Horror Hospital (1973)

Horror Hospital is a childhood favourite of mine….yes, I do have happy childhood memories of watching people being decapitated by a car with a blade attached to it.  I would have been 15 when I first saw this film, after Vipco brought it back out on video in the early 1990s.  This was the second incarnation of Vipco, and they released it a time when my enthusiasm for their releases was beginning to wane.  Their post-cert incarnation had begun strongly with re-releases of their ‘greatest hits’ like Zombie Flesh Eaters, The Deadly Spawn and Shogun Assassin, but the Vipco well was starting to run dry, and this was a period when they began to gain the nickname ‘Shitco’.  I remember picking up their VHS releases of Horror Hospital and John Russo's Midnight at the same time and those two temporarily restored my faith in all things Vipco, however misplaced that turned out to be…the worst was yet to come.  Horror Hospital also changed the way I looked at British horror films, before this my point of reference for British horror was the Amicus and Hammer films that played on late night TV.  Therefore my impression of homegrown horror was that it was all rather restrained and old fashioned, the type of horror films that your parents approved of you watching.  By the early 1990s I had turned my back on such films and was looking for more extreme and violent movies, evidenced by the fact that I was picking up Vipco videos.  So Horror Hospital blew me away with it with the revelation that British horror could get this gory and outrageous, as one of the quotes on the Vipco release puts it the film anticipates the day of the video nasty.  While being an example of a British film that could stand shoulder to shoulder with the type of material that Vipco usually released, Horror Hospital was also very funny in a way I didn't think a film so deeply into throwing blood and severed heads around could be.  

vipco: the 1990s years

Obviously this was my first port of call when it came to Antony Balch, as I suspect is the case with the majority of people, it has been his most visible movie over the years. I saw his Burroughs shorts next, having sent off for a compilation of those to a video company based in Blackpool, of all places, who sent the tape before they even cashed the cheque, which was very trusting of them.  I remember that when I opened the Jiffy bag they sent the tape in, a millipede type creature scurried out of it, a very Burroughs touch there.  Free millipede with every William Burroughs video.  It was Secrets of Sex that was the difficult to see Balch movie during that period.  Prior to its DVD release in 2005 that was a tough movie to track down, and something I had to make do with reading and hearing about before getting the chance to see it for myself.

 

Fortunately this was not the case with Horror Hospital.  In fact, me and Horror Hospital hit it off so well, that whenever a new film review book would hit the bookshelves back then, I would always make a point of looking up what they had to say about Horror Hospital.  If they were into the movie it was a good sign that me and this book were on the same wavelength.  On the other hand, if they panned the movie it was damning evidence that this book was written by someone with no soul.  The second part of this test is whether they could spell the director’s name right.  If they dropped an extra ‘H’ into Antony it was usually a sign that this was going to be an error ridden, poorly researched book.  So, now you know the secret to dodging the bullet on badly researched books, written by people with no soul…The Balch test.  You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge it by what it says about Horror Hospital. 

 

A couple of years ago I remember reading an online review of Horror Hospital, that I wished I’d done screenshots of at the time, in which the reviewer had seen that Robin Askwith was in the film, seen red and assumed that Horror Hospital was made by similar people to the Confessions films.  Therefore went off on this whole tirade about how the people who made this film must have been blokey morons who thought that was okay to ogle women and sexually harass them on trains, and that they must have also thought that gay bashing was funny as well.  At which point I thought “you really haven't done your research into the people who made this film, have you?”  I'm sure Balch was happy to leave the skirt chasing to the likes of Greg Smith and Norman Cohen.  As for gay bashing, well Balch was gay and did film himself masturbating for his short film ‘Towers Open Fire’ … so yes, I guess he was into gay bashing, just not in the sense that this dipstick meant.  People’s lack of perception amuses me sometimes.  I mean, I was 15 when I first saw this film and knew nothing about Antony Balch, back then… but even so there was a certain shot in the scene where Askwith meets Dennis Price, which tipped me off to the fact that the director of this film wasn't going home to a wife and two kids at night. 

I have a theory that the early parts of Horror Hospital are intended as a bit of a dig at Mick Jagger… I shall explain.  Horror Hospital wasn't meant to be Balch’s second movie.  After Secrets of Sex his plan was to do a film adaptation of Burroughs’ book The Naked Lunch.  There had been some movement on that in May 1971, when Mick Jagger expressed an interest in playing the lead role.  This resulted in Jagger meeting Balch and Burroughs at Dalmeny Court in Duke Street, where Balch and Burroughs both lived at the time.  Jagger wanted a big name director for the film, and took an instant dislike to Balch.  Apparently Jagger showed up wearing of a tight pair of trousers that left little to the imagination, and Balch being Balch passed comment on this, which Jagger took offense to, and felt Balch was coming onto him sexually.  So, could it be that Balch was still working through his vendetta with Jagger when he made Horror Hospital? In the cast is Robin Askwith, who prior to becoming a star in his own right, tended to be noted for his resemblance to Brian Jones, playing a character called Jason Jones, who is depicted as the real talent in a rock and roll band.  One Jones is being eased out of in favor of a flamboyant cross-dressing front man who may be a piss-take of Mick Jagger.  That’s my ‘Horror Hospital is a secret Brian Jones biopic’ theory.

 

Alan Watson in all his glory

Jason Jones’ cross dressing nemesis, who he insults as a “lemon meringue pie on heat” is played by the film's co-writer Alan Watson and by all accounts, a lemon meringue pie on heat was a role he was born to play.  Alan was a friend of Balch, but he definitely was not a friend of William Burroughs… even though he and Burroughs lived together for a few years… it's complicated.  From what I understand of that situation Burroughs had been in a relationship with a young Englishman called Ian Sommerville. Due to problems with Ian getting a US visa they had drifted apart, but when Burroughs began living in London he asked Ian to move in with him at Dalmeny Court.  The problem was that Ian had begun a relationship with Alan Watson, and so in order to still have Ian in his life, Burroughs agreed to let both Ian and Alan live with him at Dalmeny Court, in what you could describe as a triangle relationship.  Burroughs from what I understand wasn't fond of keeping company with camp effeminate men, and Alan was, in the words of Burroughs “a 100% swishy queen”.  So Alan probably drove Burroughs up the wall by playing Maria Callas records all the time, as well as with his nasally, room clearing, laugh… which is captured on film at the start of Horror Hospital.  Incredibly Alan had a day job working for the police, he was a cook at Scotland Yard, where the police would encourage him to dance on the top of tables in the canteen room.  This was another black mark against Alan in William Burroughs’ book, since Burroughs hated the police and regarded any gay man who worked for them as consorting with the enemy.  Alan did however come up with the idea of the car that decapitates people in Horror Hospital and was meant to be an extremely good cook, so he did have his uses.  Another priceless Alan Watson story is that a hotel was being built near Dalmeny Court, which brought a lot of workmen to the area.  Dalmeny Court was a respectable address where the majority of the residents choose not to draw attention to themselves and their sexuality.  Alan Watson however could not be suppressed, and was soon blowing kisses to these workmen and wolf whistling at them, to which they would laugh and occasionally jeer at him.  Being the center of attention and getting the backs up of straight men seems to be how Alan Watson got his kicks.  Which is what I suspect is really going on in that early scene between him and Askwith in Horror Hospital.  It has to be said, it is unusual in a film from the early 1970s to see a fight scene between an effeminate gay man and a straight man, in which it is the straight man who ends up worse off.  Jason Jones being the one who gets a bloody nose, which immediately leads to the cocaine joke in the film “have you been snorting coke again, Jason?” delivered by Antony Balch himself in a small cameo.  Another reason why Horror Hospital has the edge over your average 1970s British horror film.  While other horror filmmakers were trying to get down with the kids by referencing LSD and smoking grass at jazz festivals, the infinitely cooler Antony Balch and Horror Hospital was doing cocaine humour.  Although I guess having William Burroughs as a pal gave you a heads up when it came to popular narcotics.  Balch’s own idea of a good time, in that respect, was to juggle oranges, then take a few codeine pills, then set fire to money.  That was his so-called ‘The Impossible, the Immoral, and the Illegal’ routine that he’d perform for friends.  The Impossible part being the juggling, the immoral being the codeine taking, and the illegal being the burning of pound notes.  I wouldn’t have thought it was actually illegal to burn your own money, unless there was some law against defacing the Queen’s image, but irregardless ‘The Impossible, the Immoral, and the Illegal’ does sound like one hell of a party piece. 

The role of Jason Jones was written with Robin Askwith in mind, producer Richard Gordon having previously worked with him on a film called Tower of Evil, and Balch and Watson having seen him in Cool It Carol.  So it is a role that plays to Askwith’s strengths.  Out of all his pre-Confessions roles, Jason Jones is the one that points the most to where his career was heading.  Saying that, Askwith is a bit more rock and roll in Horror Hospital, he gets to swear here, smoke a joint, and has those Mungo Jerry sideburns… they gave him a bit of a squeaky clean, boy next door make over for Confession of a Window Cleaner.  I suppose you could say that Horror Hospital is a closest we ever got to a horror themed Confessions movie.  The Confessions book series did eventually get around to the genre with ‘Confessions from a Haunted House’ but the film series had expired by the time that book came out in 1980. 

 

If you wanted to pinpoint the moment when the flower power idealism of the 1960s died, the club scene in Horror Hospital is a good enough place to put the pin.  Rock bands are fighting over money, people are selling out and getting into punch ups… as the song playing in that scene puts it “something ain't right… something is wrong”.  While the role was written with Askwith in mind and Jason Jones comes across as a likable hippy refugee from the music biz, Horror Hospital does have a playfully sadistic tendency of dropping him into uncomfortable situations for a straight man.  First off he is beaten up by a transvestite, then when he fancies a holiday to try and get his head together, he is thrown to lecherous gay travel agent Pollock (Dennis Price) who after checking out his junk and giving him a wink, sends him in the direction of Dr. Storm's health farm.  Leading to more traditional horror movie indignities for Jason.  I used to correspond via email with someone in America who was deeply into movies like this and seemed to believe that everyone in Britain still spoke like Robin Askwith circa 1973.  I'd get emails like “cor blimey, Gav, have you ever seen that movie ‘Secrets of Sex’ there's some smashing birds in that” and “do you know what happened to Vanessa Shaw?, what a piece of crumpet she was”.  I could never bring myself to tell him that no one here has spoken like that for over 30 years. 

 

In the early 2000s I did actually see Askwith ‘live’ in a play called Dead Funny, which is about a bunch of British comedy anoraks who gather together to celebrate the life of Benny Hill, but during the course of the evening their private lives begin to fall apart.  The main female character discovers her husband is having an affair and Askwith’s character comes out as gay to the others.  It has to be said that for all of the snide comments you find online about Askwith being a crappy actor from all those ‘atrocious 1970s sex comedies’, that guy was on stage for around 90 minutes, never fluffed a line, never missed a cue, never mistimed a joke, and I do find myself in awe of anyone who can memorize and recite what must have been pages and pages of dialogue.  I remember that when we rang up to book tickets, the theatre had to issue a warning that the play contained a scene of full frontal male nudity.  At which point I thought “Christ, is Askwith still running around with his trousers off all these years later”.   Surprisingly, though the nudity in the play didn’t come from Askwith it was performed by his co-star Stephen Pinder, perhaps best remembered as Max Farnham in the soap opera ‘Brookside’, who took all his clothes off right at the start of the play, albeit with his back turned to the audience.  At which point an old lady in the row behind me loudly complained “I can't see anything”. 

 

Another peculiar incident connected to that play was that Askwith was falsely reported to have died during its run.  While I don't think this ever made it onto the ‘proper’ news outlets, a couple of RIP notices popped up online before it was discovered to be fake news.  I guess someone thought to ring up the theatre and ask if he was still going on that night or whether he was zipped up in a body bag backstage.  Quickly though people soon realized that Robin Askwith wasn't dead he was just appearing on stage in Oldham.  I'm sure there's a joke there… which would be highly offensive to the residents of Oldham. 

 

Decades before being falsely declared dead in Oldham, Askwith alias Jason Jones was on route to Dr. Storm’s health farm and managing to chat up the heroine of the movie Judy (Vanessa Shaw) during the train journey there.  From Horror Hospital we learn that the way to break the ice with a young lady on a train back then was to reassure her you have no plans to rape her.  At which point Judy instantly warms to Jason and is immediately sharing the most embarrassing aspects of her life.  Such as being born illegitimate, having an Aunt who used to run a  brothel, and that said Aunt has hooked up with a Mad Doctor… the kind of thing you tell people on trains who you’ve only known for a matter of minutes.  According to his autobiography, Askwith ended up jumping Vanessa Shaw’s bones during the making of this film, so I guess he was doing something right.  Her real name was Phoebe Shaw but producer Richard Gordon felt Phoebe was an old-fashioned name which wasn't befitting a young actress, and talked her into changing it to Vanessa for the film.  In fairness I can only think of three actresses of note since who have been called Phoebe... Phoebe Cates, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the woman from the Toxic Avengers sequels… so maybe Richard Gordon was onto something there. 

Horror Hospital does tap to the hippie era of belief that you should never trust anyone over thirty.  Valuable advice here, considering you have Pollock, a sexual predator and money grabber.  Carter, the guy at the train station played by Kenneth Benda, who is once again giving off Boris Karloff vibes, and Aunt Harris (Ellen Pollock) who is in cahoots with Storm.  All of the older characters in this film are united in their contempt for young people.  The baddest of the bad being, but of course, Dr. Storm himself -played by Michael Gough- whose health farm is a front for lobotomy experiments that turn itinerant hippies into his mindless zombiefied slaves.  Balch and Alan Watson thought up the title Horror Hospital before they had wrote the script, which does show at times.  Technically the film should be called Horror Health Farm but Balch and Watson managed to cover their tracks by including a line where Askwith says something like “this place is more like a hospital than a health farm”. 

 

Hospital or health farm though, it is a place that Dr. Storm rules with an iron fist… assisted by Aunt Harris, his dwarf assistant Frederick (Skip Martin), the zombiefied hippies and leather clad bikers.  I suppose to understand Horror Hospital you have to understand Balch’s influences and childhood hero worship of Bela Lugosi.  Given the time period of Balch’s early youth, which would have been played out in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Balch’s first port of call for Lugosi movies looks to have been the poverty row efforts Bela made in the 1940s in order to buy morphine and get high.  Films like Scared to Death, Return of the Ape Man and The Devil Bat, which usually feature Lugosi as a mad doctor, usually partner him with a dwarf assistant, and are so weird you suspect that Bela wasn't the only one using drugs.  Fill your head with movies like that as a child and you too can grow to make films like Horror Hospital and Secrets of Sex.  Balch did continue his Lugosi obsession into adulthood and owned his own 16mm prints of The Devil Bat and White Zombie.  Which, when not juggling oranges, taking drugs and setting fire to money, he’d bring out at parties, and I imagine were quite a novelty.  Given that these films would have been long out of theatrical distribution by that point and this being the pre video days.  There is an often told story that Balch invited Michael Gough to Dalmeny Court and screened The Devil Bat for him, in order to help Gough understand the type of performance that Balch wanted from him in the Dr Storm role.   A story that does unfairly make Michael Gough sound like a mere Bela Lugosi tribute act.  While Lugosi does cast a large, bat shaped shadow over Horror Hospital, and Balch was undoubtedly playing out his fantasy of directing Lugosi through Michael Gough, Dr. Storm is still a role that Gough makes his own.  If anything Storm feels like an amalgamation of Gough’s career in horror movies, you get the ranting control freak from Horrors of the Black Museum, the mad doctor with a spinster assistant and a pervy eye for young ladies in Konga and parts of all the other ‘Mr. Nasty’ roles he played in horror movies.  I know that in later years the Batman movies were a money earner for him, but to me Dr. Storm is the definitive Michael Gough performance.  Balch really got a master class in old school villainy from Gough, which is something needed for him to spar on screen against such a big personality actor like Robin Askwith and lots of scene stealing secondary roles from Skip Martin, Kenneth Benda and Dennis Price.  I've never heard anyone say a bad word about the making of Horror Hospital, everything seems to have gone smoothly, there were no personality clashes and everyone seems to have had a great time making it.  I think Richard Gordon was on record as saying that this was the most fun he ever had on a movie and to his credit Robin Askwith has always been very complimentary about Horror Hospital and Antony Balch, even though he and Kurt Christian are thrown around like ragdolls by those bikers.  That scene where Robin gets beaten up by the bike boys does go on for a bit, and dare I suggest that somebody behind the camera was enjoying the ‘rough stuff’ a little too much to yell ‘cut’.

 

I do wish this had been Dennis Price’s last movie, by this stage in his career he'd been reduced to appearing in The Adventurer and guest star spots in horror movies and often gives the impression of phoning it in.  However, even though he clearly was not a well man here, you can tell like he had more enthusiasm for Horror Hospital than many of his usual late period roles.  I love his line “mirror, mirror on the wall don't say a word I know it all” and his grand exit from the movie… with that jaunty, yet regal music playing as he does his final walk before getting his head cut off by the car… what a final bow for an actor that would have been.  Price did though hang on for a few more movies, there is a question mark over what was Dennis' last film but it looks like it might have been ‘Son of Dracula’ from 1974.  Which isn't a good movie but may have been fun to be in, especially if you had a love affair with the old demon alcohol going on.  You have Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, John Bonham, Freddie Jones and Dennis Price in that film… between them they must have drunk London dry.  So hopefully Dennis Price got to have one last massive booze up making Son of Dracula, shame there isn’t a decent movie to show for it. 

 

Son of Dracula shares another cast member with Horror Hospital in the form of Skip Martin, who was very well liked on the set of Horror Hospital and seems to have charmed everybody involved in the film.  Something which may factor into his character Frederick going from what initially appears to be your standard evil dwarf sidekick to a far more substantial role.  When you first see Frederick in the film, rolling his eyes and poking at the severed heads, you don't immediately think that this is the character who will turn out to have a sympathetic back story or redemptive story arc.  Even though Horror Hospital is very tongue in cheek, that “I was almost a hero, wasn’t I” line does always manage to pull at the heart strings.  While my love for Horror Hospital goes deep, I will concede that Balch does tend to overindulge Skip Martin a bit.  Did we really need a whole scene of him preparing that RoboCop like baby food for Askwith and Kurt Christian to eat… and yes that scene of him drugging the bike boys is funny, but it does go on forever.  Then there’s the catchphrases “shish kebab”, “don’t forget to brush your teeth”.  I am torn because while the Frederick scenes do tend to drag the film to a slow pace at times, they can't have been that many decent roles for dwarf actors at the time, and when it comes to screen time in Horror Hospital, Skip Martin certainly didn't get ahem… short-changed.  I wonder if Frederick could also have been a bit of a mouthpiece or even alter ego for Balch himself.  They do appear to have this shared love of unusual, head turning sayings.  One story about Balch is that he and William Burroughs were dining out at an exclusive London restaurant, and Balch ordered a fish meal, then upon being served it loudly shrieked “the trouble with fish is that they are so fisheeee”.  Which sounds like a very Frederick thing to say and did apparently embarrass William Burroughs, who socially at least, came across as a very reserved guy. 

 

What I find remarkable about Antony Balch is that in a short amount of time, and a short amount of films, he went from the Burroughs shorts which had a tiny audience and very little commercial appeal, to feature films that entertained people who went to fleapit cinemas in the UK and grindhouses and drive-ins in the States.  All without compromising on his own eccentricity, or holding back on his sexual tastes.  Horror Hospital played for years at the US drive-ins.  It was distributed by Hallmark -who also put out Last House on the Left and Mark of the Devil- and brought Horror Hospital back a number of times.  Computer Killers and Love Camp 13 were some of its drive-in titles.  Hallmark also had a habit of creating campaigns that inappropriately drew comparisons between Horror Hospital and very straight laced movies.  There was a Hallmark campaign for it that tried to ride on the coat tails of ‘Coma’ a sombre conspiracy theory thriller starring Michael Douglas.  By far the oddest repackaging of Horror Hospital was under the title ‘Eastworld’ making it out to be connected to Westworld, and anyone going to see a re-titled Horror Hospital expecting the sequel to a film starring Yul Brenner as a robot gunslinger must surely have thought they'd come to the wrong party here.

 

While Horror Hospital is very much a child of the 1970s, it was still showing up at the drive-ins way into the 1980s.  It was one of the co-features to Dr. Butcher MD for a while.  The last play date I can find for it at the drive-ins was in 1984 when it was playing as a co-feature to The House on the Edge of the Park.  This, despite the fact that Horror Hospital had already entered into US TV syndication by that point, albeit I imagine in a heavily cut version.  It played on Elvira’s show, Movie Macabre, as early as 1982. 

 

The people who tend to be the most hostile towards Horror Hospital are the William Burroughs crowd, who have issues reconciling the fact that anyone close to Burroughs was also enthusiastically involved with exploitation movies.  They have a tendency to look down on Horror Hospital and Secrets of Sex, as strictly commercial ventures that Balch merely made in order to gain the experience needed to adapt the Naked Lunch to the screen.  They also dismiss his involvement in distributing soft core porn as something Balch did to raise the money needed to shoot film of Burroughs walking around the streets of Paris and shooting up in hotel rooms… essentially reducing Balch to the level of a toadie or a hanger-on.  Which I feel does a tremendous disservice to Balch’s friendship with William Burroughs, as well as Balch as a talent in his own right.  Still, who needs the approval of a few dead eyed intellectuals when Horror Hospital played for years to the blood, boobs and hot dog brigade at the drive-ins.  It’s a film that has rarely been out of circulation since it was made and now thanks to DVD, Blu-ray and streaming has stormed its way into the 21st century. 

 

There is a French language book about Balch called ‘Guerilla Conditions’ which regrettably has never been translated into English, and its rumored that one of the Flipside people is currently working on a book about Balch.  In which case ‘take my money’, I'd be first in line if that ever materializes.  In the meantime, hopefully I've convinced people to raise a glass to Antony Balch, maybe stick an old Bela Lugosi movie on in his memory… juggling, drug taking and burning money are however optional.  Balch’s premature death and the fact that he left behind too few films, is one of the great tragedies of British exploitation cinema in particular, and British cinema in general. 

Antony Balch (1937-1980)