The great Peter Cushing plays the unnamed proprietor of an antique shop just off a busy London street. We know there's something up with it because the film (via a visible but clever edit) arrives at it after a spooky graveyard jaunt for the credits, accompanied by a great old-school horror soundtrack.
Cushing stalks the people who come off the street to look at his wares, all humble civility, the perfect shop owner even as people try to cheat, lie, or even steal to get whatever it is they're after. Did I mention that the shop is called Temptations Ltd.? You can almost catch a whiff of brimstone as the owner world-wearily lights his pipe, watching each customer make off with a dishonestly obtained bargain. They'll pay for it, one way or another; their stories form the meat of this Amicus horror anthology.
The framing device is unobtrusive and a lot of fun until a weak finale. Noticeably, it imposes the classic Tales of the Crypt (which Amicus adapted in 1972!) format -outsized comeuppance for lapses in morality- upon stories that are largely disconnected from it. It's a clever setup, but not exactly seamless (for example: the objects bought at the store have variable importance in the stories that feature them). The framing story is an original creation, while the shorts that make up the anthology are adaptations of R. Chertwynd-Hayes short stories.
The first one concerns a hipster douchebag (David Warner) who bamboozles a mirror out of the store to put on the wall of his bizarre swinging flat (a single-room affair where he entertains his guests in a living room presided by his four-poster bed). 'It looks like something a medium would use', one of his guests says, which prompts an impromptu (and beautifully filmed) spiritist session. And you know how it goes, their fooling around with forces that they don't understand wakes something in the mirror, a creepy old dude (Marcel Steiner) who is soon coercing the hipster to feed him the blood of prostitutes.
It's a fun story well told, even if it goes almost exactly as it's supposed to go. Satisfying, but no surprises.
The second customer, a nebbish businessman played by Ian Bannen, tries to escape a miserable home life by engaging with a fellow ex-soldier (Donald Pleasance). The problem is that he spent the war behind a desk, so he decides to steal a medal from the display at Temptations Ltd to impress his fellow veteran. It works, and they becomes good friends; Soon the businessman is spending more time with his friend and, especially, his odd duck of a daughter, leading to some witchy business and a fun final twist.
Next comes the tale of a pompous prick and his elemental. Reginald (Ian Carmichael), a pompous prick, does the old switcheroo to get a snuff box for a fraction of its price. Seriously, a snuff box*? In any case: on the ride home, he's accosted by a snooty old woman (Margaret Leighton) who insists he's got an elemental affixed to his shoulder - and wouldn't you know, it's the worst kind of elemental, the murderous kind.
Reggie laughs the whole incident away, but that same night strange things start happening - his dog runs away, his wife is attacked by an invisible force. It gets bad enough to convince the both of them to call the old woman to perform a sort of exorcism.
The tone is overtly comedic and gives Leighton vast amounts of scenery to chew on, which she does with relish; Honestly, she's good enough to make the whole endeavour kind of delightful. It helps that the premise is slightly off-beat (an elemental?) and that it reserves enough venom to keep things from being too light-hearted.
To close things off we have the history of William (Ian Ogilvy), a money-strapped young man who buys a door after haggling its price down a bit. Then he's left alone in the shop, with the cash register left open, his money conspicuously there for the taking...
The door, once installed, sporadically opens into an ancient-looking blue room. Director Kevin Connor stretches his muscles a little bit on this segment - there's some pretty clever transitions and use of colour. The plot, though, is as simple as it gets, with a Stuartian warlock making a bid to feed on first poor William, then his lovely wife (Lesley-Anne Down). Besides having the coolest set, it also hosts the lion's share of film's (modest) special effects, including a lovely montage of a corpse grinding down to dust. The ending playfully tweaks the film's formula, too.
All that's left is for the proprietor to close down shop while gently breaking the fourth wall. A little cheesy, but Peter Cushing sells it with his signature dignity and charm.
It's as good a sendoff as any not just to the movie, but to Amicus's storied run of horror anthology films; It'd be their last. The producers behind most of them, Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky**, would try to save the studio with a couple of adventure films (also directed by Connor), but Amicus would soon close down for good.
I hadn't seen this one before, but it's an extremely solid collection that shows the studio at top form: charming and clever, well-made and a whole lot of fun. Not particularly scary - not to my jaded sensibilities, at least, but most of the stories here (adapted by Robin Clarke and Raymond Christodoulou) have a respectable amount of meanness and a bit of conceptual flair; I've never read any Chertwynd-Hayes, but based on this I probably should correct that.
RIP Amicus. You folks were all right.
*: It does, at least, lead to an absolute gem of a one liner: "I hope you enjoy snuffing it". The delivery alone makes this movie worth the price of admission.
**: Fun fact: Subotsky spent the 80s and 90s pretty much exclusively producing Stephen King movies - the ones people tend to gloss over, and two of the most infamous. Wonder what's up with that.
No comments:
Post a Comment