Britain's
Victorian era: Professor Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing) returns from
an expedition to New Guinea, bringing with him an oversized skeleton not
dissimilar to your standard homo sapiens, but he claims that the
fleshless frame is the literal physical embodiment of evil. Rather than
do the sensible thing with so malignant a specimen and chuck it into
the nearest blast furnace, Hildern of course keeps the fucking thing in
his lab, where he of course conducts research upon it. Discovering that
the skeleton regenerates its flesh when wet, the eager scientist lops
off one of the creature's middle fingers, exposes it to water, and
examines its blood in detail, concluding that evil is a curable disease
and that an antidote can be made. Hildern is obsessed with this idea
because his wife suddenly went completely insane years earlier and died
in a mental institution, utterly shattering the professor, who still
keeps his wife's room and personal effects intact. His toothsome young
daughter, Penelope, is coming of age and Hildern (Lorn Helbron), worried
about his daughter possibly becoming mentally ill like her late mother,
keeps her on an over-protectively tight leash, a strategy that
inevitably backfires, so he injects the girl with his untested anti-evil
vaccine. This being a British horror movie in the Hammer mold (though
significantly not a Hammer film), Penelope goes batshit crazy and
escapes into the nearby village, where she runs amok at the local pub,
acting wantonly and basically becoming a violent savage. While all of
the aforementioned mishegoss is going on, Hildern's psychiatrist
brother, James (Christopher Lee), who envies his sibling's findings, is
granted custody of the now-feral Penelope, whom he takes to his mental
asylum for care. (Needless to say, the place is the kind of shrieking
madhouse where being a resident/patient would be a fate far worse than
death.) He also plots to steal Emmanuel's notes and the skeleton with
the aid of a shady carriage driver. While Emmanuel is out, James's
driver makes off with the skeleton but the carriage overturns in the
middle of a torrential rainstorm and, well, you do the math...
THE
CREEPING FLESH is another one of the number of horror outings that
played in fairly regular rotation on Channel 9 during my youth, so I saw
it a number times and have an odd love/hate opinion of it. On the one
hand it tries its damnedest to emulate the look and feel of Hammer's
signature Gothic shockers, even going so far as to nab Cushing and Lee
as its stars, and while it is not at all a bad film, the end result is
something of a letdown. It's not as nasty or gory as the films it tries
so hard to ape, and its twist ending always leaves me frustrated, with a
number of very good questions left unanswered. That said, it's still a
fun little piece and it's not bad as a starter horror film for kids of
about six and older. (NOTE: Don't necessarily use my age recommendation
as a solid indicator. I was exposed to horror as early as age 3 or 4, so
I was broken in very early. Your child's mileage may vary
considerably.)
Poster for the original theatrical release.
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