Corruption – review

Director: Robert Hartford-Davis

Release date: 1968

Contains spoilers

This is another film where medical processes are used in a vampiric way – this time to restore beauty, which makes it analogous to Atom Age Vampire, indeed like that film the disfigured woman’s scarring is on half her face and like that film the mad doctor undergoes a Jekyll and Hyde like transformation – the difference here being that his transformation is not physically into a monster but mentally through the stress of the position he is in.

leaving theatre

It starts with an operation and the lead surgeon is Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) who has completed a monumentally long surgical procedure. He goes home and falls asleep to be woken by the telephone. It his fiancée and model, Lynn Nolan (Sue Lloyd), who reminds him of a party that photographer Mike Orme (Anthony Booth) is throwing. When the couple arrive in the car we can tell it is a May to December relationship and once in the party it is clear that Sir John does not belong in this swinging (sixties) scene.

injury

Mike clearly has a thing for Lynn and spurns another model (Vanessa Howard, the Blood Beast Terror) to photograph her. When he starts encouraging Lynn to undo her dress, suggesting the shots get kinky, Sir John intervenes and the two men fight. A photography light is knocked over, landing on Lynn and badly burning her face. In the hospital the fiancé is told they have saved Lynn’s sight and her distraught sister, Val (Kate O'Mara, the Vampire Lovers) arrives.

scarred

Lynn wakes screaming and Val is by her bedside. She is back home and Val tells Lynn that Sir John is working day and night to find a way to rejuvenate her skin. For her part Lynn, knowing that her modelling career is over and knowing she is now disfigured, simply wants to die, asking for a bottle of pills to be left for her. Sir John, for his part, is irritable given setbacks. Eventually he decides he has found a cure and shows Lynn a Guinee pig he claims to have injured in the way she was and cured.

surgery at home

He goes to the hospital and performs an unauthorised autopsy on a car crash victim stealing her pituitary glands. He is caught by his mentee Steve (Noel Trevarthen) who reluctantly turns a blind eye. At home he has made a surgery theatre with laser medical implement (the film was also released under the title Laser Killer) and operates on Lynn with Val assisting. Whether he transplants the gland (ala The Man In Half Moon Street or makes some form of injection I couldn’t tell, but the surgery also involves cutting scar tissue with both scalpel and laser.

the kill (UK version)

The next scene has a dinner party with Steve attending and Lynn’s face is back to normal. Lynn and Sir John are to go on a cruise but they return early as her face reverts to what it was. Sir John decides it is because he used a dead gland and must use a living one (how long it is deemed ‘living’ is questionable given the violent removal, as we’ll see). This sees him visiting a flat of ill repute and here the film has two versions. The UK and US versions have him visit a prostitute (Jan Waters), there is a bizarre scene of her taking a phone call and discussing clients, him getting cold feet and it all leads to an attack that is mostly unseen. In the continental version the prostitute (Marian Collins) strips and he gets cold feet, she demands payment and he begins a frenzied attack. In both cases he cuts her head off. All three versions are on the Indicator Blu-Ray.

Peter Cushing as Sir John Rowan

Long and short, the “living” gland also degrades but slower and Lynn demands another operation before the scarring returns. However, it is Cushing’s deranged attacks on victims that makes quite a ludicrous narrative (which includes a home invasion by criminal beatniks – or British cinema approximations of such, a most audacious train carriage murder/decapitation, and a mass laser killing) watchable. Cushing offers a superb performance, from suave to manic, with regret, shock and pathos. He makes this worth watching. Sue Lloyd likewise offered a chillingly sociopathic performance. There is an undercurrent of misogyny to the murders, which matched the cinema poster tagline “Corruption is not a woman’s picture”. The coda scene fails to hit the mark but I won’t spoil it, nevertheless 5 out of 10 for a superb Cushing performance.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK