Frightmare

Peter Walker, the director of this notorious British horror film, said that he wanted audiences to leave the cinema feeling angry and frustrated after seeing it. He succeeds.

Unpleasant and cynical though "Frightmare" may be, it is brilliantly made and cleverly written. We move between two worlds, of 70s juvenile delinquency in the heart of London and the chintzy, old-fashioned farmhouse inhabited by Rupert Davies and Sheila Keith. What unites both worlds, shockingly, is violence and murder.

There are other dualities in the film. There is the generation gap, between the elderly couple and their children and the gender gap, for here is a horror film where it is women who are the aggressors and the men are impotent onlookers or helpless victims.

The acting is remarkably good, right down to the bit parts, such as the hapless little man (played by Andrew Sachs of "Fawlty Towers" 'Manuel' fame)who is the first victim, in the film's moody, black-and-white pre-credit sequence. But the real honours are stolen by Sheila Keith, at times pathetic, at times terrifying as Mrs Yates and by Rupert Davies as her defeated, despairing husband.

Parts of the film look a little cheesy and dated but it is still a remarkably powerful work. The music score is a bonus too - in place of the usual screeching brass, Stanley Myers score is subtle, eerie and menacing.

I can't really recommend this film as "fun" viewing and it is light years away from the comforting certainties of Hammer's Gothic tales, where good always conquers evil. But "Frightmare" is that rare beast - a genuinely disturbing and unnerving horror film.

It's 'granny goes gaga' in this genuinely creepy bone-chiller, surprisingly well directed by Peter Walker and penned down by David McGillivray. The power of this 'Frightmare' simply lies in its primitive goal to shock and to disturb the viewer by showing the disastrous fade of poor, innocent victims. *** small spoilers*** The eerie black and white opening sequences introduce us to an elderly couple on trial for a series of savage murders. Dad is pretty much sane and a devoted husband, but mum suffers from cannibalistic characteristics. 15 years later, they're freed from the asylum and declared properly sane. Even though they now live in a quiet farm outside the town and receive many visits from their oldest daughter Jackie, mommy (Dorothy Yates) resumes her old disgusting habits by enticing lonely people to the farm with the offer or reading their futures in cards. Things get even more complex when Jackie's psychiatrist boyfriend digs up matters from the past and the couple's youngest daughter Debbie seems to have inherited mom's relentless sense of cruelty and taste for blood. *** end spoilers *** There's very few background in the story and not even a proper attempt to analyze the psychological elements the plot handles about. Frightmare wants to shock you, and from that viewpoint, it's a very successful package of eeriness. Multiple scenes are loaded with tension and leave you with a very uncanny aftertaste in your stomach. There's quite a lot of offensive gore in the film and the mind-blowing climax skyrocketed the cult-value of this film, back in the early seventies. If you're not too easily petrified, I certainly recommend checking this film out.

Pete Walker's 'Frightmare' is a gloriously gory mix of psychopathic and cannibalistic killings and pretty English cottages, all topped with all those naff '70's fashions, haircuts and British cars.

Walker regular Sheila Keith is the woman sent to an asylum fifteen years ago, along with her abetting husband. He's helpless when her cravings come back and assumed cured, she now reads tarot cards. Their daughter gets romantically involved with a young psychiatrist and when her younger, adopted sister starts going off the rails, the young doctor naturally wants to help.

She's actually helping find feeding matter - and their brains - for her step mother. And step mother uses an array of everyday tools and appliances to get to her subjects' juicy bits. Electric drills, pitchforks, you name it. There's plenty of reasonable looking blood at the right times and some great make up effects of everyday folk with half their heads missing.

Now, nearly forty years on it's more a chiller than a screamer but very effective nonetheless and certainly one of the better Brit horror flicks I've seen. I saw it on The Horror channel.

There were some great exploitation flicks made in the seventies; but unfortunately, Frightmare isn't one of them. That's not to say it's terrible, or even really bad; as the film definitely does have it's moments, but it's also very talky and the plotting is far too slow, which isn't what you want when you're watching a film that has supposed to have been made to entertain the gore fanatics of it's day. If the entire movie was as good as it's last half hour, I'd be on here praising it to high heaven right now; but for some reason, director Pete Walker has seen fit to make us sit through a sometimes interesting, but more often that not tedious first hour; which doesn't do anything that couldn't have been done in half the time. The plot follows murderer and cannibal by the name of Dorothy, who is sent to an asylum along with her devoted husband Edmund. They are released after fifteen years; and this proves a problem when it seems that the couple's daughter, Debbie, has inherited her mother's lust for killing. Step daughter Jackie tries to sort things out with her father, but that doesn't stop the mother and daughter team getting seriously into cranial DIY...

The atmosphere of the film is superbly sleazy, with the couple's isolated living place taking on the foreboding role of the film's central location. Insanity often makes for a theme that allows a film to present a great atmosphere, and Pete Walker has capitalised on that. Another thing he's capitalised on is power tools. Power Tools would come to great uses again in films such as The Driller Killer, The Toolbox Murders and, of course, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and it's obvious why they continue to get used in gory exploitation flicks. Things get very messy when you've got a deranged lunatic brandishing a power drill, and this serves as one of this film's main talking points. Walker makes best of the 'insane granny' theme too, ands he gets his lead actress to show how good she can be in that respect several times in the film. In the final half hour, the film really starts to come together and as the gore increases, the tension mounts and that is when this movie is at it's very best. When the film has to rely on it's script for intrigue; it falls down, and that pretty much sums up the first hour. I'd like to like this more; but just so you know, once the first hour has elapsed; you're in for a treat!

This film is typical of early Seventies British horror in its style and format, though this is much more dark, morbid and disturbing than the average example.

The film features a psychotic woman with a penchant for cannibalism, and her equally disturbed family, hiding out as a recluse in a remote English farmhouse following her release from 15 years in an institution.

A few items of gore are presented here (the UK version will be cut by three minutes), but the real beauty of this film is its dark and unnerving undertones, along with its shocking and feel-bad finalé.