Tag Archives: Beryl Reid
The Beast in the Cellar (1971)
4-Word Review: Elderly sisters harbor prisoner.
Soldiers throughout the English countryside are being gruesomely murdered by what seems to be some wild beast, but the authorities have no idea what type of creature it is, or where it came from. Ellie (Beryl Reid) and Joyce (Flora Robson) are two elderly sisters living together in an isolated rural home, who fear they may know the answer and it has something to do with a dark family secret that lies imprisoned in their basement.
The film's perceived charm revolves around the casting of two legendary actresses in offbeat roles where they at times come-off both as antagonists and the anti-heroes. Reid is especially interesting because here she's a child-like individual while just a few years earlier she was a controlling, domineering woman to Susannah York's child-like one in The Killing of Sister George, so seeing her able to play both parts effectively is fun and impressive.
The banter between the two though needed to be played-up more and I was expecting, given the storyline, more of a campy, dark humored tone, which really never manifests. The dialogue gets too extended, as the women do nothing, but pretty much talk, talk, talk until it seemed to be almost a filmed stageplay with the camera locked in the house and nothing visually stimulating to captivate the viewer.
The scares consist mainly of a handheld camera swinging back and forth in an apparent attempt to replicate the beast attacking the victim, which ends up being more dizzying and amateurish looking than frightening and the fact that this technique gets done with each attack makes it quite derivative. It would've been better had the attacks not been played-out at all, but instead simply revealed the mangled. bloody body afterwards. The film also makes the tacky error of portraying the eyeball, which gets gouged out on one victim, as being shaped like a ping pong ball, which is probably what was used, when in reality it is more oval shaped.
A good horror film should have a frightening image to latch onto, but here that's lacking despite a few prime opportunities where one could've been implemented. Reid's retelling to the police inspector about the backstory dealing with their basement prisoner has some interesting cutaways making it the best part of the movie, but no shot of the shell-shocked, war weary father even though he's an integral component to the plot. The ultimate reveal of the beast is highly disappointing in a climactic finish that completely fizzles, which makes sitting through this not worth your time.
Director: James Kelly
Studio: Tigon Film Distributors
Available: DVD, Amazon Video
Posted in 70's Movies, British Movies, Foreign Films, Horror, Movies with a rural setting
Tagged Beryl Reid, Entertainent, Flora Robson, Movies, Review
The Killing of Sister George (1968)
4-Word Review: TV character gets axed.
June Buckridge (Beryl Reid) is an aging actress playing the character of Sister George a scooter riding nun in a long running British TV soap opera. Her character no longer has the popularity that it once had and the producers have decided to kill her off by having her die in an ugly road crash with a truck. June is upset with this news as at her age parts are hard to come by and she takes her frustrations out on Childie (Susannah York) her much younger live-in lesbian lover, but she may lose her as well as one of the show's producers Mercy (Coral Browne) has inklings to lure Childie away from June so she can have her all to herself.
After the immense box office success of The Dirty Dozen writer/director Robert Aldrich was given free rein to start up his own production company and he choose this as his first project. In many ways it is quite similar to his earlier and more well-known film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, but with sexual undertones. The film is based on the Frank Marcus play of the same name that ran for 205 performances and was nominated for the 1967 Tony Award. For its time this was considered quite controversial and groundbreaking especially the final scene that features a highly explicit sex scene between two women. It also is the first film to have a character utter the word 'bullshit' and one of the first to say the word 'fuck'. Although the word itself gets drowned out by a car horn you can still clearly tell by reading Reid's lips what she is saying.
The three female leads and their snarky exchanges with each other are the film's chief asset especially Reid who recreates the same character that she played in the stage version that netted her a Tony. Her emotional, angry outbursts are entertaining and the scene where she forces Childie to eat and swallow the butt of her cigarette as 'punishment' is still quite edgy. Browne is equally good specifically during her provocative love scene with York, which was made all the more daring since she was 30 years older than York at the time.
The film's overall staginess is a drawback. Many scenes are too talky and should've been trimmed while York and Reid's Laurel and Hardy routine could've been cut out completely. Flashbacks showing how they first met would've helped and there needed to be an explanation to the weird child-like manner of York's character, which quite possibly was based on an age-old gay stereotype. I also didn't like the foreboding quality of the music that gets played just before Browne and York have their lesbian love scene, which seemed to suggest that something 'creepy' and 'unnatural' was about to take place and convinced me that despite the daring and ahead-of-its-time nature of the subject that the filmmakers themselves still had some very dated ideas about gays much like the majority of people from that era.
Rated X (Reissued as R)
Director: Robert Aldrich
Studio: Cinerama Releasing Corporation
Available: DVD
Posted in 60's Movies, Black Comedy, British Movies, Erotica, Foreign Films, Gay/Lesbian, Movies Based on Stageplays, Movies with Nudity
Tagged Beryl Reid, Coral Browne, Entertainment, Movies, Review, Robert Aldrich, Susannah York