The Fiend (1972)

Brilliant and touching

The acting in this movie is really good.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This film is one of the best to trade on the hysteria and insanity of a religious cult that I've seen. From the cheesy opening which has scenes of a woman singing a hymn to the lord inter cut with a woman being stalked by a murderer, you know you're in for one hell of a ride. This is a low budget British production which concentrates on characters and their relationships which make it a stronger film than it might otherwise have been had a higher budget been available.Patrick Magee hams for all he's worth as a psychotic preacher who will stop at nothing to recruit prospective followers and then control them with a grip of iron. You take drugs or medication? You'll be cast out. Magee gives an absolutely frenzied performance and is a hoot whenever he's on screen. A few other actors like LUST FOR A VAMPIRE's Suzanna Leigh pop up here and there but this is a film mainly populated by unknowns who acquit themselves well with the material - especially the actor playing the tormented Kenny, Tony Beckley.The real horror comes from a series of violent murders being committed by an pervert. These pre-date and yet are remarkably similar to the later stalk-and-slash sequences in slasher epics which would swamp video shelves throughout the '80s. Each murder involves a woman who usually ends up minus most of her clothes, yes there's plenty of gratuitous nudity stirred into the brew. The killer is a man whose upbringing by the cult has left him mentally scarred and unable to have a normal relationship with a woman. So instead he goes out and slays anybody in the least bit sexual or attractive. THE FIEND is a totally demented film from start to finish and one that uncannily accesses human insanity and brings it to the screen in a believable way. Quite disturbing, quite rare, and well worth your time.

This has a very poor average rating from IMDb but don't let that put you off this forgotten gem of 1970s British exploitation cinema . It's certainly one of the most deranged movies I've seen in a long time and it'll take me a long time to forget it . It's interesting the screenwriter is called Brian Comport but one can't help thinking it's a word play on " Brain Compost " and is in fact a pen name for either Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens and the film sets out its amusingly tasteless stall right from the very start The film opens in a small church hall where we see a congregation listening to a fire and hell preacher whilst he carries out a baptism and you won't confuse this sequence with The God Channel " Sing my brethren sing " And indeed a miracle does indeed take place . Despite there only being a solitary church organ in the hall, trumpets , percussion instruments and electric guitars are heard as the lead singer mouths words to an entirely different song while the congregation have epileptic fits and terminal attacks of Tourette's syndrome . Tne momentum is kept up as after the title sequence we're treated to a British version of BATMAN where a security guard gets in to a punch up with a couple of villains . Just a pity the director forgot to put in the ZAP ! POW ! OUCH ! captions onto the screen . Luckily the security guard is rescued by the rozzers who tell him he's lucky the villains were only carrying screwdrivers ! Let me get this straight - if you're mugged by a couple of bad guys armed with screwdrivers you should be thankful that they're not carrying dangerous weapons ? well that's put my mind at rest Some people might claim it's offensive the way this film portrays Christians but I disagree . It's religion itself that's the target of THE FIEND . To quote Professor Steven Weinberg " In a secular world good people would do good things and bad people would do bad things but in order for good people to do bad things only religion must be involved . THE FIEND being rabid exploitation cinema doesn't concern itself with such cerebral philosophy but still rightly portrays religion as the worst thing ever invented by the human species and if anyone feels offended by its portrayal of Christianity would the same person feel offended if the story was set in Pakistan or Afghanistan where a student of a Madrasa school goes around killing infidels ?That said 1971 was a different world when this film was produced and religion did in fact find a new window of bad opportunity with new age thinking . Christianity was simply an old , boring dying religion and people handing out pamphlets and preaching damnation if sinners didn't repent would still have found a politely indifferent audience . Imagine how this modified scene from the film would look today in the present moral zietgeist as Kenny knocks on the door of a teenage schoolgirl " Is your mother in " " No . Why ? " I'm from the BBC "

The Fiend starts at a meeting of a strict religious cult known as the 'Christian Children Evangelical Crusade' whose sermons are performed by a nut-case minister (Patrick Magee) who is as fanatical & crazy as they come. One of the congregation is missing, that of Kenny Wemys (Tony Beckley) who happens to be a serial killer, his strict religious Mother Birdy (Ann Todd) has taught Kenny that sex is evil so Kenny becomes a messed up avenging angel type character as he stalks the streets & alleyways of London in search of morally corrupt girls like prostitutes who he then brutally murders. Kenny also likes to tape record his handiwork & listen to the tapes back home which is used as a base for his Mother's religious sect. District nurse Brigitte Lynch (Madeleine Hinde) pays regular visits to the Wemys house & becomes both concerned & suspicious about Kenny & his Mother so ask's her reporter sister Patricia (Suzannah Leigh) to do some investigating with the possibility of a big story for her, Patricia soon discovers the shocking truth but will she live long enough to tell anyone...This British production was produced & directed by Robert Hartford-Davis & is an OK watch I suppose but I didn't think it was brilliant or anything approaching it. First off I have to mention that a prostitute in The Fiend clearly says that she charges a mere £2 for a 'play-about' in the back of a truck, well all I can say is that you wouldn't get prices like that anymore, bleedin' hell that's as cheap as chips, that's inflation for you I guess. The script by Brian Comport takes itself very seriously & moves along at a fair pace, it has a pleasing amount of exploitation elements with it's fair share of dark alleyways, prostitutes, religious nut-jobs, murders & classic cockney dialogue but the story as a whole didn't quite grip or engage me enough, I never really cared about anything or anyone on screen & for the first hour or so The Fiend is all set-up with a few decent murders but then it's almost as if Comport knew he had to wrap things up quickly & introduced the female reporter to uncover the truth just so they had a convenient way to round the story off. The nut-case minister doesn't really feature until the end either when everything sort of comes together, oh & what happened to the CID inspector (David Lodge)? I mean the film starts off with him as the investigating officer dealing with the murders & then features him again in one more scene about half way through questioning a suspect after which he completely totally & utterly disappears from the rest of the film, as do the police as a whole. I suppose that The Fiend is trying to say something about religious fanatical-ism & the power it has over some people, unfortunately it means little as I think anyone watching The Fiend will be more interested in the murders, violence & nudity rather than any heavy handed moral message, I know I was. The Fiend is a decent exploitation film although I found it a bit dull & I couldn't really get into the somewhat erratic story or character's.Director Hartford-Davis does a good job & The Fiend has a really sleazy atmosphere to it, from the dirty alleyways & backstreet's of London, prostitution, murder, nudity as every victim is naked at some point or other & just the whole look & feel of the film which has to be put down to the grimy, oily, dirty, nasty, depressing, grey London location shooting, I live in the UK & things haven't improved that much... There's a fair amount of nudity but the violence isn't as strong as you may think, there's not much blood in it that's for sure. Some punches, a strangulation, a few dead bodies with one hanging up on a meat hook & that's about it actually.Technically The Fiend is solid British exploitation at it's best, it's well made & has a great sleazy feel to it. However, the gospel style songs that the congregation sing are cringe inducing. The acting isn't up to much, Magee lets his eyebrows & moustache do the acting, Beckley appeared in films such as The Italian Job (1969), Get Carter (1971) & Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) while all the females in the cast are pretty cute.The Fiend is a film that I thought was OK, it kept me watching until the end but it didn't really grab me & as a result I wasn't that interested in it or where it was going. The sleaziness of it is worth checking out since they just don't make 'em like this anymore. Worth a watch but nothing spectacular.

SPOILERS INCLUDED In 1972 sex and horror movie magazine Cinema X ran an article entitled 'How do you like your screen dollies? A-lively or..dead'. The article juxtaposed stills from Ray Selfe's Sweet and Sexy to represent 'A-lively' and stills from The Fiend to represent 'dead'. The Fiend press pack sent to Cinema X evidently consisting of little more than stills of dead, topless actresses either drowned, buried in cement or in one grisly case hung up on a meat hook. The article was subheaded 'one thing director Robert Hartford-Davis can do. He can sure make a corpse look sexy'.In fact Hartford-Davis was no stranger to sex and death cinema, having directed what's believed to be Britain's first story-driven sexploitation film (The Yellow Teddybears-1963). In the horror film arena he'd directed the infamous Corruption(1967), in which you get to see Peter Cushing butchering a prostitute and Carry On-starlet Alexandra Dane discovering a severed head in a fridge. Although dated today Corruption was the first sign (or warning if you will) of a grittier strain of horror films that would come into force in the 1970's. Hartford-Davis' final horror film The Fiend concerns the Brethren an evangelical movement under the command of 'The Minister' (Patrick Magee). Birdy (Ann Todd) a spinster has dedicated her life to the Brethren which includes handing her house over to the minister for his meetings (and what a motley crew the Brethren are). Her son Kenny (Tony Beckley) ups the ante by murdering women in an attempt to save their souls. Kenny also records his killings on audio-tape, later playing them back while having introspective conversations with his victim's bras. Supporting his mother by having duel jobs as a lifeguard and a security officer Kenny also uses these two occupations to further his third career as a serial killer. Outraged when a girl takes her top off at the pool Kenny follows her home with murder on his mind 'the day of retribution is at hand'. His security officer getup also comes in handy when terrorizing Hammersmith prostitutes. In one brutal sequence, Kenny disrupts one such woman servicing some old geezer, and before beating her around the head with a truncheon the 'nutcase bloody bible thumper' jams a torch into the girl's mouth. Which given the way we're introduced to the prostitute character in the film leaves little to the imagination as to what that torch is perversely symbolic of. Birdy takes an instant dislike to Brigitte a local nurse hired to care for the fail old woman. Brigitte is genuinely troubled by the Brethren, particularly the minister's rule forbidding the use of medicine since Birdy is a diabetic and closet insulin user. Brigitte's sister Paddy a chain-smoking journalist encouraged by her kin to write an expose of the Brethren, poses as an unwed mother-to-be in order to join the fold. Her appearance seems to bring out long repressed desire in Birdy and when the minister finds out she's been having 'foul thoughts' he orders Birdy to fast effectively issuing a death sentence to the diabetic. A desperate rush to administer her an insulin shot ensues, Paddy tries but is inadvertently stopped by Kenny, who locks her in the cellar. Finally standing up to the bullying minister Kenny storms upstairs to administer the shot, but he's too late to save her and literally exerts some biblical vengeance on the minister. Hartford-Davis was apparently driven to make The Fiend after being upset by reports of religious fanatics who forbid their followers the use of blood transfusions and medicine. The resulting film spares you none of his anger, but is also evidence of his exploiteer's eye for a good story milked for all its topical and sensationist worth. Brigitte seems to act as Hartford-Davis' mouthpiece when upon being told religion isn't that cool a subject in the Seventies she replies 'but this is different its so sick something ought to be done about those crank religions'. Inevitably today the film is usually spoken about in the same breath as the films of Pete Walker, particularly The House of Mortal Sin(1975) which similarly works religious iconology into its death scenes. Even though it was made at a time when Walker was just emerging from his School For Sex/nudie-cutie era, The Fiend anticipates Walker's heavy handed use of 'messages' and even his nuances for a headstrong heroine and an ineffectual male hero (amusingly played here by Ronald 'Uncle Quentin' Allen). Censor cuts inflicted on the film largely eliminated the angle the Cinema X article was written from. However in the uncensored print (surprisingly shown recently on UK TV!) the female nudity from actresses pretending to be dead, adds another unhealthy layer to the film. Tony Beckley (who died of cancer in 1980) is hard to fault as Kenny, Beckley also looks the part and his gaunt, sickly features would result in some memorable character bits in the period like the alcoholic in The Lost Continent(1968) and one of the gangsters in Get Carter(1971). It seems likely Beckley was cast here on account of his turn in 'british roughie' The Penthouse(1968) where he played a similar loose screw (who could forget his five minute rant about baby alligators). Another much missed actor Patrick Magee is equally memorable, relishing the minister's fire and brimstone monologues as only Magee could. And The Fiend sits alongside the varied likes of A Clockwork Orange, Dr Jekyll and the Women and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End as film's benefiting greatly from the work of this eccentric, intense actor. Although not without its fair share of tedium, The Fiend stands as one of the more interesting films in Hartford-Davis' hot and cold filmography. Wildly out of place musical numbers from one of the Brethren ('sing sister') recorded in an echo chamber, as well as the idea that Ann Todd on a church organ could produce the funky track 'wash me in his blood' are rare funny moments in another wise dark and bleak piece of work indeed.