This movie was also known as Beyond The Fog and Horror on Snape Island, but it could easily have been called Don't Go In The Lighthouse!
A quintessential teen horror movie and an almost perfect case study as a link between the old and the new - the rules of old Hollywood haunted house films, and the US slasher cycle that hadn’t yet started. This film adheres to the formula of sending a small group of unprepared youngsters into a haunted house cut off from society - The Old Dark House (1932) is an early example.
But while sticking to a simplistic well-worn premise, Tower of Evil did its best to cram in as much nudity, sex, and violence as possible. It could easily be a template for the influential Friday the 13th and Halloween films - the famous ‘have sex and die’ slasher films. Many of the horror movie ‘rules’ spelled out in Scream hold true for Tower of Evil, even though it was made back in 1972 in the UK.
The immoral are punished for having sex (or smoking too much pot). The characters think it’s a great idea to leave the women behind (in a room where the murderer was last seen) to explore the island. They also think it’s a great idea to split up when roaming around!
Tower of Evil is fast-paced and entertaining, full of solid performances (with one hulking exception) and shocks. It also has many cheesy moments that undermine the atmosphere, but in an enjoyable way.
I still can’t forget the laughs in the audience when I saw this supporting a double-bill in the seventies, particularly when the fake head makes the sounds of a fake head as it rolls down some fake stone stairs, capped with a shot of the actress’s head poking through the floor of the set—a stupidly obvious effect that was stupidly still considered a good enough idea to be used in Alien (which also got laughs when it was first shown in London in 1979).
Add to this the variable and awful American accents being attempted by British actors, and you may think that this is a negative review. But it’s not. Just a warning that you have to take the rough with the smooth.
Some of the effects are very good. The aforementioned decapitation effect has an opening shot that I still can’t quite work out. Before the head rolls down the stairs, there’s a wide shot of the body of a naked girl, found with her head turned backwards. As someone touches the head, it parts from the body, leaving a headless corpse. This is either a superb fake body, or the actress’s head has been painfully bent back and hidden beneath the floor of the set, pre-empting the similarly stunning effect that Tom Savini used on a mortuary slab zombie in Day of the Dead (1985).
The story is fast moving and tries its best to confound the audience until the very last moment. The film delivers up front, opening with two local fishermen arriving on the island to discover the aftermath of a massacre. Already we are hit with several shocks, mutilation, murder, and frantic nudity.
A survivor is taken to a strange white room for a very unorthodox interrogation, involving regressive hypnosis induced by disco lights and injections of prescription drugs. This is presented as being okay if the police use them, but bad if you use non-prescription drugs and find your own disco lights.
An expedition sets out to discover the island’s secrets, to find the killer and look for some ancient gold. The team includes two couples involved in a love quadrangle (even more complex than the usual love triangle). They are in for a night of murder, mayhem, and sexual shenanigans. It’s like a dry run for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but without the songs.
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