Terence Fisher has an off-day, as RICHARD PHILLIPS-JONES grits his teeth and revisits The Horror Of It All 1964
RELEASED: August 1964
STARRING: Pat Boone (John Robinson), Erica Rogers (Cynthia Marley), Dennis Price (Cornwallis Marley), Andrée Melly (Natalie Marley), Valentine Dyall (Reginald Marley), Archie Duncan (Muldoon Marley), Erik Chitty (Grandpa Marley), Jack Bligh (Percival Marley)
WRITER: Ray Russell
DIRECTOR: Terence Fisher
The Horror Of It All 1964 Review
An American encyclopaedia salesman heads out to the English countryside, to meet the family of his British fiancée at their secluded mansion. Once there, he discovers that someone is trying to kill off the entire clan, an eccentric bunch to say the least, to get their hands on the family fortune…
It was a difficult time for Terence Fisher. After the commercial and critical failure of The Phantom Of The Opera (1962), the director had headed off to Germany with Christopher Lee for Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (1962) but it proved to be a dispiriting experience for both director and star, further hindered by appalling post-production dubbing. Any hopes of a Holmes series to follow were quickly quashed.
Back in England, Fisher found himself working for Hammer’s early production partner, Robert L. Lippert. It might have looked a good project on paper, a spooky-house horror comedy, penned by Ray Russell (Mr. Sardonicus (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), X – The Man With The X-Ray Eyes (1963)). There was a classy supporting cast with BBC Radio’s “Man In Black” Valentine Dyall, “Bride Of Dracula” star Andreé Melly and the ever-reliable Dennis Price.
Lippert, however had not moved on from the practice of installing a US star into his UK productions to secure funding. None other than that clean-cut, all American pop singer Pat Boone was given top-billing, perhaps prompting the requirement for a musical number midway through proceedings. Oh, joy.
It’s not so much that Fisher doesn’t do comedy (his best work always had touches of dark humour), but the script — essentially an uncredited redux of The Old Dark House —is so heavy handed, its characters drawn in such broad brush strokes, and its “comedy” falling so flat, that even a great of the gothic cinema struggles to get it all working. No cliché is left unturned and, even at a slender 75 minutes it’s hard going, with the plot (such as it is) meandering like it’s struggling to find the exit.
It doesn’t help that the director is lumbered with a budget that must have made Hammer’s accounting look positively spendthrift, and a misplaced leading man who thinks the best way to react to the rest of the cast is by mugging at the camera like he might be better utilised hawking toothpaste in the interval ads. The contrast between Boone’s gung-ho approach to the material and the rest of the cast makes oil and water look like a palatable cocktail.
Like a master carpenter trying to build a shed out of wet Weetabix, Fisher does his best, but the result isn’t even so bad it’s good. It’s not even interesting. It’s just politely terrible, the cinematic equivalent of that annoying co-worker who insists they’re “a bit of a loony”.
One can only imagine how grateful Fisher must have been to return to Hammer for one of his finest films, The Gorgon (1964). With his career back on track, this misstep was quickly relegated to the status of a minor footnote in his career.
Perhaps it’s best we leave it there – The Horror Of It All remains obscure with good reason.
TRIVIA POINTS: The BBFC website notes that cuts were made for the film to obtain an A-Certificate. One can only wonder in puzzlement what the censors found so disturbing.
For its US release, The Horror Of It All was double-billed with another British Lippert production, the Lon Chaney Jr. vehicle, Witchcraft.
