Corruption

1968 "where will the bodies turn up next? ...under a car seat? ...in a valise? ...or in a deep-freeze?"
5.8| 1h31m| R| en| More Info
Released: 04 December 1968 Released
Producted By: Oakshire Productions
Country: United Kingdom
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

A surgeon discovers that he can restore the beauty to his girlfriend's scarred face by murdering other women and extracting fluids from their pituitary gland. However, the effects only last for a short time, so he has to kill more and more women. It is ultimately a killing spree which ends with considerable death and disaster.

Genre

Horror

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Director

Robert Hartford-Davis

Production Companies

Oakshire Productions

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Corruption Audience Reviews

LouHomey From my favorite movies..
Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!
ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.
ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.
Theo Robertson Sir John Rowen is a world renowned plastic surgeon . Invited to a groovy sixties party in London by his fiancé Lynn who is a model he gets in to a violent argument with a party guest during which a lamp falls and disfigures Lynn This is a film I remember very well from childhood . Peter Cushing was part of my childhood life due to one of his films being constantly shown on Friday nights on ITV and I'm sure everyone who's commentated on this page knows what I'm talking about . This stuck out because it's not often you see Cushing playing a bad guy . Even in the Hammer FRANKENSTEIN series he's not someone who struck me as all that bad but in CORRUPTION he's a serial killer and that's why he comes across as being cast against type . Of course as an adult I might have considered Rowen as being more of an anti-hero driven by his desire for Lynn but as an adult I noticed how mean , nasty and incredibly daft CORRUPTION is as a film It's an obvious reworking of the Jack The Ripper theme where a brilliant surgeon goes around murdering women because the only woman that matters in the world is the one you love . The idea is sound but nothing in the film itself seems credible . Sue Lloyd plays Lynn as a character who veers from being a bit of slapper to out and out psycho . Perhaps it's alluding to MACBETH but it's a film never sophisticated and certainly not subtle enough to suggest this and Cushing and Lloyd never make a couple who don't bare much grounding in any reality Reality isn't the film's strong point . When Rowen and Lynn attend a right on happening party in swinging sixties London and within seconds some young hippy chick is hitting on Rowen with a chat up line of " Hey how's your kiss of life ? " Let me get this straight - some girl who doesn't look older than 18 is trying to chat up a bloke who looks 60 ? " I've never taken powder or pills but I've attended raves where the ravers were all off their heads on ecstasy and this has never happened to me . On top of that we've got Tony Blair's father in law pretending he's David Baailey cross bred with Austin Powers with cool lines of dialogue " Hey baby undo your dress take it off " . Come to think of it maybe Rowen got invited to the party because he can dish out prescriptions of penicillin ? The guests look like they could use some As it transpires the party took place as a plot function because the film needs an inciting incident where Lynn is disfigured and gives a reason for Rowen to become a serial killer and murder young woman and take their pituitary glands so he can restore Lynn to her previous beauty . I know you have to suspend disbelief in these type of films but the way things work out in this film it might be easier to suspend disbelief in the tooth fairy . Take the scene where Rowen murders a woman on the train . He sits in the carriage with her and she instantly becomes terrified even though he's done absolutely nothing to yet suggest he means her any harm . Obviously he's about to murder a fortune teller . Mind you he does stab her to death and cut her head off and he hardly gets any blood on him so that's convenient he killed someone with a lack of blood The whole film continues in this vain such as Rowen chasing a young woman called Terry who is wearing high heels and a skin tight micro mini skirt who moves at the pace of a dead snail and yet seems unable to catch her . Terry as it turns out was a honeytrap used by a gang of hip young crooks one of whom is called Groper and is played by the prolific and middle aged David Lodge and there's no way you can believe any crook would be hanging around with Groper who communicates by grunting , laughing , eating apples , sticking a glass in peoples faces and smashing things up . The film ends with every major character who appeared in the film being killed by a laser probe followed by a flashback to the inciting incident . Except it's not a flashback because the continuity is entirely different . Perhaps everything up to this point has been a premonition by Rowen and he finds his premonition is about to be come true ? In a way this might make an internal sense I've got to be honest and say this must have been one of the meanest , misogynistic and misanthropic films of the 1960s . It's absolutely deranged film making and yet there's something about that makes it rather watchable and you find yourself not enjoying it but unable to not continue watching . It's possibly because it is such a mental film that it has an almost hypnotic quality on this audience member
abdullah_canvey I saw this film 35 years ago in 1978 I was 15 it was on TV and it has stayed in my mind since, when I saw it I couldn't sleep for a week and the fridge that was staying shut, I haven't seen this film since but still remember a photo shoot light burning her face the train sequence and the head in the fridge, I suppose compared to today's graphic films this would be considered rubbish but at 15 it had a big impact on my life and I am still thinking and talking about it,I would like to see it again because I would probably laugh at why I couldn't sleep, HOPEFULLY. From what i remember it was a very basic storyline, girl gets face burned husband regrets and needs to kill women to keep his wife's skin good which only lasts a short time so needs to keep killing. Peter Cushing was again excellent and i always thought this was a hammer film production which i now know it isn't, all in all this film was probably rubbish which never see the light of day again but as a young man it had an impact on me that is still there age 50.
morrison-dylan-fan Talking to a friend about Horror related movie clips that they had recently discovered on Youtube,the one which instantly stood out from the pack was a "deleted scene" from a near forgotten 1967 Horror movie starring Peter Cushing!. Checking round online for info about the film,I was shocked to discover that this movie is said to be the only one the Peter Cushing (who agreed to do the movie,due to it being filmed near by to where he was looking after his very ill wife.) found truly unsettling to work on.Quickly finding out that no edition of this distinctive film was available on Amazon,I decided to do an extensive search,until I eventually ran into the completely uncut "France cut"! of the movie,which would give me a chance to view this corrupt operation in full.The plot:Getting himself caught up in a shoving match with a photographer over the photographer wanting the female model to "show more skin",surgeon Sir John Rowan accidentally causes a camera light to fall and land on his girlfriend and wannabe model Lynn Nolan.Pushing everyone else to the side,Rowan rushes to pull the now set a blaze light off Nolan.Reaching her in the nick of time,John is able to save Lynn from certain death,but is sadly unable to save half of Nolan's beautiful face from being burnt.Taking it upon himself to look after Lynn's every need,Rowan soon begins to relies that no matter how much of his heart he gives to her,Nolan will always see her self as a "beast" due to the damage that he has done to her.Finding all his other ideas to fail in repairing Lynn's skin,Rowan begins to consider about doing an "expirmeant" on Nolan,which will involve him having to kill young women,so that he can cut out glands from their faces and put them into Lynn's,so the she can finally see herself to be as beautiful on the outside as John sees her on the inside.View on the film:Opening this terrifically psycho film on the sight of Peter Cushing being in the middle of a "happening" party,director Robert Hartford- Davis gives the movie a real grubby sticky feeling which is most prominent in scenes such as Sir John Rowan operating on the unlucky victims,and also when one of the paternal victims (a prostitute) shows Rowan that she wont take his murdering ways laying down!.Along with the moments of grubbiness,Davis shows a real skill in building up tension for two of the best scenes in the film,with a scene on a train having Davis cleverly use the "steam" soundtrack to match the increasing heartbeats of the characters,and also turn a simple "walk along the beach" into a sped-up proto-Slasher moment.Being the centre of attention in a wonderfully mix 'N' match cast,which features the future father in law of Tony Blair, (Anthony Booth) a star from the Carry On series (David Lodge) and an unexpectedly great,mean and cunning performance from Soap star Sue Lloyd,Peter Cushing's clear unease over the activates that Sir John partakes in Derek and Donald Ford's well paced mad scientist turned on its head plot,helps to give Rowan a more "natural" personality then simply being a crazy doctor.With the growing relationship between Lynn and John being the main thread of the story,Ccushing always impressively makes sure that Rowan's reasons for going to these extremes,as Cushing shows John to always give Lynn,a quiet tender hopefulness,which eventually leads to Rowan being blinded in seeing Nolan slowly becoming increasingly cunning and deranged.
ShadeGrenade As the '60's swung, movies changed. Comedies became rude, action films bloodily violent, sex films explicit, and horror? Well, you can guess. 1968 saw the release of George A.Romero's 'Night Of The Living Dead', a landmark picture which pushed the genre to extremes. Even old school horror superstars such as Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing felt the need to keep up with the times. The latter later described 'Corruption' as 'fearfully sick', and he was right. In its most notorious scene, a woman searches a fridge for food, only to find a severed head wrapped in plastic.Peter plays Sir John Rowan, eminent surgeon. At a party in which his fiancée, model Lynn Nolan ( Sue Lloyd ) is present, he becomes involved in an argument with a brash photographer ( Anthony Booth ), culminating in a flood lamp accidentally being knocked over. The bulb burns away half of Lynn's face.Rowan had been experimenting with new surgical techniques that require the theft of a pituitary gland from a corpse in the morgue. A colleague, Steve ( Noel Trevarthen ) warns him that if he does anything like that again, he will report him. Her beauty restored, Lynn is a complete woman once more. Both she and Rowan set off for a round the world cruise. But the treatment turns out not to be permanent, and Lynn becomes disfigured once more. Rowan decides to steal the pituitary gland of a living person, necessitating the murder of a number of women...Donald and Derek Ford's script is like a swinging London version of 'Frankenstein', with butchery and blood amidst the false eyelashes and mini-skirts. But whereas the Baron was a misguided genius driven by concern for Humanity, Rowan is motivated by a selfish desire to see the woman he loves restores to her former glory. Cushing turns in his usual first-rate performance, complemented by Sue Lloyd, superb as the insane 'Lynn'. She does not care how many women her fiancée has to kill as long as she looks pretty again.The director, Robert Hartford-Davis, does a fair job, though I suspect the same script in the hands of Michael Reeves could have been a cult classic. I suppose we should give thanks the film was not bastardised the way 'Incense Of The Damned' ( based on Simon Raven's classy vampire novel 'Doctors Wear Scarlet' ) was. The scene where sadistic hippies ( among them the comedy actor David Lodge, playing a half-wit ) invade a cottage and terrorise the owners anticipates 'A Clockwork Orange' by three years.The version I have on D.V.D. lacks the murder of the Soho prostitute, and the train killing is much shorter. Perhaps Anchor Bay could find the missing footage and reinstate it?What really grabs you about 'Corruption' is the ending. For years, horror movies traditionally ended with the hero saving the leading lady in the nick of time from being burned alive in a vampire's castle or whatever, yet this ends with the entire cast wiped out by an out-of-control laser beam ( where clearly most of the budget went ), including Kate O'Mara who plays Lynn's goody-two shoes sister. We then go back to the trendy party we saw at the beginning, and a freeze-frame of Cushing's face suggests the horrible story is some sort of macabre premonition.'A most unworthy vehicle for Cushing's talents", sniffed one critic. Fair comment, but the great man could not give a bad performance if he tried, and the film is worth tracking down for that alone. Great Bill McGuffie soundtrack too.