Publicity
posters for The Monster Club and Die Monster Die! (© Roy Ward Baker/Chips Productions/Sword and
Sorcery Productions/ITC / © Daniel Haller/Alta Vista Film
Productions/Anglo-Amalgamated/American International Pictures - reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
On the hot, airless evening of 26 July 2019, it seemed an ideal time for a horror movie night, so I
located and watched on YouTube two vintage cult-ish horror movies each of which
I'd last seen in its entirety over 30 years ago.
One of these was The Monster Club, inspired by an anthology of short stories first
published in 1975 and written by famous horror writer Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes.
Released in 1981, it is directed by Roy Ward Baker, and stars (among others)
Vincent Price as a suave vampire named Eramus who serves primarily as narrator
and continuity presenter between the movie's otherwise-autonomous principal segments
(see later), Donald Pleasence as a tenacious Van Helsing wannabe on a stake-out
(literally!), Stuart Whitmore as a film-maker beset by flesh-eating ghouls in a
remote mist-enshrouded English village, plus Anthony Valentine, Simon Ward, Patrick Magee, and a very demure Britt Ekland.
It also features John Carradine as
Chetwyind-Hayes himself, who ends up being accepted as a member of the
eponymous Monster Cub once Eramus reveals to the club's assemblage of vampires,
werewolves, and other monsters that thanks to the vast number and diversity of
evils conducted by members of our species upon other members of our species, Homo sapiens is unquestionably the
greatest monster of them all - a nice touch.
The Monster Club consists primarily of three
separate 25-minute segments interlinked by scenes at the club. Two of them are those noted
above, respectively featuring Pleasance in the second segment and Whitman in
the third. However, my favourite is the first segment, which centres upon a humanoid
monster known as a shadmock.
Jiminy Cricket advised
Pinocchio in the classic Disney animated movie to give a little whistle if he
were ever in trouble, but that is the very last thing that you'd ever want a
troubled shadmock to do! A memorable invention of Chetwynd-Hayes, this
mysterious entity is a fictitious, complex human hybrid of vampire, werewolf,
and ghoul whose piercing whistle, emitted only in times of severe distress, has
truly devastating effects.
The shadmock segment in The Monster Club is rooted very much in
the bittersweet Phantom of the Opera
genre, its uneasy coalescence of pathos and terror playing out beautifully
against Fauré's hauntingly melancholic 'Pavane' melody. Moreover, it features a
very moving, finely-tuned performance by James Laurenson as Raven, the
reclusive, ashen-faced, poignantly-naive but fatefully-betrayed shadmock in
question.
Raven the shadmock, played by James Laurenson, from The Monster Club (© Roy Ward Baker/Chips
Productions/Sword and Sorcery Productions/ITC - reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
The second movie in my horror double-bill
was Die Monster Die! (aka Monster of Terror), directed by Daniel
Haller, and released in 1965. Adapted very freely from H.P. Lovecraft's classic
1927 sci fi story The Colour Out of Space,
it stars Boris Karloff as Nahum Witley, a crazed scientist whose discovery of a
huge green-glowing meteorite in the grounds of his mansion's estate has led to
his wife, staff, and also various hothouse plants and caged animals being
mutated into monsters by the meteorite's radiation.
Now, his daughter Susan (played by Suzan
Farmer) and Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams), her visiting American boyfriend, are
forced to battle these and assorted other horrors in the hope of surviving long
enough to escape the accursed mansion and its insane owner. Today, thanks to
the visual wonders of CGI, such antiquated movies as these are quaint rather
than frightening, although when I was a youngster they did give me the willies,
lol. Worth noting, incidentally, is that this movie also features Patrick Magee, this time playing the taciturn local doctor, Dr Henderson.
For some considerable time, the shadmock
segment from The Monster Club was
readily accessible to watch for free on YouTube, but it was eventually deleted.
However, if you click here,
you can watch a truly fangtastic trailer to give you a taste of what to expect
from this movie. Moreover, at least at the time of posting this review, by clicking here the
entire film can be viewed free of charge on YT.
Similarly, be sure to click here
in order to view an original, typically melodramatic 1960s trailer for Die Monster Die! And click here to watch the entire
movie (albeit in very small screen-size) while it is still on YouTube and free
on watch there..
And to view a complete listing of all of my
Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly
accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
From
Die Monster Die! are two stills revealing the monstrous but
pitiful creatures mutated by the radiation emitted by fragments of the
meteorite, and caged by Nahum Witley inside a room within his hothouse but what
his daughter's boyfriend Stephen Reinhart aptly describes as "looking like
a zoo in hell" (© Daniel Haller/Alta Vista Film
Productions/Anglo-Amalgamated/American International Pictures - reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
I remember watching The Monster Club on ITV, probably only a few years after it came out. Being only about 9 or 10 at the time, I thought that the 3rd segment was probably the most frightening (the one with the Hum-ghouls (Hume-ghouls?)).
ReplyDeleteI think you have Patrick Macnee and Patrick Magee mixed up though; whilst Patrick Magee was in The Monster Club, I don't recall him ever being in The Avengers.