Friday, April 25, 2008

TORTURE GARDEN - Banks/Bernard/Martell - "I Hardly Knew The Man" (1967)

"Torture Garden" is a series of twisted tales of terror with a tricky ending brought to you by Amicus and director Freddie Francis. Out of the four stories, only one has cool jazzy music, and it is really excellent, like you could expect Art Farmer or Frank Strozier to step up and take a solo at any second. Composers Don Banks, and James Bernard get credit for the music, but Phillip Martell was involved too. By looking at his resume, I think James Bernard might be responsible for a lot of these swingin' scenes, having more of a jazz mentality in his compositions. 
 
And let's not forget to give a big thanks to the eye of Freddie Francis stalwart, Cinematographer Norman Warwick!! This is a great ferris wheel shot!!! 
 
Timothy Bateson as the carnival barker went on to be, among a bevy of other things, the voice of The Worm, The Four Guards, and Goblin in "Labyrinth", and has been seen recently as Kreacher in "Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix!" Go Timothy!!! What an awesome career! 
 
Here we have 60's bombshell Beverly Adams on the right, as Carla making a total mockery of her friendship with Millie played by Nicole Shelby! Nicole went on to be a regular on The Benny Hill TV Show. Beverly did some early surf movies before she went evil here & went on to marry Vidal Sassoon, had a reoccurring role in Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies as "Lovey Kravezit", and continued acting well into the 90's on TV and the movies!! 
 
This club is so cool, they even have a living snowglobe! Now if only a giant monster had reached in and grabbed it & shook it up, that would have been extra cool!! 
 
There's a lesson to be learned here, don't get drunk and start shooting off your big mouth, because you never know who is listening, Mike! 
 
Burgess Meredith does a splendid job as "My name is Diablo, Dr. Diablo!" 
 
"There's something going on, that I don't want to know anything about!!!"

1 comment:

Greg Goodsell said...

The penultimate Amicus horror omnibus has to be TALES FROM THE CRYPT! That film fried my brain permanently when I saw it as a wee urchin back in 1972 at a Saturday matinee. My mother had no idea what she was getting us into when we were dropped off at the Fox Theater.

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