CHRISTMAS LEFTOVERS - CHRISTMAS GHOST STORIES # 9 - THE ICE HOUSE (1978)

DIRECTED by Derek Lister

SCREENPLAY by John Griffith Bowen 

STARRING  -  John Stride as Paul,  Elizabeth Romilly as Jessica,  Geoffrey Burridge as Clovis,  David Beames as Bob,  Gladys Spencer as Diamond Lady.

PLOT - Paul is a lonely middle-adged man who has recently divorced his wife, suffering from stress and anxiety he takes a break at a health spa to recuperate.

However, all is not what it seems at the health spa. 

Paul's masseur Bob has unnaturally cold hands. Bob begs Paul to help him to escape from the spa and then disappears. The spa's owners - a mysterious pair of siblings known as Jessica and Clovis - are evasive when asked about his whereabouts.

Paul also notices the other guests behaving bizzarely and also becomes attracted to the scent of a pair of strange flowers that grow near the spa's Ice-house...and then there is the Ice-house itself - what is it's secret and what is stored there...is there more than just ice in the Ice-house ?....

DIALOUGE  - Bob - "I've got a touch of the cools."

Jessica and Clovis (on several occasions) - "There is only ice in the Ice-house."

PERFORMANCES  - John Stride plays Paul the story's central character. Paul is a middle-aged divorcee who has clearly been beaten down by recent events. He is inquisitive but easily made scared and nervous by the mysterious goings on. At times he seems to be on the verge of having a full-on nervous breakdown whilst at others he seems to be more in control of himself and can come over as being slightly pompous. It's a decent enough performance from Stride but the character as written is very inconsistent - this is in line with many other aspects of this film as we shall see later...

Probably the best things about this production are Elizabeth Romilly and Geoffrey Burridge as the health spa's mysterious owners Jessica and Clovis. The pair are brother and sister, yet they clearly also have a sexual relationship with each other. They also seem to have an affinity with the mysterious flowers that grow near to the Ice-house - thier clothing matches the colours of the flowers and at one point Jessica describes the flowers as being male and female siblings.

Individualy they are interesting characters. Jessica is sexy, cultured and charming but has an air of cruelty about her as well. At several points her mask slips and you get a sense of the monster that lurks just beneath the surface. 

Clovis is likewise outwardly charming and charismatic as well as being slightly camp. There's a scene near the end of the film where Paul comes close to breaking down and Clovis comforts him in bed by embracing him. The scene has definite homo-erotic undertones to it. You also get the impression that Clovis is both seductively calming Paul whilst at the same time asserting his power and dominance over him. As with Jessica it's that sense of something monsterous lurking beneath the carefully cultivated mask of respectability.

So what exactly are Jessica and Clovis ? Are they ghosts ? (The story is afterall part of the Ghost Story For Christmas series - but they don't seem much like ghosts to me) Are they aliens ? Are they weird plant/flower/human hybrids ? It's never explained...

All in all Romilly and Burridge give really good performances in this - engaging, enigmatic and unnerving in equal measure - they are by far the best thing about this messy and confusing drama.

SFX - None.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - Well...you get some brother on sister action as our pair of creepy siblings indulge in an incestuous kiss...

There's no violence as such. There is the one main jump scare moment when Paul discovers what appears to be the missing Bob's corpse frozen solid in ice when he's exploring the Ice-house...

However- at the end of the film Bob is shown to be alive and well. So was Bob being kept on ice to be healed after his own breakdown ? Was he murdured by Jessica and Clovis, his corpse frozen and then somehow cloned ? Once again we'll never know as this film sure as Hell isn't going to tell us.

RATING - The Ice House is a bit of a mess really. You get the impression that its more interested in being arty and abstract than it is in telling a coherent and satisfying (or scary) ghost story. 

The acting is good, the atmosphere succeeds in being weird and off-kilter but the whole thing just doesn't hang together well at all. I've got to give it credit for not talking down to it's audience, for crediting them with some intelligence and imagination to try to piece together what's happening for themselves. The problem is that it's just too annoyingly obtuse.

It tries hard to be enigmatic but it comes across like the writer and director have just laid a trail of crumbs and then totally failed to give any sense of conclusion to the story. I'm totally fine with open ended conclusions to films but it has to feel earned as opposed to just being obscure for the sake of it.

I'm giving this 3 inappropriately affectionate siblings out of 5. It tries hard but ultimately comes over as just being pretentious nonsense. The BBC and audience obviously thought so as well because this episode killed the increasingly inaccurately named Ghost Story For Christmas series stone dead. There was no Christmas ghost story on the BBC in the Christmas of 1979 or indeed for any other Christmas for over two decades afterwards (bar repeats). 

The Ghost Story For Christmas series did return eventually - on the 23rd December 2005 BBC Four screened a back to basics style adaptation of M.R. James's "A View From A Hill" and the series has remained (on and off) a mainstay of the BBC's Christmas schedules ever since. 

But for now I'm done with Christmas ghost stories. All being well I'll review the modern series next Christmas, afterall you don't want to open all your presents at once...