NEW YORK, May 2 ― Credited with directing three déclassé horror movies, dead from an overdose of barbiturates at 25, the British filmmaker Michael Reeves (1943-1969) is a quintessential cult figure.
Reeves, like Steven Spielberg and the avant-gardist brothers George and Mike Kuchar, made 8mm films in his movie-obsessed youth and, on a trip to America, paid an unannounced visit to his Hollywood idol, the genre director Don Siegel — an act of chutzpah that actually resulted in a job. After working in commercials and as an assistant director, Reeves made and even partly financed his first feature, Revenge of the Blood Beast (1966), newly out on Blu-ray from Raro Video.
Also known as The She Beast, this low-budget Italian production, set in contemporary Transylvania, gave top billing to Barbara Steele, beloved by buffs for her roles in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960) and Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). That Steele was only available to shoot for a few days demanded pragmatism from Reeves. She appears as a haughty British honeymooner who, once possessed by the malignant spirit of a medieval witch, mutates into a hideous, murderous crone played, under thick, pustulant makeup, by a male actor.
This amalgam of the awful and the audacious is a demented gross-out comedy that often evokes the early work of John Waters. It clearly amused Reeves to depict modern Transylvania as a shabby police state ruled by inept policemen. Much of the action takes place in the rundown Hotel Moskva; one gruesome attack winks at communist iconography when the weapon — a sickle — is tossed away to land neatly on a hammer. There is also some effective filmmaking. A flashback in which an accused witch is put to death by hysterical townspeople previews similar lynch-mob sequences in Reeves’ last and strongest film, Witchfinder General (1968).
Before Witchfinder General, however, Reeves directed, and partly wrote, The Sorcerers (1967), a seedy evocation of swinging London complete with Soho clubs and third-rate beat bands; Boris Karloff stars as the inventor of a device for inducing hypnotic trances. Karloff’s gizmo evokes motion-picture technology while the notion of movies as a form of mind control is further elaborated upon when the inventor and his deranged wife (the distinguished actress Catherine Lacey) programme a feckless young mod (Ian Ogilvy, Steele’s husband in Revenge of the Blood Beast) to embark on a career of extreme naughtiness.
As self-reflexive as it is, The Sorcerers (available on DVD from Warner Archive) has been compared to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). Better written than directed, The Sorcerers is at once an evocation of psychedelic fascism and a Freudian comedy with a hapless protagonist subject to subliminal prompts from two parental figures.
Witchfinder General, set in mid-17th-century East Anglia during the English Civil War between the forces of Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, is the movie in which Reeves brought it all together. Reportedly bullied by his young director into a serious performance, Vincent Price is truly frightening as the sanctimonious sadist Matthew Hopkins, a historical figure who used torture and blackmail to “discover” Catholic witches among the peasantry.
Redolent of social breakdown (and retitled Edgar Allan Poe’s The Conqueror Worm), the movie was released in the United States in August 1968, a season of acute political violence. The New York Times reviewer Renata Adler, who saw it at a 42nd Street theatre, seemed as interested in the audience as she was in the tumult on screen: “A man behind me snored and a middle-aged couple next to him quarrelled viciously, but people woke up for the action and particularly cheered when Price was hacked to death.” Some years later, the Village Voice critic William Paul caught Witchfinder General and — in a review that established Reeves’ posthumous American reputation — declared him “the most audacious visual talent to have come out of England since Hitchcock”.
Witchfinder General has been released on disc several times, most recently on Blu-ray as one of six films included in Scream’s “Vincent Price Collection.” Perhaps some altruistic distributor will thrill cultists with a Reeves collection, even including Castle of the Living Dead, a 1964 French-Italian vehicle for Christopher Lee that some fans believe was mainly shot, uncredited, by Reeves, the second-unit director.
Witchfinder General is a classic example of florid gothic cinema, a British exploitation mode that, along with Italian Westerns, graced the grungy movie houses of the 1960s and early 1970s. The Lair of the White Worm (1988), new on Blu-ray from Vestron, might be considered a one-off revival of the mode, directed by Britain’s master of high-minded hysteria, Ken Russell.
The suitably outlandish plot, loosely adapted from a novel by Bram Stoker, concerns an outbreak of pagan snake-worship in present-day Derbyshire. The young Hugh Grant is surprisingly intense as a drawling young lord, but the movie is stolen by a neighbouring aristocrat, played by Amanda Donohoe (known then mainly as an associate of the New Wave singer Adam Ant). Fabulously chic and seductively sinister, Donohoe is actually a vampire priestess, prone to coldblooded hissy fits, sprouting fangs at will and spraying a venom that transports victims into a mad delirium of screaming nuns, rampaging serpents and bloody crucifixions.
One of Russell’s most enjoyable films, White Worm seems a uniquely British amalgam of high camp, lurid psychedelia and rowdy Celtic folk-punk. As regional as Witchfinder General, it feasts on the Midlands countryside. Setting the movie in England rather than Transylvania, Russell told Film Comment magazine, “made it potentially more alarming — and, of course, absurdly comical.”
New releases
The Boy Friend: First released in 1971 and now out on Blu-ray, Ken Russell’s knowingly retro movie version of Sandy Wilson’s already retro stage musical is overdue for re-evaluation, post La La Land. Twiggy stars in the Ruby Keeler role; Glenda Jackson has a memorable, uncredited walk-on as the diva she supplants. (Warner Archive)
Demon Seed: Best known for his collaboration with Nicolas Roeg on the Mick Jagger film Performance, as well as an appearance in Kenneth Anger’s occult short Lucifer Rising, Donald Cammell directed his first solo film in 1977 — a kinky technophobic thriller, now reissued on Blu-ray, in which Julie Christie is impregnated by a rogue computer. (Warner Archive)
The Love Witch: Anna Biller’s sly, stylish and sardonic tale of female fantasy and Wiccan romance run amok is many things, including an homage to the gaudy, sexually charged horror films of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “Biller’s movie, like its heroine, presents a fascinating, perfectly composed, brightly coloured surface,” A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times in November. On Blu-ray, DVD and Amazon Video. (Oscilloscope)
Multiple Maniacs: John Waters’ second feature, made in 1970, is in some ways his most transgressive — a satire of a Manson Family-like cult, starring Divine, designed to appal hippies and, he has said, “shock the world.” In addition to interviews with cast and crew members, extras include audio commentary by Waters himself. On Blu-ray and DVD. (Criterion)
The Vampire Bat: Newly restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and now on Blu-ray, this 1933 Dracula knockoff was a surprisingly atmospheric film from a small studio, Majestic. Renting stars from the majors, it features Lionel Atwill, Melvyn Douglas and Fay Wray, as well as one strikingly economical use of colour. (The Film Detective) — The New York Times
