From Beyond the Grave (1974)

It’s not a particularly original observation that the Amicus anthology horror films were largely hot-or-miss affairs, the good and the bad stories just about balancing each other out in most cases. At the very end of their run, with Kevin Connor’s From Beyond the Grave (1974) the company produced it’s finest and most wholly satisfying anthology, four great vignettes held together with a better than average wraparound tale courtesy of scriptwriters Robin Clarke and Raymond Christodoulou working from stories from R. Chetwynd-Hayes.

Peter Cushing is the glue holding it all together as the sinister but funny, pipe-smoking, Yorkshire-accented proprietor of Temptations Limited, an out-of-the-way junk shop who promises “a big novelty surprise” with each purchase. He deals with four customers, three of who swindle him out of his dues, and a burglar as the quartet of stories unfold. Cushing is, it should go without saying, magnificent, the junk shop setting giving him plenty of the props he was so fond of playing with (he particularly has fun with a stuffed alligator), alternately charming his customers and admonishing them behind their backs (“shouldn’t have done that…”).

The first story, The Gate Crasher, stars David Warner as Edward Charlton who gets an antique mirror for less than it’s probably worth and installs it in his London pad. With his trendy young friends he holds a séance (atmospherically done by Connor) and awakens a hideous man that lives in the mirror (Marcel Steiner, one of Amicus’ most unforgettable villains) who starts demanding that Charlton feeds him blood (“You must feed me!”). As he turns his flat into a bloodbath, Charlton increasingly comes under the mysterious man’s spell until he materialises in the real world and forces Charlton to chance places with him.

The world beyond the mirror is a genuinely unsettling place and the whole story is bloodier than most Amicus films. It’s a solid opener marred only by an unconvincing nightclub scene with slightly awkward hipsters grooving to a nice bit of organ and fuzz guitar psychedelia. It ends nicely though, with a montage from the mirror’s perspective showing the flat changing hands a few times (judging by the unchanging fashions, the turnover rate is fairly rapid) until another group of hip young things hold another séance and Warner pops up in the mirror.

Story two, An Act of Kindness is the film’s – and arguably Amicus’ – crown jewel, the wonderfully twisted tale of henpecked Christopher Lowe (Ian Bannen) who seeks escape from his shrewish wife Mabel (Diana Dors) through an unlikely friendship with match seller Jim Underwood (Donald Pleasence) and his creepy daughter Emily (Angela Pleasence). Using a medal he steals from Temptations to impress the ex-serviceman, Lowe finds some of the attention and companionship denied him in his loveless marriage but it comes at a terrible cost – there’s something rotten lurking not far beneath the respectable veneer of middle-class Windsor and Lowe is soon caught up in suburban witchcraft in a story that carries a rather neat sting in its tail.

Bannen is note-perfect as the downtrodden, unappreciated Lowe and it’s not hard to see why he prefers the company of the creepy but attentive Underwoods than his appalling wife, played with just the right level of venomous contempt by Diana Dors. But the show belongs to the Pleasences. Donald drips unsettling obsequiousness, his cliché-ridden observations appealing to Lowe’s vanity and Angela is effortlessly creepy as the intelligent but inscrutable daughter (“she’s a deep one,” deadpans Jim, “she reads books with jaw-cracking words.”) There’s a nice seam of dark humour running beneath the unpleasantness (Lowe commits adultery with Emily in a bed above which hangs a needlework sampler reading “the wages of sin is death”) and the twist ending is more satisfying than most.

The comedy that weaves its way through An Act of Kindness comes bubbling to the fore in the third story, The Elemental. A lot of the time, Amicus’ comedy vignettes were just tiresome but this one is genuinely funny thanks in no small part to excellent performances. On his way home from work, having stopped off to buy a snuff box (“I hope you enjoy snuffing it,” mutters the proprietor) commuter Reginald Warren (Ian Carmichael) is accosted by dotty medium Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton) who warns him that he has an invisible elemental sitting on his shoulder – “I’ve never seen a homicidal before. Sex-starved, yes, alcoholic, often, but killers, very rare.” After a series of strange happenings at home that drive away his dog and terrify his wife Susan (Nyree Dawn Porter), Warren reluctantly calls in Orloff for possibly the silliest and funniest exorcism ever committed to film.

Leighton is an absolute hoot as the mad Madame Orloff, her performance so natural that she gives the impression of making up her delightfully quirky dialogue (“Get out of you black-hearted basket, I’ll crack yer heart you hellish lout…”) on the fly. Carmichael and Porter are really there as foils to the force of nature that Leighton unleashes and play their parts perfectly, leaving the veteran actress plenty of room to let fly with a barrage of charming eccentricities.

If there’s a disappointing story it’s the last one, The Door, and only because it’s a re-run of the first story. Charlton and his mirror are here replaced by William Seaton (Ian Ogilvy) and a truly hideous antique door that he installs at the home he shares with his wife Rosemary (Lesley-Anne Down). It’s such a repulsive bit of work that one cant help but wonder why Seaton ever considered allowing it to besmirch his otherwise ordinarily appointed house. But he hangs it nonetheless and soon finds that when he opens it, it’s not his stationary cupboard he finds beyond it but the lair of an evil 17th century occultist, Sir Michael Sinclair (Jack Watson). Sinclair’s malignant influence begins to extend beyond his grim room until he escapes and the couple are forced to destroy him by taking an axe to the door.

The Door is only disappointing in comparison to what had gone before. The happy ending – explained in a little coda back at the shop – is a tad disappointing and the two leads are serviceable enough but a little bland. But it’s still an atmospherically shot story (the photography of Alan Hume is marvellous throughout) and the sight of Watson’s blood-streaked occultist meeting his grisly end is a memorable one.

With From Beyond the Grave, the Amicus anthology horror series – which previously included Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Asylum (1972), Tales from the Crypt (1972) and The Vault of Horror (1973) – bowed out of a high. Even the slightly disappointing The Door is still a gripping story and the film boasts a fine ensemble cast, a witty set of scripts and in Connor an inventive new director whose subsequent films – The Land That Time Forgot (1975), At the Earth’s Core (1976), The People That Time Forgot (1977), Warlords of Atlantis (1978), Arabian Adventure (1979), Motel Hell (1980) et al – were never quite this impressive.

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