LATE-night telly schedules are not what they used to be. Where now only Stepford Wives-style shopping channels and all-night gambling clip joints with their stench of lonely desperation reside once lurked a whole seedy underworld of wonderful cult movies just waiting to be discovered.
As a square-eyed youth with an unquenchable thirst for such thrilling midnight movies, I was often to be found glued to the box in the early hours when all of decent society had turned in for the night and the only viewing public left were drunken students, end-of-tether insomniacs and slavering cult hounds like me.
Of the many murky B-movie delights I remember hungrily devouring back then, Tower Of Evil stands proud from the crowd as something truly special in its own decidedly dopey way.
Released in 1972 – a fine vintage for low-rent cult curios, that – it’s a dumb but entertaining slice of British horror sleaze. A cheap and cheerful tale of a fog-shrouded island where an old lighthouse plays host to an axe-wielding maniac, it has everything a proper 70s cult classic should have.
It’s got all the needless nudity and gratuitous gore you could hope for. It’s got a whole raft of groovy teenagers – including a pre-Confessions movies Robin Askwith – heading blissfully to their doom in tie-dye vests and flared jeans and it’s got the kind of unwittingly hilarious script that was just perfect for repeating to your mates down the pub.
It was also clearly cheap enough for TV companies to buy up for endless repeats throughout the 1980s. A perfect film for a nighthawk of the small screen like me, in other words.
Re-released this month on Blu-ray by Odeon Entertainment, it’s lost none of its faintly creepy charm either.
Directed by TV journeyman Jim O’Connolly (whose credits included The Saint) and produced by the great Richard Gordon (whose CV could boast such no-budget shockers as Horror Hotel and Devil Doll), it was shot at Shepperton for the kind of budget that wouldn’t cover a day’s catering on a modern-day TV drama.
It all begins when a couple of gnarly old fishermen are attacked on a fogbound island by a hatchet-swinging teenager. When said madwoman is dragged back to the mainland and subjected to some half-baked psychological interrogation it becomes clear something evil is living on the island that needs investigating.
As the young girl, played by Candace Glendenning, flashes back to the horror she saw on the island we get to meet the dimly lit teenagers I mentioned earlier. With their talk of "jazz festivals" and "funny cigarettes" these cliché-ridden creations are great fun and there’s much gory enjoyment to be had watching them each meet their grisly fate.
There are making-of docs, interviews and trailers galore added to the disc that suggest we’re talking of a lost horror classic here. We’re not. What Tower Of Evil is, though, is hugely entertaining. A precursor to the so called slasher movie that would torment the genre later that decade, it’s fun in a cheap and faintly sordid way.
