PHOBIA (Canada - 1980) Directed by John Huston. Written by Lew Lehman, Jimmy Sangster and Peter Bellwood. Cast: Paul Michael Glaser, Susan Hogan, John Colicos, David Bolt, Patricia Collins, David Eisner, Lisa Langlois, Robert O'Ree, Alexandra Stewart, Neil Vipond, Marian Waldman, Kenneth Welsh, Gwen Thomas. (R, 91 mins)
Barely released to theaters in the fall of 1980, the Canadian tax-shelter thriller PHOBIA is a front-runner for the most bizarre outlier of the legendary John Huston's filmmaking career. The director of THE MALTESE FALCON, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE AFRICAN QUEEN, and THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING never turned down a lucrative gig, but like his contemporary Orson Welles, he usually reserved the more shameless cash grabs for his onscreen appearances in other directors' movies. Huston enjoyed a major resurgence as an in-demand character actor after his memorable performance as insidiously evil water magnate Noah Cross in Roman Polanski's 1974 classic CHINATOWN, but he wasn't very picky with his subsequent acting gigs. Within just a few years, he was starring in things like the Italian JAWS ripoff TENTACLES (1977), Mexican trash auteur Rene Cardona Jr's THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE (1978), Umberto Lenzi's cheap WWII would-be epic THE GREATEST BATTLE (1978), the insane THE VISITOR (1979), and the dismal Joe Lewis martial arts actioner JAGUAR LIVES (1979). Following his acclaimed but little-seen 1979 directing effort WISE BLOOD, Huston, then 74, somehow found himself in Toronto helming PHOBIA, which spent some time in cable rotation in the early '80s but has since fallen into almost total obscurity. It's just been resurrected on Blu-ray in a 4K restoration (!) by Kino Lorber, because physical media is dead.
In his only big-screen lead, STARSKY AND HUTCH's Paul Michael Glaser stars as Dr. Peter Ross, a Los Angeles shrink who's set up shop in Toronto, where he's conducting a potentially revolutionary experimental treatment of irrational fears, using volunteer prison convicts as his subjects. The treatment doesn't appear to be anything beyond planting the patients in front of a large screen where they're forced to watch what looks like a multimedia presentation of live-action images of whatever it that frightens them the most, whether it's snakes, crowds, fear of heights and falling, etc. As one expects to happen in thrillers of this sort, Ross' patients start getting offed one by one, mostly in ways related to their phobias, except for the initial victim (Alexandra Stewart), who's killed in a bomb blast that was meant for Ross. Red herrings abound--there's colleague and former lover Dr. Alice Toland (Patricia Collins), who doesn't seem too pleased that he's taken up with new girlfriend Jenny (Susan Hogan, memorable as the schoolteacher in THE BROOD), or it could be any of the remaining subjects in the program, including Bubba (Robert O'Ree), who has a fear of snakes; Henry (David Bolt), with a fear of falling, unstable nutcase Johnny (David Eisner), and Laura (Lisa Langlois), who has a fear of drowning. Could it even be irate, bellicose cop Barnes (John Colicos), who has little but scornful derision for both Ross and his "experimentees," as he dismissively calls them, or his condescending sidekick/partner Wheeler (Kenneth Welsh)? Who knows? Did John Huston even care?
The pieces are all in place for at least a workmanlike thriller: it's co-scripted by Hammer horror vet Jimmy Sangster, and reworked from an earlier draft by genre greats Ronald Shusett (ALIEN, TOTAL RECALL) and Gary Sherman (RAW MEAT, VICE SQUAD), both of whom would collaborate on Sherman's 1981 cult classic DEAD & BURIED. But Huston doesn't even hide his complete lack of engagement with the material. Granted, they can't all be winners in a career as long as his, but PHOBIA feels like a run-of-the-mill assignment that could've just as easily been made by Harvey Hart (SHOOT), Paul Lynch (PROM NIGHT), George Kaczender (AGENCY), George Mendeluk (STONE COLD DEAD), or any other mercenary director-for-hire who was consistently busy in the Canadian film industry at that time. There's absolutely nothing here to indicate that the guy who made THE MALTESE FALCON is the one calling the shots. The story plods along with no sense of urgency and little in the way of thrills, chills, or suspense, and the "shocking" reveal at the end lands with more or less a shrug. There's only some brief Langlois nudity and a couple of F-bombs to differentiate PHOBIA from any random made-for-TV movie of the period, and even a mid-film car chase comes off as perfunctory and spectacularly unexciting. The end result is certainly watchable--Glaser is fine in the lead, Colicos is terrific as the asshole detective, and there's a vaguely Pino Donaggio-esque score by Andre Gagnon that makes you wonder what Brian De Palma could've done with the same material--and it's obviously of interest to Huston completists, but the only thing they'll take away from PHOBIA is the nagging question of why he even bothered making it. Huston stayed busy in his final years with 1981's VICTORY, the 1982 musical ANNIE, and he finished big with three acclaimed films in a row with 1984's UNDER THE VOLCANO, 1985's PRIZZI'S HONOR, and his final work, 1987's posthumously-released THE DEAD, a longtime pet project based on James Joyce's novel, but PHOBIA remains his biggest head-scratcher of a directing credit. It's also one that apparently wasn't near and dear to his heart, as according to legend, Huston once walked out of an interview when he was asked about it.
Huston and Glaser on the set of PHOBIA
After PHOBIA tanked at the box office, Glaser continued appearing in TV movies for a few years until he took a two-decade sabbatical from acting to focus on directing. He'd already logged time behind the camera on a few episodes of STARSKY AND HUTCH and his work directing several episodes of MIAMI VICE led to his 1986 Michael Mann-produced feature directing debut BAND OF THE HAND. He followed that with Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 satirical sci-fi Stephen King adaptation THE RUNNING MAN, but as a director, Glaser is best known for the 1992 figure-skating romance THE CUTTING EDGE, which was a minor hit in theaters but found an even bigger audience on video and cable and remains a sentimental favorite for its fans today. In recent years, the now-76-year-old Glaser has acted and directed on TV occasionally and appeared at fan conventions with David Soul, the Hutch to his Starsky (both had cameos in the 2004 Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson big screen STARSKY AND HUTCH). For a long time post-PHOBIA, Glaser was known less for his Hollywood career and more for the unimaginable tragedy that befell his family when his wife Elizabeth contracted HIV from a blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth to their daughter Ariel. She was unaware of it for several years, and didn't find out until 1985 that she had passed the virus on to both Ariel (via breastfeeding) and the couple's second child Jake, who was born in 1984. Seven-year-old Ariel succumbed to AIDS in 1988 and Elizabeth, who delivered a memorable speech on the AIDS epidemic at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, died in 1994. Glaser never contracted the virus, while his son Jake is now 35 and has lived with HIV since he was born. Father and son have remained active in promoting HIV and AIDS awareness through the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation.
Directed by Jimmy Sangster. Written by Jimmy Sangster and Michael Syson. Cast: Judy Geeson, Joan Collins, Ralph Bates, Peter Cushing, James Cossins, Gillian Lind, Brian Grellis, John Bown. (PG, 94 mins) A minor late-period Hammer thriller that's rarely referenced today, 1972's middling FEAR IN THE NIGHT gets by almost entirely on atmosphere alone, set in an eerily empty boarding school that allows director/co-writer Jimmy Sangster to maximize the sense of isolation felt by the film's terrorized heroine. But the story is so rote, predictable, and ultimately silly that the payoff isn't really worth the buildup. Recovering from what's been unfairly deemed a nervous breakdown (someone slipped her a mickey in a restaurant) followed closely by an attack by a one-armed man that no one around her believes really happened, Peggy (Judy Geeson) leaves her job as a caregiver for elderly Mrs. Beamish (Gillian Lind) when she marries teacher Robert (Ralph Bates) after a whirlwind romance. Robert moves them to an isolated rural area outside of London where he's accepted a position at a boarding school run by headmaster Carmichael (Peter Cushing). But right away, something is off and naive Peggy never does quite pick up on it: there doesn't seem to be any other teachers aside from Robert, and she keeps hearing voices in classrooms but there's no sign of any students. Carmichael--who has a prosthetic left arm--acts weird around her, she gets a strange vibe from his much-younger wife Molly (Joan Collins), and she's eventually attacked again by a one-armed man, but an incredulous, dismissive Robert tells her to "sleep on it" before talking her out of calling the police.
Hammer fans will recognize recycled elements from other Sangster-scripted women-in-peril thrillers like SCREAM OF FEAR (1961), PARANOIAC (1963), NIGHTMARE (1964), and CRESCENDO (1970), with some dashes of classics like GASLIGHT and DIABOLIQUE for good measure. But some of the big third-act reveals are so obvious that you'll figure out that someone is trying to drive Peggy insane and frame her for a murder long before Peggy does, especially with Robert's behavior and the presence of Collins, cast radically against type as a scheming, manipulative bitch. Robert's confession to Peggy about why he's actually at the school and what he's actually doing for Carmichael is utter nonsense, and the ultimate trick pulled off by Carmichael just comes off as one contrivance too many. Despite its myriad flaws, FEAR IN THE NIGHT is a reasonably enjoyable Hammer suspense thriller if approached with shrugged shoulders and an appropriately diminished level of expectation. Geeson (best known for co-starring with Sidney Poitier in 1967's TO SIR, WITH LOVE and more recently emerging from semi-retirement to appear in Rob Zombie's THE LORDS OF SALEM and 31) turns in an appealing performance even though you'll wish she wasn't so meek, passive, and slow on the uptake. It's obvious from the moment he's introduced sinisterly grimacing while adjusting his prosthetic arm like Dr. Strangelove that Cushing's Carmichael can't possibly be the villain, and with what's essentially a four-character story, it doesn't take much sleuthing on the part of the viewer to figure out what's going on and who's responsible.
Having written trailblazing Hammer titles like 1957's THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and 1958's HORROR OF DRACULA among many others, Sangster saw his short-lived and largely negatively-received directing career end with FEAR IN THE NIGHT, which followed 1970's THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN and 1971's LUST FOR A VAMPIRE. All three of Sangster's films starred Ralph Bates, FEAR being the last of several unsuccessful attempts at grooming the young actor to be Hammer horror's heir apparent, selected to help nab the youth market as Cushing was pushing 60 and Christopher Lee was nearing 50. Hammer and Bates parted ways by the time FEAR IN THE NIGHT was barely released in the US in 1974, and it marked the only film to team Bates with Cushing, the legend he was supposed to succeed. The film is old-fashioned enough and completely lacking in the lurid sex and skin in which Hammer was beginning to indulge that, aside from the hairstyles and the fashions and one shouted "Bastard!," it could've been made a decade earlier.
Ralph Bates and Jimmy Sangster
on the set of FEAR IN THE NIGHT
For all its stale twists and predictability issues, FEAR IN THE NIGHT (just out on Blu-ray from Scream Factory because physical media is dead), is probably Sangster's most accomplished directorial effort from a technical standpoint. The money shot that concludes the opening credits sequence is legitimately creepy, there's some unusual cutting techniques that are well-handled, and the use of all the open space in the hallways and abandoned rooms at the school indicates that he may have caught some of the early hits of the Italian giallo craze. But without the shocking violence and the innovative style of a Dario Argento, FEAR IN THE NIGHT can't really compete in that field, and the story is so old-hat that most of the "surprise" twists are really just hoary cliches. Sangster (1927-2011) would soon leave Hammer behind, relocating to Hollywood by late 1972, where he became a busy television writer, only periodically dabbling in big-screen horror (he wrote 1978's THE LEGACY and 1980's PHOBIA) while focusing on TV shows like BANACEK, IRONSIDE, CANNON, MCCLOUD, MOVIN' ON, THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, WONDER WOMAN, and B.J. AND THE BEAR.
THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (UK - 1970; US release 1971) Directed by Jimmy Sangster. Written by Jeremy Burnham and Jimmy Sangster. Cast: Ralph Bates, Kate O'Mara, Veronica Carlson, Dennis Price, Jon Finch, Dave Prowse, Joan Rice, Bernard Archard, Stephen Turner, Graham James, Neil Wilson, James Hayter, James Cossins, Glenys O'Brien, George Belbin. (R, 95 mins) One of the least-loved films in the Hammer horror cycle, 1970's THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN was intended as a reboot of their FRANKENSTEIN series as part of a calculated effort to skew toward a younger and more hip audience. By this time at the dawn of the '70s, audience interest was waning and Hammer decided to shake things up, with their general feeling being that 48-year-old Christopher Lee and 57-year-old Peter Cushing--the faces of "Hammer horror"--were starting to get on in years, relatively speaking. Cushing had just co-starred in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, the first of the so-called "Karnstein trilogy," a film that represented a sort-of turning point for Hammer in that it went all-in on excessive gore and gratuitous nudity from Ingrid Pitt and the female cast members. But when it came time for the follow-up to 1969's FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED, Hammer opted to head in a different direction, ditching Cushing to make a desperate grab for the youth market and placing most of their hopes on the shoulders of one Ralph Bates. A busy British TV actor (most notably appearing as Caligula in the 1968 six-episode ITV series THE CAESARS), Bates was already being groomed as Hammer horror's heir apparent when he was cast in 1970's TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, which, in its earliest stages, wasn't even supposed to feature Christopher Lee's Dracula, instead focusing on Bates as Lord Courtley, a Satanist disciple of the vampire. Lee was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of the DRACULA series and made no secret of his feelings to anyone who would listen. Nevertheless, it was at some point decided that he had to be in it, so the script was hastily rewritten to have Courtley supernaturally transform into Dracula, thus reducing Bates' role in the film to make way for Lee. The 30-year-old Bates took one for the team, and was rewarded by being made the new Victor Frankenstein in the same year's THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, replacing Cushing as part of Hammer's new youth-driven direction. This didn't seem to bother Cushing in the slightest, as he paid a visit to the set and even posed for some publicity shots with Bates. Perhaps he was as tired of playing Dr. Frankenstein as Lee was of playing Dracula, but just wasn't such a surly pain in the ass about it.
Ralph Bates (1940-1991)
THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN was the directing debut of veteran Hammer screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, a key figure who was instrumental in establishing the studio as the UK's premier House of Horror, having scripted their first three Cushing/Lee teamings: 1957's THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, 1958's HORROR OF DRACULA, and 1959's THE MUMMY, among many others. Sangster would ultimately prove to be a better writer than a director, quickly bailing on his short-lived directing career after just three films--all of which starred Ralph Bates--to return to his better-suited screenwriting occupation. A loose remake of THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN again tells the Frankenstein origin story, beginning with Bates' sociopathic Victor in school, where he's introduced showing up a harumphing professor and and manipulating him into believing he's having a heart attack. When his rich father Baron Frankenstein (George Belbin) refuses to pay for Victor to attend medical school, Victor rigs his father's shotgun to blow up in his face the next time he goes hunting. With the Baron out of the way, Victor inherits Castle Frankenstein, leaving it in the care of 16-year-old servant and the Baron's sexual plaything Alys (Kate O'Mara) while he goes off to university in Vienna. Six years later, Victor and his friend Wilhelm (Graham James) return to the castle, where Victor grows obsessed with reanimating the dead and assembling a man out of body parts collected by a team of husband-and-wife grave robbers (Dennis Price and Joan Rice). He picks up where his father left off with Alys ("She gave satisfaction to my father and she can do the same for me," Victor sneers to Wilhelm, adding "I hope she can cook"), and is so focused on his work that he barely picks up on the vibes he's getting from former classmate Elizabeth (Veronica Carlson), whose professor father (Bernard Archard) ends up being the source of the brain used in the Monster. Unfortunately, that brain is damaged when the grave robber drops the jar it's in and a glass shard gets stuck in it, turning the Monster (bodybuilder and future Darth Vader David Prowse) into a rampaging lunatic and convenient hit man when Victor needs his enemies eliminated.
Peter Cushing visiting Ralph Bates on the set.
As much if not more so than Cushing's interpretation of the character, Bates' Victor Frankenstein is an outrageously vainglorious prick who has absolutely no use for anyone. Starting with orchestrating his father's "accidental" death, Victor will let nothing stand in his way. He electrocutes Wilhelm when he expresses his outrage over his experiments, he kills the grave robber when he decides he knows too much, he has the Monster kill the grave robber's wife when she starts asking questions about her husband, and he tries to pin it all on his hapless, slow-witted cook Stefan (Stephen Turner) when former classmate and current chief of police Henry (Jon Finch, soon to star in Roman Polanski's MACBETH and Alfred Hitchcock's FRENZY) comes around to investigate. Bates' smug, arrogant Victor is like a Donald Trumpenstein, throwing everyone under the bus at the first sign of minor inconvenience or demonstrating even the slightest threat of disloyalty, treating Alys like shit, and stopping just short of shouting "FAKE NEWS!" when too many people have seen the Monster roaming around the woods and Henry demands to search the castle. All the pieces are in place for THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN to work, but it just never quite pulls itself together. Bates is fine in the role and much of the humor is intentional (Victor's killing of a pair of highwaymen is very funny), but the film just plods along, taking forever to get going (it's nearly 70 minutes in before the Monster even appears), and as a director, Sangster lacks the style and verve that guys like Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis, Roy Ward Baker, and even Peter Sasdy, for that matter, would always bring to the table. The film looks stagy and cheap, and Prowse's square head apparatus doesn't hold up under the scrutiny of HD on Scream Factory's new Blu-ray (because physical media is dead). Prowse, who would soon have a small but memorable role as the hulking nurse of Patrick Magee's wheelchair-bound Mr. Alexander in Stanley Kubrick's A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, is imposing enough, but he looks ridiculous, spending most his limited screen time shirtless, wearing only bandages from the waist down, which many have observed makes him look like he's wearing a diaper.
In short, nobody liked THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, neither in the UK nor in the US, where it appeared in the summer of 1971 on a drive-in double bill with the harder-edged SCARS OF DRACULA, easily the most violent of the Christopher Lee DRACULA outings. Hammer continued in their attempts to make Bates happen, first by reuniting him with Sangster on the second film in the Karnstein trilogy, 1971's LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, then by casting him as Dr. Jekyll opposite Martine Beswick in the same year's gender-bending DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE, and finally teaming him with Joan Collins, Judy Geeson, and--wait for it--Peter Cushing in Sangster's 1972 thriller FEAR IN THE NIGHT. By this time, it became apparent to Hammer that Ralph Bates wasn't the answer to the problems (nor, for that matter, was having Sangster behind the camera). Other than occasional non-Hammer supporting roles (he appeared with Lana Turner and Trevor Howard in 1974's PERSECUTION, and with Collins and Donald Pleasence in the 1976 demonic baby outing THE DEVIL WITHIN HER), he spent the rest of his career as a regular fixture on British TV, including the lead on BBC's DEAR JOHN, which ran for two seasons starting in 1986 and would be remade a couple of years later into the hit NBC sitcom with Judd Hirsch. Bates' last screen appearance came in a small role in 1990's little-seen period adventure KING OF THE WIND. He was just 51 when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1991.
What Hammer didn't realize at the time in their grooming of Bates was that the horror landscape was changing. In 1968, ROSEMARY'S BABY was a sign of things to come, but it didn't become apparent until THE EXORCIST in 1973 that the concern wasn't Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (or Ralph Bates)--it was simply a genre trend that saw a declining interest in "classic" horror. This became clear with 1972's DRACULA A.D. 1972, and 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, which found Hammer reaching a compromise in their shameless youth pandering by dropping their "aging" stars and their respective Dracula and Van Helsing characters into mod, swinging 1972 London in all its shagadelic glory. It wasn't any kind of happening and fans were decidedly not freaked out, and as a result, ambitious, inventive, and very entertaining period adventure/horror hybrids like CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER and THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES were forced to languish on the shelf for extended amounts of time because Hammer had grown skittish about their product. 1974 saw the release of FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (like CAPTAIN KRONOS, completed in 1972 and unreleased for two years), which brought back Prowse as a much-different and more ape-like monster than he played in THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN. Even with veteran Hammer director Terence Fisher returning (in what ended up being his final film before retiring from the business), along with Peter Cushing stepping back into his signature role, its focus was less on classic horror and more on graphic gore. And still, it was a critical and commercial flop and marked the end of the road for Hammer's FRANKENSTEIN series.
