classicsoncall How can you go wrong with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the same film? They appeared in movies together twenty two times; I don't know if that's a record or not, but it sounds pretty prolific to me. They're cast as half brothers in this flick, both on a course of determining the true nature of evil from slightly different angles, with Emmanuel (Cushing) seeking a cure for evil as a disease. This sounded to me a little like putting terrorists on trial as lawbreakers, with a lot of the same drawbacks.Hey, how about that escaped lunatic Lenny from the Hildern Institute for Mental Disorders. The actor, Kenneth J. Warren looked like he could have portrayed Russian dictator Nikita Khrushchev given the chance, or if you prefer, a reasonably whacky George 'The Animal' Steele. He just had the perfect look for those kinds of roles, and he fit right in here.Told in a flashback from the perspective of Professor Emmanuel Hildern, we don't know it when the movie opens that he's already become a patient of his brother James (Lee) three years earlier when the events of the story took place. If he had to do it again, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have injected daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilbron) with that anti-evil serum he concocted from the giant skeleton discovered in New Guinea. What was he thinking? And by the way, anyone else think that the head on that skeleton resembled the Predator that came along about a decade later? First thing I thought of.Well, with Penelope taking on her own mother's persona and the skeleton coming to life after the Sky God weeped, it was just a matter of time before the good doctor's plans for wiping out evil in the world came to an abrupt end. Produced by Tigon Pictures, this English film bears the hallmarks of it's competitor Hammer Films, right down to the principals and the Gothic feel of the sets and characters. One element the story could have done a better job of though, was explaining how the resurrected skeleton came by his Riding Hood gear.

Leofwine_draca THE CREEPING FLESH is one of my all-time favourite British horror films. Sure, it's a low budget product that feels inferior in terms of production values to a lot of Hammer fare, but it absolutely drips with Gothic atmosphere and dread and it has a complex and unusual storyline to boot. It's a shame that it's so hard to get hold of these days; the British DVD is long out of print and I had to make do with my old VHS for many years until recently picking up a Spanish DVD. It's the sort of film that cries out for a proper Blu ray restoration.It's hard to go wrong with the dream-team threesome of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in the lead roles (playing brothers, no less!) and Freddie Francis working as director. The latter makes sure this is a beautifully-shot film with great laboratory backdrops and costumes. The plot is a little reminiscent of HORROR EXPRESS at first, with Cushing retrieving an ancient skeleton from New Guinea, but when the regeneration storyline kicks in (with more than a nod to CARRY ON SCREAMING) the film really gets going.Much of the running time consists of a lengthy sub-plot involving psychiatry and a condemnation of common practice at the time; this gives Lee one of his most subtlety villainous performances. The exploration of hereditary madness leads to some unforgettable set-pieces. The monster stuff is great too, especially at the ghoulish climax. Cushing veers towards playing the annoying ninny from AT THE EARTH'S CORE on occasion, but by the end he's really invested you in his character. I'd argue that THE CREEPING FLESH is a great film that deserves better recognition.

Lee Eisenberg "The Creeping Flesh" is a neat idea for a movie: a doctor brings home a skeleton that grows flesh when exposed to water. That probably could have been the plot of a 1950s B movie. Unfortunately, this movie meanders way too much. A large portion of it focuses on the daughter's descent into madness, and we have to wait a really long time before the skeleton does its stuff. Maybe one has to see it more than once to appreciate the movie as a whole sufficiently.Other than that, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are great in their roles (as can be expected). Even so, I prefer Freddie Francis's movies that stick entirely to their plots. As it was, the end of this one reminded me of the end of Philip Kaufman's "Quills".

Prof-Hieronymos-Grost Scientist and widower, Emmanuel Hildern returns t Victorian England, from a long expedition to Papua New Guinea, where he has found the skeletal remains of what he believes to be a "Missing link" that will dispel Darwins's theory of evolution and perhaps prove his theory that pure evil is a disease that can be cured. Emmanuel receives a letter form his half brother, James, who runs the local sanitarium, its states that his mentally deranged wife had passed away there, his daughter Penelope believes her mother was dead a long time but Emmanuel has been hiding the truth to protect her, his ever growing fears are that the madness of her mother might me hereditary. His experiments on his skeleton sees him accidentally stumble on a way to reanimate the creature by adding water, he takes some blood cells from the creature, a mythical force of evil, and proceeds to find a cure for evil, he injects his daughter with it to protect her from madness, he however finds out his conclusions were a little premature with devastating results for him and Penelope. What can I say, I'm a sucker for Victorian era horror, if it has Cushing and Lee all the better, this one does. Tigon's The Creeping Flesh follows some faux science, but then that era had many such implausible idealists so I always forgive such misgivings. If the film has a fault, its that is follows too many of these ideas and ideals and that the rather unique creature only turns up very late on, still though its one of Francis's better pictures, Cushing is as always in his element as the befuddled mad scientist who fails to see the errors of his ways, Lee is cool too, as the obnoxious and calculating James Hildern who has his sights set on stealing the Richter Prize away from his brother by any means possible, there's also a nice twist that will have you guessing whether or not all you have seen actually happened at all.