Corruption (1967)

Robert Hartford-Davis's films may be many things but they are never boring. When he made a pop musical it was not a showcase for a group or singer depicting their efforts to put on a show at a holiday camp or such like, but the bizarre Gonks Go Beat (1965), in which Earth is separated into Beatland and Balladisle. His comedy, The Sandwich Man (1966) features not only Michael Bentine as the central character, but also familiar faces such as Norman Wisdom, Terry-Thomas, Harry H. Corbett and Bernard Cribbins in cameo appearances as the characters Bentine encounters on the streets of London.

When he came to make a horror picture, Hartford-Davis used a multitude of devices. Ostensibly a rip-off of Les yeux sans visage (1960) - with the same theme of a man trying to restore his scarred love's beauty - Hartford-Davis replaced Franju's lyricism with a lively grand guignol style harking back to Tod Slaughter, and spiced up with gruesome imagery. On top of this, he added layers of science-fiction (the laser surgery angle), teenage exploitation (Terry and her beatnik gang), and a supernatural twist ending borrowed from Dead of Night (1945).

The film provides Peter Cushing with one of his most startling roles. Though John Rowan is, at first, similarly dedicated to his pursuit, he exhibits a mania absent from the cold procedures of Victor Frankenstein. The sequences in which Rowan murders his victims show a wild frenzy in the killing, whereas murder for the Baron would only ever be a means to an end. Frankenstein is far more dogged. He would never experience the sickened remorse that Rowan feels as he is emotionally blackmailed by his wife into killing again.

The role of Lynn Rowan is similarly unusual. Although bad girls were already a staple of British horror films, they were rarely so calculating. Throughout the film she becomes ever more obsessed and focused. Archetypally, the bad girl is one who has lost all control, and is always submissive to a male master. Here, however, it is Lynn who wields power. Such female dominance is not only extraordinary in a British horror film, it is extraordinary in any British film of the period.

The title, Corruption, perhaps derived from Polanski's Repulsion (1965) reflects the film. Not only is Lynn's face corrupted, but so are her and John's personalities. Indeed, most of the people they encounter turn out to be corrupt in some way; there are hardly any sympathetic characters in the film. The hero and heroine, Steve (Rowan's fellow surgeon) and Val (Lynn's sister), exist to one side of the story. They are never menaced, and serve merely to comment upon the main action. Hammer might have shown Steve and Val running out of the house at the end and looking over their shoulders as the laser runs amok; in Corruption they are killed along with the rest of the cast.

Even little scenes such as Rowan's comical conversation with Kate at the party are effective; those who have endured ham-fisted incidental scenes in otherwise fine films (for instance, The Sorcerers (1967), or Scream and Scream Again (1969)) will appreciate this as an achievement. Only Bill McGuffie's music serves as an occasional distraction; his score is ideally suited to the delirious murder sequences, but when laid over some of the early conversation scenes, his unsympathetic muzak nearly kills them.

Corruption (albeit probably unknowingly) is a forerunner to a strand of British horror production that encompasses Tigon's modern-dress chillers, Freddie Francis's Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (1969), Victors Ritelis's The Corpse (1970), the films of Pete Walker, and many other UK horrors of the 1970s. Despite sharing with these films a particular British seediness, Corruption has a giddy euphoria which marks it out as one of a kind.
DAVID HANKS