We start our 1967 genre survey with a considerable amount of barrel-bottom scraping with two of Herschell Gordon Lewis‘ most execrable efforts: The Gruesome Twosome and Something Weird. He also made the somewhat better A Taste of Blood the same year. With a bigger budget and longer running time (118 minutes), Lewis referred to Blood as his “Gone With The Wind” masterpiece. Actually, it’s modeled more after Roger Corman than Victor Fleming. Lacking the excess of Lewis’ previous films and featuring a “classic” monster in Dracula, it’s mostly seen as a noble misfire by Lewis’ cult.
Elsewhere in 1967, Larry Buchanan, a director on par with the likes of Lewis, William Beaudine, Ed Wood, or Phil Tucker, produced a pair of jaw-dropping bombs in Mars Needs Women and Creature of Destruction. Jean Yarbrough, who had previously helmed such masterpieces as The Devil Bat (1940), directed Basil Rathbone, Joi Lansing, John Carradine and Lon Chaney, Jr. in Hillbillies in a Haunted House. Rathbone died shortly after filming and was spared embarrassment from a film so wretched that it’s virtually unwatchable. His surviving co-stars and director weren’t as fortunate. Nazis-on-ice figure prominently in Herbert Leader’s The Frozen Dead, which at least has some unintentional humor going for it. Joan Crawford went Beserk for director Jim O’Connell. The film’s a paltry effort, but Joan is a humdinger channeling her inner Mommie Dearest.
A blind Boris Karloff got whupped by Viveca Lindfors in Cauldron of Blood, but the on-his-last-leg genre icon fared considerably better in Michael Reeves‘ excellent cult classic, The Sorcerers. Harald Reini did Christopher Lee few favors when directing the actor for The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism. John Gilling likewise missed the mark in Hammer’s The Mummy’s Shroud. Away from Hammer Studios, Terence Fisher was out of his element in his final sci-fi opus ((Fisher’s first two entries in the genre were 1965’s The Earth Dies Screaming and 1966’s Island Of Terror.)) , Island of the Burning Damned, starring Lee and Peter Cushing. By his own admission, Fisher had no enthusiasm for science fiction and went back to his Hammer Horror niche later in 1967 with Frankenstein Created Woman.
Fisher favorite Peter Cushing made a sharp departure from his typical acerbic-but-classy screen persona by dipping into pure sleaze for Corruption (directed by Robert Hartford-Davis). Although most sources give the release date as 1968, it’s also listed as a 1967 production. Most likely it’s the later date, but since we have that year already filled up, we’ll cheat a tad in placing it here. A sordid hybrid of The Corpse Vanishes (1942) and Eyes Without a Face (1960), Corruption can be summed up by the Blu-ray cover art image of a middle-aged Cushing taking a knife to the throat of a scantily clad buxom blonde. He plays Continue reading 1967 EXPLOITATION TRIPLE FEATURE: CORRUPTION, QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, AND THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS