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Thursday, September 17, 2020

THE MONSTER CLUB & DIE MONSTER DIE! - A HORROR MOVIE DOUBLE-BILL!

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)


  
 

1 comment:

  1. 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?)).

    I 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.

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