The Skull

Freddie Francis – 1965 – England 

Amicus Productions was kind of the lower-rent Hammer in the 60s and 70s, and many of their films are still often confused for Hammer's; understandable since they hired Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as often as they could.  The studio lacks a real masterpiece in their filmography but they did manage to carve out a little niche with a series of anthology films comprised of 4 or 5 horror stories each.  Before that, though, Cushing and Lee appeared in this low-budget but surreal thriller about the haunted skull of the Marquis de Sade.  It seems that someone dug up Sade's corpse and removed his skull, and since then it has exchanged owners, bringing insanity and death to them all.  Cushing and Lee are rival occult enthusiasts in London; Cushing the skeptic and Lee the believer.  When the skull is stolen from Lee and sold to Cushing, Lee makes no objection, relieved to be free of the object's malevolent aura.  As Cushing begins to be effected by the curse of Sade, Francis guides us through a handful of hallucinatory sequences, highlighted by the spooky sight of the skull and Sade's autobiography hovering off a bookshelf and floating around the room on absurdly visible strings.  I don't fault Francis for the film's weak special effects, but I do blame him for not making the shots in general more interesting in order to counteract those weaknesses.  There are scenes, for example, in which the camera just remains on Cushing in a medium shot as he moves about a room reacting in terror to things like corpses tumbling out of closets.  Francis never cuts away to any details for impact or at least variety.  It's a fun, old-fashioned horror movie, but its deficiencies make it more satisfying to think about than actually watch.  The best thing about it, for me, is the immensely detailed décor in Cushing's and Lee's studies, with every inch of space on desks and walls covered with tribal masks, Gothic statues, ancient books, and other curious artifacts.