From what I’ve seen, the western-produced monster movies from the second half of the sixties very rarely show any real evolution from what was being produced a decade earlier—a movie like The Vulture could have been in theatres at any point from mid-fifties to the early sixties and would have been exactly the same, and yet it was produced well into a decade of major societal change. You wouldn’t know it from watching it, as it simply doesn’t reflect then-modern culture at all, staying in its B-movie bubble and acting as if its rather puzzling tale of science gone wrong has any bearing on anything. Based on what I’ve seen, it took years for drive-in filler like this to really start getting with the times, both thematically and visually.
Which is not to say that there is nothing novel about The Vulture—although its novelty is more in its particular choice of nonsense than in the movie itself. It was the final project of Lawrence Huntington, a British workman director with over thirty movies to his name stretching back to the thirties, and the fact that he both wrote and directed it (getting financial backing from American and Canadian studios and also an English football club?) leads one to believe that this was something of a passion project. It’s difficult to discern from the film itself what that passion was, but maybe it was in the aforementioned choice of nonsense, which represents not so much a development of the nuclear and scientific themes of the fifties creature features as it as a weird, borderline incoherent offshoot of it.
As implied by the funding backstory, this is one of those international affairs, where we get a mixed cast of Brits and Americans acting out common cliches of both countries’ monster movie traditions, giving it a supposed worldwide appeal. As in Die, Monster, Die!, this is primarily done by having an English woman, Trudy Lutens (Diane Clare, also seen in 1963’s The Haunting), married to a square American scientist, Eric Lutens (Robert Hutton, who we last saw in The Colossus of New York), back in Cornwall visiting the estate of run by her uncle (Broderick Crawford), a “millionaire newspaperman from Canada” who, as we learned, “has developed a chest complaint” from the English weather (I like the term “chest complaint.”) Whenever an old English family is in a horror movie, you know there’s some dark secret from the past that’s about to unearthed—it seems like the only reason they keep the aristocracy around!—and in this case, we learn that in the eighteenth century, the Strouds were involved with the death of a sailor, Francis Real, who they buried alive for essentially having weird hobbies, including keeping a pet vulture that he picked up while sailing the Pacific…and because they blamed him for abducting and potentially killing an infant, I guess. Would you believe that Francis Real swore revenge against the entire Stroud family? It happened!
This exposition, based on an old parchment found in a church, is delivered early on by the local Vicar (Philip Friend) to the police investigator (Patrick Holt), who is looking into a strange event where a woman (Annette Carell) claims to have seen something pop out of the grave that supposedly housed the remains of Francis Real, which was so frightening her hair turned white. Repeatedly, she states that she saw a huge bird with a human head and hands, but of course no one involved believes that…what does she think this is, a movie or something? There’s some especially detached acting in these early scenes, leading to weird and funny line readings from the actors as they tell or hear the all-important backstory—I especially like how the investigator rather casually says that both the belief that Real was “in league with the Devil” and also his pre-death curse against the family were “completely understandable.”
Almost immediately upon hearing the backstory for himself, Eric becomes quite involved with unravelling the mystery, even though this visit to Cornwall is supposed to be a vacation—he talks to the Vicar, the woman who claims to have seen the bird-man, and also to Brian Stroud’s antiques dealer Hans Koniglich (Akim Tamiroff, featured in, among other things, Orson Welles’ version of The Trial), who is Entirely Not Suspicious, especially after revealing to Eric that he has reason to believe that he is a descendant of Francis Real. Vaguely Eastern European? Connected to the backstory? Always wearing a full black suit and walking with two canes due to a “leg injury?” I can’t think of anything less suspicious than this. Name me one thing less suspicious!
The single most ludicrous part of this plot is how quickly Eric thinks he’s figured the whole thing out, cryptically hinting at the conclusions he’s jumped to based on very little actual evidence. He finds several black feathers around sites where a large bird has been sighted, and learns from an ornithologist that they belong to no local birds; he finds the remains of sheep in a hard-to-reach cave on a cliffside; and he eventually learns about Manutara, the human-headed bird god of the indigenous peoples of Easter Island (as far as I can tell, “Manutara” is the Rapa Nui peoples’ word for terns, which aren’t exactly the most intimidating kind of bird.) Sounds like something bird-related to me. Based on this evidence, his conclusion is…that someone has engaged in a nuclear-powered experiment and, through “nuclear transmutation” (a real thing) has fused themselves with a bird, and that this person will be targeting the members of the Stroud family. As a member of the “experimental staff of the Atomic Energy Commission”, he “knows what [he’s] talking about”—that would explain his instant, very American bout of confidence, but very little else.
Here lies the thing that makes The Vulture an oddity—despite providing a backstory that would imply something supernatural, another Gothic tale of a terror returning from the past to avenge itself on the living, it instead becomes a fifties-style exploration of Magic Radiation. Just hearing someone saying that they saw a bird with a man’s head is enough to convince Eric that there’s been a teleportation mishap, almost as if that’s something the Atomic Energy Commission has dealt with before—I guess if this movie takes place in the same universe as The Fly, maybe they would have become aware of it. That movie is the rather obvious inspiration for this, but how this one goes about it is so ill-defined and frankly illogical that it doesn’t feel like a rip-off. Our expert nuclear scientist is quick to tell pretty much everyone his theory, offering warnings to Brian to stay away from open windows at night (he keeps them open to deal with his “chest complaint”), and the police do not believe anything he says, despite the fact that everything he predicts comes to pass—Brian is taken from his home by a pair of disembodied bird talons (which is basically our monster until the end of the movie, as this is not exactly a top-flight production) and found mutilated in the cliffside, and eventually his English brother (Gordon Sterne) is also murdered, leaving Trudy as the sole member of the Stroud family. Most of these sorts of movies feature a police presence who are singularly incapable of solving or preventing crimes (maybe truer to life than they thought), but this might be the one case where their disbelief seems entirely justified. We in the audience can hardly believe the massive leaps Eric makes, and we’re watching the things happen!
The explanation, which Eric has to give in the movie’s conclusion—again, based on very little—is that the perpetrator, later revealed to Koniglich (gasp!), was running some high-tech operation in the basement of his house (going off the grid and using his own generator to avoid suspicion, even though the power company is able to easily identify him when Eric calls them), and used it to teleport himself into the grave of his potential ancestor, not knowing that Real was buried with his pet vulture. He accidentally merged with both human and vulture bones, infusing him with both their DNA and turning into a vulture-man that we only get to see, fleetingly, in the finale, and that looks more like he’s wearing a feather sweater. Aside from potentially stealing a chest of gold coins that was also buried with Real (why didn’t he also fuse with the coins? Now that would make for an interesting monster!), there’s no clear explanation why he did this—as a person professionally concerned with history, maybe he was trying to find a way to become physically part of it? It is implied that fusing with Real’s remains somehow gave him Real’s grudge (I guess it somehow became genetic?), which is the only potential justification given for why someone who has otherwise been friendly and was a longtime friend of Brian Stroud would become a murderous participant in a historical feud that he was only barely connected to. Needless to say, none of this makes any sense whatsoever.
In rational storytelling terms, the supernatural explanation that Eric was quick to dismiss would actually make more sense. The creepy Sexton (Edward Caddick) who keeps popping up to tell people not to interfere with what’s going on—apparently because he thinks the whole “burying someone alive” thing is a crime bad enough to deserve bird-monster punishment several generations later—seems to believe that it is some kind of supernatural justice. The way the movie is set up, it seems to want to shock the audience by revealing that a cliche paranormal story about curses from beyond the grave is in fact a cliche Sci-Fi story, one form of monster story essentially supplanting another. There is something fascinating and subversive about that idea, and it almost feels like Huntington is commenting on how horror stories had changed…albeit, probably about ten years too late.
It’s all the more amusing because Eric and other characters regularly talk about “science” and all the weird new things science is figuring out these days, but the movie itself does not seem to understand science in the slightest. Had either the magical or nonsense science version of this story been presented on its own, you could easily dismiss it as run-of-the-mill B-movie goofiness—but by offering a contrast between the two within the story itself, it begs for a closer examination. You could quite easily come to the conclusion that the people crafting this story views science as just a new kind of magic.
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