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ACTOR
Rupert DaviesSheila KeithDeborah FairfaxPaul Greenwood
DIRECTOR
Pete Walker
SYNOPSICS
Frightmare (1974) is a English movie. Pete Walker has directed this movie. Rupert Davies,Sheila Keith,Deborah Fairfax,Paul Greenwood are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1974. Frightmare (1974) is considered one of the best Comedy,Horror movie in India and around the world.
Edmund and Dorothy Yates are freed after fifteen years in an asylum. Edmund covers up for his wife who is a murderer and a cannibal and Dorothy's daughter Debbie and stepdaughter Jackie, who live apart from them, may or may not have inherited her appetites. Dorothy has started to kill again...
Frightmare (1974) Reviews
Pete Walker's horror masterpiece: As intense now as it ever was...
"Frightmare" is one of those films that sticks in your mind from the moment you first see it which, considering the relative daftness of its basic premise, is some achievement. Rupert Davis and the always-excellent Sheila Keith are both on top form as Edmund and Dorothy Yates, a married couple who, in 1957, are deemed insane in a court of law and sentenced to spend their lives in an asylum until such time as they are deemed "fit to take their place in society". Their offence? Well, it seems Dorothy has been committing acts of "pathological cannibalism" (or to put it simply, she's been killing folk and eating their craniums for a little while now) whilst Edmund, despite not being involved directly, is also labelled mad for not trying to stop her even though he was fully aware of her unusual activities. Fifteen years down the line and they are both "cured" for all intents and purposes, thus let out and sent off to live in a creepy old farmhouse somewhere in the countryside of South-East England. Possibly not a good idea. Edmund has acquired a job chauffeuring around a local aristrocrat but during those long, lonely days at the farm cottage, it doesn't too long before Mrs Yates is looking for something to occupy her time productively. She takes out an advert in London magazine Time Out offering her services as a tarot reader and before long is visited regularly by lost souls looking for guidance. The bulk of her visitors are utterly lonely individuals, no friends, no lovers, no family to speak of and you're probably already ahead of me if you've guessed that when Dorothy draws the DEATH card, it's a lot more literal than you might expect. Yes, she's back to her old "pathological cannibalism" tricks, killing folk and eating their craniums... Crikey! But to make things even more interesting, Edmund has a daughter from a previous marriage who was old enough at the time of her father being committed to be aware of his circumstances. She now lives in London and is also currently the legal guardian of her younger sister, Edmund and Dorothy's only biological daughter together, who was born the very year her parents were locked away and believes them to be dead. The plot thickens somewhat here but to tell any more would be really spoiling things. Trust me though, it's good stuff. But, as I say, it sounds like a reasonably standard issue horror premise you might think, but in the hands of Walker and his screen writing partner-in-crime David McGillivray, it becomes something entirely more powerful. As with "House of Whipcord", Walker uses much inspired photography and gifted use of light and locations to create a grimy atmosphere of unpleasantness that gives you the creeps without once employing the standard "creepy" clichés. The scenes in the farmhouse manage to pull off a genuine sense of menace even before anything particularly nasty has happened. By the time the seriously horrible stuff starts, the tension has already reached fever-pitch and you're balanced on the edge of your seat, biting your nails and shrieking like a schoolgirl. The quality of the acting (quite rare for a film of "Frightmare"'s budget) helps too, although none of the actors give a particularly 'conventional' performance. In honesty, I could imagine some of them would be quite bad indeed in the hands of a lesser director but somehow Walker manages to extract a strange, hard-to-explain intensity from even the least 'naturally' talented cast members. Needless to say this means that with someone as strong an actress as Sheila Keith, we're talking a tour-de-force performance! As Dorothy she is quite unforgettable, playing a genuinely very disturbed, horribly lunatic individual without once resorting to hokiness or hamming it up. Instead, aided by the strength of the screenplay, she gives Dorothy a worrying sense of genuine pathos - she honestly believes the people she kills are so lost and lonely they would be better off without life and, on top of that, McGillivray and Walker even provide a legitimate, believable reasoning behind her cannibalism, all too rare in this type of film. When this pathos is coupled with the extremity of her nastiness and complete insanity, it leaves us, by the final reel, with a genuinely very threatening, very unpredictable and seemingly very, very *REAL* terror. Of course, the final reel is another kettle of fish altogether, worthy of paragraph upon paragraph of analysis - sadly, that would be spoiling things. Let's just say that by the end of the film, there have been so many stones overturned and everyone seems so dysfunctional that, as a viewer, you're thrown into a state of sheer confusion, having no idea how things will end. By the time the final, mortifying frame freezes on the screen and the credits begin to roll, you're left mindblown. It's a depraved and wild plot line so loaded with twisted-up Freudian implications that even Andy Milligan would be proud - in fact, it's very nearly like watching an Andy Milligan movie as shot by Hitchcock at times... which, as anyone who's ever come across Milligan would testify to, is a mightily strange and heady experience indeed... Oh, and, trust me, after watching "Frightmare" you may never be able to hear the sound of a Black and Decker power drill again without a very, very cold shiver running down your spine... I'm sure I don't need to harp on much more - I consider this an absolute classic of British horror. I think it's a crying shame that Walker is often lumped in with his budgetary peers from the Euro-sleaze market when a film as brilliant as "Frightmare" could quite easily wee from a great height on Hammer's entire 1970's output in the 'outright terror' stakes alone. Intense, intelligent and... invigorating. They *REALLY* do not make horror anywhere near this good any more, more's the pity.
One of the greatest exploitation movies of the 1970's
FRIGHTMARE Aspect ratio: 1.75:1 Sound format: Mono After serving a lengthy prison sentence for acts of murder and cannibalism, a 'fragile' old lady (Sheila Keith) is released into the care of her husband (Rupert Davies) and they retire to a farmhouse deep in the English countryside. But old habits die hard... One of the great exploitation titles of all time, FRIGHTMARE (1974) has often been described as the UK's answer to "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" (1974) due to its bleak scenario and uncompromising violence, toplined by elderly murderess 'Dorothy Yates' (Keith), who lures unwary victims to her isolated farmhouse with promises of Tarot readings and stabs them to death with various household implements. Davies' daughter from a previous marriage (Deborah Fairfax) suspects Keith is still insane and enlists the aid of her psychiatrist boyfriend (Paul Greenwood). But Keith and Davies have another daughter (Kim Butcher), conceived just before their incarceration, and she's beginning to show disturbing signs of following in her mother's footsteps... Having infuriated tabloid hacks with his barely-disguised assault on the Christian Right in HOUSE OF WHIPCORD (1974), director Pete Walker conceived the notion of cannibalism in the Home Counties (!) and commissioned a screenplay from "Whipcord" scribe David McGillivray, a critic-turned-scriptwriter who later became an outspoken opponent of British film censorship (watch for his brief, wordless cameo as a white-coated doctor). The result is one of the best British horror movies of the 1970's. True, the fashions have dated badly and there are too many dialogue exchanges in drab apartments, but the film's antiquated charm is difficult to resist. Most of the film's Grand Guignol horrors unfold within Keith's crumbling farm, an Olde Worlde slaughterhouse far removed from the bright lights of the big city. Walker has described his approach as 'modern Gothique', an unsettling antidote to the safe, predictable (but still enjoyable) Hammer formula, and perfectly suited to an era defined by its social and political turmoil. Production-wise, the film is competent but unexceptional. The young leads are OK, nothing more, though Butcher is suitably unpleasant as the sociopathic daughter, and there are brief, throwaway cameos from British movie stalwarts Leo Genn (THE WOODEN HORSE) and Gerald Flood (PATTON), both cast purely for marquee value. Veteran character actor Davies is particularly impressive as the distraught husband who is incapable (and ultimately unwilling) to curtail his beloved wife's monstrous cravings. Immensely popular at the time due to his role on British TV as Inspector Maigret, he was singled out for special attention by outraged critics, appalled by his involvement in such 'lowbrow' material, though it wasn't the first time this 'respectable' actor had dabbled in exploitation (see also "Dracula Has Risen from the Grave", "Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General", "The Oblong Box", etc.). As it turned out, FRIGHTMARE was Davies' last film - he died in 1976. But the true star of the show is Sheila Keith, an unpretentious, supremely gifted actress who came late to the film business and stayed just long enough to leave an indelible impression on cult movie fans worldwide. As portrayed here, Dorothy Yates' pathetic frailty conceals a ruthless psychopath, capable of the most horrendous atrocities, and the demonic expression which transforms Keith's face as she stalks her helpless victims is as blood-freezing as anything in the genre. Nowhere is this more evident than in an extraordinary sequence - completely unexpected in a British horror movie at the time - when Keith uses an electric drill to mutilate the head of a corpse which she's hidden in the barn... NB. The original UK trailer is an exploitation gem which refuses to show more than a few brief moments of footage from the film, claiming the rest of it is too shocking for public exhibition!!
Visit the farm and you might just buy the farm.
By the 70s, British horror audiences were growing tired of creaky old Gothic horror—bad news for Hammer, whose stock-in-trade was vampires and man-made monsters, but good news for Pete Walker, whose more exploitative brand of horror featured homicidal maniacs that more than satisfied the viewers' blood-lust. Frightmare (1974) is one such film, a demented tale of a crazy married couple, Edmund and Dorothy Yates (Rupert Davies and Sheila Keith), committed to an asylum for murder and cannibalism, but released fifteen years later, supposedly rehabilitated. Of course, doctors are known to get things wrong from time to time, and dotty Dorothy turns out to be not quite as sane as she had led people to believe. Dorothy's stepdaughter Jackie (Deborah Fairfax) is convinced that she has matters under control, feeding her stepmother brains bought from a butcher's shop, but she hasn't counted on the involvement of her delinquent 15-year-old half-sister Debbie (the aptly named Kim Butcher), who turns out to be a chop off the old block. With a drilling, a pitch-forking, a hot poker impalement, and a dead guy with an eye missing from the socket, Frightmare certainly delivers gruesome entertainment by the bucket-load, yet also features stylish direction and some winning performances, particularly from Keith who is genuinely frightening as nutso Dorothy, and jail-bait Butcher, who is equally as scary but also adds a little titillation by prancing around the kitchen in her scanties 7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.
Quite deranged...rather great!
It's 'granny goes gaga' in this genuinely creepy bone-chiller, surprisingly well directed by Peter Walker and penned down by David McGillivray. The power of this 'Frightmare' simply lies in its primitive goal to shock and to disturb the viewer by showing the disastrous fade of poor, innocent victims. *** small spoilers*** The eerie black and white opening sequences introduce us to an elderly couple on trial for a series of savage murders. Dad is pretty much sane and a devoted husband, but mum suffers from cannibalistic characteristics. 15 years later, they're freed from the asylum and declared properly sane. Even though they now live in a quiet farm outside the town and receive many visits from their oldest daughter Jackie, mommy (Dorothy Yates) resumes her old disgusting habits by enticing lonely people to the farm with the offer or reading their futures in cards. Things get even more complex when Jackie's psychiatrist boyfriend digs up matters from the past and the couple's youngest daughter Debbie seems to have inherited mom's relentless sense of cruelty and taste for blood. *** end spoilers *** There's very few background in the story and not even a proper attempt to analyze the psychological elements the plot handles about. Frightmare wants to shock you, and from that viewpoint, it's a very successful package of eeriness. Multiple scenes are loaded with tension and leave you with a very uncanny aftertaste in your stomach. There's quite a lot of offensive gore in the film and the mind-blowing climax skyrocketed the cult-value of this film, back in the early seventies. If you're not too easily petrified, I certainly recommend checking this film out.
Cynical, depressing .... quite brilliant
Peter Walker, the director of this notorious British horror film, said that he wanted audiences to leave the cinema feeling angry and frustrated after seeing it. He succeeds. Unpleasant and cynical though "Frightmare" may be, it is brilliantly made and cleverly written. We move between two worlds, of 70s juvenile delinquency in the heart of London and the chintzy, old-fashioned farmhouse inhabited by Rupert Davies and Sheila Keith. What unites both worlds, shockingly, is violence and murder. There are other dualities in the film. There is the generation gap, between the elderly couple and their children and the gender gap, for here is a horror film where it is women who are the aggressors and the men are impotent onlookers or helpless victims. The acting is remarkably good, right down to the bit parts, such as the hapless little man (played by Andrew Sachs of "Fawlty Towers" 'Manuel' fame)who is the first victim, in the film's moody, black-and-white pre-credit sequence. But the real honours are stolen by Sheila Keith, at times pathetic, at times terrifying as Mrs Yates and by Rupert Davies as her defeated, despairing husband. Parts of the film look a little cheesy and dated but it is still a remarkably powerful work. The music score is a bonus too - in place of the usual screeching brass, Stanley Myers score is subtle, eerie and menacing. I can't really recommend this film as "fun" viewing and it is light years away from the comforting certainties of Hammer's Gothic tales, where good always conquers evil. But "Frightmare" is that rare beast - a genuinely disturbing and unnerving horror film.