Cinema
Munster assaults reviewer
Duncan Fallowell
Horror Express. Director: Gene Martin. Stars: Peter Cushing, (Christopher Lee. 'X'(88 minutes); Godfather of Harlem. Director: Larry Cohen, Stars: Fred Williamson, Gloria Hendry. 'X'. Astoria, Charing Cross Road, and New Victoria (82 minutes).
Horizon. Director: Pal Gabor. 'AA'. Academy Cinema Three (87 minutes).
Just in time to halt the belief that the British horror film industry was becoming the victim of its own sense of camp, weaving ever more ineffectual satires on the threadbare legends which often amounted to increasingly whimsical ways of resuscitating a Dracula killed apparently for all time by the forces of good in his previous film (horror as soap opera bouffe cannot be further explored here) is Horror Express starring those two brave pilots of the mysterium tremendum, Mr Lee and Mr Cushing.
Was it the lager, scotch and coke beforehand which give to the images of Siberian waste an uneasy pulse, had the heat of the day played its part in disfiguring one's sense of normality, was it our own sleepy eyes which produced in the glowing red oculars of the ghoul a positive sense of malevolent energy? These interrogatives only inform the overall sense of derangement where anything is possible, not least an extra-galactic spirit capable of sucking the brain's knowledge as vampires do blood.
It was quite surprising to find oneself engrossed at a pretty high fantasy level in any Lee-Cushing performance and it has to be said that as two upright Englishmen devoted to the scientific method they were not where the tingle was to be found. For some reason, wherever they are cast together they annihilate each other's dramatic projection. Christopher Lee acquires characteristics appropriate to the nineteenth hole and ends up sounding and looking like Michael Denison while an impalpable glaze settles over Peter Cushing's blue eyes as he takes on the unfamiliar overtones of righteousness.
No, it was the Rasputin figure consummated by Satan's power, the general Russian setting of tundra, wodka and fur hats, the circumstance of exp.ress trains, which edges involuntarily on the sinister presumably through the heating effect of confinement plus speed, which slowly began to unseat one's cynicism in the Soho afternoon; but above all the technical qualities of the picture. The photography is remarkably sophisticated and Teodor Escamilla's camera moves restlessly and obliquely through the plot with almost documentary independence: no proscenium compositions here. And the soundtrack, instead of serenading the noise of the action with the usual doomy themes, is 4 masterly blend of all the film's Sonic features, including the perceptual distortions in the characters. The music, composed by John Cavacas, is very much part of the trip. The film will not have you shooting from your seat but it is an extremely accomplished one and a half hours of comic-strip fantasy and, for the fleshly, there are some titty Countesses around too.
On with it is Godfather of Harlem but the only thing they have in common is the amount of human destruction. Otherwise it is in another world, the brute real anger of New York where the blacks muscle into the traditional preserves of the Mafia, blood and
pride spilling everywhere. What disconcerts in the behaviour here is the swaggering detachment with which people murder each other, the significance of the act being hidden under a bushel of cool. As events prove, none of the personalities are as cool as they imagine and no one wins out. James Brown's urban soul music is
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