ANYONE who knows me knows I love a good 70s horror anthology film. In fact, the truth is I love a really bad 70s horror anthology film even more.
You know the kind of thing: a handful of spooky tales of terror are rolled out portmanteau style. They invariably contain an uneven mix of morbid humour, nasty murder and ghostly goings on and they usually get dismissed as utter tripe by most film critics. For me, though, these cheap and cheerful journeys into the unknown are like cinematic catnip.
I love everything about them, including the built-in 'twists in the tail' that you can spot coming from several miles off to the hastily cobbled together framing story, usually bringing the protagonists together to tell their tales on a train, in a club or even an insane asylum, that always holds them together.
There are plenty of well-known period faces to spot among the jobbing old British thespians who are slumming it until the theatre work picks up and everyone generally learns a little morality lesson at the end.
The 70s fashions are uniformly more horrific than the stories and the laughs are usually more plentiful than the thrills but still these economic little exercises in filmic fear hold an unnatural grip on my imagination.
You can put this passion down to years spent ogling late-night screenings of vintage Amicus epics like Tales From The Crypt and Vault Of Horror on BBC2 double bills or possibly the simple fact that my increasingly aged and addled mind is drawn to stories told in less than 20 minute chunks.
Whatever the reason, Tales That Witness Madness is an anthology film that’s right up my shady street. Directed by genre legend Freddie Francis and released in 1973, as the purple patch for portmanteau films faded from view, by a company called World Film Services, it’s a ridiculous piece of cult nonsense that is both gruesomely camp and hugely entertaining.
There are four stories to enjoy here, all told by a pre-Halloween Donald Pleasance as a kindly psychiatrist who lures a benefactor, played by the great Jack Hawkins in his final film role, to his asylum to meet his most troublesome patients.
There’s a young kid who watches his miserable rich parents fight and squabble all day until he sees them off with his supposedly imaginary tiger, which turns out to have a taste for human meat, a penny-farthing-riding old geezer who comes back to life to make the existence of a modern-day antique shop owner's day job an utter nightmare and a tale of everyday cannibalism with the beautiful Kim Novak that would put you off ever ordering another steak dinner for as long as you live.
Best of the bunch, though, is a story called Mel. Generally known by connoisseurs as “the one with Joan Collins getting kicked out of bed by a tree”, it’s a tale of a marriage breaking down due to a man's love of an old tree stump that is so odd you’ll never forget it. Much as you’d like to.
