La Créature invisible

The once great hypnotist Prof Marcus Montserrat has fallen on hard times since being ridiculed by the press. He now lives in a tiny flat with his loyal wife, selling his services in the window of newsagents. His master project of mind control sits without a subject until wife Estelle hits on the idea of offering the mind-control device as some sort of wild new trip to a generally disaffected youth looking for the next thrill. With this they manage to recruit one Mike Roscoe and find that they can influence his actions and also experience the sensations that he is feeling, whether it is washing his hands or the flutter of desire for a young woman. The power of the device demonstrated, Marcus has plans for the direction it will go but Estelle finds the ability to experience youthful sensations again in your young body to be a great gift that she is unwilling to part with so easily.

Everything about this film screams that it will be poor. From the very start we learn that it is dated by throwing in so many "hip" aspects in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience while also being a film late in the life of Boris Karloff where it appears he has selected it because it means most of his scenes are done indoors. The gaudy colour/cinematography doesn't help either and within about ten minutes I could feel my brain writing this review already – dismissing it as a trashy piece of 60's trash, trading on "hip" clichés of youth and music while also alluding to better by having Karloff at the head of the cast. To some extent this first impression is correct because it is very much all of these things but yet it manages to have enough about the central plot to prevent it being a cheap and easy horror film but is something better.

It does this by making the scenes with the Monsterrats the most important and engaging scenes in the film and all the 1960's trimmings and young people remain just that – trimmings. The real battle is occurring within this tiny front room and somehow the two cast members manage to make this work despite spending most of their time pretending to feel stuff or concentrating really hard with their eyes closed. Sure Karloff is the star here and does do good work but the film is stolen by a great turn from Catherine Lacey as his wife Estelle. Her fall into madness is well delivered and she becomes the dark heart to the story, even overpowering Karloff himself. Outside of these two the film is generic young people. Ogilvy does reasonably well to convince at being controlled, Ercy and Henry run around and Sheridan looks drop-dead gorgeous. As director Reeves is guilty of some obvious shots and places but when he is in the flat with just Lacey and Karloff, he does manage to produce a genuinely tense atmosphere that is maintained in that room all the way to the memorable final shot.

The Sorcerers is not a perfect film by any means but it is much better than I thought it would be and much better than all the trimmings suggest it deserves to be. It has dated and is deliberately "hip" but it works thanks to Karloff, Lacey and some genuine tension in the confines of a grotty little flat.

There's something that suggests world domination in Boris Karloff's first description of his technique to hypnotize young people but this is soon dispelled by a surprising performance in a rather average film. Interestinglyly pieced together, the director tries hard to portray the idea of control which only sometimes works, but nevertheless does get better as the film nears a climax. Predictable in plot but still violent enough to present a challenge to those expect a little more from their Karloff movies. Great just to see Karloff in an argument in a newsagents at the very beginning - not a usual scene from your run-of-the-mill fantasy thrillers!

Those commenters who have lamented the invisibility of Michael Reeves's second feature will be glad to know it was networked on Britain's biggest channel, BBC1, on 7 January. "The Sorcerers" is one of the movies that makes one feel a fresh evaluation of Tony Tenser's Tigon (and of Amicus, the other little brother of Hammer in the spooky and gory area) is overdue.

No need to exaggerate the merits of this prentice work by the 23-year-old Great White Forlorn Hope. It has the budget and look of a made-for-television movie (Euston Films, maybe?) and falls somewhere between "Peeping Tom" and "Performance" in its conflation of traditional horror/fantasy and Swinging London elements. The first scene of Karloff sparring with a newsagent recalls Miles Malleson poring over dirty postcards in Michael Powell's masterwork. Ian Ogilvy's eternal triangle in and around a nightclub-- interrupted by the increasingly criminal forays on which he is sent by the mind-controlling Montserrats-- has a touch of James Fox's peregrinations as the hoodlum whose brain is warped by contact with Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg.

Like Fox, Ogilvy was a public schoolboy (Eton) here convincingly playing rough trade. His junk shop, cheekily named "The Glory Hole", is in Lisson Grove, not far from the infamous Bayswater pad of "Performance". A comparison of Reeves and Donald Cammell as sceptical observers of the Flower Power era might keep a film studies thesis-writer busy.

However, the film belongs to Karloff and Catherine Lacey, the puppetmasters of mesmerism. Boris, aged 80, is doing his last work in his native land. He is clearly tired and spends most of the runtime sitting or sprawling. He is in his mellow, "Targets" phase: bearded, gaunt, hollow-eyed and lined, that beautifully sepulchral voice still able to veer from sinister implication to moral authority within a few syllables. After a career of kindly spinsters, Miss Lacey must have relished her Grand Guignol, orgasmic turn as the wife who has to dominate her hubby before she can possess a younger male psyche and make Ogilvy into a serial killer.

Connoisseurs of Britflix will enjoy spotting Gerald Campion, the former Billy Bunter of BBC TV, as a queer customer of The Glory Hole; Susan George, junior sexpot, just 17 and already acting like a hardened good time girl; Meier Tzelniker, stalwart of the Yiddish theatre and singer of "Nausea" in "Expresso Bongo", as a café owner; Alf Joint, veteran stuntman, as the repair shop foreman; and Ivor Dean as the archetypal CID man with belted mac and pipe.

There will be inevitable comparisons to The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General(from the same director), from personal opinion Witchfinder General is the better film, technically and dramatically but The Sorcerers is the more entertaining one, Witchfinder is very shocking even now(easy to see why it was banned at the time) and while both have great atmosphere The Sorcerers a little more so. The Sorcerers is not the perfect film, but you don't really expect that, the first 10 minutes did come across as gaudy and trashy which will put put anybody off, while Estelle's descent into madness could have taken longer to develop and been less abrupt and the script-while mostly solid- can have a tendency to be turgid and overly silly. The Sorcerers is decently shot and the evocation of the 60s hippie era is effective and accurate. There is a great soundtrack, and the atmosphere is both fun and creepy. The story can have some dull spots but has a good sense of terror, suspense and thrills. Michael Reeves, who died tragically far too early, directs assuredly, while the acting is good by all. Ian Ogilvy, Victor Henry and Susan George hardly disgrace themselves in support, but they are outshone by both Boris Karloff and especially Catherine Lacey. Karloff is very dignified, menacing and adroit, even when not as active and towards the end of his career he still has what made him a good actor in the first place. Lacey overdoes it a tad at times but that doesn't matter at all when she is such fun to watch and is as scary as she is. In conclusion, atmospheric and entertaining, the first 10 minutes are a turn-off but if you stay with it you'll find a film, even with its imperfections, that is much better than it's given credit for. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Anyone even vaguely interested in British horror cinema will be well acquainted with the resume of Michael Reeves. Retrospectively crowned the great white hope who-never-was by genre commentators like Kim Newman and Allan 'Dark Side' Bryce, Reeves' work showed the promise of an English Spielberg. Or possibly just another Peter Sasdy. Unfortunately we'll never know, as his life was truncated by an overdose of sleeping pills. But on the evidence of this film and it's successor,'Witchfinder General', it's clear that he possessed a genuinely cinematic imagination to rival young Steven's. A quality all too rare in British film.

'Witchfinder' is good. Very good. But on balance I prefer this piece. Perhaps that's partly a personal reaction to the rather inflated claims made for Reeves' last film by certain critics, who seek to present it as the work of a suicidal soul-in-torment auteur. C'mon fellas. 'The Sorcerers' is quirky and takes itself slightly too seriously, resulting in a strange, enjoyably naive atmosphere. I particularly enjoy the unique screen presence of Victor Henry, who plays Ian Ogilvy's ginger haired friend Alan. I was saddened to learn (via the ever-educational IMDb) that he was involved in a road traffic accident not too long after making this film, and spent the last 17 years of his short life in a vegetative state. Another potential talent lost.

Ignore the wits who claim that this is a work which dissects and critiques the function and form of cinema itself, etc, etc. These people create subtexts for Pete Walker films in their spare time. Enjoy it simply as a movie where Ian Ogilvy listens to Cliff Richard's 'Out in the country' on his dansette, and then slashes up Susan George with a pair of scissors.

Hey. 'Wired for sound' gets me the same way.