The Amazing Adventures of Dwarf

This is from HORROR HOSPITAL.

I can’t, somehow, quite love this film. It’s maybe too cold and nasty. But I definitely admire it. When you consider how lacklustre and free of imagination most British horror movies always were (I still dig them though), this movie offers a real plethora of tawdry delights. It’s made by Anthony Balch, an associate of Kenneth Anger and William Burroughs, and while it’s mild fayre compared to the mind-bending squalor found within the pages of The Naked Lunch, there’s still much in the way of weirdness and unpleasantries.

I love the anecdote from Hammer scribe Christopher Wicking, quoted on Wikipedia: “I had a crazy meeting with him, when he wanted to do some picture or other. He spent most of the time walking across the furniture. Languorously, he would walk across three or four chairs. He went into another little world. He was a sad figure in a way, because he was well before his time.”

After a bizarro softcore sex film, SECRETS OF SEX, Balch launched his assault on the mainstream with HORROR HOSPITAL, in which Robin Askwith, the enthusiastically pumping buttocks in nine billion soft-porn comedies of depressing aspect (he redeems himself with a spirited turn in BRITANNIA HOSPITAL, which is almost a sequel to this one) plays, well, himself, a jobbing young actor, sent by his deeply queer agent (a dissipated Dennis Price, phoning it in via three camera set-ups stretched out to last five minutes of screen-time) to a country house clinic where mutilated nazi Michael Gough is attempting to create a lobotomised sex army for reasons we needn’t go into. Seriously, I’m refusing to go into his reasons. Don’t push me. I don’t want to talk about it.

He also rides the countryside in a swank Roller with DEATH RACE 2000 modifications — blades shoot out to decapitate stray ramblers. I bet if Rolls Royce manufactured those they’d sell like hot cakes. The limo plus motorcycle outriders (the guys in this clip) are a nod to Cocteau’s ORPHEE.

The great scene above comes near the end, where tradition and reason dictate that horror thrillers should accelerate their pace and head for some kind of climax. The generous Mr. Balch offers us an alternative to that trusted formula, paralysing his film for minutes on end while a small man tries to open a door.

Brilliant.