The Fiend (1972) - film review

Birdy Wemys and her son Kenny belong to a religious cult that regularly worship at a chapel in their house.  Whilst Birdy, an old woman who is dependent on insulin injections, fights the good fight and dedicates her life to saving lost souls, Kenny, a part-time security guard and swimming pool attendant, spends his evenings killing young women for the same goal.  Journalist Paddy Lynch is writing a series of articles on the murders when she learns about the mysterious cult that Birdy belongs to, through her sister Brigitte, who is the old woman’s nurse.  Paddy inveigles her way into Birdy’s house and stumbles across a collection of audio tapes which record the last agonising minutes of each of Kenny’s murder victims...

Trashy low budget horror films were very much in vogue in Britain in the early 1970s, with many small-time film producers hoping to cash in on the public appetite for the kind of cheap and lurid psycho horror flicks that had been made popular by rival companies Hammer and Amicus.  Robert Hartford-Davis, one of the main players in the exploitation school of British cinema, knocked out a few films in this now pretty well reviled genre, of which The Fiend is one of his best.

Today, it is virtually impossible to watch The Fiend without cringing at the film’s obvious failings, which permeate just about every aspect of the production.  It looks bad in comparison with even Hammer’s worst offerings in the psycho thriller genre.  The performances are universally awful, with the notable exception of Tony Beckley, who had a nice line in psychotic villains.  Beckley, somewhere between Michael Caine and Anthony Perkins, makes his character, a Norman Bates-style killer, genuinely disturbing, yet also strangely sympathetic.

Tony Bkeckley’s performance is just about the only thing going for this film. The direction is ham-fisted and uneven, ranging from the unbearably stilted to the ludicrously hysterical. Although the film has a great deal of physical violence, there isn’t much in the way of tension, and boredom sets in very quickly. The only reason to watch The Fiend is to realise how well-made Hammer’s films were in comparison with what else was available at the time.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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