60's British Horror Part Sixteen

THE TELL-TALE HEART

(1960)

Dir - Ernest Morris

Overall: MEH

 

While it cannot overcome its monotonous structure due to minuscule production values, producers Edward J. and Harry Lee Danzinger's very loose adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart still achieves a decent amount of gripping intensity under the circumstances.  The source material is completely reworked, with a Poe stand-in played by Laurence Payne being an sexually frustrated eccentric who becomes obsessed with his neighbor, only to loose her to the throws of passion from his noticeably more suave and charming best friend.  Things head in an inevitable direction and the movie opens with a scene that is replayed later on just to slam home the case, plus anyone familiar with Poe's famous story even in its heavily bastardized form here will sense the macabre outcome in advance.  Still, Payne goes all in with a manic, sweaty, Oliver Reed worthy performance and director Ernest Morris uses the pounding heartbeat sound effect over deafening silence for eerie effect throughout several tense sequences.  The structure takes awhile to get going though and it regularly spins in circles enough to loose momentum, but it nails the psychological, guilt-ridden torment angle very well.

CURSE OF THE FLY

(1965)

Dir - Don Sharp

Overall: MEH

 

20th Century Fox squeezed just enough juice out of their Fly franchise with the final Curse of the Fly, the only entry to be a British production.  Virtually a stand-alone sequel, it features entirely new characters, no bug monster, and only a couple of throw away lines of dialog that reference the previous two films.  This is actually a refreshing deviation as the aforementioned The Fly and Return of the Fly were similar premise wise and a third such closely related attempt would have been redundant.  Director Don Sharp and producers Robert L. Lippert and Jack Parsons reunite from the previous year's Witchcraft and the script by Harry Spalding features an escape from a mental institution, a Chinese servant couple, (where only one of them is played by a Caucasian actor for a change), mutated victims of scientific experiments, and the "curse" of the title rendering a descendant of the Delambre family prone to rapid aging unless he gets his shots regularly.  A mess on paper, there are still some effectively startling scenes, yet the story is a bit too leisurely to remain interesting until the end.  Once we have seen the entire, uncut process of people turning on the transporting machine about half a dozen times while scream queen Carole Gray spends most of the movie in bed, viewers will probably be tuned out.

 

THE COLLECTOR

(1965)

Dir - William Wyler

Overall: GOOD

A rare horror-adjacent work from renowned director William Wyler, The Collector patiently explores Stockholm syndrome and societal detachment in its two leads played splendidly by Samantha Eggar and Terence Stamp.  Wyler chose to adapt John Fowles' book of the same name as his follow-up to the similarly acclaimed The Children's Hour, setting the film in London with his two English leads, (even though everything but exteriors where shot in LA), and ultimately cutting over an hour of footage to bring it within commercial length.  Wyler's somewhat tyrannical style was particularly troublesome on Eggars who was fired, then rehired with an acting coach, and then lost fourteen pounds over the course of the shoot.  Her performance shines through the on-set torment that she suffered though.  As a victim of kidnapping whose acts of desperation are persistently misconstrued as manipulative by Stamp's hopelessly disconnected abductor, our sympathy lies wholly with her.  Stamp's role is comparatively more complex as he is clearly a victim of mental illness, yet his demented justifications ride a very thin line between being deplorable and pathetic.  As almost the entire movie is spent with just the two of them, the material has plenty of time to treat their complex dynamic respectfully.