The Alligator Woman. The Pretzel Man. The Living Skeleton. These are a few of the “freaks” in Mr. Lynch’s Traveling Circus, which has come with the autumn winds and settled along the bank of the Thames. Lynch (Tom Baker) is a man shrouded in mystery – a tall, hulking figure who obscures his face behind a scarf and wears a long, dark coat. In addition to running his carnival, he’s working to supply human subjects to Professor Nolter (Donald Pleasence), who teaches biology at a nearby college but spends extracurricular time carrying out lewd, terrifying experiments at an enormous estate in the fog-shrouded countryside. The aim of his efforts is to cross humans and plants to create a new species, an experiment which involves an enormous X-ray, various tubes that trade blood and chlorophyll and a high-powered beam of particles that reverses biological decay. When the experiments fail – as they have for many months now – Nolter passes on the botched results to Lynch’s circus, where he puts them on display for curious audiences.
A few of Nolter’s students begin to get suspicious when a classmate disappears, and their investigation, exacerbated by the arrival of a curious and oddly hunky American scientist (Brad Harris), begins to put the pressure on the professor to hurry his experiments before he’s exposed.
Employing eye-popping colors and stunning stop-motion photography, The Mutations, also known as The Freakmaker is Jack Cardiff at his wildest and most exploitative. Having made his name as a cinematographer for some of the biggest names in film history, most notable among his work a career-defining contribution to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s filmography (A Matter of Life and Death, 1946; Black Narcissus, 1947; The Red Shoes, 1948), Cardiff defined himself as a master of Technicolor. In the 1950s he began to direct his own films and found critical acclaim with an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1960). The late 60s saw wilder efforts, among them the freewheeling fervor of The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) and the sweaty chaos of Dark of the Sun (1968).
The Mutations was his last directorial effort, a science fiction horror film featuring Donald Pleasance (whose appearance in offbeat genre entries seems obligatory but always welcome) and Doctor Who’s Tom Baker, who hides behind bloated prosthetics but seems to keep the Doctor’s scarf and hat. Ken Middleham’s time lapse photography, set beneath the melancholic hum of Basil Kirchin’s strings, makes for a psychedelic, wild introduction, with colorful titles that call to mind the Scooby Doo cartoons. And while the practical effects (most notably the enormous leaves and rubbery vines adhered to faces and hands) keep the film grounded in B-movie territory, the casting of actors with actual disabilities for Lynch’s Traveling Circus gives the film a level of authenticity and nods to Tod Browning’s masterpiece Freaks (1932). Cardiff even gives those actors enough emotion and screen time to keep them from being mere background noise in the story.
While it’s hard to imagine that the man who lit David Niven ascending the staircase to Heaven or Deborah Kerr’s billowing frock stained by the Himalayan sunset would shoot a humanoid Venus fly trap eating a man whole, he treats them all with the same explosion of color and feeling. Cardiff never failed to elevate his craft, pushing the bounds of storytelling, color and what could happen within the edges of the frame. The Mutations is wild, schlocky chaos.
