The Beast in the Cellar (1970)

Filed Under Insane People, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor, The Simpsons

Movie reviews with BBT critic Jef Taylor

 

It’s a familiar story.  The black sheep of the family is bricked up in the basement for a few decades, but inevitably escapes.  The trail of savage, animal-like killings will eventually lead to the ruin of the family.  Can we expect a happy ending?

The horror of a story like The Beast in the Cellar works on two very different levels.  First is the garden variety homicidal maniac type horror, complete with monster-vision, attacks on young people having sex, and a screeching soundtrack.  Special effects consist of a shot of the victim’s face twisted in terror intercut with a picture of a claw wound, with camera movement suggesting a paint mixer being used in place of a steadycam.  This is pretty fun, very predictable, and a little scary, if you’ve never seen Halloween.

We never thought he’d escape!  Surely he wouldn’t hurt his own family…


The second level of horror is introduced halfway through, as even the filmmakers get bored of murders performed by an unseen monster.  Slowly the identity of the monster is revealed, although those of us who read the plot synopsis already knew.  An innocent young man has been locked up by those who loved him, and the captivity has driven him mad.  The secret is all the more disturbing for the fact that the jailers are a pair of pleasant elderly ladies.  They turned their beloved brother into a twisted killing machine through their own terrible good intentions.  His mind ruined through their actions, we come to sympathize with the killer and hate the dotty old birds who made him.

Unfortunately the story is hampered by a clumsy transfer from celluloid to digital.  The darker scenes –that’s most of them–are muddy, while all the scratches and hairs on the print are preserved.  Worst of all for those of us who obsessively watch movies with the subtitles on, there aren’t any.  To compensate for the quiet British speech, the volume has to be turned up to where the faults of the incidental music–often intrusive, sometimes maudlin–are unignorable.

Fortunately, if you want to see this story without these defects, you can watch the seven minute parody of it on The Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror VII, ‘the thing and I.’  Or, if you are very lucky, a movie house might show a nice crisp print of it.  Now that would be pretty scary.

 

When he isn’t writing movie reviews for BBT, Jef Taylor is a naturalist and zookeeper, and he says that keeping a large primate on a soil substrate is just asking for a code one escape.


 

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Comments

2 Responses to “The Beast in the Cellar (1970)”

  1. Natalie L. Sin on April 15th, 2008 10:18 pm

    Silly old women, when will they learn?

  2. G. Weir on April 16th, 2008 3:22 pm

    Damn, man! You find the best stuff to review!

    You should do a month of movies at Christian’s- like a guest speaker.

    –G

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