The Oblong Box (1969)

 "We have knowledge of things you know nothing of..."

This film is an odd yet enjoyable beast. It's an adaptation of an Edgar Poe Story, sort of, as it has pretty much no scenes or characters in common with it other than the coffin itself. This is no sea voyage along the Eastern Seaboard of the USA, but a British horror film of the late '60s with literally all the tropes that implies.

This is no bad thing.

It's 1865, and looks good, as such historical films often do, Vincent Price stars, inevitably, given the double whammy of British cinema of this time worshipping him and given him work and, of course, his association with Poe, courtesy of the great Roger Corman, having ceased but five years before.

The script is original, not Poe in the slightest, par for the course for a British horror film of the period, but it works. Both Price and Christopher Lee are amazing.

Gordon Kessler's direction is Jekyll and Hyde. His domestic scenes are ho-hum, but his scenes of horror and excitement are creative and inspired. The film centres on African voodoo, the opening scene feels- and is- quite unthinkingly racist- yet the sensitive treatment of Harry Baird's noble african character goes some way to mitigate, and the script goes some way to show colonialism as the original sin behind all of this.

This is not, perhaps, a great film. But, for those of us who love this type of horror, it is exquisite.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

“Every voyage has its own flavour.”

It took fifteen years for a sort of sequel to be made to The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. It was well worth the wait.

Oddly enough, I’ve seen this film before, about fifteen years ago. I didn’t like it much- and yes, perhaps Gordon Hessler’s direction isn’t the most exciting. But we have a splendid stop motion Kali as the action centrepiece from the great Ray Harryhausen. We have Caroline Munro. We have a truly memorable and magnificent villain in Shura, courtesy of the truly extraordinary Tom Baker, before he was famous.

But John Philip Law is superb as a witty, likeable, worldly wise Sinbad who is not immune to greed or cynicism but is fundamentally kind, freeing the beautiful Margiana when he has the chance to enslave her. There’s a heartwarming love story between them, as well as a nice ending where the heroic yet also roguish Sinbad turns down a crown because he loves freedom, and a king can never be free.

So, while this film is of course centred around Harryhausen's magnificent creations- Kali, the cyclops centaur, and the hippogriff that turns up briefly at the end, and while the plot is more than a little similar to the previous film (which was, to be fair, some time ago), the excellent script from Brian Clements gices us wit, comedy and character alongside the adventure. A superb film.

Scream and Scream Again! (1970)

“That bloody chicken wasn’t killed- it died of old age!”

 This is an odd film, not at all what the marketing, title and poster lead us to expect, but unexpectedly a rather good one.

The film's selling point is, of course, that it can boast the holy horror trinity of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the same horror film. But instead we get an utterly bonkers science fiction conspiracy thriller in which Cushing has but a brief cameo and the other two are not exactly in starring roles.

This is a gritty, realistic police procedural with slickly gritty direction, naturalistic acting and a basis in the more down-to-Earth end of science fiction. The plot may be utterly mad but pays off well, with the two apparently unrelated subplots- people being kidnapped and having their limbs surgically removed, while a sinister man with apparent superpowers commits a series of murders to climb up the greasy pole in a dodgy, unnamed, military dictatorship.

This all works rather well, as does the "A" plot of the pursuit of a serial killer with vampire-like attributes who kills girls whom he meets in nightclubs, which takes up an awful lot of the film. The film is, I suppose, rather disjointed, but it doesn't feel like it and is all drawn together in an effective climax. The overall effect is of a film which defies expectations in hat type of film it turns out to be, but in fact turns out to be surprisingly good.