Horror Hospital ** (1973, Michael Gough, Robin Askwith, Vanessa Shaw, Dennis Price) – Classic Movie Review 9740

Robin Askwith stars in Horror Hospital (1973) as Sixties pop songwriter Jason Jones, who plans a break at a country retreat, a pseudo-health farm called Brittlehurst Manor. On the train there he meets Judy Peters (Vanessa Shaw), also travelling there to meet her long-lost Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock), whose ‘health farm’ is a front for her wheelchair-bound husband Dr Christian Storm (Michael Gough), who is using the guests for surgical mind-control lobotomy experiments, turning hippies into his mindless zombie slaves.

With off-screen rape and male frontal nudity, co-writer/ director Antony Balch’s mix of sexploitation comedy and mad doctor sci-fi horror is an eye-opener. The film is hysterical, and Gough shows no restraint whatsoever in the shadow of Bela Lugosi, so his performance is funny. Askwith carries on regardless.

Producer Richard Gordon said it was the most fun he had making a movie, and the cast look as though they are having fun, with Askwith doing all his own stunts.

Also in the cast are Dennis Price as shifty, gay travel agent Mr Pollack, small actor Skip Martin (who ran a tobacconist’s shop between acting assignments) as Frederick, Kurt Christian (aka  Baron Kurt Christian von Siengenberg) as Abraham Warren, Barbara Wendy as Millie, Kenneth Benda as Carter, Martin Grace as Bike Boy, Colin Skeaping as Bike Boy, George Herbert as Laboratory Assistant, Susan Murphy as Lobotomy Victim Number 1, James Boris IV as Mystic band member (as James IV Boris), Alan Laurence Hudson as Mystic band member (as Allan “The River” Hudson), Simon Lust as Mystic band member, Alan Watson – Transvestite in Club (uncredited), Antony Balch as Bearded Man in Club/Bike Boy (uncredited), Ray Corbett as Hunting Man (uncredited) and Richard Gordon as Man in Club (uncredited).

The band Mystic are the late Sixties psychedelic group Tangerine Peel, though the cross-dressing frontman is the film’s co-writer Alan Watson, Balch’s friend. They wrote the script locked in a hotel room together during the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. The title was invented before the plot In the best exploitation movie tradition.

The clinic exterior is the home of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii. Location filming was at Merton Park (mainly the pop group scene), Battersea Town Hall (for the interiors of Brittlehurst Manor) and in and around Knebworth House, near Stevenage, Hertfordshire. It was shot in four weeks beginning on 16 October 1972.

It is the last film appearance of Dennis Price, though not his last released movie.

Phoebe Shaw is alleged to have served cake laced with drugs at the film’s last night party on 11 November. Askwith recalled: ‘I don’t know what she put in the cake but I ended up with a 20-stone electrician, Roy, sitting on my lap telling me he thought he was in love with me.’

Askwith’s role was written for him after appearing in producer Richard Gordon’s 1972 Tower of Evil, which also features Dennis Price.

When Gough asked Balch what he wanted bringing to the role, Balch screened Gough a print of The Devil Bat (1940) and got him to base his performance on Bela Lugosi’s mad perfume inventor. A school-aged Balch met his idol Lugosi in Brighton in the early 1950s when he was touring in a stage version of Dracula. Richard Gordon had a long history in horror cinema, and had been partly responsible for the stage version of Dracula that allowed Balch to meet Lugosi. Balch’s first film with Gordon was Secrets of Sex (1970), a sensation running six months at The Jacey cinema in Piccadilly Circus, which Balch ran along with The Times cinema in Baker Street. But Horror Hospital was the most successful of Balch’s films.

The pop number ‘Mark of Death’ is composed by Jason DeHavilland and performed by the group Mystic (James IV Boris, Alan “The River” Hudson, Simon Lust).

Askwith tweeted in May 2020: ‘Someone claiming to be Quentin Tarantino phoned my agent many years ago saying that Horror Hospital was a favourite of his and what was I doing? “Pantomime with The Chuckle Brothers.” He didn’t bother us again…’

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9740

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Antony Balch (10 September 1937 – 6 April 1980).