Color, 1972, 89 mins. Directed by Jim O'Connolly
Starring Bryant Haliday, Jill Haworth, Gary Hamilton, Mark Edwards, Anna Palk, Jack Watson, Dennis Price, Robin Askwith / Produced by Richard Gordon / Cinematography by Desmond Dickinson / Music by Kenneth V. Jones
Letterboxed (1.85:1) / Dolby Digital Mono
Format: DVD - Elite Entertainment (MSRP $29.95)
On the desolate, foggy Snape Island, a young nude girl is found after she murders one of her would-be rescuers out of fright. Mutilated bodies litter the craggy surface of the island. What could be responsible? Well, thanks to a band of intrepid, horny teenagers, an ancient evil has been stirring and bumping off everyone in sight with a valuable Phoenecian axe. When a private investigator and some treasure-hunting museum folk arrive at the island to get to the bottom of the mystery, the blood really begins to fly.
More successful as a mood piece than a standard slasher film, Tower of Evil offers some haunting moments of atmospheric terror discreetly tucked in during all of the usual horror cliches, gratuitous sex, and teen slang. The eerie opening credits (a model, but still effective) and jittery opening sequence show off the film's greatest strengths, and a cast of British horror pros helps give some class to the proceedings. In partciular, look for Robin Askwith and Dennis Price (both also in Horror Hospital), top-billed Bryant Halliday (Curse of the Voodoo), and Jill Haworth (The Mutations). The film also makes effective use of sound, with rushing wind, scuttling crabs, and eerie whistling creating a memorable horror soundscape, while the effective nighttime seaside locations may remind some viewers of Jean Rollin's similar poetic fondness for acquatic locales.
Released in the early '80s under the same title, Tower of Evil has rarely looked as good as it does here. As with its other films from producer Richard Gordon, Elite appears to have struck this directly from the negative, as the film is completely free from any blemishes or distortion. Though not really a visual powerhouse, with most of the visual color schemes relying on gray, blue, and brown, the film looks quite impressive given its low budget, and anyone accustomed to the muddy old VHS versions will be amazed at the improvement. Likewise, the mono soundtrack is generally subdued and quiet but displays no particular flaws. While the liner notes tend to play up the film more than it really deserves, Tower of Evil will most likely never receive any other treatment remotely as respectful as this. A lengthy trailer is also included.
An odd entry in British horror cinema, Tower of Evil was better known in the U.S. as Horror of Snape Island and later rode the short coattails of John Carpenter's 1979 film under the title Beyond the Fog. Thanks to the diminishing censorship of the early '70s, Tower of Evil managed to inject heavy doses of gore and nudity into a standard '60s "teens in a dark house" plot, and the result, while hardly a classic, is not without interest.
