A film that turned out very differently from that envisaged by it's ill-fated young director, who had wanted Donald Pleasance for the title role but was saddled with Vincent Price as the price - if you'll pardon the pun - of obtaining funding from American International Pictures. The atmosphere on the set was toxic - Reeves' hostility partly motivated by indignation that Price had made a pass at him - but that probably aided the film; and after the film was completed Price had come to a grudging appreciation of the temperamental young pipsqueak he had found such a trial to work with.
The film also marked Price's return to East Anglia three years after the film that had finished Roger Corman's Poe Cycle of the early sixties on a high note, 'The Tomb of Ligeia'. Nearly sixty years later Corman is a vigorous 94, while it's unlikely that Reeves would have flourished in the cesspit that was British cinema of the seventies.
By the time cameraman John Coquillon arrived in Cornwall three years later to make another tale of ultra-violence amid rural surroundings [Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs'] such blood-letting was, alas, already proving commonplace.
The film also marked Price's return to East Anglia three years after the film that had finished Roger Corman's Poe Cycle of the early sixties on a high note, 'The Tomb of Ligeia'. Nearly sixty years later Corman is a vigorous 94, while it's unlikely that Reeves would have flourished in the cesspit that was British cinema of the seventies.
By the time cameraman John Coquillon arrived in Cornwall three years later to make another tale of ultra-violence amid rural surroundings [Peckinpah's 'Straw Dogs'] such blood-letting was, alas, already proving commonplace.