Craze (Freddie Francis, 1974)

Craze is by no means a classic of cinema, but it stars Jack Palance as a British antique dealer (sans accent), leader of a coven of black magic witches, and worshiper of the African idol Chuku, which he keeps in the basement of his store and delivers human sacrifices to, and if that doesn't sound like something you want to watch, then I don't know what the hell to tell you. Besides Palance, we also get a stacked cast of British character actors and personalities, including Diana Dors, Trevor Howard, Michael Jayston, Kathleen Byron, Hugh Griffith (and his eyebrows), Edith Evans, and Julie Ege (okay, she's Norwegian, but she was a Bond girl and starred in many British cult films).

Directed by the legendary Freddie Francis (more on him later), Craze is massively entertaining, with a hilarious scenery-chewing Palance performance. I love that he doesn't even attempt a British accent except for a couple of lines and the pronunciation of "garage" as "gair-awzh." A weird Palance British accent would have been so distracting. Instead, we get unadulterated, high-octane Palance with a few odd British pronunciations sprinkled in for crazy flavor. I thought his character was an American ex-pat in London until he said "garage" two-thirds of the way into the running time. I support this choice. It makes a weird movie even weirder.

Palance plays Neal Mottram, the owner of a high-end antiques shop in London. He lives in a flat above the store along with his assistant and sole employee Ronnie (Martin Potter), a young man he rescued from a hardscrabble life of grifting and trick-turning on the streets. Neal is behind on the bills and deep in debt, and he may have to close the shop if things don't turn around. He's not as worried as Ronnie, though, because he and his coven have been offering blood sacrifices to Chuku. No deaths yet, just some voluntary bloodletting from a sexy lady in the coven, but Neal knows Chuku will provide.

When an ugly encounter with a woman who was kicked out of the coven accidentally turns deadly, Neal offers her soul to Chuku. An unexpected financial windfall happens soon after, turning Ronnie from a Chuku skeptic into a possible believer and kicking Neal's craziness up several notches. Neal believes the secret to serving Chuku properly and receiving his rewards is murder, and lots of it!

Neal starts searching for vulnerable women he can kill in the name of Chuku. (As you can guess, it's a lot of fun to hear Jack Palance repeatedly say "Chuku.") Neal's murders run the gamut from poorly planned chaos to elaborately complicated schemes. To Neal, murder is jazz, baby. Devotion to Chuku is the goal, but the road to that goal changes from kill to kill depending on mood, circumstance, and feel.

These murders almost immediately bring Neal to the attention of detectives Wall and Russet (Michael Jayston and Percy Herbert), who decide pretty quickly that this arrogant weirdo is a prime suspect. Though a bit nervous in his first encounter with the detectives, Neal soon grows confident that Chuku will keep him from being arrested, so he begins to give zero effs about how he comes across to the police, lighting up his hand-rolled cigarettes, grinning smugly, making gallows-humor jokes, bouncing around wildly from mood to mood, just effin' and a-jeffin' all over the detectives' questions, even when grilled by the big boss, Superintendent Bellamy (Trevor Howard). Palance is so damn hilarious in these scenes.

As the insanity increases, so does the fun. Every supporting character gets a chance to show some personality, especially Diana Dors as a horny, cherry brandy-loving boarding house owner named Dolly Newman. Dors was about 15 years past her heyday as the Marilyn of the UK, but the rude comment Wall makes about her appearance took me aback. Not sure if that line was a cheap shot at Dors, an ironic joke due to her sexpot status in the previous decades, or just a character detail about Wall. Maybe all three? The cops in this movie are straight-up assholes, despite being correct about Neal.

Wrangling all this insanity and fun is Freddie Francis, one of the great cinematographers and the director of many '60s and '70s (and a few '80s) horror films that weren't afraid to be baroque, pulpy, lurid, shlocky, and/or rough around the edges. Francis' directing career includes Nightmare, The Evil of Frankenstein, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, The Deadly Bees, the infamous Trog (with Joan Crawford), Tales from the Crypt (the movie), The Creeping Flesh, and Son of Dracula. His final directorial effort was an episode of HBO's Tales from the Crypt in 1996.

His credits as cinematographer include Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Innocents, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Return to Oz, Glory, The Man in the Moon, Scorsese's Cape Fear, and three films for David Lynch, including his final film as a cinematographer (The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story). Oddly enough, Francis has 37 credits as director and 37 as cinematographer. He died in 2007.