HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2020: The Creeping Flesh (1973)

It’s the penultimate no-sponsor day, so the Randomizer decided to feed my enjoyment of films starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing together.  Last year I was blessed with the viewing of 1972‘s Horror Express, and this year we travel forward one year for The Creeping Flesh....and, well....sigh....

Dr. Emmanuel Hildren (Cushing) is a Victorian-era scientist who has seen better days--his daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilburn) has had to reduce staff and cut corners to keep his home solvent--but has hope he will win the Richter Prize because of the gigantic skeleton he has found in New Guinea.  Judging from the strata in which it was found, this skeleton pre-dates neanderthal man...and yet apparently had a larger brain capacity than its descendant.  An accident involving water and some New Guinean folk tales leads him to believe that the creature this skeleton derived from is the source of all evil...and he can use the flesh that has grown on a portion of the skeleton to create an anti-evil vaccine.  Unfortunately, he acts rather impulsively when Penelope discovers the truth about her father, which leads to Emmanuel and his rival/half brother James (Lee) to cross swords over the ethics of science and the source of madness.

Now, that’s the bare bones, and it’s one of these films which leads us up to what it believes is One Great Scare.  But between that set-up and that ‘One Great Scare’ (notice the irony parentheses) there’s a lot of wheel spinning and pointlessness.  You have to understand that the early 70‘s was a time where the Golden Age of British Horror panicked to avoid its obsolesence while the...Bronze Age?...of British Horror, a movement embodied by people like Pete Walker, Gordon Hessler and Norman Daniels were rapidly approaching to eat their lunch.  Some of these attempts to revitalize the Gothic, Only Lurid Aesthetic of the Golden Age resulted in some truly remarkable results, like The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter....but sometimes it resulted in some mediocre to purely awful stuff, and this is in the later category.  There is a rather clumsy attempt to inject (no pun intended) some extra sex and violence but it does not phase the main story at all.

It’s fairly obvious early on that the emphasis of this story is the Hildren brothers and Emmanuel making this discovery, abusing it for altruistic reasons, and James trying to exploit that for his ends.  But there’s this subplot about an escaped mental patient--James runs an asylum, you see--who, of course, is a sex maniac and his crossing paths with the now inoculated Penelope, who is just a maniac, that...well, goes nowhere.  It’s as if writer Peter Spenceley realized he was running twenty minutes short and made up this guy, Lenny (Kenneth J. Warren, who reminded me of a thin Buster Bloodvessel from Bad Manners) on the spot...or maybe he created Lenny just so we could see how morally evil Penelope has become (but then, considering she goes on to strangle a maid with her manacles, it’s a moot point).  Either way, it’s a waste of time.  

For that matter, most of the Penelope subplot is pointless.  Penelope’s mother Margarite (who I thought was also played by Heilburn, but apparently was played by Jenny Runacre) went insane--which really meant she liked to sleep with people who weren’t Emmanuel--so Emmanuel had her committed.  He gives her the anti-evil vaccine to Penelope because he fears she’s become ‘insane’ as well, which prompts Penelope to let down her hair, put on her mother’s red dress and act all maniacal.  I kept expecting this development to play into the larger plot, but it doesn’t really, save for a throwaway line of James blackmailing Emmanuel.  It’s just more nothingness in a film that needed to be leaner and meaner, even at ninety-one minutes.

I should also mention that this, like The Oblong Box, is another film from this time frame that teases we’re going to see two of The Titanic Three of the 70‘s acting off each other, yet Lee and Cushing only have two fairly brief scenes together, one at the beginning and one at the climax of act two.  I was very disappointed that these two amazing actors who had amazing chemistry through collaborating personally and professionally, didn’t get more screen time as a duo.

There is a ‘One Great Scare’ that the film teases throughout its first two acts, and it’s...okay, I guess...but it’s underwhelming because director Freddie Francis stretches. it. out.  We are fairly certain what’s going to happen once we hear the first clap of thunder, but what we’ve been promised doesn’t manifest until fifteen minutes later.  Instead we watch Lee escaping with the skeleton in a carriage, then Cushing following on horseback, then the carriage getting into an accident, then Lee running to his asylum for help, and on and on and on.  It is a definite ‘Get To The Fucking Monkey’ moment and I was profoundly annoyed by it.  I was equally annoyed by the twist in the tail that was telegraphed in the first scene.

The Creeping Flesh has a really intriguing idea at its core, but like other products from this time, it falls flat with an inflated balloon of an unnecessary subplot.  I can not recommend it.

Our sponsor for tomorrow--well, today, as this is being posted late--is Rich Chamblerlin from KC Cinephile, who also contributes to Dread Media under the name Rich The Monster Movie Kid!  Rich has chosen the surrealistic Carl Dreyer classic Vampyr!

We are Going Into Overtime this Halloween Horrorfest, as my mother made a request that I’ll be doing on November 1st....and if you wish to make overtime longer, you have four options:

1) You can become a Domicile of Dread Patreon at any level.  Patreons always get a free slot, as well as advance access to podcasts and other goodies!

2) You can buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi.  Suggested donation is $3

3) You can make a donation to Black Lives Matter.  Suggested donation is $10.  Please forward your receipt to me as proof.

4) You can choose to make a donation to the charity chosen by a sponsor on his/her/their day. Like with the third possibility, please forward me proof of donation.