Dead of Night: The Exorcism

*Spoilers ahead*

BBC Four repeated this rare archive production over Christmas 2007 as part of its week of spooky festive stories. It's quite different to the traditional Ghost Stories for Christmas made by the BBC in the 1970s, but it complements that series well as it has a similarly uneasy atmosphere at times.

Where it differs from the Lawrence Gordon Clark productions most starkly is in the overt use of socio-political commentary - the entire production is centred around a discussion by four friends about socialism, the borgeousie and social structures. This sounds pretty dull, and I have to admit that while it adds a little colour to the piece, these exchanges between the characters do little to endear them to the viewer - they just come across as dry and arrogant.

However, the atmosphere of the drama is built up well. The premise of four people trapped in a haunted cottage in the middle of nowhere at Christmastime is a juicy one. The doors and windows won't open, the electricity is failing, and there's something odd going on at the dinner table.

The dinner table scenes are my favourite. First Edmund (Edward Petherbridge) tastes his claret as blood (but nobody else can), then all four of them are made nauseously ill after tucking in to a specially prepared Christmas meal.

Then, when Rachel (Anna Cropper) goes upstairs she sees the corpse of a child on the bed, and from there on everybody starts experiencing something odd, until the climax comes, with poltergeist activity, possession and a final gruesome reveal in the bedroom!

Some might dislike the way the characters try to rationalise what is happening to them as the play progresses, but I found this a very natural reaction for four intelligent, opinionated people who, by and large, do not believe in the supernatural at first.

The centrepiece of the play is Rachel's ten minute monologue while possessed by the spirit, which forces the characters to examine the basis of their privileged existences. Anna Cropper does a sterling job of performing the possession monologue, but from a viewer's standpoint it lasts far too long and is scripted with a sledgehammer tendency rather than subtlety. And anyone with an aversion to people's foaming spittle should look away during this scene!

Future Doctor Who effects man John Friedlander creates some startlingly convincing and gruesome corpses for the final reveal of the play, with the camera lingering playfully on the dead mother's pained expression. The epilogue sees police searching the abandoned cottage the next day, and we learn that the four people we have spent the last 45 minutes getting to know have met their own untimely end.

The Exorcism is a suitably spooky tale for Christmas but told with very little subtlety or artfulness. Writer Don Taylor has a message he wants to get across, and get it across he certainly does - nobody watching can fail to know what he wants to say. There's a place for socio-political posturing and the dissemination of personal ideologies, but I'm not sure it works particularly well here. Taylor's message overshadows and restricts the atmosphere of the play, and I'm not surprised to learn he had been "blacklisted" by the BBC in previous years for his political views. If he wrote all his drama as plainly as The Exorcism, no wonder the BBC wanted to distance itself from him.

Dead of Night: The Exorcism, originally transmitted November 5th 1972.
Written and directed by Don Taylor.

Quatermass II (BBC)

I watched the original The Quatermass Experiment a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it because it was the birth of populist television in the making. The Quatermass phenomenon became one of the BBC's greatest post-war triumphs and to watch these old, scratchy prints (although they have been cleaned up as much as possible for DVD) is like watching magic in motion!

So I came to Quatermass II with some excitement. I love these old B-movie type productions (whether they are TV or films) because I love to see what achievements they made with small budgets and technical expertise. And also, of course, they're often rollicking good yarns too.

Not so with Quatermass II. It starts well, building tension and gradually (and I mean gradually) unravelling the truth of what is going on at the mysterious synthetic food plant at Winnerdon Flats. It is slow, but I can accept that because the atmosphere is developed well by the director, and there's some nice location filming (especially when Quatermass goes to the factory, which I think was actually a Shell plant in Essex).

Episode 5 is called The Frenzy, and despite the expectation that this is when the action picks up and all hell breaks loose, it's quite the opposite. As soon as the villagers revolt and try to destroy the alien menace, the pace slows right down to a crawl, it gets horrifically talky and the direction takes a nosedive. It's almost as if the actors were left to their own devices for the final two weeks while Rudolph Cartier was off on holiday or something. It's a shambles.

The acting throughout is stilted at best. I'm not a fan of John Robinson's portrayal of Quatermass, and he plays the part as if he's only just read his lines for the first time. Sometimes that shows, as he falters over his words and often looks completely lost. I guess this might be because he was a very late replacement for Reginald Tate, who played Quatermass in the first serial in 1954 but who died of a heart attack while filming the location scenes for Quatermass II. Robinson must have come to this project very late, and it shows.

Elsewhere, we have the wet Monica Grey as Quatermass's daughter Paula (who looks desperately into camera to deliver her lines at any opportunity), and the bushy-browed Hugh Griffith as Dr Pugh, a man I wouldn't trust to make the tea, never mind go up in a space rocket to save the world.

The best performance of the entire six episodes is undoubtedly from Roger Delgado (who 16 years later would became the Master in Doctor Who), who plays a Fleet Street journalist chasing the secret of Winnerdon Flats alongside Quatermass. But when he gets possessed by the alien gas, Delgado puts in a fantastic performance which puts his colleagues to shame, and as he desperately tries to relate his story to his editor over the phone, the possession takes hold and he eventually succumbs. Delgado proves that not everyone acting for the BBC in the 1950s was doing so with a plumb in their mouth and a broom up their backside. Episode 4 (The Coming) is probably the best episode because of his sole contribution.

All in all, it's a disappointing serial. I think Quatermass is sorely miscast, and while Nigel Kneale's story is essentially good, it is adapted in quite a workmanlike way, particularly in light of the previous year's wonderful first serial. I think Cartier really drops the ball toward the end, resulting in a very dull episode 5 and a chaotic and confused finale.

Quatermass II, originally transmitted October 22nd - November 26th 1955.
Written by Nigel Kneale; directed by Rudolph Cartier.

Casting the Runes (1979) & Ghostwatch

Last night was Hallowe'en (I'm a stickler for that apostrophe!) and time for the traditional spooky evening of DVD watching in my household. We watched two cult items, and here are my thoughts on them.

ITV Playhouse: Casting the Runes

This 50 minute adaptation of an M R James ghost story was first shown as part of ITV Playhouse's eleventh season, and was recently released (inexplicably) on its own DVD by Network.

I've never read any of James's original stories, but am a great fan of TV and film adaptations of his work, so when I read that Ghost Story for Christmas aficionado Lawrence Gordon Clark was behind this, I had high expectations.

Sadly, it's not up to the same standard as Clark's finest work with the BBC. The story starts with an extremely atmospheric and well shot prelude where we see a man and his dog pursued by a strange something across a beautiful snowy field. The man is John Harrington, and his death seems to be down to the fact he wrote a scathing review of the latest supernatural book by author Julian ("big man") Karswell. Harrington ends up dead in a field, and his dog is never seen again (dogs never do well out of stories like this).

Some time later TV journalist Prudence Dunning mentions something derogatory about Karswell in one of her programmes, and soon enough she too has been cursed by the vengeful author. My advice is never become a writer if you can't take criticism.

But there's too much inconsistency and not enough brooding spookyness in this piece. Harrington's demise was thick with atmosphere, with a feeling of being watched and pursued, whereas all Dunning really gets is a giant rubber spider in her bed. Her efforts to break the curse by surreptitiously handing back to Karswell his runic slip of paper are half-hearted (donning a blonde wig and frilly blouse wouldn't even convince Stevie Wonder) and when she does finally manage to turn the tables, it's by impersonating a customs official at an airport, something I find so unconvincing (even for the pre-9/11 1970s) that it left me feeling disappointed and cheated.

I don't know if that's the same ending James originally wrote but it just feels like an all-too-easy attempt to be Tales of the Unexpected to me. The cast does a good job, but nothing that stands out, but it's Clark's location filming that makes the best impression - snowbound streets and countryside, and bonfires and fireworks, perfect viewing for a Hallowe'en night. It's just a shame the story's so unconvincing.

ITV Playhouse: Casting the Runes, originally transmitted April 24th 1979.

Written by Clive Exton from the M R James story; directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark.

Ghostwatch

Ghostwatch is infamous in the canon of cult British TV because of the almost hysterical reaction it got on its first (and only) broadcast. Produced and transmitted as part of BBC1's Screen One strand of one-off feature-length dramas, Ghostwatch attracted unprecedented media and public outcry because people thought it was real.

The problem was that it was made to look as if it was a live broadcast investigating hauntings at a house owned by a middle-aged mum and her two children. These days we're sick to death of this type of broadcast - Hospitalwatch, Springwatch, Crimewatch - but back then they were more popular, and more notice was taken of them.

Despite being billed as a drama, many were convinced it was real, happening live as they watched. There were strange cat noises behind the walls, scratches to the possessed teenager's face, "live" phone-ins, banging on the ceiling, quick glimpses of "something" lurking in the shadows and reflections of the house, and finally a full-on national seance, resulting in presenter Sarah Greene being sucked into a cupboard under the stairs, and Michael Parkinson being possessed in the studio.

It sounds silly, and some of it is. But back in 1992 so many people were convinced this was a real live broadcast, and that these girls were being possessed by a ghost, that switchboards were jammed, outraged leader articles filled the next day's papers and there was even one report of a young man killing himself because of watching Ghostwatch.

There's no denying that parts of it are effectively done. The scenes set in the studio, with a cynical Michael Parkinson interviewing the almost obsessive parapychologist Dr Lin Pascoe, are the most convincing, principally because of the trust the British public has in Parky. He was, and remains, a dependable figure, and provided an added layer of validity to the piece. This is also the case with Sarah Greene, a much-loved personality who had hosted children's TV through the 1980s and couldn't possibly be pulling the wool over viewers' eyes now...

Not so convincing is the use of cheeky chappy Craig Charles for the Outside Broadcast scenes (Charles was brought into this world simply to annoy, I think) and although the actress playing Pamela Earley was good, those playing her children were less skilled at pitching the reality right.

All in all, Ghostwatch is an effective and interesting piece of drama, a good experiment in distorting the narrative of both traditional TV drama and the up-and-coming reality TV. The quick glimpses keen-eyed viewers get of murderous disfigured paedophile Pipes are chilling, and the presence of Parkinson and Greene adds protracted weight until things really start getting silly toward the end.

Ghostwatch is much more convincing than some of the blatantly staged, desperate tripe today's Most Haunted trots out as entertainment.

Ghostwatch, originally transmitted October 31st 1992.

Written by Stephen Volk; directed by Lesley Manning.

I Love Lucy

I first saw Lucille Ball while holidaying in North America a few years ago. She seemed to be on at something like 6pm every evening, and when I actually sat down to watch it, I found it really funny, especially for its age.

Years later I saw an I Love Lucy box set going extremely cheaply in my local bookshop, so snapped it up and hoped I'd like it. I've been watching the series from the first episode, way back in 1951, and have to say it really has stood the test of time considerably.
Lucille Ball was a bit of a pioneer, both in terms of television comedy/ situation comedy and in the way she opened doors for female comedians, and made TV execs and viewers alike realise that a woman could carry a show herself, and be funny and successful too.

Lucy was a very talented and naturally funny lady. Although she didn't write these early I Love Lucy shows, it is her performance which turns amusing scripts into laugh out loud funny comedy more often than not. It is the physical comedy which impresses most - before Ball's rise to fame on US TV, most people had only really seen physical comedy and slapstick performed by men, such as Laurel and Hardy, Keaton and Abbot and Costello. But here was a woman who was confident in her ability to be funny and make people laugh, unbound by the usual need to maintain a respectable femininity for the public.

Those huge, innocent wide eyes, the pursed lips, the daft mop of curly hair, the slightly ungainly way she held herself. In Lucille Ball circa 1952 you can trace forward a direct link to Grace Adler from Will and Grace, devised 47 years later. Lucy was the obvious template for Grace, and while Debra Messing does the job well, it's very been there, done that. Lucille Ball was getting herself into ridiculous but hilarious scrapes four decades before Grace shacked up with a dysfunctional gay lawyer in New York.

I also like spotting what have subsequently become comedy cliches being invented. Like with Laurel and Hardy and their contemporaries, many of what we class as film cliches today were invented in the 1920s and 30s, and looking at them today you can see convention being created, before people knew what to expect. I Love Lucy's backbone is the now tried and trusted sit-com standard of misunderstanding - in the 1950s it was funny because it was new, in the 21st century it's only funny if you're putting a new spin on it. Or indeed, not doing it at all. Comedy runs out of ideas very quickly, but back in the 1950s there was no such danger because Lucille Ball was doing this for the first time.

I also have a box set of episodes from Lucille's later The Lucy Show series, in colour (1962-68), and look forward to charting the differences between these two series, and how comedy was performed then and now.

I Love Lucy, originally transmitted October 15th 1951 - May 6th 1957.

The Monster Walks

The IMDb synopsis says that this 60 minute feature is about "people in an old dark house on a stormy night being menaced by a killer ape", which suggests to me that whoever wrote that has never seen it. You'd be mistaken for thinking this is the case by looking at the video sleeve pictured, or even having seen the first half of the film.

But the truth is that while there is indeed a rather violent-looking chimp locked in a cage in the cellar, at no point does the chimp get out of the cage and menace people.

And that is, by and large, the twist of the film - throughout we are led to believe that the killer is the chimp, but in actual fact it's a 7ft tall manservant with a hairy monkey glove! So, in essence, at the end of the day, when it comes down to it, the monster doesn't walk, unless you label the killer manservant a monster. It's a classic case of narrative misdirection, and although told in a rather simplistic way, remember that this is 1932, before many filmmaking cliches and stereotypes had been invented.

The acting is expectedly stilted, but special mention must go to Martha Mattox (who, incidentally, died the following year, aged 55) as the truly unnerving Mrs Krug, while her son Hanns (Mischa Auer) has an indomitable presence too. There are some nice twists in this film, from Hanns strangling his own mother by accident, to the revelation that Hanns is Robert Earlton's illegitimate son, and all he really wants is for his father to acknowledge him. Of course, the fact Mr Earlton has been having it away with his late brother's ghoulish housekeeper obviously prevents him from admitting paternity!

It's a creaky old Thirties spookathon. It moves slowly, but the twists make it more enjoyable than most of its ilk. Just don't expect any walking monsters... !

The Monster Walks, released February 1932.
Written by Robert Ellis; directed by Frank R Strayer.

Lost in Space (US TV)

I have a separate blog for the American sci-fi series Lost in Space - see the link in my profile, or click here - http://lostinspacereviews.blogspot.com/. The blog will be updated as and when I reach the end of each of the three seasons.

Chimera (ITV)

Archive transfer - originally posted December 19th 2005 (contains spoilers)

When this four-part ITV thriller was first shown in 1991, I was a 15-year-old boy who really shouldn't have been as scared as I was!
Strapping 15-year-olds should be able to handle things like this, but there was something about the brutality of the creature Chad, and the way it was directed by Ghost Story for Christmas veteran Lawrence Gordon Clark that affected me.
Chimera was based on the Stephen Gallagher book of the same name and tells the tale of a journalist investigating the brutal murder of his ex-girlfriend while she was working at a fertility clinic. The clinic is actually the cover for a much more disturbing project involving cross-breeding the DNA of human and ape foetuses, resulting in the horrific chimera that is Chad in the story.
The story revolves around the journalist's quest to uncover the truth, and the authorities' quest to recapture and ultimately destroy the escaped creature.
Chad is a scary thing. Half man, half monkey, and wearing a Freddie Krueger style stripey jumper and Michael Myers dungarees, it escapes from the clinic in spectacularly bloody fashion, killing everyone he comes across and leaving the clinic ablaze and buried in bodies.
Episode one of the drama is a masterpiece of deception. We are introduced to lots of new characters, some sympathetic, others not, and then see them all ruthlessly hacked to bits by the episode's close at the hands of Chad and his kitchen knife. The massacre scenes are shocking and disturbingly directed, and I really don't think we would get some of the in-yer-face shots of stabbings these days. However, it manages to convey the confusion and anger the creature feels, and as the episode ends you really do fear for the lives of others out on the Yorkshire moors as the chimera is let loose.
Episodes 2-4 do not live up to the strong opening, and concentrate too much on the aftermath of Chad's outbreak, and not enough on Chad himself. Perhaps it works better for our focus to shift to the humans left behind, and let the escaped creature take a backseat for a while, but for me it slows the pace down enormously.
Horror fans will love episode one and creature fans will love episodes three and four, but the bits inbetween really do drag, as interesting as the premise is of a journalist on the run from the authorities and the uncovering of a hideous scientific cover-up.
John Lynch is suitably vulnerable and edgy as Peter Carson and Christine Kavanagh gives a great performance as the scientist whose conscience gets the better of her - but who is ultimately the reason so many innocent people die. Kenneth Cranham's character is there to represent the heartless mystery of the suits behind the cover-up, but Hennessey is ultimately a pointless, wasted character who does precisely nothing except leer over his half-moon specs. In episode four he has a scene where he talks to his daughter, whose stage play he has to miss, and you then assume he's going to end up dead and oh what a tragedy it all is. But no. That's pretty much the last you see of him.
The ending is a bit of a damp squib, the potential face-off between the Army and the creature at the centre of the rural community failing to capture any element of danger. Chad is shot, through a car window, and that's it.
All in all it's hard to see why I was so scared of this aged 15. It still has its eerie moments - including the bloody first episode and the cliffhanger to episode two - but the director does not make as much of the Chad creature as he could. I've seen "monster holed up in a barn" done much more effectively in Doctor Who's Terror of the Zygons and The Silurians.
Oh, and who the hell cast that kid as Peter Gaskell, the farmer's son who looks after Chad with his sister? It's his only IMDb entry, and thank god for that!

Chimera, originally transmitted July 7th-28th 1991.
Written by Stephen Gallagher; directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark.