Maybe it’s all just Halloween fun?
The Creeping Flesh (1973) combines some fine acting, competing subplots, excellent cinematography & generally good-to-excellent technical work, with a plot that seems to careen along mostly on coincidence, bad science, and, well, general yuckiness, all bookended by suggestions that this is the delusion of a madman.
The story opens in Victorian England on the occasion of Dr. Emmanuel Hildern returning home from New Guinea with a monstrous, huge skeleton in tow. What has he found? He believes he’s found the source of all evil, and he hopes to use this skeleton to produce a vaccine for evil in the usual way, producing antibodies for it that can then be used to inoculate sufferers.
But he arrives to find his rather magnificent home in figurative disarray: half the staff dismissed, his finances in ruin, although there’s a lovely prize dangling out there for the next big scientific breakthrough, a letter stating that his wife has passed away, and his twenty year old daughter, hopped up on the usual hormones, desperate for his attention even as she continues to desire to know more about her long-dead mother.
Who died last week.
E. Hildern must visit the insane asylum, run by his most ambitious half-brother, Dr. James Hildern, who informs him that, along with the death of his insane wife, he is also no longer supporting his brother’s research. This is but one more worry for E. Hildern, already trying to study pure evil, concerned that his daughter has inherited her mother’s madness, his own petty delusions when it comes to his late wife’s former occupation as a dancer and flirt in the raucous houses of Paris, the lack of staff.
And, it turns out, the sticky fingers of one half-brother.
And what about this painting habit of his? Aren’t we worried about that, too?
But this all seems curiously unconnected. Perhaps his wife went mad; why worry about the daughter? Is she going off her rocker? How convenient it is that a madman breaks loose and terrorizes the town, is it not, just as the daughter finds said rocker, along with a piano to play?
And why does he fear that rainstorm?
In the end, the plot seems to be a mishmash with no unifying theme. It’s a pretty movie, as in it looks authentic, and the actors take creditable turns, but in the end it’s hard to take seriously. Perhaps, for a horror aficionado, this is a delectable piece of pie, but it all left me a bit cold.
