The Mutations
I INTERVIEWED the great Tom Baker once and, after the obvious Doctor Who questions were out of the way, I asked him about the various low budget horror films he'd made back in the early 1970s, before his Time Lord payday arrived.
How, I wondered, did such a fine actor cope with having to trot out some of the awful dialogue he was asked to spout in cheap and cheerful cult classics like Vault Of Horror and The True Story? "Dear boy," he told me, in that unmistakably sonorous voice, "when I got sent the script I only read my own lines and ignored everything else!"
Having just revisited The Mutations, a particularly low rent B-movie he graced in 1974, I can clearly see it's the only way he could sleep at night. As schlock horror pot boilers go, this is seriously sordid. Don't get me wrong: it's a lot of fun, in the way that only morally bankrupt tatty old zero budget B-movies can be, but it still leaves you feeling like you need a quick shower after watching it.
Directed by the great Jack Cardiff, whose work as a cinematographer on upmarket gems like The Red Shoes and A Matter Of Life And Death is rightly revered, The Mutations is a shady little tale that stars Donald Pleasence as a mad botanist who attempts to crossbreed a human and a plant.
Our half-crazed horticulturalist experiments on students from his college and the results are less than satisfactory. Miserable mish-mashes of people and plants, the victims – with titles like 'Lizard Lady', 'Frog Boy' and the unforgettable 'Popeye', are left to earn their living lurking around in the shadows of a freak show. Yes, it seems freak shows were still a thing in 1970's exploitation cinema land.
Mr Baker weighs in as the demented Don's go-to-guy for victims, with the future Doctor Who picking out the students for his master to practice his gardening skills on and then delivering them to him to his cheap and cheerful surgery. Baker's face may be mostly hidden behind a rubbish children's Halloween mask, to cover what we're told is his hideous disfigurement, but he does get to wear a big floppy hat and massive trailing scarf which suggest his imminent Time Lord wardrobe was at least on his mind at this point. His voice is somewhat muffled by that atrocious fright mask, but he still gets to mumble some of the most Z -rade lines imaginable all the same.
As the for the rest of the film, 70s glamour puss Julie Ege gets her clothes off at one point and Donald Pleasence's beard has a go at out-acting most of the over-aged kids who pass through frame on a regular basis as the mad professor's latest victims.
In the US, this had the more appropriate title of The Freakmaker and, as that suggests, it's garish, occasionally amateurish but always good unclean B-movie fun.
It might just grow on you if you give it a chance.
