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Gary Sherman's opening poses the Britannia of old (bowler hat and suit, waxed mustache and umbrella) against glowing strip-joint neon, allying the young American filmmaker in London with the Hitchcock of Frenzy. The first victim is a government official, "a geezer with a lot of stick" spotted on the Russell Square Station floor by a college student (Sharon Gurney) and her American beau (David Ladd), no stranger to finding bodies in subways ("In New York, we call it a holiday when we don't"). Disappearances in the underground, "it's like a rabbit warren down there," the Scotland Yard inspector (Donald Pleasence) is still stuck with the mystery of teabags. The culprit is a catacomb dweller (Hugh Armstrong), feral, pestilent, savage, tender, last survivor of a festering subculture, very much in need of a new bride. "What a way to die. What a way to live." Literally an upstairs-downstairs matter, the mining injustices of The Stars Look Down transmuted into return-of-the-oppressed horror, quite richly filmed. Sherman reveals the rotting Victorian remains in an extended tour de force, a continuously moving camera from close-up of a rodent to hanging corpses to the cannibal's lair to the tunnels to the pile of skeletons right under a platform—a cabinet of tragic nightmares gradually illuminated, scored to dripping water and bereft moans. The buried proletariat ("There was no money" in them for the company, simple as that), a tradition of suppression continued by the traffic warden (Christopher Lee) with a knack for baroque intimidation. "Your dainty little footsteps are echoing in places one is well-advised to tread lightly." Craven in The Hills Have Eyes has allegorical troglodytes of his own to analyze. With Norman Rossington, June Turner, Clive Swift, and James Cossins.
--- Fernando F. Croce |