SYMPTOMS. (1973) DIRECTED BY JOSÉ RAMON LARRAZ. SCREENPLAY BY JOSÉ RAMON LARRAZ AND STANLEY MILLER. STARRING ANGELA PLEASENCE, LORNA HEILBRON AND PETER VAUGHAN. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
Bloody hell. I don't even know where to begin with this one. It's a superb Gothic chiller from the Spanish-born director who brought us films like WHIRLPOOL (1970), DEVIATION (1971) and THE HOUSE THAT VANISHED (1974). This last is a film which I saw kind of by accident about two years ago and which had a profound effect on me. It's well worth checking out also.
SYMPTOMS, often compared to Roman Polanski's REPULSION, is Larraz's first all-British production. It's a ghost story of the modern era (well, if you consider the 'Seventies to be the modern era!) and it's set in the most perfectly gothic mansion you ever saw.
The director apparently loved his gothic mansions and used them frequently in his films. I would like to live in this house. I would like to own this house and if I did, I'd never ever leave it. It's everything you could possibly want from a gothic mansion in a horror film.
The director apparently loved his gothic mansions and used them frequently in his films. I would like to live in this house. I would like to own this house and if I did, I'd never ever leave it. It's everything you could possibly want from a gothic mansion in a horror film.
The shots of the surrounding British countryside- the lake and the woods and so on- are utterly gorgeous also. From the first sighting of the still, silent lake with the fallen leaves bobbing gently on its surface and the overhanging trees that surround it, the viewer can tell straightaway that something special is coming. With Larraz's background in art history, it's no surprise that many of these shots resemble actual paintings that you might find in an art gallery.
The story centres around a young woman called Helen Ramsey, who invites her friend Anne Weston to come and stay with her in her remote country mansion for a while. Anne is only too happy to accept. She's glad of a nice quiet place to do some writing and get her head together regarding a romantic relationship that has run its course.
The two women get on well enough in the house for a while, though Helen's behaviour is a little odd at times and we learn that she's recently been 'convalescing' from something, though we're not told what. Also, she seems to intensely dislike and even fear her own handyman-gardener, a coarse and over-familiar man called Brady who seems to know things about Helen that she'd prefer he didn't, if you know what I mean.
Anne soon finds that the huge and isolated old mansion is a strange place to be. She hears noises at night and she has the weirdest feeling that she and Helen are not alone in the house. There are photographs of a beautiful woman called Cora, a friend of Helen's, dotted around the place but the obviously mentally unstable Helen doesn't seem to want to talk about her.
Helen doesn't seem to want to talk about very much these days, but she does beg an increasingly concerned Anne to 'never leave her,' before planting a kiss on the surprised young woman's mouth.
Then one day, a worried Anne goes looking for Helen in the attic above Helen's bedroom which is normally kept locked and from which we know Helen herself hears spooky noises in the night. What does Anne expect to find up there in the dark and cluttered attic? Whatever it is, it finds her...
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that Larraz was a fan of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 horror classic, PSYCHO. The house is pure PSYCHO all the way through, with its creepy, dimly-lit corridors and heavy old-fashioned furniture and cloying atmosphere of dread and impending terror. And (sorry, spoiler alert!) at least one character gets the full Milton Arbogast treatment, right in the kisser. Fans of PSYCHO will know what I mean.
The build-up of the aforementioned dread is exquisitely handled. I was scared stiff for most of the film, which is something that doesn't happen too often now that I'm a hardened horror movie reviewer, haha. Helen's descent into insanity is fantastically well done.
Incidentally, the actress Angela Pleasence is the daughter of Donald Pleasence, who famously portrayed Michael Myers's psychiatrist Dr. Loomis in John Carpenter's iconic horror movie HALLOWEEN.
Angela, whose positively cut-glass British accent is a joy to listen to, actually looks a lot like that Emily one from EMMERDALE who went out with Paddy Kirk, the local vet. As Helen, Angela expertly exudes a badly-damaged frailty that at any moment could tip over into full-blown madness.
The undercurrents of lesbian love in the film add to the tension and Peter Vaughan, whose impressive film credits include VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, Ken Russell's VALENTINO and THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, does a flawless job of portraying the rather sinister handyman-gardener who knows more than he's letting on.
Did you know that this gothic horror story was the British Palme d'Or entry at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, but that it slipped into obscurity soon afterwards and was in fact considered 'lost' for many years? 1983 was apparently the last time it was shown on British television. In 2014, however, the British Film Institute found the original negatives, thereby enabling the film to be restored by Cinematek, Belgium.
This is a fascinating story, but not only that. The fact that this film might never have been seen by a modern generation of movie fans doesn't even bear thinking about. SYMPTOMS is going straight into my Top Ten of horror movies, along with PSYCHO, THE WICKER MAN, John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN and WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? See, it's just that good!
Now for the business end of things, heh-heh-heh. The film will be released by BFI FLIPSIDE in a rather spiffing Dual Format Edition on April 25th 2016. I'm reliably informed that there will be a whole host of terrific extras in there too. These will include interviews with the two female leads and editor Brian Smedley-Aston and also two documentaries about Larraz and his work, which I for one am immensely looking forward to watching.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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