("Pete Walker" Continued)

In a black & white pre-credit sequence set in 1957, a pre-Fawlty Towers Andrew Sachs meets his premature end in a run-down caravan near a silent, off-season, fairground -- ending up with half of his head removed in the process! We cut to a British courtroom where cannibal couple Dorothy and Edmund Yates are sentenced to an indefinite term in a mental institution, "until there can be no doubt whatsoever that you are fit and able to take your place in society again", as the judge puts it. Cut to the present day and, though the viewer can, presumably, be reasonably sure we have not yet seen the last of these two malefactors, for now, the story concentrates on the struggle of a young nurse, Jackie (Deborah Fairfax) to control her younger wild-child sibling, Debbie (Kim Butcher) who has fallen-in with a dodgy biker-gang crowd!

In fact, the angel-faced, leather-jacketed teenager seems to be even more vicious than her rather feckless friends, and is behind most of the yobbish violence they perpetrate in the city! She has also discovered that her sister has been secretly leaving the house at two-in-the-morning and arriving back again before she gets up! This is because Jackie bears the burden of her family's disturbing secret: she is the daughter of Edmund Yates and stepdaughter of Dorothy Yates, while Debbie was born to them both just before they were confined to a mental institution for their heinous crimes! Jackie tries to keep this information from her unstable half-sister and her psychiatrist boyfriend, Graham (Paul Greenwood), while also regularly making the nocturnal journey to Dorothy and Edmund's country farm cottage, bringing parcels of animal brains which she and Edmund try to pass-off as human in order to assuage Dorothy's cannibalistic urges! It turns out that Dorothy alone was behind all of the couple's previous crimes, Edmund sharing the blame out of love in order to remain with his wife. The couple have been pronounced cured and sane and let back into the community, but both Edmund and Jackie suspect that Dorothy is still fighting her urge for human flesh!

When Edmund discovers what look like partially devoured human remains in the boot of their car, he tries to get Jackie to confront her mother. But, as always, she hides behind her defenceless-old-lady persona, and fools them both. In fact, Dorothy has been busy luring lost souls to the house during the day -- while her husband is at work -- via an advert for Tarot readings in the pages of "Time Out"! The replying victims' heads get skewered on the end of Dorothy's Black and Decker drill and their bodies hidden in disused farm buildings for future consumption! Furthermore, Dorothy has a young apprentice who shares her crazed culinary desires: her delinquent daughter, Debbie!

"Frightmare" was conceived as a vehicle for "House of Whipcord's" major find, Sheila Keith. Both Walker and writer David McGillivray had been impressed by this sweet old lady's on-screen transformation into warden Walker: the terrifying, birdlike disciplinarian with suppressed lesbian tendencies, whom she played in that film. In fact, Keith's performance helps it over a few bumpy patches where its pace slacks off slightly; she obviously relished the chance to play meaty characters like this and attacked the part with gusto! Walker wrote parts for her in most of his subsequent films and fans of them would go on to dub Keith "the female Boris Karloff" -- although she never gained the major horror icon status she deserved, simply because no other horror producers besides Walker picked up on her talent for these kinds of roles!

While McGillivary and Walker were trying to think of a subject for their follow-up to "House Of Whipcord", they knew that whatever it was about, it must have Sheila Keith as the lead! Inspired by the 1972 Andes plane crash, McGillivary decided that cannibalism should be a sufficiently shocking theme; and, once again, he played the same card as "House Of Whipcord" by relocating this rather exotic pastime to the chintzy, middle-class outer-suburbs of modern-day Britain. This grim and downbeat tale forgoes the sex and exploitation angle of the duo's previous film for deranged, contemporary Grand Gugnol scenarios speckled in splashes of gelatinous gore. Although tame by modern standards, the film is notably more forthright in depicting its horrors than the usual British horror movies of the time, and Dorothy's use of an electric Black and Decker drill to remove her prey's brains from their skulls obviously looks forward to Abel Ferrara's "Driller Killer" five years in the future. Unlike Ferrara's inept fumbling though, "Frightmare" is a beautifully-made piece of low budget cinema (although it wasn't received as-such at the time) which paints an unromantic, modern-day setting in strangely comforting, fairy tale ambience whenever we venture into Dorothy's quaint cottage lair. Photographer, Peter Jessop lights the place in warm, soothing, orange hues from the flames of the cosy fireplace, while art director, Chris Burke decks it all out in fussy, old lady-like bric-a-brac. But, in this fairy tale, there are no wolves in disguise waiting to eat Little Red Riding Hood; the white-haired, shawl-clad old lady doing needlepoint by the fireside is, herself, the conniving, voracious menace who should strike fear into the heart: "The fact is, she ate people" -- comments a complacent official at one point -- "She was particularly interested in their brains!"

As promised, Sheila Keith is at the centre of McGillivary and Walker's blackly comic conceit, and if she was good in "House Of Whipcord", she is absolutely magnificent here -- switching between helpless, unassuming old dear and truly malevolent witch in the bat of an eyelid! The film is considerably enhanced in its effect by her energetic and committed performance and her enjoyment of the role is obvious to anyone watching. The devious Dorothy Yates proves to be more than a match for the combined justice and psychiatric systems of Great Britain and Keith's portrayal of Dorothy's "helpless old aunty" act is often darkly funny. "I left all my headaches and problems behind at the other place. I closed the door very carefully and locked them all in" she frailly reassures her worried stepdaughter while daintily finishing a wholesome piece of needlepoint; and when lonely young women turn up at her door for Tarot Card readings, they are greeted by a respectable-looking, mild-mannered old lady whose tea-and-sympathy charm gradually begins to give way to something much more menacing, until it ends with her cackling maniacally while impaling the terrified subjects with a red-hot poker, or gleefully revelling in the crimson fountain of brain-matter & blood that spews up from the end of her drill-bit as she eviscerates their brain-pans!

There are also several other performances that complement Keith's maniacal matriarch very nicely; her daughter Debbie is almost as scary, particularly as she looks so sweet! Newcomer Kim Butcher does a fine job in portraying the manipulative teen who uses her angelic looks to evade suspicion just as effectively as Dorothy hides behind her harmless old lady persona, and even though we always know she must be in league with her mother, it still comes as a shock when we finally see her -- in the attic of Dorothy and Edmund's cottage -- with meat cleaver in hand as she and a drill-waving Dorothy slowly advance like Cheetahs on a trapped victim! The other complementary performance comes curtesy of Rupert Davies ("The Witchfinder General") who plays the hapless husband, Edmund. Completely dominated by his evil wife, Edmund closes-off from what is really going on, even when his own daughter, Jackie is threatened when Dorothy and Debbie decide that she risks "breaking up the family"! Davies is excellent as the weak-willed father who hides behind his daughter even when his tardiness puts his own flesh & blood in danger!

As the quote at the beginning of this review demonstrates, the critical reaction to "Frightmare" was in stark contrast to the relatively positive one "House Of Whipcord" received. The film's more open concentration on gruesome imagery didn't help much, but Walker brought in lots of current concerns about crime running riot and criminals being set free only to kill again; none of this played terribly well with the liberal press and neither did the suggestion that Debbie's insanity and cannibalistic urges had been inherited genetically! These days, it's not a hugely controversial idea, but in the mid-seventies, to talk about behaviour being related to genetics was tantamount to painting a swastika on your forehead! The film's main themes seem much more personal than political though. Walker's childhood was spent in a succession of foster homes and orphanages and it is hard not to read the film's hugely cynical view of the family as having its roots in his own past. All of Walker's three main collaborations with David McGillivary take trusted institutions and show how, when they become corrupted, they can be the cause of gross injustice; but with "Frightmare" there is also the sense that the family structure allows one to get away with almost anything without detection, no matter how much pain is caused -- so long as the traditional image is maintained! This idea was to be taken up again and expanded upon even more fruitfully when Walker and McGillivary came to write their third project together. Once again, Walker drew on his past -- in this case, his Catholic upbringing, in an entertaining tale of priestly madness which became, arguably, his best film of all!

"House Of Mortal Sin" (renamed "The Confessional" in the States) was another attempt to stir up controversy; this time by portraying a kindly-looking Catholic priest (played by a stately Anthony Sharp) as being driven to obsession and murder by ludicrous dogma, unrequited love and enforced celibacy! The film shares a certain similarity in its attitude and its predilection for outrageous, over-the-top murder set-pieces, with the Italian giallo sub-genre -- which quite regularly revealed Catholic priests to be closet raving sex maniacs! Here though, the trick is that both the audience and the film's main protagonist, played by fragrant Susan Penhaligon, know exactly who is wearing the black leather gloves, it's just that no one else can be convinced of the killer's identity -- despite Sharp's mad Priest usually doing-away with people virtually right under their noses! Even though Walker garnishes this cruelly cynical plot with fabulously executed scenes of bloody mayhem -- revealing a strange obsession with facial mutilation in the nasty make-up effects -- the film not only failed to accumulate the opprobrium Walker hoped it would, it also died a death at the box office. This is a bit of a mystery because it actually features some fantastic performances from everybody involved, while Walker's direction is even more assured than ever, as he whips up a delirious storm of paranoia and tension that builds, inevitably, to his bleakest climax yet!

Shop assistant, Jenny Welch (Susan Penhaligon) meets an old friend (her sister's ex-boyfriend, in fact) who she learns has recently entered the priesthood. Father Bernard Cutler (Norman Eshly) is working at the nearby Church Of The Sacred Heart and a curious Jenny pays him a visit one morning, and ends up taking confession for the first time in many years! The priest taking the confession turns out to be Bernard's colleague, Father Xavier Meldrum (Anthony Sharp) who seems unnaturally interested in the details of Jenny's sex life. This turns out to be because Meldrum regularly tape-records his parishioner's confessions and then blackmails them! But Jenny, in particular, becomes an obsession with Meldrum -- it seems she reminds him of an unrequited love -- and now furnished with the details of her relationships, he sets about killing-off boyfriends, acquaintances and anyone else who threatens to get in the way of his crazed desire, including the mother of a teenage girl he once attempted to blackmail but who subsequently committed suicide under the pressure.

Walker plays with traditional Gothic images and motifs throughout this film, often turning them on their head. In fact, out of all of his works, this one above all has the air of a Hammer Production about it, with Meldrum stalking about at night in his cassock, looking for all the world like a menacing Dracula figure! But the infamous sensibility of "...Whipcord" and "Frightmare" is more pronounced than ever and when Meldrum's glinting crucifix looms out of the darkness, it becomes a symbol of impending doom rather than salvation! The film is full of Gothic textures which contrast with the humdrum grot of its contemporary city setting: Meldrum's presbytery becomes a forbidding structure as storm clouds gather above it in the film's final confrontation; while Sheila Keith turns up again as the killer cleric's benighted, one-eyed housekeeper, Miss Brabazon -- a typical, Mrs. Danvers-type of Gothic villain who, in a particularly disturbing subplot, abuses Meldrum's senile, bedridden mother out of resentment for her having blocked them from marrying each other, thirty years previously!

Anthony Sharp is (forgive the pun) a revelation in a role which, like Sheila Keith's Dorothy Yates in "Frightmare", requires him go from distinguished authority figure to bug-eyed homicidal killer in a split second. Sharp, who had always been better-known for his mild-mannered roles in various British sitcoms, is uncharacteristically brutal in the murder sequences and despite, himself, being a Catholic, is totally convincing in numerous scenes which could be seen as being rather tasteless (and were probably intended as such by Walker) since Meldrum tends to like murdering people using various Catholic paraphernalia! First of all, Jenny's unpleasant ex-boyfriend is repeatedly smashed in the face with a burning-hot censer, while another victim is poisoned with a communion wafer; when Jenny's sister, Vanessa (Stephanie Beacham) discovers her sister has been telling the truth all along and decides to help out by stealing the tape recording of her sister's confession, the film's horrendous climax sees Meldrum throttling her to death with some rosary beads in front of his frail old mother (who had just handed Vanessa a note reading "Help me, my son is mad" in perfect handwriting -- despite suffering from debilitating Parkinson's disease!) and then finishing the old biddy off with yet another poisoned wafer! All this is set to another dramatic score by Stanley Myers (who also scored "House Of Whipcord" and "Frightmare") and again shot beautifully by Walker's regular cinematographer, Peter Jessop.

The film has sometimes been dismissed as slightly far-fetched by critics, probably because Meldrum gets away with murder in often farcical circumstances. This was all typical of Walker's black sense of humour -- but strangely, the idea that a culturally well-respected figure could walk around while being completely and utterly insane, and killing people all over the place without ever being suspected, was bizarrely vindicated in the recent Harold Shipman case: a British serial killer who also happened to be a General Practitioner, and who managed to get away with knocking-off legions of his own patients throughout his career by hiding behind his profession, before finally being found-out completely by chance! It seems that Walker's relentless urge to subvert and upset the establishment had inadvertently stumbled on something truly malignant in British culture after all!

The McGillivary/Walker collaboration continued for one more film (the exploitation-slasher flick "Schizo") but it seems the magic was beginning to fade, and for 1978's "The Comeback" Walker turned again to Murray Smith (writer of "Die Screaming, Marianne") who brought his more traditional style to the project. All of the subversive elements of Walker's best films had pretty much disappeared by this point and it seems that the director had exhausted his inspiration. Smith's script was intended as a pastiche of Jimmy Sangster's "mini-Hitchcock" thrillers, produced for Hammer in the early sixties. Films like "Taste Of Fear" (1961); Mania (1963); Nightmare (1963) and Hysteria (1965) were inspired by "Psycho" and Henri Clouzot's French thriller "Les Diaboliques", and usually featured similar plots involving attempts to drive someone mad. In fact, so familiar is this kind of plot that "The Comeback" ends up feeling more like a rehash than a pastiche.

The oddest thing about the film is Walker's choice of lead: American pop singer, Jack Jones plays (surprise, surprise) an American pop singer called Nick Cooper, whose agent (Webster Jones, better known as Bosley from "Charlie's Angels") rents a good old-fashioned Gothic Mansion in the British countryside to enable his client to relax and get over his recent divorce while he works on his new comeback album. The house is run by an oddball old couple, Mr & Mrs. B -- played by Bill Owen (or Compo from "Last of The Summer Wine") and Sheila Keith; and Cooper soon makes himself at home by getting intimate with his agent's secretary, Linda Everett (Pamela Stephenson -- this cast-list gets weirder and weirder!). Meanwhile, Cooper's ex-wife turns up at the couple's abandoned London Penthouse to collect her things and, in one of Walker's bloodiest murder set-pieces, gets hacked to pieces by a scythe-wielding maniac in an "old hag" mask! Back at the Mansion, things rapidly start going to pot for housewife's heartthrob, Nick Copper: strange sobbing noises keep him awake at night and a grotesque corpse appears outside his bedroom door, only to disappear when Mrs. B comes to investigate his screams. The days go by and Copper starts having a breakdown -- all the while, his ex-wife's rat-nibbled corpse continues to fester as it lies undiscovered in the Penthouse!

Anyone who has read this far won't be too surprised to learn who is involved in the murders (just in case, skip the rest of this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers on the subject) despite the film going to absurd lengths to make every single character look suspicious: Webster Jones plays a smarmy American agent in much the same manner as his "Charlie's Angels" character -- until it turns out that he's a rather troubled soul who dresses up as a woman in private (this is meant to make him look suspicious I suppose); Nick's sleaze-ball best friend, on the other hand, openly ogles Pamela Stephenson's breasts in a lift and casually comments on the stiffness of her nipples -- not your average pickup line it has to said! All of this barmy behaviour is just a cover to enable Walker's favourite old head-case Sheila Keith to act crazy throughout the film without it being totally obvious that it is she who is the killer! Walker obviously realises that the plot line isn't the film's strongest point and so he wisely sends the whole sub-genre up rather than attempt a serious entry in it! Sheila Keith is pivotal in this approach and she is as brilliant as ever here, with her performance going a long way towards saving the film from falling flat. She manages to inject even the most innocuous sentences -- such as, "would you like me to spread that butter for you sir?" -- with an undercurrent of malicious intent! When we finally get to the big revelation at the end of the film, that Mr and Mrs B are behind all the mayhem at the Mansion, Keith lets rip with a hilariously over-the-top speech in which she condemn the hapless pop musician. She and her dominated husband (shades of "Frightmare" here) blame Nick for the death of their daughter -- an obsessed fan of the singer who committed suicide after he got married! "You, with your foul contortions and your lewd, suggestive songs", she spits, "with your music that drives innocent children to behave like beasts in a farmyard. Disgusting!" This is particularly comical when you consider the fact that it's being directed at a rather harmless-looking middle-aged man whose spaced-out hippie music (judging from the, mercifully brief, snippets we get to hear) is hardly likely to bring down society as we know it!

Keith's performance is complemented by some seriously gory, but extremely well-staged kills. The only problem is, there aren't enough of them! After Cooper's wife (a brief cameo from Holly, daughter of Jack, Palance) is sliced-up at the beginning, there isn't another decent murder until the last third of the film! The rest of the time between seems to be mostly taken-up with Jack Jones wandering about in his dressing gown looking perplexed! There is some tension surrounding Mrs. Cooper's corpse and whether it is going to be discovered by any of the other characters; we also return to the corpse throughout the movie as it gets progressively more rancid and disgusting (very Fulci-like nastiness this). But, Murrey Smith's script tends to wander aimlessly for large stretches of time and the film loses too much energy and momentum until Sheila Keith's show-stopping finale.

Anchor Bay UK's marvellous box set features five discs, with all the films (except "The Comeback", which is an unmatted full-screen print) featured in anamorphic widescreen. There is some print damage here and there (especially in certain sections of "House Of Mortal Sin") but mostly, these transfers are in reasonably good condition, while "Frightmare" looks absolutely stunning! All the films come with their original mono soundtrack with, rather artificial sounding, 5.1 DTS mixes included as well. Also, Anchor Bay UK include English subtitles for the hard-of-hearing on all discs. Each disc includes various standard extras such as film notes, biographies and trailers (where available).

All the films feature commentary tracks by Pete Walker, who is joined by cinematographer, Peter Jessop for "House Of Whipcord" and "Frightmare". Jonathan Rigby (author of the excellent "English Gothic") moderates "Die Screaming Marianne", "House Of Mortal Sin" and "The Comeback" while Walker's biographer Steve Chibnall does the honours for "House..." and "Frightmare". All of these are extremely entertaining, although Walker's memory seems a bit confused at times!

Finally, there are two featurettes produced by Nucleus films included on "The House Of Mortal Sin" disc: "Courting Controversy" is a thirty-seven minute documentary featuring interviews with Walker, Peter Jessop, and actors Paul Greenwood and Susan Penhaligon, as well as writer, David McGillivary whose participation would have been good to have included in the commentaries (as he was in the Norman J Warren set) since he is a very amusing raconteur -- but he and Walker, apparently, no-longer get on! The other featurette is "Sheila Keith: A Nice Old Lady?"; this is a fourteen-minute tribute to the actress who died while this set was being put together, and before she could contribute to it! As well as many of the people already mentioned, Graham Duff, writer of Steve Coogan's "Dr. Terrible's House Of Horrible", talks about working with the actress on an episode of that series which spoofed the Tarot reading scenes in "Frightmare".

Once again, Anchor Bay UK present these films in one of their cardboard, coffin-shaped boxes. Previous troubles with the DVD fasteners being either too loose or too tight appear to have been solved; my copy arrived by post with all the discs intact and I had little trouble removing them. Anyone interested in the British horror movie will find this set essential -- and it sits on the shelf nicely, alongside AB UK's "Amicus", "Tigon" and "Norman J. Warren" sets!