Film Review
The Nightmare Man was an
unusual departure for the serials department of the BBC in the 1980s,
away from the familiar world of period and contemporary drama, into the
realm of adult sci-fi horror. The corporation had had some
earlier successes in the genre, most notably the
Quatermass serials of the 1950s,
but it rarely dabbled with the concoction of horror and science-fiction
outside the cosy confines of its popular series
Doctor Who. Scripted and
directed by two of the latter series' most venerated figures, Robert
Holmes and Douglas Camfield,
The
Nightmare Man is a classic
Doctor
Who story in all but name, just a tiny bit more frightening and
sporting just a little bit more female cleavage.
Adapted from David Wiltshire's thriller novel
Child of Vodyanoi, the plot is pure
50s B-movie fare, almost identical with that of Terence Fisher's
Island
of Terror (1966), with a few (not very imaginative)
twists. The characters are all stock archetypes who, in the best
B-movie tradition, have next to no depth and a worrying inability to
speak normal human dialogue. Performances range from the
downright dull (James Warwick, Celia Imrie) to the eerily portentous
(Maurice Roëves, Tom Watson), with Jonathan Newth stealing
the show as the totally creepy Colonel Howard (Newth looks as if he may
have been cast on account of his scary resemblance to the actor Leslie
Howard).
In common with pretty well every
Doctor
Who story, most of the episodes consist of people standing about
vomiting copious quantities of plot exposition, with most of the action held back
for the last five minutes to provide a sufficiently strong cliff-hanger
to make the spectator want to tune in the following week.
Director Douglas Camfield only really comes into his own in these brief
flurries of action, which he handles superbly. For most of the
production, however, Camfield's direction is as lame and uninspired as
the writing, with most of the episodes consisting of static and
uninteresting camera set-ups with actors propped up like dummies as
they try (and fail) to make their plot-laden dialogue sound
convincing.
The main technical flaw with the series is that it was recorded on
videotape instead of film (presumably because film was too
expense). As a result, the series has an ugly 'washed out' look
throughout. This adds an eerie feel to the outdoor scenes filmed
during the daytime (with a Cornish village making a good stand-in
for a Scottish island), but for the interior and nocturnal sequences film
would have been far more atmospheric and effective in sustaining the
tension. The camerawork and editing partly help to make up for
this, although, like the direction, these only rise above the mundane
within the closing few minutes of each episode.
Despite its obvious shortcomings,
The
Nightmare Man manages to make compelling viewing and genuinely
does have some terrifying moments - the last few minutes of Episode
Three being particularly horrific, easily on a par with what was being
seen in cinemas at the time. The use of the subjective camera to
show the killer's point-of-view is also effective and adds to the
general aura of menace. Such a shame that the killer ends up
being - surprise, surprise - a man in a rubber suit.
Broadcast in May 1981 as four thirty-minute long episodes,
The Nightmare Man attracted
a fairly respectable audience of six million but is hugely surpassed by the BBC's
subsequent, far more lavish sci-fi horror serial,
The Day of the Triffids (1981).
© James Travers 2014
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