Le rideau de la mort

My Ratings: Story 1.25 : Direction 0.75 : Pace 1.25 : Acting 1.25 : Entertaining 1.25 Total 5.75 out of 10.00.

Boobs. That's what this film has. To be truthful, there are nearly more boobs than actors or actresses. And not one of those scenes needs to be in the movie and is the reason I've marked the direction down accordingly.

The story isn't too new either. I admit I like the idea and concept behind the bad guy... or gal's motives, which I can't go into fully - spoilers, and all that. A Hodge-Podge of actors and actresses are hired to put on a London stage show. They are to report to the director, Mike, at a disused seaside theatre for rehearsals. However, once there, things take a step into the strange as the cast disappears, one-by-one. Mike even calls in the coppers when he believes he's found one of the missing actresses. They lay her body out on the guillotine prop... sans head. However, when the cops turn up, the body has gone poof! and the wooden mannequin has returned.

The writer Alfred Shaughnessy, gives the audience an entertaining and tension-filled hour and a half, with abundant twists and clues to pique the interest of the audience... of yes, and boobs.

Speaking of which, the director, Pete Walker, directs the story relatively well. I particularly liked the way he handled the cramped and confined spaces of the pier's theatre. You almost feel as though the walls are closing in. The way he also conducts the "Near Kill" sequence is outstanding. The way he stays in close and tight to the intended prey as the hunter, the strange hobo'esq character, slides closer on the bench, constantly coughing and wheezing builds the tension. Add to this, the cut-aways to the inside of the theatre and the casts realisation that something bad is happening outside and their swift reaction, which is too slow, build extra tension. This sequence is structured well and plays with the tempo perfectly, pulling the audience into the story.

The cast isn't too bad in their roles, though a lot is little more than stage dressing and butcher fodder. Robin Askwith, for example, is pretty much in "Adventures of..." mode. Cocky and self-assured, but seldom used. This movie is predominantly driven by Ray Brooks as Mike, Jenny Hanley as Julia, and Patrick Barr as Major Bell.

Don't get me wrong, everybody does a grand job in their roles. They just needed to and used more fully. It's like they focus on one character, then they get bumped off and it's onto the next. I never fully felt as though they were a unit. Working together to stay alive.

This is an enjoyable romp of a slasher flick; before they became known as such. And for those reasons, it's worth a watch. I have a feeling I may take a second and third look at this title before I pass on. So, if you enjoy your Chillers and Slashers, with a hint of the supernatural (and there is a hint in there - so I deem this a horror film too) then I recommend you watch this slice of celluloid history.

Swim on over to my Absolute Horror and Killer Thriller Chillers and The Game Is Afoot lists to see where I rated this English gem.

Take Care and Stay Well.

Pete Walker brings us a proto-slasher that's now as cornball as can be. Is it worthy of respect in the pantheon of horror? Yes, maybe.

This is a coastal town that they forgot to close down.

A group of actors and actresses have mysteriously been lured to an end of pier theatre to star in a play. Pretty soon they start being bumped off one by one.

So it be! There's plenty of nudity, actors siting around musing on the "biz" and its perils, while the matter of fact attitude to the disappearances is almost as ludicrous as someone opening the door in the middle of the night stark naked...

It's good fun in truth, especially for British film fans like me to see the likes of Robin Askwith and Jenny Hanley in this. The run down theatre setting is a good one, while the play they are rehearsing makes no sense and is quite surreal! 5/10

Walker's first horror film is an intriguing and enjoyable mix of sex and chills set in an abandoned theater; interestingly, in the accompanying interview on the DVD, he states that the nudity was deemed obligatory at the time if the picture was to hope for a distribution deal (particularly since Walker was his own financier).

The plot starts off by having eight out-of-work actors being convened to the aforementioned remote location by a mysterious employer; though they occasionally indulge in the kind of silly yet pretentious improvisational exercise also at the core of Jacques Rivette's insanely-long (13 hours!) OUT ONE: NOLI ME TANGERE (1971), they're often just interested in getting laid and the girls in particularly act like sluts most of the time!! At first, I was annoyed by this apparent laziness in scripting (by Alfred Shaughnessy, a respected if little-known director in his own right) – but, then, it's revealed that this was the reason these young and 'morally corrupt' folk were called upon to begin with (as the continuation of a notorious incident from the wartime era which had actually caused the theater's closure).

The male members of the cast are effectively enough led by Ray Brooks (from Richard Lester's Swinging London comedy THE KNACK [1965]) and also include Robin Askwith (soon to rise to dubious prominence with the smutty "Confessions" films) and veteran Patrick Barr (who turns in a bravura performance, particularly once his true identity is exposed). As for the girls, they all look great in and out of clothes – particularly Jenny Hanley (who, interestingly, discovers to have an inextricable link of her own with the gloomy theater) and Luan Peters (who escapes the murderer{s}' clutches the first time but not the second).

The film attempts a reasonable imitation throughout of the Italian Giallo style (that country, then, paid it the compliment by borrowing its single setting for Lamberto Bava's popular but third-rate DEMONS [1985]) – though it culminates with a rather unnecessary 3-D gimmick (which Walker had already utilized in the lackluster "Rashomon"-type sex comedy THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF GRETA [1972]). For the record, of the director's horror outings, I've yet to get my hands on SCHIZO (1976) and HOME BEFORE MIDNIGHT (1979)

The plot is a familiar one. A bunch of people go to an abandoned building to stay there, and some of them start dying.

Even taken more specifically, this is a group of young actors who go to an old theater, and are killed for reasons relating to the theater's past. The Clown at Midnight (1998) is similar.

The movie has a lot of dialog, which isn't of much interest. People go off wandering, and sometimes they come back and sometimes they don't. They visit an older couple, and I didn't get a sense of where their house was in relation to the theater, which seemed to be on an island. Police actually are contacted fairly easily early on. The actors continue to stay at the theater far beyond what is sensible.

There's a fair amount of female nudity, even some full frontal nudity. There is even some full frontal nudity from one of the men. Deaths are not depicted very graphically, to the extent they are barely on screen at all. The killer is a heavy breather, with a black mask and gloves.

The music throughout reminded me of the incidental music from the original Scooby Doo series!

There's a flashback scene which is rather surprising, that has a couple having sex in front of a young girl. The girl's scenes were quite obviously edited in (i.e. she wasn't in the room with the nude actors), but it was still a little shocking. That scene was a little better than the rest of the movie, although it started off with a staging of Othello, which was not too involving. There's another good scene in which some of the actors think one of them is shining a spotlight, but it then shines on the person they though was handling it, who was nude. Being a little thick, they don't immediately realize the spotlight must be handled by someone else, nor do they notice how the nude figure doesn't appear to have any life in it.

At the end of the Monterey Home Video, there were trailers for The Slasher is the Sex Maniac, Night After Night After Night, and The Grim Reaper, all of which looked much better. Although I've seen a cut version of The Grim Reaper AKA Antropophagus (1980), and didn't think it was all that hot, but then the trailer for it was all of five seconds long or so. The other trailers were of ordinary length.

A group of actors and a director are gathered together by a mysterious producer to rehearse a play in a creepy abandoned theater at the end of a pier off the English coast. In "Ten Little Indians" fashion they begin to disappear one by one. This sounds like a typical slasher movie, but in fact it preceded the slasher craze by many years. It was one of those movies like "Schoolgirl Killer", "Fright", and "Bay of Blood" that contained many of the elements of the slasher films and may have even influenced some of them a little, but was made well before "Black Christmas", "Halloween",and "Friday the 13th" initiated the deluge of slasher flicks.

This movie avoids many of what would later become tedious clichés of the slasher films. There's no heavy-breathing POV camera shots. The characters are stupid, but they are not so stupid that they don't notice their friends disappearing. The killer's motivation is actually somewhat believable and doesn't seem like something the filmmakers just pulled out of their collective keisters to justify the carnage. Actually, there isn't much carnage either. Most of the murders actually occur off-screen (blasphemy, I know). But what the movie lacks in blood, it makes up for in T and A. This movie marked a transition in British director Peter Walker's career from softcore sexploitation fare like "School for Sex" and "Four Dimensions of Greta" to his more mature and superior 70's horror films like "Frightmare" and "House of the Whipcord". Not surprisingly, Walker offers a hot shower of generous female nudity to prepare viewers for the sudden cold shower of the terror scenes.In the hilarious opening scene, for instance, an incredibly voluptuous actress is awakened by a knock on her door at three in the morning, so she gets out of her female "roommate's" bed and answers the door completely naked.

I'd recommend this movie to anyone, but people who like Pete Walker, and slasher movies that are actually well-crafted and scary will especially enjoy this one.