The Ash Tree (1975)

Oh, yea!, Oh, yea! Oh, yea!
Local squire desecrates grave!
Curse wreaks havoc with wildlife!
Buxom wench suspected of witchery!

A fine and haunted performance by Edward Petherbridge as the Squire. Lalla Ward makes an all too brief appearance. A good, solid entry in the series with a killer ending that bumps it up a half-star.

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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Satanic Pandemonium (1975)

AKA: The Last Temptation of Sister María.

A little slower paced and not quite as crazy as Alucarda but Satanico Pandemonium has everything you need in a nunsploitation flick: boobs, bush, a cilice, flagellation, Satan, sex, lesbian sex, corruption of the innocent, murder, torture, a fluffy lamb, and, just when I thought we'd run out of time, an orgy.

Wicked theremin, organ and drum score.

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

Phantasmagoric and very, very sad with a brilliantly fractured, otherworldly and childlike performance by Millie Perkins as Molly, the Witch/Venus/Frigga/All-Mother/Valkyrie taking those oh-so-perfect heroes to the afterlife. More than a little subversive.

Kill yr idols!

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974)

A treasure hunt involving codes, in a monastery filled with cowled monks reciting Latin (and we all know how spooky Latin can sound). You know what this is, don't you? The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is a Dan Brown adventure! That is, if Dan Brown were any bloody good, it would be.

Again, a great cast, including the always spooky Anne Blake, but this time led by the wonderful Michael Bryant; whose character, while not as shouty as in The Stone Tape, is still very much assured in his beliefs.

The film captures the gentle humour in James' stories very well. The "slab cake" scene was hilarious. Plus there's a rather nice debunking of that most favourite of Victorian pastimes - a seance!

I do find it funny it's always M.R. James' religious characters who are supposed to be the rationalists :)

A rollicking good story with a few good scares!

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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Red Shift (1978)

It's time for some, possibly incorrect, physics tempered by poetic license. If you worked out the Earth's position in space 1000 years ago this would also give you a measurement of its position in time. So, ignoring relativity, the speed of light and a few other important physical laws, if we could look at this distant planet through the time/space continuum, we would, in effect, be looking back through time and seeing our ancestors red-shifted.

Great performances from the two leads, Stephen Petcher as Tom and Lesley Dunlop as Jan. Also included in the cast are a young Daragh O'Malley (Sharpe) and Ken Hutchison (Ladyhawke). The dialogue is pretty damn good as well - it manages to mix the natural with the poetic brilliantly.

I see so much of myself in Tom. As well as his implied autism (meltdowns, fascination with data, language and specialisation), I met my wife, Zoe, when we were both young and we're still together 30 years later. Hopefully, so are Tom and Jan.

You know when you see a film and it affects you deeply and for that moment in time it overcomes any of its shortcomings and, to you at least, it is a truly great film. Witty, clever, romantic, horrific, beautiful and deeply moving.

The execs from those studios that seem to endlessly churn out terrible romantic dramas could do with watching this little British film and paying close attention to the relationship between Tom and Jan. How much sweeter could you get than these two? None. None more sweet. And none more real.

Life goes on. Time goes on. Everything changes. Everything stays the same. Love endures.

"Crewe? I've never felt romantic in Crewe!"

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A Bay of Blood (1971)

Where the Giallo becomes the Slasher.

Another great film from Bava with twisty-turns, a high body-count, grisly death scenes (Bobby's billhook to the face was a beauty and the double-spear-death would be resurrected nearly 10 years later in Friday the 13th), those octopuses, and what an ending!

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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Lost Hearts (1973)

Eleven-year-old Stephen moves to stay with his elderly cousin, Peregrine Abney, in a remote country house but will he reach his next birthday?

Spooky in that Water Babies/Secret Garden sort of way and containing some startling imagery but badly let down by the clownish performance of Joseph O'Conor as Peregrine Abney, who displays the sort of forced eccentricity you'd get in a bad Dickens adaptation. Lost Hearts would have scared the hell out of me when I was a kid but now? Not so much.

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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A Warning to the Curious (1972)

Atmospheric, steadily-paced, filled with dread and pretty gruesome for a TV adaptation of a James story, with a grisly billhook death at the very start.

Peter Vaughan leads a fine cast and is wonderfully understated as the down-at-the-heels, amateur archaeologist Mr. Paxton (it's always a treat to see Grouty in anything). After the previous year's The Stalls of Barchester, Clive Swift makes another appearance as the scholarly Dr. Black, subtly linking both stories. Make no mistake though, this is the far superior effort. Also worth a mention is Roger Milner as the odd antique shop owner.

A Warning to the Curious has one of the best scores I've ever heard, let alone on a television programme. Full of droned dissonance and rasping breathing that reminded me of the Nick Cave and Warren Ellis collaborations. Fucking brilliant!

Is it as good as Whistle and I'll Come to You? Maybe, maybe not, but it is a top-tier Christmas Ghost Story. Thank you, BFI for saving these wonderful programmes from the clutches of the ever negligent BBC.

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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Around the Village Green (1937)

Fascinating - looking back at a time that is, in turn, looking further back.

I know it's a little stupid to yearn for the days of TB and "knowing your place" but my childhood was a little like this and I miss it. I learned to write on a chalkboard, fished for tadpoles and watched the old men with their pipes sat outside the pub. Where everyone knew their neighbours and steps were scrubbed once a week. On the other hand, I also remember that the houses were black with soot and those old men coughed like bust boilers.

Still...

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Robin Redbreast (1970)

A maid from up the road is affeared by our ways.

Even considering the extremely good cast, Bernard Hepton as the softly spoken, well-read and sinister cloam collector Fisher nearly steals the show.

Unsettling and primitive, a paganistic ouroboros and a corker of a folk/rural horror film. Bleedy ansome bird!

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

Not the psychedelic and existential terror of The Masque of the Red Death, but a quite different beast indeed; the tale of a man driven to the edge of insanity by the possibility that evil can be inherited.

Knowing the slender plot of the original short story, screenwriter extraordinaire, Richard Matheson wisely blends several elements from Poe into a hideously deformed, bastard child of the sort that you would lock away in your deepest dungeon, knowing that one day they would break free!

Price plays the haunted and fragile Medina brilliantly, but if there's one complaint, it's that The Pit and the Pendulum, like all good gothic horrors, needs more Barbara Steele.

Cobwebs, dungeons, gargoyles, secret passages, torture devices, lightning, skeletons, and red candles, lots and lots of red candles. This is high-gothic!

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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The Stalls of Barchester (1971)

A Poe-like tale of murder, blackmail and guilt. A straightforward telling but tense, with a real sense of foreboding and filled to the brim with spooky details.
Good to see a Hyacinth-less Clive Swift, expert on the longbow, Robert Hardy and an extremely snotty Thelma Barlow.

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

Letterboxd Review

The Signalman (1976)

In which isolation, confinement and impotence can light cinders in the darkest corners of the mind, cause vibrations in the soul and signal the most terrible of horrors.

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

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The Innocents (1961)

The whisper of dark secrets can corrupt, even the most innocent. But who is the innocent?

"Big rooms get bigger at night" sums up perfectly the way that the rules of the universe twist and reform, when you're young, into something otherworldly; sometimes innocent and fey, sometimes cruel and dark. A beautifully spooky film - the angles, the framing, the sound-design, the depth and contrast.

Nope-Tober: Random Shit for an Ill-disciplined Mind

Letterbox Review

Z for Zachariah (2015)

Apparently, science is northern, black, aggressive, immoral and destructive whereas religion is southern, white, moral, natural, tolerant and wholesome.

Obvious, more than a little obnoxious and dull.

Letterboxd Review