Film review: The Reptile (1966)

Fun fact #1: A picture of the monster from this film was in a book I had when I was a kid that was a picture book of famous film monsters and it creeped me out.  That whole book made me queasy - I think I may have traded it with Matthew at one point.

Fun fact #2: This film was made at the same time, with the same sets and some of the same actors (Michael Ripper (I just remembered where I first knew him from) and Jacqueline Pearce) as Plague of the Zombies.  To avoid cinema-goers noticing, they were released several months apart, both as the B-picture to a bigger-budgeted Hammer film, the pair of which (a Dracula film and Rasputin The Mad Monk) also shared sets and cast members.  Of the four, however, it was only this one that came in under budget, and I would guess that they saved money on the cast, because it's very limited.  However, Ripper and Pearce are excellent, and it also has John "Dad's Army" Laurie as "Mad Peter", so you get bang for your buck.  (They struggle to explain Laurie's undisguiseable Scots brogue, given that he's a local yokel in a Cornish village, but never mind.)  As with Plague, it's a period piece, and very capably acted, with lush color and fine English country sets (shot at Bray Studios in Berkshire), with a similar plot of Englishmen at the time of the Empire bringing back strange foreign religious customs to disastrous effects in the bucolic native land - in this case it is a Sumatran Lizard-People religion, studied by a doctor of Theology (the effectively creepy Noel Willman).  Again the protagonists are a man and an attractive young blonde woman, only this time they are man and wife instead of father and daughter, the father-daughter pair being the sinister ones they discover when they move into the husband's dead brother's house (the film begins with him dying by the teeth of the shadowy lizard-creature).  The wife, who is almost indistinguishable from Plague's Silvia Forbes, is actually played by a different actress, Jennifer Daniel.  And if Plague's plot is a rip-off of Dracula, this one's plot is heavily influenced by a werewolf picture, only reptilian rather than mammalian.  There is also a hint of the Mummy, only instead of a sinister Egyptian, there is a sinister Sumatran, putatively in the employ of the doctor, but actually controlling him.  Not quite at the very high level of Plague, but still pleasant enough, and, in true Hammer fashion, with some surprisingly shocking moments.  It also ends with (the same) country house burning.  I don't know how they managed to do it twice, as it looks very realistic - maybe it's the same footage.

This time Ripper has a bigger role, as a publican rather than a policeman, but sadly has to wear face fungus.  These two are essentially the heroes of the piece, as her husband is definitely no André Morell, and in fact spends a significant amount of time just lying in bed, recovering.

This scene is very odd: sitar music is used to underpin rising incestuous sexual tension that ends in the angry destruction of the sitar.  Hammer movies don't tend to stint on the Freudian undertones.