Illustration : Unknown

Night Creature
 

Lee Madden | US | 1977

This set-in-Thailand late 70s offering, with its TV-Movie air, offers the acting talents of the late Donald Pleasence as big game hunter, and all-round “Living Legend”, Alex MacGregor. Tasked with hunting a ferocious black leopard, MacGregor is attacked and injured by the creature and is forced to return to his private island to lick his wounds and contemplate revenge. The beast is eventually captured and delivered to MacGregor, who sets it loose on his island estate in order to finish off the hunt. “My nine bullets against your nine lives…”

Unbeknownst to MacGregor — and while the animal is still at large — a party made up of a local tour operator, MacGregor’s two estranged daughters, his granddaughter, together with the family dog, decide to make an unscheduled landing on the island. The first of the leopard’s victims is the poor canine, followed quickly by MacGregor’s eldest daughter, Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes), in what transpires to be the film’s most effective set-piece. The stage is now set for a desperate cat-and-mouse game of survival between human and leopard, lending a great deal to both the stalk-and-slash and “animals attack” genres.

Probably one of director Lee Madden’s weaker films, in a career which encapsulated genre favourites Hell’s Angels 69, The Night God Screamed and The Manhandlers. Madden’s last film was the heavily re-edited Ghost Fever from 1985. He died in 2009.

 

 

 

 

The film was released to US cinemas in 1978 with eye-catching one-sheet artwork under the title Out of the Darkness; for its UK presentation it was left to early video kingpins Intervision. Initially incorrectly advertising the film as Fear in their catalogue, the tape itself came with the new more horror oriented Night Creature title, packaged with inexplicably misleading artwork!

This was another recycled release as conveyed by MPV, culled directly from its Intervision video source; here the unknown artist has obviously taken inspiration from the locandina to Franco Prosperi’s Wild Beasts. Featuring a giant demonic feral entity lording over a modern cityscape, this is the total antithesis of the film’s actual back-drop of greenery and vine-covered Thai temples! 80’s video renters must surely have felt short-changed to witness just a simple man versus beast adventure, in what transpires as low-key, jungle-based hokum: a misquoted Most Dangerous Game.

 

aka : Out of the Darkness

cast : Donald Pleasence, Nancy Kwan, Ross Hagen, Jennifer Rhodes, Lesly Fine, Prakit Yaungsri, Rachan Kanghanamat