PopHorror Let's Get Scared
I first saw The Monster Club on the crazy local UHF channel we had back in the day. I then re-visited it some 30 plus years later when it hit Prime. At that moment it dawned on me that The Monster Club was a perfect confluence of two equally great subgenres, one that was waning and one that was waxing. Hammer and Amicus had dominated the anthology game in the 1970s, and I had set the bar so high for all those films that an anthology without British accents took some acclimation. The Monster Club isn’t an Amicus film, but it might as well be. It is Milton Subotksy in the producer’s chair. He was the American who founded Amicus, a company that would go on to be Hammer’s only perceived equal when it came to the British anthology game. The stories here also have a literary background and are adapted from the stories of horror writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes.
The opening wrap around is absolute gold, and in many ways, outshines the stories. John Carradine stars as R. Chetwynd-Hanes, who strolls along a side street and pauses to appreciate a display of his works in the local bookstore. Vincent Price stumbles out of the shadows, looking as dashing as he does famished. Chetwynd-Hanes offers to give him money or anything else required to help. It ends up being something else, and Price promptly bites him on the neck. Fortunately for Chetwynd-Hayes, Price is the consummate gentleman, and he is neither turned nor killed. It turns out Price is Eramus, a vampire on his way to a nightclub just for monsters. He invites the author as a token of his appreciation.
The beauty of The Monster Club is that Price and Carradine are clearly from a different generation than the audience at this point in their careers, and that fact is amplified by both of them entering a New Wave club with music playing that their kids listen to. I’m not surprised that it still works. These guys are cool enough to pull it off, and they do. As they are seated, Chetwynd-Hayes notices a monster genealogy chart and begins to question Eramus about it. That’s the segue into the first installment.
“The Shadmock” is the classic British cautionary comeuppance tale of a young woman and her opportunistic lover crossing paths with a tortured soul of a man who just happens to be loaded. She develops a friendship with him and, as expected, he becomes utterly smitten with her. Not wanting to marry him, she is forced into it by her lover in an attempt to steal his fortune. It backfires horribly when they discover that even though a Shadmock is the mongrel of the monster family tree, they are nonetheless still terrifying.
“The Vampires” is reminiscent of the comedic Night Gallery shorts that were dropped between the longer and more serious installments. This one is my favorite. The great Donald Pleasence plays the equivalent of what an Homeowner’s Association president would be it they were a vampire hunter. A bullied boy learns the truth about how his father works the late shift, and his mother, the lovely Britt Ekland, must keep Pleasance from doing his neighborly duty of removing the undesirables. A fun and a lighthearted twist ending makes this installment a perfect distraction from the other darker ones in The Monster Club.
“The Ghouls” is the classic “stranger finds something amiss in a strange land” tale that is elevated by the presence of Stuart Whitman. He plays a film director scouting for locations, only to stumble upon modern day ghouls that have ran out of conventional food sources. He is befriended by a young girl that is half human and half ghoul. When they refuse to let him leave and he attempts to escape, he sees how long they’ve really been there. A great classic and creepy Tales from the Crypt-type ending.
The Monster Club is definitely an anthology, but what’s the other subgenre? Rock and roll horror, that’s what! Not only do we get Price and Carradine with the wraparound story, but also some top shelf rock of the day with UB40 and performances by B.A. Robertson, The Pretty Things, and The Viewers. You can see the B.A. Roberson performance in the video above. It’s absolutely uninhibited, corny to the untrained eye, and brilliant to any fan of horror-themed rock and roll. Speaking for myself, this type of film and thrillers were my first introductions to Vincent Price because it had monsters and contemporary music that I knew. I can’t say enough about The Monster Club because it’s refined, over the top, and rock and roll all at the same time, and all three exist only to compliment the other. It doesn’t get much better.
