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Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe. My favourite anthology horror film from Amicus has a great deal to do with him--1967's Torture Garden. Directed by Freddie Francis with a screenplay by Robert Bloch, based on four of Bloch's short stories, each segment has keen fantasy logic with some lovely cinematography and wonderfully weird production design.



I love this room for the killer piano in the third story. It's like a Man Ray painting. And yes, I said killer piano, and it is a bit silly, but it's also kind of a fun exploration of the subtext in the muse versus the lover type of story. The piano is named after the muse Euterpe and she seems to be murderously jealous of her player's (John Standing) lover, Dorothy (Barbara Ewing).



I like the build up with him seeming increasingly distracted and Dorothy finding it increasingly unreasonable that he has such an emotional investment in the thing. The pianist's manager (Ursula Denham) thinks it's Dorothy who's being unreasonable though, if you ask me, just wanting her lover to have dinner with her now and then is pretty low maintenance. I doubt Dorothy thought she'd have her fears confirmed by being chased around the room by a piano with a lid chomping like great mouth.



The framing story has the four protagonists at a side show run by an effectively satanic Burgess Meredith--he's so sinister in this movie I forgot all about his Penguin. He invites each person to stare into the shears of a mechanical Atropos figure (very obviously an actress sitting very still) to see into a future where their own wrongdoing leads to their downfall. Unlike in Dr. Terror's House of Horror, a big part of Meredith's spiel is that the individual can use the foreknowledge to prevent tragedy. It's a warning to each person to mend their ways.



And yes, it doesn't quite make sense because nothing Dorothy did seems all that bad. The other female protagonist, Dorothy's American cousin Carla (Beverly Adams), is at least a little mischievous and ruthless. She pretends to accidentally burn a roommate's dress so she can steal her date with a movie star (David Bauer).



Carla also makes it clear she's willing sleep with anyone to get ahead in show business and easily moves from Charles onto another movie star (Robert Hutton) when it seems the latter might be easier to manipulate. The story has an amusing Sci-Fi twist that nonetheless is a sharp, disquieting revelation on the illusion of the Hollywood dream.



All of the stories have something to do with art or entertainment industry except first story about a young man (Michael Bryant) who allows his rich uncle (Maurice Denham) to die in the hopes of inheriting his wealth. Matters are complicated when said wealth turns out to be buried chests of antique coins guarded by a mind controlling murder cat.



I suppose it fits into the other stories in that achieving the aims of avarice can introduce weird, unexpected problems. The story bears some resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat, which ties it to the final story of the film.



Jack Palance, with a very unconvincing English accent, plays an obsessive collector of Poe artefacts named Ronald Wyatt. Peter Cushing plays another obsessive, and far more successful, Poe collector named Lancelot Canning. The two meet at an exhibition of Canning's collection where Ronald covets a rare edition of one of Poe's works. Canning won't part with it for any price but invites his fellow collector to his home in the U.S. so he can rub his face in the rest of his collection.



As in Dr. Terror, the transition from England to the U.S. is a little abrupt. With no exterior shots, we basically go from one interior that could be anywhere to another interior that could be anywhere, but with this décor I'll forgive anything.



Palance plays his character slightly over the top, almost feverish, like he's ready to bludgeon Canning at any moment and I wonder why the more reserved Canning would dare even invite the other man into his home around such delicate artefacts. Cushing seems to be having fun, though, playing his character as very drunk most of the time, subtly bobbing his head and smiling placidly while Palance gets worked up over a manuscript.



Watching these two actors talk about Poe in this environment is much more satisfying than the resolution of the story but Torture Garden never really lets you down.

I'd think it difficult to be led astray by the title of 1964's Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. Though as a matter of fact we never see Dr. Terror's house--but it is a satisfyingly lurid horror anthology film, the first of a series for which British studio Amicus would become famous for in the 1960s and 1970s. Like most of those films, it features Peter Cushing, joined in this case by his friend and frequent Hammer co-star Christopher Lee. Both effectively play against type and the film's greatest flaw, its thoroughly illogical screenplay, even kind of contributes to how good it is. It's almost nightmare logic.



The framing story takes place on a train, not a house, where Dr. Schreck, played by Peter Cushing, tells the fortunes of five men in the car with him, one after another. Each story ends in doom for its subject, one of the movie's logical problems being that no-one asks if they can't avert fate now that they've been given foreknowledge. Though an unsurprising and effectively strange conclusion to the film arguably solves this problem.



Schreck's name means terror in German and Cushing plays the character with a thick accent and a lot more hair than is usual for him. A bigger departure, though, is Christopher Lee as one of the compartment occupants.



His story, the penultimate, is about revenge in the art world. "Disembodied Hand" bears a lot of resemblance to a story from the Tales from the Crypt comics, "The Maestro's Hand". Lee plays a vicious and conceited art critic named Franklyn Marsh who's embarrassed when an artist named Eric Landor (Michael Gough) tricks him into praising a painting by a chimpanzee.



It seems meant to prove a point he'd been making when Marsh had been publicly bashing an exhibition of Landor's paintings--Landor makes the argument that art is totally subjective and that its power resides in the viewer. Marsh's view of art as a measurable skill is rocked by the revelation of the chimpanzee artist so thoroughly that he goes quiet and literally runs away whenever Landor enters a room. As such, a disembodied hand that tries to strangle Marsh later in the story might be interpreted as a manifestation of repressed psychological issues.



And that's supported by Lee's nervous, fussy performance and it's really a highlight of his virtuosity to watch this alongside his natural and exuberant performance as Rasputin in Rasputin: The Mad Monk. Though I wonder if it really would've been so hard to say maybe a chimpanzee has talent. The fact that the ape's art is better than Landor's might have been a nice way to turn the insult around, Marsh really had to put his foot in it to make Landor's prank work, a slightly unlikely scenario, another thing that seems dreamlike.



Maybe the most dreamlike story in the film is the second one starring Benard Lee as a scientist trying to save a man and his family from a carnivorous vine inexplicably attacking his house.



There's no explanation for it, the plant just seems to've gone crazy one day. It's also difficult to understand why it's so hard to defeat.

The final story features Donald Sutherland as a doctor who brings his French wife (Jennifer Jayne) home to New York with him. The story is about vampirism and makes absolutely no sense, filled with motivations that turn on a dime. Sutherland is weird to watch, contemplating the murder of his wife with a wooden stake with only vague, mild distress.



There's absolutely nothing in this story to make you think it was shot anywhere near New York--apart from Sutherland, all the American accents are unconvincing and every scene was clearly shot on a sound stage.



But I like the look of it, the Technicolour in this movie is sort of gorgeously brash, particularly in the first story which is a sort of combination werewolf and haunted house story set in Scotland (again, mostly sound stages).



The film also features a story about a musician punished by supernatural forces for stealing a melody from a Haitian Voodoo ceremony, the weakest story in the film but weird enough to be enjoyable. The whole film is slightly unhinged fun.

Twitter Sonnet #1053

Two rivers make an absent third alive.
A sibling text appeared in pairs of notes.
A quiz delayed'll fade the brain's archive.
A grey and quiet crew deploy their boats.
Descending sizes stretch the cauldrons out.
In boiling clocks the hands are useless oars.
The gentlest tree contorts for leafy gout.
And ev'ry eve a cat conducts the tours.
The shadow horns replaced the scales in mind.
Ouroboros in human hearts decayed.
Expanding lungs of darkened walls rewind.
And slowly lids of metal eye cascade.
As straw inside investors try to birth.
A metal ice revisits corp'rate Earth.