Touches You

Purely Joyful Movie!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

I have a feeling that I wasn't the only baby-boomer boy to fall in love with British actress Jill Haworth after seeing her, over 50 years ago, in her very first film, 1960's "Exodus." Then only 15 years old, Jill--via her sweet portrayal of Karen, a tragically fated Jewish immigrant to the new Israeli state--was certainly an actress to move hearts and garner attention. Over the next few years, that attention was mainly centered on her budding romance with "Exodus" costar Sal Mineo, and as the decade wore on and the '70s began, Jill gradually became enamored by those devotees of less mainstream, more "psychotronic" fare. Today, Jill is admired by those horror fans for her appearances in five films: the 10/14/63 episode of television's "The Outer Limits," the one entitled "The Sixth Finger" (an especially fine episode, by the way) and four middling, British theatrical films, "It!" (1967), "The Haunted House of Horror" ('69), "Horror on Snape Island" ('72) and "The Mutations" ('73). Although the last of these films has been available on DVD for some time, "Haunted House" and "Snape Island" only seem to be viewable via an occasional airing on TCM, and "It!," until recently, had never been available on home video. "It!" was the only horror picture of Jill's that I'd never seen, so it was with great pleasure that I learned of the Warner Bros. DVD release that pairs "It!" with another British horror film from 1967, "The Shuttered Room." Besides their common year of release, both films were creations of Seven Arts Productions and both feature a beautiful blonde actress in the lead role (Carol Lynley, in the case of "The Shuttered Room"). And sadly, both films feature rather disappointing endings, although the Lynley film is clearly the more artfully composed of the two.In "It!," we meet a rather odd assistant museum curator named Arthur Pimm (played by the great Roddy McDowall, one film away from "Planet of the Apes," and referred to by everyone as just "Pimm"). Pimm's sole existence seems to consist of coveting his boss' job at the museum (the film was partially shot at London's Imperial War Museum), lusting after his coworker Ellen (well, he's got good reason...she's played by our Jill!), and purloining jewelry from the museum to drape around the neck of his mother, with whom he shares an apartment. Oops...almost forgot to mention that Pimm's mother is dead, a corpse with a marked resemblance to "Psycho"'s Mrs. Bates, bunhead, shawl and all! Pimm's life markedly changes for the better, however, when the museum acquires a 3,000-lb. Czech statue that turns out to be no less a figure than the legendary Golem...the stone figure that is, according to myth, able to come to life and perform services for those who know how to animate it. And when Pimm discovers the mystical scroll that enables him to do so, he realizes that powers for vengeance and advancement--not to mention impressing the heck out of Ellen--are now within his grasp....Never rising above a mediocre level of entertainment, "It!" yet still reveals itself to be a film of modest pleasures. Roddy, of course, is simply marvelous, an actor in complete control of his every vocal inflection and facial nuance, and he almost makes his whacko character an object of audience sympathy. Jill is sweet and appealing, as usual, although she is given too little to do, while the film's various supporting players are uniformly fine. Director Herbert J. Leder, who had previously written the script for the miniclassic "Fiend Without a Face" (1958) and directed "The Frozen Dead" (1966), has brought this particular picture home in a fairly prosaic, unimaginative manner; a little more style might have helped some. The FX in the film range from good (the walking Golem) to poor (the sight of the Hammersmith Bridge that the Golem destroys at one point), and the picture gets progressively loopy as it draws nearer to its atomic ending. The film also sports some very bizarre touches, such as when Pimm hallucinates the naked Ellen in his bedroom one night, only to realize, to his horror, that he is actually seeing the corpse of his mother. Unfortunately, the film makes pretty much nothing of the fact that Pimm DOES live with his dead mother; this little tidbit has seemingly been added to the film to serve as a mere character quirk! I also could not figure out how the Golem managed to kill curator Grove and the museum electrician early on, it supposedly being a creation with no independent will until activated by Pimm and that scroll. Equally bewildering is the film's final reel, in which Pimm is said to have just stolen his mother's body from a mortuary (Wha? How'd she get THERE?) and kidnapped Ellen from her apartment (Huh? How did he accomplish this, and why were we not shown this key scene?). A decidedly mixed bag, "It!" is a film perhaps best watched with your favorite 8-year-old, or by Jill Haworth completists, such as myself. It is certainly pipsqueak stuff when compared to the 1973 Roddy film "The Legend of Hell House" (one of the real horror champs), but yet still makes for a modest evening's entertainment. Try it...you might like "It!"

This is a very poor attempt at a horror thriller in the "golem" genre. The story is wafer thin, the script and character development is dire and the special effects are certainly not special. There are so many disappointing things in the film, you'll feel completely unsatisfied at the conclusion of it - that's if you've lasted that long Where to begin...? Well, plot wise, a fire at a warehouse reveals a previously hidden statue that is promptly put on display in a museum by assistant curator Arthur Pimm (Roddy McDowell). Pimm is a twitchy, suspicious man who lives alone - except for the corpse of his dead mother, dressed up in gown and wig and propped up in a chair! Right from the start you need to know that this element of the plot is one of the most throwaway aspects of the whole story - there is no explanation or background on this, it's just there. Presumably it is just to re-enforce the idea that Pimm is a bit crazy, but they really could have explained it.Right from the start, Pimm starts to wonder about the statue, especially as it seems responsible for a death in the first few minutes of the film. More deaths occur (not very dramatic ones), and Pimm starts to uncover the truth about the statue - that it is in fact a Golem which can be brought to life and controlled. Pimm is an unhappy man with a crush on a pretty museum worker, who dumps him for an altogether more macho American museum curator...I'm sure you can guess what happens next.Well what happens is, a pretty shabby attempt at a "golem on the rampage" film. The film barely shows anything of the creature coming to life. The statue isn't bad, it's actually very ugly and quite creepy, but apart from moving it's arms and walking about slowly, very little mayhem is ever seen on camera. This is a huge fault of the film as a whole, it takes the cheapest way out of every big scene by cutting away from every major event. The golem destroys a bridge...we see it walk under the bridge...raise it's arms in close up and rattle some rubber girders...cut to Pimm and policeman looking shocked...cut back to a PAINTING of a collapsed bridge (the worst effect in the entire movie). The golem springs Pimm from a police hospital. We see...the golem bash down one fake brick wall (from the inside, we don't see stone arm actually hit brickwork on the exterior shot). The hospital is deserted...Pimm and the golem just stroll away through the fresh hole. Oh yes and the golem also kills people...all we see is Pimm (usually) looking shocked while the murder takes place off screen.The worst part of the film is the climax (I guess the spoilers start here...), which sees Pimm and his golem blockaded in a country house. The set-up for this is hilarious, two detectives talk to someone on the phone and then say to each other "It's Pimm! He's got the golem, he's kidnapped the girl, stolen his mother's corpse from the mortuary (which makes the fact that he's had her corpse in his house all this time a total lie), and stolen a hearse!" All of which sounds very exciting, but all sadly not shown on screen. Pimm makes off for a huge remote house with this posse, which is inhabited by one single elderly lady museum worker. Soon they are all trapped inside the house. But why? What is Pimm's great plan? Well, there isn't one, expect to stop anyone coming in. In the daftest scene of the whole film, Pimm sends the golem to defend the front gates of the estate. The army send in guns, big guns, bigger guns and a nuclear warhead (!) to get past the golem. Yet the grounds of the house are massive, all the golem is doing is standing at one gate. What's to stop someone going round the back??? The golem can't move any faster than a snail, yet all they do is point guns at it from behind sandbags and then complain that it's still standing!.Finally, the nuclear bomb goes off (cue stock footage mushroom cloud), and the country house is destroyed - off camera. Who survives? Watch and find out if you can be bothered. It's all totally lame and boring. Roddy McDowell acts over the top for too much of the time, shrieking insanely at a nightmare in which he sees a naked Jill Haworth turn into his dead mother, talking to himself, miming actions to show the audience what he his thinking (terrible direction here, getting him to flap his arms stupidly about to represent him thinking about how the golem's arms have changed position when no-one was looking). The character of Pimm seems to have no motivation. Sometimes he wants to steal jewelry for his mother, sometimes he wants to get promoted, sometimes he wants the girl, sometimes he wants to get rid of the girl, sometimes he wants to get rid of the golem. I guess that's crazy for you, but I got very lost and a film needs to give it's audience something to hang on to! I got the DVD of this to satisfy my curiosity...it wasn't worth it.

Herbert Leder's IT!, or CURSE OF THE GREAT GOLEM (the name the film really should have had) is one of the most bizarre and eclectic little monster movies ever made. It's a misunderstood or better yet misguided little project that had really good intentions, a decent cast, a respectable mid-line budget, some decent writing, but ultimately falls a little flat. My association with the film and enthusiasm for it is nostalgic: This used to play on our Monster Movie Matinée and Eivom weekend afternoon/evening local film slots. At the age of 11 or so I thought it was one of the coolest movies ever made ... my more mature mindset sees it's flaws but still loves every stupid, stiff, very British minute of it.Roddy McDowall plays a very strange young man named Pimm who works for a respectable British antiquities museum and happens upon a statue slated for display there which may or may not be one of the last of the Golems -- clay juggernauts of destruction made by Hebrew alchemist/artist mystics to protect their people from outside oppression. They are infinitely strong, completely indestructible, and have absolutely no will of their own. The problem is that such power corrupts humans infinitely as well, and once you get started on being the most powerful 24 year old nebbish on the planet it's hard to make yourself -- and It -- stop. Especially when you can't get rid of the damn thing. The film is broken up into three stages: Part one involves a series of strange unexplained deaths in and around the museum that McDowall rather slowly realizes must be the work of the Golem. Part two involves his quest to learn how the thing works and his rapid descent into near madness after he learns the secret. And part three involves his ultimately futile attempts to get rid of the thing as it ruins his life, rampages across the countryside, drives him completely insane, and finally walks off into the ocean after the British Army tries to blow it up with an atom bomb. Presumably it is still wandering around down there somewhere.Along the way we meet various people who touch on Pimm's life, most notably his stuffy museum curator bosses, the pretty daughter of one of them (Jill Haworth), a couple of British police inspectors (one of them cult horror legend Ian McCulloch), and a visiting expert professor on Golemology from America. We also get to meet Pimm's mother, who is dead, and her partially embalmed body is Pym's partner in life. He "borrows" rare jewels from the museum for her to wear, fixes her tea and after dinner toddies while he talks with her about the day's events, and introduces her to others with a kind of blasé offhandedness that suggests we are getting it wrong by reacting with horror to the corpse. The scene where Pimm, the Golem and his mother terrify a museum matron is the best laugh in the movie. All the while the power of the Golem is getting under his skin, leading to the film's finest scene where he asks a Hebrew scholar to translate a script that had been etched into the Golem's side. The subsequent scenes of destruction as the Golem runs rampant pale to the chills sent down the spine by the old man's solemn intonation.Another great scene is when Pimm loses control of a situation and orders the Golem to commit murder for him, and it is at that point that the narrative begins to spiral out of control. We see a few scenes of carnage but for the most part the film is McDowall's, and fortunately even in 1966 he was a good enough actor to more or less carry the project. His Pimm has an odd ambiguity about him that is certainly "evil", yet sympathetic in the way that is very reminiscent of Anthony Perkins' PSYCHO character. We actually feel suspense hoping he will not get caught and perhaps figure out a way to free himself from the curse of the Golem, but alas he torches an elderly librarian, barricades himself in a secluded manor, and pouts like a spoiled brat when Jill Haworth tells him he is about to be blown up with an atom bomb. All this is a good premise, but aside from a single incident when Pym looks at the Golem's arm's to see them bent, looks back up in astonishment at it's face, then back down at the arms to see them straightened, then back again to gawk at the stone face, the film lacks any kind of artfulness, existing more as an act of "craft". At one point Pym even tries to light the thing on fire by spilling fuel oil all over it and the director allowed him to shake the can and snarl "This will finish you ..." like he was Daffy Duck. One other problem the film has it is that it was made at the wrong time: By 1966 London was going "mod" and this film is about as square as they come. Hammer Films was making big waves with their Gothic shockers and a stiff, somewhat talky movie about a giant walking slab of clay didn't have much resonance compared to Christopher Lee in his Dracula cape. IT! was more or less forgotten except as off-hour TV viewing for 11 year old boys who would think it was the coolest thing ever made, perhaps.7/10 nonetheless: Deserves a restoration for DVD where IT! could prove to be a cult hit of some magnitude ... and if anyone ever is of the mind to put one together, give me a call.

Highly implausible story about a museum curator that soon discovers the secret scroll that brings to life a real Golem to do his bidding. This part of the story is inventive yet not wholly convincing. The set designs, the acting, the direction, and the Golem itself all look and feel authentic at times, yet the script has so many problems that none of these things are able to gel like they should. Roddy McDowell plays prissy, circumspect, socially awkward Arthur Primm very well. I almost even believed he was interested in sexy, sultry, blonde Jill Haworth! His performance helps give the film a bit of credibility, but the film, as early as the first scene where we see Primm alone, tries to turn a golem story into a golem and Psycho story as Primm talks to his mother and then we see her dead skeleton dressed in dressing gown in a chair after having heard her talk with her son. Director Herbert Leder isn't quite sure what he is trying to do here in this film. Wiithout the Psycho touches, It! might have been a pretty entertaining film if a little more development had gone into Primm. I know Leder was trying to show us WHY Primm was the way he was, but, c'mon, pulling a Norman Bates on an English museum curator that otherwise seemed to live and function pretty normally wasn't the way to go about IT. It's possible but, as I said, highly implausible. It also takes away from the story of the Golem. Why was it in the museum? Why did it kill first and secondly when it had NOT been invoked by the scroll? The explanation of the Golem myth was interesting and the character acting is very able all around with Aubrey Richards and Ernest Clark standing out as McDowell's superiors. While the first half of the film manages to create some slow-paced suspense, the second half quickly dissolves into one ridiculous scene after another - with an English country manor, the Golem, and nuclear weapons figuring into a climatic end. For a more complete introduction into Golem lore, see the German masterpiece Der Golem.