As I was saying before, British horror became increasingly salacious as the years wore on, as evidenced by The Mutations (known in some places as The Freakmaker)—by1974, a typical mad scientist yarn was given additional sensationalist subject matter and multiple gratuitous scenes of topless women. On top of that, it attempts to mash up a storyline swipe from a thriller classic with a barely compatible monster movie plot, just like It!/Curse of the Golem (and, hey, Jill Haworth is in this one, too!)—in this case, that would be Tod Browning’s 1932 cult favourite Freaks, with its cast of real sideshow performers providing authenticity to a bit of drama set at a travelling carnival. Some of the lifts are really quite blatant, too—but a little lack of originality was apparently worth it to make something that could capitalize on the spectacle, and seems to revel in the truly downbeat and icky feeling of seventies exploitation films, even while saddled with a Sci-Fi element pulled right out of the fifties.
The movie opens with several minutes of time lapse photography of plants going about their business, brought to us by our old pal Ken Middleham of Hellstrom Chronicle and Phase IV, all in an attempt to make flowers look as alien to the audience as possible. You see so much of this footage that you begin to wonder if you’ve walked into a science class, and, in fact, you have: this is part of a university course run by Professor Nolter (Donald Pleasence, who evidently could never say no to schlock), lecturing about the interesting evolution of carnivorous plants, as well as the similarities between sea anemones and plants, and then immediately begins ranting about inducing mutations and genetic engineering. “Within ten years, it is safe to say we will be able to recreate…a living dinosaur” he drones on to his surprisingly non-bewildered class (he should consider writing a novel about that, maybe call it “Billy and the Cloneasaurus”), and then talks about cloning humans. These early scenes perfectly replicate the feeling of a mildly boring class, up to and including the part where the prof begins veering into wildly off-topic nonsense. If there’s one thing that’s constant across Pleasence’s career, it’s that he is an expert at portraying the world’s worst PhDs.
But Nolter isn’t just a guy who talks about pseudo-scientific malarkey, he lives it. In his giant English manor, he has been engaging in experiments to, as he explains, combine animal and plant DNA in order to create an organism with the best of both worlds. Originally, I decided to make this a double feature with Swamp Thing solely because they both feature plant people, but Nolter’s explanation for his experiments—the idea of creating a crop with a self-preservation instinct, “able to move to more suitable conditions”—is actually quite similar to the explanation in the later movie, and similarly silly. Having created some giant Venus fly traps (which he feeds live rabbits to), trees that bleed, and rats with leaves (as well as a laser that reverses decomposition, which fits into this somehow) , he has now set his sights much higher: injecting humans with plant DNA. To this end, he has struck a deal with sideshow owner Burns (Michael Dunn, who died almost immediately after filming all his scenes), and especially with sideshow “attraction” Lynch (Tom Baker, only a few months before taking over the lead role on Doctor Who), who has an Elephant Man-esque facial deformity that Nolter has promised to “cure” using his research—Lynch kidnaps people off the street, including some of Nolter’s own students, for use in the experiments, and the “rejects” end up spending their extremely shortened lives as part of Burns’ show (an idea that had been used in the previous year’s snake-themed Sssssss, which is a real movie with that title.) The examples of what Nolter’s human/plant fusion program does to its test subjects are suitably unpleasant.
The Freaks-style drama that plays out over half of the movie focuses on the other members of the sideshow—which, as stated, includes several real sideshow performers, including Willie “Popeye” Ingram, who you might have seen popping out his eyeballs in some stock footage somewhere—who grow increasingly perturbed by Lynch’s violent secrecy and condescending attitude towards the rest of them. Baker, having to mumble his way through his prosthetic, portrays Lynch as a person so desperate to become “normal” that he simultaneously rejects the familial support of his fellow outcasts and willingly throws all morality if it means losing his “freak” status. It is an interestingly tragic concept for this movie, with character-based moments like Lynch going to a sex worker and paying extra to get her to say “I love you” adding even more pathetic dimension to his role. On the other hand, they really go out of their way to make the whole thing unseemly (like adding extra drool dripping out of his mouth in random moments), so that the drama inherent in Lynch is turned into, well, a leering sideshow. The real performers get a moment or two to do their acts and explain their lives in a way that gives them dignity (you basically get a whole sideshow halfway through the movie, yet another thing to take up running time), but the movie itself often undercuts that in order to go for the lurid, such as in the scene that very obviously rips off the “one of us!” scene from Freaks. In general, conflating these people with this movie’s confused ideas about mutation, and an actual monster plot, as if they’re all somehow equivalently freakish is an underlying problem of this endeavour.
The other half of the movie combines the aforementioned nonsensical science plot with a group of uninteresting protagonists—three of Nolter’s students and visiting American professor Brian Redford (Brad Harris), who shares with Nolter a complete lack of emotional range (at least with Pleasence, I know it was a deliberate acting choice.) Rather unethically, Redford begins a romantic relationship with one of the students, Hedi (played by Norwegian actress Julie Ege, star of the final Hammer caveman epic Creatures The World Forgot), and hangs out with her friends Tony (Scott Antony) and Lauren (Haworth), who are a little concerned when one of their friends disappears, but still find time to visit the carnival and see the sideshow for themselves. After refusing to pay the extra money to see the “lizard woman of Tibet” (there is, surprisingly, some species of lizard that do live in Tibet), Tony goes back to the carnival after it closes down to see her for free (maybe or maybe not realizing that she is his friend mutated into a half-dead duck-faced abomination), a decision that leads him to be taken by Lynch after a decently-shot chase through a haunted house ride (director Jack Cardiff is yet another award-winning British cinematographer whose own solo efforts tended towards the lowbrow for whatever reason.) As the next human test subject, Tony becomes the actual monster of this movie, although he’s as much a tragic “freak” as Lynch ostensibly is—after breaking out of Nolter’s lab, and donning as much Phantom of the Opera gear as possible, he attempts to contact his friends to let them know what happened to him, but in the process he accidentally reveals his mutant form to his girlfriend and sends her into a state of shock.
I’ll give them this: Tony’s gradual transformation into a Venus Fly Trap-man form is an interesting piece of monster make-up, starting out as a deformed person with bulging eyes, cabbage leaf hands, and a funnel mouth before becoming a walking plant with a face. Although fitting in this with generally pretty ugly movie, it has a pretty old school creature feature vibe to it—the whole Nolter plot is a pretty much a throwback (while the sideshow plot is an even more direct one), with an equally ludicrous grasp on science, but given a very seventies greasy grindhouse sheen. The over-the-top Sci-Fi nonsense and the equally over-the-top exploitation feel are complemented, and probably surpassed, by the music provided by experimental electronica pioneer Basil Kirchin, whose score vacillates from unnerving synth stuff to what sounds like a brass section anxiety attack.
It’s clear that Pleasence’s mad doctor wasn’t just mixing people and plant DNA, but specifically with carnivorous plant DNA—which makes sense given what we see in his home, but not so much sense given…basic logic. If the whole idea is to make a superior species of human that can photosynthesize, as stated, why go with that specific plant species with its very peculiar behaviour? Especially since, when it doesn’t turn them into something ill-suited to life like it did to his first victim, it apparently makes them into something instinctively predatory, as we see the mutant Tony attack a random vagrant under a bridge (another cliche horror movie scene.) Of course, the implication the whole time is that Nolter is completely off his rocker, but it would be nice if one of these movies movie just completely threw out all the high-minded mad science pretensions and just portrayed a guy who wants to make Venus fly trap people just because he likes them so much.
The two plots conclude in a manner that is predictably disconnected: Lynch is confronted by the rest of the sideshow, who prove themselves to be quite skilled at throwing knives, and is ripped apart by angry dogs; meanwhile, the fully-transformed Tony breaks into Nolter’s lab and melts him with his fly trap digestive juices before letting himself be consumed by flames in order to end his own blighted existence (oh, and and Redford saves a naked Hedi from being experimented upon. Whatever.) In a sense, these endings have a bit of the poetic justice energy you found in Amicus’ Tales From the Crypt anthology movies (and, hey, Tom Baker was in one of those!), but in keeping with The Mutations’ general proclivities, it keeps all the gruesomeness but loses the giddy irony. It really does feel that the unique nasty streak found in the UK monster movies of prior decades pretty much reached its endpoint here, unable to reconcile itself with the even nastier edge of seventies exploitation movies.
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