Title: The Mutations

Year of Release: 1974

Director: Jack Cardiff

Length: 92 mins

Starring: Donald Pleasence, Tom Baker, Brad Harris, Julie Edge, Michael Dunn

Sometimes films, no matter how good they are, just get overlooked and then forgotten about, only to resurface decades later on some obscure satellite TV station, in this case Talking Pictures in the UK. In The Mutations (aka The Freakmaker), Donald Pleasence (What a Carve Up! Death Line, the first two Halloween films, and about a bazillion others) stars as mad scientist, Professor Nolter, who has taken it upon himself to pioneer what he sees as the next stage in human evolution by crossbreeding Venus flytraps with college students he abducts from his class (standard dialogue: “We are interested in cloning, not in clowning!”) his ultimate plan being to create a race of “plants that can walk, and men that can take root”. Seems reasonable enough, right? No problem there.

However, friends of the missing students start asking questions and obviously, science being what it is, the vast majority of Professor Nolter’s kooky experiments end in abject failure, leaving the crazed professor with a surplus of mutant human/plant hybrids which are handed over to a cruel circus freak show owner, Mr. Lynch (a barely-recognisable Baker, seen here shortly before his career-defining turn as Doctor Who) who attempts to exploit them for monetary gain which, as we all know, is the, ahem, root of all evil. Boom. This aspect calls to mind another classic Pleasence outing in Circus of Horrors (1960) though The Mutations is generally believed to have been directly inspired by Tod Browning’s classic Freaks (1932), which follows the exploits of a travelling French circus. And like that movie, it’s now frowned upon by modern standards because of the sometimes distasteful exploitation of actors with genuine disabilities who star alongside able-bodied actors with fictional disabilities, among the array of ‘freaks’ are the Pretzel Man, the Bearded Lady, the Monkey Woman, the Alligator-skinned Girl, and the Human Pincushion. Michael Dunn, a well-known American actor with dwarfism who played Lynch’s sidekick Burns, died at the Cadogan hotel in London at the age of 39 while the movie was in production. Other problematic scenes included the professor appearing to feed a live rabbit to a giant Venus flytrap. It seems people are cool with seeing scores of teenagers meet all kinds of inventive, grisly ends in the movies, but the moment you feed a rabbit to a Venus flytrap everyone loses their marbles. As you can probably guess, all this is bound to end in disaster. Good must triumph over evil. And the mutations, kitted out in shoddy costumes and grotesque make up, set out to wreak their revenge.

In much the same way as Tod Browning manages in Freaks (the parallels just keep coming), in the second half of the film the viewer is cajoled into feeling a measure of sympathy for the nutations who, from the outside looking in, would appear to be the monsters. These are the abused, the downtrodden, the disaffected, and the vulnerable, who wouldn’t even consider being evil if something evil hadn’t happened to them first, and you want them to find justice. This isn’t exactly a new mechanism, harking back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and maybe even earlier, but is unusual none-the-less. Mr. Lynch, aka, ‘the ugliest man in the world’ is also a very complex character. Horribly disfigured, he yearns to be normal and refuses to take his place among the ‘freaks’ (“He’s one of us!”). At one point he goes to a prostitute and pays her extra to say ‘I love you.’ Aww.

The Mutations was directed by legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff (1914-2009) and released through Columbia pictures. Though filled with crackpot theories and pseudo-science, it raises all kind of moral and ethical questions, chief among them being how much should (or could) people interfere with nature? Is it selfish to attempt to guarantee the future survival of a species? Or is it necessary? Pleasence is wonderfully cast, though he does tend to resemble Pete Townshend a bit too much for my liking. Speaking of music, also worthy of note is the truly unsettling soundtrack by Basil Kirchin, which starts with something resembling a heartbeat in the opening credits, and twists and writhes throughout. The film has been released on DVD several times since 2005, most notably in 2008 by Subversive Cinema as a part of a 2-Disk ‘Greenhouse Gore’ movie pack with The Gardener (1974) about a deranged landscaper who turns into a tree.

Author and film critic Leonard Maltin criticised The Mutations’ ‘predictable’ story and what he called “grotesque elements” while the TV Guide awarded it one star out of five, saying, “Though at times the film is so bad it’s unintentionally funny, it has a certain cruelty to it.” Contemporary review site My Bloody Reviews notes, “more of a curiosity piece than essential viewing The Mutations is criminally dull and only comes to life whenever Tom Baker is on screen, otherwise this is rather pedestrian and questionable in its depiction of ‘freaks’”. Michael H. Price of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was slightly more impressed, giving it a solid three stars and praising both the effects and Kirchin’s “dissonant orchestral score” which he claims “adds mightily to the mood of unease and gathering madness.”

Trivia Corner

According to Tom Baker, while filming he and Willie Ingram, who played Popeye, so-called for his uncanny ability to make his eyes pop far out of their sockets, struck up an unlikely friendship. They used to frequent a pub, where a particular waitress made it clear that she didn’t approve of Baker, who was white, being friends with Ingram, who was black. To get back at her, Ingram would make his eyes pop out when she passed, then pretend nothing had happened.