The Monster Club * (1981, Vincent Price, John Carradine, Donald Pleasence, Anthony Steel, Richard Johnson, Britt Ekland) – Classic Movie Review 7,724

Roy Ward Baker’s 1981 British portmanteau horror movie The Monster Club at least has the enormous distinction of starring Vincent Price, John Carradine and Donald Pleasence. 

Director Roy Ward Baker’s 1981 British portmanteau horror movie The Monster Club at least has the enormous distinction of starring Vincent Price, John Carradine and Donald Pleasence. After that, interest diminishes, but it still has a good cast to support the icons.

In the disco of the title, Vincent Price plays a mysterious elderly gentleman (who turns out to be a vampire named Erasmus), who tells the noted British horror writer Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes (played by John Carradine) three relatively tame and not especially amusing horror stories of the macabre kind, hoping they will provide him with ideas for a new book. It must have worked because the screenplay is based on stories by Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes.

The Monster Club is not particularly well handled by the normally reliable director Baker, with a slack pace that prevents him from disguising the poverty-row production and equally poor screenplay by Edward Abraham and Valerie Abraham.

The good old cast, stalwarts of many of these British horror film compendiums popular in the Seventies, are mostly wasted. But. however, for them, it might still be worth a look.

English rock band The Pretty Things appear as entertainers singing ‘Welcome to The Monster Club’ with Vincent Price camping around in the foreground in the opening segment The Monster Club. Also performing between stories are B A Robertson and The Viewers, and the rock band Night perform a track called ‘Stripper’ that does not appear on either of their albums. The soundtrack features UB40 though they do not appear in the film.

It is the last feature directed by Roy Ward Baker and the final film produced by American producer Milton Subotsky, who had co-founded British film production company Amicus Productions with Max Rosenberg. Amicus was well known for its anthology films though The Monster Club is not an Amicus film.

The film premiered on 12 April 1981 and was released in the UK on 24 May 1981 but it was a commercial failure.

Baker recalled: ‘It had a very distinguished cast, who all worked their heads off and did it very well. That was again a magazine picture, several stories. I didn’t think it was very good. The idea was to fill it full of pop songs and it had about four or five different bands in it, who appeared in between the stories. Well that was alright, but we would have been far better off without that aspect of it.’

It could have been even starrier. Christopher Lee abruptly and adamantly rejected the offer of playing Chetwynd-Hayes simply on hearing the film’s title from his agent, and his friend Peter Cushing also turned down a role.

Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes disliked the film, complaining how his stories were changed, of its silly humour and the pop music. He thought John Carradine was too old to play him.

Chetwynd-Hayes’ stories adapted into UK anthology movies include The Monster Club and From Beyond the Grave. His book The Monster Club refers to a movie-maker named Vinke Rocnnor, an anagram of Kevin Connor, the director of From Beyond the Grave (1974).

The main cast are Vincent Price, John Carradine, Anthony Steel and Roger Sloman (segment The Monster Club); Barbara Kellerman, Simon Ward, James Laurenson and Geoffrey Bayldon (segment Shadmock Story); Donald Pleasence, Richard Johnson, Britt Ekland, Anthony Valentine, Neil McCarthy and Warren Saire (segment Vampire Story); Stuart Whitman, Patrick Magee (with only eight lines) and Lesley Dunlop (segment Humgoo Story).

The Monster Club is directed by Roy Ward Baker, runs 97 minutes, is made by Chips Productions and Sword & Sorcery Productions, is released by ITC Entertainment Group (UK), is written by Edward Abraham and Valerie Abraham, based on stories by R Chetwynd-Hayes, is shot by Peter Jessop, is produced by Milton Subotsky, is scored by Graham Walker, Douglas Gamley, John Georgiadis and Alan Hawkshaw, and is designed by Tony Curtis.

Ronald Henry Glynn Chetwynd-Hayes (30 May 1919 – 20 March 2001)

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7,724

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