I was very happy to see this come out on DVD, as I had never seen it before. Really, there are a comparatively small percentage of horror/sci-fi films made before 1970 that I haven’t seen at some point, and it’s always great to cross another one off the list. And this was a comparative biggie, as it starred Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and was adapted from a story by Robert Bloch. As the buff might guess, this indeed means that the film was produced by Amicus, the most successful company to emulate horror powerhouse Hammer Films.
The Skull proves to be pretty good (as you’d expect given the cast and all), although it’s also a fairly creaky slice of hokum that may garner more chuckles and eye-rolling than appreciation from younger horror fans. The story revolves around two collectors of occult items, played respectively by Cushing and Lee. A skeezy provider of such wares first offers author Cushing a tome handwritten by the Marquis de Sade, one bound in (gasp!) human flesh.
However, he later proffers a greater prize: de Sade’s very skull. The film’s premise is that this object is a hotbed of EEEEEEEE-vil, and sure enough, it possesses Cushing and rattles the furniture and even flies around. (The film’s trademark image, via director Freddie Francis—moonlighting from Hammer—are POV shots from inside the skull.)
This is all played absolutely straight, so it’s possible one’s appreciation of it will depend on your ability to give yourself over to its rather old school presentation of things that go bump in the night. The cast is great, as you’d expect, with even the supporting players nicely understated in that trademark British fashion. Cushing is typically spot on as the fellow whose lack of believe makes him particularly vulnerable to the Skull’s influence, while Lee plays against type as the collector who goes with his gut where the Skull is concerned. As usual, though, while utterly commanding, Lee comes off as rather stiff and cold. Again, though, this makes the assignment of roles here all the more interesting, since it’s a bit of a reversal for what you might expect.
The cast also offers up veteran Brit actors Nigel Green and Patrick Magee, but they rather rent-a-actors, who appear together in a pair of almost comically short scenes that patently were filmed in one day. Michael Gough also pops up for about 20 seconds. This sort of thing was pretty common, and allowed you to flesh out the cast list while sticking to a fairly shoestring budget. I’m sure this whole thing was shot in a couple of weeks. And while Bloch’s short story is perhaps just a bit thin to hang an entire movie on (and sure enough, Amicus’ specialty was horror anthologies like The House that Dripped Blood), Francis keeps the action lean enough to avoid boring the viewer.
The Skull looks good on DVD, and the widescreen presentation is naturally essential to enjoying the film. Legend Films has recently acquired the rights to several fairly obscure genre films, many Brit ones from this period, and they continue to roll out in pleasingly decent if not earthshaking releases: ZPG, The Possession of Joel Delaney, The Student Bodies, Jekyll and Hyde Together Again, The Busy Body, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Phase IV, The Deadly Bees, The Sender, and the insane looking ’70s Donovan flick The Pied Piper. Many of these are out already, although sadly, there’s still no release info for such flicks as Island of Terror or Night of the Big Heat.
Very nice stuff.
