Movie review – “Paranoiac” (1964) *** (warning: spoilers)

The success of Taste of Fear saw a number of follow ups from Hammer, most written as well by Jimmy Sangster, who liked to re-use the same elements. Here we have another decadently rich family who live in a mansion that is by the sea (enabling characters to stare out over the crashing waves and threaten to plunge to their death on the rocks below); one of the family is trying to drive another insane; a family member who hasn’t been seen for a while turns out to be an impersonator; two members of the group are having an affair; there is a family assistant (in this case a lawyer) who is a goodie and a corpse in a pond; someone thought to be dead isn’t; the macguffin of family inheritance.

 

For all that I really enjoyed the film – you know what the ingredients are going to be but you don’t know how Sangster is going to mix them up. Oliver Reed is terrific as a nasty member of the family – his character is a big drinker, and it’s poignant to see Reed walk into a scene announcing he’s going to write himself off. David Shipman once wrote about Reed that when he started out in films you knew he would make it – he simply looked dynamic, imposing, and he does so here. He’s a genuine unsettling presence all the way through the film and goes mad very well at the end.

 

I really liked Janette Scott too as the member of the family worried about going insane – she’s very pretty and does a good hysteria scene. I wonder what happened to her? Liliane Brousse is pretty but not that good as a nurse; Alex Davion is effective as the long lost son. 

 

It’s stylishly directed by Freddie Francis, who makes the most of some sure-fire scenes eg a person in creepy clown make up, waves crashing against rocks, a bricked up skeleton in the family crypt. Sangster liked to give his films short, sharp endings – for instance he complained about the extra scene forced on him to wrap up The Nanny by US investors – but in this case I felt the finale is a little abrupt; I would have liked to have known what happened to the aunt and the dodgy son of the lawyer, and whether Scott got over the incest hang ups about Davion.