THE rules for making a classic 60s exploitation film are simple. Hire a cheap and cheerful director with a penchant for B-movie bravado, chuck in lashings of clumsily shot sex sequences and teenage violence and maybe crowbar a star name into the filming schedule for a few days to prop up the box office interest. Corruption does all of that and so much more.
Made 50 years ago, it still ranks high as one of the most distasteful and sleazy slices of cinema in mainstream British big-screen history. Which is why cult movie vultures like me love it so much, of course.
Made by journeyman director Robert Hartford-Davies and starring that old gentleman of British horror Peter Cushing – in a role he claimed to be mortally embarrassed by – it’s a slick and sick exercise in shock cinema that holds up surprisingly well.
Cushing is medical man Sir John Rowan who, when he accidently causes his model girlfriend to be badly scarred at a photo shoot, sets out to dedicate his life to restoring her good looks by any means necessary. This entails killing a selection of women in deeply nasty ways and extracting their pituitary glands. With said glands at his disposal and courtesy of his fancy laser surgery skills, he then brings his glamorous lady (played by future Crossroads star Sue Lloyd) back to the world of the beautiful, if only for a little while. The need to keep on replenishing his stock means Rowan is forced to kill and kill again, taking to the seedy streets of the city to stalk his pretty prey.
Shot in a frantic and overtly 'groovy' style that often looks as if the cameraman is having a seizure, Corruption comes on like a Swinging London cash-in that’s undergone a morality bypass. It’s hard to watch the usually dignified Cushing lower himself down to the part of a serial killer in a film that really pushes the boundaries of taste and acceptability even today.
Of the supporting cast, David Lodge just about steals the show as Groper, an utterly creepy ageing gang member who dresses in full Sgt Pepper’s regalia. Odd barely covers it.
Writer Derek Ford could well be taking a satirical stab at the loose morals of youth in the 1960s but it’s more likely he’s just loving all the bare flesh and blood on show. Given that he went on to make a name for himself with low-rent sex films like The Wife Swappers, that seems pretty much a given.
The story of a surgeon trying to save a young woman’s face feels lifted from the classic Euro thriller Les Yeux Sans Visage (or to give it its British title Eyes Without A Face) but in reality this tawdry little pot boiler isn’t fit to lace the shoes of Georges Franju’s 1959 game changer.
Hartford-Davies would go onto the helm a number of interesting exploitation films like Incense For The Damned and The Fiend, but this is his murky masterpiece.
