Black Carrion Reviews

This sixth episode of the BBC-TV Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense series concerns music industry intrigue, repressed memories and good old fashioned British class warfare, plus addresses pop culture obsession years before said malady became pandemic. A nostalgia fad sweeps Great Britain, so a media impresario prepares a greatest hits LP by the Verne Brothers (Alan Love and Julian Littman), a pop duo who released a handful of dynamite singles in the 1960s, but vanished mysteriously at the height of their fame among rumors of decadence. He hires investigative reporter Paul Taylor (Leigh Lawson) to uncover the truth, partnering him with music ephemera expert Cora Berlaine (Season Hubley) and sending them to the Vernes' vast country estate in an abandoned rural town. What they don't know is that the police have been investigating a rash of missing motorists in the same region, and the macabre goings-on seem to have something to do with Cora's frequent hallucinatory seizures. Black Carrion would be fun to stumble upon during a bout of insomnia-fueled channel surfing as a late, late show, so it succeeds at the task it was created for, but it's a clumsy vehicle with very square wheels. Screenwriter Don Houghton, a Hammer vet with credits on Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, scripts a story that lunges from the predictable to the routine and back again, and while director John Hough's resume includes bona-fide cult winners like The Legend of Hell House and both Escape To and Return From Witch Mountain, he's on autopilot here. The music sequences are particularly lazy, the hapless Vernes lip-synching to re-recorded versions of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and Chuck Berry classics, each laden with chilly 1980s-vintage saxophone honking cribbed from Springsteen and the Beaver Brown Band. Lawson and Hubley don't generate any heat either as an unlikely romance blossoms between the two unlikeable main characters, a dour and cynical reporter who seems to hate his work and a shrill, defensive nerd desperate to prove her worth by repeating random pop music trivia. Black Carrion may be a curiosity worth time for devotees of Hammer horror, but it's still immediately forgettable.