I'm sometimes surprised to experience just how perceptibly little, in some cases, low-budget fantasy/horror cinema has really evolved in the intervening years since the sixties and the here and now. I just watched The Blood Beast Terror (a no-budget sixties fossil from the Hammer wannabe Tigon Studios) and Catacombs (from the producers of the Saw movies, apparently) back to back and I remain utterly amused to report that The Blood Beast Terror tramples all over the newer effort for sheer entertainment value and (thankfully) sustaining a far lower level of crashing boredom-inducement.
Catacombs has a neurotic anorexic US chick, Victoria (Shannon Sossamon), visiting her fleshier free-spirited sister, Carolyn, in Paris. Carolyn is played by pop-strumpet Pink and she's clearly a serious, solid-gold, major-league non-actress in the Madonna mould. Pink and pals a bunch of ignorant Gallic goth pranksters - like to party in the ancient burial chambers situated in catacombs beneath the City of Light. They sweat and gyrate to rave music, smoke Gauloise, swig absinthe and skinny dip in the underground pond, which looks like it resulted from a ruptured sewage pipe. They also spin yarns of a satanic man-beast who lives in and stalks the catacombs in a ceaseless quest for fresh meat.
After a police raid, Victoria gets trapped in the catacombs and, believing her sister to have been done-in by said beastie boy, spends the rest of the film running around in a raging panic, sweating, screaming, scrabbling, sustaining minor injuries (the sort a half-hearted self-harmer might inflict) and rejecting the advances of Henri, a non-English speaking Frenchie who is also trapped underground with her. Henri behaves like all non English-speaking Frenchman by grunting, posturing, pointing at things and exhibiting a rapid multitude of mood-swings in a fantastically short space of time. That's about it, folks, until the earth-shattering shock twist ending which proves to be as unpredictable and inventive as a song by
er
Pink, I guess.
Put simply, Catacombs is crass, dull, monotonous, scare free, noisy and irritating. One of the most pointless films I have ever seen in my life. It sets out to achieve little and undershoots spectacularly by succeeding in achieving nothing at all of any worth, merit or significance.
Which brings me to The Blood Beast Terror. Not the best of its ilk by any stretch of the most lenient imagination. It's a Hammer rip-off from the late sixties and the film which its star, the late, great Peter Cushing, classed as his worst ever. When you consider some of the stuff Mr Cushing churned out, that's quite some put-down. He was in Star Wars.
Mr Cushing is a Scotland Yard detective who seems to spend most of his time in the Victorian countryside trying to solve a series of murders perpetrated on young men. The victims have been mutilated and drained of blood. The perpetrator is the "daughter" of local entomologist and mad scientist Dr Mallinger who is in fact one of his genetic experiments and she is able to, nay, compelled to turn into a giant
wait for it, wait for it
Death's Head Moth! That's right, the girl can turn into a huge moth with a craving for the blood of university students and brawny gardeners. She spares the local coach driver, who goes promptly off his rocker and gibbers: "The eyes! The eyes! Oh the eyes! Leave me alone!" This prompts the kindly visiting police doctor to diagnose and prescribe in one: "He's completely insane. We'll take him to the lunatic asylum in the morning." Yes, the script is laughable, the budget would probably just cover the price of a bag of chips and a bottle of pale ale by today's standards, the acting is woeful even Cushing, a man capable of elevating the shoddiest material way beyond the most plunging of depths, is left floundering here. When one character proudly announces "They call me Billy the Bug-Catcher" you really know that this film has transcended the boundary separating the mere crap from a realm of infinite mind-numbing stupidity the like of which is seldom if ever breached for fear of ending up just like the gibbering coachman and facing a lifetime caged in the booby-hatch. Well, you would if you saw a giant moth with furry breasts.
Yet, in comparison with Catacombs, The Blood Beast Terror is almost a work of art. What it has in common with Catacombs is being equally as scare-free. But, and here is where it scores points, the acting is better, there's more actually going on to keep you interested and engaged, there's the camp comedy value (unintentional, but it at least amuses), and it has an un-cynical attitude and Gothic atmosphere that worthless tripe such as Catacombs replaces with ruined expectations and cheap anticlimactic plasticity. At least The Blood Beast Terror has the gumption to go all the way with it's monster - no matter how ludicrous. Whereas, Catacombs...
Should it be worrying that, to me, a mediocre sixties movie about a woman who can turn into a blood-sucking death's head moth seems more credible, valid and fun than one about a shrieking idiot bumbling around in a mass grave beneath the streets of modern day Paris? Moth probably, bug who knows?
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