Friday, June 12, 2015
THE STONE TAPE / British Broadcasting Corporation - 1972
It's Friday Fright, here at The Dungeon!.. Here's a rare little British TV movie written by the awesome Nigel (Quatermass) Kneale. The story goes like this... A research team from an electronics company move into an old Victorian house to start work on finding a new recording medium, but, when a female team member witnesses a ghost, the team director decides to analyze the apparition. He believes a psychic impression is trapped in a stone wall in the basement and decides to exorcise it, with terrifying results!
I've got a wild little sound clip from this movie for your approval, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button over by our missing wall stone, NOW, Rufus The Gnat!.. Here's a sample of... THE STONE TAPE!
It starts with some fun when one of the team members dresses up like an alien.
The group leader is Peter Brock, played by Michael (TORTURE GAEDEN) Bryant, also there is the only female member, Jill Greeley, played by pretty Jane (ALFIE) Asher. Here they are going over the game plan and inspecting the basement where they discover the wall stones. That's not a stone he's holding, it's a can of rations from WWII.
The locals are suspicious of the outsiders showing up at the supposedly haunted estate. I personally wouldn't want to get on the bad side of the waitress there!
Well, the experiments start and strange things begin to happen to some of the team members, which seem similar to the events that happened in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
I wanted to show this still because I'd really like to have this ghost monitor in The Dungeon!
Things are not going well and tempers are beginning to flare up, so...
A new special machine is loaned to the project by the military, now they should start getting the results they're looking for.
And, they do!.. Something has been released from the stones and seek out Jill!
The things are blobby like forms that seem overly aggressive, and, are actually a group of aliens from space.
They attack Jill and knock her off the stairs, killing her! Yep, Jill dies.
Later, when things have calmed down, Peter goes back to the basement only to be attacked and also killed! Not a great ending... We're back tomorrow for our Saturday the 13th posting!
Well, I've been looking forward to seeing The Stone Tape so no thanks for the spoiler, dammit. A WARNING would have been nice.
ReplyDeleteAlso: "the only female member, Jill Greeley, played by pretty Jane (ALFIE) Asher"
Well, exactly. Reflective of its era in my country of birth and residence - the UK - women were perceived, even by Kneale, as the psychically "sensitive" ones - in Quatermass and the Pit Barbara Shelley serves the same narrative function while the men do all the heavy dramatic lifting. And Ms Asher is more than the reductive "pretty" suggests (she was, incidentally, in Corman's Masque of the Red Death), and she is certainly much more than Paul McCartney's ex-girlfriend (as the UK press still see fit to remind us) - she is a highly distinguished, elegant actor on screen, TV *and* the British stage.
Hi iain - Thanks for the very interesting extra info... You should know that we don't ever do spoiler alerts, sorry about that - I just got this on a Sinister Cinema DVD-R, it started crapping out 10 minutes before the end of the movie but was able to get the sound clip and stills with no problem -
ReplyDeleteAfter 45 years, is it even considered a spoiler any more?
ReplyDeleteYes, Anonymous. It has only (fairly) recently resurfaced thanks to the British Film Institute.
ReplyDeleteSaw it on CreepsterTV.
ReplyDeletePretty darn scary, but the "spoiler" is wrong. It's not aliens, and {SPOILER} Peter does not die. Or is this a case of different versions?
Oops, thanks Randall, I thought I'd read that the things were alien, they look alien, glad Peter doesn't die...
ReplyDelete