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Independent Producers

AMICUS PRODUCTIONS

The fag-end of the ’50s saw rock ‘n’ roll cheapo producer Milton Subotsky team up with money man Max J Rosenberg for a Shepperton-based venture into second-string cinema. It’s Trad, Dad was the result – a tempting blend of Chubby Checker and Arthur Mullard. Sci-fi sprang forth in the shape of the two soft-centred Cushing Who films, but horror was to be the studio’s lasting legacy, and portmanteau horror films at that. Roy Castle and Alan Freeman were among the protagonists in the first, the darkly silly Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, and over the next decade more were hatched – from the great From Beyond the Grave, Asylum and Tales from the Crypt to the less brilliant Vault of Horror and House That Dripped Blood. More hybrid horror oddness followed with The Deadly Bees (bee horror meets rock ‘n’ roll showcase), The Beast Must Die (Shaft vs the werewolf) and the 3-D lunacy of I, Monster. The late ’70s saw horror fall out of audience favour, so Subotsky moved into daft cod-Victorian fantasy with the Doug McClure ‘Time Forgot’ films, before the studio finally pegged out circa 1979, and Subotsky finished its last magnum opus The Monster Club (fittingly, a portmanteau horror with musical interludes from BA Robertson) under his new Sword and Sorcery moniker.

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