Beasts (1976)

 

Directors: Don Taylor, Richard Bramall, Don Leaver, Donald McWhinnie and John Nelson-Burton

Screenplay: Nigel Kneale

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)

 

Nigel Kneale is famous for the character of Bernard Quatermass, created for the sadly lost BBC TV production The Quatermass Experiment (1953), which only has the first episode still in existence. Thankfully, the two other TV productions have survived intact, as do the three Hammer adaptations of all three stories for cinema, and the 1979 Quatermass, a TV series closing off the character. Kneale worked on other projects too, and this one was originally for Associated Television (ATV), part of the Independent Television (ITV) network before ITV became the British channel it is in the current day. To avoid confusion, as I am too young to have grown up in this era when Beasts was first broadcast, ITV was for decades since its creation in 1955, the first commercial TV station in Britain, actually a network of separate television companies who shared programming as well as created television for different regions. Nowadays, barring Scotland and Northern Ireland having their own distinct regional differences, and programming like the news being focused on different regions, ITV has mostly conglomerated all its networks in itself and is divided by having additional numbered channels. Whilst ATV, who provided a service to the Midlands all week from 1968 to 1982, is no longer with us, Beasts lingered and developed a high reputation as a British horror television series, enticing the likes of myself to witness its six macabre tales as a one-off.

The programming of the episodes varies per version, but going from the DVD version that was used for this review, Baby opens the series, about an expecting young woman moving to a country cottage. Alarm bells should be heard when the cat is mewing like mad and runs away from the premises, not the last time an animal is not stupid enough to stay where danger is. The husband, who hated being a vet in the city, is headstrong and patronises her, the idea of her pregnancy affecting her emotions a gendered bias that she suffers through here, as he is impassioned by working with cattle now and in the countryside. When, in one of the walls they demolished, they find a strange desecrated corpse of an animal in a jar which is unlike anything either has seen, he thinks it is a fascinating item to show to his senior college than a warning of such a creepy entity even being in that wall in the first place. Kneale is known for nodding to folklore, such as how the most famous Quatermass story in either TV or Hammer film adaptation, Quatermass and the Pit, links old superstitions to aliens found under a London subway construction. In Baby, the female lead hears from the locals that the fields around her new home were notorious for something which caused cows to abort and chased people off using the area, with the suggestion the strange sheep-monkey creature in the jar as a supernatural tool for hexing people. All six episodes are TV production chamber pieces, having to work around not having elaborate special effects, and here, it is a psychological tale where the emphasis is on implicit fears barring the final practical effect. The lead being patronised as a pregnant woman is explicit as a theme, leading her to be isolated when an overtly supernatural end that explains the jar creature is fully formed.

Buddy-Boy for episode two is the more idiosyncratic tale, a weird tale that takes full advantage of the lack of practical effects and carefully chosen locations this story had used. This is about dolphins in the past tense, specifically the titular one of an old attraction long gone and now with the building being considered being bought by the new owners, who are running a club cinema to show porn. This reveals a surprise in its own as, whilst this series is not that violent and little cursing, this episode jars from the rest for how adult it is to the other five, in terms of the presentation of its story, but also scenes in an adult cinema with the decor not censored and even brief female nudity. It is not a detraction to bring this up, but instead as much part of the episode's distinct makeup, Buddy-Boy the most esoteric of the series but also the one dealing with some pretty heavy themes alongside these brief moments of edginess which do not feel tacked on. Dave (Martin Shaw), the one potential buyer who wants to keep a respectable business even with erotica, whilst his partner is even supposedly weighing the breasts of women he wants to get into porn films, is suspicious of how the owner of the building Hubbard (Wolfe Morris) is driven to drink and triggered by talk of Buddy-Boy. Buddy Boy was the rare American dolphin Hubbard acquired who started to rebel followed by the others starting to die when he did, not from disease or malnutrition but as if following him in rebellion.

When Dave encounters a woman strangely obsessed with Buddy-Boy and squatting secretly in the building, it is clear in his interactions with her and Hubbard to Dave that Hubbard "punished" Buddy-Boy and is haunted by him, wanting to get rid of the place ASAP. With a growing interest in the woman for her child-like love for Buddy-Boy, it is revealed he is using her to get Hubbard to sell the building to him cheaply, but Dave is becoming obsessed with what exactly happened to Buddy-Boy, initially for any dodgy dealings in Hubbard's past but finding himself dragged into this strange psychodrama. Most of the story is entirely a drama, barring the touch that in the building where Buddy-Boy died, disembodied dolphin sounds are heard and they are not inside just the woman's head as Dave hears them too. Including its bleak ending, where her mind is entirely for Buddy-Boy even when Dave tries to love her as a romantic figure, Buddy-Boy is the oddest episode and the one which is going to divide viewers. For me, it is one of the better episodes because of this.

A great episode immediately arriving afterwards, The Dummy is set on a horror film production, a period chillier about a giant bog-pig monster. A follow up to a series of Dummy films that has not had a sequel in a long while, a female film journalist writing of the production arrives when the actor in the suit, Clyde (Bernard Horsfall) is struggling emotionally - his wife has run off with the actor in a smaller role, and taken their daughter too, during Clyde's out-of-work period. The director was unaware of their bad blood, and the production is falling off the rails as this is revealed, forcing the producer, Clive Swift, to be called in. A stalemate transpires - the other actor refuses to leave his small role, but the costume was designed for only Clyde - and it is when the journalist gives the producer the idea, when talking of Clyde imbuing the Dummy costume with his personality like a ritualistic mask, to get Clyde drunk and riff on this idea. It proves too effective, and Clyde as the Dummy beast murders an extra in a scene and goes mad, continuing on with an episode that is really good.

In general, the series after its first episode, which is just a nice start, is consistently strong as with episode four, Special Offer, in which we follow a meek female employee of a supermarket, hassled by her male superior. Unfortunately compared to the other young female employee, who he is clearly having a relationship with, this is Carrie-adjacent though explicitly linked to the concept of poltergeists tapping into the emotional energy of people, as this meek younger woman dismissed as ugly and dumb by her colleagues, Noreen (Pauline Quirke), is effecting the strange circumstances happening the store, like cans of food rolling by their own will, or eventually actually destruction of the produce. What she calls after the mascot of the store's own brand, and possibly seen as a rat infestation at first, becomes far more unnatural as this progresses, with her bullying lead wanting to initially fire her, stoking the flames. When her emotional state is told to him by his senior, who has to accept the unnatural as part of the issues as a regular crisis in a store as matter-of-fact, to be effected by her crush on him, this puts him and his wandering eye against the mill stone.

Episode five, What Big Eyes, has the added star power of Patrick Magee, a North Irish actor many will likely know for his small but iconic role in A Clockwork Orange (1971), or in a variety of other places from Joseph Losey's The Servant (1963), to even a Lucio Fulci horror film partially shot in England, The Black Cat (1981). Inspector Curry (Michael Kitchen) is a new RSCPA officer, the real life group using those initials to represent the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and is eventually brought into Magee's experiments after the set up. Adamant to protect animals, Curry even ends up reading the records of an animal merchant he feels is suspicious, only to be surprised when Hungarian and Romania timber wolves are being sent to a tiny pet shop in town. He suggests to the pet shop owner herself, McGee's daughter, his suspicion someone is using their store name as a front for illegal animal smuggling but she, living absolutely devoted to her father without ever having her own life and being mocked by him, is complicit to his experiments which used the wolves. Magee is dubbed by Curry's senior officer as a crackpot scientist who believed Darwin got it wrong about evolution, and between being a specialist in lycanthropy and the title's Red Riding Hood reference, with his creation a "Grandma vaccine", it is clear what the episode is hinting at. The episode's decision to be very subjective of how this vaccine works, as Magee is using it on himself, becomes one of the best strengths of a strong episode.

Episode six, During Barty's Party, ends this series on a perfectly gruesome note, in which an older couple slowly grow paranoid in their house at night. The opening sets up that another couple, who were necking in the fields, are being attacked by some unknown form off-screen which the central female lead initially thinks is from a dream. The husband initially dismisses this as all her nerves, his pride felt when a rat is found under the floorboards of their home and refusing to be swallowed even when the situation becomes direr. However, as the radio tells them, there is supposedly a rat migration transpiring in the thousands on the march. Barty of the title is the unseen host of the radio show that plays through the story. Whilst there is one use of the word "retarded" which has not aged well, he is not dissimilar to modern hosts with their wisecracks and playfully goofy, which adds a nicely grim edge as, in-between a real pop song they licensed and the fake ads, he initially dismisses the rat migrations as more rats are heard under the central couples' floors. The additional touch, relevant to the time period but still disturbing, is a take on how species naturally adapt to resist poisons, only in this case the wife theorising the rats may have also developed a consciousness awareness of the humans who created the poisons and desired revenge. Without spoiling this episode, it is a macabre end to an insanely good anthology series. It comes with the knowledge that, just in the seventies alone when this one-off series came out, Kneale was also writing the likes of The Stone Tape (1972), so this was part of a decades' long strong career from that point between the fifties to the eighties, one where this would be a grand piece for any writers' career in television and film, but one of many that cemented his reputation.