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AMICUS PRODUCTIONS
"Come to the asylum... to get killed!"
The British film industry didn't do many things right in the 1970s, it must be said. But one thing it did perfect was what studious types like to call "British gothic", but what we'll just refer to, with your leave, as Camp Old Horror. Of course, Hammer began it all, replaying the Frankenstein and Dracula legends through endless permutations of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Ralph Bates. Good they were too, but we much prefer the films that came after, when the old conventions had begun to congeal after umpteen repetitions, and things got rather bizarre. It wasn't just Hammer on the job - Tigon (The Sorcerers, The Creeping Flesh), Tyburn (The Ghoul), and Benmar (Psychomania) all played their part. But for our money, the studio of studios had to be Amicus.
The man who was, to a great extent, Amicus personified, was much-villified exploitation king Milton Subotsky, who founded the studio with Max Rosenberg at the end of the 1950s. The awkward, bookish Subotsky had been the producer of various rock 'n' roll cash-in films just previous, and indeed Amicus' first production was the parody-proof romp It's Trad, Dad, very much a fag-end product of the '50s, which saw the likes of Chubby Checker and Del Shannon rubbing shoulders with Acker Bilk and Arthur Mullard. But Subotsky was eager to move his company into sci-fi (including the two Peter Cushing Dr Who films), fantasy and, most significantly, horror. Even so, Subotsky's old habits died hard, leading to stinkers like The Deadly Bees, in which the ever-useless killer bee format wasn't helped by the addition of a few rock 'n' roll numbers from a young Ronnie Wood.
Of course, the studio's real cash cow was the portmanteau horror film, in which several lurid horror tales (often cribbed from old EC Comics) are linked by an often perfunctory plot - usually nothing more than having various characters trapped together and telling a tale each to pass the time. Doctor Terror's House of Horrors in 1965 was the first of around ten films of this type. Although it hadn't quite developed the richly cravatted "feel" of the later films that we love so much, as an exemplar of the transitional period between the old school of Hammer (vampires, castles) and the more gory and raunchy contemporary seventies style (whisky tumblers, breasts), it's second to none. In the linking scenes Peter Cushing, as the suinister doc with the tarot cards, is great, mugging conspiratorially to camera as his foolish train-bound companions dismiss his prognosticating powers. The Alan Freeman episode is, of course, a delight, with a Brylcreemed Fluff still looking about forty-five even then, and the strangling vine being defeated by the smoke from the pipe his friend lights in order to ponder over the solution - a perfect pre-swinging sixties trick ending! Roy Castle's segment, too, is fun (and not as 'another soft centre!' jokey as we recalled), and thank God it wasn't filmed with Acker Bilk as originally planned.
Amicus made this mini-genre all its own, via the likes of Tales from the Crypt, From Beyond the Grave, The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum, and the lift-bound Vault of Horror, varying in quality from film to film, and indeed tale to tale, but always acted and produced with conviction and gusto, featuring a reliable cast of famous Brit names, from Susan Penhaligon to Tom Baker, Joan Collins to Roy Castle. Asylum, while maybe not the best of the bunch (... Grave and ...Crypt can fight it out for that honour) is a textbook example of the genre at its peak. Robert Powell is a trainee doctor at the titular establishment, asked by Patrick Magee to interview four patients in order to determine which is in fact the now-doolally former head doctor. From the opening scene of Powell getting out of a sports car to unfeasibly dramatic music, you know you're onto a winner with this one, and so it proves, through the various tales the patients regale Powell with. Richard 'Robin Hood' Todd and Barbara 'Mephisto Waltz' Parkins have an affair, and are terrorised by frozen chunks of Todd's freshly-butchered voodoo-loving wife Sylvia Syms in '70s coffee table and cravat segment Frozen Fear ("Rest in pieces!") which comes up fresh as paint (The menacing hum of the deep freeze! Sylvia's head breathing through the brown paper! the comedy kettle drum soundtrack to the waddling torso!) Then, in a rather old-fashioned piece, Barry 'Profesor Bergman' Morse runs up a suspicious suit for Peter Cushing, overacting each other off the screen beautifully.Charlotte Rampling and Britt Ekland go head to head in yet another take on the old 'evil double - or is it?' chestnut (identified by scholars as the obligatory "rubbish" segment ), and finally Herbert Lom terrorises Frank Forsyth with little toy robots with miniature human heads on the top. In all segments the protagonists' actions payed not even lip-service to realism or logic, which is as it should be. Oh, and Geoffrey Bayldon's demented giggling is the best thing ever.
Amicus' mix-and-match approach continued in the rest of its output, leading to curios like The Beast Must Die, in which Superfly millonaire Calvin 'Dynasty' Lockhart (replete with 'tache, leather gloves and black polo neck) rigs up the grounds of his stately pile with chopper surveillance, snipers, security cameras, ground mics and an unexplained 'pressure grid', all controlled from a big desk of flashing lights, in order to trap a werewolf who he knows (somehow) is among his invited guests (including Charles 'Blofeld' Gray, Michael 'BAFTA' Gambon, suspect longhair Tom 'The Changes' Chadbon and Scandinavian 'werewolf hunter' Peter Cushing). Cue a run-through of all the usual horror legends during juicily overacted dinner table confrontations, before the dog attack climax and final heavily-signposted plot twist. Plus points are a swingingly inappropriate wah-wah/big band theme tune, and the bizarre 'werewolf break', wherein the sub-Vincent Price narrator stops the film and demands 'you, the audience' work out which of the guests is the lycanthrope while a clock ticks away - a device which should have been employed more often, we think. A bizarre collaboration with the Japanese Toei Studios, Kongorilla, was in the pipeline until Dino De Laurentiis' execrable King Kong remake suggested giant ape movies might not be such a great idea. There was even the obligatory dabble in 3D photography with I, Monster.
Towards the end of the '70s, however, the now-saturated horror market began to sputter. Many smaller studios went to the wall. Even Hammer found diversifying into sitcom spinoffs a financial necessity. Amicus, however, stayed true to the horror and fantasy genres, and came up with the Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired, Doug McClure-starring Land That Time Forgot, following swiftly with the massively similar At the Earth's Core and The People That Time Forgot. This brief respite wasn't enough, however, and by the end of the decade, before moving on to a dotage spent tinkering with poor Stephen King adaptations and sci-fi mini series in which the rockets had smoke coming out the back, Subotsky wound up Amicus Productions, taking its last unfinished film, The Monster Club, and completing it under the aegis of his newly-formed Sword and Sorcery Productions. Fittingly, it was a horror portmanteau starring Vincent Price, with musical interludes from The Pretty Things and BA Robertson.
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