AaronCapenBanner
Freddie Francis directed this psychological suspense tale that stars Oliver Reed as Simon Ashby, a psychotic alcoholic determined to inherit his wealthy family's estate by driving his sister Eleanor(played by Janette Scott) insane. He secretly killed their brother Tony, and tries to convince his sister through sinister means that his ghost haunts their mansion, but when a mysterious man(played by Alexander Davion) saves Eleanor's life, and claims to be Tony, Simon must dispose of both of them, or at least expose "Tony" as a fraud... Good atmosphere and performances are undermined by the far-fetched plot that doesn't quite ring true, despite some eerie moments.
Michael_Elliott
Paranoiac (1963) *** (out of 4)A brother (Oliver Reed) tries to drive his sister insane so that he can collect their full inheritance but he's in for a shock when their dead brother returns. I wasn't expecting too much out of this film but I found myself quickly caught up in the rather interesting story, although I wish they had kept the secret hidden a tad bit longer. The second secret didn't work as well but it's still a nice little film with elements borrowed from Vertigo. Reed's horribly over the top performance doesn't help matters.
Igenlode Wordsmith
It's "Brat Farrar", of course.Encountering a character called 'Simon Ashby' was jolt enough; but when it comes to a sister called Eleanor, a brother who supposedly drowned himself eight years ago, a mother and father dead in a plane crash, and even the precise wording of Patrick/Antony's suicide note, the plot coincidences have to be more than just an accident. It's ironic that so much credit is given to the ingenuity and originality of the plot, when not only the basic set-up but so many of the details stem directly from Josephine Tey's classic novel. And once one recognises the source (which, to be fair, took me a while: Eleanor's instability and ghost-sightings don't fit the pattern), it does inevitably rather diminish the suspense.Not entirely, though: enough has been changed to make the ultimate outcome uncertain. This is "Brat Farrar" Hammer-style, with heaving bosoms, sinister organ music and skeletons in the closet -- and minus the horses which play so significant a part in the action of the original. (As a result, while he clearly shares Brat's basic honesty and decency, the un-named impostor here has to duck the question of his history and motivation with the excuse that it would all take too long to explain!) Janette Scott, in a fairly thankless role, plays Eleanor as pretty much a standard Hammer maiden-in-distress, with a tendency to long flowing robes -- although re-casting the character as a mentally unstable hero-worshipper of her elder 'brother' adds a far stronger impact in this version to her distress at realisation of the sexual attraction between them. It is Oliver Reed who is outstanding here, as the attractive, vindictive and carelessly cruel Simon: as the film opens, he is presented almost as the hero, an unconventional breath of fresh air in a household stifled by appearances. By the end he is pure charming sociopath. (It was also a real eye-opener to see those unmistakable features morphed by youth and lack of dissipation into striking good looks: it had never occurred to me that one could simultaneously look like Oliver Reed and look handsome!) As the resurrected Tony, Alexander Davion provides a sensitive, grounded contrast to Simon's bravura display, managing to do far more than just walk through what could have been a very wooden part -- most of Tony's reactions and feelings are unspoken, but he holds his own against Reed as a screen presence, and presents Tony as the one stable anchor in a world of neurotics. John Bonney is also good in the minor role of flashy Keith Kossett, playing the Alec Loding part as semi-crooked originator of the imposture: this is one part of the rewrite that works well, providing convincing motivation for the scheme while economising on a lot of back-story. I'm afraid I didn't find the character of Aunt Harriet as a sort of incestuous wicked-step-mother particularly convincing. She bears no relation to gentle Aunt Bea in "Brat Farrar", and it is possibly as a result that the script never seems quite consistent in what it wants to do with her.Unfortunately it has to be said that the end of the film, where it abandons the tensions of the source material altogether to resort to more lurid melodrama, is probably the weakest. The Hammer "Hound of the Baskervilles" pulls off this sort of source-grafting to pretty good effect, but here the killer-clown and body-in-the-basement additions are in retrospect a bit weak, coming across as an attempt to provide some manifest horrors to please the punters rather than making much sense in the plot. (Guilt complex? Simon??) Also, the special effects were clearly a bit low-budget by this point.Still, it's quite an effective little chiller in its own right, with some blackly comic sequences: memorable chiefly, I suspect, for Oliver Reed, although this isn't entirely fair to the rest of the cast.
MARIO GAUCI
The shadow of LES DIABOLIQUES (1954) and PSYCHO (1960) always loomed large over much of Hammer's output set in contemporary times; this is a moderately well-done example of that subgenre with the usual driving-an-heiress-mad plot here given a boost by the return of a long-lost brother and a would-be last minute revelation that all is not well with hard-living brother Simon Ashby (a perfectly cast Oliver Reed in a showy role). For some odd reason, I could have sworn that this film was directed by Michael Carreras, so much so that I did a double-take when Freddie Francis' name (whose first directorial job for Hammer this was) appeared on the screen; as it turned out, I was confusing this film with the similarly-titled MANIAC (1963) - unsurprisingly, another Hammer thriller in the same mould!
