Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible (2001)

 

Created by: Graham Duff

Directors: Matt Lipsey

Screenplays: Steve Coogan, Graham Duff and Henry Normal

Cast: Steve Coogan as Dr. Terrible / Captain Tobias Slater / Lester Crown / Denham Denham / Dr. Donald Baxter / Nathan Blaze / Captain Hans Brocken; Graham Duff as Josh / Norden / a Policeman / a Porter; Sarah Alexander as Beatrice Crown; Sally Bretton as Carmina; Julia Davis as Stephanie Wise; John Thomson as Sir Donald Tyburn; Louise Paige as Nurse MacReedy; Warwick Davis as Tygon

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

That day, I learnt an important lesson. Never eat your own chin. Had I feasted on my own chin, I'd be ill-equipped to introduce tonight's tale.

In terms of digging up a real obscurity, finding the time when Steve Coogan was co-writer and centre stage on a parody of horror anthology shows, and British pulp and horror stories, is pretty significant as a find. Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible is the creation of Graham Duff, an English writer/actor/producer. Steve Coogan, for those with no idea who he is, is an actor/comedian/screenwriter whose legacy includes Alan Partridge, a character of his and co-creator Armando Iannucci, over multiple productions and multi-media, who became a phenomenon alongside Coogan's extensive career in other productions such as his roles in 24 Hour Party People (2002). This, six episodes broadcast on BBC 2, was released on DVD, but has become an obscurity. He, alongside playing all the protagonists, plays the host Dr. Terrible, a horror show guide who, with his Count Orlok ears and fake teeth, contemplates in the first episode I saw his dreams of an erotic kind. He is a perversion of a senile old man who steals his deceased wife's coffin and has witnessed other macabre things like a man eating his own chin as his monologues suggest, alongside befitting that a show like this needs a macabre host.

Even the BBC DVD played a trick that, unlike the original broadcast order, episodes one and four were switched, leaving me with And Now the Fearing as the first tale, a story set in 1972 where Steve Coogan plays a sleazy businessman named Denham Denham, part of him clearly having it as part of the roles to have as many fake hair pieces, or hair stylists involved, per episode as he can. Denham, a feminist female reporter (Julia Davis) and an architect (Alexander Armstrong) are stuck in a lift which is heading towards a thirteenth floor which should not be there. A possible spoiler, but this is clearly Tales from the Crypt (1972), the Amicus anthology horror film, crunched into less than thirty minutes, including the punch line, whilst also being a parody of such Amicus and anthology films from the era.

It also presents that a) Coogan and the co-writers clearly like these types of films despite the piss taking that comes through all six episodes, and that b) unfortunately one of the clear problems, and likely why the series did not work, comes ahead in that this is a wildly inconsistent work. When this hits, it is funny, but when it misses the mark, this show has aged badly and is also broad as a brick. And Now the Fearing also sets this up with an alternative world scenario, if this had gained a cult audience and worked, of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) before Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness created it, and if interpreted by Steve Coogan, of pastiching cheesy horror tales of the past, which is bizarre to consider. For my reservations with Darkplace that it played to "ironic bad" for its humour, thankfully, we got the timeline with that series, and this makes a lot more mistakes. Here you see that, for half the episodes of House of Horrible, the broad tone in comparison does not land as well. Feeling strange as an early 2000s television production trying to replicate the nineteen seventies, stranger for an inexplicable reason than any of the older periods being tackled, the production feels like it is going for the obvious jokes which do not work. The stories themselves could have worked - one's drunken hit-and-run of a homeless man damning you in a cycle, why you never try to cheat gypsies from their land, and the most openly silly like a Darkplace joke, why never to purchase a haunted table. But the tone is off, and it is only by the end of the series the show hits the point of itself premise.

Curse of Tongs, set in Limehouse in London in 1910, is not an episode to help as it is a Fu Manchu parody, which even if played for irony to damn it, is damned in itself by playing to it. Whilst a broad parody of "Yellow Peril" xenophobia of the infamous Sax Rohmer character, I had to think about what the Chinese cast to this episode thought of all this, as this is still as a parody a Fu Manchu pastiche, with actor Mark Gatiss in yellow face as Hangman Chang. Kidnapping the love of Steve Coogan's Nathan Blaze, Coogan is also still playing the heroic white savour over the Chinese villains in something which, for the 2000s, really shows that ironically playing with these themes was not a lesson that succeeded at this time period, more so as, alongside the sixties films when Christopher Lee played the figure, Peter Sellers played Fu Manchu in a comedy in 1980 called The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Not even having a Chinese detective on the heroes' side works to undercut this as, not even a sidekick, the character barely appears onscreen.

The legacy of Fu Manchu is more uncomfortable in mind that, whilst Sax Rohmer was a good pulp writer for tales like Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918), he was also a figure ingested with the xenophobia of his time, and as a British writer, I cannot help but feel more uncomfortable, even as someone who has found enjoyment in Fu Manchu tales, knowing it stems from not only British xenophobia, but also our really problematic relationship to China into the 20th century beforehand. A character like Fu Manchu, whose first tale was published in 1912, stems from British colonial influence as much as the fear of the East coming to the West, after the likes of the Boxer Rebellion - an anti-foreign, anti-colonial, and anti-Christian uprising in China between 1899 and 1901 - and that, in mind to the scene here where Coogan is forced to become an opium addict by Hangman Chang, Britain is the villain for me as an Englishman in the two Opium Wars. The two Opium Wars, the First Opium War fought in 1839–1842 between Qing China and the United Kingdom, the Second Opium War fought between the Qing and the United Kingdom and France, 1856–1860, were the result of Western groups like the British trying to force opium trade on the Chinese. A parody in 2001 about this, ironically done, cannot work because I learnt this history in my university days in lectures, and even if I had not, as mentioned, it still involves Mark Gatiss in yellow face playing an Asiatic evil. Even the amusing special effects for the giant crab Tong has in the sewer, nor his secret crab claw hand, can help get over this.

Episode three, Curse of the Blood of the Lizard of Doom, can be argued to be as bad as an episode, in its many cheap jokes about red heads and the Scottish, the later likely as offensive just for the fake Scottish accent. It is also compellingly ridiculous. In Edinburgh 1880, Coogan plays a specialist burns doctor, Dr. Donald Baxter, who is experimenting with reptile plasma (at one point even gecko rectal fluid) to treat burns, even if it accidentally leads to patients developing webbed fingers and a need to crawl on the ceiling. There are more ironic sexism jokes as in the first episode, but for what is, frankly, an eye rolling parody, at least in this tale the humour is more about Coogan experimenting with lizards to treat burns, with a female doctor he begrudgingly works with, throwing caution to the wind in how silly it is. Chameleon plasma is experimented on, and alongside a man hanging himself with his own extending tongue, or trying to bluff around a conference with colleagues by incinerating a body of a man meant to have been a live patient, Coogan experimenting on himself leads to him turning into a giant chameleon, This is compellingly bad at least.

Episode four, in Upper Carpathians 1877 and the original first episode, is Lesbian Vampire Lovers of Lust, entirely based on Hammer's Karnstein trilogy. The trilogy - The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971) - are the children of the famous 1872 novella Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. It is a text which has gained greater weight as becoming an LGBTQ novel of gay desire between women, if in mind this period into the seventies, when Hammer were trying to sell their films on more sex, one should consider these movies from heterosexual film producers from the perspective they may have only included the content in a titillating way, not any possible interpretation from female scholars which could find more of note within the films, or the legacy of Carmilla as a story which gained weight over centuries in meaning.

This is again another premise which could pose problematic, as with a female vampire countess eyeing Coogan's newly wedded bride, the vampires are gay, even their human servant Rebenor, played by Ben Miller, a dapperly dressed and flamboyant figure who even makes a dress he stole from someone else look stylish. However it is fascinating it never touches the subject at all barring its source material as a parody, more interested in a lot of sexual innuendo as has also been common in the series. With the sense the series improved considerable by the halfway point, this is an openly silly pastiche, just from the get-go in having Coogan with his blue eyes and Hugh Grant hairstyle playing a heroic lead that is mostly useless. Sadly, the older female Van Helsing stand-in does not last long, but the tone, including the bombastic choral score, or the ending based around Steve Coogan playing tongue hockey by himself by a mirror, means this comes off as one of the strongest episodes.

In mind that was originally the first episode, the last two episodes of the series show the tone was improving. Episode 5, Voodoo Feet of Death, is also one of the stronger episodes too barring, however, it is parodying voodoo tropes in cinema, which is a huge issue as, with horror's longstanding history of demonising an actual religion, I do feel uncomfortable with even this parody. Even if I enjoy my old horror films - and will always think fondly of George Zucco playing bongos in Voodoo Man (1944) with Bela Lugosi - this is not woke for the sake of it, just admitting embarrassment at how narrow minded this area of storytelling can be, even accidentally as a parody of this narrow-mindedness. It also has no point in being included, barring the voodoo priest who demands Coogan returns his late brother's feet so they can be purified of the evil slowly corrupting their new host. The premise is strong enough as it is without the "voodoo" aesthetic, that this is The Feet of Orlac, or The Hands of Orlac (1924), which was remade as a 1960 British film, where Conrad Veidt, as a concert pianist, loses his hands in a horrible accident only to have experimental hand transplants that. To his horror, they may have once belonged to a murderer. This works with just parodying this, set in the 1920s, where there is a romantic triangle between Coogan, playing a dancer named Lester Crown, his wife and a trendy new tap dancer. An ill-advised scouting of possible adultery, involving a giant novelty barbershop pair of scissors, leads to a moment of comically levels of fake blood spurting and experiment feet transplants, taken from a dock worker who was crushed under a heavy crate baring those appendages.

The joke of sentient feet that kill is inherently funny by itself, and no one suspects that feet can strangle a person, or that extra long toe nails can slice a jugular in one swipe, which adds to this humour. It proves one of the funnier episodes, as does Episode 6, Scream Satan Scream, Coogan playing a Witchfinder General in 1645 Blackburn, who is burning witches and those who inappropriately use vegetables. Captain Tobias Slater is also a sex hound who is abusing his power, masquerading under finding witches to bed as many women he can within one location at a time. Throughout the show, there had been sexual innuendo, but Scream Satan Scream fully embraced this, to the point there is literally an inn called Fist Inn as a setting. With a curse over his head from a previous witch he burnt in the first scenes, this is a very funny episode, arguably the best as it embraces blatant sex comedy, Coogan playing a villain, and Warwick Davis makes a suddenly and welcomed appearance as his assistant Tygon, clearly a reference to Tigon British Film Productions, who released Witchfinder General (1968), the Vincent Price witch hunter film which this is parodying. Sadly, Davis does not have lines, but when the camera cuts to him in close up reacting to Coogan, it is perfect in itself.

Embracing its silliness, where Satan ends up looking like a Jan Švankmajer project, superimposed onto the screen when the Dark Lord is briefly summoned, this is what Dr. Terrible's House of Horror should have been. Not ironic attempts to mock racism or sexism of the past in horror and pulp cinema, the jokes tightened, just embrace the crude sexual innuendo, and just run with the silliest ideas possible, like The Feet of Orlock or Coogan reimagining Vincent Price's Witchfinder General just scrapping past being dunked in a river as a witch himself. There is a clear sense the people made this admire the horror cinema they parody, from the elaborate animated opening credits, and in how there is even a cameo in And the Fearing Starts of Sheila Keith, from Frightmare (1974) and House of Whipcord (1974). The show sadly faltered many times because, as I have found in other work, a lot of its humour was cheap ironic pastiches, and jokes, including enough Scottish stereotypes in one episode to fill a tin of shortbread. There was also content as well that show we did not really progress well in the 2000s in our humour as we thought we did, and other times where it did not work at all just as a joke. It is fascinating, and when it rewards, it is very funny. It is, as mentioned, that one Steve Coogan work, from a man who is an institution for many nowadays, which I have never heard brought up, as mysterious as that sounds.