HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR - EPISODE 1 - WITCHING TIME (1980)

DIRECTED By Don Leaver

SCREENPLAY By Anthony Read

STARRING - John Finch as David Winter,  Patricia Quinn as Lucinda Jessup,  Prunella Gee as Mary Winter,  Ian McCulloch as Charles Henderson,  Leonard Pearce as Rector,  Margaret Anderson as Sister.

PLOT -  David Winter is an alcoholic musician who is currently locked away in his lonely country cottage composing a soundtrack for a new horror movie. 

Meanwhile in London his wife Mary is engaged in an affair with his friend Charles.

One night, whilst working late, a strange thunderstorm surrounds the cottage, shortly after it ends David finds an unconscious woman outside the cottage.

Taking her indoors for shelter, the woman (named Lucinda) claims to be a witch who has travelled in time from the year 1627 to escape her fate of being burned at the stake for witchcraft.

Doubting her sanity at first, David finds himself drawn to the mysterious Lucinda. Too late - it turns out that she really does have magical supernatural powers. 

Lucinda enslaves David both mentally and physically. David's only hope of salvation lies with his unfaithful wife, but does she even want to save him?...

PERFORMANCES - The Hammer House of Horror consisted of a different hour long standalone episode every week. As such due to the constraints of the format the characters in the stories themselves didn't have the same amount of depth as you might expect from a full length feature film. Instead they tended to be stock character types painted in pretty broad strokes, this worked well enough for the format with these episodes being short terror tales. Despite the brevity of the characters they where always without fail fleshed out by talented, quality actors and this opening episode is no exception.

John Finch is totally convincing as the overworked alcoholic David (or "Dave-ett" as Lucinda the witch amusingly mispronounces his name). 

When we meet him he's already like a tightly coiled spring, clearly on the verge of a total breakdown due to the pressures of work and his failing marriage. Falling under Lucinda's magically malign influence only serves to hasten his implosion - David becomes like a junkie going cold turkey - he's simultaneously repulsed, attracted to, terrified of and addicted to Lucinda. It's a great portrayal of a man who is being consumed by his own darkest desires. Good stuff.

Rocky Horror Show star Patricia Quinn plays the time travelling witch Lucinda in a way that manages to be both alluring and unnerving.

Lucinda seems quite likeable at first - she's quirky, she's got a cute sounding accent and she has a childlike fascination for 20th century technology (see how she's at first horrified by and then childishly enthusiastic about a simple light switch turning a bulb off and on). It's not until she decides that she wants to seduce David that it becomes apparent just how malevolent she really is.

From this point she becomes dangerously unstable and starts acting like an utter maniac as she throws round curses and voodoo style magic to try to get rid of Mary who she sees as a rival for David's affections.

Prunella Gee plays Mary. Whilst you may think at first that Mary is going to be an unsympathetic character due to her extra marital affair with Charles (Zombie Flesh Eater's Ian McCulloch giving a wonderfully cheesy and sleazy performance), Mary in fact ends up surpassing our expectations and becomes the main character that you end up rooting for as she enters into a deadly battle of wits to both survive herself and to save David. Gee manages to make Mary likeable enough so you forgive her actions and end up cheering her on.

SFX - An animatronic decapitated dead bird that twitches gruesomely...and that's about your lot.

SEX & VIOLENCE - There's a surprisingly large amount of naked and semi-naked female flesh in this, especially when you consider that although this was broadcast past the "watershed" it was still screened at about 9 o'clock in the evening. You get a completely topless Lucinda and Mary gets supernaturally menaced whilst wearing little else except her bra and panties. 

There's also a sex scene between David and Lucinda, complete with some bloodied "back scratching".

Violence wise we get the aforementioned twitching corpse of the decapitated crow, at one point an entranced David smears the crow's blood all over his own face (for reasons known only to himself).

At one point Lucinda "magiks up" a bathtub full of blood and gore, presumably just to put the shits up Mary...

At the end Mary turns the tables on Lucinda by first drowning her in a trough full of water and then making the Voodoo doll look more like Lucinda and throwing it on a bonfire - Lucinda's drowned corpse vanishes and we hear her ghostly cries as the doll slowly melts in the flames.

Blimey - that's really quite extreme for something that was shown on TV when lots of small children where still watching. Mind you, the bloodthirsty little sods absolutely loved it. I should know because I was one of them (as where lots of my classmates at school - Hammer House Of Horror was always the number one topic of conversation in the playground come Monday morning back in the heady days of 1980. Boobies and blood - what more could a bunch of pre-pubescent horror fans in training possibly ask for ?).

RATING - A good solid opener for the series which basically acts as a mission statement for the types of slightly sleazy thrills we'd be getting over the next few weeks.

Good stuff all round. 4 time travelling witches out of 5.

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