HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR EPISODE 13 - THE MARK OF SATAN (1980)

DIRECTED by Don Leaver

SCREENPLAY by Don Shaw

STARRING - Peter McEnery as Edwin, Georgina Hale as Stella, Emrys James as Dr. Harris, Anthony Brown as Priest, Conrad Phillips as Dr. Manders.

PLOT - Edwyn is a socially awkward hospital porter who has recently been promoted to working in the mortuary.

Whilst cleaning up after an autopsy, Edwyn accidentally cuts himself with a scalpel that was used on the body. The body in question belongs to a neurosurgeon who believed that he was possessed by a soul stealing virus.

Very soon Edwyn himself starts to be become victim to the same delusional fantasies. Everywhere he goes Edwyn is plagued by visions of the number 9.

Delusion becomes obsession - Edwyn becomes increasingly erratic as the lines between reality and madness begin to blur...

PERFORMANCES - And so we come to the final episode of Hammer House Of Horror - The Mark Of Satan.

For thirteen weeks in 1980 this entertaining last gasp of the legendary Hammer studios thrilled, chilled and terrified it's eager audience. During the course of the series we'd encountered Werewolves, witches, serial killers and sinister doppelgangers. For thirteen weeks we'd been treated to brilliant performances from actors like Peter Cushing, Brian Cox and Paul Darrow. It's safe to say the series had been both a critical and ratings success, so obviously they where going to pull out all the stops for the final episode in the series right ?

Sadly this wasn't to be the case.

The Mark Of Satan is a huge disappointment, by far the worst episode of the entire series.

At least one thing remained consistent with the rest of the series and that was the quality of the acting, unfortunately though the rest of the episode just falls into the shit pit at a rate of knots.

Peter McEnery is admittedly very good as the main protagonist Edwyn, in fact he pretty much carries the entire episode (which is no mean feat when the script is this uninspiring), he at least makes the episode watchable if only to see what new manifestation of madness he comes out with next.

Edwyn is aloof and extremely socially awkward, he lives with his overbearing old battleaxe of a mother and thier lodger - a young single mother called Stella (Georgina Hale) who Edwyn appears to have a bit of an unrequited crush upon.

Edwyn seems to have no friends of his own and always seems to be either an object of derision or the butt of the jokes of his colleagues at the local morgue where he works. Already you can see that Edwyn is grade A material for a complete and utter mental breakdown.

Break down Edwyn does (as surely as night follows day) shortly after cutting himself on a scalpel and convincing himself that he's contracted some hideous disease.

What follows is a headlong flight into a total paranoid collapse. Edwyn starts noticing the number 9 absolutely everywhere and becomes convinced that there's a satanic conspiracy to steal his soul (number 9 is the number 6 reversed you see and we all know what happens when you repeat the number 6 three times).

Basically Edwyn is absolutely batshit insane by this point and McEnery puts in a really, REALLY good intense performance, but sadly the script doesn't live up its own premise (the idea is absolutely sound and with a bit more polish this could have been an amazing episode). The problem is - as entertaining and compelling as it is to see Edwyn spiral into madness after about the halfway point it starts to become just a tad repetitive.

It basically always plays out like this - Edwyn goes up to another character (i.e - a senior Doctor/colleague/local priest) has a rant about the number 9 quickly followed by a bout of intense screaming from Edwyn who then proceeds to run away until he then goes up to the next person he encounters - rinse and repeat. It just starts to get tedious after a while, not even McEnery's absolutely stellar performance can save it.

The other main performance is given by Georgina Hale as Stella - she's not got a great deal to do in the episode (nobody does except for McEnery), she's basically there to help highlight Edwyn's lack of social skills - he clearly fancies her but hasn't got the confidence to do anything about it. For her part Stella acts in a flirtatious manner towards Edwyn but you really just get the impression that's she's looking to use him as a meal ticket and a way out of her struggle as a single mum.

Stella eventually helps Edwyn dispose of his mother's corpse after he murders her in a moment of extreme paranoid meltdown... or does he ? By this point you can't really tell what's real and what's an elaborate hallucination suffered by Edwyn (arguably by this point you don't really care either...)

VIOLENCE - We get some pretty bloody gore in the scenes where we see Edwyn going about his day to day business in the morgue. It's nothing massively extreme just lots of close ups of the bloodied tools of the autopsy trade. Ironically this causes The Mark Of Satan to be one of the goriest episodes in the series even though arguably we don't actually see any murders. "Arguably", you say ?..more on this below.

At one point Edwyn "murders" his own mother (although this is later implied to be just something he imagined in his paranoid state).

The murder itself is actually pretty amusing. The idea is that Edwyn is talking to his mum and then just flips out and randomly stabs her, but the way it's filmed is hilarious. Edwyn just sort of pulls a knife out of his jacket pocket (it's filmed from behind), goes up to his mother and appears to do this bizarre, spasmodic shoulder and arm movement (this is the stabbing action), his dear old mum gasps and drops dead (with absolutely zero blood, quite an achievement for such a frenzied knife attack), it honestly looks more like Edwyn has gone up to his mum and started to do some kind of uncoordinated 70's disco shimmy which causes his mum to have a fatal heart attack (probably from sheer embarrassment). 

It's a very weird directorial choice and is probably the most unintentionally funny thing in the entire series. It was actually probably my favourite part of the episode. Unfortunately there's no stills from it that I can find online so you'll just have to take my word for it.

SFX - A bit of gore in the morgue scenes and nothing more.

RATING - This episode tries hard to be a good episode, it REALLY REALLY tries but unfortunately it misses the mark by several yards.

There's a few reasons for this. 1) It's just too overwritten - the scenes go on for far too long and there's several scenes that are just far too similar. The Mark Of Satan has the dubious distinction of being the only episode of Hammer House Of Horror that had me pausing the episode to see how long there was to go until it ended. If any piece of entertainment has you metaphorically "looking at your watch to see how long it is before home time" then it's never a good indication of how it's engaging you.

2) The ideas and thenes although sound enough in principle have been done before in previous episodes and done a lot better. Case in point - this episode is a psychodrama about one man's descent into madness. This theme has already been explored in the Denholm Elliott starring episode Rude Awakening. That episode was a lot more entertaining to watch than this and as a result more engaging to me. The other theme that has been done previously is the theme of a satanic conspiracy in the episode Guardian Of The Abyss. Again that episode was just a lot more fun to watch than this was.

3) As a series climax this episode just doesn't work. It's too small and insular, they needed to go out on a high and unfortunately this just isn't it. They should have placed this story mid-season as a smaller scale palate cleanser and had the absolutely fantastic Two Faces Of Evil as the grand finale. Always leave your audience wanting more, this just left me bored.

Overall 2 and a half paranoid nervous breakdowns out of 5. This is the sound of the Hammer House Of Horror ending with a soggy wet fart of a whimper rather than the spectacular bang it should have been. Sadly disappointing.

ART - Weirdly enough all the other episodes of the series where released individually in the U.S. on VHS under the Elvira Presents label. Every episode except the Mark Of Satan appears to have been released (I could of course be wrong but I've seen no sign of it online and the other episodes are all easy to find). I think this glaring omission alone speaks volumes...