1967, Starring Robert Hutton, Akim Tamiroff, Broderick Crawford. Directed by Lawrence Huntington. <\/p>\n
Only the second full-length horror film to be produced in Canada (the first being the trippy 3-D flick The Mask, released in 1961), 1967’s The Vulture is one of the more unusual offerings to come out of the Great White North. In the film, a small village in Cornwall, England is terrorized by a large, part-man, part-bird creature that swoops down from the skies to carry people off screaming into the night. A nuclear scientist, Dr. Lutens (Robert Hutton) and his wife Trudy (Diane Clare) arrive from the U.S. to visit her uncle, Brian Stroud (Broderick Crawford), and learn of a woman whose hair has turned white from fright after seeing the monster. As they investigate the matter, they discover the local legend of a pirate, Francis Real, who, two centuries earlier, was accused of sorcery and sentenced to be buried alive with his pet — a vulture. But, before he died, Real supposedly placed a curse on the man who entombed him, as well as all of his future descendants \u2013 which includes Trudy and her uncle Brian. Could the appearance of this huge, murderous, man-bird be part of Real’s revenge? Or is there another, more scientific explanation – one that involves the rather peculiar, cloak-wearing Professor Koniglich (Akim Tamiroff)? A Canadian\/U.K. co-production, The Vulture is a bit of an anomaly. With a mostly British cast, Gothic-styled buildings and shots of the English countryside, the film looks and feels more like a Hammer or Amicus melodrama than a true Canuck effort. Though it features a great, spooky score (by Eric Spear) and a fantastically creepy beginning set in a cemetery, the film suffers from incredibly slow pacing (even for the era), numerous plot inconsistencies, a lack of tension in key scenes and a seeming reluctance on the part of writer\/director\/producer Lawrence Huntington to show much of the creature itself. An ultimately mediocre effort, that with better execution, perhaps could have resulted in a minor B-classic. (James Burrell)