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Warner Bros/Seven Arts invested heavily in English co-productions in the 1960s, making deals with horror
specialists Hammer Films and many other smaller companies. This Warner Bros. Horror Double Feature
presents two independent productions that were given a full release and once saw heavy rotation on
late-night television. The Shuttered Room enjoys a fairly positive reputation for its star cast
and literary pedigree. By comparison It! receives little in the way of respect; even Roddy
McDowall fans tend to be underwhelmed. But how many horror movies end by detonating a nuclear bomb in a
London suburb?
Filmed in England, 1967's The Shuttered Room feigns an American setting and succeeds fairly well,
a few awkwardly dubbed voices aside. It gains in interest for being derived from a book by H.P. Lovecraft
and August Derleth, a fact confirmed by a rickety road sign reading "Dunwich Island" in the very first
scene. New York marrieds Mike and Susannah Kelton (Gig Young & Carol Lynley) drive his convertible T-Bird
to the remote New England birthplace she left as a small child, to find out what happened to her
long-lost relations, the Whately family. Susannah's Aunt Agatha (Flora Robson) is an eccentric living
atop an abandoned lighthouse. Agatha tells them that her childhood home in an old mill is cursed -- any
Whately who goes there, dies. Young hoodlum Ethon (Oliver Reed) is concerned about losing his inheritance
to Susannah, and his crude attempts to harass her develop into a stalk-and-rape scenario. Meanwhile, it
becomes clear that some entity indeed inhabits the old mill, and watches Susannah as she
undresses.
The Shuttered Room is signed by the prolific and accomplished TV director David Greene, who may
have been responsible for the class-act casting of the notable Dame Flora Robson and the busy Oliver
Reed. Greene lends the show a stylish visual surface, with many subjective-camera shots and an entire
prologue filmed from the point of view of the "thing in the attic". His eventual defeat is due to a
script that gives the show away before the main titles and moves laboriously from story point to story
point. Dunwich Island and its crazed inhabitants are so obviously sinister that we quickly lose sympathy
with the clueless Mike and Susannah. Faced with Ethon's open malice and Agatha's blunt promise of dire
consequences, they nevertheless walk calmly into the mill. Mike goes to town for groceries, leaving the
vulnerable Susannah to play at sweeping cobwebs. A haunted eye watches from a hidden panel in the
wall...
The script provides a town strumpet for some sex teasing and sends Susannah on a beach stroll to be
menaced by Ethon. To provide a hot trailer moment, Susannah inexplicably avoids rape by provocatively
disrobing. Meanwhile, Madison Avenue ad man Mike (we can visualize him returning to Manhattan to dine
with Rock Hudson and Doris Day) uses deft karate chops to best four or five yokels and the
strapping Ethon. All of this strains credibility, especially with the English cast performing as if this
hack 'n' slash horror movie were a Faulkner classic.
The ending gives us an entirely non-supernatural cause for the haunting, and has much more in common with
Friday the 13th than Lovecraft tales like The Dunwich Horror. The Shuttered Room
earned some positive reviews for some atmospheric scenes stalking about the decrepit mill, and camera
techniques that would become celebrated in later 1970s Eurohorror films. Good intentions aside, its
horrors remain stubbornly formulaic.
It! was written and directed by Herbert J. Leder for Warners/Seven Arts at the same time as The
Frozen Dead, a cut-price melodrama. That film wins the bad taste award by having Dana Andrews revive
dead Nazis to launch a Fourth Reich. It! is nothing less than a modern-dress version of the
classic Der Golem, written to sidestep most of the original story's fuss about Cabalistic Jewish
magic. The new Golem is a piece of "primitive art", a non-clay statue complete with Hebraic inscriptions
and a handy toe-box containing the secret scroll that brings it to life.
Ambitious museum assistant Arthur Pym (Roddy McDowall, his name misspelled on screen) is frustrated
because his boss's shapely daughter Ellen (Otto Preminger protégé Jill Haworth) only wants
to remain good friends. The careless script has Arthur keep the mummified corpse of his Mum in a rocking
chair, an angle that puts the entire show off balance. It! isn't an outright satire and it doesn't
even possess a sense of ironic detachment. After a visit to a local Jewish scholar, Arthur begins using
his newfound indestructible friend to eliminate people he doesn't like. He orders the Golem to cover his
thefts from the museum's exhibits, and on a whim dispatches it to knock down Hammersmith Bridge.
Unfortunately, neither money nor unlimited power can buy Pym true love. As Scotland Yard closes in he
kidnaps Ellen and holes up in his new estate with Mum's gnarly remains. When field artillery shells
bounce off The Golem's supernatural hide, the authorities calmly choose to nuke Pym's country house. But
don't worry, because they're using a special bomb guaranteed not to bother residents outside of a
five-mile radius.
Filmed in bright color and enlivened by McDowall's spirited performance, It! is weak in most
departments. The pointy-headed Golem looks like a driftwood carving. Aside from a hesitation or two it
shows no personality, unlike the clay monster of legend that rebelled against ill use by humans. Arthur
Pym's desiccated mother is a completely extraneous Psycho riff added for horror content, as
arbitrary as a salacious bit in which Pym hallucinates that Ellen is lying nude on his couch, eager for
his attentions. Pym makes just one effort to rid himself of the monster before greed and lust "force" him
to continue its misuse. He's crazy all right, but not scary-crazy like Norman Bates or fun-crazy like
McDowall's wonderful Allan Musgrave in George Axelrod's Lord Love a Duck.
Leder's direction is on the weak side; he can't enliven the finale's laughable conclusion in which the
dull hero outruns a nuclear bomb on a peppy Honda motorbike. The Golem legend has produced classic
cinema starring German Paul Wegener (1920) and Harry Bauer (1936) but Roddy McDowall's effort has to be
chalked up as an also-ran. Soon afterward, McDowall became a horror director in his own right with the
obscure but worthwhile Tam Lin (1970) based on a Scottish folk song and starring Ava
Gardner.
Horror fans will welcome the Warner Home Video Horror Double Feature of The Shuttered Room
and It! Both shows are much improved from TV airings interrupted by used car commercials. The
studio has delivered excellent enhanced widescreen transfers with fine color and clear audio. Otherwise
the presentation is without frills or extras. Although the disc has chapter stops, the one menu card
serves only to choose which film to view.
For more information about The Shuttered Room/It, visit Warner Video.To order The Shuttered Room/It, go to
TCM Shopping.
by Glenn Erickson
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