Carnage

After a model's face is burned by a lamp during a scuffle between a surgeon and a salacious photographer, the doctor (who had hopes of marrying the girl) promises to do everything he can to restore her beauty. Screenwriters Derek and Donald Ford concocted this twisted British blood-letter, a violent though somewhat muted variation on 1960's "Les yeux sans visage". Here, the mad doctor doesn't need to kill innocent lovelies for their faces--he needs their pituitary glands! Peter Cushing amusingly begins the picture a dapper, celebrated professional, and his descent into madness is quite a jolt; Sue Lloyd (who resembles Jill St. John) is also good as the vain, shrewish woman who becomes totally dependent on the need for fresh victims. The Swinging London atmospherics are heavily put-on, and the jazzy score from Bill McGuffie is occasionally inappropriate or over-emphatic. The third act, with the doctor and his girlfriend descended upon by thugs at their seaside home, becomes too hysterical, leading to an unsatisfying wrap-up. Still, a good-looking '60s slasher with some tightly-edited sequences and ghoulish suspense. ** from ****

I've always had a deep admiration for British actor Peter Cushing. He was, after all, able to convincingly portray such a wide range of characters on screen from Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Frankenstein, instilling each role with cool intelligence plus an element of human pathos. When one thinks of a Hammer horror film from the late 1950's through the ensuing fifteen years, inevitably(apart from his frequent co-star Christopher Lee)Cushing's name comes first to mind.

While CORRUPTION is not a Hammer film,(Columbia Pictures,surprisingly, is the distributor) it is a sheer delight for Cushing fans. Here, he portrays a respected surgeon who slowly goes insane, all for the love of his fiancé played by Sue Lloyd with her kitty claws rendered even sharper than the good doctor's scalpel. After a tragic accident which effectively ends her modeling career, Dr. Cushing works obsessively to repair the damage to poor disfigured Sue's face. Realizing the cure is to be found in the female pituitary gland, he wantonly murders and decapitates young, pretty lasses to achieve his goal.

After each of Cushing's kills in this flick, the camera graphically provides a distorted, fish eye lens view in which we see this eminent physician with hair disheveled and a manic look which has to be seen to be believed. Eventually, an overwhelming sense of guilt and shame reduces the doctor to a quivering mess of nerves as he tries to find solace in the bottle. He certainly won't find it in Sue. She has issues of her own which, in comparison, make Dr. Cushing look almost sane. The climax to all this blood & spatter is provided by a high powered laser(part of the cure,apparently, for Sue's face) which looks more at home in GOLDFINGER than a spartan medical lab.

CORRUPTION is a florid feast for the eyes,too, as we see swinging 1967 Carnaby Street fashions worn by both sexes. Anthony Booth really camps it up as an Andy Warhol wannabe portraying a fashion photographer who tries to shoot a nudie-cutie roll of film with Sue Lloyd to devastating results. Since this is 'Swinging London' there are mini-skirted girls aplenty, with special mention to bimbette Shirley Stelfox whom no party would be complete without. She doesn't wear flowers in her hair, but under her eyes.

CORRUPTION is a delirious roller coaster of madness, mayhem and a minimum of mirth. Character actor David Lodge does appear as a cretinous villain called 'Groper.' Watching him salute(don't ask why) is one of the highlights.

Anyway, after seeing CORRUPTION, don't be surprised if you feel uneasy opening the freezer door of your fridge. Some cold cuts are better left untouched.

This is the sixth imitation within the genre of Georges Franju's marvelously lyrical hybrid of art cinema and horror, EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1959) – which just happens to be one of my all-time Top 20 movies. For the record, the others have been the Italian Gothic piece MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN (1960), the erotic French-made THE BLOOD ROSE (1970) and three from notorious (and incredibly prolific) Spaniard Jesus Franco – THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF (1961), THE DIABLOICAL DR. Z (1965) and FACELESS (1988). Furthermore, some time ago I had also acquired another Italian stab at the same theme – ATOM AGE VAMPIRE (1960) – but, in its case, the DivX was faulty and I couldn't get the thing to work properly!

Anyhow, director Robert Hartford-Davis has somewhat mysteriously acquired an aura within the ranks of British horror cinema history not unlike that of the much younger Michael Reeves; other exploitation fare of his include THE BLACK TORMENT (1964), THE SMASHING BIRD I USED TO KNOW aka SCHOOL FOR UNCLAIMED GIRLS (1969), INCENSE FOR THE DAMNED aka BLOODSUCKERS (1970) and THE FIEND aka BEWARE, MY BRETHREN (1972). Although I am aware that TCM USA had shown CORRUPTION (presumably in its correct Widescreen aspect ratio), the version I watched as a DivX came via a soft-looking, washed-out, full-frame transfer courtesy of some obscure outfit called Midnight Video with forced Asian subtitles to boot!! The film itself, while no neglected masterpiece, is good enough to survive these deficiencies and different enough from its prototype to stand on its own two feet.

The lead roles are portrayed by Peter Cushing and Sue Lloyd who are both excellent: Cushing is the middle-aged surgical genius married to a much younger beauty who is reluctant to put her modeling career behind her. This exhibitionistic trait proves her undoing as, during a groovy party sequence (the Swinging Sixties also served as backdrop for the contemporaneous THE SORCERERS [1967] – coincidentally directed by the afore-mentioned Michael Reeves and starring another horror legend on his last legs, Boris Karloff!), Lloyd suffers partial but permanent facial disfigurement when a spotlight topples squarely on her face – following an unprecedented outburst of jealous rage in public from the usually calm and collected Cushing which culminates in a scuffle with a fashion photographer (Anthony Booth). Remorse-stricken, Cushing oversteps his bounds at the hospital where he works in search of a miracle cure but when this withers after a few days' success (with the improbable help of a laser beam dreamed up by ancient Egyptians!), he takes to scouring London's red-light district for possible 'live' donors of the required organ specimen.

Lloyd's sister (Kate O'Mara) – who, unaccountably, seems to live at her married sibling's house – is inconveniently (for Cushing) engaged to a suspicious colleague of his. To avert undue attention from their clandestine activities, they take a trip to a house by the sea but, even here, they are needful of an urgent transplant which presents itself in the lone figure of a bathing and seemingly innocuous youngster but she escapes their grips during the night before they can make 'use' of her. So, egged on by his increasingly batty and nagging wife, it's back to the drawing-board for Cushing…or, rather, the train station as he follows a blonde into her carriage and does her in (cutting her head off and stuffing her lifeless body unceremoniously under the seat) when they are left all alone.

Back at the seaside cottage, the ingénue bursts in on Cushing as he is 'playing around' with the blonde's head on the kitchen table – cue a jazzed-up three-way chase sequence across the beach and cliff-tops which ends, inevitably, in the girl's death (but not before she slams Cushing down with a rock in the face). A short while later, it transpires that the girl was married and her husband and his gang of misfits (including a butch and busty blonde and a gruff John Lennon-lookalike!) in search of "bread" crash the couple's household; Lloyd, completely insane by now, spills the beans about Cushing's involvement in the girl's death (even if it was she who actually killed her) and coerces the leader of the gang into forcing her reluctant husband to perform the usual operation on her face.

However, another scuffle breaks out in the operating room as a result of which the laser beam goes berserk and literally slices everybody up (including O'Mara and her doctor fiancé) who appear on the scene unheralded at the very last minute. The ending of the film seems to suggest that all the events that we've been witness to might just be somebody's feverish dream but one can't be too sure but, thankfully, this ambiguity dos not hamper the film's overall effectiveness or render it a cop-out (as usually happens in cheat ending cases like this). Hartford-Davis' direction is only occasionally flashy – particularly during the killings (although an unwilling participant, Cushing was rarely ever this unhinged) and afore-mentioned chase sequence. The latter third of the film – in which the gang impinges on the couple's seaside home – is its least successful element but that part is still relieved by its crazy ray free-for-all coda.

The film seems to have been available for some time in a longer, more exploitative Continental variant which went under the dubious title LASER KILLER! By the way, the cinematographer-producer of CORRUPTION was Peter Newbrook who would himself later helm a notable and cerebral British horror film – namely THE ASPHYX (1972).

Story of a brilliant doctor (Peter Cushing) in love with a beautiful younger woman (Sue Lloyd). During a fight at a party they're at, Lloyd becomes disfigured when a flood lamp falls on her face. Cushing becomes obsessed at restoring her beauty and will do anything to do it--even murder.

Plot wise this has been done before (most notably in the French film "Eyes Without a Face") but this isn't totally without merit. Cushing is excellent as a man who is driven to murder for his lover. You can see that he hates doing it but feels he has to. Lloyd, surprisingly, is not an innocent woman. She knows he's killing for her and actually spurs him on! Aside from those two performances though this is pretty by the numbers...except for an incredibly silly ending which had me laughing out loud! Also there is incredibly inappropriate music blaring sometimes on the soundtrack that's totally out of place. This is pretty much forgotten and it's easy to see why. Worth catching though for Cushing's acting alone.

After reading the plot description, I was expecting a British take on the French classic 'Eyes Without a Face'. There's a great deal of Eyes Without a Face rip offs going around; Jess Franco's pair The Awful Dr Orloff and Faceless being among the best of them, and there's nothing wrong with basing a film around that premise; but Corruption doesn't bring much, if anything, new to it and that's a shame as considering the people involved, this could have been a lot better. The film does carry the British style well, although clearly it was a much cheaper production than a lot of the Hammer films. The plot focuses on Sir John Rowan, a doctor who finds himself in a precarious position after an accident involving his wife. Unfortunately, the accident left her badly burned, and feeling responsible; the doctor tries to do something about it. He discovers that if he extracts fluid from women's pituitary glands, he can restore his wife's face - however, the effects are only temporary, leading the doctor to murder again and again to keep his wife beautiful!

Corruption is directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, a capable if not brilliant director behind decent horror 'The Black Torment' as well as rubbish such as Incense of the Damned. As mentioned, it's obvious that Hartford-Davis didn't have much of a budget to work with, although his direction is competent enough, if not particularly enthralling. The film's big draw is, of course, Peter Cushing who takes the lead role as the murderous doctor. Being a horror fan, I am naturally a big fan of the legendary Peter Cushing and always enjoy watching his movies. He doesn't put in a particularly great performance here, although he is still good to watch. It's really a shame he isn't better since the role is quite meaty and could have been made more of. The film was released in 1968 and considering that, the gore is fairly shocking; although the film hasn't aged too well and not a lot of the budget was spent on special effects. The film doesn't stay completely interesting for the duration but it never slows to a standstill or becomes completely boring. I can't recommend anyone goes out of their way to track this one down; but it's worth seeing if you can find it.