Paranoiac (1963)

This one is one of Hammer's better films... it is horror but more of a good dramatic mystery. The film does take a few twists and turns but it's not hard to figure out... it's how the movie mystery plays out that makes it so good.I have to agree with another reviewer this film almost an A film rather than a B. It's beautifully filmed, well acted, good story... it's a film I would definitely recommend to mystery lovers.Oliver Reed is gorgeous in this film and really just good to watch on screen as Simon Ashby. This is one of his better films.8.5/10

I understand that Freddie Francis's "Paranoiac" is a loose adaptation of Josephine Tey's "Brat Farrar", of which I had never heard until now. It sounds as though Hammer tried to make a number of movies like "Psycho". This one isn't a bad attempt. It focuses on a man who arrives at an estate on the coast of Dorset, England, claiming to be a brother long thought dead, causing a bunch of family secrets to come out.Oliver Reed's unctuous, irresponsible brother is the really intense character. He refuses to believe the newcomer and goes to great lengths to keep him out of the family. Reed's evil-looking face made him the perfect man for the role. A lot of the movie has the usual stuff that we see in these movies: screaming, eerie images, etc. I did like the cinematography showing the rocky English coast; the terrain looks as sinister as anything going on in the house. In the end "Paranoiac" isn't a great movie, but worth seeing, if only once.

It's "Brat Farrar", of course.Encountering a character called 'Simon Ashby' was jolt enough; but when it comes to a sister called Eleanor, a brother who supposedly drowned himself eight years ago, a mother and father dead in a plane crash, and even the precise wording of Patrick/Antony's suicide note, the plot coincidences have to be more than just an accident. It's ironic that so much credit is given to the ingenuity and originality of the plot, when not only the basic set-up but so many of the details stem directly from Josephine Tey's classic novel. And once one recognises the source (which, to be fair, took me a while: Eleanor's instability and ghost-sightings don't fit the pattern), it does inevitably rather diminish the suspense.Not entirely, though: enough has been changed to make the ultimate outcome uncertain. This is "Brat Farrar" Hammer-style, with heaving bosoms, sinister organ music and skeletons in the closet -- and minus the horses which play so significant a part in the action of the original. (As a result, while he clearly shares Brat's basic honesty and decency, the un-named impostor here has to duck the question of his history and motivation with the excuse that it would all take too long to explain!) Janette Scott, in a fairly thankless role, plays Eleanor as pretty much a standard Hammer maiden-in-distress, with a tendency to long flowing robes -- although re-casting the character as a mentally unstable hero-worshipper of her elder 'brother' adds a far stronger impact in this version to her distress at realisation of the sexual attraction between them. It is Oliver Reed who is outstanding here, as the attractive, vindictive and carelessly cruel Simon: as the film opens, he is presented almost as the hero, an unconventional breath of fresh air in a household stifled by appearances. By the end he is pure charming sociopath. (It was also a real eye-opener to see those unmistakable features morphed by youth and lack of dissipation into striking good looks: it had never occurred to me that one could simultaneously look like Oliver Reed and look handsome!) As the resurrected Tony, Alexander Davion provides a sensitive, grounded contrast to Simon's bravura display, managing to do far more than just walk through what could have been a very wooden part -- most of Tony's reactions and feelings are unspoken, but he holds his own against Reed as a screen presence, and presents Tony as the one stable anchor in a world of neurotics. John Bonney is also good in the minor role of flashy Keith Kossett, playing the Alec Loding part as semi-crooked originator of the imposture: this is one part of the rewrite that works well, providing convincing motivation for the scheme while economising on a lot of back-story. I'm afraid I didn't find the character of Aunt Harriet as a sort of incestuous wicked-step-mother particularly convincing. She bears no relation to gentle Aunt Bea in "Brat Farrar", and it is possibly as a result that the script never seems quite consistent in what it wants to do with her.Unfortunately it has to be said that the end of the film, where it abandons the tensions of the source material altogether to resort to more lurid melodrama, is probably the weakest. The Hammer "Hound of the Baskervilles" pulls off this sort of source-grafting to pretty good effect, but here the killer-clown and body-in-the-basement additions are in retrospect a bit weak, coming across as an attempt to provide some manifest horrors to please the punters rather than making much sense in the plot. (Guilt complex? Simon??) Also, the special effects were clearly a bit low-budget by this point.Still, it's quite an effective little chiller in its own right, with some blackly comic sequences: memorable chiefly, I suspect, for Oliver Reed, although this isn't entirely fair to the rest of the cast.

The first of Hammer's psycho thrillers but not one it's best. Maybe I shouldn't have watched it so soon after the excellent 'Nightmare', or indeed before it but there you go. Similar to 'Nightmare' in that it was scripted by Jimmy Sangster and directed by Freddie Francis, and again a plot revolving around who is mad, and who isn't, the film is only effective occasionally. There's cash to be inherited and Oliver Reed wants it, and he doesn't want to share it with his sister, Jeanette Scott. When Scott apparently sees her long-dead brother at a memorial service for her parents, Reed sees this as the excuse he needs to declare her insane and keep all the cash for himself. But to throw a spanner in the works, the dead brother turns up...... This is a competent film but needed a bit more. Francis makes the film look too bright, a few more dark corners and shadows would have helped build the atmosphere some. Reed's acting doesn't shift from 'intense' mode, which is fine but a bit more ambiguity would have helped in this type of film. The plot plods along at times and could have done with being tightened; there's also plot lines that simply disappear as if Sangster had forgotten about them. At the end of the day a mediocre Hammer. Watch Nightmare to see how it should have been done.