HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR EPISODE 2 - THE THIRTEENTH REUNION (1980)

DIRECTED by Peter Sasdy

SCREENPLAY by Jeremy Burnham 

STARRING - Julia Foster as Ruth Cairns, Richard Pearson as Sir Humphrey Chesterton, Warren Clarke as Ben Faraday, Gerard Kelly as Andrew, James Cosmos as Willis, Kevin Stoney as Rothwell, George Innes as Cedric Ashford, Norman Bird as Basil Ashford.

PLOT - Ruth Cairns - a reporter languishing in the women's pages is given her latest assessment covering a revolutionary new weight loss method.

Infiltrating a local group she discovers that the health farm employs brutal psychological methods to get their clients lo loose weight. Ruth befriends one of the clients - a slimmer named Ben. The two go on a date but whilst driving home Ben starts to hallucinate and fatally crashes his car.

At the funeral home Ben's body is stolen. Accompanied by a suspicious employee of the funeral directors Ruth uncovers a conspiracy involving missing corpses, the funeral home and a group of wealthy survivors of a plane crash...a group of wealthy survivors who indulge in cannibalism.

Ruth has finally got the story of a lifetime but her life may well be the very thing it costs her...

PERFORMANCES - As with the previous episode you don't get a lot of character depth here but all the performances are fairly decent.

Julia Foster plays the intrepid reporter Ruth and the character is much as you'd expect - she's feisty, inquisitive and is totally dedicated to getting her story. Foster plays the role decently enough and gives Ruth a slightly ditzy quality that makes the character more endearing than she otherwise would be, but for all that I can't help thinking that Foster was slightly miscast in this part.

There's two main reasons for this - firstly, the character is explicitly described as being twenty nine years old and...well...

Basically this woman - this clearly MATURE woman - was supposedly still a teenager only ten years ago. It's not a deal breaker by any means and Julia Foster was by no means elderly when this was filmed, but she's clearly WAY older than twenty nine (I'd put her closer to late thirties/early forties). 

The really annoying thing is that there's no need for it at all in the script. If they couldn't find the right young actress for the part and had to go with someone who was older then they should have just cut the line where Ruth's age is mentioned - it would have made absolutely NO DIFFERENCE whatsoever to the story as it's a completely irrelevant detail with no significance anyway.

Another script annoyance (this time with at least some relevance to the actual plot) is that several characters describe Ruth as being "overweight", indeed this is why she gets the story assigned to her in the first place - the reasoning being that because she's on the portly side Ruth will fit in with the weight loss group and no one will suspect that she's an undercover reporter. The problem with this is that Julia Foster could in no way, shape or form be described as being "overweight", in fact she's the EXACT OPPOSITE.

The production team clearly realised this discrepancy and try to make Foster look fatter by making her wear this absolutely hideous fluffy cardigan for most of the episode. It's deeply unflattering to Foster and once again only serves to draw further attention to the holes in the script and casting process for this episode.

The other actors involved get served a lot better deal than poor old Julia Foster and get some nice meaty roles (pun intended) to sink thier teeth into. 

These include James Cosmos as Willis (the world's rudest and most psychotic gym instructor), Richard Pearson as Sir Humphrey (the charming and avuncular gentleman cannibal cult leader), George Innes and Norman Bird as the sinister undertakers, 60's Doctor Who villain Kevin Stoney as Rothwell (Sir Humphrey's creepy right hand man) and Warren Clarke as Ben - the sweet and shy and ultimately destined for the human BBQ potential love interest for Ruth.

VIOLENCE - Ben has a horrible hallucination of a version of himself laughing at him, before promptly crashing his car at high speed into the nearest available tree.

There's a few grisly close ups of Ben's decapitated corpse in Sir Humphrey's larder.

In the final scene Ruth gets menaced by a meat cleaver. We don't get to see her fate but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that she definitely WON'T be around to see her "scoop of the decade" get published (aw well, at least she won't have to worry about being seen in that bloody horrible cardigan anymore...)

SFX - Some trippy camera work for the hallucination scene and a few splashes of mild gore but little else.

RATING - The 13th Reunion is nowhere near as good as the opening episode, mainly due to the inconsistencies in the script relating to it's central character. 

However despite that slight niggle the rest of the story is still pretty good and this is overall a solid and entertaining enough short horror story.

3 and a half cannibal dinner parties out of 5. A flawed but fun outing from the Hammer House.

ART -