Horror Hospital (1974)

Robin Askwith before he started doing his 'Confessions' plays a jaded rock star who gets sent to a country retreat to chill out. On the way there he meets a girl (Vanessa Shaw) who is also on her way to the retreat to see her aunt.Well once they arrive at the Gothic mansion it is not long before Askwith cops off with the lovely Shaw but soon realises that something is not right in this health farm.The sinister Dr Storm is performing brain surgery on the guests that lobotomises them where they are in effect zombies. If anyone escapes then various sinister henchman go after them or a limousine with sharp blades will decapitate them, although you will wonder how that is possible, maybe chop you knees off but not your head!Shaw realises that his aunty is in with this demented scheme with Dr Storm and they try to escape aided by the resident dwarf.The film is certainly bizarre, some sex, some exploitation, camp and it is ludicrously demented but it does not always amount to fun and is certainly not very scary.Michael Gough really dials it up as the campy Dr Storm and his assorted oddball assistants just adds to the bizarre. However it is not very scary and often silly especially when Shaw's boyfriend suddenly turns up looking for her. Still if you are looking for a curious 1970s mild British horror, you can drop in at the Horror Hospital.

1973's "Horror Hospital" is never as amusing as it would like to be, a script full of witty asides, just not enough incident and too much padding to kill an hour and a half. The great Michael Gough does get one of his rare starring roles (usually in low budget horror), as resident mad scientist Dr. Christian Storm, whose 'hospital' is located at a huge country estate guarded by motorcycling hoodlums, a former brothel madam, and a dwarf caretaker (Skip Martin), who effortlessly steals his scenes (watch out for the car that gets a head of yours!). Into this outré menagerie come Jason (Robin Askwith) and Judy (Vanessa Shaw), ostensibly for a holiday, which lasts approximately five seconds before they realize something strange is going on. One tends to wait patiently for the next amusing line as one attempted escape after another is predictably foiled; meanwhile, Gough's relatively restrained (for him) deadpan works wonders when he finally enters a half hour in, relishing his sexual power over his mindless, beautiful subjects. Director Antony Balch harkened back to Bela Lugosi and Angelo Rossitto in fashioning the scenario, particularly 1942's "The Corpse Vanishes." In his next-to-last role, genre veteran Dennis Price is reduced to playing a camp travel agent, appreciatively eyeing Jason's crotch, but does enjoy one priceless moment in a 'mirror mirror on the wall' routine. In what turned out to be her very last role, Vanessa Shaw is never less than appealing, but fades into the background halfway through. What really drags it down is the appalling Robin Askwith (coming off like a poor man's Nicky Henson), still a year away from his successful quartet of "Confessions" features, where a bevy of luscious Hammer starlets such as Linda Hayden assured their immortality by disrobing for the camera.

Perhaps the late great Michael Gough's last stab at a leading role and he relishes it, but the film (made for another prominent exploitation figure, Richard Gordon) lets him down pitifully! Incidentally, I guess the reason why his name is not as well-known (apart from aficionados) as that of, say, Vincent Price or Christopher Lee is that, even at his best, the overall quality of the films were markedly inferior! Anyway, this pits him in another typical environment – people being sent to a health clinic come face to face with their worst nightmare; similarly, we have a reconstituted fire victim for a villain with a dwarf as his all-purpose servant (played by Skip Martin). The hero is the future star of the sexy "Confessions" series Robin Askwith, while his female counterpart (who does little throughout the film but disrobe and scream her head off!) proves to be the niece of Gough's assistant and lover, a former Madam whose clients had served as the doctor's guineas pigs!! Typically, he intends building an army made up of wholly subservient subjects; amusingly, they are frequently made to exercise in his private gym but this does nothing to remove the very conspicuous scars on their lobotomized foreheads! Also on hand is Dennis Price as the bemused (and openly gay) tour agent who advertises Gough's specialized treatment; a review I read claims his performance is hilarious but, to me, it only felt embarrassing! His character is eventually revealed to have been blackmailing Gough, but he is disposed of before long (as are a number of others) in inventively grisly fashion via decapitation-by-blades protruding from the doctor's Rolls Royce (with a strategically-placed basket to catch the falling head)! There is also the sinister elderly station master (perhaps intended to evoke Boris Karloff!) who informs Gough of new arrivals. What to make, then, of the slimy Swamp Thing-like monster which is revealed to be hiding under the villain's 'synthetic flesh'…?! P.S. For a more rewarding (and sobering) contemporaneous film on the same themes, try Alain Jessua's SHOCK TREATMENT aka DOCTOR IN THE NUDE starring Alain Delon and the late Annie Girardot.

Horror Hospital is far too silly to be taken seriously, but that's what makes the film so good! The film throws in one illogical sequence after another, and if you tried to account for all the events in the movie and make sense of them; you'd be completely wasting your time. In fact, if you're watching this film you are, in fact, wasting your time, but the film makes up for this by being lots of fun and this ensures that it's always delightful. The film clearly knows that it's trash rather than a serious horror film, and this is shown throughout by the tongue-in-cheek mood that runs through it. The filmmakers clearly couldn't keep a straight face while making this film and that translates onto the screen. The ridiculous plot follows the insane Dr Storm and his "heath farm". After travelling there for a holiday and meeting a young lady on her way to see her aunt (who works at the "health farm"), a British man named Jason finds that his holiday might not be going as planned, and once he finds out that the not-so-good doctor is conducting experiments into making zombies; Jason, the girl and some other bloke that turns up must make a bid for freedom! When it comes to bad movie-making, this film has it all; a terrible script, duff cinematography, useless actors delivering stupid performances, daft music, a clichéd, rip-off ridden and implausible plot and the list goes on.... yet, somehow, it all moulds together into something very watchable. I think another reviewer summed it up best when he talked about the hilarious sequence that sees the utterly superfluous character, Abraham, introduced into the film. I actually had to rewind that part of the film about five times just to fully take in how amazingly stupid it is. The film is full of moments like that, and that's why this piece of trash appeals much more than the standard trash that was produced en mass in the seventies. Michael Gough helps to make this film a winner with his delightfully over the top camp performance as the 'evil' Dr Storm. You can always count on Gough to overact and make himself look silly, and that's exactly what he does here. On the whole, if you like your movies to be serious; you wont get an ounce of enjoyment out of Horror Hospital. But if you like them to be stupid and camp - prepare for a truly GREAT ride!