Welcome to another installment of B-Movie Enema and the continuation of this month’s women-in-peril theme.

The first week we saw an unbelievable terror for a pair of young women in New York. Last week, we celebrated 450 reviews on B-Movie Enema with a horrific and brutal attack on a New York woman in Connecticut. This week, we go trans-Atlantic to Europe where we follow a pair of ladies from Nottingham, England taking in a cycling holiday in rural France in Robert Fuest’s And Soon the Darkness.

I’m surprisingly well-acquainted with Mr. Fuest’s films. Some of his films I know well because I’ve seen them. Others I know because they are a sequel to a movie or TV show I’m familiar with. Another I’m aware of because it was a favorite of a family member starring someone I’m exceptionally familiar with.

Let’s start with the ones I’ve seen of his. In 1971, one year after the release of this film (and another I’ll be mentioning momentarily), he directed the Vincent Price classic The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Another year later, he directed the sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Then, in 1975, he directed William Shatner and Ernest Borgnine in the infamous film that had Anton LeVay himself as an adviser, The Devil’s Rain. Arguably, these are the films Fuest is best known for making.

But he also directed the 1980 sequel Revenge of the Stepford Wives for television. I don’t think I have to remind everyone that I’ve looked at both the 1975 and 2004 versions of The Stepford Wives. On television, Fuest directed seven episodes of the original run of The Avengers between 1968 and 1969. He followed that up in the mid 70s with two episodes directed of The New Avengers. So, while I have sadly barely seen any episodes of The Avengers (while, simultaneously owning all but four issues of the comic book Avengers), I am well-acquainted with the idea and what the show was.

In the same year as And Soon the Darkness, 1970, he directed Wuthering Heights. I wanted to mention this for two reasons. The first is that my aunt LOVED Wuthering Heights. In particular, she loved the man tapped to play Heathcliff for this version of Emily Bronte’s classic – Timothy Dalton. Because of that, she was over the moon when he was selected to replace Roger Moore in the role of James Bond. I appreciate him because his two Bond films, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, are two very underrated films in the franchise. In fact, the latter, 1989’s Licence to Kill, is one of my very favorite entries in the entire series.

And it all ties back to Robert Fuest.

On the screenplay side of things, we have a very interesting name on the front page of the script. One of the co-writers is Brian Clemens. He also was an alum on both The Avengers and The New Avengers. In fact, not only are Fuest and Clemens majorly attached to this film, the production crew used to make episodes of The Avengers was used to make this film. The other screenwriter is the more interesting one – Terry Nation. Terry Nation is one of the most important people in modern science fiction history. You see, he created the Daleks for Doctor Who. Without the second serial in that series’ run, colloquially known as The Daleks, Doctor Who may not be the powerhouse franchise it is today. However, Nation didn’t just write for Doctor Who, but also other popular shows in England like The Saint and, of course, The Avengers.

Alright, so aside from Fuest and Terry Nation, who else is key to this film’s production? That would be Bryan Forbes. He produced the film at EMI Elstree. While the film Hoffman, starring Peter Sellers and Jeremy Bulloch (the guy who originally played Boba Fett on screen), was the first to be filmed and completed under Forbes’ leadership, And Soon the Darkness was the first to be released. At the time, the production company was fledgling having only been founded the year before, and some critics raised an eyebrow at Forbes getting involved with a low-end women-in-peril thriller, but the movie performed moderately well despite getting some pretty terrible reviews at the time the film was released. But, like with many things, time was a little kinder to the movie. As with many movies from the 70s, the 2000s came calling for a remake, and, in 2010, a remake starring Karl Urban, Amber Heard, and Annette Annable (who previously appeared in Cloverfield).

Reviews were about as negative for that remake as what the 1970 film originally got.

But we don’t care what a bunch of British film snob fuddy-duddies think of a 1970 thriller that features young nurses in peril. I only care about what I think about it. I assume, if you’re here reading this, or have read other reviews here, you probably do too. So, let’s find out if this British thriller fits the bill and tickles the right bits of our 70s movie-liking brains, shall we?

The movie opens with a pretty nice little poppy theme song instrumental that kinda rocks. That plays as we watch our young nurses, brunette Jane (Pamela Franklin) and blonde Cathy (Michele Dotrice), ride their bikes through the French countryside. They eventually arrive at an outdoor cafe where several others have gathered. Cathy comments that she would like to remain in this town. While it’s not exactly as “swinging” as she typically likes, she likes the vibe of the place nonetheless. Jane is very narrow about what she wants to do and their plans. While Cathy wants to take in the sights of her surroundings, Jane very much wants to press on further down the road to their next stop where they could sleep for the night instead of remaining stuck here for a couple days as Cathy suggests.

Cathy’s desire to remain in the town is potentially heightened by a man she finds “rather dishy” sitting a few tables over. As Jane and Cathy and Jane leave the cafe, with a few of the locals taking extra notice of Cathy, the dishy man a few tables over also leaves and eventually follows the two women on his scooter. Down the road, as the girls talk about what might be going on back at the hospital, the man zooms past them, much to Cathy’s disappointment. As the girls continue on, they end up passing the man who is almost waiting for them to come by. As they pass, Cathy turns to look at the man who also turns to watch them.

Also, he was standing at the entrance to a cemetery. Is this really where you want to see a stranger who checked you out at the cafe, then zoomed right past you on the road, and now watching you as you pass? I feel like every single red flag has gone up around this guy. In fact…

There, I fixed it.

After they pass, and Jane makes the passing comment wondering if the man is following them, he goes into the cemetery. He very specifically stops at a very specific grave of a young woman who died the year before. Cathy comments that she’s starting to grow tired of biking and is getting more into a “sit down” mood. They pass through the small village of Landron with the man on the scooter following them and stopping at a restaurant. Cathy’s desire to rest grows as she wonders why they didn’t stop at that town. Jane is very dead set on sticking to an itinerary.

This leads to a little bit of an argument. Cathy says the countryside is starting to bore her. She’s not seeing anything but the same old road and the same old scenery. They have nothing to do but bike for miles and they aren’t meeting anyone. Jane keeps promising they will, but the promise has not produced anything worthwhile for Cathy. So, Cathy decides to pull over and sunbathe. Jane agrees to join her for just a little bit before carrying on to the next town to end their day.

After spending some time sunbathing, and while the man eats dinner back in Landron, Cathy waxes philosophical about marriage and a baby who died at the hospital after a difficult delivery. After a little time passes, Jane says they need to get going so they aren’t on the road after dark. Cathy refuses. She says she agreed to get away but didn’t agree to do nothing and she’s not exactly appreciating how Jane is “bossing her around” and keeping her from doing things and meeting people. So, after hurtful words are exchanged, Jane leaves. She figures that Cathy simply wants to either wait for the man to pass by again or will go back to Landron to see the man.

Further up the road, Jane stops at a roadside cafe to wait for Cathy. Back where she was sunbathing, Cathy doesn’t seem ready to move anytime soon. She puts sunscreen on while she lies in the patch of grass, but she’s being watched. Back at the cafe further up the road, the woman who runs the cafe tells Jane that it’s dangerous for her to be alone. Jane can’t quite understand what the woman is saying until the older woman tells her that this is a “bad road”.

Cathy wakes up from her nap with an uneasy feeling. At first, she has the sensation she is not alone. Then, she hears something that tells her she definitely is not alone. Earlier, she set out some knickers to dry in the sun, but when she goes to collect them off the tree she hung them on, one pair of panties is missing. Now sensing danger, she tries to flag down a speeding Mustang to no avail.

When she tries to gather her bike to ride off, she finds the spokes of her front wheel are pretty messed up, and obviously tampered with by someone. Soon, as her attention is stuck on the treeline in front of her, the missing pair of panties lands on her shoulder and she turns to see who was with her while she was alone on the side of the road.

Back at the cafe, the woman’s husband comes and Jane has to sit there uncomfortably while the two argue. This is Jane’s clue to leave. She actually goes back in the direction she came from so she can return to the spot she and Cathy were at earlier. On the way, Jane is unaware that the man following them earlier is following her. Also, she notices the police outpost she passed earlier is closed. When she returns, there is no sign of Cathy anywhere.

Soon, the mysterious man silently pulls up. This is Paul. He is able to speak English so he can communicate with her. He claims he didn’t see Cathy. He suggests to Jane maybe she’s hiding to “teach her a lesson”. I’m not sure what that means, but it didn’t sound good coming out of his mouth. Jane wonders if Cathy went back to Landron. When she finds Cathy’s camera on the ground, Paul suggests he and Jane return it and wants to drive Jane back to Landron instead of letting her use her own bicycle. You know, for “expediency” sake.

After riding off, we are shown some tracks in the mud where Cathy once was. When they get back to Landron, Paul asks the waiter at the restaurant he was eating at earlier, but he didn’t see anything. He also asks a patron at a table who he says had been there for an hour and didn’t see a blonde. Jane believes that she heard the waiter say something about “murder” in French. He plays coy and says that either Cathy went the other direction or she’s still hiding in the woods. Jane says if Cathy had gone the other way, she would have seen her, so Paul takes off back to where they came from.

At the restaurant, Jane asks the waiter about the murder she thought he mentioned, but she can’t understand his French. The lady eating at the restaurant speaks great English, and she says there was a murder a few years ago that was a bit of a scandal (can you imagine?). She explains that the girl murdered was young and beautiful and buried in that cemetery up the road. The woman says that while the murder was terrible, she was asking for trouble. She was a hiking tourist, alone on the road…

Ah, the 70s when you could victim-blame and not come off as a complete and utter weirdo.

This old lady says she’s a teacher living here as an ex-pat from England. She asks where Jane is from and she says that she’d never been to that town in England but that she has always heard the girls there are pretty. Weird. Anyway, she says that they never caught the murderer of the girl. But she always suspected that it was “one of her kind” and another nomad simply passing through and decided to kill (and rape, as it was implied) a girl. When they stop to pick up Jane’s bike, the lady says that was where the murder took place, in that spot of the woods. The very suspicious schoolmistress drops Jane off at the police outpost she passed earlier hoping to report her friend’s disappearance. She tells Jane she lives another six miles up the road if she is in need of a place to stay.

All this time, Paul has been messing about in the woods. As he looks around, he approaches an abandoned car. Under the car, he finds Cathy’s bike. He then looks in the trunk of the abandoned car and gives a little bit of a smile before shutting the trunk. After having no luck finding the gendarme (the civilian police in France), Jane returns to the cafe she waited for Cathy earlier and the lady tells her she needs to simply go because there is trouble and she’s going to be caught up in it if she doesn’t get off the bad road.

Upon returning to the gendarme once more, she runs into Paul who tells her more about the murder. The woman was Dutch, young, pretty, and blonde like Cathy. Paul says he had intimate details about the murder because he’s an inspector who worked on the case. He said he didn’t want to tell her he was police because he didn’t want to frighten or worry her. He says he did find something when he went back to where Jane last saw Cathy… something he wants her to identify.

Jane is a little suspicious of Paul’s story that he is an inspector with the Surete, which is another kind of civilian police force in France. They mostly work around Paris, unless they are specifically called in for a case – especially this far away from the capitol. Paul says that he wasn’t called in at all. In fact, he took a personal interest in the murder case. He independently researched the murder. He took an interest because murder is unpredictable and always different. He was vacationing in the area when the murder went down. He said he couldn’t interfere, but, simply from watching, he knew where they were going wrong in the investigation. Jane begins to think that Paul believes the murder has happened again, but that couldn’t be. Cathy might have looked like the girl who was killed before, but she couldn’t be dead. They simply had an argument and she’s hiding. That’s all. Cathy can’t possibly be dead.

As Paul leads Jane deeper into the woods to whatever it is he wants to show her when he came back earlier to look for Cathy, she stumbles upon the tell-tale knickers. She now believes it is very likely that Paul has done something to Cathy. She runs in the opposite direction out of the woods and back to the road while Paul tries to start his scooter and chase after her. As she runs down the road, a local farmer who has been working his field this entire day watches Jane running frantically.

Jane runs all the way back to the gendarme station to speak to the officer on duty. She tells him that she has Cathy’s panties, but she can’t find her friend anywhere. Cathy is blonde, but that’s not the full story. She says there’s a guy who has been following her and Cathy named Paul who claims he’s with the Surete. She explains that Paul claimed to have found something and was leading her into the woods but there was nothing. It was all a trick. The gendarme asks if Paul is still there and has Janes to remain behind while he goes to find out if Paul is still in the woods.

This is a good place to stop for a moment and give a little bit of my own thoughts. Pamela Franklin is fantastic in this movie. We need to just get that out of the way right now. She is measured but you know she’s trying to logically figure out what happened to her friend. She worries for her but holds out hope that she’s not dead and stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car. Franklin and Michele Dotrice are perfectly cast as Jane and Cathy. Franklin looks logical and fairly set in her ways. Cathy does seem like a little more of a party gal. After all, blondes have more fun, right? So, I have zero notes for the casting or the performance, particularly from Franklin.

Additionally, I have no notes for Sandor Eles who plays Paul. He simultaneously has this charm and a creepy vibe to him. It’s actually kind of amazing how well he balances that. He can be creepy in one moment and immediately follow that up by switching on the charm the next. Sometimes he’s both charming and creepy at the same time.

I also love the casting of all these characters that make up the locals in this movie. Clare Kelly as the schoolmistress is also one of those characters that will say a thing and you think she’s all normal and cool and shit. Then, she’ll immediately follow that up with something that comes across very off-putting. Madame Lassal, who runs that little cafe and keeps telling Jane she needs to get off the bad road, is played by Hana Maria Pravda. She’s great too. Her husband is played by Claude Bertrand and he comes off as someone who might just decide to eviscerate a lady walking along the road at the wrong time. All these characters have this undertone of being kind of xenophobic. The girl who was murdered a few years ago was an outsider. She was a foreigner who trespassed into the French countryside and her death made all these people feel distrustful of the outsiders. Even the schoolmistress, herself a foreigner who has immigrated here, is now xenophobic of outsiders. She’s assimilated as part of this country’s people. She’s one of the good ones because she moved here in some nebulous past that allows her to point fingers at others who don’t belong and say they should leave or the violence done against them was warranted in some twisted way.

This also creates a series of red herrings. Paul is immediately suspicious because of how he followed the girls earlier. Lassal is a grump and his wife just wants outsiders to stay out of trouble. The schoolmistress makes odd comments regarding the looks and the circumstances around the murdered girl and then Jane herself. Even that farmer who is always just in the background seems too present all the time to not be fully innocent. We’ll come back around to the red herrings and another theme in just a moment.

Okay, so now we are in the final act. Paul is frantically trying to repair his scooter from whatever it was that kept him from being able to start it to chase after Jane and the gendarme is on the way to the woods to confront Paul. Meanwhile, Jane is back at the gendarme’s outpost/home where his sick father is in the other room. The father comes out of the room and tries speaking to Jane only to learn that he’s deaf. He sees the panties and, trying to be a kindly old man, puts them on his head and laughs about being silly and old.

One, I didn’t have “old man puts missing girl’s panties on his head” on my bingo card for this movie. Two, this irritates, unsurprisingly, Jane. She already couldn’t understand the guy, and she’s basically unable to communicate with him because he’s deaf. But he’s putting Cathy’s panties on his head and being a clown. That’s not going to make anyone feel good. But he starts to make up for it. After all, she’s a pretty lass. Why wouldn’t he want to talk to her? He shows off some of his souvenirs from war. He has medals and a sword.

Soon, the gendarme returns without finding Paul. The gendarme decides to go further up the road thinking that perhaps Cathy hitchhiked beyond where Jane waited for her. The gendarme stops at the Lassal’s cafe and simply… waits. Additionally, the schoolmistress was also there and departed with a container that looked like a gas tank. This gets the gendarme curious about her carrying the gas tank and seeing the always-burning firepit at the cafe.

Eventually, Paul gets his scooter working again. He rides to the gendarme’s home where he tries to get inside to see Cathy, but she locks him out. He says he really needs to see her face-to-face so he can explain himself. So, he attempts to break into the gendarme’s home. When he does, she has to run away. She escapes through the backdoor and into the woods behind the house. This leads her into something like a trailer park. But… like… a French trailer park. Did you know they had those over there? I thought that was a 100% All-American thing. Huh…

As Jane is hiding from Paul, he tells her that he found Cathy’s bike. He wanted to show her what he found so she could help identify it for him and connect it to her missing friend. Meanwhile, the gendarme is still just sitting at the cafe as old man Lassal rides his motorbike through the field across the street and Madame Lassal grips the doorframe in fear. So it would kind of seem as though all our red herrings are starting to converge at the cafe.

Is Lassal involved with murders? Was it the schoolmistress? Does the gendarme know something we don’t? Is it really Paul? He’s kind of doing that classic thing where he should have told Jane what he needed to gain her trust before letting her own imagination run wild about him potentially being a murderer. Normally I hate that kind of thing but this movie has built up a lot of goodwill so I will let it pass for the movie to continue to have these types of tense moments that are now kind of playing out across two locations in the movie.

The gendarme returns home to find his door busted open and Jane missing. The backdoor is open and he follows through to see if perhaps Jane, and possibly Paul, have run through the woods toward that trailer park. While hiding in the closet of one of the trailers, Cathy’s body falls onto Jane revealing she has, indeed, been murdered. Cathy’s ripped clothes indicates, as the schoolmistress did earlier, that more than simple murder likely occurred.

Jane exits the trailer and runs away with Paul in pursuit. Back at the trailer, the gendarme enters the see that Cathy’s body is on the floor, so he joins the pursuit. Back in the woods, Paul catches up to Jane hiding behind a tree. She uses a rock to bash his face, knocking him out. Jane runs away and passes the gendarme who is simply waiting. Jane cries in his arms that she was the reason for her death. As she cries, the gendarme slides his hand into her back pocket to get a little touchy-feely with her butt.

Jane realizes she’s made a terrible mistake and the gendarme is not to be trusted. He begins groping and tackling her to the ground where he begins to strangle her as he unbuckles her belt to rape her. Paul, recovered from being knocked out, hits the gendarme in the back of the head with a tree branch. As the two survivors are left reeling from what’s happened during the course of this very long day, the camera pans back over to the trailer and looks into the window on the roof at the legs of the deceased Cathy as rain begins to fall.

This is a pretty damn fine movie. It’s an English production, made in France, with a whole lotta Italian feel to it. I think just about everything in this movie is done very well. It’s shot well, coming off almost as a travelogue of sorts of rural France. I mean… never mind the rape and murder… The scenery really makes you experience non-urban France. I’ve already said the performances are fantastic. I really do buy into Pamela Franklin’s performance entirely. Three years later, she will star in another great British horror film, The Legend of Hell House, written by Richard Matheson. I’ll get around to that someday I’m sure.

I’ll gladly give the movie a pass for Paul not being more forthcoming with vital information to gain Jane’s trust. It’s fine. That’s the Italian feel of the movie. In the end, we had that whole undertone of xenophobia running through some of the characters where Jane truly did feel like an outsider due to language barriers. Then, you had the ex-pat tell her that the foreigner died from one of her own kind, meaning a non-local. She could have even been talking about herself. But the actual killer was the worst suspect you could have had – the authority of this area, the gendarme. That’s a pretty good way to insert a little good ol’ fashioned extra terror by having the girl already unsure of how to seek help for her friend to finally get the one guy who should be the most help only to discover he’s the bad guy who killed her friend. That’s a whole new level of terrifying because if Jane was even able to try to convey to the others in town that the gendarme is the killer, who would believe Jane? She’s the outsider… the other. He’s the law and the guy everyone’s known for years whose father was ostensibly a war hero. Anyone would be at his mercy.

It’s also likely why Paul took an interest. He talked about the unpredictable nature of the crime of murder. He likely knew the killer of that girl a few years back was not a foreigner but someone in town. He talked about how the investigation was done poorly and mistakes were made. The gendarme, if he had been involved with the investigation or leading it, would have had reason to bungle it. Paul likely was trying to discover if he was truly the killer. That might be a little bit of head cannon but it would explain why he had more than a passing interest in the original crime.

Anyway, I highly recommend the film. It’s a heck of a thriller with great production work behind the camera and great performances. Next week, our 70s horror and women-in-peril theme continues with an all-time classic of exploitation splatter horror… Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore. Tomorrow, on a new B-Movie Enema: The Series, we have the penultimate episode of season five with the 1976 Herb Freed psychological drama Haunts. Come check that out and see me try to explain what I think the movie is all about!

Enjoy your week, and if you’re like me and try to pack in as many spooky delights as you can during the month of October, I highly recommend and vouch for And Soon the Darkness. Until then, Enema Man out!