The Monster Club (1980)
Directed by Roy Ward Baker

Film Review

There's an understandably end-of-term feel to The Monster Club, the last and zaniest in a series of portmanteau horror films made by the British film production company Amicus.  It turned out to be Amicus's final film, the company finally bowing to the inevitable as the British film industry went into meltdown in the early 1980s.  This one is made more for laughs than thrills, the horror content being ludicrously mild for the time.  The framing story is pretty weak although it does offer the chance to see two veteran horror icons - Vincent Price and John Carradine - taking the Mickey out of the genre that made them famous.  Hard to believe, given his long association with horror, but this was the only occasion on which Price played a fanged bloodsucker on screen.  The musical links between the stories (provided by minor new wave British pop bands of the time) are an unwelcome distraction but have contributed to the film's present standing as a cult favourite.

The stories themselves are, as ever, a mixed bag.  The first offers an unusual departure into Gothic romance which, whilst lacking in substance, has an eerie charm and concludes with the film's most shocking image.  The second story is by far the weakest, a stuttering (and hideously scored) comedy involving vampires in suburbia which is only just redeemed by its final twist (vampire-killer Donald Pleasence gets a taste of his own medicine).  It is, as usual, the third story in the anthology that makes the film worth watching, a creepily atmospheric human-versus-ghouls stand-off that looks like an affectionate homage to Hammer's Plague of the Zombies (1966).  After this effective little blood-curdler we're dragged back (kicking and screaming) to the dreary Monster Club for a rather tedious lecture by Price on man's inhumanity to man.  Do we need to be reminded that humankind is the worst monster of them all?  Definitely not Amicus's finest hour but it's a weirdly fun way to bring down the curtain on a popular series of films.

Film Synopsis

One evening, the author Chetwynd-Hayes is walking the streets when he runs into a courteous old vampire named Eramus.  In return for a small blood donation, the vampire invites the writer to his favourite night-time haunt, the Monster Club, a place where fiends of all persuasion gather to let their hair down after a hard day's monstering.  Having described the different varieties of creature that can result from cross-species couplings of vampires, werewolves and ghouls, Eramus tells the tale of a Shadmock, a sad being whose only monstrous feature is his whistle.  The Shadmock hires an attractive young woman, Angela, to itemise his vast collection of ornaments in his secluded mansion.  Unaware that Angela intends to rob him at her boyfriend's behest, the Shadmock falls in love with her and makes a proposal of marriage.  When Angela carries through her scheme she learns that a Shamock's whistle is worse than any vampire's bite...