Prime Time: The Monster Club (1981)

An Amicus anthology horror movie in almost every way, apart from the fact that it came along a few years after Amicus was no longer active, The Monster Club is a mixed experience for fans of these films, and fans of the stars involved.

John Carradine plays a horror writer who has some blood drawn from his system by a polite vampire (Vincent Price) before the grateful drinker invites him along to the titular club. There, in between a number of stage acts, he is told three spooky stories. The first is all about a creature known as a Shadmock (played by James Laurenson), the second is a comedic tale about a vampire (Richard Johnson), and the third is all about a village full of ghouls.

Carradine may be playing an onscreen version of R. Chetwynd Hayes (the author of the source material, even if the stories changed a fair bit from book to screenplay form, the latter written by Valerie and Edward Abraham), and there may be some obvious winks and gags for horror film fans (such as a character named Lintom Busotsky, a crude and simple play on the name of producer Milton Subotsky), but it's a great shame that the majority of the film avoids other opportunities for some meta humour. What we get, instead, are some moments that show director Roy Ward Baker doing his damnedest to prove that he could supply entertainment for modern horror audiences who had turned their backs on the comforting bloodshed supplied by the likes of Hammer, Amicus, Tigon, etc. I might find it amusing to watch a song performed by B. A. Robertson, and there's a great gag involving a stripper (although the film is a pretty tame affair with no nudity shown), but it's hard to imagine anyone viewing the film in 1981 leaving the cinema with anything other than a sense of disappointment. I have always had a soft spot for it, but that's because I first saw it as a pre-teen.

Price is as much fun as he usually is, Carradine spends most of his time looking around in mild bemusement (no surprise, considering the strange assortment of masks being worn by the people pretending to be monsters in the club), and the best performance in the three tales comes from Laurenson, playing a sweet and tragic, but also dangerous, creature. Barbara Kellerman and Simon Ward are also involved in his story, and both do well enough to make it the most consistently enjoyable one. The second tale, featuring Johnson, is a big step down, with Britt Ekland and Donald Pleasence wasted in their supporting roles, although it's at least fun to see Pleasence given much lighter material in the genre than he was usually given. Stuart Whitman, Lesley Dunlop, and Patrick Magee star in the third, and final, tale. They do well enough, but it's more about the atmosphere, with the main village feeling like a small British counterpart to the location features in The City Of The Dead.

The execution of the material is fairly clumsy, the humour is a lot more childish than viewers may expect (making this a surprisingly okay choice for a family viewing), and it's a far cry from the past glories of the British horror movie industry. Having said that, you get to spend time with some enjoyably familiar faces, the penny-pinching doesn't remove the sheer sense of fun, and there's actually a pretty good punchline to round it all off. It's not a good movie, but it has a charm to it that may lead to you occasionally thinking as fondly of it as I do.

5/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.