Looking for love in all the wrong places

Straight on Till Morning (1972)

The next film from the Hammer Collection is quite an interesting one. Early 70's was not a good time for conventional horror, no matter how brilliant the mood was, so Hammer needed to switch the actual monsters to humans who are monsters. Serial killers, rapists, sadists and so on. And simple horror was not good enough any more, you needed thriller that turns into terror and the viewer had to really feel the pain. So with that mind set they went on making this disturbing psychological horror movie. It's a story about a timid and withdrawn woman who moves to London from the countryside. She's looking to grow away from her mother and in the essence looking for love. Life is rough for her and things don't go as planned. When she eventually meets a man she thinks is the right one for her, the man turns out to be a sadistic serial killer. Despite the style and the story this is not just mind numbing sleaze, it's kind of like sleaze for the intelligent audience. And that makes this quite a good movie. The cast is fairly good and the mood is quite disturbing. At parts it goes to almost being surreal in it's nasty vision. The feel of the 70's is captured quite well which only adds to the already well working mood of it. All in all this was quite a great surprise and well worth watching if the genre suits you. There's a commentary with Rita Tushingham and journalist Jonathan Sothcott on the DVD with a trailer as an extra.
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