The Mutations (1974)

          Reflecting its storyline about a mad scientist who gene-splices people and plants to create monsters, this lurid UK flick offers two movies for the price of one. The putative main story is an unintentionally hilarious stinker, with Donald Pleasence phoning in his bad-guy performance while the film’s special-effects team delivers laughably bad monster costumes. However, a major subplot about the mad scientist’s deformed henchman has a certain degree of pathos and suspense, especially because the subplot borrows many elements from the 1932 cult classic Freaks. Set in modern-day England, The Mutations stars Pleasence as Professor Nolter, a psycho who envisions a new race of humans imbued with plant characteristics. Nolter’s accomplice is Lynch (Tom Baker), a deformed giant who abducts young men and women for Nolter to use as test subjects. Lynch is the leader of a group of circus freaks living at an amusement park, yet while the other circus performers are harmless, Lynch is a self-loathing psychotic. Thus, while Nolter tempts fate by taking his experiments too far, Lynch is driven to madness by waiting for Nolter to deliver on promises of correcting Lynch’s deformity. (The picture also features perfunctory material involving attractive students either investigating the disappearances of their classmates or becoming victims of Nolter’s weird science.)

          As helmed by Jack Cardiff, a master cinematographer who occasionally directed, The Mutations has a colorful look and one or two genuinely creepy scenes, notably the Freaks-influenced conclusion of Lynch’s storyline. The acting is generally bland, but Baker (beloved by many for his long run on the UK TV series Doctor Who) does well playing Lynch in the Vincent Price mode of a killer besieged by inner demons. The film’s other noteworthy performance comes from the diminutive Michael Dunn, familiar to American TV fans for his work as Dr. Loveless on the ’60s show The Wild Wild West. He plays the little person who represents the conscience of the circus-freak community. Furthermore, starlets including the scrumptious Julie Ege provide major eye candy while clothed and otherwise, and The Mutations benefits from an eerie music score that utilizes dissonant classical music—a truly unsettling flourish. FYI, The Mutations sometimes carries the alternate title The Freakmaker.

The Mutations: FUNKY

Tales from the Crypt (1972) & The Vault of Horror (1973)

          Years before the cult-favorite 1989-1996 HBO series reintroduced the title Tales from the Crypt into popular culture, the notoriously gory short stories that first appeared in the EC Comics periodical of that name inspired a pair of British anthology films. Here’s the backstory: Published by William Gaines, EC Comics’ horror titles were scandalized during a mid-1950s witch hunt that blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency. Gaines’ books were easy targets, with their viscera-laden morality tales about nefarious people suffering horrifically ironic fates; the vignettes were like O. Henry yarns with dismemberments. All of Gaines’ horror books were canceled as a result of censorship pressures—yet once the passage of two decades made lighthearted bloodshed socially acceptable again, Amicus Productions, the English company that briefly competed with Hammer Films for dominance of the lucrative Brit-horror market, licensed a slew of EC stories for a pair of films.

          Unfortunately, neither movie is particularly good. One gets the impression that brisk shooting schedules were to blame, since the acting and photography feel rushed, and, as a result, neither picture evokes the beloved shadowy atmosphere of the source material. The first picture, Tales from the Crypt, includes a familiar framing device: A character called the Crypt Keeper (Ralph Richardson) gathers several people into a mysterious tomb and exposes them to visions of horrible things they might or might not have done. Instead of the cackling cadaver from the comics or the HBO series, however, Richardson is just a bitchy old Englishman, sort of like an otherworldly schoolmaster.

          The five episodes in Tales from the Crypt are unnecessarily long-winded, though Tales benefits from the participation of Hammer Films stalwarts including director Freddie Francis and actor Peter Cushing. In the most generic episode, “All Through the House,” Joan Collins plays a murderous wife who gets stalked by a psycho on Christmas Eve, and in the most sadistic story, “Blind Alleys,” Nigel Patrick plays a former Army major who runs a home for the blind with ruthless efficiency until his charges exact bloody revenge. The picture also features “Wish You Were Here,” the umpteenth variation of the old short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” about people who get into trouble by making unwise wishes. Everyone delivers professional work in front of and behind the camera, but it’s all quite rote.

          The follow-up flick, The Vault of Horror, features more of the same, albeit with more efficiency and less impressive marquee value. In the most amusing episode, “The Neat Job,” a memorably prissy Terry-Thomas plays a clean freak who drives his wife to murderous distraction, leading to a gruesomely appropriate fate. Several Vault episodes go the supernatural route, including “Drawn and Quartered,” featuring onetime Dr. Who star Tom Baker as an artist using voodoo to kill people who stole his work, and “This Trick’ll Kill You,” with Curt Jurgens as a magician who steals a gag from the wrong snake-charmer. The problem with these movies, aside from their unrelenting gruesomeness, is the formulaic story structure: villain does creepy stuff, villain gets bloody comeuppance. Some episodes have more zing than others, but the novelty wears off quickly.

Tales from the Crypt: FUNKY

The Vault of Horror: FUNKY

Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)

          Writer James Goldman, the older brother of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid scribe William Goldman, made his name with the play and screenplay The Lion in Winter (released as a film in 1968), which dramatized the life of England’s King Henry II. He then spent much of his career exploring similarly lofty historical subjects, and Goldman’s ability to blend the personal and political is on full display in the downbeat epic Nicholas and Alexandra, which depicts the doomed reign of Russia’s last tsar. Nicholas Romanoff (Michael Jayston) is the product of a 300-year dynasty, an insulated royal so oblivious to his people’s suffering that he blithely extends military conflicts out of personal pride. He’s also preoccupied with his loving marriage to Alexandra (Janet Suzman), a foreign-born aristocrat who engenders only enmity from the Russian populace, so when the couple’s son, Alexis, is diagnosed with hemophilia, they lose virtually all connection with life outside the palace. Meanwhile, ambitious politicians including Vladimir Lenin (Michael Bryant) carefully transform public rage into the seeds of revolution.

          Even at a length well over three hours, Nicholas and Alexandra, based on the book of the same name by Robert K. Massie, tackles an enormous amount of history; some viewers will get lost amidst the huge cast of characters and the shifting backdrops of social change. Also problematic is director Franklin J. Schaffner’s regal style. Taking a step away from his usual robust camerawork, Schaffner shoots Nicholas and Alexandra somewhat like a play, with lengthy dialogue passages unfolding in an unhurried fashion, ornate costumes and sets allowed to overwhelm actors, and stiff blocking. The movie’s dramatic power is further muted by Jayston’s intense but quiet lead performance; although perfectly cast as an ineffectual monarch, Jayston displays a soft-spoken style that’s more soothing than invigorating.

          Nonetheless, Nicholas and Alexandra is such an ambitious and handsome production, offering so many insights into a tumultuous period, that it overcomes its weaknesses. The dialogue is consistently intelligent and probing, the intercutting between subplots is careful and logical, and the physical reality of the production is awesome—whether the setting is a barren Siberian encampment or a glorious St. Petersburg palace. Plus, the acting is uniformly good, even though most of the players are as understated as Jayston. Suzman is especially strong, playing a lioness of a mother, and future Doctor Who star Tom Baker is creepy as Alexandra’s notoriously debauched advisor, “mad monk” Rasputin. Familiar faces including Ian Holm, Laurence Olivier, and John Wood appear in the cast, though everyone takes a backseat to the leading players. While probably not exciting or lurid enough to entice viewers who are not predisposed toward historical subjects, Nicholas and Alexandra is an elegant treatment of an unusual subject: the reign of a man who didn’t understand the obligations that accompanied his crown until it was far too late.

Nicholas and Alexandra: GROOVY

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) & Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)

          Special-effects legend Ray Harryhausen, adored by generations of fantasy-cinema fans for the lovingly crafted creatures he brought to herky-jerky life through stop-motion animation, first dramatized the adventures of Arabic adventurer Sinbad the Sailor with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), a lively adventure featuring a memorable duel between Sinbad and a sword-wielding skeleton. More than a decade later, Harryhausen returned to the character with less beguiling results for a pair of mid-’70s romps featuring juvenile stories, outdated FX, and wooden acting. Even though many ’70s kids feel nostalgic toward these pictures, they haven’t aged particularly well, for a host of reasons—not only was Harryhausen’s take on Sinbad technically antiquated by the mid-’70s, but it was culturally antiquated, as well. Watching American and English actors prancing around with scimitars and turbans now feels borderline cringe-worthy.

          The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the better of the two ’70s Sinbad flicks, stars the attractive but vapid duo of Barbarella stud John Phillip Law, as the title character, and British starlet Caroline Munro, as Sinbad’s slave/love interest. (Her cleavage gives a better performance than either actor does.) The forgettable plot has something to do with an evil sorcerer conspiring to collect magical artifacts, but of course the narrative is merely a line from which Harryhausen strings encounters with fantastical creatures. Some of those creatures are quite silly-looking, such as a gigantic centaur, while others have more cinematic flair, notably a six-armed living statue that makes short work of Sinbad’s crewmen by wielding several swords at once. The movie also benefits from the presence of British thesp Tom Baker, who trades his familiar Doctor Who hat and scarf for a turban and a cape; playing the main villain, he provides an effective degree of gravitas and intensity, even though the script fails to give him much in the way of characterization. Harryhausen and his collaborators deserve credit for delivering a good-looking movie on a budget of less than $1 million, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad zips along at a brisk pace. Still, it’s hard to get past Law’s bland performance and the cliché-ridden script, no matter how mesmerizing Munro looks in her barely-there costume.

          Things got a hell of a lot weirder with the next installment, Sinbad and The Eye of the Tiger. Whereas the casting of American actors as Sinbad was always problematic, the casting of Patrick Wayne—son of the Duke—seems absolutely perverse. Moreover, Wayne gives such a lifeless performance that he makes Law seem dimensional by comparison. And yet that’s not what makes Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger so bizarre. The trippy plot involves an evil sorceress who transforms a prince into a baboon, then transforms herself into a seagull for spying purposes, only to botch her return to normalcy, thus ending up with a giant webbed foot. Creatures populating Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger include a bronze minotaur, a club-wielding troglodyte, a giant saber-tooth tiger, a massive mosquito, and even an enormous walrus that blasts through arctic ice before spearing victims with its tusks. (Yes, this Sinbad movie ends up at the North Pole—go figure.) There’s also a faint wisp of bestiality because the prince/baboon bonds with the telepathic daughter of a mystic who joins Sinbad’s team during their travels. Some of the film’s special effects are genuinely terrible, particularly green-screen tricks used to match studio footage with location shots, and the pacing is way too slow.

          Yet Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger has one attribute that compensates for nearly all of the film’s flaws, and that’s Jane Seymour, who plays the sister of the prince/baboon. (Her character is also Sinbad’s love interest, naturally.) Whether squeezed into a revealing costume or appearing semi-nude during one scene (quite something for a G-rated movie), Seymour is brain-meltingly beautiful here; even the sight of her twinkling eyes over the rim of a veil is enough to quicken pulses. Taryn Power, who plays the aforementioned telepathic daughter, is also quite lovely, and even more of her figure gets revealed than Seymour’s, so remarking on the film’s sex appeal is appropriate—clearly, someone on Harryhausen’s team advocated for injecting skin into the formula.

          In any event, since both of Harryhausen’s ’70s Sinbad pictures were solid hits relative to their costs, it’s interesting that he didn’t make further episodes, instead shifting focus to the more ambitious Clash of the Titans (1981), his final feature. Although much slicker in terms of production values, Clash of the Titans has some of the same problems as the Sinbad films, from hokey dialogue to wooden leading performances, but the grandiose picture embedded itself in the minds of fantasy-loving Gen-X kids. All of Harryhausen’s latter-day films trigger the same reaction when viewed today. No matter their shortcomings, the movies inspire awe that way back when, Harryhausen rendered cinematic spectacle by creating intricate puppets and moving them one frame at a time. In today’s CGI-dominated environment, there’s something comforting about revisiting crudely handcrafted escapism.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad: FUNKY

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger: FUNKY