Sinistre cinema

Carole Gray commands you!
(Click to enlarge.)

It plays fast and loose with movie legend, jumbling vampires, witchcraft and voodoo — and aren’t those gypsies lifted from The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Wolf Man? — which may be why Devils of Darkness (1965) is such a treat. Cheesy and ludicrous, but a treat. Despite my horror leanings as a kid, I never heard of it until recently, after catching up with Curse of the Fly (1965) for the first time in over forty years. No, that one doesn’t, uh, fly (did it ever?), but my eye gravitated toward leading lady Carole Gray, a poor man’s Ava Gardner running around the Fly family in bra and panties in an ill-conceived spin on the Cloris Leachman character from Kiss Me, Deadly. I scoured Netflix to find more of Carole, but there isn’t much. In fact, now that I’ve got Devils of Darkness under my belt, all that’s left is her rocking out with Cliff Richards in the potentially dreadful The Young Ones and some sundry episodes of The Saint TV show.

    For this Carole fix, however, Devils of Darkness delivers. Not to any great extent, mind you, but enough. Playing Tania, she breaks into an Esmeralda shimmy near the beginning, a lot of tambourine shaking and lusty hair-tossing. Petite with dark, piercing, seductive eyes (the Ava connection), I found her disappointingly short in the legs. Regardless, the actress is firmly rooted in this brief but potent display, vibrant and alive, undoubtedly inspired by Maureen O’Hara in The Hunchback. It feels as if the production — a low budget British takeoff on the Hammer product from a fly-by-night claiming to be called Planet Films — simply lucked out when they signed her.

    Tania’s taken under the batwing of Lucifer-as-Dracula going under the nom de plume Count Sinistre (get it?) who demands her for his wife. If you’ve had a few drinks this could become a terrific running gag, because the swishy and wan Count as played by Hubert Noël (he was Henri de Maleville in The Earrings of Madame de…), appears less than interested in carnal relations with any woman. Several centuries later — Tania and Sinistre don’t age: she’s still hot, he still looks like a sack of flour — they’re in a jam with nosy tourists and leave their base in Brittany to kick off a satellite coven in London.

    They’re also after a gilded talisman stolen by William Sylvester, a bland American actor who did most of his work in England. A year earlier he battled a deranged ventriloquist in Lindsay Shonteff’s creepy Devil Doll, and Stanley Kubrick, seeking featureless types to play astronauts, cast him as Dr. Heywood ‘Pink’ Floyd in 2001: A Space Odyssey — he was the one having a video phone chat with young Vivian Kubrick. (If you’ve a sharp eye, you can spot Sylvester alongside Alexander Knox and Robert [Slime People] Hutton in the Pentagon scenes of You Only Live Twice.) Disappearing corpses, bite marks on necks and London in a tizzy, Sinistre grows bored with Tania, relegating Carole Gray to second banana to a voluptuous bohemian so cool she wears sunglasses indoors. That would be Tracy Reed (stepdaughter of Sir Carol, stepcousin of Oliver). Buxom, long legs, with miles of silky red hair, Tracy also shares a Kubrickian connection as George C. Scott’s bikinied secretary in Dr. Strangelove.

    All this and more in 88 minutes. How can you resist?


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