The Monster Club (1981)

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

"The Monster Club" is sort of the unofficial final anthology film from Amicus, retaining Amicus veteran Milton Subotsky as a producer. It's great fun, especially in the wrap-around segments. These come complete with a devilishly entertaining performance by old pro Vincent Price, and a few musical numbers by acts such as Night, The Pretty Things, The Viewers, and B.A. Robertson. In fact, I dare say that the wrap-around portions are more entertaining than the individual stories! It's all done in high style by director Roy Ward Baker, who at this point was a seasoned genre veteran.Price plays Eramus, a vampire who sinks his teeth into the neck of renowned horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes (John Carradine, who has some priceless reactions to the goings-on), whose material provides the basis for each segment. As a means of apologizing for the "snack", Eramus introduces the writer to his favourite haunt, the Monster Club of the title. Here he educates Chetwynd-Hayes on the various types of monster offspring before the writer hears three different stories.Story # 1. "The Shadmock". Angela (the beautiful Barbara Kellerman) goes to work for Raven (James Laurenson), a creepy looking but pitiable character who only wants love. In truth, Angela and her boyfriend George (Simon Ward) only want to rob the guy, and when his heart is broken, he unleashes the deadly force of his "whistle". Laurenson is wonderful, and there's an effectively nasty ending.Story # 2. "The Vampire". A movie producer, Lintom Busotsky (Anthony Steel) - which, as you may well figure out, is an anagram of Milton Subotsky - tells the tale of his childhood, when he learned a macabre secret about his father (Richard Johnson), a count who is only out and about at night time. When Pickering (Donald Pleasence), leader of a "B squad", arrives on the scene, he intends to put an end to the fathers' days, only to fall victim to an unforeseen circumstance. Played partly for laughs, this is agreeable stuff, with a delightful performance by Johnson. Britt Ekland plays the young Lintoms' mother.Story # 3. "The Humgoo". A cantankerous horror film director, Sam (Stuart Whitman) scouts a remote location for a future production, and meets the decidedly decrepit locals. He also encounters the lovely young Luna (Lesley Dunlop), and tries to flee the place with her. He'll find that this is a very hard place to escape. The always welcome Patrick Magee co-stars as an innkeeper.With some of the soundtrack music supplied by the pop group UB40, "The Monster Club" is a good time for lovers of this format. It does know how to send its audience away with smiles on their faces.Eight out of 10.

Although Amicus broke up in 1975, Milton Subotsky carried on producing, making works like this and 1977's "The Uncanny" Amicus anthologies in a spiritual sense.Having said this, The Monster Club really is a horror movie at the end of an era. Most of these films look incredibly tame and dated in today's context and always struggle with the line between terror and camp. But The Monster Club is a film that genuinely attempts to be not only wilfully silly, but even post-modern, as the title quote suggests. Two of the three segments involve the movie industry, including a film within a film.Of those segments, then the final one, with a village of zombies-by-any-other-name is quite good, even though it does feature one of the most inexplicable moments in horror, the hero of the piece hailing down a police car and then not informing them that there's a dying girl just around the corner.What's most surprising though is how overt the comedy becomes. When I initially saw the inside of the titular Monster Club, with a hoard of completely unrealistic "monsters", I'd assumed it was some new wave club with humans wearing masks. The end of the film reveals that they are, in fact, supposed to be genuine creatures of the undead.Each of the three segments are breached by a musical number, all of which are pretty good, but feel like they belong in a different picture. Vincent Price delivering a monologue about the evil of man to the skinny tie brigade may feel like an anachronism, but just three years later he was further cementing his status as an icon with his vocal performance on Thriller.Placing The Monster Club in an historical context reveals much. Old-school horrors like grown men wearing plastic fangs can compel because of the innate classiness of the production, but there's no such sophistication here. I'm no major fan of the slasher genre, but when you consider that guest star Donald Pleasence had made Halloween just two years earlier then it throws into perspective how antiquated Monster Club was.As for the likes of B.A. Roberton as the musical performers, then just two years later Annabella Lwin of Bow Wow Wow was derogatorily calling him a "hippy" and telling him his interview show was "s***". The old crashes uncomfortably into the new, and The Monster Club tries unsuccessfully to marry the two in a brief window of opportunity.

Many years ago this reviewer subscribed to fantasy-horror magazine 'Starburst', then in its infancy and rivalling 'Fangoria' for its lurid colour photos of blood, guts and exploding latex. One such issue covered new release The Monster Club, and to this 10-year-old it looked utterly brilliant, with its gallery of werewolves, vampires and ghouls. There was even a woman with a melty face! Yet if pre-teens had actually been allowed to see it, they might have found it less impressive. The monster masks alone, fashioned by freelance designer Vic Door, who also worked at a milk processing plant, are laughable when compared with those from the Mos Eisley Cantina just three years before - lending understandable succour to the myth that they were made by producer Milton Subotsky's milkman.Amicus Studio's death-rattle, and a homage to the 1970s glory years of its portmanteau horrors, if The Monster Club has accrued a certain cult status it's mostly down to its sheer awfulness; yet, bafflingly, The Monster Club, adapted from Chetwynd-Hayes' 1976 novel of the same name, does in fact boast a highly experienced and occasionally impressive pedigree.In director Roy Ward Baker it had the man behind cult horrors like The Legend Of The Seven Golden Vampires, The Vault Of Horror, Asylum - and, most famously, Quatermass And The Pit. As a screenwriter, Amicus co-founder Subotsky had also penned a number of culty items, including I, Monster and Dr Terror's House Of Horrors. Cinematographer Peter Jessop had shot the schlocky likes of Frightmare, Venom and Schizo. But most importantly, it stars a real horror triumvirate of greatness:- Vincent Price, John Carradine and Donald Pleasence - along with veterans from past Amicus films Britt Ekland and Geoffrey Bayldon (here reprising an earlier role as an asylum keeper).This may have been made in 1980, but tonight they're going to party like it's 1973. To a frightful new wave soundtrack supplied by UB40 and BA Robertson who sings "I'm just a sucker for your love." Oh yes, a strange concoction indeed. But ranged against the likes of classic Amicus anthologies such as From Beyond The Grave (another Chetwynd-Hayes miscellany) even its dubious cult status is unwarranted - although the song "Monsters Rule OK" is pleasingly jaunty, and you do get to see Vincent Price and John Carradine disco dancing.In keeping with the Amicus tradition, the film features a handful of not-very-creepy tales, plus a 'comedy' story for light relief, linked by a story-within-a-story - here played out between Price's vampire Eramus (his fangs are retractable when not in use) and horror writer Chetwynd-Hayes himself, played by Carradine. After necking his favourite author, Eramus ferries him to his members club by way of an apology, where they're subjected to forgotten new wave bands ("down at the monster club/a zombie and a ghoul can do the monster dub"), along with "every kind of monster you could ever imagine... and some far beyond the imagining of mere mortals" - which is just not true, unless you're actually incapable of imagining a one pound joke shop mask.Price also inducts him into the arcane mysteries of monster genealogy, handily illustrated on a wall-chart (scroll away at leisure): "A vampire and a werewolf would produce a werevamp, but a werewolf and a ghoul would produce a weregoo. But a vampire and a ghoul would produce a vamgoo. A weregoo and a werevamp would produce a shaddy. Now, a weregoo and a vamgoo would produce a maddy, but a werevamp and a vamgoo would produce a raddy. Now, if a shaddy were to mate with a raddy or a maddy, the result would be a mock." Once we've waded through that gibberish (and how it must have pained the eloquent and mellifluous Price to utter it) we sample the delights of a stripper who takes her performance all too literally, and are told three tales, the first and most atmospheric of which is about a 'shadmock' (the lowest on the monster food chain) who possesses a deadly whistle - the Roger Whittaker variety, not the referee's aid.In the second, a vampire dad foils a vampire killer with... "a stake-proof vest!" The final story concerns a remote village of human-munching ghouls. Having convinced the author of the inherent humanity of his kind ("there is nothing sadder than the agonised grief of a tender-hearted monster"), Price counters that the 'real' monsters are humans. And to that we must add, jaded screenwriters.

1st watched 12/22/2008,(Dir-Roy Ward Baker): Strange group of 3 horror stories combined with weird live musical interludes from current British artists of the time(supposedly). The stories that the movie is based on were written by a popular horror writer and that writer is portrayed in the movie by John Carradine. He meets up with a real vampire, played by Vincent Price, who takes him to the "Monster Club", which is where the rest of the movie is set. The Monster Club is a strange hippi-like club in which only vampires, werewolves, ghouls or a combination of any of those thru mating can join. The stories start at various times and are interesting with the first being the best, but the silliness surrounding them lessons their impact. Vincent Price has some funny lines but there isn't much else appealing in this movie. The second and third stories are forgettable and therefore the overall affect of the movie is a negative one. The attempt, I believe, was to honor monster movies, but despite many other horror character actors appearing it doesn't do a very good job at this.