Review: Captain Clegg

AKA “Night Creatures”. Set in the late 1700s, Captain Collier (Patrick Allen) leads a motley crew of Royal Navy men appointed by the crown to investigate the supposed smuggling activities going on in the small coastal town of Dymchurch. The locals believe that the ghosts of the supposedly dead Clegg and his crew haunt the town at night, but Captain Collier has no time for such superstitious nonsense. Peter Cushing plays the Reverend Dr. Blyss, a nerdy, mild-mannered and pious town elder. Other townsfolk are played by the likes of Martin Benson, Jack MacGowran, Yvonne Romain, Oliver Reed, and Michael Ripper as a ghoulish-looking undertaker. David Lodge plays one of Collier’s nastier crewmen, and the seemingly always elderly Sydney Bromley meets a foul end early in the film. Milton Reid plays a hulking mute who was once abandoned by Captain Clegg.

 

Easily Hammer’s best pirate film, this creepy, atmospheric 1962 film from Peter Graham Scott (“The Cracksman”, “Mister Ten Per Cent”, and a lot of British TV) and screenwriter Anthony Hinds (“Taste the Blood of Dracula”, “Scars of Dracula”) is a really underrated effort. The cinematography by Arthur Grant (“Tomb of Ligeia”, “Hell is a City”, “The Devil Rides Out”) is typically excellent, and the music score by Aussie composer Don Banks (“Rasputin – The Mad Monk”) is top-notch too. The cast and characters are really interesting, led by a fantastic multi-faceted turn by Peter Cushing in the kind of role Christopher Lee probably would’ve gotten more often than not. He plays a man of the cloth who nonetheless is the leader of a band of smugglers. Cushing clearly relishes the opportunity to play something a bit different and proves himself capable of playing not only the meek, pious religious character but also being surprisingly effective at being intimidating and unscrupulous. However, his character is hardly a black-hearted villain.

 

The underrated Patrick Allen is pitch-perfect in a role that on the surface should be the hero/good guy. However, he and a very seedy David Lodge play their roles as thoroughly unlikeable from start to finish. Allen is kind of a rude prick and his men are creepy and unseemly, with Lodge terrifically nasty. Although they eventually get a bit lost in the shuffle after a while, Yvonne Romain and especially Oliver Reed also impress as the standard Hammer young lovers. A young-ish Reed brings a darkly charismatic intensity to an otherwise fairly bland character. Milton Reid has one of his bigger showings as a character simply credited as ‘Mulatto’, and although he doesn’t look it, Reid was half-Indian on his mother’s side, which narrowly avoids any culturally icky feelings one might have. Elsewhere we have a suitably creepy Martin Benson and perhaps the best Hammer role for Michael Ripper, who looks like a creepy vampire. That’s the lovely Kate O’Mara from “The Vampire Lovers” in a tiny role as a saucy barmaid. Meanwhile, for comedic value of-sorts we get an amusing Jack MacGowran.

 

Aside from an over-abundance of characters, the only flaw here for me is that the FX work doesn’t quite come off. The basic concept of the ‘night creatures’ of the film’s alternate title (I prefer “Captain Clegg”) is eerie as hell as they haunt the foggy marshes like the four horsemen of the apocalypse or something. However, the glow-in-the-dark skeletons are in practice a rather crude special effect. Still, they’re unusual and rather creepy.

 

Why is this film not better-known? I actually think it’s one of Hammer’s finest efforts, despite some crude FX and some characters being afforded more screen time than others. Very well-acted, eerie, and interesting. Check it out.

Rating: B-