be precise?

Could these bones be a clue to the busty Imogene’s identity…? And why does the man known as ‘the mulatto’ react so violently when he sees a certain man of the cloth? The village of Dymchurch is certainly awash with mysteries.

The increasingly exasperated Captain Collier will have his work cut out for him attempting to solve them, especially as the cunning villagers are determined to put obstacles in his path whichever way he turns.

I personally would have put a few more bosomy beauties and a few more sexy rolls-in- the-hay into this production, but that’s just me. As usual, the scenery and settings and costumes are spot-on and Peter Cushing is magnificent as the pleasantly-spoken bootlegging Parson, with a hidden agenda he doesn’t wish to come to light.

It reminds me of the Prohibition episode of THE SIMPSONS, where booze has been banned in the town of Springfield because ten-year-old Bart Simpson gets drunk on Saint Patrick’s Day and shames his family on national television.

Homer Simpson duly becomes the ‘Beer Baron’ or the person responsible for ‘jerking suds on the side.’ He manufactures the hooch down in his basement and smuggles it into Moe’s Bar via the use of bowling balls. Dear me, most ingenious, most ingenious indeed…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

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STEPHEN KING AND GEORGE A. ROMERO PRESENT: CREEPSHOW 2. (1987) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

CREEPSHOW 2. (1987) PRESENTED BY STEPHEN KING AND GEORGE A. ROMERO. BASED ON STORIES BY STEPHEN KING. DIRECTED BY MICHAEL GORNICK.

STARRING LOIS CHILES, GEORGE KENNEDY, DOROTHY LAMOUR, STEPHEN KING AND TOM SAVINI AS ‘THE CREEP.’

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a loving tribute to the timeless era of EC comics. Can’t you just see Stephen King as a nipper in the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties, running to spend his pocket money on the horror comic books that must have at least partially inspired him to write his novels? Bless his buttons. What a gory-minded kid he must have been, lol. A delight to have in your class at school or on your Halloween sleepover. ‘Now Stephen dear, it’s your turn to tell a spooky story…!’

Anyway, this is an anthology film like its predecessor CREEPSHOW (‘I want my cake…!’) and features three scary tales, only one of which I found actually scared me, haha. The first vignette features Hollywood actors George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour as an elderly couple of store-keepers, Ray and Martha Spruce.

Their general store is dying on its feet, situated as it is in the town of Dead River, whose name says it all. The town is all but deserted, and it’s been a long time since any customers were able to pay cold hard cash for their purchases. The local Indian Chief is a case in point.

He comes into the store one day and presents Ray and Martha with a little bag of Indian treasures. You keep these until we can afford to pay you for all the goods we’ve bought on credit, he tells them. Don’t make beggars out of us now, he warns when Ray tries to give the stuff back. He leaves the shop all pleased with himself, unaware of the tragic little tableau that’s going to play out at the general store when his back is turned.

The store is robbed at gunpoint by none other than the Indian Chief’s nephew Sam Whitemoon. Sam, a real asshole of a guy with a whole bag of chips on his shoulder, is sick to the back teeth of being an impoverished Indian in a deadbeat town.

He’s inordinately proud of his good looks and long shining black Indian hair and he hopes to go to Hollywood to make his fortune in the movies. Well, why not? After all, there are a million other good-looking guys in Hollywood just queuing up to be busboys or barmen or waiters, so why shouldn’t Sam Whitemoon be one of them, lol…?

He and his two accomplices have to leave town for the bright lights of Los Angeles a little sooner than they’ve anticipated, however, when a double tragedy occurs during the robbery. They’ve reckoned without the retribution dished out by Old Chief Woodenhead, the wooden sculpture of an Indian Chief that’s stood outside the poor old general store since time immemorial. There’s gonna be a massacre tonight…

I loved THE RAFT, the middle vignette, in which four really annoying college students all get as high as kites and drive out to this lake that’s all deserted for the winter. They strip off and swim out to this raft thing in the middle of the lake. That’s when they notice this sort of moving floating mass on top of the water that’s getting closer and closer to them.

They reckon it’s some kind of oil slick and it’s certainly gooey enough and messy enough to be an oil slick, but what kind of oil slick pulls you under and strips the flesh from your bones like a school of starving piranha fish? No oil slick these college jocks and stoners have ever heard of, anyway.

On their floating raft in the middle of the lake, in full sight of their car and dry land, they’re trapped as effectively as if the lake were an ocean and there was no dry land for miles and miles and miles. I read the short story that inspired this particular vignette and it was eerily effective.

The final vignette, THE HITCH-HIKER, tells the story of a super-privileged married woman who clearly doesn’t know on what side her bread’s buttered. She risks her position as the wife of a rich lawyer to have sex with a much-younger-and-handsomer-than-her-husband male prostitute, for whose favours she has to pay cash. Well, I suppose if you’re highly-sexed and you’re not getting the good stuff at home… But still, paying for it when you’re a woman? It seems like madness to me. Men should be bloody well paying us, lol.

Anyway, one night when she’s driving back home from a vigorous sex session with Mr. Gigolo, she runs over a hitch-hiker in a yellow rain-slicker who’s looking for a ride to Dover. She decides to scarper from the scene of the crime and is horrified when she realises that the hitch-hiker she’s sure she killed is following her home…

Stephen King has a cameo in this one as a truck-driver who stops on the road when he sees a crowd gathering around the fallen hitch-hiker. He has a whole vignette to himself in the original CREEPSHOW movie as a goofy farmer. My favourite cameo of his in his own films is the one he has in MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE. Remember when he was trying to get money out of the ATM machine: ‘Honey, this machine called me an asshole…!’

Did this vignette form the basis for the movie I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, by the way? It’s got the just-won’t-stay-dead hitch-hiker in the yellow rain slicker and the night-time hit-and-run accident that left him for dead on the freeway. It certainly seems likely.

Anyway, enjoy CREEPSHOW 2 which, as I said initially, won’t really scare you but it’s a loving homage to the creepy comics you might have perused as a young ‘un if you’re an American male of a certain age, lol.

Here in Ireland I don’t think we ever really did the creepy comics thing. I only ever remember being able to get the English BEANO and the DANDY and the girly comics like the BUNTY and the MANDY.

These comics were great too, don’t get me wrong, but American kids were privy to an entire horror-and-superhero comic-book culture that we never really had over here so we Oirish were deprived in that way, sadly. However, in our favour we do have Mr. Tayto and Father Ted. Enough said.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

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THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. (1923) BASED ON THE NOVEL BY VICTOR HUGO. DIRECTED BY WALLACE WORSLEY. PRODUCED BY CARL LAEMMLE.

STARRING LON CHANEY, PATSY RUTH MILLER AND NORMAN KERRY.

‘Swift run the sands of life, except in the hour of pain.’

Lon Chaney’s performance in this film is positively staggeringly good. He throws himself into it to the extent that he doesn’t mind at all that his creation is repugnant to lay eyes on. That’s a good thing, as far as he’s concerned, and it’s damned realistic too.

He doesn’t mind his character looking hideous and he doesn’t mind enduring a bit of physical suffering to achieve the right look. I think he thought that the suffering was a good thing too, lol. If you suffered for your art, you were obviously getting it right. And he got it so right with his Hunchback.

The Hunchback is a tragic figure, certainly unappealing to look upon but never comic, even if he does start the movie being crowned the King of the Fools during the festival of the same name. We’re in Paris, France ‘ten years before Christopher Columbus discovered America,’ so I make that 1472 by my watch.

The Middle Ages were so unsanitary with their rats, their plagues and their open sewers with filthy sewerage flowing down the streets that it’s a wonder anyone ever lived through them at all. Downright disgusting, they were.

Louis the Eleventh was the King of France during this era and you can bet your bottom dollar that he didn’t have to walk through sewerage on his way to buy a carton of milk and a packet of fags. One law for the rich and another for the poor, that’s how it was back then.

There were dire mutterings behind the scene amongst the lower classes though, and talk of uprisings and of overthrowing the King and distributing the wealth a little more evenly. I’m a little sketchy on my French history so I don’t know what happened in France between 1472 and the French Revolution of 1789 (‘Off with their heads!’ and suchlike) but the peasants were frequently revolting anyway, and you couldn’t really blame them as conditions for the poor were so appalling.

Rickets, ticks in the straw, the plague every five bloody minutes, boils and sores, infestations of this or that, no proper toilet or washing facilities, absolutely no Internet access, etc., etc. I couldn’t be doing with any of that type of thing. Give me modern times any day.

Lon Chaney’s character is Quasimodo the Hunchback, an orphaned, disfigured pauper brought up by the Church within the confines of the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral, the other star of the film. Whaddya mean you don’t remember Quasimodo? Surely his face at least rings a bell? Ba-dum-tish, lol. Bad joke. Forgive me.

He’s the bell-ringer at the Cathedral, which job has rendered him half-deaf if not wholly deaf after years of enduring the tremendous noise at close range. He loves the bells though, and at one point we see him expressing his ‘wild joy’ at something that’s happened by ringing the bejeesus out of those bells till the whole city is quivering from the reverberations.

Quasimodo is ordered by the Archdeacon’s lecherous and distinctly unholy brother Jehan to kidnap Esmeralda, the beautiful Gypsy girl who can be seen dancing and twirling like a sexy dervish in the streets during the festival. The kidnapping goes awry and Quasimodo is sentenced to a terrible public lashing, ‘not by any means the first time a servant was punished in place of its master.’

The poor Hunchback falls hopelessly in love with Esmeralda when she is the only person to take pity on him after this whipping and bring him a drink to quench his awful thirst. But Esmeralda is head-over-heels in love with Phoebus de Chateaupers, a ringleted and twirly-moustachioed popinjay who goes by the title of the Captain of the Guards.

The wicked Jehan stabs Phoebus while he- Phoebus- is engaged in embracing the lovesick Esmeralda, then he legs it and lets Esmeralda take the blame. Poor Esmeralda is ‘put to the question’ by the men of the Court, by which of course I mean she was tortured by these master torturers until she ‘confessed’ to the crime she didn’t commit, that of stabbing her lover Phoebus. These were the times of the Inquisition and witch-burnings and people being accused of sorcery if they were found to be able to add two plus two together and get four. That’s right, those were the bad old days.

On foot of her forced ‘confession,’ Esmeralda is sentenced to be hanged. On her way to the gallows, she is seen by Quasimodo, who is horrified by the implications of what he’s observed. His beautiful kind-hearted angel Esmeralda, sentenced to death? He kidnaps her away from the Guards and hops it with her into the Church. Methinks it’s time for a little Sanctuary, lol.

Can a gypsy girl really receive justice when she’s only a poor lowborn female while her accusers are all male and more powerful than she? And on whom will she bestow her love, the dashing nincompoop Phoebus or her rescuer Quasimodo who, alas, is no more pleasing to look on than last night’s curry leftovers after the dog’s been at ’em…? Whatever she does, someone’s bound to get hurt.

There’s also the intriguing mystery of Esmeralda’s parentage. Who is the girl’s mother, and is there a chance of a reunion between mother and daughter before one of them dies? Esmeralda has never been more alone in the world than she is now. She could use some good news.

The Court of Miracles, so-called because ‘here the blind can see and the lame walk,’ is a very interesting place too. Here lives Esmeralda’s ‘adopted’ father, Clopin, the King of Thieves, with the other downtrodden peasants of Paris, and here it is also that a word from Esmeralda saves Gringoire the poet, a minor character, from being hanged for wandering into the wrong part of town. Will Clopin rally his own troops when he hears of Esmeralda’s intended fate? He jolly well ought to, anyway.

The siege of the Cathedral is the most exciting bit. Look at the way Quasimodo leaps in glee and triumph when he thinks he’s gotten one over on those who are trying to force an entrance! He’s positively alive with mischief and impish malice, like the bad fairy at the party or something.

Lon Chaney, who also stars in the superb film adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA in 1925, puts his heart and soul into the performance and into the mannerisms of the poor Hunchback.

There have been other Hunchbacks since his- the brilliant Charles Laughton, for example, and even Anthony Hopkins had a go at it- but his to me will always be the most poignant and the most moving. Lon Chaney, the Man With A Million Faces, has done it again, has pulled off another master-stroke with his bag of tricks. Hats off to you, Mr. Chaney. Hats off to you.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

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THE FLY (1958) STARRING VINCENT PRICE. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

THE FLY. (1958) BASED ON A STORY BY GEORGE LANGELAAN. SCREENPLAY BY JAMES CLAVELL. PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY KURT NEUMANN.

STARRING VINCENT PRICE, PATRICIA OWENS, AL HEDISON AND HERBERT MARSHALL.

‘Help me…!’

This is no common or garden B-movie or sci-fi shocker. It’s a genuinely disturbing and moving film that makes you feel a terrible empathy for the stricken characters contained within it.

It also really makes me wish I’d been a rich glamorous ‘Fifties housewife married to a wealthy, successful and generous man, because all Helene Delambre seems to do is change from one spectacular outfit to another, give instructions to the maids and lie in bed waiting for her husband to, well, come and make love to her. (As Scarface says to Michelle Pfeiffer just before she leaves him, lol.) I could do that. I could very easily live like that, being some rich guy’s sex-Barbie and clothes-horse.

The Jeff Goldblum version of this film (1986) is pretty much unbeatable, but THE FLY (1958) holds its own remarkably well too, even today. Vincent Price plays Francois Delambre, a French-Canadian electronics millionaire who co-owns his business with his brother Andre.

Andre is the genius scientist-inventor who spends all his waking moments in his laboratory while Francois is most likely the brains behind the business side of things. Francois is suave, single, sophisticated, sexy as hell and, sadly, disappointed in love. Can you guess who disappointed him? Come on, guys. There are only three main characters, after all…!

One night, Francois is lounging about at home in his magnificent red satin smoking-jacket when he receives a phone call from Helene, saying rather bizarrely that she’s just killed Andre in their factory. Francois thinks she’s kidding at first, but this is no freakin’ joke.

A horrified Francois calls an acquaintance of his, a police inspector called Charas, and the two of them high-tail it over to the factory to find that Andre has indeed been killed, and in a particularly horrific way as well, with his head and arm crushed in an industrial press designed to squish heavy metals. I know, it’s gruesome, right?

Then the two men nip over to Helene and Andre’s house to find Helene quite composed and in control of herself. Immaculately dressed and playing the hostess, she admits quite calmly to having killed Andre but she won’t say that she ‘murdered’ him because that’s a different matter entirely. She also categorically refuses to say why she did it. End of story.

I daresay that if she were ugly, ancient and impoverished instead of a millionaire scientist’s beautiful young wife, Inspector Charas would probably throw her in jail without a second thought. As it is, he lets her stay at home on house arrest with a nurse catering to her every whim while they try to puzzle out her mental state.

When she gets hysterical one day over the squishing of a common housefly by the attending nurse, however, the floodgates open. Helene Delambre is ready to talk. Francois is permitted to fetch Charas over to the house (‘I can’t tell this story twice,’ Helene says) and the two men hear a tale from her that seems to belong more in the realms of science fiction and science fantasy than the real world of cold hard scientific facts to which they’re more used.

Do they believe her? Not at first, of course. It’s just too fantastical. But when Helene’s cute little ‘Fifties son Philippe points out the existence of a rather unusual fly in the garden to his dear Uncle Francois, it gives some credence- just a little- to Helene’s story.

Francois rushes like a mad thing to grab Inspector Charas, who’s right this minute busy arranging for Helene’s committal to an insane asylum, and hurries him out into the garden to see this fly. Is this the dramatic eleventh-hour corroboration the distraught Helene needs before the white-shirted orderlies cart her away to the funny-farm for the rest of her life?

Helene’s story is indeed fantastical, but it’s heartbreaking too. I was in floods of tears by the end. Naturally I can’t divulge the details but may I be so bold as to suggest that you add THE FLY (1958) to your Halloween viewing this year? Team it with the absolutely brilliant Jeff Goldblum version from 1986 and you’ve got yourself a nice little party going. And for God’s sake don’t forget the sugar. Flies love sugar…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

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Fun reviews of films of all genres

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MISS LESLIE’S DOLLS. (1973) A NAUGHTY VIDEO-NASTY REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

STEPHEN KING’S THE STAND. (1994) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE SKULL. (1965) AN AMICUS FILM REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

CAPTAIN CLEGG. (1962) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

STEPHEN KING AND GEORGE A. ROMERO PRESENT: CREEPSHOW 2. (1987) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME. (1923) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.©

THE FLY (1958) STARRING VINCENT PRICE. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.