The Mutations (1974)

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Good start, but then it gets ruined

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

"You may think you're normal. But you're all a product of mutations. Your ancestors, our ancestors were freaks"A traveling family of freaks, a crazy scientist with strange plant fixations, a deformed man who refuses to accept himself, a possible protagonist who is suddenly doomed, and one of the most original monster designs I have ever seen. All of these elements clump together rather crudely to form this bizarre, low budget horror that I really enjoyed for some reason -I partially blame the beautiful Julie Ege and Donald Pleasence-. It's creepy, campy and even sad in some parts, not to mention the crazy evolutionary ideas that it toys around with.

This grotesquely mad and slightly sick-spirited early 70's horror film couldn't count on too much praise from either the critics or the audiences, and there are a couple of (justified) reasons for this. First and foremost, director Jack Cardiff never really makes clear what his intentions are. Does he want "The Mutations" to be a cheesy and obviously fictional Sci-Fi horror flick about a mad scientist performing absurd experiments to create a new race of human vegetables? Or perhaps it was meant to be a harrowing and truly devastating portrait about the position of gruesomely deformed people in contemporary society, somewhat like Tod Browning's legendary classic "Freaks"? Either way, these two extreme themes are practically impossible to fold together and the film ends up somewhere in no man's land. Nonetheless it contains several genuinely disturbing and jaw-dropping moments, most notably when the collection of traveling circus freaks exhibits themselves and – in true Browning style – wreaks havoc on those who mistreated them. The whole plot is actually secondary to these sequences! The always-reliable Donald Pleasance stars as a nutball professor destined to integrate human tissue in his experiments of plant-mutation. Therefore he commands the horribly deformed & vicious owner of a circus to abduct human guinea pigs (students attending his own university lectures, which isn't that smart) and bring them to his private lab. When the experiments go inevitably wrong, resulting in a lizard-skinned girl and a male kind of Venus flytrap, Professor Pleasance just 'donates' them again to the circus as new attractions. Fellow students begin to search for their missing friends and, meanwhile, the circus' "natural" freaks plot to punish their cruel employer. The best sequence in "The Mutations" is a more than obvious tribute to the aforementioned "Freaks" and involves an attempt by the deformed people to befriend Lynch; nicknamed "the ugliest man in the world" (and he really is). One of us! One of us!! Whenever the action takes place outside of the circus tent, the film is pretty much scare-free and mildly tedious. Giant and clearly fake vegetable-monsters simply aren't creepy and several little (and stupid) details in the script just can't be true. Like biology students driving Jaguars, for example! Tod Browning's milestone once got banned for over 40 years and it nearly cost him his career, supposedly all because his portrayal of deformed people was exploitative and unacceptable. Once you see "The Mutations", you'll acknowledge that Browning's film actually is the complete opposite of exploitative! He tried to put the emphasis on how independent, courageous and perfectly able to function they are, whereas Jack Cardiff's picture really exploits the spectacle and questionable "entertainment"-value of these people's condition.

Grimy, effective English shocker from Jack Cardiff is not a remake of Browning's "Freaks", but it does recreate several sequences from the 30's classic and uses some real, highly impressive freaks (to its credit). The tabletop scene, which introduced the "One of us!" mantra, is here, as is the scene in which the freaks turn on one of their own. One of the little people in this version even produces a threatening switchblade, mirroring the original.Often titled "The Mutations", a title I prefer, the film is entertaining and filled with the great stuff of horror films -- deformities, a mad scientist, a sleazy carnival, half man/half monsters looking for love, a fiery conclusion.The film feels like Gary Sherman's "Raw Meat" at times with its 70's dialog and haircuts, and the female characters wear a little Women's Lib on their shoulders, again reflecting the period. But what really distinguishes the film is director Jack Cardiff's effort to make some of his most hideous freak creations sympathetic. In particular, Tom Baker (TV's best Dr. Who, in my opinion) is gruesomely tragic as Mr. Lynch, a facially disfigured monster who begs mad scientist Professor Nolter (Donald Pleasence) to find a "cure" for his infliction. A scene where Lynch visits a prostitute and begs her to say "I love you" to him (for an extra pound) is quite touching..."I've got a nice selection of obscenities," she tells him when he initially asks her to say "things" to him.The film is a rich tapestry and its theme is summed up in a couple of lines of dialog: "We are all a product of mutations. We mutated to survive." Plot involves Nolter's efforts to forcibly mutate local lasses and lads who end up as monsters running the streets in search of blood. The sideshow of a local carnival provides the perfect hiding place for some of the good Professor's rejected experiments. A particularly chilling scene involves one of the film's protagonists discovering a missing girl in a cage.The make-up effects are more than adequate for their time and disturbingly gruesome. The score by Basil Kirchin, which combines animalistic sound effects with traditional strings, adds immeasurably to the atmosphere. Great time lapse photography of plants, too, cut to ultra-creepy music.I like this accomplished horror film very much.

Mostly dry and boring horror film, with shoddy special effects - yet quite creepy if you let your imagination do the film's work for you. It all seems quite disturbing on paper (mutated man-plants, sideshow "freaks", etc.), but the film's only real merit is another good performance by the ever-reliable Donald Pleasence. For a genuinely engrossing and dramatic "mutation picture", I recommend the original "Fly" (1958). (**)