Whistle and I'll Come to You is probably the best known of the BBC's MR James dramatisations, adapted by Jonathon Miller in 1968. It's classic stuff, and set the tone for the adaptations that followed.
The story follows the usual MR James formula - man meddles in old things he doesn't fully understand, gets haunted. In this case a professor on holiday finds an ancient whistle on a beach, and blowing it is a really bad idea.
Black and white, noirish, deathly quiet and subtle, people who'd seen Whistle and I'll Come to You before the DVD re-release a couple of years ago talked about it in hushed tones, and it doesn't fail expectations. This is the best starting point if you want to watch the BBC's MR James adaptations - the later ones borrow from it quite heavily, which will lessen its impact if you watch them first.
This 1972 adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark (who also directed the next two adaptations) is in my mind the best of the lot, though this may be because it was the first one I saw. It is very similar - maybe too similar - to Whistle and I'll Come to You, set on the Norfolk coast again and following an amateur archaelogist who finds a cursed crown buried in the sand dunes and gets haunted.
Filmed in colour, and employing some excellent camerawork and editing A Warning to the Curious picks up where Whistle and I'll Come to You left off, improving on it but not significantly changing the effective techniques it employed.
Similar plot - boy goes to old house to stay, finds ancient lute, plays it, sees distant figures of dancing gypsy children. Lost Hearts though moves on from the subtle terror of the sixties into the gory seventies - the gypsy children have quite literally had their hearts torn out, revealed in wonderful technicolour when the young hero sees them up close.
Lost Hearts is a bit more low-brow than the previous adaptations, relying on shocks and jumps rather than creeping terror. I prefer the latter, but this is still a great film.
Woah, this is more like it. A dreamy, confusing plot where the eighteenth century narrator keeps having visions of seventeenth century witch hunts (especially confusing if you don't know your history), gives way at the end to a fantastic scene where crying babies heads with spiders legs crawl out of a tree and eat him alive. This film is great for that reason.
The only recent adaptation (this being its premier) in the series, A View From A Hill is heavily atmospheric (think winter countryside, rookeries, deafening silences) and really bloody scary. My only complaint is the use of faddy camerawork, shuddery zooms and the like (though thankfully no bullet-time), which are already looking dated and embarrassing.
Mr James is up to his old tricks, the central character (an archaeologist again) finding a pair of haunted binoculors that let him look into the past, specifically at a ruined monastry that was destroyed in the Dissolution, allowing him to see it whole as it was hundreds of years ago.
The conceit works really well. There is a great scene where the central character wanders around the ruins looking through his binoculars, through which he can see the ornate (and now destroyed) interior of the monastry. I was reminded of some of the more scientific, dimension-jumping horror of MR James's contemporary HP Lovecraft. Of course it all ends in tears.
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That's it for the MR James season. Great stuff, but not really proper horror. Never fear, my sister bought me recent DVD release Box of the Banned for my birthday, although I've only managed to watch three of the films so far.
The included documentary, Ban The Sadist Videos, is an in-depth and very well made look at the UK video nasty scare of the early 1980s (Wikipedia probably gives the best explanation for those of you overseas), and has some genuine, surprising insights.
The most interesting of these is that the UK had the highest rates of video ownership in the world at the time. This was largely because of the amount of people being laid off during the recession. Those with small pay offs would buy a then incredibly expensive VCR, whilst those with large pay offs often set up video libraries to supply communities with both high rates of unemployment and VCR ownership. There was genuine concern at the time that within these disintegrating communities unsupervised children were watching a diet of 18-rated films.
This got blown all out of proportion, and after a dodgy government sponsered survey (ask a 9 year-old kid how he would rate SS Experiment Camp, and he's going to say "It was ace!" rather than "I haven't seen it because I'm a mummy's boy", as was proved when a counter-survey full of fictional horror film titles returned the same results), vast swathes of horror titles were banned up until the late 1990s. Shame, though it has to be said it was the temptation of forbidden fruit is what gave me my love of horror films in the first place. Anyway, on with the reviews.
What can I say? Total classic. I'd only seen it twice before - once when I was a teenager and it was still banned, so on a really bad quality video, then again when it was shown on TV last year (how times change). This time I watched it properly - with half a bottle of whisky and several spliffs.
Gloriously daft, fast moving, inventive and full of shocks, Evil Dead is maybe the perfect film to watch stoned. I guffawed all the way through.
Great extra on my version as well, an episode of Jonathon Ross's late eighties TV series The Incredibly Strange Film Show concentrating on how the film was made, which is quite a story in itself. I think this is the only DVD extra I've actually watched ever.
I was probably a bit too stoned by the time I put this on, because I can't for the life of me remember what it was about. There was a child, there were people shagging, the child killed the people shagging, a man kept coming round screaming in a mental hospital, stuff like that. From what I remember this guy has had his brain experimented on and it has fucked.
Nightmare in a Damaged Brain seemed like it was made by an arthouse director forced to make an exploitation film, with all the good bits and bad bits that entailed. There were some seriously tense and creepy scenes, but it was also a bit rambling and way too long.
I've seen this before and it's crap. Basically loads of rubbish New York punk (yawn) with the ocassional tramp getting a hole drilled in his head (yay!), though those bits are few and far between. Best watched as an example of why the UK video nasty laws were completely stupid.
Haven't seen the rest of the Box of the Banned yet, but Orang Utan provided me with some short verbal reviews:
Notorious revenge flick where woman gets gang raped then goes and chops the rapist's cocks off. Orang Utan says: OK film, not great though. Definitely not a feminist masterpiece but not totally exploitative either.
Orang Utan says: best underwater zombie shark scene he's ever seen, and that's saying something.
That leaves Last House on the Left which I've been saving because it's meant to be dead good. I shall report back, faithful reader.
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