Zombos Says: Fair to Good

This review first appeared in We Belong Dead magazine, issue 14, published by Eric McNaughton. I highly recommend you pick up WBD, any issue. No. 14, in particular, is 100 pages, packed with articles, not commercial fluff, written by passionate fans of classic horror movies. Remember when Diabolique was actually good? Or when Fangoria wasn’t trying to sell you their DVD junk? Don’t sulk, start reading We Belong Dead.

Disappointed is the feeling that comes into play after reading journalist Brian McFadden’s Amicus Horrors. For someone who visited the British studio owned by two Americans, conducted interviews with Peter Cushing (arguably the best chapter in the book) and Vincent Price (the most threadbare chapter), there is an expectation of a more rewarding read to be found here. McFadden, however, writes as if he is churning out newspaper articles, leaving his book’s chapters disconnected from each other, causing noticeable repetition across them, and the inclusion of much material not related to Amicus padding their length and blurring his title’s focus. Like me, by the time you finish his book you may also be a tad annoyed at having read, again and again, why The Deadly Bees turned out so badly.

The Vincent Price at Amicus chapter, for instance, goes well beyond his movie efforts at Amicus. Redeeming its unnecessary movie career rundown are McFadden’s few interview notes: among them Price gives credit to Daniel Haller, the art director for Roger Corman’s Poe-inspired movies, as the man who gave them their expensive look, and an explanation for how Price spent his sizable expense account from AIP when he was on loan to Amicus—buying artwork, lots of artwork.

McFadden gives the history of Amicus, detailing how Milton Subotsky, who would come to handle the day to day production in Britain, joined with Max Rosenberg, who stayed in America to handle the financing. More or less, just blaming-the-teen-musicals seems to be the chief instigator. McFadden draws parallels between Subotsky’s script-writing experience with the multi-segment storylines supplying the musical numbers, threaded together by a simple plot, and Amicus’s notable portmanteau movies that followed, beginning with Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. In this chapter can also be found extensive background on Amicus’s first movie, The City of the Dead, where McFadden hints at Subotsky—a voracious reader—possibly being influenced by Richard Matheson’s Psycho, and how budget constraints helped the movie achieve its creepiness factor instead of hindering it.

Again and again, McFadden notes the key facets to the strategy Amicus used for keeping costs down and production values high. Aside from “renting a small bungalow at Shepperton Studios,” shooting scenes using the same set back to back to eliminate relighting and repositioning the cameras saved time and money, and hiring star actors for specific shoots that lasted only 2 or 3 days instead of having them wait around and getting paid for the wait kept budgets low. Subotsky also reasoned that paying for one or two stars for a segment in a portmanteau movie would attract an audience to sit through the entire movie, even if those stars appeared briefly.

Mentioned, but not fully explored, is why Amicus strayed from their successful horror portmanteau movies, coming at a time when Hammer’s success was waning, to do less successful movies that didn’t follow the omnibus format; or as McFadden wonders “why Amicus started trying to serve martinis when their stock and trade was beer and ale.” McFadden should have wondered more on this for our benefit.

After his promising and interesting second chapter, McFadden spreads the rest of his chapters thinly across the notable stars and supporting actors appearing in Amicus movies, an Amicus Filmography and Commentary, exploration on Amicus-Related Films and Amicus Imitators, two chapters best left to another book, and chapters on the music scoring and the Shepperton and Twickenham studio locations. His penchant for rattling off movies ad nauseam and straying from his Amicus focus becomes distracting, although you may find some of the straying rather interesting, like Peter Cushing’s adventures trying to attract studio attention in America and his brush with the Canadian Mounties.

Unnecessary is his chapter, A Brief Side Trip to Hammer, especially after McFadden’s premise that Hammer receives most of the attention and Amicus so little. He adds nothing new here, and leaves the reader wondering if he had a lot of notes and thoughts and decided to uncork them to flow in this book without seriously considering their relevance or discussion integrity as a whole. There’s one production note I did find surprising: I, Monster was supposed to be “3-D without classes” (the Pulfrich Effect) but wound up 2-D instead, leaving a lot of unnecessary camera movement to confound its audiences and annoy Christopher Lee.

While there is much to read here and there, more coverage on Amicus-related material is left wanting, leaving the reader wanting more than the pint he offers.